"I wonder who has succeeded beyond his best expectations? Someone closely connected with both of them, of course! And Paris--why should his success take him to Paris? Victor Fargeau, Alsatian though he is, is one of the most brilliant of the younger generation of German officers, a favourite of the Emperor, a member of the Staff, and attaché here in Petersburg. And she, my dear friend and enemy, is a Bourbon, an aristocrat of the first water, the daughter of an open enemy of our very good and convenient ally the French Republic. Paris--he who has succeeded is going to Paris. Well, I would give a good deal to know who he is and why he is going to Paris." CHAPTER II "And so, Monsieur le Ministre, I am to take that as your final word? I have given you every proof that I can--saving the impossible--the bringing of my apparatus from Strassburg to Paris, which, of course, you know is an impossibility, since it would have to cross the frontier, which was once a French high road. I have shown you the facts, the figures, the drawings--everything. Can you not see that I am honest, that I love my country, from which I have been torn away--I who come from a family that has lived in Alsace since it was first French territory--I who am a Frenchman through five generations--I who have sold my son to the Prussians--I who have masqueraded for years in the Prussian University of Strassburg, once the Queen of the Rhine Province--I who have discovered a secret which has lain buried since the days of the great Faraday--I who have discovered, or I should say re-discovered, after him the true theory, and, what is more, the actual working of the magnetic tides which flow north and south through the two hemispheres to the pole--I who can give you, Monsieur le Ministre, and through you France, the control of those tides, so that you may make them ebb and flow as the tides of the sea do--prosperity with the flow, adversity with the ebb, that is what it comes to--ah, it is incredible! "Once more, not as a scientist, not as an inventor, but only as a loyal son of France, let me implore you, Monsieur le Ministre, not to regard what I have told you as the dream of an enthusiast who has only dreamt and not done."