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By Root 1431 0

gave me the need to warn my grandmother of my symptoms with a precision into which I put a sort of physiological punctiliousness. If I observed in myself a disturbing symptom which I had not previously discerned, my body was in distress so long as I had not communicated it to my grandmother. If she pretended to take no notice, it made me insist. Sometimes I went too far; and that beloved face, which was no longer able always to control its emotion as in the past, would betray an expression of pity, a painful contraction. Then my heart was wrung by the sight of her grief; as if my kisses had the power to expel that grief, as if my affection could give my grandmother as much joy as my recovery, I flung myself into her arms. And its scruples being at the same time calmed by the certainty that she was now aware of the discomfort that I felt, my body offered no opposition to my reassuring her. I protested that this discomfort was not really painful, that I was in no sense to be pitied, that she might be quite sure that I was now happy; my body had wished to secure exactly the amount of pity that it deserved, and, provided that someone knew that it had a pain in its right side, it could see no harm in my declaring that this pain was of no consequence and was not an obstacle to my happiness; for my body did not pride itself on its philosophy; that was outside its province. Almost every day during my convalescence I had some of these fits of suffocation. One evening, after my grandmother had left me comparatively well, she returned to my room very late and, seeing me struggling for breath, “Oh, my poor boy,” she exclaimed, her face quivering with sympa thy, “you must be in dreadful pain.” She left me at once; I heard the street door open, and in a little while she came back with some brandy which she had gone out to buy since there was none in the house. Presently I began to feel better. My grandmother, who was rather flushed, seemed somehow embarrassed, and her eyes had a look of weariness and dejection.

“I shall leave you alone now, and let you take advantage of this improvement,” she said, rising suddenly to go. I detained her, however, for a kiss, and could feel on her cold cheek something moist, but did not know whether it was the dampness of the night air through which she had just passed. Next day, she did not come to my room until the evening, having had, she told me, to go out. I considered that this showed a surprising indifference to my well-being, and I had to restrain myself in order not to reproach her with it.

My suffocations having persisted long after any congestion remained that could account for them, my parents brought in Professor Cottard. It is not enough that a physician who is called in to treat cases of this sort should be learned. Confronted with symptoms which may be those of three or four different complaints, it is in the long run his flair, his instinctive judgment, that must decide with which, despite the more or less similar appearance of them all, he has to deal. This mysterious gift does not imply any superiority in the other departments of the intellect, and a person of the utmost vulgarity, who admires the worst pictures, the worst music, who is without the slightest intellectual curiosity, may perfectly well possess it. In my case, what was physically evident might well have been caused by nervous spasms, by incipient tuberculosis, by asthma, by a toxi-alimentary dyspnoea with renal insufficiency, by chronic bronchitis, or by a complex state into which more than one of these factors entered. Now, nervous spasms required to be treated firmly, and discouraged, tuberculosis with infinite care and the sort of “feeding-up” which would have been bad for an arthritic condition such as asthma and might indeed have been dangerous in a case of toxi-alimentary dyspnoea, this last calling for a strict diet which, in turn, would be fatal to a tubercular patient. But Cottard’s hesitations were brief and his prescriptions imperious: “Purges, violent and drastic purges; milk for some days, nothing but milk.