In the fall of 1882, at the age of 24, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) was sent by the French Ministry of Public Instruction to live in the provincial town of Sens, a community of 13,000 on the Yonne River, seventy miles southeast of Paris. Having studied for three years at the elite École Normale Supérieure, the traditional breeding ground for French intellectuals, Durkheim had just passed – with low marks – the agrégation examination in philosophy that was the stepping stone to a job as a philosophy teacher in one of the nation's lycées, or secondary schools. Ambitious young scholars who put in their time at a lycée and also completed two dissertations – one in French, the other in Latin – were then eligible to compete for positions at the university level. Such were Durkheim's ambitions, and those who knew him had no doubt that his prodigious intellectual gifts would prove more than adequate for their achievement. His instructors and fellow students at the École Normale were therefore surprised when he placed second to last on the exam, perhaps due to illness. Still, this was enough to secure him a lycée post. Like the vast majority of young agrégés, Durkheim was sent, not to a prestigious Parisian lycée, but to a provincial one. After a month at the Lycée de Puy, he was reassigned to Sens in November 1882.