point of fact, no book seemed to him too austere or too repellent or
too obscure for his youthful understanding. He absorbed pell-mell works
upon religion, treatises of chemistry and physics, and historical and
philosophical works. He even developed a special taste for
dictionaries, dreaming over the exact sense of words, the adventures
that befall them in the course of time and their final destinies.

"The absorption of ideas through reading had become in his case a
curious phenomenon," so Honore de Balzac has recorded in Louis Lambert,
in which he has painted in the person of his hero his own formative
years in the college school of Vendome. "His eye would take in seven or
eight lines at once, and his mind would grasp the meaning with a
velocity equal to that of his glance; sometimes even a single word in a
phrase was enough to give him the essence of it. His memory was
prodigious. He retained thoughts acquired through reading with the same
fidelity as those suggested to him in the course of reflection or
conversation. In short, he possessed every kind of memory: that of
places, of names, of things, and of faces. Not only could he recall
objects at will, but he could see them again within himself under the
same conditions of position and light and colour as they had been at
the moment when he first perceived them. This same power applied
equally to the most intangible processes of the understanding. He could
remember, according to his own expression, not merely the exact spot
from which he had gleaned a thought in any given book, but also the
conditions of his own mind at far-off periods. By an undreamed-of
privilege, his memory could thus retrace the progress and entire life
history of his mind from the earliest acquired ideas down to the latest
ones to unfold, from the most confused down to the most lucid. His
brain, which while still young was habituated to the difficult
mechanism of the concentration of human forces, drew from this rich