My whole life long I shall remember with a shudder the night which, as a student, I spent with one of these unhappy wretches. It was at that time when physicians believed that the danger could be averted and the delirium shortened by a speedy letting of blood. I had been sent by an old physician into a squalid garret, in order to bleed a patient. I found him in bed raging violently. He was a sturdy porter, with inflamed face and swollen neck-veins. When I tried to take him by the arm, he looked at me with bloodshot eyes that seemed to devour me. Then he began to mumble and tremble, pouring forth oaths like stormy thunder, and howling like a lost soul. 'No, no, help! Stop the murderer who is going to kill me--he has a razor to cut my throat!’ His face wore a terrible expression of fear, the furrows on the brow, the dilated nostrils, contracted lips, the gnashing of the teeth, gave evidence of a desperate struggle. Then he writhed in our arms, trying to escape, while we held him back. 'Help!’ he screamed, 'they are going to throw me out of the window, on to the bayonets below! Help, quick, take those cut-throats away! Do you not see that the street is full of soldiers and executioners, who are climbing up on ladders to stab me?’ Until at last, worn out, bathed in perspiration, livid, breathless, still cursing and murmuring, he fell gradually into the lethargy of the dying. When the disease grows worse, the delirium becomes continual, the trembling increases, the muscles swell to such a degree that it seems as though they would burst. One might almost think that a furious demon were hidden within, agitating the body in the bed, distorting it, hurling it to and fro, as though to shatter it completely. The most terrible apparitions are those of spectres. Some of these are so horrible that the patients are paralysed with dread. They suddenly send forth a terrible shriek, hold their hands in front of them, throw the head back, but still think they see the lean and colourless face of some dead man whom they call by name. Disguised enemies with fleshless countenance, wrapped in grave-clothes, come to lead them away with them; skeletons stride through the room, rattling their bones and gnashing their teeth with devilish glances. Then Death, dressed in all the horrors of the most corrupt reality, appears to lower them into the grave. 'Take away this rotting corpse which those wretches have put into my bed! Do you not see that it is a liquid, loathsome mass, a putrefied abomination, and that the worms are crawling about the body?’ And they hold their nose to exclude the putrid smell, and look at their hands, on which they see clots of blood, livid streaks, and the revolting blackness of gangrene. Sometimes all ends suddenly, but often they sleep after the delirium has lasted three or four days, and on waking, fall into imbecility, die exhausted, or else become quite mad. CHAPTER IX _THE EXPRESSION OF THE FACE_ I