To say that there are epidemics of suicide is to give expression to what is now a mere commonplace of knowledge.  And so far are they from being of rare occurrence, that it has even been affirmed that every sensational case of felo de se published in the newspapers is sure to be followed by some others more obscure:  their frequency, indeed, is out of all proportion with the extent of each particular outbreak.  Sometimes, however, especially in villages and small townships, the wildfire madness becomes an all-involving passion, emulating in its fury the great plagues of history.  Of such kind was the craze in Versailles in 1793, when about a quarter of the whole population perished by the scourge; while that at the Hotel des Invalides in Paris was only a notable one of the many which have occurred during the present century.  At such times it is as if the optic nerve of the mind throughout whole communities became distorted, till in the noseless and black-robed Reaper it discerned an angel of very loveliness.  As a brimming maiden, out-worn by her virginity, yields half-fainting to the dear sick stress of her desire—­with just such faintings, wanton fires, does the soul, over-taxed by the continence of living, yield voluntary to the grave, and adulterously make of Death its paramour.

   ’When she sees a bank
   Stuck full of flowers, she, with a sigh, will tell
   Her servants, what a pretty place it were
   To bury lovers in; and make her maids
   Pluck ’em, and strew her over like a corse.’

[Footnote:  Beaumont and Fletcher:  The Maid’s Tragedy.]

The mode spreads—­then rushes into rage:  to breathe is to be obsolete:  to wear the shroud becomes comme il faut, this cerecloth acquiring all the attractiveness and eclat of a wedding-garment.  The coffin is not too strait for lawless nuptial bed; and the sweet clods of the valley will prove no barren bridegroom of a writhing progeny.  There is, however, nothing specially mysterious in the operation of a pestilence of this nature:  it is as conceivable, if not yet as explicable, as the contagion of cholera, mind being at least as sensitive to the touch of mind as body to that of body.

It was during the ever-memorable outbreak of this obscure malady in the year 1875 that I ventured to break in on the calm of that deep Silence in which, as in a mantle, my friend Prince Zaleski had wrapped himself.  I wrote, in fact, to ask him what he thought of the epidemic.  His answer was in the laconic words addressed to the Master in the house of woe at Bethany: 

‘Come and see.’

To this, however, he added in postscript:  ‘but what epidemic?’