science. My daughter gave birth
to a dead child; in fact, it was twisted and smothered by internal
movements. The disease had begun, the pregnancy counted for nothing.
Perhaps you are a student of medicine?"

Godefroid made a sign which answered as well for affirmation as for
negation.

"After this terrible confinement," resumed Monsieur Bernard,--"so
terrible and laborious that it made a violent impression on my
son-in-law and began the mortal melancholy of which he died,--my
daughter, two or three months later, complained of a general weakness
affecting, particularly, her feet, which she declared felt like
cottonwood. This debility changed to paralysis,--and what a paralysis!
My daughter's feet and legs can be bent or twisted in any way and she
does not feel it. The limbs are there, apparently without blood or
muscles or bones. This affection, which is not connected with anything
known to science, spread to the arms and hands, and we then supposed
it to be a disease of the spinal cord. Doctors and remedies only made
matters worse until at last my poor daughter could not be moved without
dislocating either the shoulders, the arms, or the knees. I kept an
admirable surgeon almost constantly in the house, who, with the doctor,
or doctors (for many came out of interest in the case), replaced the
dislocated limbs,--sometimes, would you believe it monsieur? three and
four times a day! Ah!--This disease has so many forms that I forgot to
tell you that during the first period of weakness, before the paralysis
began, the strangest signs of catalepsy appeared--you know what
catalepsy is. She remained for days with her eyes wide open, motionless,
in whatever position she was when the attack seized her. The worst
symptoms of that strange affection were shown, even those of lockjaw.
This phase of her illness suggested to me the idea of employing
magnetism, and I was about to do so when the paralysis began. My
daughter, monsieur, has a miraculous clear-sightedness; her soul has
been the theatre of all the wonders of somnambulism, just as her body
has been that of all diseases."

Godefroid began to ask himself if the old man were really sane.

"So that I," continued Monsieur Bernard paying no attention to the
expression in Godefroid's eyes, "even I, a child of the eighteenth
century, fed on Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius,--I, a son of the
Revolution, who scoff at all that antiquity and the middle-ages tell
us of demoniacal posse