He lived through these quiet years in one apartment after another in the heart of Paris. Vigneul de Marville saw him "nearer heaven than earth" in a room which a light curtain divided into two. "The wind, always at the service of philosophers, running ahead of visitors, would lift this curtain adroitly, and reveal the philosopher, smiling with pleasure at the opportunity of distilling the elixir of his meditations into the brain and the heart of a listener." He was always at work, but his work was confined to meditation, talk and study. Sometimes he left his garret, and studied "the court and the town" from the benches of the public gardens, the Luxembourg and the Tuileries. There has been an enormous amount of speculation and conjecture about the central period of the life of La Bruyere, but we really have only one positive document to go upon. During the illness of his own footman, he borrowed the services of his brother's man, who robbed him of money and clothes. La Bruyere put the case in the hands of the police, who failed to catch the thief. This is the only definite fact which has rewarded the patience of the investigators, and we must build round it what we can. We build round it his own glimpse of self-portraiture (in "Des Biens de Fortune") and find the philosopher bending over the volume where Plato discusses the spirituality of the soul, or measuring, with a rapt expression, the infinite distance between Saturn and Jupiter.[12] [Footnote 12: "Vigneul de Marville," to whom we owe some picturesque impressions of La Bruyere at this time of social obscurity, was one of the pseudonyms of Bonaventure d'Argonne, whose real name appears to have been Noel Argonne. He was a Carthusian who dabbled in literature, and who towards the close of his career compiled a volume of "Melanges," containing anecdotes which are often spiteful, but sometimes useful to the historian of literature. He seems to have visited La Bruyere in the days of his comparative poverty, when his mother kept home for the whole family, first in the Rue Chapon, and later in the Rue des Grands Augustins.]