Ingestree put his considerable talents to the work of restoring Lind’s self-esteem, without losing Eisengrim’s goodwill.

“I think I sense what troubles Eisengrim about this whole Robert-Houdin business. It’s the book. It’s that wretched Confidences d’un prestidigitateur. We’ve been using it as a source for the biographical part of the film, and it’s certainly a classic of its kind. But did anybody ever read such a book? Vanity is perfectly acceptable in an artist. Personally, I wouldn’t give you sixpence for an artist who lacked vanity. But it’s honest vanity I respect. The false modesty, the exaggerated humility, the greasy bourgeois assertions of respectability, of good-husband-and-father, of debt-paying worthiness are what make the Confidences so hard to swallow. Robert-Houdin was an oddity; he was an artist who wanted to pass as a bourgeois. I’m sure that’s what irritates both you men, and sets you against each other. You feel that you are putting your very great, fully realized artistic personalities to the work of exalting a man whose attitude toward life you despise. I don’t blame you for being irritable—because you have been, you know; you’ve been terribly irritable tonight—but that’s what art is, as you very well know, much of the time: the transformation and glorification of the commonplace.”

“The revelation of the glory in the commonplace,” said Lind, who had no objection to being told that his vanity was an admirable and honest trait, and was coming around.

“Precisely. The revelation of the glory in the commonplace. And you two very great artists—the great film director and (may I say it) the great actor—are revealing the glory in Robert-Houdin, who perversely sought to conceal his own artistry behind that terrible good-citizen mask. It hampered him, of course, because it was against the grain of his talent. But you two are able to do an extraordinary, a metaphysical thing. You are able to show the world, a century after his death, what Robert-Houdin would have been if he had truly understood himself.”

Eisengrim and Lind were liking this. Magnus positively beamed, and Lind’s sad eyes rolled toward him with a glance from which the frost was slowly disappearing. Ingestree was well in the saddle now, and was riding on to victory.

“You are both men of immeasurably larger spirit than he. What was he, after all? The good citizen, the perfection of the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe that he pretended? Who can believe it? There is in every artist something black, something savouring of the crook, which he may not even understand himself, and which he certainly keeps well out of the eye of his public. What was it in Robert-Houdin?

“He gives us a sniff of it in the very first chapter of his other book, which I have read, and which is certainly familiar to you, Mr Ramsay”—this with a nod to me—“called Les Secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie—”

“My God, I read it as a boy!” I said.

“Very well. Then you recall the story of his beginnings as a magician? How he was befriended by the Count de l’Escalopier? How this nobleman gave a private show in his house, where Robert-Houdin amused the guests? How his best trick was burning a piece of paper on which the Archbishop of Paris had written a splendid compliment to Robert-Houdin, and the discovery of the piece of paper afterward in the smallest of twelve envelopes which were all sealed, one inside the other? It was a trick he learned from his master, de Grisy. But how did he try to make it up to l’Escalopier for putting him on his feet?”