letter: "Always keep me posted my dear Leander, as to what the laughers
are saying and remember the proverb that 'he will laugh well who laughs
last!' The majority of the people, even engineers, are rubbing their
hands in expectation of the colossal fiasco that awaits us, and it is
for that that the envious keep somewhat silent. I will predict to you
that as soon as success is assured everybody will mount to the house
tops and say 'I told you so! It was an idea of my own!' What great
geniuses are going to spring from the earth! I am in haste, so adieu,
courage, energy, silence and especially cheerfulness! And especially
cheerfulness!" Perhaps this cheerfulness of strong minds is the
invincible weapon of those who, like Sommeiller and Favre, fight against
apathy or the bad faith of their adversaries! Like Favre however
Sommeiller had not the pleasure of being present at the consecration of
his glory, for at the Mont Cenis banquet as at the St. Gothard the place
reserved for the creator of the great work was empty.

As disastrous as was the enterprise from a financial point of view what
a triumph for Favre would have been the day on which he traversed from
one end to the other that 15 kilometers of tunnel that he had walked
over step by step since the first blow of the pick had struck the rock
of the St. Gothard! But such a satisfaction was not to be reserved for
him. Suddenly, on the 19th of July, 1879, less than seven years after
the beginning of the work, and six months before the meeting of the
adits, in the course of one of his visits to the tunnel Favre was
carried off by the rupture of a blood vessel. A year before that epoch,
I had left the enterprise, Favre having confided to me the general
supervision over the manufacture of dynamite that he had undertaken at
Varallo Pombia for the needs of his tunnel, but my friend M. Stockalper,
engineer in chief of the Goschenen section, who accompanied Favre on his
fatal subterranean excursion, has many a time recounted to me the sad