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 assistants, who heaped insults upon him. A final séance 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 séance, and sentenced to one year in jail for swindling.
In this class 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 Duchess of Pomar. Already made distrustful by the ingenious observations of the young duke, the sitters were determined not to be the butt of her fooleries very long, and a sitting was agreed on. The participators 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 classic 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 Perrière (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.