radually disappeared, thanks to a more
regulated and sane mode of living. They now returned in another form,
attacking his whole body. The pains left his head, but affected his
inflated stomach. His entrails seemed pierced by hot bars of iron. A
nervous cough racked him at regular intervals, awakening and almost
strangling him in his bed. Then his appetite forsook him; gaseous, hot
acids and dry heats coursed through his stomach. He grew swollen, was
choked for breath, and could not endure his clothes after each attempt
at eating.

He shunned alcoholic beverages, coffee and tea, and drank only milk.
And he took recourse to baths of cold water and dosed himself with
assafoetida, valerian and quinine. He even felt a desire to go out,
and strolled about the country when the rainy days came to make it
desolate and still. He obliged himself to take exercise. As a last
resort, he temporarily abandoned his books and, corroded with ennui,
determined to make his listless life tolerable by realizing a project
he had long deferred through laziness and a dislike of change, since
his installment at Fontenay.

Being no longer able to intoxicate himself with the felicities of
style, with the delicious witchery of the rare epithet which, while
remaining precise, yet opens to the imagination of the initiate
infinite and distant vistas, he determined to give the finishing
touches to the decorations of his home. He would procure precious
hot-house flowers and thus permit himself a material occupation which
might distract him, calm his nerves and rest his brain. He also hoped
that the sight of their strange and splendid nuances would in some
degree atone for the fanciful and genuine colors of style which he was
for the time to lose from his literary diet.

Chapter 8

He had always been passionately fond of flowers, but during his
residence at Jutigny, that love had been lavished upon flowers of all
sorts; he had never cultivated distinctions and discriminations in
regard to them. Now his taste in this direction had grown refined and
self-conscious.

For a long time he had scorned the popular plants which grow in flat
baskets, in watered pots, under green awnings or under the red
parasols of Parisian markets.

Simultaneous with the refinement of his literary taste and his
preoccupations with art, which permitted him to be content only in the
presence of choice creations, distilled by subtly troubled brains, and
simultan