the departure of the two others, and Beauclair recapitulated the history
of the malady: the fall from a horse at the age of fourteen; the
dislocation and displacement of the organ, with doubtless a slight
laceration of the ligaments, whence the weight which the sufferer had
felt, and the weakness of the legs leading to paralysis. Then, a slow
healing of the disorder, everything returning to its place of itself, but
without the pain ceasing. In fact this big, nervous child, whose mind had
been so grievously impressed by her accident, was unable to forget it;
her attention remained fixed on the part where she suffered, and she
could not divert it, so that, even after cure, her sufferings had
continued--a neuropathic state, a consecutive nervous exhaustion,
doubtless aggravated by accidents due to faulty nutrition as yet
imperfectly understood. And further, Beauclair easily explained the
contrary and erroneous diagnosis of the numerous doctors who had attended
her, and who, as she would not submit to examination, had groped in the
dark, some believing in a tumour, and the others, the more numerous,
convinced of some lesion of the marrow. He alone, after inquiring into
the girl's parentage, had just begun to suspect a simple state of
auto-suggestion, in which she had obstinately remained ever since the
first violent shock of pain; and among the reasons which he gave for this
belief were the contraction of her visual field, the fixity of her eyes,
the absorbed, inattentive expression of her face, and above all the
nature of the pain she felt, which, leaving the organ, had borne to the
left, where it continued in the form of a crushing, intolerable weight,
which sometimes rose to the breast in frightful fits of stifling. A
sudden determination to throw off the false notion she had formed of her
complaint, the will to rise, breathe freely, and suffer no more, could
alone place her on her feet again, cured, transfigured, beneath the lash
of some intense emotion.