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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.
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