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

This digression was necessary to give a clew to the scene at which the old man and the youth from the island under Notre-Dame had come to be audience; it will also protect this narrative from all blame on the score of falsehood and hyperbole, of which certain persons of hasty judgment might perhaps suspect me.

Doctor Sigier was a tall man in the prime of life. His face, rescued from oblivion by the archives of the University, had singular analogies with that of Mirabeau. It was stamped with the seal of fierce, swift, and terrible eloquence. But the doctor bore on his brow the expression of religious faith that his modern double had not. Hisp. 833 voice, too, was of persuasive sweetness, with a clear and pleasing ring in it.

At this moment the daylight, that was stintingly diffused through the small, heavily-leaded window-panes, tinted the assembly with capricious tones and powerful contrasts from the checkered light and shade. Here, in a dark corner, eyes shone brightly, their dark heads under the sunbeams gleamed light above faces in shadow, and various bald heads, with only a circlet of white hair, were distinguished among the crowd lke battlements silvered by moonlight. Every face was turned toward the Doctor, mute but impatient. The drowsy voices of other lecturers in the adjoining schools were audible in the silent street like the murmuring of the sea; and the steps of the two strangers, as they now came in, attracted general attention. Doctor Sigier, ready to begin, saw the stately senior standing, looked round for a seat for him, and then finding none, as the place was full, came down from his place, went to the new-comer, and with great respect, led him to the platform of his professor’s chair, and there gave him his stool to sit upon. The assembly hailed: this mark of deference with a murmur of approval, recognizing the old man as the orator of a fine thesis admirably argued not long since at the Sorbonne.

The stranger looked down from his raised position on the crowd below with that deep glance that held a whole poem of sorrow, and those who met his eye felt an indescribable thrill. The lad, following the old man, sat down on one of the steps, leaning against the pulpit in a graceful and melancholy attitude. The silence was now profound, and the doorway and even the street were blocked by scholars who had deserted the other classes.

p. 834

Doctor Sigier was to-day to recapitulate, in the last of a series of discourses, the views he had set forth in the former lectures on the Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell. His strange doctrine responded to the sympathies of the "time, and gratified the immoderate love of the marvellous, which haunts the mind of man in every age. This effort of man to clutch the infinite, which forever slips through his ineffectual grasp, this last tourney of thought against thought was a task worthy of an assembly where the brightest luminaries of the age had met, and where the most stupendous human imagination ever known, perhaps, at that moment shone. The Doctor began by summing up in a mild and even tone the principal points he had so far established: