page_title: Eusapia Palladino
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Eusapia Palladino / France
caption_attribution_description: A table levitates in front of witnesses during a séance with medium Eusapia&#160;Palladino at the home of astronomer Camille&#160;Flammarion in France on November 25, 1898.
context_page_description: Eusapia Palladino was an Italian Spiritualist physical medium. She claimed extraordinary powers such as the ability to levitate tables, communicate with the dead through her spirit guide John King, and to produce other supernatural phenomena.
  She convinced many persons of her powers, but was caught in deceptive trickery throughout her career. Magicians, including Harry Houdini, and skeptics who evaluated her claims concluded that none of her phenomena were genuine and that she was a clever trickster.
  Her Warsaw séances at the turn of 1893–94 inspired several colorful scenes in the historical novel Pharaoh, which Bolesław Prus began writing in 1894.
context_section_description: The French psychical researcher Charles Richet with Oliver Lodge, Frederic William Henry Myers and Julian Ochorowicz investigated the medium Palladino in the summer of 1894 at his house in the Ile Roubaud in the Mediterranean. Richet claimed furniture moved during the séance and that some of the phenomena was the result of a supernatural agency. However, Richard Hodgson claimed there was inadequate control during the séances and the precautions described did not rule out trickery. Hodgson wrote all the phenomena "described could be account for on the assumption that Eusapia could get a hand or foot free." Lodge, Myers and Richet disagreed, but Hodgson was later proven correct in the Cambridge sittings as Palladino was observed to have used tricks exactly the way he had described them.
  In 1898, the French astronomer Eugene Antoniadi investigated the mediumship of Palladino at the house of Camille Flammarion. According to Antoniadi her performance was "fraud from beginning to end". Palladino tried constantly to free her hands from control and was caught lowering a letter-scale by means of a hair.
  Flammarion, who attended séances with Palladino, believed that some of her phenomena were genuine. He produced in his book alleged levitation photographs of a table and an impression of a face in putty. Joseph McCabe did not find the evidence convincing. He stated that the impressions of faces in putty were always of Palladino's face and could have easily been made, and she was not entirely clear from the table in the levitation photographs.
  In 1905, Eusapia Palladino came to Paris, where Nobel-laureate physicists Pierre Curie and Marie Curie and Nobel-laureate physiologist Charles Richet investigated her amongst other philosophers and scientists such as Henri Bergson and Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval. Signs of trickery were detected but they could not explain all of the phenomena.
  Other members of the Curies' circle of scientist friends—including William Crookes; future Nobel laureate Jean Perrin and his wife Henriette; Louis Georges Gouy; and Paul Langevin—were also exploring spiritualism, as was Pierre Curie's brother Jacques, a fervent believer.
  The Curies regarded mediumistic séances as "scientific experiments" and took detailed notes. According to historian Anna Hurwic, they thought it possible to discover in spiritualism the source of an unknown energy that would reveal the secret of radioactivity. On July 24, 1905, Pierre Curie reported to his friend Gouy: "We have had a series of séances with Eusapia Palladino at the [Society for Psychical Research]."
  It was very interesting, and really the phenomena that we saw appeared inexplicable as trickery—tables raised from all four legs, movement of objects from a distance, hands that pinch or caress you, luminous apparitions.  All in a [setting] prepared by us with a small number of spectators all known to us and without a possible accomplice.  The only trick possible is that which could result from an extraordinary facility of the medium as a magician.  But how do you explain the phenomena when one is holding her hands and feet and when the light is sufficient so that one can see everything that happens?
  Pierre was eager to enlist Gouy. Palladino, he informed him, would return in November, and "I hope that we will be able to convince you of the reality of the phenomena or at least some of them." Pierre was planning to undertake experiments "in a methodical fashion." Marie Curie also attended Palladino's séances, but does not seem to have been as intrigued by them as Pierre.
  On 14 April 1906, just five days before his accidental death, Pierre Curie wrote Gouy about his last séance with Palladino:  "There is here, in my opinion, a whole domain of entirely new facts and physical states in space of which we have no conception."
  Professors Gustave Le Bon and Albert Dastre of Paris University examined Palladino in 1906 and concluded that she was a cheat. They installed a secret lamp behind Palladino and, at a séance, saw her release and use her foot. In 1907, Palladino was found using a s
caption: Table levitates during Palladino's séance at home of astronomer Camille Flammarion, France, 25 November 1898. There are two women seated at the table. Palladino sits at the far short end.
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