Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

marked his feelings, his words, his actions, his slightest gestures, the conjugal regard that united us as boys, and that we expressed when we called ourselves chums ?

There was no distinction for us between my ideas and his. We imitated each other’s handwriting, so that one might write the tasks of both. Thus, if one of us had a book to finish and to return to the mathematical master, he could read on without interruption while the other scribbled off his exercise and imposition. We did our tasks as though paying a task on our peace of mind. If my memory does not play me false, they were sometimes of remarkable merit when Lambert did them. But on the foregone conclusion that we were both of us idiots, the master always went through them under a rooted prejudice, and even kept them to read to be laughed at by our schoolfellows.

I remember one afternoon, at the end of the lesson, which lasted from two till four, the master took possession of a page of translation by Lambert. The passage began with, Caius Gracchus, vir nobilis; Lambert had construed that by ‘‘Caius Gracchus had a noble heart.”’

‘‘Where do you find ‘heart’ in nobilis ?’’ said the Father sharply.

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

‘“What would Madame la Baronne de Stael say if she could know that you make such nonsense of a word that means of noble family, of patrician rank ?”’

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

‘Master Poet, you will stay in for a week,’’ replied the master, who unfortunately overheard me.

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Lambert simply repeated, looking at me with inexpressible affection, ‘‘ Vir nobilis /”’

Madame de Stael was, in fact, partly the cause of Lambert’s troubles. On every pretext masters and pupils threw the name in his teeth, either in irony or in reproof.

Louis lost no time in getting himself ‘‘kept in’ to share my imprisonment. reer thus than in any other circumstances, we could talk the whole day long in the silence of the dormitories, where each boy had a cubicle six feet square, the partitions consisting at the top of open bars. The doors, fitted with gratings, were locked at night and opened in the morning under the eye of the Father whose duty it was to superintend our rising and going to bed. The creak of these gates, which the college servants unlocked with remarkable expedition, was a sound peculiar to that college. These little cells were our prison, and boys were sometimes shut up there for a month ata time. The boys in these coops were under the stern eye of the prefect, a sort of censor who stole up at certain hours, or at unexpected moments, with a silent step, to hear if we were talking instead of writing our impositions. But a few walnut shells dropped on the stairs, or the sharpness of our hearing, almost always enabled us to beware of his coming, so we could give ourselves up without anxiety to our favorite studies. However, as books were prohibited, our prison hours were chiefly filled up with metaphysical discussions, or with relating singular facts connected with the phenomena of mind.