Example 3 - FRANÇOIS-SIMON LOUVET.

— The following communication was given spontaneously, at a Spiritist meeting in Le Havre, on February 12, 1863:

“Will you have pity on a poor wretch who has long passed through cruel tortures?! Oh! the void… the Space… I plunge… I fall… I die… Help me!

God, I had such a miserable existence… Poor devil, I often suffered hunger in old age; and it was for this that I grew accustomed to drinking, to feeling shame and disgust at everything.

I wished to die, and I threw myself… Oh! my God! What a moment! And to what end such a wish, when the end was so near?

Pray, that I may not incessantly see this void beneath me… I am going to be dashed to pieces against those stones! I beseech you, you who know the miseries of those who no longer belong to that world. You do not know me, but I suffer so much… Why more trials? I suffer! Is that not enough? Had I been hungry, instead of this more terrible suffering, imperceptible moreover to you, you would not hesitate to relieve me with a crumb of bread. So I ask you to pray for me…

I cannot remain any longer in this state… Ask any of those happy ones who are here, and you will know who I was. Pray for me.” François-Simon Louvet.

— The medium’s guide. — “He who has just addressed you was a poor unfortunate who had on Earth the trial of misery; overcome by disgust, courage failed him, and, instead of looking toward Heaven as he should, he gave himself over to drunkenness; he descended to the last extremes of despair, putting an end to his sad trial: he threw himself from the Francis I Tower, on July 22, 1857.

Have pity on his poor soul, which is not advanced, but which glimpses enough of the future life to suffer and to desire a reparation. Beg God to grant him that grace, and with that you will have done a meritorious work.”

— In seeking information about this, the following local item was found in the “Journal du Havre” of July 23, 1857:

“Yesterday, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the passersby on the quay were painfully impressed by a horrible accident: a man threw himself from the tower, coming to be dashed to pieces upon the stones. He was an old tow-line hauler, whose inclination to drunkenness had dragged him to suicide. He was named François-Victor-Simon Louvet. The body was carried to the house of one of his daughters, in the rue de la Corderie. He was 67 years of age.”

Six years had passed since that man had died and he still saw himself fall from the tower, being dashed to pieces upon the stones… The void terrifies him, the prospect of the fall horrifies him… and this for 6 years! How long will such a state last? He does not know it, and that uncertainty increases his anguish.

Is this not equivalent to hell with its flames? Who revealed and invented such punishments? For it is the very sufferers who come to describe them, as others do of their joys. And they do so, often, spontaneously, without one’s thinking of them, which excludes any hypothesis of our being the plaything of our own imagination.