That is the main thing; the rest is a secondary condition.
And the worthy man tells me what poverty in a frock coat means.
Though less of a pauper than I, he has known the mortification of it; he describes it to me, excitedly, in all its bitterness. Ilisten to him with an aching heart; I see the refuge which was to shelter my future crumbling before my eyes: 'You have done me a great service, sir,' I answered. 'You put an end to my hesitation.
For the moment, I give up my plan. I will first see if it is possible to earn the small fortune which I shall need if I am to teach in a decent manner.'
Thereupon we exchanged a friendly grip of the hand and parted. Inever saw him again. His fatherly arguments had soon convinced me:
I was prepared to hear the blunt truth. A few months earlier, Ihad received my nomination as an assistant lecturer in zoology at the university of Poitiers. They offered me a ridiculous salary.
After paying the costs of moving, I should have had hardly three francs a day left; and, on this income, I had to keep my family, numbering seven in all. I hastened to decline the very great honor.
No, science ought not to practice these jests. If we humble persons are of use to her, she should at least enable us to live.
If she can't do that, then let her leave us to break stones on the highway. Oh, yes, I was prepared for the truth when that honest fellow talked to me of frock coated poverty! I am telling the story of a not very distant past. Since then, things have improved considerably; but, when the pear was properly ripened, I was no longer of an age to pick it.
And what was I to do now, to overcome the difficulty mentioned by my inspector and confirmed by my personal experience? I would take up industrial chemistry. The municipal lectures at Saint Martial placed a spacious and fairly well-equipped laboratory at my disposal. Why not make the most of it?
The chief manufacture of Avignon was madder. The farmer supplied the raw material to the factories, where it was turned into purer and more concentrated products. My predecessor had gone in for it and done well by it, so people said. I would follow in his footsteps and use the vats and furnaces, the expensive plant which I had inherited. So to work.
What should I set myself to produce? I proposed to extract the coloring substance, alizarin, to separate it from the other matters found with it in the root, to obtain it in the pure state and in a form that allowed of the direct printing of the stuffs, a much quicker and more artistic method than the old dyeing process.
Nothing could be simpler than this problem, once the solution was known; but how tremendously obscure while it had still to be solved! I dare not call to mind all the imagination and patience spent upon endless endeavors which nothing, not even the madness of them, discouraged. What mighty meditations in the somber church!
What glowing dreams, soon to be followed by sore disappointment, when experiment spoke the last word and upset the scaffolding of my plans. Stubborn as the slave of old amassing a peculium for his enfranchisement, I used to reply to the check of yesterday by the fresh attempt of tomorrow, often as faulty as the others, sometimes the richer by an improvement, and I went on indefatigably, for Itoo cherished the indomitable ambition to set myself free.
Should I succeed? Perhaps so. I at last had a satisfactory answer. I obtained, in a cheap and practical fashion, the pure coloring matter, concentrated in a small volume and excellent for both printing and dyeing. One of my friends took up my process on a large scale in his works; a few calico factories adopted the produce and expressed themselves delighted with it. The future smiled at last; a pink rift opened in my gray sky. I should possess the modest fortune without which I must deny myself the pleasure of teaching in a university. Freed of the torturing anxiety about my daily bread, I should be able to live at ease among my insects.
In the midst of the joys of seeing these problems solved by chemistry, yet another ray of sunshine was reserved for me, adding its gladness to that of my success. Let us go back a couple of years. The chief inspectors visited our grammar school. These personages travel in pairs: one attends to literature, the other to science. When the inspection was over and the books checked, the staff was summoned to the principal's drawing room, to receive the parting admonitions of the two luminaries. The man of science began. I should be sadly put to it to remember what he said. It was cold professional prose, made up of soulless words which the hearer forgot once the speaker's back was turned, words merely boring to both. I had heard enough of these chilly sermons in my time; one more of them could not hope to make an impression on me.
The inspector in literature spoke next. At the first words which he uttered, I said to myself: 'Oho! This is a very different business!'
The speech was alive and vigorous and full of images; indifferent to scholastic commonplaces, the ideas soared, hovering gently in the serene heights of a kindly philosophy. This time, I listened with pleasure; I even felt stirred. Here was no official homily: it was full of impassioned zeal, of words that carried you with them, uttered by an honest man accomplished in the art of speaking, an orator in the true sense of the word. In all my school experience, I had never had such a treat.
When the meeting broke up, my heart beat faster than usual: 'What a pity,' I thought, 'that my side, the science side, cannot bring me into contact, some day, with that inspector! It seems to me that we should become great friends.'
I inquired his name of my colleagues, who were always better informed than I. They told me it was Victor Duruy.
