Louis Lambert

Honore de Balzac

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Louis Lambert was born at Montoire, a littletown in the Vendomois, where his fatherowned a tannery of no great magnitude, andintended that his son should succeed him; buthis precocious bent for study modified the pa-ternal decision. For, indeed, the tanner and hiswife adored Louis, their only child, and nevercontradicted him in anything.

At the age of five Louis had begun by readingthe Old and New Testaments; and these twoBooks, including so many books, had sealed hisfate. Could that childish imagination under-stand the mystical depths of the Scriptures?Could it so early follow the flight of the HolySpirit across the worlds? Or was it merely at-tracted by the romantic touches which aboundin those Oriental poems! Our narrative willanswer these questions to some readers.

One thing resulted from this first reading of theBible: Louis went all over Montoire begging forbooks, and he obtained them by those winning

ways peculiar to children, which no one canresist. While devoting himself to these studiesunder no sort of guidance, he reached the ageof ten.

At that period substitutes for the army werescarce; rich families secured them long before-hand to have them ready when the lots weredrawn. The poor tanner's modest fortune didnot allow of their purchasing a substitute fortheir son, and they saw no means allowed bylaw for evading the conscription but that ofmaking him a priest; so, in 1807, they sent himto his maternal uncle, the parish priest of Mer,another small town on the Loire, not far fromBlois. This arrangement at once satisfied Louis'passion for knowledge, and his parents' wishnot to expose him to the dreadful chances ofwar; and, indeed, his taste for study and preco-cious intelligence gave grounds for hoping thathe might rise to high fortunes in the Church.

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

Lambert owed the favor and patronage of thiscelebrated lady to chance, or shall we not say toProvidence, who can smooth the path of forlorngenius? To us, indeed, who do not see belowthe surface of human things, such vicissitudes,of which we find many examples in the lives ofgreat men, appear to be merely the result ofphysical phenomena; to most biographers thehead of a man of genius rises above the herd assome noble plant in the fields attracts the eye ofa botanist in its splendor. This comparison maywell be applied to Louis Lambert's adventure;he was accustomed to spend the time allowedhim by his uncle for holidays at his father'shouse; but instead of indulging, after the man-ner of schoolboys, in the sweets of the delight-

ful far niente that tempts us at every age, he setout every morning with part of a loaf and hisbooks, and went to read and meditate in thewoods, to escape his mother's remonstrances,for she believed such persistent study to beinjurious. How admirable is a mother's instinct!From that time reading was in Louis a sort ofappetite which nothing could satisfy; he de-voured books of every kind, feeding indis-criminately on religious works, history, phi-losophy, and physics. He has told me that hefound indescribable delight in reading diction-aries for lack of other books, and I readily be-lieved him. What scholar has not many a timefound pleasure in seeking the probable mean-ing of some unknown word? The analysis of aword, its physiognomy and history, would beto Lambert matter for long dreaming. But thesewere not the instinctive dreams by which a boyaccustoms himself to the phenomena of life,steels himself to every moral or physical per-ception—an involuntary education which sub-

sequently brings forth fruit both in the under-standing and character of a man; no, Louismastered the facts, and he accounted for themafter seeking out both the principle and the endwith the mother wit of a savage. Indeed, fromthe age of fourteen, by one of those startlingfreaks in which nature sometimes indulges,and which proved how anomalous was histemperament, he would utter quite simplyideas of which the depth was not revealed tome till a long time after.

"Often," he has said to me when speaking of hisstudies, "often have I made the most delightfulvoyage, floating on a word down the abyss ofthe past, like an insect embarked on a blade ofgrass tossing on the ripples of a stream. Startingfrom Greece, I would get to Rome, and traversethe whole extent of modern ages. What a finebook might be written of the life and adven-tures of a word! It has, of course, received vari-ous stamps from the occasions on which it has

served its purpose; it has conveyed differentideas in different places; but is it not stillgrander to think of it under the three aspects ofsoul, body, and motion? Merely to regard it inthe abstract, apart from its functions, its effects,and its influence, is enough to cast one into anocean of meditations? Are not most words col-ored by the idea they represent? Then, towhose genius are they due? If it takes greatintelligence to create a word, how old may hu-man speech be? The combination of letters,their shapes, and the look they give to theword, are the exact reflection, in accordancewith the character of each nation, of the un-known beings whose traces survive in us.

"Who can philosophically explain the transitionfrom sensation to thought, from thought toword, from the word to its hieroglyphic pre-sentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet,from the alphabet to written language, of whichthe eloquent beauty resides in a series of im-

ages, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in asense, the hieroglyphics of thought? Was it notthe ancient mode of representing human ideasas embodied in the forms of animals that gaverise to the shapes of the first signs used in theEast for writing down language? Then has itnot left its traces by tradition on our modernlanguages, which have all seized some remnantof the primitive speech of nations, a majesticand solemn tongue whose grandeur and so-lemnity decrease as communities grow old;whose sonorous tones ring in the Hebrew Bible,and still are noble in Greece, but grow weakerunder the progress of successive phases of civi-lization?

"Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe themysteries lying buried in every human word?In the word True do we not discern a certainimaginary rectitude? Does not the compactbrevity of its sound suggest a vague image ofchaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in all

things? The syllable seems to me singularlycrisp and fresh.

"I chose the formula of an abstract idea on pur-pose, not wishing to illustrate the case by aword which should make it too obvious to theapprehension, as the word Flight for instance,which is a direct appeal to the senses.

"But is it not so with every root word? They areall stamped with a living power that comesfrom the soul, and which they restore to thesoul through the mysterious and wonderfulaction and reaction between thought andspeech. Might we not speak of it as a lover whofinds on his mistress' lips as much love as hegives? Thus, by their mere physiognomy,words call to life in our brain the beings whichthey serve to clothe. Like all beings, there is butone place where their properties are at full lib-erty to act and develop. But the subject de-mands a science to itself perhaps!"

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

Louis' passion for reading had on the wholebeen very well satisfied. The cure of Mer hadtwo or three thousand volumes. This treasurehad been derived from the plunder committedduring the Revolution in the neighboring cha-teaux and abbeys. As a priest who had takenthe oath, the worthy man had been able tochoose the best books from among these pre-cious libraries, which were sold by the pound.In three years Louis Lambert had assimilatedthe contents of all the books in his uncle's li-brary that were worth reading. The process ofabsorbing ideas by means of reading had be-come in him a very strange phenomenon. Hiseye took in six or seven lines at once, and hismind grasped the sense with a swiftness asremarkable as that of his eye; sometimes evenone word in a sentence was enough to enablehim to seize the gist of the matter.

His memory was prodigious. He rememberedwith equal exactitude the ideas he had derivedfrom reading, and those which had occurred tohim in the course of meditation or conversa-tion. Indeed, he had every form of memory—for places, for names, for words, things, andfaces. 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 effectwith regard to the most abstract efforts of theintellect. He could remember, as he said, notmerely the position of a sentence in the bookwhere he had met with it, but the frame ofmind he had been in at remote dates. Thus hiswas the singular privilege of being able to re-trace in memory the whole life and progress ofhis mind, from the ideas he had first acquiredto the last thought evolved in it, from the mostobscure to the clearest. His brain, accustomedin early youth to the mysterious mechanism bywhich human faculties are concentrated, drew

from this rich treasury endless images full oflife and freshness, on which he fed his spiritduring those lucid spells of contemplation.

"Whenever I wish it," said he to me in his ownlanguage, to which a fund of remembrancegave precocious originality, "I can draw a veilover my eyes. Then I suddenly see within me acamera obscura, where natural objects are re-produced in purer forms than those underwhich they first appeared to my externalsense."

At the age of twelve his imagination, stimu-lated by the perpetual exercise of his faculties,had developed to a point which permitted himto have such precise concepts of things whichhe knew only from reading about them, thatthe image stamped on his mind could not havebeen clearer if he had actually seen them,whether this was by a process of analogy orthat he was gifted with a sort of second sight bywhich he could command all nature.

"When I read the story of the battle of Auster-litz," said he to me one day, "I saw every inci-dent. The roar of the cannon, the cries of thefighting men rang in my ears, and made myinmost self quiver; I could smell the powder; Iheard the clatter of horses and the voices ofmen; I looked down on the plain where armednations were in collision, just as if I had been onthe heights of Santon. The scene was as terrify-ing as a passage from the Apocalypse." On theoccasions when he brought all his powers intoplay, and in some degree lost consciousness ofhis physical existence, and lived on only by theremarkable energy of his mental powers,whose sphere was enormously expanded, heleft space behind him, to use his own words.

But I will not here anticipate the intellectualphases of his life. Already, in spite of myself, Ihave reversed the order in which I ought to tellthe history of this man, who transferred all his

activities to thinking, as others throw all theirlife into action.

A strong bias drew his mind into mystical stud-ies.

"Abyssus abyssum," he would say. "Our spirit isabysmal and loves the abyss. In childhood,manhood, and old age we are always eager formysteries in whatever form they present them-selves."

This predilection was disastrous; if indeed hislife can be measured by ordinary standards, orif we may gauge another's happiness by ourown or by social notions. This taste for the"things of heaven," another phrase he was fondof using, this mens divinior, was due perhaps tothe influence produced on his mind by the firstbooks he read at his uncle's. Saint Theresa andMadame Guyon were a sequel to the Bible; theyhad the first-fruits of his manly intelligence,and accustomed him to those swift reactions of

the soul of which ecstasy is at once the resultand the means. This line of study, this peculiartaste, elevated his heart, purified, ennobled it,gave him an appetite for the divine nature, andsuggested to him the almost womanly refine-ment of feeling which is instinctive in greatmen; perhaps their sublime superiority is nomore than the desire to devote themselveswhich characterizes woman, only transferred tothe greatest things.

As a result of these early impressions, Louispassed immaculate through his school life; thisbeautiful virginity of the senses naturally re-sulted in the richer fervor of his blood, and inincreased faculties of mind.

The Baroness de Stael, forbidden to comewithin forty leagues of Paris, spent severalmonths of her banishment on an estate nearVendome. One day, when out walking, she meton the skirts of the park the tanner's son, almostin rags, and absorbed in reading. The book was

a translation of Heaven and Hell. At that timeMonsieur Saint-Martin, Monsieur de Gence,and a few other French or half German writerswere almost the only persons in the FrenchEmpire to whom the name of Swedenborg wasknown. Madame de Stael, greatly surprised,took the book from him with the roughness sheaffected 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 shesat 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 dialogueexcepting those first words.

Such a meeting was of a kind to strike Madamede Stael very greatly; on her return home shesaid but little about it, notwithstanding an effu-siveness which in her became mere loquacity;but it evidently occupied her thoughts.

The only person now living who preserves anyrecollection of the incident, and whom I cate-chised to be informed of what few words Ma-dame de Stael had let drop, could with diffi-culty recall these words spoken by the Baronessas describing Lambert, "He is a real seer."

Louis failed to justify in the eyes of the worldthe high hopes he had inspired in his protec-tress. The transient favor she showed him wasregarded as a feminine caprice, one of the fan-cies characteristic of artist souls. Madame deStael determined to save Louis Lambert alikefrom serving the Emperor or the Church, and

to preserve him for the glorious destiny which,she thought, awaited him; for she made himout to be a second Moses snatched from thewaters. Before her departure she instructed afriend of hers, Monsieur de Corbigny, to sendher Moses in due course to the High School atVendome; then she probably forgot him.

Having entered this college at the age of four-teen, early in 1811, Lambert would leave it atthe end of 1814, when he had finished thecourse of Philosophy. I doubt whether duringthe whole time he ever heard a word of hisbenefactress—if indeed it was the act of a bene-factress to pay for a lad's schooling for threeyears without a thought of his future prospects,after diverting him from a career in which hemight have found happiness. The circum-stances of the time, and Louis Lambert's charac-ter, may to a great extent absolve Madame deStael for her thoughtlessness and her generos-ity. The gentleman who was to have kept up

communications between her and the boy leftBlois just at the time when Louis passed out ofthe college. The political events that ensuedwere then a sufficient excuse for this gentle-man's neglect of the Baroness' protege. Theauthoress of Corinne heard no more of her littleMoses.

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

At this time Louis Lambert was at once tooproud and too poor to go in search of a patron-ess who was traveling all over Europe. How-ever, he went on foot from Blois to Paris in thehope of seeing her, and arrived, unluckily, onthe very day of her death. Two letters fromLambert to the Baroness remained unanswered.

The memory of Madame de Stael's good inten-tions with regard to Louis remains, therefore,only in some few young minds, struck, as minewas, by the strangeness of the story.

No one who had not gone through the trainingat our college could understand the effect usu-ally made on our minds by the announcementthat a "new boy" had arrived, or the impressionthat such an adventure as Louis Lambert's wascalculated to produce.

And here a little information must be given asto the primitive administration of this institu-tion, originally half-military and half-monastic,to explain the new life which there awaitedLambert. Before the Revolution, the Oratorians,devoted, like the Society of Jesus, to the educa-tion of youth—succeeding the Jesuits, in fact, incertain of their establishments—the colleges ofVendome, of Tournon, of la Fleche, Pont-Levoy, Sorreze, and Juilly. That at Vendome,like the others, I believe, turned out a certain

number of cadets for the army. The abolition ofeducational bodies, decreed by the convention,had but little effect on the college at Vendome.When the first crisis had blown over, the au-thorities recovered possession of their build-ings; certain Oratorians, scattered about thecountry, came back to the college and re-opened it under the old rules, with the habits,practices, and customs which gave this school acharacter with which I have seen nothing at allcomparable in any that I have visited since I leftthat establishment.

Standing in the heart of the town, on the littleriver Loire which flows under its walls, thecollege possesses extensive precincts, carefullyenclosed by walls, and including all the build-ings necessary for an institution on that scale: achapel, a theatre, an infirmary, a bakehouse,gardens, and water supply. This college is themost celebrated home of learning in all the cen-tral provinces, and receives pupils from them

and from the colonies. Distance prohibits anyfrequent visits from parents to their children.

The rule of the House forbids holidays awayfrom it. Once entered there, a pupil neverleaves till his studies are finished. With the ex-ception of walks taken under the guidance ofthe Fathers, everything is calculated to give theSchool the benefit of conventual discipline; inmy day the tawse was still a living memory,and the classical leather strap played its terriblepart with all the honors. The punishment origi-nally invented by the Society of Jesus, as alarm-ing to the moral as to the physical man, wasstill in force in all the integrity of the originalcode.

Letters to parents were obligatory on certaindays, so was confession. Thus our sins and oursentiments were all according to pattern. Eve-rything bore the stamp of monastic rule. I wellremember, among other relics of the ancientorder, the inspection we went through every

Sunday. We were all in our best, placed in filelike soldiers to await the arrival of the two in-spectors who, attended by the tutors and thetradesmen, examined us from the three pointsof view of dress, health, and morals.

The two or three hundred pupils lodged in theestablishment were divided, according to an-cient custom, into the minimes (the smallest),the little boys, the middle boys, and the bigboys. The division of the minimes included theeighth and seventh classes; the little boysformed the sixth, fifth, and fourth; the middleboys were classed as third and second; and thefirst class comprised the senior students—ofphilosophy, rhetoric, the higher mathematics,and chemistry. Each of these divisions had itsown building, classrooms, and play-ground, inthe large common precincts on to which theclassrooms opened, and beyond which was therefectory.

This dining-hall, worthy of an ancient religiousOrder, accommodated all the school. Contraryto the usual practice in educational institutions,we were allowed to talk at our meals, a tolerantOratorian rule which enabled us to exchangeplates according to our taste. This gastronom-ical barter was always one of the chief pleas-ures of our college life. If one of the "middle"boys at the head of his table wished for a help-ing of lentils instead of dessert—for we haddessert—the offer was passed down from oneto another: "Dessert for lentils!" till some otherepicure had accepted; then the plate of lentilswas passed up to the bidder from hand tohand, and the plate of dessert returned by thesame road. Mistakes were never made. If sev-eral identical offers were made, they weretaken in order, and the formula would be, "Len-tils number one for dessert number one." Thetables were very long; our incessant barter kepteverything moving; we transacted it withamazing eagerness; and the chatter of three

hundred lads, the bustling to and fro of theservants employed in changing the plates, set-ting down the dishes, handing the bread, withthe tours of inspection of the masters, made thisrefectory at Vendome a scene unique in its way,and the amazement of visitors.

To make our life more tolerable, deprived aswe were of all communication with the outerworld and of family affection, we were allowedto keep pigeons and to have gardens. Our twoor three hundred pigeon-houses, with a thou-sand birds nesting all round the outer wall, andabove thirty garden plots, were a sight evenstranger than our meals. But a full account ofthe peculiarities which made the college atVendome a place unique in itself and fertile inreminiscences to those who spent their boy-hood there, would be weariness to the reader.Which of us all but remembers with delight,notwithstanding the bitterness of learning, theeccentric pleasures of that cloistered life? The

sweetmeats purchased by stealth in the courseof our walks, permission obtained to play cardsand devise theatrical performances during theholidays, such tricks and freedom as were ne-cessitated by our seclusion; then, again, ourmilitary band, a relic of the cadets; our acad-emy, our chaplain, our Father professors, andall our games permitted or prohibited, as thecase might be; the cavalry charges on stilts, thelong slides made in winter, the clatter of ourclogs; and, above all, the trading transactionswith "the shop" set up in the courtyard itself.

This shop was kept by a sort of cheap-jack, ofwhom big and little boys could procure—according to his prospectus—boxes, stilts, tools,Jacobin pigeons, and Nuns, Mass-books—anarticle in small demand —penknives, paper,pens, pencils, ink of all colors, balls and mar-bles; in short, the whole catalogue of the mosttreasured possessions of boys, including every-thing from sauce for the pigeons we were

obliged to kill off, to the earthenware pots inwhich we set aside the rice from supper to beeaten at next morning's breakfast. Which of uswas so unhappy as to have forgotten how hisheart beat at the sight of this booth, open peri-odically during play-hours on Sundays, towhich we went, each in his turn, to spend hislittle pocket-money; while the smallness of thesum allowed by our parents for these minorpleasures required us to make a choice amongall the objects that appealed so strongly to ourdesires? Did ever a young wife, to whom herhusband, during the first days of happiness,hands, twelve times a year, a purse of gold, thebudget of her personal fancies, dream of somany different purchases, each of which wouldabsorb the whole sum, as we imagined possibleon the eve of the first Sunday in each month?For six francs during one night we ownedevery delight of that inexhaustible shop! andduring Mass every response we chanted wasmixed up in our minds with our secret calcula-

tions. Which of us all can recollect ever havinghad a sou left to spend on the Sunday follow-ing? And which of us but obeyed the instinctivelaw of social existence by pitying, helping, anddespising those pariahs who, by the avarice orpoverty of their parents, found themselvespenniless?

Any one who forms a clear idea of this hugecollege, with its monastic buildings in the heartof a little town, and the four plots in which wewere distributed as by a monastic rule, willeasily conceive of the excitement that we felt atthe arrival of a new boy, a passenger suddenlyembarked on the ship. No young duchess, onher first appearance at Court, was ever morespitefully criticised than the new boy by theyouths in his division. Usually during the eve-ning play-hour before prayers, those syco-phants who were accustomed to ingratiatethemselves with the Fathers who took it inturns two and two for a week to keep an eye on

us, would be the first to hear on trustworthyauthority: "There will be a new boy to-morrow!" and then suddenly the shout, "ANew Boy!—A New Boy!" rang through thecourts. We hurried up to crowd round the su-perintendent and pester him with questions:

"Where was he coming from? What was hisname? Which class would he be in?" and soforth.

Louis Lambert's advent was the subject of aromance worthy of the Arabian Nights. I was inthe fourth class at the time—among the littleboys. Our housemasters were two men whomwe called Fathers from habit and tradition,though they were not priests. In my time therewere indeed but three genuine Oratorians towhom this title legitimately belonged; in 1814they all left the college, which had graduallybecome secularized, to find occupation aboutthe altar in various country parishes, like thecure of Mer.

Father Haugoult, the master for the week, wasnot a bad man, but of very moderate attain-ments, and he lacked the tact which is indis-pensable for discerning the different charactersof children, and graduating their punishmentto their powers of resistance. Father Haugoult,then, began very obligingly to communicate tohis pupils the wonderful events which were toend on the morrow in the advent of the mostsingular of "new boys." Games were at an end.All the children came round in silence to hearthe story of Louis Lambert, discovered, like anaerolite, by Madame de Stael, in a corner of thewood. Monsieur Haugoult had to tell us allabout Madame de Stael; that evening sheseemed to me ten feet high; I saw at a later timethe picture of Corinne, in which Gerard repre-sents her as so tall and handsome; and, alas! thewoman painted by my imagination so far tran-scended this, that the real Madame de Stael fellat once in my estimation, even after I read herbook of really masculine power, De l'Allemagne.

But Lambert at that time was an even greaterwonder. Monsieur Mareschal, the headmaster,after examining him, had thought of placinghim among the senior boys. It was Louis' igno-rance of Latin that placed him so low as thefourth class, but he would certainly leap up aclass every year; and, as a remarkable excep-tion, he was to be one of the "Academy." Prohpudor! we were to have the honor of countingamong the "little boys" one whose coat wasadorned with the red ribbon displayed by the"Academicians" of Vendome. These Academi-cians enjoyed distinguished privileges; theyoften dined at the director's table, and held twoliterary meetings annually, at which we wereall present to hear their elucubrations. An Aca-demician was a great man in embryo. And ifevery Vendome scholar would speak the truth,he would confess that, in later life, an Academi-cian of the great French Academy seemed tohim far less remarkable than the stupendousboy who wore the cross and the imposing red

ribbon which were the insignia of our "Acad-emy."

It was very unusual to be one of that illustriousbody before attaining to the second class, forthe Academicians were expected to hold publicmeetings every Thursday during the holidays,and to read tales in verse or prose, epistles, es-says, tragedies, dramas—compositions farabove the intelligence of the lower classes. Ilong treasured the memory of a story called the"Green Ass," which was, I think, the master-piece of this unknown Society. In the fourth,and an Academician! This boy of fourteen, apoet already, the protege of Madame de Stael, acoming genius, said Father Haugoult, was to beone of us! a wizard, a youth capable of writinga composition or a translation while we werebeing called into lessons, and of learning hislessons by reading them through but once.Louis Lambert bewildered all our ideas. AndFather Haugoult's curiosity and impatience to

see this new boy added fuel to our excitedfancy.

"If he has pigeons, he can have no pigeon-house; there is not room for another. Well, itcannot be helped," said one boy, since famousas an agriculturist.

"Who will sit next to him?" said another.

"Oh, I wish I might be his chum!" cried an en-thusiast.

In school language, the word here renderedchum—faisant, or in some schools, copin—expressed a fraternal sharing of the joys andevils of your childish existence, a community ofinterests that was fruitful of squabbling andmaking friends again, a treaty of alliance offen-sive and defensive. It is strange, but never inmy time did I know brothers who were chums.If man lives by his feelings, he thinks perhapsthat he will make his life the poorer if he

merges an affection of his own choosing in anatural tie.

The impression made upon me by FatherHaugoult's harangue that evening is one of themost vivid reminiscences of my childhood; Ican compare it with nothing but my first read-ing of Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, I owe to myrecollection of these prodigious impressions anobservation that may perhaps be new as to thedifferent sense attached to words by eachhearer. The word in itself has no final meaning;we affect a word more than it affects us; itsvalue is in relation to the images we have as-similated and grouped round it; but a study ofthis fact would require considerable elabora-tion, and lead us too far from our immediatesubject.

Not being able to sleep, I had a long discussionwith my next neighbor in the dormitory as tothe remarkable being who on the morrow wasto be one of us. This neighbor, who became an

officer, and is now a writer with lofty philoso-phical views, Barchou de Penhoen, has notbeen false to his pre-destination, nor to the haz-ard of fortune by which the only two scholarsof Vendome, of whose fame Vendome everhears, were brought together in the same class-room, on the same form, and under the sameroof. Our comrade Dufaure had not, when thisbook was published, made his appearance inpublic life as a lawyer. The translator of Fichte,the expositor and friend of Ballanche, was al-ready interested, as I myself was, in metaphysi-cal questions; we often talked nonsense to-gether about God, ourselves, and nature. He atthat time affected pyrrhonism. Jealous of hisplace as leader, he doubted Lambert's preco-cious gifts; while I, having lately read Les En-fants celebres, overwhelmed him with evidence,quoting young Montcalm, Pico della Miran-dola, Pascal—in short, a score of early devel-oped brains, anomalies that are famous in the

history of the human mind, and Lambert'spredecessors.

I was at the time passionately addicted to read-ing. My father, who was ambitious to see me inthe Ecole Polytechnique, paid for me to have aspecial course of private lessons in mathemat-ics. My mathematical master was the librarianof the college, and allowed me to help myself tobooks without much caring what I chose totake from the library, a quiet spot where I wentto him during play-hours to have my lesson.Either he was no great mathematician, or hewas absorbed in some grand scheme, for hevery willingly left me to read when I ought tohave been learning, while he worked at I knewnot what. So, by a tacit understanding betweenus, I made no complaints of being taught noth-ing, and he said nothing of the books I bor-rowed.

Carried away by this ill-timed mania, I ne-glected my studies to compose poems, which

certainly can have shown no great promise, tojudge by a line of too many feet which becamefamous among my companions—the beginningof an epic on the Incas:

"O Inca! O roi infortune et malheureux!"

In derision of such attempts, I was nicknamedthe Poet, but mockery did not cure me. I wasalways rhyming, in spite of good advice fromMonsieur Mareschal, the headmaster, whotried to cure me of an unfortunately inveteratepassion by telling me the fable of a linnet thatfell out of the nest because it tried to fly beforeits wings were grown. I persisted in my read-ing; I became the least emulous, the idlest, themost dreamy of all the division of "little boys,"and consequently the most frequently pun-ished.

This autobiographical digression may givesome idea of the reflections I was led to makein anticipation of Lambert's arrival. I was thentwelve years old. I felt sympathy from the first

for the boy whose temperament had somepoints of likeness to my own. I was at last tohave a companion in daydreams and medita-tions. Though I knew not yet what glory meant,I thought it glory to be the familiar friend of achild whose immortality was foreseen by Ma-dame de Stael. To me Louis Lambert was as agiant.

The looked-for morrow came at last. A minutebefore breakfast we heard the steps of Mon-sieur Mareschal and of the new boy in the quietcourtyard. Every head was turned at once tothe door of the classroom. Father Haugoult,who participated in our torments of curiosity,did not sound the whistle he used to reduceour mutterings to silence and bring us back toour tasks. We then saw this famous new boy,whom Monsieur Mareschal was leading by thehand. The superintendent descended from hisdesk, and the headmaster said to him solemnly,according to etiquette: "Monsieur, I have

brought you Monsieur Louis Lambert; will youplace him in the fourth class? He will beginwork to-morrow."

Then, after speaking a few words in an under-tone to the class-master, he said:

"Where can he sit?"

It would have been unfair to displace one of usfor a newcomer; so as there was but one deskvacant, Louis Lambert came to fill it, next tome, for I had last joined the class. Though westill had some time to wait before lessons wereover, we all stood up to look at Louis Lambert.Monsieur Mareschal heard our mutterings, sawhow eager we were, and said, with the kind-ness that endeared him to us all:

"Well, well, but make no noise; do not disturbthe other classes."

These words set us free to play some little timebefore breakfast, and we all gathered roundLambert while Monsieur Mareschal walked upand down the courtyard with Father Haugoult.

There were about eighty of us little demons, asbold as birds of prey. Though we ourselves hadall gone through this cruel novitiate, weshowed no mercy on a newcomer, never spar-ing him the mockery, the catechism, the imper-tinence, which were inexhaustible on such oc-casions, to the discomfiture of the neophyte,whose manners, strength, and temper werethus tested. Lambert, whether he was stoical ordumfounded, made no reply to any questions.One of us thereupon remarked that he was nodoubt of the school of Pythagoras, and therewas a shout of laughter. The new boy wasthenceforth Pythagoras through all his life atthe college. At the same time, Lambert's pierc-ing eye, the scorn expressed in his face for ourchildishness, so far removed from the stamp of

his own nature, the easy attitude he assumed,and his evident strength in proportion to hisyears, infused a certain respect into the veriestscamps among us. For my part, I kept near him,absorbed in studying him in silence.

Louis Lambert was slightly built, nearly fivefeet in height; his face was tanned, and hishands were burnt brown by the sun, givinghim an appearance of manly vigor, which, infact, he did not possess. Indeed, two monthsafter he came to the college, when studying inthe classroom had faded his vivid, so to speak,vegetable coloring, he became as pale andwhite as a woman.

His head was unusually large. His hair, of afine, bright black in masses of curls, gave won-derful beauty to his brow, of which the propor-tions were extraordinary even to us heedlessboys, knowing nothing, as may be supposed, ofthe auguries of phrenology, a science still in itscradle. The distinction of this prophetic brow

lay principally in the exquisitely chiseled shapeof the arches under which his black eyes spar-kled, and which had the transparency of ala-baster, the line having the unusual beauty ofbeing perfectly level to where it met the top ofthe nose. But when you saw his eyes it wasdifficult to think of the rest of his face, whichwas indeed plain enough, for their look wasfull of a wonderful variety of expression; theyseemed to have a soul in their depths. At onemoment astonishingly clear and piercing, atanother full of heavenly sweetness, those eyesbecame dull, almost colorless, as it seemed,when he was lost in meditation. They thenlooked like a window from which the sun hadsuddenly vanished after lighting it up. Hisstrength and his voice were no less variable;equally rigid, equally unexpected. His tonecould be as sweet as that of a woman com-pelled to own her love; at other times it waslabored, rough, rugged, if I may use suchwords in a new sense. As to his strength, he

was habitually incapable of enduring the fa-tigue of any game, and seemed weakly, almostinfirm. But during the early days of his school-life, one of our little bullies having made gameof this sickliness, which rendered him unfit forthe violent exercise in vogue among his fellows,Lambert took hold with both hands of one ofthe class-tables, consisting of twelve largedesks, face to face and sloping from the middle;he leaned back against the class-master's desk,steadying the table with his feet on the cross-bar below, and said:

"Now, ten of you try to move it!"

I was present, and can vouch for this strangedisplay of strength; it was impossible to movethe table.

Lambert had the gift of summoning to his aidat certain times the most extraordinary powers,and of concentrating all his forces on a givenpoint. But children, like men, are wont to judge

of everything by first impressions, and after thefirst few days we ceased to study Louis; he en-tirely belied Madame de Stael's prognostica-tions, and displayed none of the prodigies welooked for in him.

After three months at school, Louis was lookedupon as a quite ordinary scholar. I alone wasallowed really to know that sublime—whyshould I not say divine?—soul, for what isnearer to God than genius in the heart of achild? The similarity of our tastes and ideasmade us friends and chums; our intimacy wasso brotherly that our school-fellows joined ourtwo names; one was never spoken without theother, and to call either they always shouted"Poet-and-Pythagoras!" Some other names hadbeen known coupled in a like manner. Thus fortwo years I was the school friend of poor LouisLambert; and during that time my life was soidentified with his, that I am enabled now towrite his intellectual biography.

It was long before I fully knew the poetry andthe wealth of ideas that lay hidden in my com-panion's heart and brain. It was not till I wasthirty years of age, till my experience was ma-tured and condensed, till the flash of an intenseillumination had thrown a fresh light upon it,that I was capable of understanding all thebearings of the phenomena which I witnessedat that early time. I benefited by them withoutunderstanding their greatness or their proc-esses; indeed, I have forgotten some, or re-member only the most conspicuous facts; still,my memory is now able to co-ordinate them,and I have mastered the secrets of that fertilebrain by looking back to the delightful days ofour boyish affection. So it was time alone thatinitiated me into the meaning of the events andfacts that were crowded into that obscure life,as into that of many another man who is lost toscience. Indeed, this narrative, so far as the ex-pression and appreciation of many things isconcerned, will be found full of what may be

termed moral anachronisms, which perhapswill not detract from its peculiar interest.

In the course of the first few months after com-ing to Vendome, Louis became the victim of amalady which, though the symptoms were in-visible to the eye of our superiors, considerablyinterfered with the exercise of his remarkablegifts. Accustomed to live in the open air, and tothe freedom of a purely haphazard education,happy in the tender care of an old man whowas devoted to him, used to meditating in thesunshine, he found it very hard to submit tocollege rules, to walk in the ranks, to livewithin the four walls of a room where eightyboys were sitting in silence on wooden formseach in front of his desk. His senses were de-veloped to such perfection as gave them themost sensitive keenness, and every part of himsuffered from this life in common.

The effluvia that vitiated the air, mingled withthe odors of a classroom that was never clean,

nor free from the fragments of our breakfasts orsnacks, affected his sense of smell, the sensewhich, being more immediately connected thanthe others with the nerve-centers of the brain,must, when shocked, cause invisible distur-bance to the organs of thought.

Besides these elements of impurity in the at-mosphere, there were lockers in the classroomsin which the boys kept their miscellaneousplunder—pigeons killed for fete days, or tidbitsfilched from the dinner-table. In each class-room, too, there was a large stone slab, onwhich two pails full of water were kept stand-ing, a sort of sink, where we every morningwashed our faces and hands, one after another,in the master's presence. We then passed on toa table, where women combed and powderedour hair. Thus the place, being cleaned but oncea day before we were up, was always more orless dirty. In spite of numerous windows andlofty doors, the air was constantly fouled by the

smells from the washing-place, the hairdress-ing, the lockers, and the thousand messes madeby the boys, to say nothing of their eightyclosely packed bodies. And this sort of humus,mingling with the mud we brought in from theplaying-yard, produced a suffocatingly pesti-lent muck-heap.

The loss of the fresh and fragrant country air inwhich he had hitherto lived, the change of hab-its and strict discipline, combined to depressLambert. With his elbow on his desk and hishead supported on his left hand, he spent thehours of study gazing at the trees in the courtor the clouds in the sky; he seemed to be think-ing of his lessons; but the master, seeing his penmotionless, or the sheet before him still a blank,would call out:

"Lambert, you are doing nothing!"

This "you are doing nothing!" was a pin-thrustthat wounded Louis to the quick. And then he

never earned the rest of the play-time; he al-ways had impositions to write. The imposition,a punishment which varies according to thepractice of different schools, consisted at Ven-dome of a certain number of lines to be writtenout in play hours. Lambert and I were so over-powered with impositions, that we had not sixfree days during the two years of our schoolfriendship. But for the books we took out of thelibrary, which maintained some vitality in ourbrains, this system of discipline would havereduced us to idiotcy. Want of exercise is fatalto children. The habit of preserving a dignifiedappearance, begun in tender infancy, has, it issaid, a visible effect on the constitution of royalpersonages when the faults of such an educa-tion are not counteracted by the life of the bat-tle-field or the laborious sport of hunting. Andif the laws of etiquette and Court manners canact on the spinal marrow to such an extent as toaffect the pelvis of kings, to soften their cerebraltissue, and so degenerate the race, what deep-

seated mischief, physical and moral, must re-sult in schoolboys from the constant lack of air,exercise, and cheerfulness!

Indeed, the rules of punishment carried out inschools deserve the attention of the Office ofPublic Instruction when any thinkers are to befound there who do not think exclusively ofthemselves.

We incurred the infliction of an imposition in athousand ways. Our memory was so good thatwe never learned a lesson. It was enough foreither of us to hear our class-fellows repeat thetask in French, Latin, or grammar, and wecould say it when our turn came; but if themaster, unfortunately, took it into his head toreverse the usual order and call upon us first,we very often did not even know what the les-son was; then the imposition fell in spite of ourmost ingenious excuses. Then we always putoff writing our exercises till the last moment; ifthere were a book to be finished, or if we were

lost in thought, the task was forgotten—againan imposition. How often have we scribbled anexercise during the time when the head-boy,whose business it was to collect them when wecame into school, was gathering them from theothers!

In addition to the moral misery which Lambertwent through in trying to acclimatize himself tocollege life, there was a scarcely less cruel ap-prenticeship through which every boy had topass: to those bodily sufferings which seemedinfinitely varied. The tenderness of a child'sskin needs extreme care, especially in winter,when a school-boy is constantly exchanging thefrozen air of the muddy playing-yard for thestuffy atmosphere of the classroom. The "littleboys" and the smallest of all, for lack of amother's care, were martyrs to chilblains andchaps so severe that they had to be regularlydressed during the breakfast hour; but thiscould only be very indifferently done to so

many damaged hands, toes, and heels. A goodmany of the boys indeed were obliged to preferthe evil to the remedy; the choice constantly laybetween their lessons waiting to be finished orthe joys of a slide, and waiting for a bandagecarelessly put on, and still more carelessly castoff again. Also it was the fashion in the schoolto gibe at the poor, feeble creatures who wentto be doctored; the bullies vied with each otherin snatching off the rags which the infirmarynurse had tied on. Hence, in winter, many ofus, with half-dead feet and fingers, sick withpain, were incapable of work, and punished fornot working. The Fathers, too often deluded byshammed ailments, would not believe in realsuffering.

The price paid for our schooling and board alsocovered the cost of clothing. The committeecontracted for the shoes and clothes supplied tothe boys; hence the weekly inspection of whichI have spoken. This plan, though admirable for

the manager, is always disastrous to the man-aged. Woe to the boy who indulged in the badhabit of treading his shoes down at heel, ofcracking the shoe-leather, or wearing out thesoles too fast, whether from a defect in his gait,or by fidgeting during lessons in obedience tothe instinctive need of movement common toall children. That boy did not get through thewinter without great suffering. In the firstplace, his chilblains would ache and shot asbadly as a fit of the gout; then the rivets andpack-thread intended to repair the shoes wouldgive way, or the broken heels would preventthe wretched shoes from keeping on his feet; hewas obliged to drag them wearily along thefrozen roads, or sometimes to dispute theirpossession with the clay soil of the district; thewater and snow got in through some unnoticedcrack or ill-sewn patch, and the foot wouldswell.

Out of sixty boys, not ten perhaps could walkwithout some special form of torture; and yetthey all kept up with the body of the troop,dragged on by the general movement, as menare driven through life by life itself. Many atime some proud-tempered boy would shedtears of rage while summoning his remainingenergy to run ahead and get home again inspite of pain, so sensitively afraid of laughter orof pity—two forms of scorn—is the still tendersoul at that age.

At school, as in social life, the strong despisethe feeble without knowing in what truestrength consists.

Nor was this all. No gloves. If by good hap aboy's parents, the infirmary nurse, or theheadmaster gave gloves to a particularly deli-cate lad, the wags or the big boys of the classwould put them on the stove, amused to seethem dry and shrivel; or if the gloves escapedthe marauders, after getting wet they shrunk as

they dried for want of care. No, gloves wereimpossible. Gloves were a privilege, and boysinsist on equality.

Louis Lambert fell a victim to all these varietiesof torment. Like many contemplative men,who, when lost in thought, acquire a habit ofmechanical motion, he had a mania for fidget-ing with his shoes, and destroyed them veryquickly. His girlish complexion, the skin of hisears and lips, cracked with the least cold. Hissoft, white hands grew red and swollen. Hehad perpetual colds. Thus he was a constantsufferer till he became inured to school-life.Taught at last by cruel experience, he wasobliged to "look after his things," to use theschool phrase. He was forced to take care of hislocker, his desk, his clothes, his shoes; to pro-tect his ink, his books, his copy-paper, and hispens from pilferers; in short, to give his mind tothe thousand details of our trivial life, to whichmore selfish and commonplace minds devoted

such strict attention—thus infallibly securingprizes for "proficiency" and "good conduct"—while they were overlooked by a boy of thehighest promise, who, under the hand of analmost divine imagination, gave himself upwith rapture to the flow of his ideas.

This was not all. There is a perpetual strugglegoing on between the masters and the boys, astruggle without truce, to be compared withnothing else in the social world, unless it be theresistance of the opposition to the ministry in arepresentative government. But journalists andopposition speakers are probably less promptto take advantage of a weak point, less extremein resenting an injury, and less merciless intheir mockery than boys are in regard to thosewho rule over them. It is a task to put angelsout of patience. An unhappy class-master mustthen not be too severely blamed, ill-paid as heis, and consequently not too competent, if he isoccasionally unjust or out of temper. Perpetu-

ally watched by a hundred mocking eyes, andsurrounded with snares, he sometimes re-venges himself for his own blunders on theboys who are only too ready to detect them.

Unless for serious misdemeanors, for whichthere were other forms of punishment, thestrap was regarded at Vendome as the ultimaratio Patrum. Exercises forgotten, lessons illlearned, common ill behavior were sufficientlypunished by an imposition, but offended dig-nity spoke in the master through the strap. Ofall the physical torments to which we were ex-posed, certainly the most acute was that in-flicted by this leathern instrument, about twofingers wide, applied to our poor little handswith all the strength and all the fury of the ad-ministrator. To endure this classical form ofcorrection, the victim knelt in the middle of theroom. He had to leave his form and go to kneeldown near the master's desk under the curiousand generally merciless eyes of his fellows. To

sensitive natures these preliminaries were anintroductory torture, like the journey from thePalais de Justice to the Place de Greve whichthe condemned used to make to the scaffold.

Some boys cried out and shed bitter tears be-fore or after the application of the strap; othersaccepted the infliction with stoic calm; it was aquestion of nature; but few could control anexpression of anguish in anticipation.

Louis Lambert was constantly enduring thestrap, and owed it to a peculiarity of his physi-ognomy of which he was for a long time quiteunconscious. Whenever he was suddenlyroused from a fit of abstraction by the master'scry, "You are doing nothing!" it often happenedthat, without knowing it, he flashed at histeacher a look full of fierce contempt, andcharged with thought, as a Leyden jar ischarged with electricity. This look, no doubt,discomfited the master, who, indignant at this

unspoken retort, wished to cure his scholar ofthat thunderous flash.

The first time the Father took offence at this rayof scorn, which struck him like a lightning-flash, he made this speech, as I well remember:

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

At these words every nose was in the air, everyeye looked alternately at the master and atLouis. The observation was so utterly foolish,that the boy again looked at the Father, over-whelming him with another flash. From thisarose a standing feud between Lambert and hismaster, 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 sensitiveas a woman, under the sway of chronic melan-choly, and as sick with genius as a girl withlove that she pines for, knowing nothing of it;—

this boy, at once so powerful and so weak,transplanted by "Corinne" from the country heloved, to be squeezed in the mould of a colle-giate routine to which every spirit and everybody must yield, whatever their range or tem-perament, accepting its rule and its uniform asgold is crushed into round coin under thepress; Louis Lambert suffered in every spotwhere pain can touch the soul or the flesh.Stuck on a form, restricted to the acreage of hisdesk, a victim of the strap and to a sickly frame,tortured in every sense, environed by distress—everything compelled him to give his body upto the myriad tyrannies of school life; and, likethe martyrs who smiled in the midst of suffer-ing, he took refuge in heaven, which lay opento his mind. Perhaps this life of purely inwardemotions helped him to see something of themysteries he so entirely believed in!

Our independence, our illicit amusements, ourapparent waste of time, our persistent indiffer-

ence, our frequent punishments and aversionfor our exercises and impositions, earned us areputation, which no one cared to controvert,for being an idle and incorrigible pair. Ourmasters treated us with contempt, and we fellinto utter disgrace with our companions, fromwhom we concealed our secret studies for fearof being laughed at. This hard judgment, whichwas injustice in the masters, was but natural inour schoolfellows. We could neither play ball,nor run races, nor walk on stilts. On exceptionalholidays, when amnesty was proclaimed andwe got a few hours of freedom, we shared innone of the popular diversions of the school.Aliens from the pleasures enjoyed by the oth-ers, we were outcasts, sitting forlorn under atree in the playing-ground. The Poet-and-Pythagoras formed an exception and led a lifeapart from the life of the rest.

The penetrating instinct and unerring conceit ofschoolboys made them feel that we were of a

nature either far above or far beneath theirown; hence some simply hated our aristocraticreserve, others merely scorned our ineptitude.These feelings were equally shared by us with-out our knowing it; perhaps I have but nowdivined them. We lived exactly like two rats,huddled into the corner of the room where ourdesks were, sitting there alike during lessontime and play hours. This strange state of af-fairs inevitably and in fact placed us on a foot-ing of war with all the other boys in our divi-sion. Forgotten for the most part, we sat therevery contentedly; half happy, like two plants,two images who would have been missed fromthe furniture of the room. But the most aggres-sive of our schoolfellows would sometimestorment us, just to show their malignant power,and we responded with stolid contempt, whichbrought many a thrashing down on the Poet-and-Pythagoras.

Lambert's home-sickness lasted for manymonths. I know no words to describe the dejec-tion to which he was a prey. Louis has takenthe glory off many a masterpiece for me. Wehad both played the part of the "Leper ofAosta," and had both experienced the feelingsdescribed in Monsieur de Maistre's story, be-fore we read them as expressed by his eloquentpen. A book may, indeed, revive the memoriesof our childhood, but it can never compete withthem successfully. Lambert's woes had taughtme many a chant of sorrow far more appealingthan the finest passages in "Werther." And, in-deed, there is no possible comparison betweenthe pangs of a passion condemned, whetherrightly or wrongly, by every law, and the griefof a poor child pining for the glorious sunshine,the dews of the valley, and liberty. Werther isthe slave of desire; Louis Lambert was an en-slaved soul. Given equal talent, the more pa-thetic sorrow, founded on desires which, being

purer, are the more genuine, must transcendthe wail even of genius.

After sitting for a long time with his eyes fixedon a lime-tree in the playground, Louis wouldsay just a word; but that word would reveal aninfinite speculation.

"Happily for me," he exclaimed one day, "thereare hours of comfort when I feel as though thewalls of the room had fallen and I were away—away in the fields! What a pleasure it is to letoneself go on the stream of one's thoughts as abird is borne up on its wings!"

"Why is green a color so largely diffusedthroughout creation?" he would ask me. "Whyare there so few straight lines in nature? Why isit that man, in his structures, rarely introducescurves? Why is it that he alone, of all creatures,has a sense of straightness?"

These queries revealed long excursions inspace. He had, I am sure, seen vast landscapes,fragrant with the scent of woods. He was al-ways silent and resigned, a living elegy, alwayssuffering but unable to complain of suffering.An eagle that needed the world to feed him,shut in between four narrow, dirty walls; andthus this life became an ideal life in the strictestmeaning of the words. Filled as he was withcontempt of the almost useless studies to whichwe were harnessed, Louis went on his skywardway absolutely unconscious of the things aboutus.

I, obeying the imitative instinct that is so strongin childhood, tired to regulate my life in con-formity with his. And Louis the more easilyinfected me with the sort of torpor in whichdeep contemplation leaves the body, because Iwas younger and more impressionable than he.Like two lovers, we got into the habit of think-ing together in a common reverie. His intui-

tions had already acquired that acutenesswhich must surely characterize the intellectualperceptiveness of great poets and often bringthem to the verge of madness.

"Do you ever feel," said he to me one day, "asthough imagined suffering affected you in spiteof yourself? If, for instance, I think with concen-tration of the effect that the blade of my pen-knife would have in piercing my flesh, I feel anacute pain as if I had really cut myself; only theblood is wanting. But the pain comes suddenly,and startles me like a sharp noise breaking pro-found silence. Can an idea cause physicalpain?—What do you say to that, eh?"

When he gave utterance to such subtle reflec-tions, we both fell into artless meditation; weset to work to detect in ourselves the inscruta-ble phenomena of the origin of thoughts, whichLambert hoped to discover in their earliestgerm, so as to describe some day the unknownprocess. Then, after much discussion, often

mixed up with childish notions, a look wouldflash from Lambert's eager eyes; he wouldgrasp my hand, and a word from the depths ofhis soul would show the current of his mind.

"Thinking is seeing," said he one day, carriedaway by some objection raised as to the firstprinciples of our organization. "Every humanscience is based on deduction, which is a slowprocess of seeing by which we work up fromthe effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, allpoetry, like every work of art, proceeds from aswift vision of things."

He was a spiritualist (as opposed to material-ism); but I would venture to contradict him,using his own arguments to consider the intel-lect as a purely physical phenomenon. We bothwere right. Perhaps the words materialism andspiritualism express the two faces of the samefact. His considerations on the substance of themind led to his accepting, with a certain pride,the life of privation to which we were con-

demned in consequence of our idleness and ourindifference to learning. He had a certain con-sciousness of his own powers which bore himup through his spiritual cogitations. How de-lightful it was to me to feel his soul acting onmy own! Many a time have we remained sit-ting on our form, both buried in one book, hav-ing quite forgotten each other's existence, andyet not apart; each conscious of the other'spresence, 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 lefttraces that still abide. I used to listen hungrilyto his tales, full of the marvels which makemen, as well as children, rapturously devourstories in which truth assumes the most gro-tesque forms. His passion for mystery, and thecredulity natural to the young, often led us todiscuss Heaven and Hell. Then Louis, by ex-

pounding Swedenborg, would try to make meshare in his beliefs concerning angels. In hisleast logical arguments there were still amazingobservations as to the powers of man, whichgave his words that color of truth withoutwhich nothing can be done in any art. The ro-mantic end he foresaw as the destiny of manwas calculated to flatter the yearning whichtempts blameless imaginations to give them-selves up to beliefs. Is it not during the youth ofa nation that its dogmas and idols are con-ceived? And are not the supernatural beingsbefore whom the people tremble the personifi-cation of their feelings and their magnified de-sires?

All that I can now remember of the poeticalconversations we held together concerning theSwedish prophet, whose works I have sincehad the curiosity to read, may be told in a fewparagraphs.

In each of us there are two distinct beings. Ac-cording to Swedenborg, the angel is an indi-vidual in whom the inner being conquers theexternal being. If a man desires to earn his callto be an angel, as soon as his mind reveals tohim his twofold existence, he must strive tofoster the delicate angelic essence that existswithin him. If, for lack of a lucid appreciationof his destiny, he allows bodily action to pre-dominate, instead of confirming his intellectualbeing, all his powers will be absorbed in the useof his external senses, and the angel will slowlyperish by the materialization of both natures. Inthe contrary case, if he nourishes his inner be-ing with the aliment needful to it, the soul tri-umphs over matter and strives to get free.

When they separate by the act of what we calldeath, the angel, strong enough then to cast offits wrappings, survives and begins its real life.The infinite variety which differentiates indi-vidual men can only be explained by this two-

fold existence, which, again, is proved andmade intelligible by that variety.

In point of fact, the wide distance between aman whose torpid intelligence condemns himto evident stupidity, and one who, by the exer-cise of his inner life, has acquired the gift ofsome power, allows us to suppose that there isas great a difference between men of geniusand other beings as there is between the blindand those who see. This hypothesis, since itextends creation beyond all limits, gives us, asit were, the clue to heaven. The beings who,here on earth, are apparently mingled withoutdistinction, are there distributed, according totheir inner perfection, in distinct spheres whosespeech and manners have nothing in common.In the invisible world, as in the real world, ifsome native of the lower spheres comes, allunworthy, into a higher sphere, not only can henever understand the customs and language

there, but his mere presence paralyzes the voiceand hearts of those who dwell therein.

Dante, in his Divine Comedy, had perhaps someslight intuition of those spheres which begin inthe world of torment, and rise, circle on circle,to the highest heaven. Thus Swedenborg's doc-trine is the product of a lucid spirit notingdown the innumerable signs by which the an-gels manifest their presence among men.

This doctrine, which I have endeavored to sumup in a more or less consistent form, was setbefore me by Lambert with all the fascinationof mysticism, swathed in the wrappings of thephraseology affected by mystical writers: anobscure language full of abstractions, and tak-ing such effect on the brain, that there arebooks by Jacob Boehm, Swedenborg, and Ma-dame Guyon, so strangely powerful that theygive rise to phantasies as various as the dreamsof the opium-eater. Lambert told me of mysticalfacts so extraordinary, he so acted on my

imagination, that he made my brain reel. Still, Iloved to plunge into that realm of mystery, in-visible to the senses, in which every one likes todwell, whether he pictures it to himself underthe indefinite ideal of the Future, or clothes it inthe more solid guise of romance. These violentrevulsions of the mind on itself gave me, with-out my knowing it, a comprehension of itspower, and accustomed me to the workings ofthe mind.

Lambert himself explained everything by histheory of the angels. To him pure love—love aswe dream of it in youth—was the coalescenceof two angelic natures. Nothing could exceedthe fervency with which he longed to meet awoman angel. And who better than he couldinspire or feel love? If anything could give animpression of an exquisite nature, was it notthe amiability and kindliness that marked hisfeelings, his words, his actions, his slightestgestures, the conjugal regard that united us as

boys, and that we expressed when we calledourselves chums?

There was no distinction for us between myideas and his. We imitated each other's hand-writing, so that one might write the tasks ofboth. Thus, if one of us had a book to finish andto return to the mathematical master, he couldread on without interruption while the otherscribbled off his exercise and imposition. Wedid our tasks as though paying a task on ourpeace of mind. If my memory does not play mefalse, they were sometimes of remarkable meritwhen Lambert did them. But on the foregoneconclusion that we were both of us idiots, themaster always went through them under arooted prejudice, and even kept them to read tobe laughed at by our schoolfellows.

I remember one afternoon, at the end of thelesson, which lasted from two till four, the mas-ter took possession of a page of translation byLambert. The passage began with Caius Grac-

chus, vir nobilis; Lambert had construed this by"Caius Gracchus had a noble heart."

"Where do you find 'heart' in nobilis?" said theFather sharply.

And there was a roar of laughter, while Lam-bert looked at the master in some bewilder-ment.

"What would Madame la Baronne de Stael sayif she could know that you make such nonsenseof a word that means noble family, of patricianrank?"

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

"Master Poet, you will stay in for a week," re-plied the master, who unfortunately overheardme.

Lambert simply repeated, looking at me withinexpressible affection, "Vir nobilis!"

Madame de Stael was, in fact, partly the causeof Lambert's troubles. On every pretext mastersand pupils threw the name in his teeth, eitherin irony or in reproof.

Louis lost no time in getting himself "kept in" toshare my imprisonment. Freer thus than in anyother circumstances, we could talk the wholeday 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 atnight and opened in the morning under the eyeof the Father whose duty it was to superintendour rising and going to bed. The creak of thesegates, which the college servants unlocked withremarkable expedition, was a sound peculiar tothat college. These little cells were our prison,and boys were sometimes shut up there for amonth at a time. The boys in these coops wereunder the stern eye of the prefect, a sort of cen-sor who stole up at certain hours, or at unex-

pected moments, with a silent step, to hear ifwe were talking instead of writing our imposi-tions. But a few walnut shells dropped on thestairs, or the sharpness of our hearing, almostalways enabled us to beware of his coming, sowe could give ourselves up without anxiety toour favorite studies. However, as books wereprohibited, our prison hours were chiefly filledup with metaphysical discussions, or with re-lating singular facts connected with the phe-nomena of mind.

One of the most extraordinary of these inci-dents beyond question is this, which I will hererecord, not only because it concerns Lambert,but because it perhaps was the turning-point ofhis scientific career. By the law of custom in allschools, Thursday and Sunday were holidays;but the services, which we were made to attendvery regularly, so completely filled up Sunday,that we considered Thursday our only real dayof freedom. After once attending Mass, we had

a long day before us to spend in walks in thecountry round the town of Vendome. Themanor of Rochambeau was the most interestingobject of our excursions, perhaps by reason ofits distance; the smaller boys were very seldomtaken on so fatiguing an expedition. However,once or twice a year the class-masters wouldhold out Rochambeau as a reward for dili-gence.

In 1812, towards the end of the spring, we wereto go there for the first time. Our anxiety to seethis famous chateau of Rochambeau, where theowner sometimes treated the boys to milk,made us all very good, and nothing hinderedthe outing. Neither Lambert nor I had ever seenthe pretty valley of the Loire where the housestood. So his imagination and mine were muchexcited by the prospect of this excursion, whichfilled the school with traditional glee. Wetalked of it all the evening, planning to spend

in fruit or milk such money as we had saved,against all the habits of school-life.

After dinner next day, we set out at half-pasttwelve, each provided with a square hunch ofbread, given to us for our afternoon snack. Andoff we went, as gay as swallows, marching in abody on the famous chateau with an eagernesswhich would at first allow of no fatigue. Whenwe reached the hill, whence we looked downon the house standing half-way down theslope, on the devious valley through which theriver winds and sparkles between meadows ingraceful curves—a beautiful landscape, one ofthose scenes to which the keen emotions ofearly youth or of love lend such a charm, that itis wise never to see them again in later years—Louis Lambert said to me, "Why, I saw this lastnight in a dream."

He recognized the clump of trees under whichwe were standing, the grouping of the woods,the color of the water, the turrets of the cha-

teau, the details, the distance, in fact every partof the prospect which we looked on for the firsttime. We were mere children; I, at any rate,who was but thirteen; Louis, at fifteen, mighthave the precocity of genius, but at that timewe were incapable of falsehood in the mosttrivial matters of our life as friends. Indeed, ifLambert's powerful mind had any presenti-ment of the importance of such facts, he was farfrom appreciating their whole bearing; and hewas quite astonished by this incident. I askedhim if he had not perhaps been brought to Ro-chambeau in his infancy, and my questionstruck him; but after thinking it over, he an-swered in the negative. This incident, analo-gous to what may be known of the phenomenaof sleep in several persons, will illustrate thebeginnings of Lambert's line of talent; he tookit, in fact, as the basis of a whole system, usinga fragment—as Cuvier did in another branch ofinquiry—as a clue to the reconstruction of acomplete system.

At this moment we were sitting together on anold oak-stump, and after a few minutes' reflec-tion, Louis said to me:

"If the landscape did not come to me—which itis absurd to imagine—I must have come here. IfI was here while I was asleep in my cubicle,does not that constitute a complete severance ofmy body and my inner being? Does it notprove some inscrutable locomotive faculty inthe spirit with effects resembling those of lo-comotion in the body? Well, then, if my spiritand my body can be severed during sleep, whyshould I not insist on their separating in thesame way while I am awake? I see no half-waymean between the two propositions.

"But if we go further into details: either thefacts are due to the action of a faculty whichbrings out a second being to whom my body ismerely a husk, since I was in my cell, and yet Isaw the landscape—and this upsets many sys-tems; or the facts took place either in some

nerve centre, of which the name is yet to bediscovered, where our feelings dwell andmove; or else in the cerebral centre, where ideasare formed. This last hypothesis gives rise tosome strange questions. I walked, I saw, Iheard. 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, coloredobjects; if I heard sounds in the most perfectsilence and without the conditions requisite forthe production of sound; if without stirring Itraversed wide tracts of space, there must beinner faculties independent of the external lawsof physics. Material nature must be penetrableby the spirit.

"How is it that men have hitherto given so littlethought to the phenomena of sleep, which seemto prove that man has a double life? May therenot be a new science lying beneath them?" headded, striking his brow with his hand. "If not

the elements of a science, at any rate the revela-tion of stupendous powers in man; at least theyprove a frequent severance of our two natures,the fact I have been thinking out for a very longtime. At last, then, I have hit on evidence toshow the superiority that distinguishes ourlatent senses from our corporeal senses! Homoduplex!

"And yet," he went on, after a pause, with adoubtful shrug, "perhaps we have not two na-tures; perhaps we are merely gifted with per-sonal and perfectible qualities, of which thedevelopment within us produces certain unob-served phenomena of activity, penetration, andvision. In our love of the marvelous, a passionbegotten of our pride, we have translated theseeffects into poetical inventions, because we didnot understand them. It is so convenient to de-ify the incomprehensible!

"I should, I own, lament over the loss of myillusions. I so much wished to believe in our

twofold nature and in Swedenborg's angels.Must this new science destroy them? Yes; forthe study of our unknown properties involvesus in a science that appears to be materialistic,for the Spirit uses, divides, and animates theSubstance; but it does not destroy it."

He remained pensive, almost sad. Perhaps hesaw the dreams of his youth as swaddlingclothes that he must soon shake off.

"Sight and hearing are, no doubt, the sheathsfor a very marvelous instrument," said he,laughing at his own figure of speech.

Always when he was talking to me of Heavenand Hell, he was wont to treat of Nature asbeing master; but now, as he pronounced theselast words, big with prescience, he seemed tosoar more boldly than ever above the land-scape, and his forehead seemed ready to burstwith the afflatus of genius. His powers—mentalpowers we must call them till some new term is

found—seemed to flash from the organs in-tended to express them. His eyes shot outthoughts; his uplifted hand, his silent buttremulous lips were eloquent; his burningglance was radiant; at last his head, as thoughtoo heavy, or exhausted by too eager a flight,fell on his breast. This boy—this giant—bent hishead, took my hand and clasped it in his own,which was damp, so fevered was he for thesearch for truth; then, after a pause, he said:

"I shall be famous!—And you, too," he addedafter a pause. "We will both study the Chemis-try of the Will."

Noble soul! I recognized his superiority,though he took great care never to make mefeel it. He shared with me all the treasures ofhis mind, and regarded me as instrumental inhis discoveries, leaving me the credit of myinsignificant contributions. He was always asgracious as a woman in love; he had all the

bashful feeling, the delicacy of soul whichmake life happy and pleasant to endure.

On the following day he began writing what hecalled a Treatise on the Will; his subsequent re-flections led to many changes in its plan andmethod; but the incident of that day was cer-tainly the germ of the work, just as the electricshock always felt by Mesmer at the approach ofa particular manservant was the starting-pointof his discoveries in magnetism, a science tillthen interred under the mysteries of Isis, ofDelphi, of the cave of Trophonius, and redis-covered by that prodigious genius, close onLavater, and the precursor of Gall.

Lambert's ideas, suddenly illuminated by thisflash of light, assumed vaster proportions; hedisentangled certain truths from his many ac-quisitions 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 cruelpractical jokes which led to a fatal issue.

One day one of the masters, who was bent onseeing the manuscripts, enlisted the aid of ourtyrants, and came to seize, by force, a box thatcontained the precious papers. Lambert and Idefended it with incredible courage. The trunkwas locked, our aggressors could not open it,but they tried to smash it in the struggle, astroke of malignity at which we shrieked withrage. Some of the boys, with a sense of justice,or struck perhaps by our heroic defence, ad-vised the attacking party to leave us in peace,crushing us with insulting contempt. But sud-denly, brought to the spot by the noise of a bat-tle, Father Haugoult roughly intervened, in-quiring as to the cause of the fight. Our enemieshad interrupted us in writing our impositions,and the class-master came to protect his slaves.The foe, in self-defence, betrayed the existenceof the manuscript. The dreadful Haugoult in-

sisted on our giving up the box; if we shouldresist, he would have it broken open. Lambertgave him the key; the master took out the pa-pers, glanced through them, and said, as heconfiscated them:

"And it is for such rubbish as this that you ne-glect your lessons!"

Large tears fell from Lambert's eyes, wrungfrom him as much by a sense of his offendedmoral superiority as by the gratuitous insultand betrayal that he had suffered. We gave theaccusers a glance of stern reproach: had theynot delivered us over to the common enemy? Ifthe common law of school entitled them tothrash us, did it not require them to keep si-lence as to our misdeeds?

In a moment they were no doubt ashamed oftheir baseness.

Father Haugoult probably sold the Treatise onthe Will to a local grocer, unconscious of thescientific treasure, of which the germs thus fellinto unworthy hands.

Six months later I left the school, and I do notknow whether Lambert ever recommenced hislabors. Our parting threw him into a mood ofthe darkest melancholy.

It was in memory of the disaster that befellLouis' book that, in the tale which comes first inthese Etudes, I adopted the title invented byLambert for a work of fiction, and gave thename of a woman who was dear to him to a girlcharacterized by her self-devotion; but this isnot all I have borrowed from him: his characterand occupations were of great value to me inwriting that book, and the subject arose fromsome reminiscences of our youthful medita-tions. This present volume is intended as amodest monument, a broken column, to com-

memorate the life of the man who bequeathedto me all he had to leave—his thoughts.

In that boyish effort Lambert had enshrined theideas of a man. Ten years later, when I metsome learned men who were devoting seriousattention to the phenomena that had struck usand that Lambert had so marvelously analyzed,I understood the value of his work, then al-ready forgotten as childish. I at once spent sev-eral months in recalling the principal theoriesdiscovered by my poor schoolmate. Havingcollected my reminiscences, I can boldly statethat, by 1812, he had proved, divined, and setforth in his Treatise several important facts ofwhich, as he had declared, evidence was certainto come sooner or later. His philosophicalspeculations ought undoubtedly to gain himrecognition as one of the great thinkers whohave appeared at wide intervals among men, toreveal to them the bare skeleton of some sci-ence to come, of which the roots spread slowly,

but which, in due time, bring forth fair fruit inthe intellectual sphere. Thus a humble artisan,Bernard Palissy, searching the soil to find min-erals for glazing pottery, proclaimed, in thesixteenth century, with the infallible intuition ofgenius, geological facts which it is now theglory of Cuvier and Buffon to have demon-strated.

I can, I believe, give some idea of Lambert'sTreatise by stating the chief propositions onwhich it was based; but, in spite of myself, Ishall strip them of the ideas in which they wereclothed, and which were indeed their indispen-sable accompaniment. I started on a differentpath, and only made use of those of his re-searches which answered the purpose of myscheme. I know not, therefore, whether as hisdisciple I can faithfully expound his views,having assimilated them in the first instance soas to color them with my own.

New ideas require new words, or a new andexpanded use of old words, extended and de-fined in their meaning. Thus Lambert, to setforth the basis of his system, had adopted cer-tain common words that answered to his no-tions. The word Will he used to connote themedium in which the mind moves, or to use aless abstract expression, the mass of power bywhich man can reproduce, outside himself, theactions constituting his external life. Volition—a word due to Locke—expressed the act bywhich a man exerts his will. The word Mind, orThought, which he regarded as the quintessen-tial product of the Will, also represented themedium in which the ideas originate to whichthought gives substance. The Idea, a namecommon to every creation of the brain, consti-tuted the act by which man uses his mind. Thusthe Will and the Mind were the two generatingforces; the Volition and the Idea were the twoproducts. Volition, he thought, was the Ideaevolved from the abstract state to a concrete

state, from its generative fluid to a solid expres-sion, so to speak, if such words may be taken toformulate notions so difficult of definition. Ac-cording to him, the Mind and Ideas are the mo-tion and the outcome of our inner organization,just as the Will and Volition are of our externalactivity.

He gave the Will precedence over the Mind.

"You must will before you can think," he said."Many beings live in a condition of Willingwithout ever attaining to the condition ofThinking. In the North, life is long; in theSouth, it is shorter; but in the North we see tor-por, in the South a constant excitability of theWill, up to the point where from an excess ofcold or of heat the organs are almost nullified."

The use of the word "medium" was suggestedto him by an observation he had made in hischildhood, though, to be sure, he had no suspi-cion then of its importance, but its singularity

naturally struck his delicately alert imagina-tion. His mother, a fragile, nervous woman, allsensitiveness and affection, was one of thosebeings created to represent womanhood in allthe perfection of her attributes, but relegated bya mistaken fate to too low a place in the socialscale. Wholly loving, and consequently whollysuffering, she died young, having thrown allher energies into her motherly love. Lambert, achild of six, lying, but not always sleeping, in acot by his mother's bed, saw the electric sparksfrom her hair when she combed it. The man offifteen made scientific application of this factwhich had amused the child, a fact beyond dis-pute, of which there is ample evidence in manyinstances, especially of women who by a sadfatality are doomed to let unappreciated feel-ings evaporate in the air, or some superabun-dant power run to waste.

In support of his definitions, Lambert pro-pounded a variety of problems to be solved,

challenges flung out to science, though he pro-posed to seek the solution for himself. He in-quired, for instance, whether the element thatconstitutes electricity does not enter as a baseinto the specific fluid whence our Ideas andVolitions proceed? Whether the hair, whichloses its color, turns white, falls out, or disap-pears, in proportion to the decay or crystalliza-tion of our thoughts, may not be in fact a capil-lary system, either absorbent or diffusive, andwholly electrical? Whether the fluid phenom-ena of the Will, a matter generated within us,and spontaneously reacting under the impressof conditions as yet unobserved, were at allmore extraordinary than those of the invisibleand intangible fluid produced by a voltaic pile,and applied to the nervous system of a deadman? Whether the formation of Ideas and theirconstant diffusion was less incomprehensiblethan evaporation of the atoms, imperceptibleindeed, but so violent in their effects, that aregiven off from a grain of musk without any loss

of weight. Whether, granting that the functionof the skin is purely protective, absorbent, ex-cretive, and tactile, the circulation of the bloodand all its mechanism would not correspondwith the transsubstantiation of our Will, as thecirculation of the nerve fluid corresponds tothat of the Mind? Finally, whether the more orless rapid affluence of these two real substancesmay not be the result of a certain perfection orimperfection of organs whose conditions re-quire investigation in every manifestation?

Having set forth these principles, he proposedto class the phenomena of human life in twoseries of distinct results, demanding, with theardent insistency of conviction, a special analy-sis for each. In fact, having observed in almostevery type of created thing two separate mo-tions, he assumed, nay, he asserted, their exis-tence in our human nature, and designated thisvital antithesis Action and Reaction.

"A desire," he said, "is a fact completely accom-plished in our will before it is accomplishedexternally."

Hence the sum-total of our Volitions and ourIdeas constitutes Action, and the sum-total ofour external acts he called Reaction.

When I subsequently read the observationsmade by Bichat on the duality of our externalsenses, I was really bewildered by my recollec-tions, recognizing the startling coincidencesbetween the views of that celebrated physiolo-gist and those of Louis Lambert. They bothdied young, and they had with equal steps ar-rived at the same strange truths. Nature has inevery case been pleased to give a twofold pur-pose to the various apparatus that constituteher creatures; and the twofold action of thehuman organism, which is now ascertainedbeyond dispute, proves by a mass of evidencein daily life how true were Lambert's deduc-tions as to Action and Reaction.

The inner Being, the Being of Action—the wordhe used to designate an unknown specializa-tion—the mysterious nexus of fibrils to whichwe owe the inadequately investigated powersof thought and will—in short, the namelessentity which sees, acts, foresees the end, andaccomplishes everything before expressing it-self in any physical phenomenon—must, inconformity with its nature, be free from thephysical conditions by which the external Beingof Reaction, the visible man, is fettered in itsmanifestation. From this followed a multitudeof logical explanation as to those results of ourtwofold nature which appear the strangest, anda rectification of various systems in which truthand falsehood are mingled.

Certain men, having had a glimpse of somephenomena of the natural working of the Beingof Action, were, like Swedenborg, carried awayabove this world by their ardent soul, thirstingfor poetry, and filled with the Divine Spirit.

Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and theiradmiration of the facts, they pleased their fancyby regarding that inner man as divine, and con-structing a mystical universe. Hence we haveangels! A lovely illusion which Lambert wouldnever abandon, cherishing it even when thesword of his logic was cutting off their dazzlingwings.

"Heaven," he would say, "must, after all, be thesurvival of our perfected faculties, and hell thevoid into which our unperfected faculties arecast away."

But how, then, in the ages when the under-standing had preserved the religious and spiri-tualist impressions, which prevailed from thetime of Christ till that of Descartes, betweenfaith and doubt, how could men help account-ing for the mysteries of our nature otherwisethan by divine interposition? Of whom but ofGod Himself could sages demand an account ofan invisible creature so actively and so reac-

tively sensitive, gifted with faculties so exten-sive, so improvable by use, and so powerfulunder certain occult influences, that they couldsometimes see it annihilate, by some phenome-non of sight or movement, space in its twomanifestations—Time and Distance—of whichthe former is the space of the intellect, the latteris physical space? Sometimes they found it re-constructing the past, either by the power ofretrospective vision, or by the mystery of a pal-ingenesis not unlike the power a man mighthave of detecting in the form, integument, andembryo in a seed, the flowers of the past, andthe numberless variations of their color, scent,and shape; and sometimes, again, it could beseen vaguely foreseeing the future, either by itsapprehension of final causes, or by some phe-nomenon of physical presentiment.

Other men, less poetically religious, cold, andargumentative—quacks perhaps, but enthusi-asts in brain at least, if not in heart —

recognizing some isolated examples of suchphenomena, admitted their truth while refus-ing to consider them as radiating from a com-mon centre. Each of these was, then, bent onconstructing a science out of a simple fact.Hence arose demonology, judicial astrology,the black arts, in short, every form of divinationfounded on circumstances that were essentiallytransient, because they varied according tomen's temperament, and to conditions that arestill completely unknown.

But from these errors of the learned, and fromthe ecclesiastical trials under which fell somany martyrs to their own powers, startlingevidence was derived of the prodigious facul-ties at the command of the Being of Action,which, according to Lambert, can abstract itselfcompletely from the Being of Reaction, burstingits envelope, and piercing walls by its potentvision; a phenomenon known to the Hindoos,as missionaries tell us, by the name of Tokeiad;

or again, by another faculty, can grasp in thebrain, in spite of its closest convolutions, theideas which are formed or forming there, andthe whole of past consciousness.

"If apparitions are not impossible," said Lam-bert, "they must be due to a faculty of discern-ing the ideas which represent man in his purestessence, whose life, imperishable perhaps, es-capes our grosser senses, though they may be-come perceptible to the inner being when it hasreached a high degree of ecstasy, or a great per-fection of vision."

I know—though my remembrance is nowvague—that Lambert, by following the resultsof Mind and Will step by step, after he had es-tablished their laws, accounted for a multitudeof phenomena which, till then, had been re-garded with reason as incomprehensible. Thuswizards, men possessed with second sight, anddemoniacs of every degree—the victims of theMiddle Ages—became the subject of explana-

tions so natural, that their very simplicity oftenseemed to me the seal of their truth. The mar-velous gifts which the Church of Rome, jealousof all mysteries, punished with the stake, were,in Louis' opinion, the result of certain affinitiesbetween the constituent elements of matter andthose of mind, which proceed from the samesource. The man holding a hazel rod when hefound a spring of water was guided by someantipathy or sympathy of which he was uncon-scious; nothing but the eccentricity of thesephenomena could have availed to give some ofthem historic certainty.

Sympathies have rarely been proved; they af-ford a kind of pleasure which those who are sohappy as to possess them rarely speak of unlessthey are abnormally singular, and even thenonly in the privacy of intimate intercourse,where everything is buried. But the antipathiesthat arise from the inversion of affinities have,very happily, been recorded when developed

by famous men. Thus, Bayle had hystericswhen he heard water splashing, Scaliger turnedpale at the sight of water-cress, Erasmus wasthrown into a fever by the smell of fish. Thesethree antipathies were connected with water.The Duc d'Epernon fainted at the sight of ahare, Tycho-Brahe at that of a fox, Henri III. atthe presence of a cat, the Marechal d'Albret atthe sight of a wild hog; these antipathies wereproduced by animal emanations, and oftentook effect at a great distance. The Chevalier deGuise, Marie de Medici, and many other per-sons have felt faint at seeing a rose even in apainting. Lord Bacon, whether he were fore-warned or no of an eclipse of the moon, alwaysfell into a syncope while it lasted; and his vital-ity, suspended while the phenomenon lastedwas restored as soon as it was over without hisfeeling any further inconvenience. These effectsof antipathy, all well authenticated, and chosenfrom among many which history has happened

to preserve, are enough to give a clue to thesympathies which remain unknown.

This fragment of Lambert's investigations,which I remember from among his essays, willthrow a light on the method on which heworked. I need not emphasize the obvious con-nection between this theory and the collateralsciences projected by Gall and Lavater; theywere its natural corollary; and every more orless scientific brain will discern the ramifica-tions by which it is inevitably connected withthe phrenological observations of one and thespeculations on physiognomy of the other.

Mesmer's discovery, so important, though asyet so little appreciated, was also embodied in asingle section of this treatise, though Louis didnot know the Swiss doctor's writings—whichare few and brief.

A simple and logical inference from these prin-ciples led him to perceive that the will might be

accumulated by a contractile effort of the innerman, and then, by another effort, projected, oreven imparted, to material objects. Thus thewhole force of a man must have the property ofreacting on other men, and of infusing intothem an essence foreign to their own, if theycould not protect themselves against such anaggression. The evidence of this theorem of thescience of humanity is, of course, very multi-farious; but there is nothing to establish it be-yond question. We have only the notoriousdisaster of Marius and his harangue to theCimbrian commanded to kill him, or the augustinjunction of a mother to the Lion of Florence,in historic proof of instances of such lightningflashes of mind. To Lambert, then, Will andThought were living forces; and he spoke ofthem in such a way as to impress his belief onthe hearer. To him these two forces were, in away, visible, tangible. Thought was slow oralert, heavy or nimble, light or dark; he as-cribed to it all the attributes of an active agent,

and thought of it as rising, resting, waking,expanding, growing old, shrinking, becomingatrophied, or resuscitating; he described its life,and specified all its actions by the strangestwords in our language, speaking of its sponta-neity, its strength, and all its qualities with akind of intuition which enabled him to recog-nize all the manifestations of its substantialexistence.

"Often," said he, "in the midst of quiet and si-lence, when our inner faculties are dormant,when a sort of darkness reigns within us, andwe are lost in the contemplation of things out-side us, an idea suddenly flies forth, and rusheswith the swiftness of lightning across the infi-nite space which our inner vision allows us toperceive. This radiant idea, springing into exis-tence like a will-o'-the-wisp, dies out never toreturn; an ephemeral life, like that of babes whogive their parents such infinite joy and sorrow;a sort of still-born blossom in the fields of the

mind. Sometimes an idea, instead of springingforcibly into life and dying unembodied, dawnsgradually, hovers in the unknown limbo of theorgans where it has its birth; exhausts us bylong gestation, develops, is itself fruitful, growsoutwardly in all the grace of youth and thepromising attributes of a long life; it can endurethe closest inspection, invites it, and never tiresthe sight; the investigation it undergoes com-mands the admiration we give to works slowlyelaborated. Sometimes ideas are evolved in aswarm; one brings another; they come linkedtogether; they vie with each other; they fly inclouds, wild and headlong. Again, they rise uppallid and misty, and perish for want ofstrength or of nutrition; the vital force is lack-ing. Or again, on certain days, they rush downinto the depths to light up that immense obscu-rity; they terrify us and leave the soul dejected.

"Ideas are a complete system within us, resem-bling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of

which the iconography will one day be out-lined by some man who will perhaps be ac-counted a madman.

"Yes, within us and without, everything testi-fies to the livingness of those exquisite crea-tions, which I compare with flowers in obedi-ence to some unutterable revelation of theirtrue nature!

"Their being produced as the final cause of manis, after all, not more amazing than the produc-tion of perfume and color in a plant. Perfumesare ideas, perhaps!

"When we consider the line where flesh endsand the nail begins contains the invisible andinexplicable mystery of the constant transfor-mation of a fluid into horn, we must confessthat nothing is impossible in the marvelousmodifications of human tissue.

"And are there not in our inner nature phe-nomena of weight and motion comparable tothose of physical nature? Suspense, to choosean example vividly familiar to everybody, ispainful only as a result of the law in virtue ofwhich the weight of a body is multiplied by itsvelocity. The weight of the feeling produced bysuspense increases by the constant addition ofpast pain to the pain of the moment.

"And then, to what, unless it be to the electricfluid, are we to attribute the magic by whichthe Will enthrones itself so imperiously in theeye to demolish obstacles at the behest of gen-ius, thunders in the voice, or filters, in spite ofdissimulation, through the human frame? Thecurrent of that sovereign fluid, which, in obedi-ence to the high pressure of thought or of feel-ing, flows in a torrent or is reduced to a merethread, and collects to flash in lightnings, is theoccult agent to which are due the evil or thebeneficent efforts of Art and Passion—

intonation of voice, whether harsh or suave,terrible, lascivious, horrifying or seductive byturns, thrilling the heart, the nerves, or thebrain at our will; the marvels of the touch, theinstrument of the mental transfusions of a myr-iad artists, whose creative fingers are able, afterpassionate study, to reproduce the forms ofnature; or, again, the infinite gradations of theeye from dull inertia to the emission of themost terrifying gleams.

"By this system God is bereft of none of Hisrights. Mind, as a form of matter, has broughtme a new conviction of His greatness."

After hearing him discourse thus, after receiv-ing into my soul his look like a ray of light, itwas difficult not to be dazzled by his convictionand carried away by his arguments. The Mindappeared to me as a purely physical power,surrounded by its innumerable progeny. It wasa new conception of humanity under a newform.

This brief sketch of the laws which, as Lambertmaintained, constitute the formula of our intel-lect, must suffice to give a notion of the prodi-gious activity of his spirit feeding on itself.Louis had sought for proofs of his theories inthe history of great men, whose lives, as setforth by their biographers, supply very curiousparticulars as to the operation of their under-standing. His memory allowed him to recallsuch facts as might serve to support his state-ments; he had appended them to each chapterin the form of demonstrations, so as to give tomany of his theories an almost mathematicalcertainty. The works of Cardan, a man giftedwith singular powers of insight, supplied himwith valuable materials. He had not forgottenthat Apollonius of Tyana had, in Asia, an-nounced the death of a tyrant with every detailof his execution, at the very hour when it wastaking place in Rome; nor that Plotinus, whenfar away from Porphyrius, was aware of hisfriend's intention to kill himself, and flew to

dissuade him; nor the incident in the last cen-tury, proved in the face of the most incredulousmockery ever known—an incident most sur-prising to men who were accustomed to regarddoubt as a weapon against the fact alone, butsimple enough to believers—the fact thatAlphonzo-Maria di Liguori, Bishop of Saint-Agatha, administered consolations to PopeGanganelli, who saw him, heard him, and an-swered him, while the Bishop himself, at agreat distance from Rome, was in a trance athome, in the chair where he commonly sat onhis return from Mass. On recovering con-sciousness, he saw all his attendants kneelingbeside him, believing him to be dead: "Myfriends," said he, "the Holy Father is just dead."Two days later a letter confirmed the news. Thehour of the Pope's death coincided with thatwhen the Bishop had been restored to his natu-ral state.

Nor had Lambert omitted the yet more recentadventure of an English girl who was passion-ately attached to a sailor, and set out from Lon-don to seek him. She found him, without aguide, making her way alone in the NorthAmerican wilderness, reaching him just in timeto save his life.

Louis had found confirmatory evidence in themysteries of the ancients, in the acts of the mar-tyrs—in which glorious instances may be foundof the triumph of human will, in the demonol-ogy of the Middle Ages, in criminal trials andmedical researches; always selecting the realfact, the probable phenomenon, with admirablesagacity.

All this rich collection of scientific anecdotes,culled from so many books, most of them wor-thy of credit, served no doubt to wrap parcelsin; and this work, which was curious, to say theleast of it, as the outcome of a most extraordi-nary memory, was doomed to destruction.

Among the various cases which added to thevalue of Lambert's Treatise was an incident thathad taken place in his own family, of which hehad told me before he wrote his essay. Thisfact, bearing on the post-existence of the innerman, if I may be allowed to coin a new wordfor a phenomenon hitherto nameless, struck meso forcibly that I have never forgotten it. Hisfather and mother were being forced into alawsuit, of which the loss would leave themwith a stain on their good name, the only thingthey had in the world. Hence their anxiety wasvery great when the question first arose as towhether they should yield to the plaintiff's un-just demands, or should defend themselvesagainst him. The matter came under discussionone autumn evening, before a turf fire in theroom used by the tanner and his wife. Two orthree relations were invited to this family coun-cil, and among others Louis' maternal great-grandfather, an old laborer, much bent, butwith a venerable and dignified countenance,

bright eyes, and a bald, yellow head, on whichgrew a few locks of thin, white hair. Like theObi of the Negroes, or the Sagamore of the In-dian savages, he was a sort of oracle, consultedon important occasions. His land was tilled byhis grandchildren, who fed and served him; hepredicted rain and fine weather, and told themwhen to mow the hay and gather the crops. Thebarometric exactitude of his forecasts was quitefamous, and added to the confidence and re-spect he inspired. For whole days he would sitimmovable in his armchair. This state of raptmeditation often came upon him since hiswife's death; he had been attached to her in thetruest and most faithful affection.

This discussion was held in his presence, but hedid not seem to give much heed to it.

"My children," said he, when he was asked forhis opinion, "this is too serious a matter for meto decide on alone. I must go and consult mywife."

The old man rose, took his stick, and went out,to the great astonishment of the others, whothought him daft. He presently came back andsaid:

"I did not have to go so far as the graveyard;your mother came to meet me; I found her bythe brook. She tells me that you will find somereceipts in the hands of a notary at Blois, whichwill enable you to gain your suit."

The words were spoken in a firm tone; the oldman's demeanor and countenance showed thatsuch an apparition was habitual with him. Infact, the disputed receipts were found, and thelawsuit was not attempted.

This event, under his father's roof and to hisown knowledge, when Louis was nine yearsold, contributed largely to his belief in Swe-denborg's miraculous visions, for in the courseof that philosopher's life he repeatedly gaveproof of the power of sight developed in his

Inner Being. As he grew older, and as his intel-ligence was developed, Lambert was naturallyled to seek in the laws of nature for the causesof the miracle which, in his childhood, had cap-tivated his attention. What name can be givento the chance which brought within his ken somany facts and books bearing on such phe-nomena, and made him the principal subjectand actor in such marvelous manifestations ofmind?

If Lambert had no other title to fame than thefact of his having formulated, in his sixteenthyear, such a psychological dictum as this:—"The events which bear witness to the action ofthe human race, and are the outcome of its in-tellect, have causes by which they are precon-ceived, as our actions are accomplished in ourminds before they are reproduced by the outerman; presentiments or predictions are the per-ception of these causes"—I think we may de-plore in him a genius equal to Pascal, Lavoisier,

or Laplace. His chimerical notions about angelsperhaps overruled his work too long; but was itnot in trying to make gold that the alchemistsunconsciously created chemistry? At the sametime, Lambert, at a later period, studied com-parative anatomy, physics, geometry, and othersciences bearing on his discoveries, and thiswas undoubtedly with the purpose of collect-ing facts and submitting them to analysis—theonly torch that can guide us through the darkplaces of the most inscrutable work of nature.He had too much good sense to dwell amongthe clouds of theories which can all be ex-pressed in a few words. In our day, is not thesimplest demonstration based on facts morehighly esteemed than the most specious systemthough defended by more or less ingeniousinductions? But as I did not know him at theperiod of his life when his cogitations were, nodoubt, the most productive of results, I canonly conjecture that the bent of his work must

have been from that of his first efforts ofthought.

It is easy to see where his Treatise on the Willwas faulty. Though gifted already with thepowers which characterize superior men, hewas but a boy. His brain, though endowed witha great faculty for abstractions, was still full ofthe delightful beliefs that hover around youth.Thus his conception, while at some points ittouched the ripest fruits of his genius, still, bymany more, clung to the smaller elements of itsgerms. To certain readers, lovers of poetry,what he chiefly lacked must have been a certainvein of interest.

But his work bore the stamp of the struggle thatwas going on in that noble Spirit between thetwo great principles of Spiritualism and Mate-rialism, round which so many a fine genius hasbeaten its way without ever daring to amalga-mate them. Louis, at first purely Spiritualist,had been irresistibly led to recognize the Mate-

rial conditions of Mind. Confounded by thefacts of analysis at the moment when his heartstill gazed with yearning at the clouds whichfloated in Swedenborg's heaven, he had not yetacquired the necessary powers to produce acoherent system, compactly cast in a piece, as itwere. Hence certain inconsistencies that haveleft their stamp even on the sketch here givenof his first attempts. Still, incomplete as hiswork may have been, was it not the rough copyof a science of which he would have investi-gated the secrets at a later time, have securedthe foundations, have examined, deduced, andconnected the logical sequence?

Six months after the confiscation of the Treatiseon the Will I left school. Our parting was unex-pected. My mother, alarmed by a feverish at-tack which for some months I had been unableto shake off, while my inactive life inducedsymptoms of coma, carried me off at four or five

hours' notice. The announcement of my depar-ture reduced Lambert to dreadful dejection.

"Shall I ever seen you again?" said he in hisgentle voice, as he clasped me in his arms. "Youwill live," he went on, "but I shall die. If I can, Iwill come back to you."

Only the young can utter such words with theaccent of conviction that gives them the im-pressiveness of prophecy, of a pledge, leaving aterror of its fulfilment. For a long time indeed Ivaguely looked for the promised apparition.Even now there are days of depression, ofdoubt, alarm, and loneliness, when I am forcedto 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 tosee me pass. By my request my mother ob-tained 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 mis-tress ever shed more tears at parting.

"Well, good-bye; I shall be left alone in this de-sert!" said he, pointing to the playgroundwhere two hundred boys were disportingthemselves and shouting. "When I come backhalf dead with fatigue from my long excursionsthrough the fields of thought, on whose heartcan I rest? I could tell you everything in a look.Who will understand me now?—Good-bye! Icould wish I had never met you; I should notknow all I am losing."

"And what is to become of me?" said I. "Is notmy position a dreadful one? I have nothinghere to uphold me!" and I slapped my fore-head.

He shook his head with a gentle gesture, gra-cious and sad, and we parted.

At that time Louis Lambert was about five feetfive inches in height; he grew no more. Hiscountenance, which was full of expression, re-vealed his sweet nature. Divine patience, de-veloped by harsh usage, and the constant con-centration needed for his meditative life, hadbereft his eyes of the audacious pride which isso attractive in some faces, and which had soshocked our masters. Peaceful mildness gavecharm to his face, an exquisite serenity that wasnever marred by a tinge of irony or satire; forhis natural kindliness tempered his consciousstrength and superiority. He had pretty hands,very slender, and almost always moist. Hisframe was a marvel, a model for a sculptor; butour iron-gray uniform, with gilt buttons andknee-breeches, gave us such an ungainly ap-pearance that Lambert's fine proportions andfirm muscles could only be appreciated in thebath. When we swam in our pool in the Loire,Louis was conspicuous by the whiteness of hisskin, which was unlike the different shades of

our schoolfellows' bodies mottled by the cold,or blue from the water. Gracefully formed, ele-gant in his attitudes, delicate in hue, nevershivering after his bath, perhaps because heavoided the shade and always ran into the sun-shine, Louis was like one of those cautiousblossoms that close their petals to the blast andrefuse to open unless to a clear sky. He ate lit-tle, and drank water only; either by instinct orby choice he was averse to any exertion thatmade a demand on his strength; his move-ments were few and simple, like those of Orien-tals or of savages, with whom gravity seems acondition of nature.

As a rule, he disliked everything that resem-bled any special care for his person. He com-monly sat with his head a little inclined to theleft, and so constantly rested his elbows on thetable, that the sleeves of his coats were soon inholes.

To this slight picture of the outer man I mustadd a sketch of his moral qualities, for I believeI can now judge him impartially.

Though naturally religious, Louis did not ac-cept the minute practices of the Roman ritual;his ideas were more intimately in sympathywith Saint Theresa and Fenelon, and severalFathers and certain Saints, who, in our day,would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists.He was rigidly calm during the services. Hisown prayers went up in gusts, in aspirations,without any regular formality; in all things hegave himself up to nature, and would not pray,any more than he would think, at any fixedhour. In chapel he was equally apt to think ofGod or to meditate on some problem of phi-losophy.

To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect typeof his system. Et Verbum caro factum est seemeda sublime statement intended to express thetraditional formula of the Will, the Word, and

the Act made visible. Christ's unconsciousnessof His Death—having so perfected His innerBeing by divine works, that one day the invisi-ble form of it appeared to His disciples—andthe other Mysteries of the Gospels, the mag-netic cures wrought by Christ, and the gift oftongues, all to him confirmed his doctrine. Iremember once hearing him say on this subject,that the greatest work that could be writtennowadays was a History of the PrimitiveChurch. And he never rose to such poeticheights as when, in the evening, as we con-versed, he would enter on an inquiry into mira-cles, worked by the power of Will during thatgreat age of faith. He discerned the strongestevidence of his theory in most of the martyr-doms endured during the first century of ourera, which he spoke of as the great era of theMind.

"Do not the phenomena observed in almostevery instance of the torments so heroically

endured by the early Christians for the estab-lishment of the faith, amply prove that Materialforce will never prevail against the force ofIdeas or the Will of man?" he would say. "Fromthis effect, produced by the Will of all, eachman may draw conclusions in favor of hisown."

I need say nothing of his views on poetry orhistory, nor of his judgment on the master-pieces of our language. There would be littleinterest in the record of opinions now almostuniversally held, though at that time, from thelips of a boy, they might seem remarkable.Louis was capable of the highest flights. Togive a notion of his talents in a few words, hecould have written Zadig as wittily as Voltaire;he could have thought out the dialogue be-tween Sylla and Eucrates as powerfully asMontesquieu. His rectitude of character madehim desire above all else in a work that itshould bear the stamp of utility; at the same

time, his refined taste demanded novelty ofthought as well as of form. One of his most re-markable literary observations, which willserve as a clue to all the others, and show thelucidity of his judgment, is this, which has everdwelt in my memory, "The Apocalypse is writ-ten ecstasy." He regarded the Bible as a part ofthe traditional history of the antediluvian na-tions which had taken for its share the newhumanity. He thought that the mythology ofthe Greeks was borrowed both from the He-brew Scriptures and from the sacred Books ofIndia, adapted after their own fashion by thebeauty-loving Hellenes.

"It is impossible," said he, "to doubt the priorityof the Asiatic Scriptures; they are earlier thanour sacred books. The man who is candidenough to admit this historical fact sees thewhole world expand before him. Was it not onthe Asiatic highland that the few men took ref-uge who were able to escape the catastrophe

that ruined our globe—if, indeed men had ex-isted before that cataclysm or shock? A seriousquery, the answer to which lies at the bottom ofthe sea. The anthropogony of the Bible ismerely a genealogy of a swarm escaping fromthe human hive which settled on the moun-tainous slopes of Thibet between the summitsof the Himalaya and the Caucasus.

"The character of the primitive ideas of thathorde called by its lawgiver the people of God,no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps alsoto induce it to maintain his laws and his systemof government —for the Books of Moses are areligious, political, and civil code —that charac-ter bears the authority of terror; convulsions ofnature are interpreted with stupendous poweras a vengeance from on high. In fact, since thiswandering tribe knew none of the ease enjoyedby a community settled in a patriarchal home,their sorrows as pilgrims inspired them withnone but gloomy poems, majestic but blood-

stained. In the Hindoos, on the contrary, thespectacle of the rapid recoveries of the naturalworld, and the prodigious effects of sunshine,which they were the first to recognize, gave riseto happy images of blissful love, to the worshipof Fire and of the endless personifications ofreproductive force. These fine fancies are lack-ing in the Book of the Hebrews. A constantneed of self-preservation amid all the dangersand the lands they traversed to reach the Prom-ised Land engendered their exclusive race-feeling and their hatred of all other nations.

"These three Scriptures are the archives of anengulfed world. Therein lies the secret of theextraordinary splendor of those languages andtheir myths. A grand human history lies be-neath those names of men and places, andthose fables which charm us so irresistibly, weknow not why. Perhaps it is because we find inthem the native air of renewed humanity."

Thus, to him, this threefold literature includedall the thoughts of man. Not a book could bewritten, in his opinion, of which the subjectmight not there be discerned in its germ. Thisview shows how learnedly he had pursued hisearly studies of the Bible, and how far they hadled him. Hovering, as it were, over the heads ofsociety, and knowing it solely from books, hecould judge it coldly.

"The law," said he, "never puts a check on theenterprises of the rich and great, but crushesthe poor, who, on the contrary, need protec-tion."

His kind heart did not therefore allow him tosympathize in political ideas; his system ledrather to the passive obedience of which Jesusset the example. During the last hours of mylife at Vendome, Louis had ceased to feel thespur to glory; he had, in a way, had an abstractenjoyment of fame; and having opened it, asthe ancient priests of sacrifice sought to read

the future in the hearts of men, he had foundnothing in the entrails of his chimera. Scorninga sentiment so wholly personal: "Glory," saidhe, "is but beatified egoism."

Here, perhaps, before taking leave of this ex-ceptional boyhood, I may pronounce judgmenton it by a rapid glance.

A short time before our separation, Lambertsaid to me:

"Apart from the general laws which I haveformulated—and this, perhaps, will be myglory—laws which must be those of the humanorganism, the life of man is Movement deter-mined in each individual by the pressure ofsome inscrutable influence—by the brain, theheart, or the sinews. All the innumerablemodes of human existence result from the pro-portions in which these three generating forcesare more or less intimately combined with the

substances they assimilate in the environmentthey live in."

He stopped short, struck his forehead, and ex-claimed: "How strange! In every great manwhose portrait I have remarked, the neck isshort. Perhaps nature requires that in them theheart should be nearer to the brain!"

Then he went on:

"From that, a sum-total of action takes its risewhich constitutes social life. The man of sinewcontributes action or strength; the man of brain,genius; the man of heart, faith. But," he addedsadly, "faith sees only the clouds of the sanctu-ary; the Angel alone has light."

So, according to his own definitions, Lambertwas all brain and all heart. It seems to me thathis intellectual life was divided into threemarked phases.

Under the impulsion, from his earliest years, ofa precocious activity, due, no doubt, to somemalady—or to some special perfection—of or-ganism, his powers were concentrated on thefunctions of the inner senses and a superabun-dant flow of nerve-fluid. As a man of ideas, hecraved to satisfy the thirst of his brain, to as-similate every idea. Hence his reading; andfrom his reading, the reflections that gave himthe power of reducing things to their simplestexpression, and of absorbing them to studythem in their essence. Thus, the advantages ofthis splendid stage, acquired by other men onlyafter long study, were achieved by Lambertduring his bodily childhood: a happy child-hood, colored by the studious joys of a bornpoet.

The point which most thinkers reach at last wasto him the starting-point, whence his brain wasto set out one day in search of new worlds ofknowledge. Though as yet he knew it not, he

had made for himself the most exacting lifepossible, and the most insatiably greedy.Merely to live, was he not compelled to be per-petually casting nutriment into the gulf he hadopened in himself? Like some beings whodwell in the grosser world, might not he die ofinanition for want of feeding abnormal anddisappointed cravings? Was not this a sort ofdebauchery of the intellect which might lead tospontaneous combustion, like that of bodiessaturated with alcohol?

I had seen nothing of this first phase of hisbrain-development; it is only now, at a laterday, that I can thus give an account of its pro-digious fruit and results. Lambert was nowthirteen.

I was so fortunate as to witness the first stage ofthe second period. Lambert was cast into all themiseries of school-life—and that, perhaps, washis salvation—it absorbed the superabundanceof his thoughts. After passing from concrete

ideas to their purest expression, from words totheir ideal import, and from that import toprinciples, after reducing everything to the ab-stract, to enable him to live he yearned for yetother intellectual creations. Quelled by thewoes of school and the critical development ofhis physical constitution, he became thoughtful,dreamed of feeling, and caught a glimpse ofnew sciences—positively masses of ideas.Checked in his career, and not yet strongenough to contemplate the higher spheres, hecontemplated his inmost self. I then perceivedin him the struggle of the Mind reacting onitself, and trying to detect the secrets of its ownnature, like a physician who watches the courseof his own disease.

At this stage of weakness and strength, ofchildish grace and superhuman powers, LouisLambert is the creature who, more than anyother, gave me a poetical and truthful image ofthe being we call an angel, always excepting

one woman whose name, whose features,whose identity, and whose life I would fainhide from all the world, so as to be sole masterof the secret of her existence, and to bury it inthe depths of my heart.

The third phase I was not destined to see. Itbegan when Lambert and I were parted, for hedid not leave college till he was eighteen, in thesummer of 1815. He had at that time lost hisfather and mother about six months before.Finding no member of his family with whomhis soul could sympathize, expansive still, but,since our parting, thrown back on himself, hemade his home with his uncle, who was alsohis guardian, and who, having been turned outof his benefice as a priest who had taken theoaths, had come to settle at Blois. There Louislived for some time; but consumed ere long bythe desire to finish his incomplete studies, hecame to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and todrink of science at its highest fount. The old

priest, being very fond of his nephew, left Louisfree to spend his whole little inheritance in histhree years' stay in Paris, though he lived verypoorly. This fortune consisted of but a fewthousand francs.

Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of1820, driven from Paris by the sufferings towhich the impecunious are exposed there. Hemust often have been a victim to the secretstorms, the terrible rage of mind by which art-ists are tossed to judge from the only fact hisuncle recollected, and the only letter he pre-served of all those which Louis Lambert wroteto him at that time, perhaps because it was thelast and the longest.

To begin with the story. Louis one evening wasat the Theatre-Francais, seated on a bench inthe upper gallery, near to one of the pillarswhich, in those days, divided off the third rowof boxes. On rising between the acts, he saw ayoung woman who had just come into the box

next him. The sight of this lady, who wasyoung, pretty, well dressed, in a low bodice nodoubt, and escorted by a man for whom herface beamed with all the charms of love, pro-duced such a terrible effect on Lambert's souland senses, that he was obliged to leave thetheatre. If he had not been controlled by someremaining glimmer of reason, which was notwholly extinguished by this first fever of burn-ing passion, he might perhaps have yielded tothe most irresistible desire that came over himto kill the young man on whom the lady's looksbeamed. Was not this a reversion, in the heartof the Paris world, to the savage passion thatregards women as its prey, an effect of animalinstinct combining with the almost luminousflashes of a soul crushed under the weight ofthought? In short, was it not the prick of thepenknife so vividly imagined by the boy, felt bythe man as the thunderbolt of his most vitalcraving—for love?

And now, here is the letter that depicts the stateof his mind as it was struck by the spectacle ofParisian civilization. His feelings, perpetuallywounded no doubt in that whirlpool of self-interest, must always have suffered there; heprobably had no friend to comfort him, no en-emy to give tone to this life. Compelled to livein himself alone, having no one to share hissubtle raptures, he may have hoped to solve theproblem of his destiny by a life of ecstasy,adopting an almost vegetative attitude, like ananchorite of the early Church, and abdicatingthe empire of the intellectual world.

This letter seems to hint at such a scheme,which is a temptation to all lofty souls at peri-ods of social reform. But is not this purpose, insome cases, the result of a vocation? Do notsome of them endeavor to concentrate theirpowers by long silence, so as to emerge fullycapable of governing the world by word or bydeed? Louis must, assuredly, have found much

bitterness in his intercourse with men, or havestriven hard with Society in terrible irony,without extracting anything from it, before ut-tering so strident a cry, and expressing, poorfellow, the desire which satiety of power and ofall earthly things has led even monarchs to in-dulge!

And perhaps, too, he went back to solitude tocarry out some great work that was floatinginchoate in his brain. We would gladly believeit as we read this fragment of his thoughts, be-traying the struggle of his soul at the time whenyouth was ending and the terrible power ofproduction was coming into being, to which wemight have owed the works of the man.

This letter connects itself with the adventure atthe theatre. The incident and the letter throwlight on each other, body and soul were tunedto the same pitch. This tempest of doubts andasseverations, of clouds and of lightnings thatflash before the thunder, ending by a starved

yearning for heavenly illumination, throwssuch a light on the third phase of his educationas enables us to understand it perfectly. As weread these lines, written at chance moments,taken up when the vicissitudes of life in Parisallowed, may we not fancy that we see an oakat that stage of its growth when its inner ex-pansion bursts the tender green bark, coveringit with wrinkles and cracks, when its majesticstature is in preparation—if indeed the light-nings of heaven and the axe of man shall spareit?

This letter, then, will close, alike for the poetand the philosopher, this portentous childhoodand unappreciated youth. It finishes off theoutline of this nature in its germ. Philosopherswill regret the foliage frost-nipped in the bud;but they will, perhaps, find the flowers expand-ing in regions far above the highest places ofthe earth.

"PARIS, September-October 1819.

"DEAR UNCLE,—I shall soon be leaving thispart of the world,

where I could never bear to live. I find no onehere who likes

what I like, who works at my work, or isamazed at what amazes me.

Thrown back on myself, I eat my heart out inmisery. My long and

patient study of Society here has brought me tomelancholy

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 inpeace, I have not

courage enough to make it the sole motivepower of my thoughts. To

make a fortune, I must take up a profession; intwo words, I must,

by acquiring some privilege of position or ofself-advertisement,

either legal or ingeniously contrived, purchasethe right of

taking day by day out of somebody else's pursea certain sum

which, by the end of the year, would amount toa small capital;

and this, in twenty years, would hardly securean income of four

or five thousand francs to a man who dealshonestly. An advocate,

a notary, a merchant, any recognized profes-sional, has earned a

living for his later days in the course of fifteenor sixteen

years after ending his apprenticeship.

"But I have never felt fit for work of this kind. Iprefer thought

to action, an idea to a transaction, contempla-tion to activity. I

am absolutely devoid of the constant attentionindispensable to

the making of a fortune. Any mercantile ven-ture, any need for

using other people's money would bring me togrief, and I should

be ruined. Though I have nothing, at least atthe moment, I owe

nothing. The man who gives his life to theachievement of great

things in the sphere of intellect, needs very lit-tle; still,

though twenty sous a day would be enough, Ido not possess that

small income for my laborious idleness. When Iwish to cogitate,

want drives me out of the sanctuary where mymind has its being.

What is to become of me?

"I am not frightened at poverty. If it were notthat beggars are

imprisoned, branded, scorned, I would beg, toenable me to solve

at my leisure the problems that haunt me. Still,this sublime

resignation, by which I might emancipate mymind, through

abstracting it from the body, would not servemy end. I should

still need money to devote myself to certainexperiments. But for

that, I would accept the outward indigence of asage possessed of

both heaven and heart. A man need only neverstoop, to remain

lofty in poverty. He who struggles and en-dures, 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 themud. Everything here

checks the flight of the spirit that strives to-wards the future.

"I should not be afraid of myself in a desertcave; I am afraid of

myself here. In the desert I should be alonewith myself,

undisturbed; here man has a thousand wantswhich drag him down.

You go out walking, absorbed in dreams; thevoice of the beggar

asking an alms brings you back to this world ofhunger and thirst.

You need money only to take a walk. Your or-gans of sense,

perpetually wearied by trifles, never get anyrest. The poet's

sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, andwhat ought to be his

glory becomes his torment; his imagination ishis cruelest enemy.

The injured workman, the poor mother inchildbed, the prostitute

who has fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm andaged—even vice

and crime here find a refuge and charity; butthe world is

merciless to the inventor, to the man whothinks. Here everything

must show an immediate and practical result.Fruitless attempts

are mocked at, though they may lead to thegreatest discoveries;

the deep and untiring study that demands longconcentrations of

every faculty is not valued here. The Statemight pay talent as it

pays the bayonet; but it is afraid of being takenin by mere

cleverness, as if genius could be counterfeitedfor any length of

time.

"Ah, my dear uncle, when monastic solitudewas destroyed, uprooted

from its home at the foot of mountains, undergreen and silent

shade, asylums ought to have been providedfor those suffering

souls who, by an idea, promote the progress ofnations or prepare

some new and fruitful development of science.

"September 20th.

"The love of study brought me hither, as youknow. I have met

really learned men, amazing for the most part;but the lack of

unity in scientific work almost nullifies theirefforts. There is

no Head of instruction or of scientific research.At the Museum a

professor argues to prove that another in theRue Saint-Jacques

talks nonsense. The lecturer at the College ofMedicine abuses him

of the College de France. When I first arrived, Iwent to hear an

old Academician who taught five hundredyouths that Corneille was

a haughty and powerful genius; Racine, elegiacand graceful;

Moliere, inimitable; Voltaire, supremely witty;Bossuet and

Pascal, incomparable in argument. A professorof philosophy may

make a name by explaining how Plato is Pla-tonic. Another

discourses on the history of words, withouttroubling himself

about ideas. One explains Aeschylus, anothertells you that

communes were communes, and neither morenor less. These original

and brilliant discoveries, diluted to last severalhours,

constitute the higher education which is to leadto giant strides

in human knowledge.

"If the Government could have an idea, Ishould suspect it of

being afraid of any real superiority, which,once roused, might

bring Society under the yoke of an intelligentrule. Then nations

would go too far and too fast; so professors areappointed to

produce simpletons. How else can we accountfor a scheme devoid of

method or any notion of the future?

"The Institut might be the central governmentof the moral and

intellectual world; but it has been ruined latelyby its

subdivision into separate academies. So humanscience marches on,

without a guide, without a system, and floatshaphazard with no

road traced out.

"This vagueness and uncertainty prevails inpolitics as well as in

science. In the order of nature means are sim-ple, the end is grand

and marvelous; here in science as in govern-ment, the means are

stupendous, the end is mean. The force whichin nature proceeds at

an equal pace, and of which the sum is con-stantly being added to

itself—the A + A from which everything isproduced—is

destructive in society. Politics, at the presenttime, place human

forces in antagonism to neutralize each other,instead of

combining them to promote their action tosome definite end.

"Looking at Europe alone, from Caesar to Con-stantine, from the

puny Constantine to the great Attila, from theHuns to

Charlemagne, from Charlemagne to Leo X.,from Leo X., to Philip

II., from Philip II. to Louis XIV.; from Venice toEngland, from

England to Napoleon, from Napoleon to Eng-land, I see no fixed

purpose in politics; its constant agitation hasled to noprogress.

"Nations leave witnesses to their greatness inmonuments, and to

their happiness in the welfare of individuals.Are modern

monuments as fine as those of the ancients? Idoubt it. The arts,

which are the direct outcome of the individual,the products of

genius or of handicraft, have not advancedmuch. The pleasures of

Lucullus were as good as those of Samuel Ber-nard, of Beaujon, or

of the King of Bavaria. And then human lon-gevity has diminished.

"Thus, to those who will be candid, man is stillthe same; might

is his only law, and success his only wisdom.

"Jesus Christ, Mahomet, and Luther only lent adifferent hue to

the arena in which youthful nations disportthemselves.

"No development of politics has hindered civi-lization, with its

riches, its manners, its alliance of the strongagainst the weak,

its ideas, and its delights, from moving fromMemphis to Tyre,

from Tyre to Baalbek, from Tadmor to Car-thage, from Carthage to

Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, fromConstantinople to Venice,

from Venice to Spain, from Spain to England—while 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 for-mulated this axiom:

When the effect produced ceases to be in a ratioto its cause,

disorganization follows.

"The most subtle genius can discover no com-mon bond between great

social facts. No political theory has ever lasted.Governments

pass away, as men do, without handing downany lesson, and no

system gives birth to a system better than thatwhich came before

it. What can we say about politics when a Gov-ernment directly

referred to God perished in India and Egypt;when the rule of the

Sword and of the Tiara are past; when Monar-chy is dying; when the

Government of the People has never been alive;when no scheme of

intellectual power as applied to material inter-ests has ever

proved durable, and everything at this day re-mains to be done all

over again, as it has been at every period whenman has turned to

cry out, 'I am in torment!'

"The code, which is considered Napoleon'sgreatest achievement, is

the most Draconian work I know of. Territorialsubdivision carried

out to the uttermost, and its principle con-firmed by the equal

division of property generally, must result inthe degeneracy of

the nation and the death of the Arts and Sci-ences. The land, too

much broken up, is cultivated only with cerealsand small crops;

the forests, and consequently the rivers, aredisappearing; oxen

and horses are no longer bred. Means are lack-ing both for attack

and for resistance. If we should be invaded, thepeople must be

crushed; it has lost its mainspring—its leaders.This is the

history of deserts!

"Thus the science of politics has no definiteprinciples, and it

can have no fixity; it is the spirit of the hour, theperpetual

application of strength proportioned to the ne-cessities of the

moment. The man who should foresee two cen-turies ahead would die

on the place of execution, loaded with the im-precations of the

mob, or else—which seems worse—would belashed with the myriad

whips of ridicule. Nations are but individuals,neither wiser nor

stronger than man, and their destinies are iden-tical. If we

reflect on man, is not that to consider mankind?

"By studying the spectacle of society perpetu-ally storm-tossed in

its foundations as well as in its results, in itscauses as well

as in its actions, while philanthropy is but asplendid mistake,

and progress is vanity, I have been confirmedin this truth: Life

is within and not without us; to rise above men,to govern them,

is only the part of an aggrandized school-master; and those men

who are capable of rising to the level whencethey can enjoy a

view of the world should not look at their ownfeet.

"November 4th."I am no doubt occupied with weighty

thoughts, I am on the way tocertain discoveries, an invincible power bears

me toward aluminary which shone at an early age on the

darkness of my morallife; but what name can I give to the power that

ties my hands andshuts my mouth, and drags me in a direction

opposite to my

vocation? I must leave Paris, bid farewell to thebooks in the

libraries, those noble centres of illumination,those kindly and

always accessible sages, and the younger gen-iuses with whom I

sympathize. Who is it that drives me away?Chance or Providence?

"The two ideas represented by those words areirreconcilable. If

Chance does not exist, we must admit fatalism,that is to say, the

compulsory co-ordination of things under therule 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 cancontrol his

destiny, if by his own freewill he can interferewith the

execution of the general plan, what becomes ofGod?

"Why did I come here? If I examine myself, Ifind the answer: I

find in myself axioms that need developing.But why then have I

such vast faculties without being suffered touse them? If my

suffering could serve as an example, I couldunderstand it; but

no, I suffer unknown.

"This is perhaps as much the act of Providenceas the fate of the

flower that dies unseen in the heart of the vir-gin forest, where

no one can enjoy its perfume or admire itssplendor. Just as that

blossom vainly sheds its fragrance to the soli-tude, so do I, here

in the garret, give birth to ideas that no one cangrasp.

"Yesterday evening I sat eating bread andgrapes in front of my

window with a young doctor named Meyraux.We talked as men do whom

misfortune has joined in brotherhood, and Isaid to him:

"'I am going away; you are staying. Take up myideas and develop

them.'

"'I cannot!' said he, with bitter regret: 'my feeblehealth

cannot stand so much work, and I shall dieyoung 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 gal-leries of the Museum,

attracted thither by the same study—the unityof geological

structure. In him this was the presentiment ofgenius sent to open

a new path in the fallows of intellect; in me itwas a deduction

from a general system.

"My point is to ascertain the real relation thatmay exist between

God and man. Is not this a need of the age?Without the highest

assurance, it is impossible to put bit and bridleon the social

factions that have been let loose by the spirit ofscepticism and

discussion, and which are now crying aloud:'Show us a way in

which we may walk and find no pitfalls in ourway!'

"You will wonder what comparative anatomyhas to do with a

question of such importance to the future ofsociety. Must we not

attain to the conviction that man is the end ofall earthly means

before we ask whether he too is not the meansto some end? If man

is bound up with everything, is there not some-thing above him with

which he again is bound up? If he is the end-allof the explained

transmutations that lead up to him, must he notbe also the link

between the visible and invisible creations?

"The activity of the universe is not absurd; itmust tend to an

end, and that end is surely not a social bodyconstituted as ours

is! There is a fearful gulf between us andheaven. In our present

existence we can neither be always happy noralways in torment;

must there not be some tremendous change tobring about Paradise

and Hell, two images without which God can-not exist to the mind of

the vulgar? I know that a compromise wasmade by the invention of

the Soul; but it is repugnant to me to make Godanswerable for

human baseness, for our disenchantments, ouraversions, ourdegeneracy.

"Again, how can we recognize as divine theprinciple within us

which can be overthrown by a few glasses ofrum? How conceive of

immaterial faculties which matter can conquer,and whose exercise

is suspended by a grain of opium? How imag-ine that we shall be

able to feel when we are bereft of the vehiclesof sensation? Why

must God perish if matter can be proved tothink? Is the vitality

of matter in its innumerable manifestations—the effect of its

instincts—at all more explicable than the effectsof the mind? Is

not the motion given to the worlds enough toprove God's

existence, without our plunging into absurdspeculations suggested

by pride? And if we pass, after our trials, froma perishable

state of being to a higher existence, is not thatenough for a

creature that is distinguished from other crea-tures only by more

perfect instincts? If in moral philosophy there isnot a single

principle which does not lead to the absurd, orcannot be

disproved by evidence, is it not high time thatwe should set to

work to seek such dogmas as are written in theinnermost nature of

things? Must we not reverse philosophical sci-ence?

"We trouble ourselves very little about the sup-posed void that

must have pre-existed for us, and we try tofathom the supposed

void that lies before us. We make God respon-sible for the future,

but we do not expect Him to account for thepast. And yet it is

quite as desirable to know whether we haveany roots in the past

as to discover whether we are inseparable fromthe future.

"We have been Deists or Atheists in one direc-tion only.

"Is the world eternal? Was the world created?We can conceive of

no middle term between these two proposi-tions; one, then, is true

and the other false! Take your choice. Which-ever it may be, God,

as our reason depicts Him, must be deposed,and that amounts to

denial. The world is eternal: then, beyond ques-tion, God has had

it forced upon Him. The world was created:then God is an

impossibility. How could He have subsistedthrough an eternity,

not knowing that He would presently want tocreate 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 fromGood is absurd. If

evil does not exist, what do you make of sociallife and its laws?

On all hands we find a precipice! On every sidea gulf in which

reason is lost! Then social science must be alto-gether

reconstructed.

"Listen to me, uncle; until some splendid gen-ius shall have taken

account of the obvious inequality of intellectsand the general

sense of humanity, the word God will be con-stantly arraigned, and

Society will rest on shifting sands. The secret ofthe various

moral zones through which man passes will bediscovered by the

analysis of the animal type as a whole. Thatanimal type has

hitherto been studied with reference only to itsdifferences, not

to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations,not in its

faculties. Animal faculties are perfected in di-rect transmission,

in obedience to laws which remain to be dis-covered. These

faculties correspond to the forces which expressthem, and those

forces are essentially material and divisible.

"Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtapositionof words. Is

not this a problem as insoluble as that of thefirst communication

of motion to matter—an unsounded gulf ofwhich the difficulties

were transposed rather than removed by New-ton's system? Again, the

universal assimilation of light by everythingthat exists on earth

demands a new study of our globe. The sameanimal differs in the

tropics of India and in the North. Under theangular or the

vertical incidence of the sun's rays nature isdeveloped the same,

but not the same; identical in its principles, buttotally

dissimilar in its outcome. The phenomenon thatamazes our eyes in

the zoological world when we compare thebutterflies of Brazil

with those of Europe, is even more startling inthe world of Mind.

A particular facial angle, a certain amount ofbrain convolutions,

are indispensable to produce Columbus, Raph-ael, Napoleon, Laplace,

or Beethoven; the sunless valley produces thecretin—draw your

own conclusions. Why such differences, due tothe more or less

ample diffusion of light to men? The masses ofsuffering humanity,

more or less active, fed, and enlightened, are adifficulty to be

accounted for, crying out against God.

"Why in great joy do we always want to quitthe earth? whence

comes the longing to rise which every creaturehas known or will

know? Motion is a great soul, and its alliancewith matter is just

as difficult to account for as the origin ofthought in man. In

these days science is one; it is impossible totouch politics

independent of moral questions, and these arebound up with

scientific questions. It seems to me that we areon the eve of a

great human struggle; the forces are there; onlyI do not see the

General.

"November 25.

"Believe me, dear uncle, it is hard to give up thelife that is in

us without a pang. I am returning to Blois witha heavy grip at my

heart; I shall die then, taking with me someuseful truths. No

personal interest debases my regrets. Is earthlyfame a guerdon to

those who believe that they will mount to ahigher sphere?

"I am by no means in love with the two sylla-bles Lam and bert;

whether spoken with respect or with contemptover my grave, they

can make no change in my ultimate destiny. Ifeel myself strong

and energetic; I might become a power; I feel inmyself a life so

luminous that it might enlighten a world, andyet I am shut up in

a sort of mineral, as perhaps indeed are thecolors you admire on

the neck of an Indian bird. I should need toembrace the whole

world, to clasp and re-create it; but those whohave done this,

who have thus embraced and remoulded itbegan—did they not?—by

being a wheel in the machine. I can only becrushed. Mahomet had

the sword; Jesus had the cross; I shall die un-known. I shall be at

Blois for a day, and then in my coffin.

"Do you know why I have come back to Swe-denborg after vast studies

of all religions, and after proving to myself, byreading all the

works published within the last sixty years bythe patient

English, by Germany, and by France, howdeeply true were my

youthful views about the Bible? Swedenborgundoubtedly epitomizes

all the religions—or rather the one religion—ofhumanity. Though

forms of worship are infinitely various, neithertheir true

meaning nor their metaphysical interpretationhas ever varied. In

short, man has, and has had, but one religion.

"Sivaism, Vishnuism, and Brahmanism, thethree primitive creeds,

originating as they did in Thibet, in the valleyof the Indus, and

on the vast plains of the Ganges, ended theirwarfare some

thousand years before the birth of Christ byadopting the Hindoo

Trimourti. The Trimourti is our Trinity. Fromthis dogma Magianism

arose in Persia; in Egypt, the African beliefs andthe Mosaic law;

the worship of the Cabiri, and the polytheismof Greece and Rome.

While by this ramification of the Trimourti theAsiatic myths

became adapted to the imaginations of variousraces in the lands

they reached by the agency of certain sageswhom men elevated to

be demi-gods—Mithra, Bacchus, Hermes, Her-cules, and the rest

—Buddha, the great reformer of the three pri-meval religions, lived

in India, and founded his Church there, a sectwhich still numbers

two hundred millions more believers thanChristianity can show,

while it certainly influenced the powerful Willboth of Jesus and

of Confucius.

"Then Christianity raised her standard. Subse-quently Mahomet fused

Judaism and Christianity, the Bible and theGospel, in one book,

the Koran, adapting them to the apprehensionof the Arab race.

Finally, Swedenborg borrowed from Magian-ism, Brahmanism, Buddhism,

and Christian mysticism all the truth and di-vine beauty that those

four great religious books hold in common, andadded to them a

doctrine, a basis of reasoning, that may betermed mathematical.

"Any man who plunges into these religiouswaters, of which the

sources are not all known, will find proofs thatZoroaster, Moses,

Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and Sweden-borg had identical

principles and aimed at identical ends.

"The last of them all, Swedenborg, will perhapsbe the Buddha of

the North. Obscure and diffuse as his writingsare, we find in

them the elements of a magnificent conceptionof society. His

Theocracy is sublime, and his creed is the onlyacceptable one to

superior souls. He alone brings man into im-mediate communion with

God, he gives a thirst for God, he has freed themajesty of God

from the trappings in which other humandogmas have disguised Him.

He left Him where He is, making His myriadcreations and creatures

gravitate towards Him through successivetransformations which

promise a more immediate and more naturalfuture than the Catholic

idea of Eternity. Swedenborg has absolved Godfrom the reproach

attaching to Him in the estimation of tendersouls for the

perpetuity of revenge to punish the sin of amoment—a system ofinjustice and cruelty.

"Each man may know for himself what hope hehas 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. Thesewere both the

offspring of the desert. Of the thirty-three yearsof Christ's

life, we only know the history of nine; His lifeof seclusion

prepared Him for His life of glory. And I toocrave for the

desert!"

Notwithstanding the difficulties of the task, Ihave felt it my duty to depict Lambert's boy-hood, the unknown life to which I owe the onlyhappy hours, the only pleasant memories, ofmy early days. Excepting during those twoyears I had nothing but annoyances and weari-ness. Though some happiness was mine at alater time, it was always incomplete.

I have been diffuse, I know; but in default ofentering into the whole wide heart and brain ofLouis Lambert—two words which inade-quately express the infinite aspects of his innerlife—it would be almost impossible to make thesecond part of his intellectual history intelligi-ble—a phase that was unknown to the worldand to me, but of which the mystical outcome

was made evident to my eyes in the course of afew hours. Those who have not alreadydropped this volume, will, I hope, understandthe events I still have to tell, forming as they doa sort of second existence lived by this crea-ture—may I not say this creation?—in whomeverything was to be so extraordinary, even hisend.

When Louis returned to Blois, his uncle waseager to procure him some amusement; but thepoor priest was regarded as a perfect leper inthat godly-minded town. No one would haveanything to say to a revolutionary who hadtaken the oaths. His society, therefore, con-sisted of a few individuals of what were thencalled liberal or patriotic, or constitutionalopinions, on whom he would call for a rubberof whist or of boston.

At the first house where he was introduced byhis uncle, Louis met a young lady, whose cir-cumstances obliged her to remain in this circle,

so contemned by those of the fashionableworld, though her fortune was such as to makeit probable that she might by and by marry intothe highest aristocracy of the province. Made-moiselle Pauline de Villenoix was sole heiressto the wealth amassed by her grandfather, aJew named Salomon, who, contrary to the cus-toms of his nation, had, in his old age, marrieda Christian and a Catholic. He had only oneson, who was brought up in his mother's faith.At his father's death young Salomon purchasedwhat was known at that time as a savonnette avilain (literally a cake of soap for a serf), a smallestate called Villenoix, which he contrived toget registered with a baronial title, and took itsname. He died unmarried, but he left a naturaldaughter, to whom he bequeathed the greaterpart of his fortune, including the lands of Ville-noix. He appointed one of his uncles, MonsieurJoseph Salomon, to be the girl's guardian. Theold Jew was so devoted to his ward that heseemed willing to make great sacrifices for the

sake of marrying her well. But Mademoisellede Villenoix's birth, and the cherished prejudiceagainst Jews that prevails in the provinces,would not allow of her being received in thevery exclusive circle which, rightly or wrongly,considers itself noble, notwithstanding her ownlarge fortune and her guardian's.

Monsieur Joseph Salomon was resolved that ifshe could not secure a country squire, his nieceshould go to Paris and make choice of a hus-band among the peers of France, liberal ormonarchical; as to happiness, that he believedhe could secure her by the terms of the mar-riage contract.

Mademoiselle de Villenoix was now twenty.Her remarkable beauty and gifts of mind weresurer guarantees of happiness than those of-fered by money. Her features were of the pur-est type of Jewish beauty; the oval lines, so no-ble and maidenly, have an indescribable stampof the ideal, and seem to speak of the joys of the

East, its unchangeably blue sky, the glories ofits lands, and the fabulous riches of life there.She had fine eyes, shaded by deep eyelids,fringed with thick, curled lashes. Biblical inno-cence sat on her brow. Her complexion was ofthe pure whiteness of the Levite's robe. She washabitually silent and thoughtful, but hermovements and gestures betrayed a quietgrace, as her speech bore witness to a woman'ssweet and loving nature. She had not, indeed,the rosy freshness, the fruit-like bloom whichblush on a girl's cheek during her carelessyears. Darker shadows, with here and there aredder vein, took the place of color, sympto-matic of an energetic temper and nervous irri-tability, such as many men do not like to meetwith in a wife, while to others they are an indi-cation of the most sensitive chastity and pas-sion mingled with pride.

As soon as Louis saw Mademoiselle de Ville-noix, he discerned the angel within. The richest

powers of his soul, and his tendency to ecstaticreverie, every faculty within him was at onceconcentrated in boundless love, the first love ofa young man, a passion which is strong indeedin all, but which in him was raised to incalcula-ble power by the perennial ardor of his senses,the character of his ideas, and the manner inwhich he lived. This passion became a gulf, intowhich the hapless fellow threw everything; agulf whither the mind dare not venture, sincehis, flexible and firm as it was, was lost there.There all was mysterious, for everything wenton in that moral world, closed to most men,whose laws were revealed to him—perhaps tohis sorrow.

When an accident threw me in the way of hisuncle, the good man showed me into the roomwhich Lambert had at that time lived in. Iwanted to find some vestiges of his writings, ifhe should have left any. There among his pa-pers, untouched by the old man from that fine

instinct of grief that characterized the aged, Ifound a number of letters, too illegible ever tohave been sent to Mademoiselle de Villenoix.My familiarity with Lambert's writing enabledme in time to decipher the hieroglyphics of thisshorthand, the result of impatience and afrenzy of passion. Carried away by his feelings,he had written without being conscious of theirregularity of words too slow to express histhoughts. He must have been compelled tocopy these chaotic attempts, for the lines oftenran into each other; but he was also afraid per-haps of not having sufficiently disguised hisfeelings, and at first, at any rate, he had proba-bly written his love-letters twice over.

It required all the fervency of my devotion tohis memory, and the sort of fanaticism whichcomes of such a task, to enable me to divineand restore the meaning of the five letters thathere follow. These documents, preserved by mewith pious care, are the only material evidence

of his overmastering passion. Mademoiselle deVillenoix had no doubt destroyed the real let-ters that she received, eloquent witnesses to thedelirium she inspired.

The first of these papers, evidently a roughsketch, betrays by its style and by its length themany emendations, the heartfelt alarms, theinnumerable terrors caused by a desire toplease; the changes of expression and the hesi-tation between the whirl of ideas that beset aman as he indites his first love-letter—a letterhe never will forget, each line the result of areverie, each word the subject of long cogita-tion, while the most unbridled passion knownto man feels the necessity of the most reservedutterance, and like a giant stooping to enter ahovel, speaks humbly and low, so as not toalarm a girl's soul.

No antiquary ever handled his palimpsestswith greater respect than I showed in recon-structing these mutilated documents of such

joy and suffering as must always be sacred tothose 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 loveyou; and to me,

the hope of being loved is life. Others, perhaps,ere now, have,

in speaking of themselves, misused the words Imust employ to

depict the state of my soul; yet, I beseech you tobelieve in the

truth of my expressions; though weak, they aresincere. Perhaps I

ought not thus to proclaim my love. Indeed, myheart counseled me

to wait in silence till my passion should touchyou, that I might

the better conceal it if its silent demonstrationsshould

displease you; or till I could express it evenmore delicately

than in words if I found favor in your eyes.However, after having

listened for long to the coy fears that fill ayouthful heart with

alarms, I write in obedience to the instinctwhich drags useless

lamentations from the dying.

"It has needed all my courage to silence thepride of poverty, and

to overleap the barriers which prejudice erectsbetween you and

me. I have had to smother many reflections tolove you in spite of

your wealth; and as I write to you, am I not indanger of the

scorn which women often reserve for profes-sion of love, which they

accept only as one more tribute of flattery? Butwe cannot help

rushing with all our might towards happiness,or being attracted

to the life of love as a plant is to the light; wemust have been

very unhappy before we can conquer the tor-ment, the anguish of

those secret deliberations when reason provesto us by a thousand

arguments how barren our yearning must be ifit remains buried in

our hearts, and when hopes bid us dare every-thing.

"I was happy when I admired you in silence; Iwas so lost in the

contemplation of your beautiful soul, that onlyto see you left me

hardly anything further to imagine. And Ishould not now have

dared to address you if I had not heard thatyou were leaving.

What misery has that one word brought uponme! Indeed, it is my

despair that has shown me the extent of myattachment—it is

unbounded. Mademoiselle, you will neverknow—at least, I hope you

may never know—the anguish of dreading lestyou should lose the

only happiness that has dawned on you onearth, the only thing

that has thrown a gleam of light in the darknessof misery. I

understood yesterday that my life was no morein myself, but in

you. There is but one woman in the world forme, as there is but

one thought in my soul. I dare not tell you towhat a state I am

reduced by my love for you. I would have youonly as a gift from

yourself; I must therefore avoid showing my-self to you in all the

attractiveness of dejection—for is it not oftenmore impressive

to a noble soul than that of good fortune? Thereare many things I

may not tell you. Indeed, I have too lofty a no-tion of love to

taint it with ideas that are alien to its nature. Ifmy soul is

worthy of yours, and my life pure, your heartwill have a

sympathetic insight, and you will understandme!

"It is the fate of man to offer himself to thewoman who can make

him believe in happiness; but it is your pre-rogative to reject the

truest passion if it is not in harmony with thevague voices in

your heart—that I know. If my lot, as decidedby you, must be

adverse to my hopes, mademoiselle, let meappeal to the delicacy

of your maiden soul and the ingenuous com-passion of a woman to

burn my letter. On my knees I beseech you toforget all! Do not

mock at a feeling that is wholly respectful, andthat is too

deeply graven on my heart ever to be effaced.Break my heart, but

do not rend it! Let the expression of my firstlove, a pure and

youthful love, be lost in your pure and youthfulheart! Let it die

there as a prayer rises up to die in the bosom ofGod!

"I owe you much gratitude: I have spent deli-cious hours occupied

in watching you, and giving myself up to thefaint dreams of my

life; do not crush these long but transient joysby some girlish

irony. Be satisfied not to answer me. I shallknow how to

interpret your silence; you will see me no more.If I must be

condemned to know for ever what happinessmeans, and to be for

ever bereft of it; if, like a banished angel, I amto cherish the

sense of celestial joys while bound for ever to aworld of sorrow

—well, I can keep the secret of my love as wellas that of my

griefs.—And farewell!

"Yes, I resign you to God, to whom I will prayfor you, beseeching

Him to grant you a happy life; for even if I amdriven from your

heart, into which I have crept by stealth, still Ishall ever be

near you. Otherwise, of what value would thesacred words be of

this letter, my first and perhaps my last en-treaty? If I should

ever cease to think of you, to love you whetherin happiness or in

woe, should I not deserve my punishment?"II

"You are not going away! And I am loved! I, apoor, insignificant

creature! My beloved Pauline, you do not your-self know the power

of the look I believe in, the look you gave me totell me that you

had chosen me—you so young and lovely, withthe world at your

feet!

"To enable you to understand my happiness, Ishould 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 foryou, my comforting

and stupendous love, was a last effort of yearn-ing for the

happiness my soul strove to reach—a soulcrushed by fruitless

labor, consumed by fears that make me doubtmyself, eaten into by

despair which has often urged me to die. Noone in the world can

conceive of the terrors my fateful imaginationinflicts on me. It

often bears me up to the sky, and suddenlyflings me to earth

again from prodigious heights. Deep-seatedrushes of power, or

some rare and subtle instance of peculiar lucid-ity, assure me now

and then that I am capable of great things. ThenI embrace the

universe in my mind, I knead, shape it, informit, I comprehend it

—or fancy that I do; then suddenly I awake—alone, sunk in

blackest night, helpless and weak; I forget thelight I saw but

now, I find no succor; above all, there is noheart where I may

take refuge.

"This distress of my inner life affects my physi-cal existence. The

nature of my character gives me over to theraptures of happiness

as defenceless as when the fearful light of re-flection comes to

analyze and demolish them. Gifted as I amwith the melancholy

faculty of seeing obstacles and success withequal clearness,

according to the mood of the moment, I amhappy or miserable by

turns.

"Thus, when I first met you, I felt the presenceof an angelic

nature, I breathed an air that was sweet to myburning breast, I

heard in my soul the voice that never can befalse, telling me

that here was happiness; but perceiving all thebarriers that

divided us, I understood the vastness of theirpettiness, and

these difficulties terrified me more than theprospect of

happiness could delight me. At once I felt theawful reaction

which casts my expansive soul back on itself;the smile you had

brought to my lips suddenly turned to a bittergrimace, and I

could only strive to keep calm, while my soulwas boiling with the

turmoil of contradictory emotions. In short, Iexperienced that

gnawing pang to which twenty-three years ofsuppressed sighs and

betrayed affections have not inured me.

"Well, Pauline, the look by which you promisedthat I should be

happy suddenly warmed my vitality, andturned all my sorrows into

joy. Now, I could wish that I had sufferedmore. My love is

suddenly full-grown. My soul was a wide terri-tory that lacked the

blessing of sunshine, and your eyes have shedlight on it. Beloved

providence! you will be all in all to me, orphanas I am, without

a relation but my uncle. You will be my wholefamily, as you are

my whole wealth, nay, the whole world to me.Have you not bestowed

on me every gladness man can desire in thatchaste—lavish—timid

glance?

"You have given me incredible self-confidenceand audacity. I can

dare all things now. I came back to Blois indeep dejection. Five

years of study in the heart of Paris had mademe 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 charla-tans, to which a

really noble spirit should not stoop. Thus, myideas could only

make their way by the assistance of a man boldenough to mount the

platform of the press, and to harangue loudlythe simpletons he

scorns. This kind of courage I have not. Iploughed my way on,

crushed by the verdict of the crowd, in despairat never making it

hear me. I was at once too humble and toolofty! I swallowed my

thoughts as other men swallow humiliations. Ihad even come to

despise knowledge, blaming it for yielding noreal happiness.

"But since yesterday I am wholly changed. Foryour sake I now

covet every palm of glory, every triumph ofsuccess. When I lay my

head on your knees, I could wish to attract toyou the eyes of the

whole world, just as I long to concentrate in mylove every idea,

every power that is in me. The most splendidcelebrity is a

possession that genius alone can create. Well, Ican, at my will,

make for you a bed of laurels. And if the silentovation paid to

science is not all you desire, I have within methe sword of the

Word; I could run in the path of honor and am-bition where others

only crawl.

"Command me, Pauline; I will be whatever youwill. My iron will

can do anything—I am loved! Armed with thatthought, ought not a

man to sweep everything before him? The manwho wants all can do

all. If you are the prize of success, I enter thelists to-morrow.

To win such a look as that you bestowed onme, I would leap the

deepest abyss. Through you I understand thefabulous achievements

of chivalry and the most fantastic tales of theArabian Nights.

I can believe now in the most fantastic excessesof love, and in

the success of a prisoner's wildest attempt torecover his

liberty. You have aroused the thousand virtuesthat lay dormant

within me—patience, resignation, all the pow-ers of my heart, all

the strength of my soul. I live by you and—heavenly thought!—for

you. Everything now has a meaning for me inlife. I understand

everything, even the vanities of wealth.

"I find myself shedding all the pearls of theIndies at your feet;

I fancy you reclining either on the rarest flow-ers, or on the

softest tissues, and all the splendor of the worldseems hardly

worthy of you, for whom I would I couldcommand the harmony and

the light that are given out by the harps of ser-aphs and the stars

of heaven! Alas! a poor, studious poet, I offeryou in words

treasures I cannot bestow; I can only give youmy heart, in which

you reign for ever. I have nothing else. But arethere no

treasures in eternal gratitude, in a smile whoseexpressions will

perpetually vary with perennial happiness,under the constant

eagerness of my devotion to guess the wishesof your loving soul?

Has not one celestial glance given us assuranceof always

understanding each other?

"I have a prayer now to be said to God everynight—a prayer full

of you: 'Let my Pauline be happy!' And willyou 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 dis-pleased you

yesterday? Throw off the pride of heart whichinflicts on me the

secret tortures that can be caused by one welove. Scold me if you

will! Since yesterday, a vague, unutterabledread of having

offended you pours grief on the life of feelingwhich you had made

so sweet and so rich. The lightest veil thatcomes between two

souls sometimes grows to be a brazen wall.There are no venial

crimes in love! If you have the very spirit ofthat noble

sentiment, you must feel all its pangs, and wemust be unceasingly

careful not to fret each other by some heedlessword.

"No doubt, my beloved treasure, if there is anyfault, it is in

me. I cannot pride myself in the belief that Iunderstand a

woman's heart, in all the expansion of its ten-derness, all the

grace of its devotedness; but I will always en-deavor to appreciate

the value of what you vouchsafe to show me ofthe secrets of

yours.

"Speak to me! Answer me soon! The melan-choly 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 thesunken road,

gazing at the turrets of Villenoix, not daring togo to our hedge.

If you could imagine all I saw in my soul! Whatgloomy visions

passed before me under the gray sky, whosecold sheen added to my

dreary mood! I had dark presentiments! I wasterrified 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 abandonme. 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 growsdim, my tongue is

paralyzed, my imagination is extinct, desire isdead—nothing

survives but my mere human vitality. At suchtimes, though you

were in all the splendor of your beauty, thoughyou should lavish

on me your subtlest smiles and tenderestwords, an evil influence

would blind me, and distort the most ravishingmelody into

discordant sounds. At those times—as I be-lieve—some

argumentative demon stands before me, show-ing me the void beneath

the most real possessions. This pitiless demonmows down every

flower, and mocks at the sweetest feelings, say-ing: 'Well—and

then?' He mars the fairest work by showing meits skeleton, and

reveals the mechanism of things while hidingthe beautiful

results.

"At those terrible moments, when the evil spirittakes possession

of me, when the divine light is darkened in mysoul without my

knowing the cause, I sit in grief and anguish, Iwish myself deaf

and dumb, I long for death to give me rest.These hours of doubt

and uneasiness are perhaps inevitable; at anyrate, they teach me

not to be proud after the flights which haveborne me to the skies

where I have gathered a full harvest ofthoughts; for it is always

after some long excursion in the vast fields ofthe intellect, and

after the most luminous speculations, that Itumble, broken and

weary, into this limbo. At such a moment, myangel, a wife would

double my love for her—at any rate, she might.If she were

capricious, ailing, or depressed, she wouldneed the comforting

overflow of ingenious affection, and I shouldnot have a glance to

bestow on her. It is my shame, Pauline, to haveto tell you that

at times I could weep with you, but that noth-ing could make me

smile.

"A woman can always conceal her troubles; forher child, or for

the man she loves, she can laugh in the midst ofsuffering. And

could not I, for you, Pauline, imitate the exqui-site reserve of a

woman? Since yesterday I have doubted myown power. If I could

displease you once, if I failed once to under-stand you, I dread

lest I should often be carried out of our happycircle by my evil

demon. Supposing I were to have many ofthose dreadful moods, or

that my unbounded love could not make up forthe dark hours of my

life—that I were doomed to remain such as Iam?—Fatal doubts!

"Power is indeed a fatal possession if what Ifeel within me is

power. Pauline, go! Leave me, desert me!Sooner would I endure

every ill in life than endure the misery of know-ing that you were

unhappy through me.

"But, perhaps, the demon has had such empireover me only because

I have had no gentle, white hands about me todrive him off. No

woman has ever shed on me the balm of heraffection; and I know

not whether, if love should wave his pinionsover my head in these

moments of exhaustion, new strength mightnot be given to my

spirit. This terrible melancholy is perhaps aresult of my

isolation, one of the torments of a lonely soulwhich pays for its

hidden treasures with groans and unknownsuffering. Those who

enjoy little shall suffer little; immense happi-ness entails

unutterable anguish!

"How terrible a doom! If it be so, must we notshudder for

ourselves, we who are superhumanly happy? Ifnature sells us

everything at its true value, into what pit arewe not fated to

fall? Ah! the most fortunate lovers are thosewho die together in

the midst of their youth and love! How sad itall is! Does my soul

foresee evil in the future? I examine myself,wondering whether

there is anything in me that can cause you amoment's anxiety. I

love you too selfishly perhaps? I shall be layingon your beloved

head a burden heavy out of all proportion tothe joy my love can

bring to your heart. If there dwells in me someinexorable power

which I must obey—if I am compelled to cursewhen you pray, if

some dark thought coerces me when I wouldfain kneel at your feet

and play as a child, will you not be jealous ofthat wayward and

tricky spirit?

"You understand, dearest heart, that what Idread is not being

wholly yours; that I would gladly forego all thesceptres and the

palms of the world to enshrine you in one eter-nal thought, to see

a perfect life and an exquisite poem in our rap-turous love; to

throw my soul into it, drown my powers, andwring from each hourthe joys it has to give!

"Ah, my memories of love are crowding backupon me, the clouds of

despair will lift. Farewell. I leave you now to bemore entirely

yours. My beloved soul, I look for a line, aword that may restore

my peace of mind. Let me know whether Ireally grieved my Pauline,

or whether some uncertain expression of hercountenance misled me.

I could not bear to have to reproach myself af-ter a whole life of

happiness, for ever having met you without asmile of love, a

honeyed word. To grieve the woman I love—Pauline, I should count

it a crime. Tell me the truth, do not put me offwith some

magnanimous subterfuge, but forgive mewithout cruelty."

FRAGMENT."Is so perfect an attachment happiness? Yes, for

years ofsuffering would not pay for an hour of love.

"Yesterday, your sadness, as I suppose, passedinto my soul as

swiftly as a shadow falls. Were you sad or suf-fering? I was

wretched. Whence came my distress? Write tome at once. Why did I

not know it? We are not yet completely one inmind. At two

leagues' distance or at a thousand I ought tofeel your pain and

sorrows. I shall not believe that I love you tillmy life is so

bound up with yours that our life is one, till ourhearts, our

thoughts are one. I must be where you are, seewhat you feel, feel

what you feel, be with you in thought. Did not Iknow, at once,

that your carriage had been overthrown andyou were bruised? But

on that day I had been with you, I had neverleft you, I could see

you. When my uncle asked me what made meturn so pale, I answered

at once, 'Mademoiselle de Villenoix had has afall.'

"Why, then, yesterday, did I fail to read yoursoul? Did you wish

to hide the cause of your grief? However, I fan-cied I could feel

that you were arguing in my favor, though invain, with that

dreadful Salomon, who freezes my blood. Thatman is not of our

heaven.

"Why do you insist that our happiness, whichhas no resemblance to

that of other people, should conform to thelaws 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, asnothing is lovelier

than your face, which reflects your divine soul.

"I shall wait for a letter before going along thelanes to meet

the sweet hour you grant me. Oh! if you couldknow how the sight

of those turrets makes my heart throb when Isee them edged with

light by the moon, our only confidante."IV

"Farewell to glory, farewell to the future, to thelife I had

dreamed of! Now, my well-beloved, my gloryis that I am yours, and

worthy of you; my future lies entirely in thehope of seeing you;

and is not my life summed up in sitting at yourfeet, in lying

under your eyes, in drawing deep breaths inthe heaven you have

created for me? All my powers, all my thoughtsmust be yours,

since you could speak those thrilling words,'Your sufferings must

be mine!' Should I not be stealing some joysfrom love, some

moments from happiness, some experiencesfrom your divine spirit,

if I gave my hours to study—ideas to the worldand poems to the

poets? Nay, nay, my very life, I will treasureeverything for you;

I will bring to you every flower of my soul. Isthere anything

fine enough, splendid enough, in all the re-sources of the world,

or of intellect, to do honor to a heart so rich, sopure as yours

—the heart to which I dare now and again tounite my own? Yes,

now and again, I dare believe that I can love asmuch as you do.

"And yet, no; you are the angel-woman; therewill always be a

greater charm in the expression of your feel-ings, more harmony in

your voice, more grace in your smile, more pu-rity in your looks

than in mine. Let me feel that you are the crea-ture of a higher

sphere than that I live in; it will be your prideto have

descended from it; mine, that I should havedeserved you; and you

will not perhaps have fallen too far by comingdown to me in my

poverty and misery. Nay, if a woman's mostglorious refuge is in a

heart that is wholly her own, you will alwaysreign supreme in

mine. Not a thought, not a deed, shall ever pol-lute this heart,

this glorious sanctuary, so long as you vouch-safe to dwell in it

—and will you not dwell in it for ever? Did younot enchant me by

the words, 'Now and for ever?' Nunc et semper!And I have

written these words of our ritual below yourportrait—words

worthy of you, as they are of God. He is nunc etsemper, as my

love is.

"Never, no, never, can I exhaust that which isimmense, infinite,

unbounded—and such is the feeling I have foryou; I have imagined

its immeasurable extent, as we measure spaceby the dimensions of

one of its parts. I have had ineffable joys, wholehours filled

with delicious meditation, as I have recalled asingle gesture or

the tone of a word of yours. Thus there will bememories of which

the magnitude will overpower me, if the remi-niscence of a sweet

and friendly interview is enough to make meshed tears of joy, to

move and thrill my soul, and to be an inex-haustible wellspring of

gladness. Love is the life of angels!

"I can never, I believe, exhaust my joy in seeingyou. This

rapture, the least fervid of any, though it nevercan last long

enough, has made me apprehend the eternalcontemplation in which

seraphs and spirits abide in the presence ofGod; nothing can be

more natural, if from His essence there ema-nates a light as

fruitful of new emotions as that of your eyes is,of your imposing

brow, and your beautiful countenance—theimage of your soul.

Then, the soul, our second self, whose pureform can never perish,

makes our love immortal. I would there weresome other language

than that I use to express to you the ever-newecstasy of my love;

but since there is one of our own creating, sinceour looks are

living speech, must we not meet face to face toread in each

other's eyes those questions and answers fromthe heart, that are

so living, so penetrating, that one evening youcould say to me,

'Be silent!' when I was not speaking. Do youremember it, dear

life?

"When I am away from you in the darkness ofabsence, am I not

reduced to use human words, too feeble to ex-press heavenly

feelings? But words at any rate represent themarks these feelings

leave in my soul, just as the word God imper-fectly sums up the

notions we form of that mysterious First Cause.But, in spite of

the subtleties and infinite variety of language, Ihave no words

that can express to you the exquisite union bywhich my life is

merged into yours whenever I think of you.

"And with what word can I conclude when Icease writing to you,

and yet do not part from you? What can farewellmean, unless in

death? But is death a farewell? Would not myspirit be then more

closely one with yours? Ah! my first and lastthought; 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 havenot already

given you? It would be a gift of a part of whatis wholly yours.

"Are you my future? How deeply I regret thepast! 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 presentlife. What indeed was

that time when I knew you not? It would be avoid but that I was

so wretched."FRAGMENT.

"Beloved angel, how delightful last eveningwas! How full of

riches your dear heart is! And is your love end-less, like mine?

Each word brought me fresh joy, and each lookmade it deeper. The

placid expression of your countenance gave ourthoughts a

limitless horizon. It was all as infinite as thesky, and as bland

as its blue. The refinement of your adored fea-tures repeated

itself by some inexplicable magic in your prettymovements and

your least gestures. I knew that you were allgraciousness, all

love, but I did not know how variously gracefulyou could be.

Everything combined to urge me to tender so-licitation, to make me

ask the first kiss that a woman always refuses,no doubt that it

may be snatched from her. You, dear soul ofmy life, will never

guess beforehand what you may grant to mylove, and will yield

perhaps without knowing it! You are utterlytrue, and obey your

heart alone.

"The sweet tones of your voice blended withthe tender harmonies

that filled the quiet air, the cloudless sky. Not abird piped,

not a breeze whispered—solitude, you, and I.The motionless

leaves did not quiver in the beautiful sunsethues which are both

light and shadow. You felt that heavenly po-etry—you who

experienced so many various emotions, andwho so often raised your

eyes to heaven to avoid answering me. Youwho are proud and saucy,

humble and masterful, who give yourself to meso completely in

spirit and in thought, and evade the most bash-ful caress. Dear

witcheries of the heart! They ring in my ears;they sound and play

there still. Sweet words but half spoken, like achild's speech,

neither promise nor confession, but allowinglove to cherish its

fairest hopes without fear or torment! Howpure a memory for life!

What a free blossoming of all the flowers thatspring 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 be-loved? As I recall,

this morning, the fresh and living delights re-vealed to me in that

hour, I am conscious of a joy which makes meconceive of true love

as an ocean of everlasting and ever-new experi-ences, into which we

may plunge with increasing delight. Every day,every word, every

kiss, every glance, must increase it by its tributeof past

happiness. Hearts that are large enough neverto forget must live

every moment in their past joys as much as inthose promised by

the future. This was my dream of old, and nowit is no longer a

dream! Have I not met on this earth with anangel who had made me

know all its happiness, as a reward, perhaps,for having endured

all its torments? Angel of heaven, I salute theewith a kiss.

"I shall send you this hymn of thanksgivingfrom my heart, I owe

it to you; but it can hardly express my gratitudeor the morning

worship my heart offers up day by day to herwho epitomized the

whole gospel of the heart in this divine word:'Believe.'"

V

"What! no further difficulties, dearest heart! Weshall 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 ofour life as we now

are by stealth, at rare intervals! Our pure, deepfeelings will

assume the expression of the thousand fondacts I have dreamed of.

For me your little foot will be bared, you will bewholly mine!

Such happiness kills me; it is too much for me.My head is too

weak, it will burst with the vehemence of myideas. I cry and I

laugh—I am possessed! Every joy is an arrowof flame; it pierces

and burns me. In fancy you rise before my eyes,ravished and

dazzled by numberless and capricious imagesof delight.

"In short, our whole future life is before me—itstorrents, its

still places, its joys; it seethes, it flows on, it liessleeping;

then again it awakes fresh and young. I seemyself and you side by

side, walking with equal pace, living in thesame thought; each

dwelling in each other's heart, understandingeach other,

responding to each other as an echo catchesand repeats a sound

across wide distances.

"Can life be long when it is thus consumedhour by hour? Shall we

not die in a first embrace? What if our soulshave already met in

that sweet evening kiss which almost overpow-ered us—a feeling

kiss, but the crown of my hopes, the ineffectualexpression of all

the prayers I breathe while we are apart, hid-den in my soul like

remorse?

"I, who would creep back and hide in the hedgeonly to hear your

footsteps as you went homewards—I mayhenceforth admire you at my

leisure, see you busy, moving, smiling, prat-tling! An endless joy!

You cannot imagine all the gladness it is to meto see you going

and coming; only a man can know that deepdelight. Your least

movement gives me greater pleasure than amother even can feel as

she sees her child asleep or at play. I love youwith every kind

of love in one. The grace of your least gesture isalways new to

me. I fancy I could spend whole nights breath-ing your breath; I

would I could steal into every detail of yourlife, be the very

substance of your thoughts—be your very self.

"Well, we shall, at any rate, never part again!No human alloy

shall ever disturb our love, infinite in its phasesand as pure as

all things are which are One—our love, vast asthe sea, vast as

the sky! You are mine! all mine! I may look intothe depths of

your eyes to read the sweet soul that alternatelyhides and shines

there, to anticipate your wishes.

"My best-beloved, listen to some things I havenever yet dared to

tell you, but which I may confess to you now. Ifelt a certain

bashfulness of soul which hindered the fullexpression of my

feelings, so I strove to shroud them under thegarbs 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 de-mands of my senses,

excited, no doubt, by the solitude in which Ihave lived,

perpetually fired by conceptions of happiness,and aroused by you,

so fair in form, so attractive in manner. Howcan I express to you

my thirst for the unknown rapture of possess-ing an adored wife, a

rapture to which the union of two souls by lovemust give frenzied

intensity. Yes, my Pauline, I have sat for hoursin a sort of

stupor caused by the violence of my passionateyearning, lost in

the dream of a caress as though in a bottomlessabyss. At such

moments my whole vitality, my thoughts andpowers, are merged and

united in what I must call desire, for lack of aword 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 sweetly—anact of melancholy

prudence that made you doubt my love—I wasin one of those fits

of madness when a man could commit a mur-der to possess a woman.

Yes, if I had felt the exquisite pressure you of-fered me as

vividly as I heard your voice in my heart, Iknow 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 an-guish when my visions

are to become realities? It will be in my powernow to make life

one long love-making!

"Dearest love, there is a certain effect of light onyour black

hair which could rivet me for hours, my eyesfull of tears, as I

gazed at your sweet person, were it not thatyou turn away and

say, 'For shame; you make me quite shy!'

"To-morrow, then, our love is to be madeknown! Oh, Pauline! the

eyes of others, the curiosity of strangers, weighon my soul. Let

us go to Villenoix, and stay there far from everyone. I should

like no creature in human form to intrude intothe sanctuary where

you are to be mine; I could even wish that,when we are dead, it

should cease to exist—should be destroyed.Yes, I would fain hide

from all nature a happiness which we alone canunderstand, alone

can feel, which is so stupendous that I throwmyself into it onlyto die—it is a gulf!

"Do not be alarmed by the tears that have wet-ted this page; they are tears of joy. My only blessing, we neednever part again!"

In 1823 I traveled from Paris to Touraine bydiligence. At Mer we took up a passenger forBlois. As the guard put him into that part of thecoach where I had my seat, he said jestingly:

"You will not be crowded, Monsieur Le-febvre!"—I was, in fact, alone.

On hearing this name, and seeing a white-haired old man, who looked eighty at least, Inaturally thought of Lambert's uncle. After afew ingenious questions, I discovered that Iwas not mistaken. The good man had beenlooking after his vintage at Mer, and was re-turning to Blois. I then asked for some news ofmy old "chum." At the first word, the oldpriest's face, as grave and stern already as thatof a soldier who has gone through many hard-ships, became more sad and dark; the lines onhis forehead were slightly knit, he set his lips,and said, with a suspicious glance:

"Then you have never seen him since you leftthe College?"

"Indeed, I have not," said I. "But we are equallyto blame for our forgetfulness. Young men, asyou know, lead such an adventurous andstorm-tossed life when they leave their school-forms, that it is only by meeting that they canbe sure of an enduring affection. However, areminiscence of youth sometimes comes as areminder, and it is impossible to forget entirely,especially when two lads have been suchfriends as we were. We went by the name ofthe Poet-and-Pythagoras."

I told him my name; when he heard it, the wor-thy man grew gloomier than ever.

"Then you have not heard his story?" said he."My poor nephew was to be married to therichest heiress in Blois; but the day before hiswedding he went mad."

"Lambert! Mad!" cried I in dismay. "But fromwhat cause? He had the finest memory, themost strongly-constituted brain, the soundestjudgment, I ever met with. Really a great gen-ius—with too great a passion for mysticismperhaps; but the kindest heart in the world.Something most extraordinary must have hap-pened?"

"I see you knew him well," said the priest.

From Mer, till we reached Blois, we talked onlyof my poor friend, with long digressions, bywhich I learned the facts I have already relatedin the order of their interest. I confessed to hisuncle the character of our studies and of hisnephew's predominant ideas; then the old mantold me of the events that had come into Lam-bert's life since our parting. From MonsieurLefebvre's account, Lambert had betrayed somesymptoms of madness before his marriage; butthey were such as are common to men wholove passionately, and seemed to me less star-

tling when I knew how vehement his love hadbeen and when I saw Mademoiselle de Ville-noix. In the country, where ideas are scarce, aman overflowing with original thought anddevoted to a system, as Louis was, might wellbe regarded as eccentric, to say the least. Hislanguage would, no doubt, seem the strangerbecause he so rarely spoke. He would say,"That man does not dwell in heaven," whereany one else would have said, "We are notmade on the same pattern." Every clever manhas his own quirks of speech. The broader hisgenius, the more conspicuous are the singulari-ties which constitute the various degrees ofeccentricity. In the country an eccentric man isat once set down as half mad.

Hence Monsieur Lefebvre's first sentences leftme doubtful of my schoolmate's insanity. I lis-tened to the old man, but I criticised his state-ments.

The most serious symptom had supervened aday or two before the marriage. Louis had hadsome well-marked attacks of catalepsy. He hadonce remained motionless for fifty-nine hours,his eyes staring, neither speaking nor eating; apurely nervous affection, to which persons un-der the influence of violent passion are liable; arare malady, but perfectly well known to themedical faculty. What was really extraordinarywas that Louis should not have had severalprevious attacks, since his habits of raptthought and the character of his mind wouldpredispose him to them. But his temperament,physical and mental, was so admirably bal-anced, that it had no doubt been able to resistthe demands on his strength. The excitement towhich he had been wound up by the anticipa-tion of acute physical enjoyment, enhanced bya chaste life and a highly-strung soul, had nodoubt led to these attacks, of which the resultsare as little known as the cause.

The letters that have by chance escaped de-struction show very plainly a transition frompure idealism to the most intense sensualism.

Time was when Lambert and I had admiredthis phenomenon of the human mind, in whichhe saw the fortuitous separation of our twonatures, and the signs of a total removal of theinner man, using its unknown faculties underthe operation of an unknown cause. This disor-der, a mystery as deep as that of sleep, wasconnected with the scheme of evidence whichLambert had set forth in his Treatise on the Will.And when Monsieur Lefebvre spoke to me ofLouis' first attack, I suddenly remembered aconversation we had had on the subject afterreading a medical book.

"Deep meditation and rapt ecstasy are perhapsthe undeveloped germs of catalepsy," he said inconclusion.

On the occasion when he so concisely formu-lated this idea, he had been trying to link men-tal phenomena together by a series of results,following the processes of the intellect step bystep, from their beginnings as those simple,purely animal impulses of instinct, which areall-sufficient to many human beings, particu-larly to those men whose energies are whollyspent in mere mechanical labor; then, going onto the aggregation of ideas and rising to com-parison, reflection, meditation, and finally ec-stasy and catalepsy. Lambert, of course, in theartlessness of youth, imagined that he had laiddown the lines of a great work when he thusbuilt up a scale of the various degrees of man'smental powers.

I remember that, by one of those chances whichseems like predestination, we got hold of agreat Martyrology, in which the most curiousnarratives are given of the total abeyance ofphysical life which a man can attain to under

the paroxysms of the inner life. By reflecting onthe effects of fanaticism, Lambert was led tobelieve that the collected ideas to which wegive the name of feelings may very possibly bethe material outcome of some fluid which isgenerated in all men, more or less abundantly,according to the way in which their organs ab-sorb, from the medium in which they live, theelementary atoms that produce it. We wentcrazy over catalepsy; and with the eagernessthat boys throw into every pursuit, we endeav-ored to endure pain by thinking of somethingelse. We exhausted ourselves by making ex-periments not unlike those of the epileptic fa-natics of the last century, a religious maniawhich will some day be of service to the scienceof humanity. I would stand on Lambert's chest,remaining there for several minutes withoutgiving him the slightest pain; but notwithstand-ing these crazy attempts, we did not achieve anattack of catalepsy.

This digression seemed necessary to accountfor my first doubts, which were, however,completely dispelled by Monsieur Lefebvre.

"When this attack had passed off," said he, "mynephew sank into a state of extreme terror, adejection that nothing could overcome. Hethought himself unfit for marriage. I watchedhim with the care of a mother for her child, andfound him preparing to perform on himself theoperation to which Origen believed he owedhis talents. I at once carried him off to Paris,and placed him under the care of MonsieurEsquirol. All through our journey Louis satsunk in almost unbroken torpor, and did notrecognize me. The Paris physicians pronouncedhim incurable, and unanimously advised hisbeing left in perfect solitude, with nothing tobreak the silence that was needful for his veryimprobable recovery, and that he should livealways in a cool room with a subdued light.—Mademoiselle de Villenoix, whom I had been

careful not to apprise of Louis' state," he wenton, blinking his eyes, "but who was supposedto have broken off the match, went to Paris andheard what the doctors had pronounced. Sheimmediately begged to see my nephew, whohardly recognized her; then, like the noble soulshe is, she insisted on devoting herself to givinghim such care as might tend to his recovery.She would have been obliged to do so if he hadbeen her husband, she said, and could she doless for him as her lover?

"She removed Louis to Villenoix, where theyhave been living for two years."

So, instead of continuing my journey, I stoppedat Blois to go to see Louis. Good Monsieur Le-febvre would not hear of my lodging anywherebut at his house, where he showed me hisnephew's room with the books and all else thathad belonged to him. At every turn the oldman could not suppress some mournful excla-mation, showing what hopes Louis' precocious

genius had raised, and the terrible grief intowhich this irreparable ruin had plunged him.

"That young fellow knew everything, my dearsir!" said he, laying on the table a volume con-taining Spinoza's works. "How could so wellorganized a brain go astray?"

"Indeed, monsieur," said I, "was it not perhapsthe result of its being so highly organized? If hereally is a victim to the malady as yet unstud-ied in all its aspects, which is known simply asmadness, I am inclined to attribute it to his pas-sion. His studies and his mode of life hadstrung his powers and faculties to a degree ofenergy beyond which the least further strainwas too much for nature; Love was enough tocrack them, or to raise them to a new form ofexpression which we are maligning perhaps, byticketing it without due knowledge. In fact, hemay perhaps have regarded the joys of mar-riage as an obstacle to the perfection of his in-

ner man and his flight towards spiritualspheres."

"My dear sir," said the old man, after listeningto me with attention, "your reasoning is, nodoubt, very sound; but even if I could follow it,would this melancholy logic comfort me for theloss of my nephew?"

Lambert's uncle was one of those men who liveonly by their affections.

I went to Villenoix on the following day. Thekind old man accompanied me to the gates ofBlois. When we were out on the road to Ville-noix, he stopped me and said:

"As you may suppose, I do not go there. But donot forget what I have said; and in Mademoi-selle de Villenoix's presence affect not to per-ceive that Louis is mad."

He remained standing on the spot where I lefthim, watching me till I was out of sight.

I made my way to the chateau of Villenoix, notwithout deep agitation. My thoughts weremany at each step on this road, which Louishad 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 windingroad where little gullies broke the banks oneach side, were to me full of strange interest. Itried to enter into the impressions and thoughtsof my unhappy friend. Those evening meetingson the edge of the coombe, where his lady-lovehad been wont to find him, had, no doubt, ini-tiated Mademoiselle de Villenoix into the se-crets of that vast and lofty spirit, as I hadlearned them all some years before.

But the thing that most occupied my mind, andgave to my pilgrimage the interest of intensecuriosity, in addition to the almost pious feel-ings that led me onwards, was that glorious

faith of Mademoiselle de Villenoix's which thegood priest had told me of. Had she in thecourse of time been infected with her lover'smadness, or had she so completely entered intohis soul that she could understand all itsthoughts, even the most perplexed? I lost my-self in the wonderful problem of feeling, pass-ing the highest inspirations of passion and themost beautiful instances of self-sacrifice. Thatone should die for the other is an almost vulgarform of devotion. To live faithful to one love isa form of heroism that immortalized Mademoi-selle Dupuis. When the great Napoleon andLord Byron could find successors in the heartsof women they had loved, we may well admireBolingbroke's widow; but Mademoiselle Du-puis could feed on the memories of many yearsof happiness, whereas Mademoiselle de Ville-noix, having known nothing of love but its firstexcitement, seemed to me to typify love in itshighest expression. If she were herself almostcrazy, it was splendid; but if she had under-

stood and entered into his madness, she com-bined with the beauty of a noble heart a crown-ing effort of passion worthy to be studied andhonored.

When I saw the tall turrets of the chateau, re-membering how often poor Lambert must havethrilled at the sight of them, my heart beat anx-iously. As I recalled the events of our boyhood,I was almost a sharer in his present life andsituation. At last I reached a wide, desertedcourtyard, and I went into the hall of the housewithout meeting a soul. There the sound of mysteps brought out an old woman, to whom Igave a letter written to Mademoiselle de Ville-noix by Monsieur Lefebvre. In a few minutesthis woman returned to bid me enter, and ledme to a low room, floored with black-and-white marble; the Venetian shutters wereclosed, and at the end of the room I dimly sawLouis Lambert.

"Be seated, monsieur," said a gentle voice thatwent to my heart.

Mademoiselle de Villenoix was at my side be-fore I was aware of her presence, and noise-lessly brought me a chair, which at first I wouldnot accept. It was so dark that at first I sawMademoiselle de Villenoix and Lambert only astwo black masses perceived against the gloomybackground. I presently sat down under theinfluence of the feeling that comes over us, al-most in spite of ourselves, under the obscurevault of a church. My eyes, full of the brightsunshine, accustomed themselves gradually tothis artificial night.

"Monsieur is your old school-friend," she saidto Louis.

He made no reply. At last I could see him, andit was one of those spectacles that are stampedon the memory for ever. He was standing, hiselbows resting on the cornice of the low wain-

scot, which threw his body forward, so that itseemed bowed under the weight of his benthead. His hair was as long as a woman's, fallingover his shoulders and hanging about his face,giving him a resemblance to the busts of thegreat men of the time of Louis XIV. His facewas perfectly white. He constantly rubbed oneleg against the other, with a mechanical actionthat nothing could have checked, and the inces-sant friction of the bones made a doleful sound.Near him was a bed of moss on boards.

"He very rarely lies down," said Mademoisellede Villenoix; "but whenever he does, he sleepsfor several days."

Louis stood, as I beheld him, day and nightwith a fixed gaze, never winking his eyelids aswe do. Having asked Mademoiselle de Ville-noix whether a little more light would hurt ourfriend, on her reply I opened the shutters a littleway, and could see the expression of Lambert'scountenance. Alas! he was wrinkled, white-

headed, his eyes dull and lifeless as those of theblind. His features seemed all drawn upwardsto the top of his head. I made several attemptsto talk to him, but he did not hear me. He was awreck snatched from the grave, a conquest oflife from death—or of death from life!

I stayed for about an hour, sunk in unaccount-able dreams, and lost in painful thought. I lis-tened to Mademoiselle de Villenoix, who toldme every detail of this life—that of a child inarms.

Suddenly Louis ceased rubbing his legs to-gether, and said slowly:

"The angels are white."

I cannot express the effect produced upon meby this utterance, by the sound of the voice Ihad loved, whose accents, so painfully ex-pected, had seemed to be lost for ever. My eyesfilled with tears in spite of every effort. An in-

voluntary instinct warned me, making medoubt whether Louis had really lost his reason.I was indeed well assured that he neither sawnor heard me; but the sweetness of his tone,which seemed to reveal heavenly happiness,gave his speech an amazing effect. Thesewords, the incomplete revelation of an un-known world, rang in our souls like some glo-rious distant bells in the depth of a dark night. Iwas no longer surprised that Mademoiselle deVillenoix considered Lambert to be perfectlysane. The life of the soul had perhaps subduedthat of the body. His faithful companion had,no doubt—as I had at that moment—intuitionsof that melodious and beautiful existence towhich we give the name of Heaven in its high-est meaning.

This woman, this angel, always was with him,seated at her embroidery frame; and each timeshe drew the needle out she gazed at Lambertwith sad and tender feeling. Unable to endure

this terrible sight—for I could not, like Made-moiselle de Villenoix, read all his secrets—Iwent out, and she came with me to walk for afew minutes and talk of herself and of Lambert.

"Louis must, no doubt, appear to be mad," saidshe. "But he is not, if the term mad ought onlyto be used in speaking of those whose brain isfor some unknown cause diseased, and whocan show no reason in their actions. Everythingin my husband is perfectly balanced. Thoughhe did not actively recognize you, it is not thathe did not see you. He has succeeded in detach-ing himself from his body, and discerns us un-der some other aspect—what that is, I knownot. When he speaks, he utters wondrousthings. Only it often happens that he concludesin speech an idea that had its beginning in hismind; or he may begin a sentence and finish itin thought. To other men he seems insane; tome, living as I do in his mind, his ideas arequite lucid. I follow the road his spirit travels;

and though I do not know every turning, I canreach the goal with him.

"Which of us has not often known what it is tothink of some futile thing and be led on to someserious reflection through the ideas or memo-ries it brings in its train? Not unfrequently, af-ter speaking about some trifle, the simple start-ing-point of a rapid train of reflections, athinker may forget or be silent as to the abstractconnection of ideas leading to his conclusion,and speak again only to utter the last link in thechain of his meditations.

"Inferior minds, to whom this swift mental vi-sion is a thing unknown, who are ignorant ofthe spirit's inner workings, laugh at thedreamer; and if he is subject to this kind ofobliviousness, regard him as a madman. Louisis always in this state; he soars perpetuallythrough the spaces of thought, traversing themwith the swiftness of a swallow; I can followhim in his flight. This is the whole history of his

madness. Some day, perhaps, Louis will comeback to the life in which we vegetate; but if hebreathes the air of heaven before the time whenwe may be permitted to do so, why should wedesire to have him down among us? I am con-tent to hear his heart beat, and all my happinessis to be with him. Is he not wholly mine? Inthree years, twice at intervals he was himselffor a few days; once in Switzerland, where wewent, and once in an island off the wilds ofBrittany, where we took some sea-baths. I havetwice been very happy! I can live on memory."

"But do you write down the things he says?" Iasked.

"Why should I?" said she.

I was silent; human knowledge was indeed asnothing in this woman's eyes.

"At those times, when he talked a little," sheadded, "I think I have recorded some of his

phrases, but I left it off; I did not understandhim then."

I asked her for them by a look; she understoodme. This is what I have been able to preservefrom oblivion.

I

Everything here on earth is produced by anethereal substance

which is the common element of various phe-nomena, known

inaccurately as electricity, heat, light, the gal-vanic fluid, the

magnetic fluid, and so forth. The universal dis-tribution of this

substance, under various forms, constituteswhat is commonly known

as Matter.

II

The brain is the alembic to which the Animalconveys what each of

its organizations, in proportion to the strengthof that vessel,

can absorb of that Substance, which returns ittransformed into

Will.

The Will is a fluid inherent in every creatureendowed with

motion. Hence the innumerable forms assumedby the Animal, the

results of its combinations with that Substance.The Animal's

instincts are the product of the coercion of theenvironment in

which it develops. Hence its variety.III

In Man the Will becomes a power peculiar tohim, and exceeding in

intensity that of any other species.IV

By constant assimilation, the Will depends onthe Substance it

meets with again and again in all its transmuta-tions, pervading

them by Thought, which is a product peculiarto the human Will, in

combination with the modifications of thatSubstance.

V

The innumerable forms assumed by Thoughtare the result of the

greater or less perfection of the human mecha-nism.

VI

The Will acts through organs commonly calledthe five senses,

which, in fact, are but one—the faculty of Sight.Feeling and

tasting, hearing and smelling, are Sight modi-fied to the

transformations of the Substance which Mancan absorb in two

conditions: untransformed and transformed.VII

Everything of which the form comes within thecognizance of the

one sense of Sight may be reduced to certainsimple bodies of

which the elements exist in the air, the light, orin the elements

of air and light. Sound is a condition of the air;colors are all

conditions of light; every smell is a combinationof air and

light; hence the four aspects of Matter with re-gard to Man—sound,

color, smell, and shape—have the same origin,for the day is not

far off when the relationship of the phenomenaof air and light

will be made clear.

Thought, which is allied to Light, is expressedin words which

depend on sound. To man, then, everything isderived from the

Substance, whose transformations vary onlythrough Number—a

certain quantitative dissimilarity, the propor-tions resulting in

the individuals or objects of what are classed asKingdoms.

VIII

When the Substance is absorbed in sufficientnumber (or quantity)

it makes of man an immensely powerfulmechanism, in direct

communication with the very element of theSubstance, and acting

on organic nature in the same way as a largestream when it

absorbs the smaller brooks. Volition sets thisforce in motion

independently of the Mind. By its concentrationit acquires some

of the qualities of the Substance, such as theswiftness of light,

the penetrating power of electricity, and thefaculty of

saturating a body; to which must be added thatit apprehends what

it can do.

Still, there is in man a primordial and overrul-ing phenomenon

which defies analysis. Man may be dissectedcompletely; the

elements of Will and Mind may perhaps befound; but there still

will remain beyond apprehension the x againstwhich I once used

to struggle. That x is the Word, the Logos,whose communication

burns and consumes those who are not pre-pared to receive it. The

Word is for ever generating the Substance.IX

Rage, like all our vehement demonstrations, isa current of the

human force that acts electrically; its turmoilwhen liberated

acts on persons who are present even thoughthey be neither its

cause nor its object. Are there not certain menwho by a discharge

of Volition can sublimate the essence of thefeelings of the

masses?

X

Fanaticism and all emotions are living forces.These forces in

some beings become rivers that gather in andsweep awayeverything.

XI

Though Space is, certain faculties have thepower of traversing

it with such rapidity that it is as though it ex-isted not. From

your own bed to the frontiers of the universethere are but two

steps: Will and Faith.XII

Facts are nothing; they do not subsist; all thatlives of us is

the Idea.XIII

The realm of Ideas is divided into threespheres: that of

Instinct, that of Abstractions, that of Specialism.XIV

The greater part, the weaker part of visible hu-manity, dwells in

the Sphere of Instinct. The Instinctives are born,labor, and

die without rising to the second degree of hu-man intelligence,

namely Abstraction.XV

Society begins in the sphere of Abstraction. IfAbstraction, as

compared with Instinct, is an almost divinepower, it is

nevertheless incredibly weak as compared withthe gift of

Specialism, which is the formula of God. Ab-straction comprises all

nature in a germ, more virtually than a seedcontains the whole

system of a plant and its fruits. From Abstrac-tion are derived

laws, arts, social ideas, and interests. It is theglory and the

scourge of the earth: its glory because it hascreated social

life; its scourge because it allows man to evadeentering into

Specialism, which is one of the paths to the In-finite. Man

measures everything by Abstractions: Goodand 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 differ-ence.

There must be intermediate Beings, then, divid-ing the sphere of

Instinct from the sphere of Abstractions, inwhom the two elements

mingle in an infinite variety of proportions.Some have more of

one, some more of the other. And there are alsosome in which the

two powers neutralize each other by equality ofeffect.XVI

Specialism consists in seeing the things of thematerial universe

and the things of the spiritual universe in alltheir

ramifications original and causative. The great-est human geniuses

are those who started from the darkness of Ab-straction to attain

to the light of Specialism. (Specialism, species,sight;

speculation, or seeing everything, and all atonce; Speculum, a

mirror or means of apprehending a thing byseeing the whole of

it.) Jesus had the gift of Specialism; He saweach fact in its

root and in its results, in the past where it hadits rise, and in

the future where it would grow and spread;His sight pierced into

the understanding of others. The perfection ofthe inner eye gives

rise to the gift of Specialism. Specialism bringswith it

Intuition. Intuition is one of the faculties of theInner Man, of

which Specialism is an attribute. Intuition actsby an

imperceptible sensation of which he who obeysit is not conscious:

for instance, Napoleon instinctively movingfrom a spot struck

immediately afterwards by a cannon ball.XVII

Between the sphere of Abstraction and that ofSpecialism, as

between those of Abstraction and Instinct, thereare beings in

whom the attributes of both combine and pro-duce a mixture; these

are men of genius.XVIII

Specialism is necessarily the most perfect ex-pression of man, and

he is the link binding the visible world to thehigher worlds; he

acts, sees, and feels by his inner powers. Theman 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 ofSpecialism,

above the average. Specialism opens to man histrue career; the

Infinite dawns on him; he sees what his destinymust be.

XX

There are three worlds—the Natural, the Spiri-tual, and the

Divine. Humanity passes through the Naturalworld, which is not

fixed either in its essence and unfixed in itsfaculties. The

Spiritual world is fixed in its essence and un-fixed in its

faculties. The Divine world is necessarily a Ma-terial worship, a

Spiritual worship, and a Divine worship: threeforms expressed in

action, speech, and prayer, or, in other words,in deed,

apprehension, and love. Instinct demandsdeed; Abstraction is

concerned with Ideas; Specialism sees the end,it aspires to God

with presentiment or contemplation.XXI

Hence, perhaps, some day the converse of EtVerbum caro factum

est will become the epitome of a new Gospel,which will proclaim

that The Flesh shall be made the Word and be-come the Utterance of

God.XXII

The Resurrection is the work of the Wind ofHeaven sweeping over

the worlds. The angel borne on the Wind doesnot say: "Arise, ye

dead"; he says, "Arise, ye who live!"

Such are the meditations which I have withgreat difficulty cast in a form adapted to ourunderstanding. There are some others which

Pauline remembered more exactly, wherefore Iknow not, and which I wrote from her dicta-

tion; 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 fig-ure; partly, too, perhaps, because, in these last

aphorisms, Lambert's formulas seem to includea 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 persons—though they be butfew—who love to dive into such intellectual

deeps.

I

Everything on earth exists solely by motion andnumber.

II

Motion is, so to speak, number in action.III

Motion is the product of a force generated bythe Word and by

Resistance, which is Matter. But for Resistance,Motion would have

had no results; its action would have been infi-nite. Newton's

gravitation is not a law, but an effect of thegeneral 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 thestronger, Life

ceases.V

No portion of Motion is wasted; it always pro-duces number; still,

it can be neutralized by disproportionate resis-tance, as inminerals.

VI

Number, which produces variety of all kinds,also gives rise to

Harmony, which, in the highest meaning of theword, is the

relation of parts to the whole.VII

But for Motion, everything would be one andthe same. Its

products, identical in their essence, differ onlyby Number, which

gives rise to faculties.

VIII

Man looks to faculties; angels look to the Es-sence.

IX

By giving his body up to elemental action, mancan achieve an

inner union with the Light.X

Number is intellectual evidence belonging toman alone; by it he

acquires knowledge of the Word.XI

There is a Number beyond which the impurecannot pass: the Number

which is the limit of creation.XII

The Unit was the starting-point of every prod-uct: compounds are

derived from it, but the end must be identicalwith the beginning.

Hence this Spiritual formula: the compoundUnit, the variable

Unit, the fixed Unit.XIII

The Universe is the Unit in variety. Motion isthe means; Number

is the result. The end is the return of all thingsto the Unit,

which is God.XIV

Three and Seven are the two chief Spiritualnumbers.

XV

Three is the formula of created worlds. It is theSpiritual Sign

of the creation, as it is the Material Sign of di-mension. In fact,

God has worked by curved lines only: theStraight Line is an

attribute of the Infinite; and man, who has thepresentiment of

the Infinite, reproduces it in his works. Two isthe number of

generation. Three is the number of Life whichincludes generation

and offspring. Add the sum of four, and youhave seven, the

formula of Heaven. Above all is God; He is theUnit.

After going in to see Louis once more, I tookleave of his wife and went home, lost in ideasso adverse to social life that, in spite of a prom-ise to return to Villenoix, I did not go.

The sight of Louis had had some mysteriouslysinister influence over me. I was afraid to placemyself again in that heavy atmosphere, where

ecstasy was contagious. Any man would havefelt, as I did, a longing to throw himself into theinfinite, just as one soldier after another killedhimself in a certain sentry box where one hadcommitted suicide in the camp at Boulogne. Itis a known fact that Napoleon was obliged tohave the hut burned which had harbored anidea that had become a mortal infection.

Louis' room had perhaps the same fatal effectas that sentry box.

These two facts would then be additional evi-dence in favor of his theory of the transfusionof Will. I was conscious of strange disturbances,transcending the most fantastic results of tak-ing tea, coffee, or opium, of dreams or of fe-ver—mysterious agents, whose terrible actionoften sets our brains on fire.

I ought perhaps to have made a separate bookof these fragments of thought, intelligible onlyto certain spirits who have been accustomed to

lean over the edge of abysses in the hope ofseeing to the bottom. The life of that mightybrain, which split up on every side perhaps,like a too vast empire, would have been setforth in the narrative of this man's visions—abeing incomplete for lack of force or of weak-ness; but I preferred to give an account of myown impressions rather than to compose amore or less poetical romance.

Louis Lambert died at the age of twenty-eight,September 25, 1824, in his true love's arms. Hewas buried by her desire in an island in thepark at Villenoix. His tombstone is a plainstone cross, without name or date. Like aflower that has blossomed on the margin of aprecipice, and drops into it, its colors and fra-grance all unknown, it was fitting that he tooshould fall. Like many another misprized soul,he had often yearned to dive haughtily into thevoid, and abandon there the secrets of his ownlife.

Mademoiselle de Villenoix would, however,have been quite justified in recording his nameon that cross with her own. Since her partner'sdeath, reunion has been her constant, hourlyhope. But the vanities of woe are foreign tofaithful souls.

Villenoix is falling into ruin. She no longer re-sides there; to the end, no doubt, that she maythe better picture herself there as she used tobe. She had said long ago:

"His heart was mine; his genius is with God."

CHATEAU DE SACHE. June-July 1832.