These reversions to religion, these intimations of
faith tormented him particularly since the changes
that had lately taken place in his health. Their
progress coincided with that of his recent nervous
disorders.
He had been tortured since his youth by inexplicable
aversions, by shudderings which chilled his spine
and made him grit his teeth, as, for example, when
he saw a girl wringing wet linen. These reactions
had long persisted. Even now he suffered poignantly
when he heard the tearing of cloth, the rubbing of
a finger against a piece of chalk, or a hand touching
a bit of moire.
The excesses of his youthful life, the exaggerated
tension of his mind had strangely aggravated his earliest
nervous disorder, and had thinned the already impoverished
blood of his race. In Paris, he had been compelled
to submit to hydrotherapic treatments for his trembling
fingers, frightful pains, neuralgic strokes which cut
his face in two, drummed maddeningly against his temples,
pricked his eyelids agonizingly and induced a nausea
which could be dispelled only by lying flat on his
back in the dark.
These afflictions had gradually disappeared, thanks
to a more regulated and sane mode of living.
They now returned in another form, attacking his whole
body. The pains left his head, but affected his
inflated stomach. His entrails seemed pierced
by hot bars of iron. A nervous cough racked him
at regular intervals, awakening and almost strangling
him in his bed. Then his appetite forsook him;
gaseous, hot acids and dry heats coursed through his
stomach. He grew swollen, was choked for breath,
and could not endure his clothes after each attempt
at eating.
He shunned alcoholic beverages, coffee and tea, and
drank only milk. And he took recourse to baths
of cold water and dosed himself with assafoetida,
valerian and quinine. He even felt a desire to
go out, and strolled about the country when the rainy
days came to make it desolate and still. He obliged
himself to take exercise. As a last resort, he
temporarily abandoned his books and, corroded with
ennui, determined to make his listless life tolerable
by realizing a project he had long deferred through
laziness and a dislike of change, since his installment
at Fontenay.
Being no longer able to intoxicate himself with the
felicities of style, with the delicious witchery of
the rare epithet which, while remaining precise, yet
opens to the imagination of the initiate infinite
and distant vistas, he determined to give the finishing
touches to the decorations of his home. He would
procure precious hot-house flowers and thus permit
himself a material occupation which might distract
him, calm his nerves and rest his brain. He also
hoped that the sight of their strange and splendid
nuances would in some degree atone for the fanciful
and genuine colors of style which he was for the time
to lose from his literary diet.
