Doctor Van Monckhoven
Among the essential readings, more and more rare, which can elevate the soul and strengthen the heart, few pages are so eloquent in their brevity, at times a little pompous, following the fashion of the time, than the few pages of the report presented by Fourcroy at the National Convention, on behalf of the Committee on Public Health—On the arts that have already served in defense of the Republic and a recent discovery of citizen Armand Seguin.
Whatever opinion one might have—and it is not even necessary to be French—, it is impossible not to experience a profound emotion before this document of the admirable effort of a people determined not to perish or to retreat under the universe conspiring against them.
“Everything was missing at the same time, men, materials, and time.” It was necessary to create everything, “to overcome at every step the resistance of nature itself, the inertia of idleness and of carelessness, the obstacles of malevolence.”
In this report, a real patriotic breviary, and quickly, since he himself does not have time to waste or to make others waste, Fourcroy declares that arms factories, improvised immediately and throughout the territory, have already responded to the first needs: Paris alone has provided or refurbished one hundred and fifty thousand rifles.
In nine months, twelve million pounds of saltpeter had been delivered, while on average we used to obtain barely a million per year. From now on, twenty-four hours are enough to make thirty thousand pounds of saltpeter.
Our steel, until now dependent on other people, emancipates itself suddenly and becomes national. Our manufacturing facilities multiply everywhere: we create cannons in cast iron.
The telegraph—“this new revolutionary courier”—inspires and impels in the same breath the movements of our sparse armies, at the same time that it imposes on us the study and the methodical fabrication of the flint glass that we used to borrow from our enemy, who, each time, found the right composition for it only by chance.
The aerostation school of Meudon builds balloons and trains students for aerostatic companies; each army corps will have its aerostation park just as it has its artillery park. In the plains of Fleurus, in the ramparts of Maubeuge, in Franckenthal, in Ehrenbreistein, everywhere, our balloons stun the enemy and prepare his defeat.
Hemp, tar, potash, all that is missing is substituted by something else: we braid the ropes with plants until now neglected, even with animal materials.
But the manufacturing of saltpeter absorbs all our potash and we will be forced to close the factories of glass, soap, bleach, etc.: immediately soda replaces potash.
So far we have paid for tar: from now on our coal, our purified peat, will provide it.
Even graphite was missing, until recently supplied by England alone: —Conté (“all the sciences in the mind, all the arts in the hand,” said Monge), Conté, on his first encounter with our mountains, extracts the iron carbide from which he will create the pencils which our students still use today and which the English in turn will borrow from us.
And this first, absorbing preoccupation of the war, far from being the obstacle, becomes instead the most precious auxiliary of the arts of peace. The military scientific commissions accelerate the study of all products useful for domestic purposes. An ardent youth rushes to attend public courses on all sciences at the Military School, at the Central School of Public Works, at the three Schools of Health, everywhere, and the progress of universal instruction, which must renew and improve the economic conditions of our existence, results naturally from the preparation for combat.
The fact that concludes Fourcroy’s report is startling.
For the fourteen improvised armies assigned to the Republic—usually forgetting that of Santo Domingo, which nevertheless did not stay idle—shoes were needed, and right away.
If the annual consumption of each citizen of the Republic is calculated to be two pairs of shoes, the expenditure is a billion: for the armies alone, it is one hundred and forty million. At this stage, the expense comes to two hundred million, representing around fifteen hundred thousand skins of oxen, twelve hundred thousand skins of cows, and a million calfskins: all this “needing to pass, according to the report, through the chamois shop, the belt shop, the gelding clinic, the fine leather goods business, the tannery, the parchment shop, the leatherwear shop; and many other ‘arts’ of no less importance that derive directly from them. These ‘arts’ must therefore call the attention of legislators. Like those of primary necessity, they contribute effectively to the prosperity of the Republic and can give us, in the commercial balance of nations, a considerable advantage over all the powers of Europe …”
We see that here everything is examined from above and from afar and that considerations of general economy do not get lost even in the face of the very serious preoccupations with the present war.
To confine ourselves to the present situation and to the only shoe repair store, in a pinch we have leather; but this leather, flushed and swollen by lime, by fermented barley or tan, must be kept for two years in tanning pits before it is delivered to us.
It is not in two years, it is in two weeks, in two days, that we need this leather.
We will have it.
At an invitation by the Committee of Public Health, Berthol- let1 comes immediately to present the process of Armand Séguin, who, treating leather with sulfuric acid mixed with tan, eliminates the barley, reduces the expenses by eighty percent, the time to nothing, simplifies and popularizes the operation to such a degree that every citizen can now prepare at home the leather necessary for his consumption—“more easily than he does his laundry.” And this new leather, delivered on time, will be more supple, more solid and durable than the old leather …
Never has the memory of these pages that one cannot read enough, repeat enough—the most beautiful pages that the human soul has dictated to human genius—, never has this memory come back to me without my immediately evoking my dear Monckhoven, just as my thinking of Monckhoven always evokes Fourcroy’s report.
*
It is because Van Monckhoven was also one of those scholars from whom one can order a discovery.
He was truly worthy of being born in that heroic age, and he would have been one of the most brilliant in the pleiad of Condorcet, Lavoisier, Monge, Chaptal, Vauquelin, Lalande, Fourcroy, Bossut, Darcet, Conté, etc., as he remains one of the first today among Janssen, sworn observer of the sun, the brothers Henry who impose their ne varietur (let us not move anymore!) to the last nebula, marking the exits and escapades of the comets, and that incredible Marey who makes us see the invisible, and will soon, in time, make us fly like a bird.
Monckhoven had everything going for him: universal notions, a passion for research, unparalleled physical and intellectual activity, inventive acuity and quick understanding, precise vision, sagacity of observation, ingenuity of application, fecundity of means and resources, flexibility in front of the obstacle: add still to the dexterity of the experimenter perseverance pushed to the point of obstinacy.
His acquired knowledge was enhanced by incessant personal work—for, as one of the orators who spoke at his funeral said, “who ever saw him rest? From the time he became a man he was able to count his days by ingenious discoveries and fruitful research.”
This productive man was in fact the exact opposite of the type that is all too familiar in a world in which, as elsewhere, the empire belongs primarily to the impudent; I refer to the pseudo-savant, the cryptoramic, or rather pedicular parasite, who more often frequents the antechambers than the laboratory, who adorns himself with all kinds of feathers that are not his own, self-important, pompous, richly colored, having no other resources than to walk on others in order to elevate his pettiness and to obtain honors to decorate his boutonnière, that is, to blow his own trumpet: a meddler on all committees or commissions, a hornet whose sterile existence is spent on busyness around the bee hole without ever entering it.
And if Monckhoven’s work had not, in its full bloom, been abruptly cut short by death—he was barely forty-eight years old—, how much more could we not have expected from him who had already given us so much, still extracting from nature its secrets and popularizing them so passionately that he became an industrialist in order to better diffuse them.
Photography, having just been born, had immediately captured him. Direct heir of the Niépces, the Talbots, the Poitevins, addressing the practice, directly and in depth, as soon as the theory was revealed to him, he will never stop. Blow by blow, he gives us a New Procedure for Iron Plates (these “ferrotypes,” which are presently still part of the daily life of humble families), the Simplified Method of Photography on Paper, the Treatise on Collodion Photography, the History of the Carbon Process, the Procedure of the Carbon Practice, etc., and he condenses all his initial studies in his precious Treatise on Photography, whose successive editions will never stop. And, believe me, not like those editions of recent invention, published in fantastic quantities, but in reality different only on the covers. With each of these editions, he adds, he revises, with the zeal of an honest man, with his scientific conscience always restless, unquenched. I have seen him, every time, preoccupied, absorbed, feverish, as if he had given birth to a new child.
He goes on and on, enlarging his circle without ever losing sight of photography. He publishes Studies on Nitroglucose, The Various Modes of the Production of Light, Gelatin-Bromide, the Treatise on Photographic Optics, where he has explained so beautifully all the forms of adopted lenses, their qualities and their defects, that, in 1882, the great optician Steinheil declared publicly—and to his credit—that he owed the inspiration for his most important works to the teaching, to the scientific impulse, of Van Monckhoven.
Everywhere and in every new science, doing is as necessary as knowing. From invention and theory, Van Monckhoven proceeds everywhere and immediately to practice, to action.
He had already constructed, for enlargements, his own dialitic apparatus with a heliostat, superior to the best systems known until then.
At the first appearance of carbon processes, he takes the lead in industrial manufacturing and his papers replace all the others.
The same happened in regard to his gelatin-bromide plates, from which he created in Ghent a considerable industry, using, from the very beginning, over ten thousand kilos of glass per week, producing on average twelve hundred dozen plates per day—nearly four and a half million plates per year.
Model head of family, adored as much as venerated by his own, it is to the intelligence, to the activity of his closest relatives, to female hands, that he confides the management of his factory, a large patrimony put together for his daughters, which will have been created for the family by the family.
*
But, either in the private laboratory or in the factory, photography would not be sufficient for the curiosity of this universal and insatiable mind. Independently of the participating sciences that he continues to pursue and all the other problems to which he attends, it is to astronomy, his favorite, that he ceaselessly returns. And there where he felt the strongest, because of a special attraction and because it was his first course of study, it is there where, deplorably, he will not be able to display the true measure of his strength. By one of those contradictions which are encountered in more than one of our destinies, it is exactly there, where he is especially called upon, that he will be unable to go freely: other attachments, other duties, have claimed his attention and they will keep him.
You should have heard him talk about his passion for astronomy. You would say a lover was singing the charms of “the person,” of the beloved person, inaccessible, unimaginable. Even I, despite my irresistible aversion to everything that is a number, despite my innate terror of anything that resembles the execrable number, I could not help but be touched by the tone of this passion, so sincere, so emotional, for the matters of algebra: at times I would feel as if I were myself rising with my friend through the ether, carried away by the inextricable cosmogony, in the contagion of an unimagined poetics where we were bound to see theorems rounding out to the rhythm of the periods and the mnb2 flying away in winged strophes …
But duty was there, strict, jealous. Astronomy had to elude him, and Monckhoven did not have the time to consummate this much-desired marriage, which could have been so fecund. His dream remained a dream.
Nevertheless, he found more than one moment to escape in order to pull over to that side. His superhuman activity knew how to reserve, here and there, precious leisure time to dedicate to his most fervent obsession.
He had an observatory built just for him, where he accumulated the instruments that only a nation can provide.2 He did not know there, any more than anywhere else, how to count or how to bargain. Nothing was too expensive, and he himself built the telescopes, whose models were copied in the premier observatories of the world.
And these expenses, these efforts, were not, could not be sterile. When I was given the joy of bringing together two of my best, of my highest friendships, by reuniting for the first—and the last!—time Monckhoven and Marey, Monck (as we called him) trusted Marey to present at the Academy a thesis On the Enlargement of Hydrogen’s Principal Trajectories and on the Diffusion of Solar Rays.
At the moment of his death, he had finished a work on Rarefied Gases and Electricity.
*
How did we meet, Monckhoven and I?
I had never seen him, until, on a clear and mild morning thirty years ago, my wonderful Ghemar dropped by, from his studio in Brussels to my studio on the boulevard des Capucines.
He was accompanied by two friends, the one a French chemist established in Berlin, the other a very young man, small and blond.
After the first exchange of pleasantries between Ghemar and me, he tells me, putting his hand on the shoulder of the beardless blond:
— I present to you Van Monckhoven.
— Related to the author of the Treatise?
— No. The author.
I looked, surprised, at this very young man, almost a child, pale blond, buttery-blond, the real Belgian blond. And as he, nose in the air, was steadily pointing at me the two carbuncles of his lenses, so shiny that you couldn’t see anything through them, I ask him:
—You—it is you who wrote the Treatise on Photography?
—Yes!
—You are nothing but a little liar; it’s your grandfather …
Then, and continuously until his death, how many years—so quickly gone today!—of joyful, sweet, fraternal friendship, without ever a shadow of a cloud passing between us …
*
He was blessed with the beautiful and joyous temperament that belongs by right to those with clear consciences, and he was, moreover, one of those wise people who are convinced that laughter is a characteristic of a healthy person. Always cheerful, restless and rustling like a silkworm butterfly in front of its laid eggs—and in fact wasn’t he always there?—this Flemish man, this native of Ghent, had all the pleasant exuberance of the Walloon: Rops, Rops3 himself was never more brilliant, more alive, from living the beautiful and good life of an honest man. Alas! of my poor Monck, and then of my very dear Rops, of all these joys, of all these achievements, what remains today? …
*
He had the noble indifference to what can be possessed, the liberality, the generosity of great souls, and he could have adopted as his the Ravenswood motto, one of the most beautiful I know: “The open hand.”4
When he constructed his enlargement apparatuses with heliostats, his first words were:
— I will send you one.
I declined the offer. I knew how much these instruments cost (three thousand francs then, I think) and however urgent it was for me to make this acquisition, it was not the right moment.
As he insisted, I ended up telling him the reason. He lost his temper:
— Are you kidding me, and did you think I wanted to make a “deal” with you?
It did not matter how much we debated: barely had he left than I received the instrument, with an affectionate word in place of the bill: we were, he and I, merchants!
It was necessary to give in—and await the hour of revenge.
It took a long time, but it struck.
On one of his trips to Paris (he never failed to stay with me, and what a feast for us, especially when he was with his family!), he told me of his intentions to buy a one-horsepower gas motor, which he needed.
I just happened to have one, which was not being used at that moment. It was two-horsepower, but the double power was not a great obstacle.
Immediately and without a word, the heavy machine was dismantled, cleaned like jewelry, packaged, piece by piece, with the most meticulous care, and dispatched to Ghent postage paid, as is necessary for all gifts.
My good Monck, more accustomed to give than to receive, appeared dazzled by the delivery, far more so than necessary.
“You give gifts befitting a gentleman,” he wrote to me.
— A gentleman yourself, it was you who started it.
He had forgotten his first gift:
— Well, he responded, but an ox in exchange for an egg!5 …
As if he did not know, he better than anyone else, that in friendship the one who remains in debt is the one who gives …
*
Brave and dear companion lost so early! What affection lost, what fidelity, what loyalty! Affable, kind to everyone, severe only with procrastinators and stick-in-the-muds, from the beginning he found himself naturally in personal relations with anyone who was eminent in the domain of abstract science as well as in industrial science. These relations, that such a happy character could only strengthen more and more intimately, had become forever unshakeable. I find the most moving testimonials to this in abundance in the voluminous dossier collected by the devotion of his wife during the hours of the funeral, in that sad month of September 1882. The press of all countries, the letters, the telegrams, testify to the universal respect for the scholar, no less than to the highest esteem and affection for the man.
Free spirit, if ever there was one, noble soul, he has always lived outside of and very far from all official attachments, all conventions, all negotiations, wanting only to do good. His death was in accordance with all his life as an honest man. He belongs to the very small number of those who remain the Honor of a nation.
Yes, he had an assuredly clear look, and a far-reaching perspective, this son of his work, always free from all ties, who was able to see clearly the error becoming truth and the truth becoming error, from this or from that side of a stream, a stone, a pond, and who, meticulous observer that he was, so attentive and rigorously precise a calculator of both the infinitesimal and the great spaces, did not fear, when the time came, to proclaim human liberty and his own faith by this transcendent affirmation, which sums him up:
NEITHER IN THE SCIENCES, NOR IN THE ARTS, NOR IN MORALS,
ARE THERE FORMULAS.