Pickwick Abroad: or, The Tour in France — page 351: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

290 | Pickwick Abroad. her throne—sense gave way before the hurricane of strange and wild fancies which seized upon his imagination—his brain whirled— and he became a madman ! | And then, instead of breathing sighs and vows @f love to the mid- night breeze from his dull lattice, he uttered blas mies, maledictions, and curses. His wild howlings even alarmed the very children of Mad- ness—that universal mother in our sad department of the Salpetriere —themselves ; and in order to prevent him from laying violent hands upon himself, he was manacled and bound to his couch. His father, who had long been mconsolable for his loss, set out m pursuit of his son, whom many believed to have committed suicide: but the old man clung to a faint hope, as the wretch, precipitated from the Tarpeian rock, would have striven to snatch at any bush or bramble that grew from the craggy side, to break his fall. The aged parent, in the decline of his years, with the snows of sixty winters upon his venerable head, and with the experience of sixty years of happiness to teach him to feel the more acutely a few weeks of misery, —that aged man set out to trace his son, and once more clasp his much-loved offspring in his arms. He was rich—aud he lavished his gold profusely and freely to obtain the information he so much sought after: he despatched messengers to the principal cities in Europe; and he himself remained in Paris to await tidings of his son. And when he had spent more than half his fortune in the pursuit of his object, and when four or five months had passed away in the pro- secution of his research, he learnt that he had all the while been near his son—that his son had not sought any of the cities to which the messengers were despatched—but that his son—his -heir—his only earthly joy—his son, John Melville, was confined in a mad-house! To the Salpetriere did the old man hasten; and when he was shown into the presence of his son, a sudden gleam of intelligence flashed across the brain of the maniac—he gazed Jong and wistfully upon the sorrowful countenance of his father—tears ran down his cheeks— he sobbed like a child—and the incipient dawn of returning reason speedily animated his countenance. In afew hours his manacles were taken off—he threw himself into the arms of his sire—and even spoke with the coherence of sanity. He then lay down to rest, and sank into a deep, deep sleep. An eminent physician—one of the most celebrated in Paris—was 1m- mediately summoned by the happy father, whose heart now beat high with hope; and having listened with the most profound attention to all the circumstances of the case, the medical adviser recommended the transportation of the patient to his father’s abode, so that, when he should awake, he might not find himself still in a tenement which would recal a thousand horrors to his mind. This counsel was im- mediately followed: John Melville was removed to the hotel in which his parent resided; and when he was aroused from the species of trance into which he had fallen, the powers of intelligence had entirely triumphed over the machinations of the deadly enemy, beneath whose influence they had so long succumbed. The advice of the physician was proved to be judicious in the extreme; and it was only when the mind of the young self-devoted victim was more or less prepared to receive the intelligence, that the assemblage of his ideas into one focus made him aware of a portion of the past, . EGomichbooks.co m