An article in le LibÉral informed the town of… that it possessed a prophetess. This was Mademoiselle Claude Deniseau, daughter of a man who kept a registry for country servants. Up to the age of seventeen Mademoiselle Deniseau had not revealed to the closest observer any abnormality of mind or body. She was a fair, fat, short girl, neither pretty nor ugly, but pleasant and of a lively disposition. “She had received,” said le LibÉral, “a good middle-class education, and she was religious without bigotry.” At the beginning of her eighteenth year, on the 3rd of February, 189–, at six o’clock in the evening, being engaged in laying the cloth on the table in the dining-room, she thought she heard her mother’s voice saying, “Claudine, go to your room.” She went there and between the bed and the door she perceived a bright light, and heard a voice which spoke from the light, saying: “Claudine, this country must do penance, for that will ward off great misfortunes. I am Saint Radegonde, Queen of France.” Mademoiselle Deniseau then descried in the splendour a luminous and, as it were, transparent face that wore a crown of gold and gems.

After that Saint Radegonde came every day to converse with Mademoiselle Deniseau, to whom she revealed secrets and made prophecies. She had foretold the frosts that blighted the vine in blossom, and revealed that M. Rieu, curÉ of Sainte-AgnÈs, would not see the Easter festival. The venerable M. Rieu actually died on Holy Thursday. For the Republic and for France she never ceased to foretell terrible disasters close at hand—fires, floods, massacres. But God, wearied of chastising a faithless people, would at last, under a king, bring back peace and prosperity to it. The saint diagnosed and cured diseases. Under her inspiration, Mademoiselle Deniseau had told Jobelin, the road-mender, of an ointment which had cured him of an anchylosis of the knee. Jobelin had been able to resume his work again.

These marvels attracted a crowd of inquirers to the flat inhabited by the Deniseau family in the Place Saint-ExupÈre, above the tramway office. The young girl was studied by ecclesiastics, retired officers, and doctors of medicine. They believed that they noticed, when she was repeating the words of Saint Radegonde, that her voice became deeper, her expression sterner, and that her limbs became rigid. They also noticed that she used expressions which are not customary with young girls, and that her words could be explained by no natural means.

M. le prÉfet Worms-Clavelin, at first indifferent and scoffing, soon followed the extraordinary success of the prophetess with anxiety, for she announced the end of the Republic and the return of France to a Christian monarchy.

M. Worms-Clavelin had entered office at the time of the scandals at the ÉlysÉe under President GrÉvy. Since then he had participated in those cases of corruption that are endlessly being hushed up and as constantly revived to the great detriment of Parliament and the public authority. And this spectacle, which seemed natural to him, had ingrafted in his mind a profound feeling of laxity, which spread from him to all his subordinates. A senator and two deputies from his department were being threatened with legal proceedings. The most influential members of the party, engineers and financiers, were either in prison or in hiding. Under these circumstances, satisfied that the people were attached to the republican rule, he expected from them neither enthusiasm nor deference, which seemed to him but old-fashioned qualities and the empty symbols of a vanished age. Events had enlarged his naturally limited intelligence. The vast irony of things had passed into his soul, making it easy-going, mocking, indifferent. Having recognised, moreover, that the electoral committees constituted the only real authority that still subsisted in the department, he obeyed them with a semblance of zeal and with secret opposition. If he executed their orders, it was not without a considerable modification of their rigour. In a word, from opportunist he had become liberal and progressive. He willingly allowed liberty of speech and action. But he was too wise to allow any unbearable excesses, and, like a conscientious official, he took good care that the government should not receive any glaring insult, and that the ministers should peaceably enjoy that common attitude of indifference which, by gaining over their friends as well as their enemies, ensured at the same time both their power and their repose.

It pleased him that the governmental papers and the opposition ones, both being compromised by financial transactions, should be utterly discredited, alike as to their praise and their blame. The socialist sheet, being the only independent one, was also the only violent one. But it was very poor; and the fear which it inspired drove people back towards the government. Thus M. le prÉfet Worms-Clavelin was entirely sincere when he informed the Home Secretary that the political situation was excellent in his department. And here was the prophetess of the Place Saint-ExupÈre destroying the harmony of this happy state. Under the direction of Saint Radegonde, she announced the fall of the ministry, the dissolution of Parliament, the resignation of the President of the Republic, and the collapse of a discredited government. She was much more violent than le LibÉral and far more influential. For le LibÉral drew but few, while the whole town thronged around Mademoiselle Deniseau. The clergy, the large landowners, the nobility, the clerical press, hung upon her and drank in her words. Saint Radegonde rallied the defeated enemies of the Republic and brought together the “Conservatives.” A harmless rally, but inconvenient. M. Worms-Clavelin was especially afraid lest a Paris paper should noise the affair about. “It would then assume,” said he to himself, “the proportions of a scandal and would expose me to a reprimand from the minister.” He resolved to look for the quietest way of silencing Mademoiselle Deniseau, and first began to make inquiries as to the character of her relations.

Her father’s family was not much respected in the town. The Deniseaux were people of no position. Mademoiselle Claude’s father kept a registry office, the reputation of which was neither better nor worse than that of other registries. Masters and servants complained of it, but still made use of it. In 1871 Deniseau had had the Commune proclaimed in the Place Saint-ExupÈre. Somewhat later, upon the expulsion of three Dominicans at the point of the sword, he had offered resistance to the gendarmes, and had got himself arrested. Next he had stood at municipal elections as a socialist, and had only obtained a very small number of votes. He was hot-headed and weak-minded, but believed to be honest.

The mother was a Nadal. The Nadals, in a better position than the Deniseaux, were small agricultural proprietors, all much respected. One of the Nadals, an aunt to Mademoiselle Claude, being subject to hallucinations, had been shut up in an asylum for some years. The Nadals were religious and had clerical connections. M. Worms-Clavelin could learn nothing more about them.

One morning he had a conversation on this subject with his private secretary, M. Lacarelle, who belonged to an old family in the neighbourhood and knew the department well.

“My dear Lacarelle, we must put an end to this madness. For it is plain that Mademoiselle Deniseau is mad.”

Lacarelle replied gravely, not without the kind of arrogance inseparable from his long fair moustaches.

“Monsieur le prÉfet, opinions are divided with respect to this, and many people believe that Mademoiselle Deniseau is perfectly sane.”

“After all, Lacarelle, you do not believe that Saint Radegonde comes every morning to chat with her and to drag the head of the State, along with the Government, down into the mire.”

But Lacarelle was of opinion that there had been exaggeration, that ill-disposed persons were making the most of an extraordinary manifestation. It really was extraordinary that Mademoiselle Deniseau should prescribe sovereign remedies for incurable diseases; she had cured Jobelin, the road-mender, and an old bailiff called Favru. That was not all. She foretold events that fell out as she had said.

“I can vouch for one fact, monsieur le prÉfet. Last week Mademoiselle Deniseau said: ‘There is a treasure hidden in a field called Faifeu, at Noiselles.’ They dug at the place described and discovered a great slab of stone which blocked the entrance of an underground passage.”

“But, still,” cried the prÉfet, “you cannot maintain that Saint Radegonde…”

He stopped, thoughtful and questioning. He was profoundly ignorant of the saintly legends of Christian Gaul and of the national antiquities of France. But at school he had studied text-books of history. He was struggling to recall his boyish recollections.

“Saint Radegonde was the mother of Saint Louis?” M. Lacarelle, who knew more history, only hesitated a moment.

“No,” said he, “the mother of Saint Louis was Blanche of Castille. Saint Radegonde was an earlier queen.”

“Well, she cannot be allowed to perform her conjuring tricks in the county town. And you, my dear Lacarelle, you ought to make her father understand—this Deniseau, I mean to say—that he has nothing to do but to give a good flogging to his daughter and put her under lock and key.”

Lacarelle smoothed his Gallic moustaches.

“Monsieur le prÉfet, I advise you to go and see this Deniseau girl. She is interesting. She will give you a private sitting quite to yourself.”

“You can’t mean it, Lacarelle! Fancy my going to be instructed by a little hussy that my Government is on the point of collapse!”

M. le prÉfet Worms-Clavelin was not credulous. He only thought of religion from a political point of view. He had inherited no creed from his parents, who were aliens to every superstition, as they were to every land. His soul had sucked none of the nourishment of the past from any soil. He remained empty, colourless, unfettered. Through metaphysical incompetency and the instinctive feeling for action and acquisition, he clung to tangible truth, and in all good faith believed himself to be a positivist. Having but lately drunk his bocks in the cafÉs at Montmartre in the company of chemists with political opinions, he still preserved a blind trustfulness in scientific methods, which he in his turn extolled in the lodges to the leading spirits among the freemasons. He enjoyed embellishing his political intrigues and administrative expedients with the fair appearance of sociological experiment. And the more useful science was to him the better he appreciated it. “I profess,” said he in all sincerity, “that unquestioning faith in facts which constitutes the scientist, the sociologist.” And it was just because he only believed in facts and because he professed the creed of positivism that the affair of the Sibyl began to worry him.

His private secretary, M. Lacarelle, had said to him: “This young woman has cured a road-mender and a bailiff. These are facts. She has pointed out the place where they would discover a treasure, and they really found in that place a trap-door to the opening of a subterranean passage. That is a fact. She foretold the failure of the vines. That is a fact.”

M. le prÉfet Worms-Clavelin had the instinct of mockery and a sense of humour, but this word fact exercised a spell over his mind; and it occurred vaguely to his memory that doctors like Charcot had made observations in the hospitals on sick people gifted with extraordinary powers. He remembered certain curious phenomena of hysteria and cases of second sight. He wondered whether Mademoiselle Deniseau were not a sufficiently interesting hysteric patient for her to be handed over to the experts in mental cases, which would rid the town of her.

He thought:

“I might give an official order for the consignment of this girl to an asylum, as in the case of any person whose mental derangement forms a danger to public order and personal safety; but the enemies of the government would squeal like polecats, and I can already hear lawyer Lerond charging me with unlawful committal. The plot must be unravelled, if the clericals of the county town have concocted one. For it is not to be endured that Mademoiselle Deniseau should declare every day, as the mouthpiece of Saint Radegonde, that the Republic is sinking into the mire. I grant that some regrettable deeds have been done. Certain partial changes will force themselves on us, especially in national representation, but, thank God, the government is still strong enough for me to support it.”