Have you never, my dear child, whilst warming your little feet on the hearth in winter-time, asked yourself, What is fire? that great benefactor of man; fire, without which part of the world would be uninhabitable by us during at least a third of the year; fire, without which we could not bake a morsel of bread, and would have to eat our meat raw; fire, which lights up the night for us, and without which we should have to go to bed when the hens go to roost; fire, which subdues metals, and without which we should have neither iron, nor copper, nor silver, nor anything that is manufactured from those materials; fire, without which, in short, human industry could not rise to much higher results than that of the monkey and of the beaver?
We are all of us, it is true, so much accustomed to fire that we do not pay much attention to it, and have a sort of persuasion that lucifer matches have existed from all eternity. But the first men, who were nearer neighbors to that great discovery whence all others have originated—the first men treated fire with more respect than we do. It was to them one of the mighty things of the world. The ancient Persians made a god of it, and told how Zoroaster, their prophet, went to seek it in heaven, passing thither from the top of the Himalayas, the highest chain of mountains in the known world.
The old Greeks pretended that Prometheus stole it from the gods, to make a present of it to man, which came to nearly the same thing as the Persian account. The Romans had their sacred fire, which the celebrated Vestals were bound to keep lighted, on pain of death to whoever should let it go out. At the present day we do not stand upon such ceremonies, but warm our feet at it quite familiarly, without wishing for anything further. But you would see a terrible revolution in the world if some Prometheus reversed were, some fine morning, to steal it from us, and carry it back to its ancient owners. Every branch of human industry would suddenly stop, as if by enchantment, and in the course of a very few years the poor little framework of human society, of which we are now so proud, would totally change its aspect, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy.
But do not be alarmed; there is no danger of the sort. Fire is not a present once made to man, but liable to be taken away from him at will. It is a law of nature which existed before the human race came into being, and which will doubtless continue to exist when the human race shall have disappeared. The existence of fire is connected in the most intimate way with that of that great king of the world of whom we spoke last time—Oxygen. Fire is the wedding-feast of Oxygen with other substances!
When kings are married, what rejoicings there are! what a commotion! what illuminations! It is only right and proper, then, that the king of the world should have rejoicings and illuminations at his weddings also. And they have never been wanting. The rejoicings are the warmth which rejoices us; the illuminations, the flame which gives us light. But man, in his dealings with nature, is an imperious subject, such as few earthly kings are troubled with—happily for them! Whenever he wants warmth and light he forces the king of the world to get married, and then takes advantage of the feast; nothing worse than that.
"How so?" you exclaim. "If I want to make a fire with stones or iron, I should never succeed. Is this because oxygen never unites himself with those substances, nor with heaps of others which are equally useless in lighting a fire? Yet you told me that oxygen was to be met with almost everywhere."
It is a fair question, my dear child; but my answer is, that what you said last is precisely the reason why all substances are not fit for making fire of. When oxygen is already there, as he is in stones, for instance, the marriage is over—the feast cannot begin again. Kings are like other people in this respect; their weddings are only celebrated once. If you had happened to be present at the moment when oxygen was united to the materials of which stones are composed, you would have seen a feast of which I should like to have heard some news. I was not there myself either; but learned men in these latter days have succeeded in breaking the bonds which united oxygen with the primitive substances in certain fragments of stone, and with these substances thus freed, and consequently able to remarry, they have been enabled to give us, in miniature, the spectacle of the festivities of a fresh wedding. And I can assure you it is enough to make one shudder, to think of the time when such a marriage must have taken place on a large scale.
With regard to iron the case is quite different.
You have without doubt heard tell of Louis XIV. (of France), that proud king who was called le Grand, and who is said to have heard himself compared to the sun, without smiling. It seems that he one day took it into his head to marry, it is difficult to say why, with Madame de Maintenon, the old wife of a poor paralytic poet named Scarron, who, as such, however, was only known by some few farces. Do you suppose that the palace of Versailles was illuminated in honor of this marriage? Not a bit of it. It was a disgraceful marriage, which they were bound to keep secret. The ceremony was conducted mysteriously and without lighting a single candle more than ordinary.
I do not pretend to say that oxygen has any of these weaknesses, nor that he is any more partial to marrying with one body more than with another. In the good God's great world, outside of the family of man, they know nothing of our foolish pride, of our little weaknesses. It is nevertheless a fact that this dear monarch has his preferences, and that all his marriages are not made in this fashion.