[2] The film includes magic tricks Méliès had previously performed live on stage at his Paris theatre of illusions, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin: one in which giant playing-cards come from a display stand, and one in which a head comes out of a crate and chases the magician around the stage.
(This latter stage illusion was created by Méliès as "Le décapité recalcitrant" in 1891, with the head being that of a talkative pedant, Professor Barbenfouillis.
[1] A surviving print of the film was rediscovered in the 1920s by Jean P. Mauclaire, director of the French art house cinema Studio 28.
)[2] Mauclaire exhibited the film as part of the Gala Méliès at the Salle Pleyel on 16 December 1929.
However, this was disproved in an interview with Thuillier herself in the journal Le Nouvel Art Cinématographique (volume 5, January 1930, page 74).