The Marquis de Saint-Paul.

Died in 1860. Evoked at the request of his sister, a member of the Society, on the 16th of May, 1861.

Evocation.

Answer. – Here I am.

Your sister asked us to evoke you, although she is a medium, but not yet sufficiently developed to feel sure of herself.

Answer. – I will try to answer in the best way possible.

First of all she wishes to know whether you are happy.

Answer. – I am wandering, and this transitory state never brings either absolute happiness or absolute punishment.

Did you take a long time to recognize yourself?

Answer. – I remained a long time in disturbance, and I came out of it only to bless the piety of those who did not forget me and prayed for me.

Can you estimate the duration of that disturbance?

Answer. – No.

Which of your relatives did you soon recognize?

Answer. – I recognized my mother and my father; both received me upon my awakening. They initiated me into the new life.

How is it to be explained that at the end of your illness you seemed to converse with those you had loved on Earth?

Answer. – Because I had, before dying, the revelation of the world I was going to inhabit. I was clairvoyant before dying, and my eyes were veiled in the passage of the definitive separation from the body, because the carnal bonds were still very vigorous. Observation. – The phenomenon of the anticipated detachment of the soul is very frequent. Before dying, many persons glimpse the world of the Spirits; it is, no doubt, with the aim of softening, through hope, the regret of leaving life. But the Spirit adds that his eyes were veiled during the separation; this is, in effect, what always occurs. At that moment the Spirit, losing consciousness of itself, never witnesses the last breath of its body, and the separation takes place without its being aware of it. The very convulsions of the agony are a purely physical effect, the sensation of which the Spirit almost never experiences; we say almost because it may happen that these last sufferings are inflicted upon it as punishment.

How is it that the memories of childhood seem to come in preference to others?

Answer. – Because the beginning is nearer to the end than the middle of life.

What do you mean to signify by that?

Answer. – That the dying remember and see, as a consoling mirage, the young and innocent years.

Observation. – It is probably for a similar providential reason that the old, as the term of life approaches them, sometimes have such precise memories of the smallest details of their earliest years.

Why, in referring to your body, did you always speak in the third person?

Answer. – Because, as I said, I was clairvoyant and felt clearly the differences that exist between the physical and the moral; such differences, linked together by the fluid of life, become quite distinct to the eyes of the clairvoyant dying. Observation. – Here is a singular particularity, presented by the death of this gentleman. In his last moments he always said: He is thirsty; he must be given to drink; he is cold; he must be warmed; he suffers in such a region, etc. And when they said to him: But it is you who are thirsty, he answered: No, it is he. Here the two existences are perfectly delineated; the thinking self is in the Spirit and not in the body; already in part detached, the Spirit regarded its body as another individuality, which, properly speaking, was not itself. It was, then, his body that they were to give to drink, and not him, the Spirit.

What you said of your wandering state and of the duration of your disturbance leads one to believe that you are not very happy, and yet your qualities ought to make one suppose the contrary. Besides, there are wandering Spirits who are very happy, just as there are very unhappy ones. Answer. – I am in a transitory state. The human virtues here acquire their true value. No doubt my state is a hundred thousand times preferable to that of earthly incarnation, but I always carried with me the aspirations toward the true good and the true beautiful, and my soul will not be sated until it raises itself to the feet of its Creator.