Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/339

 trifling details, insisting upon the absolute truth of the facts, the facility of her movements, and the somnambulism of an inner self, which, she said, moved about under the spirit’s guidance with the greatest ease.

The priest, knowing Ursule’s truthfulness, was not a little surprised at the accurate description of the room formerly occupied by Zélie Minoret in her post-house, in which Ursule had never been, and of which, in fact, she had never even heard.

“By what means can these strange apparitions take place?” said Ursule. “What did my godfather think of it?”

“Your godfather, my child, went by hypothesis. He had admitted the existence of a spiritual world, a world of ideas. If ideas are a production peculiar to man, if they subsist upon a life which is their own, they might have shapes that are imperceptible to our outward senses, but perceptible to our inward senses when they are in certain conditions. And so your godfather’s ideas may envelop you, and perhaps you have invested them with his semblance. Then, if Minoret has committed these acts, they resolve themselves into ideas; for all action is the result of several ideas. Now, if ideas move in the spiritual world your spirit must have perceived them by penetrating into it. These phenomena are not more extraordinary than those of memory, and those of memory are as surprising and unaccountable as those of the perfume of plants, which may be the ideas of the plant.”