Josephine, though he hoped that his son would be better able to stand the blow, and perhaps prove a consolation to his mother. The news proved almost too much for the young Ampère, and for a time his reason was despaired of. All his faculties seemed to be shocked for the moment into insensibility. Biographers tell us that he wandered around, building little piles of sand, gazing idly at the stars or vacantly into space, wearing scarcely any of the expression of a rational being. His friends could harbor only the worst possible expectations for him, and even his physical health suffered so much that it seemed he would not long survive. One day, by chance, Rousseau's "Letters on Botany" fell into his hands. They caught his attention, and he became interested in their charming narrative style, and as a result, his reason awoke once more. He began to study botany in the field, and soon acquired a taste for the reading of Linnæus. At the same time, classic poetry, especially such as contained descriptions of nature, once more appealed to him, and so he took up his classical studies. He varied the reading of the poets with dissections of flowers, and yet succeeded in following both sets of studies so attentively that, forty years afterward, he was still perfectly capable of taking up the technical description of the plants that he had then studied, and while acting as a university inspector, he composed 150 Latin verses during his horseback rides from one inspection district to another, without ever having to consult a gradus or a dictionary for the quantities, yet without making a single mistake. His memory for subjects once learned, was almost literally infallible. Something of his love for nature can be appreciated from an incident of his early manhood, which is not without its amusing side. Ampère was very near-sighted, and had been able to read books all his life only by holding them very close to his eyes. This makes it all the more difficult to understand how he succeeded in reading so much. His near-sightedness was so marked that he had no idea of beauties of scenery beyond him, and was often rather put out at the enthusiastic description of scenes through which he passed _en diligence_, when his fellow-travelers spoke of the beauties of the scenes around them. Ampère, like most people who do not share, or at least appreciate, the enthusiasm of others for beautiful things around them, was in this mood, mainly because he was not able to see them in the way that others did, and, therefore, could not have the same pleasure in them. This lack in himself was unconscious, of course, as in all other cases, and, far from lessening, rather emphasized the tendency to be impatient with others, and rather made him more ready to think how foolish they were to go into ecstasies over something that to him was so insignificant.