Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part IV - II
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THE CONFESSION OF A FOOL 249
to seek her society; but since we never talked for fear
of quarrelling, I had to be content with merely seeing her
at my side, with feeling that I was not quite isolated.
My illness became worse ; I was so ill that I could take
nothing but beef tea; I lay awake at night, suffering
agonies, tortured by an unbearable thirst which I tried to
relieve by drinking cold milk.
My brain, keen and refined by study and culture, was
thrown into confusion by contact with a coarser brain ;
every attempt to bring it into harmony with my wife’s
caused me to have convulsions. I tried to get into touch
with strangers. But they treated me with the forbearance
which a sane person usually shows to a lunatic.
For three months I hardly opened my lips. At the end
of that time I noticed with horror that I had almost lost
my voice, and, from sheer want of practice, had no longer
any control of the spoken word.
Determined not to be defeated in the struggle, I began
a brisk correspondence with my friends in Sweden. But
their guarded language, their deep sympathy, their well-
meant advice, plainly betrayed the opinion which they had
formed of my mental condition.
She triumphed. I was on the verge of insanity, and
the first symptoms of persecutional mania showed them-
selves. Mania? Did I say mania? I xvas being per-
secuted, there was nothing irrational in the thought.
It was just as if I had become a child again. Extremely
feeble, I lay for hours on the sofa, my head on her knees,
my arms round her waist, like Michel Angelo’s Pieta. I
buried my face in her lap, and she called me her child.
" Your child, yes," I stammered. I forgot my sex in the
arms of the mother, who was no longer female, but sexless.
Now she regarded me with the eyes of the conqueror, now
she looked at me kindly, seized with the sudden tenderness
which the hangman is said to feel sometimes for his victim.
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