d
intelligence, all helped to repress her memory, even the effort she made
to acquire a new one, for she had as much to unlearn as to learn. There
is more than one form of memory: the body and mind have each their own;
home-sickness, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory. Thus,
during the third month, the vehemence of this virgin soul, soaring to
Paradise on outspread wings, was not indeed quelled, but fettered by a
dull rebellion, of which Esther herself did not know the cause. Like the
Scottish sheep, she wanted to pasture in solitude, she could not conquer
the instincts begotten of debauchery.

Was it that the foul ways of the Paris she had abjured were calling her
back to them? Did the chains of the hideous habits she had renounced
cling to her by forgotten rivets, and was she feeling them, as old
soldiers suffer still, the surgeons tell us, in the limbs they have
lost? Had vice and excess so soaked into her marrow that holy waters had
not yet exorcised the devil lurking there? Was the sight of him for
whom her angelic efforts were made, necessary to the poor soul, whom God
would surely forgive for mingling human and sacred love? One had led
to the other. Was there some transposition of the vital force in her
involving her in inevitable suffering? Everything is doubtful and
obscure in a case which science scorns to study, regarding the subject
as too immoral and too compromising, as if the physician and the writer,
the priest and the political student, were not above all suspicion.
However, a doctor who was stopped by death had the courage to begin an
investigation which he left unfinished.

Perhaps the dark depression to which Esther fell a victim, and which
cast a gloom over her happy life, was due to all these causes; and
perhaps, unable as she was to suspect them herself, she suffered as sick
creatures suffer who know nothing of medicine or surgery.

The fact is strange. Wholesome and abundant food in the place of bad
and inflammatory nourishment did not sustain Esther. A pure and regular
life, divided between recreation and studies intentionally abridged,
taking the place of a disorderly existence of which the pleasures and
the pains were equally horrible, exhausted the convent-boarder. The
coolest rest, the calmest nights, taking the place of crushing fatigue
and the most torturing agitation, gave her low fever, in which the
common symptoms were imperceptible to the nursing Sister's eye or
finger