e keen power
of diagnosis of the observant physician, and if he still continued to
reason about it, it was only to confound and pervert symptoms, under the
influence of the moral and physical depression into which he had fallen.
He was no longer master of himself; he was mad, so to say, to convince
himself hour by hour that he must become so.

All the days of this pale December were spent by him in going deeper
and deeper into his malady. Every morning he tried to escape from the
haunting subject, but he invariably ended by shutting himself in the
study to take up again, in spite of himself, the tangled skein of the
day before.

The long study which he had made of heredity, his important researches,
his works, completed the poisoning of his peace, furnishing him with
ever renewed causes of disquietude. To the question which he put to
himself continually as to his own hereditary case, the documents were
there to answer it by all possible combinations. They were so numerous
that he lost himself among them now. If he had deceived himself, if he
could not set himself apart, as a remarkable case of variation, should
he place himself under the head of reversional heredity, passing
over one, two, or even three generations? Or was his case rather a
manifestation of larvated heredity, which would bring anew proof to the
support of his theory of the germ plasm, or was it simply a singular
case of hereditary resemblance, the sudden apparition of some unknown
ancestor at the very decline of life?

From this moment he never rested, giving himself up completely to the
investigation of his case, searching his notes, rereading his books. And
he studied himself, watching the least of his sensations, to deduce from
them the facts on which he might judge himself. On the days when his
mind was most sluggish, or when he thought he experienced particular
phenomena of vision, he inclined to a predominance of the original
nervous lesion; while, if he felt that his limbs were affected, his feet
heavy and painful, he imagined he was suffering the indirect influence
of some ancestor come from outside. Everything became confused, until at
last he could recognize himself no longer, in the midst of the imaginary
troubles which agitated his disturbed organism. And every evening the
conclusion was the same, the same knell sounded in his brain--heredity,
appalling heredity, the fear of becoming mad.

In the early part of January Clotilde was an inv