The great intellectual adventure and the titanic effort of the author of the famous and monumental Dictionary of the French language are narrated to us by the author in this illustrative document of great historical and human interest.

Émile Maximilien Paul Littré (1801 1881) was a physician, lexicographer and French philosopher who made history by his illustrious Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, popularly known as the Littré. The dictionary, in which the author worked thirty years was published by Louis Hachette, his classmate and friend, between 1873 and 1878. It consisted of four volumes and a supplement with additions by the author, plus an etymological repertoire of words of Oriental origin (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Malay) by Louis-Marcel Devic. Littré dominated classical literature and Sanskrit, was a disciple Auguste Comte, and in addition to the dictionary, translated into French and edited the works of Hippocrates and Pliny's Natural History, and poured into the language of Dante's Inferno oíl. He played a multiform intelligence, and was an intellectual of great broadmindedness and an extreme spiritual rigor.