All Is Unfinished

Fama is a fickle deity. at the turn of the 20th century, Henri Bergson was one of the most famous people in the world, and certainly the most famous philosopher. Enormous crowds attended his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris—there are photographs of people thronging the street outside the college, scaling ladders and even standing on windowsills to try to catch a scrap of la leçon du maître. When he visited New York in 1913 to speak at Columbia University, so many turned out to hear him that Broadway experienced its first traffic jam.