This excentric power of attraction or projection supposes invariably a diseased condition in the person who is the subject thereof; the mediums are all excentric and badly equilibrated beings; mediomania supposes or occasions a sequence of other nervous manias, fixed notions, deordinated appetites, disorderly erotomania, tendencies to murder or suicide. Among persons so affected moral responsibility seems to exist no more; they do evil with good as their motive; they shed tears of emotion in a church and may be surprised at bacchanalian orgies. They have a way of explaining everything—by the devil or the spirits which obsess and carry them away. What would you have of them? They live no more in themselves; some mysterious creature animates them and acts in their place; this being is named “Legion.”

The reiterated efforts of a healthy person to develop mediumistic faculties cause fatigue, disease and may even derange reason. It is this which happened to Victor Hennequin, formerly an editor of La Démocratie Pacifique and, after 1848, a member of the National Assembly. He was a young barrister, with a plentiful flow of eloquence, wanting neither education nor talent, but he was infatuated with the reveries of Fourier. Being banished as an after consequence of December 2, he took up table-turning during his enforced inactivity; he fell a victim all too soon to mediomania and believed himself an instrument for the revelations of the soul of the earth. He published a book entitled: Save the Human Race; it was a medley of socialistic and Christian reminiscences; a last gleam of reason flickered therein; but the experiences continued and folly triumphed. In a final work, of which only one volume was issued, Victor Hennequin represents God in the guise of an immense polypus located at the centre of the earth, having antennae and horns turned inwards like tendrils all over his brain, as also over that of his wife Octavia. Soon afterwards it was reported that Victor Hennequin had died from the consequences of a maniacal paroxysm in a madhouse.[359]

We have also heard of a lady belonging to the aristocracy who gave herself up to communications with pretended spirits in tables and who, scandalised beyond measure at the unsuitable replies of her particular piece of furniture, undertook a journey to Rome to submit the heretical article to the chair of St. Peter. She carried it with her and had an auto-da-fé in the capital of the Christian world. Better to burn her furniture than to court madness, and to say the truth it was an imminent danger for the lady here in question. Let us not laugh at the episode—for we are children of an age of reason in which men who pass as serious, like the Comte de Mirville, ascribe to the devil unexplained phenomena of Nature.

In a drama which is well known on the boulevards there is much to be heard of a magician who, requiring a formidable auxiliary, created an automaton, being a monster with the paws of a lion, a bull’s horns and the scales of leviathan. To this hybrid sphinx he imparted life, but took flight incontinently, being terrified at the work of his hands. The monster followed in pursuit, appeared between him and his betrothed, set fire to his house, burnt his father, carried off his son, and continuing the chase to the sea, followed him on board a ship which he caused to be engulphed, but finally made an end of himself amidst thunder. This awful spectacle, rendered visible by fear, has been realised in the history of humanity; poetry has personified the phantom of evil and has endowed it with all forces of Nature. It has sought to enlist the chimera as an aid to morality, and has then gone in fear of the ugliness begotten by its own dreams. From this time forward, the monster has pursued us through the ages; it makes grimaces between us and the objects of our love; an impure nightmare, it strangles our children in their sleep; it carries through creation, that father’s house of humanity, the inextinguishable torch of hell; it burns and tortures our parents everlastingly; it spreads black wings to hide heaven from our eyes; it shrieks to us: “Hope no more.” It mounts the crupper and gallops behind us like remorse; it plunges into the ocean of despair the last rock of our hopes; it is the old Persian Ahriman, the Egyptian Typhon, the darksome god confessed by the heretics of Manes, the Comte de Mirville and the Black Magic of the devil; it is the world’s horror and the idol of bad Christians. Men have tried to laugh at it and have been afraid; they have caricatured it and then trembled, for the cartoons have seemed to take life and to mock at those who made them. All this notwithstanding, its reign is over, though it will not perish overwhelmed by a bolt from heaven; science has conquered the lightning and converted it into torches; the monster will dissolve before the brightness of science and truth; the genius of ignorance and darkness can only be blasted by the light.

CHAPTER IV
THE FANTASTIC SIDE OF MAGICAL LITERATURE

It is now twenty years since Alphonse Esquiros,[360] one of the friends of our childhood, issued a work of high fantasy, entitled the Magician. All that the romanticism of that period conceived to be most bizarre was embodied in the story; the author provided his magus with a seraglio of dead ladies, embalmed according to a process which has since been discovered by Gannal. The characters included an automaton of bronze who preached chastity, a hermaphrodite who was in love with the moon and conducted a regular correspondence with that satellite: there were other wonderful things which one has forgotten at this day. Alphonse Esquiros may be said to have founded a school of fantasiasts in Magic by the publication of this romance, its most distinguished present representative being the young and interesting Henri Delaage, who is a productive writer, an unrecognised thaumaturgist and a gifted charmer. His style is not less astonishing than were the notions of Alphonse Esquiros, his initiator and master. Thus, in his book dealing with those who have risen from the dead, he remarks as follows concerning some objection against Christianity: “I take this objection by the throat and, when I loose my grasp, the earth shall resound sullenly under the weight of its strangled corpse.” It is true that his reply to the objection comes to very little; but what would you, when an objection has been strangled and when the earth has resounded sullenly under the weight of its body?

We have said that Henri Delaage is an unrecognised thaumaturgist. As a fact he has informed a person of our acquaintance that during a winter when influenza was prevalent, it was sufficient for him to enter a room and every one who happened to be therein was cured immediately. Unhappily he became himself a victim of the miracle, for he contracted a slight hoarseness which has never left him. Many of our friends declare that he has the gift of ubiquity; he is left at the office of La Patrie and is found again with his publisher Dantu; one retires in dismay and goes home, there to find—Delaage awaiting one’s arrival. He is a skilful charmer. A society lady who had been reading one of his books testified that she knew nothing better written or more beautiful, but it is not to his works alone that Delaage imparts beauty. We had been reading an article signed Fiorentino which said that the physical attractions of the young magician equalled or even surpassed those of angels. We encountered Delaage and questioned him with curiosity on this singular revelation. Delaage then put his hand in his waistcoat, turned three parts round and looked smiling to heaven; it happened fortunately that we were carrying the Enchiridion of Leo III, which is known to preserve from enchantments, so that the charmer’s angelical beauty was hidden from our eyes. Let us offer on our part a more serious eulogium to Henri Delaage than do those who admire his good looks; he is sincere when he says that he is a catholic and when he proclaims loudly his love and respect for religion. Now religion can make you a saint, and this title is more estimable and glorious than that of a sorcerer.[361]

It is owing to his rank as a publicist that we have placed this young man in the first place among the Fantasiasts of Magic, but in all other respects it belongs to the Comte D’Ourches, a man of venerable age who has devoted his life and fortune to mesmeric experiments. Ladies in a state of somnambulism, and any furniture at his house, give themselves up to frenzied dances; the furniture becomes worn out and is broken, but it is said that the ladies are all the better for their gyrations.

For a long time the Comte D’Ourches has been dominated by a fixed idea, which is the fear of being buried alive, and he has written a number of memorials on the need for verifying decease in a more certain way than obtains usually. He has some justification for such a fear on his own part because his temperament is plethoric, while his extreme nervous susceptibility, continually superexcited by experiments with fair somnambulists, may expose him to attacks of apoplexy. In magnetism he is the pupil of Abbé Faria and in necromancy he belongs to the school of Baron de Guldenstubbé. The latter has published a work entitled Practical Experimental Pneumatology, or the Reality of Spirits and the Marvellous Phenomenon of their Direct Writing. He gives an account of his discovery as follows: “It was in the course of the year 1850, or about three years prior to the epidemic of table-rapping, that the author sought to introduce into France the circles of American spiritualism, the mysterious Rochester knockings and the purely automatic writing of mediums. Unfortunately he met with many obstacles raised by other mesmerists. Those who were committed to the hypothesis of a magnetic fluid, and even those who styled themselves Spiritual Mesmerists, but who were really inferior inducers of somnambulism, treated the mysterious knockings of American Spiritualism as visionary follies. It was therefore only after more than six months that the author was able to form his first circle on the American plan, and then thanks to the zealous concurrence of M. Roustan, a former member of the Société des Magnétiseurs Spiritualistes, a simple man who was full of enthusiasm for the holy cause of spiritualism. We were joined by a number of other persons, amongst whom was the Abbé Châtel,[362] founder of the Église Française, who, despite his rationalistic tendencies, ended by admitting the reality of objective and supernatural revelation, as an indispensable condition of spiritualism and all practical religions. Setting aside the moral conditions, which are equally requisite, it is known that American circles are based on the distinction of positive and electric or negative magnetic currents.

“The circles consist of twelve persons, representing in equal proportions the positive and negative or sensitive elements. This distinction does not follow the sex of the members, though generally women are negative and sensitive, while men are positive and magnetic. The mental and physical constitution of each individual must be studied before forming the circles, for some delicate women have masculine qualities, while some strong men are, morally speaking, women. A table is placed in a clear and ventilated spot; the medium is seated at one end and entirely isolated; by his calm and contemplative quietude he serves as a conductor for the electricity, and it may be noted that a good somnambulist is usually an excellent medium. The six electrical or negative dispositions, which are generally recognised by their emotional qualities and their sensibility, are placed at the right of the medium, the most sensitive of all being next him. The same rule is followed with the positive personalities, who are at the left of the medium, with the most positive among them next to him. In order to form a chain, the twelve persons each place their right hand on the table and their left hand on that of their neighbour, thus making a circle round the table. Observe that the medium or mediums, if there be more than one, are entirely isolated from those who form the chain.