In
winter chaps and chilblains were Honore's unceasing lot. His woman's
complexion, and especially the skin of his ears and lips, cracked
under the least cold; his soft white hands reddened and swelled.
Constant colds harassed him; and, until he was inured to the Vendome
regimen, pain was his daily portion.
A lively recollection of what he went through in these school-days
persisted during his maturer years. Writing in 1844 to Monsieur
Fontemoing, one of his few boy-companions that he maintained relations
with, he said: "When David is ready to inaugurate his statue of Jean
Bart in Dieppe, I shall perhaps be there to enjoy the spectacle; and
then we will spend one or two days recalling to mind the cages, wooden
breeches and other Vendomoiseries."
His memory was probably less faithful in 1832, when striving to
reproduce the tenour of the lost _Treatise of the Will_. At thirteen
he could scarcely have had such definite notions of intuition and
other operations of the mind; and there must be a fairly long
antedating of reflection in attributing to Louis Lambert, even with
the latter's two years seniority, thoughts like the following:--
"Often amid calm and silence, when our inner faculties are lulled and
we indulge in sweet repose, and darkness hovers round us, and we fall
into a contemplation of other things, straight an idea darts forth,
flashes through the infinite space created by our brain, and then,
like a will-o'-the-wisp, vanishes never to return--an ephemeral
apparition like that of such children as yield boundless joy and grief
to bereaved parents; a species of still-born flower in the fields of
thought.
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