Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/102

 the watch-charms, a drawl in the tone of the voice, a habit of repeating the same word. It would be hard to invent deliberately such whimsical reasons as hysterical women are capable of imagining to explain the aversion they conceive for certain persons. The unfortunate person thus detested is most likely to be the husband.

M. A. France says of one of his heroines, that "she was pleasant, indolent, fastidious, subject to gushes of affection, and of quick sympathies. They had trouble in the refectory in making her eat anything but salads and bread with salt. She made a friend with whom she went on the days-out. This friend, who was rich, took Helen into the tapestried room, where she crunched bonbons. Helen lingered in this nest of goods. When she came out, all seemed dull, hard, repellent. She had lost courage; she dreamed of having a blue chamber, and of reading romances in it lying in an easy-chair. Pains of the stomach came on and cast her down completely. . . . She gave up, indifferent to everything around her, dreaming of jewels, dresses, horses, sailing, and going into tears at the mere thought of her father."

MM. E. and J. de Goncourt have related the touching, sad story of poor Germinie Lacerteux. She was indeed a victim of hysteria; of an untaught nature, passionate, ardent in devotion as in infamy; of weak intelligence besides, the blind plaything of passions of which she was hardly conscious, and which moved her as the winds turn a vane. "Germinie had not a consciousness that could escape suffering by brutishness and that dense stupidity in which a woman may vegetate in simple inanity. A sickly sensitiveness, a head always busy, cherishing grief, inquietude, discontent with herself, a moral sense which seemed to rise in her again after each of her faults, all the gifts of delicacy, and the capacity of suffering were united in her to torture her." To feel, to think, to have no will, these are the three miseries with which the poor sufferers from hysteria have to struggle.

M. Albert Delpit has thus depicted the symptoms of hysteria in his "Mariage d'Odette": "She was seized with a fit of melancholy, to which succeeded violent spasms of crying and immoderate bursts of laughter; sometimes she would shake with tremors from head to foot; then she grew pale and felt an oppression at her chest. Her temper underwent an entire change. They had to give up taking her into society, its too free manners were so startling to her."

The most life-like hysterical character delineated by the novelists, the truest, the most passionate, is Madame de Bovary. Brought up in a convent, among girls richer than herself, she married a country doctor—a poor, weak youth, whose rusticity and poverty disheartened her. M. Flaubert has described her hysteria in a few lines with scientific precision and artistic distinctness: "Emma became hard to please, capricious; she ordered dishes for herself and would not touch them; one day she would drink nothing but pure milk, and the next coffee by the dozen cups. Sometimes she would persist in refusing to go