fit is over. The attack is marked by a complete absence of mind. The intellectual life is entirely suspended, but is resumed at the end of the fit, just as if nothing had taken place. If a remark has been begun and is interrupted, it is resumed on recovery at the point where it was interrupted.
We call these attacks indifferently demoniac fits or fits of hystero-epilepsy, because it was believed for a long time that demons were the real living agents that provoked the terrible morbid phenomena. The symptoms are the same, and it is only necessary to read the description of the demoniac attacks of the past to recognize their identity in all points with the hystero-epileptic fits of the present. Esprit de Bosrager, a Capuchin father, who was charged with the exorcising of the nuns of Louviers,[1] tells pertinently to this point: "On the day of Pentecost (1644), the same Dagon (this was the name of the devil that possessed Sister Marie du Saint Esprit) kept up for four good hours the greatest rebellion that could be imagined to prevent the girl from communicating, and during all this time he made her suffer extraordinary convulsions, threw her to the ground several times, forced her to make a hundred leaps, a hundred courses round the church, made her push at people, strike them, and throw them down . . . . Oh, what astonishing motions! what wonderful contortions! what furious rolling, sometimes into a ball, sometimes into horrible shapes! What numerous and rude convulsions in such delicate creatures, and with so frequent repetition and reënforcement! I should have to be persuaded very much, I assure you, before I would believe that sensible and judicious men would make all those convulsions pass for disease and all those wonderful movements and rollings for juggler's tricks. But what ought to convince every human mind as by a demonstration, what admits of no reply, and what all the famous doctors have acknowledged, is this: that it is quite impossible that convulsions, and such terrible ones, should come naturally by disease, should last so long, should return so frequently, should not leave lassitude after they had passed, and, finally, that they should not destroy the subject."
With all respect to the brave Capuchin, these spells of demonomania are a veritable disease. We are able to class the symptoms, distinguish the phases, the beginning, the middle, and the end, and we can affirm that the "wonderful rollings" of Sister Marie de Louviers belong to the second period of the hystero-epileptic fit.
The strange acrobatic attitudes which characterized the preceding phase are not observed in the third period. The limbs are no longer
- ↑ "La Piété Affligée"; or, "An Historical and Theological Discourse on the Possession of the Nuns called of St. Elizabeth at Louviers, by Esprit de Bosrager, Capuchin, Rouen, 1752," pp. 257. This is the work, otherwise very curious, which Michelet calls an immortal book in the annals of human folly. The author's style may be judged from the quotation.
