“All at once, from the bottom of a magic casket, leaped out a harlequin about ten inches high but so well proportioned in its figure, so well made, so nimble and supple, so intelligent and _spirituel_, that the whole audience uttered a cry of pleasure and admiration. This pretty little manikin does everything belonging to its character. It dances, smokes, frisks about, takes off and puts on its mask, bows to the company and plays the flageolet. One is tempted to say—‘it only needs speech to be human.’ Well, it has speech. It talks and answers all questions addressed to it like a real person. It even tells stories, making them up as it goes along.” Besides the show of magic an “agioscope” was to be seen which projected upon a screen the history of creation in forty-five pictures. Robin also performed experiments in physics and chemistry and an exhibition of the ghost illusion closed the entertainment. Robin and Robert-Houdin were at odds about the inexhaustible bottle which each claimed to have invented. Robert-Houdin declared that he had exhibited it for the first time on December 1, 1847, while Robin produced his “Almanach of Cagliostro,” showing the trick of the inexhaustible bottle which he declares he had invented and exhibited for the first time July 6, 1844, at the theatre Re at Milan. Nevertheless in all their lectures {166} on physics, scientific men explain to their hearers the operation of the Robert-Houdin bottle.[24] [24] “It is remarkable how many of the illusions regarded as the original inventions of eminent conjurers have been really improvements of older tricks. ‘Hocus Pocus Junior,’ _the Anatomy of Legerdemain_ (4th edition, 1654), gives an explanatory cut of a method of drawing different liquors out of a single tap in a barrel, the barrel being divided into compartments, each having an air-hole at the top, by means of which the liquor in any of the compartments was withheld or permitted to flow. Robert-Houdin applied the principle to a wine-bottle held in his hand, from which he could pour four different liquids, regulated by the unstopping of any of the four tiny air holes which were covered by his fingers. A large number of very small liquor glasses being provided on trays, and containing drops of certain flavoring essences, enabled him to supply imitations of various wines and liquors, according to the glasses with which he poured syrup from the bottle.”—_Encyclopedia Britannica._ When the Davenport Brothers, pretended spiritualists, came to Paris, Robin duplicated all their tricks at his theatre. He did much to discredit the charlatans. About 1869 he gave up his theatre, and became the proprietor of a hotel on the Boulevard Mazas.