In 1848, I made a tour in Burgundy. My daughter and I were in the same coach with a very charming lady of thirty to thirty-two; we only exchanged a few words; it was eleven o'clock at night; and one of the things she had told me was that she never slept when she was travelling. Ten minutes later, she was not only asleep, but asleep with her head on my shoulder. I waked her up; she was extremely surprised to find she had fallen asleep, and fallen asleep in the position in which she found herself. I renewed the experiment two or three times during the night, and my strength of will was sufficient, without my needing to touch my neighbour, to be successful in every instance.
When the coach stopped at the posting-house and horses were being changed, I woke her abruptly and asked her what time it was; she opened her eyes and tried to pull out her watch.
"Never mind that," I said to her; "tell me the time by your watch without looking at it."
"Three minutes to three o'clock," she replied immediately
We called the postillion, and by the light of his lantern we verified that it was exactly three minutes to three.
These were nearly all the experiments I tried upon that lady; they yielded the results I have just related, and, with the exception of the time being told without looking at the watch, they all appertain to the order of physical phenomena.
At Joigny, I made an official call on M. Lorin, the procureur de la République, whom I had never met before. It was just about the time of the publication of Balsamo, which had made magnetism quite the rage. I rarely entered a salon at that period without being questioned about this great mystery. At Joigny I replied, as I always did—
"Magnetic power exists; it can be practised, but its scientific basis is not yet known. It is in a similar condition to that of air balloons: we can send them up, but no means of directing them have yet been devised."
Doubts were then expressed by persons present, and especially by women. I asked one of these ladies, Madame B——, if she would allow me to put her to sleep; she refused in such a manner as to convince me that she would not be overweeningly angry if I did it without her leave. Nevertheless, I assumed an attitude of submission to her; but, five minutes later, having got up as though to look at an engraving hanging above her arm-chair, I summoned to my aid all my magnetic power and for five minutes I persistently willed her to go to sleep; at the end of that five minutes she was asleep. Then I began a series of extremely curious experiments on this lady, who was a total stranger to me, in a house which I had never entered before or have since re-entered. Madame B——, in spite of her will, obeyed both my expressed mandates and also my mute wishes. Every ordinary sensation in her was reversed: fire felt like ice, ice like fire. She complained of a bad headache: I bound her forehead with an imaginary bandage which I told her contained snow, and she immediately experienced a delicious sensation of coolness; then, a moment later, she wiped away from her forehead the water from the imaginary bandage, as though the heat of her head were melting the supposititious snow; but, soon, her handkerchief was not enough for the operation; she borrowed a friend's; finally, the demand for a handkerchief was followed by that for a serviette; then, her dress and the rest of her clothes being damp, she asked to be allowed to go to a room to change everything. I let her feel this sensation of cold till she shivered; then, suddenly, I gave the order for her clothes to dry themselves, and they dried themselves. The whole thing, of course, was in the imagination of the lady mesmerised. She had an extremely fine voice, of a fairly wide range, but which stopped short at the Ionic si. I ordered her to sing as high as re; she sang, and gave the two last notes perfectly—an impossible feat for her in her ordinary state, and one which she tried in vain when I had wakened her from her magnetic sleep. A woman was working in the next room. I put a paper-knife in the somnambulist's hands and made her think it was a real knife. Then I ordered her to go and stab the workwoman. Thereupon what free will she had left in her revolted; she refused, writhed, hung back on the furniture, but I had only to will and to point in the direction I wished her to take, and she obeyed and went up to the workwoman, utterly stupefied, the knife raised.
Her eyes were open and her face, which was a very lovely one, assumed an admirable stage expression, as beautiful as that of Miss Faucit when she is acting the sleep-walking scene in Hamlet. The procureur de la République was terrified at the thought of such a power, which could urge a person to a crime, in spite of herself. When I had willed Madame B—— back to calmness, I tried to make her see things at a distance. When Colonel S. M——, who was a friend of mine, had been staying in Joigny with his regiment, she had made his acquaintance, so I asked where the colonel was at that hour, and what he was doing.