ssion,--well, monsieur, I affirm that nothing but
such possession can explain the condition of my child. As a somnambulist
she has never been able to tell us the cause of her sufferings; she has
never perceived it, and all the remedies she has proposed when in
that state, though carefully carried out, have done her no good. For
instance, she wished to be wrapped in the carcass of a freshly killed
pig; then she ordered us to run the sharp points of ret-hot magnets into
her legs; and to put hot sealing-wax on her spine--"

Godefroid looked at him in amazement.

"And then! what endless other troubles, monsieur! her teeth fell out;
she became deaf, then dumb; and then, after six months of absolute
dumbness, utter deafness, speech and hearing have returned to her! She
recovered, just as capriciously as she had lost, the use of her hands.
But her feet have continued in the same hapless condition for the last
seven years. She has shown marked and well-characterized symptoms of
hydrophobia. Not only does the sight of water, the sound of water, the
presence of a glass or a cup fling her at times into a state of fury,
but she barks like a dog, that melancholy bark, or rather howl, a dog
utters when he hears an organ. Several times we have thought her dying,
and the priests had administered the last sacraments; but she has always
returned to life to suffer with her full reason and the most absolute
clearness of mind; for her faculties of heart and soul are still
untouched. Though she has lived, monsieur, she has caused the deaths
of her mother and her husband, who have not been able to endure the
suffering of such scenes. Alas! monsieur, those distressing scenes are
becoming worse. All the natural functions are perverted; the Faculty
alone can explain the strange aberration of the organs. She was in this
state when I brought her from the provinces to Paris in 1829, because
the two or three distinguished doctors to whom I wrote, Desplein,
Bianchon, and Haudry, thought from my letters that I was telling them
fables. Magnetism was then energetically denied by all the schools of
medicine, and without saying that they doubted either my word or that of
the provincial doctors, they said we could not have observed thoroughly,
or else we had been misled by the exaggeration which patients are apt to
indulge in. But they were forced to change their minds when they saw my
daughter; and it is to the phenomena they then observed that the great