Madame de Chilly.

One reads in the newspaper Petite Presse of February 11, 1869:

Mr. de Chilly; the sympathetic director of the Odéon, so cruelly tried by the almost sudden death of his only daughter, is threatened by a new sorrow. His niece, Miss Artus, daughter of the former conductor of the Ambigu-Comique, is at this moment, so to speak, at the edge of the tomb. On this subject, the Figaro relates this sad and moving story:

“Dying, Miss de Chilly gave a little ring to this cousin, whose life is today so cruelly threatened, and said to her: – Take it, you will return it to me.

“Had these words struck the imagination of the poor girl? Were they the expression of that double sight, attributed to death? The truth is that, a few days after the funeral of Miss de Chilly, the young woman fell ill.”

“What the Figaro does not say is that, in her last moments, the poor dead girl, who clung to life with all the energy of her beautiful eighteen years, cried out from her bed of pain to her cousin, who was dissolving in tears in a corner of the room, the theater of her agony: – No, I do not want to die! I do not want to go alone! you will come with me! I wait for you! I wait for you! you will not marry!

“What a spectacle and what anguish for that unfortunate Miss Artus, whose betrothal was being prepared at the very moment when Miss de Chilly took to her bed never to rise again!”

Yes, certainly these words are the expression of the double sight attributed to death, and of which the examples are not rare. How many persons have had presentiments of this kind before dying! Will it be said that they are playing a comedy? Let the nihilists explain these phenomena, if they can! If intelligence were nothing but a property of matter, and had to be extinguished with it, how to explain the recrudescence of the activity of that same intelligence, the new faculties, sometimes transcendent, that often manifest themselves at the very moment when the organism dissolves, when the last breath is about to be exhaled? Does this not prove that something survives the body? It has been said hundreds of times: the independent soul manifests itself at every instant under a thousand forms and in conditions so evident that one must voluntarily close one's eyes in order not to see.