Berthe
My old friend—sometimes one has friends much older than oneself—my old friend Doctor Bonnet had often invited me to stay with him at his house at Riom. I did not know Auvergne at all, and I decided to go and see him about the middle of the summer of 1876.
I arrived on the morning train, and the first figure I saw upon the station platform was the doctor’s. He was dressed in grey, and wore a round black broad-brimmed soft felt hat, whose very high crown narrowed as it rose, like the chimney of an anthracite stove; it was a true Auvergne hat, and positively smelt of charcoal-burning. Clad thus, the doctor had the appearance of an old young man, with his slender body wrapped in the light-coloured coat, and his large head with its white hair.
He embraced me with the manifest pleasure of a provincial greeting the arrival of a long-desired friend. Extending his arm and pointing all round him he exclaimed proudly:
“Here is Auvergne.”
I saw nothing but a line of mountains in front of me, whose summits, like truncated cones, must have been extinct volcanoes.
Then, raising his finger towards the name of the town written upon the front of the station, he said:
“Riom, fatherland of magistrates, pride of the law courts, which should rather have been the fatherland of doctors.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” he answered with a laugh. “Turn the name round and you have ‘mori’—to die … That’s why I installed myself in this neighbourhood, young man.”
And, delighted with his jest, he led me away, rubbing his hands.
As soon as I had swallowed a cup of coffee, I had to go and see the old city. I admired the chemist’s house, and the other notable houses, all black, but as pretty as toy houses, with their fronts of carved stone. I admired the statue of the Virgin, patron saint of butchers, and even heard, in this connection, the story of an amusing adventure which I will relate some other day, when Doctor Bonnet said to me:
“Now I must beg five minutes in which to go and see a patient, and then I will take you up the hill of Châtel-Guyon, so as to show you, before lunch, the general view of the town and of the whole range of the Puy-de-Dôme. You can wait on the pavement; I’m only going straight up and down again.”
He left me opposite one of those old provincial mansions, dark, closed, silent, gloomy. This one seemed to me to have a particularly melancholy physiognomy, and I soon discovered the reason. All the large windows on the first floor were blocked up to half their height by stout wooden shutters. Only the top halves opened, as though someone had wished to prevent the creatures shut up in this vast stone box from seeing into the street.
When the doctor came down again, I told him what I had noticed.
“You were not mistaken,” he replied; “the poor creature shut up in there must never see what is going on outside. She’s a madwoman, or rather an idiot, or an imbecile—what you Normans call a ‘Niente.’
“Yes, it’s a sad story, and an extraordinary pathological case into the bargain. Would you like me to tell it you?”
I told him yes.
“Well,” he went on, “here it is, then. Twenty years ago now, the owners of that house, my employers, had a child, a girl, just like any other girl.
“But I soon saw that although the body of the little creature was developing admirably, her intelligence was remaining dormant.
“She walked at a very early age, but she absolutely refused to speak. At first I thought her deaf; then, later, I found out that she could hear perfectly, but did not understand. Violent noises made her tremble; they frightened her, but she could never trace the cause of them.
“She grew up; she was superb, and dumb, dumb through lack of intelligence. I tried every means to bring a gleam of light into her brain; nothing was of avail. I fancied that she recognised her nurse; once weaned, she did not recognise her mother. She never knew how to speak that word, the first uttered by children, the last murmured by soldiers dying on the battlefield: ‘Mother.’ Sometimes she attempted inarticulate mutterings, but nothing more.
“When the weather was fine, she laughed all the time, uttering gentle cries like the twittering of a bird; when it rained, she wept and groaned in a melancholy, terrifying way like the mourning of dogs howling round a corpse.
“She liked to roll in the grass like a young animal, and run about like a mad creature, and every morning she clapped her hands if she saw the sun coming into her room. When the window was opened, she clapped her hands and moved about in her bed, so as to make them dress her at once.
“She seemed to draw no distinction between people, between her mother and her servant, between her father and me, between the coachman and the cook.
“I was fond of her unhappy parents, and went to see them almost every day. I often dined with them, which made me notice that Berthe (she had been named Berthe) appeared to recognise the dishes and prefer some to others.
“She was twelve years old at that time. She looked like a girl of eighteen, and was taller than I am.
“So the idea came into my head of developing her greed, and of attempting by this means to introduce a sense of difference into her mind, of forcing her, by the difference between tastes, by the scale of flavours, if not to think, at least to make instinctive distinctions, which would be if nothing else a physical stirring of her brain.
“In appealing to her senses, and carefully choosing those which would best serve our purpose, we were bound
