enter into trade. A small ship was
freighted with goods for Calcutta, whither the two exiles had resolved
to proceed in search of fortune; and all that was wanted to enable them
to put their scheme in execution was a fair wind, which, however, the
elements refused. In the interval caused by this detention Talleyrand
had one of what he called his "presentiments;" and to its occult
warnings, as he afterward declared, he owed the immediate preservation
of his life, salvation from shipwreck, and that change in his "destiny"
which led to all the future incidents of his eventful career.
Disappointment and vexation preying upon an irritable temper drove his
partner mad. He saw insanity in his look and gestures, and suffering
himself to be led by the lunatic to the heights of Brooklyn, which
overlook the harbor, he fixed his eyes sternly upon him, exclaiming, at
the same time, "Beaumetz, you mean to murder me; you intend to throw me
from the height into the sea below. Deny it, monster, if you can!" Thus
apostrophized, the unhappy and conscience-stricken maniac quailed
beneath the intensity and sternness of his gaze; confessed that such was
his design, the thought, "like a flash from the lurid fire of hell,"
having haunted him day and night; implored forgiveness, flung himself
upon the neck of his meditated victim, and burst into tears. The
paroxysm had passed off, and tottering reason had resumed her sway.
Beaumetz was conveyed home and placed under medical treatment, speedily
recovered, proceeded on his voyage alone, and was never more heard of.
"My Fate," said Talleyrand, when speaking of this incident in after
life, "was at work."

From the way in which this anecdote is introduced we learn that
Talleyrand had some strong leaning to the Celtic superstition known as
the second sight, which, in the adust imagination of a Frenchman, is
closely allied to fatalism, and which, we fear, loses its interest, as
it certainly does its virtue, when transported into sunnier regions from
"the land of the mountain and the flood." In ancient times Augustus
Caesar,[18] and in modern Samuel Johnson, Napoleon, and Walter Scott,
were all, more or less, and after the manner of their several
idiosyncracies, the victims of this imaginary belief; and if we knew the
apocalyptic tendencies of obscure, as well as we do those of celebrated
individuals, we should probably, discover that this weakness was much
more prevalent than is generally supposed. We