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“That is Mademoiselle Victorine Taillefer.”

I grew dizzy.

“Her step-mother,” continued my neighbor, “has lately taken her from a convent, where she was finishing, rather late in the day, her education. For a long time her father refused to recognize her. She comes here for the first time. She is very beautiful and very rich.”

These words were accompanied by a sardonic smile.

At this moment we heard violent, but smothered outcries; they seemed to come from a neighboring apartment and to be echoed faintly back through the garden.

“Isn’t that the voice of Monsieur Taillefer?” I said.

We gave our full attention to the noise; a frightful moaning reached our ears. The wife of the banker came hurriedly towards us and closed the window.

“Let us avoid a scene,” she said. “If Mademoiselle Taillefer hears her father, she might be thrown into hysterics.”

The banker now re-entered the salon, looked round for Victorine, and said a few words in her ear. Instantly the young girl uttered a cry, ran to the door, and disappeared. This event produced a great sensation. The card-players paused. Every one questioned his neighbor. The murmur of voices swelled, and groups gathered.

“Can Monsieur Taillefer be–” I began.

“–dead?” said my sarcastic neighbor. “You would wear the gayest mourning, I fancy!”

“But what has happened to him?”

“The poor dear man,” said the mistress of the house, “is subject to attacks of a disease the name of which I never can remember, though Monsieur Brousson has often told it to me; and he has just been seized with one.”

“What is the nature of the disease?” asked an examining-judge.

“Oh, it is something terrible, monsieur,” she replied. “The doctors know no remedy. It causes the most dreadful suffering. One day, while the unfortunate man was staying at my country-house, he had an attack, and I was obliged to go away and stay with a neighbor to avoid hearing him; his cries were terrible; he tried to kill himself; his daughter was obliged to have him put into a strait-jacket and fastened to his bed. The poor man declares there are live animals in his head gnawing his brain; every nerve quivers with horrible shooting pains, and he writhes in torture. He suffers so much in his head that he did not even feel the moxas they used formerly to apply to relieve it; but Monsieur Brousson, who is now his physician, has forbidden that remedy, declaring that the trouble is a nervous affection, an inflammation of the nerves, for which leeches should be applied to the neck, and opium to the head. As a result, the attacks are not so frequent; they appear now only about once a year, and always late in the autumn. When he recovers, Taillefer says repeatedly that he would far rather die than endure such torture.”

“Then he must suffer terribly!” said a broker, considered a wit, who was present.

“Oh,” continued the mistress of the house, “last year he nearly died in one of these attacks. He had gone alone to his country-house on pressing business. For want, perhaps, of immediate help, he lay twenty-two hours stiff and stark as though he were dead. A very hot bath was all that saved him.”

“It must be a species of lockjaw,” said one of the guests.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He got the disease in the army nearly thirty years ago. He says it was caused by a splinter of wood entering his head from a shot on board a boat. Brousson hopes to cure him. They say the English have discovered a mode of treating the disease with prussic acid–“

At that instant a still more piercing cry echoed through the house, and froze us with horror.

“There! that is what I listened to all day long last year,” said the banker’s wife. “It made me jump in my chair and rasped my nerves dreadfully. But, strange to say, poor Taillefer, though he suffers untold agony, is in no danger of dying. He eats and drinks as well as ever during even short cessations of the pain–nature is so queer! A German doctor told him it was a form of gout in the head, and that agrees with Brousson’s opinion.”