Excerpt from Salammbo, Vol. 3: A Romance of Ancient Carthage His mind was at work, however, for he composed dramatic pieces before he was able to write, which he acted all alone, representing the different person ages, and improvising the long dialogues. From his early infancy, the two distinctive traits of his nature were great ingenuousness and a dislike of physical action. All his life he remained ingenuous and sedentary. He could not see any one walking or moving about near him without becoming exasperated; and he would declare in his sharp voice, sonorous and always a little theatrical, that motion was not philosophical. One can think and write only when seated, he would say. His ingenuousness continued until his last days. This observer, so penetrating and so subtle, seemed to see life clearly only from afar. When it touched him, when it was busy in his immediate neighbor hood, one would have said that a veil covered his eyes. His extreme native frankness, his immovable honesty, the generosity of all his emotions, of all the impulses of his soul are indubitably the causes of this unchanging ingenuousness. He lived beside the world, but not in it. Better placed for observation, he did not have the impression of downright contact. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.