“Well, my best wishes to them, but their intellects are sadly obscured.”
Eusebe, who was ignorant of what the artists call “faire poser un bourgeois” (to make a fool of one), looked at his friend with astonishment. The merchant, however, continued, with an air of importance:—
“Since devastating wars have ceased to ravage our glorious country, the arts, the other victorious weapon of France, have secured to her conquests of far greater importance, to say nothing of steam, which would have given the world to the great Napoleon; and then the astonishing discoveries of chemistry! But, leaving all that out of the question, what is so grand and surprising as to see the events that agitate the universe heralded from point to point by numerous metal threads bordering the roads and traversing the land? The electric telegraph would suffice to illustrate our age! And then photography!——”
“No more, I beg of you!” interrupted Paul Buck. “I will say nothing of the electric wires, although they disfigure the landscape; but not a word of photography before breakfast, I insist: it would bring bad luck.”
“I respect every thing, even the most absurd superstition. It is my inflexible tolerance for opinions of every description which has rendered me hostile to those who would mar the grandeur of our age and check our progress towards a perfect civilization.”
The painter, who could hardly restrain an inclination to laugh, bit his lips, and turned to look out at the door. Then Bonnaud, who was determined to have an interlocutor at all hazards, addressed himself to Eusebe:—
“Are you not of my opinion, Monsieur Martin?”
The young provincial was absorbed and abstracted, and only caught the last words of the garrulous merchant. Seeing that it was absolutely necessary to make some sort of response, Eusebe repeated, mechanically, some of the phrases which constituted the staple of his father’s philosophical observations:—