Soon she, too, receives the gift of prophecy. It was not an uncommon gift at this time. Both De Maistre and Bonald prophesied the restoration of the royal family many years in advance, thereby winning considerable renown. But whenever their prophecies are of a more definite nature, it happens with them as with the prophecies of old--they do not come to pass. De Maistre, for instance, writing on the subject of the proposed seat of government in America, says: "I may safely wager ten to one that the town will not be built, or that it will not be called Washington, or that the Congress will not meet there;" which three things all happened. In 1807 he wrote (_Opuscules_, p. 98): "Nothing can restore the power of Prussia. This famous edifice, built of blood, filth, false coin, and pamphlets, has collapsed in one moment and is gone for ever." He also prophesied that the restoration of the Bourbons would take place quite peacefully, without foreign interference, and that autocratic rule and the power of the aristocracy would in the end be strengthened by the Revolution, &c., &c. Some of Bonald's prophecies (in his _Théorie du Pouvoir_) were rather more successful, for the simple reason that he who prophesies the end of the transient, prophesies what is certain to come true some day; there are things concerning the future to which Horatio's words apply: "There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this." But Madame de Krüdener's prophecies attracted more attention than those of any of her contemporaries. In October 1814 she wrote from Strasburg to a lady at the Russian court: "We shall soon witness the punishment of guilty France, a punishment which Providence would have spared it if it had continued to bow beneath the cross." How was it possible, after Napoleon's return from Elba, to interpret this otherwise than as a mysterious prevision of this return? She also wrote: "The storm is approaching; the lilies which the Eternal had preserved--the pure, delicate, symbolic flowers which had been crushed by a sceptre of iron, because such was the will of the Eternal--those lilies, which ought to have pled their cause before the tribunal of the purity and love of God, have only shown themselves to disappear." What could this be but a prophecy of the flight of Louis XVIII? The fame of these predictions sped over Europe. One of the first to hear of them was Czar Alexander. Worn out by the campaigns of 1813 and 1814, tormented by an uneasy conscience, grieved by the sudden death of his only child and by the desertion of its mother, a lady who had been his mistress for eleven years, but whose affections were now transferred to one of his aides-de-camp, enfeebled by excesses of every kind, Alexander was exactly in the condition to be influenced by pious mysticism.[2]