Page 1107 - les-miserables

pared Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics,
broke the pebble which he found and reasoned on geology,
drew from memory a silkworm moth, pointed out the faulty
French in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puysegur
and Deleuze, affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied
nothing, not even ghosts; turned over the files of the Moni-
teur, reflected. He declared that the future lies in the hand
of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with educational
questions. He desired that society should labor without re-
laxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level,
at coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at in-
creasing the mind in youthful persons, and he feared lest
the present poverty of method, the paltriness from a liter-
ary point of view confined to two or three centuries called
classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scho-
lastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our
colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist,
exact, a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at
the same time, thoughtful ‘even to chimaeras,’ so his friends
said. He believed in all dreams, railroads, the suppression
of suffering in chirurgical operations, the fixing of images
in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the steering of
balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed by the cit-
adels erected against the human mind in every direction,
by superstition, despotism, and prejudice. He was one of
those who think that science will eventually turn the po-
sition. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was a guide. One
would have liked to fight under the one and to march be-
hind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable

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