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

The only person now living who preserves any recollection of the incident, and whom I catechized to be informed of what few words Madame de Staél had let drop, could with difficulty recall these words spoken by the Baroness as describing Lambert, ‘‘He is a real seer.”’

Louis failed to justify in the eyes of the world the high hopes he had inspired in his protectress. The transient favor she showed him was regarded as a feminine caprice, one of the fancies characteristic of artist souls. Madame de Staél determined to save Louis Lambert alike from serving the Hmperor or the Church, and to preserve him for the glorious destiny which, she thought, awaited him; for she made him out to be a second Moses snatched from the waters. Before her departure she instructed a friend of hers, Monsieur de Corbigny, to send her Moses in due course to the High School at Vendome; then she probably forgot him.

Having entered this college at the age of fourteen, early in 1811, Lambert would leave it at the end of 1814, when he had finished the course of Philosophy. I doubt whether during the whole time he ever heard a word -of his benefacss

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p. 189

tress—if indeed it was the act of a benefactress to pay for a lad’s schooling for three years without a thought of his future prospects, after diverting him from a career in which he might have found happiness. The circumstances of the time, and Louis Lambert’s character, may to a great extent absolve Madame de Staél for her thoughtlessness and her generosity. The gentleman who was to have kept up communications between her and the boy left Blois just at the time when Louis passed out of the college. The political events that ensued were then a sufficient excuse for this gentleman’s neglect of the Baroness’s protégé. The authoress of ‘‘Corinne’’ heard no more of her little Moses.

A hundred louis, which she placed in the hands of Monsieur de Corbigny, who died, I believe, in 1812, was not a sufficiently large sum to leave lasting memories in Madame de Staél, whose excitable nature found ample pasture during the vicissitudes of 1814 and 1815, which absorbed all her interest.

At this time Louis Lambert was at once too proud and too poor to go in search of a patroness who was travelling all over Europe. Mowever, he went on foot from Blois to Paris in the hope of seeing her, and arrived, unluckily, on the very day of her death. Two letters from Lambert to the Baroness remained unanswered. The memory of Madame de Staél’s good intentions with regard to Louis remains, therefore, only in some few young minds, struck, as mine was, by the strangeness of the story.

No one who had not gone through the training at our college could understand the effect usually made on our minds by the announcement that a ‘‘new boy’’ had arrived, or the impression that such an adventure as Louis Lambert’s was calculated to produce.

p. 190

And here a little information must be given as to the primitive administration of this institution, originally halfmilitary and half-monastic, to explain the new life which there awaited Lambert. Before the Revolution, the Oratorians, devoted, like the Society of Jesus, to the education of youth—succeeding the Jesuits, in fact, in certain of their establishments—had various provincial houses, of which the most famous were the colleges of Vendome, of Tournon, of la Fléche, Pont-Levoy, Sorréze, and Juilly. That at Vendome, like the others, I believe, turned out a certain number of cadets for the army. The abolition of educational bodies, decreed by the Convention, had but little effect on the college at Vendome. When the first erisis had blown over, the authorities recovered possession of their buildings; certain Oratorians, scattered about the country, came back to the college and reopened it under the old rules, with the habits, practices, and customs which gave this school a character with which I have seen nothing at all comparable in any that I have visited since I left that establishment.