| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: demands a science to itself perhaps!"
And he would shrug his shoulders as much as to say, "But we are too
high and too low!"
Louis' passion for reading had on the whole been very well satisfied.
The cure of Mer had two or three thousand volumes. This treasure had
been derived from the plunder committed during the Revolution in the
neighboring chateaux and abbeys. As a priest who had taken the oath,
the worthy man had been able to choose the best books from among these
precious libraries, which were sold by the pound. In three years Louis
Lambert had assimilated the contents of all the books in his uncle's
library that were worth reading. The process of absorbing ideas by
Louis Lambert |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: lurking about some corner of the apartment.
"I will not pretend to describe what hot and cold fever-fits
tormented me for the rest of the night, through broken sleep,
weary vigils, and that dubious state which forms the neutral
ground between them. A hundred terrible objects appeared to
haunt me; but there was the great difference betwixt the vision
which I have described, and those which followed, that I knew the
last to be deceptions of my own fancy and over-excited nerves.
"Day at last appeared, and I rose from my bed ill in health and
humiliated in mind. I was ashamed of myself as a man and a
soldier, and still more so at feeling my own extreme desire to
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