His real name was Vries. He was a negro from
the Dutch West Indies, a veritable bull, with a huge body and a black,
bald physiognomy, made to stand outside a tent at a fair, and be his own
crier to the public. His conversation was one incessant brag, in
atrocious French. Although he had lived seventeen years in France, he
spoke almost unintelligibly.
He persuaded himself, or at least others, that he had discovered
perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, "by a simple
mechanism," could replace steam power and had been declared practicable
by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak
freely about it. Columbus and Fulton only were his equals; he knew all
the secrets of Nature. He had been persecuted--in 1859 he had been
imprisoned for eleven months, on a charge of quackery--because all great
men were persecuted; remember our Lord Jesus Christ! He himself was the
greatest man living. _Moi vous dire le plus grand homme d'universe_.
Hello and the ladies smiled admiringly at him, and never grew tired of
listening to him. This encouraged him to monopolise the conversation:
He, Vries, was a man possessed of courage and wisdom; he understood
Phrenology, Allopathy, Homoeopathy, Engineering Science, Metereology
--like Moliere's doctors and Holberg's Oldfux.
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