"Before making up my mind to any decided choice of profession, allow me to offer one observation. Are you sure that it is your trade which is impossible of extension, or is it owing to the smallness of the town in which you have carried it on? Let me follow my own bent, I beseech you, and when I have become a good workman by your instruction, I will go to Paris and make a fortune there; I feel quite convinced I can do so."
Fearing lest he might give way, my father tried to cut the conversation short by evading a reply to my objection.
"As you leave it to me," he said, "I advise you to become a solicitor; with your natural parts, aided by application and good conduct, I am certain you will make your way famously."
Two days later I was installed in one of the best offices at Blois, and, owing to my caligraphy, I was employed as a copying clerk, and in engrossing from morning till night, though rarely understanding what I was writing. My readers can readily guess that this mechanical work could not long satisfy the turn of my mind; pens, ink, and paper were most unsuitable articles to carry out the inventive ideas which continually occurred to me. Fortunately, at that period, steel pens were unknown; hence I had a resource in making my pens, to which I devoted the best part of my time. This simple fact will suffice to give an idea of the deep spleen which weighed upon me like a coating of lead, and I should have certainly fallen ill, had I not found more attractive employment.
Among the mechanical curiosities entrusted to my father for repair, I had noticed a snuff-box, on the top of which a small piece of mechanism attracted my entire attention. The top of the box represented a landscape. On pressing a spring, a hare made its appearance, and went towards a tuft of grass, which it began to crop; soon after a sportsman emerged from a thicket accompanied by a pointer. The miniature Nimrod stopped at the sight of the game, shouldered his gun and fired; a noise indicative of the explosion of a fire-arm was heard, and the hare, apparently wounded, disappeared in the thicket, pursued by the dog.
This pretty piece of mechanism excited my desires in an eminent degree, but I could not hope to possess it, as the owner, in addition to the value he attached to it, had no reason to dispose of it, and, besides, my pecuniary means were insufficient. As I could not make the article my own, I determined, at least, to keep it in remembrance, and drew a careful plan of it without my father's knowledge. This only more inflamed my desires, and I began to ask myself whether I could not make an exact copy of it.