AND WE THINK OF BUBBLES AS FRAGILE!

On the occasion of accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, French physicist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932–2007) ended his speech on "Bubbles, Foams and Other Fragile Objects" by projecting an image of the painting Soap Bubbles by Jean-Simon Chardin, one of the great genre painters of the eighteenth century. Mischievously, de Gennes offered the following quatrain, daring to compare the vanity of honors with the fragility of a soap bubble—a provocation in front an audience of Prize winners!