care of sufferers, possibly because of the disgrace heaped upon a
bourgeoise if she allows her husband or children to be taken to a
public hospital? Moreover, who does not know the repugnance which
these people feel to the payment of the two or three thousand francs
required at Charenton or in the private lunatic asylums? If any one
had spoken to Madame Margaritis of Doctors Dubuisson, Esquirol,
Blanche, and others, she would have preferred, with noble indignation,
to keep her thousands and take care of the "good-man" at home.

As the incomprehensible whims of this lunatic are connected with the
current of our story, we are compelled to exhibit the most striking of
them. Margaritis went out as soon as it rained, and walked about
bare-headed in his vineyard. At home he made incessant inquiries for
newspapers; to satisfy him his wife and the maid-servant used to give
him an old journal called the "Indre-et-Loire," and for seven years he
had never yet perceived that he was reading the same number over and
over again. Perhaps a doctor would have observed with interest the
connection that evidently existed between the recurring and spasmodic
demands for the newspaper and the atmospheric variations of the
weather.

Usually when his wife had company, which happened nearly every
evening, for the neighbors, pitying her situation, would frequently
come to play at boston in her salon, Margaritis remained silent in a
corner and never stirred. But the moment ten o'clock began to strike
on a clock which he kept shut up in a large oblong closet, he rose at
the stroke with the mechanical precision of the figures which are made
to move by springs in the German toys. He would then advance slowly
towards the players, give them a glance like the automatic gaze of the
Greeks and Turks exhibited on the Boulevard du Temple, and say