In Bohemia with Du Maurier | Page 8

fair."
The second drawing shows our "Salut à la Gente et accorte pucelle!" and the winning smile with which Carry would receive us.
Mesmerism, or, as the fashion of to-day calls it, Hypnotism, formed so frequent a topic of conversation and speculation between du Maurier and myself, that it takes a very prominent place in my recollections.
In Paris I had had opportunities of attending some most interesting séances, in consequence of which I soon proceeded to investigate the mesmeric phenomena on my own account. Now I have not touched the fluid for some thirty years; I swore off because it was taking too much out of me; but I look back with pleasure on my earlier experiments, successes I may say, for I was fortunate enough to come across several exceptional subjects. Du Maurier was particularly interested in one of these, Virginie Marsaudon, and had a way of putting puzzling questions concerning her faculties and my mesmeric influence. Virginie was a "femme de ménage" of the true Parisian type, a devoted elderly creature, a sort of cross between a charwoman and a housekeeper. I was not yet eighteen when I first went to Paris, to study under my cousin, the eminent painter, Henri Lehmann. At his studio I found Virginie installed as the presiding genius of the establishment, using in turn broom or tub, needle, grill or frying-pan as the occasion might require; the wide range of her powers I further extended by making a truly remarkable mesmeric subject of her. My début in Paris was that of the somewhat bewildered foreigner, speaking but very indifferent French, and she had from the first done what she could to make me feel at home in the strange city, treating me with truly motherly care and devotion. How completely she took possession of me, is shown by a passage in a letter she wrote when I was ill in Leipsic, where I had gone on a visit to my parents. After expressing her anxiety and her regret at not being there to nurse me, she emphatically says:--"Je rends Madame, votre mère, responsable de votre santé" (I make Madame, your mother, responsible for your health). It needed but little to lead her on from a state of docile and genial dependence to one of unconscious mesmeric subjection, and so, a few passes shaping her course, I willed her across the boundary line that separates us from the unknown, a line which, thanks to science, is daily being extended. Madame veuve Marsaudon was herself an incorrigible disbeliever in the phenomena of mesmerism, but as a subject her faculties were such as to surprise and convert many a scoffer.
At the séances, to which I invited my friends and a few scientific outsiders, I always courted the fullest investigation, taking it as the first duty of the mesmerist to show cause why he should not be put down as a charlatan. So we had tests and counter-tests, evidence and counter-evidence; there were doctors to feel the pulse and to scrutinise the rigidity of the muscles, experts to propound scientific ifs and buts, and wiseacres generally to put spokes in the wheel of progress, as is their playful way, wherever they find that wheel in motion. It was doubly satisfactory, then, that the good faith of subject and mesmerist could be conclusively proved.
One of these séances led to a rather amusing incident. One night I was awakened from first slumbers by a sharp ring at my bell, and when, after some parleying, I opened the door, I found myself confronted by two individuals. One I recognised as an "inquirer" who had been brought to my rooms some time previously; the other was a lad I had not seen before. The inquirer, I ascertained, having carefully watched my modus operandi on the occasion of his visit, had next tried experiments of his own. In this instance he had succeeded in mesmerising a lad, but had found it impossible to recall him to his normal condition. So, securing him by a leather strap fastened round his waist, he led him through the streets of Paris to my rooms. There we both tried our powers upon him, the result being very unsatisfactory. The youth, feeling himself freed from one operator and not subjected by the other, refused allegiance to either, and, being of a pugnacious temperament, he squared up and commenced striking out at both of us. It was not without considerable difficulty that I re-mesmerised him completely, and then, having previously prepared his mind to account naturally for his presence in my rooms, I succeeded in awakening him, and all ended happily. The inquirer was duly grateful, the youth went home strapless and none the worse for the adventure, and I proceeded to do some very sound sleeping on my own