Passion and criminality in France : a legal and literary study / by Louis Proal ; translated from the French by A. R. Allinsom [!].

  • Proal, Louis, 1843-
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Passion and criminality in France : a legal and literary study / by Louis Proal ; translated from the French by A. R. Allinsom [!]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    39/720 (page 5)
    unable to work. Seeing him so pensive and melancholy, I was struck by his sombre looks and I asked him what he was thinking about. He replied, I am thinking of her. I have myself known a case where a young lover, being unable to work in consequence of the one idea that paralysed his energies, was refused the girl whose hand he had asked for ; the latter's family judged him a hopeless idler and sent him about his business, whereas the poor fellow's sole and only crime was to be too deep in love. His despair led to suicide.— I cannot work any more, writes another workman who had been disappointed in love, my head is half mad ; I must give up my work.—A young work-girl, who lately committed suicide at Marseilles together with a young man she wished to marry, because the latter's mother was opposed to the match, had struck her companions by her dreamy, dis- traught and self-absorbed looks. One of her friends, speaking of her to me, said : She was wrapped up in her own thoughts ; if you spoke to her, it was an evident effort to her to answer, and she seemed to be waking out of a dream. Finding an account in a newspaper of a young girl's suicide, she exclaimed, A happy woman, that ! Death has no terrors for a girl suffering from balked or slighted love; it may even be said to have attractions for her. Love in fact longs for death, when it cannot satisfy its craving for union, for complete fusion, for one common life. I read in a farewell letter to his father written by a student, driven desperate by his mistress's unfaithfulness, that death was calling to him, luring him on, and had an irresistible attraction for him. Corneille has noted the fact in the lines : L'amour au désespoir ne peut craindre la mort ; Dans un pareil naufrage, elle ouvre un heureux port. ^ These pangs of unhappy Love arise from an imperious ^ How should despairing Love fear death? In such a shipwreck of the soul, death is a happy harbour of refuge. La Toison d'Or, Act iii. Sc. 5.