Mme. Forget was not at all ill, apart from her being in a delicate situation. The next day morning, M. Hedin said to me that his daughter was in her pains; and the same evening he told me that his wife had just set out for Paris to be with her. The next day I received instructions to a.s.sume his duties. Mme. Hedin had telegraphed to her husband to come to her. Her daughter was taken with puerperal fever.

When the father got there he found only a corpse.

4. I had a cousin named Poncet (since dead) who was formerly an apothecary, at Beaune (Cote-d" Or). I had never been at his apartments. One day he came to Lyons to see our aunt (she who had the vision about which I spoke to you). We conversed about these extraordinary psychical occurrences. He was incredulous.

"Well then," said he, "try to find for me a thing which has no particular market value, but which I laid great store by, because it belonged to my deceased wife. I had a little packet of laces that she was very fond of, and I can"t put my hand on it."

The Unknown wrote, "_It is in the middle drawer of the secretary in the chamber, behind a package of visiting cards_."

My cousin wrote to his servant at Beaune, _without giving her any hint of our experiment_, "Send by post a little packet which you will find in [such a place] behind a package of visiting cards."

The laces arrived by return mail.

You will notice, my dear sir, that, during the experiments, I was by no means asleep or in a state of trance, and that I was conversing in my usual manner.

5. One of my childhood friends, M. Laloge, at the present time a dealer in coffees and chocolates at Saint-Etienne (Loire), had had as his professor, as well as I, an excellent man whom we most highly esteemed, and who was named Thollon.[77]

M. Thollon, after having directed the education of the children of the Prince of Oldenburg, uncle of the present emperor of Russia, had returned to France and entered the Nice Observatory.

We had the misfortune to lose him shortly after. Laloge had a photograph of him but had lost it. He came and begged me to try to find it. The Unknown wrote, "_The photograph is in the upper drawer of the secretary in the chamber_."

Laloge had two rooms,--one which he called the "salon," and another called the "chamber."

"There is some mistake," said he. "I have turned everything topsy-turvy in the place you mention and have found nothing."

In the evening having to search for some object in the drawer, he saw in the middle of a package of letter-paper a little dark end of something sticking out. He pulled it forth: it was the photograph.

6. Camille Bellon, No. 50 Avenue de Noailles, at Lyons, had three young children whose education he had intrusted to a young governess.

This person left when the children entered college, and, sometime after, she married a very fine man, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but which I can easily find again if there is any need of it.

This young woman came on her wedding trip to visit her old employer. I was invited to go and pa.s.s a day with them at the chateau of my friend Bellon. During the course of this visit, we talked of spiritualistic phenomena; and the newly married man, a highly educated veterinary doctor, joked me about my so-called mediumship. I, of course, laughed about it and we parted the best kind of friends.

Some days afterward, I received a letter from my friend. He had himself received a letter from the young lady, who was in a great state of mind. She had lost her wedding ring, and was in despair. She begged my friend to ask me to recover it for her.

The Mysterious Force wrote, "_The ring slipped from her finger while she was asleep. It is on one of the cleats which hold up the mattress of the bed_."

I transmitted the _despatch_. The husband put his hands between the wood of the bed and the mattress. The wife did the same thing. Nothing was found. Some days afterwards, having decided to change the arrangement of their apartments, they moved their bed into another room. Of course they had to lift up the mattress, in order to get it into the other chamber. The ring was upon one of the cleats. They had not found it when they were hunting for it, because it had slipped _under_ the mattress, which did not adhere to the cleat in that particular place.

7. One of my friends, named Boucaut, who lived at 15 quai de la Guillotiere at Lyons, had lost a letter which he sadly wanted. He begged me to ask where it was.

The Invisible replied in writing, "_He must remember that he has an oven in his garden_."

Before showing it to him, I began to laugh, saying that it was a joke and had nothing to do with his request. As he insisted that it did, I read it to him.

"Why yes," he said to me, "that agrees very well. My tenant-farmer had just had his bread baked. I had heaps of papers which I wanted to get rid of, to burn up. My letter must have been burned in the pile which I reduced to ashes."

8. One evening, in an a.s.sembly composed of a score of persons, a lady dressed in black greeted my entrance with a little nervous laugh.

After the customary introductions, this lady spoke to me as follows:

"Sir, would it be possible to ask your spirits to reply to a question I am going to ask you?"

"In the first place, madam, I have no spirits at my disposal; but I should be a lack-wit indeed if I said yes. You, of course, don"t suppose that I am unintelligent enough not to find some kind of an answer; and, consequently, if any "spirits," as you so kindly call them should happen to respond, you would not be convinced, and you would be right. Write your request. Put it in an envelope there on the table and we will try. You see that I am not in a somnambulistic state, and you must believe that it is wholly impossible for me to know the contents of what you are going to enclose in it."

So said, so done.

At the end of five minutes I a.s.sure you I was very much embarra.s.sed. I had written a reply, but it was such that I did not dare to communicate it. But here it is:

"You are in a very bad way, and, if you persist, you will be severely punished. Marriage is something sacred, it should never be regarded as a question of money."

After some oratorical precautions, I decided to read her this reply.

The lady blushed up to the roots of her hair and stretched out her hands to seize her envelope.

"Pardon me, madam," I replied, putting my hand upon it. "You began by making fun of me. You wished a reply. It is only just, since we are making an experiment, that we know what the request was."

I tore open the envelope. Behold its contents:

"Will the marriage take place that I am trying to bring about between M. X. and Mlle. Z? And, in that case, shall I get what I have been promised?"

Notwithstanding this shameful exposure, the woman did not consider that she was beaten. She asked a second question under the same conditions.

Reply: "Leave me alone! When I was living you abandoned me. Now don"t bother me."

Upon this, the lady got up and disappeared! I told you she was in mourning. This last request of hers was as follows: "What has become of the soul of my father?"

Her father had been ill for six months. Persons who were present and who were stupefied at the results, told me that during his illness she had not paid him a single visit.

9. One day, shortly after I had lost one of my good friends, I was seated at my writing-desk with my head resting on my hand, and I was thinking of what the hereafter might possibly be. If all the work that a man had done was to be irretrievably lost, and if the beyond existed, I was wondering what the life might be that one would lead there. All of a sudden, the phenomenon well known to me occurred (that weird seizure of the arm). Of course, I allowed my arm to remain pa.s.sive, and here is what I read:

"You wish to know what our occupations are? We organize matter, we ameliorate the condition of the spirits, and, above all, we adore the Creator of your souls and ours."

ARAGO.

In _all_ the communications which I have obtained, every time a word representing an idea of the Supreme Being--such as G.o.d, the All-Powerful, etc.--came under my pen, the writing doubled in size, but immediately after resumed the same dimensions as before.[78] It would be very easy for me to give you still more numerous examples of the strange things that happened to me, but those I have given seem to me quite remarkable. I shall be happy if this true account can give you any a.s.sistance in your important researches.

The letter which my readers have just perused contains a series of cases of such great interest that I lost no time in entering into regular correspondence with the author. And first I thought I ought to ask him about the conclusions which he himself had been able to draw from his personal experience. The following is an abstract of his replies:

May 1st, 1899.

You ask me, my dear sir, the following questions:

1. Whether I have reached absolute conviction as to the existence of one or of several _spirits_?

I am a person of absolute good faith. I examined myself as a surgeon would examine an invalid. I am a person of such good faith that I have long been seeking (without finding him) a skilful pract.i.tioner who would consent to study in my own person the phenomenon while it was taking place; to ascertain the state of my pulse, the warmth of the skin, etc.,--in a word, the apparent physical side. Furthermore, in my opinion there is no auto-suggestion in this thing; and the proof is that I was _absolutely ignorant_ of the things that I was writing _mechanically_,--so mechanically that, when, by chance, my attention was called away, whether by reading or by conversation, and I forgot to look where my hand was going, when it approached the edge of the paper the writing would continue backward across the sheet in _reversed letters and just as fast_, so that I was obliged to turn the paper over in order by holding it to the light to read what was written on it.

So then, if there is neither auto-suggestion in it, nor a somnambulistic condition (I was completely awake and not at all hypnotized), then there must be external "forces" acting upon my senses, "intelligent forces." This is my fixed and unalterable opinion.

Now are these forces spirits? Do they belong to beings like ourselves?

It is evident that this hypothesis would explain many things, but leave quite a number obscure. Since I several times discovered a mental state of the lowest kind among these "beings," I have reached a conclusion that it is not absolutely necessary to think that they are "men."