Balzac wrote Louis Lambert during the summer of 1832 while he was staying with friends at the Château de Saché, and published three editions with three different titles.

While he was a student at Vendôme, Balzac wrote an essay called Traité de la Volonté ("Treatise on the Will"); it is described in the novel as being written by Louis Lambert.

Ideas analyzed in the essay and elsewhere in the novel include the split between inward and outward existence; the presence of angels and spiritual enlightenment; and the interplay between genius and madness.

As he developed the scheme for La Comédie humaine, he placed Louis Lambert in the Études philosophiques section, and later returned to the same themes in his novel Séraphîta, about an androgynous angelic creature.

In 1829 he finally released a novel under his own name, titled Les Chouans; it was a minor success, though it did not earn the author enough money to relieve his considerable debt.

[4] In 1831 Balzac published a short story called "Les Proscrits" ("The Exiles"), about two poets named Dante and Godefroid de Gand who attend the Sorbonne at the start of the fourteenth century.

[8] While in Saché, he wrote a short novel called Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert about a misfit boy genius interested in metaphysics.

[10] The novel was first published as part of the Nouveaux contes philosophiques in late 1832, but by the start of the following year he declared it to be "a wretched miscarriage" and began rewriting it.

Balzac, still unsatisfied, continued reworking the text – as he often did between editions – and included a series of letters written by the boy genius, as well as a detailed description of his metaphysical theories.

This final edition was released as Louis Lambert, included with "Les Proscrits" and a later work, Séraphîta, in a volume entitled Le Livre mystique ("The Mystical Book").

After completing an essay entitled Traité de la Volonté ("Treatise on the Will"), Lambert is horrified when a teacher confiscates it, calls it "rubbish", and – the narrator speculates – sells it to a local grocer.

The first part of the novel is replete with details about the school, describing how quarters were inspected and the complex social rules for exchanging dishes at dinnertime.

[20] Punishments are also described at length, including the assignment of tedious writing tasks and the painful application of the strap: Of all the physical torments to which we were exposed, certainly the most acute was that inflicted by this leathern instrument, about two fingers wide, applied to our poor little hands with all the strength and all the fury of the administrator.

Some boys cried out and shed bitter tears before or after the application of the strap; others accepted the infliction with stoic calm ... but few could control an expression of anguish in anticipation.

[27] The precise details of the school also reflect Balzac's time there: as described in the novel, students were allowed to keep pigeons and tend gardens, and holidays were spent in the dormitories.

Like his heroes Swedenborg and Saint-Martin, Balzac attempts in Louis Lambert to construct a viable theory to unify spirit and matter.

[35] Young Lambert attempts this goal in his Traité de la Volonté, which – having been confiscated by a teacher – is described by the narrator:The word Will he used to connote ... the mass of power by which man can reproduce, outside himself, the actions constituting his external life....

The split between inward and outward realities, he suggests, serves to explain the ability of those being tortured and maimed to escape physical suffering through the will of the spirit.

[44] The boy genius himself is seen as an example of this process: his physical body withers and sickens, while his spiritual enlightenment expands, reaching its apex with his comment to the narrator: "The angels are white.

[46] Their parallel angelic states merge into what critic Charles Affron calls "a kind of perfect marriage, a spiritual bond that traverses this world and the next".

[49] This transformation is in many ways a byproduct of his genius; because his brilliance is condemned by teachers and incompatible with the society of the other children, Lambert finds himself rejected by the world.

"[52] Balzac was fiercely proud of Louis Lambert and believed that it elegantly represented his diverse interests in philosophy, mysticism, religion, and occultism.

"Let the whole world see you for themselves, my dearest," she wrote, "but do not cry out to them to admire you, because then the most powerful magnifying glasses will be directed at you, and what becomes of the most exquisite object when it is put under a microscope?

[54] Conservative commentator Eugène Poitou, on the other hand, accused Balzac of lacking true faith and portraying the French family as a vile institution.

[55] Balzac was undeterred by the negative reactions; referring to Louis Lambert and the other works in Le Livre mystique, he wrote: "Those are books that I create for myself and for a few others.

[57] While the three editions of Louis Lambert were being revised and published, Balzac was developing a scheme to organize all of his novels – written and unwritten.

[59] Balzac also inserted Lambert and his lover Pauline into later works – as he often did with characters from earlier novels – most notably in the story Un drame au bord de la mer ("A Drama at the Sea's Edge").