Louis Lambert | Page 3

seize the gist of
the matter.
His memory was prodigious. He remembered with equal exactitude the
ideas he had derived from reading, and those which had occurred to
him in the course of meditation or conversation. Indeed, he had every
form of memory--for places, for names, for words, things, and faces.
He not only recalled any object at will, but he saw them in his mind,
situated, lighted, and colored as he had originally seen them. And this
power he could exert with equal effect with regard to the most abstract
efforts of the intellect. He could remember, as he said, not merely the
position of a sentence in the book where he had met with it, but the
frame of mind he had been in at remote dates. Thus his was the singular
privilege of being able to retrace in memory the whole life and progress
of his mind, from the ideas he had first acquired to the last thought
evolved in it, from the most obscure to the clearest. His brain,
accustomed in early youth to the mysterious mechanism by which
human faculties are concentrated, drew from this rich treasury endless
images full of life and freshness, on which he fed his spirit during those
lucid spells of contemplation.
"Whenever I wish it," said he to me in his own language, to which a
fund of remembrance gave precocious originality, "I can draw a veil

over my eyes. Then I suddenly see within me a camera obscura, where
natural objects are reproduced in purer forms than those under which
they first appeared to my external sense."
At the age of twelve his imagination, stimulated by the perpetual
exercise of his faculties, had developed to a point which permitted him
to have such precise concepts of things which he knew only from
reading about them, that the image stamped on his mind could not have
been clearer if he had actually seen them, whether this was by a process
of analogy or that he was gifted with a sort of second sight by which he
could command all nature.
"When I read the story of the battle of Austerlitz," said he to me one
day, "I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the
fighting men rang in my ears, and made my inmost self quiver; I could
smell the powder; I heard the clatter of horses and the voices of men; I
looked down on the plain where armed nations were in collision, just as
if I had been on the heights of Santon. The scene was as terrifying as a
passage from the Apocalypse." On the occasions when he brought all
his powers into play, and in some degree lost consciousness of his
physical existence, and lived on only by the remarkable energy of his
mental powers, whose sphere was enormously expanded, he left space
behind him, to use his own words.
But I will not here anticipate the intellectual phases of his life. Already,
in spite of myself, I have reversed the order in which I ought to tell the
history of this man, who transferred all his activities to thinking, as
others throw all their life into action.
A strong bias drew his mind into mystical studies.
"Abyssus abyssum," he would say. "Our spirit is abysmal and loves the
abyss. In childhood, manhood, and old age we are always eager for
mysteries in whatever form they present themselves."
This predilection was disastrous; if indeed his life can be measured by
ordinary standards, or if we may gauge another's happiness by our own
or by social notions. This taste for the "things of heaven," another
phrase he was fond of using, this mens divinior, was due perhaps to the
influence produced on his mind by the first books he read at his uncle's.
Saint Theresa and Madame Guyon were a sequel to the Bible; they had
the first-fruits of his manly intelligence, and accustomed him to those
swift reactions of the soul of which ecstasy is at once the result and the

means. This line of study, this peculiar taste, elevated his heart, purified,
ennobled it, gave him an appetite for the divine nature, and suggested
to him the almost womanly refinement of feeling which is instinctive in
great men; perhaps their sublime superiority is no more than the desire
to devote themselves which characterizes woman, only transferred to
the greatest things.
As a result of these early impressions, Louis passed immaculate
through his school life; this beautiful virginity of the senses naturally
resulted in the richer fervor of his blood, and in increased faculties of
mind.
The Baroness de Stael, forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris,
spent several months of her banishment on an estate near Vendome.
One day, when out