"
It was the Caesar cropping up in him again.
Without question he was a born builder of fortifications. One day the
great Marshal MacMahon came by on a tour of inspection, and was much
delighted with a series of defenses he had built near Paris.
"I congratulate you, Monsieur le Capitaine!" he said.
By one sentence he had promoted the young lieutenant to a captaincy.
It was about this time that a fall from his horse very nearly cut short
his military career. He was so severely injured that the doctors feared
that his mind was affected, and he was sent home for a complete rest.
At home he did not complain--that was not his nature--but he spent
several days pacing back and forth in his little upper room. Then came a
day when he burst in to the downstairs room where sat his parents, his
face beaming--showing the strain which he had overcome.
"It's all right, mon pere!" he cried joyfully. "I have solved it. I
will get well!"
What he had been doing was to set himself an abstruse and difficult
problem in mathematics, in order to see if his brain would respond. It
did so, he solved it and thus had no more fears as to his own ultimate
recovery.
Another story told by his sister, of these early army days, shows further
his power of mental abstraction.
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