sarini had been
delicate even to effeminacy; but now his proportions were enlarged, his
form, though still lean and spare, muscular and vigorous,--as if in
the torpor which usually succeeded to his bursts of frenzy, the animal
portion gained by the repose or disorganization of the intellectual.
When in his better and calmer mood--in which indeed none but the
experienced could have detected his malady--books made his chief
delight. But then he complained bitterly, if briefly, of the confinement
he endured, of the injustice be suffered; and as, shunning all
companions, he walked gloomily amidst the grounds that surrounded that
House of Woe, his unseen guardians beheld him clenching his hands, as at
some visionary enemy, or overheard him accuse some phantom of his brain
of the torments he endured.

Though the reader can detect in Lumley Ferrers the cause of the frenzy,
and the object of the imprecation, it was not so with the De Montaignes,
nor with the patient's keepers and physicians; for in his delirium he
seldom or never gave name to the shadows that he invoked,--not even to
that of Florence. It is, indeed, no unusual characteristic of madness to
shun, as by a kind of cunning, all mention of the names of those by whom
the madness has been caused. It is as if the unfortunates imagined that
the madness might be undiscovered if the images connected with it were
unbetrayed.

Such, at this time, was the wretched state of the man, whose talents
had promised a fair and honourable career, had it not been the wretched
tendency of his mind, from boyhood upward, to pamper every unwholesome
and unhallowed feeling as a token of the exuberance of genius. De
Montaigne, though he touched as lightly as possible upon this dark
domestic calamity in his first communications with Maltravers, whose
conduct in that melancholy tale of crime and woe had, he conceived, been
stamped with generosity and feeling, still betrayed emotions that told
how much his peace had been embittered.

"I seek to console Teresa," said he, turning away his manly head, "and
to point out all the blessings yet left to her; but that brother so
beloved, from whom so much was so vainly expected,--still ever and ever,
though she strives to conceal it from me, this affliction comes back to
her, and poisons every thought! Oh, better a thousand times that he
had died! When reason, sense, almost the soul, are dead, how dark and
fiend-like is the life that remains behind!