Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/338

 Ursule to Sens. Ursule then resolved to relate her three dreams to the Abbé Chaperon.

“Monsieur le Curé,” she said to him one evening, “do you believe that the dead can re-appear?”

“My child, sacred history, secular and modern history, give several instances of testimony on this subject; but the Church has never made an Article of Faith of it; and as to science, in France, it scorns it.”

“What do you think?”

“God’s power, my child, is infinite.”

“Did my godfather ever speak to you about that kind of thing?”

“Yes, often. He had changed his opinion on those matters. His conversion dates from the day, so he has told me twenty times, upon which a woman in Paris heard you praying for him in Nemours, and saw the red dot you had put before Saint-Savinien’s day in your almanac.”

Ursule gave a piercing cry that made the priest shiver; she remembered the scene when, upon his return to Nemours, her godfather had read her mind and had taken away her almanac.

“If that is so,” she said, “my visions are quite possible. My godfather has appeared to me as Jesus did to His disciples. He is enveloped in golden light, he speaks! I wanted to ask you to say a mass for the repose of his soul and implore the help of God so as to stop these apparitions, which tire me out.”

She narrated her three dreams and their most