ess some mournful exclamation, showing what hopes Louis' precocious
genius had raised, and the terrible grief into which this irreparable
ruin had plunged him.

"That young fellow knew everything, my dear sir!" said he, laying on the
table a volume containing Spinoza's works. "How could so well organized
a brain go astray?"

"Indeed, monsieur," said I, "was it not perhaps the result of its being
so highly organized? If he really is a victim to the malady as yet
unstudied in all its aspects, which is known simply as madness, I am
inclined to attribute it to his passion. His studies and his mode of
life had strung his powers and faculties to a degree of energy beyond
which the least further strain was too much for nature; Love was enough
to crack them, or to raise them to a new form of expression which we are
maligning perhaps, by ticketing it without due knowledge. In fact, he
may perhaps have regarded the joys of marriage as an obstacle to the
perfection of his inner man and his flight towards spiritual spheres."

"My dear sir," said the old man, after listening to me with attention,
"your reasoning is, no doubt, very sound; but even if I could follow it,
would this melancholy logic comfort me for the loss of my nephew?"

Lambert's uncle was one of those men who live only by their affections.

I went to Villenoix on the following day. The kind old man accompanied
me to the gates of Blois. When we were out on the road to Villenoix, he
stopped me and said:

"As you may suppose, I do not go there. But do not forget what I have
said; and in Mademoiselle de Villenoix's presence affect not to perceive
that Louis is mad."

He remained standing on the spot where I left him, watching me till I
was out of sight.

I made my way to the chateau of Villenoix, not without deep agitation.
My thoughts were many at each step on this road, which Louis had so
often trodden with a heart full of hopes, a soul spurred on by the
myriad darts of love. The shrubs, the trees, the turns of the winding
road where little gullies broke the banks on each side, were to me full
of strange interest. I tried to enter into the impressions and thoughts
of my unhappy friend. Those evening meetings on the edge of the coombe,
where his lady-love had been wont to find him, had, no doubt, initiated
Mademoiselle de Villenoix into the secrets of that vast and lofty
spirit, as I had learned them all some years before.

But the thing that most occupied