The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [238]
Such a powerful flush mounted into Wokulski’s face that it covered his forehead and even neck. ‘Let us go,’ he said, ‘to this Professor Palmieri.’ Privately he added: ‘So this great thinker Geist is a charlatan, and I a fool, who paid three hundred francs for a display worth five…How he caught me!’
They went up to the second floor and into a drawing-room furnished as richly as the others in this hotel. A greater part was already filled with old and young spectators, men and women elegantly dressed and all very intent upon Professor Palmieri, who had just concluded a short speech on hypnotism. He was a man of middle age. A faded and dark man with an unkempt beard and expressive eyes. He was surrounded by a few pretty women and some young men with thin and apathetic faces.
‘Those are the mediums,’ Jumart whispered, ‘Palmieri exercises his art on them.’
The spectacle, of about two hours’ duration, showed Palmieri sending his mediums to sleep by the use of his gaze, but in such a manner that they were still able to walk, answer questions and perform various acts. The persons sent to sleep by the hypnotist also displayed unusual muscular strength in obeying his commands, and even more unusual lack of sensitivity, or hyper-sensitivity of the senses.
As Wokulski was seeing these phenomena for the first time in his life, and did not conceal his incredulity in the least, Palmieri invited him into the front row. Here, after some experiments, Wokulski realised that the phenomena he was witnessing were not conjuring tricks, but derived from some unknown properties of the nervous system. But he was most interested and even alarmed by two demonstrations which had a certain relevance to his own life. In them, the medium was persuaded of non-existent things. Palmieri gave one of the sleepers the stopper of a carafe, declaring it to be a rose. At once the medium began sniffing the stopper, displaying great enjoyment as he did so.
‘What are you at, sir?’ Palmieri cried to the medium, ‘that is asaphoetida.’
And the medium instantly threw the stopper away in disgust, rubbed his hands and complained that they stank.
To another, he gave a handkerchief and, when he told him the handkerchief weighed a hundred pounds, the medium began slumping, trembling and sweating under its weight. On seeing this, Wokulski sweated too: ‘I understand Geist’s secret now,’ he thought, ‘he hypnotised me.’
But he experienced the most painful feeling of all when Palmieri put to sleep a frail young man, then wrapped a coal shovel in a towel and persuaded his medium it was a young and beautiful woman he must love. The medium embraced and kissed the shovel, kneeled before it and uttered the most affectionate expressions. When it was put underneath a sofa, he crawled in after it on all fours, like a dog, and drove away by force four men who tried to hold him back. When Palmieri hid it and announced she had died, the young man lapsed into such despair that he writhed on the floor and beat his head against the wall. At that moment Palmieri puffed into his eyes and the young man woke up with tears streaming down his cheeks, much to the applause and laughter of the audience.
Terribly agitated, Wokulski quit the hall: ‘So it is all a lie! The alleged inventions of Geist and his intellect, my insane love and even she…She herself is nothing but an illusion of my bewitched thoughts…. The only reality which never deceives and which does not lie is surely—death.’
He hastened into the street, rushed into a café and ordered cognac. This time he drank a carafe and a half, and as he drank he thought that this Paris, in which he had found the apex of intellect, the greatest illusions and total disillusion, would surely be his tomb: ‘What am I waiting for? What have I to find out? If Geist is a common trickster, and if a man can fall in love with a coal shovel, what is left to me?’
Dazed with the cognac, he went back to his hotel and fell asleep with his clothes on. And when he awoke at eight next morning, his first thought was: ‘There is