give rise to the affection. Thus hysteria is common in Paris and other large cities where girls of the lower and middle classes receive an education superior to their social condition. Such girls seldom find the ideal husband of whom they have dreamed. Marriage affords them no relief from the sordid difficulties that occur daily, and the narrow ' cares of the household afford an insufficient satisfaction to the vast aspirations of a disordered imagination. Misery, want, grief, etc., often cause the symptoms of hysteria to appear in girls and young women who have only a slight predisposition to it. To sum it all up, hysteria has a physiological cause—heredity; and a social cause—the inferiority of the reality to the dream.
Light hysteria is not a true disease. It is one of the varieties of the female character. We might say that hysterical persons are women more than other women. They have lively and transient feelings, brilliant and variable fancies, and, withal, inability to bring their feelings and fancies under the rule of reason and judgment. The novelists have appreciated the advantage which they could derive from the study of this form of character, and have given us numerous pictures of attacks of hysteria, and of women who were subject to them. Their efforts have not always been fortunate, but occasionally they furnish exact descriptions which complement what we have just said respecting the psychical state of nervous women.
M. Octave Feuillet makes the husband of a woman who suffers from hysteria speak in a manner that, without pronouncing the word, projects the symptoms of the affection so plainly that there can be no mistake in the diagnosis. Thus: "That woman of the world," said M. de Marsan, "has suddenly borrowed from the prisoners a set of bitter, curt, desperate phrases, like those we may read on the walls of the cells. That woman of sense has all at once given herself up to the reading of the least reserved poets and novelists. . . . I inspire with terror from her elocution, formerly so sober, some insipid poetic perfume. At other times we might say she had fallen back into childhood, so nice and finical has become the turn of her conversation. She adds to it the movements of a little girl; then all at once her language, just now modest almost to puerility, breaks out into the most indelicate flashes, into curiously improper expressions. She passes without transition from the style Rambouillet and the Byronic paraphrase to the coarse language of the fish-woman, and this without preparation, provocation, or excuse. At the same time, the woman, the wife, the mother, is transformed. The husband has assumed the proportions of a tyrant, and the children seem to have become a burden."
The last observation is true to the life. Nothing is more common than to see a nervous woman, till now tender to her husband and children, take a sudden disaffection or even a hatred against them. The aversion manifested in such cases may be provoked by the most futile causes, as, any insignificant external object, the shape of the beard,
