demands a science to itself perhaps!"

And he would shrug his shoulders as much as to say, "But we are too
high and too low!"

Louis' passion for reading had on the whole been very well satisfied.
The cure of Mer had two or three thousand volumes. This treasure had
been derived from the plunder committed during the Revolution in the
neighboring chateaux and abbeys. As a priest who had taken the oath,
the worthy man had been able to choose the best books from among these
precious libraries, which were sold by the pound. In three years Louis
Lambert had assimilated the contents of all the books in his uncle's
library that were worth reading. The process of absorbing ideas by
means of reading had become in him a very strange phenomenon. His eye
took in six or seven lines at once, and his mind grasped the sense
with a swiftness as remarkable as that of his eye; sometimes even one
word in a sentence was enough to enable him to seize the gist of the
matter.

His memory was prodigious. He remembered with equal exactitude the
ideas he had derived from reading, and those which had occurred to him
in the course of meditation or conversation. Indeed, he had every form
of memory--for places, for names, for words, things, and faces. He not
only recalled any object at will, but he saw them in his mind,
situated, lighted, and colored as he had originally seen them. And
this power he could exert with equal effect with regard to the most
abstract efforts of the intellect. He could remember, as he said, not
merely the position of a sentence in the book where he had met with
it, but the frame of mind he had been in at remote dates. Thus his was
the singular privilege of being able to retrace in memory the whole