"Religion and Friendship are twin companions, who aid us to traverse the painful path of life."
I cannot forego the pleasure of inserting here, at the close of this chapter, a fable, dictated like the others by table-rappings, and sent to me by M. Joubert, vice-president of the civil tribunal of Carcassonne.[13] The sentiment of it may be queried by some; but is not the central principle applicable to all epochs and to all governments: Do not the "arrivistes"[14] belong to all times?
A king who had profaned the public liberties, who for twenty years had slaked his thirst in the blood of heretics; awaiting the quiet peace of the hangman in his declining days; decrepit, surfeited with adulterous amours; this king, this haughty monster of whom they had made a great man,—Louis the Fourteenth, in short, if I must name him,—was one day airing under the leafy arches of his vast gardens his Scarron, his infamy and his troubles. The noble band of court flunkeys came along. Each one at once lost at least six inches of his height. Pages, counts, marquises, dukes, princes, marshals, ministers, bowed low before insulting rivals, the creatures of the king. Grave magistrates made their deep reverences, each humbler than a suitor asking for audience. 'Twas pleasant to see how the ribbons, crosses and decorations on their embroidered coats went ever backwards. Always and always that ignoble bowing and scraping and cringing. I should like to wake up some morning an emperor, that I might sting with my whip the backbone of a flatterer. But see! alone, confronting the despot, yet without abasing his head, forging along with slow steps on his own way, modest, clad in coarse homespun garments, comes one who seems a peasant, perhaps a philosopher, and passes by the groups of insolent courtiers. "Oh," cries the king, in great surprise, "why do you alone confront me without bending the knee?" "Sire," said the unknown, "must I be frank? It is because I alone here expect nothing from you."
If we stop to think how these sentences and phrases and different bits of literature were produced, letter by letter, rap by rap, following the alphabet as it was read out, we shall appreciate the difficulty of the thing. The rappings are made either in the interior of the wood of the table (the vibrations of which are perceptible) or in some other piece of furniture, or even in the air. The table, as I have already said, is alive, pregnant with a kind of momentary vitality. Melodies of well-known airs, sounds of sawing and of the workshop, and the report of fusillades can be drawn from it. Sometimes it becomes so light that it floats for a moment in the air, then so heavy that two men can scarcely lift it from the floor or budge it in any way. You must have a distinct picture in your mind of all these manifestations,—often puerile, no doubt, sometimes vulgar and grotesque, yet striking in their method of operation,—if you would accurately understand the phenomena, and realize that you are in the presence of an unknown element which jugglery and prestidigitation cannot explain.
Some folks can move their toes separately and crack the joints. If we should grant that the dictations, by combinations of letters (quoted above), were arranged in advance, learned by heart, and thus rapped, the matter would be simple enough. But this particular faculty is very rare, and it does not explain the noises in the table, the vibrations of which are felt by the hands. Again, one could fancy the medium tapping the table-legs with his foot, and thus constructing such sentences as he pleases. But it would require a wonderful memory in the medium to enable him to remember the precise arrangement of letters (for he has no memorandum before him), and, further, these curious dictations have been secured just the same in select companies where no one would cheat.
As to the theory that the spirits of eminent men are in communication with the experimenters the mere statement of the hypothesis shows its absurdity. Imagine a table-rapper calling up from the vasty deep the spirits of Paul or Saint Augustine, Archimedes or Newton, Pythagoras or Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci or William Herschel, and receiving their dictations from the interior of a table!
We were speaking, a few pages back, of the séance drawings and descriptions of Jupiter made by Victorien Sardou. This is the proper place to insert a letter written by him to M. Jules Claretie, and published by the latter in Le Temps at the date when that learned Academician was putting on the boards his drama Spiritisme. The letter is here appended:
... As to Spiritualism, I could better tell you verbally in three words what I think of it than I could write here in three pages. You are half right and half wrong. Pardon my freedom of speech. There are two things in Spiritualism,—(1) curious facts, inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge, and yet authenticated; and (2) the folks who explain them.
The facts are real. Those who explain them belong to three categories: there are, first, Spiritualists who are imbecile, ignorant, or mad, the chaps who call up Epaminondas and whom you justly make fun of, or who believe in the intervention of the devil; those, in short, who end in the lunatic asylum in Charenton.