's ward, bed No. 10. The doctors were
astonished at my case; they say it is _purpura_. I should say it
was! The purple of the Roman emperors was not, I am very sure, as
purple as my envelope.... My disease is now in a stage of
reaction, and the doctors do not know what to do, I cannot walk
thirty paces without stumbling. I have thousands of trumpets
blowing flourishes in my ears. I have been bled, re-bled,
mustard-plastered, all in vain. I have swallowed down my poor
throat more arsenic than any three melodramatists of the
Boulevards. I do not know how all this is going to end. The
physician tells me that he will cure me, but that it will take
time. To-day they are going to put all sorts of things on my body,
and among them leeches to remove my giddiness.... I am greatly
fatigued by my life here, and I pass some; very gloomy days,--and
they are the gloomier, because there is not a single day but I see
in the ward next to mine men die thick as flies. A hospital may be
very poetical, but it is, too, a sad, sad place."
Many and many a time afterwards did he return to the hospital, all sad
as it was.
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