Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/118

 but Bouvard came to fetch him directly and ushered him into this room occupied by the mysterious Swedenborgian and a woman seated in an armchair. This woman did not get up at all, and did not seem to notice the entrance of the two old men.

“What! no more tub?” said Minoret, smiling.

“Nothing but the power of God,” gravely replied the Swedenborgian, who appeared to Minoret to be about fifty years old.

The three men sat down, and the stranger began to talk. They talked about the weather, to the great surprise of old Minoret, who thought he was being humbugged. The Swedenborgian questioned the visitor upon his scientific opinions, and evidently seemed to be taking time to examine him.

“You come here out of mere curiosity, monsieur,” he finally said. “I am not in the habit of prostituting a power, which, in my conviction, emanates from God; if I were to make a bad or frivolous use of it, it might be withdrawn from me. Nevertheless, it is a question, so Monsieur Bouvard tells me, of changing a contrary opinion to our own, and of enlightening an honest scholar; so I will gratify you. This woman whom you see,” he said, pointing to the strange woman, “is in a somnambulistic sleep. According to the confessions and manifestations of all somnambulists, this condition constitutes a delicious life during which the inmost being, freed from all the fetters which are brought into the exercise of its faculties by visible nature, wanders through the world which we wrongfully call