Spoilering the trick, a pamphlet published in Paris reveals the secret. A woman is cosseted in the roof of the room, from where she can look down on the proceedings through a hole. The woman’s voice passes through a speaking tube running down into the wall of the lower chamber.

The interesting point here is that the debate between skeptics and believers may miss the symbolic value of the operation. Trying to locate the belief in relation to this experience, one may overlook some crucial questions. “Why a woman?”, for example. The social historian Jann Matlock notes that “the Invisible Woman Shows burst into the popular imagination at precisely the moment when women’s public visibility was most fervently debated.” Philip Ball explains that “after the Revolution, girls in France had the temerity to run around morning and night with complete liberty [and] fathers would give their fortunes to make their daughters as invisible as the lady in the box.” In a letter to a newspaper, a female correspondent expresses an ambivalent attitude towards it: on one side, her husband is demanding her to emulate the illusion and vanish; on the other, when invisible you can be ugly and still receive the most flattering compliments. It is no coincidence that the most famous Grand Illusions in the history of magic involve women and women only, who are tortured, cut in half and vanished with much applause.