And so I did; but it was unfinished, and Madame Pasteur had to stand over him, encouraging him with tender _très biens_ and little pats while he wrote. He was peevish as a child; he didn’t like the looks of it, tried again, and finally with a pathetic look said: “I’m afraid you don’t want either. But if you do, take your choice.” And so I did. What he had written was: “_In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power fails._” Before the time limit was up I had autographed sentiments from Alphonse Daudet, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, François Coppée and Jules Simon, as veil as a collection of impressions still clear. There was Zola. I carried away from my visit with him an impression of a man agitated, confused, sulky, an impression emphasized by the amazing conglomeration of furnishings of all ages and all countries which cluttered the entry, stairway, and big salon of his house. I had to wind my way between suits of armor, sedan chairs, Chinese lacquered tables and seats, carved and painted wood to reach him standing at the end of the room. The whole house was like that, as is shown in a series of sketches McClure published in one of the early numbers. He talked long and violently about his enemies, defended his realism, hinted that he was a latter-day Balzac, also a great collector spending his leisure in Paris at art sales, which accounted for my difficulty in finding him in his own salon. The sentiment he gave me was a reflection of his talk and of the point of view of his school. “War,” he wrote, “is the very life, the law of the world. How pitiful is man when he introduces ideas of justice and of peace, when implacable nature is only a continual battle field.” Dumas _fils_ was the only serene person in the group and was very courteous, the quietest Frenchman I ever met. Jules Simon touched me deeply by what he wrote: “Faire le bien Récolter l’ingratitude Se confier à Dieu.” 7 A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR Now that _McClure’s_ was really started, I felt that on what I could do for them and the two or three articles in which I had interested _Scribner’s_ I could live, and that I might drop everything else and devote the bulk of my time to my real business—a study of the life of Madame Roland. She had never been out of my mind. Soon after my arrival I had found to my joy that my daily walks to and from the National Library, where I was spending most of my time, could be laid through the very Quarter in which her father had carried on his trade of goldsmith and past the house in which she had been born, the church where she had taken her first communion, the prison where she had spent her last days, along the route she followed to the guillotine.