there is in science, how it narrows our horizon! It's just as well to
remain a child with eyes gazing into the invisible. A child knows more
than all your learned men."

Francois, who occasionally indulged in irony, pretended to share his
opinion. "No doubt, no doubt," said he, "but one must have a natural
disposition to remain a child. For my part, unhappily, I'm consumed by a
desire to learn and know. It's deplorable, as I'm well aware, but I pass
my days racking my brain over books. . . . I shall never know very much,
that's certain; and perhaps that's the reason why I'm ever striving to
learn a little more. You must at all events grant that work, like
idleness, is a means of passing life, though of course it is a less
elegant and aesthetic one."

"Less aesthetic, precisely," rejoined Hyacinthe. "Beauty lies solely in
the unexpressed, and life is simply degraded when one introduces anything
material into it."

Simpleton though he was in spite of the enormity of his pretensions, he
doubtless detected that Francois had been speaking ironically. So he
turned to Antoine, who had remained seated in front of a block he was
engraving. It was the one which represented Lise reading in her garden,
for he was ever taking it in hand again and touching it up in his desire
to emphasise his indication of the girl's awakening to intelligence and
life.

"So you engrave, I see," said Hyacinthe. "Well, since I renounced
versification--a little poem I had begun on the End of Woman--because
words seemed to me so gross and cumbersome, mere paving-stones as it
were, fit for labourers, I myself have had some idea of trying drawing,