Case XXXVII

R. was born of parents without fortune; his education was far from being religious. At fourteen, he might have obtained favors from a young girl, but denied himself on thinking of God. In fact, that thought seemed to have employed him from childhood. At eighteen, his understanding seemed to enlarge, and all the exterior phenomena of the world appeared unveiled to his sight; he saw all creation, as it were, in a coup d'aeil. The sight of a corrupt world saddened him more and more; that did not, however, prevent his learning the trade of a wheelwright, by which he afterwards gained a livelihood. His love for changing his location and acquaintances increased; he seemed invariably driven towards a result unknown to himself; he thought that God called him somewhere.

In 1825, the jubilee took place. R. took part in it, fervently, and joined, in preaching, with the most eloquent missionaries. At that time his first revelations took place; it appeared to him that, from the epigastrium, where he always felt a sensation of heat, words were very distinctly pronounced, not such as sound on the ear, but very easily distinguished from them. These words, which formed prophecies and parables, plunged R. into ecstasies. His appetite failed, sleep vanished, and he passed the nights in prayer.

During one of these excited nights, R. suddenly saw a luminous disk as large, but not so bright, as the sun, appear in the clouds; a voice proceeded from the disk that said: "The children whom I bless, shall be blessed; but those whom I curse, shall be cursed to the third and fourth generation." R., who recognized the voice of God, entered into communication with the uncreated, addressing many questions which were not all replied to. The conversation lasted three-quarters of an hour.

R. began to understand what were God's intentions towards him; finally, the Deity told him to go to rest.

The words pronounced from the epigastrium were very different from those proceeding from the vision. In the latter, the words precisely resembled those which are orally heard, which was not the case with the words (epigastric) of the revelations. The vision decided the fate of B.; he was the Messiah, who should come, at the end of time, to draw all nations to the same belief, and to prepare the last judgment. It was in this quality that he commenced prophesying to his fellow-workmen, and that he requested audiences with the Abbe M., a priest of Charles the Tenth's court, and with the Archbishop of Paris. Being unable to succeed in the latter point, he, one day during mass, scaled the grating of the metropolitan choir, in order, he said, to be arrested, that he might thus make known the plans he could not otherwise communicate. He had his wish. He was taken to the police-office.

If we allow the reality of B.'s visions, then, indeed, he is no madman - but what he pretends to be, the Messiah. Prior to his vision - prior to his greatest revelations, he did not know the Scriptures; it was only subsequently that he studied them, and very artfully applied them to his belief, even the Apocalypse, in which he found a clear meaning. "Jesus Christ," said he," is the Son of God; he came to prepare the way, but he is not the Messiah; that is nowhere written." When he spoke of the misery reserved for the wicked at the end of time, his eyes overflowed with tears; he sighed over their future torments, and then his countenance assumed an elevated expression, not a little extraordinary.

He believed in the evil spirit, and spoke of him with pain; he had a singular theory of hell. "Thither," said he, "go all the sounds that are lost on earth, all the lights and fires that vanish in the air; but punishments will not be eternal, at least for those who were placed there before the last judgment."

At the end of fourteen months, he was found so disposed to postpone, until a more favorable time, his projects of reform that, under a regular certificate, he was restored to society. *

* Observations sur la Folie sensoriale, par Le1ut, p. 284. Du Demon de Socrate, 1 vol. in 8vo., 1834.

This case may be placed amongst those cited to establish the analogy which exists between hallucinated persons and the founders of religion. However painful to humanity may be the opinion of those who represent it as touched with madness relative to many questions of a social nature, and with respect to the realisation of thoughts which appear to us, and to others, the conceptions of genius, we believe that this apparent parity should be opposed by more direct reasons. We do not discover in R. that strong will, logical reasoning, and fixity of purpose that belong to those having a providential mission. His was a weak mind inflamed with religious ideas, which, like many of that temper, he exaggerated, until, finally, all his actions had reference thereto. Instead of marching at the head of his ideas, commanding them in person, being their promoter, their standard, he could neither originate nor develop them; they drew him along, or, rather, they absorbed him. The man of genius controls and directs his idea, and makes it fruitful. The madman has no power over his; he follows it as its shadow, and obeys all its caprices. In short, one is the king of his idea, the other the slave.

In the case of R., there are multiplied proofs of madness. It is God who tells him to go to bed; it is his stomach that speaks to him. Scaling the grating of the cathedral was the act of a madman; had he been master of himself, he would have known that it would lead to the police-office and the madhouse. Thence ho proved that he no longer looked sanely on things, and that several of his intellectual faculties were injured.

Nevertheless, we have always observed, in the great number of cases of hallucination that have come under our notice during more than twenty years, that, by the side of a well-sustained reasoning, which appeared the result of an idea, was placed an incoherent word or a whimsical act - in a word, the seed of madness.

Hallucinations of the Touch. - These have been considered very difficult to study, because they have been confounded with neuralgic and visceral affections; but there are doubtless some hallucinated quite capable of describing their sensations, who speak confidently of having been pinched and struck, and who had received electric shocks on various parts of the body. Latterly we examined, in company with Messrs. Foville, Mi-chon, and Seguin, a young man who declared that magnetizers were every moment darting magnetic fluid into his breast, his back, and arms, and that he sensibly felt the contact of that agent. He had no neuralgic affection.