At the age of eight years and some months, on the 22d of June, 1807,
Honore entered a college school at Vendome. It was an institution
celebrated throughout the districts of central France and directed by
the Oratorian Fathers. Prior to the Revolution, cadets used to be
trained there for the army, and it had preserved the military severity
of its discipline. After their admission, the pupils were never allowed
outside vacations and never left its walls until their course of study
was terminated. Honore lived there until April 22, 1813,--and in Louis
Lambert he has described his sufferings, his hopes and the tumultuous
and confused awakening of his genius, throughout those long years of
convent-like imprisonment. He had passed from the cold discipline of
the family circle, which had nevertheless been tempered by an
atmosphere of kindliness, to the hard and impersonal discipline of the
college school. The warm-hearted and melancholy child must needs
undergo this second severe test, and he was destined to come out from
it in a state of self-intoxication, a bewilderment of dreams and ideas.

The college buildings, surrounded by walls, contained everything that
would seem calculated to render existence laborious and gloomy for the
students. The latter were divided into four sections, the Minions, the
Smalls, the Mediums, and the Greats, to which they were assigned
according to the grade of their studies. For diversion, they had a
narrow garden which they could cultivate and a cabin; they had
permission to raise pigeons and to eat them, in addition to the
ordinary fare. The classrooms were dirty, being either muddy or covered
with dust, according to the season, and evil-smelling as a result of
crowding together within narrow spaces too many young folks who were
none too clean and to whom the laws of hygiene were unknown. The
masters were either overbearing or neglectful, incapable of
distinguishing the individual from the crowd and concerned only with