how verse should be spoken. But she noticed that in
the orchestra stalls there was a priest wearing his cassock. It was not
the first time that an ecclesiastic had been present at an afternoon
performance of this tragedy drawn from the Scriptures. Nevertheless, it
impressed her disagreeably. When she went on the stage she distinctly
saw Louise Dalle, wearing the turban of Jehoshabeath; loading a revolver
in front of the prompter's box. She had enough common sense and presence
of mind to reject this absurd vision, which disappeared. But she spoke
her first lines in an inaudible voice.

She had burning pains in the stomach. She suffered from fits of
suffocation, sometimes, without apparent cause, an unspeakable agony
gripped her bowels, her heart beat madly and she feared that she must be
dying.

Dr Trublet attended her with watchful prudence. She often saw him at the
theatre, and occasionally went to consult him at his old house in the
Rue de Seine. She did not go through the waiting-room; the servant would
show her at once into the little dining-room, where Arab potteries
glinted in the shadows, and she was always the first to be shown in. One
day Socrates succeeded in making her understand the manner in which
images are formed in the brain, and how these images do not always
correspond with external objects, or, at my rate, do not always
correspond exactly.

"Hallucinations," he added, "are more often than not merely false
perceptions. One sees a thing, but one sees it badly, so that a
feather-broom becomes a head of bristling locks, a red carnation is a
beast's open mouth, and a chemise is a ghost in its winding-sheet.
Insignificant errors."

From these arguments she derived sufficient strength to despise and
dispel her visions of cats and dogs, or of persons who were living, and
well known to her. Yet she dreaded seeing the dead man again; and the
mystic terrors nestling in the obscure crannies of her brain were more
powerful than the demonstrations of science. It was useless to tell her
that the dead never returned; she knew very well that they did.

On this occasion Socrates once more advised her to find some
distraction, to visit her friends, and by preference the more pleasant
of her friends, and to avoid darkness and solitude, as her two most
treacherous enemies.

And he added this prescription:

"Especially must you avoid persons and things which may be connected
with the object of your visions."

H