He was, nevertheless, constantly urged to fill his pockets. Owing to his first researches on carburette d'hydrogen, he discovered an improvement in the manufacture of gas for lighting purposes, which constituted for Paris alone a saving of several hundred millions of francs to the Gas Company. He immediately made his discovery public without deriving any personal advantage from it.
Important manufacturers, such as the millionaire Menier, often came to him with proposals of partnership, or tried to buy some of his processes for the synthetic manufacture of organic compounds. The brewers of northern France once offered him two million francs if he would give them the monopoly on one of his discoveries. Enormous fortunes have been made out of one single item of his scientific treatises. His researches on explosives led to smokeless powder and would have accumulated riches for him equal to those of Nobel.
Germany owes the greater part of her wonderful modern industrial development to the introduction to science of Berthelot's revolutionary synthetic method.
In the course of his long career, he never took out a single patent, and always relinquished to humanity the benefit of his discoveries. “The scientist,” he said, “ought to make the possession of truth his only riches.”
He wrote in 1895: “It is not half a century since I attained the age of manhood, and I have faithfully lived up to the ideal dream of justice and truth which dazzled my youthI have always had the will to achieve what I thought morally the best for myself, my country, and humanity.”
While perpetually engaged in his chemical researches, he still took part in public life. He became a Senator, a Minister of Public Instruction, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a pioneer to the “entente cordiale.”
His private life was just as beautiful. His wife was thus described at the time of her wedding by the brothers de Goncourt:
“A singular beauty, never to be forgotten; a beauty, intelligent, profound, magnetic, a beauty of soul and thought resembling one of Edgar Poe's creations of the other world. The hair parted, and standing away from the head, gave the appearance of a halo; a prominent calm foreheadlarge eyes full of light, encircled by a dark ring, and the musical voice of an ephebe.”
For forty-five years, husband and wife lived side by side. They were not separated for a day. In the closest union of heart and thought, their affection was never veiled by the slightest cloud.
The loss of her grandson in a railway accident was Madame Berthelot's death-blow. The first attack of heart disease she got over, but at the close of 1906, her husband saw that nothing could stop it. Then this old man of eighty was to be seen watching night and day at the bedside of his dear patient, measuring hour by hour the diminution of her vital forces, at the same time as he noted the deep inroads made in his own organism by the keen anguish which he suffered. The patient retained her admirable serenity until the last hour, and her ultimate words were said to her daughter: “What will become of him when I am gone?”
A few minutes later, one of his sons, who had followed him into the room, heard him heave a deep and harrowing sigh. He took his hand to say a few tender words of consolation to him, but the arm dropped inactive.
Through the sad blow, that great heart was broken.
Madame Berthelot was buried with her husband in the Pantheon, the first time that this supreme honor was rendered to a woman.
Had his life been spared, Berthelot would, a friend says, probably have astonished the world by his observations on trees as regulators of electricity, and as possible media of electrical communications, and on the worldwide disasters which the clearing off of forests to make paper is likely to occasion. His walks in the forests of Meudon opened to him new and original views on the harmonies of creation.
Berthelot was a charming lecturer, charming from every point of viewartistic expression, voice enunciation, and appearance.
There was often a rhythm in his sentences which caught the ear and helped the memory to retain them. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was deep, and he thought the classics an invaluable mental discipline.
His son, Philippe Berthelot, is now in the Foreign Office in Paris and many of us foreigners who live in France have reason to be grateful to him. He, too, lives quite simply, but is naturally proud of his father's extraordinary character and noble achievements. I often think of Marcelin Berthelot as an ideal. He is the first man of whom I have said this. We are apt to think of Frenchmen as resembling Rochefort; it is well to be reminded sometimes that there are Frenchmen such as Marcelin Berthelot.
CHAPTER VII
I have been asked frequently why, on my African travels, I was so cold in regard to native women. This will perhaps be my last opportunity briefly to outline all that befell me in the Dark Continent. In the first place, it would not be true to assert that I was always cold. On the contrary, some of my most passionate encounters took place on the same continent on which Rhodes and Kruger struggled and upon which the irresponsible German Kaiser cast an envious eye. Of the ludicrous braggadocio of the Emperor of Germany I shall have occasion to speak in the chapter which follows. For the momentAfrica.
Much has been said of this continent in many places. All I can add is that kind of personal reminiscence which sometimes throws a new and penetrating light on what is sometimes considered to be a problem incapable of solution. I refer to my knowledge of the African people, and in particular to my knowledge of African women. If I did not spend more time among them, it was not, as has sometimes been imputed, that I was the victim of color prejudice, but that there is an archaic quality in the tribeswomen of Africa which must eternally set them at a distance from a European. This is not true, as we shall see, of Egyptians and other Arab peoples, whose cultural development was on a par with that of the early Christians and who have lent to the West, in the shape of a workable mathematical symbolism, the basis of modern science. Let anyone who doubts this attempt a complex problem of multiplication and division using only the old Roman numerals and then let him judge in what measure the Arab culture has contributed towards our own.
But I shall speak first of the dark races. I have seen Zulu girls and Swahili girls with superb figures. Statues in ebony appeal to me as keenly as statues in ivory. How then could I live among these people on the most familiar terms without yielding occasionally to passion?
I had stayed for a number of days as the guest of the headsman of the village. At first the people in the village were curious about me, but after a while they became used to my presence at their dances and at the other few social functions of the group. One night the chief, who spoke English very well, began to talk to me about women. He asked me if white women were passionate. I said that some of them were and some of them weren't.
“It is the same here in my country,” he said. “There are some who like to make love all the time and there are others who always appear to do so reluctantly.”
He, himself, had five wives, three of whom were very passionate. The other two, he said, seemed to care for nothing but their children. He asked me if I had been attracted by any of the women of the village. I smiled and said that I had had little opportunity to be close enough to any of them to feel passion for them. He laughed and said that on that very evening there was going to be a dancea kind of frenzied religious ceremonyin the public place in the village. It would take place according to tradition after sunset and it would be a fine opportunity for me to look over the unattached women. If I wished to have sexual intercourse with a girl, however, I should have to make the normal gesture to the parentsthat is, I should have to present them with a yoke of oxen. When I had done so, the girl would automatically become my spouse.