It often happens in the course of life that we are driven by some
inexplicable fatality to suffer those very afflictions we dread the
most. We are told of persons who trembled for a lifetime at the horrid
anticipation of being one day mad; it was the shadow of the judgement
that was creeping on them, which cast them finally amongst the victims
of the lunatic asylum. The suicide is the prophet of his own doom;
the presentiment of death by drowning has but too often ended in a
watery grave. Perhaps where the fibres of the heart are weakest, the
strain brought on them by excited fancy snaps them in the misfortune
that is dreaded; or perhaps some unseen spirit, charged with the decree
of our individual sorrow, casts the dark shadow of his wing over our
thoughts, and communicates the gloomy foreboding of a presentiment.
They dying mother had one of these heart-tearing presentiments, so
frequent and so mysterious in the history of human suffering.

She was guilty of a species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child
Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her
aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she
would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling
in the cabinets of state or worshipped in the circles of the great
and learned, Heaven itself could not build up a greater joy in the
limited horizon of her hopes; but an awful conviction crept over her
that some misfortune would tear from her the object of her love like
the fruit torn from the stem, like the young branch from the oak. In
dreams she saw him struggling in the torrent which bore him away, or
dragged to the hills at the feet of a wild horse. More than once she
saw him on board a Government vessel, sailing with the hapless children
of guilt to the convict settlements of southern seas--not as a felon,
but an angel of light amongst the condemned.'