Genius in France by Jefferson Ann

Author:Jefferson, Ann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

A DOSE OF PHOSPHOROUS

Balzac endows Lambert with most of the features that characterize genius in the thinking of the time.11 Lambert has the imagination (“an almost divine imagination”), the originality (“[t]he larger the genius, the starker are the oddities that constitute the different degrees of originality”), and the sensitivity (“exquisite delicacy”) that the eighteenth century had bequeathed to the nineteenth.12 He is incapable of complying with the rules and conventions of the world around him, whether those of the school curriculum, the strict regime governing life in the Collège Vendôme, or the demands of a society where everything is based on money and every enterprise required to produce immediate results.

As Balzac demonstrates in “Des artistes,” and as the example of the poets has already shown, the man of genius appears increasingly in the guise of a social misfit. Lambert is the butt of mockery on the part of his fellow collégiens, as well as a target for the scorn of teachers who are incapable of discerning the true forms of genius behind an exterior that does not conform to the image of the precocious “wizard” who can dash off a Latin prose and memorize his lessons at a glance. Lambert’s genius is repeatedly misrecognized. The teacher who confiscates his Treatise sees in it only “garbage for which [Lambert] neglects [his] assignments.” It does not occur to him that “at the age of fifteen Louis could have the profundity of a man of genius” and that “in this work Lambert [had] set down the ideas of a full-grown man.”13 Without the retrospective consecration of adult achievement, precocity becomes just another of the many reasons why genius may be overlooked or disparaged—unless there is a witness capable of seeing it for what it is.

Like Stello, and like the poètes malheureux on whose example Vigny draws, Lambert is “ill with his genius,” and like Corinne, he suffers from the heightened sensitivity it confers. The final image of Lambert in his darkened room has something of Delacroix’s Tasso about it, and the consensus of the outside world is that Lambert has gone mad. If he is not incarcerated in La Salpêtrière, this is only because Esquirol, whom Lambert’s uncle has him consult, diagnoses his condition as incurable and sends him home with the recommendation that he be kept in isolation and protected from disturbance. Balzac himself was interested in medical views of genius, and like many of his contemporaries he saw it as a hair’s breadth away from insanity. Or as his fictional Dr. Bianchon says in La Peau de chagrin, that hair’s breadth consists in “a dose of phosphorus more or less [which] makes the man of genius or the scoundrel, the intelligent man or the idiot, the virtuous man or the criminal.”14

After reading Moreau de Tours’s study of the effects of hashish, Balzac wrote to its author with his own thoughts about the risks of madness for creative writers. But he was equally aware that it was all too easy for people

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