"Nonsense! you are but wretches and vagabonds, shadowed by all the police of the world. You are penniless. How can you manufacture all the machines?"
By way of reply, Prince Istar drew from his pocket a small copper cylinder, which he gracefully presented to Baron Everdingen.
"You see," said he, "this ordinary-looking box. It is only necessary to let it fall on the ground immediately to reduce this mansion with its inmates to a mass of smoking ashes, and to set a fire going which would devour all the Trocadéro quarter. I have ten thousand like that, and I make three dozen a day."
The financier asked the Cherub to replace the machine in his pocket, and continued in a conciliatory tone:
"Listen to me, my friends. Go and start a revolution at once in Heaven, and leave things alone in this country. I will sign a cheque for you. You can procure all the material you need to attack celestial Jerusalem."
And Baron Everdingen was already working up in his imagination a magnificent deal in electrophores and war-material.
CHAPTER XVIII
wherein is begun the gardener's story, in the course of which we shall see the destiny of the world unfolded in a discourse as broad and magnificent in its views as bossuet's discourse on the history of the universe is narrow and dismal