Chapter XXIV: Conclusion

I can, in ending this work, repeat what I said at the beginning of my penultimate chapter: “I have reached the object of my every hope.” But this time, if it pleases God, as my guide Muhammad would say, no temptation will again come to modify my plans of happiness. I hope still for a long time (always if it pleases God) to enjoy that gentle and peaceful existence which I had scarce tasted when ambition and curiosity took me to Algiers.

On returning home, I arranged round my study my performing instruments, my faithful comrades, I may almost say, my dear friends; henceforth I intended to devote myself to my darling study, the application of electricity to mechanism.

It must not be believed that, for that purpose, I disown the art to which I owe so much pleasure. The thought is far from me; I am more than ever proud of having cultivated it, as to it alone I owe the happiness of devoting myself to my new studies. Besides, I diverge from it less than my readers might be inclined to suppose, for I have, during a long period, applied electricity to mechanism, and I must confess--if my readers have not already guessed it--that electricity played an important part in many of my experiments. In reality, my labors of to-day only differ from the old ones in the form; but they are still experiments.

A lingering love for my old clockmaking trade has made me choose chronometro-electrical works as the objects of my study. I have adopted as my motto, “_to popularize electric clocks by making them as simple and exact as possible_.” And as art always supposes an ideal which the artist seeks to realize, I already dream of the day when the electric wires, issuing from a single regulator, will radiate through the whole of France, and bear the precise time to the largest towns and the most modest villages.

In the meanwhile, devoted to the sacred cause of progress, I labor incessantly in the hope that my humble discoveries will be of some service in the solution of this important problem.

My performance is ended (I must remind my readers that I offered them my narrative under this title); but I live in hope to begin it again soon, for I have still so many mysteries, great and small, to unveil. Sleight-of-hand is an immense quarry on which public curiosity can work for a long time; hence I do not take leave of my audience, or rather of my readers, for in the second form of performance I have adopted, my farewell will not be definitive, until I have exhausted all that may be said about SLEIGHT-OF-HAND AND ITS PROFESSORS. These two words will serve as the title of the supplemental part of my Memoirs.[F]