Dorsenne had spoken truly, he loved to comprehend—­to comprehend as the gamester loves to game, the miser to accumulate money, the ambitious to obtain position—­there was within him that appetite, that taste, that mania for ideas which makes the scholar and the philosopher.  But a philosopher united by a caprice of nature to an artist, and by that of fortune and of education to a worldly man and a traveller.  The abstract speculations of the metaphysician would not have sufficed for him, nor would the continuous and simple creation of the narrator who narrates to amuse himself, nor would the ardor of the semi-animal of the man-of-pleasure who abandons himself to the frenzy of vice.  He invented for himself, partly from instinct, partly from method, a compromise between his contradictory tendencies, which he formulated in a fashion slightly pedantic, when he said that his sole aim was to “intellectualize the forcible sensations;” in clearer terms, he dreamed of meeting with, in human life, the greatest number of impressions it could give and to think of them after having met them.

He thought, with or without reason, to discover in his two favorite writers, Goethe and Stendhal, a constant application of a similar principle.  His studies had, for the past fourteen years when he had begun to live and to write, passed through the most varied spheres possible to him.  But he had passed through them, lending his presence without giving himself to them, with this idea always present in his mind:  that he existed to become familiar with other customs, to watch other characters, to clothe other personages and the sensations which vibrated within them.  The period of his revival was marked by the achievement of each one of his books which he composed then, persuaded that, once written and construed, a sentimental or social experience was not worth the trouble of being dwelt upon.  Thus is explained the incoherence of custom and the atmospheric contact, if one may so express it, which are the characteristics of his work.  Take, for example, his first collection of novels, the ‘Etudes de Femmes,’ which made him famous.  They are about a sentimental woman who loved unwisely, and who spent hours from excess of the romantic studying the avowed or disguised demi-monde.  By the side of that, ‘Sans Dieu,’ the story of a drama of scientific consciousness, attests a continuous frequenting of the Museum, the Sorbonne and the College of France, while ‘Monsieur de Premier’ presents one of the most striking pictures of the contemporary political world, which could only have been traced by a familiar of the Palais Bourbon.