herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, and wonders if he is right that all
things exist only in the imagination; has a passion for such "abracadabrante
follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is grieved to feel them to be false;
longs to penetrate the intellectual world, to see, learn, and know everything;
admires Balzac because he describes so frankly all that he has felt; loves Fleury,
who has shown her a wider horizon; still has spells of admiring her dazzling
complexion and deploring that she can not go out alone; feels that she is losing
her grip on art and also on God, who no longer hears her prayers, and resolves to
kill herself if she is not famous at thirty.
At nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient cries, calls on
God, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears that the young French
prince about whom she has spun romances was killed by the Kaffirs; feels
herself growing serious and sensible; despises death; realizes that God is not
what she thought, but is perhaps Nature and Life or is perhaps Chance; she
thinks out possible pictures she might paint; develops a Platonic friendship for
her professor; might marry an old man with twenty-seven millions, but spurns
the thought; finds herself growing deaf gradually, and at nineteen finds three
grey hairs; has awful remorse for days, when she cannot work and so loses
herself in novels and cigarettes; makes many good resolutions and then commits
some folly as if in a dream; has spells of reviewing the past. When the doctor
finds a serious lung trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and
flannel, she at first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at the terror of
her friends, but gradually does all that is necessary; feels herself too precocious
and doomed; deplores especially that consumption will cost her her good looks;
has fits of intense anger alternating with tears; concludes that death is
annihilation; realizes the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her that
some time or other will come out; reads the New Testament again and returns to
belief in miracle, and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; distributes one thousand
francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow through her brain at
night and the strange sensations by day. Her eye symptoms cause her to fear
blindness again; she grows superstitious, believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is
strongly impelled to embrace and make up with her mother; at times defies God
and death; sees a Spanish bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of
human cowardice, but has a strange intoxication with blood and would like to
thrust a lance into the neck of every one she meets; coquets a great deal with the
thought of marriage; takes up her art and paints a few very successful pictures;
tries to grapple with the terrible question, "What is my unbiased opinion
concerning myself?" pants chiefly for fame. When the other lung is found