Ursule gave a scream that made the priest shudder; she remembered the scene when, on his return from Paris, her guardian had read her heart, and had taken away her calendar.
“If that is the case,” said she, “my visions are possible. My godfather has appeared to me as Jesus appeared to His disciples. He stands in a golden light, and he speaks to me. I wanted to beg you to say a mass for the repose of his soul, and to beseech the interposition of God to stop these apparitions which overwhelm me.”
She then related her three dreams in every detail, insisting on the absolute truthfulness of the facts, the freedom of her own movements, and the clear vision of an inner self which, as she described it, followed the guidance of her uncle’s spectre with perfect ease. What most surprised the priest, to whom Ursule’s perfect veracity was well known, was her exact description of the room formerly occupied by Zélie Minoret at the posting-house, into which Ursule had never been, and which, indeed, she had never even heard mentioned.
“By what means can these strange apparitions be produced?” said Ursule. “What did my godfather think?”
“Your godfather, my child, argued from hypotheses. He acknowledged the possible existence of a spiritual world, a world of ideas. If ideas are a creation proper to man, if they subsist and live a life peculiar to themselves, they must have forms imperceptible to our external senses, but perceptible to our interior senses under certain conditions. Thus your godfather’s ideas may enwrap you, and you perhaps have lent them his aspect. Then, if Minoret has committed these actions, they are dissolved into ideas; for every action is the outcome of several ideas. Now, if ideas have their being in the spiritual world, your spirit may have been enabled to see them when transported thither. These phenomena are not more strange than those of memory; and those of memory are as surprising and as inexplicable as those of the perfume of plants, which are perhaps the plants’ ideas.”
“Dear me! how you expand the world! But is it really possible to hear a dead man speak, to see him walk and act?”
“Swedenborg, in Sweden,” replied the Abbé, “has proved to demonstration that he held intercourse with the dead. But, at any rate, come into the library, and in the life of the famous Duc de Montmorency, who was beheaded at Toulouse, and who certainly was not the man to invent a cock-and-bull story, you will read of an adventure almost like your own, which also occurred, above a hundred years before, to Cardan.”
Ursule and the curé went up to the first floor, and the good man found for her a little duodecimo edition, printed in Paris in 1666, of the History of Henri de Montmorency, written by a contemporary priest who had known that prince.
“Read,” said the curé, giving her the volume open at pages 175 and 176. “Your godfather often read this passage; see, here are some grains of his snuff.”
“And he is no more!” said Ursule, taking the book to read this passage:—
“The siege of Privas was remarkable for the loss of some of the persons in command. Two colonels were killed: to wit, the Marquis d’Uxelles, who died of a wound received in the trenches, and the Marquis de Fortes, by a gunshot in the head. He was to have been made Marshal of France the very day he was killed. Just about the moment when the Marquis died, the Duc de Montmorency, who was sleeping in his tent, was roused by a voice like that of the Marquis, bidding him farewell. The love he had for one who was so near to him caused him to attribute the illusion of this dream to the power of his imagination; and the toil of the night, which he had spent as usual in the trenches, made him go to sleep again without any fear. But the same voice suddenly broke it again; and the phantom, which he had only seen in his sleep, compelled him to wake once more, and to hear distinctly the same words that it had spoken before disappearing. The Due then recollected that one day when they had heard Pitrat the philosopher discoursing of the separation of the soul from the body, they had promised to bid each other farewell, whichever died first, if he were permitted. Whereupon, unable to hinder his dread of the truth of this warning, he at once sent one of his servants to the Marquis’ lodgings, which were distant from his own. But before his man could return he was sent for by the king, who caused him to be told, by persons who could comfort him, of the misfortune he had already apprehended.
“I leave it to the learned to discuss the cause of this event, which I have often heard the Due de Montmorency relate, and which I have thought worthy to be set down for its marvelousness and its truth.”
“But, then,” asked Ursule, “what ought I to do?”
“My child,” said the curé, “the case is so serious, and so much to your own advantage, that you must keep complete silence. Now that you have trusted me with the secret of this apparition, perhaps it will come no more. Besides, you are strong enough now to go to church; well, then, tomorrow you can come to thank God, and to pray for the peace of your godfather’s soul. Be quite sure, at any rate, that your secret is in safe hands.”
“If you could know in what terror I go to sleep! What awful looks my godfather gives me! The last time he held on to my dress to see me longer. I woke with my face streaming with tears.”
“Rest in peace; he will come no more,” said the curé.
Without
