Around 1840 two French travelers returning from Journeys to Italy passed by Basle and reflected on Erasmus, who—so both believed—had helped form the city's modern character. One was Louis Veuillot, fresh from his Roman conversion and exercising for the first time the pen that was to make him the most formidable ultramontane publicist of the age. The other was Jules Michelet, historian of France, future apostle of the people's liberation, finding here already in the rapid flow of the Rhine an analogy for the irresistible progress of the human mind.