, a power which is superior even to that of the
headache; and we must avow to the glory of France, that this power is
one of the most recent which has been won by Parisian genius. As in the
case with all the most useful discoveries of art and science, no one
knows to whose intellect it is due. Only, it is certain that it was
towards the middle of the last century that "Vapors" made their first
appearance in France. Thus while Papin was applying the force of
vaporized water in mechanical problems, a French woman, whose name
unhappily is unknown, had the glory of endowing her sex with the faculty
of vaporizing their fluids. Very soon the prodigious influence obtained
by vapors was extended to the nerves; it was thus in passing from fibre
to fibre that the science of neurology was born. This admirable science
has since then led such men as Philips and other clever physiologists
to the discovery of the nervous fluid in its circulation; they are now
perhaps on the eve of identifying its organs, and the secret of its
origin and of its evaporation. And thus, thanks to certain quackeries of
this kind, we may be enabled some day to penetrate the mysteries of that
unknown power which we have already called more than once in the present
book, the _Will_. But do not let us trespass on the territory of medical
philosophy. Let us consider the nerves and the vapors solely in their
connection with marriage.

Victims of Neurosis (a pathological term under which are comprised all
affections of the nervous system) suffer in two ways, as far as married
women are concerned; for our physiology has the loftiest disdain for
medical classifications. Thus we recognize only:

1. CLASSIC NEUROSIS.
2. ROMANTIC NEUROSIS.

The classic affection has something bellicose and excitable on it.
Those who thus suffer are as violent in their antics as pythonesses,
as frantic as _monads_, as excited as _bacchantes_; it is a revival of
antiquity, pure and simple.

The romantic sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid
the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their
bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they
breathe all the melancholy of the North.

That woman with black hair, with piercing eye, with high color, with
dry lips and a powerful hand, will become excited and convulsive; she
represents the genius of classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman,
with white skin, is the genius