1,500, or 1,800 radical or primitive simple words, and engraved them
upon my mind by means of mnemonic formulas. In that way I had learned
about 41,500 words, whose meaning is generally, or most frequently,
without connection with the word itself, and from 10,000 to 12,000
historical facts, with their precise date. All this existed
simultaneously in my mind, always at my disposal when I wanted the
meaning of a word or the date of an event. If anyone asked me who was
the twenty-fifth king of England, for instance, I saw in my brain that
it was Edward, surnamed Plantagenet, who ascended the throne in 1154.
With respect to philology or chronology, I was the most extraordinary
man of my time, and Francis Arago jokingly threatened to have me burnt
like a wizard. But I had again fallen into the practice of
snuff-taking during a stay of some weeks in Munich, where I spent my
evenings in a smoking room with the learned Bavarians, each of whom
ate four or five meals a day, and drank two or three jugs of beer. The
most illustrious of these learned men, Steinhein, boasted of smoking
6,000 cigars a year. I attained to smoking three or four cigars a day.
While drawing up my treatise on the Calculus of Variations, the most
difficult of my mathematical treatises, I unconsciously emptied my
snuff-box, which contained twenty-five grammes (nearly an ounce) of
snuff; and one day I was painfully surprised to find that I was
obliged to have recourse to my dictionary for the meaning of foreign
words. I found that the dates of the numerous facts I had learnt by
heart had fallen from my mind. Such a thing has rarely or seldom
happened before. Distressed at this sorrowful decay of my memory, I
made an heroic resolution, which nothing has disturbed since. On the
1st of August, 1863, I smoked three cigars and used twenty-five
centimes (2-1/2d.) worth of snuff; from the following day to June,
1882, I have neither taken a pinch of snuff nor smoked a single
cigarette.