The Report that the Imprimerie royale printed in August 1784 was not the only thing Bailly wrote for the commission that month. Alexandre Bertrand, who published a history of animal magnetism in France in 1826, put it this way: besides the report “which was spread among the public with great profusion”, the united commissioners of the Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine “made another which was kept secret, and which was addressed to the minister.” Bertrand printed it as a note at the end of his book. Burdin and Dubois printed it again in 1841 in their Histoire académique du magnétisme animal, with footnotes of their own. It bears the same date as the public Report, Paris, 11 August 1784, and the same nine names. The translation below is mine from the text as Burdin and Dubois give it, which does not differ in substance from Bertrand’s; the full French is in the Sources of the entry.

What the king was to read

It opens by explaining itself.

“The commissioners charged by the king with the examination of animal magnetism, in drawing up the report which is to be presented to his majesty, and which may perhaps become public, believed it was prudent to suppress an observation which ought not to be divulged; but they could not conceal it from his majesty’s minister: that minister charged them to draw up a note on it, intended to be put before the eyes of the king, and reserved for his majesty alone.

“This important observation concerns morals.”

The commissioners restate their public finding, that the causes of the effects attributed to magnetism are touch, imagination and imitation, and add the observation that there were always many more women than men in crisis. They explain this first by the physiology of the day: women’s nerves are more mobile, their imagination “more lively, more exalted”, and like strings tuned in unison, “it is enough to set one in motion for all the others instantly to share it; this is what the commissioners observed several times; as soon as one woman falls into crisis, the others are not long in falling into it.”

Then they come to the cause they would not print. “It is always men who magnetise women.” The relations established are those of a patient to a physician, “but this physician is a man”. Most of the women who come to the magnetism are not really ill: “many come out of idleness and for amusement; others, who have some slight indispositions, keep none the less their freshness and their strength; their senses are entire; their youth has all its sensibility; they have charms enough to act upon the physician, they have health enough for the physician to act upon them; then the danger is reciprocal.”

What follows is a description of the treatment as the commissioners had watched it, written as an anatomy of what the hands and knees were doing. “The man who magnetises ordinarily has the woman’s knees enclosed in his own; the knees and all the lower parts of the body are consequently in contact. The hand is applied on the hypochondria, and sometimes lower, on the ovaries; the touch is therefore exercised at once on an infinity of parts, and in the neighbourhood of the most sensitive parts of the body.” Often the man passes his right hand behind the woman’s back, and both lean toward each other. “The proximity becomes the greatest possible, the face almost touches the face, the breaths mingle, all the physical impressions are shared instantaneously, and the reciprocal attraction of the sexes must act in all its force.”

The physicians among the commissioners, “present and attentive at the treatment”, had watched what they took to be the course of such a crisis, and they set it down stage by stage: the face flushing by degrees, the eye becoming ardent, the woman lowering her head and covering her eyes with her hand, “her habitual modesty watching without her knowing it”; then the eye clouding, the eyelids growing moist, the breathing short and broken, the chest rising and falling quickly, and the convulsions. “In lively and sensitive women the last degree, the term of the sweetest of emotions, is often a convulsion”. Afterwards came languor and a kind of sleep of the senses. The proof that the state was not painful to those who underwent it, the commissioners wrote, was that “as soon as it has ceased, no distressing trace of it remains. The memory of it is not disagreeable, the women find themselves the better for it, and have no repugnance to feeling it again.” Many women, they thought, had never felt these effects; others had not known their cause; “the more honest they are, the less they must have suspected it.”

Their conclusion on this head is one sentence: “The magnetic treatment can only be dangerous for morals.”

The question put to d’Eslon

Then the one piece of direct evidence, which is also the one exchange in the whole affair that was recorded in the king’s note and nowhere else.

“M. Deslon is not unaware of it; M. the lieutenant-general of police put some questions to him on this subject, in the presence of the commissioners, in an assembly held at M. Deslon’s own house, on 9 May last. M. Lenoir said to him: I ask you, in my capacity as lieutenant-general of police, whether, when a woman is magnetised or in crisis, it would not be easy to abuse her? M. Deslon answered in the affirmative”.

The commissioners were fair to him on the point. “Justice must be done to this physician, that he has always insisted that his colleagues, bound to honesty by their profession, should alone have the right and the privilege of practising magnetism.” And although he had a room at his house “originally intended for crises”, he did not use it; all the crises took place in public. “But despite this decency observed, the danger subsists none the less as soon as the physician can, if he wishes, abuse his patient. The occasions recur every day, at every moment; he is exposed to them sometimes for two or three hours; who can answer that he will always be master enough not to wish it?”

The other suspicions

Two further observations were kept for the king.

The first is a suspicion of fraud, which the public Report never makes. “There is yet another means of exciting convulsions, a means of which the commissioners have had no direct and positive proof, but which they could not help suspecting: it is a simulated crisis, which gives the signal or which determines a great number of others by imitation. This means is at least necessary to hasten and to keep up the crises, crises all the more useful to magnetism since without them it would not sustain itself.”

The second is a verdict on the cures, which the public Report had refused to judge at all. “There are no real cures; the treatments are very long and fruitless. There is many a patient who has been going to the treatment for eighteen months or two years without any relief; in the long run one would be bored to be there, one would tire of coming. The crises make a spectacle, they occupy, they interest; moreover, to inattentive eyes, they are effects of magnetism and proofs of the existence of that agent, which is really only the power of the imagination.”

The note closes as the public Report does, by extending its findings from d’Eslon to Mesmer. The king’s order had sent the commissioners only to d’Eslon, but d’Eslon’s principles were the twenty-seven propositions Mesmer had printed in 1779, his method was Mesmer’s, and the effects at both houses were the same. “Public report announces that there are no more cures at M. Mesmer’s than at M. Deslon’s”; the same convulsions might become habitual and spread in the towns; “these practices and these assemblies have equally the gravest drawbacks for morals.” Whatever the mystery of Mesmer’s magnetism, “that magnetism must be no more real than M. Deslon’s, and the procedures of the one are neither more useful nor less dangerous than those of the other.”

Signed Franklin, Bory, Lavoisier, Bailly, Majault, Sallin, Darcet, Guillotin, Leroy. Paris, 11 August 1784.

What it changes

The public Report answered the question it had been asked and stopped. It said the fluid did not exist, that imagination, touch and imitation did the work, and that the crises were dangerous to health. It said nothing about why the halls were full of women of fashion who were not ill, nothing about simulation, and nothing about cures except that cures could not be evidence either way.

The secret note is the same nine men saying what they thought was going on. They thought the treatment was, for many of the women, an erotic experience that neither they nor the physician named; they thought some crises were staged to start the rest; and they thought nobody was being cured. None of this was offered as proof, and the commissioners were careful to say which parts were suspicion. But it is the half of the finding that would have persuaded the public that had felt the heat and seen the convulsions, and it was the half the public did not get. A man who had watched a woman convulse at d’Eslon’s tub could read the printed Report and conclude, as many did, that the academicians had explained away with a word, imagination, a thing he had seen with his eyes. He was not allowed to read that the academicians had seen the same thing, had a view about what it was, and had told the king.

Burdin and Dubois, printing the note fifty-seven years later, added a footnote to the sentence “It is always men who magnetise women”: “Things still happen today in the same manner; so the commissioners’ observations subsist in all their force. It is still exclusively men who magnetise women, with this difference, that there is no longer public treatment as in the time of Mesmer and Deslon; and that instead of convulsions a pretended somnambulism is provoked.”

Sources

• Rapport secret sur le magnétisme animal, rédigé par Bailly au nom de la même commission, 11 August 1784, in Charles Burdin and Frédéric Dubois, Histoire académique du magnétisme animal, Paris: Baillière, 1841, pages 92 to 100, with the editors’ footnotes. archive.org
• Alexandre Bertrand, Du magnétisme animal en France, Paris: Baillière, 1826, pages 148 to 149 and the note at the end of the volume, for the earlier printing and the statement that the report was kept secret and addressed to the minister. archive.org