Great
ladies, more especially, often came to him on the spur of the moment,
prompted to seek his solace by sudden attacks of the nerves. A lover had
used them ill, perhaps, or a husband had turned upon them and had rent a
long dressmaker's bill into fragments, without paying it first. Or the
_ennui_ of an exquisite life of unbridled pleasure had suddenly sprung
upon them like a grisly spectre, torn their hearts, shaken them into
tears. Or--and this happened often--a fantastic recognition of the
obvious fact that even butterflies must die, had abruptly started into
their minds, obtruding a skeleton head above the billowing _chiffons_,
rattling its bones until the dismal sound outvied the _frou-frou_ of
silk, the burr of great waving fans, the click of high heels from Paris.
Then, in terror, they drove to Doctor Levillier's door and begged to see
him, if only for a moment.
There was no doctor in London so universally sought by the sane lunatics
of society as Dr. Levillier. He was no mad-doctor. He had no private
asylum. He had never definitely aimed at becoming a famous specialist in
lunacy. But the pretty lunatics came to him, nevertheless; the lunatics
who live at afternoon parties, till the grave yawns at their feet, and
they must go down the strange ways of another world, teacup in hand,
scandal still fluttering upon their ashy lip; the lunatics who live
for themselves, until their eyes are hollow as tombs and their mouths
fall in from selfishness, and their cheeks are a greenish white from
satiety, and lust's gratified flame beacons on their drawn cheeks and
along their crawling wrinkles; the lunatics who seek to be what they can
never be, the beauties of this world, the great Queens of the Sun, whose
gaze shall glorify, whose smile shall crown and bless, whose touch shall
call hearts to agony and to worship, whose word shall take a man from
his plough and send him out to win renown, or snatch a leader from his
ambition and set him creeping in the dust, like a white mouse prisoned
by a scarlet silken thread; the lunatics who dandle religions like dolls,
and play with faiths as a boy plays with marbles, until the moment comes
when the game is over, and the player is faced by the terror of a great
lesson; the lunatics who stare away their days behind prancing horses in
the Park, who worship in the sacred groves of bonnets, who burn incense
to rouged and powdered fashions, who turn literature into a "movement,"
and art into a cult, and humanity into a bogey, and love into an
adulterous sensation; the lunatics who think that to "live" is only
another word for to sin, that innocence is a prison and vice liberty; the
lunatics who fill their boudoirs with false gods, and cry everlastingly,
"Baal, hear us!" till the fire comes down from heaven, which is no
painted ceiling presided over by a plaster god.
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