Knowing I was nursing my child, she had not let me suspect anything about her tragical determination; on the contrary, in each one of her letters she reassured me, saying she did not take my husband’s words seriously. I did not even imagine that she was ill.
One night, about ten o’clock, I had just put my daughter in her crib, had returned to bed, and was about to go to sleep, when, by the light of a night lamp that was always burning, I saw my grandmother come into my room.
“Ah! grandmother, is it you?” I cried.
With a slow gesture, she put her hand up to her eyes. The sockets were empty! I jumped out of bed and went toward her—she had disappeared!
I rushed into my husband’s study, where he was writing.
“My grandmother, my grandmother, where is she? I have just seen her, with empty eyes, in my room!”
“You are crazy,” Monsieur Lamessine said; “your grandmother cannot be here. Your mother writes me that she is ill, and begs me, on account of your nursing, not to inform you of it.”
The next day I heard that my grandmother had died at the very hour she had appeared to me.
When I began to believe in religion again, this apparition of my grandmother was to me one of the strongest proofs of a hereafter.