at twelve and at six
o'clock to place my fingers on the figures twelve and six, as soon as
the moment she was waiting for, had arrived, and I soon noticed that she
attentively followed the motion of the small brass hands, which I had
often turned in her presence.

"She had understood! Perhaps I ought rather to say that she had seized
the idea. I had succeeded in getting the knowledge, or rather the
sensation of the time into her, just as is the case with carp, who
certainly have no clocks, when they are fed every day exactly at the
same time.

"When once I had obtained that result, all the clocks and watches in the
house occupied her attention almost exclusively. She spent her time in
looking at them, in listening to them and in waiting for meal times, and
once something very funny happened. The striking apparatus of a pretty
little Louis XVI. clock that hung at the head of her bed, having got out
of order, she noticed it. She sat for twenty minutes, with her eyes on
the hands, waiting for it to strike ten, but when the hand passed the
figure, she was astonished at not hearing anything; so stupefied was
she, indeed, that she sat down, no doubt overwhelmed by a feeling of
violent emotion, such as attacks us in the face of some terrible
catastrophe. And she had the wonderful patience to wait until eleven
o'clock, in order to see what would happen, and as she naturally heard
nothing, she was suddenly either seized with a wild fit of rage at
having been deceived, and imposed upon by appearances, or else overcome
by that fear which some frightened creature feels at some terrible
mystery, and by the furious impatience of a passionate individual who
meets with some obstacle, she took up the tongs from the fireplace and
struck the clock so violently that she broke it to pieces in a moment.

"It was evident, therefore, that her brain did act and calculate,
obscurely it is true, and within very restricted limits, for I could
never succeed in making her distinguish persons as she distinguished the
time; and to stir her intellect, it was necessary to appeal to her
passions, in the material sense of the word, and we soon had another,
and alas! a very terrible proof of this!"

* * * * *

"She had grown up into a splendid girl; a perfect type of a race, a sort
of lovely and stupid Venus. She was sixteen, and I have rarely seen such
perfection of form, such suppleness and such regular features. I sai