HYSTERIA AND DEMONISM. 91 



give rise to the affection. Thus hysteria is common in Paris and other 

 large cities where girls of the lower and middle classes receive an edu- 

 cation superior to their social condition. Such girls seldom find the 

 ideal husband of whom they have dreamed. Marriage affords them 

 no relief from the sordid difficulties that occur daily, and the narrow 

 ' cares of the household afford an insufficient satisfaction to the vast 

 aspirations of a disordered imagination. Misery, want, grief, etc., 

 often cause the symptoms of hysteria to appear in girls and young 

 women who have only a slight predisposition to it. To sum it all up, 

 hysteria has a physiological cause heredity ; and a social cause the 

 inferiority of the reality to the dream. 



Light hysteria is not a true disease. It is one of the varieties of 

 the female character. We might say that hysterical persons are wo- 

 men more than other women. They have lively and transient feelings, 

 brilliant and variable fancies, and, withal, inability to bring their feel- 

 ings and fancies under the rule of reason and judgment. The novel- 

 ists have appreciated the advantage which they could derive from the 

 study of this form of character, and have given us numerous pictures 

 of attacks of hysteria, and of women who were subject to them. Their 

 efforts have not always been fortunate, but occasionally they furnish 

 exact descriptions which complement what we have just said respect- 

 ing the psychical state of nervous women. 



M. Octave Feuillet makes the husband of a woman who suffers 

 from hysteria speak in a manner that, without pronouncing the word, 

 projects the symptoms of the affection so plainly that there can be no 

 mistake in the diagnosis. Thus : " That woman of the world," said 

 M. de Marsan, " has suddenly borrowed from the prisoners a set of 

 bitter, curt, desperate phrases, like those we may read on the walls of 

 the cells. That woman of sense has all at once given herself up to 

 the reading of the least reserved poets and novelists. ... I inspire 

 with terror from her elocution, formerly so sober, some insipid poetic 

 perfume. At other times we might say she had fallen back into child- 

 hood, so nice and finical has become the turn of her conversation. She 

 adds to it the movements of a little girl ; then all at once her language, 

 just now modest almost to puerility, breaks out into the most indeli- 

 cate flashes, into curiously improper expressions. She passes without 

 transition from the style Rambouillet and the Byronic paraphrase to 

 the coarse language of the fish-woman, and this without preparation, 

 provocation, or excuse. At the same time, the woman, the wife, the 

 mother, is transformed. The husband has assumed the proportions of 

 a tyrant, and the children seem to have become a burden." 



The last observation is true to the life. Nothing is more common 

 than to see a nervous woman, till now tender to her husband and chil- 

 dren, take a sudden disaffection or even a hatred against them. The 

 aversion manifested in such cases may be provoked by the most futile 

 causes, as, any insignificant external object, the shape of the beard, 



