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1dont l’aspect avait dû faire si souvent tressaillir le pauvre Lambert, mon cœur palpita vivement. Je m’étais associé, pour ainsi dire, à sa vie et à sa situation en me rappelant tous les événements de notre jeunesse. Enfin, j’arrivai dans une grande cour déserte, et pénétrai jusque dans le vestibule du château sans avoir rencontré personne. Le bruit de mes pas fit venir une femme âgée, à laquelle je remis la lettre que monsieur Lefebvre avait écrite à mademoiselle de Villenoix. Bientôt la même femme revint me chercher, et m’introduisit dans une salle basse, dallée en marbre blanc et noir, dont les persiennes étaient fermées, et au fond de laquelle je vis indistinctement Louis Lambert. — Asseyez-vous, monsieur, me dit une voix douce qui allait au cœur.
2Mademoiselle de Villenoix se trouvait à côté de moi sans que je l’eusse aperçue, et m’avait apporté sans bruit une chaise que je ne pris pas d’abord. L’obscurité était si forte que, dans le premier moment, mademoiselle de Villenoix et Louis me firent l’effet de deux masses noires qui tranchaient sur le fond de cette atmosphère ténébreuse. Je m’assis, en proie à ce sentiment qui nous saisit presque malgré nous sous les sombres arcades d’une église. Mes yeux, encore frappés par l’éclat du soleil, ne s’accoutumèrent que graduellement à cette nuit factice. — Monsieur, lui dit-elle, est ton ami de collége. Lambert ne répondit pas. Je pus enfin le voir, et il m’offrit un de ces spectacles qui se gravent à jamais dans la mémoire. Il se tenait debout, les deux coudes appuyés sur la saillie formée par la boiserie, en sorte que son buste paraissait fléchir sous le poids de sa tête inclinée. Ses cheveux, aussi longs que ceux d’une femme, tombaient sur ses épaules, et entouraient sa figure de manière à lui donner de la ressemblance avec les bustes qui représentent les grands hommes du siècle de Louis XIV . Son visage était d’une blancheur parfaite. Il frottait habituellement une de ses jambes sur l’autre par un mouvement machinal que rien n’avait pu réprimer, et le frottement continuel des deux os produisait un bruit affreux. Auprès de lui se trouvait un sommier de mousse posé sur une planche.
3— Il lui arrive très-rarement de se coucher, me dit mademoiselle de Villenoix, quoique chaque fois il dorme pendant plusieurs jours. Louis se tenait debout comme je le voyais, jour et nuit, les yeux fixes, sans jamais baisser et relever les paupières comme nous en avons l’habitude. Après avoir demandé à mademoiselle Villenoix si un peu plus de jour ne causerait aucune douleur à Lambert, sur sa réponse, j’ouvris légèrement la persienne, et pus voir alors l’expression de la physionomie de mon ami. Hélas ! déjà ridé, déjà blanchi, enfin déjà plus de lumière dans ses yeux, devenus vitreux comme ceux d’un aveugle. Tous ses traits semblaient tirés par une convulsion vers le haut de sa tête. J’essayai de lui parler à plusieurs reprises ; mais il ne m’entendit pas. C’était un débris arraché à la tombe, une espèce de conquête faite par la vie sur la mort, ou par la mort sur la vie. J’étais là depuis une heure environ, plongé dans une indéfinissable rêverie, en proie à mille idées affligeantes. J’écoutais mademoiselle de Villenoix qui me racontait dans tous ses détails cette vie d’enfant au berceau. Tout à coup Louis cessa de frotter ses jambes l’une contre l’autre, et dit d’une voix lente : — Les anges sont blancs !
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1Time was when Lambert and I had admired this phenomenon of the human mind, in which he saw the fortuitous separation of our two natures, and the signs of a total removal of the inner man, using its unknown faculties under the operation of an unknown cause. This disorder, a mystery as deep as that of sleep, was connected with the scheme of evidence which Lambert had set forth in his ‘‘Treatise on the Will.’’ And when Monsieur Lefebvre spoke to me of Louis’s first attack, I suddenly remembered a conversation we had had on the subject after reading a medical book. ‘Deep meditation and rapt ecstasy are perhaps the undeveloped germs of catalepsy,’’ he had said in conclusion. On the occasion when he so concisely formulated this idea, he had been trying to link mental phenomena together by a series of results, following the processes of the intellect step by step, from their beginnings as those simple, purely animal impulses of instinct, which are all-sufficient to many human beings, particularly to those men whose energies are wholly spent in mere mechanical labor; then, going on to the aggregation of ideas and rising to comparison, reflection, meditation, and finally ecstasy and catalepsy. Lambert, of course, in the artlessness of youth, imagined that he had laid down the lines of a great work when he thus built up a scale of the various degrees of man’s mental powers.
2I remember that, by one of those chances which seem like predestination, we got hold of a great Martyrology, in which the most curious narratives are given of the total abeyance of physical life which a man can attain to under the paroxysms of the inner life. By reflecting on the effects of fanaticism, Lambert was led to believe that the collected 296 BALZAC’S WORKS — ideas to which we give the name of feelings may very possibly be the material outcome of some fluid which is generated in all men, more or less abundantly, according to the way in which their organs absorb, from the medium in which they live, the elementary atoms that produce it. We went crazy over catalepsy; and with the eagerness that boys throw into every pursuit, we endeavored to endure pain by thinking of something else. We exhausted ourselves by making experiments not unlike those of the epileptic fanatics of the last century, a religious mania which will some day be of service to the science of humanity. I would stand on Lambert’s chest, remaining there several minutes without giving him the slightest pain; but notwithstanding these crazy attempts, we did not achieve an attack of catalepsy. This digression seemed necessary to account for my first doubts, which were, however, completely dispelled by Monsieur Lefebvre. ‘‘When this attack had passed off,’ said he, ‘‘my nephew sank into a state of extreme terror, a dejection that nothing could overcome. He thought himself unfit for marriage. I watched him with the care of a mother for her child, and found him preparing to perform on himself the operation to which Origen believed he owed his talents. I at once carried him off to Paris, and placed him under the care of Monsieur Hsquirol. All through our journey Louis sat sunk in almost unbroken torpor, and did not recognize me. The Paris physicians pronounced him incurable, and unanimously advised his being left in perfect solitude, with nothing to break the silence that was needful for his very improbable recovery, and that he should live always in a cool room with a subdued light.—Mademoiselle de VilleLOUIS LAMBERT OT noix, whom I had been careful not to apprise of Louis’s state,’’ he went on, blinking his eyes, ‘‘but who was supposed to have broken off the match, went to Paris and heard what the doctors had pronounced. She immediately begged to see my nephew, who hardly recognized her; then, like the noble soul she is, she insisted on devoting herself to giving him such care as might tend to his recovery. She would have been obliged to do so if he had been her husband, she said, and could she do less for him as her lover? ‘She removed Louis to Villenoix, where they have been living for two years.”’
3So, instead of continuing my journey, I stopped at Blois to go to see Louis. Good Monsieur Lefebvre would not hear of my lodging anywhere but at his house, where he showed me his nephew’s room with the books and all else that had belonged to him. At every turn the old man could not suppress some mournful exclamation, showing what hopes Louis’s precocious genius had raised, and the terrible grief into which this irreparable ruin had plunged him. ‘““That young fellow knew everything, my dear sir!” said he, laying on the table a volume containing Spinoza’s works. ‘‘How could so well organized a brain go astray ?”’ ‘Indeed, Monsieur,’’ said I, ‘‘was it not perhaps the result of its being so highly organized? If he really isa victim to the malady as yet unstudied in all its aspects, which is known simply as madness, I am inclined to attribute it to his passion. His studies and his mode of life had strung his powers and faculties to a degree of energy beyond which the least further strain was too much for nature; Love was enough to crack them, or to raise them to a new form of expression which we are maligning, perhaps, by ticketing it without due knowledge. In fact, he may 298 BALZAC’S WORKS perhaps have regarded the joys of marriage as an obstacle to the perfection of his inner man and his flight toward spiritual spheres.”’
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
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