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I resolved to fast most rigorously. At night, during my sleep, nature found its own solution, and I was horribly afraid of the visible result, as though it was my fault. I increased the strictness of my abstinence and my care to avoid all sinful thoughts. This continual internal strife finally brought me to a stupid and idiotic state of mind.
My constrained abstinence caused a sensitiveness or rather an irritation in my nervous system, that I had never suspected before.
I often felt giddy, it seemed to me that everything was turning round and I was spinning round also. If my eyes chanced to fall on a young girl, she appeared instantly to me to be some fairy princess resplendent with a thousand magic lights.
The humour of my body, too copious and ever overheated, ran to my head, and its waves beating against the walls of my brain, caused me a sort of dazzling mirage.
This morbid condition had lasted for several months, when one morning I felt all at once a violent contraction and tension in all my limbs, followed by a terrible and convulsive movement, as if I was going to have an epileptic fit. The sensation of dazzling lights before my eyes returned
