Louis Lambert (novel)

Louis Lambert is an 1832 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. Set mostly in a school at Vendôme, it examines the life and theories of a boy genius fascinated by the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Although critics panned the novel, Balzac remained steadfast in his belief that it provided an important look at philosophy, especially metaphysics.

About Louis Lambert (novel) in brief

Louis Lambert is an 1832 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. Set mostly in a school at Vendôme, it examines the life and theories of a boy genius fascinated by the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. The novel contains a minimal plot, focusing mostly on the metaphysical ideas of its boy-genius protagonist and his only friend. Although critics panned the novel, Balzac remained steadfast in his belief that it provided an important look at philosophy, especially metaphysics. In 1831 Balzac published a short story about two poets named Dante and Godefroid de Gand who attend the Sorbonne at the start of the fourteenth century. The story was published – alongside La Peau de chagrin – as part of an 1831 collection entitled Romans et contes philosophiques. In May 1832 Balzac suffered a head injury when his tilbury carriage crashed in a Parisian street. He wrote to a friend about his worry that “some of the cogs in the mechanism of my brain may have got out of adjustment”. His doctor ordered him to rest and refrain from writing and other mental activity. When he had recuperated, he spent the summer at the Château de Saché, just outside the city of Tours, with a family friend, Jean de Margonne. While in Saché he wrote a short novel called Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert a misfit interested in metaphysics and mysticism. He later returned to the same themes in his novel Séraphîta, about an androgynous angelic creature.

Like “Les Proscrits”, Louis Lambert was a vehicle for Balzac to explore the ideas that had fascinated him, particularly of Swedenborg and Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. He hoped the work would provide an effect of effect of superiority and provide a glorious rebuttal to critics who ridiculed his interest in metaph physics. Once he returned home, he declared it to be a wretched work and began rewriting it. In late 1832, he published it in late contveaux philosophiques, but by the end of the year he had returned to his original plan to publish it as La Comédie humaine. It is not a significant example of the realist style for which Balzac became famous, but the novel provides insight into the author’s own childhood. Balzac was sent to the Oratorian College de Vendô me at the age of eight, and returned from the school six years later, sickly and weak. He found fame soon afterwards with a series of novels including La Physiologie du mariage, Sarrasine, and La Pe Pau de Chagrin. In 1829 he finally released a novel under his own name, titled Les Chouans; it was a minor success, though it did not earn the author enough money to relieve his considerable debt. He was taught by tutors and private schools for two and a half years, then attended the Sor Bonne in Paris.

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