"Instantly Catherine beheld a figure, exactly resembling her son, appear in the glass before her, and with a slow and mournful step take one turn round the chamber and begin another; but before it was much more than half completed, he disappeared suddenly; and another figure succeeded, in which she instantly recognised her second son, afterwards Charles IX. He encircled the hall fourteen times, with a quick and irregular pace. After him came Henry III., who nearly completed fifteen circles; when suddenly another figure, supposed to be that of the Duke of Guise, came suddenly before him, and both disappearing together, left the hall void, seemingly intimating to the queen that there her posterity should end. There stands the mirror," he added, "but its powers are gone."
I approached the large ancient mirror with its carved ebony frame, to which he pointed, and looked into it for a moment, my mind glancing back to the days of Catherine de Medicis and her gay and vicious court; and binding the present to the past, with that fine vague line of associations whose thrilling vibrations form as it were the music of memory; when suddenly, as if the old magician still exercised his power upon his own mirror, the stately form of a lady dressed in long robes of black velvet rose up before me in the glass; and with a start which showed how much my imagination was already excited, I turned round and beheld the Countess de Soissons.
Without waiting for the reprimand which, I doubted not, she intended to bestow upon me, I apologised for having been rude enough to go anywhere without first having paid my respects to herself, alleging business of an important nature as my excuse.
"And pray, what important business can such a great man as yourself have in our poor capital?" demanded the Countess, with a look of haughty scorn, that had well nigh put to flight my whole provision of politeness.
"I believe, Madam," replied I, after a moment's pause, "that Monsieur le Comte your son informed you, by a note which I delivered, that I had to come to Paris on affairs which he thought fit to intrust to me."
"And a pretty personage he chose," interrupted the Countess. "But I come not here to hear your excuses, youth. Has Signor Vanoni told you the important purpose for which I commanded you to meet me here?"
I replied that he had not done so fully; and she proceeded to inform me, that the learned Italian, having been furnished by her with all the astrological particulars of my birth, which she had obtained from my mother many years before, and also having received those of the birth of her own son the Count de Soissons, he had chosen that evening for the purpose of consulting the stars concerning our future fate.
It is needless to go through all the proceedings of the astrologer, his prediction being the only interesting part of the ceremony. This he delivered without any affectation or mummery, as the mere effect of calculations; and his very plainness had something in it much more convincing than any assumption of mystery; for it left me convinced of his own sincere belief in what he stated. I forget the precise terms of his prophecy in regard to the Count de Soissons; suffice it, that it was such as left room for an easy construction to be put upon it, shadowing out what was really the after-fate of the Prince to whom it related. In regard to myself, he informed me that dangers and difficulties awaited me, more fearful and more painful than any I had hitherto encountered; but that with fortitude I should surmount them all; and he added, that if I still lived after one month from that day, my future fate looked clear and smiling. All who sought my life, he said farther, should die by my hand, or fail in their attempt, and that in marriage I should meet both wealth, and rank, and beauty.
Absurd as I knew the whole system to be, yet I own--man's weaknesses form perhaps the most instructive part of his history, and therefore it is, I say it--absurd, as I knew the whole system to be, yet I could not help pondering over this latter part of the prediction, and endeavoured to reconcile it in my own mind with the probabilities of the future. My Helen had beauty, I knew too well. Wealth, I had heard attributed to her; and rank, the Prince had promised to obtain. Oh man, man! thou art a strange, weak being; and thy boasted reason is but a glorious vanity, which serves thee little till thy passions have left thee, and then conducts thee to a grave!
Hope, in my breast but a drowning swimmer, clung to a straw--to worse--a bubble.