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The Life of a Sensitive – Madame Michael Bouissou

Suddenly, emerging from my sleepy boredom, I began to listen to an obviously very exciting story which my Uncle Andre de M- was telling to some young women.  A writer and learned historian, he has left behind several works on events and characters in the by-ways of history.  The best known and most charming is his study of Madame de Souza.

He was my mother's first cousin and, in common with all the members of his family possessed the gift of telling the most simple stories with a great deal of wit.

Inclined to mockery and subtle irony, he would at times leave his audience in some doubt as to the exact meaning of the charming story they had just heard. The particular tale he was telling that day, to which I listened spellbound, was a gloomy ghost story. While staying with friends in the country he had suddenly, in the middle of the night, felt his pillow and bolster lifted by an irresistible force and a cold draught of air pass over his face. Quickly lighting the candle at the head of his bed he could see nothing unusual; straightening the pillows and replacing them, he snuffed the candle and lay down once more; immediately the pillows began to move again. Tired of lighting and extinguishing his candle and also tired of this strange gymnastic display, he got out of bed and went to lie down in a big armchair. The rest of the night was quite peaceful, but on the following morning my uncle told his host of his strange experiences. With an embarrassed smile, and apologising for this unpleasant adventure, his host told him that a forbear, whose selfishness and sordid avarice had driven her relatives to despair, had lived and died in that very room. She had threatened them that she would never leave the room and would return to haunt it as a ghost.

"Unfortunately," added my uncle in a very quiet voice, wiping his moustache delicately with a napkin, "the poor woman was apparently monstrously ugly."