The Best Works of Balzac. Оноре де Бальзак

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      Suddenly Louis ceased rubbing his legs together, and said slowly:

      "The angels are white."

      I cannot express the effect produced upon me by this utterance, by the sound of the voice I had loved, whose accents, so painfully expected, had seemed to be lost for ever. My eyes filled with tears in spite of every effort. An involuntary instinct warned me, making me doubt whether Louis had really lost his reason. I was indeed well assured that he neither saw nor heard me; but the sweetness of his tone, which seemed to reveal heavenly happiness, gave his speech an amazing effect. These words, the incomplete revelation of an unknown world, rang in our souls like some glorious distant bells in the depth of a dark night. I was no longer surprised that Mademoiselle de Villenoix considered Lambert to be perfectly sane. The life of the soul had perhaps subdued that of the body. His faithful companion had, no doubt—as I had at that moment—intuitions of that melodious and beautiful existence to which we give the name of Heaven in its highest meaning.

      This woman, this angel, always was with him, seated at her embroidery frame; and each time she drew the needle out she gazed at Lambert with sad and tender feeling. Unable to endure this terrible sight—for I could not, like Mademoiselle de Villenoix, read all his secrets—I went out, and she came with me to walk for a few minutes and talk of herself and of Lambert.

      "Louis must, no doubt, appear to be mad," said she. "But he is not, if the term mad ought only to be used in speaking of those whose brain is for some unknown cause diseased, and who can show no reason in their actions. Everything in my husband is perfectly balanced. Though he did not actively recognize you, it is not that he did not see you. He has succeeded in detaching himself from his body, and discerns us under some other aspect—what that is, I know not. When he speaks, he utters wondrous things. Only it often happens that he concludes in speech an idea that had its beginning in his mind; or he may begin a sentence and finish it in thought. To other men he seems insane; to me, living as I do in his mind, his ideas are quite lucid. I follow the road his spirit travels; and though I do not know every turning, I can reach the goal with him.

      "Which of us has not often known what it is to think of some futile thing and be led on to some serious reflection through the ideas or memories it brings in its train? Not unfrequently, after speaking about some trifle, the simple starting-point of a rapid train of reflections, a thinker may forget or be silent as to the abstract connection of ideas leading to his conclusion, and speak again only to utter the last link in the chain of his meditations.

      "Inferior minds, to whom this swift mental vision is a thing unknown, who are ignorant of the spirit's inner workings, laugh at the dreamer; and if he is subject to this kind of obliviousness, regard him as a madman. Louis is always in this state; he soars perpetually through the spaces of thought, traversing them with the swiftness of a swallow; I can follow him in his flight. This is the whole history of his madness. Some day, perhaps, Louis will come back to the life in which we vegetate; but if he breathes the air of heaven before the time when we may be permitted to do so, why should we desire to have him down among us? I am content to hear his heart beat, and all my happiness is to be with him. Is he not wholly mine? In three years, twice at intervals he was himself for a few days; once in Switzerland, where we went, and once in an island off the wilds of Brittany, where we took some sea-baths. I have twice been very happy! I can live on memory."

      "But do you write down the things he says?" I asked.

      "Why should I?" said she.

      I was silent; human knowledge was indeed as nothing in this woman's eyes.

      "At those times, when he talked a little," she added, "I think I have recorded some of his phrases, but I left it off; I did not understand him then."

      I asked her for them by a look; she understood me. This is what I have been able to preserve from oblivion.

       I

      Everything here on earth is produced by an ethereal substance

       which is the common element of various phenomena, known

       inaccurately as electricity, heat, light, the galvanic fluid, the

       magnetic fluid, and so forth. The universal distribution of this

       substance, under various forms, constitutes what is commonly known

       as Matter.

       II

      The brain is the alembic to which the Animal conveys what each of

       its organizations, in proportion to the strength of that vessel,

       can absorb of that Substance, which returns it transformed into

       Will.

       The Will is a fluid inherent in every creature endowed with

       motion. Hence the innumerable forms assumed by the Animal, the

       results of its combinations with that Substance. The Animal's

       instincts are the product of the coercion of the environment in

       which it develops. Hence its variety.

       III

      In Man the Will becomes a power peculiar to him, and exceeding in

       intensity that of any other species.

       IV

      By constant assimilation, the Will depends on the Substance it

       meets with again and again in all its transmutations, pervading

       them by Thought, which is a product peculiar to the human Will, in

       combination with the modifications of that Substance.

       V

      The innumerable forms assumed by Thought are the result of the

       greater or less perfection of the human mechanism.

       VI

      The Will acts through organs commonly called the five senses,

       which, in fact, are but one—the faculty of Sight. Feeling and

       tasting, hearing and smelling, are Sight modified to the

       transformations of the Substance which Man can absorb in two

       conditions: untransformed and transformed.

       VII

      Everything of which the form comes within the cognizance of the

       one sense of Sight may be reduced to certain simple bodies of

       which the elements exist in the air, the light, or in the elements

       of air and light. Sound is a condition of the air; colors are all

       conditions of light; every smell is a combination of air and

       light; hence the four aspects of Matter with regard to Man—sound,

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