Explore "The Mad Woman" by Guy de Maupassant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
That reminds me of a terrible story of the Franco-Prussian war (said Monsieur d'Endolin). You know my house in the faubourg de Cormeil. I was living there when the Prussians came, and I had for a neighbour a kind of mad woman, who had lost her senses in consequence of a series of misfortunes, as at the age of twenty-five she had lost her father, her husband and her newly born child, all in the space of a month.
When death has once entered a house, it almost invariably returns immediately, as if it knew the way, and the young woman, overwhelmed with grief, took to her bed and was delirious for six weeks. Then, a species of calm lassitude succeeded that violent crisis, and she remained motionless, eating next to nothing, and only moving her eyes. Every time they tried to make her get up, she screamed as if they were about to kill her, and so they ended by leaving her continually in bed, and only taking her out to wash her, to change her linen and to turn her mattress.