For them the impossible does not exist, the unlikely disappears, the fairy world becomes the natural world, and the supernatural familiar. Logic, that ancient barrier, reason, that ancient wall, good sense, that ancient balustrade of the mind, is broken, shattered, demolished by their imagination, which has been loosed into freedom, has escaped into the realms of fantasy to which no bounds are set, and rushes forward in fabulous leaps without let or hindrance. For them everything happens and everything can happen. They make no efforts to conquer events, overcome resistances, surmount obstacles. A mere whim of their fantasy-creating will allows them to become princes, emperors or gods, to possess all the riches of the world, all the good things of life, allows them to enjoy all pleasures, allows them to be always strong, always beautiful, always young, always loved. Of all creatures on this earth, they alone are happy, since for them reality no longer exists. I like to hang over their vagabond minds, as one hangs over an abyss in whose depths boils an unknown torrent, come one knows not whence and going one knows not whither.
But it avails us nothing to hang over these ravines, since we could never know whence comes that stream or whither it goes. After all, it is only a stream, like the streams that run in broad daylight, and a sight of it would teach us very little.
It avails us as little to hang over the minds of madmen, for their most fantastic ideas are, in effect, no more than ideas already known to us, made strange only because they are no longer shackled by Reason. That capricious spring confounds and amazes us because we do not see the place of its rising. Doubtless a little stone dropped in its course is enough to produce these whirlpools. Nevertheless, madmen fascinate me, and I keep going back to them, attracted in spite of myself by this commonplace mystery of insanity.
But one day, as I was visiting one of their asylums, the doctor who was escorting me said:
“Come, I’ll show you an interesting case.”
And he opened a cell in which a woman of about forty years of age, still beautiful, was seated in a big armchair, gazing fixedly at her face in a small hand-glass.
As soon as she saw us, she stood up, ran to the farther side of the room to get a veil thrown down on a chair, very carefully swarthed her face in it, then returned, replying to our greetings by a sign of her head.
“Well,” said the doctor, “how are you this morning?”
She uttered a deep sigh.
“Oh, ill, very ill, doctor, the marks get worse every day.”
He replied with an air of conviction:
“No, certainly not, I assure you that you’re mistaken.”
She drew close to him to murmur:
“No. I’m sure of it. I’ve counted ten more marks this morning, three on the right cheek, four on the left cheek, and three on my forehead. It’s frightful, frightful. I daren’t let anyone see me now, not even my son, no, not even he! I’m ruined, I’m disfigured for life.”
She sank back into her armchair and began to sob.
The doctor took a chair, seated himself near her, and in a gentle, comforting voice said:
“Come now, let me look, I assure you it’s nothing. By a slight cauterising, I can make them all disappear.”
She shook her head, without saying a word. He tried to touch her veil, but she grasped it in both hands with such violence that her fingers went through it.
He began afresh to exhort and reassure her.
“Come, now, you know quite well that I remove the ugly pockmarks from your skin every time and that you can’t see them at all when I have attended to them. If you don’t show them to me, I can’t cure you.”
She murmured:
“I’m quite willing to let you look again but I don’t know this gentleman who is with you.”
“He is a doctor too, who can attend to you even better than I can.”
Then she uncovered her face, but her fear and her emotion, her shame at being seen, made her blush even over her throat, to the point where her gown covered it. She lowered her eyes, turned her face now to the right and now to the left, to escape our gaze, and stammered:
“Oh, it makes me suffer agonies to let you see me like this. It’s horrible, isn’t it? Isn’t it horrible?”
I looked at her in the utmost amazement, for she had nothing on her face, not a mark, not a stain, not a sign nor a scar.
She turned towards me, keeping her eyes lowered, and said to me:
“It was through nursing my son that I contracted this frightful disease. I saved him but I am disfigured. I gave my beauty to my poor child. Well, I did my duty, and my conscience is at rest. If I suffer, only God knows it.”
The doctor had taken from his pocket a slender watercolour brush.
“Allow me,” said he, “I’ll put it all right for you.”
She turned to him her right cheek, and he began to lay light touches on it, as if he were putting small dabs of paint on it. He did the same to the left cheek, then to the chin, then the forehead; then he cried:
“Look, it’s all gone, all gone.”
She took up her glass, gazed at herself for a long time with a searching intensity, a harrowing intensity, a savagely concentrated mental effort to discover something, then she sighed:
“No. There’s very little to see now. Thank you very much indeed.”
The doctor rose. He took leave of her, ushered me out and followed me; and as soon as the door was closed, said:
“I’ll tell you that poor woman’s
