"Chesterton, G.K. - The Innocence of Father Brown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of
one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a
doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of
interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the
last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a
man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named
Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there
is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning
on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well
expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the
unforeseen.

Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French
intelligence is intelligence specially and solely. He was not "a
thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of modern
fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it
cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the
same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring,
had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French
thought. The French electrify the world not by starting any
paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a
truism so far--as in the French Revolution. But exactly because
Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason.
Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without
petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning
without strong, undisputed first principles. Here he had no
strong first principles. Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and
if he was in London at all, he might be anything from a tall tramp
on Wimbledon Common to a tall toast-master at the Hotel Metropole.
In such a naked state of nescience, Valentin had a view and a
method of his own.

In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases,
when he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly
and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable. Instead of
going to the right places--banks, police stations, rendezvous--
he systematically went to the wrong places; knocked at every empty
house, turned down every cul de sac, went up every lane blocked
with rubbish, went round every crescent that led him uselessly out
of the way. He defended this crazy course quite logically. He
said that if one had a clue this was the worst way; but if one had
no clue at all it was the best, because there was just the chance
that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be the
same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must
begin, and it had better be just where another man might stop.
Something about that flight of steps up to the shop, something
about the quietude and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all
the detective's rare romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike
at random. He went up the steps, and sitting down at a table by