"That's a big man with a most capable and far-reaching
mind. He takes a thing in as the ocean mouths a river. If I had had
men like that to deal with all my life, what a different ledger I'd be
balancing now! Descartes, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel--he has
an ear for them all. That is the intellectual side of him; and in
business"--he threw up a hand--"there he views the landscape from the
mountain-top. He has vision, strategy, executive. He is Napoleon and
Anacreon in one. He is of the builders on the one hand, of the
Illuminati and the Encyclopedistes on the other."
Even the Clerk of the Court, with his circumscribed range of thought and
experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was. Here was a
man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake; who had
been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about to receive buffetings
beyond aught he had yet experienced, philosophizing on the tight-rope--
Blondin and Plato in one. Yet sardonically piteous as it was, the
incident had shown Jean Jacques with the germ of something big in him.
He had recognized in M. Mornay, who could level him to the dust tomorrow
financially, a master of the world's affairs, a prospector of life's
fields, who would march fearlessly beyond the farthest frontiers into the
unknown.
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