aints returned to his lips,
there was evoked for him a suburban, flinty and gloomy site where a
succession of silent bent persons, harassed by life, filed past into
the twilight, while, steeped in bitterness and overflowing with
disgust, he felt himself solitary in this dejected landscape, struck
by an inexpressibly melancholy and stubborn distress whose mysterious
intensity excluded all consolation, pity and repose. Like a
funeral-knell, this despairing chant haunted him, now that he was in
bed, prostrated by fever and agitated by an anxiety so much the more
inappeasable for the fact that he could not discover its cause. He
ended by abandoning himself to the torrent of anguishes suddenly
dammed by the chant of psalms slowly rising in his tortured head.

One morning, nevertheless, he felt more tranquil and requested the
servant to bring a looking-glass. It fell from his hands. He hardly
recognized himself. His face was a clay color, the lips bloated and
dry, the tongue parched, the skin rough. His hair and beard, untended
since his illness by the domestic, added to the horror of the sunken
face and staring eyes burning with feverish intensity in this skeleton
head that bristled with hair. More than his weakness, more than his
vomitings which began with each attempt at taking nourishment, more
than his emaciation, did his changed visage terrify him. He felt lost.
Then, in the dejection which overcame him, a sudden energy forced him
in a sitting posture. He had strength to write a letter to his Paris
physician and to order the servant to depart instantly, seek and bring
him back that very day.

He passed suddenly from complete depression into boundless hope. This
physician was a celebrated specialist, a doctor renowned for his cures
of nervous maladies "He must have cured many more dangerous cases than
mine," Des Esseintes reflected. "I shall certainly be on my feet in a
few days." Disenchantment succeeded his confidence. Learned and
intuitive though they be, physicians know absolutely nothing of
neurotic diseases, being ignorant of their origins. Like the others,
this one would prescribe the eternal oxyde of zinc and quinine,
bromide of potassium and valerian. He had recourse to another thought:
"If these remedies have availed me little in the past, could it not be
due to the fact that I have not taken the right quantities?"

In spite of everything, this expectation of being cured cheered him,
but then a new fear ente