In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature once said, “What of it if I have no scepter? I have got a pen.” And right he was. He had a pen. Any number of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose and used more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged to that class of literary giants who all alone and under the most adverse circumstances can turn out as much copy as an entire syndicate of modern sport writers. He scribbled on the tables of dirty country inns. He composed endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses in Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets of the royal Prussian residence and used reams of the private stationery which bore the monogram of the governor of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play with a hoop and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some books,” and eighty years later, in the self-same town of Paris, we hear him ask for a pad of foolscap and unlimited coffee that he may finish yet one more volume before the inevitable hour of darkness and rest. His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and his treatises upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle him to an entire chapter of this book. He wrote no better verses than half a hundred other sonneteers of that era. As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort of stuff we find in the Sunday papers. But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was stupid and narrow and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence which has endured until the beginning of the Great Civil War of the year 1914. The age in which he lived was a period of extremes. On the one hand, the utter selfishness and corruption of a religious, social and economic system which had long since outlived its usefulness. On the other side, a large number of eager but overzealous young men and young women ready to bring about a millennium which was based upon nothing more substantial than their good intentions. A humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly son of an inconspicuous notary public into this maelstrom of sharks and pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred to swim and struck out for shore. The methods he employed during his long struggle with adverse circumstances were often of a questionable nature. He begged and flattered and played the clown. But this was in the days before royalties and literary agents. And let the author who never wrote a potboiler throw the first stone!