or a translation while we were being
called into lessons, and of learning his lessons by reading them through
but once. Louis Lambert bewildered all our ideas. And Father Haugoult's
curiosity and impatience to see this new boy added fuel to our excited
fancy.

"If he has pigeons, he can have no pigeon-house; there is not room for
another. Well, it cannot be helped," said one boy, since famous as an
agriculturist.

"Who will sit next to him?" said another.

"Oh, I wish I might be his chum!" cried an enthusiast.

In school language, the word here rendered chum--_faisant_, or in some
schools, _copin_--expressed a fraternal sharing of the joys and evils of
your childish existence, a community of interests that was fruitful of
squabbling and making friends again, a treaty of alliance offensive and
defensive. It is strange, but never in my time did I know brothers who
were chums. If man lives by his feelings, he thinks perhaps that he will
make his life the poorer if he merges an affection of his own choosing
in a natural tie.

The impression made upon me by Father Haugoult's harangue that evening
is one of the most vivid reminiscences of my childhood; I can compare it
with nothing but my first reading of _Robinson Crusoe_. Indeed, I owe to
my recollection of these prodigious impressions an observation that
may perhaps be new as to the different sense attached to words by each
hearer. The word in itself has no final meaning; we affect a word more
than it affects us; its value is in relation to the images we have
assimilated and grouped round it; but a study of this fact would
require considerable elaboration, and lead us too far from our immediate
subject.

Not being able to sleep, I had a long discussion with my next neighbor
in the dormitory as to the remarkable being who on the morrow was to
be one of us. This neighbor, who became an officer, and is now a writer
with lofty philosophical views, Barchou de Penhoen, has not been false
to his pre-destination, nor to the hazard of fortune by which the only
two scholars of Vendome, of whose fame Vendome ever hears, were brought
together in the same classroom, on the same form, and under the same
roof. Our comrade Dufaure had not, when this book was published, made
his appearance in public life as a lawyer. The translator of Fichte, the
expositor and friend of Ballanche, was already interested, as I myself
was, in metaphysical questions; we often talked nonsense together