About all the distress and the horrors which followed in the wake of the Franco-German War I heard little—or would not hear anything; I put it aside with my habitual fatalistic _C’est la guerre_. Politics did not interest me in the least; I did not read the newspapers. This gave me all the more time for books. Books carried me into another world in which, along with my own individual life, I led a second life. In my early childhood I had been seized by the passion for reading and learning; through my intercourse with Elvira, poetess and daughter of a savant, it was still more fanned into flame, and never, under any circumstances, has it left me. Whether at home in Baden or off traveling; whether studying at the opera school or moving in high life amid joys and festivities; whether in love and engaged and disengaged again; whether my existence was offering me splendor and pleasures or care and worriments,—I always spent many hours every day in the company of books. At the time of which I am now speaking, what I had read would have filled a stately library. All of Shakespeare, all of Goethe, all of Schiller and Lessing, all of Victor Hugo. The last-named,—a world in himself,—who had already made such a mighty impression upon me as a child with his _Ruy Blas_, I felt called upon to know in all his works; and I was intoxicated with his command of language, with the sunward flight of his genius. Anastasius Grün, Hamerling, Grillparzer, Byron, Shelley, Alfred de Musset, Tennyson, among poets; and of the novelists I knew all of Dickens, all of Bulwer,—better say at once, all of the Tauchnitz collection. In French the novels of George Sand, Balzac, Dumas; the dramatic works of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Dumas _fils_, Augier, Sardou. Yet scientific writings interested me as much as elegant literature, perhaps even more. I read works on ethnography, chemistry, astronomy; but my favorite branch was philosophy. Kant, Schopenhauer, Hartmann (“The Philosophy of the Unconscious”), Strauss, Feuerbach, Pascal, Comte, Littré, Victor Cousin, Jules Janet, Alfred Fouillée,—the three last named in the _Revue des deux mondes_, which I regularly read from the first page to the last,—these and many others, all of whose names I cannot here enumerate, were my intellectual comrades, in whose company I led a happy double existence quite apart from my personal doings, and in this my soul expanded most comfortably.