The book that cost him the greatest efforts during the year of 1832 was his _Louis Lambert_, already mentioned in the second chapter. Writing about it to his family from Angouleme he explained that he was attempting in it to vie with Goethe and Byron, with _Faust_ and _Manfred_. It was to be a conclusive reply to his enemies, and would make his superiority manifest. Some day or other it would lead science into new paths. Meantime it would produce a deep impression and astonish the Swedenborgians. Whether the members of this sect were astonished, history does not record. Those who were most so were the novelist's friends, and Madame de Berny among the number. But their wonder was not a eulogium. First of all, the hero--his _alter ego_--is a very poor replica of Pascal; and the exalting of Lambert's intelligence, which was mere self-praise, jarred on them the more, as they truly loved him. The _Dilecta_, whom he had asked to pass her frank opinion on it, did not hesitate to tell him some hard truths: "Goethe and Byron," she said, "have admirably painted the desires of a superior mind; when reading them, one aggrandizes them by all the space they have perceived; one admires the scope of their view; one would fain give them one's soul to help theirs to cover the distance that separates them from the goal they aspire to reach. But, if an author comes and tells me he has attained this goal, I no longer see in him, however great he may be, more than a presumptuous man; his vanity shocks me, and I diminish him by all the height to which he has tried to raise himself. . . . I would therefore beg you, dearest, to cut out of your _Lambert_ everything that might suggest these singular ideas; for instance: 'The admirable combat of thought arrived at its greatest force, at its vastest expression' . . . 'The moral world, whose limits he had thrown back for himself,' cannot be tolerated. Write, dearest, in such a manner that the whole crowd may perceive you from everywhere, by the height at which you will have placed yourself; but do not cry out for people to admire you; for, on all sides, the largest magnifying-glasses would be directed towards you; and what becomes of the most delicious object seen by the microscope!" The lesson was a severe one. Though it did not cure Balzac of his author's vanity--nothing could cure him of that--it did, for a while at least, direct his endeavours towards fiction of a more objective kind.