Its rulers are as besotted; but instead of obeying men they obey principles, which can only be half-baked, sterile and false in so much as they are principles, that is to say, ideas reputed certain and immutable, in this world where nothing is sure, since light and sound are both illusions.
July 16. Yesterday I saw some things that have profoundly disturbed me.
I dined with my cousin, Mme. Sablé, whose husband commands the 76th light horse at Limoges. At her house I met two young women, one of whom has married a doctor, Dr. Parent, who devotes himself largely to nervous illnesses and the extraordinary discoveries that are the outcome of the recent experiments in hypnotism and suggestion.
He told us at length about the amazing results obtained by English scientists and by the doctors of the Nancy school.
The facts that he put forward struck me as so fantastic that I confessed myself utterly incredulous.
“We are,” he declared, “on the point of discovering one of the most important secrets of nature, I mean one of the most important secrets on this earth; for there are certainly others as important, away yonder, in the stars. Since man began to think, since he learned to express and record his thoughts, he has felt the almost impalpable touch of a mystery impenetrable by his clumsy and imperfect senses, and he has tried to supplement the impotence of his organic powers by the force of his intelligence. While this intelligence was still in a rudimentary stage, this haunting sense of invisible phenomena clothed itself in terrors such as occur to simple minds. Thus are born popular theories of the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, fairies, gnomes, ghosts. I’ll add the God-myth itself, since our conceptions of the artificer-creator, to whatever religion they belong, are really the most uninspired, the most unintelligent, the most inacceptable products of the fear-clouded brain of human beings. Nothing is truer than that saying of Voltaire’s: ‘God has made man in His image, but man has retorted upon Him in kind.’
“But for a little over a century we have had glimpse of a new knowledge. Mesmer and others have set our feet on a fresh path, and, more specially during the last four or five years, we have actually reached surprising results.”
My cousin, as incredulous as I, smiled. Dr. Parent said to her: “Shall I try to put you to sleep, madame?”
“Yes, do.”
She seated herself in an armchair, and he looked fixedly into her eyes, as if he were trying to fascinate her. As for me, I felt suddenly uneasy: my heart thumped, my throat contracted. I saw Mme. Sable’s eyes grow heavy, her mouth twitch, her bosom rise and fall with her quick breathing.
Within ten minutes she was asleep.
“Go behind her,” said the doctor.
I seated myself behind her. He put a visiting-card in her hands and said to her: “Here is a looking-glass: what can you see in it?”
“I see my cousin,” she answered.
“What is he doing?”
“He is twisting his moustache.”
“And now?”
“He is drawing a photograph from his pocket.”
“Whose photograph is it?”
“His.”
She was right! And this photograph had been sent me at my hotel only that very evening.
“What is he doing in the photograph?”
“He is standing, with his hat in his hand.”
Evidently she saw, in this card, this piece of white pasteboard, as she would have seen in a glass.
The young women, terrified, cried: “That’s enough, that’s quite enough.”
But the doctor said authoritatively: “You will get up tomorrow at eight o’clock; then you will call on your cousin at his hotel and you will beg him to lend you five thousand francs that your husband has asked you to get and will exact on his next leave.”
Then he woke her up.
On my way back to the hotel, I thought about this curious séance, and I was assailed by doubts, not of the absolutely unimpeachable good faith of my cousin, whom since our childhood I had looked upon as my sister, but of the possibility of trickery on the doctor’s part. Had he concealed a looking-glass in his hand and held it before the slumbering young woman when he was holding before her his visiting-card? Professional conjurers do things as strange.
I had reached the hotel by now and I went to bed.
Then in the morning, towards half past eight, I was roused by my man, who said to me:
“Mme. Sablé wishes to speak to you at once, sir.”
I got hurriedly into my clothes and had her shown in.
She seated herself, very agitated, her eyes downcast, and, without lifting her veil, said:
“I have a great favour to ask you, my dear cousin.”
“What is it, my dear?”
“I hate to ask it of you, and yet I must. I need, desperately, five thousand francs.”
“You? You need it?”
“Yes, I, or rather my husband, who has laid it on me to get it.”
I was so astounded that I stammered as I answered her. I wondered whether she and Dr. Parent were not actually making fun of me, whether it weren’t a little comedy they had prepared beforehand and were acting very well.
But as I watched her closely my doubts vanished entirely. The whole affair was so distasteful to her that she was shaking with anguish, and I saw that her throat was quivering with sobs.
I knew that she was very rich and I added:
“What! do you mean to say that your husband can’t call on five thousand francs! Come, think. Are you sure he told you to ask me for it?”
She hesitated for a few moments as if she were making a tremendous effort to search her memory, then she answered:
“Yes … yes. … I’m quite sure.”
“Has he
