Now I must describe a magnetic _séance_ to you; but I beg that you will receive the description with becoming seriousness, for I have a decided respect for M. Dupotet, and if any risibility should be excited it will proceed from your own nervous imagination, and not from my sober portraiture. These revelations of a higher sphere of existence are received up several pairs of stairs, in the back-room of a house situated in the heart of the city. It is a large, somewhat darkened room hung round with curious pictures, and lined with very curious people. Mesmer occupies a large frame carved with firebrands and anchors and other significant images; he looks fixedly at a pale lady hanging opposite to him, who has evidently undergone several magnetic crises. There are some verses framed and hanging very near the ceiling, surrounded by a thick wreath of yellow immortelles, but I have not yet been able to decipher their meaning. On the seats lining the walls about fifty persons assemble. It is an original assembly always, though it seems to be constantly changing. There was a lady with a small hole in her cheek, a child with a crooked neck, and the painter to the King of Sweden, with very light eyes and hair and great impressibility, with his companion who laughs and says, ‘Oui, monsieur,’ to every question addressed to him; and the son of the English Consul to Sicily, who displays a large amount of good clothes, good flesh, a little peaked moustache, and an immense amount of enthusiasm. But it would be difficult to give all the varieties of structure and expression in this group of believing heretics, some looking very fierce, some very sheepish, some with features turned up, some with them turned down, and some with them turned every way. The folding-doors of this room open into a small cabinet which is always opened on these occasions to receive Madame Dupotet and all the impressible ladies who form a circle inside, and go through many sympathetic manœuvres during the magnetising in the larger room: that is to say, the impressible ladies perform various antics, for Madame Dupotet, who is fat, fair, and forty, seems in no way affected, but looks on with smiling health and assists the nervous ladies. There was one remarkably fat dame, seated just within the folding-doors, who had powerful fits of nervous twitching, which gave her a singular appearance of pale, tremulous red jelly.