Tho the magnetizer could, so he said, mesmerize “dry,” even to charging bread, paper, wood, and jars and flasks with the wonderful fluid, the bottom of the “baquet” was eighteen inches deep in water. Its top was covered by a wooden lid, pierced with holes in which were jointed branches of iron for the patients to lay hold of. Around the “baquet” sat the patients with linked hands, and connected with a cord, ecstatically awaiting the fluid, from Mesmer’s magnetic fingers. Within the hall only a dim light penetrated the heavy curtains, and stillness reigned except that at intervals, soothing yet awe-inspiring notes of music floated up from below. Only Mesmer, arrayed in lilac satin and bearing a thin wand of iron, together with his assistants, Antoine and D’Eslon, moved about in the haunted gloom.

Dressed in easy, flowing robes, and handsome—for Mesmer thought no man useful who was not handsome—they walked to and fro, one of them occasionally stopping to fascinate some neurotic patient with his bright magnetic eye, or so holding the iron wand that a gush of the magnetic fluid passed into the fair one. Now and again Mesmer would put aside his wonder-working rod, and setting him self knee to knee and foot to foot, one hand on the patient’s stomach and one on her back, he would magnetize her who had taken his especial fancy.

For hours nothing would happen in particular, till, of a sudden, on one patient going off into hysterics or convulsions, the others would soon follow. This one would laugh and scream, that one hiccough and weep herself into a fit. Another would roll her eyes in a trance, while her neighbor was flinging herself about as if demented.