“ ... M. Lemaître! M. Flournoy! are you there? Answer me, then. Did I not come here this evening? If only I could ... however, I am not en voyage.... I really believe it is Sunday at last ... I understand nothing more about it. I think my brain is so tired that all my ideas are mixed up ... however, I am not dreaming.... It seems to me that I have also lived with them ... [the sitters at the table], and with them [the Arabs of her vision].... But I know them—all those men. Tell me, then, who you are! Did you arrive in Geneva lately? [They are, says the table, Arabs who lived five centuries ago, among them the father of Simandini.] Come nearer, then, come here. I want you to speak to me! M. Lemaître! Oh, that pretty little sketch! What is that sketch? [The table having said that it is a drawing which her father is presenting to her, and that she can copy it, a pencil and a sheet of paper are placed before her, the latter of which seems to be transformed into papyrus in her dream.] That green leaf is pretty. Of what plant is it the leaf? I think I have a pencil; I am going to try to make this sketch....”
After the usual struggle between the two methods of holding the pencil (see pp. [100]-102), she yields to Leopold’s manner of holding it, saying, “So much the worse”; then traces, slowly and with great care, Fig. 35, from left to right, often raising her eyes to her imaginary model, as if copying a drawing. After which she goes profoundly asleep; then other somnambulisms come.
On awaking she recollects the state of confusion through which she had passed. “Wretched evening,” said she. “I was unhappy. I felt that I was living here, as I always have, and I saw some things as though I were a foreigner. I was with you, but I was living elsewhere,” etc.
This whole scene gives the distinct impression that the Arab phrase only existed in Hélène’s recollection as a visual memory, without meaning or any verbal images. It was for her an incomprehensible piece of writing, a simple drawing, like Chinese or Japanese characters would be for us. Evidently it was a text which had come before her eyes at some propitious moment, and, having been absorbed by the subliminal imagination—always on the watch for matters of Oriental aspect—had been incorporated in a scene of the Asiatic dream.
Fig. 35. Arabian text drawn from left to right by Mlle. Smith in hemisomnambulism: elqalil men elhabib ktsir, the little from the friend (is) much. Natural size.
Such, at least, is the supposition which seems to me the most plausible. For, to regard it as a fragment of Arabian, which Hélène could speak and write fluently if she were in an appropriate state of somnambulism—as Leopold pretended one day to be the fact—seems to me an hypothesis still more arbitrary, and little in accord with the other trance phenomena of Mlle. Smith.
Occasions have not been wanting to her in the five years during which her exotic romances have been unfolding themselves to make use of her supposed philological reserves by speaking and writing Arabian, if her subliminal memory had so desired.
She has presented all degrees and kinds of somnambulism, and more visions of Arabia than could have failed to awaken by association the corresponding idiom, if it really was slumbering in her. The complete and total isolation of the text given above, in the midst of this flood of Oriental scenes, seems to me, therefore, to testify strongly in favor of my supposition that it has to do with a visual flash, unique in its kind, accidentally encountered and stored up, and that the Asiatic secondary personality of Mlle. Smith is absolutely ignorant of Arabic.