nce, and started the series of psychical oscillations on which he
has been tossed ever since. At first the symptoms were only physical,
epilepsy and hysterical paralysis of the legs; and at the asylum of
Bonneval, whither he was next sent, he worked at tailoring steadily for
a couple of months. Then suddenly he had a hystero-epileptic
attack--fifty hours of convulsions and ecstasy--and when he awoke from
it he was no longer paralysed, no longer acquainted with tailoring, and
no longer virtuous. His memory was set back, so to say, to the moment of
the viper's appearance, and he could remember nothing since. His
character had become violent, greedy, quarrelsome, and his tastes were
radically changed. For instance, though he had before the attack been a
total abstainer, he now not only drank his own wine, but stole the wine
of the other patients. He escaped from Bonneval, and after a few
turbulent years, tracked by his occasional relapses into hospital or
madhouse, he turned up once more at the Rochefort asylum in the
character of a private of marines, convicted of theft, but considered to
be of unsound mind. And at Rochefort and La Rochelle, by great good
fortune, he fell into the hands of three physicians--Professors Bourru
and Burot, and Dr. Mabille--able and willing to continue and extend the
observations which Dr. Camuset at Bonneval, and Dr. Jules Voisin at
Bicetre, had already made on this most precious of _mauvais sujets_
at earlier points in his chequered career.

"He is now no longer at Rochefort, and Dr. Burot informs me that his
health has much improved, and that his peculiarities have in great part
disappeared. I must, however, for clearness sake, use the present tense
in briefly describing his condition at the time when the long series of
experiments were made.

"The state into which he has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There
is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and, as is often the
case in right hemiplegia, the speech is indistinct and difficult.
Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him,
abusing his physicians, or preaching--with a monkey-like impudence
rather than with reasoned clearness--radicalism in politics and atheism
in religion. He makes bad jokes, and if any one pleases him he
endeavours to caress him. He remembers recent events during his
residence at Rochefort asylum, but only two scraps of his life before
that date, namely, his vicious period at