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remarkable prediction of the fates of several of the aristocracy and intelligentsia at the hands of the Revolution. The tale turns up in most books on prophecy or clairvoyance. In 1788, Cazotte was present at a dinner party given in Paris by the Duchesse de Gramont. One of the guests, Guillaume de Malesherbes, a minister and confidant of Louis XVI, proposed a toast "to the day when reason will be triumphant in the affairs of men." A day, he added ruefully, "which I shall never live to see."
    Cazotte, responding to Malesherbes' remark, rose from his seat and announced that he was wrong. "You, sir," he said, "will live to see that day. It will come in six years." Cazotte then went on to say that the Revolution was soon approaching, and that the lives of everyone in the room would be profoundly affected by it.
    Naturally, everyone wanted to hear what would happen. Jean de la Harpe, a staunch sceptic and radical atheist, was intrigued by Cazotte's confident manner, and quickly wrote down his reply. He intended to produce his notes later, in order to show how wrong Cazotte had been, and to prove once again that prophecy was mere superstition. As it turned out, La Harpe's notes, discovered after his death in 1803, are the strongest evidence for the accuracy of Cazotte's vision.

    Cazotte regarded his fellow guests and told them what was in store. The Marquis de Condorcet, a celebrated philosopher and proponent of progress would, Cazotte announced, die on the floor of a prison cell, after taking poison to avoid execution. When Condorcet replied that such fate had little to do with an age of reason, Cazotte replied that nevertheless, his suicide would take place during such a reign. A favourite of Louis, Chamfort would, Cazotte went on, cut his veins several times, but not die until some months later. Dr. Vicq d'Azyr would be assisted in a similar fate, having his veins opened by someone else. The astronomer jean Bailly would die on the scaffold, a victim of the mob, as would MM. Nicolai, Roucher, and Malesherbes. Even their host, the duchesse, would meet her end in the same way, along with many other of the ladies present.
    After hearing this, La Harpe asked about himself. He, Cazotte replied, would not die, but would instead become a Christian: to the atheistic La Harpe, a fate perhaps worse than death. When asked about his own future, Cazotte likened himself to the man who, during the siege of Jerusalem, walked about its walls crying "Woe to Jerusalem," only to be crushed in the end by a stone from a Roman catapult.
    Within six years everything Cazotte had said became true. Condorcet poisoned himself in a prison cell. When threatened with arrest, Chamfort tried to kill himself, but bungled the job, and later died at the hands of the doctor treating his wounds. Dr. Vicq d'Azyr avoided the guillotine by having his veins opened by a fellow prisoner. The rest were guillotined, and La Harpe, horrified by the carnage of the Revolution, entered a monastery and became a devout Catholic. Cazotte, an ardent royalist, was not however killed by a Roman catapult, but executed by the tribunal in 1792 after plans he had made for a counter-revolution had fallen into the wrong hands. Before any of this had come to pass, La Harpe had mentioned Cazotte's prediction to many friends, and Baroness d'Oberkirch records in her memoirs that she had come across the story in 1789. As for the reign of reason that Cazotte assured Malesherbes he would live to see, as Christopher McIntosh makes clear in Eliphas Levi and The French Occult Revival, by 1792, a number of `cults of reason' had sprung up in revolutionary France, the aim of which was to take the place of the detested Church.

    Jacques Cazotte was born in Dijon in 1719, and was educated at a Jesuit College, in preparation for a career in law. After qualifying in 1740, he went to Paris to enter the Marine Department of the civil service, and while there became part of several literary circles and salons