VOCAL IMITATION, AND VENTRILOQUISM. 



269 



He recollected that there lived at Lyons an old miserly banker, of the 

 name of Cornu, who had accumulated immense wealth by usury and extor- 

 tion, and whose conscience appeared often to be ill at ease, in consequence 

 of the means he had made use of; and it immediately struck him that 

 M. Cornu was the very character that might answer his purpose. 



To Lyons, therefore, he went instantly post-haste, commenced an imme- 

 diate acquaintance with M. Cornu, and on every interview took especial care, 

 on entering into conversation with him, to contrast the pure happiness en- 

 joyed by the man whose conscience could look back, like M. Cornu's, as he 

 was pleased to say, on a life devoted to acts of charity and benevolence, with 

 the horrors of the wretch who had amassed heaps of wealth by usury and 

 injustice, and whose tormented mind only gave him now a foretaste of what 

 he was to expect hereafter. The miser was perpetually desirous of changing 

 the conversation ; but the more he tried, the more his companion pressed 

 upon him with it ; till finding, on one occasion, that he appeared more agi- 

 tated than ever, the ventriloquist conceived such an occasion to be the golden 

 moment for putting his scheme into execution ; and at that instant a low, 

 solemn, sepulchral mutter was heard, as in the former case, which was at 

 last found to be the voice of M. Cornu's father, who had been dead for some 

 years, and which declared him to have passed all this time in the tortures of 

 purgatory, from which he had now just learned that nothing could free him 

 but his son's paying ten thousand crowns into the hands of Lewis Brabant, 

 then with him, for the purpose of redeeming Christian slaves from the hands 

 of the Turks. 



All, as in the last case, was unutterable astonishment ; but Lewis Brabant 

 was the most astonished of the two: modestly declared that now for the first 

 time in his life he was convinced of the possibility of the dead holding con- 

 versation with the living: a-nd admitted that, in truth, he had for many years 

 been benevolently employed in redeeming Christian slaves from the Turks, 

 although his native bashfulness would not allow him to avow it publicly. 



The mind of the old miser was distracted with a thousand contending pas- 

 sions. He was suspicious without having any satisfactory reason for sus- 

 picion ; filial duty prompted him to rescue his father from his abode of 

 misery: but ten thousand crowns was a large sum of money even for such a 

 purpose. He at length resolved to adjourn the meeting till the next day, 

 and to change it to another place. He required time to examine into this 

 mysterious affair, and also wished, as he told his companion, to give his 

 father an opportunity of trying whether he could not bargain for a smaller sum. 



They accordingly separated ; but renewed their meeting the next day with 

 the punctuality of men of business. The place made choice of by M. Cornu, 

 for this rencounter, was an open common in the vicinity of Lyons, where there 

 was neither a house, nor a wall, nor a tree, nor a bush that could conceal a 

 confederate, even if such a person should be in employment. No sooner, 

 however, had they met than the old banker's ears were again assailed with 

 the same hideous and sepulchral cries, upbraiding him for having suffered his 

 father to remain for four-and-twenty hours longer in all the torments of pur- 

 gatory ; denouncing that, unless the demaiid of the ten thousand crowns was 

 instantly complied with, the sum would be doubled ; and that the miser himself 

 would be condemned to the same doleful regions, and to an increased degree of 

 torture. M. Cornu moved a few paces forward, but he was assaulted with still 

 louder shrieks : he advanced a second time, and now instead of hearing his 

 father's voice alone, he was assailed witli the dreadful outcry of a hundred 

 ghosts at once, those of his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his uncles and 

 aunts, and the whole family of the Cornus for the last two or three genera- 

 tions ; who, it seems, were all equally suffering in purgatory — and were 

 included in the general contract for the ten thousand crowns ; all of them 

 beseeching him in the name of every saint in the calendar to have mercy 

 upon them, and to have mercy upon himself. It required more fortitude than 

 M. Cornu possessed to resist the throats and outcries of a hundred and fifty 

 or two hundred ghosts at a time. He instantly paid the ten thousand crowns 



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