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Updated: June 22, 2025
Attendance on the cretin deprived me often of the power and inclination to swallow a meal, and sent me faint to the fresh air, and the well or fountain in the court; but this duty never wrung my heart, or brimmed my eyes, or scalded my cheek with tears hot as molten metal. The cretin being gone, I was free to walk out.
A cretin, idiotic, dwarfish, deformed, hopeless, an incessantly prodding burden of sorrow to the mother, who looks upon the masterpiece she had labored to bring forth, and beholds a terrible gargoyle, becomes transformed when fed thyroid. In a few days the cretin will get warmer, and require much less wrapping and bed-clothing.
Generally flushed over the cheek-bones, there is undoubtedly a certain effeminate effect associated with it. At least, it is the least animal and brutish of the faces of man. On the other hand, the subthyroid face is that of the cretin and cretinoid idiot, in a mild degree.
There are possibilities the imagination may envisage. One may suppose such a cretin, with all his other ductless glands intact, grown successfully to manhood under careful medical guidance. No one but himself is aware of his affliction, outside of his medical advisers. Luck aids him to rise in the world, or perhaps he has been born with a spoon of the precious metals in his mouth.
Some have even derived the word goitre from Got, or Goth; but their name, Crestia, is not unlike Cretin, and the same symptoms of idiotism were not unusual among the Cagots; although sometimes, if old tradition is to be credited, their malady of the brain took rather the form of violent delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons.
Instead of the lowered temperature and coldness of the cretin, there is a heightened temperature, one or two degrees above the normal, and a feeling of heat. The individual has a high warm color, does not sleep well, becomes or remains thin no matter how much he or she eats, is abnormally susceptible sexually, may suffer from a definite insomnia, is emotional, and perspires freely.
He was one of those men of whom their friends habitually say that they are "no fools," or "not such fools as they look," which generally may be understood to mean that the individual spoken of cannot with physiological accuracy be considered a crétin. Nevertheless, in his case the expression was doubtless accurately true.
The first month was, indeed, a long, black, heavy month to me. The cretin did not seem unhappy. I did my best to feed her well and keep her warm, and she only asked food and sunshine, or when that lacked, fire. Her weak faculties approved of inertion: her brain, her eyes, her ears, her heart slept content; they could not wake to work, so lethargy was their Paradise.
You say Monday! Very well then. Don't you forget now. Don't you forget. For I've a memory like a vice. I shan't forget. Just before twelve then. And come right up. I'm right under the roof. In Paradise, as the porter always says. Siamo nel paradiso. But he's a cretin. As near Paradise as I care for, for it's devilish hot in summer, and damned cold in winter.
Madame Beck went, the first day of the holidays, to join her children at the sea-side; all the three teachers had parents or friends with whom they took refuge; every professor quitted the city; some went to Paris, some to Boue-Marine; M. Paul set forth on a pilgrimage to Rome; the house was left quite empty, but for me, a servant, and a poor deformed and imbecile pupil, a sort of cretin, whom her stepmother in a distant province would not allow to return home.
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