which the mind can never have enough--

_Et voila ce qui fait que votre ami est muet._'

He thinks himself happy if, by refusing invitations to dinner, he can
pass a whole day without stirring from his house. 'I read, I write, I
study; for after all one must know something.' In his hours of
depression he fancied that he only read and worked, not for the sake of
the knowledge, but to stupefy and tire himself out, if that were
possible.

As a student De Maistre was indefatigable. He never belonged to that
languid band who hoped to learn difficult things by easy methods. The
only way, he warned his son, is to shut your door, to say that you are
not within, and to work. 'Since they have set themselves to teach us how
we ought to learn the dead languages, you can find nobody who knows
them; and it is amusing enough that people who don't know them, should
be so obstinately bent on demonstrating the vices of the methods
employed by us who do know them.' He was one of those wise and laborious
students who do not read without a pen in their hands. He never shrank
from the useful toil of transcribing abundantly from all the books he
read everything that could by any possibility eventually be of service
to him in his inquiries. His notebooks were enormous. As soon as one of
them was filled, he carefully made up an index of its contents, numbered
it, and placed it on a shelf with its unforgotten predecessors. In one
place he accidentally mentions that he had some thirty of these folios
over the head of his writing-table.

'If I am a pedant at home,' he said, 'at least I am as little as
possible a pedant out of doors.' In the evening he would occasionally
seek the society of ladies, by way of recovering some of that native
gaiety of heart which had hitherto kept him alive. 'I blow on this
spark,' to use his own words, 'just as an old woman blows among the
ashes to get a light for her lamp.' A student and a thinker, De Maistre
was also a man of the world, and he may be added to the long list of
writers who have shown that to take an active part in public affairs and
mix in society give a peculiar life, reality, and force to both
scholarship and speculation. It was computed at that time that the
author of a philosophic piece could not safely count upon more than a
hundred and fifty readers in Russia; and hence, we might be sure, even
if we had not De Maistre's word for it, that away from his own house he
left his philosophy be