Old-time magic from the woods of France
Robert-Houdin’s son Emile gets airborne for the rubes in Paris, circa 1850.
The approximate former location in Paris of the Theatre Robert-Houdin is shown on this Google Earth image. It stood at 8 rue des Italiens until about 1923, when the vast and well-treed Boulevard Haussmann, seen along the bottom of the picture, came trundling through and its tentacles swept away the foundations. Just up the street was the Theatre des Italiens, which was the original home of the considerably more famous and influential Commedia dell’Arte, but our focus remains sharp on the theatre that Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin built, because it became a vortex in Harry Houdini’s story, as it was destined to be in the history of visual illusion.
Robert-Houdin was born in Blois in 1805 (as Jean-Eugène Robert — when he married he added his wife’s maiden name) and after his schooling joined his family’s watchmaking business, while at the same time becoming adept at building clockwork toys and automata as well.
One was the figure of a draughtsman that wrote down the answers to people’s questions with full sentences or symbolic drawings. When he showed it at the 1844 Universal Exposition, PT Barnum was looking on as someone asked the machine to produce a symbol of fidelity and it drew a picture of a dog. The great American showman promptly bought the draughtsman, and Robert-Houdin won a silver medal as well. The 7,000 francs from Barnum financed the finishing touches to the magic theatre that Robert-Houdin was about to open in Paris.
Cynics other than Houdini have wondered how he could possibly have built his draughtsman in just 18 months, as he claimed, when his rivals in the craft, the Jaquet-Droz brothers, spent six years creating one that did pretty much the same thing.
At any rate, Robert-Houdin also (allegedly) built a French guardsman that fired its musket, then tossed it aside and blew kisses to the children in the audience; a confectioner that filled orders for ice cream and fresh-baked bread; a lady who gave singing lessons to a flitting bird; and an acrobat named Antonio Diavolo that answered questions between puffs on a pipe while dangling from a swinging trapeze.
Robert-Houdin had by then married the daughter of a successful Parisian clockmaker, who enabled him to open his own studio there. But the son-in-law had learned juggling and sleight-of-hand in his youth and his passion for magic blossomed in the capital. In 1845, at the ripe old age of 40, he took his magic to the stage — his own, at the 200-seat Theatre Robert-Houdin, and it had all of its trapdoors exactly where he wanted them.
For the first time (though Houdini no doubt disputed even this), audiences saw — on a proper stage rather than in some grotty back street — a magician who wasn’t shaggily cloaked in wizard’s robes or ensconsed in a catacomb of gear. Robert-Houdin wore evening dress and the stage trappings had the elegance of simplicity. He welcomed his guests as if they’d entered a cultured salon and settled them down to a “Soiree Fantastique”.
In a routine called “Second Sight”, his blindfolded son correctly identified objects held by his father in the audience. They used a verbal code, much like the one Harry and Bess would employ half a century later. Father also levitated son a metre off the ground with his neck resting on a cane, just like Harry and Bess. At his command, showers of coins appeared from nowhere, wallets migrated from one person’s pocket to another’s, and wine flowed endlessly from a bottle.
Far greater tricks lay ahead, so amazing, in fact, that some authorities murmured about prosecuting him for witchcraft. Again like Harry, Robert-Houdin became profuse in his insistence that it was all mere trickery.
So the government put him to work. In 1856 Napoleon III dispatched Robert-Houdin to Algeria to chill Arab tempers. They were flaunting the “miracles” of their religious leaders, and their colonial masters reckoned their man could do better. Robert-Houdin obliged by inviting one of the rebels to shoot at him with a marked bullet, which he caught between his teeth. Then he challenged the strongest among them to lift an empty box. The magnet he hid under the floor beneath its iron base made sure no one could.
Robert-Houdin’s ensemble of illusions was perhaps crowned by “The Fantastic Orange Tree”. He would borrow a handkerchief from the audience, roll it into a ball and place it beside an egg, a lemon and an orange. All mysteriously merged in turn into the orange, from which the maestro squeezed a powder that was poured into a bottle filled with wine.
An orange tree was brought onstage and set ablaze, and on this Robert-Houdin poured his magic elixir. The branches sprouted blossoms and then several fine samples of fruit, all but one of which were distributed among the audience. The orange remaining on the tree opened into four segments and the handkerchief could be seen within. A pair of butterflies fluttered into view and unfurled it.
Using hidden pedals, Robert-Houdin pumped the flowers open and withdrew the foliage that was hiding the oranges. The final orange was metallic and opened on hinges, and the artificial butterflies mounted on invisible wires were merely sprung into the air.
Houdini must have understood this explanation better than I do, and it must have driven him nuts, in the sense of “why didn’t I think of that?” As a youngster he’d read the great man’s autobiography, “The Memoirs of Robert-Houdin”, but the problem was that he kept on reading, and other people’s revelations convinced him that “the father of modern magic” wasn’t such a great man, or a good father, after all. In “The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin”, he accused his namesake of shameless exhibitionism, exaggeration and “supreme egotism”. Harry must have been looking in a mirror.
Houdini’s exposé came out in 1908, after he’d let a wound he’d received in Blois fester for six years. Harry had rolled into Paris in ‘02 ready to perform at the Folies Bergere, but there’d been a crisis in the owner’s family and the Folies had been abruptly sold. While a replacement gig was being lined up at the Olympia, Houdini asked around about Robert-Houdin and was told that the old man was still running his theatre on rue des Italiens. He wasn’t, of course — he’d been dead three decades — but in his place at the Theatre Robert-Houdin, Harry found Georges Méliès.
Méliès (1861-1938), one of the great pioneers of cinema, was originally a magician himself. He’d bought the playhouse, complete with most of the original mechanical gadgets, from the widow of Emile Robert-Houdin, the levitating son. He’d made some renovations and reopened it in 1888, once again offering “Soirees Fantastiques”, only this time with his home-made movies. Among these small, quirky, yet wondrous silent films was “A Trip to the Moon”, whose iconic rocketship-in-the-moon’s-eye image I stole to use as the logo for my Dorseyland blog.
Méliès struggled along until World War I made things too difficult for him. A lot of his reels were seized by the government and melted down to make the heels for soldiers’ boots. By 1915 he was so broke that he sold up — to a cinema operator, no less — and hauled away what film negatives he still had, though most of these too were lost when, in a moment of despair, he ordered them burned.
Méliès went into the toymaking trade — and toyed with automata — but in 1926 he was barely ekeing out an existence when Leon Druhot happened to recognise the man selling playthings in a Paris train station. Druhot was the editor of a film magazine and swiftly wrote up a “whatever became of” story that revived public interest in Méliès’ long-ago experiments. His films were once more in demand, and in 1931 he was awarded the French Legion of Honour, but he still managed, seven years later, to die in poverty.
In 1902 Méliès had told Houdini that Robert-Houdin’s daughter-in-law was living on the outskirts of Paris. Harry wrote to her seeking permission on behalf of the Society of American Magicians to place a wreath on the master’s grave in Blois.
She said no.
We’ll now head to Blois, 160 kilometres to the southwest, and have a poke around for ourselves.
Here, a little unfocused through the clouds from this viewpoint in conjurors’ heaven is the castle known as the Château de Blois, one wing Gothic, another Flamboyant Gothic, the third early Renaissance and the last classical, attesting to a magnificent three-century work in progress. Just before Christmas in 1588, Catholic King Henri III gathered the States-General and summoned to his bedroom his rival, the powerful Catholic Duke of Guise, and hid behind a tapestry while his men slashed him to death in decidedly un-Christian fashion. Henri was himself assassinated eight months later.
Tourists visiting the vast edifice can see in one chamber the incandescent filament lightbulbs that Robert-Houdin made in 1851 so that his dinner guests could keep a closer eye on their food.
Just to the right of the château in the Google Earth image above, angling onto the square, is the House of Magic, dedicated to the local-boy-made-good. Robert-Houdin had returned to the city of his birth when he retired, wealthy and exceedingly famous across the continent, in 1855. He passed on his magic wand to Pierre Chocat, an illusionist who had married his sister and performed as “Hamilton”.
Robert-Houdin bought a mansion that he called the Priory (le Prieuré). Several sources say it was “near Blois”, others (including Wikipedia) that the House of Magic now occupies it. On the Wiki’s side is a French newspaper’s website reporting that the old man’s descendants bequeathed all of his local properties to the town of Blois in 1981 on condition that public access be assured. It says the mansion that became the House of Magic — originally “built by François-Marie Ballet between 1856 and 1862″ — was bought by the municipality in 1990 and eight years of transformation began.
On the other hand, the newspaper also says that Robert-Houdin retired to his Priory “in the commune of Saint-Gervais-la-Forêt”, just outside Blois, and there wrote his memoirs, and then died. This little village (population 3,300) not only has a Rue Robert-Houdin, it’s got a Rue Georges Melies as well!
In 2005 France’s Club des Magiciens Collectionneurs celebrated the centenary of Robert-Houdin’s birth in part by taking the train to Saint-Gervais to view the Prieuré and his tomb, so evidently the old homestead is still standing. Neither Blois nor Saint-Gervais seems interested in promoting these landmarks, however. Maybe they don’t want Harry Houdini coming around again.
Back to the House of Magic, then. Former culture minister Jack Lang was in 1988 the mayor of Blois, and he saw to it that $11 million was channelled into turning the old house into a fine museum. It packs the tourists in and the kids love it. There are interactive illusions and professional magic acts and, upstairs, Robert-Houdin’s automata and scientific instruments, including glass clocks that have no visible mechanisms. It also houses the International Centre of Prestidigitation and lllusion, a teaching academy, reminiscent of the notion that Harry Houdini had for a University of Magic in New York.
And, in the House of Magic’s permanent collection, is a display concerning, yes, Harry Houdini.
Every hour on the hour the House of Magic becomes a giant cuckoo clock. The windows open and a dragon sticks its six heads out to roar at passers-by on the street while waving its tail from the roof.
Whether this was the same place or not, Robert-Houdin’s Priory was just as magical, and no doubt far more so for its time. It was a mechanical house, the first “smart” house, it’s been called. Robert-Houdin’s servants opening and closing doors wound the master clock, which in turn controlled a network of alarm clocks, one in in each of their rooms, which would only stop ringing when they got out of bed. Another timer fed the horses automatically; there were burglar alarms on all the doors and windows, and a temperature-activated fire alarm. When visitors rang the bell at the gate, a name plaque that read “Robert-Houdin” twirled around and said, “Entrez”.
He may have been an entertainer, but his inventiveness stood him among the great scientists of his day. From his studies of the human eye he concocted instruments still used routinely by ophthalmologists, and he built the original taxi meter, a device initially used by the military to measure the distance its carriages travelled.
Somewhere around Blois Robert-Houdin rests in a tomb. When Harry Houdini got no help from the son’s widow, he took the train to Blois and looked up the old wizard’s daughter Rosalie, a sculptor. He couldn’t get to see her either, but her husband suggested that Harry go ahead and visit the grave on his own, no permission required. And thus it was that, on June 28, 1902, the Great Houdini laid a wreath on the resting place of the Great Robert-Houdin, and had a photographer take his picture there to prove it.
There is one more stop on this tour that will allow us to triangulate Harry’s position in this mystic comedy of illusion and disillusion: the site of the Egyptian Hall in London. All of the above threads are woven together there and a few more for good measure.
The Egyptian Hall was purpose-built in 1812 to house the natural-history and art items amassed by Sheffield jeweller and goldsmith William Bullockin. People paid a shilling to enter its Ancient Egypt facade and gawk at some 15,000 items including, back in the 1820s, Emperor Napoleon’s carriage, seized at Waterloo, and Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault’s amazing painting “The Raft of the Medusa”.
In 1898, two years after he’d been so smitten with the performance put on in Milwaukee by Dr Lynn of Egyptian Hall fame, the young Houdini wrote to the famous British magician John Nevil Maskelyne asking to join his show, which was a popular daily feature at the Egyptian Hall.
Maskelyne said no.
While Robert-Houdin levitated his son with the boy’s neck leaning on a cane, JN Maskelyne raised a woman into the air with no supports at all. He was that good, and there was much more to his act than that. As a child he had attended a performance by the Davenport Brothers from America, and it was his lot to be in the right place when a curtain fell and he could plainly see all their gimmickry in action.
This is Maskelyne with an automaton of his own, “Psycho the Whist Player”.
@
Maskelyne (1839-1917) was by profession yet another watchmaker, and with George Alfred Cooke, a cabinet maker, he set out to bring the so-called mediums down a peg by putting on displays of “psychic phenomena” equal to or better than theirs. The exposés spawned a full-blown and much admired magic act, during which Maskelyne escaped from a locked box. This became Houdini’s “Metamorphosis”, though by then the originator had given up on retaining copyright — he’d already taken a pair of imitators to court but then refused to reveal the trick’s secret, so the case was dismissed.
Maskelyne and Cooke hit the theatres in 1865, and the fame they quickly accumulated as conjurors took them to the Egyptian Hall, of which Maskelyne actually became manager.
With the theatre in darkness, ghosts, skeletons, severed limbs and various musical instruments that played themselves would fly about. Then the lights would be switched on and the spoilsport duo would repeat the stunt so that everyone could see that’s all it was — a stunt. At one of their shows in 1884 was Georges Méliès, then just 22, and what he saw showed him the enormous potential of trickery for the stage — and ultimately, for film.
Maskelyne and Cooke continued to perform at the Egyptian Hall from 1873 until 1904, when the building was torn down to make room for a mammoth Edwardian office block (though not before it became one of the first places in England to screen moving pictures).
Maskelyne took his kit to St George’s Hall in Langham Place with a new partner, David Wighton (1868-1941), who went by the stage name David Devant and as such would become the first president of the Magic Circle, Britain’s leading club for conjurors. Its members later elected Houdini president, year after year after year. Maskelyne’s offspring became a dynasty of magician after magician after magician. More on the Magic Circle below.
There’s still a bit more linkage in all of this.
Like Houdini, JN Maskelyne had an exceedingly well-respected man dogging him, insisting that he had genuine psychic powers. Try as he might, the trickster could not convince Alfred Russel Wallace, the ingenious evolutionist, that he was only a trickster. Arthur Conan Doyle would cast the same shadow on Harry in the years to come.
Among the trade secrets he shared with aspiring magicians, Robert-Houdin stressed that their success would come from believing they really did have supernatural powers. Consciously they know that they don’t, that they’re merely putting on a show but, just as consciously, they have to fool themselves. Illusion envelops the theatre — and all who play a role in it.
The headquarters of Britain’s Magic Circle at 12 Stephenson Way in London NW1 is for rent these days — as a rather peculiar but certainly fascinating venue for weddings, banquets, product launches, seminars, training sessions and other such events.
The Magic Circle Theatre hosted its first wedding ceremony in August 2008, after which the newlyweds were toasted by their guests in the Devant Room, surrounded by, among other exhibits, Houdini’s handcuffs, Tommy Cooper’s fez and the props used by Prince Charles when he became a member of the Inner Magic Circle, adopting the motto Indocilis Privata Loqui, which is translated as “Not apt to disclose secrets”.
The Devant Room — which also has displays on Chung Ling Soo and the British army’s use of magic to make the Suez Canal invisible to enemy bombers in 1941 — is named for the Magic Circle’s first president a century ago, David Devant, one of the great British magicians of the day.
The Magic Circle moved to these premises in 1998, and quickly made sure that, along with a clubroom and a bar, there was “a secret underground museum”. Its website is here.
