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Louis Lambert by Honoré de Balzac
page 73 of 145 (50%)
only after long study, were achieved by Lambert during his bodily
childhood: a happy childhood, colored by the studious joys of a born
poet.

The point which most thinkers reach at last was to him the
starting-point, whence his brain was to set out one day in search of
new worlds of knowledge. Though as yet he knew it not, he had made for
himself the most exacting life possible, and the most insatiably greedy.
Merely to live, was he not compelled to be perpetually casting
nutriment into the gulf he had opened in himself? Like some beings who
dwell in the grosser world, might not he die of inanition for want of
feeding abnormal and disappointed cravings? Was not this a sort of
debauchery of the intellect which might lead to spontaneous
combustion, like that of bodies saturated with alcohol?

I had seen nothing of this first phase of his brain-development; it is
only now, at a later day, that I can thus give an account of its
prodigious fruit and results. Lambert was now thirteen.

I was so fortunate as to witness the first stage of the second period.
Lambert was cast into all the miseries of school-life--and that,
perhaps, was his salvation--it absorbed the superabundance of his
thoughts. After passing from concrete ideas to their purest
expression, from words to their ideal import, and from that import to
principles, after reducing everything to the abstract, to enable him
to live he yearned for yet other intellectual creations. Quelled by
the woes of school and the critical development of his physical
constitution, he became thoughtful, dreamed of feeling, and caught a
glimpse of new sciences--positively masses of ideas. Checked in his
career, and not yet strong enough to contemplate the higher spheres,
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