The Strange Surprising Adventures of Reading Balzac's Louis Lambert

This article reads Balzac's Louis Lambert in the light of the history of rewritings of the Robinson Crusoe legend. Balzac participates in that history as one of the first figures of transition between early nineteenth-century popular rewritings of the Crusoe story for children and the many serious Crusoe-based novels for adults composed in the twentieth century. In Louis Lambert he makes subtle use of the Crusoe story, naming it only twice. Nevertheless, Balzac borrows and adapts structural patterns from Defoe's novel, eschewing literal travel adventure in favour of a philosophical focus. At the time when popular reworkings of Robinson Crusoe for children were at their height, Balzac paves the way for later novelists who will de-emphasize the story's moralistic aspect and inscribe it into a different set of aesthetic and philosophical concerns. Balzac and those who follow him foreground a philosophical escapade, solitary by nature, thus redrawing the map of self and world.