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

At the age of twelve his imagination, stimulated by the perpetual exercise of his faculties, had developed to a point which permitted him to have such precise concepts of thingsp. 186 which he knew only from reading about them, that the im- = age stamped on his mind could not have been clearer if he had actually seen them, whether this was by a process of analogy or that he was gifted with a sort of second-sight by which he could command all nature.

‘‘When I read the story of the battle of Austerlitz,’’ said | he to me one day, “‘I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the fighting men rang in my ears, and made my inmost self quiver; I could smell the powder; | heard the clatter of horses and the voices of men; I looked down on the plain where armed nations were in collision, just as if I had been on the heights of Santon. The scene was as terrifying as a passage from the Apocalypse.’

On the occasions when he brought all his powers into play, and in some degree lost consciousness of his physical existence, and lived on only by the remarkable energy of his mental powers, whose sphere was enormously expanded, he left space behind him, to use his own words.

But I will not here anticipate the intellectual phases of his life. Already, in spite of myself, I have reversed the order in which I ought to tell the history of this man, who transferred all his activities to thinking, as others throw all their life into action.

A strong bias drew his mind to mystical studies.

‘‘ Abyssus abyssum,’’ he would say. ‘‘Our spirit is abysmal and loves the abyss. In childhood, manhood, and old age we are always eager for mysteries in whatever form they present. themselves.”’

This predilection was disastrous; if indeed his life can be measured by ordinary standards, or if we may gauge another's happiness by our own or by social notions. This taste for the ‘‘things of heaven,’’ another phrase he wasp. 187 fond of using, this mens divinior, was due perhaps to the influence produced on his mind by the first books he read at his uncle’s. Saint Theresa and Madame Guyon were a sequel to the Bible; they had the first-fruits of his manly intelligence, and accustomed him to those swift reactions of the soul of which ecstasy is at once the result and the means. This line of study, this peculiar taste, elevated his heart, purified, ennobled it, gave him an appetite for ‘the divine nature, and suggested to him the almost womanly refinement of feeling which is instinctive in great men; perhaps their sublime superiority is no more than the desire to devote themselves which characterizes woman, only transferred to the greatest things.

As a result of these early impressions, Louis passed immaculate through his school life; this beautiful virginity of the senses naturally resulted in the richer fervor of his blood, and in increased faculties of mind.

The Baroness de Staél, forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris, spent several months of her banishment on an estate near Vendome. One day, when out walking, she met on the skirts of the park the tanner’s son, almost in rags, and absorbed in reading. The book was a translation of ‘‘Heaven and Hell.’’ At that time Monsieur Saint-Martin, Monsieur de Gence, and a few other French or half German writers were almost the only persons in the French Empire to whom the name of Swedenborg was known. Madame de Staél, greatly surprised, took the book from him with the roughness she affected 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!”

p. 188

And do you understand Him?” The Baroness was silent for a moment; then she sat down by Lambert, and began to talk to him. Unfortu- — nately, my memory, though retentive, is far from being so trustworthy as my friend’s, and I have forgotten the whole of the dialogue excepting those first words.

Such a meeting was of a kind to strike Madame de Staél very greatly; on her return home she said but little about it, notwithstanding an effusiveness which in her became mere loquacity; but it evidently occupied her thoughts.