Laura Read Online Free PDF Page B

ceiling and that they were enveloping me like a cloud. At first I experienced a tiresome sensation like that of a fainting fit; but little by little the cloud lightened, spread out over a vast space and gently transported me onto the rounded top of a mountain, whose centre was all at once filled with a lively, red-gold blaze of light which enabled me to see Laura, seated beside me.
    Friend, she said, talking to me in that language which she alone knew, and which had the gift of revealing itself to me suddenly, do not believe a word of what I said to you in front of our uncle. It is he who dreamed up this fable to prevent you from being distracted from your studies , seeing that we loved each other and that you were still too young to marry; but have no fear, I do not love Walter, and I shall never belong to anyone but you.
    Ah! my dear Laura! I cried out, at last you have become radiant again with love and beauty, as I saw you in the amethyst! Yes, I believe, I know that you love me, and thatnothing can pull us apart. So why, in our family, do you always appear so incredulous or mocking?
    I could also ask you, she replied, why in our family I see you as ugly, awkward, ridiculous, and poorly dressed, while in the crystal, you are as handsome as an angel and draped in the colours of the rainbow; but I do not ask you that, I know.
    Teach it to me, Laura! You who know everything, give me the secret of appearing to you always and everywhere as you see me here.
    My dear Alexis, it is with this as it is with all the secrets of the sciences you call natural: one who knows them can tell you that things are, and how they are; but when it is a question of why, everyone has his own opinion. I shall willingly tell you my opinion of the strange phenomenon which places us here together in broad daylight, while, in the world called the world of facts, we now see each other only through the shadows of relative life; but my opinion will be nothing but my opinion, and, if I told you it anywhere but here, you would regard me as a madwoman.
    Tell it to me, Laura; it seems to me that here we are in the world of the real, and that elsewhere everything is illusion and lies.
    Then, beautiful Laura spoke to me thus:
    You must be aware that within each one of us who inhabit the earth there are two manifestations that are very distinct in reality, although they are confused in the notion of our terrestrial life. If consequently we believe that our senses are limited and our appreciation incomplete , we have only one soul, or, to speak like Walter, a certain animism destined to be extinguished with thefunctions of our organs. If, on the contrary, we raise ourselves above the sphere of the positive and the palpable, a mysterious, unnamed, invincible sense tells us that our self is not only in our organs, but that it is indissolubly linked to the life of the universe, and that it must survive intact beyond what we call death.
    “What I remind you of here is not new: in all religious or metaphysical forms, men have believed and will always believe in the persistence of the self; but my idea, mine which I tell you about in the land of the ideal, is that this immortal self is contained only partially in the visible man. The visible man is merely the result of an emanation from the invisible man, and this, the true unit of his soul, the real, durable and divine face of his life, remains veiled to him.
    “Where is it and what does it do, this flower of the eternal spirit, while the body’s soul accomplishes its difficult , austere life of but a day? It is somewhere in time and space, since space and time are conditions of all life. In time, it preceded human life, and will survive after it, it accompanies and watches over it up to a certain point; but it is not dependent upon it and does not count its days and its hours within the same framework. In space, it certainly enjoys a feasible and frequent relationship with the human self; but it is not its slave,