Laura Read Free

was expecting to see her a little confused at the sight of my merit. Alas! she was nothing of the kind. The little imp began to laugh, took my hand and, holding on to it, looked me up and down with an air of teasing admiration; after which, she declared to our uncle that she found me much uglier.
    However, I did not become disconcerted and, thinking that she still doubted my abilities, I set to questioning my uncle on a point which I felt he had neglected in his last lecture, an ingenious pretext for treating the ladies to a display of technical words and theories I had learned by heart. My uncle lent himself with an obliging lack of pretentiousness to this stratagem, which lasted some considerable time and showed off all my talents.
    Laura did not appear to pay it any attention, and at the far end of the table she began a hushed conversation in Italian with her governess. I had studied this language a little in my brief leisure moments; I lent an ear several times, and recognised that they were having a discussion on the way to preserve green peas then, in my own eyes I regained the upper hand. Although Laura had grown yet more beautiful, I felt indifferent to her charms, and I left her saying to myself: “If I had known that you were only a silly little middle-class girl, I would not have taken so much trouble to show you of what I am capable.”
    Despite this reaction on the part of my self-pride, after an hour had passed I felt very sad, and as though I were being crushed by the weight of an immense disappointment . My immediate superior, the deputy assistant curator, saw me sitting in the corner of the gallery, looking shattered and with the gloomy expression I had habitually worn the previous year.
    What is wrong? he asked me. Anyone would think that today you are remembering having been the greatest slowcoach in all creation.
    Walter was an excellent young man: twenty-four years old, with an amiable face, a serious mind and a cheerfuldemeanour. His eyes and voice were imbued with the serenity of a clear conscience. He had always shown indulgence and affection towards me. I could not open my heart to him, for I could not see clearly into it myself; but I let him see the preoccupations which were rising up vaguely within me, and in the end I asked him what he thought of our arid studies, which had value only in the eyes of a few scientific adepts and remained a closed book to common mortals.
    My dear boy, he replied, there are three ways of viewing our studies’ goal. Your uncle, who is a respectable scholar, sits astride just one of these ways, and the pony he is riding with such panache, the one he spurs on furiously, and which often carries him away beyond all certainty, is called hypothesis. The rough, ardent horseman wishes, like Curtius, to plunge into the abysses of the earth, but there to discover the beginning of things and the successive and regular development of those first things. I believe he is seeking the impossible: chaos will not let go of its prey, and the word mystery is written on the cradle of earthly life. It matters not, your uncle’s works have great value, because in the midst of many errors, he unearths many truths. Without the hypothesis which fascinates him and which has fascinated so many others, we would still find ourselves limited to the inexact symbolism of Genesis.
    “But,” Walter continued, “there is a second way of viewing science, and this is the one that has won me over. It consists of applying to industry the riches which slumber between the leaves of the earth’s bark and which, every day, thanks to the progress of physics and chemistry,reveal to us new peculiarities and elements of well-being, sources of infinite power for the future of human societies.
    “As for the third way, it is interesting but puerile. It consists of knowing the detail of the innumerable events and minute modifications that the mineralogical elements present. This is the science of details, which