Louis Lambert | Page 2

the principle and the end with the mother wit of a
savage. Indeed, from the age of fourteen, by one of those startling
freaks in which nature sometimes indulges, and which proved how
anomalous was his temperament, he would utter quite simply ideas of
which the depth was not revealed to me till a long time after.
"Often," he has said to me when speaking of his studies, "often have I
made the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down the abyss of
the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of grass tossing on the
ripples of a stream. Starting from Greece, I would get to Rome, and
traverse the whole extent of modern ages. What a fine book might be
written of the life and adventures of a word! It has, of course, received
various stamps from the occasions on which it has served its purpose; it
has conveyed different ideas in different places; but is it not still
grander to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion?

Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects,
and its influence, is enough to cast one into an ocean of meditations?
Are not most words colored by the idea they represent? Then, to whose
genius are they due? If it takes great intelligence to create a word, how
old may human speech be? The combination of letters, their shapes,
and the look they give to the word, are the exact reflection, in
accordance with the character of each nation, of the unknown beings
whose traces survive in us.
"Who can philosophically explain the transition from sensation to
thought, from thought to word, from the word to its hieroglyphic
presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to
written language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of
images, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in a sense, the
hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing
human ideas as embodied in the forms of animals that gave rise to the
shapes of the first signs used in the East for writing down language?
Then has it not left its traces by tradition on our modern languages,
which have all seized some remnant of the primitive speech of nations,
a majestic and solemn tongue whose grandeur and solemnity decrease
as communities grow old; whose sonorous tones ring in the Hebrew
Bible, and still are noble in Greece, but grow weaker under the progress
of successive phases of civilization?
"Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried
in every human word? In the word True do we not discern a certain
imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest
a vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in all things?
The syllable seems to me singularly crisp and fresh.
"I chose the formula of an abstract idea on purpose, not wishing to
illustrate the case by a word which should make it too obvious to the
apprehension, as the word Flight for instance, which is a direct appeal
to the senses.
"But is it not so with every root word? They are all stamped with a
living power that comes from the soul, and which they restore to the
soul through the mysterious and wonderful action and reaction between
thought and speech. Might we not speak of it as a lover who finds on
his mistress' lips as much love as he gives? Thus, by their mere
physiognomy, words call to life in our brain the beings which they

serve to clothe. Like all beings, there is but one place where their
properties are at full liberty to act and develop. But the subject
demands a science to itself perhaps!"
And he would shrug his shoulders as much as to say, "But we are too
high and too low!"
Louis' passion for reading had on the whole been very well satisfied.
The cure of Mer had two or three thousand volumes. This treasure had
been derived from the plunder committed during the Revolution in the
neighboring chateaux and abbeys. As a priest who had taken the oath,
the worthy man had been able to choose the best books from among
these precious libraries, which were sold by the pound. In three years
Louis Lambert had assimilated the contents of all the books in his
uncle's library that were worth reading. The process of absorbing ideas
by means of reading had become in him a very strange phenomenon.
His eye took in six or seven lines at once, and his mind grasped the
sense with a swiftness as remarkable as that of his eye; sometimes even
one word in a sentence was enough to enable him to