[83] Whereabouts are we?
[84] He will not die for that.
[85] Bed is the strength of a sick person.
[86] I have five to seven for me.
CHAP. XX.
I have mentioned the strong emotion which I felt in passing through the village of St. Clair betwixt Rouen and Pontoise, as also the surprise excited by the view of the features of an infant Jesus drawn by my departed son immediately after his return from England. It is now the proper time to explain to what I then referred. In saying that I alluded to a dream, I know that I expose myself to ridicule: to pay regard to dreams is justly considered as a sign of imbecillity of mind, and generally condemned as superstitious: how far I may be exempted from these censures by the prophetic nature of my dream, I leave to be determined by those who shall compare it with the events lately narrated, which seem to me to form a striking and full interpretation of it. I no more affect the character of a dreamer, than that of a visionary: but I am not deterred, by the fear of being laughed at, from believing, in the case of the vision, the evidence of my senses, and that a dream, portraying things future, ought to be distinguished from the ordinary phenomena of that inexplicable faculty, (if that which is involuntarily exercised may be called a faculty,) of our fearful and wonderful nature.
On Thursday, the 27th of November, 1817, being then at Lincoln, I dreamed that I was in a large, lofty room, which was entirely unknown to me.
In the month of October, 1818, I hired a house at Avignon in which was a salon, exactly resembling that of the dream; the situation of the doors, windows, and chimney, and the appearance of them just the same.