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Oh, may the God to whom I look for mercy through Christ, show mercy on the author of the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater, if, as I have too strong reason to believe, his book has been the occasion of seducing others into this withering vice through wantonness.
But even so, there was no conclusive evidence of any criminal act. The patient might be a confirmed opium-eater, and the symptoms heightened by deliberate deception. The cunning of these unfortunates is proverbial and is only equalled by their secretiveness and mendacity.
Just as the opium-eater must constantly increase his doses in order to obtain the same result, so our mind, imperious as it is weak, desires that feeling, ideas and objects should go on ever increasing in size and in intensity. Hence the necessity of cleverly distributing the interest in a dramatic work, and of graduating doses in medicine.
It seems to have been a mutual infatuation a case of love at first sight, and in a moment of delirium, under an impulse which was perhaps uncontrollable, she sacrificed her virtue and her self-respect. The story of her infatuation reads like the distempered dream of an opium-eater. It was a case of fervent love on both sides.
However, as some people in spite of all laws to the contrary will persist in asking what became of the opium-eater, and in what state he now is, I answer for him thus: The reader is aware that opium had long ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it was solely by the tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it that it kept its hold.
Often, I am satisfied, the opium-eater, during periods of protracted effort or great excitement, takes doses of the drug which he does not recollect an hour afterward, and may, practically without knowing it, overrun his supposed weekly dose twenty-five per cent.
The opium-eater is prevailingly disinclined to, and in some sort incapacitated for, bodily exertion or locomotion. A considerable part of the time he feels something like a sense, not very distinctly defined, of bodily fatigue; and to sit continuously in a rocking or an easy chair, or to recline on a sofa or bed, is his preference above all modes of disposing of himself.
I pushed it away. Jacqueline polished it with her palm. "She was an opium-eater, you see? The eyes have that rigid staring, like Death looking into life. You pushed it from you, Mrs. Manning?" shutting it.
Under this papaverian mask it is likely to be best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater" that he is most generally recognized. It was through his Opium-Confessions, popular both as to matter and style, that he first conciliated and charmed the reading public, and to such a degree that great expectations were awakened as to anything which afterwards he might write.
I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."
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