Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/137

 room, and he wanted to cast his eye over the almanac hung at the corner of the fireplace.

“These horrid candlesticks are too heavy for your pretty little hands,” he said, taking up the candlesticks of marble decorated with copper.

He weighed them in his hand, looked at the almanac, took it and said:

“This seems to me very ugly also. Why do you keep this postman’s almanac in such a pretty room?”

“Oh! do let me have it, godfather.”

“No, you shall have another one to-morrow.”

He went down with this convincing proof, shut himself up in his study, looked for Saint Savinien, and found, as the somnambulist had said, a tiny, red dot in front of the nineteenth of October; he also saw one opposite the day of Saint Denis, his own patron saint and before Saint Jean, the curé’s patron. This point, the size of a pin’s head, the sleeping woman had seen in spite of distance and obstacles. Until night time the old man meditated upon these events, which were even more immense to him than to anyone else. He was bound to yield to evidence. A strong wall crumbled away, so to speak, within him, for he lived supported by two foundations; his indifference to religious matters and his disbelief in magnetism. By proving that the senses, a purely physical construction, organs whose powers were accounted for, were bounded by some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism overthrew, or at least seemed to him to overthrow, Spinosa’s powerful argumentation; the infinite and