Great is the number of ten-sous pieces spent in the four-sous stalls!
The professor saw a pamphlet by Vicq-d'Azyr, a complete Charles Bonnet in the edition of Fauche Borel, and an essay on Malus.
"And such then is the sum of our achievements," he said to himself. "Malus! A genius arrested in his course when he had almost captured the empire of light! But we have had Fresnel. Fresnel has done excellent things!—Oh, they will recognize some day that light is only a mode of substance."
The professor held the notice on Malus. He turned its pages. He had known Malus. He recalled to himself and recited the names of all the Maluses. Then he returned to Malus, to his dear Malus, for they had entered the Institute together at the return to Paris of the expedition to Egypt. Ah! It was then the Institute of France and not a mass of disunited Academies.
"The Emperor had preserved," said Marmus to himself, "the saintly idea of the Convention. I remember," he muttered aloud, "what he said to me when I was presented to him as a member of the Institute. Napoleon the First said, 'Marmus, I am the Emperor of the French, but you are the King of the infinitely little and you will organize them as I have organized the Empire.' Ah, he was a very great man and a man of wit! The French appreciated this too late."
The professor replaced Malus and the essay on him in the ten-sous stall, without remarking how often hope had been lit and extinguished alternately in the gray eyes of an old woman seated on a stool in an angle of the quay.
"He was there," Marmus said, pointing to the Tuileries on the opposite bank of the river. "I saw him reviewing his sublime troops! I saw him thin, ardent as the sands of Egypt; but, as soon as he became Emperor, he grew fat and good-natured, for all fat men are excellent—this is why Sinard is thin, he is a gall-making machine. But would Napoleon have supported my theory?"