The major punishment inflicted at Vendome was imprisonment in the dormitory. Referring to himself and his double, Balzac says: "We were freer in prison than anywhere. There we could talk for days together in the silence of the room, where each pupil had a cubicle six feet square, whose partitions were provided with bars across the top, and whose grated iron door was locked every evening and unlocked every morning under the surveillance of a Father, who assisted at our going to bed and getting up. The creak of the doors, turned with singular celerity by the dormitory porters, was one of the peculiarities of the school. In these alcoves we were sometimes shut up for months on end. The scholars thus caged fell under the stern eye of the Prefect, who came regularly, and even irregularly, to see whether we were talking instead of working at our tasks. But nutshells on the stairs or the fineness of our hearing nearly always warned us of his arrival, so that we were able to indulge safely in our favourite studies." One of the confinements was inflicted on Honore for his faulty Latin and impertinence. "Caius Gracchus was a noble heart," he translated with a free paraphrase of _vir nobilis_. "What would Madame de Stael say, if she happened to learn you had thus misconstrued the sense?" asked the master. (Madame de Stael was supposed to be Louis Lambert's patroness.) "She would say you are a stupid," muttered Honore. "Mister poet, you will go to prison for a week," retorted the master, who had overheard the comment. Among the long walks enjoyed by the pupils on Thursdays, when there were no lessons, was one to the famous castle of Rochambeau. In 1812, Balzac paid his first and impatiently anticipated visit to this spot. "When we arrived on the hill," he says, "whence the castle was visible, perched on its flank, and the winding valley with the glittering river threading its way through a meadow artistically laid out by Nature, Louis Lambert said to me: 'Why, I saw this last night in a dream.' He recognized the clump of trees under which we were, the arrangement of the foliage, the colour of the water, the turrets of the castle, in fine, all the details of the place. . . . I relate this event," he continues, "first because each man can find in his existence some phenomenon of sleeping or waking analogous to it; and next, because it is true and gives an idea of Lambert's prodigious intelligence. In fact, he deduced from the occurrence an entire system, possessing himself, like Cuvier, in another order of things, of a fragment of life to reconstruct a whole creation." And Lambert is made to develop a theory of the astral body and astral locomotion. The younger self announces also: "I shall be celebrated--an alchemist of thought."