LUCILE was tall and remarkably beautiful, but solemn. Her pale face was framed by long black tresses, and she often gazed fixedly at the sky or cast around her with eyes full of sadness or fire. Her gait, her voice, her smile, and even her physiognomy had something dreamy and long suffering about them.
Lucile and I were useless to each other. When we talked about the world, it was the world that we carried within ourselves and that did not resemble the real world. She looked to me as her protector, and I looked to her as my friend. She was subject to black moods that I found very difficult to dispel. At seventeen, she mourned the passing of her youth and wanted nothing so much as to entomb herself in a nunnery. Everything was worrisome to her, everything an anguish or an injury. An expression she sought, or a chimera that she herself had created, could torment her for months on end. I often used to see her lying down with one arm flung above her head, lost in a reverie, motionless and unconscious; her life, having retreated toward her heart, ceased to make any outward appearance: even her breast no longer rose and fell. In her posture, her melancholy, her Venusian beauty, she resembled an ancient funerary spirit. I would try to console her at such times, but a moment later I would be plunged into inexplicable despair.
Lucile preferred to spend her evenings alone, reading some pious sermon or other. Her favorite chapel was the junction of two country roads, marked by a stone cross and a poplar tree whose long stem pointed to the heavens like a pencil. My devout mother, quite delighted by all this, said that her daughter reminded her of a Christian woman of the Early Church, praying at one of those stations called “Laures.”[5]
The concentration of my sister’s soul gave rise to extraordinary mental phenomena. Asleep, she had prophetic dreams; awake, she seemed able to read the future. On one of the landings of the staircase in the high tower, there was a clock that chimed the hours in the silence. Lucile, in her insomnia, would go and sit on a step across from this clock. She would watch its face by the light of a lamp placed on the floor. When the two hands met at midnight, generating in their ominous conjunction the hour of chaos and crime, Lucile would hear noises which gave her visions of faraway deaths. Many years later, finding herself in Paris a few days before the Tenth of August, and staying with my other sisters in the neighborhood of the Carmelite Convent, she cast her eyes on a mirror and cried out, saying, “I have just seen Death coming in.”[6] On the moors of Caledonia, Lucile would have been one of Walter Scott’s mystic women, gifted with second sight; on the moors of Armorica, she was merely a recluse favored with beauty, genius, and misfortune.