Louis Lambert | Page 4

walking, she met on the skirts of the park the
tanner's son, almost in rags, and absorbed in reading. The book was a
translation of Heaven and Hell. At that time Monsieur Saint-Martin,
Monsieur de Gence, and a few other French or half German writers
were almost the only persons in the French Empire to whom the name
of Swedenborg was known. Madame de Stael, greatly surprised, took
the book from him with the roughness she affected in her questions,
looks, and manners, and with a keen glance at Lambert,--
"Do you understand all this?" she asked.
"Do you pray to God?" said the child.
"Why? yes!"
"And do you understand Him?"
The Baroness was silent for a moment; then she sat down by Lambert,
and began to talk to him. Unfortunately, my memory, though retentive,
is far from being so trustworthy as my friend's, and I have forgotten the
whole of the dialogue excepting those first words.
Such a meeting was of a kind to strike Madame de Stael very greatly;
on her return home she said but little about it, notwithstanding an
effusiveness which in her became mere loquacity; but it evidently
occupied her thoughts.
The only person now living who preserves any recollection of the
incident, and whom I catechised to be informed of what few words
Madame de Stael had let drop, could with difficulty recall these words
spoken by the Baroness as describing Lambert, "He is a real seer."
Louis failed to justify in the eyes of the world the high hopes he had

inspired in his protectress. The transient favor she showed him was
regarded as a feminine caprice, one of the fancies characteristic of artist
souls. Madame de Stael determined to save Louis Lambert alike from
serving the Emperor or the Church, and to preserve him for the glorious
destiny which, she thought, awaited him; for she made him out to be a
second Moses snatched from the waters. Before her departure she
instructed a friend of hers, Monsieur de Corbigny, to send her Moses in
due course to the High School at Vendome; then she probably forgot
him.

Having entered this college at the age of fourteen, early in 1811,
Lambert would leave it at the end of 1814, when he had finished the
course of Philosophy. I doubt whether during the whole time he ever
heard a word of his benefactress--if indeed it was the act of a
benefactress to pay for a lad's schooling for three years without a
thought of his future prospects, after diverting him from a career in
which he might have found happiness. The circumstances of the time,
and Louis Lambert's character, may to a great extent absolve Madame
de Stael for her thoughtlessness and her generosity. The gentleman who
was to have kept up communications between her and the boy left Blois
just at the time when Louis passed out of the college. The political
events that ensued were then a sufficient excuse for this gentleman's
neglect of the Baroness' protege. The authoress of Corinne heard no
more of her little Moses.
A hundred louis, which she placed in the hands of Monsieur de
Corbigny, who died, I believe, in 1812, was not a sufficiently large sum
to leave lasting memories in Madame de Stael, whose excitable nature
found ample pasture during the vicissitudes of 1814 and 1815, which
absorbed all her interest.
At this time Louis Lambert was at once too proud and too poor to go in
search of a patroness who was traveling all over Europe. However, he
went on foot from Blois to Paris in the hope of seeing her, and arrived,
unluckily, on the very day of her death. Two letters from Lambert to
the Baroness remained unanswered. The memory of Madame de Stael's
good intentions with regard to Louis remains, therefore, only in some
few young minds, struck, as mine was, by the strangeness of the story.
No one who had not gone through the training at our college could

understand the effect usually made on our minds by the announcement
that a "new boy" had arrived, or the impression that such an adventure
as Louis Lambert's was calculated to produce.
And here a little information must be given as to the primitive
administration of this institution, originally half-military and
half-monastic, to explain the new life which there awaited Lambert.
Before the Revolution, the Oratorians, devoted, like the Society of
Jesus, to the education of youth--succeeding the Jesuits, in fact, in
certain of their establishments--the colleges of Vendome, of Tournon,
of la Fleche, Pont-Levoy, Sorreze, and Juilly. That at Vendome, like
the others, I believe, turned out a certain number of cadets for the army.
The abolition of educational bodies, decreed by the convention, had but
little effect on the