Louis Lambert

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LOUIS LAMBERT

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC


Translated by
Clara Bell and James Waring




DEDICATION

"Et nunc et semper dilectoe dicatum."




LOUIS LAMBERT



Louis Lambert was born at Montoire, a little town in the Vendomois,
where his father owned a tannery of no great magnitude, and intended
that his son should succeed him; but his precocious bent for study
modified the paternal decision. For, indeed, the tanner and his wife
adored Louis, their only child, and never contradicted him in
anything.

At the age of five Louis had begun by reading the Old and New
Testaments; and these two Books, including so many books, had sealed
his fate. Could that childish imagination understand the mystical
depths of the Scriptures? Could it so early follow the flight of the
Holy Spirit across the worlds? Or was it merely attracted by the
romantic touches which abound in those Oriental poems! Our narrative
will answer these questions to some readers.

One thing resulted from this first reading of the Bible: Louis went
all over Montoire begging for books, and he obtained them by those
winning ways peculiar to children, which no one can resist. While
devoting himself to these studies under no sort of guidance, he
reached the age of ten.

At that period substitutes for the army were scarce; rich families
secured them long beforehand to have them ready when the lots were
drawn. The poor tanner's modest fortune did not allow of their
purchasing a substitute for their son, and they saw no means allowed
by law for evading the conscription but that of making him a priest;
so, in 1807, they sent him to his maternal uncle, the parish priest of
Mer, another small town on the Loire, not far from Blois. This
arrangement at once satisfied Louis' passion for knowledge, and his
parents' wish not to expose him to the dreadful chances of war; and,
indeed, his taste for study and precocious intelligence gave grounds
for hoping that he might rise to high fortunes in the Church.

After remaining for about three years with his uncle, an old and not
uncultured Oratorian, Louis left him early in 1811 to enter the
college at Vendome, where he was maintained at the cost of Madame de
Stael.

Lambert owed the favor and patronage of this celebrated lady to
chance, or shall we not say to Providence, who can smooth the path of
forlorn genius? To us, indeed, who do not see below the surface of
human things, such vicissitudes, of which we find many examples in the
lives of great men, appear to be merely the result of physical
phenomena; to most biographers the head of a man of genius rises above
the herd as some noble plant in the fields attracts the eye of a
botanist in its splendor. This comparison may well be applied to Louis
Lambert's adventure; he was accustomed to spend the time allowed him
by his uncle for holidays at his father's house; but instead of
indulging, after the manner of schoolboys, in the sweets of the
delightful _far niente_ that tempts us at every age, he set out every
morning with part of a loaf and his books, and went to read and
meditate in the woods, to escape his mother's remonstrances, for she
believed such persistent study to be injurious. How admirable is a
mother's instinct! From that time reading was in Louis a sort of
appetite which nothing could satisfy; he devoured books of every kind,
feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history, philosophy, and
physics. He has told me that he found indescribable delight in reading
dictionaries for lack of other books, and I readily believed him. What
scholar has not many a time found pleasure in seeking the probable
meaning of some unknown word? The analysis of a word, its physiognomy
and history, would be to Lambert matter for long dreaming. But these
were not the instinctive dreams by which a boy accustoms himself to
the phenomena of life, steels himself to every moral or physical
perception--an involuntary education which subsequently brings forth
fruit both in the understanding and character of a man; no, Louis
mastered the facts, and he accounted for them after seeking out both
the principle and the end with the mother wit of a savage. Indeed,
from the age of fourteen, by one of those startling freaks in which
nature sometimes indulges, and which proved how anomalous was his
temperament, he would utter quite simply ideas of which the depth was
not revealed to me till a long time after.

"Often," he has said to me when speaking of his studies, "often
have I made the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down
the abyss of the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of
grass tossing on the ripples of a stream. Starting from Greece, I
would get to Rome, and traverse the whole extent of modern ages.
What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a
word! It has, of course, received various stamps from the
occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed
different ideas in different places; but is it not still grander
to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion?
Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions,
its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an
ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored by the idea they
represent? Then, to whose genius are they due? If it takes great
intelligence to create a word, how old may human speech be? The
combination of letters, their shapes, and the look they give to
the word, are the exact reflection, in accordance with the
character of each nation, of the unknown beings whose traces
survive in us.

"Who can philosophically explain the transition from sensation to
thought, from thought to word, from the word to its hieroglyphic
presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to
written language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of
images, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in a sense, the
hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing
human ideas as embodied in the forms of animals that gave rise to the
shapes of the first signs used in the East for writing down language?
Then has it not left its traces by tradition on our modern languages,
which have all seized some remnant of the primitive speech of nations,
a majestic and solemn tongue whose grandeur and solemnity decrease as
communities grow old; whose sonorous tones ring in the Hebrew Bible,
and still are noble in Greece, but grow weaker under the progress of
successive phases of civilization?

"Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying
buried in every human word? In the word _True_ do we not discern a
certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound
suggest a vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in
all things? The syllable seems to me singularly crisp and fresh.

"I chose the formula of an abstract idea on purpose, not wishing to
illustrate the case by a word which should make it too obvious to the
apprehension, as the word _Flight_ for instance, which is a direct
appeal to the senses.

"But is it not so with every root word? They are all stamped with a
living power that comes from the soul, and which they restore to the
soul through the mysterious and wonderful action and reaction between
thought and speech. Might we not speak of it as a lover who finds on
his mistress' lips as much love as he gives? Thus, by their mere
physiognomy, words call to life in our brain the beings which they
serve to clothe. Like all beings, there is but one place where their
properties are at full liberty to act and develop. But the subject
demands a science to itself perhaps!"

And he would shrug his shoulders as much as to say, "But we are too
high and too low!"

Louis' passion for reading had on the whole been very well satisfied.
The cure of Mer had two or three thousand volumes. This treasure had
been derived from the plunder committed during the Revolution in the
neighboring chateaux and abbeys. As a priest who had taken the oath,
the worthy man had been able to choose the best books from among these
precious libraries, which were sold by the pound. In three years Louis
Lambert had assimilated the contents of all the books in his uncle's
library that were worth reading. The process of absorbing ideas by
means of reading had become in him a very strange phenomenon. His eye
took in six or seven lines at once, and his mind grasped the sense
with a swiftness as remarkable as that of his eye; sometimes even one
word in a sentence was enough to enable him to seize the gist of the
matter.

His memory was prodigious. He remembered with equal exactitude the
ideas he had derived from reading, and those which had occurred to him
in the course of meditation or conversation. Indeed, he had every form
of memory--for places, for names, for words, things, and faces. He not
only recalled any object at will, but he saw them in his mind,
situated, lighted, and colored as he had originally seen them. And
this power he could exert with equal effect with regard to the most
abstract efforts of the intellect. He could remember, as he said, not
merely the position of a sentence in the book where he had met with
it, but the frame of mind he had been in at remote dates. Thus his was
the singular privilege of being able to retrace in memory the whole
life and progress of his mind, from the ideas he had first acquired to
the last thought evolved in it, from the most obscure to the clearest.
His brain, accustomed in early youth to the mysterious mechanism by
which human faculties are concentrated, drew from this rich treasury
endless images full of life and freshness, on which he fed his spirit
during those lucid spells of contemplation.

"Whenever I wish it," said he to me in his own language, to which a
fund of remembrance gave precocious originality, "I can draw a veil
over my eyes. Then I suddenly see within me a camera obscura, where
natural objects are reproduced in purer forms than those under which
they first appeared to my external sense."

At the age of twelve his imagination, stimulated by the perpetual
exercise of his faculties, had developed to a point which permitted
him to have such precise concepts of things which he knew only from
reading about them, that the image stamped on his mind could not have
been clearer if he had actually seen them, whether this was by a
process of analogy or that he was gifted with a sort of second sight
by which he could command all nature.

"When I read the story of the battle of Austerlitz," said he to me one
day, "I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the
fighting men rang in my ears, and made my inmost self quiver; I could
smell the powder; I heard the clatter of horses and the voices of men;
I looked down on the plain where armed nations were in collision, just
as if I had been on the heights of Santon. The scene was as terrifying
as a passage from the Apocalypse." On the occasions when he brought
all his powers into play, and in some degree lost consciousness of his
physical existence, and lived on only by the remarkable energy of his
mental powers, whose sphere was enormously expanded, he left space
behind him, to use his own words.

But I will not here anticipate the intellectual phases of his life.
Already, in spite of myself, I have reversed the order in which I
ought to tell the history of this man, who transferred all his
activities to thinking, as others throw all their life into action.

A strong bias drew his mind into mystical studies.

"_Abyssus abyssum_," he would say. "Our spirit is abysmal and loves
the abyss. In childhood, manhood, and old age we are always eager for
mysteries in whatever form they present themselves."

This predilection was disastrous; if indeed his life can be measured
by ordinary standards, or if we may gauge another's happiness by our
own or by social notions. This taste for the "things of heaven,"
another phrase he was fond of using, this _mens divinior_, was due
perhaps to the influence produced on his mind by the first books he
read at his uncle's. Saint Theresa and Madame Guyon were a sequel to
the Bible; they had the first-fruits of his manly intelligence, and
accustomed him to those swift reactions of the soul of which ecstasy
is at once the result and the means. This line of study, this peculiar
taste, elevated his heart, purified, ennobled it, gave him an appetite
for the divine nature, and suggested to him the almost womanly
refinement of feeling which is instinctive in great men; perhaps their
sublime superiority is no more than the desire to devote themselves
which characterizes woman, only transferred to the greatest things.

As a result of these early impressions, Louis passed immaculate
through his school life; this beautiful virginity of the senses
naturally resulted in the richer fervor of his blood, and in increased
faculties of mind.

The Baroness de Stael, forbidden to come within forty leagues of
Paris, spent several months of her banishment on an estate near
Vendome. One day, when out walking, she met on the skirts of the park
the tanner's son, almost in rags, and absorbed in reading. The book
was a translation of _Heaven and Hell_. At that time Monsieur
Saint-Martin, Monsieur de Gence, and a few other French or half German
writers were almost the only persons in the French Empire to whom the
name of Swedenborg was known. Madame de Stael, greatly surprised, took
the book from him with the roughness she affected in her questions,
looks, and manners, and with a keen glance at Lambert,--

"Do you understand all this?" she asked.

"Do you pray to God?" said the child.

"Why? yes!"

"And do you understand Him?"

The Baroness was silent for a moment; then she sat down by Lambert,
and began to talk to him. Unfortunately, my memory, though retentive,
is far from being so trustworthy as my friend's, and I have forgotten
the whole of the dialogue excepting those first words.

Such a meeting was of a kind to strike Madame de Stael very greatly;
on her return home she said but little about it, notwithstanding an
effusiveness which in her became mere loquacity; but it evidently
occupied her thoughts.

The only person now living who preserves any recollection of the
incident, and whom I catechised to be informed of what few words
Madame de Stael had let drop, could with difficulty recall these words
spoken by the Baroness as describing Lambert, "He is a real seer."

Louis failed to justify in the eyes of the world the high hopes he had
inspired in his protectress. The transient favor she showed him was
regarded as a feminine caprice, one of the fancies characteristic of
artist souls. Madame de Stael determined to save Louis Lambert alike
from serving the Emperor or the Church, and to preserve him for the
glorious destiny which, she thought, awaited him; for she made him out
to be a second Moses snatched from the waters. Before her departure
she instructed a friend of hers, Monsieur de Corbigny, to send her
Moses in due course to the High School at Vendome; then she probably
forgot him.



Having entered this college at the age of fourteen, early in 1811,
Lambert would leave it at the end of 1814, when he had finished the
course of Philosophy. I doubt whether during the whole time he ever
heard a word of his benefactress--if indeed it was the act of a
benefactress to pay for a lad's schooling for three years without a
thought of his future prospects, after diverting him from a career in
which he might have found happiness. The circumstances of the time,
and Louis Lambert's character, may to a great extent absolve Madame de
Stael for her thoughtlessness and her generosity. The gentleman who
was to have kept up communications between her and the boy left Blois
just at the time when Louis passed out of the college. The political
events that ensued were then a sufficient excuse for this gentleman's
neglect of the Baroness' protege. The authoress of _Corinne_ heard no
more of her little Moses.

A hundred louis, which she placed in the hands of Monsieur de
Corbigny, who died, I believe, in 1812, was not a sufficiently large
sum to leave lasting memories in Madame de Stael, whose excitable
nature found ample pasture during the vicissitudes of 1814 and 1815,
which absorbed all her interest.

At this time Louis Lambert was at once too proud and too poor to go in
search of a patroness who was traveling all over Europe. However, he
went on foot from Blois to Paris in the hope of seeing her, and
arrived, unluckily, on the very day of her death. Two letters from
Lambert to the Baroness remained unanswered. The memory of Madame de
Stael's good intentions with regard to Louis remains, therefore, only
in some few young minds, struck, as mine was, by the strangeness of
the story.

No one who had not gone through the training at our college could
understand the effect usually made on our minds by the announcement
that a "new boy" had arrived, or the impression that such an adventure
as Louis Lambert's was calculated to produce.

And here a little information must be given as to the primitive
administration of this institution, originally half-military and
half-monastic, to explain the new life which there awaited Lambert.
Before the Revolution, the Oratorians, devoted, like the Society of Jesus,
to the education of youth--succeeding the Jesuits, in fact, in certain of
their establishments--the colleges of Vendome, of Tournon, of la
Fleche, Pont-Levoy, Sorreze, and Juilly. That at Vendome, like the
others, I believe, turned out a certain number of cadets for the army.
The abolition of educational bodies, decreed by the convention, had
but little effect on the college at Vendome. When the first crisis had
blown over, the authorities recovered possession of their buildings;
certain Oratorians, scattered about the country, came back to the
college and re-opened it under the old rules, with the habits,
practices, and customs which gave this school a character with which I
have seen nothing at all comparable in any that I have visited since I
left that establishment.

Standing in the heart of the town, on the little river Loire which
flows under its walls, the college possesses extensive precincts,
carefully enclosed by walls, and including all the buildings necessary
for an institution on that scale: a chapel, a theatre, an infirmary, a
bakehouse, gardens, and water supply. This college is the most
celebrated home of learning in all the central provinces, and receives
pupils from them and from the colonies. Distance prohibits any
frequent visits from parents to their children.

The rule of the House forbids holidays away from it. Once entered
there, a pupil never leaves till his studies are finished. With the
exception of walks taken under the guidance of the Fathers, everything
is calculated to give the School the benefit of conventual discipline;
in my day the tawse was still a living memory, and the classical
leather strap played its terrible part with all the honors. The
punishment originally invented by the Society of Jesus, as alarming to
the moral as to the physical man, was still in force in all the
integrity of the original code.

Letters to parents were obligatory on certain days, so was confession.
Thus our sins and our sentiments were all according to pattern.
Everything bore the stamp of monastic rule. I well remember, among
other relics of the ancient order, the inspection we went through
every Sunday. We were all in our best, placed in file like soldiers to
await the arrival of the two inspectors who, attended by the tutors
and the tradesmen, examined us from the three points of view of dress,
health, and morals.

The two or three hundred pupils lodged in the establishment were
divided, according to ancient custom, into the _minimes_ (the
smallest), the little boys, the middle boys, and the big boys. The
division of the _minimes_ included the eighth and seventh classes; the
little boys formed the sixth, fifth, and fourth; the middle boys were
classed as third and second; and the first class comprised the senior
students--of philosophy, rhetoric, the higher mathematics, and
chemistry. Each of these divisions had its own building, classrooms,
and play-ground, in the large common precincts on to which the
classrooms opened, and beyond which was the refectory.

This dining-hall, worthy of an ancient religious Order, accommodated
all the school. Contrary to the usual practice in educational
institutions, we were allowed to talk at our meals, a tolerant
Oratorian rule which enabled us to exchange plates according to our
taste. This gastronomical barter was always one of the chief pleasures
of our college life. If one of the "middle" boys at the head of his
table wished for a helping of lentils instead of dessert--for we had
dessert--the offer was passed down from one to another: "Dessert for
lentils!" till some other epicure had accepted; then the plate of
lentils was passed up to the bidder from hand to hand, and the plate
of dessert returned by the same road. Mistakes were never made. If
several identical offers were made, they were taken in order, and the
formula would be, "Lentils number one for dessert number one." The
tables were very long; our incessant barter kept everything moving; we
transacted it with amazing eagerness; and the chatter of three hundred
lads, the bustling to and fro of the servants employed in changing the
plates, setting down the dishes, handing the bread, with the tours of
inspection of the masters, made this refectory at Vendome a scene
unique in its way, and the amazement of visitors.

To make our life more tolerable, deprived as we were of all
communication with the outer world and of family affection, we were
allowed to keep pigeons and to have gardens. Our two or three hundred
pigeon-houses, with a thousand birds nesting all round the outer wall,
and above thirty garden plots, were a sight even stranger than our
meals. But a full account of the peculiarities which made the college
at Vendome a place unique in itself and fertile in reminiscences to
those who spent their boyhood there, would be weariness to the reader.
Which of us all but remembers with delight, notwithstanding the
bitterness of learning, the eccentric pleasures of that cloistered
life? The sweetmeats purchased by stealth in the course of our walks,
permission obtained to play cards and devise theatrical performances
during the holidays, such tricks and freedom as were necessitated by
our seclusion; then, again, our military band, a relic of the cadets;
our academy, our chaplain, our Father professors, and all our games
permitted or prohibited, as the case might be; the cavalry charges on
stilts, the long slides made in winter, the clatter of our clogs; and,
above all, the trading transactions with "the shop" set up in the
courtyard itself.

This shop was kept by a sort of cheap-jack, of whom big and little
boys could procure--according to his prospectus--boxes, stilts, tools,
Jacobin pigeons, and Nuns, Mass-books--an article in small demand
--penknives, paper, pens, pencils, ink of all colors, balls and marbles;
in short, the whole catalogue of the most treasured possessions of
boys, including everything from sauce for the pigeons we were obliged
to kill off, to the earthenware pots in which we set aside the rice
from supper to be eaten at next morning's breakfast. Which of us was
so unhappy as to have forgotten how his heart beat at the sight of
this booth, open periodically during play-hours on Sundays, to which
we went, each in his turn, to spend his little pocket-money; while the
smallness of the sum allowed by our parents for these minor pleasures
required us to make a choice among all the objects that appealed so
strongly to our desires? Did ever a young wife, to whom her husband,
during the first days of happiness, hands, twelve times a year, a
purse of gold, the budget of her personal fancies, dream of so many
different purchases, each of which would absorb the whole sum, as we
imagined possible on the eve of the first Sunday in each month? For
six francs during one night we owned every delight of that
inexhaustible shop! and during Mass every response we chanted was
mixed up in our minds with our secret calculations. Which of us all
can recollect ever having had a sou left to spend on the Sunday
following? And which of us but obeyed the instinctive law of social
existence by pitying, helping, and despising those pariahs who, by the
avarice or poverty of their parents, found themselves penniless?

Any one who forms a clear idea of this huge college, with its monastic
buildings in the heart of a little town, and the four plots in which
we were distributed as by a monastic rule, will easily conceive of the
excitement that we felt at the arrival of a new boy, a passenger
suddenly embarked on the ship. No young duchess, on her first
appearance at Court, was ever more spitefully criticised than the new
boy by the youths in his division. Usually during the evening
play-hour before prayers, those sycophants who were accustomed to
ingratiate themselves with the Fathers who took it in turns two and
two for a week to keep an eye on us, would be the first to hear on
trustworthy authority: "There will be a new boy to-morrow!" and then
suddenly the shout, "A New Boy!--A New Boy!" rang through the courts.
We hurried up to crowd round the superintendent and pester him with
questions: