Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 06

								

discern his assailant.  He at length succeeded, however, in freeing
himself, and casting the intended assassin on the ground.  He shouted for
assistance; and the lights borne by the servants who rushed into the room
revealed to him the face of his brother-in-law.  Cesarini, though in
strong convulsions, still uttered cries and imprecations of revenge; he
denounced De Montaigne as a traitor and a murderer!  In the dark
confusion of his mind, he had mistaken the guardian for the distant foe,
whose name sufficed to conjure up the phantoms of the dead, and plunge
reason into fury.
It was now clear that there was danger and death in Cesarini's disease.
His madness was pronounced to be capable of no certain and permanent
cure; he was placed at a new asylum (the superintendents of which were
celebrated for humanity as well as skill), a little distance from
Versailles, and there he still remained.  Recently his lucid intervals
had become more frequent and prolonged; but trifles that sprang from his
own mind, and which no care could prevent or detect, sufficed to renew
his calamity in all its fierceness.  At such times he required the most
unrelaxing vigilance, for his madness ever took an alarming and ferocious
character; and had he been left unshackled, the boldest and stoutest of
the keepers would have dreaded to enter his cell unarmed, or alone.
What made the disease of the mind appear more melancholy and confirmed
was, that all this time the frame seemed to increase in health and
strength.  This is not an uncommon case in instances of mania--and it is
generally the worst symptom.  In earlier youth, Cesarini had been
delicate even to effeminacy; but now his proportions were enlarged, his
form, though still lean and spare, muscular and vigorous,--as if in the
torpor which usually succeeded to his bursts of frenzy, the animal
portion gained by the repose or disorganization of the intellectual.
When in his better and calmer mood--in which indeed none but the
experienced could have detected his malady--books made his chief delight.
But then he complained bitterly, if briefly, of the confinement he
endured, of the injustice be suffered; and as, shunning all companions,
he walked gloomily amidst the grounds that surrounded that House of Woe,
his unseen guardians beheld him clenching his hands, as at some visionary
enemy, or overheard him accuse some phantom of his brain of the torments
he endured.
Though the reader can detect in Lumley Ferrers the cause of the frenzy,
and the object of the imprecation, it was not so with the De Montaignes,
nor with the patient's keepers and physicians; for in his delirium he
seldom or never gave name to the shadows that he invoked,--not even to
that of Florence.  It is, indeed, no unusual characteristic of madness to
shun, as by a kind of cunning, all mention of the names of those by whom
the madness has been caused.  It is as if the unfortunates imagined that