Leuret says, in speaking of mania, “It has happened to me more than once to form too favourable an idea of the intellectual capacity of some persons, when I could only judge of it by what they said or did during an attack of mania. A patient whose conversation and flashes of wit had struck me, sometimes turned out, after his recovery, to be a very ordinary man, far inferior to the opinion I had conceived of him.”[287] Marcé has recorded the case of a young married woman of cultivated mind, but merely ordinary intelligence, who, during the course of an attack of mania, in which ideas of jealousy predominated, “wrote to her husband letters which, for their eloquence and the passionate energy of their style, might easily be placed beside the most fervent passages of the _Nouvelle Héloise_. When the attack was over her letters became simple and modest, and no one, on comparing them with the others, would have believed that the two sets came from the same pen.”[288] Excessive activity of the intellect, writes Dagonet, is also sometimes observed in the depressive forms of mental aberration, but much less frequently than in the expansive forms. As a proof of this, it is sufficient to cite the following letter, written by a patient affected with melancholic delusion, to her husband, a country schoolmaster. The letter was full of mistakes in spelling; the woman who wrote it had no education, and in her normal condition, no eloquence; but disease had transformed her by developing her intellectual faculties:-- “Why did not the Master of the universe open the tomb to me in my brilliant youth? Why, at the same time, did He not remove me from you, since you do not love me, and I am making you unhappy? “Why did I become a mother? To be unhappy--more than unhappy--to leave the children who are so dear to me.... Why do you hate me? Though I stood with my feet in boiling oil, I should still say, I love you!... “Why did you not let me die? You would be happy,--and I--my troubles would be over.... My dear children would come and play by my grave. I should still be near them--I should still, in the darkness of the grave, hear them say, ‘There is our mother!’”[289] If this woman had fed her mind on the works of Chateaubriand she could not have expressed herself with more poetry or imagination. “It has been known,” says Tissot, “that a young man, whose tutor had never been able to teach him anything, and who, as the saying is, could not put a noun and an adjective together, spoke Latin fluently, after some days of malignant fever, and developed ideas which till then had not struck him.”[290]