This work, the unceasing labor of a spirit imprisoned in a body, imprisoned within narrow walls during all these years, who can measure it? The written books are but a fraction of it. The ardor of our recluse is all-embracing, reaching forth to include the cultures of every tongue, the history, philosophy, poesy, and music of every nation. He is in touch with all endeavors. He receives sketches, letters, and reviews concerning everything. He is one who thinks as he writes, speaking to himself and to others while his pen moves over the paper. With his small, upright handwriting in which all the letters are clearly and powerfully formed, he permanently fixes the thoughts that pass through his mind, whether spontaneously arising or coming from without; he records the airs of past and recent times, noting them down in manuscript books; he makes extracts from newspapers, drafts plans for future work; his thriftily collected hoard of these autographic intellectual goods is enormous. The flame of his labor burns unceasingly. Rarely does he take more than five hours' sleep; seldom does he go for a stroll in the adjoining Luxembourg; infrequently does a friend climb the five nights of winding stair for an hour's quiet talk; even such journeys as he undertakes are mostly for purposes of research. Repose signifies for him a change of occupation; to write letters instead of books, to read philosophy instead of poetry. His solitude is an active communing with the world. His free hours are his only holiday, stolen from the long days when he sits in the twilight at the piano, holding converse with the great masters of music, drawing melodies from other worlds into this confined space which is itself a world of the creative spirit. CHAPTER XII RENOWN We are in the year 1910. A motor is tearing along the Champs Elysées, outrunning the belated warnings of its own hooter. There is a cry, and a man who was incautiously crossing the street lies beneath the wheels. He is borne away wounded and with broken limbs, to be nursed back to life. Nothing can better exemplify the slenderness, as yet, of Romain Rolland's fame, than the reflection how little his death at this juncture would have signified to the literary world. There would have been a paragraph or two in the newspapers informing the public that the sometime professor of musical history at the Sorbonne had succumbed after being run over by a motor. A few, perhaps, would have remembered that fifteen years earlier this man Rolland had written promising dramas, and books on musical topics. Among the innumerable inhabitants of Paris, scarce a handful would have known anything of the deceased author. Thus ignored was Romain Rolland two years before he obtained a European reputation; thus nameless was he when he had finished most of the works which were to make him a leader of our generation--the dozen or so dramas, the biographies of the heroes, and the first eight volumes of _Jean Christophe_.