Tennessee Williams recounts in his Memoirs his first bouts with mental illness during a Grand Tour of Europe in 1928. He had felt all his life that this anxiety attack was the result of "blue devils" chasing him, and that only his writing would keep them at bay. While this article does not wish to belittle Williams's adamant belief that "madness" (his recurrent term) was an immediate and present danger-though hypochondria was certainly part of his constitution-it does suggest an alternative explanation for what he experienced in Paris, Cologne and Amsterdam that summer: the Stendhal Syndrome, a theory on psychosomatic symptoms linked to the overwhelming impact of having been exposed to countless artistic masterpieces during an extended and frenetic period of foreign travel. The syndrome, which sparks an acute panic attack, is palliated through a return to daily routines, which for Williams meant writing. It is thus only by composing a little poem that he is finally released from his extensive dysautonomic attack, which suggests that neuroaesthetics, not divine intervention, may have been the real source of his salvation, and that the "blue devils" he felt were chasing him throughout his life may have been more psychosomatic than real. While this alternative reading to Williams's condition has obvious implications in theatre studies, his case study also extends to travel writing in general to help explain similar dystopic experiences documented in travelogues written over the last century or more.