Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
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:
"Where was he coming from? What was his name? Which class would he be
in?" and so forth.
Louis Lambert's advent was the subject of a romance worthy of the
_Arabian Nights_. I was in the fourth class at the time--among the
little boys. Our housemasters were two men whom we called Fathers from
habit and tradition, though they were not priests. In my time there
were indeed but three genuine Oratorians to whom this title legitimately
belonged; in 1814 they all left the college, which had gradually become
secularized, to find occupation about the altar in various country
parishes, like the cure of Mer.
Father Haugoult, the master for the week, was not a bad man, but of very
moderate attainments, and he lacked the tact which is indispensable for
discerning the different characters of children, and graduating their
punishment to their powers of resistance. Father Haugoult, then, began
very obligingly to communicate to his pupils the wonderful events which
were to end on the morrow in the advent of the most singular of "new
boys." Games were at an end. All the children came round in silence to
hear the story of Louis Lambert, discovered, like an aerolite, by Madame
de Stael, in a corner of the wood. Monsieur Haugoult had to tell us all
about Madame de Stael; that evening she seemed to me ten feet high; I
saw at a later time the picture of Corinne, in which Gerard represents
her as so tall and handsome; and, alas! the woman painted by my
imagination so far transcended this, that the real Madame de Stael fell
at once in my estimation, even after I read her book of really masculine
power, _De l'Allemagne_.
But Lambert at that time was an even greater wonder. Monsieur Mareschal,
the headmaster, after examining him, had thought of placing him among
the senior boys. It was Louis' ignorance of Latin that placed him so low
as the fourth class, but he would certainly leap up a class every year;
and, as a remarkable exception, he was to be one of the "Academy." _Proh
pudor_! we were to have the honor of counting among the "little
boys" one whose coat was adorned with the red ribbon displayed by the
"Academicians" of Vendome. These Academicians enjoyed distinguished
privileges; they often dined at the director's table, and held two
literary meetings annually, at which we were all present to hear their
elucubrations. An Academician was a great man in embryo. And if every
Vendome scholar would speak the truth, he would confess that, in later
life, an Academician of the great French Academy seemed to him far less
remarkable than the stupendous boy who wore the cross and the imposing
red ribbon which were the insignia of our "Academy."
It was very unusual to be one of that illustrious body before attaining
to the second class, for the Academicians were expected to hold public
meetings every Thursday during the holidays, and to read tales in verse
or prose, epistles, essays, tragedies, dramas--compositions far above
the intelligence of the lower classes. I long treasured the memory of
a story called the "Green Ass," which was, I think, the masterpiece of
this unknown Society. In the fourth, and an Academician! This boy of
fourteen, a poet already, the protege of Madame de Stael, a coming
genius, said Father Haugoult, was to be one of us! a wizard, a youth
capable of writing a composition or a translation while we were being
called into lessons, and of learning his lessons by reading them through
but once. Louis Lambert bewildered all our ideas. And Father Haugoult's
curiosity and impatience to see this new boy added fuel to our excited
fancy.
"If he has pigeons, he can have no pigeon-house; there is not room for
another. Well, it cannot be helped," said one boy, since famous as an
agriculturist.
"Who will sit next to him?" said another.
"Oh, I wish I might be his chum!" cried an enthusiast.
In school language, the word here rendered chum--_faisant_, or in some
schools, _copin_--expressed a fraternal sharing of the joys and evils of
your childish existence, a community of interests that was fruitful of
squabbling and making friends again, a treaty of alliance offensive and
defensive. It is strange, but never in my time did I know brothers who
were chums. If man lives by his feelings, he thinks perhaps that he will
make his life the poorer if he merges an affection of his own choosing
in a natural tie.
The impression made upon me by Father Haugoult's harangue that evening
is one of the most vivid reminiscences of my childhood; I can compare it
with nothing but my first reading of _Robinson Crusoe_. Indeed, I owe to
my recollection of these prodigious impressions an observation that
may perhaps be new as to the different sense attached to words by each
hearer. The word in itself has no final meaning; we affect a word more
than it affects us; its value is in relation to the images we have
assimilated and grouped round it; but a study of this fact would
require considerable elaboration, and lead us too far from our immediate
subject.
Not being able to sleep, I had a long discussion with my next neighbor
in the dormitory as to the remarkable being who on the morrow was to
be one of us. This neighbor, who became an officer, and is now a writer
with lofty philosophical views, Barchou de Penhoen, has not been false
to his pre-destination, nor to the hazard of fortune by which the only
two scholars of Vendome, of whose fame Vendome ever hears, were brought
together in the same classroom, on the same form, and under the same
roof. Our comrade Dufaure had not, when this book was published, made
his appearance in public life as a lawyer. The translator of Fichte, the
expositor and friend of Ballanche, was already interested, as I myself
was, in metaphysical questions; we often talked nonsense together about
God, ourselves, and nature. He at that time affected pyrrhonism. Jealous
of his place as leader, he doubted Lambert's precocious gifts; while
I, having lately read _Les Enfants celebres_, overwhelmed him with
evidence, quoting young Montcalm, Pico della Mirandola, Pascal--in
short, a score of early developed brains, anomalies that are famous in
the history of the human mind, and Lambert's predecessors.
I was at the time passionately addicted to reading. My father, who was
ambitious to see me in the Ecole Polytechnique, paid for me to have a
special course of private lessons in mathematics. My mathematical master
was the librarian of the college, and allowed me to help myself to books
without much caring what I chose to take from the library, a quiet spot
where I went to him during play-hours to have my lesson. Either he was
no great mathematician, or he was absorbed in some grand scheme, for he
very willingly left me to read when I ought to have been learning, while
he worked at I knew not what. So, by a tacit understanding between us,
I made no complaints of being taught nothing, and he said nothing of the
books I borrowed.
Carried away by this ill-timed mania, I neglected my studies to compose
poems, which certainly can have shown no great promise, to judge by
a line of too many feet which became famous among my companions--the
beginning of an epic on the Incas:
"O Inca! O roi infortune et malheureux!"
In derision of such attempts, I was nicknamed the Poet, but mockery did
not cure me. I was always rhyming, in spite of good advice from Monsieur
Mareschal, the headmaster, who tried to cure me of an unfortunately
inveterate passion by telling me the fable of a linnet that fell out
of the nest because it tried to fly before its wings were grown. I
persisted in my reading; I became the least emulous, the idlest, the
most dreamy of all the division of "little boys," and consequently the
most frequently punished.
This autobiographical digression may give some idea of the reflections I
was led to make in anticipation of Lambert's arrival. I was then twelve
years old. I felt sympathy from the first for the boy whose temperament
had some points of likeness to my own. I was at last to have a companion
in daydreams and meditations. Though I knew not yet what glory meant, I
thought it glory to be the familiar friend of a child whose immortality
was foreseen by Madame de Stael. To me Louis Lambert was as a giant.
The looked-for morrow came at last. A minute before breakfast we
heard the steps of Monsieur Mareschal and of the new boy in the quiet
courtyard. Every head was turned at once to the door of the classroom.
Father Haugoult, who participated in our torments of curiosity, did not
sound the whistle he used to reduce our mutterings to silence and bring
us back to our tasks. We then saw this famous new boy, whom Monsieur
Mareschal was leading by the hand. The superintendent descended from his
desk, and the headmaster said to him solemnly, according to etiquette:
"Monsieur, I have brought you Monsieur Louis Lambert; will you place him
in the fourth class? He will begin work to-morrow."
Then, after speaking a few words in an undertone to the class-master, he
said:
"Where can he sit?"
It would have been unfair to displace one of us for a newcomer; so as
there was but one desk vacant, Louis Lambert came to fill it, next to
me, for I had last joined the class. Though we still had some time to
wait before lessons were over, we all stood up to look at Louis Lambert.
Monsieur Mareschal heard our mutterings, saw how eager we were, and
said, with the kindness that endeared him to us all:
"Well, well, but make no noise; do not disturb the other classes."
These words set us free to play some little time before breakfast, and
we all gathered round Lambert while Monsieur Mareschal walked up and
down the courtyard with Father Haugoult.
There were about eighty of us little demons, as bold as birds of prey.
Though we ourselves had all gone through this cruel novitiate, we showed
no mercy on a newcomer, never sparing him the mockery, the catechism,
the impertinence, which were inexhaustible on such occasions, to the
discomfiture of the neophyte, whose manners, strength, and temper were
thus tested. Lambert, whether he was stoical or dumfounded, made no
reply to any questions. One of us thereupon remarked that he was no
doubt of the school of Pythagoras, and there was a shout of laughter.
The new boy was thenceforth Pythagoras through all his life at the
college. At the same time, Lambert's piercing eye, the scorn expressed
in his face for our childishness, so far removed from the stamp of his
own nature, the easy attitude he assumed, and his evident strength in
proportion to his years, infused a certain respect into the veriest
scamps among us. For my part, I kept near him, absorbed in studying him
in silence.
Louis Lambert was slightly built, nearly five feet in height; his face
was tanned, and his hands were burnt brown by the sun, giving him an
appearance of manly vigor, which, in fact, he did not possess. Indeed,
two months after he came to the college, when studying in the classroom
had faded his vivid, so to speak, vegetable coloring, he became as pale
and white as a woman.
His head was unusually large. His hair, of a fine, bright black in
masses of curls, gave wonderful beauty to his brow, of which the
proportions were extraordinary even to us heedless boys, knowing
nothing, as may be supposed, of the auguries of phrenology, a science
still in its cradle. The distinction of this prophetic brow lay
principally in the exquisitely chiseled shape of the arches under which
his black eyes sparkled, and which had the transparency of alabaster,
the line having the unusual beauty of being perfectly level to where it
met the top of the nose. But when you saw his eyes it was difficult to
think of the rest of his face, which was indeed plain enough, for their
look was full of a wonderful variety of expression; they seemed to have
a soul in their depths. At one moment astonishingly clear and piercing,
at another full of heavenly sweetness, those eyes became dull, almost
colorless, as it seemed, when he was lost in meditation. They then
looked like a window from which the sun had suddenly vanished after
lighting it up. His strength and his voice were no less variable;
equally rigid, equally unexpected. His tone could be as sweet as that of
a woman compelled to own her love; at other times it was labored, rough,
rugged, if I may use such words in a new sense. As to his strength, he
was habitually incapable of enduring the fatigue of any game, and seemed
weakly, almost infirm. But during the early days of his school-life,
one of our little bullies having made game of this sickliness, which
rendered him unfit for the violent exercise in vogue among his fellows,
Lambert took hold with both hands of one of the class-tables, consisting
of twelve large desks, face to face and sloping from the middle; he
leaned back against the class-master's desk, steadying the table with
his feet on the cross-bar below, and said:
"Now, ten of you try to move it!"
I was present, and can vouch for this strange display of strength; it
was impossible to move the table.
Lambert had the gift of summoning to his aid at certain times the most
extraordinary powers, and of concentrating all his forces on a given
point. But children, like men, are wont to judge of everything by first
impressions, and after the first few days we ceased to study Louis; he
entirely belied Madame de Stael's prognostications, and displayed none
of the prodigies we looked for in him.
After three months at school, Louis was looked upon as a quite ordinary
scholar. I alone was allowed really to know that sublime--why should
I not say divine?--soul, for what is nearer to God than genius in the
heart of a child? The similarity of our tastes and ideas made us friends
and chums; our intimacy was so brotherly that our school-fellows joined
our two names; one was never spoken without the other, and to call
either they always shouted "Poet-and-Pythagoras!" Some other names had
been known coupled in a like manner. Thus for two years I was the
school friend of poor Louis Lambert; and during that time my life was
so identified with his, that I am enabled now to write his intellectual
biography.
It was long before I fully knew the poetry and the wealth of ideas that
lay hidden in my companion's heart and brain. It was not till I was
thirty years of age, till my experience was matured and condensed, till
the flash of an intense illumination had thrown a fresh light upon it,
that I was capable of understanding all the bearings of the phenomena
which I witnessed at that early time. I benefited by them without
understanding their greatness or their processes; indeed, I have
forgotten some, or remember only the most conspicuous facts; still, my
memory is now able to co-ordinate them, and I have mastered the secrets
of that fertile brain by looking back to the delightful days of our
boyish affection. So it was time alone that initiated me into the
meaning of the events and facts that were crowded into that obscure
life, as into that of many another man who is lost to science. Indeed,
this narrative, so far as the expression and appreciation of many
things is concerned, will be found full of what may be termed moral
anachronisms, which perhaps will not detract from its peculiar interest.
In the course of the first few months after coming to Vendome, Louis
became the victim of a malady which, though the symptoms were invisible
to the eye of our superiors, considerably interfered with the exercise
of his remarkable gifts. Accustomed to live in the open air, and to the
freedom of a purely haphazard education, happy in the tender care of an
old man who was devoted to him, used to meditating in the sunshine, he
found it very hard to submit to college rules, to walk in the ranks, to
live within the four walls of a room where eighty boys were sitting
in silence on wooden forms each in front of his desk. His senses were
developed to such perfection as gave them the most sensitive keenness,
and every part of him suffered from this life in common.
The effluvia that vitiated the air, mingled with the odors of a
classroom that was never clean, nor free from the fragments of our
breakfasts or snacks, affected his sense of smell, the sense which,
being more immediately connected than the others with the nerve-centers
of the brain, must, when shocked, cause invisible disturbance to the
organs of thought.
Besides these elements of impurity in the atmosphere, there were
lockers in the classrooms in which the boys kept their miscellaneous
plunder--pigeons killed for fete days, or tidbits filched from the
dinner-table. In each classroom, too, there was a large stone slab, on
which two pails full of water were kept standing, a sort of sink, where
we every morning washed our faces and hands, one after another, in the
master's presence. We then passed on to a table, where women combed and
powdered our hair. Thus the place, being cleaned but once a day before
we were up, was always more or less dirty. In spite of numerous windows
and lofty doors, the air was constantly fouled by the smells from the
washing-place, the hairdressing, the lockers, and the thousand messes
made by the boys, to say nothing of their eighty closely packed bodies.
And this sort of _humus_, mingling with the mud we brought in from the
playing-yard, produced a suffocatingly pestilent muck-heap.
The loss of the fresh and fragrant country air in which he had hitherto
lived, the change of habits and strict discipline, combined to depress
Lambert. With his elbow on his desk and his head supported on his left
hand, he spent the hours of study gazing at the trees in the court or
the clouds in the sky; he seemed to be thinking of his lessons; but
the master, seeing his pen motionless, or the sheet before him still a
blank, would call out:
"Lambert, you are doing nothing!"
This "_you are doing nothing_!" was a pin-thrust that wounded Louis to
the quick. And then he never earned the rest of the play-time; he always
had impositions to write. The imposition, a punishment which varies
according to the practice of different schools, consisted at Vendome of
a certain number of lines to be written out in play hours. Lambert and
I were so overpowered with impositions, that we had not six free days
during the two years of our school friendship. But for the books we took
out of the library, which maintained some vitality in our brains, this
system of discipline would have reduced us to idiotcy. Want of exercise
is fatal to children. The habit of preserving a dignified appearance,
begun in tender infancy, has, it is said, a visible effect on the
constitution of royal personages when the faults of such an education
are not counteracted by the life of the battle-field or the laborious
sport of hunting. And if the laws of etiquette and Court manners can act
on the spinal marrow to such an extent as to affect the pelvis of
kings, to soften their cerebral tissue, and so degenerate the race, what
deep-seated mischief, physical and moral, must result in schoolboys from
the constant lack of air, exercise, and cheerfulness!
Indeed, the rules of punishment carried out in schools deserve the
attention of the Office of Public Instruction when any thinkers are to
be found there who do not think exclusively of themselves.
We incurred the infliction of an imposition in a thousand ways. Our
memory was so good that we never learned a lesson. It was enough for
either of us to hear our class-fellows repeat the task in French, Latin,
or grammar, and we could say it when our turn came; but if the master,
unfortunately, took it into his head to reverse the usual order and call
upon us first, we very often did not even know what the lesson was;
then the imposition fell in spite of our most ingenious excuses. Then we
always put off writing our exercises till the last moment; if there
were a book to be finished, or if we were lost in thought, the task was
forgotten--again an imposition. How often have we scribbled an exercise
during the time when the head-boy, whose business it was to collect them
when we came into school, was gathering them from the others!
In addition to the moral misery which Lambert went through in trying
to acclimatize himself to college life, there was a scarcely less cruel
apprenticeship through which every boy had to pass: to those bodily
sufferings which seemed infinitely varied. The tenderness of a child's
skin needs extreme care, especially in winter, when a school-boy is
constantly exchanging the frozen air of the muddy playing-yard for the
stuffy atmosphere of the classroom. The "little boys" and the smallest
of all, for lack of a mother's care, were martyrs to chilblains and
chaps so severe that they had to be regularly dressed during the
breakfast hour; but this could only be very indifferently done to so
many damaged hands, toes, and heels. A good many of the boys indeed
were obliged to prefer the evil to the remedy; the choice constantly lay
between their lessons waiting to be finished or the joys of a slide, and
waiting for a bandage carelessly put on, and still more carelessly cast
off again. Also it was the fashion in the school to gibe at the poor,
feeble creatures who went to be doctored; the bullies vied with each
other in snatching off the rags which the infirmary nurse had tied on.
Hence, in winter, many of us, with half-dead feet and fingers, sick with
pain, were incapable of work, and punished for not working. The Fathers,
too often deluded by shammed ailments, would not believe in real
suffering.
The price paid for our schooling and board also covered the cost of
clothing. The committee contracted for the shoes and clothes supplied to
the boys; hence the weekly inspection of which I have spoken. This plan,
though admirable for the manager, is always disastrous to the managed.
Woe to the boy who indulged in the bad habit of treading his shoes down
at heel, of cracking the shoe-leather, or wearing out the soles too
fast, whether from a defect in his gait, or by fidgeting during lessons
in obedience to the instinctive need of movement common to all children.
That boy did not get through the winter without great suffering. In the
first place, his chilblains would ache and shot as badly as a fit of the
gout; then the rivets and pack-thread intended to repair the shoes would
give way, or the broken heels would prevent the wretched shoes from
keeping on his feet; he was obliged to drag them wearily along the
frozen roads, or sometimes to dispute their possession with the clay
soil of the district; the water and snow got in through some unnoticed
crack or ill-sewn patch, and the foot would swell.
Out of sixty boys, not ten perhaps could walk without some special form
of torture; and yet they all kept up with the body of the troop, dragged
on by the general movement, as men are driven through life by life
itself. Many a time some proud-tempered boy would shed tears of rage
while summoning his remaining energy to run ahead and get home again in
spite of pain, so sensitively afraid of laughter or of pity--two forms
of scorn--is the still tender soul at that age.