WHEN any extraordinary events, unexpected anxieties or catastrophes,
intrude themselves suddenly into a life up to that period peaceful and
happy, these unexpected emotions interrupt the repose of the soul which
lay dreaming in the monotony of prosperity. Misfortune which comes on
you in this manner does not seem like an awakening from bliss, but
rather like a dream of evil. With the man who has been invariably happy,
despair begins with stupor. Unexpected misery is like cramp—it clasps,
and deadens everything. Men, acts, and things, at that time pass before
us like a fantastic apparition, and move along as if in a dream.
Everything in the horizon of our life is changed, both the atmosphere
and the perspective, but it still goes on for a long time before our
eyes have lost that sort of luminous image of past happiness which
follows in its train, and interposes without cessation between it and
the sombre present. Then everything that is, appears to be unreal and
ridiculous, and we can scarcely believe in our own existence, because we
find nothing around us that formerly used to compose our life, and we
cannot understand how all can have gone away without taking us with it,
and why nothing of our life remains to us.
Were this strained position of the soul to continue long, it would
disturb the equilibrium of the brain and become madness—a state happier
perhaps than that which remains, for life then is nothing but a vision
of past misfortune, acting like a ghost.