Alessandro di Cagliostro was a rather flamboyant 18th century prophet. Hated by the Catholic Church, imprisoned by the French for fraud, and temerarious enough to give himself the title of Count, Cagliostro is normally the type of man to disregard as a charlatan. Except that he was often right, particularly when talking about the future French revolution. At a masonic meeting in Paris before the revolution, Cagliostro delighted his listeners with predictions about France using a form of numerology involving numbers associated with letters in names. He predicted the death of Louis XVI, and claimed this would happen before August 23, 1793. He predicted that Marie Antoinette would waste in prison before being beheaded. He predicted that the Princesse de Lamballe would escape imprisonment and the guillotine, but die on the Rue des Ballets. The prediction was true, she died at that very place, cut to pieces by a mob after being released from prison. All of the other predictions also came true, and when asked about the end of the revolution, he consulted the numbers again and said that a Corsican would be elected and would take the powers of the King, but with a new title. When asked his name, he replied that it would be Napoleon Bonaparte.
In 1812 Napoleon pressed a campaign into Russia that would ultimately prove disastrous for the Grand Army of France. Initially, things went well, but the turning point began outside a small village called Borodino. Absent was Napoleon’s typical military genius, seemingly due to a fever that he was suffering from, and the battle evolved into a very expensive affair estimated to have cost the lives of 30,000 French and 45,000 Russians. In the end, the Tsar’s forces retreated, allowing Napoleon to take Moscow but this would be the last battle where the French were on the offensive. Before the battle, the wife of Russian general Count Toutschkoff had been the recipient of a recurring dream in which she saw herself at an inn, where her father and small son stood before her and told her that her husband had fallen at Borodino. She told her husband, and they frantically looked for the town on a map, which they could not find. Soon after, staying in an inn some miles from the battlefield at Borodino, her dream became reality exactly as it had been in her dream.
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