“It was impossible for me for a long time to attract her attention to the hands, but I succeeded in making her remark the clockwork and the striking apparatus.  The means I employed were very simple; I asked them not to have the bell rung for lunch, and everybody got up and went into the dining room, when the little brass hammer struck twelve o’clock, but I found great difficulty in making her learn to count the strokes.  She ran to the door each time she heard the clock strike, but by degrees she learned that all the strokes had not the same value as far as regarded meals, and she frequently fixed her eyes, guided by her ears, on the dial of the clock.

“When I noticed that, I took care, every day at twelve and at six o’clock to place my fingers on the figures twelve and six, as soon as the moment she was waiting for, had arrived, and I soon noticed that she attentively followed the motion of the small brass hands, which I had often turned in her presence.

“She had understood!  Perhaps I ought rather to say that she had seized the idea.  I had succeeded in getting the knowledge, or rather the sensation of the time into her, just as is the case with carp, who certainly have no clocks, when they are fed every day exactly at the same time.

“When once I had obtained that result, all the clocks and watches in the house occupied her attention almost exclusively.  She spent her time in looking at them, in listening to them and in waiting for meal times, and once something very funny happened.  The striking apparatus of a pretty little Louis XVI. clock that hung at the head of her bed, having got out of order, she noticed it.  She sat for twenty minutes, with her eyes on the hands, waiting for it to strike ten, but when the hand passed the figure, she was astonished at not hearing anything; so stupefied was she, indeed, that she sat down, no doubt overwhelmed by a feeling of violent emotion, such as attacks us in the face of some terrible catastrophe.  And she had the wonderful patience to wait until eleven o’clock, in order to see what would happen, and as she naturally heard nothing, she was suddenly either seized with a wild fit of rage at having been deceived, and imposed upon by appearances, or else overcome by that fear which some frightened creature feels at some terrible mystery, and by the furious impatience of a passionate individual who meets with some obstacle, she took up the tongs from the fireplace and struck the clock so violently that she broke it to pieces in a moment.

“It was evident, therefore, that her brain did act and calculate, obscurely it is true, and within very restricted limits, for I could never succeed in making her distinguish persons as she distinguished the time; and to stir her intellect, it was necessary to appeal to her passions, in the material sense of the word, and we soon had another, and alas! a very terrible proof of this!”

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