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

Lambert’s homesickness lasted for many months. I know no words to describe the dejection to which he was a prey. Louis has taken the glory of many a masterpiece for me. We had both played the part of the ‘‘Leper of Aosta,’’ and had both experienced the feelings described in Monsieur de Maistre’s story, before we read them as expressed by his eloquent pen, A book may, indeed, revive the memories of our childhood, but it can never compete with them successfully. Lambert’s woes had taught me many a chant of sorrow far more appealing than the finest passages in ‘‘Werther.’? And, indeed, there is no possible comparison between the pangs of a passion condemned, whether rightly or wrongly, by every law, and the grief of a poor child pining for the glorious sunshine, the dews of the valley, and liberty. Werther is the slave of desire; Louis Lambert was an enslaved soul. Given equal talent, the more pathetic sorrow, founded on desires which, being purer, are the more genuine, must transcend the wail even of genius.

After sitting for a long time with his eyes fixed on a lime tree in the playground, Louis would say just a word; but that word would reveal an infinite speculation.

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p. 213

‘Happily for me,’’ he exclaimed one day, ‘'there are hours of comfort when I feel as though the walls of the room had fallen and I were away—away in the fields! What a pleasure it is to let one’s self go on the stream of one’s thoughts as a bird is borne up on its wings!”’ |

‘“Why is green a color so largely diffused throughout creation ?’’ he would ask me. ‘‘Why are there so few straight lines in nature? Why is it that man, in his structures, rarely introduces curves? Why is it that he alone, of all creatures, has a sense of straightness ?’’

These queries revealed long excursions in space. He had, I am sure, seen vast landscapes, fragrant with the scent of woods. He was always silent and resigned, a living elegy, always suffering but unable to complain cf suffering. An eagle that needed the world to feed him, shut in between four narrow, dirty walls; and thus his life became an ideal life in the strictest meaning of the words. Filled as he was with contempt of the almost useless studies to which we were harnessed, Louis went on his skyward way absolutely unconscious of the things about us.

I, obeying the imitative instinct that is so strong in childhood, tried to regulate my life in conformity with his. And Louis the more easily infected me with the sort of torpor in which deep contemplation leaves the body, because I was younger and more impressionable than he. Like two lovers, we got into the habit of thinking together in a common revery. His intuitions had already acquired that acuteness which must surely characterize the intellectual perceptiveness of great poets and often bring them to the verge of madness.

‘Do you ever feel,’’ said he to me one day, ‘‘as though imagined suffering affected you in spite of yourself? If, for eee!

p. 214

instance, I think with concentration of the effect that the blade of my penknife would have in piercing my flesh, I feel an acute pain as if I had really cut myself; only the blood is wanting. But the pain comes suddenly, and startles me like a sharp noise breaking profound silence. _ Can an idea cause physical pain!—What do you say to that, eh?”