By the caprice of chance, for this friend likewise fame was to come only after twenty years of silence. Romain Rolland and his intimate Paul Claudel (author of _Annonce faite à Marie_), the two greatest imaginative writers in contemporary France, who crossed the threshold of school together, were almost simultaneously, twenty years later, to secure a European reputation. During the last quarter of a century, the two have followed very different paths in faith and spirit, have cultivated widely divergent ideals. Claudel's steps have been directed towards the mystic cathedral of the Catholic past; Rolland has moved through France and beyond, towards the ideal of a free Europe. At that time, however, in their daily walks to and from school, they enjoyed endless conversations, exchanging thoughts upon the books they had read, and mutually inflaming one another's youthful ardors. The bright particular star of their heaven was Richard Wagner, who at that date was casting a marvelous spell over the mind of French youth. In Rolland's case it was not simply Wagner the artist who exercised this influence, but Wagner the universal poietic personality. School days passed quickly and somewhat joylessly. Too sudden had been the transition from the romanticist home to the harshly realist Paris. To the sensitive lad, the city could only show its teeth, display its indifference, manifest the fierceness of its rhythm. These qualities, this Maelstrom aspect, aroused in his mind something approaching to alarm. He yearned for sympathy, cordiality, soaring aspirations; now as before, art was his savior, "glorious art, in so many gray hours." His chief joys were the rare afternoons spent at popular Sunday concerts, when the pulse of music came to thrill his heart--how charmingly is not this described in _Antoinette_! Nor had Shakespeare lost power in any degree, now that his figures, seen on the stage, were able to arouse mingled dread and ecstasy. The boy gave his whole soul to the dramatist. "He took possession of me like a conqueror; I threw myself to him like a flower. At the same time, the spirit of music flowed over me as water floods a plain; Beethoven and Berlioz even more than Wagner. I had to pay for these joys. I was, as it were, intoxicated for a year or two, much as the earth becomes supersaturated in time of flood. In the entrance examination to the Normal School I failed twice, thanks to my preoccupation with Shakespeare and with music." Subsequently, he discovered a third master, a liberator of his faith. This was Spinoza, whose acquaintance he made during an evening spent alone at school, and whose gentle intellectual light was henceforward to illumine Rolland's soul throughout life. The greatest of mankind have ever been his examples and companions.