pastry was allowed
to burn, whether a curtain was hanging properly, whether a dress was a
success, whether a lesson was well learned, or whether a medicine was
swallowed.

"I saw clearly that to her all this was, more than anything else, a
means of forgetting, an intoxication, just as hunting, card-playing, and
my functions at the Zemstvo served the same purpose for me. It is true
that in addition I had an intoxication literally speaking,--tobacco,
which I smoked in large quantities, and wine, upon which I did not get
drunk, but of which I took too much. Vodka before meals, and during
meals two glasses of wine, so that a perpetual mist concealed the
turmoil of existence.

"These new theories of hypnotism, of mental maladies, of hysteria are
not simple stupidities, but dangerous or evil stupidities. Charcot, I
am sure, would have said that my wife was hysterical, and of me he would
have said that I was an abnormal being, and he would have wanted to
treat me. But in us there was nothing requiring treatment. All this
mental malady was the simple result of the fact that we were living
immorally. Thanks to this immoral life, we suffered, and, to stifle
our sufferings, we tried abnormal means, which the doctors call the
'symptoms' of a mental malady,--hysteria.

"There was no occasion in all this to apply for treatment to Charcot
or to anybody else. Neither suggestion nor bromide would have been
effective in working our cure. The needful thing was an examination of
the origin of the evil. It is as when one is sitting on a nail; if you
see the nail, you see that which is irregular in your life, and you
avoid it. Then the pain stops, without any necessity of stifling it. Our
pain arose from the irregularity of our life, and also my jealousy,
my irritability, and the necessity of keeping myself in a state of
perpetual semi-intoxication by hunting, card-playing, and, above all,
the use of wine and tobacco. It was because of this irregularity that my
wife so passionately pursued her occupations. The sudden changes of her
disposition, from extreme sadness to extreme gayety, and her babble,
arose from the need of forgetting herself, of forgetting her life, in
the continual intoxication of varied and very brief occupations.

"Thus we lived in a perpetual fog, in which we did not distinguish our
condition. We were like two galley-slaves fastened to the same ball,
cursing each other, poisoning each other's existence, and trying to