‘Now, not one of these details could have been found out by any inquiry, however clever, however well-planned and well carried out such an inquiry might have been.
‘1. Madame B. was the only living person who knew of Antoine’s preference for the name of Lucie. She had never spoken of this to any one; and it is a minute detail of which I was in complete ignorance, until Madame B. told me of it in 1901, after hearing about the visions Madame X. had related to me in her letters, a year before.
‘2. I was the only person living who knew that Antoine called me “Carlos”; and this is not a very commonplace statement, since no one, save Antoine, has ever called me “Carlos.”
‘3. No one ever suspected Antoine of having written under a nom de plume; the few insignificant things he wrote for the stage are so entirely forgotten, that Madame B. herself remembered nothing about them in 1901; and it is even highly probable that what he wrote could not be found again, the Bobino theatre, where he presented his plays, having disappeared years ago.
‘4. The monetary losses which his father, Louis B., sustained a short while before Antoine’s marriage, had been carefully kept from the knowledge of every one. These losses were occasioned by a dishonest cashier. The man was not prosecuted. Notwithstanding the importance of the sum involved, Antoine was relatively indifferent to the loss, as was distinctly indicated by Madame X.
‘5. The circumstances of his death are described with striking reality. I kissed Antoine on the forehead when he was dead. Some little time before the end, he spoke to me about his health, saying he felt in great need of rest. He did not look ill, however, and he died, after a few hours’ illness only, from a cardiac affection: quelque chose l’a étouffé à la poitrine.
‘There is still another item of interest, which I wish to touch upon: this is, the “message” from Antoine to his wife: rien de mauvais ne lui arrivera. These words were written by Madame X. in one of her letters to me, with the indication that Antoine had pronounced them on a certain day. Now, on that very day, Madame B. was delivered of a still-born child. She was, therefore, in a perilous condition at the very time Antoine said: “I watch over her, even now; tell her, no evil will ever befall her.”
‘We have, now, to draw our conclusion. The hypothesis of chance is absurd; the hypothesis of fraud is absurd; there remains but a third hypothesis, that of a phenomenon inexplicable by any of the existing data of our knowledge. It is for this inexplicable phenomenon, that we are going to try and find an explanation.
‘Two explanations at once present themselves: α, either this knowledge is entirely due to the intellectual faculties of Madame X.; or β, some other intelligence intervenes, which manifests itself to Madame X.
‘α. This hypothesis is rather complicated, for it is not in the form of abstract knowledge that Madame X. learnt of all these real facts concerning Antoine, but in the form of Antoine himself. So that, if it really be only a question of abstract notions, these abstract notions have taken a concrete form in order to manifest themselves. They would thus have constituted a sort of error in themselves. It has been supposed that Antoine himself came into the railway carriage at Melun, that he accompanied Madame X. in her walks in the forest at Fontainebleau during the whole month of October 1900, that he related the story of his life to her; and there is something which shocks us in the thought that, though the story told to Madame X. be true, there was no Antoine. At the same time, this objection is not paramount; for we know so little of the ways in which supernormal knowledge flows into the mind, that we are unable to make any negation concerning them.