"It seems to me," said Marechal, "that it only depends upon yourself to do as much and more business than any one?"
"You know well enough that it is not so," sighed Savinien; "my aunt is opposed to it."
"What a mistake!" cried Marechal, quickly. "I have heard Madame Desvarennes say more than twenty times how she regretted your being unemployed. Come into the firm, you will have a good berth in the counting-house."
"In the counting-house!" cried Savinien, bitterly; "there's the sore point. Now look here; my friend, do you think that an organization like mine is made to bend to the trivialities of a copying clerk's work? To follow the humdrum of every-day routine? To blacken paper? To become a servant?—me! with what I have in my brain?"
And, rising abruptly, Savinien began to walk hurriedly up and down the room, disdainfully shaking his little head with its low forehead on which were plastered a few fair curls (made with curling-irons), with the indignant air of an Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders.
"Oh, I know very well what is at the bottom of the business—my aunt is jealous of me because I am a man of ideas. She wishes to be the only one of the family who possesses any. She thinks of binding me down to a besotting work," continued he, "but I won't have it. I know what I want! It is independence of thought, bent on the solution of great problems— that is, a wide field to apply my discoveries. But a fixed rule, common law, I could not submit to it."
"It is like the examinations," observed Marechal, looking slyly at young Desvarennes, who was drawing himself up to his full height; "examinations never suited you."
"Never," said Savinien, energetically. "They wished to get me into the
Polytechnic School; impossible! Then the Central School; no better.
I astonished the examiners by the novelty of my ideas. They refused me."
"Well, you know," retorted Marechal, "if you began by overthrowing their theories—"
"That's it!" cried Savinien, triumphantly. "My mind is stronger than I; I must let my imagination have free run, and no one will ever know what that particular turn of mind has cost me. Even my family do not think me serious. Aunt Desvarennes has forbidden any kind of enterprise, under pretence that I bear her name, and that I might compromise it because I have twice failed. My aunt paid, it is true. Do you think it is generous of her to take advantage of my situation, and prohibit my trying to succeed? Are inventors judged by three or four failures? If my aunt had allowed me I should have astonished the world."