CHAPTER 4.XXVII.
Pantagruel's discourse of the decease of heroic souls; and of the dreadful prodigies that happened before the death of the late Lord de Langey.
I would not, continued Pantagruel, have missed the storm that hath thus disordered us, were I also to have missed the relation of these things told us by this good Macrobius.

Neither am I unwilling to believe what he said of a comet that appears in the sky some days before such a decease.

For some of those souls are so noble, so precious, and so heroic that heaven gives us notice of their departing some days before it happens.

And as a prudent physician, seeing by some symptoms that his patient draws towards his end, some days before gives notice of it to his wife, children, kindred, and friends, that, in that little time he hath yet to live, they may admonish him to settle all things in his family, to tutor and instruct his children as much as he can, recommend his relict to his friends in her widowhood, and declare what he knows to be necessary about a provision for the orphans; that he may not be surprised by death without making his will, and may take care of his soul and family; in the same manner the heavens, as it were joyful for the approaching reception of those blessed souls, seem to make bonfires by those comets and blazing meteors, which they at the same time kindly design should prognosticate to us here that in a few days one of those venerable souls is to leave her body and this terrestrial globe.

Not altogether unlike this was what was formerly done at Athens by the judges of the Areopagus.