The spirit went on to say:—
‘This workman has recently wounded his hand, and is consequently debarred from working; he is always prowling about the house, and I advise you to be on your guard against him.’
Marie often used to ask me to put her to sleep in the evening. Then, strange to say, she would tell us when and how many times this man Toussaint would pass the door, the next day.
This information was always correct. However, one day, our man did not turn up at the given time—he was two minutes late. Marie was asleep in the sitting-room, and I went backwards and forwards from her to the terrace. I was nearly losing patience, when she cried out, ‘He is coming—you will barely have time to get to the terrace.’ And so it was; as soon as I reached my post of observation, the carpenter came into the Rue Malbec out of the Rue Bègles.
A few days afterwards, the spirit, whom the somnambulist called ‘Grand Father,’ warned us that Marie ran a great risk. Toussaint having had the door shown to him everywhere because of the disgrace which had fallen upon his family, had made up his mind to avenge himself.
Animated with the worst designs, he had shaved off his beard in order to make himself unrecognisable; and hiding a large knife under his coat, he was bending his way to the house, with the fixed purpose, said the spirit, of striking Marie.
When giving us this information through the somnambulist, our mysterious friend added: ‘Do not allow this girl to go out to-day. I will deliver you from this dangerous man very soon, by making him wish to go on a long voyage, from which he will never return.’
Two or three days afterwards, Marie heard that this individual had left for Algeria.
First of all we have seen, by the substitution of the spirit to the faculties of the somnambulist, how our free-will is subordinated to occult influences. And if the objection be made that in that case, magnetic influences facilitated this substitution, there still remains the case of the carpenter, whose free-will was absolutely subjugated after premeditation, as is shown by the spirit’s declaration that he would ‘make him wish to take a long voyage from which the individual would never return.’
In proportion as these strange facts succeeded each other, we yielded further and further to an influence from which it was impossible to escape—I may even say we were happy to obey.