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

our minds with our secret calculations. Which of us all can recollect ever having had a sou left to spend on the Sunday following? And which of us but obeyed the instinctive law of social existence by pitying, helping, and despising those pariahs who, by the avarice or poverty of their parents, found themselves penniless?

Any one who forms a clear idea of this huge college, with its monastic buildings in the heart of a little town, and the four plots in which we were distributed as by a monastic rule, will easily conceive of the excitement that we felt at the arrival of a new boy, a passenger suddenly embarked on the ship. No young duchess, on her first appearance at Court, was ever more spitefully criticised than the new boy by the youths in his division. Usually, during the evening play-hour before prayers, those sycophants who were accustomed to ingratiate themselves with the Fathers who took it in turns two and two for a week to keep an eye on us, would be the first to hear on trustworthy authority: ‘There will be a new boy to-morrow!” and then suddenly the shout, ‘‘A New Boy!—A New Boy!”’ rang through the courts. We hurried up to crowd round the superintendent and pester him with questions—

‘“Where was he coming from? What was his name?
Which class would he be in?’’ and so forth.

Louis Lambert’s advent was the subject of a romance worthy of the ‘‘ Arabian Nights.’

)

I was in the fourth class at the time—among the httle boys. Our house-masters were two men whom we called Fathers from habit and tradition, though they were not priests. In my time there were indeed but three genuine Oratorians to whom this title legitimately belonged: in 1814 they all left the college, which had gradually become secularized, to find occupation aboutp. 54 the altar in various country parishes, like the curé of Mer. Father Haugoult, the master for the week, was not a bad man, but of very moderate attainments, and he lacked the tact which is indispensable for discerning the different characters of children, and graduating their punishment to their powers of resistance. Father Haugoult, then, began very obiigingly to communicate to his pupils the wonderful events which were to end on the morrow in the advent of the most singular of ‘‘new boys.’’ Games were at an end. All the children came round in silence to hear the story of Louis Lambert, discovered, like an aerolite, by Madame de Staél, in a corner of the wood. Monsieur Haugoult had to tell us all about Madame de Staél; that evening she seemed to me ten feet high; I saw at a later time the picture of Corinne, in which Gérard represents her as so tall and handsome; and, alas! the woman painted by my imagination so far transcended this, that the real Madame de Staél fell at once in my estimation, even after I read her book of really masculine power, ‘‘De |’ Allemagne.”’

But Lambert at that time was an even greater wonder. Monsieur Mareschal, the headmaster, after examining him, had thought of placing him among the senior boys. It was Louis’s ignorance of Latin that placed him so low as the fourth class, but he would certainly leap up a class every year; and, as a remarkable exception, he was to be one of the ‘‘Academy.’’ Proh pudor! we were to have the honor of counting among the ‘“‘little boys’’ one whose coat was adorned with the red ribbon displayed by the ‘‘ Academicians’’ of Vendome. These Academicians enjoyed distinguished privileges; they often dined at the director’s table, and held two literary meetings annually, at which we were all present to hear their lucubrations. An Academicianp. 196 was a great many in ‘embryo. And if every Vendome scholar would speak the truth, he would confess that, in later life, an Academician of the great French Academy seemed to him far less remarkable than the stupendous boy who wore the cross and the imposing red ribbon which were the insignia of our ‘‘Academy.”’