A tall girl afflicted
with chorea--St. Vitus's dance--was dancing with every limb, without a
pause, the left side of her face being continually distorted by sudden,
convulsive grimaces. A younger one, who followed, gave vent to a bark, a
kind of plaintive animal cry, each time that the tic douloureux which was
torturing her twisted her mouth and her right cheek, which she seemed to
throw forward. Next came the consumptives, trembling with fever,
exhausted by dysentery, wasted to skeletons, with livid skins, recalling
the colour of that earth in which they would soon be laid to rest; and
there was one among them who was quite white, with flaming eyes, who
looked indeed like a death's head in which a torch had been lighted. Then
every deformity of the contractions followed in succession--twisted
trunks, twisted arms, necks askew, all the distortions of poor creatures
whom nature had warped and broken; and among these was one whose right
hand was thrust back behind her ribs whilst her head fell to the left
resting fixedly upon her shoulder. Afterwards came poor rachitic girls
displaying waxen complexions and slender necks eaten away by sores, and
yellow-faced women in the painful stupor which falls on those whose
bosoms are devoured by cancers; whilst others, lying down with their
mournful eyes gazing heavenwards, seemed to be listening to the throbs of
the tumours which obstructed their organs. And still more and more went
by; there was always something more frightful to come; this woman
following that other one increased the general shudder of horror.
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