A distraught resuscitated
Extracted from Mr. Victor Hugo’s trip to Zeeland
The following episode is taken from the story published by the newspaper La Liberté, of a trip by Mr. Victor Hugo to Holland, in the province of Zeeland. This article can be found in the issue of November 6th, 1867:
“We had just entered the city. I was looking up and calling Stevens’ attention, my car companion, to the picturesque indentation of a succession of Hispano-Flemish roofs when, by his turn, he touched me on the shoulder and pointed me out to watch what was happening on the platform.
A noisy crowd of men, women and children surrounded Victor Hugo. He got out of the car, and escorted by the city authorities, he came forward, looking simply moved, his head uncovered, with two bouquets in his hands and two little girls in white dresses by his side.
Those two girls had just offered him the flowers.
What do you say, in this time of crowned visits and artificial or official cheers, of this singularly triumphant entry of a universally popular man, that arrives unexpectedly in a lost region, whose existence he did not even suspected, and who is there quite naturally in its estates? Who could have made the poet foresee that this unknown little town, whose outline he had regarded with curiosity from afar, was his good town of Ziéricsée?
At dinner, Mr. Van Maenen asked Victor Hugo:
"- Do you know who these two pretty children that gave you the bouquets are?”
" - No.”
"- They are the daughters of a ghost.”
This called for an explanation, and the captain told us the following strange adventure:
It was about a month ago. One evening, at dusk, a car with a man and a little boy was driving into town. It must be said that not long before, this man had lost his wife and one of his children and was very sad. Although he still had two little girls, and the boy he now had with him, he found no consolation and lived in melancholy.
That evening his car was following one of those high, steep causeways that are bordered left and right by a ditch of stagnant and often deep water. The horse, undoubtedly misdirected through the evening mist, suddenly lost its balance, and rolled off the top of the embankment into the ditch, dragging the car, the man, and the child with it.
There was in this group of rushed creatures a moment of dreadful anguish, that nobody witnessed, and a dark and desperate effort towards salvation. But the engulfment was done with the jumble of the fall, and everything disappeared in the cesspool, that closed again with the thick slowness of the mud.
Only the child, miraculously left out of the ditch, cried, and called out miserably, waving his little arms. Two peasants, who were crossing a field of madder at some distance from there, heard he boy and ran up. They took the child away.
The child cried: “My daddy! my dad! I want my daddy! "
"- And where is your daddy?”
“There,” said the child, pointing to the ditch.
The two peasants understood and set to work. After a quarter of an hour, they removed the broken car; after half an hour they removed the dead horse. The little one was still screaming and asking for his father.
At last, after renewed efforts, from the same hole in the ditch where the carriage and the horse were, they fished and brought out of the water something inert and fetid that was entirely black and covered with mud: it was the corpse of the father.
All that had taken about an hour. The child's despair redoubled; he did not want his father to be dead. The peasants believed him to be dead, however; but as the child begged them and grabbed them, and they were good people, they tried, to calm the little one, something that is always done in such a case in the country, and began to roll the drowned in the madder field.
They rolled him like that for a good quarter of an hour. Nothing changed. They rolled him over again. Same stillness. The little one followed and wept. They did it a third time, and they were about to give up for good, when they thought the corpse was moving an arm. They continued. The other arm twitched. They persisted. The whole body gave vague signs of life, and the dead man began to resuscitate slowly.
This is extraordinary, isn't it? Well! Here is what is even more unexpected. The man sighed for a long time as he came to life and cried out in despair: “Ah! my God! What have you done? I was so good where I was. I was with my wife, with my son. They had come to me, and I to them. I saw them, I was in heavenb, I was in the light. Ah! My God! What have you done? I am no longer dead!"
The man who spoke like that had just spent an hour in the marsh. He had a broken arm and severe contusions.
“He was brought back to the city, and he has just recovered," added Mr. Van Maenen, finishing this story. It is Mr. D ..., one of the highest intelligences, not only of Zeeland, but of Holland. He's one of our best lawyers. Everyone respects and honors him here. When he learned, Mr. Victor Hugo, that you were going to pass through the city, he absolutely wanted to get up from his bed, that he had not yet left for a month, and he did his first outing today to meet you and introduce you to his two little daughters, to whom he had given bouquets for you.
There was a unanimous cry from all over the table.
“These are things that only happen in Zeeland! Travelers don't come here, but locals revive.”
“He should have been invited to dinner," ventured the female part of the table.
"- Invite him! I cried; but we were already twelve! Now was not exactly the time to invite a ghost. Would you like, ladies, to see a dead as the thirteenth.”
"- There are," said Victor Hugo, who had remained silent, "two enigmas in this story, the enigma of the body and that of the soul. I do not undertake to explain the first nor to say how it is possible that a man remains engulfed for a whole hour in a cesspool, without death ensuing. Asphyxiation, it must be believed, is a phenomenon that is still poorly understood. But what I understand admirably is the lamentation of this soul. What! She had already left the earthly life, from this shadow, from this soiled body, from those black lips, from this black ditch! She had started the charming escape. Through the mud she had reached the surface of the cesspool, and there, still barely attached by the last feather of his wing, to that horrible last sigh strangled with mud, she was already silently inhaling the ineffable freshness of life outside. She could already fly to her lost loves and reach the woman and rise to the child. Suddenly, the semi-escapee shudders; she feels that the earthly bond, instead of being completely broken, is renewed, and that instead of ascending with the light, she suddenly descends again in the night, and that she, the soul, is violently returned to the corpse. Thus, she utters a terrible cry.”
"What results from this to me," added Victor Hugo, "is that the soul can remain for a certain time above the body, in a floating state, no longer being a prisoner and not being freed yet. This floating state is agony, it is lethargy. The rattle is the soul that rushes out of the open mouth and falls back at times, and that shakes, panting, until she breaks the vaporous thread of the last breath. It seems that I see her. She struggles, she half escapes from the lips, she returns to them, she escapes again, then she gives a great flap of the wing, and there she goes, flying away in one gulp and disappearing into the immense azure. She's free. But sometimes also the dying person comes back to life: then the desperate soul returns to the dying person. The dream sometimes gives us the sensation of these strange comings and goings of the prisoner. The dreams are the few daily steps that the soul takes outside of us. Until it has finished its time in the body, the soul makes, every night, in our sleep, the tour of the playground of the dream.”
Paul de la Miltière”
The fact in itself is eminently Spiritist, as one can see; but if there is anything more Spiritist still, it is the explanation given by Mr. Victor Hugo; one would say it was drawn verbatim from the doctrine; it is, moreover, not the first time that he has expressed himself in this direction. We remember the charming speech he gave, almost three years ago, at the tomb of the young Emily Putron (Spiritist Review, February 1865); certainly, the most convinced Spiritist would not speak otherwise. All that is missing from such thoughts is the word; but what does the word matter if the ideas are accredited? Mr. Victor Hugo, by his authorized name, is a popularizer. And yet, those who applaud him ridicule Spiritism, a new proof that they do not know what it consists of. If they knew it, they would not treat the same idea as madness in some, and sublime truth in others.
