If Louis's handsomeness was so extreme that he seemed like Prince Paris stepping out of myth to hand the golden apple to Aphrodite, or like an archangel bringing the flames and thunderbolts of the Last Judgment down from the clouds to earth, then the next friend Armand introduced to Joseph was, in terms of appearance, nearly the opposite extreme.
He was a short, scrawny man. His face was waxen yellow, and his eyes were different sizes. His nose was large but flat, as if someone had slapped it so hard that it had been squashed. His forehead was flat too, but his jaw was powerfully built and jutted outward. This made his mouth look especially large; at first glance, he looked like a toad. Add his withered hands, whose knuckles stuck out, and his dry, scaly, dark-yellow skin, made worse by a skin disease, and he looked like a monster that had crawled out of a nightmare.
"Joseph, this is my friend, Mr. Marat."
"Pleased to meet you." Joseph nodded and held out his hand.
Marat held out his own and shook Joseph's hand. But his grip was limp; he barely pinched Joseph's fingertips with his own. Joseph noticed that Marat's hand was quite cold.
"Mr. Bonaparte, I've read your paper. You believe light is a wave?" Marat said slowly. His voice was just as cold.
"It isn't a matter of what I believe. The evidence we have simply makes me lean toward that conclusion. I have no bias about whether light is a particle or a wave," Joseph replied.
"Why won't you clearly support your own theory? Why hide your position behind such a weak statement? Is it because you aren't confident in your own judgment?" Marat asked in a mocking tone.
Joseph couldn't help frowning. A thought sprang into his mind: Ugly people sure know how to make a nuisance of themselves!
Indeed, "ugly people sure know how to make a nuisance of themselves." In general, people with very unattractive looks were prone to facing all kinds of discrimination in society. This often filled them with anger and made them aggressive. In Joseph's eyes, Marat was a textbook example.
Still, Joseph didn't want to offend Marat just yet, because offending this man was far too dangerous. Although Joseph didn't know much about the history of the French Revolution—after all, it was foreign history before he'd crossed over, wasn't it? To be honest, the fact that he even knew Marat's name meant he must have stayed awake through his history and art classes—he did know that Marat was likely responsible for many of the revolution's notorious atrocities. There were bound to be plenty of cases of settling personal scores under the guise of public duty, and Joseph had no wish to provoke a rabid dog like him.
He won't be alive much longer anyway. I'll just let him have his way for now, Joseph told himself, suppressing the urge to fire back.
"I truly have no bias about whether light is a wave or a particle. As for my theory, I think what it is depends on the experimental evidence and the mathematical explanation. If the interference pattern can be explained mathematically from the perspective of particles, I'd be just as happy. After all, the world is so complex that the only thing we can truly rely on is mathematics," Joseph explained.
"Ah, Joseph, your view sounds rather Pythagorean," Danton said with a smile. "All things are numbers?"
Pythagoras was a famous mathematician of ancient Greece. He and his disciples formed an important school of thought, the Pythagorean School. One of its fundamental ideas was that "all things are numbers." They believed mathematics was the only means of describing the entire world, and that it was the true essence of the world itself.
"I'm not as fanatical as they were," Joseph said with a faint smile. "At least, I wouldn't throw someone into the sea for discovering irrational numbers. But, my friend, consider this as well. Can we trust our vision? Not necessarily. For example, I've noticed that some people see colors differently from others. I think..."
"Wait... What did you just say? Some people see colors differently from others? Are you sure there are people like that?" Marat interrupted suddenly.
"Yes. Why?" Joseph asked.
"This may be a new disease that people haven't noticed before," Marat said. "Can you tell me how you discovered it?"
"When I was a child, a friend of mine came to tell me one day that he'd noticed the flowers in my garden looked different by day and at dusk. During the day, they were sky blue, but at dusk, they were bright red. But to me, those flowers were pink at all times. When I told him so, he was astonished and even suspected something was wrong with my eyes. So we asked a few other people, and everyone except his brother agreed that the flowers should be pink. Later, we found out that his uncle also thought the flowers were blue during the day and bright red at dusk. At the time, though, I envied them, because they could see two different colors of flowers."
"Can your friend come and let me examine him?" Marat asked again.
"He's from Corsica. With Corsica being where it is, there's no way to bring him here now." Joseph spread his hands.
"Ah..." Marat curled his lip scornfully. "Mr. Bonaparte, you know, I have a friend with an incredible leap. He can jump all the way to the moon."
Joseph hurriedly told himself Don't stoop to his level several times, and managed to suppress the urge to snap back. But then Danton spoke up:
"Could it be... could the flowers not actually change color between day and dusk? Was I mistaken? Is there something wrong with my vision?"
Everyone turned to look at Danton.
"Why are you all staring at me?" Danton asked.
"Danton, do the flowers change color between day and dusk in your eyes?" Marat asked, staring at him as if he were some rare animal.
"Yes... Don't they look that way to you?" Danton countered.
"What color is this?" Marat suddenly asked, pointing at Louis's hair.
"Flaxen, I suppose?" Danton said, sounding uncertain.
"Mm, that's right. No problem there... What color is Armand's hat?" Marat asked again.
"Green," Danton answered at once.
"Take another look," Marat said.
Danton opened his eyes wide and stared at Armand's hat for a while. "It's green."
"Good heavens! There really are people who see colors differently from everyone else! Armand's hat is obviously light red!" Marat clapped his hands. Then he turned to Joseph. "Mr. Bonaparte, do you realize how slow you are? Don't you know this is a major medical discovery?"
"I'm not a doctor, after all," Joseph said with a smile. "When it comes to medicine, I'm practically illiterate."
"Don't you plan to study this seriously?" Marat asked.
"No. This isn't a field I know or care about. I still have plenty of mathematical problems to investigate," Joseph replied. "Let's return to what we were discussing at the beginning. I think our vision is unreliable, and our hearing is the same. Some people claim they can hear sounds that others can't..."
"That's just a trick used by charlatans to deceive people," Marat cut in.
"Ordinary people experience it too," Joseph said. "For example, when we dream, we hear all kinds of sounds that don't exist and see all kinds of things that aren't there. Our vision can deceive us, our hearing can deceive us, and even our imagination can deceive us—for example, when it tells us that 0.9999... equals one. But mathematics doesn't. Mm, I remember a priest once said, 'When heaven and earth are turned upside down, the cross still stands.' I won't comment on whether the cross can stand, but I'm certain that even if the entire solar system were destroyed, two points would still determine a straight line. So when everything else is unreliable, the only thing I can trust is mathematics. If mathematical calculations show that light is probably a wave, then I accept that possibility."
"And what if your calculations show that light also behaves like a particle in many cases?" Marat asked.
"Then it may also be a particle," Joseph replied.
"An incurable Pythagorean," Marat said, shaking his head. "Mr. Bonaparte, truth isn't revealed through mathematics alone. There are other, higher ways of knowing it."
"What ways?" Joseph asked.
"Intuition from the soul," Marat replied. "Have you read On the Human Soul and Philosophical Essays on Man? I think some of their ideas make a lot of sense. For example, different people see colors differently; that must be connected to their souls..."
"On the Human Soul and Philosophical Essays on Man"—Lavoisier had mentioned those two works while chatting about Marat:
"That Marat even quoted two equally nonsensical articles in his own utterly incoherent paper, those ramblings in On the Human Soul and Philosophical Essays on Man. Judging by that hopelessly muddled way of thinking, I'd bet those two anonymously published works were written by him too."
It seemed Lavoisier's guess had been very reliable.
I never thought I'd meet a quack even in this era, Joseph couldn't help thinking.
But his experience from a later age had taught him not to try to convince a quack and not to argue with one. They would drag you down into the realm of stupidity, then beat you with their vast experience being idiots. When dealing with a quack, the only sensible thing to do was agree with him, encourage him, and nurture him into a truly colossal idiot.
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