[2] Other subjects of my inquiries gave me less curious, but often
analogous results. I visited, for instance, a certain number of
palmists. On seeing the sumptuous apartments of several of those
prophets of the hand, who revealed to me nothing but nonsense, I was
admiring the ingenuousness of their patrons, when a friend pointed out
to me, in a lane near the Mont-de-Piété, the abode of a practitioner
who, according to him, had most effectively cultivated and developed the
great traditions of the science of Desbarolles and d'Arpentigny.
On the sixth floor of a hideous rabbit-warren of a house, in a loft that
served as both living-room and bed-room, I found an unpretending, gentle
and vulgar old man, whose manner of speech suggested the hall-porter
rather than the prophet. I did not obtain much from him; but, in the
case of some more nervous persons whom I brought to him, particularly
two or three women with whose past and character I was fairly
well-acquainted, he revealed with rather astonishing precision the
essential preoccupations of their minds and hearts, discerned very
cleverly the chief curves of their existence, stopped at the cross-roads
where their destinies had really swerved or wavered, and discovered
certain strikingly exact and almost anecdotical particulars, such as
journeys, love-affairs, influences undergone, or accidents. In a word,
and taking into consideration the sort of auto-suggestion that causes
our imagination, more or less inflamed by the contact of mystery,
immediately and precisely to state the most shapeless clue, he traced,
on a somewhat conventional and symbolical plan, a clearly-established
scheme of their past and present, in which they were obliged, in spite
of their distrust, to recognize the special track of their lives. In so
far as his predictions are concerned, I must say, in passing, that not
one of them was realized.
Certainly there was in his intuition something more than a fortunate
coincidence. It was, in a lesser degree, a sort of nervous communication
between one unconsciousness and another of the same class, as with the
clairvoyant. I have met the same phenomenon in the case of a woman who
read coffee-grounds, but accompanied by more venturesome and less
certain manifestations: I will, therefore, not pause to consider it.