The flouting of his actual surroundings brought peace to Durtal's soul, and he had completely reorganized his life, mentally cloistering himself, far from the furore of contemporary letters, in the chateau de Tiffauges with the monster Bluebeard, with whom he lived in perfect accord, even in mischievous amity.
Thus history had for Durtal supplanted the novel, whose forced banality, conventionality, and tidy structure of plot simply griped him.

Yet history, too, was only a peg for a man of talent to hang style and ideas on, for events could not fail to be coloured by the temperament and distorted by the bias of the historian.
As for the documents and sources! Well attested as they might be, they were all subject to revision, even to contradiction by others exhumed later which were no less authentic than the first and which also but waited their turn to be refuted by newer discoveries.
In the present rage for grubbing around in dusty archives writing of history served as an outlet for the pedantry of the moles who reworked their mouldy findings and were duly rewarded by the Institute with medals and diplomas.
For Durtal history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the most infantile of deceptions.

Old Clio ought to be represented with a sphinx's head, mutton-chop whiskers, and one of those padded bonnets which babies wore to keep them from bashing their little brains out when they took a tumble.
Of course exactitude was impossible.

Why should he dream of getting at the whole truth about the Middle Ages when nobody had been able to give a full account of the Revolution, of the Commune for that matter?
The best he could do was to imagine himself in the midst of creatures of that other epoch, wearing their antique garb, thinking their thoughts, and then, having saturated himself with their spirit, to convey his illusion by means of adroitly selected details.
That is practically what Michelet did, and though the garrulous old gossip drivelled endlessly about matters of supreme unimportance and ecstasized in his mild way over trivial anecdotes which he expanded beyond all proportion, and though his sentimentality and chauvinism sometimes discredited his quite plausible conjectures, he was nevertheless the only French historian who had overcome the limitation of time and made another age live anew before our eyes.
Hysterical, garrulous, manneristic as he was, there was yet a truly epic sweep in certain passages of his History of France.

The personages were raised from the oblivion into which the dry-as-dust professors had sunk them, and became live human beings.