"That was nothing. I was hurried and excited, and I have been keeping myself too closely to my work. A run to Dunkerque, a week of rest and sea-air, will make all right again."
But the great man shook his head gravely: "Not weeks, but years, of a different life are needed. You must give up the laboratory altogether if you want to live. Remember your mother's fate and your father's early death—think of the deadly blight that fell so soon upon the rare beauty of your sister. Some day you will realize your danger: realize it now, in time. Close your laboratory, lock up your library, say adieu to Paris, and lead the life of a traveler, an Arab, a Tartar. For the present cease to dream of the future: strength is better than a professorship in the College of France, and health more than the cross of the Legion of Honor."
Fournier was at first surprised and incredulous: he became convinced, then alarmed. After some thought he was horribly dejected. At such a time an Englishman becomes stolid, a German gives up utterly, an American begins to live fast, since he may not live long; but he, being a Frenchman and a Parisian, had alternations—first, the idea of suicide, which means sleep; second, reaction, which is hopefulness.
He chose to react, and did it promptly. A little time, and the rooms in the Place de l'École de Médecine, opposite the bookseller's, displayed a card stuck on the entrance-door with red wafers, "à louer," the hammer of the auctioneer knocked down the comfortable furniture of the apartments in the rue Rossini, while that of the carpenter nailed up the well-beloved books in stout boxes, and the places that had known M. le docteur knew him no more. None but those who have experienced the pleasures of a life devoted to scientific research can understand how hard all this was to him. The fulfillment of long-cherished desires, the completion of elaborate systematic investigations, the realization of pet theories, the establishment of new principles,—all, all abandoned after so much toil and care. To struggle painfully through a desert toward some beautiful height, which, at first dimly seen, has grown clearer and clearer and always more splendid as he advances, and now at its very foot to be turned back by a gloomy stream in whose depths lurks death itself; to reach out his hand to the golden truth, fruit of much winnowing of human knowledge, and as he grasps the precious grains to be borne back by a grim spectre whose very breath is horrible with the noisome odors of the tomb; to choose an arduous life, and learn to love it because it has high aims, and then to give it up at once and utterly!—alas, poor Fournier!
"Nevertheless," he said as he turned his back on Paris, "even idle wanderings are better than dying of consumption."
Behold the student of science a wanderer—sailing his yacht among the islands of the Mediterranean; making long journeys through the wild mountain-regions and lovely valleys of untraveled Spain; stemming the historic current of the Nile; among the nomad tribes, in Arab costume riding an Arabian mare, as wild an Arab as the wildest of them; killing tigers in India, tending stock in Australia, chasing buffaloes in Western America,—everywhere avoiding civilization and courting Nature and the company of men who either by birth or adoption were the children of Nature. By day the winds of heaven kissed his cheeks and the sun bronzed them: at night he often fell asleep wondering at the star-worlds that gemmed the only canopy over his welcome blanket-couch.
His treatment of consumption was certainly a rational one, and perhaps the only one that is ever wholly successful. But, alas! few can take so costly a prescription.
How often had his studies led him to dissect the bodies of animals that had died in their dens in the Jardin des Plantes! Often in the first generation of cage-life, almost always in the second, invariably in the third, they grow dull, listless, the fire goes out of their eyes, the litheness out of their limbs: they forget to eat, they cough, and soon they die. Of what? Consumption. Once our fathers were wild and lived in the open air: they scarcely ever died, as we do, of consumption. Crowded cities, bad drainage, overwork, want of healthful exercise, stimulating food, dissipation,—these are human cage-life. If a man is threatened with consumption, let him go back to the plains and forests before it is too late.
Certainly the treatment benefited Fournier. By and by it did more—it cured him. The cough was forgotten, the cheeks filled out, the muscles became hard as bundles of steel wire, his strength was prodigious: he ate his food with a relish unknown in Paris, and slept like a child.
Nevertheless, his mind, trained to habits of thought and observation, was not idle. When a city was his home he had been a physiologist and had studied man: he made the world his dwelling-place, and wandering among the nations he became an ethnologist and began to study men.