It is always very interesting when historians or biographers, eschewing the usual generalizations, manage to outline the influence of economic factors on individual lives. Because such factors, although sometimes overestimated, and although they do not explain everything by themselves, determine much of what is done. There are decisions that seem irrational if stripped of the economic factors that motivated them, just as there are trials, misfortunes, and states of mind that are economically based. Sometimes, it is in this type of factor that the greatest obstacles to a personality’s affirmation are condensed. It seems somewhat undignified, but that is how it is.