IV
INCONVENIENCE OF QUAYS WHERE ARE BOOK STALLS
At four o'clock, Professor Marmus was at the end of the Rue de Seine, under the arcades of the Institute. Those who know him will admit that he had done nobly, since he had taken only one hour to go through the Luxembourg and down the Rue de Seine.
There a lamentable voice, the voice of a child, plucked from the good man the two sous that Madame Adolphe had given to him. When he reached the Pont des Arts he remembered that he had to pay toll and turned back suddenly to beg for a sou from the child.
The little rascal had gone to break the coin, in order to give only one sou to his mother. She was walking up and down the Rue Mazarine with her baby at her breast.
It became necessary for the professor to turn his back on the veteran soldier who guards against the possibility of a Parisian passing over the bridge without paying the toll.
Two roads were open to him: the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal. Curiosity makes one lose more time in Paris than anywhere else.
How may one walk without looking at those little oblong boxes, wide as the stones of the parapet, that all along the quays stimulate book lovers with posters saying, "Four Sous – Six Sous – Ten Sous – Twelve Sous – Thirty Sous?" These catacombs of glory have devoured many hours that belonged to the poets, to the philosophers and to the men of science of Paris.
Great is the number of ten-sous pieces spent in the four-sous stalls!
The professor saw a pamphlet by Vicq-d'Azyr, a complete Charles Bonnet in the edition of Fauche Borel, and an essay on Malus.
"And such then is the sum of our achievements," he said to himself. "Malus! A genius arrested in his course when he had almost captured the empire of light! But we have had Fresnel. Fresnel has done excellent things! – Oh, they will recognize some day that light is only a mode of substance."
The professor held the notice on Malus. He turned its pages. He had known Malus. He recalled to himself and recited the names of all the Maluses. Then he returned to Malus, to his dear Malus, for they had entered the Institute together at the return to Paris of the expedition to Egypt. Ah! It was then the Institute of France and not a mass of disunited Academies.
"The Emperor had preserved," said Marmus to himself, "the saintly idea of the Convention. I remember," he muttered aloud, "what he said to me when I was presented to him as a member of the Institute. Napoleon the First said, 'Marmus, I am the Emperor of the French, but you are the King of the infinitely little and you will organize them as I have organized the Empire.' Ah, he was a very great man and a man of wit! The French appreciated this too late."
The professor replaced Malus and the essay on him in the ten-sous stall, without remarking how often hope had been lit and extinguished alternately in the gray eyes of an old woman seated on a stool in an angle of the quay.
"He was there," Marmus said, pointing to the Tuileries on the opposite bank of the river. "I saw him reviewing his sublime troops! I saw him thin, ardent as the sands of Egypt; but, as soon as he became Emperor, he grew fat and good-natured, for all fat men are excellent – this is why Sinard is thin, he is a gall-making machine. But would Napoleon have supported my theory?"