Another well-known and much discussed occurrence of this kind happened in the days of Mazarin, and created a great sensation in the highest circles at Paris. A marquis of Rambouillet and a marquis of Preci, intimate friends, had agreed to inform each other of their fate after death. The former was ordered to the army in Flanders, while the other remained in the capital. Here he was taken ill with a fever, several weeks after parting with his friend, and as he was one morning towards 6 o'clock lying in bed awake, the curtains were suddenly drawn aside, and his friend dressed as usual, booted and spurred, was standing before him. Overjoyed, he was about to embrace him, but his friend drew back and said that he had come only to keep his promise after having been killed in a skirmish the day before, and that Preci also would share his fate in the first combat in which he should be engaged. The latter thinks his friend is joking, jumps up and tries to seize him--but he feels nothing. The vision, however, is still there; Rambouillet even shows him the fatal wound in his thigh from which the blood seems still to be flowing. Then only he disappears and Preci remains utterly overcome; at last he summons his valet, rouses the whole house, and causes every room and every passage to be searched. No trace, however, is found, and the whole vision is attributed to his fever. But a few days later the mail arrives from Flanders, bringing the news that Rambouillet had really fallen in such a skirmish and died from a wound in the thigh; the prediction also was fulfilled, for Preci fell afterwards in his first fight near St. Antoine (Petaval, _Causes Célèbres_, xii. 269). The parents of the well-known writer Schubert were exceptionally endowed with magic powers of this kind. The father once heard, as he thought in a dream, the voice of his aged mother, who called upon him to come and visit her in the distant town in which she lived, if he desired to see her once more before she died. He rejected the idea that this was more than a common dream; but soon he heard the voice repeating the warning. Now he jumped up and saw his mother standing before him, extending her hand and saying: "Christian Gottlob, farewell, and may God bless you; you will not see me again upon earth," and with these words she disappeared. Although no one had apprehended such a calamity, she had actually died at that hour, after expressing in her last moments a most anxious desire to see her son once more.