Then suddenly he had a hystero-epileptic attack--fifty hours of convulsions and ecstasy--and when he awoke from it he was no longer paralysed, no longer acquainted with tailoring, and no longer virtuous.

His memory was set back, so to say, to the moment of the viper's appearance, and he could remember nothing since.

His character had become violent, greedy, quarrelsome, and his tastes were radically changed.

For instance, though he had before the attack been a total abstainer, he now not only drank his own wine, but stole the wine of the other patients.

He escaped from Bonneval, and after a few turbulent years, tracked by his occasional relapses into hospital or madhouse, he turned up once more at the Rochefort asylum in the character of a private of marines, convicted of theft, but considered to be of unsound mind.