My Library

of the three professors of the art, named. They declined; whereupon the Emperor, speaking aloud, asked ‘if any of the company were willing to test, in their own persons, the vaunted powers of his excellency, the Italian Count?’ whose methods of inducing his magnetic marvels differed altogether from those usually adopted; inasmuch as he, like Boucicault, the actor, in his famous play—‘The Phantom’— makes no passes, scarcely glances for an instant at his subjects, and invariably looks away from, not toward, them. Now, it is a well-known fact that everybody believes everybody else, save themselves, subject to mesmeric influence, as is often demonstrated at the weekly séances of the Magnetic Society, held in the Rue Grenelle St. Honore. “At the date of this Imperial Séance, spiritualism had not yet made public pretensions in France, and although the Scotch trickster, Daniel Hume, had crossed the Atlantic, and was at that time living at Cox’s, in Jermyn street, Picadilly, London—yet he had not then obtained the notoriety that subsequently became his, nor had half Europe ran after those in whose presence tables tipped by heel, toe, and genuine spirit power. Of course, then, spiritual phenomena, so called, being then under bann, it could not be, and was not depended on as a means of explaining what there and then took place. “ ‘With great pleasure,’ said the Count, in reply