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

It was very unusual to be one of that illustrious body before attaining to the second class, for the Academicians were expected to hold public meetings every Thursday during the holidays, and to read tales in verse or prose, epistles, essays, tragedies, dramas—compositions far above the intelligence of the lower classes. I long treasured the memory of a story called the ‘‘Green Ass,’’ which was, I think, the masterpiece of this unknown Society. In the fourth, and an Academician! This boy of fourteen, a poet already, the protégé of Madame de Staél, a coming genius, said Father Haugoult, was to be one of us! a wizard, a youth capable of writing a composition or a translation while we were being called in to lessons, and of learning his lessons by reading them through but once. Louis Lambert bewildered all our ideas. And Father Haugoult’s curiosity and impatience to see this new boy added fuel to our excited fancy.

‘If he has pigeons, he can have no pigeon-house; there is not room for another. Well, it cannot be helped,’’ said one boy, since famous as an agriculturist.

‘Who will sit next to him?’’ said another.

‘Oh, I wish I might be his chum!’’ cried an enthusiast.

In school language, the word here rendered chum— faisant, or, in some schools, copin—expressed a fraternal sharing of the joys and evils of your childish existence, a community of interests that was fruitful of squabbling and making friends again, a treaty of alliance offensive and deLOUIS p. 497fensive. It is strange, but never in my time did I know brothers who were chums. If man lives by his feelings, he thinks perhaps that he will make his life the poorer if he merges an affection of his own choosing in a natural tie.

The impression made upon me by Father Haugoult’s harangue that evening is one of the most vivid reminiscences of my childhood; I can compare it with nothing but

” Indeed, I owe to my first reading of ‘‘Robinson Crusoe.’ my recollection of these prodigious impressions an observation that may perhaps be new as to the different sense attached to words by each hearer. The word in itself has no final meaning; we affect a word more than it affects us; its value is in relation to the images we have assimilated and grouped round it; but a study of this fact would require considerable elaboration, and lead us too far from our immediate subject.

Not being able to sleep, I had a long discussion with my next neighbor in the dormitory as to the remarkable being who on the morrow was to be one of us. This neighbor, who became an officer, and is now a writer with lofty philosophical views, Barchou de Penhoén, has not been false to his predestination, nor to the hazard of fortune by which the only two scholars of Vendome, of whose fame Vendome ever hears, were brought together in the same class-room, on the same form, and under the same roof. Our comrade Defaure had not, when this book was published, made his appearance in public life as a lawyer. The translator of Fichte, the expositor and friend of Ballanche, was already interested, as I myself was, in metaphysical questions; we often talked nonsense together about God, ourselves, and nature. He at that time affected pyrrhonism. Jealous of his place as leader, he doubted Lambert’s precocious gifts;

p. 198

while I, having lately read ‘‘Les Enfants célébres,’’ overwhelmed him with evidence, quoting young Montcalm, Pico della Mirandola, Pascal—in short, a score of early developed brains, anomalies that are famous in the history of the human mind, and Lambert’s predecessors.