The impression made upon me by Father Haugoult's harangue that evening
is one of the most vivid reminiscences of my childhood; I can compare
it with nothing but my first reading of _Robinson Crusoe_. Indeed, I
owe to my recollection of these prodigious impressions an observation
that may perhaps be new as to the different sense attached to words by
each hearer. The word in itself has no final meaning; we affect a word
more than it affects us; its value is in relation to the images we
have assimilated and grouped round it; but a study of this fact would
require considerable elaboration, and lead us too far from our
immediate subject.

Not being able to sleep, I had a long discussion with my next neighbor
in the dormitory as to the remarkable being who on the morrow was to
be one of us. This neighbor, who became an officer, and is now a
writer with lofty philosophical views, Barchou de Penhoen, has not
been false to his pre-destination, nor to the hazard of fortune by
which the only two scholars of Vendome, of whose fame Vendome ever
hears, were brought together in the same classroom, on the same form,
and under the same roof. Our comrade Dufaure had not, when this book
was published, made his appearance in public life as a lawyer. The
translator of Fichte, the expositor and friend of Ballanche, was
already interested, as I myself was, in metaphysical questions; we
often talked nonsense together 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.