Shortly after this the bloody battle of Borodino was fought, and Napoleon, with his army, appeared before the gates of Moscow. The hundred-towered city was abandoned by the Russians and was given over to the flames.
Years afterward this same nun thus told her story, as printed in the “Revue des Deux Mondes”:
“Every night the Comet blazed in the Heavens, and we all asked ourselves: What misfortune does it bring? Then the enemy came, and our sacred city was put to the torch. Our convent, together with all other cloisters, monasteries and churches, was burned to the ground.”
Many other writers of the time who saw the great Comets that blazoned Napoleon’s destructive wars have recorded how they were universally taken as omens of the great conqueror’s bloody trail.
Napoleon himself gloried in this dread omen and hailed the Comet as his “guiding star.”
All this has been fully set forth by the famous French astronomer Messier, a latter-day observer of Halley’s Comet, who wrote a special book on “The Wonderful Comet which appeared at the Birth of Napoleon the Great.”
As for the many Comets that have blazed down upon other great conquerors and other bloody wars, before the comparatively recent Comets of the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars, they are all set down in a special History of Comets.
In this great work, entitled “A History of All Comets,” the Latin scholar Lubienitius has pointed out all the calamities and dire events which attended the appearance of each and every Comet recorded in history.
THE EFFECTS OF COMETS ON MAN
Some thinkers have pointed out that there has often been a direct connection between the feelings produced in the human soul by the appearance of a Comet and the human deeds of violence or the human epidemics and excessive mortality following the widespread terror produced by Comets.