A man who has made a fortune in the world of magic and who desires to hand down to posterity a clean record of his attainments will be clever enough and manly enough to avoid any attempt to explain that which he does not understand. By his flagrant mis-statements regarding the tricks of his predecessors and contemporaries, Robert-Houdin, however, convicts himself of ignorance regarding the fundamental principles of magic, and arouses in the minds of broad, intelligent readers doubts regarding his claims to the invention of the various tricks and automata which he declares to have been the output of his brain, the production of his own deft hands. CHAPTER XI THE NARROWNESS OF ROBERT-HOUDIN'S "MEMOIRS" The charm of true memoirs lies far beyond the printed pages, in the depth and breadth of the writer's soul. The greatest of all autobiographies are those which detail not only the lives of the men who penned them, but which abound in diverting anecdotes and character studies of the men and women among whom the writer moved. They are not autobiographies alone, but vivid, broad-minded pen-pictures of the period in which the writer was a vigorous, respect-compelling figure. Memoirs written with a view to settling old scores seldom live to accomplish their ends. The narrowness and pettiness of the writer, which intelligent reading of history is bound to disclose, destroy all other charms which the book may possess. At personal exploitation Robert-Houdin is a brilliant success. As a writer of memoirs he is a wretched failure. Whenever he writes of himself, his pen seems fairly to scintillate. Whenever he refers to other magicians of his times, his pen lags and drops on the pages blots which can emanate only from a narrow, petty, jealous nature. Even when he writes of his own family, this peculiar trait of petty egotism may be read between the lines. He mentions the name of his son Émile, apparently because the lad shared his stage triumphs. His other children he never mentions by name. The second wife, who, he grudgingly admits, stood valiantly by him in his days of poverty and disappointment, he does not honor by so much as stating her name before marriage. Rather, he refers to her as a person whom he was constrained to place in charge of his household in order that he might continue his experiments and his work on automata. A less gracious tribute to wifely devotion was never penned.