25

25. On not pretending to be ill

[Molière may have been thinking of this chapter when his Imaginary Invalid wondered: ‘Is there not some danger in pretending to be ill?’]

[A] There is an epigram of Martial’s – a good one, for there are all kinds in his book – in which he amusingly tells of Coelius who pretended to suffer from gout in order to avoid having to pay court to some of the Roman grandees, be present at their levees, wait upon them and join their followers. To make his excuse more plausible he would cover his legs with ointment, wrap them in bandages and in every way counterfeit the gait and appearance of sufferers from the gout. In the end Fortune favoured him by giving it to him:

Tantum cura potest et ars doloris, Desiit fingere Cælius podagram.

[So much can care and the art of pain! Coelius has no longer to feign to be gouty.]1

I have read somewhere in Appian [C] I think [A] a similar tale of a man who sought to escape from a declaration of outlawry by the Roman Triumvirate and to hide from his pursuers; he remained in hiding, took on a disguise, deciding in addition to pretend to be blind in one eye. When he was able to recover a little liberty and wanted to rid himself of the plaster which he had worn so long over his eye, he found that he had actually lost the sight of that eye while under the mask. It is possible that his power of sight had been weakened by not having being exercised for such a long time and that his visual powers had all transferred to the other eye: for we can plainly feel that when we cover one eye it transfers to its fellow some part of its activity so that the remaining eye grows and becomes swollen; similarly for that gouty man in Martial: lack of use, together with the heat of his ointments and bandages, may well have concentrated upon his leg some gouty humour.

Since I read in Froissart2 of the vow taken by a troop of some young English noblemen to keep their left eyes covered until they had crossed into France and achieved some great deed of arms against us, I have often been obsessed by the thought that it may have befallen them as it did to those others and that when they came back to greet the ladies for whose sake they had done such deeds they would all have become blind in one eye.

Mothers are right to scold their children when they play at being one-eyed, limping or squinting or having other such deformities; for, leaving aside the fact that their tender bodies may indeed acquire some bad habit from this, it seems to me that Fortune (though I do not know how) delights in taking us at our word: I have heard of many examples of people falling ill after pretending to be so.

[C] Whether riding or walking I have always been used to burdening my hand with a cane or stick, even affecting an air of elegance by leaning on it with a distinguished look on my face. Several people have warned me that one day Fortune may change this affectation into a necessity. I comfort myself with the thought that, if so, I would be the first of my tribe to get the gout!

[A] But let us stretch out this chapter and stick on to it a different coloured patch concerned with blindness. Pliny tells of a man who, never having been ill before, dreamt he was blind and woke up next morning to find that he was.3 The force of imagination could well have contributed to that, as I have said elsewhere, and Pliny seems to share that opinion: but it is more likely that the dream was produced by the same internal disturbances as his body experienced and which deprived him of his sight; if they want to, the doctors will find their cause…

Now let us add another closely similar account which Seneca gives in one of his letters.4 ‘You know Harpasté, my wife’s female idiot,’ he wrote to Lucilius. ‘She is staying in my house as I have inherited the burden of looking after her. I loathe such freaks; if I ever want to laugh at a fool I do not have to look far: I can laugh at myself. She has suddenly become blind. It may seem incredible but it is true that she does not realize she is blind: she keeps begging her keeper to take her away; she thinks that my house is too dark. What in her we laugh at I urge you to believe to apply to each one of us. No one realizes he is miserly; no one realizes he is covetous. At least the blind do ask for a guide: we wander off alone. “I am not an ambitious man,” we say, “but you can live in Rome no other way. I am no spendthrift, but it costs a lot merely to live in Rome.” “It is not my fault if I get angry or if I have had not yet definitely settled down: it is the fault of my youth.” Let us not go looking elsewhere for our evils: they are at home in us, rooted in our inward parts. We make the cure harder precisely because we do not realize we are ill. If we do not soon start to dress our wounds, when shall we ever cure them and their evils? Yet Philosophy provides the sweetest of cures: other cures are enjoyed only after they have worked: this one cures and gives joy all at once.’

That is what Seneca says; he carried me off my subject, but there is profit in the change.