FullReads

“I was sure of it,” said Madame Adolphe to herself. She picked up the handkerchief and cried:

“Monsieur! Monsieur!”

“Well!” exclaimed the professor, made indignant by her watchfulness.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, receiving the handkerchief.

“Have you any money?” asked Madame Adolphe with maternal solicitude.

“I need none,” he replied naively, explaining thus the lives of all men of science.

“It depends,” Madame Adolphe said. “If you go by way of the Pont des Arts you need one sou.”

“You are right,” replied the man of science, as if he were retracing instructions for a voyage to the North Pole. “I will go through the Luxembourg, the Rue de Seine, the Pont des Arts, the Louvre, the Rue du Coq, the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, the Rue des Fosses-Montmartre. It is the shortest route to the Faubourg Poissonniere.”

“It is three o’clock,” Madame Adolphe said. “Your sister-in-law dines at six. You have three hours before you–Yes–you’ll be there, but you’ll be late.” She searched her apron pocket for two sous, which she handed to the professor.

“Very well, then,” she said to him. “Do not eat too much. You are not a glutton, but you think of other things. You are frugal, but you eat when you are absent-minded as if you had no bread at home. Take care not to make Madame Vernet, your sister-in-law, wait. If you make her wait, you will never be permitted again to go there alone, and it will be shameful for you.”

Madame Adolphe returned to the threshold of the little door and from there watched her master. She had to cry to him, “To the right! To the right!” for he was turning toward the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

“And yet he is a man of science, people say,” she muttered to herself. “How did he ever manage to get married? I’ll ask Madame when I dress her hair.”

IV

INCONVENIENCE OF QUAYS WHERE ARE BOOK STALLS

At four o’clock, Professor Marmus was at the end of the Rue de Seine, under the arcades of the Institute. Those who know him will admit that he had done nobly, since he had taken only one hour to go through the Luxembourg and down the Rue de Seine.

There a lamentable voice, the voice of a child, plucked from the good man the two sous that Madame Adolphe had given to him. When he reached the Pont des Arts he remembered that he had to pay toll and turned back suddenly to beg for a sou from the child.

The little rascal had gone to break the coin, in order to give only one sou to his mother. She was walking up and down the Rue Mazarine with her baby at her breast.

It became necessary for the professor to turn his back on the veteran soldier who guards against the possibility of a Parisian passing over the bridge without paying the toll.

Two roads were open to him: the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal. Curiosity makes one lose more time in Paris than anywhere else.

How may one walk without looking at those little oblong boxes, wide as the stones of the parapet, that all along the quays stimulate book lovers with posters saying, “Four Sous–Six Sous–Ten Sous–Twelve Sous–Thirty Sous?” These catacombs of glory have devoured many hours that belonged to the poets, to the philosophers and to the men of science of Paris.

Great is the number of ten-sous pieces spent in the four-sous stalls!

The professor saw a pamphlet by Vicq-d’Azyr, a complete Charles Bonnet in the edition of Fauche Borel, and an essay on Malus.

“And such then is the sum of our achievements,” he said to himself. “Malus! A genius arrested in his course when he had almost captured the empire of light! But we have had Fresnel. Fresnel has done excellent things!–Oh, they will recognize some day that light is only a mode of substance.”

The professor held the notice on Malus. He turned its pages. He had known Malus. He recalled to himself and recited the names of all the Maluses. Then he returned to Malus, to his dear Malus, for they had entered the Institute together at the return to Paris of the expedition to Egypt. Ah! It was then the Institute of France and not a mass of disunited Academies.