Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/353



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That very night, Ursule had an apparition which took place in a strange way.

It seemed to her that her bed was in the cemetery at Nemours, and that her uncle’s grave was at the foot of her bed. The white stone on which she read the inscription dazzled her most intensely in opening like the oblong cover of an album. She uttered piercing cries, but her uncle’s spirit slowly stood up. First she saw the yellow head and the shining white hair surrounded by a sort of halo. The eyes were like two rays beneath the bare forehead, and he was rising, as if impelled by some superior power. Ursule trembled dreadfully in her bodily exterior, her flesh was like a burning garment and there seemed, she said later on, to be another self moving within her.

“Godfather, have mercy!” she said.

“Mercy? there is no longer time,” he said in the voice of the dead, according to the inexplicable expression of the poor girl when relating this fresh dream to the Abbé Chaperon. “He has been warned, he has not paid attention to the warnings. His son’s days are numbered. If he has not confessed all, restored all within a short time, he will mourn his son, who will die a horrible and violent death. Let him know it!”