But Louis was never daunted by lack of money. On the contrary the satisfaction of everybody concerned with Brazilian fishes encouraged him to go ahead with his own natural history of the fresh water fishes of Germany and Switzerland. Then when all the naturalists and foreign savants met at Heidelberg, he would have something to show them. Louis was curiously practical about forwarding his own ends through the right people and the right efforts. And if one of these ends did not happen to be a good living, a good living received very little attention.
He dedicated his book to Cuvier, and Cuvier began to notice him. He wrote to Humboldt a long and convincing appeal to accompany him on a journey to the Ural Mountains. And like the letters of application of many a young student, his request was turned down. But the letter certainly made Humboldt acquainted with the many advantages which would accrue to him and his expedition were Agassiz to accompany him! Louis believed that there was no sense in concealment of superiority, as indeed there was none. Humboldt remembered him. And Cuvier became his warm friend from the moment of the dedication.
As for Pastor Agassiz, he unfolded the magnificent book on Brazilian fishes from its wrappings and sat down to write to his gifted son:
“I hasten, my dear son, to announce the arrival of your beautiful work, which reached us on Thursday from Geneva. I have no terms to express the pleasure which it has given me. In two words, for I have only a moment to myself, I repeat my urgent entreaty that you would hasten your return as much as possible… The old father who waits for you with open heart and arms, sends you the most tender greeting…”
This, in spite of the fact that instead of the long-waited medical degree, Louis unexpectedly presented a degree of doctor of philosophy. Not a substitute for the M.D., he announced, but to give dignity to the title page of the Brazilian fishes volume, and to make a little surer—this he did not emphasize—the possibilities of a professorship. And gratifyingly enough, no oral examination required, such was the excellence of the written examinations. Louis could take his vacation at home with no sense of prodigal son.
Most famous people learn before they become famous to let others attend to the details of their work, quite probably the reason why they get time to be famous. Louis lost no time in acquiring this characteristic; indeed, he seemed to be born with it as perhaps he had to be since he was born to be famous. Before he was ten, his young sister, Cecile, was making drawings for him, and Auguste was tramping the countryside and wading the lake to collect specimens for him. Now that he was twenty, Louis had his system in full swing. Never was he to be without his retinue of helpers.
Such a policy would seem to require an unlimited amount of money since assistants are likely to place a fairly high valuation on their services. But it was never money which Louis offered the men who served him so faithfully. Money was so unimportant a thing to him that he would have considered it entirely inadequate as a return. We may well wonder in these days of price tags upon everything, including men, how help was possible without cash payment. But there are people, now and then, so rare indeed that most of the world denies their existence, people who are so filled with abundance of all we most desire from life, so enriched with gaiety of spirit, with acuteness of thought, with wit of tongue and sweetness of affection, that all we ask is a chance to stand by and serve. And we lose nothing, for life at once becomes heightened to such a pitch as only supermen live. We move among the stars, and who can pay us for that?
Louis Agassiz shared everything that he had, and if money was the least of his possessions, he could divide up only what he had and make it seem a subordinate thing compared with the stimulus of his company. When assistants found life among the stars too difficult for the ordinary human frame, Louis regretfully let them go back where they belonged. And he was, by and large, in hot water most of his life because of this system which took into no account the demands of the ordinary human frame!
Yet here was Dinkel, who began to draw his fishes for him almost as soon as he arrived at Munich, and who kept on drawing fishes or anything else which Louis filled with glamour and offered to him until sixteen years had worn him down to the necessity of separation. And as many more years were filled with unhappiness away from Agassiz. Only one day in the country where Louis had brought the young artist to see and draw a bright trout served to attach the lad, but years of hardship were needed to make him waver. He had a standing desk for his drawing in the crowded Munich lodging where no one could sit down, and there he listened and grew used to the clamor which was sometimes a wrestling of hard bodies among boys whom he knew only as Rhubarb, Molluscus, Cyprinus, and sometimes a wrestling of flexible minds which left him sure only of an outcome of more work for him. Dinkel helped to decorate the white walls with caricatures of his betters and skeletons of those not so good. He admired the Little Academy and made an offering to it of his magic pencil.
So essential did his drawings become to Louis that later when college was over, the Agassiz family was set into a flutter by a letter requesting arrangements for both boys at the parsonage. The father begged Louis to tell him where in Heaven’s name he could stow an artist when every available inch was occupied in the preparations for Cecile’s wedding. Louis regretted that they were so crowded, but there was no getting on without Dinkel. And Dinkel with the observant eye soon had his unassuming place in the parsonage. He and Cily Braun, when Louis could reach her, settled down to draw with grace and accuracy the interminable, inexhaustible supply of specimens which piled up around them.
But the three years at Munich had taught Dinkel to take things as they came, and the new parsonage at Concise proved indeed much better than most things which had been coming his way in college. Nowadays we hear a good deal of discussion about whether growing boys should work their way through college, considerate adults holding that the strain of additional work with possible lack of proper nourishment is too high a price to pay for advanced education. Possibly it is, the kind they get. But there seemed no visible strain in any of the boys who shared Munich’s gay poverty.
Louis had two hundred and fifty dollars a year and Alex had about three hundred. The other boys had none, but as Louis sagely remarked, they had less than he did so they got along very well together. Balanced-diet protagonists would object to their fare of bread and cheese with home-brewed Munich beer and a pipe of tobacco. Any sensible person would pronounce it useless for six hearty lads to try to get along on less than six hundred a year from which tuition, books, and clothes had to come. But six boys did get along, admirably if scantily.
Days of plain living, begun at five-thirty with coffee served from the machine which was needed later for soaking skeletons, and later still for evening tea. Louis, the housekeeper, could not clutter up his room with unnecessary utensils. At six, mathematics, proof if nothing else were needed of vitality! At eight, clinical lectures; at ten, mechanics of physics followed by natural history of amphibians as the day warmed up. For a while they were concerned because they had nothing to do between twelve and one, but they corrected this omission with lectures on the sense organs. At one, a good and well-served meal at a private house which they discovered after many trials, a meal which cost about nine cents each. It seems doubtful if the boardinghouse made much money on its boarders that year. Then chemistry, entomology, natural philosophy, and finally the high point of the day, Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of revelation which lasted from four to six. Six o’clock to six o’clock, a giant’s day! But now that the university lectures were over, the boys went home and produced a few of their own, the fruit of the Little Academy. So, as Alex wrote his father, you see there was enough to do!
And as Yankees say, enough, to do with. Louis from a little extra money made by writing bought himself a microscope. When Karl Schimper, quite penniless, first decided to join the group, Louis scraped together enough money to get him there; and when he arrived bringing along his brother William, Louis, far from being disconcerted, gave him the key to his money chest in
to which Karl was to dip during his three years at Munich. A second artist helped Dinkel, and there were the six husky lads, the nucleus of a group which brought the professors into the position of hangers-on. As far as one is able to judge, their health was quite adequate to the strain.
But Munich days were nearly over. For the last time Louis would pack up his college books and weed out his cherished collections. The boys hung around the emptied rooms together, inarticulate and gruff. They drank to the future together at their favorite beer-hof. They said good-bye to professors who would never let them know how empty the classrooms would feel, or how proud they were of these shining results of Munich’s early efforts. They wrenched themselves away at last. And Munich’s old streets filled up with a new crowd of shouting students, reckless of citizens, strong and eager with their immolation for the college.
Louis stood ready to go, his books and collections sent off to the shelves provided for them at his uncle’s, most of his clothes on his back, and in his bag his passport to home and family, his degree of Doctor of Medicine. Nor had it been handed out to him as easily as the Doctor of Philosophy. Louis had used the store of his mighty energy well to the limits of its resources in fulfilling his promise. “My character and conduct are a pledge of its accomplishment,” he had told his brother, and added that he hoped it would please Mama. He passed through the ordeal when after nine days of examination, the Faculty sent him out of the room to wait their decision. That wait alone in a gloomy hall with the long table of learned men behind the closed door while an excited fatigued brain records with dreadful clarity mistakes which it now could correct! The numb beatification when the door opened and he saw Dollinger smile at him. The far-off sound of the Dean’s voice, “The Faculty have been very much pleased with your answers; they congratulate themselves.…” The drunken stagger out into the sunshine where the boys waited; and the cheer of their celebration. Louis had his degree!
His mother’s letter was reward enough. “Only one thing was wanting,” she told him, “to make me the happiest of mothers, and this, my Louis, you have just given me.” And only one regret, that her beloved father had not lived to share her happiness. Remembering her tenderness and delight in his achievement, Louis patted his sheepskin and resolved to be as fine a doctor as the good grandfather Mayor. But as well have resolved to become a skillful shoemaker because years ago he had made excellent doll’s shoes for Olympe! His genius, well-nourished and active now, cared no more for Rose Agassiz and her beautiful diploma than for Olympe and the neat small shoes.
Louis Agassiz at twenty-three besides his two degrees, had a reputation among naturalists which had nothing to do with a profitable medical practice. He had published in Latin his book on Brazilian fishes. He had caught the attention of savants with his Fossil Fishes volume which was well under way and which had at its service the collections of every well-known museum. He was no longer “a lad of great promise,” he was a distinguished naturalist whose opinion was sought and respected. And he had found the taste of his achievement very sweet. Munich had stamped him with a Doctor of Medicine degree, and a naturalist’s equipment. Louis respected the degree and dearly wished to fulfil his mother’s intentions about it. But Rose Agassiz, when she bore him, had invested him with a legacy which defeated her own ends. And which finally made them of so little consequence to her that she quite forgot them.
PART II: STEEP SLOPES
7. THE SCHOLARS’ ROAD TO PARIS
When a man has a medical degree, the next logical step is to find some patients on whom to try it out. At best the process of acquiring a practice is a struggle which demands everything that a young doctor has, all of his thought, his patience, his endurance, his time. Young Dr. Agassiz was using his thought for his fossil fishes, his patience, what there was of it, on his family, his endurance to keep his artist Dinkel and himself uninterrupted, and his time for his laboratory. Small chance a patient had!
Probably because his genius had a way of arranging his life without consulting anybody, including Louis himself, the selection for the doctor’s office was a room in the home parsonage at Concise. What more natural than to settle in the only locality where Louis had really known doctors who practised and who had built up an Agassiz tradition of doctors? What more simple than to settle down at home where the question of room and board would not interfere with work? If a patient or two interrupted, that was small price to pay for the peace of the pleasant corner of the parsonage with its sunny windows where he and Dinkel could work, protected by the watchful care of Rose Agassiz who never allowed anybody, unless he looked ill, to enter.
The work on the fossil fishes progressed, the patients dropped away, alive or dead, and Louis grew more and more restless. He had raced through Munich in high gear, plunging from lecture, to laboratory, to hot discussion, to small discoveries of almost unbearable excitement. Close behind him, following his every lead, had surged other high-geared minds. The swifter the pace, the higher the spirits. The greater the recognition of his achievements, the more he could achieve. The joys and sorrows and ideas of Louis Agassiz were never meant to go unshared!
It came to pass, then, that the days at Concise grew very long with only the taciturn Dinkel to agree with him and to follow his directions. The old days of village leadership were over. These villagers stared with astonishment at two German students who marched about their town with little black caps perched on their heads. When Louis, eager for some audience, some discussion, invited them to the parsonage, they came now and then and listened good-naturedly, sleepily, without comment. Unless it came when they yawned their way home down the narrow mountain roads.
On Sundays with even work ruled out, Louis and Dinkel rowed themselves about the Lake of Neuchâtel, and in desperate ennui smashed the prehistoric pottery in its clear depths. Not vandals any more than most boys, but consumed with undirected energy. An energy that would soon fling them well out of Concise!
“We must go to Paris,” Louis bent his dark brows on Dinkel, and Dinkel laid his pencil down and said, “Yes.” His drawings were not finished so that of course he would go to Paris if Louis must go.
But of money there was none, and this time really none. The parsonage could give shelter, and advice, nothing else. The boys were tired of both. The publishers were willing when urged to provide only a small amount to carry on a work which gave no assurance of repayment. Even the sanguine spirit of Louis began to wonder if it had inadvertently sprung a trap for itself. Though not for long.
Whoever had the idea that ministers would give away money only for the Lord’s work? Over in the Canton de Vaud lived Pastor Christinat who had known Louis since he was an eager boy who prowled tirelessly through the canton for specimens which though indeed they were the Lord’s work could hardly cause such unaccountable excitement. Yet if the specimens themselves did not amount to much, the boy who collected had the earmarks of the highest form of the Lord’s work. Pastor Christinat with his zest for brilliancy as one of the great good things of life, never forgot him, and when he returned, an eager young man still searching for his specimens and now writing a splendid book about them, Pastor Christinat knew him for what he was worth. He dropped into the parsonage at Concise now and then to consult with Pastor Agassiz, and to peer at the end of his call into the southeast room where through the blue smoke of pipes he could see two young men working on those interminable specimens. Then what a welcome! He would go away feeling as if he had been standing under a waterfall, breathless, young again! And so he found out about the poverty which imprisoned his brilliant lad, and the next time he called at the Concise parsonage he left in Louis’ hand the fare to Paris. When he plodded toward his own canton, he must have felt that he walked away from the sunrise.
Given just enough money to cover one project, Louis always discovered a dozen other ways to spend it. But for poverty which held him firmly by the hand and led him down a narrow road, he would have explored every bypath that offered an interesting problem to hi
m. Now he was exuberant again with the whole world opened out to him. It was September with no lonely mountain winter to face. Why then take the straight and conventional road to Paris? Why not see a bit on the way? Especially when a little zigzagging would allow him to see his girl. (Poor Cily, still waiting to be preferred above fishes!) And there was Alex, too, who by now would have all the new discoveries in geology ready to deliver to his old friend who could make excellent use of them.
Then, though Louis had never heard the word rationalization, he explained to himself and his mother, both equally credulous, that as a doctor he should know more about this dreaded cholera which swept the country, and hospitals which had museums were certainly the best places to study his treatment. With that, he and Dinkel took the “scholars’ road” which led him to Stuttgart, Carlsruhe, Heidelberg, and Strasbourg; and whether the treatment of cholera was benefited, there are no records. But at the end of the scholars’ road, Louis had acquired enough material about his fossil fishes “to join without embarrassment at least in conversation upon the more recent researches.”
Meanwhile, as he lingered at Carlsruhe rediscovering the charms of Cily, and tucking away with his remarkable memory all of the other kinds of discoveries which her brother Alex had accumulated, the fall slipped away into winter. Rose Agassiz watched the calendar and the postmarks of her son’s letters, and in late November after doing a little reckoning, she wrote to him. He replied instantly, contrite and obedient. Since her letter was so urgent, he would not delay his departure an instant. Nor did he. He had by now everything which he needed for a satisfactory entrance into Paris. What Cily thought about his departure and her prospects, we do not know.
Even then, with this and that to detain him on the way, it was the middle of December before he took the diligence from Strasbourg to Paris. Two days and three nights, over rutted roads, packed so tightly between other travelers that even if there had been air there was no room to breathe it, shaken sick, and numb with fatigue, he left the stagecoach in the courtyard of the messagerie. And even thus he watched the magic names on the other diligences, Calais, Cherbourg, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and vowed that he would some day see them all. There is, however, no indication that the shattered Dinkel meant to go with him.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 17
