constant attention indispensable to
the making of a fortune. Any mercantile venture, any need for
using other people's money would bring me to grief, and I should
be ruined. Though I have nothing, at least at the moment, I owe
nothing. The man who gives his life to the achievement of great
things in the sphere of intellect, needs very little; still,
though twenty sous a day would be enough, I do not possess that
small income for my laborious idleness. When I wish to cogitate,
want drives me out of the sanctuary where my mind has its being.
What is to become of me?

"I am not frightened at poverty. If it were not that beggars are
imprisoned, branded, scorned, I would beg, to enable me to solve
at my leisure the problems that haunt me. Still, this sublime
resignation, by which I might emancipate my mind, through
abstracting it from the body, would not serve my end. I should
still need money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for
that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage possessed of
both heaven and heart. A man need only never stoop, to remain
lofty in poverty. He who struggles and endures, while marching on
to a glorious end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have
the strength to fight here? We can climb cliffs, but it is
unendurable to remain for ever tramping the mud. Everything here
checks the flight of the spirit that strives towards the future.

"I should not be afraid of myself in a desert cave; I am afraid of
myself here. In the desert I should be alone with myself,
undisturbed; here man has a thousand wants which drag him down.
You go out walking, absorbed in dreams; the voice of the beggar
asking an alms brings you back to this world of hunger and thirst.
You need money only to take a walk. Your organs of sense,
perpetually wearied by trifles, never get any rest. The poet's
sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and what ought to be his
glory becomes his torment; his imagination is his cruelest enemy.
The injured workman, the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute
who has fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged--even vice
and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the world is
merciless to the inventor, to the man who thinks. Here everything
must show an immediate and practical result. Fruitless attempts
are mocked at, though they may lead to the greatest discoveries;
the deep and untiring stud