man named Camille, but at the end of a year her affianced died of a brain-fever. She was shut up during the funeral, to prevent a scene, but got out of the window, ran to the cemetery, and wanted to throw herself into the grave. She was confined again, but went to the cemetery in the night, calling on her lover and wishing to dig up his body. She was afterward seized with a nervous fit, during which she appeared to be dead, and continued for about twenty-four hours in a complete lethargy. After two years more of residence in the asylum she seemed to have nearly recovered; then, at seventeen years of age, she took a situation as chambermaid at Poitiers. Her nervous attacks returned in a few weeks; she pretended to be pregnant, was believed, and was sent to the hospital to be confined. The deception was soon exposed, but her attacks had assumed a graver form; she was indomitable and rebellious to all discipline, and was sent to an insane asylum. While the physician was treating her with belladonna, she hid her daily doses of pills for ten days, and then took them all at once. They nearly killed her, but she recovered. She maimed her chest with a pair of scissors, and could not tell why she had done it. She ran away from the hospital and went to Paris, but was attacked again and sent back. She was transferred to the insane asylum at Toulouse, but escaped from there and returned to Paris, walking all the way, if her story is to be believed, dressed in the uniform of the asylum, sleeping in the woods, undressing herself to wash her linen, living on bread which she asked for at the farmhouses, and being three months on the road. She made up her mind, under the pressure of hunger, to beg in spite of her pride, saying that our Lord had asked for alms, and she could do what he had done. She was arrested at a railroad-station for tearing down the placards from the walls. She was taken back to the Salpêtrière, where she gave birth to a daughter in 1867. She escaped in 1870, and became an attendant in the hospital of St. Antoine, but gave way to violence in a dispute with a nun, and was discharged. She started to go to see her daughter in Burgundy after the armistice was signed, but was detained by the Prussians, returned to Paris, and went back to the Salpêtrière. At one time, having read in the papers the stories about the miraculous Louise Lateau, she desired to go to Belgium to visit "her sister." She was attacked with a fit on the way, and met with adventures in Brussels which prevented her making her visit. She finally returned to the Salpêtrière in 1877, and has been there ever since. She suffers from frequent demoniac attacks, but is generally quite docile and reasonable in a certain measure, ready to tell, to any one who will listen to it, her long and improbable history.[1]
The story of G—— will be read with more interest, if we are able to realize that two hundred and fifty years ago she would have been exorcised, or condemned as a witch and burned alive.
- ↑ For a more detailed narrative of the facts relative to G——, see the "Iconographie Photographique," part i., pp. 65, et seq.
