Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/229

Rh January all symptoms of disease had disappeared, but his emaciation had so increased, and the sinking of his moral force was so alarming, that the house-physician thought it his duty to remonstrate kindly with him. Two soldiers and a nurse were placed in attendance on him, who talked with him constantly in the Breton dialect, about his country and his family. All these methods failed. On the 16th, when examined again by the physician, the young patient sighed sadly, and, with tears in his eyes, expressed himself nearly in these words: "It is all over; I am very sure of it; I am going to die, and you will not succeed in preventing it. I had never left Brittany; I was satisfied, rich, and happy; my father died without ever having been severe with me, leaving me always to do as I chose. I refused to go to college, and was educated at home; I grew up under the cure's training and instruction, and led the careless, pure, and honorable life of a Breton gentleman. Who would have told me that I should ever leave Finisterre, and come to die in a hospital-bed at the gates of Paris! I was sure of it, the day I left Brittany, that it was all over with me. I was at Villiers, at Champigny—I fought there, doing as the rest did, but God refused to take me. He chose to try me yet more, and I bow to his holy will. If you knew how I suffer! Never to see my mansion again, nor the forests, nor my flocks, my horse, and my dogs! May God shorten my misery, and pardon my weakness! How loud the guns sound this morning!—the building will be battered down—do not stay here—my last hour is near, and I wish to make ready for death as a good Christian." The 23d of January the patient's pulse was at 110, his skin dry, his eye brilliant, his mind wandering, and on the 28th, at ten in the morning, he died.

Benoist de la Grandière gives some curious details about nostalgia in different nations. The French, precisely because they are more attached to their country than any others, and feel a passionate aversion to expatriation, are the very ones whom nostalgia most readily attacks. The inhabitants of the western departments, particularly the Bretons, and next to them those of the southern provinces and of Corsica, are remarkably predisposed to it. The very religious life, the manners so unchanging and the customs so characteristic which have continued so long in Brittany, create bonds not to be severed without danger between the soil of ancient Armorica and its inhabitants. The Swiss, too, love their country warmly, and never quit it but with regret. Nostalgia is not uncommon in Italy, particularly since the transfer of conscripts from one end of the kingdom to the other has become the practice. Between 1867 and 1870, the Italian Army showed a total of 203 cases of positive nostalgia, eight of which were fatal. The English and the Germans leave their country with less reluctance. The English, above all, are spared nostalgia through their adventurous spirit, and it may be said that their country is wherever the British flag floats. The cosmopolitan character of the Germans is less