In consequence of mental
isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young
Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms
which he thus describes:--
"I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start,
thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic
school, or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was
pouring into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed
up. And when these impressions were past, all day long without
respite I suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation,
verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God,
lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before
that I had never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned
in that direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had
impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and
all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.
"But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of
heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of
anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to.
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