“I was there nearly three-quarters of an hour, conversing with Desfontaines.  ‘I promised you,’ said he to me, ’that if I died before you I would come and tell you of it.  I was drowned the day before yesterday in the river of Caen, at nearly this same hour.  I was out walking with such and such a one.  It was very warm, and we had a wish to bathe; a faintness seized me in the water, and I fell to the bottom.  The Abbe de Menil-Jean, my comrade, dived to bring me up.  I seized hold of his foot; but whether he was afraid it might be a salmon, because I held him so fast, or that he wished to remount promptly to the surface of the water, he shook his legs so roughly, that he gave me a violent kick on the breast, which sent me to the bottom of the river, which is there very deep.’

“Desfontaines related to me afterwards all that had occurred to them in their walk, and the subjects they had conversed upon.  It was in vain for me to ask him questions—­whether he was saved, whether he was damned, if he was in purgatory, if I was in a state of grace, and if I should soon follow him; he continued to discourse as if he had not heard me, and as if he would not hear me.

“I approached him several times to embrace him, but it seemed to me that I embraced nothing, and yet I felt very sensibly that he held me tightly by the arm, and that when I tried to turn away my head that I might not see him, because I could not look at him without feeling afflicted, he shook my arm as if to oblige me to look at and listen to him.

“He always appeared to me taller than I had seen him, and taller even than he was at the time of his death, although he had grown during the eighteen months in which we had not met.  I beheld him always naked to the middle of his body, his head uncovered, with his fine hair, and a white scroll twisted in his hair over his forehead, on which there was some writing, but I could only make out the word In....

“It was his usual tone of voice.  He appeared to me neither gay nor sad, but in a calm and tranquil state.  He begged of me, when his brother returned, to tell him certain things to say to his father and mother.  He begged me to say the Seven Psalms which had been given him as a penance the preceding Sunday, which he had not yet recited; again he recommended me to speak to his brother, and then he bade me adieu, saying, as he left me, ‘Jusques, jusques’ (till, till), which was the usual term he made use of when at the end of our walk we bade each other good-bye, to go home.

“He told me that at the time he was drowned, his brother, who was writing a translation, regretted having let him go without accompanying him, fearing some accident.  He described to me so well where he was drowned, and the tree in the avenue of Louvigni on which he had written a few words, that two years afterwards, being there with the late Chevalier de Getel, one of these who were with him at the time he