Observations placeholder

from Camille Flammarion's book: Autour de la Mort ("Around death", page 280)

Mr. A. Blavet, president of the "Horticulture Society of Étampes", writes as follows:

I was at Sens College, in the Yonne, and I was 16 years old when I received a letter from my sister who lived in Étampes, with my father, my mother and a maid.

My mother was very ill at that time.

One night, the bell, whose cord went from the alcove where my parents slept, to the maid's room, which was on the first floor, began to clink.

In all haste, my sister, whose room was close to that of the maid, came to find her, and they both went downstairs to inquire whether my mother was ill and why they were calling.

My father and mother replied that they had slept and no one had rung the bell.

At that moment, another bell rang.

My father jumped out of bed.

The bell's cord and its flapper were still shaking, and the maid did the brave thing by shouting: "Tap, tap, pole (wanted to say hammer); this does not frighten me."

So there were four witnesses who were awake and nothing could set the bell in motion but one person from the alcove.

Then everything went back to normal. Before going to bed, my father looked at the clock and it said 2.30. The day after that night, he received a letter from Paris announcing the death of a relative.

Trying to find out if there had been a coincidence between the fact of the night and the death, he wrote and received a prompt reply telling him that it was the same night and at the same time that his relative's death had taken place, which led him to say: "So it is not all over with us?".