_Louis Lambert_ is a slice of autobiography, attempting also a
portrait of the novelist, psychologically as well as outwardly, while
he was at Vendome. Although the author speaks of himself as distinct
from his hero, they make up one and the same individual. Of himself he
says: "I had a passion for books. My father, being desirous I should
enter the Ecole Polytechnique, paid for me to take private lessons in
mathematics. But my coach, being the librarian of the college, let me
borrow books, without much troubling about what I chose, from the
library, where during playtime he gave me my tuition. Either he was
very little qualified to teach, or he must have been pre-occupied with
some undertaking of his own; for he was only too willing I should read
in the hours he ought to have devoted to me, himself working at
something else. Thus, by virtue of a tacit agreement between us, I did
not complain of learning nothing, and he kept secret my book-borrowing.
This precocious passion led me to neglect my studies and instead to
compose poems, which indeed were of no high promise, if judged by the
following verse: 'O Inca! O roi infortune,' commencing an epopee on
the Incas.
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