In their eyrie above the anxious city they led an existence all their own. Between them were a hundred jests, Greek to others; and whimsical ways, and fond sayings and old smiles a thousand times repeated. And things that must be done after one fashion or the sky would fall; and others that must be done after another fashion or the world would end. When the house was empty of boarders, or nearly empty--though at such times the cupboard also was apt to be bare--there were long hours spent upstairs and surveys of household gear, carried up with difficulty, and reviews of linen and much talk of it, and small meals, taken at the open windows that looked over the Rhone valley and commanded the sunset view. Such times were times of gaiety though not of prosperity, and far from the worst hours of life--had they but persisted. But in the March of 1601 a great calamity fell on these two. A fire, which consumed several houses near the Corraterie, and flung wide through the streets the rumour that the enemy had entered, struck the bedridden woman--aroused at midnight by shouts and the glare of flames--with so dire a terror, not on her own account but on her daughter's, that she was never the same again. For weeks at a time she appeared to be as of old, save for some increase of weakness and tremulousness. But below the surface the brain was out of poise, and under the least pressure of excitement she betrayed the change in a manner so appalling--by the loud negation of those beliefs which in saner moments were most dear to her, and especially by a denial of the Providence and goodness of God--that even her child, even the being who knew her and loved her best, shuddered lest Satan, visible and triumphant, should rise to confront her. Fortunately the fits of this mysterious malady were short as they were appalling, and to the minds of that day, suspicious. And in the beginning Anne had the support of an old physician, well-nigh their only intimate. True, even he was scared by a form of disease, new and beyond his science; but he prescribed a sedative and he kept counsel. He went further: for sufficiently enlightened himself to believe in the innocence of these attacks, he none the less explained to the daughter the peril to which her mother's aberrations must expose her were they known to the vulgar; and he bade her hide them with all the care imaginable.