Intellectual indigestion..............................

Rafael Sabatini sure can turn a phrase.............................

     Andre-Louis, on his side, had made the most of his opportunities.  You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.  Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encylopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his species.  Nor can I discover that anything in his eventful life ever afterwards caused him to waiver in that opinion.

-as excerpted from Scaramouche