“What! the author of the Lettres provinciales invented it?” Raphael exclaimed.
“He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor more beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of expansion possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into being. But water will only expand up to a certain point, while its incompressibility, being a force in a manner negative, is, of necessity, infinite.”
“If this skin is expanded,” said Raphael, “I promise you to erect a colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred thousand francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the grandest problem of mechanical science effected during the interval; to find dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally to build an asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane mathematicians.”
“That would be exceedingly useful,” Planchette replied. “We will go to Spieghalter to-morrow, sir,” he continued, with the serenity of a man living on a plane wholly intellectual. “That distinguished mechanic has just completed, after my own designs, an improved mechanical arrangement by which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay inside his cap.”
“Then good-bye till to-morrow.”
“Till to-morrow, sir.”
“Talk of mechanics!” cried Raphael; “isn’t it the greatest of the sciences? The other fellow with his onagers, classifications, ducks, and species, and his phials full of bottled monstrosities, is at best only fit for a billiard-marker in a saloon.”
The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette, and together they set out for the Rue de la Sante—auspicious appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter’s, the young man found himself in a vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and roaring furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an ocean of pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a sea of melted metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings filled your throat. There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were covered with it; everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a living organism; it became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself intelligently after every fashion, to obey the worker’s every caprice. Through the uproar made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling hammers, and the shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the steel, Raphael passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was able to inspect at his leisure the great press that Planchette had told him about. He admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call them, and the twin bars of steel coupled together with indestructible bolts.
“If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank,” said Spieghalter, pointing out a beam of polished steel, “you would make a steel bar spurt out in thousands of jets, that would get into your legs like needles.”
“The deuce!” exclaimed Raphael.