seemed as if the latter would prove as useless as the former. However,
he slept without being tormented by dreams or wakings, and the next day
he still slept.

But he knew too well the effects produced by a prolonged use of these
injections to continue them beyond what was strictly indispensable; he
therefore omitted them, and sleep left him.

He tried them again; then, soon, as the small doses lost their efficacy,
he gradually increased them. At the end of a certain time what he feared
came to pass--his leanness increased; he lost his appetite, his muscular
force, and his moral energy; his pale face began to wear the
characteristic expression of the morphomaniac.

Then he stopped, frightened.

Should he continue, he would become a morphomaniac in a given time, and
the apathy into which he fell prevented him from resisting the desire to
absorb new doses of poison, a desire as imperious, as irresistible in
morphinism as that of alcohol for the alcoholic, and more terrible in its
effects--the perversion of the intellectual faculties, loss of will, of
memory, of judgment, paralysis, or the mania that leads to suicide.

If he did not continue, and these sleepless nights or the agitated sleep
which maddened him should return, and following them, this over-
excitement of the brain in troubling the nutrition of the encephalic
mass, it might be the prelude of some grave cerebral affection.

On one side the morphine habit; on the other, dementia from the constant
excitement and disorganization of the brain.