maniaque

Updated: July 24, 2026

Personally FitzGerald was a man of rather few and not obtrusive, but deep and warm sympathies, slow to make new friends but intensely tenacious of and affectionate towards the old, with a very strong distaste for crowds and general society, and undoubtedly somewhat of what the French call a maniaque, that is to say, a slightly hypochondriac crotcheteer.

George Saintsbury - A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)