Text B — a film historian's note. The programme of the Paris show of 28 December 1895 survives. It lists ten films, and the train is not among them; the film seems to have been shown publicly only some weeks later. Reviews from 1896 praise the picture's realism, and some describe the feeling that the engine was about to leave the screen. Historians who have searched the newspapers of the time report finding no account of anyone leaving a seat, still less of a crowd in flight. The fuller versions of the story appear decades afterwards, in memoirs and popular histories of the cinema. None of this proves that nobody was ever frightened. It does suggest that a strong impression grew in the retelling into a stampede, perhaps because the story flatters later audiences, who know better.