“In the course of the same year (1863),” says Robert-Houdin in his Les Secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie, “M. Hostein, manager of the Imperial Châtelet Theatre, purchased[19] from M. Pepper the secret of the ‘Ghost,’ in order to introduce it into a drama entitled Le Secret de Miss Aurore [19] He paid 20,000 francs for the invention. “But before the trick was in working order at its new destination, several of the Parisian theatres, in the face of letters patent duly granted to M. Pepper, had already advertised performances wherein it was included. “M. Hostein had no means of preventing the piracy; unluckily for himself, and still more so for the inventor, the plagiarists had discovered among the French official records a patent taken out, ten years before, by a person named Séguin for a toy called the Polyoscope, which was founded on the same principle as the ghost illusion.” Professor Pepper claims to have been totally unaware of the existence of M. Séguin’s Polyoscope. In his True History of the Ghost, Pepper describes the toy as follows: “It consisted of a box with a small sheet of glass placed at an angle of forty-five degrees, and it reflected a concealed table, with plastic figures, the spectres of which appeared behind the glass, and which young people who possessed the toy invited their companions to take out of the box, when they melted away, as it were, in their hands and disappeared.” In France, at that time, all improvements on a patent fell to the original patentee, and Pepper found himself out-of-court. {95} The conjurer Robin claims, on very good authority, to have been the original inventor of the ghost illusion. He writes as follows: “I first had the idea of producing the apparitions in 1845. Meeting innumerable difficulties in carrying out my invention I was obliged to wait until 1847 before reaching a satisfactory result. In that year I was able to exhibit the ‘spectres’ to the public in the theatres of Lyons and Saint Etienne under the name of ‘The living phantasmagoria.’ To my great astonishment I produced little effect. The apparitions still were in want of certain improvements which I have since added. After succeeding in perfecting them I met with great success in exhibiting them in Venice, Rome, Munich, Vienna and Brussels, but as my experiments were very costly I was obliged to lay them aside for some time.” He further declares that M. Séguin, who had been employed by him to paint phantasmagoric figures, had based his toy, the Polyoscope, upon the principle of his (Robin’s) spectres. Robin was one of the managers who brought out the illusion in Paris, despite the protests of M. Hostein. He opposed Hostein with the patent of the Polyoscope and some of his old theatre posters of the year 1847, advertising the “living phantasmagoria.”