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1— Mais, lui dis-je, écrivez-vous les paroles qui lui échappent ? — Pourquoi ? me répondit-elle. Je gardai le silence, les sciences humaines étaient bien petites devant cette femme. — Dans le temps où il se mit à parler, reprit-elle, je crois avoir recueilli ses premières phrases, mais j’ai cessé de le faire ; je n’y entendais rien alors. Je les lui demandai par un regard ; elle me comprit, et voici ce que je pus sauver de l’oubli. I. Ici-bas, tout est le produit d’une substance éthérée , base commune de plusieurs phénomènes connus sous les noms impropres d’ Électricité, Chaleur, Lumière, Fluide galvanique, magnétique, etc. L’universalité des transmutations de cette Substance constitue ce que l’on appelle vulgairement la Matière.
2II. Le Cerveau est le matras où l’ animal transporte ce que, suivant la force de cet appareil, chacune de ses organisations peut absorber de cette substance , et d’où elle sort transformée en Volonté. La Volonté est un fluide, attribut de tout être doué de mouvement. De là les innombrables formes qu’affecte l’ animal , et qui sont les effets de sa combinaison avec la substance . Ses instincts sont le produit des nécessités que lui imposent les milieux où il se développe. De là ses variétés. III. En l’homme, la Volonté devient une force qui lui est propre, et qui surpasse en intensité celle de toutes les espèces. IV. Par sa constante alimentation, la Volonté tient à la substance qu’elle retrouve dans toutes les transmutations les pénétrant par la Pensée, qui est un produit particulier de la Volonté humaine, combinée avec les modifications de la substance .
3V. Du plus ou moins de perfection de l’appareil humain, viennent les innombrables formes qu’affecte la Pensée. VI. La Volonté s’exerce par des organes vulgairement nommés les cinq sens qui n’en sont qu’un seul, la faculté de voir. Le tact comme le goût, l’ouïe comme l’odorat, est une vue adaptée aux transformations de la substance que l’homme peut saisir dans ses deux états, transformée et non transformée. VII. Toutes les choses qui tombent par la Forme dans le domaine du sens unique, la faculté de voir, se réduisent à quelques corps élémentaires dont les principes sont dans l’air, dans la lumière ou dans les principes de l’air et de la lumière. Le son est une modification de l’air ; toutes les couleurs sont des modifications de la lumière ; tout parfum est une combinaison d’air et de lumière ; ainsi les quatre expressions de la matière par rapport à l’homme, le son, la couleur, le parfum et la forme, ont une même origine ; car le jour n’est pas loin où l’on reconnaîtra la filiation des principes de la lumière dans ceux de l’air. La pensée qui tient à la lumière s’exprime par la parole qui tient au son. Pour lui, tout provient donc de la substance dont les transformations ne diffèrent que par le NOMBRE , par un certain dosage dont les proportions produisent les individus ou les choses de ce que l’on nomme les règnes .
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.
1He made no reply. At last I could see him, and it was one of those spectacles that are stamped on the memory forever. He was standing, his elbows resting on the cornice of the low wainscot, which threw his body forward, so that it seemed bowed under the weight of his bent head. His hair was as long as a woman’s, falling over his shoulders and hanging about his face, giving him a resemblance to the busts of the great men of the time of Louis X1V. His face was perfectly white. He constantly rubbed one leg against the other, with a mechanical action that nothing could have checked, and the incessant friction of the bones made a doleful sound. Near him was a bed of moss on boards. ‘‘He very rarely lies down,’’ said Mademoiselle de Villenoix; ‘‘but whenever he does, he sleeps for several days.”’ Louis stood, as I beheld him, day and night with a fixed LOUIS LAMBERT 801 gaze, never winking his eyelids as we do. Having asked Mademoiselle de Villenoix whether a little more light would hurt our friend, on her reply I opened the shutters a little way, and could see the expression of Lambert’s countenance. Alas! he was wrinkled, white-headed, his eyes dull and lifeless as those of the blind. His features seemed all drawn upward to the top of his head. I made several attempts to talk to him, but he did not hear me. He was a wreck snatched from the grave, a conquest of life from death—or of death from life!
2I stayed for about an hour, sunk in unaccountable dreams, and lost in painful thought. I listened to Mademoiselle de Villenoix, who told me every detail of this life—that of a child in arms. Suddenly Louis ceased rubbing his legs together, and said slowly— “The angels are white.” T cannot express the effect produced upon me by this utterance, by the sound of the voice I had loved, whose accents, so painfully expected, had seemed to be lost forever. My eyes filled with tears in spite of every effort. An involuntary instinct warned me, making me doubt whether Louis had really lost his reason. I was indeed well assured that he neither saw nor heard me; but the sweetness of his tone, which seemed to reveal heavenly happiness, gave his speech an amazing effect. These words, the incomplete revelation of an unknown world, rang in our souls like some glorious distant bells in the depth of a dark night. I was no longer surprised that Mademoiselle de Villenoix considered Lambert to be perfectly sane. The life of the soul had perhaps subdued that of the body. His faithful companion had no doubt—as I had at that 302 . BALZAC’S WORKS moment—intuitions of that melodious and beautiful existence to which we give the name of Heaven in its highest meaning. This woman, this angel, always was with him, seated at her embroidery frame; and each time she drew the needle out she gazed-at Lambert with sad and tender feeling. Unable to endure this terrible sight—for I could not, like Mademoiselle de Villenoix, read all his secrets—I went out, and she came with me to walk for a few minutes and talk of herself and of Lambert. “Louis must, no doubt, appear to be mad,’’ said she. ‘‘But he is not, if the term mad ought only to be used in speaking of those whose brain is for some unknown cause diseased, and who can show no reason in their actions. Everything in my husband is perfectly balanced. Though he did not actively recognize you, it is not that he did not see you. He has succeeded in detaching himself from his body, and discerns us under some other aspect—what that is | know not. When he speaks, he utters wondrous things. Only it often happens that he concludes in speech an idea that had its beginning in his mind; or he may begin a sentence and finish it in thought. To others he seems insane; to me, living as I do in his mind, his ideas are quite lucid. I follow the road his spirit travels; and though I do not know every turning, I can reach the goal with him.
3‘“Which of us has not often known what it is to think of some futile thing and be led on to some serious reflection through the ideas or memories it brings in its train? Not infrequently, after speaking about some trifle, the simple starting-point of a rapid train of reflections, a thinker may forget or be silent as to the abstract connection of ideas LOUIS LAMBERT 303 leading to his conclusion, and speak again only to utter the last link in the chain of his meditations. “Inferior minds, to whom this swift mental vision is a thing unknown, who are ignorant of the spirit’s inner workings, laugh at the dreamer; and if he is subject to this kind of obliviousness, regard him asa madman. Louis is always in this state; he soars perpetually through the spaces of thought, traversing them with the swiftness of a swallow; I can follow him in his flight. This is the whole history of his madness. Some day, perhaps, Louis will come back to the life in which we vegetate; but if he breathes the air of heaven before the time when we may be permitted to do so, why should we desire to have him down among us? I am content to hear his heart beat, and all my happiness is to be with him. Is he not wholly mine? In three years, twice at intervals he was himself for a few days; once in Switzerland, where we went, and once in an island off the wilds of Brittany, where he took some sea-baths. I have twice been very happy! I can live on memory.”’
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
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