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 ménage" 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 début 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 mère, responsable de votre santé" (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 séances, to which I invited my friends and a few scientific
outsiders, I always courted the fullest investigation, taking it as