Timon of Athens hated all men because he had once too greatly loved them. To whom shall the fault be ascribed, to mankind, or to Timon of Athens? The long-standing open question does not yet appear to have been answered. The human race continues to lay the blame on its detractors, and the descendants of Timon, who was above all a disappointed lover of his kind, have not ceased to find good reasons for their censure. The special descendant of Timon who trotted me on his knee when I was a child was an old navy doctor retired from service after a severe wound received at Navarino. If I close my eyes, the better to call up my memories, there arises before me a long, gaunt silhouette surmounted by a bald head, the entire figure running to length, which is, they say, the mark of an immoderate idealism. I remember his small, mocking green eyes, sunk behind the brush of his formidable eyebrows. The long, white side-whiskers, the carefully shaven lips that would stretch to his ears in a grin like Voltaire's, accompanied by a dry chuckle, have remained alive in my memory, as have also his wide, incoördinate gestures, his dry, harsh voice, and his biting, wrathful utterances. I should find it impossible at this distance to trace the life history of Doctor Jean du Pouët, known over the entire Plain, from Sainte Hermine to Fontenay-le-Comte, under the familiar yet respectful title of "The Doctor." All I can say is that the Doctor, hailing originally from L'Aiguillon, a little port of the Vendée at the mouth of the Lay, had sailed every sea, landed on every island, visited every coast of every continent, and made his studies of all nations on earth from life, which enabled him to criticise his neighbours at every turn by comparing them, disastrously for them, with heaven knows what abominable savages, in which comparison the latter were always found far superior, with regard to the point under discussion, to the men of the Vendée, from the Plain, the Woodland, and the Marsh, all put together. It was in the very heart of the Plain, in the village of Ecoulandres, that the "Doctor" had come to settle, brought there by an inheritance from a cousin, who had left him lord and master of an old middle-class dwelling with large tile-paved rooms in which hung panoplies of tomahawks, javelins, bucklers, boomerangs, in warlike wreaths around monstrous idols, whose barbaric names, impressively enumerated by the traveller, aroused a holy terror in the soul of the peaceable tillers of the soil.