Looking the room well over that he might seem to have a reason for his visit, the doctor saw at once how the windows looked into those of Madame de Portenduere.  During the night he had meditated as to the course he ought to pursue with Ursula about his discovery of this dawning passion.  To question her now would commit him to some course.  He must either approve or disapprove of her love; in either case his position would be a false one.  He therefore resolved to watch and examine into the state of things between the two young people, and learn whether it were his duty to check the inclination before it was irresistible.  None but an old man could have shown such deliberate wisdom.  Still panting from the discovery of the truth of these magnetic facts, he turned about and looked at all the various little things around the room; he wished to examine the almanac which was hanging at a corner of the chimney-piece.

“These ugly things are too heavy for your little hands,” he said, taking up the marble candlesticks which were partly covered with leather.

He weighed them in his hand; then he looked at the almanac and took it, saying, “This is ugly too.  Why do you keep such a common thing in your pretty room?”

“Oh, please let me have it, godfather.”

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

So saying he carried off this possible proof, shut himself up in his study, looked for Saint Savinien and found, as the somnambulist had told him, a little red dot at the 19th of October; he also saw another before his own saint’s day, Saint Denis, and a third before Saint John, the abbe’s patron.  This little dot, no larger than a pin’s head, had been seen by the sleeping woman in spite of distance and other obstacles!  The old man thought till evening of these events, more momentous for him than for others.  He was forced to yield to evidence.  A strong wall, as it were, crumbled within him; for his life had rested on two bases,—­indifference in matters of religion and a firm disbelief in magnetism.  When it was proved to him that the senses —­faculties purely physical, organs, the effects of which could be explained—­attained to some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism upset, or at least it seemed to him to upset, the powerful arguments of Spinoza.  The finite and the infinite, two incompatible elements according to that remarkable man, were here united, the one in the other.  No matter what power he gave to the divisibility and mobility of matter he could not help recognizing that it possessed qualities that were almost divine.

He was too old now to connect those phenomena to a system, and compare them with those of sleep, of vision, of light.  His whole scientific belief, based on the assertions of the school of Locke and Condillac, was in ruins.  Seeing his hollow ideas in pieces, his scepticism staggered.  Thus the advantage in this struggle between the Catholic child and the Voltairean old man was on Ursula’s side.  In the dismantled fortress, above these ruins, shone a light; from the center of these ashes issued the path of prayer!  Nevertheless, the obstinate old scientist fought his doubts.  Though struck to the heart, he would not decide, he struggled on against God.