Then she lays her head on my shoulder, takes my entire right arm, including the hand, and putting my leg between hers, and my feet between her feet, she held me very tight. Then she begins to rub the carpet, drawing my feet along with hers, and squeezing me tighter than before. Then she cries, "Spetta! spetta!" ("Look! look!"); then, "Vieni! vieni!" ("Come! come!") She invites M. Pallotti to take a place behind his wife and see what will happen. I must add that both of them had been earnestly asking, for some minutes, if they might see and embrace their daughter, as they had done at Rome.
After a new nervous effort on the part of Eusapia, and a kind of convulsion accompanied by groans, complaints, and cries, there was a great movement of the curtain. Several times I see the head of a young girl bowing before me, with high-arched forehead and with long hair.
She bows three times, and shows her dark profile against the window. A moment after we hear sounds from M. and Mme. Pallotti. They are covering with kisses the face of a being invisible to us, saying to her with passionate affection, "Rosa, Rosa, my dear, my Rosalie," etc. They say they felt between their hands the face and the hair of their daughter.
My impression was that there was really there a fluidic being. I did not touch it. The grief of the parents, revived and consoled at the same time, seemed to me so worthy of respect that I did not approach them. But, as to the identity of the spectral being, I believed it to be a sentimental illusion of theirs.
I come now to the strangest circumstances of all, the most incomprehensible, the most incredible, of any that we experienced in our séances.
On November 21 M. Jules Bois presents a book before the curtain at about the height of a man standing upright. The salon is dimly lighted by a little lamp with a shade, set pretty well to one side. Yet objects are seen with distinctness.
An invisible hand behind the curtain seizes the book. Then all the observers see it disappear as if it had passed through the curtain. It is not seen to fall before the curtain. It is an octavo, rather slender, bound in red, which I have just taken from my library.
Now Mme. Flammarion, almost as sceptical as M. Baschet about these phenomena, had glided past the window to the rear of the curtain, in order to observe carefully what was passing. She hoped to detect a movement of the medium's arm, and to unmask her, in spite of the courtesy she owed her as her hostess. She saw very plainly Eusapia's head, motionless before the mirror which reflected the light.
Suddenly the book appears to her, it having passed through the curtain,—upheld in the air, without hands or arms, for a space of one or two seconds. Then she sees it fall down. She cries, "Oh! the book: it has just passed through the curtain!" and, pale and stupefied with wonder, she abruptly retires among the observers.
The entire hither side of the curtain was plainly visible, because the left portion of the left-hand curtain had been loosened from its rod by the weight of a person who had sat down on the sofa where the lower part of the curtain had been accidentally placed; and because a large opening had been made fronting the mirror which filled the entire wall of the farther end of the salon,—a mirror that reflected the light of the little lamp.