urning from serving at the siege of Gibraltar, this young
officer found mesmerism the mode at Paris, and appears to have become,
for no other reason, one of the initiated. At the end of the course of
instruction, he professed himself to be no wiser than when he began; and
he ridiculed the credulity and the faith of his brothers, who were
stanch adherents of the new doctrine. However he did not forget his
lesson; and on going, the same spring, to his estate at Basancy, near
Soissons, he took occasion to mesmerise the daughter of his agent, and
another young person, for the toothach, who declared themselves, in a
few minutes, cured. This questionable success was sufficient to lead M.
de Puysegur, a few days after, to try his hand on a young peasant of the
name of Victor, who was suffering with a severe fluxion upon the chest.
What was M. de Puysegur's surprise when, at the end of a few minutes,
Victor went off into a kind of tranquil sleep, without crisis or
convulsion, and in that sleep began to gesticulate, and talk, and enter
into his private affairs. Then he became sad; and M. de Puysegur tried
mentally to inspire him with cheerful thoughts; he hummed a lively tune
to himself, _inaudibly_, and immediately Victor began to sing the air.
Victor remained asleep for an hour, and awoke composed, with his
symptoms mitigated.

The case of Victor revolutionised the art of mesmerism. The large part
of his life in which M. Puysegur had nothing to do but to follow this
vein of inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle
manipulation to induce sleep, in preference to the more violent crises.
I have no plea for telling you how M. de Puysegur served in the first
French revolutionary armies; how he quitted the service in disgust; how
narrowly he escaped the guillotine; how he lived in retirement
afterwards, benevolently endeavouring to do good to his sick neighbours
by mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died
of a cold caught by serving again in the encampment at Rheims to assist
as an old _militaire_ at the _sacre_ of Charles X.

For he had, to use the phrase of the moment, fulfilled his mission the
day that he put Victor to sleep. He had made a vast stride in advance of
his teacher. Not but that Mesmer must frequently have produced the same
effect, but _he_ had passed it over unheeded, as one only of the
numerous forms of salutary crisis; nor that M. de Puysegur himself
estimated, or th