Note 17 — Chapter VIII · REINCARNATION

In this connexion may I be permitted to quote a personal experience? One evening, at the Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille, where I am wont to spend my summers, some newly-arrived guests were amusing themselves by making a small table spin on its foot. I was quietly smoking in a corner of the drawing-room, at some distance from the little table, taking no interest in what was happening around it and thinking of something quite different. After due entreaty, the table replied that it held the spirit of a seventeenth-century monk, who was buried in the east gallery of the cloisters, under a flagstone dated 1693. After the departure of the monk, who suddenly, for no apparent reason, refused to continue the interview, we thought that we would go, with a lamp, and look for the grave. We ended by discovering, in the far cloister on the eastern side, a tombstone in very bad condition, broken, worn down, trodden into the ground and crumbling, on which, by examining it very closely, we were able, with great difficulty, to decipher the inscription, “A.D. 1693.” Now, at the moment of the monk’s reply, there was no one in the drawing-room except my guests and myself. None of them knew the abbey; they had arrived that very evening, a few minutes before dinner, after which, as it was quite dark, they had put off their visit to the cloisters and the ruins until the following day. Therefore, short of a belief in the “shells” or the “elementals” of the theosophists, the revelation could only have come from me. Nevertheless, I believed myself to be absolutely ignorant of the existence of that particular tombstone, one of the least legible among a score of others, all belonging to the seventeenth century, which pave this part of the cloisters.