angelically mild, this gaze grew dull and colourless, so to speak, in
his contemplative moments. His eye then resembled a pane of glass no
longer illuminated by the sun. The same was true of his strength,
which was purely nervous, and also of his voice. Both were equally
mobile and variable. The latter was alternately sweet and harmonious,
and then at times painful, incorrect, and rugged. As for his ordinary
strength, he was incapable of supporting the fatigue of any games
whatever. He seemed obviously feeble and almost infirm; but once,
during his first year at school, one of our bullies having jeered at
this extreme delicacy that rendered him unfit for the rough games
practised in the playground, Lambert with his two hands gripped the
end of one of our tables containing twelve desks in two rows; then,
stiffening himself against the master's chair and holding the table
with his feet placed on the bottom cross-bar, he said: 'Let any ten of
you try to move it.' I was there and witnessed this singular display
of strength. It was impossible to drag the table from him. He appeared
at certain moments to have the gift of summoning unusual powers, or of
concentrating his whole force on a given point."

That _Louis Lambert_ is an attempted revelation of Balzac's adolescent
mind we have both Madame Surville's and Champfleury's additional
testimony to prove. Discounting the exaggerations, due either to
literary morbidity of the kind that produced Chateaubriand's _Rene_
and Sainte-Beuve's _Joseph Delorme_, or to the natural vanity of which
the novelist had so large a share, there yet remains a considerable
substratum of truth in this record of twin, boyish existence, which
affords a valuable secondary help towards understanding its author's
character.

The major punishment inflicted at Vendome was imprisonment in the