Paris was a dreary enough place in December, and the cheap hotel was even drearier. But as Louis explained later to his mother, it was within ten minutes walk of the medical school, and as if he had just noticed it, the Jardin des Plantes not two hundred steps away. A curious, a happy coincidence!
The day after their arrival even the invincible Louis could scarcely move a hand to pick up the letter which a messenger brought him. He read it, and sprang from his bed dynamic with rekindled life. Cuvier, the great Cuvier, had sent for him. That very night! Where was his manuscript? Where his collections? Where his clean clothes?
The evening was a surprise, and a success. The polished Frenchman whose erudition Agassiz felt could never be plumbed, whose memory was more prodigious than his own, whose swiftness of thought kept even a pace ahead of him, this keen and noble scholar was like nothing he had known in the German universities. Young Agassiz was ever ready to pay homage when homage was due from him, and only regretted that the opportunity came to him so infrequently. He recognized Cuvier as his master and offered him proud fealty. The reserve and fine manners bewildered and chilled him somewhat, but the scientist he knew as one of his own kind.
Cuvier watched the lad intently, and he realized also a truth which must always seem incredible, that here was a man of his own sort. He watched him for a few days and then offered Louis and Dinkel a corner in his own laboratory, thus carrying on the pattern which had been set by every professor, Swiss or German, who had felt the tingling contact of that magic combination of brilliance and charm. Louis settled into the laboratory, special for fishes and orderly as nothing in his life had ever been, and fell to work on material which Cuvier had been fifteen years collecting. Fell to work with such effect that in February Cuvier had made up his mind.
It was at one of his Saturday evening receptions that he sent his assistant to his study on an errand. The man came back with an enormous portfolio which Louis knew well from his hours of hard work upon it. As the guests watched, Cuvier delivered it, filled to running over with his drawings and notes, into the astonished hands of Louis Agassiz, his to keep for his fossil fishes project which Cuvier hereby renounced. When Agassiz was old and could remember many things, he could recall none which had so confounded him with joy. It was seal and signet of a great man’s faith in him, a trust never to be betrayed.
Always under his deep admiration and respect for Cuvier, or perhaps because of them, Louis Agassiz was a little in awe of his formality. This feeling of being an outsider depressed his warm nature so much that a few weeks after his arrival he wrote his sister Olympe that he would gladly go away but for the richness of the opportunity. Yet here as at the universities, it was not the need of home which made Louis homesick, but the necessity for leadership, for appreciation. Louis must always be first, or among the first, and here in Paris where he was too poor for even a presentable coat, he had little opportunity to make himself known. Fifteen hours a day he worked between medical school and the museum of natural history. He could not admire Cuvier all the time; he needed some admiration himself.
He got it, curiously enough from the great French savant who because of his devastating tongue was known as the terrible Humboldt, a man who slew both enemies and friends with biting brilliant sarcasm. Louis walked into his laboratory in the Latin Quarter one day, and never did the strange magic of his charm perform a greater miracle. Humboldt looked at the young man, ingenuous, keen-eyed, sure of himself yet with tribute in his hands; and exceedingly good to look at in his strength and youth and poverty.
“Come to breakfast with me,” he said, and took him around the corner to the Café Procop, a place so celebrated that Louis had not dared to enter it. Humboldt ordered food which he scarcely took time to eat, though it is probable that not much of it was wasted. He began to tell this attentive young man about how he had worked with the electric fishes of Venezuela, and breakfast lasted exactly three hours. Nor did Louis, already a famous talker, interrupt him once, a greater tribute than Humboldt knew. The two parted warm friends.
And before long Louis needed all the cheer that he could get from this friendship. Poverty no longer led him by the hand, it had him by the throat. As Rose Agassiz had foreseen, the long trip to Paris had eaten into his resources, and now there were books to buy, and drawing materials for Dinkel, and now and then a little food. Because Louis had not enough money for a book which Auguste wanted, the family discovered his straits. “Now,” said Rose Agassiz, “something must be done.” And being practical, as her son was not, she wrote him about what he could do; leave Paris, because after all if he was too poor to enjoy its advantages he might as well be in Switzerland; and get rid of Dinkel. Two propositions presented to her boy with such sympathy and clarity, such common sense and sweetness, that the letter sounds wholly irresistible.
But not to Louis! Who knew better than he of what his poverty was depriving him? “I can not even follow up my letters of introduction,” he tells his mother, “because I have no presentable coat.” Yet neither he nor Rose Agassiz could realize that just across the Seine was the potential companionship of the great ones of the earth. Young men then, only a few years older than Louis, and known as Balzac, Dumas, and Victor Hugo. Great men seem to consort only when implacable Time has drained away the obscuring crowds and left them in their bleak and quiet possession of the hilltops.
If Louis had owned enough money to set him free to wander as he liked, he might even have come across a small Provençal peasant lad who would have hidden away from him, and have capitulated only when he saw the big stranger lost in admiration of the gorgeous butterfly which he had pinned to his father’s barn. Then he might have shown the man with the magic smile the fine collection which he kept in the shabby farm, and shared some of his amazing lore. But he probably would have been much too shy, for his name was Henri Fabre, and it was never anything to him that a great scientist was around. Still, Louis always liked children, and he might have made friends both with Henri and with the little Pasteur boy who later considered Fabre only an untrained peasant of no importance. Time has a way of establishing queer neighbors in that final occupation of the hilltops!
But none of this concerned Louis now. He was bent upon proving to his mother that her prudent letter hadn’t, after all, much sense. How, he asks reasonably, could he carry with him these thousands of fish skeletons which were essential to his work? Sometime he would like to organize all Swiss colleges into one Helvetic university, but not just now. And as for Dinkel, if the stagnation of the book trade continued (how familiar a refrain!), he might be forced to give him up. But meantime he had forgotten to mention that Alex Braun had been in town for six weeks with his fine young brother, and that they missed Schimper. And love to Auguste.
Braun was in town, and dozens of young medical students were filling the hotel as spring drew on, and life even without money looked up. Already another Little Academy had started in Louis’ room; already the lads were gravitating toward him and Braun, and the lectures were under way in botany and zoology. Louis had Paris where he wanted it. He started a friendly correspondence about a professorship at Neuchâtel, and went on with his fishes.
Then, toward the end of March, when even Louis could see nothing ahead of him but back to Switzerland by foot, and even Louis felt that March was going out like a lion after devouring him, a letter arrived by messenger. Louis opened it and drew out a bank note for one thousand francs, an incredible bank note and an incredible letter with it. And yet in view of the way his Aladdin’s lamp had always served him, not incredible at all. The letter explained that no reply had come from the publisher (again a familiar refrain) and that fearing the effect of worry on Louis’ work, the writer entreated him to accept the enclosed credit. It was signed Alexander von Humboldt.
A great gift because greatly needed, and one which moved Louis so deeply that no one but his mother sufficed to bear his thanks. If she would but write him a few lines, the great and good Humboldt, forgetting how celeb
rated he was! Better, he adds with less diplomacy than honesty, to have it come from her than from papa, who while he would doubtless write it more correctly, would not do it the way he liked. Rose Agassiz did write the great man, and correct or not, she pleased the sarcastic Humboldt into as gracious a letter as her heart could desire, even her heart which so much needed that praise of her son.
“How happy you are to have a son so distinguished by his talents, by the variety and solidity of his acquirements, and, withal, as modest as if he knew nothing—in these days, too, when youth is generally characterized by a cold and scornful amour-propre. One might well despair of the world if a person like your son, with information so substantial and manners so sweet and prepossessing, should fail to make his way.”
Louis scrawled a note of gratitude, himself, which he apparently never sent. Nor did he ever return the money which Humboldt had tactfully considered a loan; being, he said, pleased to remain his debtor. But he never forgot the kindness which made it possible for him to continue his work.
Louis, exuberant again because money jingled in his pockets and because spring was in the air, and Normandy was one of the lovely places of the earth which he had promised himself, invited Dinkel and Braun for a walking trip along its coast. Freedom from care, the sea for the first time, the strange new life of the tides on the shore, sun, salt air, and good friends—what more could a man want? It was a holiday which no person of good sense would have taken, and it probably started Louis, the mountain-born, in his lifelong service to find out what the sea had to contribute to the fund of human knowledge. A holiday indeed for all science to celebrate!
Then in the curious way that fate has of fattening us for the slaughter, Louis came back, tanned and joyous from his trip, to face a shattering loss. His good friend, the man he willingly called master, Cuvier, who held the lad’s friendship and his career in his hand and who cherished both, Cuvier suddenly died. On a Sunday in May when Louis had worked all day, shut into the laboratory out of the bright spring, Cuvier appeared, and watching his engrossed absorption, and perhaps recalling his own intense youth, tried to warn him. “Be prudent,” he said, “and remember that too much work kills.” And went away to die because his body was not strong enough to feed the fire of his mind. Yet Cuvier would not have taken away from Agassiz any of the burden of the work that kills. He knew that a man cannot die well unless he has first been quickened.
If Cuvier, who had just been created a peer of France and who had the influence of birth and of achievement, if he had lived he would probably have seen to it that Agassiz received recognition with a Paris professorship. With his protection withdrawn, the young scholar found himself surrounded and attacked by the intrigues which seem concomitant to all academic positions, and which were probably heightened by French love of intrigue. But Louis had no love of intrigue, and no defenses against it. What he wanted, he asked for honestly, and worked hard to get. He discovered, however, that it took more than hard and honest work to get him what he wanted in Paris.
Paris was full of young Frenchmen who had no mind to see a Swiss in a coveted position. So furious became the competition as soon as Cuvier was gone, that Agassiz turned with real zest toward the Neuchâtel proposition for a professorship which he had started half-heartedly before Humboldt relieved his need. It was indeed too small a place for a man of his achievement, and Louis never underestimated his worth, but it offered peace and a living wage while the disturbing Paris had neither for him. He quieted his own bitterness with the promise of a position later in a German university which a Paris professorship would have made impossible but for which Neuchâtel would serve as excellent preparation. Humboldt advised him to go, and wrote letters for him, no one urged him to stay. On the other hand, warm and cordial letters came from the little Swiss university begging for his consideration of the post. They must have comforted Agassiz’s sore heart, and helped to restore his sanguine confidence that whatever plan he decided upon was the best plan. Never a backward look after he had set his feet on their way.
Through a small, unwilling contribution of his publisher he could leave Dinkel in Paris to finish up some of the drawings. And now in a burst of gratitude toward Humboldt who had been diplomatically easing him out of Paris, he sums up all of the results of his labor in Paris and begs him to share them with others since it would be so long before he had money to publish them. No man, indeed, for intrigue was Agassiz!
The contributions were considerable, too, and Humboldt must have been glad to consider them. Louis was still deeply interested in the problems of classification. He had now through his study of living fishes in relation to the structure of fossil fishes found what he felt to be a complete and natural relation of the different families. The scattered bits of his puzzle had shaken themselves into a kind of fitted order which he recognized with a delight that he must share. “In one word,” he says, “the genetic succession of the fishes corresponds perfectly with their zoological classification, and with just that classification proposed by me.”
Louis Agassiz presented the world with a new basis for the study of fossils and asked for no return except that it be used. With characteristic Agassiz grace, he bows first to himself for that classification “proposed by me,” then to Paris which found no place for a man who could not be devious with his gifts, and most graciously and joyously of all to the struggling university in Switzerland which was to be his laboratory for future gifts.
8. TIME TO SETTLE DOWN
November again. A year gone by since the zigzag journey to Paris. A year of high hope, bitter struggle, and more laughter than comes to most in a year. A long step forward in his work, a short one in influences which would forward his welfare; always the proportion with Louis Agassiz. A year from which he salvaged the high hopes, the laughter, and a thick quarto of sheets about his fossil fishes. All these he took with him when he made his way back to Switzerland. And well they served him.
Neuchâtel was the Switzerland of his boyhood, just across the lake from Cudrefin where Grandfather Mayor’s old white horse had so many vacations ago brought him and Auguste down from school. Only the length of the lake away from the parish of Concise which now that it could not hold him, was a dear neighbor. A small college town of a few thousand people, and less than a hundred students, so small, and muddy, and austere with its plain houses built to shed the weather that it needed Swiss blood to find the beauty of the mountain tops behind it, and to breathe home in its clear air.
When Louis walked into the university that November day in 1832 he saw it, not as a place with no materials for work, with no room for his class, but as a place where he could supply materials, where he could find quarters, where he had much to do. “Here is room at last for my specimens,” he said, and began his first museum in the Orphans’ Home, not an inappropriate place for them. “The justice of the peace does not need his room in City Hall all of the time,” he said. “It would make a central location for my lectures.” Quite naturally, then, the townspeople drifted in to the room which they had loaned him, listened to him, and came again and again. “Everybody really wants to know about nature,” Agassiz said, and proceeded to weave his magic about them.
For Louis Agassiz was making a new discovery about himself. His share of the Little Academy when he had lectured to his equals, and defended his opinions against their sharp minds, had always filled him with zest. Intellectual gymnastics which made him strong and lean. Now he had a different zest. This audience had no rapier for fencing, but empty hands which they held up for him to fill. What should he give them and how give it that they might not let it slip from their unaccustomed grasp? Louis knew how he had fed his own hungry mind, and he saw no better way to feed theirs. As he got experience, so would he give it. And thus was given to the world its great modern teacher! For as Louis Agassiz taught the Neuchâtelois, we teach today from the youngest play-school to the perfectly equipped laboratories of our greatest universities. And if the magic of the teacher is not a
lways inherited with his methods, at least the student now has a chance to know his work at first hand instead of through the dull pages of a book.
The university boys had never had such a teacher. They sat, a dingy little group in a dingy little classroom, waiting for the new professor that first morning. They sprawled and gossiped as they waited but had not even interest enough to speculate about the new man. He would be like all the rest, and read them a dull lecture which they might themselves get from one of his books.
The door flung open, and the boys sat up. A young man, not so much older than themselves, yet with none of their gawky immaturity. Sure of himself, sure of them. Deep eyes which looked through them and which they met with doubtful stare, until he suddenly smiled. They blinked and watched more closely the swift grace of his movements as he crossed the room and tossed his papers on his table. Then they sighed and pulled out notebooks and pencils. For a moment they had forgotten the dull business of the hour.
But the pencils remained suspended over the page; there was no time for writing. The sleepy room was suddenly stung into vitality. Agassiz was talking to them about a hawk which had swooped past him as he crossed the campus, and how its beak and claws were adapted to catch and hold the mouse that it carried away. “Like this,” he said, and turned to the dingy blackboard where in a few swift strokes the curve of the cruel beak was alive before them.
“And now for the work of the course,” he said, and they all slackened a bit, having felt for an instant the prey of that hawk. But the young professor did not even sit down, his papers lay untouched on his desk. “This is what we shall do,” he said, and gave them a brief survey of some of the problems in natural history which they might attack. A quick sketch on the board, an explanation so clear that it sounded too simple to be true, and all the time that sense of mounting excitement. Out of their stodgy selves, they were asking questions, getting answers direct and satisfactory, diving and swimming beside him in cold sharp waters which galvanized them all. The old clock struck the hour, and some students stumbled out in a daze, and others rushed to the desk where Agassiz sat collecting his unused notes. When he left the room they still surrounded him, an eager bodyguard convoying him to his next class.
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