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 to 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 forget 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--had various provincial houses, of which the most famous

were 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 Loir 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 punishments 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 playground, 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 is 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 in to 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

predestination, 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

day-dreams 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 schoolfellows 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.

[Illustration: Tower in which Balzac passed most of his time at college]

* * * * *

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 or 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-centres 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 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 shoot 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.

At school, as in social life, the strong despise the feeble without knowing

in what true strength consists.

Nor was this all. No gloves. If by good hap a boy's parents, the infirmary

nurse, or the headmaster gave gloves to a particularly delicate lad, the

wags or the big boys of the class would put them on the stove, amused to

see them dry and shrivel; or if the gloves escaped the marauders, after

getting wet they shrunk as they dried for want of care. No, gloves were

impossible. Gloves were a privilege, and boys insist on equality.

Louis Lambert fell a victim to all these varieties of torment. Like many

contemplative men, who, when lost in thought, acquire a habit of mechanical

motion, he had a mania for fidgeting with his shoes, and destroyed them

very quickly. His girlish complexion, the skin of his ears and lips,

cracked with the least cold. His soft, white hands grew red and swollen. He

had perpetual colds. Thus he was a constant sufferer till he became inured

to school-life. Taught at last by cruel experience, he was obliged to "look

after his things," to use the school phrase. He was forced to take care of

his locker, his desk, his clothes, his shoes; to protect his ink, his

books, his copy-paper, and his pens from pilferers; in short, to give his

mind to the thousand details of our trivial life, to which more selfish and

commonplace minds devoted such strict attention--thus infallibly securing

prizes for "proficiency" and "good conduct"--while they were overlooked by

a boy of the highest promise, who, under the hand of an almost divine

imagination, gave himself up with rapture to the flow of his ideas.

This was not all. There is a perpetual struggle going on between the

masters and the boys, a struggle without truce, to be compared with nothing

else in the social world, unless it be the resistance of the opposition to

the ministry in a representative government. But journalists and opposition

speakers are probably less prompt to take advantage of a weak point, less

extreme in resenting an injury, and less merciless in their mockery than

boys are in regard to those who rule over them. It is a task to put angels

out of patience. An unhappy class-master must then not be too severely

blamed, ill-paid as he is, and consequently not too competent, if he is

occasionally unjust or out of temper. Perpetually watched by a hundred

mocking eyes, and surrounded with snares, he sometimes revenges himself for

his own blunders on the boys who are only too ready to detect them.

Unless for serious misdemeanors, for which there were other forms of

punishment, the strap was regarded at Vendome as the _ultima ratio Patrum_.

Exercises forgotten, lessons ill learned, common ill behavior were

sufficiently punished by an imposition, but offended dignity spoke in the

master through the strap. Of all the physical torments to which we were

exposed, certainly the most acute was that inflicted by this leathern

instrument, about two fingers wide, applied to our poor little hands with

all the strength and all the fury of the administrator. To endure this

classical form of correction, the victim knelt in the middle of the room.

He had to leave his form and go to kneel down near the master's desk under

the curious and generally merciless eyes of his fellows. To sensitive

natures these preliminaries were an introductory torture, like the journey

from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve which the condemned used

to make to the scaffold.

Some boys cried out and shed bitter tears before or after the application

of the strap; others accepted the infliction with stoic calm; it was a

question of nature; but few could control an expression of anguish in

anticipation.

Louis Lambert was constantly enduring the strap, and owed it to a

peculiarity of his physiognomy of which he was for a long time quite

unconscious. Whenever he was suddenly roused from a fit of abstraction by

the master's cry, "You are doing nothing!" it often happened that, without

knowing it, he flashed at his teacher a look full of fierce contempt, and

charged with thought, as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity. This

look, no doubt, discomfited the master, who, indignant at this unspoken

retort, wished to cure his scholar of that thunderous flash.

The first time the Father took offence at this ray of scorn, which struck

him like a lightning-flash, he made this speech, as I well remember:

"If you look at me again in that way, Lambert, you will get the strap."

At these words every nose was in the air, every eye looked alternately at

the master and at Louis. The observation was so utterly foolish, that the

boy again looked at the Father, overwhelming him with another flash. From

this arose a standing feud between Lambert and his master, resulting in a

certain amount of "strap." Thus did he first discover the power of his eye.

The hapless poet, so full of nerves, as sensitive as a woman, under the

sway of chronic melancholy, and as sick with genius as a girl with love

that she pines for, knowing nothing of it;--this boy, at once so powerful

and so weak, transplanted by "Corinne" from the country he loved, to be

squeezed in the mould of a collegiate routine to which every spirit and

every body must yield, whatever their range or temperament, accepting its

rule and its uniform as gold is crushed into round coin under the press;

Louis Lambert suffered in every spot where pain can touch the soul or the

flesh. Stuck on a form, restricted to the acreage of his desk, a victim of

the strap and to a sickly frame, tortured in every sense, environed by

distress--everything compelled him to give his body up to the myriad

tyrannies of school life; and, like the martyrs who smiled in the midst of

suffering, he took refuge in heaven, which lay open to his mind. Perhaps

this life of purely inward emotions helped him to see something of the

mysteries he so entirely believed in!

Our independence, our illicit amusements, our apparent waste of time, our

persistent indifference, our frequent punishments and aversion for our

exercises and impositions, earned us a reputation, which no one cared to

controvert, for being an idle and incorrigible pair. Our masters treated us

with contempt, and we fell into utter disgrace with our companions, from

whom we concealed our secret studies for fear of being laughed at. This

hard judgment, which was injustice in the masters, was but natural in our

schoolfellows. We could neither play ball, nor run races, nor walk on

stilts. On exceptional holidays, when amnesty was proclaimed and we got a

few hours of freedom, we shared in none of the popular diversions of the

school. Aliens from the pleasures enjoyed by the others, we were outcasts,

sitting forlorn under a tree in the playing-ground. The Poet-and-Pythagoras

formed an exception and led a life apart from the life of the rest.

The penetrating instinct and unerring conceit of schoolboys made them feel

that we were of a nature either far above or far beneath their own; hence

some simply hated our aristocratic reserve, others merely scorned our

ineptitude. These feelings were equally shared by us without our knowing

it; perhaps I have but now divined them. We lived exactly like two rats,

huddled into the corner of the room where our desks were, sitting there

alike during lesson time and play hours. This strange state of affairs

inevitably and in fact placed us on a footing of war with all the other

boys in our division. Forgotten for the most part, we sat there very

contentedly; half happy, like two plants, two images who would have been

missed from the furniture of the room. But the most aggressive of our

schoolfellows would sometimes torment us, just to show their malignant

power, and we responded with stolid contempt, which brought many a

thrashing down on the Poet-and-Pythagoras.

Lambert's home-sickness lasted for many months. I know no words to describe

the dejection to which he was a prey. Louis has taken the glory off many a

masterpiece for me. We had both played the part of the "Leper of Aosta,"

and had both experienced the feelings described in Monsieur de Maistre's

story, before we read them as expressed by his eloquent pen. A book may,

indeed, revive the memories of our childhood, but it can never compete with

them successfully. Lambert's woes had taught me many a chant of sorrow far

more appealing than the finest passages in "Werther." And, indeed, there is

no possible comparison between the pangs of a passion condemned, whether

rightly or wrongly, by every law, and the grief of a poor child pining for

the glorious sunshine, the dews of the valley, and liberty. Werther is the

slave of desire; Louis Lambert was an enslaved soul. Given equal talent,

the more pathetic sorrow, founded on desires which, being purer, are the

more genuine, must transcend the wail even of genius.

After sitting for a long time with his eyes fixed on a lime-tree in the

playground, Louis would say just a word; but that word would reveal an

infinite speculation.

"Happily for me," he exclaimed one day, "there are hours of comfort when I

feel as though the walls of the room had fallen and I were away--away in

the fields! What a pleasure it is to let oneself go on the stream of one's

thoughts as a bird is borne up on its wings!"

"Why is green a color so largely diffused throughout creation?" he would

ask me. "Why are there so few straight lines in nature? Why is it that man,

in his structures, rarely introduces curves? Why is it that he alone, of

all creatures, has a sense of straightness?"

These queries revealed long excursions in space. He had, I am sure, seen

vast landscapes, fragrant with the scent of woods. He was always silent and

resigned, a living elegy, always suffering but unable to complain of

suffering. An eagle that needed the world to feed him, shut in between four

narrow, dirty walls; and thus his life became an ideal life in the

strictest meaning of the words. Filled as he was with contempt of the

almost useless studies to which we were harnessed, Louis went on his

skyward way absolutely unconscious of the things about us.

I, obeying the imitative instinct that is so strong in childhood, tried to

regulate my life in conformity with his. And Louis the more easily infected

me with the sort of torpor in which deep contemplation leaves the body,

because I was younger and more impressionable than he. Like two lovers, we

got into the habit of thinking together in a common reverie. His intuitions

had already acquired that acuteness which must surely characterize the

intellectual perceptiveness of great poets and often bring them to the

verge of madness.

"Do you ever feel," said he to me one day, "as though imagined suffering

affected you in spite of yourself? If, for instance, I think with

concentration of the effect that the blade of my penknife would have in

piercing my flesh, I feel an acute pain as if I had really cut myself; only

the blood is wanting. But the pain comes suddenly, and startles me like a

sharp noise breaking profound silence. Can an idea cause physical

pain?--What do you say to that, eh?"

When he gave utterance to such subtle reflections, we both fell into

artless meditation; we set to work to detect in ourselves the inscrutable

phenomena of the origin of thoughts, which Lambert hoped to discover in

their earliest germ, so as to describe some day the unknown process. Then,

after much discussion, often mixed up with childish notions, a look would

flash from Lambert's eager eyes; he would grasp my hand, and a word from

the depths of his soul would show the current of his mind.

"Thinking is seeing," said he one day, carried away by some objection

raised as to the first principles of our organization. "Every human science

is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work

up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry, like

every work of art, proceeds from a swift vision of things."

He was a spiritualist (as opposed to materialism); but I would venture to

contradict him, using his own arguments to consider the intellect as a

purely physical phenomenon. We both were right. Perhaps the words

materialism and spiritualism express the two faces of the same fact. His

considerations on the substance of the mind led to his accepting, with a

certain pride, the life of privation to which we were condemned in

consequence of our idleness and our indifference to learning. He had a

certain consciousness of his own powers which bore him up through his

spiritual cogitations. How delightful it was to me to feel his soul acting

on my own! Many a time have we remained sitting on our form, both buried in

one book, having quite forgotten each other's existence, and yet not apart;

each conscious of the other's presence, and bathing in an ocean of thought,

like two fish swimming in the same waters.

Our life, apparently, was merely vegetating; but we lived through our heart

and brain.

Lambert's influence over my imagination left traces that still abide. I

used to listen hungrily to his tales, full of the marvels which make men,

as well as children, rapturously devour stories in which truth assumes the

most grotesque forms. His passion for mystery, and the credulity natural to

the young, often led us to discuss Heaven and Hell. Then Louis, by

expounding Swedenborg, would try to make me share in his beliefs concerning

angels. In his least logical arguments there were still amazing

observations as to the powers of man, which gave his words that color of

truth without which nothing can be done in any art. The romantic end he

foresaw as the destiny of man was calculated to flatter the yearning which

tempts blameless imaginations to give themselves up to beliefs. Is it not

during the youth of a nation that its dogmas and idols are conceived? And

are not the supernatural beings before whom the people tremble the

personification of their feelings and their magnified desires?

* * * * *

All that I can now remember of the poetical conversations we held together

concerning the Swedish prophet, whose works I have since had the curiosity

to read, may be told in a few paragraphs.

In each of us there are two distinct beings. According to Swedenborg, the

angel is an individual in whom the inner being conquers the external being.

If a man desires to earn his call to be an angel, as soon as his mind

reveals to him his twofold existence, he must strive to foster the delicate

angelic essence that exists within him. If, for lack of a lucid

appreciation of his destiny, he allows bodily action to predominate,

instead of confirming his intellectual being, all his powers will be

absorbed in the use of his external senses, and the angel will slowly

perish by the materialization of both natures. In the contrary case, if he

nourishes his inner being with the aliment needful to it, the soul triumphs

over matter and strives to get free.

When they separate by the act of what we call death, the angel, strong

enough then to cast off its wrappings, survives and begins its real life.

The infinite variety which differentiates individual men can only be

explained by this twofold existence, which, again, is proved and made

intelligible by that variety.

In point of fact, the wide distance between a man whose torpid intelligence

condemns him to evident stupidity, and one who, by the exercise of his

inner life, has acquired the gift of some power, allows us to suppose that

there is as great a difference between men of genius and other beings as

there is between the blind and those who see. This hypothesis, since it

extends creation beyond all limits, gives us, as it were, the clue to

heaven. The beings who, here on earth, are apparently mingled without

distinction, are there distributed, according to their inner perfection, in

distinct spheres whose speech and manners have nothing in common. In the

invisible world, as in the real world, if some native of the lower spheres

comes, all unworthy, into a higher sphere, not only can he never understand

the customs and language there, but his mere presence paralyzes the voice

and hearts of those who dwell therein.

Dante, in his _Divine Comedy_, had perhaps some slight intuition of those

spheres which begin in the world of torment, and rise, circle on circle, to

the highest heaven. Thus Swedenborg's doctrine is the product of a lucid

spirit noting down the innumerable signs by which the angels manifest their

presence among men.

This doctrine, which I have endeavored to sum up in a more or less

consistent form, was set before me by Lambert with all the fascination of

mysticism, swathed in the wrappings of the phraseology affected by mystical

writers: an obscure language full of abstractions, and taking such effect

on the brain, that there are books by Jacob Boehm, Swedenborg, and Madame

Guyon, so strangely powerful that they give rise to phantasies as various

as the dreams of the opium-eater. Lambert told me of mystical facts so

extraordinary, he so acted on my imagination, that he made my brain reel.

Still, I loved to plunge into that realm of mystery, invisible to the

senses, in which every one likes to dwell, whether he pictures it to

himself under the indefinite ideal of the Future, or clothes it in the more

solid guise of romance. These violent revulsions of the mind on itself gave

me, without my knowing it, a comprehension of its power, and accustomed me

to the workings of the mind.

Lambert himself explained everything by his theory of the angels. To him

pure love--love as we dream of it in youth--was the coalescence of two

angelic natures. Nothing could exceed the fervency with which he longed to

meet a woman angel. And who better than he could inspire or feel love? If

anything could give an impression of an exquisite nature, was it not the

amiability and kindliness that marked his feelings, his words, his actions,

his slightest gestures, the conjugal regard that united us as boys, and

that we expressed when we called ourselves _chums_?

There was no distinction for us between my ideas and his. We imitated each

other's handwriting, so that one might write the tasks of both. Thus, if

one of us had a book to finish and to return to the mathematical master, he

could read on without interruption while the other scribbled off his

exercise and imposition. We did our tasks as though paying a task on our

peace of mind. If my memory does not play me false, they were sometimes of

remarkable merit when Lambert did them. But on the foregone conclusion that

we were both of us idiots, the master always went through them under a

rooted prejudice, and even kept them to read to be laughed at by our

schoolfellows.

I remember one afternoon, at the end of the lesson, which lasted from two

till four, the master took possession of a page of translation by Lambert.

The passage began with, _Caius Gracchus_, _vir nobilis_; Lambert had

construed this by "Caius Gracchus had a noble heart."

"Where do you find 'heart' in _nobilis_?" said the Father sharply.

And there was a roar of laughter, while Lambert looked at the master in

some bewilderment.

"What would Madame la Baronne de Stael say if she could know that you make

such nonsense of a word that means of noble family, of patrician rank?"

"She would say that you were an ass!" said I in a muttered tone.

"Master Poet, you will stay in for a week," replied the master, who

unfortunately overheard me.

Lambert simply repeated, looking at me with inexpressible affection, "_Vir

nobilis!_"

Madame de Stael was, in fact, partly the cause of Lambert's troubles. On

every pretext masters and pupils threw the name in his teeth, either in

irony or in reproof.

Louis lost no time in getting himself "kept in" to share my imprisonment.

Freer thus than in any other circumstances, we could talk the whole day

long in the silence of the dormitories, where each boy had a cubicle six

feet square, the partitions consisting at the top of open bars. The doors,

fitted with gratings, were locked at night and opened in the morning under

the eye of the Father whose duty it was to superintend our rising and going

to bed. The creak of these gates, which the college servants unlocked with

remarkable expedition, was a sound peculiar to that college. These little

cells were our prison, and boys were sometimes shut up there for a month at

a time. The boys in these coops were under the stern eye of the prefect, a

sort of censor who stole up at certain hours, or at unexpected moments,

with a silent step, to hear if we were talking instead of writing our

impositions. But a few walnut shells dropped on the stairs, or the

sharpness of our hearing, almost always enabled us to beware of his

joining, so we could give ourselves up without anxiety to our favorite

studies. However, as books were prohibited, our prison hours were chiefly

filled up with metaphysical discussions, or with relating singular facts

connected with the phenomena of mind.

One of the most extraordinary of these incidents beyond question is this,

which I will here record, not only because it concerns Lambert, but because

it perhaps was the turning-point of his scientific career. By the law of

custom in all schools, Thursday and Sunday were holidays; but the services,

which we were made to attend very regularly, so completely filled up

Sunday, that we considered Thursday our only real day of freedom. After

once attending Mass, we had a long day before us to spend in walks in the

country round the town of Vendome. The manor of Rochambeau was the most

interesting object of our excursions, perhaps by reason of its distance;

the smaller boys were very seldom taken on so fatiguing an expedition.

However, once or twice a year the class-masters would hold out Rochambeau

as a reward for diligence.

In 1812, towards the end of the spring, we were to go there for the first

time. Our anxiety to see this famous chateau of Rochambeau, where the owner

sometimes treated the boys to milk, made us all very good, and nothing

hindered the outing. Neither Lambert nor I had ever seen the pretty valley

of the Loir where the house stood. So his imagination and mine were much

excited by the prospect of this excursion, which filled the school with

traditional glee. We talked of it all the evening, planning to spend in

fruit or milk such money as we had saved, against all the habits of

school-life.

After dinner next day, we set out at half-past twelve, each provided with a

square hunch of bread, given to us for our afternoon snack. And off we

went, as gay as swallows, marching in a body on the famous chateau with an

eagerness which would at first allow of no fatigue. When we reached the

hill, whence we looked down on the house standing half-way down the slope,

on the devious valley through which the river winds and sparkles between

meadows in graceful curves--a beautiful landscape, one of those scenes to

which the keen emotions of early youth or of love lend such a charm, that

it is wise never to see them again in later years--Louis Lambert said to

me, "Why, I saw this last night in a dream."

He recognized the clump of trees under which we were standing, the grouping

of the woods, the color of the water, the turrets of the chateau, the

details, the distance, in fact every part of the prospect which we looked

on for the first time. We were mere children; I, at any rate, who was but

thirteen; Louis, at fifteen, might, have the precocity of genius, but at

that time we were incapable of falsehood in the most trivial matters of our

life as friends. Indeed, if Lambert's powerful mind had any presentiment of

the importance of such facts, he was far from appreciating their whole

bearing; and he was quite astonished by this incident. I asked him if he

had not perhaps been brought to Rochambeau in his infancy, and my question

struck him; but after thinking it over, he answered in the negative. This

incident, analogous to what may be known of the phenomena of sleep in

several persons, will illustrate the beginnings of Lambert's line of

talent; he took it, in fact, as the basis of a whole system, using a

fragment--as Cuvier did in another branch of inquiry--as a clue to the

reconstruction of a complete system.

At this moment we were sitting together on an old oak-stump, and after a

few minutes' reflection, Louis said to me:

"If the landscape did not come to me--which it is absurd to imagine--I must

have come here. If I was here while I was asleep in my cubicle, does not

that constitute a complete severance of my body and my inner being? Does it

not prove some inscrutable locomotive faculty in the spirit with effects

resembling those of locomotion in the body? Well, then, if my spirit and my

body can be severed during sleep, why should I not insist on their

separating in the same way while I am awake? I see no half-way mean between

the two propositions.

"But if we go further into details: Either the facts are due to the action

of a faculty which brings out a second being to whom my body is merely a

husk, since I was in my cell, and yet I saw the landscape--and this upsets

many systems; or the facts took place either in some nerve centre, of which

the name is yet to be discovered, where our feelings dwell and move; or

else in the cerebral centre, where ideas are formed. This last hypothesis

gives rise to some strange questions. I walked, I saw, I heard. Motion is

inconceivable but in space, sound acts only at certain angles or on

surfaces, color is caused only by light. If, in the dark, with my eyes

shut, I saw, in myself, colored objects; if I heard sounds in the most

perfect silence and without the conditions requisite for the production of

sound; if without stirring I traversed wide tracts of space, there must be

inner faculties independent of the external laws of physics. Material

nature must be penetrable by the spirit.

"How is it that men have hitherto given so little thought to the phenomena

of sleep, which seem to prove that man has a double life? May there not be

a new science lying beneath them?" he added, striking his brow with his

hand. "If not the elements of a science, at any rate the revelation of

stupendous powers in man; at least they prove a frequent severance of our

two natures, the fact I have been thinking out for a very long time. At

last, then, I have hit on evidence to show the superiority that

distinguishes our latent senses from our corporeal senses! _Homo duplex!_

"And yet," he went on, after a pause, with a doubtful shrug, "perhaps we

have not two natures; perhaps we are merely gifted with personal and

perfectible qualities, of which the development within us produces certain

unobserved phenomena of activity, penetration, and vision. In our love of

the marvelous, a passion begotten of our pride, we have translated these

effects into poetical inventions, because we did not understand them. It is

so convenient to deify the incomprehensible!

"I should, I own, lament over the loss of my illusions. I so much wished to

believe in our twofold nature and in Swedenborg's angels. Must this new

science destroy them? Yes; for the study of our unknown properties involves

us in a science that appears to be materialistic, for the Spirit uses,

divides, and animates the Substance; but it does not destroy it."

He remained pensive, almost sad. Perhaps he saw the dreams of his youth as

swaddling clothes that he must soon shake off.

"Sight and hearing are, no doubt, the sheaths for a very marvelous

instrument," said he, laughing at his own figure of speech.

Always when he was talking to me of Heaven and Hell, he was wont to treat

of Nature as being master; but now, as he pronounced these last words, big

with prescience, he seemed to soar more boldly than ever above the

landscape, and his forehead seemed ready to burst with the afflatus of

genius. His powers--mental powers we must call them till some new term is

found--seemed to flash from the organs intended to express them. His eyes

shot out thoughts; his uplifted hand, his silent but tremulous lips were

eloquent; his burning glance was radiant; at last his head, as though too

heavy, or exhausted by too eager a flight, fell on his breast. This

boy--this giant--bent his head, took my hand and clasped it in his own,

which was damp, so fevered was he for the search for truth; then, after a

pause, he said:

"I shall be famous!--And you too," he added after a pause. "We will both

study the Chemistry of the Will."

Noble soul! I recognized his superiority, though he took great care never

to make me feel it. He shared with me all the treasures of his mind, and

regarded me as instrumental in his discoveries, leaving me the credit of my

insignificant contributions. He was always as gracious as a woman in love;

he had all the bashful feeling, the delicacy of soul which make life happy

and pleasant to endure.

* * * * *

On the following day he began writing what he called a _Treatise on the

Will_; his subsequent reflections led to many changes in its plan and

method; but the incident of that day was certainly the germ of the work,

just as the electric shock always felt by Mesmer at the approach of a

particular man-servant was the starting-point of his discoveries in

magnetism, a science till then interred under the mysteries of Isis, of

Delphi, of the cave of Trophonius, and rediscovered by that prodigious

genius, close on Lavater, and the precursor of Gall.

Lambert's ideas, suddenly illuminated by this flash of light, assumed

vaster proportions; he disentangled certain truths from his many

acquisitions and brought them into order; then, like a founder, he cast the

model of his work. At the end of six months' indefatigable labor, Lambert's

writings excited the curiosity of our companions, and became the object of

cruel practical jokes which led to a fatal issue.

One day one of the masters, who was bent on seeing the manuscripts,

enlisted the aid of our tyrants, and came to seize, by force, a box that

contained the precious papers. Lambert and I defended it with incredible

courage. The trunk was locked, our aggressors could not open it, but they

tried to smash it in the struggle, a stroke of malignity at which we

shrieked with rage. Some of the boys, with a sense of justice, or struck

perhaps by our heroic defence, advised the attacking party to leave us in

peace, crushing us with insulting contempt. But suddenly, brought to the

spot by the noise of a battle, Father Haugoult roughly intervened,

inquiring as to the cause of the fight. Our enemies had interrupted us in

writing our impositions, and the class-master came to protect his slaves.

The foe, in self-defence, betrayed the existence of the manuscript. The

dreadful Haugoult insisted on our giving up the box; if we should resist,

he would have it broken open. Lambert gave him the key; the master took out

the papers, glanced through them, and said, as he confiscated them:

"And it is for such rubbish as this that you neglect your lessons!"

Large tears fell from Lambert's eyes, wrung from him as much by a sense of

his offended moral superiority as by the gratuitous insult and betrayal

that he had suffered. We gave the accusers a glance of stern reproach: had

they not delivered us over to the common enemy? If the common law of school

entitled them to thrash us, did it not require them to keep silence as to

our misdeeds?

In a moment they were no doubt ashamed of their baseness.

Father Haugoult probably sold the _Treatise on the Will_ to a local grocer,

unconscious of the scientific treasure, of which the germs thus fell into

unworthy hands.

* * * * *

Six months later I left the school, and I do not know whether Lambert ever

recommenced his labors. Our parting threw him into a mood of the darkest

melancholy.

It was in memory of the disaster that befell Louis' book that, in the tale

which comes first in these _Etudes_, I adopted the title invented by

Lambert for a work of fiction, and gave the name of a woman who was dear to

him to a girl characterized by her self-devotion; but this is not all I

have borrowed from him: his character and occupations were of great value

to me in writing that book, and the subject arose from some reminiscences

of our youthful meditations. This present volume is intended as a modest

monument, a broken column, to commemorate the life of the man who

bequeathed to me all he had to leave--his thoughts.

In that boyish effort Lambert had enshrined the ideas of a man. Ten years

later, when I met some learned men who were devoting serious attention to

the phenomena that had struck us and that Lambert had so marvelously

analyzed, I understood the value of his work, then already forgotten as

childish. I at once spent several months in recalling the principal

theories discovered by my poor schoolmate. Having collected my

reminiscences, I can boldly state that, by 1812, he had proved, divined,

and set forth in his Treatise several important facts of which, as he had

declared, evidence was certain to come sooner or later. His philosophical

speculations ought undoubtedly to gain him recognition as one of the great

thinkers who have appeared at wide intervals among men, to reveal to them

the bare skeleton of some science to come, of which the roots spread

slowly, but which, in due time, bring forth fair fruit in the intellectual

sphere. Thus a humble artisan, Bernard Palissy, searching the soil to find

minerals for glazing pottery, proclaimed, in the sixteenth century, with

the infallible intuition of genius, geological facts which it is now the

glory of Cuvier and Buffon to have demonstrated.

I can, I believe, give some idea of Lambert's Treatise by stating the chief

propositions on which it was based; but, in spite of myself, I shall strip

them of the ideas in which they were clothed, and which were indeed their

indispensable accompaniment. I started on a different path, and only made

use of those of his researches which answered the purpose of my scheme. I

know not, therefore, whether as his disciple I can faithfully expound his

views, having assimilated them in the first instance so as to color them

with my own.

New ideas require new words, or a new and expanded use of old words,

extended and defined in their meaning. Thus Lambert, to set forth the basis

of his system, had adopted certain common words that answered to his

notions. The word Will he used to connote the medium in which the mind

moves, or to use a less abstract expression, the mass of power by which man

can reproduce, outside himself, the actions constituting his external life.

Volition--a word due to Locke--expressed the act by which a man exerts his

will. The word Mind, or Thought, which he regarded as the quintessential

product of the Will, also represented the medium in which the ideas

originate to which thought gives substance. The Idea, a name common to

every creation of the brain, constituted the act by which man uses his

mind. Thus the Will and the Mind were the two generating forces; the

Volition and the Idea were the two products. Volition, he thought, was the

Idea evolved from the abstract state to a concrete state, from its

generative fluid to a solid expression, so to speak, if such words may be

taken to formulate notions so difficult of definition. According to him,

the Mind and Ideas are the motion and the outcome of our inner

organization, just as the Will and Volition are of our external activity.

He gave the Will precedence over the Mind.

"You must will before you can think," he said. "Many beings live in a

condition of Willing without ever attaining to the condition of Thinking.

In the North, life is long; in the South, it is shorter; but in the North

we see torpor, in the South a constant excitability of the Will, up to the

point where from an excess of cold or of heat the organs are almost

nullified."

The use of the word "medium" was suggested to him by an observation he had

made in his childhood, though, to be sure, he had no suspicion then of its

importance, but its singularity naturally struck his delicately alert

imagination. His mother, a fragile, nervous woman, all sensitiveness and

affection, was one of those beings created to represent womanhood in all

the perfection of her attributes, but relegated by a mistaken fate to too

low a place in the social scale. Wholly loving, and consequently wholly

suffering, she died young, having thrown all her energies into her motherly

love. Lambert, a child of six, lying, but not always sleeping, in a cot by

his mother's bed, saw the electric sparks from her hair when she combed it.

The man of fifteen made scientific application of this fact which had

amused the child, a fact beyond dispute, of which there is ample evidence

in many instances, especially of women who by a sad fatality are doomed to

let unappreciated feelings evaporate in the air, or some superabundant

power run to waste.

In support of his definitions, Lambert propounded a variety of problems to

be solved, challenges flung out to science, though he proposed to seek the

solution for himself. He inquired, for instance, whether the element that

constitutes electricity does not enter as a base into the specific fluid

whence our Ideas and Volitions proceed? Whether the hair, which loses its

color, turns white, falls out, or disappears, in proportion to the decay or

crystallization of our thoughts, may not be in fact a capillary system,

either absorbent or diffusive, and wholly electrical? Whether the fluid

phenomena of the Will, a matter generated within us, and spontaneously

reacting under the impress of conditions as yet unobserved, were at all

more extraordinary than those of the invisible and intangible fluid

produced by a voltaic pile, and applied to the nervous system of a dead

man? Whether the formation of Ideas and their constant diffusion was less

incomprehensible than evaporation of the atoms, imperceptible indeed, but

so violent in their effects, that are given off from a grain of musk

without any loss of weight. Whether, granting that the function of the skin

is purely protective, absorbent, excretive, and tactile, the circulation of

the blood and all its mechanism would not correspond with the

transubstantiation of our Will, as the circulation of the nerve fluid

corresponds to that of the Mind? Finally, whether the more or less rapid

affluence of these two real substances may not be the result of a certain

perfection or imperfection of organs whose conditions require

investigation in every manifestation?

Having set forth these principles, he proposed to class the phenomena of

human life in two series of distinct results, demanding, with the ardent

insistency of conviction, a special analysis for each. In fact, having

observed in almost every type of created thing two separate motions, he

assumed, nay, he asserted, their existence in our human nature, and

designated this vital antithesis Action and Reaction.

"A desire," he said, "is a fact completely accomplished in our will before

it is accomplished externally."

Hence the sum-total of our Volitions and our Ideas constitutes Action, and

the sum-total of our external acts he called Reaction.

When I subsequently read the observations made by Bichat on the duality of

our external senses, I was really bewildered by my recollections,

recognizing the startling coincidences between the views of that celebrated

physiologist and those of Louis Lambert. They both died too young, and they

had with equal steps arrived at the same strange truths. Nature has in

every case been pleased to give a twofold purpose to the various apparatus

that constitute her creatures; and the twofold action of the human

organism, which is now ascertained beyond dispute, proves by a mass of

evidence in daily life how true were Lambert's deductions as to Action and

Reaction.

The inner Being, the Being of Action--the word he used to designate an

unknown specialization--the mysterious nexus of fibrils to which we owe the

inadequately investigated powers of thought and will--in short, the

nameless entity which sees, acts, foresees the end, and accomplishes

everything before expressing itself in any physical phenomenon--must, in

conformity with its nature, be free from the physical conditions by which

the external Being of Reaction, the visible man, is fettered in its

manifestation. From this followed a multitude of logical explanation as to

those results of our twofold nature which appear the strangest, and a

rectification of various systems in which truth and falsehood are mingled.

Certain men, having had a glimpse of some phenomena of the natural working

of the Being of Action, were, like Swedenborg, carried away above this

world by their ardent soul, thirsting for poetry, and filled with the

Divine Spirit. Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and their admiration

of the facts, they pleased their fancy by regarding that inner man as

divine, and constructing a mystical universe. Hence we have angels! A

lovely illusion which Lambert would never abandon, cherishing it even when

the sword of his logic was cutting off their dazzling wings.

"Heaven," he would say, "must, after all, be the survival of our perfected

faculties, and hell the void into which our unperfected faculties are cast

away."

But how, then, in the ages when the understanding had preserved the

religious and spiritualist impressions, which prevailed from the time of

Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could men help

accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine

interposition? Of whom but of God Himself could sages demand an account of

an invisible creature so actively and so reactively sensitive, gifted with

faculties so extensive, so improvable by use, and so powerful under certain

occult influences, that they could sometimes see it annihilate, by some

phenomenon of sight or movement, space in its two manifestations--Time and

Distance--of which the former is the space of the intellect, the latter is

physical space? Sometimes they found it reconstructing the past, either by

the power of retrospective vision, or by the mystery of a palingenesis not

unlike the power a man might have of detecting in the form, integument, and

embryo in a seed, the flowers of the past, and the numberless variations of

their color, scent, and shape; and sometimes, again, it could be seen

vaguely foreseeing the future, either by its apprehension of final causes,

or by some phenomenon of physical presentiment.

Other men, less poetically religious, cold, and argumentative--quacks

perhaps, but enthusiasts in brain at least, if not in heart--recognizing

some isolated examples of such phenomena, admitted their truth while

refusing to consider them as radiating from a common centre. Each of these

was, then, bent on constructing a science out of a simple fact. Hence arose

demonology, judicial astrology, the black arts, in short, every form of

divination founded on circumstances that were essentially transient,

because they varied according to men's temperament, and to conditions that

are still completely unknown.

But from these errors of the learned, and from the ecclesiastical trials

under which fell so many martyrs to their own powers, startling evidence

was derived of the prodigious faculties at the command of the Being of

Action, which, according to Lambert, can abstract itself completely from

the Being of Reaction, bursting its envelope, and piercing walls by its

potent vision; a phenomenon known to the Hindoos, as missionaries tell us,

by the name of _Tokeiad_; or again, by another faculty, can grasp in the

brain, in spite of its closest convolutions, the ideas which are formed or

forming there, and the whole of past consciousness.

"If apparitions are not impossible," said Lambert, "they must be due to a

faculty of discerning the ideas which represent man in his purest essence,

whose life, imperishable perhaps, escapes our grosser senses, though they

may become perceptible to the inner being when it has reached a high degree

of ecstasy, or a great perfection of vision."

I know--though my remembrance is now vague--that Lambert, by following the

results of Mind and Will step by step, after he had established their laws,

accounted for a multitude of phenomena which, till then, had been regarded

with reason as incomprehensible. Thus wizards, men possessed, those gifted

with second sight, and demoniacs of every degree--the victims of the Middle

Ages--became the subject of explanations so natural, that their very

simplicity often seemed to me the seal of their truth. The marvelous gifts

which the Church of Rome, jealous of all mysteries, punished with the

stake, were, in Louis' opinion, the result of certain affinities between

the constituent elements of matter and those of mind, which proceed from

the same source. The man holding a hazel rod when he found a spring of

water was guided by some antipathy or sympathy of which he was unconscious;

nothing but the eccentricity of these phenomena could have availed to give

some of them historic certainty.

Sympathies have rarely been proved; they afford a kind of pleasure which

those who are so happy as to possess them rarely speak of unless they are

abnormally singular, and even then only in the privacy of intimate

intercourse, where everything is buried. But the antipathies that arise

from the inversion of affinities have, very happily, been recorded when

developed in famous men. Thus, Bayle had hysterics when he heard water

splashing, Scaliger turned pale at the sight of water-cress, Erasmus was

thrown into a fever by the smell of fish. These three antipathies were

connected with water. The Duc d'Epernon fainted at the sight of a hare,

Tycho-Brahe at that of a fox, Henri III. at the presence of a cat, the

Marechal d'Albret at the sight of a wild hog; these antipathies were

produced by animal emanations, and often took effect at a great distance.

The Chevalier de Guise, Marie de' Medici, and many other persons, have felt

faint at seeing a rose even in a painting. Lord Bacon, whether he were

forewarned or no of an eclipse of the moon, always fell into a syncope

while it lasted; and his vitality, suspended while the phenomenon lasted,

was restored as soon as it was over without his feeling any further

inconvenience. These effects of antipathy, all well authenticated, and

chosen from among many which history has happened to preserve, are enough

to give a clue to the sympathies which remain unknown.

This fragment of Lambert's investigations, which I remember from among his

essays, will throw a light on the method on which he worked. I need not

emphasize the obvious connection between this theory and the collateral

sciences projected by Gall and Lavater; they were its natural corollary;

and every more or less scientific brain will discern the ramifications by

which it is inevitably connected with the phrenological observations of one

and the speculations on physiognomy of the other.

Mesmer's discovery, so important, though as yet so little appreciated, was

also embodied in a single section of this treatise, though Louis did not

know the Swiss doctor's writings--which are few and brief.

A simple and logical inference from these principles led him to perceive

that the will might be accumulated by a contractile effort of the inner

man, and then, by another effort, projected, or even imparted, to material

objects. Thus, the whole force of a man must have the property of reacting

on other men, and of infusing into them an essence foreign to their own, if

they could not protect themselves against such an aggression. The evidence

of this theorem of the science of humanity is, of course, very

multifarious; but there is nothing to establish it beyond question. We have

only the notorious disaster of Marius and his harangue to the Cimbrian

commanded to kill him, or the august injunction of a mother to the Lion of

Florence, in historic proof of instances of such lightning flashes of mind.

To Lambert, then, Will and Thought were _living forces_; and he spoke of

them in such a way as to impress his belief on the hearer. To him these two

forces were, in a way, visible, tangible. Thought was slow or alert, heavy

or nimble, light or dark; he ascribed to it all the attributes of an active

agent, and thought of it as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing

old, shrinking, becoming atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its

life, and specified all its actions by the strangest words in our language,

speaking of its spontaneity, its strength, and all its qualities with a

kind of intuition which enabled him to recognize all the manifestations of

its substantial existence.

"Often," said he, "in the midst of quiet and silence, when our inner

faculties are dormant, when we have given ourselves up to sweet repose,

when a sort of darkness reigns within us, and we are lost in the

contemplation of things outside us, an idea suddenly flies forth, and

rushes with the swiftness of lightning across the infinite space which our

inner vision allows us to perceive. This radiant idea, springing into

existence like a will-o'-the-wisp, dies out never to return; an ephemeral

life, like that of babes who give their parents such infinite joy and

sorrow; a sort of still-born blossom in the fields of the mind. Sometimes

an idea, instead of springing forcibly into life and dying unembodied,

dawns gradually, hovers in the unknown limbo of the organs where it has its

birth; exhausts us by long gestation, develops, is itself fruitful, grows

outwardly in all the grace of youth and the promising attributes of a long

life; it can endure the closest inspection, invites it, and never tires the

sight; the investigation it undergoes commands the admiration we give to

works slowly elaborated. Sometimes ideas are evolved in a swarm; one brings

another; they come linked together; they vie with each other; they fly in

clouds, wild and headlong. Again, they rise up pallid and misty, and perish

for want of strength or of nutrition; the vital force is lacking. Or again,

on certain days, they rush down into the depths to light up that immense

obscurity; they terrify us and leave the soul dejected.

"Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a

sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some

man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.

"Yes, within us and without, everything testifies to the livingness of

those exquisite creations, which I compare with flowers in obedience to

some unutterable revelation of their true nature!

"Their being produced as the final cause of man is, after all, not more

amazing than the production of perfume and color in a plant. Perfumes _are_

ideas, perhaps!

"When we consider that the line where flesh ends and the nail begins

contains the invisible and inexplicable mystery of the constant

transformation of a fluid into horn, we must confess that nothing is

impossible in the marvelous modifications of human tissue.

"And are there not in our inner nature phenomena of weight and motion

comparable to those of physical nature? Suspense, to choose an example

vividly familiar to everybody, is painful only as a result of the law in

virtue of which the weight of a body is multiplied by its velocity. The

weight of the feeling produced by suspense increases by the constant

addition of past pain to the pain of the moment.

"And then, to what, unless it be to the electric fluid, are we to attribute

the magic by which the Will enthrones itself so imperiously in the eye to

demolish obstacles at the behest of genius, thunders in the voice, or

filters, in spite of dissimulation, through the human frame? The current of

that sovereign fluid, which, in obedience to the high pressure of thought

or of feeling, flows in a torrent or is reduced to a mere thread, and

collects to flash in lightnings, is the occult agent to which are due the

evil or the beneficent efforts of Art and Passion--intonation of voice,

whether harsh or suave, terrible, lascivious, horrifying or seductive by

turns, thrilling the heart, the nerves, or the brain at our will; the

marvels of the touch, the instrument of the mental transfusions of a myriad

artists, whose creative fingers are able, after passionate study, to

reproduce the forms of nature; or, again, the infinite gradations of the

eye from dull inertia to the emission of the most terrifying gleams.

"By this system God is bereft of none of His rights. Mind, as a form of

matter, has brought me a new conviction of His greatness."

After hearing him discourse thus, after receiving into my soul his look

like a ray of light, it was difficult not to be dazzled by his conviction

and carried away by his arguments. The Mind appeared to me as a purely

physical power, surrounded by its innumerable progeny. It was a new

conception of humanity under a new form.

This brief sketch of the laws which, as Lambert maintained, constitute the

formula of our intellect, must suffice to give a notion of the prodigious

activity of his spirit feeding on itself. Louis had sought for proofs of

his theories in the history of great men, whose lives, as set forth by

their biographers, supply very curious particulars as to the operation of

their understanding. His memory allowed him to recall such facts as might

serve to support his statements; he had appended them to each chapter in

the form of demonstrations, so as to give to many of his theories an almost

mathematical certainty. The works of Cardan, a man gifted with singular

powers of insight, supplied him with valuable materials. He had not

forgotten that Apollonius of Tyana had, in Asia, announced the death of the

tyrant with every detail of his execution, at the very hour when it was

taking place in Rome; nor that Plotinus, when far away from Porphyrius, was

aware of his friend's intention to kill himself, and flew to dissuade him;

nor the incident in the last century, proved in the face of the most

incredulous mockery ever known--an incident most surprising to men who were

accustomed to regard doubt as a weapon against the fact alone, but simple

enough to believers--the fact that Alphonzo-Maria di Liguori, Bishop of

Saint-Agatha, administered consolations to Pope Ganganelli, who saw him,

heard him, and answered him, while the Bishop himself, at a great distance

from Rome, was in a trance at home, in the chair where he commonly sat on

his return from Mass. On recovering consciousness, he saw all his

attendants kneeling beside him, believing him to be dead: "My friends,"

said he, "the Holy Father is just dead." Two days later a letter confirmed

the news. The hour of the Pope's death coincided with that when the Bishop

had been restored to his natural state.

Nor had Lambert omitted the yet more recent adventure of an English girl

who was passionately attached to a sailor, and set out from London to seek

him. She found him, without a guide, making her way alone in the North

American wilderness, reaching him just in time to save his life.

Louis had found confirmatory evidence in the mysteries of the ancients, in

the acts of the martyrs--in which glorious instances may be found of the

triumph of human will, in the demonology of the Middle Ages, in criminal

trials and medical researches; always selecting the real fact, the

probable phenomenon, with admirable sagacity.

All this rich collection of scientific anecdotes, culled from so many

books, most of them worthy of credit, served no doubt to wrap parcels in;

and this work, which was curious, to say the least of it, as the outcome of

a most extraordinary memory, was doomed to destruction.

Among the various cases which added to the value of Lambert's _Treatise_

was an incident that had taken place in his own family, of which he had

told me before he wrote his essay. This fact, bearing on the post-existence

of the inner man, if I may be allowed to coin a new word for a phenomenon

hitherto nameless, struck me so forcibly that I have never forgotten it.

His father and mother were being forced into a lawsuit, of which the loss

would leave them with a stain on their good name, the only thing they had

in the world. Hence their anxiety was very great when the question first

arose as to whether they should yield to the plaintiff's unjust demands, or

should defend themselves against him. The matter came under discussion one

autumn evening, before a turf fire in the room used by the tanner and his

wife. Two or three relations were invited to this family council, and among

others Louis' maternal great-grandfather, an old laborer, much bent, but

with a venerable and dignified countenance, bright eyes, and a bald, yellow

head, on which grew a few locks of thin, white hair. Like the Obi of the

Negroes, or the Sagamore of the Indian savage, he was a sort of oracle,

consulted on important occasions. His land was tilled by his grandchildren,

who fed and served him; he predicted rain and fine weather, and told them

when to mow the hay and gather the crops. The barometric exactitude of his

forecasts was quite famous, and added to the confidence and respect he

inspired. For whole days he would sit immovable in his armchair. This state

of rapt meditation often came upon him since his wife's death; he had been

attached to her with the truest and most faithful affection.

This discussion was held in his presence, but he did not seem to give much

heed to it.

"My children," said he, when he was asked for his opinion, "this is too

serious a matter for me to decide on alone. I must go and consult my wife."

The old man rose, took his stick, and went out, to the great astonishment

of the others, who thought him daft. He presently came back and said:

"I did not have to go so far as the graveyard; your mother came to meet me;

I found her by the brook. She tells me that you will find some receipts in

the hands of a notary at Blois, which will enable you to gain your suit."

The words were spoken in a firm tone; the old man's demeanor and

countenance showed that such an apparition was habitual with him. In fact,

the disputed receipts were found, and the lawsuit was not attempted.

This event, under his father's roof and to his own knowledge, when Louis

was nine years old, contributed largely to his belief in Swedenborg's

miraculous visions, for in the course of that philosopher's life he

repeatedly gave proof of the power of sight developed in his Inner Being.

As he grew older, and as his intelligence was developed, Lambert was

naturally led to seek in the laws of nature for the causes of the miracle

which, in his childhood, had captivated his attention. What name can be

given to the chance which brought within his ken so many facts and books

bearing on such phenomena, and made him the principal subject and actor in

such marvelous manifestations of mind?

If Lambert had no other title to fame than the fact of his having

formulated, in his sixteenth year, such a psychological dictum as

this:--"The events which bear witness to the action of the human race, and

are the outcome of its intellect, have causes by which they are

preconceived, as our actions are accomplished in our mind before they are

reproduced by the outer man; presentiments or predictions are the

perception of these causes"--I think we may deplore in him a genius equal

to Pascal, Lavoisier, or Laplace. His chimerical notions about angels

perhaps overruled his work too long; but was it not in trying to make gold

that the alchemists unconsciously created chemistry? At the same time,

Lambert, at a later period, studied comparative anatomy, physics, geometry,

and other sciences bearing on his discoveries, and this was undoubtedly

with the purpose of collecting facts and submitting them to analysis--the

only torch that can guide us through the dark places of the most

inscrutable work of nature. He had too much good sense to dwell among the

clouds of theories which can all be expressed in a few words. In our day,

is not the simplest demonstration based on facts more highly esteemed than

the most specious system though defended by more or less ingenious

inductions? But as I did not know him at the period of his life when his

cogitations were, no doubt, the most productive of results, I can only

conjecture what the bent of his work must have been from that of his first

efforts of thought.

It is easy to see where his _Treatise on the Will_ was faulty. Though

gifted already with the powers which characterize superior men, he was but

a boy. His brain, though endowed with a great faculty for abstractions, was

still full of the delightful beliefs that hover around youth. Thus his

conception, while at some points it touched the ripest fruits of his

genius, still, by many more, clung to the smaller elements of its germs. To

certain readers, lovers of poetry, what he chiefly lacked must have been a

certain vein of interest.

But his work bore the stamp of the struggle that was going on in that noble

Spirit between the two great principles of Spiritualism and Materialism,

round which so many a fine genius has beaten its way without ever daring to

amalgamate them. Louis, at first purely Spiritualist, had been irresistibly

led to recognize the Material conditions of Mind. Confounded by the facts

of analysis at the moment when his heart still gazed with yearning at the

clouds that floated in Swedenborg's heaven, he had not yet acquired the

necessary powers to produce a coherent system, compactly cast in a piece,

as it were. Hence certain inconsistencies that have left their stamp even

on the sketch here given of his first attempts. Still, incomplete as his

work may have been, was it not the rough copy of a science of which he

would have investigated the secrets at a later time, have secured the

foundations, have examined, deduced, and connected the logical sequence?

* * * * *

Six months after the confiscation of the _Treatise on the Will_ I left

school. Our parting was unexpected. My mother, alarmed by a feverish attack

which for some months I had been unable to shake off, while my inactive

life induced symptoms of _coma_, carried me off at four or five hours'

notice. The announcement of my departure reduced Lambert to dreadful

dejection.

"Shall I ever see you again?" said he in his gentle voice, as he clasped me

in his arms. "You will live," he went on, "but I shall die. If I can, I

will come back to you."

Only the young can utter such words with the accent of conviction that

gives them the impressiveness of prophecy, of a pledge, leaving a terror of

its fulfilment. For a long time indeed I vaguely looked for the promised

apparition. Even now there are days of depression, of doubt, alarm, and

loneliness, when I am forced to repel the intrusion of that sad parting,

though it was not fated to be the last.

When I crossed the yard by which we left, Lambert was at one of the

refectory windows to see me pass. By my request my mother obtained leave

for him to dine with us at the inn, and in the evening I escorted him back

to the fatal gate of the college. No lover and his mistress ever shed more

tears at parting.

"Well, good-bye; I shall be left alone in this desert!" said he, pointing

to the playground where two hundred boys were disporting themselves and

shouting. "When I come back half dead with fatigue from my long excursions

through the fields of thought, on whose heart can I rest? I could tell you

everything in a look. Who will understand me now?--Good-bye! I could wish I

had never met you; I should not know all I am losing."

"And what is to become of me?" said I. "Is not my position a dreadful one.

_I_ have nothing here to uphold me!" and I slapped my forehead.

He shook his head with a gentle gesture, gracious and sad, and we parted.

At that time Louis Lambert was about five feet five inches in height; he

grew no more. His countenance, which was full of expression, revealed his

sweet nature. Divine patience, developed by harsh usage, and the constant

concentration needed for his meditative life, had bereft his eyes of the

audacious pride which is so attractive in some faces, and which had so

shocked our masters. Peaceful mildness gave charm to his face, an exquisite

serenity that was never marred by a tinge of irony or satire; for his

natural kindliness tempered his conscious strength and superiority. He had

pretty hands, very slender, and almost always moist. His frame was a

marvel, a model for a sculptor; but our iron-gray uniform, with gilt

buttons and knee-breeches, gave us such an ungainly appearance that

Lambert's fine proportions and firm muscles could only be appreciated in

the bath. When we swam in our pool in the Loir, Louis was conspicuous by

the whiteness of his skin, which was unlike the different shades of our

schoolfellows' bodies mottled by the cold, or blue from the water.

Gracefully formed, elegant in his attitudes, delicate in hue, never

shivering after his bath, perhaps because he avoided the shade and always

ran into the sunshine, Louis was like one of those cautious blossoms that

close their petals to the blast and refuse to open unless to a clear sky.

He ate little, and drank water only; either by instinct or by choice he was

averse to any exertion that made a demand on his strength; his movements

were few and simple, like those of Orientals or of savages, with whom

gravity seems a condition of nature.

As a rule, he disliked everything that resembled any special care for his

person. He commonly sat with his head a little inclined to the left, and so

constantly rested his elbows on the table, that the sleeves of his coats

were soon in holes.

To this slight picture of the outer man I must add a sketch of his moral

qualities, for I believe I can now judge him impartially.

Though naturally religious, Louis did not accept the minute practices of

the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with Saint

Theresa and Fenelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints, who, in our

day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. He was rigidly calm

during the services. His own prayers went up in gusts, in aspirations,

without any regular formality; in all things he gave himself up to nature,

and would not pray, any more than he would think, at any fixed hour. In

chapel he was equally apt to think of God or to meditate on some problem of

philosophy.

To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect type of his system. _Et Verbum

caro factum est_ seemed a sublime statement intended to express the

traditional formula of the Will, the Word, and the Act made visible.

Christ's unconsciousness of His Death--having so perfected His inner Being

by divine works, that one day the invisible form of it appeared to His

disciples--and the other Mysteries of the Gospels, the magnetic cures

wrought by Christ, and the gift of tongues, all to him confirmed his

doctrine. I remember once hearing him say on this subject, that the

greatest work that could be written nowadays was a History of the Primitive

Church. And he never rose to such poetic heights as when, in the evening,

as we conversed, he would enter on an inquiry into miracles, worked by the

power of Will during that great age of faith. He discerned the strongest

evidence of his theory in most of the martyrdoms endured during the first

century of our era, which he spoke of as _the great era of the Mind_.

"Do not the phenomena observed in almost every instance of the torments so

heroically endured by the early Christians for the establishment of the

faith, amply prove that Material force will never prevail against the force

of Ideas or the Will of man?" he would say. "From this effect, produced by

the Will of all, each man may draw conclusions in favor of his own."

I need say nothing of his views on poetry or history, nor of his judgment

on the masterpieces of our language. There would be little interest in the

record of opinions now almost universally held, though at that time, from

the lips of a boy, they might seem remarkable. Louis was capable of the

highest flights. To give a notion of his talents in two words, he could

have written _Zadig_ as wittily as Voltaire; he could have thought out the

Dialogue between Sylla and Eucrates as powerfully as Montesquieu. His

rectitude of character made him desire above all else in a work that it

should bear the stamp of utility; at the same time, his refined taste

demanded novelty of thought as well as of form. One of his most remarkable

literary observations, which will serve as a clue to all the others, and

show the lucidity of his judgment, is this, which has ever dwelt in my

memory, "The Apocalypse is written ecstasy." He regarded the Bible as a

part of the traditional history of the antediluvian nations which had taken

for its share the new humanity. He thought that the mythology of the Greeks

was borrowed both from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the sacred Books of

India, adapted after their own fashion by the beauty-loving Hellenes.

"It is impossible," said he, "to doubt the priority of the Asiatic

Scriptures; they are earlier than our sacred books. The man who is candid

enough to admit this historical fact sees the whole world expand before

him. Was it not on the Asiatic highland that the few men took refuge who

were able to escape the catastrophe that ruined our globe--if, indeed, men

had existed before that cataclysm or shock? A serious query, the answer to

which lies at the bottom of the sea. The anthropogony of the Bible is

merely a genealogy of a swarm escaping from the human hive which settled on

the mountainous slopes of Thibet between the summits of the Himalaya and

the Caucasus.

"The character of the primitive ideas of that horde called by its lawgiver

the people of God, no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps also to induce

it to maintain his laws and his system of government--for the Books of

Moses are a religious, political, and civil code--that character bears the

authority of terror; convulsions of nature are interpreted with stupendous

power as a vengeance from on high. In fact, since this wandering tribe knew

none of the ease enjoyed by a community settled in a patriarchal home,

their sorrows as pilgrims inspired them with none but gloomy poems,

majestic but blood-stained. In the Hindoos, on the contrary, the spectacle

of the rapid recoveries of the natural world, and the prodigious effects of

sunshine, which they were the first to recognize, gave rise to happy images

of blissful love, to the worship of Fire and of the endless

personifications of reproductive force. These fine fancies are lacking in

the Book of the Hebrews. A constant need of self-preservation amid all the

dangers and the lands they traversed to reach the Promised Land engendered

their exclusive race-feeling and their hatred of all other nations.

"These three Scriptures are the archives of an engulfed world. Therein lies

the secret of the extraordinary splendor of those languages and their

myths. A grand human history lies beneath those names of men and places,

and those fables which charm us so irresistibly, we know not why. Perhaps

it is because we find in them the native air of renewed humanity."

Thus, to him, this threefold literature included all the thoughts of man.

Not a book could be written, in his opinion, of which the subject might not

there be discerned in its germ. This view shows how learnedly he had

pursued his early studies of the Bible, and how far they had led him.

Hovering, as it were, over the heads of society, and knowing it solely from

books, he could judge it coldly.

"The law," said he, "never puts a check on the enterprises of the rich and

great, but crushes the poor, who, on the contrary, need protection."

His kind heart did not therefore allow him to sympathize in political

ideas; his system led rather to the passive obedience of which Jesus set

the example. During the last hours of my life at Vendome, Louis had ceased

to feel the spur to glory; he had, in a way, had an abstract enjoyment of

fame; and having opened it, as the ancient priests of sacrifice sought to

read the future in the hearts of men, he had found nothing in the entrails

of his chimera. Scorning a sentiment so wholly personal: "Glory," said he,

"is but beatified egoism."

Here, perhaps, before taking leave of this exceptional boyhood, I may

pronounce judgment on it by a rapid glance.

A short time before our separation, Lambert said to me:

"Apart from the general laws which I have formulated--and this, perhaps,

will be my glory--laws which must be those of the human organism, the life

of man is Movement determined in each individual by the pressure of some

inscrutable influence--by the brain, the heart, or the sinews. All the

innumerable modes of human existence result from the proportions in which

these three generating forces are more or less intimately combined with the

substances they assimilate in the environment they live in."

He stopped short, struck his forehead, and exclaimed: "How strange! In

every great man whose portrait I have remarked, the neck is short. Perhaps

nature requires that in them the heart should be nearer to the brain!"

Then he went on:

"From that, a sum-total of action takes its rise which constitutes social

life. The man of sinew contributes action or strength; the man of brain,

genius; the man of heart, faith. But," he added sadly, "faith sees only the

clouds of the sanctuary; the Angel alone has light."

So, according to his own definitions, Lambert was all brain and all heart.

It seems to me that his intellectual life was divided into three marked

phases.

Under the impulsion, from his earliest years, of a precocious activity,

due, no doubt, to some malady--or to some special perfection--of organism,

his powers were concentrated on the functions of the inner senses and a

superabundant flow of nerve-fluid. As a man of ideas, he craved to satisfy

the thirst of his brain, to assimilate every idea. Hence his reading; and

from his reading, the reflections that gave him the power of reducing

things to their simplest expression, and of absorbing them to study them in

their essence. Thus, the advantages of this splendid stage, acquired by

other men only after long study, were achieved by Lambert during his bodily

childhood: a happy childhood, colored by the studious joys of a born poet.

The point which most thinkers reach at last was to him the starting-point,

whence his brain was to set out one day in search of new worlds of

knowledge. Though as yet he knew it not, he had made for himself the most

exacting life possible, and the most insatiably greedy. Merely to live, was

he not compelled to be perpetually casting nutriment into the gulf he had

opened in himself? Like some beings who dwell in the grosser world, might

he not die of inanition for want of feeding abnormal and disappointed

cravings? Was not this a sort of debauchery of the intellect which might

lead to spontaneous combustion, like that of bodies saturated with alcohol?

I had seen nothing of this first phase of his brain-development; it is only

now, at a later day, that I can thus give an account of its prodigious

fruit and results. Lambert was now thirteen.

I was so fortunate as to witness the first stage of the second period.

Lambert was cast into all the miseries of school-life--and that, perhaps,

was his salvation--it absorbed the superabundance of his thoughts. After

passing from concrete ideas to their purest expression, from words to their

ideal import, and from that import to principles, after reducing everything

to the abstract, to enable him to live he yearned for yet other

intellectual creations. Quelled by the woes of school and the critical

development of his physical constitution, he became thoughtful, dreamed of

feeling, and caught a glimpse of new sciences--positively masses of ideas.

Checked in his career, and not yet strong enough to contemplate the higher

spheres, he contemplated his inmost self. I then perceived in him the

struggle of the Mind reacting on itself, and trying to detect the secrets

of its own nature, like a physician who watches the course of his own

disease.

At this stage of weakness and strength, of childish grace and superhuman

powers, Louis Lambert is the creature who, more than any other, gave me a

poetical and truthful image of the being we call an angel, always excepting

one woman whose name, whose features, whose identity, and whose life I

would fain hide from all the world, so as to be sole master of the secret

of her existence, and to bury it in the depths of my heart.

* * * * *

The third phase I was not destined to see. It began when Lambert and I were

parted, for he did not leave college till he was eighteen, in the summer of

1815. He had at that time lost his father and mother about six months

before. Finding no member of his family with whom his soul could

sympathize, expansive still, but, since our parting, thrown back on

himself, he made his home with his uncle, who was also his guardian, and

who, having been turned out of his benefice as a priest who had taken the

oaths, had come to settle at Blois. There Louis lived for some time; but

consumed ere long by the desire to finish his incomplete studies, he came

to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and to drink of science at its highest

fount. The old priest, being very fond of his nephew, left Louis free to

spend his whole little inheritance in his three years' stay in Paris,

though he lived very poorly. This fortune consisted of but a few thousand

francs.

Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of 1820, driven from Paris by

the sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there. He must often

have been a victim to the secret storms, the terrible rage of mind by which

artists are tossed to judge from the only fact his uncle recollected, and

the only letter he preserved of all those which Louis Lambert wrote to him

at that time, perhaps because it was the last and the longest.

To begin with the story. Louis one evening was at the Theatre-Francais,

seated on a bench in the upper gallery, near to one of the pillars which,

in those days, divided off the third row of boxes. On rising between the

acts, he saw a young woman who had just come into the box next him. The

sight of this lady, who was young, pretty, well dressed, in a low bodice no

doubt, and escorted by a man for whom her face beamed with all the charms

of love, produced such a terrible effect on Lambert's soul and senses, that

he was obliged to leave the theatre. If he had not been controlled by some

remaining glimmer of reason, which was not wholly extinguished by this

first fever of burning passion, he might perhaps have yielded to the almost

irresistible desire that came over him to kill the young man on whom the

lady's looks beamed. Was not this a reversion, in the heart of the Paris

world, to the savage passion that regards women as its prey, an effect of

animal instinct combining with the almost luminous flashes of a soul

crushed under the weight of thought? In short, was it not the prick of the

penknife so vividly imagined by the boy, felt by the man as the thunderbolt

of his most vital craving--for love?

And now, here is the letter that depicts the state of his mind as it was

struck by the spectacle of Parisian civilization. His feelings, perpetually

wounded no doubt in that whirlpool of self-interest, must always have

suffered there; he probably had no friend to comfort him, no enemy to give

tone to his life. Compelled to live in himself alone, having no one to

share his subtle raptures, he may have hoped to solve the problem of his

destiny by a life of ecstasy, adopting an almost vegetative attitude, like

an anchorite of the early Church, and abdicating the empire of the

intellectual world.

This letter seems to hint at such a scheme, which is a temptation to all

lofty souls at periods of social reform. But is not this purpose, in some

cases, the result of a vocation? Do not some of them endeavor to

concentrate their powers by long silence, so as to emerge fully capable of

governing the world by word or by deed? Louis must, assuredly, have found

much bitterness in his intercourse with men, or have striven hard with

Society in terrible irony, without extracting anything from it, before

uttering so strident a cry, and expressing, poor fellow, the desire which

satiety of power and of all earthly things has led even monarchs to

indulge!

And perhaps, too, he went back to solitude to carry out some great work

that was floating inchoate in his brain. We would gladly believe it as we

read this fragment of his thoughts, betraying the struggle of his soul at

the time when youth was ending and the terrible power of production was

coming into being, to which we might have owed the works of the man.

This letter connects itself with the adventure at the theatre. The incident

and the letter throw light on each other, body and soul were tuned to the

same pitch. This tempest of doubts and asseverations, of clouds and of

lightnings that flash before the thunder, ending by a starved yearning for

heavenly illumination, throws such a light on the third phase of his

education as enables us to understand it perfectly. As we read these lines,

written at chance moments, taken up when the vicissitudes of life in Paris

allowed, may we not fancy that we see an oak at that stage of its growth

when its inner expansion bursts the tender green bark, covering it with

wrinkles and cracks, when its majestic stature is in preparation--if indeed

the lightnings of heaven and the axe of man shall spare it?

This letter, then, will close, alike for the poet and the philosopher, this

portentous childhood and unappreciated youth. It finishes off the outline

of this nature in its germ. Philosophers will regret the foliage

frost-nipped in the bud; but they will, perhaps, find the flowers expanding

in regions far above the highest places of the earth.

"PARIS, _September-October 1819_.

"DEAR UNCLE,--I shall soon be leaving this part of the

world, where I could never bear to live. I find no one

here who likes what I like, who works at my work, or is

amazed at what amazes me. Thrown back on myself, I eat

my heart out in misery. My long and patient study of

Society here has brought me to melancholy conclusions,

in which doubt predominates.

"Here, money is the mainspring of everything. Money is

indispensable, even for going without money. But though

that dross is necessary to any one who wishes to think

in peace, I have not courage enough to make it the sole

motive power of my thoughts. To make a fortune, I must

take up a profession; in two words, I must, by

acquiring some privilege of position or of

self-advertisement, either legal or ingeniously

contrived, purchase the right of taking day by day out

of somebody else's purse a certain sum which, by the

end of the year, would amount to a small capital; and

this, in twenty years, would hardly secure an income of

four or five thousand francs to a man who deals

honestly. An advocate, a notary, a merchant, any

recognized professional, has earned a living for his

later days in the course of fifteen or sixteen years

after ending his apprenticeship.

"But I have never felt fit for work of this kind. I

prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction,

contemplation to activity. I am absolutely devoid of

the constant attention indispensable to the making of a

fortune. Any mercantile venture, any need for using

other people's money would bring me to grief, and I

should be ruined. Though I have nothing, at least at

the moment, I owe nothing. The man who gives his life

to the achievement of great things in the sphere of

intellect, needs very little; still, though twenty sous

a day would be enough, I do not possess that small

income for my laborious idleness. When I wish to

cogitate, want drives me out of the sanctuary where my

mind has its being. What is to become of me?

"I am not frightened at poverty. If it were not that

beggars are imprisoned, branded, scorned, I would beg,

to enable me to solve at my leisure the problems that

haunt me. Still, this sublime resignation, by which I

might emancipate my mind, through abstracting it from

the body, would not serve my end. I should still need

money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for

that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage

possessed of both heaven and earth. A man need only

never stoop, to remain lofty in poverty. He who

struggles and endures, while marching on to a glorious

end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have the

strength to fight here? We can climb cliffs, but it is

unendurable to remain for ever tramping the mud.

Everything here checks the flight of a spirit that

strives towards the future.

"I should not be afraid of myself in a desert cave; I

am afraid of myself here. In the desert I should be

alone with myself, undisturbed; here man has a thousand

wants which drag him down. You go out walking, absorbed

in dreams; the voice of the beggar asking an alms

brings you back to this world of hunger and thirst. You

need money only to take a walk. Your organs of sense,

perpetually wearied by trifles, never get any rest. The

poet's sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and

what ought to be his glory becomes his torment; his

imagination is his cruelest enemy. The injured workman,

the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute who has

fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged--even

vice and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the

world is merciless to the inventor, to the man who

thinks. Here everything must show an immediate and

practical result. Fruitless attempts are mocked at,

though they may lead to the greatest discoveries; the

deep and untiring study that demands long concentration

of every faculty is not valued here. The State might

pay talent as it pays the bayonet; but it is afraid of

being taken in by mere cleverness, as if genius could

be counterfeited for any length of time.

"Ah, my dear uncle, when monastic solitude was

destroyed, uprooted from its home at the foot of

mountains, under green and silent shade, asylums ought

to have been provided for those suffering souls who, by

an idea, promote the progress of nations or prepare

some new and fruitful development of science."

"_September 20th._