[355] The charges are contained in a pamphlet entitled Le Prophète Vintras, published by Gozzoli in 1851. I do not think that Geoffroi wrote anything.
[356] Vintras was arrested at Tilly-sur-Seules in 1842 on a charge of roguery; he was tried at Caen and condemned to five years’ imprisonment. After his release in 1848, he found an asylum in England.
[357] See La France Mystique, vol. i. p. 36 et seq. for a contemporary account of Du Potet and of the periodical magnetic séances which took place au dessus du restaurant des Frères Provençaux, au Perron du Palais-Royal.
[358] According to another account, the Magic Mirror was an ordinary circle of evocation drawn with charcoal. Wandering spirits were supposed to be conjured therein.
[359] His madness is said otherwise to have been partial, or characterised by many lucid intervals. His second work was Religion, and it preached the doctrine of reincarnation, with periodical changes of sex. It described the Deity as an infinite substance in which circulated myriads of soul-entities.
[360] His other works include the Gospel of the People, 1840, to which Éliphas Lévi refers subsequently. For this he was imprisoned. In 1847 he published a Histoire des Montagnards. At the end of 1851 he was compelled to leave France, and seems to have lived in England. Henri Alphonse Esquiros was born in 1814.
[361] Henri Delaage seems to have taken the question of physical beauty rather seriously to heart. In 1850, under the title of Perfectionnement physique de la Race Humaine, he made a collection of processes and methods for acquiring beauty, drawn—as he claimed—from Chaldean Magi and Hermetic Philosophers.
[362] The Église Française was forcibly closed about 1840, but in 1848 an attempt was made to reopen it in a small room. A particular kind of Mass was celebrated in the French language, and it appears that the church had fixed festivals of its own. In doctrinal matters, Abbé Châtel regarded the relation between God and the universe as comparable to that between the soul and body, “but in an infinitely more excellent manner.” Paradise, Purgatory and Hell were alike abolished, and in their place two states were substituted, one of glory and felicity, the other of reparation.
[363] See the appendix to Essai sur le Secte des Illuminés, by the Marquis de Luchet, already quoted.
[364] Joseph Pitton de Tournefort: Relation d’un Voyage du Levant, 1717, 2 vols. It was translated into English and published in 3 vols., 1741.