Louis Lambert

Louis Lambert

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Title: Louis Lambert
Author: Honore de Balzac
Release Date: February 2, 2005 [EBook #1943]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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LAMBERT ***

Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers

LOUIS LAMBERT
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring

DEDICATION
"Et nunc et semper dilectoe dicatum."

LOUIS LAMBERT

Louis Lambert was born at Montoire, a little town in the Vendomois,
where his father owned a tannery of no great magnitude, and intended
that his son should succeed him; but his precocious bent for study
modified the paternal decision. For, indeed, the tanner and his wife
adored Louis, their only child, and never contradicted him in anything.
At the age of five Louis had begun by reading the Old and New
Testaments; and these two Books, including so many books, had sealed
his fate. Could that childish imagination understand the mystical depths
of the Scriptures? Could it so early follow the flight of the Holy Spirit
across the worlds? Or was it merely attracted by the romantic touches
which abound in those Oriental poems! Our narrative will answer these
questions to some readers.
One thing resulted from this first reading of the Bible: Louis went all
over Montoire begging for books, and he obtained them by those
winning ways peculiar to children, which no one can resist. While
devoting himself to these studies under no sort of guidance, he reached
the age of ten.
At that period substitutes for the army were scarce; rich families
secured them long beforehand to have them ready when the lots were
drawn. The poor tanner's modest fortune did not allow of their
purchasing a substitute for their son, and they saw no means allowed by
law for evading the conscription but that of making him a priest; so, in
1807, they sent him to his maternal uncle, the parish priest of Mer,
another small town on the Loire, not far from Blois. This arrangement
at once satisfied Louis' passion for knowledge, and his parents' wish
not to expose him to the dreadful chances of war; and, indeed, his taste
for study and precocious intelligence gave grounds for hoping that he
might rise to high fortunes in the Church.
After remaining for about three years with his uncle, an old and not
uncultured Oratorian, Louis left him early in 1811 to enter the college
at Vendome, where he was maintained at the cost of Madame de Stael.
Lambert owed the favor and patronage of this celebrated lady to chance,
or shall we not say to Providence, who can smooth the path of forlorn
genius? To us, indeed, who do not see below the surface of human
things, such vicissitudes, of which we find many examples in the lives

of great men, appear to be merely the result of physical phenomena; to
most biographers the head of a man of genius rises above the herd as
some noble plant in the fields attracts the eye of a botanist in its
splendor. This comparison may well be applied to Louis Lambert's
adventure; he was accustomed to spend the time allowed him by his
uncle for holidays at his father's house; but instead of indulging, after
the manner of schoolboys, in the sweets of the delightful far niente that
tempts us at every age, he set out every morning with part of a loaf and
his books, and went to read and meditate in the woods, to escape his
mother's remonstrances, for she believed such persistent study to be
injurious. How admirable is a mother's instinct! From that time reading
was in Louis a sort of appetite which nothing could satisfy; he
devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious
works, history, philosophy, and physics. He has told me that he found
indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books,
and I readily believed him. What scholar has not many a time found
pleasure in seeking the probable meaning of some unknown word? The
analysis of a word, its physiognomy and history, would be to Lambert
matter for long dreaming. But these were not the instinctive dreams by
which a boy accustoms himself to the phenomena of life, steels himself
to every moral or physical perception--an involuntary education which
subsequently brings forth fruit both in the understanding and character
of a man; no, Louis mastered the facts, and he accounted for them after
seeking out both