That story was reported by three authors: Robert Dale Owen, the French astronomer Camille Flammarion and the Russian parapsychologist Alexander Aksakov from one direct witness, Julie de Güldenstubbe.
She was of the Northern type, — a blonde, with very fair complexion, light-blue eyes, chestnut hair, slightly above the middle size, and of slender figure.
The young lady, happening to turn round and to look in an adjacent mirror, perceived two Mademoiselle Sagée hooking her dress.
The most remarkable phenomenon occurred one day when the 42 students were assembled in the same room, engaged in embroidery in a spacious hall on the first floor of the principal building.
The young ladies immediately looked into the garden and there she still was, engaged as before; only they remarked that she moved very slowly and languidly, as a drowsy or exhausted person might.
When asked what she meant by such an exclamation, she confessed that previous to her engagement at Neuwelcke she had been teacher in eighteen different schools, having entered the first when only 16 years of age.
Mademoiselle de Güldenstubbe, going to see her there, learned that the children, all around three or four years of age, all knew of it; being in the habit of saying that "they saw two Aunt Emilies."
In 1883, the magazine Light, A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research published a text which it presents as the complete report of the testimony from what «an abridged version of this narrative was given by the Hon.
Flammarion recognized the whole story was based on the unique testimony of Julie de Güldenstubbe, whose noble title of baroness did not prevent her from possessing an vivid imagination and who lived in a family acquainted with theories of the supernatural.
The description of the baroness in the Daily News in 1859 reveals her to be quite exalted indeed: «very clever and amiable, but the most weird, unearthly, elfin-looking little creature imaginable.»[7] During a trip to Dijon, Camille Flammarion seeks to obtain more information on the existence of Émilie Sagée.
He assumes that it is the same Émilie Sagée, whose name could have been altered by the memory of Julie de Güldenstubbe and the English transcription of Robert Dale Owen, unless it might be a voluntary modification of her name to hide her illegitimacy or cover her tracks in her 18 professorships.
[8] The registers of the civil status of the city of Dijon report that «On January 3 at six o'clock in the morning, Marguerite Saget, aged thirty, a worker native of Orbigny, department of Haute-Marne and residing in Dijon, adult daughter, gave birth to a female child to whom she gave the first name of Octavie».
[9] This birth certificate is the only historical clue that could authenticate the existence of Émilie Sagée (but not the story of the bilocations, only reported by Julie de Güldenstubbe).