"I am well pleased with you, Emile. I see that you are busy; that you are working in earnest; and that you are no longer wasting your time running about from château to château. You have been talking very clearly, like a conscientious young lawyer who has studied his case carefully. I thank you for the excellent direction your ideas are taking; and do you know what affords me the most pleasure? that you apply yourself to your work as I had hoped that you would as a result of hard study. Here you are already eager for success; you feel its potent excitement. You are passing through the inevitable stages of alarm, doubt, and even momentary discouragement which accompany the development of every important plan in the genius of the manufacturer. Yes, Emile, that is what I call conceiving and giving birth. This mystery of the will is not begotten without pain; it is with the man's brain as with the woman's womb. But set your mind at rest now, my boy. The danger that you fancy that you have discovered exists only upon a superficial examination of things, and you cannot grasp the whole subject in a simple walk. I passed a week exploring this stream before I laid the first stone on its banks, and I took counsel of a man more experienced than you. See, here is a plan of the whole locality, with the levels, measurements and depths of water. Let us look it over together."
Emile examined the plan with care and discovered several actual mistakes. They had considered it impossible that the water should reach a certain elevation even in extraordinary freshets, and that certain barriers could hold it in check beyond a certain number of hours. They had figured on contingencies, and the commonest experience, the testimony of any witness of what had happened theretofore, would have sufficed to destroy the theory, if they had been willing to listen to that evidence. But that was something that Cardonnet's proud and distrustful nature could not do. He had placed himself at the mercy of the elements, with his eyes closed, like Napoléon in the Russian campaign, and in his superb obstinacy he would willingly have undertaken, like Xerxes, to whip the rebellious Neptune into submission. His adviser, although a very clever man, had thought of nothing but encouraging his ambition, or had allowed himself to be swayed and influenced by that ardent will.
"Father," said Emile, "this is not simply a matter of hydrographic calculations, and you will allow me to say that your absolute confidence in the work of a specialist has led you astray. You laughed at me when, at the beginning of my general studies, I said to you that all branches of human knowledge seemed to me to be interrelated, and that one must needs know almost everything to be infallible on any given point; in a word, that no special work could dispense with synthesis, and that before learning the mechanism of a watch it would be well to learn the mechanism of creation. You laughed at me—you laugh at me still—and you took me away from the stars to send me back to mills. Very well; if, with your hydrographer, you had consulted a geologist, a botanist and a physicist, they would have demonstrated to you something that I feel safe in asserting after one view of the locality, subject to the confirmation of more competent judges than myself. It is: that, taking into consideration the slope of the ridge of the mountain over which your stream flows, taking into consideration the direction of the winds that accompany it, taking into consideration the plateaus from which it takes its source and their relative elevation, which attracts all the clouds, where indeed all the storms take rise—floods of water must constantly pour down into this ravine and sweep away unavailing obstacles; unless, as I have said, it be controlled by works which you cannot undertake to erect, because the necessary expense exceeds the resources of any single capitalist. That is what the physicist would have told you on the authority of atmospheric laws: he would have appealed to the incessant effects of the lightning upon the rocks which attract it; the geologist would have appealed to the nature of the soil, whether loamy, chalky or granitic, which retains, absorbs and discharges the water in turn.
"And the botanist," said Monsieur Cardonnet, smiling, "do you forget him?"
"He," replied Emile, with an answering smile, "would have noticed on the steep, barren cliff, where the geologist could not have detected with absolute assurance the former passage of the water, a few blades of grass which would not have enlightened his fellow-scientists. 'This little plant,' he would have said to them, 'did not grow there all alone; it is not the kind of spot that it loves, and you see what a melancholy look it has, awaiting the time when the flood that brought it here shall carry it away again or bring some of its friends for company.'"
"Bravo! Emile, nothing could be more ingenious."
"And nothing more certain, father."
"Where did you learn all this, pray? Are you hydrographer, mechanician, astronomer, geologist, physicist and botanist all at once?"
"No, father; you compelled me to pick up on the wing the elements of those sciences, which have a common foundation; but there are some privileged natures in which observation and logic take the place of learning."
"You are not modest."