Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel’s. His social difficulties represent rather a dull discomfort in his life, which in course of time, and in combination with a good many other causes, produced certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on his public career, than anything very tragic and acute. They were real, and he, being what he was, was specially unfitted to cope with and conquer them. But he had his friends, his pleasures, and even to some extent his successes, like other men. “He had an elasticity of mind,” says M. Scherer, speaking of him as he knew him in youth, “which reacted against vexations from without, and his cheerfulness was readily restored by conversation and the society of a few kindred spirits. We were accustomed, two or three friends and I, to walk every Thursday to the Salève, Lamartine’s _Salève aux flancs azurés_; we dined there, and did not return till nightfall.” They were days devoted to _débauches platoniciennes_, to “the free exchange of ideas, the free play of fancy and of gayety. Amiel was not one of the original members of these Thursday parties; but whenever he joined us we regarded it as a fête-day. In serious discussion he was a master of the unexpected, and his energy, his _entrain_, affected us all. If his grammatical questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms, astonished us at times, how often, on the other hand, did he not give us cause to admire the variety of his knowledge, the precision of his ideas, the charm of his quick intelligence! We found him always, besides, kindly and amiable, a nature one might trust and lean upon with perfect security. He awakened in us but one regret; _we could not understand how it was a man so richly gifted produced nothing, or only trivialities_.” In these last words of M. Scherer’s we have come across the determining fact of Amiel’s life in its relation to the outer world--that “sterility of genius,” of which he was the victim. For social ostracism and political anxiety would have mattered to him comparatively little if he could but have lost himself in the fruitful activities of thought, in the struggles and the victories of composition and creation. A German professor of Amiel’s knowledge would have wanted nothing beyond his _Fach_, and nine men out of ten in his circumstances would have made themselves the slave of a _magnum opus_, and forgotten the vexations of everyday life in the “_douces joies de la science_.” But there were certain characteristics in Amiel which made it impossible--which neutralized his powers, his knowledge, his intelligence, and condemned him, so far as his public performance was concerned, to barrenness and failure. What were these characteristics, this element of unsoundness and disease, which M. Caro calls “_la maladie de l’idéal_?”