Laura Read Online Free PDF Page A

times more precious, and, by reason of its usefulness, I find it more beautiful than diamond. Remember what I told you, Alexis; the mattock, the anvil, the drill, the pick and the hammer, these are the most brilliant jewels and the most respectable forces of human reasoning!
    I listened to Walter speaking, and my over-excited imagination followed him into the depths of the subterranean excavations. I saw the reflections of torches, suddenly illuminating veins of gold running along flanks of quartz the colour of rust; I heard the hoarse voices of the miners as they plunged into the galleries of iron or the chambers of copper, and their heavy steel sledgehammers ’ brutal rage as they beat mercilessly upon the most ingenious products of the mysterious work of centuries. Walter, who led this greedy, barbarous horde, looked to me like a Vandal chieftain, and fever ran through my veins, fear turned my limbs to ice; I felt the blows echo in my skull, and I hid my head in the pillows on my bed, crying out:
    Mercy! Mercy! The mattock, the horrible mattock!
    One day, my Uncle Tungstenius, seeing that I was calm, wanted to convince me also that my journey intothe radiant regions of the crystal was nothing but a dream.
    If you have seen all these pretty things, he told me with a smile, I congratulate you. That could be quite curious , especially the turquoise islands, if they derived from a gigantic accumulation of the remains of antediluvian animals; but you would do better to forget these fantastical exaggerations and study, if not more exactly, then at least more rationally, the history of life from its origin and throughout the entire course of its transformations on our globe. Your vision presented you only with a world that was dead or had yet to be born. You had perhaps thought too much of the moon, where nothing as yet indicates the presence of organic life. It would be better to think of that succession of magnificent births that are wrongly called the lost races, as if anything could be lost in the universe, and as if all new life was not a reworking of the elements of former life.
    I listened more readily to my uncle than to my friend Walter, because, despite his stammer, he said some quite good things and did not have so much contempt for the combinations of shape and colour. Only, the sense of the beautiful, which had been revealed to me by Laura in our excursion through the crystal, was absolutely denied to him. He was open to enthusiastic admiration; but for him beauty was a state of being relative to the conditions of its existence. He fell down in ecstasy before the most hideous animals of the antediluvian ages. He was entirely at ease before the mastodon’s teeth, and that monster’s digestive faculties drew tears of affection from him. For him everything was mechanism, appropriation and function.
    After a few weeks, I was cured and became fully aware of the delirium from which I had suffered. Seeing me become lucid again, people ceased tormenting me, and confined themselves to forbidding me to speak again, even in jest, about the amethyst geode and what I had seen from the summit of the great milky-white crystal.
    In this regard Laura was unassailably discreet or stern. As soon as I opened my mouth to remind her of that magnificent excursion, she closed it with her hand; but she did not discourage me as the others did.
    Later! later! she told me with a mysterious smile. Regain your strength, and we shall see if your dream was that of a poet or a madman.
    I realised that I was expressing myself rather badly, and that this world that had seemed to me so beautiful was becoming ridiculous, viewed through the prosaic pedantry of my narration. I promised myself that I would train my mind and dull my senses to accept the language of the common man.
    I had grown very attached to Laura during my illness. She had distracted me in my melancholy moments, reassured me in my nightmares, in a word, cared for me as if I had been