rying to detect the secrets of its own nature, like a
physician who watches the course of his own disease.

At this stage of weakness and strength, of childish grace and superhuman
powers, Louis Lambert is the creature who, more than any other, gave
me a poetical and truthful image of the 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 l