tunate enough to come across several
exceptional subjects. Du Maurier was particularly interested in one of
these, Virginie Marsaudon, and had a way of putting puzzling questions
concerning her faculties and my mesmeric influence. Virginie was
a "femme de menage" of the true Parisian type, a devoted elderly
creature, a sort of cross between a charwoman and a housekeeper. I was
not yet eighteen when I first went to Paris, to study under my cousin,
the eminent painter, Henri Lehmann. At his studio I found Virginie
installed as the presiding genius of the establishment, using in
turn broom or tub, needle, grill or frying-pan as the occasion might
require; the wide range of her powers I further extended by making a
truly remarkable mesmeric subject of her. My debut in Paris was that
of the somewhat bewildered foreigner, speaking but very indifferent
French, and she had from the first done what she could to make me feel
at home in the strange city, treating me with truly motherly care
and devotion. How completely she took possession of me, is shown by a
passage in a letter she wrote when I was ill in Leipsic, where I had
gone on a visit to my parents. After expressing her anxiety and her
regret at not being there to nurse me, she emphatically says:--"Je
rends Madame, votre mere, responsable de votre sante" (I make Madame,
your mother, responsible for your health). It needed but little to
lead her on from a state of docile and genial dependence to one of
unconscious mesmeric subjection, and so, a few passes shaping her
course, I willed her across the boundary line that separates us from
the unknown, a line which, thanks to science, is daily being extended.
Madame veuve Marsaudon was herself an incorrigible disbeliever in the
phenomena of mesmerism, but as a subject her faculties were such as to
surprise and convert many a scoffer.

At the seances, to which I invited my friends and a few scientific
outsiders, I always courted the fullest investigation, taking it as
the first duty of the mesmerist to show cause why he should not be
put down as a charlatan. So we had tests and counter-tests, evidence
and counter-evidence; there were doctors to feel the pulse and to
scrutinise the rigidity of the muscles, experts to propound scientific
ifs and buts, and wiseacres generally to put spokes in the wheel of
progress, as is their playful way, wherever they find that wheel
in motion. It was doubly satisfactory, then, that the good faith