“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.”