Oh Inca, oh ill‑fated and unhappy king!
This unfortunate inspiration earned him, for all of the remaining time that he stayed at the school, the derisory nickname of poet. Balzac, it must be confessed, never had a gift for poetry, at least for meter; his complex thoughts rebelled against rhythm.
From these intense meditations, from these truly prodigious intellectual efforts of a child of twelve or fourteen years, there resulted a bizarre malady, a nervous fever, a sort of coma entirely inexplicable for the professors, who were not in on the secret of the readings and the works of young Honoré, who appeared to be so lazy and stupid. No one at the school suspected this precocious excess of intelligence, no one knew that in the cell in which he caused himself to be put daily so as to be at liberty, this student who was thought to be lazy had absorbed an entire library of serious books that were beyond the typical understanding of his age.
Let me here tie together several curious lines related to the reading ability attributed to Louis Lambert, that is to say, Balzac:
"In three years, Louis had assimilated the substance of the books in his uncle's library that deserved to be read. His absorption of ideas by reading had become a curious phenomenon: his eye took in seven or eight lines at a time, and his mind appreciated their meaning at an equal speed. Often a single word in a phrase sufficed for him to appreciate its substance. His memory was prodigious. He remembered with the same fidelity the thoughts acquired by reading as those which reflection or conversation had suggested to him. Ultimately he retained all of those memories: those of places, of names, of words, of things, of figures; not only did he recall objects at will, but he remembered them again lit and colored as they were at the moment that he first perceived them. This power applied equally to the most imperceptible elements of understanding. He remembered not only the placement of thoughts in the book from which he had derived them, but even the disposition of his soul at those distant times."
Balzac retained this marvelous gift of his youth throughout his life, even in larger measure as the years passed, and it is through this that his immense work can be explained, truly the work of Hercules.
The anxious teachers wrote to Balzac's parents to come for him as soon as possible. His mother hurried to him and picked him up to take him back to Tours. The astonishment of the family was great when they saw the thin and sickly child that the school had returned to them in place of the cherub it had received, and it was distressing for Honoré's grandmother. Not only had he lost his beautiful colors and his youthful sturdiness, but, struck by a congestion of ideas, he appeared to be an imbecile. His manner was that of an ecstatic, of a somnambulist who sleeps with his eyes open: lost in a profound reverie, he did not hear that which was said to him, or his mind, returning from afar, arrived too late to respond. But the open air, rest, the nurturing environment of the family, the recreations they forced him to take and the vigorous juices of adolescence soon triumphed over this sickly state. The tumult caused in that young brain by the whirring of ideas diminished. Little by little, the muddled readings became organized; abstractions came to be blended into real images, observations made silently on life; while walking and playing, he studied the pretty landscapes of the Loire, the provincial types, the cathedral of Saint‑Gatien and the characteristic physiognomies of the priests and canons; many of the images which later served in the grand fresco of the Comédie were sketched during this period of fruitful inaction. However, the intelligence of Balzac was not perceived or understood any more in his family than at school. Even if something clever escaped his lips, his mother, despite being a superior woman, would say to him: "Without a doubt, Honoré, you don't understand what you are saying." And Balzac would laugh, without further explanation, that wonderful laugh that he had. Balzac's father, who shared qualities at that time with Montaigne, Rabelais, and Uncle Toby, by his philosophy, his originality, and his goodness (it's Madame de Surville who is speaking), had a little better opinion of his son, believing due to certain genetic theories that he held that a child created by himself could not be stupid: nevertheless, he had no suspicion of the great man that he would become in the future.
Balzac's family having returned to Paris, he was entered into the boarding school of Monsieur Lepitre, Rue Saint‑Louis, and Messieurs Sganzer and Beuzelin, Rue Thoringy in the Marais. There as at the school in Vendôme, his genius did not reveal itself, and he remained in the midst of the troop of ordinary students. No prefect exclaimed to him: "You will be Marcellus!" or "Thus you shall go to the stars!"
His classes finished, Balzac gave himself that second education which is the true one; he studied, perfected himself, attended the courses of the Sorbonne, and studied law while working with an attorney and a notary. This time, apparently lost, since Balzac became neither an attorney, nor a notary, nor a lawyer, nor a judge, gave him a personal acquaintance with the personnel of the Bazoche and led him to later write what I might call the litigations of La Comédie Humaine in the style of a man marvelously versed in that profession.
The examinations passed, the great question of which career to select presented itself. His family wanted to make a notary of Balzac; but the future great writer, who, even though no one believed in his genius, had a consciousness of it himself, refused in a most respectful manner, although they had organized a position on the most favorable terms. His father gave him two years to prove himself, and as the family had returned to the provinces, Madame Balzac installed Honoré in a garret, allowing him a stipend sufficient for only his most pressing needs, hoping that a little hardship would make him wiser.