"And how did you write your name on this piece of paper?"
"By passing 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 séance 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 séance at the Clément 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.