He now reposed in me a confidence, the purport of which ought perhaps to be numbered among the symptoms of the coming malady, though I was as yet unable to account for it in this way. He said his scruples, such as he had combated and surmounted three years before, had returned and had distressed him of late, beginning from a time to which he referred; since which time, and, as he believed, from the efforts he had made, he had suffered from a head-ache and pains in his chest and limbs. Not aware that an illness was at hand which would account for the sensations of which he complained without reference to any mental uneasiness, I endeavoured by reproaches and praises to restore his tranquillity. "You are indebted for your head-ache and other pains to allowing your mind to dwell on useless and groundless apprehensions. Cheerfulness, hope, and gaiety are the best things in the world to make the blood circulate and distribute equally the animal heat. Enough has been said to you on the subject of scruples, and you have admitted the reasonableness of what has been said: I had hoped they were gone for ever. You are a great comfort and blessing to me: be satisfied with yourself. You were at confession and communion five days ago: has any thing occurred since, on which you would consult your director?" He replied, "No, nothing." This we afterwards remembered with great comfort.
In the evening we went to the promenade, and walked till it was dark. I then asked if he would go home and play a game at chess: he said playfully, "Yes, if you will let me rest my head on my hands, and stick up my shoulders." This posture he had been used to take sometimes in the study-room in college, where it was permitted, being neither a mortal sin nor false grammar: of course he had since avoided and corrected the habit.
The next day the annual distribution of prizes took place at the Royal College. This scene had some attraction for Kenelm as reminding him of Stoneyhurst. He did not stay to the end of the ceremony, complaining of a sense of fatigue. In the evening he walked out again for the last time: we stopt to listen to some music on the walk, when I observed that he was excessively chill. He said to his mother, "I hope my father will be satisfied with my obedience; I have dragged myself along, cold and tired." I had urged him to walk, in the hope of diverting him. We went home; there was no question of chess; he retired early to rest.
The day following, the last of the month of August, he appeared to be well, and recovered from all sense of fatigue: he announced his intention of bathing in the Rhone as usual. I requested him to give it up, till it should be seen whether the chilliness, that seemed to renew its attacks like the fits of an ague, should again come upon him. To this he assented. He took his lesson of drawing without complaint; but, almost immediately after the departure of the master, was seized with a violent shivering: he put on a great coat; then wrapped himself in blankets, lying on the sofa. The sense of cold still continuing, he took soup, and afterwards tea. Towards evening he desired to have his bed brought down from his chamber, and placed in the inner salon: this was done. He soon broke out into a violent perspiration. Nothing more was apprehended, than that he had taken cold at his last bathing in the Rhone.
His malady was however the dreadful typhus, so fatal in crowded hospitals, in camps and prisons. To an insulated patient, well taken care of, the danger is much diminished; and, but for error, and worse than error, of the medical men who attended, my elder son had probably not fallen a victim to it, and the younger would have been kept out of the way of contagion.
In the first spring that I had passed at Avignon, my children, owing to the change of climate, all of them, beginning with the youngest, at short intervals from each other, fell ill of the scarlet fever. At that time I had sent for a physician, who treated them with much care, and, as I judged from the event, with sufficient skill. In the course of three years he had occasionally attended when his advice was wanted. His practice was among the best families of the town; he was a middle-aged man, married, and father of a family. He was entrusted by the municipality with the place of physician to the hospital, in which quality he gave lectures on anatomy, at which, so long as the dissected subject was fresh, I had allowed my sons to attend.
The typhus is an universal prostration of the forces of the body; it is no wonder then that Kenelm felt no inclination to leave his bed. For two days he remained there without seeming to himself to have any illness to complain of. M. le Docteur Roche was sent for: he pronounced the disorder to be a catarrhal fever; the symptoms nothing unfavourable; the perspiration beneficial, but excessive; and ordered the removal of some of the bed-clothes. He prescribed at this time no medicine.
As this man was considered as devout, and had frequently conversed with us on religious subjects, Kenelm, on account of the effect which he supposed his scruples to have had on his health, and assured that they would not be a subject of ridicule to a pious man, thought it right to confide them to him. The doctor coincided entirely with the reasoning of his patient: he said, "For some time past you have been forming unwholesome chyle: the bowels must be relieved; perspiration, so as not to weaken you, but to carry off the fever, probably caused by the cold bath, must be sustained: all will soon be well again." Kenelm had talked of his scruples in so edifying a manner, as to inspire the devout doctor with great respect for his piety and humility: returning into the first salon, he said to the mother: "Madame, votre fils est un ange:" she replied, "Pas encore."[69] This is one of those prophetic expressions launched at hazard, of which so many examples are on record.
On the fourth day of the malady, the delirium commenced. Roche was one of those physicians who never find out that they are in the wrong: he added the epithet "nervous," to his former definition of the fever, and ordered a calming draught at night. He called three times a day: he felt the pulse of his patient: if the delirium had failed to alarm him, the pulse might have indicated the typhus, by the "subsaltus tendonis," a weak tremulous motion in the wrist, close by the pulse. From this fourth day of his illness, I began to watch every night by the bed-side of Kenelm till two o'clock in the morning: for several years past I had been accustomed not to retire to rest till after midnight; to sit up an hour or two longer was therefore no great fatigue. Antoine, who was directed to go to bed at eight in the evening, then relieved me for the rest of the night. We adopted this arrangement, not foreseeing how long the illness would last, though the period of the typhus is well known to be thirty days. Kenelm's brother and sisters attended and served him during the day, without fear of contagion, the existence of which was positively denied by Roche, and which indeed was not to be apprehended in a case of "nervous catarrhal fever." The care of his mother extended to every moment of the day and night: her chamber was the next room to the salon in which her son lay: on the least noise she was at his bed-side. What she endured of toil, seemingly beyond human strength, and how her maternal feelings were tortured, will appear in the sequel.
One of the symptoms of the malady was the induration of the belly: it became hard and tight like a drum or inflated bladder; this proceeded from the meteorized state of the bowels; and the vapour or fumes, ascending thence to the brain, as in the case of drunkenness, caused delirium. It was attempted to relieve this induration by emollient fomentations. Kenelm's delirium was not so entire, but that his attention might be directed by those around him to any object that might require it: he spoke French or English, according to the nation of the person whom he addressed; and it was remarkable, that he talked French without hesitating or correcting his phrases, as he was wont to do in health: the delirium in this also resembling drunkenness, which, in its earlier stage, gives a firm and ready elocution.