Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from this visit, all
of science that man can grasp, a terminology to wit. Lavrille, the
worthy man, was very much like Sancho Panza giving to Don Quixote the
history of the goats; he was entertaining himself by making out a list
of animals and ticking them off. Even now that his life was nearing
its end, he was scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the
countless numbers of the great tribes that God has scattered, for some
unknown end, throughout the ocean of worlds.
Raphael was well pleased. "I shall keep my ass well in hand," cried
he. Sterne had said before his day, "Let us take care of our ass, if
we wish to live to old age." But it is such a fantastic brute!
Planchette was a tall, thin man, a poet of a surety, lost in one
continual thought, and always employed in gazing into the bottomless
abyss of Motion. Commonplace minds accuse these lofty intellects of
madness; they form a misinterpreted race apart that lives in a
wonderful carelessness of luxuries or other people's notions. They
will spend whole days at a stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out,
and enter a drawing-room with the buttons on their garments not in
every case formally wedded to the button-holes.
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