Renée gradually recovered and in a few months' time seemed to be quite
well again. All the outward appearances of health came back to her, and
she had no suffering at all. She did not even feel anything of the
disturbance which illness leaves in the organs it has touched and in the
life it has just attacked.
All at once the trouble began again. When she went upstairs or walked
uphill she suddenly felt suffocated. Palpitation became more frequent
and more violent, and then just as suddenly all this would stop again,
as it happens sometimes with these insidious diseases which at intervals
seem to entirely forget their victims.
At the end of a few weeks the doctor from Saint-Denis, who was attending
Renée, took M. Mauperin aside.
"I don't feel satisfied about your daughter," he said. "There is
something not quite clear to me. I should like to have a consultation
with a specialist. These heart affections are very treacherous
sometimes."
"Yes, these heart affections--you are quite right," stammered M.
Mauperin.
He could not find anything else to say. His former notions of medicine,
the desperate doctrines of the old school, Corvisart, the epigraph in
his famous book on the subject of heart affections: "_Hæret lateri
lethalis arundo_"; all these things came suddenly back to his mind,
clearly and distinctly. He could see the pages again of those books so
full of terror.
"You see," the doctor went on, "the great danger of these diseases is
that they are so often of long standing. People send for us when the
disease has made great headway. There are symptoms that the patient has
not even noticed. Your daughter must have been very impressionable
always, from her very childhood, I should say; isn't that so? Torrents
of tears for the least blame, her face on fire for nothing at all, and
then her pulse beating a hundred a minute, a constant state of emotion
with her, very excitable, tempers like convulsions, always slightly
feverish. She would put a certain amount of passion into everything, I
should say, into her friendship, her games, her likes and dislikes; am I
not right? Oh yes, this is generally the way with children in whom this
organ predominates and who have an unfortunate predisposition to
hypertrophy. Tell me now, has she lately had any great emotion--any
great grief?"
"Yes, oh yes; her brother's death."
"Her brother's death. Ah yes, there was that," said the doctor, not
appearing to attach any great importance, nevertheless, to this
information. "I meant to ask you, though, whether she had been crossed
in love, for instance."
"She? Crossed in love? Oh, good heavens!" and M. Mauperin shrugged his
shoulders, and half joining his hands looked up in the air.
"Well, I'm only asking you that for the sake of having my conscience
clear. Accidents of this kind only develop the germ that is already
there and hasten on the disease. The physical influence of the passions
on the heart is a theory--It has been studied a great deal the last
twenty years; and quite right, too, in my opinion. The thesis that the
heart is lacerated in a burst of temper, in any great moral----"