Seeking for someone to share in his excitement and keep it up by fresh
arguments, he went to his friend Perrotin.

Hippolyte Perrotin was of one of those types, formerly the pride of
the higher instruction in France but seldom met with in these days--a
great humanist. Led by a wide and sagacious curiosity, he walked
calmly through the garden of the centuries, botanising as he went. The
spectacle of the present was the object least worthy of his attention,
but he was too keen an observer to miss any of it, and knew how to
draw it gently back into scale to fit into the whole picture. Events
which others regarded as most important were not so in his eyes, and
political agitations appeared to him like bugs on a rose-bush which he
would carefully study with its parasites. This was to him a constant
source of delight. He had the finest appreciation of shades of
literary beauty, and his learning rather increased than impaired the
faculty, giving to his thought an infinite range of highly-flavoured
experiences to taste and compare. He belonged to the great French
tradition of learned men, master writers from Buffon to Renan and
Gaston Pâris. Member of the Academy and of several Classes, his
extended knowledge gave him a superiority, not only of pure and
classic taste, but of a liberal modern spirit, over his colleagues,
genuine men of letters. He did not think himself exempt from study,
as most of them did, as soon as they had passed the threshold of the
sacred Cupola; old profesor as he was, he still went to school. When
Clerambault was still unknown to the rest of the Immortals, except to
one or two brother poets who mentioned him as little as possible with
a disdainful smile, Perrotin had already discovered and placed him in