THE MAD WOMAN


"I can tell you a terrible story about the Franco-Prussian war,"
Monsieur d'Endolin said to some friends assembled in the smoking-room of
Baron de Ravot's château. "You know my house in the Faubourg de Cormeil.
I was living there when the Prussians came, and I had for a neighbor a
kind of a mad woman, who had lost her senses in consequence of a series
of misfortunes, as at the age of seven and twenty she had lost her
father, her husband and her newly born child, all in the space of a
month.

"When death has once entered into a house, it almost invariably returns
immediately, as if it knew the way, and the young woman, overwhelmed
with grief, took to her bed and was delirious for six weeks. Then, a
species of calm lassitude succeeded that violent crisis, and she
remained motionless, eating next to nothing, and only moving her eyes.
Every time they tried to make her get up, she screamed as if they were
about to kill her, and so they ended by leaving her continually in bed,
and only taking her out to wash her, to change her linen and to turn her
mattress.

"An old servant remained with her, who gave her something to drink, or
a little cold meat, from time to time. What passed in that despairing
mind? No one ever knew, for she did not speak at all now. Was she
thinking of the dead? Was she dreaming sadly, without any precise
recollection of anything that had happened? Or was her memory as
stagnant as water without any current? But however this may have been,