“She removed Louis to Villenoix, where they have been living for two years.”

So, instead of continuing my journey, I stopped at Blois to go to see Louis.  Good Monsieur Lefebvre would not hear of my lodging anywhere but at his house, where he showed me his nephew’s room with the books and all else that had belonged to him.  At every turn the old man could not suppress 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.