Title: Louis Lambert
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Author: Honore de Balzac
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Louis Lambert
Honore de Balzac
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Honore de Balzac .....................................................................................................................................1
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Louis Lambert
Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring
DEDICATION
"Et nunc et semper dilectoe dicatum."
Louis Lambert was born at Montoire, a little town in the Vendomois, where his father owned a tannery of no
great magnitude, and intended that his son should succeed him; but his precocious bent for study modified the
paternal decision. For, indeed, the tanner and his wife adored Louis, their only child, and never contradicted
him in anything.
At the age of five Louis had begun by reading the Old and New Testaments; and these two Books, including
so many books, had sealed his fate. Could that childish imagination understand the mystical depths of the
Scriptures? Could it so early follow the flight of the Holy Spirit across the worlds? Or was it merely attracted
by the romantic touches which abound in those Oriental poems! Our narrative will answer these questions to
some readers.
One thing resulted from this first reading of the Bible: Louis went all over Montoire begging for books, and
he obtained them by those winning ways peculiar to children, which no one can resist. While devoting
himself to these studies under no sort of guidance, he reached the age of ten.
At that period substitutes for the army were scarce; rich families secured them long beforehand to have them
ready when the lots were drawn. The poor tanner's modest fortune did not allow of their purchasing a
substitute for their son, and they saw no means allowed by law for evading the conscription but that of
making him a priest; so, in 1807, they sent him to his maternal uncle, the parish priest of Mer, another small
town on the Loire, not far from Blois. This arrangement at once satisfied Louis' passion for knowledge, and
his parents' wish not to expose him to the dreadful chances of war; and, indeed, his taste for study and
precocious intelligence gave grounds for hoping that he might rise to high fortunes in the Church.
After remaining for about three years with his uncle, an old and not uncultured Oratorian, Louis left him early
in 1811 to enter the college at Vendome, where he was maintained at the cost of Madame de Stael.
Lambert owed the favor and patronage of this celebrated lady to chance, or shall we not say to Providence,
who can smooth the path of forlorn genius? To us, indeed, who do not see below the surface of human things,
such vicissitudes, of which we find many examples in the lives of great men, appear to be merely the result of
physical phenomena; to most biographers the head of a man of genius rises above the herd as some noble
plant in the fields attracts the eye of a botanist in its splendor. This comparison may well be applied to Louis
Lambert's adventure; he was accustomed to spend the time allowed him by his uncle for holidays at his
father's house; but instead of indulging, after the manner of schoolboys, in the sweets of the delightful far
niente that tempts us at every age, he set out every morning with part of a loaf and his books, and went to
read and meditate in the woods, to escape his mother's remonstrances, for she believed such persistent study
to be injurious. How admirable is a mother's instinct! From that time reading was in Louis a sort of appetite
which nothing could satisfy; he devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious works,
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history, philosophy, and physics. He has told me that he found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries
for lack of other books, and I readily believed him. What scholar has not many a time found pleasure in
seeking the probable meaning of some unknown word? The analysis of a word, its physiognomy and history,
would be to Lambert matter for long dreaming. But these were not the instinctive dreams by which a boy
accustoms himself to the phenomena of life, steels himself to every moral or physical perceptionan
involuntary education which subsequently brings forth fruit both in the understanding and character of a man;
no, Louis mastered the facts, and he accounted for them after seeking out both the principle and the end with
the mother wit of a savage. Indeed, from the age of fourteen, by one of those startling freaks in which nature
sometimes indulges, and which proved how anomalous was his temperament, he would utter quite simply
ideas of which the depth was not revealed to me till a long time after.
"Often," he has said to me when speaking of his studies, "often have I made the most delightful voyage,
floating on a word down the abyss of the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of grass tossing on the
ripples of a stream. Starting from Greece, I would get to Rome, and traverse the whole extent of modern ages.
What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a word! It has, of course, received various
stamps from the occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed different ideas in different
places; but is it not still grander to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion? Merely to
regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an
ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored by the idea they represent? Then, to whose genius are they
due? If it takes great intelligence to create a word, how old may human speech be? The combination of
letters, their shapes, and the look they give to the word, are the exact reflection, in accordance with the
character of each nation, of the unknown beings whose traces survive in us.
"Who can philosophically explain the transition from sensation to thought, from thought to word, from the
word to its hieroglyphic presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to written
language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of images, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in a
sense, the hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing human ideas as embodied in
the forms of animals that gave rise to the shapes of the first signs used in the East for writing down language?
Then has it not left its traces by tradition on our modern languages, which have all seized some remnant of
the primitive speech of nations, a majestic and solemn tongue whose grandeur and solemnity decrease as
communities grow old; whose sonorous tones ring in the Hebrew Bible, and still are noble in Greece, but
grow weaker under the progress of successive phases of civilization?
"Is it to this timehonored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried in every human word? In the word
True do we not discern a certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest a
vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in all things? The syllable seems to me singularly
crisp and fresh.
"I chose the formula of an abstract idea on purpose, not wishing to illustrate the case by a word which should
make it too obvious to the apprehension, as the word Flight for instance, which is a direct appeal to the
senses.
"But is it not so with every root word? They are all stamped with a living power that comes from the soul,
and which they restore to the soul through the mysterious and wonderful action and reaction between thought
and speech. Might we not speak of it as a lover who finds on his mistress' lips as much love as he gives?
Thus, by their mere physiognomy, words call to life in our brain the beings which they serve to clothe. Like
all beings, there is but one place where their properties are at full liberty to act and develop. But the subject
demands a science to itself perhaps!"
And he would shrug his shoulders as much as to say, "But we are too high and too low!"
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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 memoryfor places, for names, for words, things, and faces. He not only recalled any object at will, but
he saw them in his mind, situated, lighted, and colored as he had originally seen them. And this power he
could exert with equal effect with regard to the most abstract efforts of the intellect. He could remember, as
he said, not merely the position of a sentence in the book where he had met with it, but the frame of mind he
had been in at remote dates. Thus his was the singular privilege of being able to retrace in memory the whole
life and progress of his mind, from the ideas he had first acquired to the last thought evolved in it, from the
most obscure to the clearest. His brain, accustomed in early youth to the mysterious mechanism by which
human faculties are concentrated, drew from this rich treasury endless images full of life and freshness, on
which he fed his spirit during those lucid spells of contemplation.
"Whenever I wish it," said he to me in his own language, to which a fund of remembrance gave precocious
originality, "I can draw a veil over my eyes. Then I suddenly see within me a camera obscura, where natural
objects are reproduced in purer forms than those under which they first appeared to my external sense."
At the age of twelve his imagination, stimulated by the perpetual exercise of his faculties, had developed to a
point which permitted him to have such precise concepts of things which he knew only from reading about
them, that the image stamped on his mind could not have been clearer if he had actually seen them, whether
this was by a process of analogy or that he was gifted with a sort of second sight by which he could command
all nature.
"When I read the story of the battle of Austerlitz," said he to me one day, "I saw every incident. The roar of
the cannon, the cries of the fighting men rang in my ears, and made my inmost self quiver; I could smell the
powder; I heard the clatter of horses and the voices of men; I looked down on the plain where armed nations
were in collision, just as if I had been on the heights of Santon. The scene was as terrifying as a passage from
the Apocalypse." On the occasions when he brought all his powers into play, and in some degree lost
consciousness of his physical existence, and lived on only by the remarkable energy of his mental powers,
whose sphere was enormously expanded, he left space behind him, to use his own words.
But I will not here anticipate the intellectual phases of his life. Already, in spite of myself, I have reversed the
order in which I ought to tell the history of this man, who transferred all his activities to thinking, as others
throw all their life into action.
A strong bias drew his mind into mystical studies.
"Abyssus abyssum," he would say. "Our spirit is abysmal and loves the abyss. In childhood, manhood, and
old age we are always eager for mysteries in whatever form they present themselves."
This predilection was disastrous; if indeed his life can be measured by ordinary standards, or if we may gauge
another's happiness by our own or by social notions. This taste for the "things of heaven," another phrase he
was fond of using, this mens divinior, was due perhaps to the influence produced on his mind by the first
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books he read at his uncle's. Saint Theresa and Madame Guyon were a sequel to the Bible; they had the
firstfruits of his manly intelligence, and accustomed him to those swift reactions of the soul of which
ecstasy is at once the result and the means. This line of study, this peculiar taste, elevated his heart, purified,
ennobled it, gave him an appetite for the divine nature, and suggested to him the almost womanly refinement
of feeling which is instinctive in great men; perhaps their sublime superiority is no more than the desire to
devote themselves which characterizes woman, only transferred to the greatest things.
As a result of these early impressions, Louis passed immaculate through his school life; this beautiful
virginity of the senses naturally resulted in the richer fervor of his blood, and in increased faculties of mind.
The Baroness de Stael, forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris, spent several months of her
banishment on an estate near Vendome. One day, when out walking, she met on the skirts of the park the
tanner's son, almost in rags, and absorbed in reading. The book was a translation of Heaven and Hell. At that
time Monsieur Saint Martin, Monsieur de Gence, and a few other French or half German writers were
almost the only persons in the French Empire to whom the name of Swedenborg was known. Madame de
Stael, greatly surprised, took the book from him with the roughness she affected in her questions, looks, and
manners, and with a keen glance at Lambert,
"Do you understand all this?" she asked.
"Do you pray to God?" said the child.
"Why? yes!"
"And do you understand Him?"
The Baroness was silent for a moment; then she sat down by Lambert, and began to talk to him.
Unfortunately, my memory, though retentive, is far from being so trustworthy as my friend's, and I have
forgotten the whole of the dialogue excepting those first words.
Such a meeting was of a kind to strike Madame de Stael very greatly; on her return home she said but little
about it, notwithstanding an effusiveness which in her became mere loquacity; but it evidently occupied her
thoughts.
The only person now living who preserves any recollection of the incident, and whom I catechised to be
informed of what few words Madame de Stael had let drop, could with difficulty recall these words spoken
by the Baroness as describing Lambert, "He is a real seer."
Louis failed to justify in the eyes of the world the high hopes he had inspired in his protectress. The transient
favor she showed him was regarded as a feminine caprice, one of the fancies characteristic of artist souls.
Madame de Stael determined to save Louis Lambert alike from serving the Emperor or the Church, and to
preserve him for the glorious destiny which, she thought, awaited him; for she made him out to be a second
Moses snatched from the waters. Before her departure she instructed a friend of hers, Monsieur de Corbigny,
to send her Moses in due course to the High School at Vendome; then she probably forgot him.
Having entered this college at the age of fourteen, early in 1811, Lambert would leave it at the end of 1814,
when he had finished the course of Philosophy. I doubt whether during the whole time he ever heard a word
of his benefactressif 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
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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
halfmilitary 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 youthsucceeding the
Jesuits, in fact, in certain of their establishmentsthe colleges of Vendome, of Tournon, of la Fleche,
PontLevoy, 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 reopened it under
the old rules, with the habits, practices, and customs which gave this school a character with which I have
seen nothing at all comparable in any that I have visited since I left that establishment.
Standing in the heart of the town, on the little river Loire which flows under its walls, the college possesses
extensive precincts, carefully enclosed by walls, and including all the buildings necessary for an institution on
that scale: a chapel, a theatre, an infirmary, a bakehouse, gardens, and water supply. This college is the most
celebrated home of learning in all the central provinces, and receives pupils from them and from the colonies.
Distance prohibits any frequent visits from parents to their children.
The rule of the House forbids holidays away from it. Once entered there, a pupil never leaves till his studies
are finished. With the exception of walks taken under the guidance of the Fathers, everything is calculated to
give the School the benefit of conventual discipline; in my day the tawse was still a living memory, and the
classical leather strap played its terrible part with all the honors. The punishment originally invented by the
Society of Jesus, as alarming to the moral as to the physical man, was still in force in all the integrity of the
original code.
Letters to parents were obligatory on certain days, so was confession. Thus our sins and our sentiments were
all according to pattern. Everything bore the stamp of monastic rule. I well remember, among other relics of
the ancient order, the inspection we went through every Sunday. We were all in our best, placed in file like
soldiers to await the arrival of the two inspectors who, attended by the tutors and the tradesmen, examined us
from the three points of view of dress, health, and morals.
The two or three hundred pupils lodged in the establishment were divided, according to ancient custom, into
the minimes (the smallest), the little boys, the middle boys, and the big boys. The division of the minimes
included the eighth and seventh classes; the little boys formed the sixth, fifth, and fourth; the middle boys
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were classed as third and second; and the first class comprised the senior studentsof 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 dininghall, 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 dessertfor we had dessertthe 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
pigeonhouses, 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 cheapjack, of whom big and little boys could procureaccording to his
prospectusboxes, stilts, tools, Jacobin pigeons, and Nuns, Massbooksan article in small demand
penknives, paper, pens, pencils, ink of all colors, balls and marbles; in short, the whole catalogue of the most
treasured possessions of boys, including everything from sauce for the pigeons we were obliged to kill off, to
the earthenware pots in which we set aside the rice from supper to be eaten at next morning's breakfast.
Which of us was so unhappy as to have forgotten how his heart beat at the sight of this booth, open
periodically during playhours on Sundays, to which we went, each in his turn, to spend his little
pocketmoney; 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
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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 tomorrow!" 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 timeamong the little boys. Our housemasters were two men whom we called Fathers from habit and
tradition, though they were not priests. In my time there were indeed but three genuine Oratorians to whom
this title legitimately belonged; in 1814 they all left the college, which had gradually become secularized, to
find occupation about the altar in various country parishes, like the cure of Mer.
Father Haugoult, the master for the week, was not a bad man, but of very moderate attainments, and he
lacked the tact which is indispensable for discerning the different characters of children, and graduating their
punishment to their powers of resistance. Father Haugoult, then, began very obligingly to communicate to his
pupils the wonderful events which were to end on the morrow in the advent of the most singular of "new
boys." Games were at an end. All the children came round in silence to hear the story of Louis Lambert,
discovered, like an aerolite, by Madame de Stael, in a corner of the wood. Monsieur Haugoult had to tell us
all about Madame de Stael; that evening she seemed to me ten feet high; I saw at a later time the picture of
Corinne, in which Gerard represents her as so tall and handsome; and, alas! the woman painted by my
imagination so far transcended this, that the real Madame de Stael fell at once in my estimation, even after I
read her book of really masculine power, De l'Allemagne.
But Lambert at that time was an even greater wonder. Monsieur Mareschal, the headmaster, after examining
him, had thought of placing him among the senior boys. It was Louis' ignorance of Latin that placed him so
low as the fourth class, but he would certainly leap up a class every year; and, as a remarkable exception, he
was to be one of the "Academy." Proh pudor! we were to have the honor of counting among the "little boys"
one whose coat was adorned with the red ribbon displayed by the "Academicians" of Vendome. These
Academicians enjoyed distinguished privileges; they often dined at the director's table, and held two literary
meetings annually, at which we were all present to hear their elucubrations. An Academician was a great man
in embryo. And if every Vendome scholar would speak the truth, he would confess that, in later life, an
Academician of the great French Academy seemed to him far less remarkable than the stupendous boy who
wore the cross and the imposing red ribbon which were the insignia of our "Academy."
It was very unusual to be one of that illustrious body before attaining to the second class, for the
Academicians were expected to hold public meetings every Thursday during the holidays, and to read tales in
verse or prose, epistles, essays, tragedies, dramas compositions far above the intelligence of the lower
classes. I long treasured the memory of a story called the "Green Ass," which was, I think, the masterpiece of
this unknown Society. In the fourth, and an Academician! This boy of fourteen, a poet already, the protege of
Madame de Stael, a coming genius, said Father Haugoult, was to be one of us! a wizard, a youth capable of
writing a composition or a translation while we were being called into lessons, and of learning his lessons by
reading them through but once. Louis Lambert bewildered all our ideas. And Father Haugoult's curiosity and
impatience to see this new boy added fuel to our excited fancy.
"If he has pigeons, he can have no pigeonhouse; 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.
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"Oh, I wish I might be his chum!" cried an enthusiast.
In school language, the word here rendered chumfaisant, or in some schools, copinexpressed 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,
Pascalin 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 playhours 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 illtimed 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
companionsthe 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
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had some points of likeness to my own. I was at last to have a companion in daydreams and meditations.
Though I knew not yet what glory meant, I thought it glory to be the familiar friend of a child whose
immortality was foreseen by Madame de Stael. To me Louis Lambert was as a giant.
The lookedfor 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 tomorrow."
Then, after speaking a few words in an undertone to the classmaster, 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
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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 schoollife, 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 classtables, consisting of twelve large desks, face to face and sloping from the middle;
he leaned back against the classmaster's desk, steadying the table with his feet on the crossbar 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 sublimewhy should I not say divine?soul, for what is nearer to God than genius in the heart
of a child? The similarity of our tastes and ideas made us friends and chums; our intimacy was so brotherly
that our school fellows joined our two names; one was never spoken without the other, and to call either
they always shouted "PoetandPythagoras!" 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 coordinate them, and I have mastered the secrets of that fertile brain
by looking back to the delightful days of our boyish affection. So it was time alone that initiated me into the
meaning of the events and facts that were crowded into that obscure life, as into that of many another man
who is lost to science. Indeed, this narrative, so far as the expression and appreciation of many things is
concerned, will be found full of what may be termed moral anachronisms, which perhaps will not detract
from its peculiar interest.
In the course of the first few months after coming to Vendome, Louis became the victim of a malady which,
though the symptoms were invisible to the eye of our superiors, considerably interfered with the exercise of
his remarkable gifts. Accustomed to live in the open air, and to the freedom of a purely haphazard education,
happy in the tender care of an old man who was devoted to him, used to meditating in the sunshine, he found
it very hard to submit to college rules, to walk in the ranks, to live within the four walls of a room where
eighty boys were sitting in silence on wooden forms each in front of his desk. His senses were developed to
such perfection as gave them the most sensitive keenness, and every part of him suffered from this life in
common.
The effluvia that vitiated the air, mingled with the odors of a classroom that was never clean, nor free from
the fragments of our breakfasts or snacks, affected his sense of smell, the sense which, being more
immediately connected than the others with the nerve centers of the brain, must, when shocked, cause
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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 plunderpigeons killed for fete days, or tidbits filched from the dinnertable. 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 washingplace, 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 playingyard, produced a suffocatingly pestilent
muckheap.
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 pinthrust that wounded Louis to the quick. And then he never earned
the rest of the playtime; 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 battlefield 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 deepseated 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 classfellows 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 forgottenagain
an imposition. How often have we scribbled an exercise during the time when the headboy, 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 playingyard 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
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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 shoeleather, or wearing out the soles too fast,
whether from a defect in his gait, or by fidgeting during lessons in obedience to the instinctive need of
movement common to all children. That boy did not get through the winter without great suffering. In the
first place, his chilblains would ache and shot as badly as a fit of the gout; then the rivets and packthread
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
illsewn 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 proudtempered 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
scornis 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 schoollife. 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 copypaper, 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 attentionthus 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
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classmaster must then not be too severely blamed, illpaid 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 lightningflash, 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
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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
playingground. The PoetandPythagoras 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
Poetand Pythagoras.
Lambert's homesickness 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 limetree 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 awayaway 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 this
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, tired 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.
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"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.
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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 opiumeater. 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 lovelove as we dream of it
in youthwas 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.
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"What would Madame la Baronne de Stael say if she could know that you make such nonsense of a word that
means 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 coming, 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 turningpoint 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 classmasters 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 Loire 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 schoollife.
After dinner next day, we set out at halfpast 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 halfway down the slope, on the devious valley through which the river winds
and sparkles between meadows in graceful curvesa 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
yearsLouis 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
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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 fragmentas Cuvier did in another branch of inquiryas a clue to the reconstruction
of a complete system.
At this moment we were sitting together on an old oakstump, and after a few minutes' reflection, Louis said
to me:
"If the landscape did not come to mewhich it is absurd to imagineI 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 halfway 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.
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"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 powersmental
powers we must call them till some new term is foundseemed 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 boythis giantbent 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 manservant was the startingpoint 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
classmaster came to protect his slaves. The foe, in selfdefence, 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.
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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 selfdevotion; 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 leavehis 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. Volitiona word due to Lockeexpressed 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
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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 transsubstantiation 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 sumtotal of our Volitions and our Ideas constitutes Action, and the sumtotal 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 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 Actionthe word he used to designate an unknown specializationthe
mysterious nexus of fibrils to which we owe the inadequately investigated powers of thought and willin
short, the nameless entity which sees, acts, foresees the end, and accomplishes everything before expressing
itself in any physical phenomenonmust, in conformity with its nature, be free from the physical conditions
Louis Lambert
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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
manifestationsTime and Distanceof 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 argumentativequacks 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 knowthough my remembrance is now vaguethat 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 with second sight, and
demoniacs of every degreethe victims of the Middle Agesbecame 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
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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 by 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, TychoBrahe 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 writingswhich 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 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 willo' thewisp, dies out never to return; an
ephemeral life, like that of babes who give their parents such infinite joy and sorrow; a sort of stillborn
blossom in the fields of the mind. Sometimes an idea, instead of springing forcibly into life and dying
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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 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
Passionintonation 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
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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 a 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 knownan incident most surprising to men who were accustomed to
regard doubt as a weapon against the fact alone, but simple enough to believersthe fact that
AlphonzoMaria di Liguori, Bishop of SaintAgatha, 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 martyrsin 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
postexistence 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 greatgrandfather, 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 savages, 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 in 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:
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"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
minds 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 analysisthe 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 that 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 which 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
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my departure reduced Lambert to dreadful dejection.
"Shall I ever seen 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, goodbye; 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?Goodbye! 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 irongray 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 Loire, 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
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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 Deathhaving so perfected His inner Being by divine works, that one day the
invisible form of it appeared to His disciplesand 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 a few 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 beautyloving 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 globeif, 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 bloodstained. 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 selfpreservation amid all the dangers and the lands they traversed to reach the
Promised Land engendered their exclusive racefeeling and their hatred of all other nations.
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"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 formulatedand this, perhaps, will be my glorylaws which
must be those of the human organism, the life of man is Movement determined in each individual by the
pressure of some inscrutable influenceby 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 sumtotal 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 maladyor 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.
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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 not he 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 braindevelopment; 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
schoollifeand that, perhaps, was his salvationit 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 sciencespositively 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 most irresistible
desire that came over him to kill the young man on whom the lady's looks beamed. Was not this a reversion,
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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 cravingfor 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 selfinterest, must always have
suffered there; he probably had no friend to comfort him, no enemy to give tone to this 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 preparationif 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
frostnipped in the bud; but they will, perhaps, find the flowers expanding in regions far above the highest
places of the earth.
"PARIS, SeptemberOctober 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 selfadvertisement, 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
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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 heart. 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 the 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 agedeven 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 concentrations 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.
"The love of study brought me hither, as you know. I have met really learned men, amazing for the most part;
but the lack of unity in scientific work almost nullifies their efforts. There is no Head of instruction or of
scientific research. At the Museum a professor argues to prove that another in the Rue SaintJacques talks
nonsense. The lecturer at the College of Medicine abuses him of the College de France. When I first arrived, I
went to hear an old Academician who taught five hundred youths that Corneille was a haughty and powerful
genius; Racine, elegiac and graceful; Moliere, inimitable; Voltaire, supremely witty; Bossuet and Pascal,
incomparable in argument. A professor of philosophy may make a name by explaining how Plato is Platonic.
Another discourses on the history of words, without troubling himself about ideas. One explains Aeschylus,
another tells you that communes were communes, and neither more nor less. These original and brilliant
discoveries, diluted to last several hours, constitute the higher education which is to lead to giant strides in
human knowledge.
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"If the Government could have an idea, I should suspect it of being afraid of any real superiority, which, once
roused, might bring Society under the yoke of an intelligent rule. Then nations would go too far and too fast;
so professors are appointed to produce simpletons. How else can we account for a scheme devoid of method
or any notion of the future?
"The Institut might be the central government of the moral and intellectual world; but it has been ruined lately
by its subdivision into separate academies. So human science marches on, without a guide, without a system,
and floats haphazard with no road traced out.
"This vagueness and uncertainty prevails in politics as well as in science. In the order of nature means are
simple, the end is grand and marvelous; here in science as in government, the means are stupendous, the end
is mean. The force which in nature proceeds at an equal pace, and of which the sum is constantly being added
to itselfthe A + A from which everything is producedis destructive in society. Politics, at the present
time, place human forces in antagonism to neutralize each other, instead of combining them to promote their
action to some definite end.
"Looking at Europe alone, from Caesar to Constantine, from the puny Constantine to the great Attila, from
the Huns to Charlemagne, from Charlemagne to Leo X., from Leo X., to Philip II., from Philip II. to Louis
XIV.; from Venice to England, from England to Napoleon, from Napoleon to England, I see no fixed purpose
in politics; its constant agitation has led to no progress.
"Nations leave witnesses to their greatness in monuments, and to their happiness in the welfare of individuals.
Are modern monuments as fine as those of the ancients? I doubt it. The arts, which are the direct outcome of
the individual, the products of genius or of handicraft, have not advanced much. The pleasures of Lucullus
were as good as those of Samuel Bernard, of Beaujon, or of the King of Bavaria. And then human longevity
has diminished.
"Thus, to those who will be candid, man is still the same; might is his only law, and success his only wisdom.
"Jesus Christ, Mahomet, and Luther only lent a different hue to the arena in which youthful nations disport
themselves.
"No development of politics has hindered civilization, with its riches, its manners, its alliance of the strong
against the weak, its ideas, and its delights, from moving from Memphis to Tyre, from Tyre to Baalbek, from
Tadmor to Carthage, from Carthage to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice,
from Venice to Spain, from Spain to Englandwhile no trace is left of Memphis, of Tyre, of Carthage, of
Rome, of Venice, or Madrid. The soul of those great bodies has fled. Not one of them has preserved itself
from destruction, nor formulated this axiom: When the effect produced ceases to be in a ratio to its cause,
disorganization follows.
"The most subtle genius can discover no common bond between great social facts. No political theory has
ever lasted. Governments pass away, as men do, without handing down any lesson, and no system gives birth
to a system better than that which came before it. What can we say about politics when a Government
directly referred to God perished in India and Egypt; when the rule of the Sword and of the Tiara are past;
when Monarchy is dying; when the Government of the People has never been alive; when no scheme of
intellectual power as applied to material interests has ever proved durable, and everything at this day remains
to be done all over again, as it has been at every period when man has turned to cry out, 'I am in torment!'
"The code, which is considered Napoleon's greatest achievement, is the most Draconian work I know of.
Territorial subdivision carried out to the uttermost, and its principle confirmed by the equal division of
property generally, must result in the degeneracy of the nation and the death of the Arts and Sciences. The
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land, too much broken up, is cultivated only with cereals and small crops; the forests, and consequently the
rivers, are disappearing; oxen and horses are no longer bred. Means are lacking both for attack and for
resistance. If we should be invaded, the people must be crushed; it has lost its mainspring its leaders. This
is the history of deserts!
"Thus the science of politics has no definite principles, and it can have no fixity; it is the spirit of the hour, the
perpetual application of strength proportioned to the necessities of the moment. The man who should foresee
two centuries ahead would die on the place of execution, loaded with the imprecations of the mob, or
elsewhich seems worsewould be lashed with the myriad whips of ridicule. Nations are but individuals,
neither wiser nor stronger than man, and their destinies are identical. If we reflect on man, is not that to
consider mankind?
"By studying the spectacle of society perpetually stormtossed in its foundations as well as in its results, in
its causes as well as in its actions, while philanthropy is but a splendid mistake, and progress is vanity, I have
been confirmed in this truth: Life is within and not without us; to rise above men, to govern them, is only the
part of an aggrandized schoolmaster; and those men who are capable of rising to the level whence they can
enjoy a view of the world should not look at their own feet.
"November 4th.
"I am no doubt occupied with weighty thoughts, I am on the way to certain discoveries, an invincible power
bears me toward a luminary which shone at an early age on the darkness of my moral life; but what name can
I give to the power that ties my hands and shuts my mouth, and drags me in a direction opposite to my
vocation? I must leave Paris, bid farewell to the books in the libraries, those noble centres of illumination,
those kindly and always accessible sages, and the younger geniuses with whom I sympathize. Who is it that
drives me away? Chance or Providence?
"The two ideas represented by those words are irreconcilable. If Chance does not exist, we must admit
fatalism, that is to say, the compulsory coordination of things under the rule of a general plan. Why then do
we rebel? If man is not free, what becomes of the scaffolding of his moral sense? Or, if he can control his
destiny, if by his own freewill he can interfere with the execution of the general plan, what becomes of God?
"Why did I come here? If I examine myself, I find the answer: I find in myself axioms that need developing.
But why then have I such vast faculties without being suffered to use them? If my suffering could serve as an
example, I could understand it; but no, I suffer unknown.
"This is perhaps as much the act of Providence as the fate of the flower that dies unseen in the heart of the
virgin forest, where no one can enjoy its perfume or admire its splendor. Just as that blossom vainly sheds its
fragrance to the solitude, so do I, here in the garret, give birth to ideas that no one can grasp.
"Yesterday evening I sat eating bread and grapes in front of my window with a young doctor named
Meyraux. We talked as men do whom misfortune has joined in brotherhood, and I said to him:
" 'I am going away; you are staying. Take up my ideas and develop them.'
" 'I cannot!' said he, with bitter regret: 'my feeble health cannot stand so much work, and I shall die young of
my struggle with penury.'
"We looked up at the sky and grasped hands. We first met at the Comparative Anatomy course, and in the
galleries of the Museum, attracted thither by the same studythe unity of geological structure. In him this
was the presentiment of genius sent to open a new path in the fallows of intellect; in me it was a deduction
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from a general system.
"My point is to ascertain the real relation that may exist between God and man. Is not this a need of the age?
Without the highest assurance, it is impossible to put bit and bridle on the social factions that have been let
loose by the spirit of scepticism and discussion, and which are now crying aloud: 'Show us a way in which
we may walk and find no pitfalls in our way!'
"You will wonder what comparative anatomy has to do with a question of such importance to the future of
society. Must we not attain to the conviction that man is the end of all earthly means before we ask whether
he too is not the means to some end? If man is bound up with everything, is there not something above him
with which he again is bound up? If he is the endall of the explained transmutations that lead up to him,
must he not be also the link between the visible and invisible creations?
"The activity of the universe is not absurd; it must tend to an end, and that end is surely not a social body
constituted as ours is! There is a fearful gulf between us and heaven. In our present existence we can neither
be always happy nor always in torment; must there not be some tremendous change to bring about Paradise
and Hell, two images without which God cannot exist to the mind of the vulgar? I know that a compromise
was made by the invention of the Soul; but it is repugnant to me to make God answerable for human
baseness, for our disenchantments, our aversions, our degeneracy.
"Again, how can we recognize as divine the principle within us which can be overthrown by a few glasses of
rum? How conceive of immaterial faculties which matter can conquer, and whose exercise is suspended by a
grain of opium? How imagine that we shall be able to feel when we are bereft of the vehicles of sensation?
Why must God perish if matter can be proved to think? Is the vitality of matter in its innumerable
manifestationsthe effect of its instinctsat all more explicable than the effects of the mind? Is not the
motion given to the worlds enough to prove God's existence, without our plunging into absurd speculations
suggested by pride? And if we pass, after our trials, from a perishable state of being to a higher existence, is
not that enough for a creature that is distinguished from other creatures only by more perfect instincts? If in
moral philosophy there is not a single principle which does not lead to the absurd, or cannot be disproved by
evidence, is it not high time that we should set to work to seek such dogmas as are written in the innermost
nature of things? Must we not reverse philosophical science?
"We trouble ourselves very little about the supposed void that must have preexisted for us, and we try to
fathom the supposed void that lies before us. We make God responsible for the future, but we do not expect
Him to account for the past. And yet it is quite as desirable to know whether we have any roots in the past as
to discover whether we are inseparable from the future.
"We have been Deists or Atheists in one direction only.
"Is the world eternal? Was the world created? We can conceive of no middle term between these two
propositions; one, then, is true and the other false! Take your choice. Whichever it may be, God, as our
reason depicts Him, must be deposed, and that amounts to denial. The world is eternal: then, beyond
question, God has had it forced upon Him. The world was created: then God is an impossibility. How could
He have subsisted through an eternity, not knowing that He would presently want to create the world? How
could He have failed to foresee all the results?
"Whence did He derive the essence of creation? Evidently from Himself. If, then, the world proceeds from
God, how can you account for evil? That Evil should proceed from Good is absurd. If evil does not exist,
what do you make of social life and its laws? On all hands we find a precipice! On every side a gulf in which
reason is lost! Then social science must be altogether reconstructed.
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"Listen to me, uncle; until some splendid genius shall have taken account of the obvious inequality of
intellects and the general sense of humanity, the word God will be constantly arraigned, and Society will rest
on shifting sands. The secret of the various moral zones through which man passes will be discovered by the
analysis of the animal type as a whole. That animal type has hitherto been studied with reference only to its
differences, not to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations, not in its faculties. Animal faculties are
perfected in direct transmission, in obedience to laws which remain to be discovered. These faculties
correspond to the forces which express them, and those forces are essentially material and divisible.
"Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtaposition of words. Is not this a problem as insoluble as that of the
first communication of motion to matteran unsounded gulf of which the difficulties were transposed rather
than removed by Newton's system? Again, the universal assimilation of light by everything that exists on
earth demands a new study of our globe. The same animal differs in the tropics of India and in the North.
Under the angular or the vertical incidence of the sun's rays nature is developed the same, but not the same;
identical in its principles, but totally dissimilar in its outcome. The phenomenon that amazes our eyes in the
zoological world when we compare the butterflies of Brazil with those of Europe, is even more startling in
the world of Mind. A particular facial angle, a certain amount of brain convolutions, are indispensable to
produce Columbus, Raphael, Napoleon, Laplace, or Beethoven; the sunless valley produces the cretindraw
your own conclusions. Why such differences, due to the more or less ample diffusion of light to men? The
masses of suffering humanity, more or less active, fed, and enlightened, are a difficulty to be accounted for,
crying out against God.
"Why in great joy do we always want to quit the earth? whence comes the longing to rise which every
creature has known or will know? Motion is a great soul, and its alliance with matter is just as difficult to
account for as the origin of thought in man. In these days science is one; it is impossible to touch politics
independent of moral questions, and these are bound up with scientific questions. It seems to me that we are
on the eve of a great human struggle; the forces are there; only I do not see the General.
"November 25.
"Believe me, dear uncle, it is hard to give up the life that is in us without a pang. I am returning to Blois with
a heavy grip at my heart; I shall die then, taking with me some useful truths. No personal interest debases my
regrets. Is earthly fame a guerdon to those who believe that they will mount to a higher sphere?
"I am by no means in love with the two syllables Lam and bert; whether spoken with respect or with
contempt over my grave, they can make no change in my ultimate destiny. I feel myself strong and energetic;
I might become a power; I feel in myself a life so luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut
up in a sort of mineral, as perhaps indeed are the colors you admire on the neck of an Indian bird. I should
need to embrace the whole world, to clasp and recreate it; but those who have done this, who have thus
embraced and remoulded it begandid they not?by being a wheel in the machine. I can only be crushed.
Mahomet had the sword; Jesus had the cross; I shall die unknown. I shall be at Blois for a day, and then in
my coffin.
"Do you know why I have come back to Swedenborg after vast studies of all religions, and after proving to
myself, by reading all the works published within the last sixty years by the patient English, by Germany, and
by France, how deeply true were my youthful views about the Bible? Swedenborg undoubtedly epitomizes all
the religionsor rather the one religionof humanity. Though forms of worship are infinitely various,
neither their true meaning nor their metaphysical interpretation has ever varied. In short, man has, and has
had, but one religion.
"Sivaism, Vishnuism, and Brahmanism, the three primitive creeds, originating as they did in Thibet, in the
valley of the Indus, and on the vast plains of the Ganges, ended their warfare some thousand years before the
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birth of Christ by adopting the Hindoo Trimourti. The Trimourti is our Trinity. From this dogma Magianism
arose in Persia; in Egypt, the African beliefs and the Mosaic law; the worship of the Cabiri, and the
polytheism of Greece and Rome. While by this ramification of the Trimourti the Asiatic myths became
adapted to the imaginations of various races in the lands they reached by the agency of certain sages whom
men elevated to be demigodsMithra, Bacchus, Hermes, Hercules, and the rest Buddha, the great
reformer of the three primeval religions, lived in India, and founded his Church there, a sect which still
numbers two hundred millions more believers than Christianity can show, while it certainly influenced the
powerful Will both of Jesus and of Confucius.
"Then Christianity raised her standard. Subsequently Mahomet fused Judaism and Christianity, the Bible and
the Gospel, in one book, the Koran, adapting them to the apprehension of the Arab race. Finally, Swedenborg
borrowed from Magianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism all the truth and divine beauty
that those four great religious books hold in common, and added to them a doctrine, a basis of reasoning, that
may be termed mathematical.
"Any man who plunges into these religious waters, of which the sources are not all known, will find proofs
that Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and Swedenborg had identical principles and aimed
at identical ends.
"The last of them all, Swedenborg, will perhaps be the Buddha of the North. Obscure and diffuse as his
writings are, we find in them the elements of a magnificent conception of society. His Theocracy is sublime,
and his creed is the only acceptable one to superior souls. He alone brings man into immediate communion
with God, he gives a thirst for God, he has freed the majesty of God from the trappings in which other human
dogmas have disguised Him. He left Him where He is, making His myriad creations and creatures gravitate
towards Him through successive transformations which promise a more immediate and more natural future
than the Catholic idea of Eternity. Swedenborg has absolved God from the reproach attaching to Him in the
estimation of tender souls for the perpetuity of revenge to punish the sin of a momenta system of injustice
and cruelty.
"Each man may know for himself what hope he has of life eternal, and whether this world has any rational
sense. I mean to make the attempt. And this attempt may save the world, just as much as the cross at
Jerusalem or the sword at Mecca. These were both the offspring of the desert. Of the thirtythree years of
Christ's life, we only know the history of nine; His life of seclusion prepared Him for His life of glory. And I
too crave for the desert!"
Notwithstanding the difficulties of the task, I have felt it my duty to depict Lambert's boyhood, the unknown
life to which I owe the only happy hours, the only pleasant memories, of my early days. Excepting during
those two years I had nothing but annoyances and weariness. Though some happiness was mine at a later
time, it was always incomplete.
I have been diffuse, I know; but in default of entering into the whole wide heart and brain of Louis
Lamberttwo words which inadequately express the infinite aspects of his inner lifeit would be almost
impossible to make the second part of his intellectual history intelligiblea phase that was unknown to the
world and to me, but of which the mystical outcome was made evident to my eyes in the course of a few
hours. Those who have not already dropped this volume, will, I hope, understand the events I still have to tell,
forming as they do a sort of second existence lived by this creaturemay I not say this creation?in whom
everything was to be so extraordinary, even his end.
When Louis returned to Blois, his uncle was eager to procure him some amusement; but the poor priest was
regarded as a perfect leper in that godlyminded town. No one would have anything to say to a revolutionary
who had taken the oaths. His society, therefore, consisted of a few individuals of what were then called
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liberal or patriotic, or constitutional opinions, on whom he would call for a rubber of whist or of boston.
At the first house where he was introduced by his uncle, Louis met a young lady, whose circumstances
obliged her to remain in this circle, so contemned by those of the fashionable world, though her fortune was
such as to make it probable that she might by and by marry into the highest aristocracy of the province.
Mademoiselle Pauline de Villenoix was sole heiress to the wealth amassed by her grandfather, a Jew named
Salomon, who, contrary to the customs of his nation, had, in his old age, married a Christian and a Catholic.
He had only one son, who was brought up in his mother's faith. At his father's death young Salomon
purchased what was known at that time as a savonnette a vilain (literally a cake of soap for a serf), a small
estate called Villenoix, which he contrived to get registered with a baronial title, and took its name. He died
unmarried, but he left a natural daughter, to whom he bequeathed the greater part of his fortune, including the
lands of Villenoix. He appointed one of his uncles, Monsieur Joseph Salomon, to be the girl's guardian. The
old Jew was so devoted to his ward that he seemed willing to make great sacrifices for the sake of marrying
her well. But Mademoiselle de Villenoix's birth, and the cherished prejudice against Jews that prevails in the
provinces, would not allow of her being received in the very exclusive circle which, rightly or wrongly,
considers itself noble, notwithstanding her own large fortune and her guardian's.
Monsieur Joseph Salomon was resolved that if she could not secure a country squire, his niece should go to
Paris and make choice of a husband among the peers of France, liberal or monarchical; as to happiness, that
he believed he could secure her by the terms of the marriage contract.
Mademoiselle de Villenoix was now twenty. Her remarkable beauty and gifts of mind were surer guarantees
of happiness than those offered by money. Her features were of the purest type of Jewish beauty; the oval
lines, so noble and maidenly, have an indescribable stamp of the ideal, and seem to speak of the joys of the
East, its unchangeably blue sky, the glories of its lands, and the fabulous riches of life there. She had fine
eyes, shaded by deep eyelids, fringed with thick, curled lashes. Biblical innocence sat on her brow. Her
complexion was of the pure whiteness of the Levite's robe. She was habitually silent and thoughtful, but her
movements and gestures betrayed a quiet grace, as her speech bore witness to a woman's sweet and loving
nature. She had not, indeed, the rosy freshness, the fruitlike bloom which blush on a girl's cheek during her
careless years. Darker shadows, with here and there a redder vein, took the place of color, symptomatic of an
energetic temper and nervous irritability, such as many men do not like to meet with in a wife, while to others
they are an indication of the most sensitive chastity and passion mingled with pride.
As soon as Louis saw Mademoiselle de Villenoix, he discerned the angel within. The richest powers of his
soul, and his tendency to ecstatic reverie, every faculty within him was at once concentrated in boundless
love, the first love of a young man, a passion which is strong indeed in all, but which in him was raised to
incalculable power by the perennial ardor of his senses, the character of his ideas, and the manner in which he
lived. This passion became a gulf, into which the hapless fellow threw everything; a gulf whither the mind
dare not venture, since his, flexible and firm as it was, was lost there. There all was mysterious, for
everything went on in that moral world, closed to most men, whose laws were revealed to him perhaps to
his sorrow.
When an accident threw me in the way of his uncle, the good man showed me into the room which Lambert
had at that time lived in. I wanted to find some vestiges of his writings, if he should have left any. There
among his papers, untouched by the old man from that fine instinct of grief that characterized the aged, I
found a number of letters, too illegible ever to have been sent to Mademoiselle de Villenoix. My familiarity
with Lambert's writing enabled me in time to decipher the hieroglyphics of this shorthand, the result of
impatience and a frenzy of passion. Carried away by his feelings, he had written without being conscious of
the irregularity of words too slow to express his thoughts. He must have been compelled to copy these chaotic
attempts, for the lines often ran into each other; but he was also afraid perhaps of not having sufficiently
disguised his feelings, and at first, at any rate, he had probably written his loveletters twice over.
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It required all the fervency of my devotion to his memory, and the sort of fanaticism which comes of such a
task, to enable me to divine and restore the meaning of the five letters that here follow. These documents,
preserved by me with pious care, are the only material evidence of his overmastering passion. Mademoiselle
de Villenoix had no doubt destroyed the real letters that she received, eloquent witnesses to the delirium she
inspired.
The first of these papers, evidently a rough sketch, betrays by its style and by its length the many
emendations, the heartfelt alarms, the innumerable terrors caused by a desire to please; the changes of
expression and the hesitation between the whirl of ideas that beset a man as he indites his first lovelettera
letter he never will forget, each line the result of a reverie, each word the subject of long cogitation, while the
most unbridled passion known to man feels the necessity of the most reserved utterance, and like a giant
stooping to enter a hovel, speaks humbly and low, so as not to alarm a girl's soul.
No antiquary ever handled his palimpsests with greater respect than I showed in reconstructing these
mutilated documents of such joy and suffering as must always be sacred to those who have known similar joy
and grief.
I
"Mademoiselle, when you have read this letter, if you ever should
read it, my life will be in your hands, for I love you; and to me,
the hope of being loved is life. Others, perhaps, ere now, have,
in speaking of themselves, misused the words I must employ to
depict the state of my soul; yet, I beseech you to believe in the
truth of my expressions; though weak, they are sincere. Perhaps I
ought not thus to proclaim my love. Indeed, my heart counseled me
to wait in silence till my passion should touch you, that I might
the better conceal it if its silent demonstrations should
displease you; or till I could express it even more delicately
than in words if I found favor in your eyes. However, after having
listened for long to the coy fears that fill a youthful heart with
alarms, I write in obedience to the instinct which drags useless
lamentations from the dying.
"It has needed all my courage to silence the pride of poverty, and
to overleap the barriers which prejudice erects between you and
me. I have had to smother many reflections to love you in spite of
your wealth; and as I write to you, am I not in danger of the
scorn which women often reserve for profession of love, which they
accept only as one more tribute of flattery? But we cannot help
rushing with all our might towards happiness, or being attracted
to the life of love as a plant is to the light; we must have been
very unhappy before we can conquer the torment, the anguish of
those secret deliberations when reason proves to us by a thousand
arguments how barren our yearning must be if it remains buried in
our hearts, and when hopes bid us dare everything.
"I was happy when I admired you in silence; I was so lost in the
contemplation of your beautiful soul, that only to see you left me
hardly anything further to imagine. And I should not now have
dared to address you if I had not heard that you were leaving.
What misery has that one word brought upon me! Indeed, it is my
despair that has shown me the extent of my attachmentit is
unbounded. Mademoiselle, you will never knowat least, I hope you
may never knowthe anguish of dreading lest you should lose the
only happiness that has dawned on you on earth, the only thing
that has thrown a gleam of light in the darkness of misery. I
understood yesterday that my life was no more in myself, but in
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you. There is but one woman in the world for me, as there is but
one thought in my soul. I dare not tell you to what a state I am
reduced by my love for you. I would have you only as a gift from
yourself; I must therefore avoid showing myself to you in all the
attractiveness of dejectionfor is it not often more impressive
to a noble soul than that of good fortune? There are many things I
may not tell you. Indeed, I have too lofty a notion of love to
taint it with ideas that are alien to its nature. If my soul is
worthy of yours, and my life pure, your heart will have a
sympathetic insight, and you will understand me!
"It is the fate of man to offer himself to the woman who can make
him believe in happiness; but it is your prerogative to reject the
truest passion if it is not in harmony with the vague voices in
your heartthat I know. If my lot, as decided by you, must be
adverse to my hopes, mademoiselle, let me appeal to the delicacy
of your maiden soul and the ingenuous compassion of a woman to
burn my letter. On my knees I beseech you to forget all! Do not
mock at a feeling that is wholly respectful, and that is too
deeply graven on my heart ever to be effaced. Break my heart, but
do not rend it! Let the expression of my first love, a pure and
youthful love, be lost in your pure and youthful heart! Let it die
there as a prayer rises up to die in the bosom of God!
"I owe you much gratitude: I have spent delicious hours occupied
in watching you, and giving myself up to the faint dreams of my
life; do not crush these long but transient joys by some girlish
irony. Be satisfied not to answer me. I shall know how to
interpret your silence; you will see me no more. If I must be
condemned to know for ever what happiness means, and to be for
ever bereft of it; if, like a banished angel, I am to cherish the
sense of celestial joys while bound for ever to a world of sorrow
well, I can keep the secret of my love as well as that of my
griefs.And farewell!
"Yes, I resign you to God, to whom I will pray for you, beseeching
Him to grant you a happy life; for even if I am driven from your
heart, into which I have crept by stealth, still I shall ever be
near you. Otherwise, of what value would the sacred words be of
this letter, my first and perhaps my last entreaty? If I should
ever cease to think of you, to love you whether in happiness or in
woe, should I not deserve my punishment?"
II
"You are not going away! And I am loved! I, a poor, insignificant
creature! My beloved Pauline, you do not yourself know the power
of the look I believe in, the look you gave me to tell me that you
had chosen meyou so young and lovely, with the world at your
feet!
"To enable you to understand my happiness, I should have to give
you a history of my life. If you had rejected me, all was over for
me. I have suffered too much. Yes, my love for you, my comforting
and stupendous love, was a last effort of yearning for the
happiness my soul strove to reacha soul crushed by fruitless
labor, consumed by fears that make me doubt myself, eaten into by
despair which has often urged me to die. No one in the world can
conceive of the terrors my fateful imagination inflicts on me. It
often bears me up to the sky, and suddenly flings me to earth
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again from prodigious heights. Deepseated rushes of power, or
some rare and subtle instance of peculiar lucidity, assure me now
and then that I am capable of great things. Then I embrace the
universe in my mind, I knead, shape it, inform it, I comprehend it
or fancy that I do; then suddenly I awakealone, sunk in
blackest night, helpless and weak; I forget the light I saw but
now, I find no succor; above all, there is no heart where I may
take refuge.
"This distress of my inner life affects my physical existence. The
nature of my character gives me over to the raptures of happiness
as defenceless as when the fearful light of reflection comes to
analyze and demolish them. Gifted as I am with the melancholy
faculty of seeing obstacles and success with equal clearness,
according to the mood of the moment, I am happy or miserable by
turns.
"Thus, when I first met you, I felt the presence of an angelic
nature, I breathed an air that was sweet to my burning breast, I
heard in my soul the voice that never can be false, telling me
that here was happiness; but perceiving all the barriers that
divided us, I understood the vastness of their pettiness, and
these difficulties terrified me more than the prospect of
happiness could delight me. At once I felt the awful reaction
which casts my expansive soul back on itself; the smile you had
brought to my lips suddenly turned to a bitter grimace, and I
could only strive to keep calm, while my soul was boiling with the
turmoil of contradictory emotions. In short, I experienced that
gnawing pang to which twentythree years of suppressed sighs and
betrayed affections have not inured me.
"Well, Pauline, the look by which you promised that I should be
happy suddenly warmed my vitality, and turned all my sorrows into
joy. Now, I could wish that I had suffered more. My love is
suddenly fullgrown. My soul was a wide territory that lacked the
blessing of sunshine, and your eyes have shed light on it. Beloved
providence! you will be all in all to me, orphan as I am, without
a relation but my uncle. You will be my whole family, as you are
my whole wealth, nay, the whole world to me. Have you not bestowed
on me every gladness man can desire in that chastelavishtimid
glance?
"You have given me incredible selfconfidence and audacity. I can
dare all things now. I came back to Blois in deep dejection. Five
years of study in the heart of Paris had made me look on the world
as a prison. I had conceived of vast schemes, and dared not speak
of them. Fame seemed to me a prize for charlatans, to which a
really noble spirit should not stoop. Thus, my ideas could only
make their way by the assistance of a man bold enough to mount the
platform of the press, and to harangue loudly the simpletons he
scorns. This kind of courage I have not. I ploughed my way on,
crushed by the verdict of the crowd, in despair at never making it
hear me. I was at once too humble and too lofty! I swallowed my
thoughts as other men swallow humiliations. I had even come to
despise knowledge, blaming it for yielding no real happiness.
"But since yesterday I am wholly changed. For your sake I now
covet every palm of glory, every triumph of success. When I lay my
head on your knees, I could wish to attract to you the eyes of the
whole world, just as I long to concentrate in my love every idea,
every power that is in me. The most splendid celebrity is a
possession that genius alone can create. Well, I can, at my will,
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make for you a bed of laurels. And if the silent ovation paid to
science is not all you desire, I have within me the sword of the
Word; I could run in the path of honor and ambition where others
only crawl.
"Command me, Pauline; I will be whatever you will. My iron will
can do anythingI am loved! Armed with that thought, ought not a
man to sweep everything before him? The man who wants all can do
all. If you are the prize of success, I enter the lists tomorrow.
To win such a look as that you bestowed on me, I would leap the
deepest abyss. Through you I understand the fabulous achievements
of chivalry and the most fantastic tales of the Arabian Nights.
I can believe now in the most fantastic excesses of love, and in
the success of a prisoner's wildest attempt to recover his
liberty. You have aroused the thousand virtues that lay dormant
within mepatience, resignation, all the powers of my heart, all
the strength of my soul. I live by you andheavenly thought!for
you. Everything now has a meaning for me in life. I understand
everything, even the vanities of wealth.
"I find myself shedding all the pearls of the Indies at your feet;
I fancy you reclining either on the rarest flowers, or on the
softest tissues, and all the splendor of the world seems hardly
worthy of you, for whom I would I could command the harmony and
the light that are given out by the harps of seraphs and the stars
of heaven! Alas! a poor, studious poet, I offer you in words
treasures I cannot bestow; I can only give you my heart, in which
you reign for ever. I have nothing else. But are there no
treasures in eternal gratitude, in a smile whose expressions will
perpetually vary with perennial happiness, under the constant
eagerness of my devotion to guess the wishes of your loving soul?
Has not one celestial glance given us assurance of always
understanding each other?
"I have a prayer now to be said to God every nighta prayer full
of you: 'Let my Pauline be happy!' And will you fill all my days
as you now fill my heart?
"Farewell, I can but trust you to God alone!"
III
"Pauline! tell me if I can in any way have displeased you
yesterday? Throw off the pride of heart which inflicts on me the
secret tortures that can be caused by one we love. Scold me if you
will! Since yesterday, a vague, unutterable dread of having
offended you pours grief on the life of feeling which you had made
so sweet and so rich. The lightest veil that comes between two
souls sometimes grows to be a brazen wall. There are no venial
crimes in love! If you have the very spirit of that noble
sentiment, you must feel all its pangs, and we must be unceasingly
careful not to fret each other by some heedless word.
"No doubt, my beloved treasure, if there is any fault, it is in
me. I cannot pride myself in the belief that I understand a
woman's heart, in all the expansion of its tenderness, all the
grace of its devotedness; but I will always endeavor to appreciate
the value of what you vouchsafe to show me of the secrets of
yours.
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"Speak to me! Answer me soon! The melancholy into which we are
thrown by the idea of a wrong done is frightful; it casts a shroud
over life, and doubts on everything.
"I spent this morning sitting on the bank by the sunken road,
gazing at the turrets of Villenoix, not daring to go to our hedge.
If you could imagine all I saw in my soul! What gloomy visions
passed before me under the gray sky, whose cold sheen added to my
dreary mood! I had dark presentiments! I was terrified lest I
should fail to make you happy.
"I must tell you everything, my dear Pauline. There are moments
when the spirit of vitality seems to abandon me. I feel bereft of
all strength. Everything is a burden to me; every fibre of my body
is inert, every sense is flaccid, my sight grows dim, my tongue is
paralyzed, my imagination is extinct, desire is deadnothing
survives but my mere human vitality. At such times, though you
were in all the splendor of your beauty, though you should lavish
on me your subtlest smiles and tenderest words, an evil influence
would blind me, and distort the most ravishing melody into
discordant sounds. At those timesas I believesome
argumentative demon stands before me, showing me the void beneath
the most real possessions. This pitiless demon mows down every
flower, and mocks at the sweetest feelings, saying: 'Welland
then?' He mars the fairest work by showing me its skeleton, and
reveals the mechanism of things while hiding the beautiful
results.
"At those terrible moments, when the evil spirit takes possession
of me, when the divine light is darkened in my soul without my
knowing the cause, I sit in grief and anguish, I wish myself deaf
and dumb, I long for death to give me rest. These hours of doubt
and uneasiness are perhaps inevitable; at any rate, they teach me
not to be proud after the flights which have borne me to the skies
where I have gathered a full harvest of thoughts; for it is always
after some long excursion in the vast fields of the intellect, and
after the most luminous speculations, that I tumble, broken and
weary, into this limbo. At such a moment, my angel, a wife would
double my love for herat any rate, she might. If she were
capricious, ailing, or depressed, she would need the comforting
overflow of ingenious affection, and I should not have a glance to
bestow on her. It is my shame, Pauline, to have to tell you that
at times I could weep with you, but that nothing could make me
smile.
"A woman can always conceal her troubles; for her child, or for
the man she loves, she can laugh in the midst of suffering. And
could not I, for you, Pauline, imitate the exquisite reserve of a
woman? Since yesterday I have doubted my own power. If I could
displease you once, if I failed once to understand you, I dread
lest I should often be carried out of our happy circle by my evil
demon. Supposing I were to have many of those dreadful moods, or
that my unbounded love could not make up for the dark hours of my
lifethat I were doomed to remain such as I am?Fatal doubts!
"Power is indeed a fatal possession if what I feel within me is
power. Pauline, go! Leave me, desert me! Sooner would I endure
every ill in life than endure the misery of knowing that you were
unhappy through me.
"But, perhaps, the demon has had such empire over me only because
I have had no gentle, white hands about me to drive him off. No
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woman has ever shed on me the balm of her affection; and I know
not whether, if love should wave his pinions over my head in these
moments of exhaustion, new strength might not be given to my
spirit. This terrible melancholy is perhaps a result of my
isolation, one of the torments of a lonely soul which pays for its
hidden treasures with groans and unknown suffering. Those who
enjoy little shall suffer little; immense happiness entails
unutterable anguish!
"How terrible a doom! If it be so, must we not shudder for
ourselves, we who are superhumanly happy? If nature sells us
everything at its true value, into what pit are we not fated to
fall? Ah! the most fortunate lovers are those who die together in
the midst of their youth and love! How sad it all is! Does my soul
foresee evil in the future? I examine myself, wondering whether
there is anything in me that can cause you a moment's anxiety. I
love you too selfishly perhaps? I shall be laying on your beloved
head a burden heavy out of all proportion to the joy my love can
bring to your heart. If there dwells in me some inexorable power
which I must obeyif I am compelled to curse when you pray, if
some dark thought coerces me when I would fain kneel at your feet
and play as a child, will you not be jealous of that wayward and
tricky spirit?
"You understand, dearest heart, that what I dread is not being
wholly yours; that I would gladly forego all the sceptres and the
palms of the world to enshrine you in one eternal thought, to see
a perfect life and an exquisite poem in our rapturous love; to
throw my soul into it, drown my powers, and wring from each hour
the joys it has to give!
"Ah, my memories of love are crowding back upon me, the clouds of
despair will lift. Farewell. I leave you now to be more entirely
yours. My beloved soul, I look for a line, a word that may restore
my peace of mind. Let me know whether I really grieved my Pauline,
or whether some uncertain expression of her countenance misled me.
I could not bear to have to reproach myself after a whole life of
happiness, for ever having met you without a smile of love, a
honeyed word. To grieve the woman I lovePauline, I should count
it a crime. Tell me the truth, do not put me off with some
magnanimous subterfuge, but forgive me without cruelty."
FRAGMENT.
"Is so perfect an attachment happiness? Yes, for years of
suffering would not pay for an hour of love.
"Yesterday, your sadness, as I suppose, passed into my soul as
swiftly as a shadow falls. Were you sad or suffering? I was
wretched. Whence came my distress? Write to me at once. Why did I
not know it? We are not yet completely one in mind. At two
leagues' distance or at a thousand I ought to feel your pain and
sorrows. I shall not believe that I love you till my life is so
bound up with yours that our life is one, till our hearts, our
thoughts are one. I must be where you are, see what you feel, feel
what you feel, be with you in thought. Did not I know, at once,
that your carriage had been overthrown and you were bruised? But
on that day I had been with you, I had never left you, I could see
you. When my uncle asked me what made me turn so pale, I answered
at once, 'Mademoiselle de Villenoix had has a fall.'
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"Why, then, yesterday, did I fail to read your soul? Did you wish
to hide the cause of your grief? However, I fancied I could feel
that you were arguing in my favor, though in vain, with that
dreadful Salomon, who freezes my blood. That man is not of our
heaven.
"Why do you insist that our happiness, which has no resemblance to
that of other people, should conform to the laws of the world? And
yet I delight too much in your bashfulness, your religion, your
superstitions, not to obey your lightest whim. What you do must be
right; nothing can be purer than your mind, as nothing is lovelier
than your face, which reflects your divine soul.
"I shall wait for a letter before going along the lanes to meet
the sweet hour you grant me. Oh! if you could know how the sight
of those turrets makes my heart throb when I see them edged with
light by the moon, our only confidante."
IV
"Farewell to glory, farewell to the future, to the life I had
dreamed of! Now, my wellbeloved, my glory is that I am yours, and
worthy of you; my future lies entirely in the hope of seeing you;
and is not my life summed up in sitting at your feet, in lying
under your eyes, in drawing deep breaths in the heaven you have
created for me? All my powers, all my thoughts must be yours,
since you could speak those thrilling words, 'Your sufferings must
be mine!' Should I not be stealing some joys from love, some
moments from happiness, some experiences from your divine spirit,
if I gave my hours to studyideas to the world and poems to the
poets? Nay, nay, my very life, I will treasure everything for you;
I will bring to you every flower of my soul. Is there anything
fine enough, splendid enough, in all the resources of the world,
or of intellect, to do honor to a heart so rich, so pure as yours
the heart to which I dare now and again to unite my own? Yes,
now and again, I dare believe that I can love as much as you do.
"And yet, no; you are the angelwoman; there will always be a
greater charm in the expression of your feelings, more harmony in
your voice, more grace in your smile, more purity in your looks
than in mine. Let me feel that you are the creature of a higher
sphere than that I live in; it will be your pride to have
descended from it; mine, that I should have deserved you; and you
will not perhaps have fallen too far by coming down to me in my
poverty and misery. Nay, if a woman's most glorious refuge is in a
heart that is wholly her own, you will always reign supreme in
mine. Not a thought, not a deed, shall ever pollute this heart,
this glorious sanctuary, so long as you vouchsafe to dwell in it
and will you not dwell in it for ever? Did you not enchant me by
the words, 'Now and for ever?' Nunc et semper! And I have
written these words of our ritual below your portraitwords
worthy of you, as they are of God. He is nunc et semper, as my
love is.
"Never, no, never, can I exhaust that which is immense, infinite,
unboundedand such is the feeling I have for you; I have imagined
its immeasurable extent, as we measure space by the dimensions of
one of its parts. I have had ineffable joys, whole hours filled
with delicious meditation, as I have recalled a single gesture or
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the tone of a word of yours. Thus there will be memories of which
the magnitude will overpower me, if the reminiscence of a sweet
and friendly interview is enough to make me shed tears of joy, to
move and thrill my soul, and to be an inexhaustible wellspring of
gladness. Love is the life of angels!
"I can never, I believe, exhaust my joy in seeing you. This
rapture, the least fervid of any, though it never can last long
enough, has made me apprehend the eternal contemplation in which
seraphs and spirits abide in the presence of God; nothing can be
more natural, if from His essence there emanates a light as
fruitful of new emotions as that of your eyes is, of your imposing
brow, and your beautiful countenancethe image of your soul.
Then, the soul, our second self, whose pure form can never perish,
makes our love immortal. I would there were some other language
than that I use to express to you the evernew ecstasy of my love;
but since there is one of our own creating, since our looks are
living speech, must we not meet face to face to read in each
other's eyes those questions and answers from the heart, that are
so living, so penetrating, that one evening you could say to me,
'Be silent!' when I was not speaking. Do you remember it, dear
life?
"When I am away from you in the darkness of absence, am I not
reduced to use human words, too feeble to express heavenly
feelings? But words at any rate represent the marks these feelings
leave in my soul, just as the word God imperfectly sums up the
notions we form of that mysterious First Cause. But, in spite of
the subtleties and infinite variety of language, I have no words
that can express to you the exquisite union by which my life is
merged into yours whenever I think of you.
"And with what word can I conclude when I cease writing to you,
and yet do not part from you? What can farewell mean, unless in
death? But is death a farewell? Would not my spirit be then more
closely one with yours? Ah! my first and last thought; formerly I
offered you my heart and life on my knees; now what fresh blossoms
of feelings can I discover in my soul that I have not already
given you? It would be a gift of a part of what is wholly yours.
"Are you my future? How deeply I regret the past! I would I could
have back all the years that are ours no more, and give them to
you to reign over, as you do over my present life. What indeed was
that time when I knew you not? It would be a void but that I was
so wretched."
FRAGMENT.
"Beloved angel, how delightful last evening was! How full of
riches your dear heart is! And is your love endless, like mine?
Each word brought me fresh joy, and each look made it deeper. The
placid expression of your countenance gave our thoughts a
limitless horizon. It was all as infinite as the sky, and as bland
as its blue. The refinement of your adored features repeated
itself by some inexplicable magic in your pretty movements and
your least gestures. I knew that you were all graciousness, all
love, but I did not know how variously graceful you could be.
Everything combined to urge me to tender solicitation, to make me
ask the first kiss that a woman always refuses, no doubt that it
may be snatched from her. You, dear soul of my life, will never
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guess beforehand what you may grant to my love, and will yield
perhaps without knowing it! You are utterly true, and obey your
heart alone.
"The sweet tones of your voice blended with the tender harmonies
that filled the quiet air, the cloudless sky. Not a bird piped,
not a breeze whisperedsolitude, you, and I. The motionless
leaves did not quiver in the beautiful sunset hues which are both
light and shadow. You felt that heavenly poetryyou who
experienced so many various emotions, and who so often raised your
eyes to heaven to avoid answering me. You who are proud and saucy,
humble and masterful, who give yourself to me so completely in
spirit and in thought, and evade the most bashful caress. Dear
witcheries of the heart! They ring in my ears; they sound and play
there still. Sweet words but half spoken, like a child's speech,
neither promise nor confession, but allowing love to cherish its
fairest hopes without fear or torment! How pure a memory for life!
What a free blossoming of all the flowers that spring from the
soul, which a mere trifle can blight, but which, at that moment,
everything warmed and expanded.
"And it will always be so, will it not, my beloved? As I recall,
this morning, the fresh and living delights revealed to me in that
hour, I am conscious of a joy which makes me conceive of true love
as an ocean of everlasting and evernew experiences, into which we
may plunge with increasing delight. Every day, every word, every
kiss, every glance, must increase it by its tribute of past
happiness. Hearts that are large enough never to forget must live
every moment in their past joys as much as in those promised by
the future. This was my dream of old, and now it is no longer a
dream! Have I not met on this earth with an angel who had made me
know all its happiness, as a reward, perhaps, for having endured
all its torments? Angel of heaven, I salute thee with a kiss.
"I shall send you this hymn of thanksgiving from my heart, I owe
it to you; but it can hardly express my gratitude or the morning
worship my heart offers up day by day to her who epitomized the
whole gospel of the heart in this divine word: 'Believe.' "
V
"What! no further difficulties, dearest heart! We shall be free to
belong to each other every day, every hour, every minute, and for
ever! We may be as happy for all the days of our life as we now
are by stealth, at rare intervals! Our pure, deep feelings will
assume the expression of the thousand fond acts I have dreamed of.
For me your little foot will be bared, you will be wholly mine!
Such happiness kills me; it is too much for me. My head is too
weak, it will burst with the vehemence of my ideas. I cry and I
laughI am possessed! Every joy is an arrow of flame; it pierces
and burns me. In fancy you rise before my eyes, ravished and
dazzled by numberless and capricious images of delight.
"In short, our whole future life is before meits torrents, its
still places, its joys; it seethes, it flows on, it lies sleeping;
then again it awakes fresh and young. I see myself and you side by
side, walking with equal pace, living in the same thought; each
dwelling in each other's heart, understanding each other,
responding to each other as an echo catches and repeats a sound
across wide distances.
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"Can life be long when it is thus consumed hour by hour? Shall we
not die in a first embrace? What if our souls have already met in
that sweet evening kiss which almost overpowered usa feeling
kiss, but the crown of my hopes, the ineffectual expression of all
the prayers I breathe while we are apart, hidden in my soul like
remorse?
"I, who would creep back and hide in the hedge only to hear your
footsteps as you went homewardsI may henceforth admire you at my
leisure, see you busy, moving, smiling, prattling! An endless joy!
You cannot imagine all the gladness it is to me to see you going
and coming; only a man can know that deep delight. Your least
movement gives me greater pleasure than a mother even can feel as
she sees her child asleep or at play. I love you with every kind
of love in one. The grace of your least gesture is always new to
me. I fancy I could spend whole nights breathing your breath; I
would I could steal into every detail of your life, be the very
substance of your thoughtsbe your very self.
"Well, we shall, at any rate, never part again! No human alloy
shall ever disturb our love, infinite in its phases and as pure as
all things are which are Oneour love, vast as the sea, vast as
the sky! You are mine! all mine! I may look into the depths of
your eyes to read the sweet soul that alternately hides and shines
there, to anticipate your wishes.
"My bestbeloved, listen to some things I have never yet dared to
tell you, but which I may confess to you now. I felt a certain
bashfulness of soul which hindered the full expression of my
feelings, so I strove to shroud them under the garbs of thoughts.
But now I long to lay my heart bare before you, to tell you of the
ardor of my dreams, to reveal the boiling demands of my senses,
excited, no doubt, by the solitude in which I have lived,
perpetually fired by conceptions of happiness, and aroused by you,
so fair in form, so attractive in manner. How can I express to you
my thirst for the unknown rapture of possessing an adored wife, a
rapture to which the union of two souls by love must give frenzied
intensity. Yes, my Pauline, I have sat for hours in a sort of
stupor caused by the violence of my passionate yearning, lost in
the dream of a caress as though in a bottomless abyss. At such
moments my whole vitality, my thoughts and powers, are merged and
united in what I must call desire, for lack of a word to express
that nameless delirium.
"And I may confess to you now that one day, when I would not take
your hand when you offered it so sweetlyan act of melancholy
prudence that made you doubt my loveI was in one of those fits
of madness when a man could commit a murder to possess a woman.
Yes, if I had felt the exquisite pressure you offered me as
vividly as I heard your voice in my heart, I know not to what
lengths my passion might not have carried me. But I can be silent,
and suffer a great deal. Why speak of this anguish when my visions
are to become realities? It will be in my power now to make life
one long lovemaking!
"Dearest love, there is a certain effect of light on your black
hair which could rivet me for hours, my eyes full of tears, as I
gazed at your sweet person, were it not that you turn away and
say, 'For shame; you make me quite shy!'
"Tomorrow, then, our love is to be made known! Oh, Pauline! the
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eyes of others, the curiosity of strangers, weigh on my soul. Let
us go to Villenoix, and stay there far from every one. I should
like no creature in human form to intrude into the sanctuary where
you are to be mine; I could even wish that, when we are dead, it
should cease to existshould be destroyed. Yes, I would fain hide
from all nature a happiness which we alone can understand, alone
can feel, which is so stupendous that I throw myself into it only
to dieit is a gulf!
"Do not be alarmed by the tears that have wetted this page; they
are tears of joy. My only blessing, we need never part again!"
In 1823 I traveled from Paris to Touraine by diligence. At Mer we
took up a passenger for Blois. As the guard put him into that part of
the coach where I had my seat, he said jestingly:
"You will not be crowded, Monsieur Lefebvre!"I was, in fact, alone.
On hearing this name, and seeing a whitehaired old man, who looked
eighty at least, I naturally thought of Lambert's uncle. After a few
ingenious questions, I discovered that I was not mistaken. The good
man had been looking after his vintage at Mer, and was returning to
Blois. I then asked for some news of my old "chum." At the first word,
the old priest's face, as grave and stern already as that of a soldier
who has gone through many hardships, became more sad and dark; the
lines on his forehead were slightly knit, he set his lips, and said,
with a suspicious glance:
"Then you have never seen him since you left the College?"
"Indeed, I have not," said I. "But we are equally to blame for our
forgetfulness. Young men, as you know, lead such an adventurous and
stormtossed life when they leave their schoolforms, that it is only
by meeting that they can be sure of an enduring affection. However, a
reminiscence of youth sometimes comes as a reminder, and it is
impossible to forget entirely, especially when two lads have been such
friends as we were. We went by the name of the PoetandPythagoras."
I told him my name; when he heard it, the worthy man grew gloomier
than ever.
"Then you have not heard his story?" said he. "My poor nephew was to
be married to the richest heiress in Blois; but the day before his
wedding he went mad."
"Lambert! Mad!" cried I in dismay. "But from what cause? He had the
finest memory, the most stronglyconstituted brain, the soundest
judgment, I ever met with. Really a great geniuswith too great a
passion for mysticism perhaps; but the kindest heart in the world.
Something most extraordinary must have happened?"
"I see you knew him well," said the priest.
From Mer, till we reached Blois, we talked only of my poor friend,
with long digressions, by which I learned the facts I have already
related in the order of their interest. I confessed to his uncle the
character of our studies and of his nephew's predominant ideas; then
the old man told me of the events that had come into Lambert's life
since our parting. From Monsieur Lefebvre's account, Lambert had
betrayed some symptoms of madness before his marriage; but they were
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such as are common to men who love passionately, and seemed to me less
startling when I knew how vehement his love had been and when I saw
Mademoiselle de Villenoix. In the country, where ideas are scarce, a
man overflowing with original thought and devoted to a system, as
Louis was, might well be regarded as eccentric, to say the least. His
language would, no doubt, seem the stranger because he so rarely
spoke. He would say, "That man does not dwell in heaven," where any
one else would have said, "We are not made on the same pattern." Every
clever man has his own quirks of speech. The broader his genius, the
more conspicuous are the singularities which constitute the various
degrees of eccentricity. In the country an eccentric man is at once
set down as half mad.
Hence Monsieur Lefebvre's first sentences left me doubtful of my
schoolmate's insanity. I listened to the old man, but I criticised his
statements.
The most serious symptom had supervened a day or two before the
marriage. Louis had had some wellmarked attacks of catalepsy. He had
once remained motionless for fiftynine hours, his eyes staring,
neither speaking nor eating; a purely nervous affection, to which
persons under the influence of violent passion are liable; a rare
malady, but perfectly well known to the medical faculty. What was
really extraordinary was that Louis should not have had several
previous attacks, since his habits of rapt thought and the character
of his mind would predispose him to them. But his temperament,
physical and mental, was so admirably balanced, that it had no doubt
been able to resist the demands on his strength. The excitement to
which he had been wound up by the anticipation of acute physical
enjoyment, enhanced by a chaste life and a highlystrung soul, had no
doubt led to these attacks, of which the results are as little known
as the cause.
The letters that have by chance escaped destruction show very plainly
a transition from pure idealism to the most intense sensualism.
Time was when Lambert and I had admired this phenomenon of the human
mind, in which he saw the fortuitous separation of our two natures,
and the signs of a total removal of the inner man, using its unknown
faculties under the operation of an unknown cause. This disorder, a
mystery as deep as that of sleep, was connected with the scheme of
evidence which Lambert had set forth in his Treatise on the Will.
And when Monsieur Lefebvre spoke to me of Louis' first attack, I
suddenly remembered a conversation we had had on the subject after
reading a medical book.
"Deep meditation and rapt ecstasy are perhaps the undeveloped germs of
catalepsy," he said in conclusion.
On the occasion when he so concisely formulated this idea, he had been
trying to link mental phenomena together by a series of results,
following the processes of the intellect step by step, from their
beginnings as those simple, purely animal impulses of instinct, which
are allsufficient to many human beings, particularly to those men
whose energies are wholly spent in mere mechanical labor; then, going
on to the aggregation of ideas and rising to comparison, reflection,
meditation, and finally ecstasy and catalepsy. Lambert, of course, in
the artlessness of youth, imagined that he had laid down the lines of
a great work when he thus built up a scale of the various degrees of
man's mental powers.
I remember that, by one of those chances which seems like
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predestination, we got hold of a great Martyrology, in which the most
curious narratives are given of the total abeyance of physical life
which a man can attain to under the paroxysms of the inner life. By
reflecting on the effects of fanaticism, Lambert was led to believe
that the collected ideas to which we give the name of feelings may
very possibly be the material outcome of some fluid which is generated
in all men, more or less abundantly, according to the way in which
their organs absorb, from the medium in which they live, the
elementary atoms that produce it. We went crazy over catalepsy; and
with the eagerness that boys throw into every pursuit, we endeavored
to endure pain by thinking of something else. We exhausted ourselves
by making experiments not unlike those of the epileptic fanatics of
the last century, a religious mania which will some day be of service
to the science of humanity. I would stand on Lambert's chest,
remaining there for several minutes without giving him the slightest
pain; but notwithstanding these crazy attempts, we did not achieve an
attack of catalepsy.
This digression seemed necessary to account for my first doubts, which
were, however, completely dispelled by Monsieur Lefebvre.
"When this attack had passed off," said he, "my nephew sank into a
state of extreme terror, a dejection that nothing could overcome. He
thought himself unfit for marriage. I watched him with the care of a
mother for her child, and found him preparing to perform on himself
the operation to which Origen believed he owed his talents. I at once
carried him off to Paris, and placed him under the care of Monsieur
Esquirol. All through our journey Louis sat sunk in almost unbroken
torpor, and did not recognize me. The Paris physicians pronounced him
incurable, and unanimously advised his being left in perfect solitude,
with nothing to break the silence that was needful for his very
improbable recovery, and that he should live always in a cool room
with a subdued light.Mademoiselle de Villenoix, whom I had been
careful not to apprise of Louis' state," he went on, blinking his
eyes, "but who was supposed to have broken off the match, went to
Paris and heard what the doctors had pronounced. She immediately
begged to see my nephew, who hardly recognized her; then, like the
noble soul she is, she insisted on devoting herself to giving him such
care as might tend to his recovery. She would have been obliged to do
so if he had been her husband, she said, and could she do less for him
as her lover?
"She removed Louis to Villenoix, where they have been living for two
years."
So, instead of continuing my journey, I stopped at Blois to go to see
Louis. Good Monsieur Lefebvre would not hear of my lodging anywhere
but at his house, where he showed me his nephew's room with the books
and all else that had belonged to him. At every turn the old man could
not suppress some mournful exclamation, showing what hopes Louis'
precocious genius had raised, and the terrible grief into which this
irreparable ruin had plunged him.
"That young fellow knew everything, my dear sir!" said he, laying on
the table a volume containing Spinoza's works. "How could so well
organized a brain go astray?"
"Indeed, monsieur," said I, "was it not perhaps the result of its
being so highly organized? If he really is a victim to the malady as
yet unstudied in all its aspects, which is known simply as madness, I
am inclined to attribute it to his passion. His studies and his mode
of life had strung his powers and faculties to a degree of energy
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beyond which the least further strain was too much for nature; Love
was enough to crack them, or to raise them to a new form of expression
which we are maligning perhaps, by ticketing it without due knowledge.
In fact, he may perhaps have regarded the joys of marriage as an
obstacle to the perfection of his inner man and his flight towards
spiritual spheres."
"My dear sir," said the old man, after listening to me with attention,
"your reasoning is, no doubt, very sound; but even if I could follow
it, would this melancholy logic comfort me for the loss of my nephew?"
Lambert's uncle was one of those men who live only by their
affections.
I went to Villenoix on the following day. The kind old man accompanied
me to the gates of Blois. When we were out on the road to Villenoix,
he stopped me and said:
"As you may suppose, I do not go there. But do not forget what I have
said; and in Mademoiselle de Villenoix's presence affect not to
perceive that Louis is mad."
He remained standing on the spot where I left him, watching me till I
was out of sight.
I made my way to the chateau of Villenoix, not without deep agitation.
My thoughts were many at each step on this road, which Louis had so
often trodden with a heart full of hopes, a soul spurred on by the
myriad darts of love. The shrubs, the trees, the turns of the winding
road where little gullies broke the banks on each side, were to me
full of strange interest. I tried to enter into the impressions and
thoughts of my unhappy friend. Those evening meetings on the edge of
the coombe, where his ladylove had been wont to find him, had, no
doubt, initiated Mademoiselle de Villenoix into the secrets of that
vast and lofty spirit, as I had learned them all some years before.
But the thing that most occupied my mind, and gave to my pilgrimage
the interest of intense curiosity, in addition to the almost pious
feelings that led me onwards, was that glorious faith of Mademoiselle
de Villenoix's which the good priest had told me of. Had she in the
course of time been infected with her lover's madness, or had she so
completely entered into his soul that she could understand all its
thoughts, even the most perplexed? I lost myself in the wonderful
problem of feeling, passing the highest inspirations of passion and
the most beautiful instances of selfsacrifice. That one should die
for the other is an almost vulgar form of devotion. To live faithful
to one love is a form of heroism that immortalized Mademoiselle
Dupuis. When the great Napoleon and Lord Byron could find successors
in the hearts of women they had loved, we may well admire
Bolingbroke's widow; but Mademoiselle Dupuis could feed on the
memories of many years of happiness, whereas Mademoiselle de
Villenoix, having known nothing of love but its first excitement,
seemed to me to typify love in its highest expression. If she were
herself almost crazy, it was splendid; but if she had understood and
entered into his madness, she combined with the beauty of a noble
heart a crowning effort of passion worthy to be studied and honored.
When I saw the tall turrets of the chateau, remembering how often poor
Lambert must have thrilled at the sight of them, my heart beat
anxiously. As I recalled the events of our boyhood, I was almost a
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sharer in his present life and situation. At last I reached a wide,
deserted courtyard, and I went into the hall of the house without
meeting a soul. There the sound of my steps brought out an old woman,
to whom I gave a letter written to Mademoiselle de Villenoix by
Monsieur Lefebvre. In a few minutes this woman returned to bid me
enter, and led me to a low room, floored with blackandwhite marble;
the Venetian shutters were closed, and at the end of the room I dimly
saw Louis Lambert.
"Be seated, monsieur," said a gentle voice that went to my heart.
Mademoiselle de Villenoix was at my side before I was aware of her
presence, and noiselessly brought me a chair, which at first I would
not accept. It was so dark that at first I saw Mademoiselle de
Villenoix and Lambert only as two black masses perceived against the
gloomy background. I presently sat down under the influence of the
feeling that comes over us, almost in spite of ourselves, under the
obscure vault of a church. My eyes, full of the bright sunshine,
accustomed themselves gradually to this artificial night.
"Monsieur is your old schoolfriend," she said to Louis.
He made no reply. At last I could see him, and it was one of those
spectacles that are stamped on the memory for ever. He was standing,
his elbows resting on the cornice of the low wainscot, which threw his
body forward, so that it seemed bowed under the weight of his bent
head. His hair was as long as a woman's, falling over his shoulders
and hanging about his face, giving him a resemblance to the busts of
the great men of the time of Louis XIV. His face was perfectly white.
He constantly rubbed one leg against the other, with a mechanical
action that nothing could have checked, and the incessant friction of
the bones made a doleful sound. Near him was a bed of moss on boards.
"He very rarely lies down," said Mademoiselle de Villenoix; "but
whenever he does, he sleeps for several days."
Louis stood, as I beheld him, day and night with a fixed gaze, never
winking his eyelids as we do. Having asked Mademoiselle de Villenoix
whether a little more light would hurt our friend, on her reply I
opened the shutters a little way, and could see the expression of
Lambert's countenance. Alas! he was wrinkled, whiteheaded, his eyes
dull and lifeless as those of the blind. His features seemed all drawn
upwards to the top of his head. I made several attempts to talk to
him, but he did not hear me. He was a wreck snatched from the grave, a
conquest of life from deathor of death from life!
I stayed for about an hour, sunk in unaccountable dreams, and lost in
painful thought. I listened to Mademoiselle de Villenoix, who told me
every detail of this lifethat of a child in arms.
Suddenly Louis ceased rubbing his legs together, and said slowly:
"The angels are white."
I cannot express the effect produced upon me by this utterance, by the
sound of the voice I had loved, whose accents, so painfully expected,
had seemed to be lost for ever. My eyes filled with tears in spite of
every effort. An involuntary instinct warned me, making me doubt
whether Louis had really lost his reason. I was indeed well assured
that he neither saw nor heard me; but the sweetness of his tone, which
seemed to reveal heavenly happiness, gave his speech an amazing
effect. These words, the incomplete revelation of an unknown world,
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rang in our souls like some glorious distant bells in the depth of a
dark night. I was no longer surprised that Mademoiselle de Villenoix
considered Lambert to be perfectly sane. The life of the soul had
perhaps subdued that of the body. His faithful companion had, no doubt
as I had at that momentintuitions of that melodious and beautiful
existence to which we give the name of Heaven in its highest meaning.
This woman, this angel, always was with him, seated at her embroidery
frame; and each time she drew the needle out she gazed at Lambert with
sad and tender feeling. Unable to endure this terrible sightfor I
could not, like Mademoiselle de Villenoix, read all his secretsI
went out, and she came with me to walk for a few minutes and talk of
herself and of Lambert.
"Louis must, no doubt, appear to be mad," said she. "But he is not, if
the term mad ought only to be used in speaking of those whose brain is
for some unknown cause diseased, and who can show no reason in their
actions. Everything in my husband is perfectly balanced. Though he did
not actively recognize you, it is not that he did not see you. He has
succeeded in detaching himself from his body, and discerns us under
some other aspectwhat that is, I know not. When he speaks, he utters
wondrous things. Only it often happens that he concludes in speech an
idea that had its beginning in his mind; or he may begin a sentence
and finish it in thought. To other men he seems insane; to me, living
as I do in his mind, his ideas are quite lucid. I follow the road his
spirit travels; and though I do not know every turning, I can reach
the goal with him.
"Which of us has not often known what it is to think of some futile
thing and be led on to some serious reflection through the ideas or
memories it brings in its train? Not unfrequently, after speaking
about some trifle, the simple startingpoint of a rapid train of
reflections, a thinker may forget or be silent as to the abstract
connection of ideas leading to his conclusion, and speak again only to
utter the last link in the chain of his meditations.
"Inferior minds, to whom this swift mental vision is a thing unknown,
who are ignorant of the spirit's inner workings, laugh at the dreamer;
and if he is subject to this kind of obliviousness, regard him as a
madman. Louis is always in this state; he soars perpetually through
the spaces of thought, traversing them with the swiftness of a
swallow; I can follow him in his flight. This is the whole history of
his madness. Some day, perhaps, Louis will come back to the life in
which we vegetate; but if he breathes the air of heaven before the
time when we may be permitted to do so, why should we desire to have
him down among us? I am content to hear his heart beat, and all my
happiness is to be with him. Is he not wholly mine? In three years,
twice at intervals he was himself for a few days; once in Switzerland,
where we went, and once in an island off the wilds of Brittany, where
we took some seabaths. I have twice been very happy! I can live on
memory."
"But do you write down the things he says?" I asked.
"Why should I?" said she.
I was silent; human knowledge was indeed as nothing in this woman's
eyes.
"At those times, when he talked a little," she added, "I think I have
recorded some of his phrases, but I left it off; I did not understand
him then."
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I asked her for them by a look; she understood me. This is what I have
been able to preserve from oblivion.
I
Everything here on earth is produced by an ethereal substance
which is the common element of various phenomena, known
inaccurately as electricity, heat, light, the galvanic fluid, the
magnetic fluid, and so forth. The universal distribution of this
substance, under various forms, constitutes what is commonly known
as Matter.
II
The brain is the alembic to which the Animal conveys what each of
its organizations, in proportion to the strength of that vessel,
can absorb of that Substance, which returns it transformed into
Will.
The Will is a fluid inherent in every creature endowed with
motion. Hence the innumerable forms assumed by the Animal, the
results of its combinations with that Substance. The Animal's
instincts are the product of the coercion of the environment in
which it develops. Hence its variety.
III
In Man the Will becomes a power peculiar to him, and exceeding in
intensity that of any other species.
IV
By constant assimilation, the Will depends on the Substance it
meets with again and again in all its transmutations, pervading
them by Thought, which is a product peculiar to the human Will, in
combination with the modifications of that Substance.
V
The innumerable forms assumed by Thought are the result of the
greater or less perfection of the human mechanism.
VI
The Will acts through organs commonly called the five senses,
which, in fact, are but onethe faculty of Sight. Feeling and
tasting, hearing and smelling, are Sight modified to the
transformations of the Substance which Man can absorb in two
conditions: untransformed and transformed.
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VII
Everything of which the form comes within the cognizance of the
one sense of Sight may be reduced to certain simple bodies of
which the elements exist in the air, the light, or in the elements
of air and light. Sound is a condition of the air; colors are all
conditions of light; every smell is a combination of air and
light; hence the four aspects of Matter with regard to Mansound,
color, smell, and shape have the same origin, for the day is not
far off when the relationship of the phenomena of air and light
will be made clear.
Thought, which is allied to Light, is expressed in words which
depend on sound. To man, then, everything is derived from the
Substance, whose transformations vary only through Numbera
certain quantitative dissimilarity, the proportions resulting in
the individuals or objects of what are classed as Kingdoms.
VIII
When the Substance is absorbed in sufficient number (or quantity)
it makes of man an immensely powerful mechanism, in direct
communication with the very element of the Substance, and acting
on organic nature in the same way as a large stream when it
absorbs the smaller brooks. Volition sets this force in motion
independently of the Mind. By its concentration it acquires some
of the qualities of the Substance, such as the swiftness of light,
the penetrating power of electricity, and the faculty of
saturating a body; to which must be added that it apprehends what
it can do.
Still, there is in man a primordial and overruling phenomenon
which defies analysis. Man may be dissected completely; the
elements of Will and Mind may perhaps be found; but there still
will remain beyond apprehension the x against which I once used
to struggle. That x is the Word, the Logos, whose communication
burns and consumes those who are not prepared to receive it. The
Word is for ever generating the Substance.
IX
Rage, like all our vehement demonstrations, is a current of the
human force that acts electrically; its turmoil when liberated
acts on persons who are present even though they be neither its
cause nor its object. Are there not certain men who by a discharge
of Volition can sublimate the essence of the feelings of the
masses?
X
Fanaticism and all emotions are living forces. These forces in
some beings become rivers that gather in and sweep away
everything.
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XI
Though Space is, certain faculties have the power of traversing
it with such rapidity that it is as though it existed not. From
your own bed to the frontiers of the universe there are but two
steps: Will and Faith.
XII
Facts are nothing; they do not subsist; all that lives of us is
the Idea.
XIII
The realm of Ideas is divided into three spheres: that of
Instinct, that of Abstractions, that of Specialism.
XIV
The greater part, the weaker part of visible humanity, dwells in
the Sphere of Instinct. The Instinctives are born, labor, and
die without rising to the second degree of human intelligence,
namely Abstraction.
XV
Society begins in the sphere of Abstraction. If Abstraction, as
compared with Instinct, is an almost divine power, it is
nevertheless incredibly weak as compared with the gift of
Specialism, which is the formula of God. Abstraction comprises all
nature in a germ, more virtually than a seed contains the whole
system of a plant and its fruits. From Abstraction are derived
laws, arts, social ideas, and interests. It is the glory and the
scourge of the earth: its glory because it has created social
life; its scourge because it allows man to evade entering into
Specialism, which is one of the paths to the Infinite. Man
measures everything by Abstractions: Good and Evil, Virtue and
Crime. Its formula of equity is a pair of scales, its justice is
blind. God's justice sees: there is all the difference.
There must be intermediate Beings, then, dividing the sphere of
Instinct from the sphere of Abstractions, in whom the two elements
mingle in an infinite variety of proportions. Some have more of
one, some more of the other. And there are also some in which the
two powers neutralize each other by equality of effect.
XVI
Specialism consists in seeing the things of the material universe
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and the things of the spiritual universe in all their
ramifications original and causative. The greatest human geniuses
are those who started from the darkness of Abstraction to attain
to the light of Specialism. (Specialism, species, sight;
speculation, or seeing everything, and all at once; Speculum, a
mirror or means of apprehending a thing by seeing the whole of
it.) Jesus had the gift of Specialism; He saw each fact in its
root and in its results, in the past where it had its rise, and in
the future where it would grow and spread; His sight pierced into
the understanding of others. The perfection of the inner eye gives
rise to the gift of Specialism. Specialism brings with it
Intuition. Intuition is one of the faculties of the Inner Man, of
which Specialism is an attribute. Intuition acts by an
imperceptible sensation of which he who obeys it is not conscious:
for instance, Napoleon instinctively moving from a spot struck
immediately afterwards by a cannon ball.
XVII
Between the sphere of Abstraction and that of Specialism, as
between those of Abstraction and Instinct, there are beings in
whom the attributes of both combine and produce a mixture; these
are men of genius.
XVIII
Specialism is necessarily the most perfect expression of man, and
he is the link binding the visible world to the higher worlds; he
acts, sees, and feels by his inner powers. The man of Abstraction
thinks. The man of Instinct acts.
XIX
Hence man has three degrees. That of Instinct, below the average;
that of Abstraction, the general average; that of Specialism,
above the average. Specialism opens to man his true career; the
Infinite dawns on him; he sees what his destiny must be.
XX
There are three worldsthe Natural, the Spiritual, and the
Divine. Humanity passes through the Natural world, which is not
fixed either in its essence and unfixed in its faculties. The
Spiritual world is fixed in its essence and unfixed in its
faculties. The Divine world is necessarily a Material worship, a
Spiritual worship, and a Divine worship: three forms expressed in
action, speech, and prayer, or, in other words, in deed,
apprehension, and love. Instinct demands deed; Abstraction is
concerned with Ideas; Specialism sees the end, it aspires to God
with presentiment or contemplation.
XXI
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Hence, perhaps, some day the converse of Et Verbum caro factum
est will become the epitome of a new Gospel, which will proclaim
that The Flesh shall be made the Word and become the Utterance of
God.
XXII
The Resurrection is the work of the Wind of Heaven sweeping over
the worlds. The angel borne on the Wind does not say: "Arise, ye
dead"; he says, "Arise, ye who live!"
Such are the meditations which I have with great difficulty cast in a
form adapted to our understanding. There are some others which Pauline
remembered more exactly, wherefore I know not, and which I wrote from
her dictation; but they drive the mind to despair when, knowing in
what an intellect they originated, we strive to understand them. I
will quote a few of them to complete my study of this figure; partly,
too, perhaps, because, in these last aphorisms, Lambert's formulas
seem to include a larger universe than the former set, which would
apply only to zoological evolution. Still, there is a relation between
the two fragments, evident to those personsthough they be but few
who love to dive into such intellectual deeps.
I
Everything on earth exists solely by motion and number.
II
Motion is, so to speak, number in action.
III
Motion is the product of a force generated by the Word and by
Resistance, which is Matter. But for Resistance, Motion would have
had no results; its action would have been infinite. Newton's
gravitation is not a law, but an effect of the general law of
universal motion.
IV
Motion, acting in proportion to Resistance, produces a result
which is Life. As soon as one or the other is the stronger, Life
ceases.
V
No portion of Motion is wasted; it always produces number; still,
it can be neutralized by disproportionate resistance, as in
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minerals.
VI
Number, which produces variety of all kinds, also gives rise to
Harmony, which, in the highest meaning of the word, is the
relation of parts to the whole.
VII
But for Motion, everything would be one and the same. Its
products, identical in their essence, differ only by Number, which
gives rise to faculties.
VIII
Man looks to faculties; angels look to the Essence.
IX
By giving his body up to elemental action, man can achieve an
inner union with the Light.
X
Number is intellectual evidence belonging to man alone; by it he
acquires knowledge of the Word.
XI
There is a Number beyond which the impure cannot pass: the Number
which is the limit of creation.
XII
The Unit was the startingpoint of every product: compounds are
derived from it, but the end must be identical with the beginning.
Hence this Spiritual formula: the compound Unit, the variable
Unit, the fixed Unit.
XIII
The Universe is the Unit in variety. Motion is the means; Number
is the result. The end is the return of all things to the Unit,
which is God.
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XIV
Three and Seven are the two chief Spiritual numbers.
XV
Three is the formula of created worlds. It is the Spiritual Sign
of the creation, as it is the Material Sign of dimension. In fact,
God has worked by curved lines only: the Straight Line is an
attribute of the Infinite; and man, who has the presentiment of
the Infinite, reproduces it in his works. Two is the number of
generation. Three is the number of Life which includes generation
and offspring. Add the sum of four, and you have seven, the
formula of Heaven. Above all is God; He is the Unit.
After going in to see Louis once more, I took leave of his wife and
went home, lost in ideas so adverse to social life that, in spite of a
promise to return to Villenoix, I did not go.
The sight of Louis had had some mysteriously sinister influence over
me. I was afraid to place myself again in that heavy atmosphere, where
ecstasy was contagious. Any man would have felt, as I did, a longing
to throw himself into the infinite, just as one soldier after another
killed himself in a certain sentry box where one had committed suicide
in the camp at Boulogne. It is a known fact that Napoleon was obliged
to have the hut burned which had harbored an idea that had become a
mortal infection.
Louis' room had perhaps the same fatal effect as that sentry box.
These two facts would then be additional evidence in favor of his
theory of the transfusion of Will. I was conscious of strange
disturbances, transcending the most fantastic results of taking tea,
coffee, or opium, of dreams or of fevermysterious agents, whose
terrible action often sets our brains on fire.
I ought perhaps to have made a separate book of these fragments of
thought, intelligible only to certain spirits who have been accustomed
to lean over the edge of abysses in the hope of seeing to the bottom.
The life of that mighty brain, which split up on every side perhaps,
like a too vast empire, would have been set forth in the narrative of
this man's visionsa being incomplete for lack of force or of
weakness; but I preferred to give an account of my own impressions
rather than to compose a more or less poetical romance.
Louis Lambert died at the age of twentyeight, September 25, 1824, in
his true love's arms. He was buried by her desire in an island in the
park at Villenoix. His tombstone is a plain stone cross, without name
or date. Like a flower that has blossomed on the margin of a
precipice, and drops into it, its colors and fragrance all unknown, it
was fitting that he too should fall. Like many another misprized soul,
he had often yearned to dive haughtily into the void, and abandon
there the secrets of his own life.
Louis Lambert
Louis Lambert 61
Page No 64
Mademoiselle de Villenoix would, however, have been quite justified in
recording his name on that cross with her own. Since her partner's
death, reunion has been her constant, hourly hope. But the vanities of
woe are foreign to faithful souls.
Villenoix is falling into ruin. She no longer resides there; to the
end, no doubt, that she may the better picture herself there as she
used to be. She had said long ago:
"His heart was mine; his genius is with God."
CHATEAU DE SACHE. JuneJuly 1832.
ADDENDUM
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Lambert, Louis
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Seaside Tragedy
Lefebvre
A Seaside Tragedy
Meyraux
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
StaelHolstein (AnneLouiseGermaine Necker, Baronne de)
The Chouans
Letters of Two Brides
Villenoix, Pauline Salomon de
A Seaside Tragedy
The Vicar of Tours
Louis Lambert
Louis Lambert 62
Bookmarks
1. Table of Contents, page = 3
2. Louis Lambert, page = 4
3. Honore de Balzac, page = 4