Louis Claude

In May 1832, Balzac suffered a head injury when his tilbury carriage crashed in a Parisian street. Although he was not hurt badly, he wrote to a friend about his worry that "some of the cogs in the mechanism of my brain may have got out of adjustment".[7] His doctor ordered him to rest and refrain from writing and other mental activity. When he had recuperated, he spent the summer at the Château de Saché, just outside the city of Tours, with a family friend, Jean de Margonne.[8]
While in Saché, he wrote a short novel called Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert about a misfit boy genius interested in metaphysics. Like "Les Proscrits", Louis Lambert was a vehicle for Balzac to explore the ideas that had fascinated him, particularly those of Swedenborg and Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. He hoped the work would "produce an effect of incontestable superiority".[9] and provide "a glorious rebuttal" to critics who ridiculed his interest in metaphysics.[10]
The novel was first published as part of the Nouveaux contes philosophiques in late 1832, but by the start of the following year he declared it to be "a wretched miscarriage" and began rewriting it.[11] During the process, Balzac was aided by a grammarian working as a proofreader, who found "a thousand errors" in the text. Once he had returned home, the author "cried with despair and with that rage that takes hold of you when you recognize your faults after working so hard".[12]
A vastly expanded and revised novel, Histoire intellectuelle de L.L., was published as a single volume in 1833. Balzac, still unsatisfied, continued reworking the text – as he often did between editions – and included a series of letters written by the boy genius, as well as a detailed description of his metaphysical theories. This final edition was released as Louis Lambert, included with "Les Proscrits" and a later work, Séraphîta, in a volume entitled Le Livre mystique ("The Mystical Book").[13]


christian tours to israel
deck builders pa