Eight long, tedious, heartbreaking years succeeded this resolution, during the course of which his powers of endurance and splendid physical strength were put to a severe test in his attempts to find a suitable enamel for the objects he made out of the earth of the neighborhood, a sort of pipe-clay. Month after month and year after year came sorrowful failures when he was seemingly just on the point of success. Without caring that he knew nothing concerning argillaceous earths, he set himself to search out enamels, like a man who gropes in the darkness. Whatever else he may have been, we can rest assured that he was thorough and practical in his craft. That so long a time elapsed before the results he hoped to attain were reached seems a proof to confute the theory often advanced that he had learned the secret of his enamel from the Hirschvogels in Nuremberg. If they disclosed any part of their craft to him when he was roving through Germany, they zealously guarded that of making white enamel, since for this he sought so long and arduously--indeed, through fifteen years of patient toil and discouragement. Abaquesne, at Rouen, had anticipated him, it is true, but it is just because it chanced to be his lot to have to seek out these things for himself that his works were endowed with marked originality. All this time his family suffered in poverty. We can sympathize with his wife, certainly. That Palissy was quite out of his right mind she had no doubt. Was he not sacrificing everything for--what seemed in the face of his failures--nothing? It is hard enough to believe in genius in our own day, when miracles are no longer surprises. What, then, must have been the alienating doubts of Master Bernard’s whole family as they saw him, day after day, absorbed with his clays, his enamels, and his ovens, while they stood by, hungry and neglected! The colossal selfishness of the men who win against all odds is forgotten afterward and forgiven, and one is inclined to think Palissy’s plaint about the lack of encouragement of his friends and family more of a screen to his troubled conscience than anything else. When a man gives up the employment which supports his wife and children for the sake of obstinately attempting to discover the secret of making ornamental dishes like one he has seen years before, is there any wonder he is thought to be mad? Even in these days a family would ask that a commission in lunacy be appointed to look into his sanity.