“This is Auvergne!” I saw nothing except a range of mountains before me, whose summits, which resembled truncated cones, must have been extinct volcanoes.

Then, pointing to the name of the station, he said: 

“Riom, the fatherland of magistrates, the pride of the magistracy, and which ought rather to be the fatherland of doctors.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” he replied with a laugh.  “If you transpose the letters, you have the Latin word mori, to die....  That is the reason why I settled here, my young friend.”

And delighted at his own joke, he carried me off, rubbing his hands.

As soon as I had swallowed a cup of coffee, he made me go and see the town.  I admired the chemist’s house, and the other celebrated houses, which were all black, but as pretty as knick-nacks, with facades of sculptured stone.  I admired the statue of the Virgin, the patroness of butchers, and he told me an amusing story about this, which I will relate some other time, and then Doctor Bonnet said to me: 

“I must beg you to excuse me for a few minutes while I go and see a patient, and then I will take you to Chatel-Guyon, so as to show you the general aspect of the town, and all the mountain chain of the Puy-de-Dome, before lunch.  You can wait for me outside; I shall only go upstairs and come down immediately.”

He left me outside one of those old, gloomy, silent, melancholy houses, which one sees in the provinces, and this one appeared to look particularly sinister, and I soon discovered the reason.  All the large windows on the first floor were half boarded up with wooden shutters.  The upper part of them alone could be opened, as if one had wished to prevent the people who were locked up in that huge stone trunk from looking into the street.

When the doctor came down again, I told him how it had struck me, and he replied: 

“You are quite right; the poor creature who is living there must never see what is going on outside.  She is a mad woman, or rather an idiot, what you Normans would call a Niente[8].  It is a miserable story, but a very singular pathological case at the same time.  Shall I tell you?”

[Footnote 8:  A Nothing.—­TRANSLATOR.]

I begged him to do so, and he continued: 

“Twenty years ago, the owners of this house, who were my patients, had a daughter who was like all other girls, but I soon discovered that while her body became admirably developed, her intellect remained stationary.

“She began to walk very early, but she could not talk.  At first I thought she was deaf, but I soon discovered that although she heard perfectly, she did not understand anything that was said to her.  Violent noises made her start and frightened her, without her understanding how they were caused.