THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Chapter
III
FOUNDATION OF THE IIB
HARD TIMES
Though he had begun what was to be his life's work by
1894, Otlet was to experience constant interference with it
for 1 a number of years to come, to have his attention and his
energies diverted from it by chronic difficulties in his family's
affairs. His decision in Paris at the end of 1888 to assist his
father in business, a decision taken only after a great struggle
between his sense of loyalty to his family and his penchant
for an independent life of scholarship, proved to have farreaching
consequences. It committed him to a wheel of fortune
which seemed to govern his father's business life. Not
long after his marriage, Edouard Otlet, building tramways in
association with the House of Lebon, had become a millionaire.
1 But in 1874 legal and financial difficulties connected
with the dissolution of that association forced the Otlets to
leave Brussels for Paris where Paul first went to school. In
1882, the family returned to Brussels, and, not long after,
Edouard Otlet's flourishing South American investments
brought them a gratifying and dramatic prosperity. From this
zenith, however, their fortunes soon declined. Edouard Otlet
was in a precarious financial position from 1893 to the time
of his death in 1907. Paul, having pledged himself to help his
father, was plunged into the difficult and frustrating business
of attempting to keep the family solvent and the patrimony of
the children, of whom he was the oldest, intact. 2 A lawsuit
initiated by Edouard Otlet with the assistance of Picard had
two million francs at stake. Should they lose it, Otlet observed
in his diary, «the family is ruined, and the eventuality of this
disaster is imminent*. His father was forced to sell a considerable
art collection. The He du Levant, scene of so many
pleasant childhood memories for Otlet, for which his father
had once spurned an offer of a million francs, was sold for
just over 41,000 francs. The Villa Valere in Nice, the scene of
Otlet's renunciation of faith, having been closed for a number
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