Louis Lambert by Honoré de Balzac

First published: 1832 (English translation, 1889)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: 1811-1824

Locale: Vendome, France

Principal Characters:

• Louis Lambert (Pythagoras), a prodigy, mystic, and thinly disguised version of the young Balzac
• The Narrator (the Poet), an older version of Balzac recounting his youth
• Pauline de Villenoix, Lambert’s fiancee and caretaker

The Novel

An autobiographical fable of self-identity, Louis Lambert is one of a few principal works in his multinovel epic The Human Comedy (1829-1848) that Honore de Balzac explicitly called philosophical studies. Like most works in this genre, Louis Lambert lacks either action or plot development in the usual sense and reflects, rather, the intellectual growth of its protagonist from his childhood as a prodigy through his days at the College Vendome to his insanity and death. In tracing his own spiritual growth and passion for mysticism, Balzac reorders and rearranges his own experience into a fiction that both reflects his actual development as a thinker and organizes its presentation so that it resembles but does not equal the facts of his life. Balzac distances himself, however, by making Louis a philosopher, not a writer of fiction, and also by telling his story from the viewpoint of another character, the narrator, rather than in the first person.

The novel opens with a description of Louis’ intellectual childhood, his biblical reading to probe the mysteries of Scripture and his omnivorous reading of any other book that he could beg or borrow. Providentially encountering Madame de Stael, he is saved from a life of service in the army or in the Church and is to be educated at her expense. The bulk of the novel describes that education in the school of the Oratorians at Vendome, an education that Louis (nicknamed “Pythagoras”) and the narrator (nicknamed “the Poet”) achieve despite the ignorance and malice of their instructors and classmates.

Balzac’s descriptions of a highly regimented life at boarding school emphasize the uniformity of thought and performance that was its goal, and they also highlight the alienation of those who seek an education beyond the confines of a banal and structured curriculum. Ironically, Louis and the narrator are punished at every turn for not keeping up with the assigned studies that are, compared to the philosophical studies that they clandestinely pursue, dull and elementary. These secret studies, writings, and discussions occur at the risk of corporal punishment from the instructors and ridicule from the other schoolboys. When one of the fruits of Louis’ studies, “Treatise on the Will,” is discovered, it is indeed ridiculed, and both Pythagoras and the Poet continue to suffer the indignities and wretchedness of school for a short time longer until the narrator leaves the college.

The final phase of Louis’ life begins in Paris with a brief story, in which he discovers the vanity and inconsequence of Parisian life before he returns to Blois. Once in Blois, Louis courts Pauline de Villenoix and, on the eve of his wedding, is so overcome by the prospect of marrying the angelic Pauline that he becomes utterly insane. This madness is foreshadowed from the novel’s beginning and seems to be the inevitable outcome of a life devoted to exploring will, thought, and mysticism. It is the unfolding of the time-honored superstition that madness is the natural result of a life spent in study and meditation.

The narrator reenters Louis’ life by chance, having met Louis’ uncle and learned of his friend’s unfortunate state. His encounter with the mystically mad Louis and his caretaker-fiancee, his recording of aphorisms, and his reverence for Louis lead the narrator to wonder whether his friend is truly mad or is in a constant state of ecstasy.

The Characters

Louis occupies center stage for most of the narrative, with the other characters taking up a necessarily small place in the novel. The narrator, for example, is intent upon filling in only enough background about Louis’ family, uncle, and fiancee to add continuity to his tale, which showcases the mental life of his friend. Each of the characters is sharply drawn and carefully described with the characteristic realism that Balzac developed in his fiction. None, however, including the narrator, distracts the reader from focusing on Louis, and all exist in the narrative only in relation to him.

Balzac has noted that this novel was among his most difficult to write, because it contains so much of himself and embodies the research he had done on mysticism, both ancient and modern. Louis, indeed, replicates that research, converses about it with the narrator, writes of it in letters to his uncle, and infuses it into the letters he writes to his “angel,” Pauline, who later records twenty-two fragments of his lucidly mad thoughts. These fragments, complemented by fifteen more that the narrator recalls, sketch out Louis’ notions of the divine, of flesh becoming word, of the animate existence of thought and will, and of the relation of motion to number and of all to unity.

Louis Lambert, then, exists primarily as the spokesman for Balzac’s reflections on spiritual matters and their intersection with the physical world. Yet Balzac undercuts his character by making him so thoroughly obsessed with the world of ideas that he is incapable of functioning in any practical way. The man of genius is also the victim of that genius; the thinker is ultimately unable to voice his thought; the spiritual man, by neglecting the physical world, is not equipped to survive in it. Like many protagonists of Romantic fiction, Louis is a seeker after something that does not exist, or, if it does exist, does so imperfectly. This fruitless quest is the burden of Balzac’s treatment of character and the viewpoint that Louis personifies: Genius is self-destructive.

Balzac’s irony extends to Pauline, who not only refuses to accept Louis’ madness but also believes that he is sane, and who herself is nearly mad. She believes that Louis is in direct communication with a spirit world and that he is the medium through which eternal truths are spoken. For all of her blindness, Pauline is one of Balzac’s great creations, a model for his other characters who exemplify a particular virtue. Her steadfast devotion to Louis and her self-sacrifice to care for him make her a remarkable antithesis to him. He has sacrificed himself for ideas and lives catatonically; she has devoted herself to him and can survive despite the burden she has undertaken.

Each of the minor characters—Louis’ parents, his uncle, some schoolmates and masters—is drawn with such fidelity to detail and habit of speech, with such realistic rendering of situation, that, like the characters of most great writers, they have their own existence. While they enter and exit as needed to illustrate Louis’ conditions and reflections, each could, like the narrator, reenter at any time to give his or her account of this man of genius.

Critical Context

Louis Lambert was the product of a new and growing tradition of French Romanticism and added to that tradition; it was also an important work in Balzac’s own estimate of his career, although it is not ranked among his generally acknowledged masterpieces. The more well-known precedents for the novel include Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile: Ou, De l’education (1762; Emilius and Sophia: Or, A New System of Education, 1762-1763), Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816; English translation, 1816), Etienne de Senancour’s Obermann (1804; English translation, 1910-1914), and Chateaubriand’s Rene (1802; English translation, 1813). Similar concerns with human nature’s physical and spiritual dimensions are evident in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Werther, 1779; better known as The Sorrows of Young Werther) and Faust: Eine Tragodie (1808; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823), and Lord Byron’s Manfred (1817). Balzac’s contribution to the tradition is the acute observation and detailed description of the actual state of persons, places, and segments of society (the school, village life, Parisian life), and the penetrating examination of the life of a mind overloaded with facts, suppositions, theories, and intuitive mysticism.

Although the novel has not fared well in the late twentieth century, it was well received in Balzac’s time and remained one of his favorites. He had begun writing in a philosophical vein—the entire body of his work may be viewed as explorations in philosophy—early in his career, but his chief philosophical works include, along with Louis Lambert, Le Peau de Chagrin (1831; The Wild Ass’s Skin; also as The Fatal Skin), and Melmoth reconcilie (1835; Melmoth Converted, 1900). Of the nearly ninety novels in The Human Comedy, which range from scenes of private and provincial life to scenes of Parisian life, political life, military life, and country life, Balzac particularly favored Louis Lambert because it is his most autobiographical work.

The master of analysis, having at last analyzed this critical period in his own life when he himself underwent a crisis of mysticism, built an even firmer foundation for his speculations based on observation of human behavior. While engaged over a three-year period in writing and rewriting this novel, Balzac was also at work on several other volumes, including his best-known masterpieces, Eugenie Grandet (1833; English translation, 1859) and Le Pere Goriot (1835; Daddy Goriot, 1860; also as Pere Goriot).

Bibliography

Besser, Gretchen. Balzac’s Concept of Genius, 1969.

Curtius, Ernst R. Balzac, 1933.

Evans, Henri. Louis Lambert et la philosophie de Balzac, 1951.

Le Yaouanc, Moise. Nosgraphie de l’Humanite balzacienne, 1959.

McCormick, Diana Festa. Honore de Balzac, 1979.