Madame de Saulce, the wife of a rich planter of St. Domingo, was residing in France about the time of the Revolution. Her husband occasionally visited his native country, leaving his lady at Paris, who was a woman of sense and piety, by no means of a nervous temperament. During the last voyage of her husband, being engaged at cards at an evening party, she suddenly uttered a shriek, and sunk on her chair, exclaiming, “Monsieur Saulce is dead!” Her friends crowding about her, attempted to tranquillize her by their remonstrances, till by degrees she recovered her reason. So powerful, however, had been the sensation or presentiment, that she had no peace till she obtained news of her husband.
A favourable letter arrived; but, alas! the date was anterior to that of her vision. And soon afterwards, one of the friends present at the scene of Madame de Saulce’s ejaculation, received a communication from a stranger in St. Domingo, requesting him to communicate to that lady the distressing news of her husband’s decease. Monsieur de Saulce had been assassinated by his negroes, on the very day and hour of her fatal presentiment. The event occurred in the presence of at least twenty persons; and till the day of her death, the widow remained a prey to sorrow mingled with awe and consternation.
In the Memoirs of the great Sully will be found the record of the presentiments of assassination, which oppressed the mind of Henry IV. “The King,” says he, “had the strongest presentiment of his dreadful destiny. As the moment of his coronation approached, his alarm and consternation increased; and in answer to my remonstrance, he exclaimed: ‘In spite of all you can urge, this ceremony is most distasteful to me. My heart assures me that some misfortune will be the result.’ After uttering these desponding words, he sank back, overcome by gloomy anticipations; and remained tapping the case of his spectacles, absorbed in gloomy reverie.”
The presentiment of Henri IV. of his approaching assassination, is confirmed by the testimony of L’Etoile and Bassompierre, who, in their Memoirs, relate the same particulars; and the fact is as historically established as the evil dream of Calphurnia, and the denunciation of the soothsayer to Julius Cæsar, on a parallel occasion.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
BEES AND ANTS.
Dull must be the blockhead, who could reproach La Fontaine with ignorance of Natural History, and pronounce the fable of the “Ant and the Grasshopper” bad, because the fabulist has not shown himself a rigid naturalist. The great fault charged against La Fontaine, by the critics, is having made the grasshopper sing. Its cry is considered by most people far from melodious.
The bee possesses a thousand poetical associations derived from our early conversancy with the Georgics. From the remotest periods of antiquity, bees have been recognised as attached to monarchical government, though not to the Salique law. A hive has been compared to the palace of a Czarina of Muscovy.