"In three years, Louis had assimilated the substance of the books in his uncle's library that deserved to be read. His absorption of ideas by reading had become a curious phenomenon: his eye took in seven or eight lines at a time, and his mind appreciated their meaning at an equal speed. Often a single word in a phrase sufficed for him to appreciate its substance. His memory was prodigious. He remembered with the same fidelity the thoughts acquired by reading as those which reflection or conversation had suggested to him. Ultimately he retained all of those memories: those of places, of names, of words, of things, of figures; not only did he recall objects at will, but he remembered them again lit and colored as they were at the moment that he first perceived them. This power applied equally to the most imperceptible elements of understanding. He remembered not only the placement of thoughts in the book from which he had derived them, but even the disposition of his soul at those distant times." Balzac retained this marvelous gift of his youth throughout his life, even in larger measure as the years passed, and it is through this that his immense work can be explained, truly the work of Hercules. The anxious teachers wrote to Balzac's parents to come for him as soon as possible. His mother hurried to him and picked him up to take him back to Tours. The astonishment of the family was great when they saw the thin and sickly child that the school had returned to them in place of the cherub it had received, and it was distressing for Honoré's grandmother. Not only had he lost his beautiful colors and his youthful sturdiness, but, struck by a congestion of ideas, he appeared to be an imbecile. His manner was that of an ecstatic, of a somnambulist who sleeps with his eyes open: lost in a profound reverie, he did not hear that which was said to him, or his mind, returning from afar, arrived too late to respond. But the open air, rest, the nurturing environment of the family, the recreations they forced him to take and the vigorous juices of adolescence soon triumphed over this sickly state. The tumult caused in that young brain by the whirring of ideas diminished. Little by little, the muddled readings became organized; abstractions came to be blended into real images, observations made silently on life; while walking and playing, he studied the pretty landscapes of the Loire, the provincial types, the cathedral of Saint-Gatien and the characteristic physiognomies of the priests and canons; many of the images which later served in the grand fresco of the Comédie were sketched during this period of fruitful inaction. However, the intelligence of Balzac was not perceived or understood any more in his family than at school. Even if something clever escaped his lips, his mother, despite being a superior woman, would say to him: "Without a doubt, Honoré, you don't understand what you are saying." And Balzac would laugh, without