“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 Hélène, 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 Hélène’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.