"
"He must have been a stranger then," returned Jean Jacques bitterly. "Who
was it?"
M. Fille, after an instant's further hesitation, told him.
"Oh, him--M. Momay!" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with a look of relief, his
face lighting. "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.
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