The atmosphere of this room had a fragrance as of heaven. The careful arrangement of everything indicated a spirit of order, a feeling for the harmony of things, that would have struck anyone, even a Minoret-Levrault. It was, above all, easy to see how dear to Ursule were the things about her, and how fond she was of the room which was, so to speak, part of all her life as a child and a young girl.
While looking round at it all as an excuse, the guardian convinced himself that from her window Ursule could see across to Madame de Portenduère’s house. During the night he had considered the line of conduct to be taken with regard to the secret he had discovered of her budding passion. To question his ward would compromise him in her eyes; for either he must approve or disapprove of her love; in either case he would be awkwardly situated. He had therefore determined that he would study for himself the relations of young Portenduère and Ursule, to decide whether he should try to counteract her inclination before it had become irresistible. Only an old man could show so much prudence. Still gasping under the shock of finding the magnetic revelations true, he turned about, examining the smallest things in the room, for he wished to glance at the almanac which hung by a corner of the chimneypiece.
“These clumsy candlesticks are too heavy for your pretty little hands,” he said, taking up the marble candlesticks, ornamented with brass.
He weighed them in his hands, looked at the almanac, unhooked it, and said:
“This, too, seems to me very ugly. Why do you hang this common calendar in such a pretty room?”
“Oh, leave me that, godfather!”
“No, no; you shall have another tomorrow.”
He went downstairs again, carrying away the convicting document, shut himself into his room, looked for Saint Savinien, and found, as the clairvoyant had said, a small red dot on the 19th of October; he found such another at Saint Denis’ day, his own patron Saint; and at Saint John’s day—that of the curé. And this dot, as large as a pin’s head, the sleeping woman had discerned in spite of distance and obstacles. The old man meditated till dusk on all these facts, more stupendous to him than to any other man. He was forced to yield to evidence. A thick wall, within himself, as it were, crumbled down; for he had lived on the double foundation of his indifference to religion and his denial of magnetism. By proving that the senses—a purely physical structure, mere organs whose effects can all be explained—were conterminous with some of the attributes of infinity, magnetism overthrew, or at any rate seemed to him to overthrow, Spinoza’s powerful logic. The Finite and the Infinite, two elements which, according to that great man, are incompatible, existed one in the other. However great the power he could conceive of the divisibility and mobility of matter, he could not credit it with almost divine characters. And he was too old to connect these phenomena with a system, to compare them with those of sleep, of vision, or of light. All his scientific theory, based on the statements of the school of Locke and Condillac, lay in ruins. On seeing his hollow idols wrecked, his incredulity naturally was shaken. Hence all the advantages in this struggle between Catholic youth and Voltairean old age was certain to be on Ursule’s side. A beam of light fell on the dismantled fortress in ruins; from the depths of the wreckage rose the cry of prayer.
And yet, the stiff-necked old man tried to dispute his own doubts. Though stricken to the heart, he could not make up his mind; he still strove with God. At the same time his mind seemed to vacillate; he was not the same man. He became unnaturally pensive; he reads the Pensées of Pascal, Bossuet’s sublime Histoire des Variations; he studied Bonald; he read Saint-Augustine; he also read through the works of Swedenborg and of the deceased Saint-Martin, of whom the mysterious stranger had spoken. The structure raised in this man by materialism was splitting on all sides; a shock alone was needed; and when his heart was ripe for God, it fell into the heavenly vineyard as fruits drop. Several times already in the evening, when playing his game with the priest, his goddaughter sitting by, he had asked questions which, in view of his opinions, struck the Abbé Chaperon as strange; for as yet he knew not of the moral travail by which God was rectifying this noble conscience.
“Do you believe in apparitions?” the infidel suddenly asked his pastor, pausing in his game.
“Cardan, a great philosopher of the sixteenth century, said that he had seen some,” replied the curé.
“I know of all those that the philosophers have seen; I have just reread Plotinus. A this moment I ask you as a Catholic: I want to know whether you think that a dead man can return to visit the living?”
“Well, Jesus appeared to His apostles after His death,” replied the priest. “The Church must believe in the apparitions of our Lord. As to miracles, there is
