“One day, therefore, I set in front of her two plates, one of soup, one of very sweet vanilla custard. I made her taste them alternately. Then I left her free to make a choice. She ate the plateful of custard.
“I soon made her very greedy, so greedy that she seemed to have nothing in her head but the idea, or rather the desire, of eating. She recognised dishes perfectly, holding out her hand towards those which she liked and eagerly seizing them. She cried when they were taken away.
“Then I had the notion of teaching her to come to the dining room at the sound of the bell. It took a long time, but I succeeded. In her vague understanding became firmly established a connection between the sound and the taste, a relation between two senses, an appeal from one to the other, and consequently a kind of concatenation of ideas, if one can call this sort of instinctive link between two organic functions an idea.
“I carried my experiment still further, and taught her—with what pains!—to recognise mealtimes on the dial of the clock.
“For a long time I was unable to call her attention to the hands, but I succeeded in making her notice the striking mechanism. The method I employed was simple: I stopped the ringing of the bell, and everyone rose to go to table when the little brass hammer struck twelve.
“I tried in vain to teach her to count the strokes. Every time she heard the chime she ran to the door; but little by little she must have realised that all the chimes had not the same value with regard to meals; and her eye, guided by her ear, was often fixed upon the dial.
“Noticing this, I took care to go every day at twelve and at six, and as soon as it came to the moment she was waiting for, I placed my finger on the figure twelve and on the figure six. I soon observed that she was following attentively the advance of the little brass hands, which I had often pushed round in her presence.
“She had understood! Or, it would be truer to say, she had grasped it. I had succeeded in awakening in her the knowledge, or rather the sensation, of time, in the same way as one succeeds with carp, though they have not the advantage of clocks, by feeding them at exactly the same moment every day.
“Once this result had been attained, all the timepieces in the house occupied her attention to the exclusion of everything else. She spent her life in looking at them, listening to them, waiting for the hours. A rather funny incident happened. The strike of a pretty Louis XVI clock, that was hanging over the head of her bed, ran down, and she noticed it. For twenty minutes she stared at the hands, waiting for ten o’clock to strike. But when the hand had passed the figure, she was left bewildered at hearing nothing, so bewildered that she remained sitting there, stirred no doubt by one of those strong emotions which lay hold on us in the face of great catastrophes. And she had the curious patience to sit in front of that little instrument until eleven o’clock, to see what would happen. Again she heard nothing, very naturally. Then, seized abruptly with the mad rage of a creature deceived and tricked, or with the terror inspired by a frightful mystery, or with the furious impatience of a passionate creature confronted by an obstacle, she seized the tongs from the fireplace and struck the clock with such force that she smashed it to pieces instantly.
“Her brain worked then, and calculated, in an obscure way, it is true, and within a very limited range, for I could not make her distinguish between people as she did between hours. In order to produce a stirring of intelligence in her mind, it was necessary to appeal to her passions, in the physical sense of the word.
“We soon had another proof of this; alas! it was a terrible one.
“She had grown into a superb creature; she was a true type of the race, an admirable stupid Venus.
“She was now sixteen, and I have rarely seen such perfection of form, suppleness, and regularity of features. I said she was a Venus; so she was, a fair, full-figured, vigorous Venus, with large eyes, clear and empty, blue like flax-flowers, and a large mouth with round, greedy, sensual lips, a mouth made for kisses.
“One morning her father came into my room with a curious expression, and sat down without even replying to my greeting.
“ ‘I want to speak to you about a very serious matter,’ he said. ‘Could … Berthe get married?’
“I started with surprise.
“ ‘Berthe get married!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s impossible!’
“ ‘Yes,’ he resumed, ‘I know … but think, doctor … you see … perhaps … we had hoped … if she had children … it would be a great shock for her, a great happiness … and who knows whether motherhood might not awaken her intelligence?’
“I was very perplexed. It was true. It was possible that the novelty of the experience, the wonderful maternal instinct which throbs in the hearts of beasts as strongly as in the hearts of women, which makes the hen fling herself upon the jaws of the dog in order to protect her little ones, might lead to a revolution, a violent disturbance in that dormant brain, might even set going the motionless mechanism of her mind.
“Suddenly, too, I remembered an example from my own experience. Some years previously I had owned a little bitch, a retriever, so stupid that I could get nothing out of her. She had puppies, and became in one day, not intelligent, but almost the equal of many poorly developed dogs.
“I had scarcely perceived this possibility before the longing increased in me to get Berthe married, not so much
