It is twenty years since Theodore withdrew from society, to work or to be idle, which of the two nobody knew. He dreamed, and no one read his dreams. He passed his life among his books, and occupied himself only with them. This caused some of his friends to think that Theodore was writing a book which would make all other books useless; but evidently they were all mistaken. Theodore was too much the student not to know that that book was written three hundred years ago. It is the thirteenth chapter of the first book of Rabelais.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
19 December 2013
The Thirteenth Chapter of Gargantua
Charles Nodier, The Bibliomaniac, tr. Frank H. Ginn (Cleveland: The Rowfant Club, 1900), pp. 18-19: