In France, the spread of knowledge concerning Vico's thought was due to Michelet, who translated his works and in his last years described Italy as "the second mother and nurse who in my youth suckled me upon Virgil, and in my maturity nourished me with Vico; potent cordials that have many times renewed my heart." Michelet was the first or one of the first to proclaim, in his introduction, that Vico was not understood in the eighteenth century because he wrote for the nineteenth. Michelet was joined by Ballanche, of whom we spoke above, and also by Jouffroy, Lerminier, Chateaubriand, and Cousin, some of whom grasped the connexion between Vico and the German philosophy that Cousin was at this time propagating in France; and later by Laurent, Vacherot, De Ferron, Franck, Cournot and many others. Vico was read and admired by Comte, who mentioned him in a letter to John Stuart Mill in 1844, and lastly Léon Gambetta conceived in his youth a general history of commerce upon the scheme of the Vician "reflux." The popularity of Vico's name in France at this period was so great that it is several times mentioned in joke in passages of Balzac's novels and in Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pécuchet._ But thought of the quality of Vico's could never have a very deep or lasting influence in the persistently intellectualistic and spiritualistic atmosphere of France. Perhaps the most conspicuous results it produced were the theories of Fustel de Coulanges on the ancient city and the origin of feudalism.