And listen to his own testimony: “Another misfortune befell me, causing me great annoyance, which was that, running short of wood, I was obliged to burn the palings which maintained the boundaries of my garden, the which after being burned I had to burn the tables and the flooring of my house in order to cause the melting of the second composition. I was in such agony as I cannot express”--not a word about the agony of wife and children!--“for I was utterly exhausted and withered up by my work and the heat of the furnace; during more than a month my shirt had never been dry upon me; even those who ought to have helped me ran crying through the town that I was burning the planks of the floors, so that I was made to lose my credit and was thought to be mad. Others said that I was trying to coin false money, and I went about crouching to the earth, like one ashamed.” I think that what Madame Palissy did not say places her in the hierarchy of our marveling esteem! Howbeit I write of a hero and not of heroines. Here, surely seemed to be a second Columbus tossed on the stormy seas of derision. But finally, in 1549, the success of the secret formula for which he had been striving was attained as the fires of his experimental oven cooled. It had been his agonized hope--the last straw held out by Providence. How differently they all regarded him now! Wife and children forgave him, friends returned to him, tradesmen were eager to give him credit, for Bernard Palissy had brought renown to their town, and they hailed him as a great man where but the day before they would have driven him to a madhouse. Quickly the fame of his achievements spread far and near, and almost immediately he found a munificent patron in Anne de Montmorency, the great constable, while to the king and the queen mother he became “worker in earth and inventor of figulines” by royal patent. Is it any wonder he felt justified for all his sacrifices? He could now give his wife a prouder place than any she had ever dreamed of, and his children would be educated beyond all their companions. Surely it was worth these fifteen years of sorrow and suffering, he argued. Ah, little blue book with the gilt morning-glories, the aniline frontispiece! Courageous, unflinching Master Bernard; brave, suffering madame!