I.

November 12, 1898.--This afternoon we took a drive in a landau (Eusapia and I) in company with M. and Mme. Pallotti of Cairo, and, among other things, we visited the exhibition of chrysanthemums at the Tuileries. Eusapia is enchanted. We return about 6 o'clock. My wife seats herself at the piano, and Eusapia sings some Neapolitan airs and some little fragments of Italian operas. Afterwards we all three chat confidentially with each other.

She is in a very happy state of mind, tells us how sometimes on stormy days she experiences electric cracklings and sparkling in her hair, especially on an old wound that she once received on the head. She also tells us that when she has been a long time without holding a seance she is in a state of irritation, and feels the need of freeing herself of the psychic fluid which saturates her. This avowal astonishes me, for, at the end of every seance, she seems rather to be listless and melancholy and seems to hold a sitting rather unwillingly than otherwise. She adds that she frequently has fluidic prolongations of the ends of her fingers, and, putting her two hands on my knees, the inside of the hand turned upward, at the same time spreading out the fingers and placing them opposite each other face to face, at a distance of several inches, and alternately bringing the hands together and withdrawing them, she tells us to observe from time to time the radiations which prolong the fingers by forming a sort of luminous aureole at their extremities. My wife thinks she perceives some of them. I am unable to see anything at all, in spite of all my efforts, although I change the light and shade in all sorts of ways. The salon is lighted at this time by two intense Auer burners. We go into the bedroom, lighted only by candles, and I cannot see them any better. I snuff out the candles, on the supposition that this is perhaps a case of phosphorescence; but I never perceive anything. We return to the salon. Eusapia spreads a black woollen shawl over her silk skirt and shows me the luminous effluence. But all the time I can see nothing, unless it be for a moment a kind of pale ray at the end of the index finger of her right-hand.

The dinner hour approaches. It is seven o'clock. A letter-weigher (Pl. X), which I had bought to renew the curious experiment of M. de Rochas, is upon the table. I ask Eusapia if she remembers having made a piece of mechanism like this move downward on its spring by placing her hands on each side of it, at a distance, and making something like magnetic passes. She doesn't seem to remember anything about it and hums a little stanza from _Santa Lucia_. I beg that she will try it. She does so. Nothing moves. She asks me to place my hands on hers. We make the same passes, and, to my amazement (for I really was not expecting it at all) the little tray sinks down to the point where it touches the lever and produces the sharp sound of contact. This point is beyond the graduation of the scale, which stops at fifty grams, and may go to sixty, and represents seventy grams at the lowest. The tray immediately rises again. We begin a second time. Nothing. A third time: the same lowering and the same return to equilibrium. Then I beg her to try the experiment alone. She rubs her hands together and makes the same passes. The letter weigher goes down to the same maximum point. We are all standing close by her, in the full light of the Auer burners. The same performance is repeated, the tray remaining down for an interval of about five minutes. The movement does not take place at once; there are sometimes three or four trials without success, as if the force were exhausted by the result. The tray had already sunk down four times before our eyes, always as far as the maximum point, when the valet de chambre, passing by upon some matter of service, I tell him to stop and look. Eusapia begins again and does not succeed. She waits a moment, rubs her hands, begins again, and the same movement without contact is produced for the seventh time, before the three witnesses, each as much astonished as the other. Her hands are sensibly chilled. I think of the trick of the hair, pass my hands between both of hers and find nothing there; I did not see anything. Besides, she does not seem to have touched her head, and her hands have remained before us since the commencement of the experiment, free and untouched.

On the supposition that there may be here some electric force in operation, I beg her to place her fingers upon an extremely sensitive compass. In whatever way she grasps this, it refuses to move.

We sit down to the dinner-table. I ask her to lift a fork as she had done at Montfort. At the third trial she succeeds--and without the use of a hair, at least any that was apparent.