posture. All that we
have just related of the effects of magic, enchantments, and
witchcraft, which were pretended to cause such terrible effects on the
bodies and the possessions of mankind, and all that is recounted of
doomings, evocations, and magic figures, which, being consumed by
fire, occasioned the death of those who were destined or enchanted,
relate but very imperfectly to the affair of vampires, which we are
treating of in this volume; unless it may be said that those ghosts
are raised and evoked by magic art, and that the persons who fancy
themselves strangled and finally stricken with death by vampires, only
suffer these miseries through the malice of the demon, who makes their
deceased parents or relations appear to them, and produces all these
effects upon them; or simply strikes the imagination of the persons to
whom it happens, and makes them believe that it is their deceased
relations, who come to torment and kill them; although in all this it
is only an imagination strongly affected which acts upon them.

We may also connect with the history of ghosts what is related of
certain persons who have promised each other to return after their
death, and to reveal what passes in the other world, and the state in
which they find themselves.

Footnotes:

[550] Hector Boethius, Hist. Scot. lib. xi. c. 216, 219.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

INSTANCES OF PERSONS WHO HAVE PROMISED TO GIVE EACH OTHER NEWS OF THE
OTHER WORLD AFTER THEIR DEATH.

The story of the Marquis de Rambouillet, who appeared after his death
to the Marquis de Precy, is very celebrated. These two lords,
conversing on the subject of the other world, like people who were not
very strongly persuaded of the truth of all that is said upon it,
promised each other that the first of the two who died should bring
the news of it to the other. The Marquis de Rambouillet set off for
Flanders, where the war was then carried on; and the Marquis de Precy
remained at Paris, detained by a low fever. Six weeks after, in broad
day, he heard some one undraw his bed-curtains, and turning to see who
it was, he perceived the Marquis de Rambouillet, in buff-leather
jacket and boots. He sprang from his bed to embrace his friend; but
Rambouillet, stepping back a few paces, told him that he was come to
keep his word as he had promised--that all that was said of the next
life was very certain--that he must change his conduct, and in the
first action wherein he was e