Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  The result of his interview with his assailant was soon apparent. Though Goupil had concluded his bargain with the sheriff the night before, he now impudently refused to fulfil it.

  “My dear Lecoeur,” he said, “I am unexpectedly enabled to buy up Monsieur Dionis’s practice; I am therefore in a position to help you to sell to others. Tear up the agreement; it’s only the loss of two stamps, — here are seventy centimes.”

  Lecoeur was too much afraid of Goupil to complain. All Nemours knew before night that Minoret had given Dionis security to enable Goupil to buy his practice. The latter wrote to Savinien denying his charges against Minoret, and telling the young nobleman that in his new position he was forbidden by the rules of the supreme court, and also by his respect for law, to fight a duel. But he warned Savinien to treat him well in future; assuring him he was a capital boxer, and would break his leg at the first offence.

  The walls of Nemours were cleared of the inscription; but the quarrel between Minoret and his wife went on; and Savinien maintained a threatening silence. Ten days after these events the marriage of Mademoiselle Massin, the elder, to the future notary was bruited about the town. Mademoiselle Massin had a dowry of eighty thousand francs and her own peculiar ugliness; Goupil had his deformities and his practice; the union therefore seemed suitable and probable. One evening, towards midnight, two unknown men seized Goupil in the street as he was leaving Massin’s house, gave him a sound beating, and disappeared. The notary kept the matter a profound secret, and even contradicted an old woman who saw the scene from her window and thought that she recognized him.

  These great little events were carefully studied by Bongrand, who became convinced that Goupil held some mysterious power over Minoret, and he determined to find out its cause.

  CHAPTER XIX. APPARITIONS

  Though the public opinion of the little town recognized Ursula’s perfect innocence, she recovered slowly. While in a state of bodily exhaustion, which left her mind and spirit free, she became the medium of phenomena the effects of which were astounding, and of a nature to challenge science, if science had been brought into contact with them.

  Ten days after Madame de Portenduere’s visit Ursula had a dream, with all the characteristics of a supernatural vision, as much in its moral aspects as in the, so to speak, physical circumstances. Her godfather appeared to her and made a sign that she should come with him. She dressed herself and followed him through the darkness to their former house in the Rue des Bourgeois, where she found everything precisely as it was on the day of her godfather’s death. The old man wore the clothes that were on him the evening before his death. His face was pale, his movements caused no sound; nevertheless, Ursula heard his voice distinctly, though it was feeble and as if repeated by a distant echo. The doctor conducted his child as far as the Chinese pagoda, where he made her lift the marble top of the little Boule cabinet just as she had raised it on the day of his death; but instead of finding nothing there she saw the letter her godfather had told her to fetch. She opened it and read both the letter addressed to herself and the will in favor of Savinien. The writing, as she afterwards told the abbe, shone as if traced by sunbeams — ”it burned my eyes,” she said. When she looked at her uncle to thank him she saw the old benevolent smile upon his discolored lips. Then, in a feeble voice, but still clearly, he told her to look at Minoret, who was listening in the corridor to what he said to her; and next, slipping the lock of the library door with his knife, and taking the papers from the study. With his right hand the old man seized his goddaughter and obliged her to walk at the pace of death and follow Minoret to his own house. Ursula crossed the town, entered the post house and went into Zelie’s old room, where the spectre showed her Minoret unfolding the letters, reading them and burning them.

  “He could not,” said Ursula, telling her dream to the abbe, “light the first two matches, but the third took fire; he burned the papers and buried their remains in the ashes. Then my godfather brought me back to our house, and I saw Minoret-Levrault slipping into the library, where he took from the third volume of Pandects three certificates of twelve thousand francs each; also, from the preceding volume, a number of banknotes. ‘He is,’ said my godfather, ‘the cause of all the trouble which has brought you to the verge of the tomb; but God wills that you shall yet be happy. You will not die now; you will marry Savinien. If you love me, and if you love Savinien, I charge you to demand your fortune from my nephew. Swear it.’”

  Resplendent as though transfigured, the spectre had so powerful an influence on Ursula’s soul that she promised all her uncle asked, hoping to put an end to the nightmare. She woke suddenly and found herself standing in the middle of her bedroom, facing her godfather’s portrait, which had been placed there during her illness. She went back to bed and fell asleep after much agitation, and on waking again she remembered all the particulars of this singular vision; but she dared not speak of it. Her judgment and her delicacy both shrank from revealing a dream the end and object of which was her pecuniary benefit. She attributed the vision, not unnaturally, to remarks made by La Bougival the preceding evening, when the old woman talked of the doctor’s intended liberality and of her own convictions on that subject. But the dream returned, with aggravated circumstances which made it fearful to the poor girl. On the second occasion the icy hand of her godfather was laid upon her shoulder, causing her the most horrible distress, an indefinable sensation. “You must obey the dead,” he said, in a sepulchral voice. “Tears,” said Ursula, relating her dreams, “fell from his white, wide-open eyes.”

  The third time the vision came the dead man took her by the braids of her long hair and showed her the post master talking with Goupil and promising money if he would remove Ursula to Sens. Ursula then decided to relate the three dreams to the Abbe Chaperon.

  “Monsieur l’abbe,” she said, “do you believe that the dead reappear?”

  “My child, sacred history, profane history, and modern history, have much testimony to that effect; but the Church has never made it an article of faith; and as for science, in France science laughs at the idea.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “That the power of God is infinite.”

  “Did my godfather ever speak to you of such matters?”

  “Yes, often. He had entirely changed his views of them. His conversion, as he told me at least twenty times, dated from the day when a woman in Paris heard you praying for him in Nemours, and saw the red dot you made against Saint-Savinien’s day in your almanac.”

  Ursula uttered a piercing cry, which alarmed the priest; she remembered the scene when, on returning to Nemours, her godfather read her soul, and took away the almanac.

  “If that is so,” she said, “then my visions are possibly true. My godfather has appeared to me, as Jesus appeared to his disciples. He was wrapped in yellow light; he spoke to me. I beg you to say a mass for the repose of his soul and to implore the help of God that these visions may cease, for they are destroying me.”

  She then related the three dreams with all their details, insisting on the truth of what she said, on her own freedom of action, on the somnambulism of her inner being, which, she said, detached itself from her body at the bidding of the spectre and followed him with perfect ease. The thing that most surprised the abbe, to whom Ursula’s veracity was known, was the exact description which she gave of the bedroom formerly occupied by Zelie at the post house, which Ursula had never entered and about which no one had ever spoken to her.

  “By what means can these singular apparitions take place?” asked Ursula. “What did my godfather think?”

  “Your godfather, my dear child, argued my hypothesis. He recognized the possibility of a spiritual world, a world of ideas. If ideas are of man’s creation, if they subsist in a life of their own, they must have forms which our external senses cannot grasp, but which are perceptible to our inward senses when brought under certain conditions. Thus your godfather’s ideas might so enfold you that you
would clothe them with his bodily presence. Then, if Minoret really committed those actions, they too resolve themselves into ideas; for all action is the result of many ideas. Now, if ideas live and move in a spiritual world, your spirit must be able to perceive them if it penetrates that world. These phenomena are not more extraordinary than those of memory; and those of memory are quite as amazing and inexplicable as those of the perfume of plants — which are perhaps the ideas of the plants.”

  “How you enlarge and magnify the world!” exclaimed Ursula. “But to hear the dead speak, to see them walk, act — do you think it possible?”

  “In Sweden,” replied the abbe, “Swedenborg has proved by evidence that he communicated with the dead. But come with me into the library and you shall read in the life of the famous Duc de Montmorency, beheaded at Toulouse, and who certainly was not a man to invent foolish tales, an adventure very like yours, which happened a hundred years earlier at Cardan.”

  Ursula and the abbe went upstairs, and the good man hunted up a little edition in 12mo, printed in Paris in 1666, of the “History of Henri de Montmorency,” written by a priest of that period who had known the prince.

  “Read it,” said the abbe, giving Ursula the volume, which he had opened at the 175th page. “Your godfather often re-read that passage, — and see! here’s a little of his snuff in it.”

  “And he not here!” said Ursula, taking the volume to read the passage.

  “The siege of Privat was remarkable for the loss of a great number

  of officers. Two brigadier-generals died there — namely, the

  Marquis d’Uxelles, of a wound received at the outposts, and the

  Marquis de Portes, from a musket-shot through the head. The day

  the latter was killed he was to have been made a marshal of

  France. About the moment when the marquis expired the Duc de

  Montmorency, who was sleeping in his tent, was awakened by a voice

  like that of the marquis bidding him farewell. The affection he

  felt for a friend so near made him attribute the illusion of this

  dream to the force of his own imagination; and owing to the

  fatigues of the night, which he had spent, according to his

  custom, in the trenches, he fell asleep once more without any

  sense of dread. But the same voice disturbed him again, and the

  phantom obliged him to wake up and listen to the same words it had

  said as it first passed. The duke then recollected that he had

  heard the philosopher Pitrat discourse on the possibility of the

  separation of the soul from the body, and that he and the marquis

  had agreed that the first who died should bid adieu to the other.

  On which, not being able to restrain his fears as to the truth of

  this warning, he sent a servant to the marquis’s quarters, which

  were distant from him. But before the man could get back, the king

  sent to inform the duke, by persons fitted to console him, of the

  great loss he had sustained.

  “I leave learned men to discuss the cause of this event, which I

  have frequently heard the Duc de Montmorency relate: I think that

  the truth and singularity of the fact itself ought to be recorded

  and preserved.”

  “If all this is so,” said Ursula, “what ought I do do?”

  “My child,” said the abbe, “it concerns matters so important, and which may prove so profitable to you, that you ought to keep absolutely silent about it. Now that you have confided to me the secret of these apparitions perhaps they may not return. Besides, you are now strong enough to come to church; well, then, come to-morrow and thank God and pray to him for the repose of your godfather’s soul. Feel quite sure that you have entrusted your secret to prudent hands.”

  “If you knew how afraid I am to go to sleep, — what glances my godfather gives me! The last time he caught hold of my dress — I awoke with my face all covered with tears.”

  “Be at peace; he will not come again,” said the priest.

  Without losing a moment the Abbe Chaperon went straight to Minoret and asked for a few moments interview in the Chinese pagoda, requesting that they might be entirely alone.

  “Can any one hear us?” he asked.

  “No one,” replied Minoret.

  “Monsieur, my character must be known to you,” said the abbe, fastening a gentle but attentive look on Minoret’s face. “I have to speak to you of serious and extraordinary matters, which concern you, and about which you may be sure that I shall keep the profoundest secrecy; but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than give you this information. While your uncle lived, there stood there,” said the priest, pointing to a certain spot in the room, “a small buffet made by Boule, with a marble top” (Minoret turned livid), “and beneath the marble your uncle placed a letter for Ursula — ” The abbe then went on to relate, without omitting the smallest circumstance, Minoret’s conduct to Minoret himself. When the last post master heard the detail of the two matches refusing to light he felt his hair begin to writhe on his skull.

  “Who invented such nonsense?” he said, in a strangled voice, when the tale ended.

  “The dead man himself.”

  This answer made Minoret tremble, for he himself had dreamed of the doctor.

  “God is very good, Monsieur l’abbe, to do miracles for me,” he said, danger inspiring him to make the sole jest of his life.

  “All that God does is natural,” replied the priest.

  “Your phantoms don’t frighten me,” said the colossus, recovering his coolness.

  “I did not come to frighten you, for I shall never speak of this to any one in the world,” said the abbe. “You alone know the truth. The matter is between you and God.”

  “Come now, Monsieur l’abbe, do you really think me capable of such a horrible abuse of confidence?”

  “I believe only in crimes which are confessed to me, and of which the sinner repents,” said the priest, in an apostolic tone.

  “Crime?” cried Minoret.

  “A crime frightful in its consequences.”

  “What consequences?”

  “In the fact that it escapes human justice. The crimes which are not expiated here below will be punished in another world. God himself avenges innocence.”

  “Do you think God concerns himself with such trifles?”

  “If he did not see the worlds in all their details at a glance, as you take a landscape into your eye, he would not be God.”

  “Monsieur l’abbe, will you give me your word of honor that you have had these facts from my uncle?”

  “Your uncle has appeared three times to Ursula and has told them and repeated them to her. Exhausted by such visions she revealed them to me privately; she considers them so devoid of reason that she will never speak of them. You may make yourself easy on that point.”

  “I am easy on all points, Monsieur Chaperon.”

  “I hope you are,” said the old priest. “Even if I considered these warnings absurd, I should still feel bound to inform you of them, considering the singular nature of the details. You are an honest man, and you have obtained your handsome fortune in too legal a way to wish to add to it by theft. Besides, you are an almost primitive man, and you would be tortured by remorse. We have within us, be we savage or civilized, the sense of what is right, and this will not permit us to enjoy in peace ill-gotten gains acquired against the laws of the society in which we live, — for well-constituted societies are modeled on the system God has ordained for the universe. In this respect societies have a divine origin. Man does not originate ideas, he invents no form; he answers to the eternal relations that surround him on all sides. Therefore, see what happens! Criminals going to the scaffold, and having it in their power to carry their secret with them, are compelled by the force of some mysterious power to make confessions before their heads are take
n off. Therefore, Monsieur Minoret, if your mind is at ease, I go my way satisfied.”

  Minoret was so stupefied that he allowed the abbe to find his own way out. When he thought himself alone he flew into the fury of a choleric man; the strangest blasphemies escaped his lips, in which Ursula’s name was mingled with odious language.

  “Why, what has she done to you?” cried Zelie, who had slipped in on tiptoe after seeing the abbe out of the house.

  For the first and only time in his life, Minoret, drunk with anger and driven to extremities by his wife’s reiterated questions, turned upon her and beat her so violently that he was obliged, when she fell half-dead on the floor, to take her in his arms and put her to bed himself, ashamed of his act. He was taken ill and the doctor bled him twice; when he appeared again in the streets everybody noticed a great change in him. He walked alone, and often roamed the town as though uneasy. When any one addressed him he seemed preoccupied in his mind, he who had never before had two ideas in his head. At last, one evening, he went up to Monsieur Bongrand in the Grand’Rue, the latter being on his way to take Ursula to Madame de Portenduere’s, where the whist parties had begun again.

  “Monsieur Bongrand, I have something important to say to my cousin,” he said, taking the justice by the arm, “and I am very glad you should be present, for you can advise her.”

  They found Ursula studying; she rose, with a cold and dignified air, as soon as she saw Minoret.

  “My child, Monsieur Minoret wants to speak to you on a matter of business,” said Bongrand. “By the bye, don’t forget to give me your certificates; I shall go to Paris in the morning and will draw your dividend and La Bougival’s.”

  “Cousin,” said Minoret, “our uncle accustomed you to more luxury than you have now.”

  “We can be very happy with very little money,” she replied.