An experiment in instantaneous fascination by Donato that was not planned. It was an irritation. It was Baron Alfred d’Hont, thirty years old, in a Belgian café. A lawyer wanted to ridicule him. What happened next changed the history of magnetism and hypnosis.
What is instantaneous fascination? The scene is in a café in Liège, one evening in 1874. A young lawyer named Cudell is speaking loudly. He is saying that hypnotic fascination does not exist, that it is charlatanism, that the man sitting nearby is a buffoon.
That man is Baron Alfred d’Hont. Thirty years later, Americans will know him simply as Donato. That evening in 1874, no one yet knew who he was.
Donato tells the story himself, sixteen years later, in the Cosmopolitan Magazine of New York. It is a little-read text because it is in English, while most people search for texts about Donato in French — he wrote it for the American public after his demonstrations at Chickering Hall. It is worth letting him speak directly:
«One evening in Liège, in 1874, in a café, I heard a young lawyer — M. Cudell — who was denying my power and trying to make me look ridiculous. Indignant and furious, I placed myself before him, and without bravado but with a profound conviction, I announced to him that with a single look I would make him fall backward. My audacity paralyzed his mind, and yielding to the power of my will, he immediately rolled to the ground.»
Notice what Donato is saying, and what he is not saying.
He is not saying he performed a technique. He does not speak of magnetic passes, of fluid, of concentration on chakras, of any of the stereotypes we might expect. He is saying he was indignant and furious, that he placed himself before the lawyer without bravado but with a profound conviction, and that the lawyer fell.
Then he adds — and this is the key sentence of the entire Cosmopolitan article, one of those sentences that should be copied by hand:
«I am quick, ardent, impetuous to excess. It is to these natural defects that I owe my discovery.»
Fascination, as Donato treats it, is more than a learned technique, even though he too fits into a tradition of using the gaze. It is a temperament used well. It is what happens when a person with a very compact mind plants themselves in front of another person with a very clear intention.
When I first encountered Donato’s method I was not yet thirty, and it was with Virgilio, who also hypnotized in seconds. Actually, the true certain successor of Donato with whom I also worked was Prof. Erminio Di Pisa, but Virgilio actually had the crystalline method in addition to a series of inner strengthening exercises. Those were the years in Italy when NLP was spoken of as if it had arrived from Mars, and “rapport” as if it were a formula. I accidentally found a book by Prof. Erminio Di Pisa, Ipnomagnetismo Pratico, which spoke of Donato. Later, precisely because of this, I met him and a research on fascination began that lasted years.
The Problem of Witnesses
Of course, many read. When a story is so beautiful — the idea that a single look is enough to hypnotize — the first suspicion is that it is invented. But the witnesses are in the hundreds. Donato fascinated queens, princes, officers from the Turin War School. In 1881 in Paris he fascinated Sarah Bernhardt’s friends. In 1887 in Ostend he gave a private séance for the Queen of Belgium before the entire court. He published a newspaper, Le Magnétisme, in which he systematically collected the testimonies of the subjects.
All very beautiful, and even the doctors had to admit it.
In 1884 — exactly ten years after the evening in Liège — a French doctor decided to verify the matter thoroughly. His name was Brémaud, he was a Navy doctor, and he had attended a séance by Donato in Brest. Brémaud did not trust it. He wanted to reproduce everything himself.
In four months he hypnotized about a hundred subjects, sixty of whom had already been with Donato, and forty who had never heard his name. He brought the results to the Société Historique and the Société de Biologie. He had three stated objectives: to exonerate Donato from the accusation of using accomplices, to demonstrate the reality of the phenomena, and — this is the part that is interesting today — to counter Charcot by demonstrating that the phenomena of fascination were reproduced on healthy subjects, not only on hysterics.
Experiment II is the one that best describes what happens to the body:
«M.Z., twenty-three years old, sanguine and strong. I look deeply, suddenly, very closely at the young man, ordering him to look at me with all the strength he is capable of; the effect is stunning, his face becomes rubicund, his eyes are wide open, his pupils dilated, the vessels of the conjunctiva have undergone considerable dilation, his pulse rises from seventy to one hundred and twenty.»
Pulse going from 70 to 120 in a few seconds. Dilated pupils. Dilated conjunctival vessels. Brémaud emphasizes that these are signs impossible to simulate. An actor can feign a lost gaze. He cannot make his own heart accelerate by fifty beats on command, and he cannot dilate his pupils on demand.
Brémaud also notes a detail that says a lot about the type of “trance” the subjects were in. M.Z., once returned to himself, reported to him «that he had been aware of the entire scene, but had been incapable of manifesting his own will; he felt bound to my gaze by a bond stronger than himself.»
He was not asleep. He was fully conscious, and he could not move.
That “could not move” is what, for those who know a bit about Polyvagal Theory, begins to make a certain noise today. It is literally the description of a dorsovagal freeze state in someone who, in the rest of their system, is perfectly awake. But perhaps more on that another time.
Turin 1886: Thirty Officers Interpret Garibaldi
There is an episode from the Cosmopolitan text worth recalling because it explains what fascination cannot do. Donato is in Turin, at the war school. They bring him a hundred young officers. He fascinates thirty of them:
«I made them perform their military exercises and take part in imaginary battles. I suggested to one that he was Garibaldi at Aspromonte; to another that he was the general commanding the school, etc. They assumed the bearing, gestures, and voices, and perfectly played the roles of the characters they represented.»
Then he adds a very important technical limitation:
«Fascination, like hypnotism, cannot give anyone knowledge of the unknown.»
The thirty officers interpreted Garibaldi because they knew him. They had within themselves an image of Garibaldi ready to be acted out. Donato did not put it there. Donato turned on the projector.
This detail is important because it dismantles a whole mythology about hypnosis that continues even today: that you can “program” someone with suggestions that correspond to nothing in their personal background. You cannot. What you can do is remove the cortical inhibition and let what is already there emerge.
The Controversial Take, Sixty-Eight Personal Opinion
Today in NLP/PNL courses they teach “rapport techniques” that require thirty seconds of attunement, mirroring, calibration, follow-and-lead, anchoring. All correct, all useful, all extremely slow compared to what a Belgian in 1874 did in a café out of personal indignation and what I have developed over these years after meeting Virgilio. What NLP does in thirty seconds at best, Donato did in a single look because he didn’t know it was supposed to be difficult. The so-called “direct fascination” of the Paret Method is not my invention: it is the rediscovery of an exceptional ability that existed in 1874 and that was forgotten because it does not lend itself to being sold on DVD for $397. It only works if the operator is truly compact and present. There is no shortcut. Donato knew it, Di Pisa knew it, and those who teach honestly today know it.
What Donato Dreamed Of
The Cosmopolitan article closes with a paragraph that should be engraved somewhere. Donato quotes Victor Hugo:
«A great discovery in the so little explored domain of mesmerism perhaps holds in store for us the supreme manifestation of the scientific spirit of the twentieth century. As Victor Hugo wrote in a sublime verse: ‘The real is narrow, the possible is immense.’ Let us therefore work without wavering to remove the limits of the real and reach the limits of the possible.»
The twentieth century proved him wrong. There was no great discovery in the domain of mesmerism. There was Freud, there was structuralism, there was cognitive psychotherapy, there was behaviorism. The thread of fascination was lost. Baron d’Hont died in 1900, and with him disappeared a tradition that only a few stubborn Italians — Caravelli, Di Pisa, and in more recent times the writer of these lines — kept alive in courses held in small rooms with few people, off the academic radar, even though I have recently been called to state universities precisely for the novelty I brought ( https://www.stiripesurse.ro/congresul-orientari-psihoterapeutice-in-psihiatria-moderna-la-oradea-cu-hipnoza-nonverbala_3254227.html).
Perhaps this is the moment to put the thread back in place. The pulse going from 70 to 120 in a few seconds was an experimental datum in 1884. Today we even know why it does it. But to understand it, one must first start again from an evening in Liège in 1874, and from a lawyer who fell backward from a look.
The sources cited in this article are all verifiable in the ISI-CNV archive. Donato’s journal Le Magnétisme (1880-1886) is preserved in digital format in the school’s archive. Donato’s article in Cosmopolitan Magazine (c. 1890) has been fully translated into Italian. For those wishing to delve deeper into Dr. Brémaud’s 4 experiments (1884), the original text is available at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
— Marco Paret
