That is all very well, but what becomes of the cylinder? The magician has no accomplice; he performs the trick alone, before the eyes of the public. It seems impossible that any movement could escape that watchful gaze.
Lastly, M. de Kolta is not satisfied with making a bird disappear, he causes a woman to vanish—his wife, so they say; and although he chose one so frail, so tiny, so nearly related to the elves, that she looks as though she might run across a meadow without bending a blade of grass, still she is a woman of flesh and blood, who could not be forced into the sheath of a sword.
M. de Kolta, who is cleverer than you are, spreads a newspaper upon the floor and places a chair on the paper. Madame de Kolta seats herself upon the chair, and her husband covers the little parcel of lace with a red and black veil; then rapidly takes the veil off again.
The woman has gone!
Evidently the woman disappeared through a trap; but yet, whilst she went through it, the veil never moved, and the newspaper is still intact, though it is much larger than the [p105] edges of the veil. We feel humiliated at being the victims of such an illusion, although we were forewarned. And we ask ourselves with some alarm, what is, then, the value of the feeble organs of knowledge we call our senses, in which we so blindly place our trust?
But through this uneasiness, this distrust of our judgment, which conjuring leaves, this entertainment becomes an excellent school of wisdom. You may believe M. Jules Lemaître on this point, for he first discovered the philosophical side of these performances. “M. de Kolta,” he said, “should be a happy man. He is a true sorcerer. He forces us to see with our eyes things which we cannot see, and not to see things which we do see, and this is solely through the marvellous skill of his agile fingers. In his place, I would go to the mysterious and credulous East, where I would found a new religion based upon miracles. M. Renan would provide a dogma suited to the requirements of those far-distant souls, and M. de Kolta would work the miracles. He would be a prophet during his life, a saint, perhaps a god, after his death. . . . But one sorrowful reflection tempers the pleasure which this idea gives me. The miracles worked by M. de Kolta are practically injurious. Since we do not believe in the false miracles he performs—since nothing distinguishes them from real ones, and we have only the magician’s word to assure us they are false, what, then, should we do if real miracles were worked in our presence? We should say, We know all about them; it’s only conjuring! And thus the small remnant of faith which we may still retain in the supernatural is insidiously destroyed. [p106] When the prophet Elijah returns to earth at the end of time he will meet other De Koltas here; he will himself be sent to the Eden or to the Folies Bergères. And that is how the last men will lose their souls—just like the first, however.”
FOOTNOTES
“She is dead, the mummer gay,