THE CREDULITY OF THE FRENCH

Evening Star, Issue 20109, 25 February 1929, Page 7

THE CREDULITY OF THE FRENCH

SOME REGENT GASES THE PHILOSOPHER’S STOKE AT LYONS It is difficult for anyone who has not lived in Prance long enough to recognise instinctively, without attempting to understand, the paradoxical inconsistencies of her national character, to believe that the French arc among the most credulous people in the world (writes, a correspondent of the ‘Observer’). All national characters are full of paradoxes, but this paradox is perhaps the greatest. The logical, thrifty, clear-headed, cautious, materialist, shrewd, nnforgetting, fiercely individual and fearlessly realist - French, can be taken in more easily than any civilised people in the world. Of course, the events of the moment arc throwing a limelight more particularly on'their credulity in money matters, though, it has long been known to all the shady financiers of'-Europe that any scheme too hare-brained or too transparently dishonest to have a chance in any other capital can generally be floated in Paris, if the pi'ospective profits are made out to ho large enough. Again and again the savings of France have been wheedled out of her pockets by bankrupt company promoters and even by bankrupt countries. As a nation and as individuals, the French would bo fabulously rich to-day if they had only known how to hold on to the products of their tireless and patient industry and their self-denying thrift. This is only one side of their credulity, however. It may, perhaps, be explained by the fact that they remain peasants. They are shrewd, like peasants, hut, like peasants, they fall ready victims to the chcapjack at the fair, if he knows how to play upon their grasping desire to accumulate money—not to spend it, but to accumulate it.

THE FAKIR AND ITJS DISCIPLES

What is to explain those other sides of their credulity, ■ evidence of which is to be found in the very daily papers that have been revealing the collapse of their latest financial'house of cards? What is to_ explain the constant readiness of this matter-of-fact people to believe in any kind of magic? it is not necessary to go hack many days to find three examples of this readiness. Only a week or so ago the crowded audience in a largo public building howled with anger at a journalist who had undertaken to expose the so-called supernatural powers of a trick music hall performer masquerading under the title of a fakir. The exposure was well and truly made, but the attitude of the audience showed the passion with which the dupes of the trickster had been convinced of his magic qualities. Again, it is not _so very long ago that one of the leading monthly reviews opened its columns to accounts of those spiritualistic manifestations where the materialisation of the visitors from an unknown world was proved to have been produced by indiarubber bladders and soap lather. This very week we have had signs of a similar credulity. One morning paper tells us that the School of Psychology is conducting a series of experiments to discover whether a certain Joanny Gaillard, who comes from Lyons, possesses secret magnetic power which enable him by merely passing Ids bands over pieces of meat ami fish to give them properties which prevent their going bad. It is not yet announced whether the cold storage companies, of the world have offered to buy nut ' the young man. and his method. THE ALCHEMIST OF LYONS. -Another piece of news, which, curiously enough, also comes from Lyons, is that this prosperous centre of the silk manufacturing industry possesses a young scientist—he is only twentyseven—who has gone further than the alchemists ever succeeded in doing, for he lias found the Philosopher’s Stone. 11a can transmute base metals into gold. His first studies in chemistry, he has frankly confessed to an interviewer, were made, by correspondence only, with a school in Paris. He was evidently a ready pupil, however, for he soon "took up advanced stages of his subject at Geneva. Be then came back to Lyons, and, at twenty-six, be set up in the alchemist business. Almost immediately—according to his own _ account—ho succeeded in obtaining from a mixture of silver, sulphide of arsenic, and sulphide of antimony (the prescription of the old alchemists), a metal which, as he cautiously says, if it is not gold, at any rate has the same properties. Nevertheless, lie confesses that he cannot produce gold every time, and, as lie declares himself to be a practical man and not an artist, he is devoting himself rather to the production of synthetic iron, lead, silver, copper, and platinum, of all of which he declares that ho can' make a certainty. - M. Ballandras —for that is the name of the young magician, whose portrait is published with his interview in the leading Paris daily—lias not' only succeeded in these experiments. Ho has, also, or so ho says, found a hard-headed business man in Lyons to back him, and to enable him to continue his preparatory work for another two years. At the end of that time ho declares that he will set up his factory of synthetic metals.

Meanwhile, there are probably a lot ol' thrifty Frenchmen, np nnci down the country, who are wishing, as they read Dio interview, that the Lyons business man would let them take a share.