If a fortune-teller gives you minute details of past facts known only to yourself, why should he not foresee the events to be produced by existing causes? The world of ideas is cut out, so to speak, on the pattern of the physical world; the same phenomena should be discernible in both, allowing for the difference of the medium. As, for instance, a corporeal body actually projects an image upon the atmosphere—a spectral double detected and recorded by the daguerreotype; so also ideas, having a real and effective existence, leave an impression, as it were, upon the atmosphere of the spiritual world; they likewise produce effects, and exist spectrally (to coin a word to express phenomena for which no words exist), and certain human beings are endowed with the faculty of discerning these "forms" or traces of ideas.
As for the material means employed to assist the seer—the objects arranged by the hands of the consultant that the accidents of his life may be revealed to him,—this is the least inexplicable part of the process. Everything in the material world is part of a series of causes and effects. Nothing happens without a cause, every cause is a part of a whole, and consequently the whole leaves its impression on the slightest accident. Rabelais, the greatest mind among moderns, resuming Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, and Dante, pronounced three centuries ago that "man is a microcosm"—a little world. Three hundred years later, the great seer Swedenborg declared that "the world was a man." The prophet and the precursor of incredulity meet thus in the greatest of all formulas.
Everything in human life is predestined, so it is also with the existence of the planet. The least event, the most futile phenomena, are all subordinate parts of a scheme. Great things, therefore, great designs, and great thoughts are of necessity reflected in the smallest actions, and that so faithfully, that should a conspirator shuffle and cut a pack of playing-cards, he will write the history of his plot for the eyes of the seer styled gypsy, fortune-teller, charlatan, or what not. If you once admit fate, which is to say, the chain of links of cause and effect, astrology has a locus standi, and becomes what it was of yore, a boundless science, requiring the same faculty of deduction by which Cuvier became so great, a faculty to be exercised spontaneously, however, and not merely in nights of study in the closet.
For seven centuries astrology and divination have exercised an influence not only (as at present) over the uneducated, but over the greatest minds, over kings and queens and wealthy people. Animal magnetism, one of the great sciences of antiquity, had its origin in occult philosophy; chemistry is the outcome of alchemy; phrenology and neurology are no less the fruit of similar studies. The first illustrious workers in these, to all appearance, untouched fields, made one mistake, the mistake of all inventors; that is to say, they erected an absolute system on a basis of isolated facts for which modern analysis as yet cannot account. The Catholic Church, the law of the land, and modern philosophy, in agreement for once, combined to prescribe, persecute, and ridicule the mysteries of the Cabala as well as the adepts; the result is a lamentable interregnum of a century in occult philosophy. But the uneducated classes, and not a few cultivated people (women especially), continue to pay a tribute to the mysterious power of those who can raise the veil of the future; they go to buy hope, strength, and courage of the fortune-teller; in other words, to ask of him all that religion alone can give. So the art is still practised in spite of a certain amount of risk. The eighteenth century encyclopaedists procured tolerance for the sorcerer; he is no longer amenable to a court of law, unless, indeed, he lends himself to fraudulent practices, and frightens his "clients" to extort money from them, in which case he may be prosecuted on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences. Unluckily, the exercise of the sublime art is only too often used as a method of obtaining money under false pretences, and for the following reasons.
The seer's wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and uneducated are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at which we marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise —an Apostle Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is imprisoned, and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in conversation, in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, or the soldier's toils of war; the fire within is apt to flash out in gleams of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden in an unpolished diamond. Let the occasion come, and the spirit within kindles and glows, finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like power of beholding all things. The coal of yesterday under the play of some mysterious influence becomes a radiant diamond. Better educated people, many-sided and highly polished, continually giving out all that is in them, can never exhibit this supreme power, save by one of the miracles which God sometimes vouchsafes to work. For this reason the soothsayer is almost always a beggar, whose mind is virgin soil, a creature coarse to all appearance, a pebble borne along the torrent of misery and left in the ruts of life, where it spends nothing of itself save in mere physical suffering.
The prophet, the seer, in short, is some Martin le Laboureur making a Louis XVIII. tremble by telling him a secret known only to the king himself; or it is a Mlle. Lenormand, or a domestic servant like Mme. Fontaine, or again, perhaps it is some half-idiotic negress, some herdsman living among his cattle, who receives the gift of vision; some Hindoo fakir, seated by a pagoda, mortifying the flesh till the spirit gains the mysterious power of the somnambulist.
Asia, indeed, through all time, has been the home of the heroes of occult science. Persons of this kind, recovering their normal state, are usually just as they were before. They fulfil, in some sort, the chemical and physical functions of bodies which conduct electricity; at times inert metal, at other times a channel filled with a mysterious current. In their normal condition they are given to practices which bring them before the magistrate, yea, verily, like the notorious Balthazar, even unto the criminal court, and so to the hulks. You could hardly find a better proof of the immense influence of fortune-telling upon the working classes than the fact that poor Pons' life and death hung upon the prediction that Mme. Fontaine was to make from the cards.
Although a certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a canvas so considerable and so full of detail as a complete picture of French society in the nineteenth century, it is needless to repeat the description of Mme. Fontaine's den, already given in Les Comediens sans le savoir; suffice it to say that Mme. Cibot used to go to Mme. Fontaine's house in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple as regularly as frequenters of the Cafe Anglais drop in at that restaurant for lunch. Mme. Cibot, being a very old customer, often introduced young persons and old gossips consumed with curiosity to the wise woman.
The old servant who acted as provost marshal flung open the door of the sanctuary with no further ceremony than the remark, "It's Mme. Cibot.—Come in, there's nobody here."
"Well, child, what can bring you here so early of a morning?" asked the sorceress, as Mme. Fontaine might well be called, for she was seventy-eight years old, and looked like one of the Parcae.