Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part I/5
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About this time, Ursule was to take her first communion. The Abbé Chaperon spent a whole year preparing this young girl, whose heart and intelligence, both so developed, but so discreetly kept in check by each other, required a particular spiritual nurture. Such was this initiation into the knowledge of things divine, that, from the time the soul takes its religious shape, Ursule became the pious, mystic young girl whose character always rose above events, and whose heart dominated all adversity. It was then that a struggle secretly began between incredulous old age and believing childhood, for a long time unknown to her who provoked it, the issue of which was occupying the whole town, and was to have so great an influence over Ursule’s future by exciting the doctor’s collateral heirs against her.
During the first six months of the year 1824, Ursule spent nearly all her mornings at the presbytery. The old doctor guessed the curé’s intentions. The priest wanted to make Ursule an invincible argument. The unbeliever, loved by his godchild as if she had been his own daughter, would believe in this ingenuousness, would be won by the moving results of religion in the soul of a child whose love resembled those trees in Indian climates that are always laden with flowers and fruit, always green and always perfumed. A beautiful life is always more forcible than the most vigorous reasoning. One cannot resist the charms of certain pictures. And so the doctor’s eyes insensibly filled with tears when he saw the daughter of his heart going to church, dressed in white crêpe, shod in white satin shoes, adorned with white ribbons, her head encircled by a royal fillet fastened at the side with a big bow, the thousand curls streaming over her beautiful white shoulders, the bodice edged with a ruche trimmed with narrow ribbon, her eyes starry with a first hope, flying high and happy to a first union, loving her godfather more since she had soared up to God. When he saw the thought of eternity feeding this soul which had been till lately in the limbo of childhood, as after the night the sun gives life to the earth, still without knowing why, he felt angry at remaining alone at home. Seated on his flight of steps, he kept his eyes a long time fixed on their own gate through the bars of which his ward had vanished, saying: “Godfather, why do you not come? How can I be happy without you?” Although shaken to its very roots, the encyclopedist’s pride would not yet give way. Still he walked out so that he could see the procession of communicants, and distinguished his little Ursule shining with exaltation under her veil. She gave him an inspired look which moved, in the stony portion of his heart, the corner that was closed to God. But the deist held out, and he said to himself:
“Mummeries! To imagine, that, if there does exist a creator of the world, the organizer of the infinite pays any attention to this foolery!”
He laughed and continued his walk on the heights that overlook the road to Gâtinais, where the full pealing of the bells spread afar the joy of families.
The sound of backgammon is unbearable to people who do not know this game, one of the most difficult that exist. To avoid worrying his ward, whose delicacy of organs and nerves prevented her from listening with impunity to these movements and to this apparently senseless chatter, the curé, old Jordy, when he was alive, and the doctor, would always wait until their child had gone to bed or for a walk. It often happened that the game was still going on when Ursule came in; she would then resign herself with infinite grace and seat herself near the window to work. She disliked this game, the beginning of which is in fact dull and difficult to many minds, and which is so difficult to master, that, if one does not get into the habit of playing this game during youth, it is almost impossible to learn it later. Now, the night of her first communion, when Ursule returned to her guardian, who was alone that evening, she placed the backgammon in front of the old man.
“Now then! whose turn is it to play?” she said.
“Ursule,” replied the doctor, “is it not a sin to mock your godfather on the day of your first communion?”
“I am not mocking you at all,” she said, sitting down, “I belong to your pleasures, you who take care of all mine. When Monsieur Chaperon was pleased, he used to give me a lesson in backgammon, and he has given me so many lessons, that I am now quite able to win—You shall no longer put yourself out for me. So as not to hinder your pleasures, I have conquered all the difficulties, and I like the noise of backgammon.”
Ursule won. The curé came and surprised the players and rejoiced in her triumph. The next day, Minoret, who had hitherto refused to have his ward taught music, went to Paris, bought a piano, made arrangements at Fontainebleau with a mistress and resigned himself to the annoyance that his ward’s continual practice was bound to cause him. One of the prophecies of the late Jordy the phrenologist was realized; the little girl became an excellent musician. The guardian, proud of his godchild, then engaged an old German called Schmucke, a learned professor of music, to come from Paris once a week, and provided for the expenses of this art, which he had first thought perfectly useless in a household. Unbelievers do not like music, a celestial language developed by Catholicism, which has borrowed the names of the seven notes in one of its hymns; every note is the first syllable of the first seven verses of the hymn to St. John. Although vivid, the impression produced upon the old man by Ursule’s first communion was only temporary. The calmness and content diffused throughout this young mind by works of charity and prayer were also meaningless examples to him. Without any cause for remorse or repentance, Minoret enjoyed a perfect serenity. In carrying out his kindnesses without any hope of a heavenly harvest, he considered himself loftier than the catholic, whom he always accused of usury with God.
“But,” the Abbé Chaperon would say, “if all men would devote themselves to this trade, you must confess that society would be perfect. There would be no more poor. To be charitable in your way, one must be a great philosopher; you raise yourself to your doctrine by reasoning, you are a social exception; whilst it suffices to be a Christian to be charitable according to ours. With you, it is an effort; with us, it is natural.”
“That means, curé, that I think and you feel, that’s all.”
And yet, at twelve years of age, Ursule, whose naturally feminine penetration and cleverness had been trained by a superior education, and whose reason, in all its bloom, was enlightened by a religious spirit, of all kinds of spirits the most delicate, ended by understanding that her godfather believed neither in a future, nor in the immortality of the soul, neither in providence nor in God. Plied with questions by the innocent creature, it was impossible for the doctor to hide this fatal secret any longer. Ursule’s artless consternation made him smile at first; but, seeing her sometimes sad, he understood the depth of affection that this sadness betokened. Despotic love has a horror of any kind of disagreement even in ideas that are alien to it Sometimes, the doctor yielded to his adopted daughter’s softly, tenderly spoken arguments as if they were caresses, breathed by the warmest and purest affection. Believers and unbelievers speak two different languages and can never agree. The godchild, in pleading God’s cause, would ill-treat her godfather just as a spoilt child sometimes ill-treats its mother. The curé gently reproved Ursule, and told her that God reserved the right to humble these haughty spirits. The young girl answered that David had discomfited Goliath. This religious difference and the regrets of the child who wanted to win her guardian to God were the only sorrows of this home life, so sweet and satisfied, hidden away from the eyes of the inquisitive little town. Ursule was growing and developing, and becoming the modest and religiously educated young girl that Désiré had admired coming out of church. The culture of flowers in the garden, music, her guardian’s pleasures and all the little attentions that Ursule paid him—for she had relieved La Bougival by attending to him—filled the hours, days and months of this quiet existence. Nevertheless, for a year the doctor had been anxious about some trouble with Ursule; but the cause had been so much expected, that he did not worry himself further than to watch over her health. And yet, this sagacious observer and profound practitioner thought that these troubles had had some sort of echo in the mind. He watched his ward as a mother would, but could not see anyone around her who was worthy of inspiring her with love, and so his anxiety passed.
At this juncture, one month before the day upon which this drama commences, one of those events took place in the doctor’s intellectual life which ploughs up the field of conviction to the chalk and overturns it; but this event requires a brief account of several incidents of his medical career, which will moreover give fresh interest to this story.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, science was as entirely divided about Mesmer’s appearance, as art had been about that of Gluck. After having discovered magnetism, Mesmer came to France, where from time immemorial inventors have flocked to obtain recognition of their discoveries. France, thanks to her intelligible language, is in some sort the trumpet of the world.
“If homeopathy reaches Paris, it is safe,” said Hahnemann lately.
“Go to France,” said Monsieur de Metternich to Gall, “and, if they jeer at your bumps, you will be famous.”
Mesmer had, then, followers and antagonists as keen as were the Piccinists against the Gluckists. Learned France was roused and a solemn discussion opened. Before pronouncing any decision the Faculty of Medicine in a body proscribed Mesmer’s socalled charlatanism, his tub, his divining rod and his theories. But, it must be said, this German unfortunately compromised his magnificent discovery by preposterous pecuniary claims. Mesmer failed through uncertainty about facts, through ignorance of the rôle played by hitherto unobserved imponderables in Nature, through his inaptitude for investigating the different sides of a triple-faced science. Magnetism has more applications; in Mesmer’s hands it was, as regards its prospects, what principle is to effect. But, if the inventor was lacking in genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to have to state that a contemporary science of the societies, cultivated equally by Egypt and Chaldea, by Greece and India, experienced in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century the fate that truth had met with in the person of Galileo in the sixteenth century, and that magnetism was scouted by the united attacks of religious people and materialistic philosophers, alike alarmed. Magnetism, Christ’s favorite science and one of the divine powers remitted to the apostles, seemed to have been no more foreseen by the Church than by the disciples of Jean-Jacques, Voltaire, Locke and Condillac. The Encyclopedia and the clergy could not reconcile themselves to this old human power which seemed so new. The miracles of the Convulsionaries, hushed up by the Church and the indifference of scholars, in spite of the valuable pamphlets of the Councillor Carré de Montgeron, were the first summons to make experiments with the human fluids which give the power to oppose interior forces sufficiently to annul the suffering caused by exterior agents. But it was necessary to recognize the existence of intangible, invisible and imponderable fluids, three negations which the science of that time insisted upon considering as a definition of space. In modern philosophy, space does not exist. Ten feet of space and the world would crumble to pieces! According to materialists particularly, the world is full, everything is connected, everything is linked together and everything is contrived. “The world,” said Diderot, “as the result of chance, is more explicable than God. The multiplicity of causes and the measureless number of rays that chance implies explains the creation. Given the Eneid and all the characters necessary to its composition, and given the time and the space, by means of tossing up the letters, I should arrive at the combination of the Eneid.” Those wretched men, who deified anything rather than acknowledge God, also shrank before the infinite divisibility of matter that the nature of imponderable forces admits of. Locke and Condillac then delayed for fifty years the immense progress that the natural sciences now make under the idea of unity due to the great Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Several upright men, without any system, convinced by facts conscientiously considered, persisted in Mesmer’s doctrine, which recognized in man the existence of a penetrating influence, leading from man to man, worked by the will, healing by the abundance of fluid, the exercise of which constituted a duel between two wills, between an evil to be cured and the will to cure it. The phenomena of somnambulism, barely surmised by Mesmer, were due to Messieurs de Puységur and Deleuze; but the Revolution put a stop to these discoveries which gave success to the cause of the scholars and mockers. A few doctors were amongst the believers. Until their death these dissenters were persecuted by their fellow-physicians. The respectable body of Paris doctors displayed all the harshness of the religious wars towards the Mesmerists, and were as cruel in their hatred for them as it was possible to be in that time of Voltairean tolerance. The orthodox doctors refused to consult with those doctors who favored the Mesmeric heresy. In 1820, these so-called arch-heretics were still the object of this secret proscription. The miseries and storms of the Revolution did not extinguish this scientific hatred. Only priests, magistrates and doctors can hate like that. The gown is always terrible. But are not ideas also much more implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, one of Minoret’s friends, believed in the new faith, and persisted until his death in the science to which he had sacrificed his peace in life, for he was one of the bêtes-noires of the Faculty of Paris. Minoret, one of the stoutest upholders of the Encyclopedists, the most formidable enemy of Deslon, Mesmer’s provost, and whose pen carried enormous weight in this dispute, quarreled irrevocably with his fellow-physician; he went even further, and persecuted him. His treatment of Bouvard was to cause him the only regret that troubled the serenity of his declining age. Since Doctor Minoret’s retirement to Nemours, the science of imponderables, the only name that tallies with magnetism, which is so closely allied by the nature of its phenomena to light and electricity, was making immense progress, in spite of the ceaseless jeers of Parisian science. Phrenology and physiognomy, twin sciences of Gall and Lavater, of which one is to the other what cause is to effect, proved to the eyes of more than one physiologist the traces of an imperceptible fluid, the base of the phenomena of the human will, the source of the passions and habits, the forms of face and those of the skull. In short, magnetic facts, and somnambulistic miracles, those of divination and entrancement which permitted penetration into the spiritual world, were accumulating. The strange and well-established story of the apparitions of farmer Martin, and this peasant’s interview with Louis XVIII.; the knowledge of Swedenborg’s relations with the dead, so seriously established in Germany; Walter Scott’s accounts of the effects of second sight; the exercise of the prodigious faculties of several fortune-tellers who jumble up chiromancy, cartomancy and horoscopy into one science; the feats of catalepsy and those of the working of the properties of the diaphragm by certain morbid affections; these phenomena, all emanating from the same source and at least curious, were undermining many doubts and leading the most indifferent to the ground of experiment. Minoret knew nothing of this march of intelligence, so great in the north of Europe, still so feeble in France, where those facts were nevertheless taking place, which were styled marvelous by superficial observers, and which fall, like stones to the bottom of the sea, into the turmoil of Parisian events.
At the beginning of this year, the anti-mesmerist’s peace was disturbed by the following letter:
“MY OLD FRIEND,
“Every friendship, even if lost, has its rights which are with difficulty prescribed. I know that you are alive, and I retain less recollection of our enmity than of our happy days in the wretched lodging of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Just as I am about to leave this world I am anxious to prove to you that magnetism will constitute one of the most important sciences, if, however, all science is not one. I can overwhelm your incredulity with positive proofs. Perhaps I may be indebted to your curiosity for the pleasure of shaking your hand once more, as we used to do before Mesmer.
Stung as a lion is stung by a gad-fly, the anti-mesmerist flew to Paris and left his card at old Bouvard’s house, in Rue Férou, near Saint-Sulpice. Bouvard left a card at his hotel, writing on it: “Tomorrow, at nine o’clock, Rue Saint-Honoré, opposite the Assumption.” Minoret, grown young once more, did not sleep. He went to see the old doctors of his acquaintance, and asked them if the world was upside down, if there was a College of Medicine, if the four Faculties still survived. The doctors reassured him by saying that the old spirit of resistance still existed; only, instead of persecuting, the Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Science grossly ridiculed whilst ranking the magnetic feats with the surprises of Comus, Comte, and De Bosco, and as jugglery, conjuring and what is known as entertaining physics. This talk in no way deterred old Minoret from keeping the appointment made by old Bouvard. After forty-four years of enmity, the two opponents met again under a gateway in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Frenchmen are too continually distracted to hate each other long. In Paris particularly, events enlarge space too much and by politics, literature and science make life too vast for men not to be able to find countries to conquer where their pretensions may reign at ease. Hatred requires so many forces ready armed, that one has to keep in touch with them when one tries to hate very long. Moreover the body only can have any recollection of it. After forty-four years, Robespierre and Danton would embrace each other. And yet, neither of the doctors offered his hand. Bouvard was the first to say to Minoret:
“You look wonderfully well.”
“Yes, not bad, and you?” replied Minoret once the ice was broken.
“I? Just as you see.”
“Has magnetism prevented you from dying?” asked Minoret in a pleasant tone, but without bitterness.
“No, but it nearly prevented my living.”
“Then you are not rich?” said Minoret.
“Bah!” said Bouvard.
“Well, I am rich,” cried Minoret.
“It is not your fortune, but your conviction that I want. Come along,” answered Bouvard.
“Oh! you obstinate man!” cried Minoret.
The Mesmerist dragged the unbeliever into a rather dark stairway and made him go up carefully to the fourth story.
Just then an extraordinary man was making himself known in Paris, gifted by faith with an incalculable power, and making use of the magnetic powers in all their applications. Not only did this great unknown, who is yet living, himself suddenly and radically cure the most cruel and most inveterate illnesses from a distance, like the Saviour of mankind did formerly; but he would also produce the most curious instantaneous phenomena of somnambulism by mastering the most rebellious wills. The physiognomy of this stranger, who is said to depend only upon God and to communicate with the angels, like Swedenborg, resembles a lion; a concentrated, irresistible strength flashes from it. His singularly distorted features have a terrible and startling appearance; his voice, which comes from the depths of his being, is as if charged with magnetic fluid, it penetrates the hearer through every pore. Disgusted by the public ingratitude after thousands of cures, he has fallen back into impenetrable solitude, into voluntary nothingness. His all-powerful hand, which has restored dying daughters to their mothers, fathers to their weeping children, idolizing mistresses to their frenzied lovers; which has cured sick people given up by the doctors, which caused hymns to be sung in synagogues, temples and churches by priests of different creeds all brought to the same God by the same miracle; which softened the agonies of the dying, to whom life was impossible; this sovereign hand, the sun of life which dazzled the closed eyes of somnambulists, will not raise itself to restore an heir presumptive to a queen. Wrapt in the memory of his good deeds as if in a shining shroud, he refuses to see anybody and lives in the skies. But, at the dawn of his reign, almost astonished at his own power, this man, whose disinterestedness has equaled his power, permitted a few inquisitive people to be witnesses of his miracles. The fame of this celebrated man, which was unbounded and which might revive again to-morrow, roused Doctor Bouvard at the brink of the grave. The persecuted mesmerist could at last see the most radiant phenomena of this science, guarded in his heart like a treasure. The misfortunes of this old man had touched the great stranger, who allowed him several privileges. And so Bouvard, going up the stairs, suffered his old antagonist’s jests with malicious joy. His only answer was, “You will see! You will see!” and those little tosses of the head indulged in by people who are sure of their facts.
The two doctors entered a more than modest apartment. Bouvard went to talk for a moment in a bedroom adjoining the drawing-room where Minoret, whose mistrust was awakening, was waiting; but Bouvard came to fetch him directly and ushered him into this room occupied by the mysterious Swedenborgian and a woman seated in an armchair. This woman did not get up at all, and did not seem to notice the entrance of the two old men.
“What! no more tub?” said Minoret, smiling.
“Nothing but the power of God,” gravely replied the Swedenborgian, who appeared to Minoret to be about fifty years old.
The three men sat down, and the stranger began to talk. They talked about the weather, to the great surprise of old Minoret, who thought he was being humbugged. The Swedenborgian questioned the visitor upon his scientific opinions, and evidently seemed to be taking time to examine him.
“You come here out of mere curiosity, monsieur,” he finally said. “I am not in the habit of prostituting a power, which, in my conviction, emanates from God; if I were to make a bad or frivolous use of it, it might be withdrawn from me. Nevertheless, it is a question, so Monsieur Bouvard tells me, of changing a contrary opinion to our own, and of enlightening an honest scholar; so I will gratify you. This woman whom you see,” he said, pointing to the strange woman, “is in a somnambulistic sleep. According to the confessions and manifestations of all somnambulists, this condition constitutes a delicious life during which the inmost being, freed from all the fetters which are brought into the exercise of its faculties by visible nature, wanders through the world which we wrongfully call invisible. Sight and hearing then exercise themselves more perfectly than in the condition called waking, and possibly without the aid of those organs which are the sheaths for those luminous swords called sight and hearing! For a man put into this condition, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life that is within us, and for which our body is a reservoir, a necessary prop, an envelope. Terms are wanting for such freshly recovered effects; for nowadays the words imponderable, intangible, invisible, have no meaning relative to the fluid whose action is demonstrated by magnetism. Light is weighable by its heat, which, by penetrating bodies, increases their volume, and electricity is certainly only too tangible. We have condemned things instead of accusing the imperfection of our agents.”
“Is she asleep?” said Minoret, examining the woman, who seemed to him to belong to the inferior class.
“Her body is in some degree annihilated,” replied the Swedenborgian. “Ignorant people take this condition for sleep. But she will prove to you that there exists a spiritual universe and that the soul does not recognize the laws of the material universe. I will send her to any region that you wish, twenty leagues away or to China; she will tell you what is happening there.”
“Send her to my home only, at Nemours,” Minoret requested.
“I will have nothing to do with it,” replied the mysterious man. “Give me your hand; you shall be both actor and spectator, cause and effect.”
He took Minoret’s passive hand; he held it for a moment whilst appearing to be collecting himself, and with his other hand seized the hand of the woman sitting in the armchair; then he placed the doctor’s in that of the woman, whilst signing to the old unbeliever to seat himself beside this priestess without a tripod. Minoret noticed a slight quivering in this woman’s exceedingly calm features when they were united by the Swedenborgian; but this movement, although marvelous in its effect, was wonderfully simple.
“Obey this gentleman,” said this person, extending his hand over the woman’s head, who seemed to inhale both light and life from him, “and remember that all you do for him will please me.”
“Now you can speak to her,” said he to Minoret.
“Go to Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois, to my house,” said the doctor.
“Give her time, leave your hand in hers until she proves to you by what she tells you that she has got there,” said Bouvard to his old friend.
“I see a river,” replied the woman in a feeble voice whilst seeming to be looking within herself with profound attention, in spite of her lowered lids, “I see a pretty garden—”
“Why do you go in by the river and the garden?” said Minoret.
“Because they are there.”
“Who?”
“The young girl and the nurse of whom you are thinking.”
“What is the garden like?” asked Minoret.
“On the right as you go in by the little stairway leading down to the river, there is a long brick gallery in which I see books, and ending in a rambling barracks decorated with little wooden bells and red eggs. On the left, the wall is covered with a clump of climbing plants, Virginia creeper, and Virginia jasmine. In the centre is a little sundial. There are many pots of flowers. Your ward examines her flowers, shows them to her nurse, makes holes with a dibble and puts in some seeds—The nurse is raking the paths—Although this young girl is as pure as an angel, there is a dawning of love within her, faint as the morning twilight.”
“For whom?” asked the doctor, who till now, was persuaded that no one could tell him anything without being somnambulistic. He always believed there was some jugglery.
“You know nothing about it, although you were lately somewhat anxious when she grew into a woman,” she said smiling. “The working of her heart has followed that of Nature—”
“And it is a common working-woman who speaks like this?” cried the old doctor.
“In this state people express themselves with peculiar clearness,” replied Bouvard.
“But whom does Ursule love?”
“Ursule does not know that she is in love,” replied the woman, with a little movement of the head, “she is much too angelic to know desire or anything whatever about love; but she is engrossed by him, she thinks of him, she even resists it, but returns to it in spite of her determination to refrain.—She is at the piano—”
“But who is it?”
“The son of a lady who lives opposite—”
“Madame de Portenduère?”
“Portenduère, do you say?” rejoined the somnambulist, “I daresay. But there is no danger, he is not in the country.”
“Have they spoken to each other?” asked the doctor.
“Never. They have looked at each other. She thinks him charming. In fact, he is a handsome man and has a good heart. She has seen him from her window, they have also seen each other in church; but the young man thinks no more about it.”
“His name?”
“Ah! to tell you that, I must read it or hear it—He is called Savinien, she has just uttered his name; she finds it sweet to pronounce; she has already looked out his birthday in her almanac, she has put a little red dot against it—Such childishness! Oh! she will love well, but with as much purity as strength; she is not a girl to love twice, and love will tinge her soul and penetrate it so thoroughly that it will drive out every other feeling.”
“Where do you see that?”
“Within her. She will know how to suffer; she has this from someone, for her father and mother have suffered much!”
This last remark upset the doctor, who was less staggered than surprised. It may be as well to note here that ten or fifteen minutes elapsed between each of the woman’s sentences, during which her attention became more and more concentrated. They could see her looking! Her forehead presented an extraordinary appearance; the inward efforts were depicted there, it cleared or contracted through some power the effects of which Minoret had only remarked in dying persons at those moments in which they are gifted with the power of prophecy. Several times she made gestures which were like Ursule’s.
“Oh! question her,” resumed the mysterious person addressing Minoret, “she will tell you secrets that you alone can know.”
“Does Ursule love me?” continued Minoret.
“Almost as much as she does God,” she said with a smile, “she is also very unhappy about your unbelief. You do not believe in God, as if you could prevent Him from being! His word fills the world! In this you are the only cause of anxiety to this poor child—Ah! she is playing scales; she wishes she were an even better musician than she is, she frets about it. This is what she is thinking: ‘If I could sing well, if I had a beautiful voice, when he comes to his mother’s my voice would reach his ears.’”
Doctor Minoret took out his pocket-book and noted down the exact time.
“Can you tell me what sort of seeds she has sown?”
“Mignonette, sweet peas, balsam—”
“And the last?”
“Larkspur.”
“Where is my money?”
“At your notary’s; but you invest it cautiously without losing a single day’s interest.”
“Yes; but where is the money I keep at Nemours for my half-yearly expenditure?”
“You put it in a big book bound in red, entitled Pandects of Justinian, volume II., between the last two leaves; the book is above the glass-paneled sideboard in the folio division. You have a whole row of it. Your funds are in the last volume, on the salon side. Stay! volume III. is before volume II. But you have no money, it is—”
“Bills of one thousand francs?” asked the doctor.
“I cannot see clearly, they are folded up. No, there are two bills of five hundred francs each.”
“Can you see them?”
“Yes.”
“What are they like?”
“One is very yellow and old, the other white and almost new.—”
This last part of the examination startled Doctor Minoret. He looked at Bouvard stupefied; but Bouvard and the Swedenborgian, accustomed to the astonishment of unbelievers, were talking in a low voice without appearing either surprised or astounded. Minoret begged them to let him return after dinner. The anti-Mesmerist wanted to collect himself, to recover his profound terror, to test afresh this immense power, to submit it to decisive experiments, to put it questions whose solution should remove every kind of doubt.
“Be here at nine o’clock to-night,” said the stranger; “I will come back for you.”
Doctor Minoret was in such a violent state, that he left without bowing, followed by Bouvard, who cried out to him at intervals:
“Well? Well?”
“I think I am mad, Bouvard,” replied Minoret on the step of the gateway. “If the woman has told the truth about Ursule, and as Ursule is the only person in the world who knows what this sorceress has revealed to me, you will be right. I wish I had wings to go to Nemours to verify her assertions. But I shall hire a carriage and leave to-night at ten o’clock. Ah! I am losing my head.”
“What would happen to you if, having known an invalid incurable for many years, you saw him cured in five seconds; if you saw this great magnetizer make perspiration pour profusely from a person who had ringworm; if you saw him make a crippled woman walk?”
“Let us dine together, Bouvard, and do not leave me until nine o’clock. I want to try a decisive unimpeachable experiment.”
“Very well, my old friend,” replied the mesmerist doctor.
The two enemies, reconciled, went to dine at the Palais-Royal. After an animated conversation which helped Minoret to divert the fever of ideas that was ravaging his brain, Bouvard said to him:
“If you acknowledge that this woman has the faculty of reducing or of traversing space, if you admit the certainty that, from the Assumption, she hears and sees all that is being said and done at Nemours, then you must admit all the other magnetic effects, which to an unbeliever are as incredible as these are. So ask her for one proof only that shall satisfy you, for you may think that we procured all this information; but we could not know, for instance, what will take place at nine o’clock, in your house, in your ward’s room; remember or write down what the somnambulist will see or hear, and then hurry home. This little Ursule, whom I do not know at all, is not our accomplice; and, if she has said or done what you have written, then bow your head, proud Sicambrus!”
The two friends returned to the room, and there found the somnambulist, who did not recognize Doctor Minoret. This woman’s eyes gently closed under the hand which the Swedenborgian stretched over her at intervals, and she resumed the attitude in which Minoret had seen her before dinner. When the woman’s hand and the doctor’s had been placed in communication, he begged her to tell him all that was passing at his house in Nemours at that moment.
“What is Ursule doing?” he said.
“She is undressed, she has finished putting on her curl-papers, she is kneeling on her prie-Dieu, in front of an ivory crucifix fastened on a red velvet panel.”
“What is she saying?”
“She is saying her evening prayers, she commends herself to God, beseeches Him to keep her mind from evil thoughts; she examines her conscience and goes over all she has done during the day, in order to know if she has failed in any of His commandments or those of the church. In fact, she sifts her soul, poor dear little creature!”—The somnambulist’s eyes were wet—“She has not committed any sin, but she reproaches herself with having thought too much about Monsieur Savinien,” she continued, “she breaks off to wonder what he is doing in Paris, and prays God to make him happy. She finishes with you and says a prayer aloud.”
“Can you repeat it?”
“Yes.”
Minoret took his pencil and wrote, at the somnambulist’s dictation, the following prayer, evidently composed by the Abbé Chaperon:
“‘O God! if Thou art pleased with Thy servant, who adores Thee, and prays to Thee with as much love as fervor, who tries in every way to keep Thy Holy Commandments, who would gladly die as did Thy Son to glorify Thy name, and who would dwell within Thy shadow, Thou who readest all hearts, graciously deign to open my godfather’s eyes, set him in the way of salvation, and impart to him Thy grace so that he may live his last days in Thee; keep him from all harm and let me suffer in his stead! Good Saint-Ursule, my beloved patroness, and Thou, Divine Mother of God, queen of Heaven, archangels and saints of Paradise, hear me, and join Thy intercessions to mine, and have pity upon us!’”
The somnambulist imitated the child’s innocent gestures of holy inspirations so perfectly, that Doctor Minoret’s eyes were full of tears.
“Does she say anything else?” asked Minoret.
“Yes.”
“Repeat it.”
“‘Dear godfather! who will play backgammon with him in Paris?’ She blows out the candle, lays her head down, and goes to sleep. Now she is off! She looks very pretty in her little nightcap.”
Minoret bowed to the great stranger, shook hands with Bouvard, rapidly descended the stairs, and ran to a coach-stand which then existed under the gateway of a hôtel that has since been demolished to make way for the Rue d’Alger; there he found a driver and asked him if he would agree to start at once for Fontainebleau. Once the fare was settled and accepted, the old man, once more revived, set out immediately. According to his agreement, he rested the horse at Essonne, caught the diligence for Nemours, found a place in it, and dismissed his cabman. Reaching home about five in the morning, he went to bed amidst the ruins of all his previous ideas about physiology, nature, and metaphysics, and slept until nine o’clock, so greatly had his journey tired him.
NEMOURS, RUE DES BOURGEOIS.
"Obey this gentleman," said this person, extending his hand over the woman's head, who seemed to inhale both light and life from him, "and remember that all you do for him will please me."
"Now you can speak to her," said he to Minoret.
"Go to Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois, to my house," said the doctor.
Copyrighted 1897 by G. B. & Son
