Louis Lambert | Page 6

our seclusion;
then, again, our military band, a relic of the cadets; our academy, our
chaplain, our Father professors, and all our games permitted or
prohibited, as the case might be; the cavalry charges on stilts, the long
slides made in winter, the clatter of our clogs; and, above all, the
trading transactions with "the shop" set up in the courtyard itself.
This shop was kept by a sort of cheap-jack, of whom big and little boys
could procure--according to his prospectus--boxes, stilts, tools, Jacobin
pigeons, and Nuns, Mass-books--an article in small demand
--penknives, paper, pens, pencils, ink of all colors, balls and marbles; in
short, the whole catalogue of the most treasured possessions of boys,
including everything from sauce for the pigeons we were obliged to kill
off, to the earthenware pots in which we set aside the rice from supper
to be eaten at next morning's breakfast. Which of us was so unhappy as
to have forgotten how his heart beat at the sight of this booth, open
periodically during play-hours on Sundays, to which we went, each in
his turn, to spend his little pocket-money; while the smallness of the
sum allowed by our parents for these minor pleasures required us to
make a choice among all the objects that appealed so strongly to our
desires? Did ever a young wife, to whom her husband, during the first
days of happiness, hands, twelve times a year, a purse of gold, the
budget of her personal fancies, dream of so many different purchases,
each of which would absorb the whole sum, as we imagined possible
on the eve of the first Sunday in each month? For six francs during one
night we owned every delight of that inexhaustible shop! and during
Mass every response we chanted was mixed up in our minds with our
secret calculations. Which of us all can recollect ever having had a sou

left to spend on the Sunday following? And which of us but obeyed the
instinctive law of social existence by pitying, helping, and despising
those pariahs who, by the avarice or poverty of their parents, found
themselves penniless?
Any one who forms a clear idea of this huge college, with its monastic
buildings in the heart of a little town, and the four plots in which we
were distributed as by a monastic rule, will easily conceive of the
excitement that we felt at the arrival of a new boy, a passenger
suddenly embarked on the ship. No young duchess, on her first
appearance at Court, was ever more spitefully criticised than the new
boy by the youths in his division. Usually during the evening play-hour
before prayers, those sycophants who were accustomed to ingratiate
themselves with the Fathers who took it in turns two and two for a
week to keep an eye on us, would be the first to hear on trustworthy
authority: "There will be a new boy to-morrow!" and then suddenly the
shout, "A New Boy!--A New Boy!" rang through the courts. We
hurried up to crowd round the superintendent and pester him with
questions:
"Where was he coming from? What was his name? Which class would
he be in?" and so forth.
Louis Lambert's advent was the subject of a romance worthy of the
Arabian Nights. I was in the fourth class at the time--among the little
boys. Our housemasters were two men whom we called Fathers from
habit and tradition, though they were not priests. In my time there were
indeed but three genuine Oratorians to whom this title legitimately
belonged; in 1814 they all left the college, which had gradually become
secularized, to find occupation about the altar in various country
parishes, like the cure of Mer.
Father Haugoult, the master for the week, was not a bad man, but of
very moderate attainments, and he lacked the tact which is
indispensable for discerning the different characters of children, and
graduating their punishment to their powers of resistance. Father
Haugoult, then, began very obligingly to communicate to his pupils the
wonderful events which were to end on the morrow in the advent of the
most singular of "new boys." Games were at an end. All the children
came round in silence to hear the story of Louis Lambert, discovered,
like an aerolite, by Madame de Stael, in a corner of the wood. Monsieur

Haugoult had to tell us all about Madame de Stael; that evening she
seemed to me ten feet high; I saw at a later time the picture of Corinne,
in which Gerard represents her as so tall and handsome; and, alas! the
woman painted by my imagination so far transcended this, that the real
Madame de Stael fell at once in my estimation, even after I read her
book of really masculine power,