Ireneus went to his uncle’s room.  He found the old man rested in an arm chair, with his legs crossed and a long pipe in his mouth.

M. de Vermondans was not one of those persons who willingly distress themselves about what the poets call the miseries of human life.  He took things as they came, and enjoyed prosperity without imagining future troubles.

While young, he had fought with his brothers the battles of legitimacy.  Like his brother, he entertained a mortal hatred for revolutionary rabble:  gradually, like many others, he had begun to reason on the matter, and become so tolerant that his doctrines reached the point almost of carelessness.  Just as her [sic] nephew came in, he was reflecting and quasi confirmed in the wisdom of his principles.  “Yes,” said he, as if he continued a conversation already begun, “yes, my friend, I am as much opposed as you are to a stormy revolution.  I left my father’s house, I abandoned my patrimony to accompany our princes into exile.  I have fought for them, in their holy cause I received a sabre cut on the arm, which every now and then, by a very disagreeable sensation, recalls my youthful patriotism to me.  Soon, however, the idle pretensions of my comrades, the disputes of our chiefs, repressed my ardor.  I left one of the cohorts in which reason was treated as treachery, and where boasting alone was listened to with complacency.  There firmness and complaisance were paralyzed now by erroneous movements and next by contradictory orders.  A faithful servant contrived to save a portion of my estate, and at the peril of his own life brought me twenty thousand francs in gold.  With this sum I came to Sweden, knowing that here everything was cheap, and determined to buy a small estate on which I might live, until I could find an opportunity of serving to some purpose that cause to which my heart was devoted, and which I had never yet entirely abandoned.

“At Stockholm one of those strange rencontres which we attribute to chance, but which the pious with more propriety think originate in Providence, made me acquainted with a land-holder in Angermania, named Guldberg, as good a man as ever lived.  I am indebted to him for all my prosperity, and I bless his memory.  M. Guldberg had discovered a rich mineral deposit on his estate, was anxious to establish a furnace, and sought for some one to aid him in his enterprise.  In the course of my studies I had acquired some ideas of hydraulics and mechanics, trifling enough it is true, but one day conversation having been directed to these matters, Guldberg, who knew even less than I did, appeared delighted with my explanations, and asked me to aid him in his projected enterprise.  Without reflecting more than he did when he made the offer, I consented.  I came hither with him:  I superintended the construction and the first labor of the furnace you see glowing there.  I was not unlike the ignorant teacher who studies in the morning the lesson he teaches in the afternoon.