“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 boarded half way up.  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 box from looking into the street.

When the doctor came down again, I told him how it 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 madwoman, or rather an idiot, what you Normans would call a Niente.  It is a miserable story, but a very singular pathological case at the same time.  Shall I tell you?”

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.

“She grew up into a superb woman, but she was dumb, from an absolute want of intellect.  I tried all means to introduce a gleam of intelligence into her brain, but nothing succeeded.  I thought I noticed that she knew her nurse, though as soon as she was weaned, she failed to recognize her mother.  She could never pronounce that word which is the first that children utter and the last which soldiers murmur when they are dying on the field of battle.  She sometimes tried to talk, but she produced nothing but incoherent sounds.

“When the weather was fine, she laughed continually, and emitted low cries which might be compared to the twittering of birds; when it rained she cried and moaned in a mournful, terrifying manner, which sounded like the howling of a dog before a death occurs in a house.

“She was fond of rolling on the grass, as young animals do, and of running about madly, and she would clap her hands every morning, when the sun shone into her room, and would insist, by signs, on being dressed as quickly as possible, so that she might get out.