228 ON THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN MENTAL 



cate with her on the subject of her grief, and to offer to her that 

 consolation which neither heaven nor earth could bestow or afford. 

 I should have said that, in addition to the other conceits which tor- 

 mented her, her mind was uneasy with regard to a sura of money 

 which she had borrowed, and in default of the repayment of which 

 the creditor had threatened her with imprisonment. Mephistophi- 

 les accosted her with his usual insinuating politeness, with the 

 sophistry which ruined Faustus, and the gilded temptation which 

 has blasted and destroyed the happiness of thousands more: he 

 promised to find her the money if she would make over to him her 

 body, promising that her spirit should continue to wander through 

 air and earth, through flood and fire, unharmed and imperishable, 

 insensible to pain, unexcited by pleasure, and, like Ladurlad, free 

 from all the various kinds of death which the united force of physi- 

 cal agents could inflict. She consented. She pricked her thumb — 

 and signed the deed. Instantly, flames burst out around her, tor- 

 rents rushed over her, the whirlwind and the tornado encircled her 

 — but she was free from the violence of all. The devil had taken 

 her body, her ghost only was left ; and material agents could no 

 more hurt her than they could affect the Being that created them. 

 So firmly convinced is, or was, this poor creature that all that had 

 passed was true, and not a creation of her own disordered fancy, 

 that she affirmed she had attempted to drown, to burn, and to hang 

 herself; for she was convinced that she was a spiritual and not a 

 corporeal being, and, therefore, the things of earth had no power 

 over her. The physician who attended her declared that he had, at 

 her request, passed a small dagger through the fleshy part of her 

 arm, and that she was totally insensible to pain.* Such t?icks hath 

 strong Imagination. 



Hallucination partakes not only of the character of the individual 

 in whom it occurs, but likewise of the nature of the disease which 

 produced it. The last, however, is, in reality, so strictly dependent 

 upon the first — i. e., the form of disease is so influenced by the 

 temperament or constitution of the individual in whom it originates 

 — that the second of these states may be considered merely as a 

 morbid modification of the former. The hallucinations of hysteria, 

 hypochondria, fever, and inflammation of the brain, will illustrate 

 this point. Those attendant upon hysteria are of a lively and vo- 

 latile character ; the patient fancies herself attended by the most 



• This case, originally observed and related by Esquirol, is to be found in 

 the Diclionnaire ties Sciences Mtdicales : art. Demonomania. 



