Louis Lambert by Honoré de Balzac (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

being we call an angel, always excepting one woman whose name, whose features, whose identity, and whose life I would fain hide from all the world, so as to be sole master of the secret of her existence, and to bury it in the depths of my heart.


The third phase I was not destined to see. It began when Lambert and I were parted, for he did not leave college till he was eighteen, in the summer of 1815. He had at that time lost his father and mother about six months before. Finding no member of his family with whom his soul could sympathize, expansive still, but, since our parting, thrown back on himself, he made his home with his uncle, who was also his guardian, and who, having been turned out of his benefice as a priest who had taken the oaths, had come to settle at Blois. There Louis lived for some time; but consumed ere long by the desire to finish his incomplete studies, he came to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and to drink of science at its highest fount. The old priest, being very fond of his nephew, left Louis free to spend his whole little inheritance in his three years' stay in Paris, though he lived very poorly. This fortune consisted of but a few thousand francs.

Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of 1820, driven from Paris by the sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there. He must often have been a victim to the secret storms, the terrible rage of mind by which artists are tossed to judge from the only fact his uncle recollected, and the only letter he preserved of all those which Louis Lambert wrote to him at that time, perhaps because it was the last and the longest.

To begin with the story. Louis one evening was at the Theatre-Francais, seated on a bench in the upper gallery, near to one of the pillars which, in those days, divided off the third row of boxes. On rising between the acts, he saw a young woman who had just come into the box next him. The sight of this lady, who was young, pretty, well dressed, in a low bodice no doubt, and escorted by a man for whom her face beamed with all the charms of love, produced such a terrible effect on Lambert's soul and senses, that he was obliged to leave the theatre. If he had not been controlled by some remaining glimmer of reason, which was not wholly extinguished by this first fever of burning passion, he might perhaps have yielded to the most irresistible desire that came over him to kill the young man on whom the lady's looks beamed. Was not this a reversion, in the heart of the Paris world, to the savage passion that regards women as its prey, an effect of animal instinct combining with the almost luminous flashes of a soul crushed under the weight of thought? In short, was it not the prick of the penknife so vividly imagined by the boy, felt by the man as the thunderbolt of his most vital craving--for love?

And now, here is the letter that depicts the state of his mind as it was struck by the spectacle of Parisian civilization. His feelings, perpetually wounded no doubt in that whirlpool of self-interest, must always have suffered there; he probably had no friend to comfort him, no enemy to give tone to this life. Compelled to live in himself alone, having no one to share his subtle raptures, he may have hoped to solve the problem of his destiny by a life of ecstasy, adopting an almost vegetative attitude, like an anchorite of the early Church, and abdicating the empire of the intellectual world.

This letter seems to hint at such a scheme, which is a temptation to all lofty souls at periods of social reform. But is not this purpose, in some cases, the result of a vocation? Do not some of them endeavor to concentrate their powers by long silence, so as to emerge fully capable of governing the world by word or by deed? Louis must, assuredly, have found much bitterness in his intercourse with men, or have striven hard with Society in terrible irony, without extracting anything from it, before uttering so strident a cry, and expressing, poor fellow, the desire which satiety of power and of all earthly things has led even monarchs to indulge!

And perhaps, too, he went back to solitude to carry out some great work that was floating inchoate in his brain. We would gladly believe it as we read this fragment of his thoughts, betraying the struggle of his soul at the time when youth was ending and the terrible power of production was coming into being, to which we might have owed the works of the man.

This letter connects itself with the adventure at the theatre. The incident and the letter throw light on each other, body and soul were tuned to the same pitch. This tempest of doubts and asseverations, of clouds and of lightnings that flash before the thunder, ending by a starved yearning for heavenly illumination, throws such a light on the third phase of his education as enables us to understand it perfectly. As we read these lines, written at chance moments, taken up when the vicissitudes of life in Paris allowed, may we not fancy that we see an oak at that stage of its growth when its inner expansion bursts the tender green bark, covering it with wrinkles and cracks, when its majestic stature is in preparation--if indeed the lightnings of heaven and the axe of man shall spare it?

This letter, then, will close, alike for the poet and the philosopher, this portentous childhood and unappreciated youth. It finishes off the outline of this nature in its germ. Philosophers will regret the foliage frost-nipped in the bud; but they will, perhaps, find the flowers expanding in regions far above the highest places of the earth.


"PARIS, September-October 1819.

"DEAR UNCLE,--I shall soon be leaving this part of the world,
where I could never bear to live. I find no one here who likes
what I like, who works at my work, or is amazed at what amazes me.
Thrown back on myself, I eat my heart out in misery. My long and
patient study of Society here has brought me to melancholy
conclusions, in which doubt predominates.

"Here, money is the mainspring of everything. Money is
indispensable, even for going without money. But though that dross
is necessary to any one who wishes to think in peace, I have not
courage enough to make it the sole motive power of my thoughts. To
make a fortune, I must take up a profession; in two words, I must,
by acquiring some privilege of position or of self-advertisement,
either legal or ingeniously contrived, purchase the right of
taking day by day out of somebody else's purse a certain sum
which, by the end of the year, would amount to a small capital;
and this, in twenty years, would hardly secure an income of four
or five thousand francs to a man who deals honestly. An advocate,
a notary, a merchant, any recognized professional, has earned a
living for his later days in the course of fifteen or sixteen
years after ending his apprenticeship.

"But I have never felt fit for work of this kind. I prefer thought
to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity. I
am absolutely devoid of the constant attention indispensable to
the making of a fortune. Any mercantile venture, any need for
using other people's money would bring me to grief, and I should
be ruined. Though I have nothing, at least at the moment, I owe
nothing. The man who gives his life to the achievement of great
things in the sphere of intellect, needs very little; still,
though twenty sous a day would be enough, I do not possess that
small income for my laborious idleness. When I wish to cogitate,
want drives me out of the sanctuary where my mind has its being.
What is to become of me?

"I am not frightened at poverty. If it were not that beggars are
imprisoned, branded, scorned, I would beg, to enable me to solve
at my leisure the problems that haunt me. Still, this sublime
resignation, by which I might emancipate my mind, through
abstracting it from the body, would not serve my end. I should
still need money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for
that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage possessed of
both heaven and heart. A man need only never stoop, to remain
lofty in poverty. He who struggles and endures, while marching on
to a glorious end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have
the strength to fight here? We can climb cliffs, but it is
unendurable to remain for ever tramping the mud. Everything here
checks the flight of the spirit that strives towards the future.

"I should not be afraid of myself in a desert cave; I am afraid of
myself here. In the desert I should be alone with myself,
undisturbed; here man has a thousand wants which drag him down.
You go out walking, absorbed in dreams; the voice of the beggar
asking an alms brings you back to this world of hunger and thirst.
You need money only to take a walk. Your organs of sense,
perpetually wearied by trifles, never get any rest. The poet's
sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and what ought to be his
glory becomes his torment; his imagination is his cruelest enemy.
The injured workman, the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute
who has fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged--even vice
and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the world is
merciless to the inventor, to the man who thinks. Here everything
must show an immediate and practical result. Fruitless attempts
are mocked at, though they may lead to the greatest discoveries;
the deep and untiring study that demands long concentrations of
every faculty is not valued here. The State might pay talent as it
pays the bayonet; but it is afraid of being taken in by mere
cleverness, as if genius could be counterfeited for any length of
time.

"Ah, my dear uncle, when monastic solitude was destroyed, uprooted
from its home at the foot of mountains, under green and silent
shade, asylums ought to have been provided for those suffering
souls who, by an idea, promote the progress of nations or prepare
some new and fruitful development of science.

"September 20th.

"The love of study brought me hither, as you know. I have met
really learned men, amazing for the most part; but the lack of
unity in scientific work almost nullifies their efforts. There is
no Head of instruction or of scientific research. At the Museum a
professor argues to prove that another in the Rue Saint-Jacques
talks nonsense. The lecturer at the College of Medicine abuses him
of the College de France. When I first arrived, I went to hear an
old Academician who taught five hundred youths that Corneille was
a haughty and powerful genius; Racine, elegiac and graceful;