3. Towards the end of the séance I felt upon my back a gust of cold air, and at the same time I heard the curtain behind me slowly open.
Then, when I turned around, very much puzzled, I perceived standing at the lower end of this kind of alcove a form,—indistinct, it is true, but not so much so that I could not recognize the silhouette of a young girl whose figure was slightly beneath the average. I ought to say here that my sister Rosalie was also of short stature. The head of this apparition was not very distinct. It seemed surrounded by a short of shaded aureole. The whole form of the statue, if I may so express myself, stood out very little from the dim obscurity from which it had emerged; that is to say, it was not very luminous.
4. I addressed myself to the spirit in Arabic, in very nearly the following terms:
"If it is really thou, Rosalie, who art in the midst of us, pull the hair on the back of my head three times in succession."
About ten minutes later, and when I had almost completely forgotten my request, I felt my hair pulled three separate times, just as I had desired. I certify this fact, which, besides, formed for me a most convincing truth of the presence of a familiar spirit close about us.
Le Bocain, Illustrator,
Rire, Pêle-Mêle, Chronique Amusante, etc.
I have restricted myself to presenting here these different reports,[28] in spite of certain contradictions, and even because of them. The reports mutually supplement each other and form a complete whole, through the entire independence of each observer.
You see how complex the subject is, and how difficult it is to form a radical conviction, an absolute scientific judgment. Some phenomena are incontestably true: there are others which are doubtful and which we may attribute to fraud, conscious or unconscious, and sometimes also to illusions of the observers. The levitation of the table, for example, its complete detachment from the floor under the action of an unknown force acting in opposition to the law of gravity, is a fact which cannot reasonably be contested.
I may remark, in this connection, that the table almost always rises hesitatingly, after balancings and oscillations, while, on the contrary, when it falls back it goes straight down at one swoop, alighting squarely on its four feet.[29]
On the other hand, since the medium constantly seeks to release one hand (generally her left hand) from the control designed to hinder her from doing so, a certain number of the touches felt and of the displacements of objects may be due to a substitution of hands. This behavior of hers will be the subject of a special examination in the following chapter.