Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/409

 described the writer of the letters and figures contained in that envelope as a handsome, dark-bearded man, with sparkling eyes, who had once governed a city full of armed men and besieged by enemies. The description of his person, of his past, and also of his character as far as I knew it, was throughout correct; but when the clairvoyante added that this man was at the time not in Paris, but in another city, where he had gone to meet a person very dear to him, I thought we had caught her in a mistake. A few days later I returned to Paris, and had hardly arrived there when I met General Klapka on the street. I asked him at once whether, since he had written his last letter to me, he had been constantly in Paris, and I was not a little amazed when he told me that he had a few days ago made an excursion to Brussels, where he had stopped not quite a week, and the “dear person” whom he was to have seen there, I learned from an intimate friend of Klapka, was a lady whom it was said he would marry. The clairvoyante was therefore right in every point.

This occurrence mystified me very much. The more I considered the question, whether the clairvoyante could possibly have received knowledge of the contents of my envelopes, or whether she could have had any cue for guessing at them, the more certain I became that this could not be. Strodtmann himself did not know what I had put into the envelopes. Of Klapka's letter to me he had not the slightest information. He also assured me that he had put the envelopes into the hands of the clairvoyante, one after the other, in exactly the same condition in which he had received them, without for a moment confiding them to anybody else and without telling to anyone from whom they came; and I could absolutely depend upon the word of my thoroughly honest friend. But even if—which was quite unthinkable to me—there had been some collusion