FOOTNOTES:
[1] This passage has been misunderstood. It has been taken to mean that all the French nation had degenerated, and their race was approaching its end. However, from the concluding paragraph of this chapter, it may be clearly seen that I had in my eye only the upper ten thousand. The peasant population, and a part of the working classes and the bourgeoisie, are sound. I assert only the decay of the rich inhabitants of great cities and the leading classes. It is they who have discovered fin-de-siècle, and it is to them also that fin-de-race applies.
[2] ‘My thought I hasten to fulfil.’
[3] A four-act comedy, by H. Micard and F. de Jouvenot, named Fin-de-Siècle, which was played in Paris in 1890, hardly avails to determine the sense of the word as the French use it. The authors were concerned, not to depict a phase of the age or a psychological state, but only to give an attractive title to their piece.
[4] Traité des Dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’Espèce humaine et des Causes qui produisent ces Variétés maladives. Par le Dr. B. A. Morel. Paris, 1857, p. 5.
[5] At the instigation of his mistress Ebergenyi, Count Chorinsky had poisoned his wife, previously an actress. The murderer was an epileptic, and a ‘degenerate,’ in the Morelian sense. His family summoned Morel from Normandy to Munich, for the purpose of proving to the jury, before whom the case (1868) was tried, that the accused was irresponsible. The latter was singularly indignant at this; and the Attorney-General also contradicted, in the most emphatic manner, the evidence of the French alienist, and supported himself by the approbation of the most prominent alienists in Munich. Chorinsky was pronounced guilty. Nevertheless, only a short time after his conviction, insanity developed itself in him, and a few months later he died, in the deepest mental darkness, thus justifying all the previous assertions of the French physician, who had, in the German tongue, demonstrated to a German jury the incompetence of his professional confrères in Munich.
[6] Morel, op. cit., p. 683.
[7] L’Uomo delinquente in rapporto all’ Antropologia, Giurisprudenza e alle Discipline carcerarie. 3ª edizione. Torino, 1884, p. 147 et seq. See also Dr. Ch. Féré, ‘La Famille nevropathique.’ Paris, 1894, pp. 176-212.
[8] ‘La Famille nevropathique,’ Archives de Nevrologie, 1884, Nos. 19 et 20.