It is very astonishing that others can thus penetrate into the last
refuge of our being and there, better than ourselves, read thoughts and
sentiments at times forgotten or rejected, but always long-lived, or as
yet unformulated. It is really disconcerting that a stranger should see
further than ourselves into our own hearts. That sheds a singular light
on the nature of our inner lives. It is vain for us to keep watch upon
ourselves, to shut ourselves up within ourselves: our consciousness is
not watertight, it escapes, it does not belong to us; and, though it
requires special circumstances for another to instal himself there and
take possession of it, nevertheless it is certain that, in normal life,
our spiritual tribunal, our _for intérieur_--as the French have called
it, with that profound intuition which we often discover in the
etymology of words--is a kind of _forum_, or spiritual market-place, in
which the majority of those who have business there come and go at will,
look about them and pick out the truths, in a very different fashion and
much more freely than we would have believed.
But let us leave this point, which is not the object of our study. What
I should like to unravel in Julia's predictions is the unknown part
foreign to myself. Did she go beyond what I knew? I do not think so.
When she spoke to me of the fortunate issue of the affair, this was,
upon the whole, the issue which I anticipated and which the selfish and
unavowed part of my instinct desired more keenly than the complete
triumph which another and more generous sentiment made it incumbent on
me to pursue and hope for, although I knew it to be, in its essence,
impossible. When she foretold the death of my adversary, she was but
revealing a secret wish of that same instinct, one of those dastardly
and shameful wishes which we hide from ourselves and which never rise to
the surface of our thought. There would be no real prophecy in this,
except if, against all expectation, against all likelihood, that death
should occur, suddenly, within a short time hence. But, even if it were
shortly to occur, it would not, I think, be the Pythian that would have
fathomed the Future, but I, my instinct, my unconscious being, that
would have foreseen an event with which it was connected. It would have
read the pages of Time, not absolutely and as though in an universal
book where all that is to take place is written, but by me, through me,
in my private intuition, and would but have translated what my
unconsciousness was unable to communicate to my thought.
It was the same, I imagine, with the two persons who went to consult
her. That one to whom she foretold the death of a friend probably, in
spite of the assurance which reason gave to friendship, had the inner
conviction, either natural or conjectural, but violently suppressed,
that the sick man would die; and it was this conviction which the
clairvoyant discerned amid the sweet hopes that strove to deceive it. As
for the second, who unexpectedly recovered a mislaid object, it is
difficult to know the state of another's mind with sufficient exactness
to decide whether this was a case of second sight, or simply of
recollection. Was he who had lost the object absolutely ignorant of the
place and circumstances in which he had lost it? He says so; he declares
that he never had the least notion: that, on the contrary, he was
persuaded that the object had been not mislaid, but stolen, and that he
had never ceased to suspect one of his servants. But it is possible
that, while his intelligence, his waking _ego_, paid no attention to it,
the unconscious and as though sleeping portion of himself may very well
have remarked and remembered the place where the object had been put.
Thence, by a miracle no less surprising, but of a different order, the
seer would have found and awakened the latent and almost animal memory
and brought it to human light which it had vainly tried to reach.