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only the wooden floorboards and some thin
     lath-and-plaster lay between me and the open air the room was noisy through every day of
     the year, and viciously cold in the winter months. It was in that room that I slowly grew
     up and became the man that I am.
    That man is Le Professeur de la Magie, and I am a master of illusions.
    It is time to pause, even so early, for this account is not intended to be about my life
     in the usual habit of autobiographers, but is, as I have said, about my life's secrets.
     Secrecy is intrinsic to my work.
    Let me then first consider and describe the method of writing this account. The very act
     of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of
     course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A
     puzzle is implicitly involved.
    It is therefore only fair that I should from the beginning try to elucidate those closely
     connected subjects — Secrecy and the Appreciation Of Secrecy.
    Here is an example.
    There almost invariably comes a moment during the exercise of my profession when the
     prestidigitator will seem to pause. He will step forward to the footlights, and in the
     full glare of their light will face the audience directly. He will say, or if his act is
     silent he will seem to say, “Look at my hands. There is nothing concealed within them.” He
     will then hold up his hands for the audience to see, raising his palms to expose them,
     splaying his fingers so as to prove nothing is gripped secretly between them. With his
     hands held thus he will rotate them, so that the backs are shown to the audience, and it
     is established that his hands are, indeed, as empty as it is possible to be. To take the
     matter beyond any remaining suspicion, the magician will probably then tweak lightly at
     the cuffs of his jacket, pulling them back an inch or two to expose his wrists, showing
     that nothing is there concealed either. He then performs his trick, and during it, moments
     after this incontrovertible evidence of empty-handedness he produces something from his
     hands: a fan, a live dove or rabbit, a bunch of paper flowers, sometimes even a burning
     wick. It is a paradox, an impossibility! The audience marvels at the mystery, and applause
     rings out.
    How could any of this be?
    The prestidigitator and the audience have entered into what I term the Pact of Acquiescent
     Sorcery. They do not articulate it as such, and indeed the audience is barely aware that
     such a Pact might exist, but that is what it is.
    The performer is of course not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the part of a
     sorcerer and who wishes the audience to believe, if only temporarily, that he is in
     contact with darker powers. The audience, meantime, knows that what they are seeing is not
     true sorcery, but they suppress the knowledge and acquiesce to the selfsame wish as the
     performer’s. The greater the performer's skill at maintaining the illusion, the better at
     this deceptive sorcery he is judged to be.
    The act of showing the hands to be empty, before revealing that despite appearances they
     could
    
    
     not
    
    
     have been, is itself a constituent of the Pact. The Pact implies special conditions are
     in force. In normal social intercourse, for instance, how often does it arise that someone
     has to prove that his hands are empty? And consider this: if the magician were suddenly to
     produce a vase of flowers without first suggesting to the audience that such a production
     was impossible, it would seem to be no trick at all. No one would applaud.
    This then illustrates my method.
    Let me set out the Pact of Acquiescence under which I write these words, so that those who
     read them will realize that what follows is not sorcery, but the appearance of it.
    First let me in a manner of speaking show you my hands, palms forward, fingers splayed,
     and I will say to you (and mark