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The Life of a Sensitive – Madame Michael Bouissou

The house [in Saint-Germain] was surrounded by a very large garden, and access to the street was through a huge carriage gateway. The reason I give these apparently superfluous details is for the purpose of placing more easily the curious vision I had one evening -a premonitory vision which was to prove tragically true.

My room had a window looking out onto the gateway I have just mentioned and onto the big gravel drive where the cars turned.

I was sitting by this window one evening in September.

I felt sad and weary. The improvement promised by the doctors had not been realised and my sister was bedridden once more. Perhaps that evening I had attained that crepuscular state so favourable to the apparition of occult phenomena.

In any case, with hallucinating clarity, I saw the great gate open to let through two hearses and a bridal carriage adorned with white flowers and ribbons. The strange procession passed slowly beneath my window, reached the street and made off, while the gates closed slowly behind it. This vision was extremely brief and I "came to" to find myself still leaning at my window, my heart constricted, terrified by what I had just seen. The garden was perfectly quiet and the gates were closed.

Then began the agony of the "search". Although in the future, after exploiting my gift, the images concerning my consultants were always very clear and accompanied by symbolism reduced to a minimum - a symbolism I had carefully studied - in the case of those I loved I never had any other warning than these symbolical visions which, as such, demanded an interpretation subject, of course, to many errors. These visions were always accompanied by a deep anxiety comparable with that of some threatened individual trying to see from what side the danger will come.

Forewarned but, I repeat, without any exact knowledge as to the threat hanging over someone I loved, I brought each of them into the light of the conscious and there, before the cherished and threatened image, I asked myself the terrible question: "Is the danger for this one or that one?" A mysterious instinct warned me the moment I was correct, but without my being able in any way to know the nature of the threat; the only hint was that my anxiety increased in proportion to the danger suspected.

That evening, terrified by this vision, I sought to plumb the darkness of the future and to discover "who" was to be taken away by these sinister hearses. My sister was the first to answer this call, but crazed with grief and fear and as though led by some imperious hand I sought . . . I sought . . . my mother? No. It could not be possible. She was so young, so active, so pretty. That was impossible.

But pitilessly and without mercy my inner voice replied: "Yes, it is she."

Terrified and bewildered I fell on my divan and burst into tears. At that very moment my mother came into the room. She was going out that evening with my brother, and had come, as she usually did, to tell me to look after my sister until she returned. Finding me in tears, which was an unusual occurrence, she misunderstood my grief and said rather curtly, "If you're going to cry every time I go out with your brother you'll shed a great many more tears. You know perfectly well that it's impossible for your sister to be left alone in her state."

Overcome with grief I looked at her standing there, elegant, harmonious, well-dressed, and I said to myself, "She's going to die. She's going to die, but what can I do about it? Whom can I summon? How can I avert this terrible danger?"

She went out, leaving behind her that faint, delicious perfume which has haunted me all my life.  Six months later my sister died and two months after my mother was taken from us by a fatal disease. Two hearses bore away from this house, so full of life and youth at the moment of my vision, two women who might have expected many more years of life.

The third image, the white flowered carriage, was really a perfect example of the mechanics of the subconscious and the way in which it utilises symbolism.

When this vision took place nothing in my life could have made me foresee a marriage, and yet I was to become engaged and be married from this house.