Thus, the case of Josephine which he describes.

She was eighteen years old and she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isere.

Under hypnotism Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her girlhood, her childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her mother's womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, and embittered old man, by name Jean-Claude Bourdon, who had served his time in the Seventh Artillery at Besancon, and who died at the age of seventy, long bedridden.

_Yes_, and did not Colonel de Rochas in turn hypnotize this shade of Jean-Claude Bourdon, so that he adventured farther back into time, through infancy and birth and the dark of the unborn, until he found again light and life when, as a wicked old woman, he had been Philomene Carteron?
But try as I would with my bright bit of straw in the oozement of light into solitary, I failed to achieve any such definiteness of previous personality.

I became convinced, through the failure of my experiments, that only through death could I clearly and coherently resurrect the memories of my previous selves.
But the tides of life ran strong in me.