Le Réquisitionnaire is a brief, mysterious tale, set under the Terror, that explores the occult powers of maternal love. In a small provincial town, Madame de Dey, a noble widow discreetly royalist, lives in anguish: her only son, a young émigré compromised in the cause of the counter-revolution, is to return secretly to join her, at peril of his life, disguised to escape the revolutionary authorities. She awaits him in a fever of hope and terror, dreading at each instant to be denounced or that her son may fall into the hands of his enemies. Now, by the hazards of war, a conscript — a young recruit passing through — is designated to be billeted with her. Madame de Dey, overcome, believes or wishes to believe she recognizes in this young man her own son returned in disguise, and the whole house organizes itself in this feverish illusion. The narrative culminates in a strange, overwhelming denouement: Madame de Dey dies suddenly, at the precise hour when, elsewhere, her true son is executed. Between mother and child a mysterious sympathy has established itself, an occult communication across distance, making the mother feel, at the very moment it is accomplished, the fatal ordeal of her son. Balzac blends the depiction of the climate of terror and denunciation of the revolutionary era with a meditation on the invisible forces that unite souls, a mystical theme dear to the Philosophical Studies. The tale suggests the existence of a supernatural bond, a transmission of thought and suffering between deeply united beings. Le Réquisitionnaire is a striking study of maternal love and presentiment, in which the historical drama is doubled with a spiritual enigma about the powers of the soul and the communion of hearts.