"And how did you write your name on this piece of paper?"

"By pa.s.sing through the thought of my medium."

Etc., etc.

I thought it would be superfluous to persist any farther.

Mme. X. not being able to raise the table had chosen the device of table rappings. The calling up of the Hindu prophet, however, I thought was a fine piece of audacity.

The simplest hypothesis is that the woman went into my library and put the piece of paper in the book. In fact, she was seen there. But even had she not been, the conclusion would be no less certain. For the room was open, and Mme. X. had remained about an hour in the next room, detained by "a nervous headache."

This specimen of mediumistic trickery is, as I have said, one among hundreds. Really, one must be endowed with the most unweariable perseverance to enable him to devote to those studies hours which would be much better employed even in doing nothing at all. However, when one has the conviction that something real exists he always returns, in spite of incessant trickery.

In the month of May, 1901, Princess Karadja introduced to me a professional medium, Frau Anna Rothe, a German, whose specialty consisted in her alleged ability to spirit flowers into a tightly closed room in broad daylight.

I made arrangements for a seance with her at my apartments in Paris.

During its continuance, bouquets of flowers of all sizes, did, in truth, make their appearance, but always from a quarter in the room the opposite of that to which our attention was drawn by Frau Rothe and her manager, Max Ientsch.

Being well nigh convinced that all was fraud, but not having the time to devote to such sittings, I begged M. Cail to be present, as often as he could, at the meetings which were to be held in different Parisian salons.

He gladly consented, and got invited to a seance at the Clement Marot house. Having taken his station a little in the rear of the flower-scattering medium, he saw her adroitly slip one hand beneath her skirts and draw out branches which she tossed into the air.

He also saw her take oranges from her corsage, and ascertained that they were warm.

The imposture was a glaring one, and he immediately unmasked her, to the great scandal of the a.s.sistants, who heaped insults upon him. A final seance had been planned, to be held in my salon on the following Tuesday.

But Frau Rothe and her two accomplices took the train at the Eastern Railway station that very morning, and we saw them no more. In the following year she was arrested in Berlin, after a fraudulent seance, and sentenced to one year in jail for swindling.

In this cla.s.s of things, cheatings and hoaxings are as numerous as authenticated facts. Those who are curious in such things will not have forgotten the scandalous hoax and misdemeanor of the celebrated Mrs.

Williams, an American woman who was received in full confidence, in 1894, in Paris, by my excellent friend, the d.u.c.h.ess of Pomar. Already made distrustful by the ingenious observations of the young duke, the sitters were determined not to be the b.u.t.t of her fooleries very long, and a sitting was agreed on. The partic.i.p.ators were MM. de Watteville, Dariex, Mangin, Ribero, Wellemberg, Lebel, Wolf, Paul Leymarie (son of the editor of _La Revue Spirite_), etc.

The specialty of Mrs. Williams (who was, by the way, quite a stout person) was the showing of apparitions, or ghosts. Said apparitions proved to be manikins, rather poorly got up; the lady spectators, as well as the gentlemen, were quite disappointed at the absence of the rich and flowing outlines of _form_ under the draperies of the wretched puppets. Thin and limp, tatterdemalion things, they showed not the faintest resemblance to the normal and cla.s.sic contours of woman, the lines of which we should have been able to glimpse at least to some extent under the light gauze that enwrapped the figures. Several bright-witted, but rather irreverent, ladies took no pains to conceal the fact that they should prefer annihilation if it were necessary to be so ... "reduced," so "incomplete"

in the other world! The gentlemen added that they would certainly not be alone in lamenting such a state of things!

There was no religious atmosphere at all about these sittings. The imposture was discovered, or, one might rather say, seized, by M. Paul Leymarie. He simply grasps Mme. Impostor around the waist (having slipped behind the curtain for the purpose), and holds her fast for the inspection of the audience. Lights are brought on, and, in the midst of the confused uproar made by twenty-five duped sitters, the heroine of the entertainment is compelled to show herself in flesh tights, while the whole apparatus of her ghostly puppet-show is discovered in the cabinet!

Mrs. Williams had the effrontery to defend herself, a little later, in the American Journal _Light_, bestowing the playful epithet of "bandits" upon those who had unmasked her in Paris.

That was a case of high mystification, of jugglery worthy of a street-corner mountebank. But, as we have already seen, matters do not usually attain to such a height of audacity, and quite often fraud only intervenes when the genuine powers have become enfeebled. This well appeared in the accounts of the "girl torpedo-fish," Angelica Cottin, who attained a good deal of notoriety.

On the 15th of January, 1846, in the village of Bouvigny, near Perriere (Orne), a young girl thirteen years old, named Angelica Cottin, light and robust, but extremely apathetic in physical temperament and in morals, suddenly exhibited strange powers. Objects touched by her, or by her clothing, were forcibly repelled. Sometimes, even on her mere approach, people were thrown into commotion and excitement, and pieces of furniture and household utensils were seen to move and vibrate. With some variations in intensity, and with intermittences, sometimes, of two or three days, this curious virtue held good for about a month, then disappeared as unexpectedly as it had appeared. It was authenticated by a large number of persons, some of whom submitted the little girl to genuine scientific experiments, and embodied their observations in formal reports, which were collected and published by Dr. Tanchou. This gentleman first saw Angelica on February 12 (1846), in Paris, where she had been taken to be exhibited.

The manifestations (which had decreased from the day when the basis, or usual course of her habits had been altered) were on the point of disappearing altogether. Yet they were still distinct enough to enable the investigator to draw up the following note, which was read to the Academy of Science, on February 17, by Arago, an eye-witness of the facts.[47]

I saw the young "electric" girl twice (says Dr. Tanchou).

A chair which I was holding as hard as I could with my foot and both hands was forcibly wrenched from me the moment she sat down in it.

A little slip of paper which I held poised on one finger was several times carried away as if by a gust of wind.

A dining-table of moderate size, though rather heavy, was more than once displaced by the mere touch of her dress.

A little paper wheel, placed vertically or horizontally upon its axis was put into rapid movement by the radiations which darted from this child's wrist and the bend of her arm.[48]

A large and heavy sofa upon which I was seated was pushed with great force against the wall the moment the girl came to seat herself by me.

A chair was held fast upon the floor by strong men and I was seated on it in such a way as to occupy only the half of the seat. It was forcibly wrenched away from under me as soon as the young girl sat down on the other half.

One curious thing is that every time the chair is lifted it seems to cling to Angelica's dress. It follows her for an instant before it becomes detached.

Two little elder-pith b.a.l.l.s or feather-b.a.l.l.s, suspended by a silken thread, are set in motion, attracted to each other and sometimes repelled.

This girl's radiations of psychic force (_emanations_) are not permanently present during all the hours of the day. They are especially strong in the evening, from seven to nine o'clock,--which leads me to surmise that perhaps her last meal (taken at six o'clock) is not without its influence.

The emanations are given forth only from the front part of the body, especially at the wrist and at the bend of the arm. They only occur on the left side, and the arm of this side is of a higher temperature than that of the other. It gives off a gentle heat, as from a part where a lively reaction is going on. The arm trembles and is continually disturbed by unusual contractions and quiverings which seem to be imparted to the hand that touches it.

During the time I observed this subject, her pulse varied from 105 to 120 pulsations a minute. It seemed to me frequently irregular.

When she is isolated from the common reservoir of electric or magnetic power, either by being seated upon a chair without her feet touching the floor or when placing them upon the chair of a person in front of her, the phenomena do not take place. They also cease when she is made to sit down on her own hands. A waxed floor, a piece of oiled silk, a plate of gla.s.s under her feet or on the chair, all have the effect of antagonizing and destroying for the time the electro-dynamic property of her body.

During the paroxysm she can touch scarcely anything with her left hand without throwing it from her as if it burned her. When her clothes touch the articles of furniture in a room she attracts them, displaces them, and overturns them.

One will understand this more easily when it is realized that at every electric discharge she runs away to escape the pain. She says "it p.r.i.c.ks" or "stings" her in the wrist or bend of the elbow. Once when I was feeling for her pulse in the temporal artery (not having been able to locate it in the left arm) my fingers chanced to touch the nape of the neck. She uttered a cry and drew back quickly from me. I several times a.s.sured myself of the fact that, near the cerebellum, at the place where the muscles of the upper part of the neck are joined to the cranium, there is a spot so sensitive that she allows no one to touch it. All the sensations she feels in her left arm are here echoed or repeated.

The electric emanations of this child seem to move by waves, intermittently, and in succession through different parts of the anterior portion of the body. But be that as it may, _they are certainly accompanied by an aeriform current which gives the sensation of cold_. I plainly felt upon my hand a quick puff of air like that produced by the lips.

Every time the mysterious force strikes through her frame and materializes in an act, terror and dismay fill the mind of this child, and she seeks refuge in flight. Every time she brings the end of her fingers near the north pole of a piece of magnetized iron, she receives a severe shock; the south pole produces no effect. If I manipulated the iron in such a way that I could not myself tell the north pole on it, _she_ could always tell it very well.

She is thirteen years old and has not yet reached the age of p.u.b.erty.

I learned from her mother that nothing like menstruation has yet appeared. She is very strong and healthy, but her intellect is as yet little developed. She is a peasant cottager (_villageoise_) in every sense of the word; yet she knows how to read and write. Her occupation is the making of thread gloves for ladies. The first electric phenomena began a month ago.

It is desirable to add to the foregoing note extracts from other reports.

Here, for example, is a citation from M. Hebert:

On the 17th of January,--that is to say, the second day of the appearance of the phenomena,--the scissors suspended from her waist by a cotton tape, flew from her without the cord being broken, and no one could imagine how it got untied. This circ.u.mstance, incredible from its resemblance to the pranks of lightning, makes one think at once that electricity must play an important role in the production of such astonishing effects. But this way of looking at the thing did not last long. For the miracle of the scissors only occurred twice, once in the presence of the cure of the village, who guaranteed to me upon his honor the truth of the statement. In the middle of the day almost no effects were obtained, but in the evening, at the usual hour, they redoubled in intensity. It was at that time that action without contact took place, and effects were produced in organic living bodies. These latter made their first appearance in the form of violent shocks felt in the ankles by one of the women laborers who happened at the time to be facing Angelica, the points of their sabots being about four inches apart.

Dr. Beaumont Chardon, a physician of Mortagne, also published similar notes and observations,--among others the following:

The repulsion and attraction, hopping about and displacement, of a rather solid table; of another table six feet by nine, mounted on casters; of another four-feet-and-a-half square oak table; of a very ma.s.sive mahogany easy-chair,--_all these displacements took place through contact with the Cottin girl's clothes,--contact either involuntary or purposely brought about by experiments_.

There was a sensation of violent p.r.i.c.kings when a stick of sealing-wax or a gla.s.s tube suitably rubbed was placed in contact with a bend in the left arm or with the head, or simply when brought somewhat near there. When the sealing-wax or the tube had not been rubbed, or when they were being wiped dry or moistened, there was a cessation of effects. The hairs on one's arm, made to slope or lie flat by a little saliva, rose up again at the approach of the child's left arm.

I have already remarked that this young girl was brought to Paris as a subject of scientific observation. Arago, at the Observatory, in the presence of his colleagues MM. Mathieu, Laugier, and Goujon, established the truth of the following phenomena:

When Angelica held out her hand toward a sheet of paper laid near the edge of a table, the paper was strongly attracted by the hand. Approaching a centre-table, she grazed it with her ap.r.o.n, and the table drew back from her. When she sat down on a chair and put her feet on the floor, the chair was thrown back violently against the wall, and she herself was thrown forward to the other side of the room. This last experiment, repeated several times, always succeeded. Neither Arago nor the astronomers of the Observatory were able to hold the chair down. M. Goujon, who had sat down in advance upon one half of the chair which was going to be used by Angelica, was upset at the moment when she came to share the seat with him.

Following a favorable report of its ill.u.s.trious perpetual secretary,[49]

the Academy of Science named a commission to examine Angelica Cottin. This commission confined its efforts exclusively to the task of determining whether or not the electrical force of the subject was similar to that of the machines or that of the torpedo-fish. They could not come to any conclusion, probably on account of the emotion excited in the girl at the sight of the formidable apparatus of experimentation; and then her peculiar powers were already on their decline. Thus the commission hastened to declare all the communications on this subject made to the Academy previous to this to be null and void.

Upon this topic my old master and friend Babinet, who was a member of the commission, wrote as follows: