Louis Lambert

“ Louis Lambert is a slice of autobiography, attempting also a portrait of the novelist, psychologically as well as outwardly, while he was at Vendome. Although the author speaks of himself as distinct from his hero, they make up one and the same individual. Of himself he says: "I had a passion for books. My father, being desirous I should enter the Ecole Polytechnique, paid for me to take private lessons in mathematics. ”

“ He recognized the clump of trees under which we were standing, the grouping of the woods, the color of the water, the turrets of the chateau, the details, the distance, in fact every part of the prospect which we looked on for the first time. We were mere children; I, at any rate, who was but thirteen; Louis, at fifteen, might have the precocity of genius, but at that time we were incapable of falsehood in the most trivial matters of our life as friends. Indeed, if Lambert's powerful mind had any presentiment of the importance of such facts, he was far from appreciating their whole bearing ”

“ He knew how much unfinished work there was in the first version of his books and he had spells of artistic despair, but they were brief, for he relied on his strength of will to bring his writings to the perfection of which he dreamed. "This Biographic Notice of Louis Lambert," he wrote to Laure, "is a work in which I have tried to rival Goethe and Byron, to out-do Faust and Manfred; and the tilt is not over yet, for the proof sheets are not yet corrected. ”

“ How admirable is a mother's instinct! From that time reading was in Louis a sort of appetite which nothing could satisfy; he devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history, philosophy, and physics. He has told me that he found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books, and I readily believed him. What scholar has not many a time found pleasure in seeking the probable meaning of some unknown word? The analysis of a word, its physiognomy and history, would be to Lambert matter for long dreaming. ”

“ Filled as he was with contempt of the almost useless studies to which we were harnessed, Louis went on his skyward way absolutely unconscious of the things about us.
I, obeying the imitative instinct that is so strong in childhood, tired to regulate my life in conformity with his. And Louis the more easily infected me with the sort of torpor in which deep contemplation leaves the body, because I was younger and more impressionable than he. Like two lovers, we got into the habit of thinking together in a common reverie. ”

“ This boy of fourteen, a poet already, the protege of Madame de Stael, a coming genius, said Father Haugoult, was to be one of us! a wizard, a youth capable of writing a composition or a translation while we were being called into lessons, and of learning his lessons by reading them through but once. Louis Lambert bewildered all our ideas. And Father Haugoult's curiosity and impatience to see this new boy added fuel to our excited fancy.
"If he has pigeons, he can have no pigeon-house; there is not room for another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From Monsieur Lefebvre's account, Lambert had betrayed some symptoms of madness before his marriage; but they were such as are common to men who love passionately, and seemed to me less startling when I knew how vehement his love had been and when I saw Mademoiselle de Villenoix. In the country, where ideas are scarce, a man overflowing with original thought and devoted to a system, as Louis was, might well be regarded as eccentric, to say the least. ”

“ After remaining for about three years with his uncle, an old and not uncultured Oratorian, Louis left him early in 1811 to enter the college at Vendôme, where he was maintained at the cost of Madame de Staël.
Lambert owed the favor and patronage of this celebrated lady to chance, or shall we not say to Providence, who can smooth the path of forlorn genius? To us, indeed, who do not see below the surface of human things, such vicissitudes, of which we find many examples in the lives of great men, appear to be merely the result of physical phenomena ”

“ Mademoiselle, you will never know—at least, I hope you may never know—the anguish of dreading lest you should lose the only happiness that has dawned on you on earth, the only thing that has thrown a gleam of light in the darkness of misery. I understood yesterday that my life was no more in myself, but in you. There is but one woman in the world for me, as there is but one thought in my soul. ”

“ Sweet words but half spoken, like a child's speech, neither promise nor confession, but allowing love to cherish its fairest hopes without fear or torment! How pure a memory for life! What a free blossoming of all the flowers that spring from the soul, which a mere trifle can blight, but which, at that moment, everything warmed and expanded. ”

“ Can life be long when it is thus consumed hour by hour? Shall we not die in a first embrace? What if our souls have already met in that sweet evening kiss which almost overpowered us—a feeling kiss, but the crown of my hopes, the ineffectual expression of all the prayers I breathe while we are apart, hidden in my soul like remorse? ”

“ Many a time have we remained sitting on our form, both buried in one book, having quite forgotten each other's existence, and yet not apart; each conscious of the other's presence, and bathing in an ocean of thought, like two fish swimming in the same waters. ”

“ No woman has ever shed on me the balm of her affection; and I know not whether, if love should wave his pinions over my head in these moments of exhaustion, new strength might not be given to my spirit. This terrible melancholy is perhaps a result of my isolation, one of the torments of a lonely soul which pays for its hidden treasures with groans and unknown suffering. Those who enjoy little shall suffer little; immense happiness entails unutterable anguish! ”

“ As I recall, this morning, the fresh and living delights revealed to me in that hour, I am conscious of a joy which makes me conceive of true love as an ocean of everlasting and ever-new experiences, into which we may plunge with increasing delight. ”

“ Yes, my love for you, my comforting and stupendous love, was a last effort of yearning for the happiness my soul strove to reach—a soul crushed by fruitless labor, consumed by fears that make me doubt myself, eaten into by despair which has often urged me to die. No one in the world can conceive of the terrors my fateful imagination inflicts on me. It often bears me up to the sky, and suddenly flings me to earth again from prodigious heights. ”

“ I see myself and you side by side, walking with equal pace, living in the same thought; each dwelling in each other's heart, understanding each other, responding to each other as an echo catches and repeats a sound across wide distances. ”

“ An endless joy! You cannot imagine all the gladness it is to me to see you going and coming; only a man can know that deep delight. Your least movement gives me greater pleasure than a mother even can feel as she sees her child asleep or at play. I love you with every kind of love in one. The grace of your least gesture is always new to me. I fancy I could spend whole nights breathing your breath; I would I could steal into every detail of your life, be the very substance of your thoughts—be your very self. ”

“ Every day, every word, every kiss, every glance, must increase it by its tribute of past happiness. Hearts that are large enough never to forget must live every moment in their past joys as much as in those promised by the future. This was my dream of old, and now it is no longer a dream! Have I not met on this earth with an angel who had made me know all its happiness, as a reward, perhaps, for having endured all its torments? Angel of heaven, I salute thee with a kiss. ”

“ It made a noise like father’s gun,
Only a nation louder.
7
And there they’d fife away like fun,
And play on corn-stalk fiddles,
And some red ribbons red as blood,
All bound about their middles. ”

“ In 1791 Lambert was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and he also joined the Society of Antiquaries, and was elected a member of numerous foreign societies. On his father's death in 1802 he removed from Salisbury to Boyton, where he entertained many eminent foreign naturalists, and formed an herbarium of some thirty thousand specimens. ”

“ Some of them expanded up to the size for ranch owners, superintendents, bosses; stopped [Pg 54] there, set in their mold. Lambert never had heard of one stretching so wide that he was drawn out of himself entirely, his eyes fixed on the far light of a nobler life. He liked to imagine a man so inspired out of the lonely watches, the stormy rides, the battle against blizzard and night.
This train of thought had carried him away that gentle spring day as he rode to Misery. ”

“ When Lambert was dredged he gave up worthless stuff, scraps of stale news, old jokes worn to pieces, venerable conundrums that had lost their point, and familiar anecdotes retailed without salt. Undredged, he yielded nothing, except among those of his own mental calibre, and with them he talked about people he had met, houses at which he had visited, wines that he had drunk, game that he had shot, the relationships of his acquaintance, about jolly fellows, nice girls, good cigars, and scrumptious dinners. ”

“ There was nothing about Lambert's appearance to scare anybody, and least of all a bow-legged man beside a fire in the open air of the Bad Lands, where things are not just as they are in any other part of this world at all. His manner was rather boyish and diffident, and wholly apologetic, and the All-in-One glistened in his hand like a razor, or a revolver, or anything terrible and destructive that a startled camp cook might make it out to be. ”

“ Lambert's cheeks became deathly pale. The first inkling of the deadly peril of his own situation had suddenly come to him with Sir Marmaduke's callous words. It seemed to him as if the very universe must stand still in the face of such treachery. The man whom he loved with all the fervor of a grateful nature, the man who knew him and whom he had wholly trusted, was proving his most bitter, most damning enemy.
After Sir Marmaduke's speech, his own employer's repudiation, he felt that all his chances of clearing his character before these sneering gentlemen had suddenly vanished. ”

“ He fancied at intervals he was going back to Paris to his little home there, and that he would find Elsie at the piano, and Madame Weber knitting. Then he would pull himself together, and think hard of a certain plan he was trying to mature.
Reaching the little inn he called for his horse, and asked for a glass of ale.
"You'll have to ride sharp," said the landlord, as Lambert paid his bill. "I thought you wouldn't be back in time; that's what you artist gentlemen don't think of. We've lots of 'em sketching about Denham woods in summer-time." ”

“ Amid the hardships and scant diversions of this life, Lambert spent his first winter in the Bad Lands, drinking in the noisy revels at Misery, riding the long, bitter miles back to the ranch, despising himself for being so mean and low. It was a life in which a man's soul would either shrink to nothing or expand until it became too large to find contentment within the horizon of such an existence. ”

“ Of course it is,” said Lambert. “I have given you the story just as Mother told it to me, years ago. Why, there is not a child in Holland who does not know it. And, Ben, you may not think so, but that little boy represents the spirit of the whole country. Not a leak can show itself anywhere either in its politics, honor, or public safety, that a million fingers are not ready to stop it, at any cost.” ”

“ Since his death he has become a synonym for hugeness. Mr. George Meredith, in 'One of our Conquerors,' describes London as the 'Daniel Lambert of cities,' Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his 'Study of Sociology,' speaks of a 'Daniel Lambert of learning,' and Mr. Donisthorpe, in his 'Individualism,' of a 'Daniel Lambert view of the salus populi.'
A suit of Lambert's clothes is preserved at Stamford, and in the King's Lynn Museum is a waistcoat of his with a girth of 102 inches. There are several portraits of Lambert ”

“ Lambert was one of those characters which are, too unfortunately, rare in this world, but of which alone shall doubtless be composed the population of that Holy City, where nothing that defileth shall in any wise enter in: with a powerful mind, and many a noble intellectual quality, he had sought and attained to the innocency of life and humility of heart of a little child, who once was set as an example to the gifted of this earth. ”

“ Touchet had departed with the envoy’s cloak, and M. de Lambert sat down beside me at the table, shading the taper so that he threw the light full on the face of the Swede.
“What was the motive of your attack on a Frenchman, knave?” he asked, addressing the prisoner.
The man looked at him strangely for a moment, and then seemed to come to a sudden determination.
“I made a mistake, your Worship,” he replied hoarsely. “I pray you, pardon me and let me go. I took you for an enemy of mine.”
“A likely story,” said M. de Lambert; “why should I not rather believe you a common thief? ”