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Updated: May 21, 2025
And we do also declare natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempest, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things; and we give counsel thereupon, what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them."
In the case of the Vidame and Misè Fougueiroun the excitement did not even lurk: it blazed forth so openly that they were as a brace of comets bustling violently through our universe and dragging into their erratic wakes, away from normal orbits, the whole planetary system of the household and all the haply intrusive stars.
When we remember that it was not a mere idle fancy which had to be opposed, not mere terrors which had to be calmed, but that the idea of the significance of changes in the heavens had come to be regarded by mankind as a part of their religion, it cannot but be thought a hopeful sign that all reasoning men in our time have abandoned the idea that comets are sent to warn the inhabitants of this small earth.
Thus, comets are portents, shaking the faith of nations, not supporting it, like the stars. So among men.
On Monday evening the city of Paris presented a scene that might have been taken from the realms of enchantment: the illuminations were the most brilliant I have ever witnessed, forming a succession of magic panorama in which houses, hotels, palaces, and churches, shone with dazzling splendor, the glittering towers of the churches appeared like stars and comets suspended in the air.
It is at such times of general affliction that minds of the meaner sort have proved 'zealous even to slaying. The influence of strange appearances in the heavens on even thoughtful and reasoning minds, at such times of universal calamity, is well shown by Defoe's remarks on the comets of the years 1664 and 1666.
"Men must not awake." The voice opposite me, capsizing in laughter and swollen with a rattle, says again: "Don't worry!" Yonder, in the hemisphere of night, comets glide, blending their cries of engines and owls with their flaming entrails. Will the sky ever recover the huge peace of the sun and the stainless blue? A little order, a little lucidity are coming back into my mind.
For the light which glowed from the bodies of the rebels, which had been given them by their passage through the white flames, was transmitted to the cars themselves, so that they glowed as with an inner radiance of their own like comets flashing across the night.
She too, majestic matron, had strange, brief yearnings for an existence more romantic than this; shootings across her spirit's firmament of tailed comets; soft, inexplicable melancholies. The good angel, withdrawing her from such a mood, directed her gaze to a particular spot at the top of the square. She passed at once out of the room not precisely in a hurry, yet without wasting time.
In Protestant London there had been less inclination to superstition; yet even here a comet which, under ordinary circumstances, would have appeared but as other comets, was thought to wear the shape of a fiery sword stretched over the city in awful threatening.
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