Ms. de Chilly The Petite Presse on February 11
th, 1869, reads:
"Mr. de Chilly, the nice director of the Odeon, so cruelly tried by the almost sudden death of his only daughter, is threatened with a new pain. His niece, Ms. Artus, daughter of the former conductor of the Ambigu-Comique, is currently, so to speak, at the gates of the tomb. In this regard, Le Figaro reports this sad and touching story:“The dying Ms. de Chilly gave a little ring to her cousin whose life is now so cruelly threatened, and said to her: "Take it, you will bring it back to me! Have these words captured the poor child's imagination? Were they the expression of that double vision attributed to death? Still, a few days after Ms. de Chilly's funeral, her young cousin fell ill.”What Le Figaro does not say is that in her last moments, the poor dead woman, who clung to life with all the energy of her eighteen beautiful years, shouted from her bed of pain to her cousin, bursting into tears in a corner of the room, the scene of her agony: "No I do not want to die! I don't want to go away alone! You will come with me! I'm waiting for you! I'm waiting for you! You won't get married!”What a spectacle and what anxieties to that unfortunate Ms. Artus, whose wedding was indeed in preparation at the very moment when Ms. de Chilly fell ill, to not get up again!” Yes, these words are certainly the expression of the double vision attributed to death, and whose examples are not uncommon. How many people have had such hunches before they died! Will it be said that they played a comedy? Let the Materialists explain these phenomena if they can! If intelligence were only a property of matter, and were to be extinguished with it, how to explain the resurgence of activity of this same intelligence, the new faculties, sometimes transcendent, that so often manifest themselves at the very moment when the organism dissolves, when the last breath will be exhaled? Doesn't this prove that something survives the body? It has been said a hundred times: the independent soul reveals itself at every moment in a thousand forms and in such obvious conditions, that one must voluntarily close one's eyes so as not to see it.
