about
God, ourselves, and nature. He at that time affected pyrrhonism. Jealous
of his place as leader, he doubted Lambert's precocious gifts; while
I, having lately read _Les Enfants celebres_, overwhelmed him with
evidence, quoting young Montcalm, Pico della Mirandola, Pascal--in
short, a score of early developed brains, anomalies that are famous in
the history of the human mind, and Lambert's predecessors.

I was at the time passionately addicted to reading. My father, who was
ambitious to see me in the Ecole Polytechnique, paid for me to have a
special course of private lessons in mathematics. My mathematical master
was the librarian of the college, and allowed me to help myself to books
without much caring what I chose to take from the library, a quiet spot
where I went to him during play-hours to have my lesson. Either he was
no great mathematician, or he was absorbed in some grand scheme, for he
very willingly left me to read when I ought to have been learning, while
he worked at I knew not what. So, by a tacit understanding between us,
I made no complaints of being taught nothing, and he said nothing of the
books I borrowed.

Carried away by this ill-timed mania, I neglected my studies to compose
poems, which certainly can have shown no great promise, to judge by
a line of too many feet which became famous among my companions--the
beginning of an epic on the Incas:

"O Inca! O roi infortune et malheureux!"

In derision of such attempts, I was nicknamed the Poet, but mockery did
not cure me. I was always rhyming, in spite of good advice from Monsieur
Mareschal, the headmaster, who tried to cure me of an unfortunately
inveterate passion by telling me the fable of a linnet that fell out
of the nest because it tried to fly before its wings were grown. I
persisted in my reading; I became the least emulous, the idlest, the
most dreamy of all the division of "little boys," and consequently the
most frequently punished.

This autobiographical digression may give some idea of the reflections I
was led to make in anticipation of Lambert's arrival. I was then twelve
years old. I felt sympathy from the first for the boy whose temperament
had some points of likeness to my own. I was at last to have a companion
in daydreams and meditations. Though I knew not yet what glory meant, I
thought it glory to be the familiar friend of a child whose immortality
was foreseen by Madame de Stael. To me Louis Lambert was as a giant.