He lived alone, despised by pious relatives, who besieged him with flattering attentions aimed at his inheritance, but were kept at a respectful distance by his witty and well-directed shafts of sarcasm. A veritable Doctor Faustus. Fifty years he spent in assiduous study of the great minds that make up the history of human thought. His door was open to the poor, but he did not seek them out, absorbed as he was in problems allowing him neither diversion nor respite. He had no curiosity as to what was going on in the world. His spirit lived in the perpetual tension of reaching out toward the unknown, feverishly importuned to deliver up its mystery, and he did not wish to know anything of men, their conflicts, their often contradictory efforts to better their fate. Had he lived in the midst of the Siberian steppes, or on some Malay Island, he would not have been more entirely cut off from the surrounding social life. The Franco-Prussian war and the Commune were as remote from him in the depths of the Vendée as Alexander's expedition to the Indies. When one of the farmers once tried to recall that period to his mind: "Yes, yes, I remember," he answered, "all the fruit was frozen that year." It was the only vestige in his memory of those terrific storms. He was naturally considered mad, but it could not be denied that he reasoned pertinently on all subjects. Absorbed in books, he had for sole company the men of all time, and felt himself far better acquainted with Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Newton, Laplace, Darwin, and Auguste Comte than with Bismarck or General Trochu. Shut up day and night in a great room to which no one had admittance, he lived over with delight the vast poem of the creation of the world. In waking to consciousness, the universe, he was wont to say, had set us a riddle, after the manner of the Sphinx, and he, a new Oedipus, was challenging the monster. He would tear out its secret, he would proclaim it from the earth to the stars, while disdaining the glory dear to ordinary mortals. For he had taken every precaution to ensure the author's name remaining absolutely unknown when his great work should be published. In order to avert suspicion, the book was first to be printed in a foreign tongue.