No. 99

Adele, as soon as she was asleep, said: - "I see him." "Where do you see him?" "Here." "Give us a description of him again and also of the place where he is." "He is a fair man, tanned by the heat of the sun; he is very stout, his features are fairly regular; brown eyes, large mouth; he appears gloomy and meditative. He is dressed as a workman, in a sort of short blouse. He is occupied at present, as he was last time, in gathering seed, which resembles pepper-corns, but I do not think it is pepper; it is larger. This seed grows on small shrubs about one metre high. There is a little negro with him occupied in the same way." "Try to obtain some answer to-day. Get him to tell you the name of the country where you see him." "He will not answer." "Tell him that his good mother, for whom he had a great affection, is with you, and asks for news of him." "Oh! at the mention of his mother he turned round and said to me, 'My mother! I shall not die without seeing her again. Comfort her, and tell her that I always think of her. I am not dead!'" "Why does he not write to her?" "He has written to her, but the vessel has no doubt been wrecked - at least he supposes this to be so, since he has received no answer.

He tells me that he is in Mexico. He has followed the emperor, Don Pedro; he has been imprisoned for five years, he has suffered a great deal, and will use every effort to return to France; they will see him again." "Can he name the place in which he is living?" "No; it is very far inland, those countries have no names." "Is he living with a European?" "No, with a coloured man." "Why does he not write to his mother?" "Because no vessels come to the place where he is. He does not know to whom to turn. Besides, he only knew how to write a very little, and has almost forgotten. There is no one with him who can render him this service; no one speaks his language; he makes himself understood with great difficulty. Besides that, he has never been of a communicative disposition or a talker. He seems to be rather a surly fellow. It is very difficult to get these few words out of him. One would think he were dumb." "In short, how can one manage to write to him or hear news of him?" "He knows nothing about it. He can only say these three things: I am in Mexico, I am not dead, they will see me again." "Why did he leave his parents in this manner, without saying anything to them, as he was happy at home?" "This man was very reserved; he hardly ever spoke.

He loved his mother very much, but he had not the same affection for his father, who was a passionate, surly man, and often treated him brutally. The cup had long since been full. It was not the trifling dispute that he had had with his father the day before his departure that made him decide to go away; it had been his fixed determination for some time past. He told no one of it. He went away on the sly. Having kissed them all the evening before, he made good his escape next day, without another word. Do not be uneasy, madam; you will see him again!" This good woman burst into tears, because she recognised the truth of every detail given her by Adele. She did not find anything at fault in the description. The disposition, the education, and the departure of her son were as Adele said; but a greater semblance of probability is given to the clairvoyante's account by the fact that his relations had an idea that he had enlisted in Don Pedro's army, and at one time took some steps to ascertain the truth of it. M. Lucas told me of this detail on a journey which he afterwards made to Paris. No information was, however, obtainable.

What no less contributed to the astonishment of this good woman, of M. Lucas, and the other people present at this curious seance, was to see Adele put up her hand to the left side of her face to keep off the fiery rays of the sun in those countries, and appear to be suffocated with heat; but the most extraordinary part of this scene was that she had a severe sunstroke which turned the whole of that side of her face, from forehead to shoulder, bluish red, whilst the other side remained dead white. This dark colour did not begin to disappear till twenty-four hours later. At the time the heat of it was so great that one could not hold one's hand on it.

This simulation, by the subliminal consciousness, of the effects of severe sunburn is no doubt not more incredible than the production in hypnosis of mimic stigmata. Such physical effects of the imagination, if rare, are well authenticated. But if Cahagnet's last sentence refers to the heat of the medium's skin, I am afraid we must admit that the imagination of the recorder possibly played as prominent a part in the marvel as that of the patient.

[On another occasion, inquiry being made for a missing man, believed by his relatives to be dead, Adele described him as alive, and gave many VOL. II. 2 O details of his personal appearance, which were recognised as correct, and of his then whereabouts and occupations, which could not be verified. Full details are given by Mr. Podmore].

We have, unfortunately (Mr. Podmore continues1), no corroboration of the truth of the statements made about those two persons. It follows, then, that in the two seances all that we are entitled to say is that Adele was able to divine with, it may be admitted, singular accuracy the ideas present in the minds of her interlocutors. It was a striking example of telepathy; but we have no kind of proof that it was anything more, and from internal evidence it seems very unlikely that it was anything more.

It appears, in fact, that no evidence is forthcoming of Adele's power of conversing with the living at a distance, since the only two cases in which she professed to do so could not be verified, and this affords, I submit, a strong presumption that she did not possess that power, and that the conversations here detailed were purely imaginary, the authentic or plausible details which they contained being filched telepathically from the minds of those present. The curious similarity of the two accounts also points in the same direction. Both men profess to have written home, but the letters must have miscarried. Neither can write now, because they are far from the sea, in the interior. Both have suffered much; both have been prisoners; both protest that their relations will see them before they die; neither, however, is in a hurry to come back; and neither is willing to discover the name of his present place of abiding.

To suppose, as the recorder supposes, that these narratives are authentic revelations obtained from actual conversations with the spirits of men living in unnamed, and - as Cahagnet explains at length - probably nameless localities in the interior of Mexico or Asiatic Russia, is to strain credulity to the breaking-point. But if these two narratives are not what they seem to be, what are we to say of the other narratives in the book, which are cast in the same dramatic form, and contain similar details harmonising with the expectations or memories of the interlocutors? If those are not authentic messages from the distant living, we require some further warrant for the assumption that these are authentic messages from the spirits of the dead. Considered in conjunction with the almost certainly subjective visions of Heaven and dead playmates which characterised the earlier trances, these later seances certainly point to an exclusively mundane origin.

We must, however, at least note that all the witnesses cited by Cahagnet seem to have been satisfied that nothing less than thought-transference would explain the revelations, and that any candid reader now must find it hard to resist the same conviction.