“So that I,” continued Monsieur Bernard paying no attention to the expression in Godefroid’s eyes, “even I, a child of the eighteenth century, fed on Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius,—­I, a son of the Revolution, who scoff at all that antiquity and the middle-ages tell us of demoniacal possession,—­well, monsieur, I affirm that nothing but such possession can explain the condition of my child.  As a somnambulist she has never been able to tell us the cause of her sufferings; she has never perceived it, and all the remedies she has proposed when in that state, though carefully carried out, have done her no good.  For instance, she wished to be wrapped in the carcass of a freshly killed pig; then she ordered us to run the sharp points of ret-hot magnets into her legs; and to put hot sealing-wax on her spine—­”

Godefroid looked at him in amazement.

“And then! what endless other troubles, monsieur! her teeth fell out; she became deaf, then dumb; and then, after six months of absolute dumbness, utter deafness, speech and hearing have returned to her!  She recovered, just as capriciously as she had lost, the use of her hands.  But her feet have continued in the same hapless condition for the last seven years.  She has shown marked and well-characterized symptoms of hydrophobia.  Not only does the sight of water, the sound of water, the presence of a glass or a cup fling her at times into a state of fury, but she barks like a dog, that melancholy bark, or rather howl, a dog utters when he hears an organ.  Several times we have thought her dying, and the priests had administered the last sacraments; but she has always returned to life to suffer with her full reason and the most absolute clearness of mind; for her faculties of heart and soul are still untouched.  Though she has lived, monsieur, she has caused the deaths of her mother and her husband, who have not been able to endure the suffering of such scenes.  Alas! monsieur, those distressing scenes are becoming worse.  All the natural functions are perverted; the Faculty alone can explain the strange aberration of the organs.  She was in this state when I brought her from the provinces to Paris in 1829, because the two or three distinguished doctors to whom I wrote, Desplein, Bianchon, and Haudry, thought from my letters that I was telling them fables.  Magnetism was then energetically denied by all the schools of medicine, and without saying that they doubted either my word or that of the provincial doctors, they said we could not have observed thoroughly, or else we had been misled by the exaggeration which patients are apt to indulge in.  But they were forced to change their minds when they saw my daughter; and it is to the phenomena they then observed that the great researches made in these latter days are owing; for I must tell you that they class my daughter’s singular state as a form of neurosis.  At the last consultation of these gentlemen they decided to stop all medicines, to let nature alone and study it.  Since then I have had but one doctor, and he is the doctor who attends the poor of this quarter.  We do nothing for her now but alleviate pain, for we know not the cause of it.”