“I would say,” replied Catherine Théot, “ that the sun will beam brightly on that day when a man clothed in blue and bearing a sceptre of flowers shall be for one moment the king and saviour of the world. I would say that you shall be great as Moses and as Orpheus, when, trampling on the head of that monster which is ready to devour you, you shall testify to headsmen and to victims that God is. Cease from this masking, Robespierre; shew us rather without paling that valiant head which God is about to cast in the empty scale of his balance. The head of Louis XVI is heavy and yours can only be its counterpoise.”

“Do you threaten?” asked Robespierre coldly, letting his cloak fall. “Do you think by this juggling to startle my patriotism and influence my conscience? Do you hope by fanatical measures and old wives’ fables to surprise my resolves as you have played the spy on my proceedings? You have looked for me, it would seem, and woe to you because you have looked. Since you compel the curiosity-seeker, the anonymous visitor and observer to be Maximilian Robespierre, representative of the people, as such I denounce you to the committee of public weal, and I shall proceed to have you arrested.”

Having said these words, Robespierre cast his cloak round his powdered head and walked stiffly to the door. No one dared to detain and none to address him. Catherine Théot clasped her hands and said: “Respect his will, for he is king and pontiff of the new age. If he strike us, it is that God wills to strike us; lay bare the throat before the knife of Providence.”

The initiates of Catherine Théot waited expecting their arrest through the whole night, but no one appeared. They separated on the following day. Two or three further days and nights elapsed, during which the members of the sect made no attempt at concealment. On the fifth day, Catherine Théot and those who were called her accomplices were denounced to the Jacobins by a secret enemy of Robespierre who insinuated skilfully to his hearers certain doubts against the tribune—a dictatorship had been mentioned, the very name of king was pronounced. Robespierre knew, and how came he to tolerate it? Robespierre shrugged his shoulders, but on the morrow Catherine Théot, Dom Gerle and some others were arrested and consigned to those prisons which, once entered, opened only to furnish his daily task to the headsman.

The story of Robespierre’s interview with Catherine Théot had transpired, one knows not how.[332] Already the counter-police of the Thermidorians were watching the presumed dictator, whom they accused of mysticism because he believed in God. Robespierre notwithstanding was neither the friend nor enemy of the sect of New Johannites. He went to Catherine Théot that he might take account of phenomena, and dissatisfied at having been recognised he departed with threats which he did not attempt to fulfil; those who converted the conventicle of the old monk and ecstatic into a sect of conspiracy hoped to derive from the proceeding a doubt or an opportunity for ridicule attaching to the reputation of the incorruptible Maximilian. The prophecy of Catherine Théot was fulfilled by the inauguration of the worship of the Supreme Being and the swift reaction of Thermidor.

During this time the sect which had gathered about Sister André, whose revelations were recorded by a Sieur Ducy, continued their visions and miracles. The fixed notion which they cherished was to preserve the legitimacy by the future reign of Louis XVII.[333] Times out of number they saved in dream the poor little orphan of the Temple and believed also that they had saved him literally. Old prophecies promised the throne of the lilies to a young man who had been once a captive. So Bridget, St. Hildegarde, Bernard Tollard, Lichtemberger—all foretold a miraculous restoration after great disasters.[334] The Neo-Johannites were the interpreters and multipliers of these forecasts; a Louis XVII never failed them; they had seven or eight in succession, all perfectly authentic and not less perfectly preserved. It is to the influence of this sect that we owe at a later period the revelations of the peasant Martin de Gallardon and the prodigies of Vintras.

In this magnetic circle, as in the assemblies of Quakers or Shakers of Great Britain, enthusiasm proved contagious, and was propagated from one to another. After the death of Sister André, second sight and the gift of prophecy devolved upon a certain Legros, who was at Charenton when Martin was incarcerated provisionally therein. He recognised a brother in the Beauceron peasant whom he had never seen. All these partisans, by force of willing Louis XVII created him in a certain sense; that is to say, they worked such efficacious hallucinations that mediums were made in the image and likeness of the magnetic type, and believing themselves to be literally the royal child escaped from the Temple, they attracted all the reflections of this gentle and frail victim, so even that they remembered circumstances known only to the family of Louis XVI. This phenomenon, however incredible it may appear, is neither impossible nor unheard of. Paracelsus states that if, by an extraordinary effort of will, one can picture oneself as another person, one would know thereby and forthwith the inmost thought of that person, and would attract his most secret memories. Often after a conversation which has placed us in thought-affinity with a companion in conversation, we dream reminiscences of his private life. Among the simulators of Louis XVII we must therefore recognise some who were not impostors, but hallucinated beings, and among these last is the Swiss who is named Naündorff, a visionary like Swedenborg, one indeed so contagious in his conviction that old servants of the royal family have recognised him and cast themselves weeping at his feet. He bore the particular signs and scars of Louis XVII; he recounted his infancy with a startling appearance of truth and entered into minute details, which are decisive for private remembrances. His very features would have been those of the orphan of Louis XVI, had he really lived. One thing only in fine was wanting for the pretender to have been Louis XVII truly, and that is not to have been Naündorff.[335]

Such was the contagious magnetic power of this deluded person that even his death did not undeceive any of the believers in his reign to come. We have seen one of the most convinced, to whom we timidly objected—when he spoke of the approaching restoration of what he called the true legitimacy—that his Louis XVII was dead. “Is it then more difficult for God to raise him from death than it was for those who preceded us to save him from the Temple?” Such was the answer given us—and this with a smile so triumphant that almost it seemed disdainful. We had nothing to rejoin on our own part, but were rather compelled to bow in the presence of such a conviction.

CHAPTER VI
THE GERMAN ILLUMINATI

Germany is the native land of metaphysical mysticism and phantoms. A phantom itself of the old Roman empire, it seems always to invoke the mighty shade of Hermann, consecrating in his honour the simulacrum of the captive eagles of Varus. The patriotism of young Germany is invariably that of the Germans in elder days. They have no thought of invading the laughing land of Italy; they accept the situation, as it stands, simply as a matter of revenge; but they would die a thousand times in the defence of their hearths and homes. They love their old castles, their old legends of the banks of the Rhine; they read with the uttermost patience the darksome treatises of their philosophy; they behold in the fogs of their sky and in the smoke of their pipes a thousand things inexpressible, by which they are initiated into the marvels of the other world. Long before there was any question of mediums and their evocations in America and France, Prussia had its illuminati and seers, who had habitual communications with the dead. At Berlin, a great noble built a house destined for evocations; King Frederick William was very curious about all such mysteries and was often immured in this house with an adept named Steinert. His experiences were so signal that a state of exhaustion supervened and he had to be restored with drops of some magical elixir analogous to that of Cagliostro. There is a secret correspondence belonging to the reign in question which is cited by the Marquis de Luchet in his work against the illuminati, and it contains a description of the dark chamber in which the evocations were performed. It was a square apartment, divided by a transparent veil; the magical furnace or altar of perfumes was erected in front of the veil and behind was a pedestal on which the spirit manifested. In his German work upon Magic, Eckartshausen describes the whole of the fantastic apparatus, being a system of machines and operations by which imagination was helped to create the phantoms desired, those who consulted the oracle being in a kind of waking somnambulism, comparable to the nervous excitement produced by opium or hasheesh. Those who are contented with the explanations given by the author just mentioned will regard the apparitions as magic lantern effects, but there is more in it assuredly than this, while the magic lantern was only an accessory instrument in the business and one in no sense necessary for the production of the phenomenon. The images of persons once known on earth and now called up by thought do not appear as reflections of coloured glass; the pictures painted by a lantern do not speak, nor do they give answers to question on matters of conscience. The king of Prussia, to whom the house belonged, was well acquainted with all the apparatus and was not therefore duped by jugglery, as the author of the secret correspondence pretends. The natural means paved the way for the prodigy but did not perform the latter; and the things which occurred were of a kind to surprise and disturb the most inveterate sceptic.[336] Schroepfer, moreover made use of no magic lantern and no veil, but those who came to him drank a kind of punch which he prepared; the forms which then appeared by his mediation were like those of the American Home, that is to say, partially materialised, and they caused a curious sensation in persons who sought to touch them. The experience was analogous to an electric disturbance, making the flesh creep, and there would have been no such sensation if people had moistened their hands before touching the apparition. Schroepfer acted in good faith, as does also the American Home; he believed in the reality of the spirits evoked by him, and he killed himself when he began to doubt it.[337]