Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton

care
very much to meet with an old friend, go to the eight o'clock Mass
at the Recollets, and enter the second chapel on the right hand.
     
    How good a prophet was St.
Germain? He was dead center. His prophetic verse could be a capsule
history of time, foretold, and deadly accurate even in the most
literal sense. The revolution was actually a series of revolts and
power struggles between various contending factions, raging back
and forth for years and seeing a steady succession of leaders
rising and toppling—and it was a revolt not simply of the peasant
against the crown but of class against class, farmer versus
urbanite, artisan versus businessman, all versus the church in one
form or another, the church against all at various times, nobility
undercutting nobility and plotting against king or nation, king
resisting all and betraying the nation to its enemies without,
military versus militia and both ready to strike at any hand—more
than ten years toward the struggle for "liberty, equality, and
fraternity" but culminating with the 18th Brumaire in military
dictatorship by the thirty-year-old general, Napoleon, who became
first emperor of France.
    It was not until Napoleon's defeat by the
European allies in 1814 that the last line of St. Germain's
prophecy began to have meaning, because Napoleon was mere epilogue
to the French Revolution—or perhaps he was the vector, whatever,
the flowering of St. Germain's lily into the modern French
Republic was still some time away.
    But the year is now 1792;
Louis XVI and his queen are in the shadow of the guillotine and a
mighty nation is beginning its descent into the abyss. A
mysterious foreigner known by many names has traveled to Paris in
the name of friendship to counsel the queen's endangered friend,
who writes in her diary: "A cry of surprise escaped me; he still
living, he who was said to have died in 1784, and whom I had not
heard spoken of for long years past—he had suddenly reappeared,
and at what a moment, what an epoch! Why had he come to France? Was
he then never to have done with life? For I knew some old people
who had seen him bearing the stamp of forty or fifty years of age,
and that at the beginning of the 18th century!"
    The Countess d'Adhemar had her meeting with
St. Germain shortly before the king was seized and bound over for
trial. And this is her record of that final conversation, quoted
earlier in part:
     
    "I have written it to
you, I can do nothing, my hands are tied
by a sense stronger than myself. There are
periods of time when to retreat is impossible, others when He has pronounced and
the decree will be executed. Into this we
are entering."
    "Will you see the Queen?"
    "No, she is doomed."
    "Doomed! To
what?"
    "To death."
    Oh, this time I could not
keep back a cry. I rose on my seat, my hands repulsed the Comte,
and in a trembling voice I said:
    "And you too! you! what, you too!" [Saying
this.]
    "Yes, I—I, like Cazotte."
    "You know...."
    "What you do not even suspect. Return to the
Palace, go and tell the Queen to take heed to herself, that this
day will be fatal to her; there is a plot, murder is
premeditated."
    "You fill me with horror, but the Comte
d'Estaing has promised..."
    "He will take fright, and will hide
himself."
    "But M. de Lafayette..."
    "A balloon puffed out with wind! Even now
they are setting what to do with him, whether he shall be
instrument or victim; by noon all will be decided. The hour of
repose is past, and the decrees of Providence must be
fulfilled."
    "In plain words, what do they want?"
    "The complete ruin of the Bourbons; they
will expel them from all the thrones they occupy, and in less than
a century they will return to the rank of simple private
individuals in their different branches."
    "And France?"
    "Kingdom, Republic,
Empire, mixed Governments, tormented, agitated, torn; from clever
tyrants she will pass to others who are ambitious without merit.
She will be divided, parcelled out, cut up; and these are