A photographic plate was made to capture solely the light of what stood before its lens. Yet in Paris, in 1873, it was asked to yield far more: to preserve the countenance of the living and to summon beside it the likeness of the dead. The caller would pose upon the terrace of Buguet’s studio on the Boulevard Montmartre. He was invited to collect his thoughts. The photographer, meanwhile, withdrew from the plate, feigning a silent invocation. Moments later, a faint, indistinct form emerged behind the sitter’s shoulder or beside his likeness. The client departed with six prints and—whether he recognised the apparition or not—twenty francs poorer.
Thus the prosecution, addressing the Seventh Correctional Chamber of Paris, laid bare the mechanism. This was no mere matter of unconvincing likenesses. The very promise was preternatural: an image conjured through the agency of the spirits. Late in 1873, the Revue spirite, edited by Leymarie, heralded Buguet as a photographer endowed with mediumistic gifts. Issue after issue published his prints alongside testimonies from clients who claimed to recognise departed kin. The journal’s influence lent its weight to commercial advertisements and personal letters. At the core of the proceedings lay a question far more precise than the truth of spiritualism: what had the three men known of the manipulations within the studio?
The contrivance required the apparition to be arranged before the client ever sat for his portrait. According to the prosecution’s case, the cashier, Léonie Ménessier, first enquired as to the age and features of the person to be evoked. Buguet then seated the visitor upon the terrace, placed a plate inside the apparatus, and urged him to fix his mind upon the deceased. While the client sat motionless, an assistant carried the plate away. He returned after the chemical manipulations; the finished print then revealed, beside the living face, a veiled, somewhat hazy form. A preliminary image had been photographed earlier in a separate workroom, then combined with the client’s likeness.
Orders arriving from the provinces proceeded upon the very same principle, sparing the petitioner the need to travel. One could post one’s portrait, remit payment for the prints, and receive in turn the likeness of the allegedly summoned departed. To sustain such belief from afar, Buguet would announce the precise day and hour of the purported séance. The recipients were urged to join their prayers with his own. The fee remained earned even if the face appeared blurred or recalled no one at all. The trial proceedings noted that a female client from Lyon, dissatisfied with the image she received, had obtained the reimbursement of her twenty francs accompanied by an insolent letter.
The judicial inquiry altered the very meaning of these gestures. On 22 April 1875, Police Officer Lombard and Inspector Belin de Ballu arrived at the studio under a false pretext. They requested that Buguet summon the deceased father of one of them. Buguet placed de Ballu in the pose and exhorted him to concentrate upon his father. Thereupon Lombard disclosed his office and demanded to know whether the plate had already received an impression. After some hesitation, Buguet confessed that the image had been prepared shortly before in an adjoining room. An inspector developed the plate: two human figures appeared, a man and a woman. Buguet explained that he occasionally prepared two spectres to better satisfy a client who had asked for but one.
The search of the premises provided this confession with its material apparatus. In a laboratory partitioned from the waiting room, the officers discovered a jointed mannequin measuring some forty-five centimetres, draped in blue gauze and dark cloth. Its head had been replaced with an image cut from pasteboard. Nearby stood the photographic camera. Buguet demonstrated how he produced the apparition by photographing the doll swaddled as a phantom. In a cabinet, they uncovered a box containing two hundred and forty cardboard heads, and a second box holding fifty-nine more. Thus could he vary the countenances and ages of the promised dead.
At the trial on 16 June, Buguet did not deny the physical operations. He acknowledged that two separate exposures were made and that pasteboard heads had been employed to construct the apparitions. He disputed, however, the crown’s interpretation of this practice. He maintained that he had compelled no one to come, had guaranteed no likeness, and had left each to his own beliefs. He pointed out that the price, announced beforehand, was not contingent upon the recognition of the face. The defence turned this fixed tariff into an argument: a photograph delivered for remuneration, however poorly executed, did not necessarily constitute a swindle.
Yet the court’s enquiries addressed equally those who were privy to the scheme. Studio assistants described the manufacture of the spectres. Vanderzaein, tasked with their preparation, testified that Leymarie had seen the dolls and the heads; the boy Blot carried the photographs to the offices of the Revue spirite. Ménessier, the cashier, confirmed that she received the sitters and admitted that Buguet had dictated to her the words presented as the automatic writing of Allan Kardec. These depositions were not sufficient on their own to establish what Leymarie had grasped during each individual operation. Yet they gave concrete substance to the debate over his good faith: who had seen the props, who had disseminated the images, who had sustained the correspondents?
Leymarie maintained that he had believed in spirit photography and remained ignorant of Buguet’s artifices. Yet he was the director of the journal that championed them; correspondence and advertisements stood at the centre of the hearings. The prosecution argued that he held a financial interest in the enterprise and had persisted in defending the images despite explicit warnings. The defence countered that Leymarie’s zeal sprang from genuine conviction. The two versions clashed along a boundary difficult to draw: could faith exonerate one who disseminated deceptive images, or did belief, once harnessed to commerce, become an instrument of fraud?
Count de Bullet, among Buguet’s most devoted patrons, embodied this boundary in its most unyielding form. He had sat on numerous occasions and asserted that he had recognised his sister, who was living in Baltimore, upon a photographic print. Leymarie had spoken to him of bi-corporeity—the supposed capacity of a living person to manifest elsewhere than where the physical body rested. In the witness box, Bullet persisted in believing what he had seen, even after the doll and the pasteboard heads were produced before him. The court accounts cite varying sums throughout the hearings: the prosecution estimated his disbursements at three or four thousand francs; Bullet reduced them to roughly twenty-five hundred. His obstinacy did not establish the reality of spirits; rather, it demonstrated how tenaciously conviction could survive the revelation of the trick.
Firman stood trial for another series of séances. The prosecution charged him with having simulated apparitions, notably that of the “little Indian.” Madame Huguet testified that she had grown suspicious of the medium and concealed herself to observe him. She recounted surprising him draped in shimmering cloth, whereupon she hurled herself upon him. Firman denied any recollection of the incident and maintained his status as a genuine medium. His counsel argued that the séances had been sought by spectators already inclined to scepticism, belonging to the realm of parlour amusement rather than fraud. The court also heard believers who avowed they had recognised relatives in the prints. The proceedings did not elevate these accounts into preternatural evidence; it placed them directly alongside the physical objects, gestures, and confessions gathered during the investigation.
The closing speeches on 17 June retraced this division. For the prosecution, Buguet had physically fabricated the spectres, while the journal’s publicity had endowed the images with the authority of scientific experiment. For the defence, the photographer had made no guarantee of resemblance and the clients had solicited the sittings of their own accord; Leymarie, it was argued, had acted out of faith, not calculation. Firman’s counsel insisted upon the absence of complaints from spectators whom he framed as the medium’s own patrons. The press reported a boisterous courtroom, murmurs of assent that the presiding judge was forced to quell, and personal testimonies whose convictions could not be dismantled by the mere exhibition of a mannequin.
The judgment, delivered the following day, rejected this separation between the stage trick and religious belief. Buguet and Leymarie were each sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of five hundred francs; Firman received six months’ imprisonment and a fine of three hundred francs. The court fixed the term of civil imprisonment at four months and ordered joint and several liability for the fines and costs. The glass plate, the cut-out cardboard heads, and the depositions had pulled the apparitions back into the realm of material objects. Yet in the courtroom, men and women remained who continued to recognise their dead. The verdict brought the trial to a close; it could not bridge the chasm between what the inquiry had brought to light and what each had resolved to believe.