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.
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