Pareto as I Knew Him
I
IT was late in the afternoon of a sultry day when, after not a few traveling adventures due to our ignorance of the locality, we were set down by the local train Nyon-Geneva at a flower-covered little station in the open country. The name CÉLIGNY stood out boldly in white letters on a blue background. No one was at hand to show us the house of Vilfredo Pareto. Obviously we had to turn our steps toward the village, which greeted us from the hills. Meadows and fields spread out before us; behind, in the distance, was Lake Geneva — a narrow strip gradually widening as we ascended. The heat and the mounting road made the two travelers short of breath: one a very tall gentleman, armed with a suitcase filled mostly with manuscripts and books, my father; the other a little girl skipping along in spite of a heavy black leather bag that beat against her legs at every step, his daughter.
In the centre of the village, some peasants at the fountain could only show their startled appearance and grin. At the rustic inn, with its large dark bare rooms, we were finally welcomed with an ‘Ah! mais, c’est de la villa Angora qu’ilfallait demander! Personne ici ne connaît le nom du Marquis. . . . Du reste, on ne le voit jamais.’ We had to retrace our steps down to the station, and face another walk of a mile to the lake. Meanwhile it began to rain, and night fell rapidly. Having reached the pier, we asked for further directions at the wharf cafe. We then followed the Lausanne highway, flanked on the lake side by high walls topped with ancient trees that made me think of the Belle au bois dormant, until we reached a low, simple, wrought-iron gate, with two brick pillars at the sides, and the legend VILLA ANGORA.
The Italian gardener who opened the gate explained that, as my father had been looked for on an earlier train, his hosts by now no longer thought he was coming. He took us into the villa, where we were immediately assailed by a strong scent, of cats. And cats were also painted on the walls of the stairs leading to the second floor, while a flesh-and-blood cat, huge, gray and white, hurtled itself between our legs, streaking like a rocket to the kitchen below. We were ushered into the living room. Queer thumpings and other noises were coming from the room next to it. And to accentuate the sense of mystery that had been gradually developed in me by the night, the rain, the gardener’s uneasy look when he saw me, and the unaccustomed sounds of a strange house, there came from the landing the noise of slamming doors and of a prolonged whispering, which ended when the door finally opened.
A lady of an assured, detached air, whose stiffly erect posture was perhaps due to the fact that her stays had been drawn a little too tight, entered the room. Visibly perturbed, she took my father aside, speaking French to him in a low tone of voice. After she had brought us downstairs to our rooms she left us, urging my father to return upstairs as soon as possible, for Monsieur Pareto wished to welcome him and to make his acquaintance.
My curiosity was aroused. Who was that lady, from whose waist at least a score of keys hung tinkling? And why was she so mysterious in regard to me? Smiling, my father explained things: we had just met our host’s second wife, called Madame Régis, and the whispering had been to warn Father that my coming was very embarrassing, since Pareto, unable to endure children about because of the noise they made, refused to allow them to cross the threshold of his house. He had been suffering from heart trouble for many years, and any unwonted noise upset him. Since I was already there, I could remain for the night, but I was to be very careful never to attract my elders’ attention in any way, and above all I was to refrain from shouting, speaking only when spoken to.
However much I was piqued at being treated like any other child, I waited quietly to be introduced to the maître de Céligny. And when the time came I found myself before a tall personage, made more impressive by a cloak with double capes which rippled at every movement of his arms. What struck me most was not so much the flowing cloak (he had a supply of three or four of these, which he would don or take off according to the temperature; he rarely wore only one), nor the hat which remained almost always on his head, nor even the curling and graying beard; what struck me were his pair of flaming, piercing eyes, —fureteurs, as the French so well express it, — and his two pale, nervous, fine hands, with the protruding blue veins, and the very long fingernails. At times the hands would beat rhythmically on the arm of his chair or on the table, the fingertips close together; I fully expected to see the chair arm or the tablecloth worn through.
He spoke a Tuscan Italian and a French colored with argot equally well, passing with absolute ease from one language to the other. He explained that, born of a Ligurian father and a French mother, a student at Turin, he had been an engineer for several years in Florence, before being nominated Walras’s successor at Lausanne. Several times that evening at the dinner table I felt him stare intently at me, while my father, proud of his small traveling companion, tried to appease his illustrious colleague, bringing in evidence what were to him my good qualities. By the end of the meal, Pareto had become the most courteous of hosts even toward me, and when we went upstairs to have coffee his resentment at my intrusion had clearly melted away.
The best proof of it was that, not content with the choice foods with which he had regaled us, or with the French wine he himself had gone down to find in the cellar during dinner, — after he had discovered that my father, in spite of his Rhenish origin, did not care for the exquisite Rhine wine served especially in his honor, — he asked us to witness a scene most dear to him, to which profane eyes were not admitted: the feeding of his Angora cats. He opened the door of the room from which we had heard the thumping noises issue on our arrival, thus disclosing a long verandah, the exclusive domain of at least two dozen Angora cats, large and small, blue, gray, and white, with the silkiest and longest of fur. Pareto had a parcel of raw meat brought to him, and made the cats jump for the pieces he threw them. Each cat had a name, and Pareto and Madame Régis told them apart with great assurance.
Only one of the cats, Fanfinou d’Amour, bolder than the rest, had succeeded in escaping since it was a kitten, and now it wandered about the house: it was the one that had almost knocked me down the stairs. All the other cats were kept on the verandah, Pareto occasionally allowing them free access to his study by another door. He even confessed (and at that time I firmly believed it) that he could not write a single line unless he had a cat on each shoulder to warm him and keep him company. Resides various boxes and baskets, there were on the verandah some straight chairs and easy-chairs, and an old desk, on which the Angoras voluptuously lounged. I saw all these details by daylight the next morning (without, however, being allowed to set foot on the verandah itself), when no one any longer thought of sending me away.
II
And thus began for me a series of extremely pleasant visits at the Villa Angora, during Easter or summer vacations, when my father would deposit me between a congress and a lecture, for days, weeks, and even months. Pareto after a while not only tolerated me, but even honored me by giving my name to one of his kittens.
It is difficult to say to what extent Pareto loved his cats: they were actually sacred to him, especially Angora cats, which he characterized as an independent, feline, and proud race. And independent, feline, and proud was Pareto himself, a lover of form, but capable, at times, of showing his teeth in dissatisfaction, only to become all of a sudden docile again. Independent, he was a friend to all independents and all rebels in conflict with their government, whether exiled Italian socialists or French clericals, welcoming them to his home with the utmost generosity. Proud, he was conscious of his own value and his own originality, of the ancient origins of his family, as noble and venerable as that of Savoy. (For all that, he did not want to be called ‘marquis’; at the most ‘professor,’ or better ‘monsieur.’ He used to say he was born a marquis, and had not earned the title; and he had become a professor by chance rather than by personal merit.) Feline was his glance, and his caustic tongue could work with devastating effects, whether he was railing at the Democrats, ‘those parvenus,’ or against the Pan-Germanists, who dared to claim even Dante as their own, or against the temperance agitators, whom he called pathological specimens, or against his countrymen allegedly united in a conspiracy of silence against him — or the thousand other enemies of his ideas or his tastes.
Pareto’s cats, besides keeping him company and inspiring him during his long hours of work, served him sometimes also as an object of study. Perhaps he regretted being able to observe them only ‘from the outside,’ without penetrating their inner nature as he tried to do with men. We find his Angora cats already in the Systèmes Socialistes of 1902: ‘Why are Angora cats more delicate than alley cats? Because they are smothered with care; we take pains to save every kitten in a litter of Angoras, while from the brood of a wretched common cat, roving and hungry, only the kittens with the best of health are saved.’ In The Mind and Society Pareto mentions cats several times, whether to compare them to the Europeans who conquer and destroy the Africans as the cat eats the mouse, or to quote his favorite proverb, ‘The hasty cat bears blind kittens,’ or to consider man as bound by certain instincts like the cat, which, with no mice to catch, plays with a ball of paper as if it were a mouse.
In general all animals enjoyed his sympathy. He had allowed Madame Régis to keep some dogs: a magnificent Saint Bernard, which to their great sorrow they had to give away, since the playful disposition of the enormous animal was dangerous to guests; and a female wolfhound, called Miquette, because she was surprised one morning while burying, in a remote corner of the garden, a part of her daily ration of bread. She was seen again the next morning digging up the piece of bread to eat it in spite of the fresh ration she had been given. Pareto utilizes the incident in his Mind and Society: ’A dog may be given all the bread it wants, but it will bury the leftover and later dig it up and eat it, though it has plenty of fresh bread at its disposal.’ Nor did Miquette’s contribution to the varicolored mosaic of The Mind and Society stop there. Taking advantage of the gate left open, one day she disappeared in the fields in front of the house. A peasant of the neighborhood soon popped up holding a chicken which had fallen victim to the dog. Of course Madame Régis had to pay a high price for it, and she did not refrain from complaining about it to Pareto at teatime; whence came these lines: ‘A dog kenneled in a garden will not harm the cats and the poultry that belong there. Once outside the gate, he chases all the cats and hens he sees; and he will attack a strange cat that enters his garden.’
Pareto’s cats and Madame Régis’s dogs were not the only animal inhabitants of Villa Angora. There was a little zoölogical garden with an enclosure, four or five cages with little houses, overflowing with rabbits, guinea pigs, pigeons, gold and silver pheasants, a peacock, two cranes, two brown squirrels, an Angora goat and some kids.
The goat, ‘Mr. le Bouc,’ became the special pet of my father. During the tour du propriétaire which Pareto and Madame Régis had us make the day after our arrival, Mr. le Bouc, perhaps excited by the sight of so many admirers, lowered his head and charged toward my father; and Father rushed against him with both hands outstretched, repulsing the attack. From that day, every time we stopped outside the goat’s pen and made him come out, the same performance would take place. Since the odor of the goat was extremely strong, my father, before the encounter, would put on a pair of gloves, fine French gloves, new and wine-colored; and even now, after so many years, when taken from my father’s collection of souvenirs and trophies, they call to mind the scene of my father at grips with Mr. le Bouc, aided in the battle by Madame Régis, with Pareto looking on and having a world of fun.
The two cranes were the only free citizens of the enclosure, and ventured out on the lake, always faithfully returning to the villa. A third had flown away long ago, never to return. In the cage nearest to the villa were kept the squirrels, which had a stump with a little house at the top at their disposal. The gardener was strictly forbidden to give them anything to eat, a ministration reserved for Pareto alone, who early in the morning, before setting to work, went to the squirrels’ cage, His pockets full of nuts. One of them would accept food from no one but his master; refusing to be fed even by Madame Régis, he let himself starve to death when Pareto died. The squirrels too have their little niche in The Mind and Society. Between the cages and an avenue of plane trees there was the kitchen garden, with fruits and greens, a patch of strawberries, white and red raspberries, red and black currants, and a fountain with a basin full of frogs and toads. I was given permission to eat the fruit at my pleasure; the strawberries alone were reserved for Pareto.
But what was for me then a veritable earthly paradise was the part of the grounds at the right of the house, kept up as a garden. There were carefully tended green lawns, with flower beds, where the gardener gave his fancy free play at making stars of Italy and various geometrical designs in different colors; two banana trees, protected in winter by a little wooden house with a door which Pareto used to inspect methodically each autumn; a tiny pond with some ducks on it, surrounded by a fringe of gooseberry and currant bushes; majestic trees of the most varied species — willows, arbor vitæ, and extremely tall pines, in the shade of which we took tea at about five o’clock, when Pareto emerged from his study. A certain chair was reserved there for Pareto; like the cats, the squirrels, and the strawberries, woe to whoever touched it.
The farthest end of the garden I called my virgin forest. No voice from the house could pierce as far as that, to the exasperation of the maid Julie, who had to come and fetch me out at mealtimes. For Pareto did not allow delays: if I arrived barely a minute late, gasping for breath, he welcomed me smiling, with a ‘ J’ai failli attendre,’ à la Louis XIV, to freeze my blood.
Along the lake and for the whole length of the garden extended an avenue of those geometrical plane trees so typical of Lake Geneva. When the water was rough, the lake looked like a miniature sea in a tempest. On calm days the French shore was visible. The lake gave the villa a characteristic of its own, enveloping it with the uninterrupted murmur of its waves. The passing of a steamboat en route to Geneva or toward Nyon and Lausanne served to set the watch to the entire household with the exception of Pareto.
After having worked a part of the afternoon, Pareto frequently walked up and down the avenue, or had his armchair brought there, in the shade of a plane tree, and turned toward the lake. Losing himself in gazing far off, he meditated on men, in company with ‘Mother Nature.’ Even then he did not really rest. While he seemed to be dozing, his mind was kept working by the sight of the swans which would often float by: ‘On the shores of the Lake of Geneva one may see flocks of swans, each of which occupies a certain area of the lake. If the swan of one flock tries to invade the territory of another flock, it is attacked, beaten, driven off. The old swans die, young ones are hatched and grow up, and the flock endures as a unit.’
III
When we were kept in the house by bad weather, especially after the interminable autumnal rains began, the villa offered a pleasant and varied refuge indoors. There was the small antechamber where old cloaks, caps, and canes accumulated, and the large room at the left with enormous cupboards kept under lock and key by Madame Régis, so that every time a sugar bowl had to be replenished or a napkin was needed for a new guest Julie had to fetch the mistress of the house, who came preceded by a great clattering of keys. This room was large and diverting, for from one of the wide windows, as one went about the housework, the various animals’ cages were in plain sight. A service lift connected it with the kitchens below. On the ground floor were two rooms set apart for guests, with large comfortable beds and solidly bourgeois and uninteresting furniture.
The dining room at the right was cheerful, full of light, and boasting a view of the garden and a verandah full of flowers. On the wall the same artist who had prevailed upon Pareto to let him ornament the staircase with cats had painted full-length figures of women, clad in veils of rose, pale blue, and white, with long, loose-flowing hair. Pareto’s generosity, however, was perhaps not enough to excuse the vulgarity of those veiled women, who certainly did not speak for the æsthetic and artistic sense of anyone who tolerated their sight, day after day.
The fare at the Villa Angora was extremely refined, prepared by experienced cooks. In the rainy season we used to go hunting together along the hedges of the highways for snails to prepare à la bourguignonne, a dish my father relished. Pareto delighted in satisfying the appetites and fancies of his guests, he himself being rather sparing in his diet and rarely tempted by Pantagruelian dishes, While Madame Régis herself supervised the preparation of the food, Pareto, as was seen above, was the dispenser of the wines, chosen always with the discrimination of a real connoisseur. His cellar, plentifully stocked before the war, included wines of infinite variety, French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, and Swiss. Whenever he was expecting guests, he could be seen descending to the cellar, armed with candle and keys, to choose the kind of wine that seemed the most appropriate to the occasion. He never entrusted the task to anyone else, even after a hard day’s work, or when his weak heart worried those about him.
Following his physician’s advice, he drank very little, and only after having battled between the desire to drink the glass of wine and the fear that it might injure his health. He yielded, however, to the temptation, thinking that ‘one considered but the effects, all probably bad, of wine on the physical health and paid no attention to the pleasure a man receives from its temperate use.’ He took exception with anyone who claimed that alcohol had the effect of diminishing brain power. His great admiration for Bismarck was increased when he discovered that the German statesman was a lover and connoisseur of wines, a taste he also shared with the great mathematician Abel.
At dinnertime, when there were guests, more than at any other time, Pareto gave free rein to his talents as a witty and learned causeur. When we were alone, Madame Régis made a brief résume of the morning’s or afternoon’s happenings, while Pareto listened, ready to find reason for comment in the most trifling things and in the least interesting conversation. He used to say, ‘Even an absurd and idiotic argument is a fact.’ He enjoyed asking my opinion on the minor events of the day, listening attentively. In the same way he encouraged the servants to chatter away to him, and not even the recounting of a dream bored him. ‘ Facts which at first blush might seem insignificant or childish; tales, legends, the fancies of magic or theology, may often be accounted idle and ridiculous things. . . . They may be very helpful as tools for discovering the thoughts and feelings of men.’ For the same reason, again, he was an assiduous reader of the sensational news columns in the papers, and would retell amusing bits from them, adapting his conversation to the mentality of a little girl.
After lunch, Pareto used to rest an hour before continuing his work, as did Madame Régis, who withdrew to her little sitting room, next to the dining room, where Pareto hardly ever set foot. To enter it one lifted a Gobelin tapestry; covering its walls were other French tapestries of the end of the last century representing the four seasons in rural settings. The only object of any artistic value in the whole villa was kept in this room: a Saxe porcelain group. In one corner was an ancient gramophone with a horn, and a few records, — ‘Pagliacci,’‘La Fille de Madame Angot,’‘Carmen,’ ‘Les Cloches de Cornevillc ’ — to which Pareto would unfailingly refuse to listen, murmuring, ‘Music — I never listen to it. It tells me nothing. To me it is like the creaking of a cart passing in the street.’
Situated directly above the sitting room, on the second floor, was Pareto’s bedroom, a veritable cell, with one large bed of iron, I think, which almost completely filled it, and a few other pieces of extremely simple furniture. I never saw the two windows except when they were hermetically closed with Venetian blinds and shades, which added to the austere atmosphere of the room. The only lively decoration was Fanfinou d’Amour, who became a cushion at the foot of the bed at night. The appearance of the room typified Pareto’s character: bare of useless frills, simple almost to a Spartan degree. His frugal disposition, so evident in his personal tastes, caused him to be a very careful administrator: thus he settled at Céligny, in the Canton of Geneva, to avoid the taxes of the Lausanne Canton, where he taught. But at the same time he was lavishly generous with others, with all those who came to enjoy his hospitality.
IV
The centre of the social life was the living room on the same floor, where we gathered in the evenings: sofas, armchairs, tables, prints, pillows, laces. Here, also, a rather bourgeois and indifferent taste. In a corner there was a piano that Madame Régis opened sometimes to sing her favorite song, ‘Ma Normandie.’ Pareto would very politely listen, maintaining complete silence. Sometimes he would invite me to give a comedy, which he knew I liked to do. I would take some pillows, the laces from the chairs and tables, and with those simple properties make up my sets, playing the various characters à tour de rôle. One pillow became a baby in swaddling clothes, two tied together represented a husband, a little one balanced on my head made me a hat, with a lace for a veil, and so on. Pareto laughed and enjoyed himself. As usual he was cataloguing in his mind what he saw: ‘Children are just trying to amuse themselves by humoring their instinct for combinations, just as they do when on a romp they make the strangest combinations of the things at their disposal.’ I can perhaps flatter myself that when Pareto wrote these lines his mind went back to the little child performer.
I remember one evening when, in order to interrupt a rather boring discussion which had started at dinner, Madame Régis unearthed a huge box of photographs of the most disparate people. There were pictures of Pareto and of his colleagues, of Madame Régis and her actress and singer friends of the Geneva theatre. From that box my father produced the handsomest photograph of Pareto that I have ever seen. It was taken at Florence during a masquerade ball, and Pareto appears about thirty years old, in Arab costume, with a hood covering part of the head, in an attitude of proud defiance, his large eyes glowing darkly, his beard black and curly. The photograph has passed into my father’s collection, enriched with a fine dedication. On that evening it recalled old memories. Pareto, leaving us for an instant, reappeared with a yellowed manuscript, giving it to me to read. It was one of his ‘sins of youth,’a story he had written at Florence, when, as he put it, he dabbled in literature. As if ashamed of having brought to light old waste paper, he immediately left the room.
It was an animated tale of an evening passed at the Peruzzi house, or some other illustrious Florentine drawingroom of the period. Pareto’s clear, simple, and not too small handwriting made it easy for me to read it aloud, later, to my father. Invited to a gala function pour pendre la créuiadllère, Pareto, then a young engineer of modest means (he had not yet come into the inheritance which enabled him to live in comfort a life dedicated solely to science), having skipped his dinner, had arrived famished. He hastily went to the buffet, and, when no one was looking, filled the pockets of his coattails with chocolate éclairs, against the morrow. A cat, the only witness of his deed, started to miaow, and Pareto, to send it away, pulled its tail (this particular impressed me especially, for I mentioned it later to Pareto, who, with his sweetest smile, commented, ‘Bygone days’). Pareto was about to leave when his hostess seized him by the arm, obliging him to sit by her side. Alas, he failed to part his coattails in time, and soon felt a rivulet of sticky wetness run down his legs. When the time to take his leave arrived, there remained quite evident traces on the armchair. The hostess, noticing these, and at the same time the spotted suit of her guest, was at first astounded, then begged a thousand pardons of him: Pareto must have leaned against a newly varnished moulding. How sorry she was that his suit had been ruined through her fault!
V
In rather marked contrast with the simplicity of Pareto’s own room was Madame Régis’s bedchamber, glowing with what seemed to me a profusion of mirrors, of sparkling perfume bottles and evening gowns. Often a guest, especially if English, would dress for dinner, and in this case Madame Régis would dress too, Pareto alone remaining as he was, in his sack suit, of iron gray and his high boots with strips of elastic at the sides.
On the top floor was the room which I considered mine, with a double ogival window and balcony, from which one could enjoy a magnificent view of the lake. Along the window frame, tiny but active spiders had made the finest of fabrics, in which thousands of little flies were imprisoned. I remember having asked the maid Julie why she did not remove the spider webs. It was forbidden, she replied, for Pareto did not allow a single spider to be killed or the webs to be destroyed. To myself I debated for a long time the reason for such an order: did Pareto perhaps think those laborious little creatures formed a protective netting against the flies and other insects? Or did he simply respect their industrious ability? And when, having forgetfully leaned against the balcony parapet, I found filmy gray veils dotted with black spots on my dress, I could not tell which feeling was stronger in me, disgust, or regret at having done something against Pareto’s will.
VI
Pareto’s study was on the second floor. Past its doorway, which no one dared to violate, Pareto was in his laboratory, surrounded by his tools, the books, and his muses, the cats. There were two rooms with high open and closed bookcases around all the walls up to the ceiling, with two and sometimes three rows of volumes on each shelf; and piles of books heaped everywhere, on tables, chairs, and even on the floor, arranged according to a system that Pareto apparently knew, for when he sought a book he found it without too great an expenditure of time. He had an iron memory, which made him independent of any catalogue. Woe to whoever should touch his books, or dust his desk, displacing his newspaper clippings or his papers full of hieroglyphics and mathematical problems which he amused himself by solving.
Pareto did not willingly lend his books, because, as he read them, he filled them with loose sheets of paper on which he took notes. As he gradually progressed in his work, the hundreds of little sheets of semitransparent paper full of notes were thrown away, and my father has rescued several from the waste-paper basket. They enrich to-day his collection of autographs, together with the many and fine letters Pareto wrote him. Pareto liked personal correspondence with his friends, and answered at once all letters, with a special courtesy all his own.
Infinite in number were the newspapers and reviews that came to the villa, and the complimentary copies of books and reprints from colleagues and disciples. Of the periodicals, Pareto read with pleasure the Travaso delle Idee, a Roman comic weekly, and the Baretti, a literary journal edited by Piero Gobetti, perhaps because they satisfied his critical and satirical spirit. Besides Aristotle and Machiavelli, his favorite classics, Pareto liked to talk about Bismarck’s memoirs, and to me, who had never read them, he warmly recommended The Adventures of Pinocchio.
In spite of his illness, he used to spend at his desk more than eight hours a day. He began the day at seven, and, when his work was urgent, ended it at eleven at night, at which hour he invariably retired. As an engineer, he had never refused, when the occasion arose, to perform even heavy manual labor; but when I knew him his physician, Jomini, who came all the way from Lausanne to see him and often used to linger with him at great length, talking rather of history and politics than of medicine, had prohibited the least physical exertion. Thus all of Pareto’s enormous energies were turned toward his studies, permitting him to bring to an end his work on experimental science. There, in his study, he found himself in his element. Like the Angora cats surrounding him, Pareto had need of special care. The verandah and the two studies were indeed the warmest places in the whole house, and there Pareto could permit himself the luxury of leaving off his outer wrappings and his hat. With these he laid aside also, he used to say, ‘to an extent at least, his sentiments, preconceptions, and beliefs, resuming them on leaving the study.’
As simple as this, then, was the villa, with its elaborate park. And yet Pareto was proud of it, and used to say that at his death he would like to have the villa made into a museum, as in the neighboring Coppet had been done with Madame de Staël’s house, and in the not far-off Ferney with that of Voltaire. Later, however, he bequeathed his library to the University of Lausanne; and to-day his cats and the other animals are dead or scattered, except one crane which struts in solitude the botanical garden of Lausanne; his villa is for sale, while the ‘virgin forest,’ having been already sold, has vanished to make room for a cottage. And nothing remains of Pareto at Céligny but a very modest tomb.
VII
Already before the war, Pareto no longer went to Lausanne to give lectures. During the war and immediately after, when I frequented the villa, he hardly ever left even the limits of his garden, and it was for this reason that for neighbors and peasants he was an almost legendary personage.
In 1917, however, in order to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment to the chair of political economy, the University of Lausanne, which took the initiative, asked Pareto to give in the spring at least a short course of lectures. Thus, after an interruption of over eight years, Pareto made a few trips to Lausanne.
At that time he was entering on his seventieth year of life. The indomitable pride that he took in his work had become more marked in the solitude of Céligny, and he was addicted to a bitterness at times excessive and to an irritability perhaps made more acute by his illness. I remember that during the preparations for the celebration, which were prolonged and difficult on account of the war, and in which my father took part, having charge of all the Italian organization and a part of the Swiss, there was at least as much friction as pleasure. My father did all he could to bring about a decoration by the Italian Government, but when it came Pareto thought it insufficient, and refused it. Other sources of apprehension were Pareto’s relations with some of his colleagues, and the coldness toward his best friend Pantaleoni, which ended, however, when Pantaleoni in person came to the jubilee to represent the Italian minister of public instruction, Ruffini, and the University of Rome.
At the ceremonies which took place on July 6 in a hall of the baroque De Rumine palace, Italian, French, German, American, and Swiss scientists were gathered together on neutral ground. Of the great number of telegrams and letters that poured in, the one that pleased Pareto the most, because it came from the enemy’s camp, was that from the University of Frankfort. Among the many speeches, I recall the eloquent and witty one by the representative of the University of Paris, Charles Gide, willing to forget that Pareto had treated him with some condescension as a Titerary economist.’ Pareto’s colleague at Lausanne, Iioguin, and Pantaleoni gave other long speeches, with some personal touches, not forgetting Madame Régis, to whose care Pareto owed in part his being able to continue his work. My father presented a parchment scroll containing the names of over eighty of Pareto’s Italian admirers, and another one from his colleagues and admirers living in Switzerland, among whom I remember the name of George Davis Herron, friend and counselor of Wilson.
VIII
In the thick of a war, then, whose outcome still seemed undecided, scientists from all over the world, forgetting partisan hates, had united to honor Pareto. Pareto’s personal attitude toward the war was the same one he had proposed to maintain in his own work. Free of any political bias, he tried to clothe himself with the objectivity of the scientist who ‘looks on the game, setting down the score.’ He was a profound pacifist, however convinced he was, by his historicosociological researches, that there would always be wars. He laughed at those who, at the beginning of the war, believed it would last only a short time and then, seeing it drag on, consoled themselves with the thought that here was the war to end wars. He spoke with profound contempt of those pacifists who suddenly became militarists, ‘letting themselves be carried away, like a leaf in the wind, by the storm of warlike enthusiasms.’ Of himself he said, bending down to me with a complacent smile, ‘I am a defeatist,’ and as my eyes widened in disappointment he turned to my father: ‘Defeatist, to be sure, in that I do not share the beliefs and interest which to-day have obtained the upper hand.’
That his attitude was judged by the intolerant as being unpatriotic is shown by the following incident. The Nation had praised an article of his on the war and its principal sociological factors, published by Rignano in his journal, Scientia, in March 1915 — that is, before Italy entered the war, ‘when a crumb or two of experimental truth was still tolerated.’ As a consequence, several American publishers wrote to him with offers to translate and publish the article. Pareto replied, sending it, but advising against its publication because it ran counter to the spirit of the times: ‘And that I was right is proved by the fact that not one of those publishers pursued the matter further. . . .The article seemed too daring.’
To me, ardent in the cause of the Allies, Pareto, so impartial and unenthusiastic, appeared Germanophile — perhaps also because at first, before the entry of the United States into the war, he seemed to believe in the ultimate victory of Germany. To tease Madame Régis, who was a supporter of the Allied side, as befitted a good Frenchwoman, he used to tell her that his real name was Fritz Willy. I believed then that he had invented the name to annoy us. I learned later that he had actually used it in his doctor’s thesis; but to this day I am ignorant of its origin. In any case, Pareto was no Germanophile, just as he was no Francophile either; and in spite of all his partiality for Bismarck, he had to read his memoirs in a French translation.
He had always been unrelenting in his criticism of the political life of his own country, Italy. But at bottom he loved it sincerely, in spite of all his ironies and the deep sense of grievance that the voluntary exile following the vexations he had suffered under Crispi’s government had left in him. This love for his country manifested itself when the news of the battle of the Piave reached Céligny. The gardener had prepared for the table a centrepiece of flowers arranged in a star with the word ‘Victory.’ Pareto, who had not yet read the newspapers, was thus apprised of the Italian triumph. As if propelled by a spring, he rushed at once down to the cellar to find a bottle of champagne worthy of the success of the Italian army.
IX
A lover of paradoxes, he himself used to say that, ‘with many people of a contradictory turn of mind, to condemn a thing is a surer way of gaining its acceptance than to praise it.’ ‘I shall poke fun at the “Goddess Science,”yet the fact stands that I have devoted my life to experimental science.’
A hater of adulation, he was sometimes blinded by the adulation of pupils or followers far from approaching his mental stature. Although he had meditated on all that was humanly knowable, he was often unable to judge those who were nearest him or who courted his favors. By temperament a lover of liberty in all its aspects, political and economic, when he wrote he leaned actually in the other direction: ‘But in doing this it may be that I have gone too far, and that, for fear of giving too much weight to the arguments in favor of liberty, I have failed to give them enough,’
What a deep-rooted bitterness and sadness, a bitterness that even work could not make him forget, caused him to write to the small girl who had become his friend: ‘May you, when nearing the end of your life, consider false the words in Ecclesiastes which say that all is vanity and a striving after wind. It is the best wish that could be made for one who is just entering upon life.’