Read "The World Masters" by George Griffith online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"And so, Monsieur le Ministre, I am to take that as your final word? I have given you every proof that I can -- saving the impossible -- the bringing of my apparatus from Strassburg to Paris, which, of course, you know is an impossibility, since it would have to cross the frontier, which was once a French high road. I have shown you the facts, the figures, the drawings -- everything.
Can you not see that I am honest, that I love my country, from which I have been torn away -- I who come from a family that has lived in Alsace since it was first French territory -- I who am a Frenchman through five generations -- I who have sold my son to the Prussians -- I who have masqueraded for years in the Prussian University of Strassburg, once the Queen of the Rhine Province -- I who have discovered a secret which has lain buried since the days of the great Faraday -- I who have discovered, or I should say re-discovered, after him the true theory, and, what is more, the actual working of the magnetic tides which flow north and south through the two hemispheres to the pole -- I who can give you, Monsieur le Ministre, and through you France, the control of those tides, so that you may make them ebb and flow as the tides of the sea do -- prosperity with the flow, adversity with the ebb, that is what it comes to -- ah, it is incredible!