Example 3 - THE MARQUIS DE SAINT-PAUL.

Evocation. — A. Here I am.

Your sister asked us to evoke you, for, although she is a medium, she is not yet sufficiently developed. — A. I shall answer as best I can.

First of all she wishes to know whether you are happy. — A. I am in erraticity, a transitory state that affords neither absolute happiness nor absolute punishment.

Did you remain for a long time unconscious of your state? — A. I was disturbed for a long time and only came to myself to bless the piety of those who, remembering me, prayed for me. — 2 Q. And can you specify the duration of that disturbance? — A. No.

Which relatives did you recognize first? — A. My mother and my father, who received me upon my awakening, initiating me into the new life.

To what is the fact attributed that, in the final extremes of the illness, you seemed to converse with the dear persons of Earth? — A. To the foreknowledge, through revelation, of the world I was about to inhabit.

A seer before death, my eyes were clouded only at the moment of separation from the body, because the carnal bonds were still very strong.

How to explain the recollections of childhood that preferentially occurred to you? — A. By the fact that the beginning identifies itself more with the end than with the middle of life. — 2 Q. How to explain that? — A. It is fitting to say that the dying remember and see, as a consoling reflection, the childhood purity of the first years.

It is probably for a similar providential reason that the elderly, in proportion as they approach the end of life, sometimes have a clear recollection of the most trifling episodes of childhood.

Why, in referring to the body, did you always speak in the third person? — A. Because I was a seer as I told you, 2 and I clearly felt the differences between the physical and the moral; 3 these differences, much amalgamated with one another by the vital fluid, become very distinct to the eyes of the clairvoyant dying.

Here is a singular particularity of this gentleman’s death. In his last moments, he always said: He is thirsty, he must be given drink; he is cold, he must be warmed; he suffers in such or such a region, etc.

And when one said to him: “But is it you who are thirsty?” — he answered: “No, it is he.”

Here the two existences stand out perfectly; the thinking self is in the Spirit and not in the body; 7 the Spirit, partly detached, considered the body another individuality, which, properly speaking, did not belong to it: it was therefore his body that needed to be given drink, and not he, the Spirit.

This phenomenon is also noted in some somnambulists.

What you said about the erraticity of your Spirit and its respective disturbance would lead one to doubt your happiness, contrary to what might be inferred from your qualities. Moreover, there are wandering Spirits both happy and unhappy. — A. I am in a transitory state; 2 here human virtues come to have their just value.

Certainly, this state is a thousand times preferable to that of my earthly incarnation; but because I always nourished aspirations toward the truly good and beautiful, my soul will not be satisfied except when it rises to the feet of the Creator.