"I know it; I know your heart, and I see that you would like to enrich others before enriching yourself. Everything will turn out as you wish, I am sure. I have dreamed of it more than ten times." "If you have done nothing more than dream, my dear Jean-----" "Wait, wait. What is that book you always carry under your arm and that you seem to be studying?" "I have already told you, a scientific treatise on the power and weight of water and the laws of equilibrium." "I remember--you have told me before; but I tell you that your book lies, or else you have read it wrong; otherwise you would know what I know." "What is that?" "That your factory is impossible, and that your father, if he persists in fighting against a stream that snaps its fingers at him, will lose his outlay and will discover his folly too late. That is why I have been so cheerful for some time past. I was depressed and out of temper as long as I thought that your undertaking might succeed; but I had one hope that kept coming to my mind again and again, and I determined to satisfy myself about it. So I walked and worked and used my eyes and studied. Oh! yes, studied, and I didn't read your books and your maps and your figuring; I saw and understood everything. Monsieur Emile, I am only a poor peasant, and your Galuchet would spit on me if he dared; but I can tell you of one thing that you hardly suspect, and that is that your father has no idea of what he is doing, that he has taken bad advice, and that you don't know enough about it to set him right. The coming winter will carry away your works, and every winter will carry off whatever there is, until Monsieur Cardonnet has thrown his last three-franc piece into the water. Remember what I tell you, and don't try to persuade your father. It would be one more reason for him to persist in ruining himself, and we don't need that to induce him to do it; but you will be ruined, my son, and if not altogether here, you will be somewhere else, for I hold your papa's brain in the hollow of my hand. It is a powerful brain, I admit, but it is a madman's brain. He is a man who works himself into a frenzy for his schemes to such an extent that he considers them infallible, and when a man is built that way he never succeeds in anything. I thought at first that he had played his hand out, but now I see that the game is becoming serious, for he is beginning to rebuild all that the last freshet destroyed. He had had too good luck until then; still another reason--good luck makes a man overbearing and presumptuous. That is the history of Napoléon, whom I saw rise and fall, like a carpenter who climbs to the roof of a house without looking to see if the foundations are solid. However good a carpenter he may be--however fine a building he may build--if the wall totters, good-bye to the whole work!"