Although during these years Rolland's chief interest was directed towards philosophy, although he was a diligent student of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, of the Cartesians, and of Spinoza, nevertheless, during the second year of his course, he chose, or was intelligently guided to choose, history and geography as his principal subjects. The choice was a fortunate one, and was decisive for the development of his artistic life. Here he first came to look upon universal history as an eternal ebb and flow of epochs, wherein yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow comprise but a single living entity. He learned to take broad views. He acquired his pre-eminent capacity for vitalizing history. On the other hand, he owes to this same strenuous school of youth his power for contemplating the present from the detachment of a higher cultural sphere. No other imaginative writer of our time possesses anything like so solid a foundation in the form of real and methodical knowledge in all domains. It may well be, moreover, that his incomparable capacity for work was acquired during these years of seclusion. Here in the Prytaneum (Rolland's life is full of such mystical word plays) the young man found a friend. He also was in the future to be one of the leading spirits of France, one who, like Claudel and Rolland himself, was not to attain widespread celebrity until the lapse of a quarter of a century. We should err were we to consider it the outcome of pure chance that the three greatest representatives of idealism, of the new poetic faith in France, Paul Claudel, André Suarès, and Charles Péguy, should in their formative years have been intimate friends of Romain Rolland, and that after long years of obscurity they should almost at the same hour have acquired extensive influence over the French nation. In their mutual converse, in their mysterious and ardent faith, were created the elements of a world which was not immediately to become visible through the formless vapors of time. Though not one of these friends had as yet a clear vision of his goal, and though their respective energies were to lead them along widely divergent paths, their mutual reactions strengthened the primary forces of passion and of steadfast earnestness to become a sense of all-embracing world community. They were inspired with an identical mission to devote their lives, renouncing success and pecuniary reward, that by work and appeal they might help to restore to their nation its lost faith. Each one of these four comrades, Rolland, Suarès, Claudel, and Péguy, has from a different intellectual standpoint brought this revival to his nation.