Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin

His penmanship was excellent, and it landed him a job as a clerk for an attorney's office. Instead of studying law, he tinkered with mechanical gadgets. His employer sent him back to his father. He was told that he was better suited as a watchmaker than a lawyer, but by then, Jean's father had already retired, so he became an apprentice to his cousin who had a watch-shop. For a short time, Jean-Eugène worked as a watchmaker.[3]

In the mid-1820s, he saved up to buy a copy of a two-volume set of books on clockmaking called Traité de l'horlogerie ("Treatise on Clockmaking"), written by Ferdinand Berthoud.[3] He would go on to pursue the craft of clockmaking for the rest of his life, and is widely credited with inventing the mystery clock.

When he got home and opened the wrapping, instead of the Berthoud books, what appeared before his eyes was a two-volume set on magic called Scientific Amusements. Instead of returning the books, his curiosity got the better of him. From those crude volumes, he learned the rudiments of magic. He practiced at all hours of the day.[3]

From that point on, he became very interested in the art. He was upset that the books he got only revealed how the secrets were done but did not show how to do them.[2] He found that learning from the books available in those days was very difficult due to the lack of detailed explanations,[3] but the books piqued his interest in the art. So Jean-Eugène began taking lessons from a local amateur magician.[3] He paid ten francs for a series of lessons from a man named Maous from Blois who was a podiatrist but also entertained at fairs and parties doing magic. He was proficient at sleight of hand, and taught Jean-Eugène how to juggle to improve his hand-eye coordination.[2][3] He also taught him rudiments of the cups and balls. He told young Jean-Eugène that digital dexterity came with repetition, and as a direct result, Jean-Eugène practiced incessantly.[2]

Magic was his pastime, and meanwhile, his studies in horology continued. When he felt he was ready, he moved to Tours and set up a watchmaking business, doing conjuring on the side.[3]

Much of what we know about Robert-Houdin comes from his memoirs—and his writings were meant more to entertain than to chronicle, rendering it difficult to separate fact from fiction. Robert-Houdin would have readers believe that a major turning point in his life came when he became apprenticed to the magician Edmund De Grisi, Count's son and better known as Torrini. What is known is that his early performing came from joining an amateur acting troupe.[3]

Later, he performed at social parties as a professional magician in Europe and the United States.[3] It was during this period while at a party that he met the daughter of a Parisian watchmaker, Jacques-François Houdin, who had also come from Jean-Eugène Robert's native Blois.[2][3] The daughter's name was Josèphe Cecile Houdin, and Jean-Eugène fell in love with her at their first meeting.[3] On 8 July 1830, they were married. He hyphenated his own name to hers and became Robert-Houdin.[2][3] He and Josèphe had eight children, of whom three survived.[2]

He moved to Paris and worked in his father-in-law's wholesale shop. Jacques-François was among the last of the watchmakers to use the old method of handcrafting each piece and embraced his new son-in-law's ambitions for mechanism.[3] While Houdin worked in the main shop, Jean-Eugène was to tinker with mechanical toys and automatic figures.[3] With his work in the shop, Jean-Eugène was still practicing magic. Quite by accident, Robert-Houdin walked into a shop on the Rue Richelieu and discovered that it sold magic. He visited the store, which was owned by a Père (Papa) Roujol.[2] There, he met fellow magicians, both amateur and professional, where he engaged in talk about conjuring, and he met an aristocrat by the name of Jules de Rovère, who coined the term "prestidigitation" to describe a major misdirection technique magicians used.[2][3]

At Papa Roujol's, Robert-Houdin learned the details to many of the mechanical tricks of the time as well as how to improve them. From there, he built his own mechanical figures, like a singing bird, a dancer on a tightrope, and an automaton doing the cups and balls. His most acclaimed automaton was his writing and drawing figure. He displayed this figure before King Louis Philippe and eventually sold it to P. T. Barnum.[3]

On 19 October 1843, Josèphe died at the age of thirty-two,[2][3] having been ill for months. At her death, having three young children to take care of, he remarried in August to François Marguerite Olympe Braconnier, a woman ten years younger, [2][3] who soon took over the household.

Robert-Houdin loved to watch the big magic shows that came to Paris.[2] He dreamed about some day opening his own theatre. In the meantime, he was hired by a friend by the name of Count de l'Escalopier[2] to perform at private parties.[3]

Now that he had free time, he began constructing equipment for his own use instead of selling it to others.[2] The income from the shop and his new inventions gave him enough money to experiment on new tricks using glass apparatus that would be (or at least appear to be) free of trickery. He envisioned a stage that would be as elegant as the drawing rooms in which he was hired to perform. He also thought that a magician should be dressed as such by wearing traditional evening clothes.[3]

He obtained financial backing from Count de l'Escalopier, who fronted him[3] the 15,000 francs[2] to turn his vision into reality. He rented out a suite of rooms above the archways around the gardens of the Palais Royal, which was once owned by Cardinal Richelieu. He hired workmen to redesign the old assembly room into a theatre. They painted it white with gold trim. Tasteful drapes were hung, chic candelabras were placed throughout, and the stage furniture was set in the style of Louis XV.[2]

On 3 July 1845, Robert-Houdin premiered his 200-seat Théâtre Robert-Houdin in what he called "Soirées fantastiques". No critics covered Robert-Houdin’s debut, and in his memoirs, Robert-Houdin said that the show had been a disaster. He suffered from stage fright that caused him to talk too fast and in a monotone. He said that he did not know what he was saying or doing, and everything was a blur. He believed that a magician should not present a trick until it was mechanically perfected to be certain of avoiding failure, and this caused him to over-rehearse.[2]

After the first show, he was about to have a nervous breakdown. He closed the theatre and had every intention to close it for good, until a friend agreed that the venture was a silly idea. Instead of admitting defeat, Robert-Houdin, irked at the friend's effrontery, used this insult to regain his courage, and persevered in giving the show a long run at his little theatre.[2][3] Although the forty-year-old magician was unpolished at first, he soon gained the confidence required for the stage.[3]

With each performance, Robert-Houdin got better, and he began to receive critical acclaim. Le Charivari and L'Illustration both said that his mechanical marvels and artistic magic was comparable to those of his predecessors like Philippe and Bartolomeo Bosco. Even with all of this, still relatively few people would come to the little theatre during the summer months, and he struggled to keep it open. To meet expenses, he sold the three houses that he had inherited from his mother.

The following year, he added a new trick to his programme that became especially popular. Seats at the Palais Royal were at a premium. This new marvel was called Second Sight. Second Sight drew the audiences into the little theatre. Once there, they saw the other creations Robert-Houdin had to offer.[2] He also performed outside Paris, sometimes with local magicians, as he did in Liège in 1846 with the then well-known Belgian magician Louis Courtois.[3]

Statue in front of Robert-Houdin's home in Blois

When Robert-Houdin first opened his theatre, it was sparsely attended and he realized that he needed something more extraordinary that would bring the public to his theatre. So he came upon the idea of doing a two-person mind-reading act, concocting a silly story about how his son Emile had created a game of hot and cold that resulted in Robert-Houdin using it for the stage.[3]

He named the trick "Second Sight", a title that was already used by magicians such as John Henry Anderson, but the effect was entirely different. Anderson had a box into which items were inserted. The medium would then describe the contents inside. In Robert-Houdin's version, he walked into the audience and touched items that the audience held up, and his blindfolded assistant, played by his son, described each one in detail. It caused a sensation and brought the throng to see his shows.

Eventually, Robert-Houdin changed the method, so instead of asking his son what was in his hands, he simply rang a bell. This stunned those that suspected a spoken code. He would even set the bell off to the side and remain silent, and his son still described every object handed to his father.

Robert-Houdin even made the test difficult. He placed a glass of water into his son's hands, and Emile proceeded to drink from it. He was able to perceive the taste of the liquids that spectators from the audience merely thought of.[4] Even then, the audiences were not entirely convinced; they tried to trip up Emile by bringing in books written in Greek, or odd tools such as a thread counter.[2]

During Robert-Houdin's time, all of Paris was enthusiastically talking about the mysterious uses of "ether".[3] He took advantage of this by presenting an illusion that appeared to use the pungent liquid. He told the audience that he had discovered a marvelous new property of ether. "If one has a living person inhale this liquid when it is at its highest degree of concentration, the body of the patient for a few moments becomes as light as a balloon," Robert-Houdin claimed.

He proceeded to "prove" just that. He placed three stools on a wooden bench. His youngest son Eugène stood on the middle one. With the instructions from his father, he extended his arms. Robert-Houdin placed two canes on top of the stools and positioned them under his son's arms.

He took a vial of ether and opened it. The audience smelled it wafting through the theatre. He placed the vial under his son's nose, and he went limp. In reality, the vial was empty, with the odour being produced by his son Emile pouring real ether on a hot iron shovel.

Robert-Houdin took the stool away from his son's feet, and he just hung limp as a rag. He took away one of the canes, so he was dangling by one arm, and carefully placed his head against his upraised hand. This was startling enough. What he did next was stunning. He lifted his boy upright in a horizontal position by his little finger and then let go until he was suspended in mid air.[4] Robert-Houdin stepped away to leave his son in that suspended state, balanced only by his right elbow and no other support.[3]

When it was apparent that the drug was wearing off, Robert-Houdin returned his son to his upright position. When he woke up, he seemed no worse for wear.[3][4] Robert-Houdin built up the surprise of spectators until, "… by gradually heightening it up to the moment when, so to speak, it exploded."[4] This brought letters of protest against Robert-Houdin, thinking he was putting his son's health in jeopardy, although the ether had nothing to do with the trick.[3]

Robert-Houdin was not the first to perform the Levitation Illusion. The first in Europe was Ching Lau Lauro in 1832 or 1833.[5]

On one of Robert-Houdin's side tables, he had an egg, a lemon, and an orange. He went into the audience and borrowed a lady's handkerchief that was in style then. He rolled it into a ball. He rubbed the ball in between his hands, and the handkerchief got smaller and smaller until it disappeared, passing through to the egg on the table.

Carefully, he picked up the egg. The audience expected him to crack it open and produce the spectator's handkerchief. Instead, he made that disappear too. He told the audience that the egg went to the lemon. This was repeated with the lemon and the orange. When he made the orange disappear, all that was left was a fine powder. This was placed into a silver vial. He soaked this vial with alcohol and set it on fire.

A small orange tree planted in a wooden box was brought forth by one of his assistants. The audience noticed that the tree was barren of any blossoms or fruit. The blue flame from the vial was placed underneath it. The vapors from it caused the leaves to spread and sprout orange blossoms from it. Robert-Houdin then picked up his magic wand and waved it. The flowers disappeared and oranges bloomed forth.

He plucked the oranges from the tree and tossed them to the audience to prove they were real. He did this until he only had one left. He waved his wand again, and the orange split open into four sections, revealing a white material of sorts inside of it. Two clockwork butterflies appeared from behind the tree. The butterflies grabbed the end of the corner of the white cloth and spread it open, revealing the spectator's handkerchief.[4][6]

The Marvelous Orange Tree trick was used by the eponymous conjurer in Steven Millhauser's short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" and its film adaptation The Illusionist (2006), where a more complex variant is shown. It is also alluded to in Donald Barthelme's short story "Sentence".

Robert-Houdin brought in a large portfolio used for holding documents or art work under his arm. The portfolio was only about one and three quarters of an inch thick, too small or too thin to hold anything but pictures.[2]

He set it on two thin trestles to hold the case with the spine facing the audience.[2] He removed the expected drawings from it.[4] One of those pictures showed a bareheaded woman. Then, he produced two lady's bonnets decorated with flowers; one for winter, the other for summer. He lowered the flap for each production. Then, he showed a picture of birds, followed by a stuffed bird flat as a pancake.[2] With that, he proceeded to produce from the portfolio four live turtle doves.[4]

He showed a picture of a cartoon of two cooks fighting with pots.[2] This was followed by three enormous copper pots. One was filled with beans, another with flames bursting forth, and the third pot was filled with boiling water.[4] As an afterthought, he lifted the top flap of the portfolio[2] and pulled out a large cage filled with birds.[4]

He walked forward towards the audience with the square cage, and they applauded thinking the trick was over. "Nothing here now—neither anything, nor anybody," he said as he knocked on the upright flap.[2] For a finale, he closed the portfolio one last time and produced his young son from it.[4][6]

The number of tricks he invented for his theatre was extensive, but his most remarkable one was the "Light and Heavy Chest". He took advantage of the infancy of the usage of electricity, especially the then-novelty of Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery of electromagnetism, to his advantage. Robert-Houdin brought on a small wooden box about a foot wide. He said that he had found a way to protect it from thieves. He asked a spectator to lift it, usually a small child. The child lifted it with ease. Then, he brought an adult male up from the audience and asked him to lift the same box. The adult male was unable to lift the box.