This precaution saved my life. In fact, dinner was hardly over and the game of loto begun, when I felt most uncomfortable. I went to my room, where atrocious pains seized upon me, and a doctor was sent for. After a careful investigation, the doctor discovered that a powerful layer of verdigris had formed in the stewpan in which the ragoût had been cooked and said I was poisoned.
The consequences of this poisoning were most terrible to me: for some time my life was despaired of, but eventually the sufferings seemed to be modified by the gentle care bestowed on me, and I was granted some slight relief. Strangely enough, it was not till this second phase of my illness, when the doctor declared me out of danger, that I was haunted by a certainty of speedy death, to which was joined an immoderate desire to end my days in the bosom of my family. This idea--a species of monomania--incessantly assailed me, and I soon had no other thought than that of escaping to Blois. As I could not hope to obtain the doctor's permission to set out, when his most urgent advice was to take care of myself, I determined to take leave.
At six o'clock one morning, taking advantage of a moment when I was left to myself, I hastily dressed, went down stairs, and found a stage-coach just starting for Blois. I entered the rotonde, in which I happened to be the only passenger, and the coach, lightly laden as it was, soon set off at full gallop.
The journey was a horrible martyrdom to me. I was devoured by a burning fever, and my head seemed to be burst asunder by every jolt of the vehicle. In my frenzy I tried to escape my agony, and yet it was continually increasing. Unable to endure longer, I opened the door of the compartment, and leaped, at an imminent risk of my life, on to the high road, where I fell in a state of insensibility.
I cannot say what happened to me after my fainting fit; I can only remember long days of vague and painful existence, that appeared of eternal duration: I was in a raging fever; my dreams were frightful, and I suffered from the most dreadful hallucinations. One of them was incessantly recurring--it seemed as if my head opened like a snuff-box; a doctor, with turned-up cuffs, and armed with an enormous pair of iron pincers, drew from my brain roasted chesnuts, which immediately burst like bombs, and scattered myriads of scintillations before my eyes.