benches and arranged for a service, which seemed to mean a good deal to the Calvinists among the boarders.  I fell in with this quite happily, and made my sacrifice honourably the very first Sunday by betaking myself to Geneva to read the papers.  The next day, however, my hostess informed me that the boarders were very annoyed at only being able to hold the service, and not the week-day games in my drawing-room.  I was given notice, and looked round for other quarters, which I found in the house of a neighbour.

This neighbour was a Dr. Vaillant, who had taken an equally fine site on which to erect a hydropathic institute.  I first made inquiries about warm baths, as my Zurich doctor had advised the use of these with sulphur, but there was no prospect of obtaining any such thing.  Dr. Vaillant’a whole manner pleased me so much, however, that I told him my troubles.  When I asked him which of two things I should drink:  hot sulphur bath-water or a certain stinking mineral water, he smiled and said:  ’Monsieur, vous n’etes que nerveux.  All this will only excite you more; you merely need calming.  If you will entrust yourself to me, I promise that you will have so far recovered by the end of two months as never to have erysipelas again.’  And he kept his word.

I certainly formed a very different opinion of hydrotherapic methods through this excellent doctor from any I could have acquired from the ‘Water Jew’ of Albisbrunnen and other raw amateurs.  Vaillant had been famous as a doctor in Paris itself (Lablache and Rossini had consulted him), but he had the misfortune of becoming paralysed in both legs, and after four years of helpless misery, during which he lost his whole practice and sank into utter misery, he came across the original Silesian hydropathologist, Priessnitz, to whom he was conveyed, with the result that he recovered completely.  There he learned the method that had proved so effective, refined it from all the brutalities of its inventor, and tried to recommend himself to the Parisians by building a hydro at Meudon.  But he met with no encouragement.  His former patients, whom he tried to persuade into visiting his institution, merely asked whether there was dancing there in the evening.  He found it impossible to keep it up, and it is to this circumstance that I owe my meeting with him there, near Geneva, where he was once more trying to exploit his cure in a practical way.  He laid claim to attention, if only by the fact that he strictly limited the number of patients he took into his house, insisting that a doctor could only be responsible for the right application and success of his treatment by being in a position to observe his patients minutely at all hours of the day.  The advantage of his system, which benefited me so wonderfully, was the thoroughly calming effect of the treatment, which consisted in the most ingenious use of water at a moderate temperature.