Ursule Mirouët

it, it might be taken from me. However, Monsieur Bouvard tells me our aim is to be the conversion of an opinion antagonistic to ours, and the enlightenment of a man of learning and good faith. I shall therefore satisfy you. The woman you see there,” he went on, pointing to the armchair, “is in a magnetic sleep. From the accounts and revelations of such somnambulists, the state is one of great beatitude, during which the inner being, set free from the fetters by which visible nature hinders the full exercise of its faculties, wanders through the world which we erroneously call invisible. Sight and hearing are then far more perfectly active than in the state which we call being awake, and independent, perhaps, of the medium of those organs which are but as a sheath to the blades of light that we call sight and hearing. To a man in that condition distance and material obstacles have ceased to exist, or are pierced through by an internal vitality of which our body is the container, the necessary fulcrum, a mere wrapper. Terms are lacking for results so recently rediscovered; for the words imponderable, intangible, invisible, have no meaning in relation to the fluid whose action is perceptible through magnetism. Light is ponderable by heat, which, when it penetrates a body, increases its volume; and electricity is only too tangible. We have passed judgment on things instead of blaming the imperfection of our instruments.”

“She is asleep?” asked Minoret, examining the woman, who seemed to him of the lower class.

“Her body is in a certain sense annihilated,” replied the Swedenborgian. “Ignorant persons mistake this state for sleep. But she will prove to you that there is a spiritual world, where the spirit does not obey the laws of the physical universe. I will send her to any region whither you may choose that she shall go, twenty leagues away, or as far as China; she will tell you what is happening there.”

“Send her only to my house at Nemours,” replied Minoret.

“I will not interfere between you,” said the mysterious man. “Give me your hand; you shall be at once actor and spectator, cause and effect.”

He took Minoret’s hand, Minoret yielding; he held it for a minute with an apparent concentration of thought, and with his other hand he took that of the woman in the chair; then he placed the doctor’s hand in the woman’s, signing to the old sceptic to sit down by the side of this Pythoness without a tripod. Minoret observed a slight thrill in the excessively calm face of the woman when the Swedenborgian placed them in contact; but the movement, though marvelous in its results, was in itself extremely simple.

“Obey this gentleman,” said the Unknown, extending his hand over the head of the woman, who seemed to inhale light and life from him. “And remember that all you do for him will please me.⁠—Now, you can speak to her,” he said to Minoret.

“Go to Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois, to my house,” said the doctor.

“Give her time; hold her hand till she shows by what she says that she is there,” said Bouvard to his old friend.

“I see a river,” replied the woman in a low voice, and seeming to be looking attentively within herself, in spite of her closed eyes. “I see a pretty garden.”

“Why have you begun by the river and the garden?” asked Minoret.

“Because they are in the garden.”

“Who?”

“The young lady and her nurse, of whom you are thinking.”

“What is the garden like?” asked Minoret.

“As you go into it by the steps that lead to the river there is a long gallery to the right, built of brick, in which I see books, and at the end there is a little gazebo trimmed up with wooden bells and red eggs. The wall on the left is covered with creepers⁠—Virginia creeper and yellow jasmine. There is a little sundial in the middle; there are a great many pots of flowers. Your ward is looking at the flowers and showing them to her nurse; she makes holes with a dibble and sows some seeds. The nurse is raking the path. Though the girl is as pure as an angel, there is a dawning of love in her, as faint as the first light of morning.”

“For whom?” asked the doctor, who had so far heard nothing that anyone might not have told him without being clairvoyant. He still believed it was a trick.

“You know nothing of it, though you were somewhat anxious not long since as she grew up,” said the woman, smiling. “The instincts of her heart followed the development of her nature.”

“And it is quite a common woman who speaks thus?” exclaimed the old doctor.

“In this state they all speak with peculiar lucidity,” replied Bouvard.

“But who is it that Ursule loves?”

“Ursule does not know that she is in love,” answered the woman, with a little shake of her head. “She is too angelically innocent to be conscious of desire, or of love in any kind; but she wonders over him, she thinks of him; she even forbids herself to do so, and returns in spite of her determination to avoid it.⁠—Now she is at the piano⁠—”

“But who is he?”

“The son of the lady who lives opposite.”

“Madame de Portenduère?”

“Portenduère, did you say?” replied the clairvoyant. “I daresay. But there is no danger; he is not at home.”

“Have they ever spoken to each other?”

“Never. They have looked at each other. She thinks him charming. And he really is very good-looking, and he has a good heart. She has watched him out of her window, and they have seen each other at church; but the young man thinks no more about it.”

“What is his name?”

“I cannot tell you unless I should read it or hear it.⁠—His name is Savinien; she has just spoken it; she likes the sound of it; she had looked in the calendar for his saint’s day, and had marked it with a tiny red