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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

III. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE

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On the 8th of May, Dr. Teste magnetizes Mme. Hortense--in the presence of her husband. She is no sooner asleep than she announces that she has been pregnant for a fortnight, that she will not go her full time, that "she will take fright at something," that she will have a fall and that the result will be a miscarriage. She adds that, on the 12th of May, after having had a fright, she will have a fainting-fit which will last for eight minutes; and she then describes, hour by hour, the course of her malady, which will end in three days' loss of reason, from which she will recover.

On awaking, she retains no recollection of anything that has passed; it is kept from her; and Dr. Teste communicates his notes to Dr. Amidee Latour. On the 12th of May, he calls on M. and Mme.--, finds them at table and puts Mme.-- to sleep again, whereupon she repeats word for word what she told him four days before. They wake her up. The dangerous hour is drawing near. They take every imaginable precaution and even close the shutters. Mme.--, made uneasy by these extraordinary measures which she is quite unable to understand, asks what they are going to do to her. Half-past three o'clock strikes. Mme.-- rises from the sofa on which they have made her sit and wants to leave the room. The doctor and her husband try to prevent her.

"But what is the matter with you?" she asks. "I simply must go out."

"No, madame, you shall not: I speak in the interest of your health." "Well, then, doctor," she replies, with a smile, "if it is in the interest of my health, that is all the more reason why you should let me go out."

The excuse is a plausible one and even irresistible; but the husband, wishing to carry the struggle against destiny to the last, declares that he will accompany his wife. The doctor remains alone, feeling somewhat anxious, in spite of the rather farcical turn which the incident has taken. Suddenly, a piercing shriek is heard and the noise of a body falling. He runs out and finds Mme.-- wild with fright and apparently dying in her husband's arms. At the moment when, leaving him for an instant, she opened the door of the place where she was going, a rat, the first seen there for twenty years, rushed at her and gave her so great a start that she fell flat on her back. And all the rest of the prediction was fulfilled to the letter, hour by hour and detail by detail.

To make it quite clear in what spirit I am undertaking this study and to remove at the beginning any suspicion of blind or systematic credulity, I am anxious, before going any further, to say that I fully realize that cases of this kind by no means carry conviction. It is quite possible that everything happened in the subconscious imagination of the subject and that she herself created, by self-suggestion, her illness, her fright, her fall and her miscarriage and adapted herself to most of the circumstances which she had foretold in her secondary state. The appearance of the rat at the fatal moment is the only thing that would suggest a precise and disquieting vision of an inevitable future event. Unfortunately, we are not told that the rat was perceived by other witnesses than the patient, so that there is nothing to prove that it also was not imaginary. I have therefore quoted this inadequate instance only because it represents fairly well the general aspect and the indecisive value of many similar cases and enable us to note once and for all the objections which can be raised and the precautions which we should take before entering these suspicious and obscure regions.