(From Hopkins’ Magic, etc. Sci. Amer. Co.)
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I first saw this interesting illusion exhibited in a café chantant in Paris. The fat, thick-necked, little Frenchman, who presented the trick to the audience, reminded me of one of those human-headed bulls carved upon the walls of Assyrian palaces and temples. His hair and beard were oiled and curled. He bellowed out the marvels of his decapitated Princess, and flirted the skirts of his long Prince Albert coat like an animal lashing flies off its flanks with its tail. According to this Chevalier d’Ananias, the Princess lost her charming little powdered head during the reign of Robespierre I; it “sneezed into the basket” of the guillotine one fine morning while the knitting women sat around the scaffold and plied their needles and tongues. “Down with the Aristocrats!” Thanks to an eminent surgeon, who begged the head from the executioner, it was restored to life by hypnotic power. The surgeon handed it down to his descendants. Finally it came into possession of the showman, by what means the gentleman did not relate.
A few days after the above exhibition, I saw the poor little Princess eating cabbage soup in a second-class cabaret. Her manager was with her. Her head was on her body at the time.
TREWEYISM.
“Le mime-comédien Trewey est un prestidigitateur merveilleus, créateur vraiment surprenant d’ombres chinoises avec l’unique secours de ses mains. On peut dire que Trewey est de ceux qui ont agrandi le cercle de la fantasmagorie et en ont fait un des astres les plus vagabonds de la fantaisie.”—DOM BLASIUS: L’Intransigeant.
I.
My favorite character in French fiction is Alexander Dumas’ inimitable D’Artagnan, le mousquetaire par excellence, who comes out of Gascony with nothing but a rusty suit of clothes on his back, an ancestral sword at his side, his father’s blessing, and a bony sorrel horse under him, to seek his fortune in the world. Aided by his good rapier, his wonderful sang froid, splendid audacity and versatile talents, he elbows his way to the foot of a throne, to become captain of the Grand Monarque’s bodyguard, and eventually a marshal of France.
In the world of magic we have a similar character, not a mere figment, however, of the novelist’s imagination, but a living, breathing personality. I refer to Félicien Trewey, the eminent French fantaisiste, whose life reads like a romance. M. Trewey possesses all of the qualities of heart and mind of Dumas’ hero—audacity, versatility, tireless energy in the pursuit of his profession, bonhomie, and what not. Had he lived in the seventeenth century, he doubtless would have been a soldier of fortune like D’Artagnan, fought duels, made love to duchesses, and outwitted a cardinal, but having been born in an age of steam and electricity, and fully realizing the fact that science has reduced the art of war to mere mechanics, he sought out a career that promised the most romance and adventure, and became a mousquetaire of magic, wielding the wand instead of {332} the sword. It is a long, long way from the half-starved mountebank of a wandering caravan to an Officier d’Académie and landed proprietor living at ease in one’s old age. But Trewey has accomplished all this.