By a strong effort he controlled himself.
“Good M. Reveillon,” he said, “understand that my wits are my employés. If, following your edifying example, I give them an outing, I must accompany them like a schoolmaster. Thus your penetration may divine the reason why I do not lie abed on this rare occasion of a holiday, which, as your plutocratship suggests, should be an excuse for rest to all poor devils of workmen.”
A young mechanic, in his squalor and hungering leanness, simply typical of his class, hurried by at the moment, eagerly seeking a place to view. His roving eyes, catching those of the paper manufacturer, took a hostile, half-anxious expression as he went on his way with a louting salutation.
“One of the two-thirds?” asked David. “A testimony, indeed, to the fostering kindness of the Sieur Papetier.”
“Bah!” cried Reveillon. “It is the cant. The successful must always be held responsible for the ineptitude of the improvident. He that passed was a journeyman; and a journeyman may live very handsomely on fifteen sous a-day, if he is sober and prudent. I have been through it and I know. I have no false pride, monsieur le peintre du Roi. I was apprentice—journeyman myself—before I was master.”
As he spoke, a great seething roar issued from the crowd. Ned, who had been sketching desultorily as he listened, raised his face. A huge bulge of grey went up into the sky—a mystery of bellying silk and intricate ropes straining at a little cockle-shell of a car. To the explosion of guns, to the frantic waving of flags and handkerchiefs, to the jubilant vociferating of half a city, the quasi-scientific toy rose, and was reflected as it sprang aloft in the pupils of ten thousand eyes. The circle of the mob dilated as its components yielded a pace or so to secure the better view, and the act brought the two disputants into Ned’s close neighbourhood. M. Reveillon, for all his late colloquy, was now no less hysterical than the rest of the company.
“Voilà!” he shouted, clutching at the young fellow’s arm spasmodically: “is it not a sight the very acme of sublimity! Behold the unconquerable enterprise of man thus committed to victory or destruction. There is no middle course. He is to triumph or to die.”
His excited grasp tightened on the sleeve he held. His glance travelled swiftly to and from the sketch-book, on a page of which Ned was endeavouring to hastily record some impression of the buoyant monster above. The Englishman marvelled to see this sudden eruption from so flat and commonplace a surface.
“You can discipline yourself to draw in the face of this stupendous fascination,” cried the paper-maker. “Mon Dieu! that you had been with me at Boulogne in ’85, when Rozier’s Montgolfier took fire at the height of a thousand mètres, and he and Romain were precipitated to the earth!”
He never removed his hungry gaze from the mounting balloon while he talked.