"The study of the exact sciences led you, against my will and your own, to a passion for the natural sciences, and, starting off at random, you thought of nothing but astronomy and of dreaming of worlds to which we can never go. After a contest in which I was not the stronger, I made you abandon those sciences, although I was not able to bring you back to a healthy and profitable application to the others; and, abandoning the idea of making you a mechanical engineer, I looked about to see in what way you could be useful to me. When I say useful to me, I assume that you do not mistake the sense in which I use the words. As my fortune was yours, it was my duty to train you to the work which will probably wear my life out to your advantage before long; that is in the natural order of things. I am happy to do my duty, and I shall persist in doing it in spite of you, if necessary. But should not good sense and paternal affection impel me to make you capable of preserving and defending that fortune, at all events, if not of developing it? My ignorance of the law had placed me a hundred times at the mercy of foolish or treacherous advice. I had been victimized by those parasites of pettifoggery who, having neither any genuine knowledge nor any healthy understanding of business, demand blind submission from their clients, and endanger their most valuable interests by folly, obstinacy, presumption, false tactics, useless subtleties and the rest. Thereupon, I said to myself that with a keen, quick intellect like yours, you could learn the law in a few years and obtain a sufficiently accurate idea of the details of procedure to need no other guide, no other adviser, and, above all, no other confidant than yourself. I had no desire to make of you an orator, an advocate, an assize court comedian, but I asked you to obtain your certificates and pass your examinations. You promised to do it!" "Well, father, have I ever rebelled, have I broken my promise?" said Emile, surprised to hear Monsieur Cardonnet speak with superb and as it were insulting contempt of that profession of which he had done his best to extol the honor and brilliancy, when it was a question of persuading his son to study it. "Emile," rejoined the manufacturer, "I do not propose to reproach you; but you have a passive, apathetic way of submitting, that is a hundred times worse than resistance. If I could have foreseen that you would waste your time, I would very quickly have thought of something else; for, as I have told you, time is the capital of capital, and here are two years of your life which have had no result in the way of developing your faculties and therefore none in the way of assuring your future." "I flatter myself that the contrary is true," said Emile, with a smile of mingled sweetness and pride, "and I can assure you, father, that I have worked hard, read a great deal, thought a great deal--I dare not say learned a great deal--since I have been at Poitiers."