Poncelet (and Pole and Polar)

Abstract

Following the example of a celebrated contemporary novelist, whose statue stands at the entrance to the room where our academicians hold their private meetings to glorify, without doubt, a political and religious system from the day before yesterday and which is still fashionable today, I could have entitled this work, which is purely mathematical, Memoirs from beyond the tomb. It is, in fact, the fruit of the meditations of a young lieutenant of the engineers, left for dead on the fatal battlefield of Krasnoy, not far from Smolensk, and for a long time strewn with the bodies of the French army. There, in that terrible retreat from Moscow, seven thousand Frenchmen, exhausted by hunger, cold and fatigue, under the orders of the unfortunate Marshal Ney, came, deprived of all artillery, on the 18th of November 1812, the anniversary of the Russian Saint Michael, to fight a furious, bloody and final combat with twenty-five thousand soldiers, fresh and equipped with forty cannons of Field-Marshal Prince Miliradowitch, who himself would soon become the victim of a military conspiracy hatched in the bosom of the modern capital of the Muscovite Tsars. But the adoption of such an ostentatious title, however justifiable it might seem, would seem with good reason to be a ridiculous plagiarism, an overweening imitation with perhaps a permitted licence, of the avowed leader of the romantic novel in our France, at a time of moral perturbation as much political as literary. A similar title, besides, would suggest of this modest book neither the serious and reserved habits of the author, still less the character, the aptitudes, the tastes which presume a sincere love of the truths of geometry, whose profound culture calls for a spirit disengaged from all foreign passion and, one might say, of any earthly interest.