Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/344

328 information about the Empress Elizabeth, who had died in 1762, must have considerably impressed him. At any rate Tuxen continued to seek every opportunity to meet Swedenborg that wind and weather might furnish, and in 1770 he found a good one. Swedenborg's ship was becalmed off Kullen, near Elsinore, and Tuxen boarded it. That was the time, mentioned before, when he disturbed him in trance, but Swedenborg soon recovered himself, and consented to dine with Tuxen, "pulling off his gown and slippers, putting on clean linen, and dressing himself as briskly and alertly as a young man of one and twenty" (being eighty-two).

At Tuxen's house the Major-General apologized for having only his sickly wife and her young girls to meet him, to which Swedenborg replied, "And is not this very good company? I was always partial to the company of ladies."

This made Tuxen ask if he had ever wanted to marry. No, he said. Once Charles XII wanted him to marry Polhem's daughter but she refused. Tuxen excused himself, but his guest told him to ask anything. The Dane inquired if Swedenborg while young could resist sexual temptation. "Not altogether," he said, "in my youth I had a mistress in Italy."

Mrs. Tuxen—a notoriously hysterical woman—began to tell him about her bad health, and Swedenborg assured her that the time was coming when she would again attain the same health and beauty as when she was fifteen, not specifying that it would be necessary for her to die first. The daughter sang and Swedenborg said, "Bravo, very fine!" And he persuaded the mother to sing with the daughter, paying Mrs. Tuxen many compliments. He talked on other "indifferent subjects," Tuxen wrote, such as the "favorite dogs and cats that were in the room, which caressed him and jumped on his knee, showing their little tricks."

Tuxen loved him, and continued his faithful friend, and even became one of his disciples. That they were not many we have Swedenborg's own word for, since, in a postscript to his recollections, Tuxen said that once when he asked Swedenborg how many people he knew in this world that favored his doctrines, the latter answered "that there were not many yet that he knew of, still he might compute their number at perhaps fifty, or thereabouts; and in proportion the same number in the world of spirits."