Lurance, which André Marcueil had inherited from his mother, had been built in the reign of Louis XIII, yet it seemed entirely natural for its huge, wrought-iron lampposts to be topped with arc-lamps, and for the water running in its grounds to propel the machinery to light them. And in the same way it seemed that the apparently endless driveways, whose broad radii led to all the horizons, had not merely been drawn for carriages to creep on, but that the architect, by some obscure premonitory flash of genius, had designed them, three hundred years in advance, for modern vehicles. There is certainly no reason for men to build enduring works if they do not vaguely imagine that these works must wait for some additional beauty with which they themselves cannot invest them, but which the future holds in store. Great works are not created great; they become so.

Lurance stands only a few kilometers southwest of Paris. Marcueil, seeming strangely irritated by the evening’s conversation, concealed his desire for diversion behind an apparent solicitude for his guests: he insisted on driving the doctor and the general back to Paris himself.

Out of regard for the latter, who rebelled against newfangled means of locomotion, and as there was no railway station near Lurance, Marcueil had had a coupé harnessed.

The weather was dry, clear, and cold. The road sounded like cardboard. In less than an hour they had reached the Etoile, and, as it was not late – barely two in the morning – they went into an English bar.

“Hello, Mark Antony,” said Bathybius to the barman.

“You seem to be an habitué,” said the general.

“Is that hefty fellow legitimately entitled to enjoy a name so Shakespearianly Roman?” asked Marcueil.

“As a matter of fact, I have been told that he owes his historico-dramatical sobriquet to the remarkable solemnity with which he addresses his customers, a solemnity only comparable to Shakespeare’s Mark Antony pronouncing his classic speech before Caesar’s tomb. And his customers – jockeys, trainers, grooms, boxers, and the like – are all great lovers of a good fight, and very often stand in need of admonition.”

“I hope we shall shortly have a sample; it might prove entertaining,” said Marcueil.

They were served. The general drank stout, the doctor pale ale, and Marcueil, decidedly a neutralist – except when he was amusing himself by propounding some paradoxical theorem – asked for an equal mixture of both brews, or half and half.

Despite the doctor’s prediction, the bar was quiet; there was just enough conversation for its buzz to isolate theirs.

The doctor could not refrain from referring to Marcueil’s earlier remarks at Lurance and gently pulling his leg about them. At heart he was somewhat piqued that his friend, even in jest, had not left the last word to his authority as a celebrated man of science.