Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/534

518 in countenance, and moving awkwardly about in the chair. I asked him what was the matter. "He can not answer you," said Dr. Luys; "he is dumb, he can not speak; he is transformed; he is no longer a man and can not use the speech of men; he is assuming the nature of a cat." And, sure enough, presently the unhappy creature threw himself on to the ground with every sign of excitement and congestion; he began scratching about the floor on all fours, and presently mewing like a cat—a disagreeable but striking imitation—and when the valerian tube was taken from his neck and held in front of him he came scratching and spitting along the floor on all fours, as though irresistibly attracted, as a cat might be, to the person who held it. This astonishing gymnastic lasted for some minutes and seemed to fatigue him, as well it might. On the following day I secured the presence in my apartments of Mile. V. above mentioned. On calling on her with M. Cremière I found her installed as a hypnotizer as well as a hypnotic subject, and with a plate on her door accordingly. We arranged for a séance on her usual terms. She insisted, however, on bringing "her subject" with her, for she apparently now finds the passive and performing state rather fatiguing and not sufficiently profitable, and prefers the double emploi. When she arrived a very amusing scene followed. Acting Dr. Luys to the life, she proceeded to place her subject before her, and began to give us the magistral demonstration based on his lectures on suggestion, which he describes above as the peculiar endowment of her somnambulistic condition, and of which, as he observes artlessly, he believes her to be quite incapable in her waking state, thinking it only possible when her faculties are peculiarly "exalted" by his manipulation, I have no doubt that, as he says, she would have gone on indefinitely and until she was exhausted; but we were very soon tired of her glib impudence, and stopped the performance after she had shown us how she had trained this new subject in three weeks to a number of the required manifestations. We had the "passional attitudes," "fascination," the prise du regard, etc. The eyelids were duly opened by order for further performances, for she intelligently observed:

The eyelids, gentlemen, are the windows of the soul, are they not? and in order that her heightened faculties may acquire their full perception, the light must penetrate; but she sees only me, she knows nothing of what goes on around her, she thinks my thoughts, she is en rapport with me alone.

Here we stopped' her, for we were beginning to be fatigued, although she was not. We now requested herself to become the subject, and duly regretted her absence at the clinique of Dr. Luys on the previous day.

Oh (she said), I am very sorry I was not there, but I did not come because it is the off season. At the New Year every one is making holiday; very few