Let us consider here some characteristic details that, under the name of Louis Lambert, also describe Balzac. "Accustomed to the open air, the independence of an education left to chance, the tender care of an old man who cherished him, and thinking while being warmed by the rays of the sun, it was very difficult for him to conform to the rules of the college, to march in line, to live within the four walls of a room in which twenty-four young boys were silent, seated on a wooden bench, each before his desk. His senses possessed a perfection which gave them an exquisite fragility, and they all suffered from this communal life; the exhalations that left the air corrupted, mixed with the odor of a class that was always dirty and encumbered by the remains of our lunches and our snacks, affected his sense of smell, that sense which, connected more directly than the others to the cerebral system, should cause by its derangements some unavoidable shocks to the organ of thought; apart from these atmospheric corruptions, he found in our study halls some spots where each would put his booty, pigeons killed for the feast days or plates stolen from the refectory. Finally our rooms contained an immense stone on which two buckets of water rested where on a rotating basis we went each morning to wash our face and hands, in the presence of the master. Washed only once each day before our awakening, our premises were always dirty. Then, despite the number of windows and the height of the door, the air was always fouled by the emanations of the wash house, the garbage dump, by the thousand activities of every schoolboy, without counting our eighty bodies when assembled. This kind of a collective humidity, when combined with the dirt that we would carry back from our travels, resulted in an unbearable stench. The deprivation of air that was pure and scented with the countryside in which he had until then lived, the change in his routines, and the discipline all saddened Lambert. His head always leaning on his left hand and his arm supported by his desk, he passed his study time by looking at the foliage of the trees or the clouds in the sky. He seemed to be studying his lessons; but seeing his pen immovably fixed and his page remaining blank, the professor would cry out to him: 'You are doing nothing, Lambert.'" To this vivid and truthful description of the miseries of life at school, let me add an extract in which Balzac characterizes himself as a duality under the double sobriquet Pythagoras and the Poet, one carried by the half of himself personified in Louis Lambert and the other by the half of himself that was his true identity, and which explains admirably why he was seen by his teachers as being an incapable child: