Galois' Death

 

[Évariste Galois was a French boy-mathematician, whose notoriety for his definace of establishment, uncompromising political stand and untimely murder in a duel over une femme coquette— has been surpassed by his fundamental formulation of Group and Galois Theories, without even the latter of which an M.Sc. course in pure math is incomplete today, and which he scribbled in a brief letter to an English friend the night before the fateful duel.]

The bloody dusk, the whizzy sky,
The spasmic wound, a breath of sigh;
Black robes of death engulf all sense;
Blur his sight of narrow Paris-lanes...
Fresh blood soaked in the coarse river-sand—
And the letter reaches England.

A duel fought all meant to be killed,
Burning cuts by the coming night chilled.
The last night’s efforts with scribbles he filled,
In an untidy parchment Galois revealed!
Last thoughts quiver on an hopeful errand—
And the letter reaches England.

As dreams soar and seek the clouds
His triumph returns and weeps aloud.
In torn arteries anew blood runs,
Sweeps his memory through the new-age France:
Amidst a rotten era it does outstand—
As the letter reaches England.