My good master was talking in this fashion before the first recess to the left, counting from the Rue Dauphine, and he was beginning to frighten the dealer who took him for an exorcist, when he suddenly picked up an old geometry, illustrated with sufficiently bad cuts by Sebastien Leclerc.[7]
"Perhaps," he said, "instead of drowning myself in love or in water, if I were not a Christian and a Catholic, I should decide to throw myself into the study of mathematics where the mind finds the aliment of which it is most in need, to wit: sequence and continuity. And I vow that this little book, quite ordinary as it is, gives me a certain good opinion of man's genius."
At these words he opened the treatise by Sebastien Leclerc so widely, at the section concerning triangles, that he nearly broke it clean in two. But soon he flung it down in disgust.
"Alas," he murmured, "numbers depend on time, lines on space, and these again are but human illusions. Without man there is neither mathematics nor geometry, and it is, after all, but a form of knowledge which does not draw us out of ourselves, although it affects an air of quite magnificent independence."
Having spoken, he turned his back on the relieved bookstall-keeper, and drew a long breath.
"Ah! Tournebroche, my son," he continued, "you see me suffering from an ill that I have brought on myself, and burnt with the fiery tunic with which I have been at such pains to clothe and deck myself."
He spoke thus in a fanciful fashion, being in reality clad in a shocking old overcoat generally held together by two or three buttons which, moreover, were not even fastened in their own button-holes, and, as he was accustomed to say laughingly, when one spoke to him of it, it was an adulterous connection, a presentation of city manners!
He spoke with warmth:
"I hate science," said he, "for having loved it too much, after the manner of voluptuaries who reproach women with not having come up to the dream they formed of them. I wanted to know everything, and I suffer to-day for my culpable folly. Happy," added he, "oh! very happy are those good people assembled round that vendor of quack medicines."
And he pointed with his hand to the lackeys, the chambermaids, and the porters of St. Nicolas, forming a circle round a practitioner who was giving a demonstration with his attendant.