"My evening walks had but one motive, health. I had long made that a consideration, even when my studies were most enthralling; for I knew that the only way to long life was to husband the oil in the lamp. Every evening, in good or bad weather, I walked about the streets and quays of Venice, and generally ended my promenade by taking a cup of coffee at a respectable resort, where I heard all the news of the city and of the external world. It was not because I was interested in the world outside my laboratory that I listened keenly to the gossip of worldlings, but I was always on the watch for any new discovery or invention that might have some bearing on my pursuits. Science has many branches curiously interwoven, and the scientific world was at this period peculiarly active. I listened to discussions upon all the new facts and new theories which were upon men's tongues in those days—listened while ignorance dogmatised and folly argued, and religiously held my peace. I had no wish to be known as a disputant or an experimentalist. Scarcely half a dozen people in Venice knew of the existence of my laboratory. The Venetians are fonder of pleasure than of science—a gay and idle people, spending their nights in casinos, dividing their energies between the fever of high play and the excitement of secret intrigues; not a people to watch the progress of discovery with any profound interest. They gossiped about Newton and Descartes just in as light a tone as they discussed the last European war or the last revolt in Turkey.
"One evening the conversation was about an English millionaire who had hired a palace on the Canal Reggio, and whose wealth and splendour were the talk of the city. He was young, handsome, elegant, an accomplished musician, and a great linguist. He travelled with a secretary and twenty servants of different nationalities, and had engaged half a dozen gondoliers, and as many more miscellaneous attendants, in the city. One of the gossips whispered that, not content with the palace where he lived in an almost royal state and before the public eye, and where he received all the nobility of Venice, the Englishman had imitated our native manners so far as to engage a small suite of apartments in a quiet nook behind the Piazza, so hidden from the public eye that as yet even gossip had not been able to identify the exact position of this secret haven. Rumour asserted that there were days and nights when Mr. Topsparkle disappeared altogether from his palace, and was yet known not to have left the city. These mysterious disappearances might be easily accounted for in Venice, where it is a common thing for a wealthy profligate to provide himself with a secondary and secret establishment whose whereabouts is known only to the initiated.
"I had no interest in hearing of the rich Mr. Topsparkle, and listened with the utmost indifference to those minuter details of his life which the company at the coffee-house discussed with a keen relish, merely because this young man happened to be inordinately rich.
"It was not long after the advent of Mr. Topsparkle, and while the stories about his excellent manners and his worse than doubtful morals were still on every lip, that I met a young Frenchman at the coffee-house, whose conversation, addressed to a person at the next table, at once interested me.
"They were talking of the latest discovery in chemistry, which had been made at Munich by the great Johann Becher; and by the Frenchman's conversation I gathered that he was a good practical chemist, and had an intelligence which went far beyond his actual knowledge. He was just the order of neophyte to interest a worker who longs for some younger mind with which to share his developing ideas. Almost for the first time since I had frequented the coffee-house I joined unasked in the conversation of two strangers. I ventured to correct an assertion of the Frenchman's, and he received my correction with a modesty that delighted me. I enlarged upon the subject, and his interest was so much engaged that he walked with me to my door, listening respectfully to all I could tell him.
"We met again and again. The Frenchman told me that he had been educated as a chemist and apothecary, but, disliking the beaten tracks of medicine, had given up his profession, and was now maintaining himself by his attendance as secretary upon a travelling gentleman. I was so interested in the young man himself and his aspirations that I was entirely unconcerned as to his employer, and it certainly never occurred to me that he could be in the service of the rich Mr. Topsparkle.
"I asked my new friend his name. 'Louis,' he told me. 'What, Louis only—no surname?'
"He shrugged his shoulders. 'A waif, sir,' he said; 'there are many such in Paris.'
"I was content to accept him as a waif, and to know him only as Louis.
"After meeting him about a dozen times, I invited him to my laboratory, first exacting from him a promise that he should tell no one in Venice of anything that he saw there, or indeed of the existence of such a chamber under my son's roof.