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By Root 1848 0

not mistaken; they were there. Neurosis has a genius for mimicry. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. It will produce lifelike imitations of the dilatations of dyspepsia, the nausea of pregnancy, the arythmia of the cardiac, the feverishness of the consumptive. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient? Ah, do not think that I am mocking your sufferings. I should not undertake to cure them unless I understood them thoroughly. And, may I say, there is no good confession that is not reciprocal. I have told you that without nervous disorder there can be no great artist. What is more,” he added, raising a solemn forefinger, “there can be no great scientist either. I will go further, and say that, unless he himself is subject to nervous trouble, he is not, I won’t say a good doctor, but I do say the right doctor to treat nervous troubles. In the pathology of nervous diseases, a doctor who doesn’t talk too much nonsense is a half-cured patient, just as a critic is a poet who has stopped writing verse and a policeman a burglar who has retired from practice. I, Madame, I do not, like you, fancy myself to be suffering from albuminuria, I have not your neurotic fear of food, or of fresh air, but I can never go to sleep without getting out of bed at least twenty times to see if my door is shut. And yesterday I went to that nursing-home, where I came across the poet who wouldn’t move his neck, for the purpose of booking a room, for, between ourselves, I spend my holidays there looking after myself when I have aggravated my own troubles by wearing myself out in the attempt to cure those of others.”

“But, Doctor, ought I to take a similar cure?” asked my grandmother, aghast.

“It is not necessary, Madame. The symptoms you betray here will vanish at my bidding. Besides, you have a very efficient person whom I appoint as your doctor from now onwards. That is your malady itself, your nervous hyperactivity. Even if I knew how to cure you of it, I should take good care not to. All I need do is to control it. I see on your table there one of Bergotte’s books. Cured of your nervous diathesis, you would no longer care for it. Now, how could I take it upon myself to substitute for the joys that it procures you a nervous stability which would be quite incapable of giving you those joys? But those joys themselves are a powerful remedy, the most powerful of all perhaps. No, I have nothing to say against your nervous energy. All I ask is that it should listen to me; I leave you in its charge. It must reverse its engines. The force which it has been using to prevent you from going out, from taking sufficient food, must be directed towards making you eat, making you read, making you go out, and distracting you in every possible way. Don’t tell me that you feel tired. Tiredness is the organic realisation of a preconceived idea. Begin by not thinking it. And if ever you have a slight indisposition, which is a thing that may happen to anyone, it will be just as if you hadn’t, for your nervous energy will have endowed you with what M. de Talleyrand astutely called ‘imaginary good health.’ See, it has begun to cure you already. You’ve been sitting up in bed listening to me without once leaning back on your pillows, your eyes bright, colour in your cheeks. I’ve been talking to you for a good half-hour and you haven’t noticed the time. Well, Madame, I shall now bid you good-day.”

When, after seeing Dr du Boulbon to the door, I returned to the room in which my mother was alone, the anguish that had been weighing me down for several weeks suddenly lifted, I sensed that my mother was going to give vent to her joy and would observe mine too, and I felt that inability to endure the suspense of the coming moment when a person is about to be overcome with emotion in our presence, which mutatis mutandis is not unlike the thrill of fear that runs through one when one knows that somebody is going to come in and startle one by a door that is still closed. I tried to speak to Mamma but my voice broke,