r after she reached her sixth birthday. Ah!
she is very delicate. For some days past she had seemed ill at ease.
She was at times taken with cramp, and plunged in a stupor."

"Do you know of any members of your family that have suffered from
nervous affections?"

"I don't know. My mother was carried off by consumption."

Here shame made her pause. She could not confess that she had a
grandmother who was an inmate of a lunatic asylum.[*] There was
something tragic connected with all her ancestry.

[*] This is Adelaide Fouque, otherwise Aunt Dide, the ancestress of
the Rougon-Macquart family, whose early career is related in the
"Fortune of the Rougons," whilst her death is graphically
described in the pages of "Dr. Pascal."

"Take care! the convulsions are coming on again!" now hastily
exclaimed the doctor.

Jeanne had just opened her eyes, and for a moment she gazed around her
with a vacant look, never speaking a word. Her glance then grew fixed,
her body was violently thrown backwards, and her limbs became
distended and rigid. Her skin, fiery-red, all at once turned livid.
Her pallor was the pallor of death; the convulsions began once more.

"Do not loose your hold of her," said the doctor. "Take her other
hand!"

He ran to the table, where, on entering, he had placed a small
medicine-case. He came back with a bottle, the contents of which he
made Jeanne inhale; but the effect was like that of a terrible lash;
the child gave such a violent jerk that she slipped from her mother's
hands.

"No, no, don't give her ether," exclaimed Helene, warned by the odor.
"It drives her mad."

The two had now scarcely strength enough to keep the child under
control. Her frame was racked and distorted, raised by the heels and
the nape of the neck, as if bent in two. But she fell back again and
began tossing from one side of the bed to the other. Her fists were
clenched, her thumbs bent against the palms of her hands. At times she
would open the latter, and, with fingers wide apart, grasp at phantom
bodies in the air, as though to twist them. She touched her mother's
shawl and fiercely clung to it. But Helene's greatest grief was that
she no longer recognized her daughter. The suffering angel, whose face
was usually so sweet, was transformed in every feature, while her eyes
swam, showing balls of a nacreous blue.

"Oh, do something, I implore you!" she murmured. "My strength is
exhausted, sir."

She had just