O ancient laborer, great, simple man, how rich and enviable you were, you who aspired to just one thing: to do well what you were doing, to possess intimately the object of your toil! No one better than you has understood the ponderous, obedient iron, no one than you has worked it with greater love and constancy. Somewhere there exists, I believe, an unhappy man eaten up with nerves and stomach-disorder. He lives crouched up against his telephone, and sends his orders to all the stock exchanges of the world. People call him the “iron king,” for some reason that has to do with finance. I don’t believe he has ever touched or weighed a morsel of real iron. Let us smile, Chalifour! Let us smile, my master! VI I should like to tell you about Bernier, too. They say he is a very poor man because his coat is all shiny from wear and his shoes have the weary, wretched look of things that have never been young, because the sweat of many summers has soaked and stained the ribbon of his hat and his baggy trousers give him the air of always kneeling. Bernier has a poor little drooping moustache with nothing glorious about it. You know only too well that he earns a hundred and twenty francs a month in some government bureau and that people say of him, “He’s a poor devil with a miserable job.” As for me, I know that Bernier is rich, and I have seen him smile in the hour of his wealth,--for the true wealth has its times of slumber and its awakenings. Bernier possesses something which is quite strange and almost inexpressible; it is a space, a white space, vast and virgin, and it is his power to be able to trace there certain harmonious lines which he alone knows how to trace in the right way. Why have you never seen, why have you never been able to see Bernier at the moment when he begins his work, when the whole sickly light of the office seems concentrated on the beautiful white page? His face is serene, smiling, assured. He half closes his eyes and draws back his head; he holds, adroitly and elegantly, a certain chosen pen, flexible, with a good point, a pen that belongs to him alone, which he has prepared for himself and which he would throw away if some blundering fool happened to touch it. And then he begins! His kingdom is ranged all about him: ink pure from all dust, a brightly lined ruler, a collection of pens with all sorts of points. He begins, and the black line obeys him, springs up, curves in, stops, bounds forward or falls back, prances, yields. Look at Bernier’s face: is it really the face of that poor wretch you have just described to me? No! No! It is the face of a masterful man, calm, sure of himself and his wealth, who is doing something that no one can do as well as he: across a snowy, limitless desert he directs, as if in a dream, a black line that advances, advances, now slowly, now dizzily, like time itself. VII