Seeing that she did not seem to be attending to him, he went up to her and said, "Did you hear what I did just now ?" "No; what ?" "Do you hear this ?" and he clapped his hands once more.
"Yes, you clapped your hands." "How often ?" "Once." M.Janet again withdrew and clapped his hands six times gently, with pauses between the claps.

Lucie paid no apparent attention, but when the sixth clap of this second series--making the twelfth altogether--was reached, she fell instantly into the trance again.

It seemed, then, that the "slave of the lamp" had counted the claps through all, and had obeyed the order much as a clock strikes after a certain number of swings of the pendulum, however often you stop it between hour and hour.
Thus far, the knowledge gained as to the unconscious element in Lucie was not direct, but inferential.

The nature of the command which it could execute showed it to be capable of attention and memory; but there was no way of learning its own conception of itself, if such existed, or of determining its relation to other phenomena of Lucie's trance.

And here it was that automatic writing was successfully invoked; here we have, as I may say, the first fruits in France of the new attention directed to this seldom-trodden field.