I woke at night with a start,
thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school, or
that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring into the
Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And when these
impressions were past, all day long without respite I suffered an
incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on despair. I thought
myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like
the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell.
My mind had never turned in that direction. Neither discourses nor
reflections had impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell.
Now, and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.

"But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of heaven
was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of anything of the
sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum;
a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth.
I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy,
light, affection, love-- all these words were now devoid of sense.
Without doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had
become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything
about them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to
exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived
nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An
abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for
eternity."[77]

[77] A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121, abridged.
Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate
with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide
supply such examples as the following:--

An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and
leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents
she writes:--

"Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life,
and that is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents. It is
nobody's fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to
fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some
day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has
come.... It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought
perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head."
To h