CHAPTER IV

Absurd Ideas of Madame D’Urfe on My Supernatural Powers—­Marriage of My Brother—­I Conceive a Plan on His Wedding Day—­I Go to Holland on a Financial Mission—­The Jew Boaz Gives Me a Lesson—­M. d’Afri—­Esther—­Another Casanova—­I Find Therese Imer Again

By the time that the Prince du Turenne had recovered from the small-pox and the Count de la Tour d’Auvergne had left him, the latter, knowing his aunt’s taste for the occult sciences, was not surprised to find me become her confident and most intimate friend.

I was glad so see him and all the relations of the marchioness at dinner, as I was delighted with the courtesy with which they treated me.  I am referring more especially to her brothers mm. de Pont-Carre and de Viarme who had lately been chosen head of the trade companies, and his son.  I have already spoken of Madame du Chatelet, the marchioness’s daughter, but an unlucky lawsuit separated them, and she no longer formed one of the family circle.

De la Tour d’Auvergne having been obliged to rejoin his regiment which was in garrison in Brittany, the marchioness and I dined together almost every day and people looked upon me as her husband, and despite the improbability of the supposition this was the only way in which they could account for the long hours we spent together.  Madame d’Urfe thought that I was rich and looked upon my position at the lottery as a mere device for preserving my incognito.

I was the possessor in her estimation, not only of the philosopher’s stone, but also of the power of speaking with the whole host of elementary spirits; from which premises she drew the very logical deduction that I could turn the world upside down if I liked, and be the blessing or the plague of France; and she thought my object in remaining incognito was to guard myself from arrest and imprisonment; which according to her would be the inevitable result of the minister’s discovering my real character.  These wild notions were the fruit of the nocturnal revelations of her genius, that is, of the dreams of her disordered spirit, which seemed to her realities.  She did not seem to think that if I was endowed as she supposed no one would have been able to arrest me, in the first place, because I should have had foreknowledge of the attempt, and in the second place because my power would have been too strong for all bolts and bars.  All this was clear enough, but strong passion and prejudice cannot reason.

One day, in the course of conversation, she said, with the utmost seriousness, that her genius had advised her that not even I had power to give her speech with the spirits, since she was a woman, and the genii only communicated with men, whose nature is more perfect.  Nevertheless, by a process which was well known to me, I might make her soul pass into the body of a male child born of the mystic connection between a mortal and an immortal, or, in other words, between an ordinary man and a woman of a divine nature.