August 13. When one is attacked by certain maladies, the springs
of our physical being seem broken, our energies destroyed, our
muscles relaxed, our bones to be as soft as our flesh, and our
blood as liquid as water. I am experiencing the same in my moral
being, in a strange and distressing manner. I have no longer any
strength, any courage, any self-control, nor even any power to
set my own will in motion. I have no power left to WILL anything,
but some one does it for me and I obey.

August 14. I am lost! Somebody possesses my soul and governs it!
Somebody orders all my acts, all my movements, all my thoughts. I
am no longer master of myself, nothing except an enslaved and
terrified spectator of the things which I do. I wish to go out; I
cannot. HE does not wish to; and so I remain, trembling and
distracted in the armchair in which he keeps me sitting. I merely
wish to get up and to rouse myself, so as to think that I am
still master of myself: I cannot! I am riveted to my chair, and
my chair adheres to the floor in such a manner that no force of
mine can move us.

Then suddenly, I must, I MUST go to the foot of my garden to pick
some strawberries and eat them --and I go there. I pick the
strawberries and I eat them! Oh! my God! my God! Is there a God?
If there be one, deliver me! save me! succor me! Pardon! Pity!
Mercy! Save me! Oh! what sufferings! what torture! what horror!

August 15. Certainly this is the way in which my poor cousin was
possessed and swayed, when she came to borrow five thousand
francs of me. She was under the power of a strange will which had
entered into her, like another soul, a parasitic and ruling soul.