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proportions of a small melon. Soon he even had
to give up his Saturday evenings in the
Scandinavian club where, streaming with perspiration,
he used to gallop round the room with all the
ladies in turn for the sake of his liver. He said
there was nothing like dancing and perspiring
to keep your liver going.
Norstrom’s success made me so happy that
for some time I almost forgot my own disgrace.
Alas, it all came back to me soon in all its horror,
first in my dreams, then in my waking thoughts.
Often just as I was falling to sleep I saw under
my closing eyelids the ignominious last scene of
the tragedy before the curtain went down over
my future. I saw Charcot’s terrible eyes flashing
through the darkness, I saw myself escorted by
two of his assistants like a criminal between two
policemen, walking out of the Salpêtrière for the
last time. I saw my own folly, I understood that
Norstrom’s diagnosis—“Don Quixottish
foolhardiness and immeasurable conceit”—was right
after all. Don Quixote again!
Soon I ceased to sleep altogether, an acute
attack of insomnia set in, so terrible that it
nearly made me go off my head. Insomnia does
not kill its man unless he kills himself—
sleeplessness is the most common cause of suicide. But it
kills his joie de vivre, it saps his strength, it sucks
the blood from his brain and from his heart like
a vampire. It makes him remember during the
night what he was meant to forget in blissful
sleep. It makes him forget during the day what
he was meant to remember. Memory is the first
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