The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [105]
RICHET’S FAMILY owned a tiny island in the Mediterranean, just off the French Riviera, tucked amid three famously beautiful islands called the Isles of Gold. Ile Roubaud was a rocky scrap of land, scrubbed by light and polished by water. Only three buildings occupied the island. The Richet family summer cottage, though not large, bristled with towers, turrets, verandas, and porches. Nearby stood a lighthouse and a simple cottage for the lighthouse keeper.
The simplest route there was to sail through the French government’s salt lagoons, where the dried layers of sea salt were prepared for sale. The salt ponds gave the voyage to Ile Roubaud a slightly unreal feeling, a passage through a landscape of almost blinding white where the sun dazzled on the crystal layers rimming the water.
Beyond, across a blue sparkle of sea, lay the small island, encircled by pinwheeling seabirds. Richet thought it the perfect place to run tests on a troublesome medium. He would search her, isolate her on the island, and then he would see what happened to her so-called powers in the luminous light of Ile Roubaud.
In the summer of 1894, Richet invited a small party to join him for the grand experiment. His guests—and witnesses and collaborators—were Fred Myers, Oliver Lodge, the Polish psychologist Julien Ochorowicz, and Richet’s personal secretary, who would be there to take notes.
Lodge remembered the journey to Richet’s island as something of a comedy of errors. Traveling by rail to the Mediterranean coast, he and Myers disembarked at one station to have a quick drink. The train left without them. They caught up with it in Avignon. But Myers wouldn’t leave that ancient city without touring the Palace of the Popes and the famous crumbling bridges over the Rhone. Finally they reached the coastal spa city of Hyeres. With some difficulty, the pair hired a boat and made their way past the white glimmer of the salt lagoons, guarded by soldiers installed to protect the government’s lucrative monopoly on salt sales, apparently bent on preventing the theft of a single white crystal.
“The salt monopoly has curious results,” Lodge noted in his diary. “It appeared that the peasantry were forbidden to take a bucket of water out of the sea.” The French soldiers returned the stares of the voyaging English-men; the air was filled with the dry creak of seagull voices overhead. Lodge feared that this was going to be a very odd visit.
In that, he would be proved absolutely correct.
THE INVESTIGATORS wedged themselves like tinned sardines into the family cottage. Lodge shared a bedroom with Richet. Myers occupied a child’s bedroom and slept folded into a very small bed, which he claimed to share with a family of flies. Ochorowicz bunked on a balcony. Lodge traded places with Ochorowicz for a while, but “found the only other occupant was a mosquito, who woke me up punctually at five every morning.” Eusapia had a room to herself, a respectable distance from the others. Richet’s secretary commuted in from Hyeres for the tests.
The summer heat parboiled the island. The air steamed around them. Most afternoons, Richet sought escape in his small boat, trolling for fish and the elusive breeze dancing over the cooler waters. Lodge and Myers shed their usual sober dress and spent the days in their cotton pajamas, clambering over the rocks and occasionally dousing themselves in the sea.
There was nothing else to do, really. The sittings were held in the evenings, and the researchers had been instructed not to socialize beforehand with their captive medium. The group did gather for dinner, cooked and served by the lighthouse keeper’s wife. These meals tended to lapse into cacophony. The investigators conversed in French. Eusapia spoke Italian, in the Neapolitan dialect, loudly. She liked to shout down her companions, demanding that they listen to her life stories, over and over.
She particularly liked to recall the dramas of her life, and she not only verbally re-created the moments, she acted them out