A tempest, assailed us in the Gulf of Lyons, and our engines were disabled. Our vessel, after being tossed about for nine days by the winds, at length reached the coast of Spain, and we managed to make the port of Barcelona, where the authorities would not allow us to land, as we had no passports for Spain. We coasted this inhospitable country during a frightful storm, and at length reached the little port of Rosas, where we intended to ride out the tempest.
Here I landed, and crossed the Pyrenees in an open carriage, a hurricane, the result of the tempest at sea, threatening to hurl us into an abyss at every moment. At last we safely reached France, and Marseilles, where I was obliged to fulfil a promise made to the managers of the Grand Theatre on my former passage through the town.
I was, indeed, famously recompensed for the fatigues and dangers of my journey; for the Marseillais displayed towards me such unexampled kindness, that these last performances will ever remain on my mind as those in which I received the greatest applause. I could not take my leave of the public in a more solemn way, and I hastened my return to St. Gervais.
CONCLUSION.
I CAN, in ending this work, repeat what I said at the beginning of my penultimate chapter: “I have reached the object of my every hope.” But this time, if it pleases God, as my guide Muhammad would say, no temptation will again come to modify my plans of happiness. I hope still for a long time (always if it pleases God) to enjoy that gentle and peaceful existence which I had scarce tasted when ambition and curiosity took me to Algiers.
On returning home, I arranged round my study my performing instruments, my faithful comrades, I may almost say, my dear friends; henceforth I intended to devote myself to my darling study, the application of electricity to mechanism.
It must not be believed that, for that purpose, I disown the art to which I owe so much pleasure. The thought is far from me; I am more than ever proud of having cultivated it, as to it alone I owe the happiness of devoting myself to my new studies. Besides, I diverge from it less than my readers might be inclined to suppose, for I have, during a long period, applied electricity to mechanism, and I must confess—if my readers have not already guessed it—that electricity played an important part in many of my experiments. In reality, my labors of to-day only differ from the old ones in the form; but they are still experiments.
A lingering love for my old clockmaking trade has made me choose chronometro-electrical works as the objects of my study. I have adopted as my motto, “to popularize electric clocks by making them as simple and exact as possible.” And as art always supposes an ideal which the artist seeks to realize, I already dream of the day when the electric wires, issuing from a single regulator, will radiate through the whole of France, and bear the precise time to the largest towns and the most modest villages.
In the meanwhile, devoted to the sacred cause of progress, I labor incessantly in the hope that my humble discoveries will be of some service in the solution of this important problem.
My performance is ended (I must remind my readers that I offered them my narrative under this title); but I live in hope to begin it again soon, for I have still so many mysteries, great and small, to unveil. Sleight-of-hand is an immense quarry on which public curiosity can work for a long time; hence I do not take leave of my audience, or rather of my readers, for in the second form of performance I have adopted, my farewell will not be definitive, until I have exhausted all that may be said about Sleight-of-hand and its Professors. These two words will serve as the title of the supplemental part of my Memoirs.[F]