Eusapia Paladino was introduced to me. She is a woman of very ordinary appearance, a brunette, her figure a little under the medium height. She was forty-three years old, not at all neurotic, rather stout. She was born on January 21, 1854, in a village of La Pouille; her mother died while giving birth to the child; her father was assassinated eight years afterward, in 1862, by brigands of southern Italy. Eusapia Paladino is her maiden name. She was married at Naples to a merchant of modest means named Raphael Delgaiz, a citizen of Naples. She manages the petty business of the shop, is illiterate, does not know how to either read or write, understands only a little French. I conversed with her, and soon perceived that she has no theories and does not burden herself by trying to explain the phenomena produced by her.
The salon in which we are going to conduct our experiments is a room on the ground floor, rectangular, measuring twenty feet in length by nineteen in breadth; there are four windows, an outside entrance door and another in the vestibule.
Before the sitting, I make sure that the large doors and windows are closely shut by window-blinds with hooks and by wooden blinds on the inside. The door of the vestibule is simply locked with a key.
In an angle of the salon, at the left of the large entrance door, two curtains of a light color have been stretched on a rod, joining in the middle and forming thus a little cabinet. In this cabinet there is a sofa, and leaning against this a guitar; on one side is a chair, on which have been placed a music-box and a bell. In the recess of the window which is included in the cabinet there is a music-rack, upon which has been placed a plate containing a well-smoothed cake of glazier's putty, and under which, on the floor, is a huge tray containing a large smoothed cake of the same. We have prepared these plaques of putty because the annals of Spiritualism have often shown the imprint of hands and of heads produced by the unknown beings whom it is our business in this work to investigate. The large tray weighs about nine pounds.
Why this dark cabinet? The medium declares it is necessary to the production of the phenomena "that relate to the condensation of fluids."
I should prefer that there should be nothing of the kind. But the conditions must be accepted, though we must have an exact understanding about them. Behind the curtain the stillness of the aërial waves is at its maximum, the light at its minimum. It is curious, strange, infinitely regrettable that light prohibits certain effects. Undoubtedly, it would not be either philosophic or scientific to oppose this condition. It is possible that the radiations, the forces, which act may be the rays of the invisible end of the spectrum, I have already had occasion to remark, in the first chapter, that he who would seek to make photographs without a dark chamber would cloud over his plate and obtain nothing. The man who would deny the existence of electricity because he had been unable to obtain a spark in a damp atmosphere would be in error. He who would not believe in the existence of stars because we only see them at night would not be very wise. Modern progress in natural philosophy has taught us that the radiations that impinge on the retina represent only the smallest fraction of the totality. We can then admit the existence of forces which do not act in the full light of day. But, in accepting these conditions, the essential point is not to be their dupe.
Hence, before the séance, I examined carefully the narrow corner of the room before which the curtain was stretched, and I found nothing except the objects mentioned above. Nowhere in the room was there any sign whatever of concealed mechanism, no electric wires or batteries or anything of the kind, either on the floor or in the walls. Moreover, the perfect sincerity of M. and Mme. Blech is beyond all suspicion.
Before the séance, Eusapia was undressed and dressed before Mme. Zelma Blech. Nothing suspicious was found.
The sitting was begun in full light, and I constantly laid stress upon obtaining the largest number of phenomena we could in the full light of day. It was only gradually, according as the "spirit" begged for it, that the light was turned down. But I obtained the concession that the darkness should never be absolute. At the last limit, when the light had to be entirely extinguished, it was replaced by one of the red lanterns used by photographers.
The medium sits before the curtain, turning her back to it. A table is placed before her,—a kitchen table, made of spruce, weighing about fifteen pounds. I examined this table and found nothing in it suspicious. It could be moved about in every direction.