SKETCH OF LOUIS FIGUIER. 835 



an ancient hat tree. Its salon, carpeted witli a dark-green Brus- 

 sels, such as was in style in the United States perhaps forty years 

 ago, "was decorated with numbers of flower pieces, huge wreaths 

 and bouquets, after the manner in which our mothers did their 

 water colors. They were framed in narrow black or gilt mold- 

 ings, and some of them still bore in the corner the numbers they 

 had borne in the salons of the sixties. 



As for M. Figuier, he had all the alertness, the decision, the 

 energy of the life which surged all about and invaded the street 

 in which he dwelt. In spite of his seventy- five years his form 

 was tall and straight ; his bearing was that of an ofiicer rather 

 than that of a writer ; in his white face was none of the efface- 

 ment of character so often seen in the old, no letting down of 

 moral and physical self-control; his eye was ardent, indignant, 

 sad by turns ; his speech eloquent, rapid, full of conviction, impa- 

 tient of contradiction. Yet one saw that he was, like the old 

 houses of the Rue Caumartin, " condemned." His bitter protest 

 against the way in which the journalism of the day treats the 

 popularization of science, his persistency in regarding himself as 

 the one and only popularizer ; his despair at the good-natured 

 raillery which the hobbies of his old age had called out, all 

 showed that M. Figuier was out of touch. This mingling of gen- 

 erations, this refusal to believe that his work was done, gave me 

 from the first of our acquaintance an interest in the fine old man 

 which was half pathetic, half humorous. 



I have never known a person whose origin and early education 

 were more evident. He proved his southern birth he was a Lan- 

 guedocian by his fervor, his imagination, his astonishing plans. 

 He showed his Huguenot parentage by the strength of his con- 

 victions. 



But these things did not explain why, at thirty years of age, 

 he should have left an excellent position as a professor, after hav- 

 ing spent years in the universities of Montpellier and Paris pre- 

 paring for it, and after having begun and succeeded in original 

 investigations, to become a popularizer of science. 



It struck me that a man of his evident pride and culture 

 would have a justifiable satisfaction in remaining among savants 

 and in pursuing the conventional path of university work, espe- 

 cially after he had acquired a sure footing. Why did not M. 

 Figuier accept the scholar's career in which he was so well 

 launched ? Why did he take up popularization ? I asked him 

 one day. 



" It was simple enough," he said. " It is true I had taken my 

 degrees and had a good position, but I had the idea that scientific 

 knowledge, which until then had been almost exclusively the 

 property of the learned, should be put within the reach of the 



