In Bavaria and Austria, regional papers were being bought up by men with agendas.  Those agendas were evolving in the country, in churches, and in the unemployment lines of the valleys beneath the alps.  Montclair, who never followed anyone, ha an early understanding of what was happening - that men who want to be led are prime targets for being misled, and that the countryside that he so loved was the breeding ground for anti-Enlightenment ideas.  And Montclair knew that the newspapers and the talk in the pews was a direct affront to what he was so optimistic that Northern Europe was going to become.

Those long train rides would have given him the time to reflect on the significant changes in his life, as he withdrew from his past as a successful big city fromager.  Montclair grew up in a boisterous community in a family of successful doctors and merchants, and this made him a successful conversationalist.  This was his greatest asset as a fromager, because selling handmade cheese required a social personality and the ability to free-form stories to hold customers in rapt attention. With no close friends but thousands of acquaintences, Montclair’s personal life and salesman life were interlocked.  At the bar, he was still the fromager.

Montclair was also an autodidact, which was a component of his character that was sometimes at odds with his exceptional social skills. Montclair would never make a good apprentice and he didn’t have the type of patience for traditional learning.  This is perhaps why the boy who had the potential  through family to become anything he wanted chose such a peculiar trade for his class.  He simply could not do things anybody else’s way, and that made him as unqualified for merchant trading and the medical field as he found these professions unsuitable to his nature.

Managing an urban cheese shop was honest work to Montclair, and he found a sort of intellectual challenge in cheesemongering.  He enjoyed exchanging letters with cheese producers hundreds of miles away.  He appreciated the exotic stamps that came back to him, and the personalities that walked into his shop.  He saw each face that walked through the door as a nut to crack.  If they were set on a fresh goat cheese, for example, he would break them down somehow , using every note of their clothing and accent to send them home with a Valençay, because deep down, he believed he could make them better people by expanding their horizon and shattering their prejudgments about cheese.

As an autodidact, Montclair really did live in a world of his own.  He had his own rules, his own way of learning, and his own suite of mental challenges racing through his head.  Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century – war, depression, hyperinflation - gave Montclair a deep sense of uncertainty, and so he was also an insomniac. 

Growing up in a tradition of science and competition and status, ideas raced through his head late into night.  While he never had the patience to learn chess play through the books about openings and endgames, Montclair could replay a chess game he had played that day over and over again in his mind.  By refusing to learn chess traditionally, he would never be a very good player, because good chess play required standing on the shoulders of giants – reading the books, becoming a follower of a master.