rix had written his
Commentaries.

Ancient history is obscure through want of documents. There is an
abundance of them in modern history; and Bouvard and Pecuchet came back
to France, and began Sismondi.

The succession of so many men filled them with a desire to understand
them more thoroughly, to enter into their lives. They wanted to read the
originals--Gregory of Tours, Monstrelet, Commines, all those whose names
were odd or agreeable. But the events got confused through want of
knowledge of the dates.

Fortunately they possessed Dumouchel's work on mnemonics, a duodecimo in
boards with this epigraph: "To instruct while amusing."

It combined the three systems of Allevy, of Paris, and of Fenaigle.

Allevy transforms numbers into external objects, the number 1 being
expressed by a tower, 2 by a bird, 3 by a camel, and so on. Paris
strikes the imagination by means of rebuses: an armchair garnished with
clincher-nails will give "Clou, vis--Clovis"; and, as the sound of
frying makes "ric, ric," whitings in a stove will recall "Chilperic."
Fenaigle divides the universe into houses, which contain rooms, each
having four walls with nine panels, and each panel bearing an emblem. A
pharos on a mountain will tell the name of "Phar-a-mond" in Paris's
system; and, according to Allevy's directions, by placing above a
mirror, which signifies 4, a bird 2, and a hoop 0, we shall obtain 420,
the date of that prince's accession.

For greater clearness, they took as their mnemotechnic basis their own
house, their domicile, associating a distinct fact with each part of it;
and the courtyard, the garden, the outskirts, the entire country, had
for them no meaning any longer except as objects for facilitating
memory. The boundaries in the fields defined certain epochs; the apple
trees were genealogical stems, the bushes battles; everything became
symbolic. They sought for quantities of absent things on their walls,
ended by seeing them, but lost the recollection of what dates they
represented.

Besides the dates are not always authentic. They learned out of a manual
for colleges that the birth of Jesus ought to be carried back five years
earlier than the date usually assigned for it; that there were amongst
the Greeks three ways of counting the Olympiads, and eight amongst the
Latin of making the year begin. So many opportunities for mistakes
outside of those which result from the zodiacs, from the epochs, and
from the different