Foreseeing the future,
however, he had induced his elder brother, one of the managers of the Bon
Marche, to finance him, on the promise that he would supply that great
emporium with excellent bicycles at 150 francs apiece. And now quite a
big venture was in progress, for the Bon Marche was already bringing out
the new popular machine "La Lisette," the "Bicycle for the Multitude," as
the advertisements asserted. Nevertheless, Grandidier was still in all
the throes of a great struggle, for his new machinery had cast a heavy
burden of debt on him. At the same time each month brought its effort,
the perfecting or simplifying of some part of the manufacture, which
meant a saving in the future. He was ever on the watch; and even now was
thinking of reverting to the construction of little motors, for he
thought he could divine in the near future the triumph of the motor-car.
On asking if M. Thomas Froment were there, Pierre was led by an old
workman to a little shed, where he found the young fellow in the linen
jacket of a mechanician, his hands black with filings. He was adjusting
some piece of mechanism, and nobody would have suspected him to be a
former pupil of the Lycee Condorcet, one of the three clever Froments who
had there rendered the name famous. But his only desire had been to act
as his father's faithful servant, the arm that forges, the embodiment of
the manual toil by which conceptions are realised.
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