onged that marvelous effect, and stood a moment as if
annihilated by the frantic and tumultuous shouts of the audience.

Chapter XVII.

Delsarte's Inventions.

Delsarte always had his father's propensity to devote himself to
mechanics that he might apply his knowledge of them to new things. When
he felt his artistic abilities, not growing less, but their plastic
expression becoming more difficult, owing to the cruel warnings of his
departing youth, this tendency toward occupations more especially
intellectual, became more marked.

It may be helpful here to note that a _machine_--that positive and most
material of all things--is the thing whose creation requires force of
understanding in the highest degree.

The brain, that living machine, lends its aid to the intellect; it
represents the physical side; it is the spot where the work is carried
on. Feeling has no part in the intellectual acts which work together in
mechanical production,--mathematics playing the principal part,--it has
no other share, I say, but to inspire certain persons with a passionate
taste for abstract studies, which leads them toward useful and glorious
discoveries.

Thus, this thought of Delsarte and Pierre Leroux seems to be justified:
that, in no case, can man break his essential triplicity.

Delsarte, moreover, by changing the direction of his faculties, or
rather by displacing the dominant, affirmed his freedom of will. If he
did not always class himself with the strong, he still loved to reign
over himself in the omnipotence of his will.

The artist became an inventor; he took out letters-patent for various
discoveries, among others for an instrument of precision applicable to
astronomical observations. Competent persons have recognized the great
value of this invention, conceived without previous study, and which
remains hidden among the papers of some official.

Only one of his mechanical conceptions was ever really put to practical
use, that of the _Guide-accord_; it gained him a gold medal at the
Exhibition of 1855; Dublin awarded it the same praise.

Berlioz wrote of this invention, in his book entitled, "_A Travers
Chants_:"

"M. Delsarte has made piano tuning easier by means of an instrument
which he calls the _phonopticon_. Any one who will take the trouble to
use it will find that it produces such absolute correctness, that the
most practiced ear could not attain to similar perfection. This
_Guide-accord_ cann