“When I was Professor at the Lycee du Parc at Lyons.  I knew Berlioux and followed eagerly his works on African History.  I had, at that time, a very original idea for my doctor’s thesis.  I was going to establish a parallel between the Berber heroine of the seventh century, who struggled against the Arab invader, Kahena, and the French heroine, Joan of Arc, who struggled against the English invader.  I proposed to the Faculte des Lettres at Paris this title for my thesis:  Joan of Arc and the Tuareg.  This simple announcement gave rise to a perfect outcry in learned circles, a furor of ridicule.  My friends warned me discreetly.  I refused to believe them.  Finally I was forced to believe when my rector summoned me before him and, after manifesting an astonishing interest in my health, asked whether I should object to taking two years’ leave on half pay.  I refused indignantly.  The rector did not insist; but fifteen days later, a ministerial decree, with no other legal procedure, assigned me to one of the most insignificant and remote Lycees of France, at Mont-de-Marsan.

“Realize my exasperation and you will excuse the excesses to which I delivered myself in that strange country.  What is there to do in Landes, if you neither eat nor drink?  I did both violently.  My pay melted away in fois gras, in woodcocks, in fine wines.  The result came quickly enough:  in less than a year my joints began to crack like the over-oiled axle of a bicycle that has gone a long way upon a dusty track.  A sharp attack of gout nailed me to my bed.  Fortunately, in that blessed country, the cure is in reach of the suffering.  So I departed to Dax, at vacation time, to try the waters.

“I rented a room on the bank of the Adour, overlooking the Promenade des Baignots.  A charwoman took care of it for me.  She worked also for an old gentleman, a retired Examining Magistrate, President of the Roger-Ducos Society, which was a vague scientific backwater, in which the scholars of the neighborhood applied themselves with prodigious incompetence to the most whimsical subjects.  One afternoon I stayed in my room on account of a very heavy rain.  The good woman was energetically polishing the copper latch of my door.  She used a paste called Tripoli, which she spread upon a paper and rubbed and rubbed....  The peculiar appearance of the paper made me curious.  I glanced at it.  ‘Great heavens!  Where did you get this paper?’ She was perturbed.  ’At my master’s; he has lots of it.  I tore this out of a notebook.’  ‘Here are ten francs.  Go and get me the notebook.’

“A quarter of an hour later, she was back with it.  By good luck it lacked only one page, the one with which she had been polishing my door.  This manuscript, this notebook, have you any idea what it was?  Merely the Voyage to Atlantis of the mythologist Denis de Milet, which is mentioned by Diodorus and the loss of which I had so often heard Berlioux deplore.[10]