licable. In any case, my mental state
bordered on madness, and twenty-four hours of Paris sufficed to restore
me to my equilibrium.

Yesterday after doing some business and paying some visits, which
instilled fresh and invigorating mental air into me, I wound up my
evening at the Theatre Francais. A drama by Alexander Dumas the Younger
was being acted, and his brilliant and powerful play completed my cure.
Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We need men who can
think and can talk, around us. When we are alone for a long time, we
people space with phantoms.

I returned along the boulevards to my hotel in excellent spirits. Amid
the jostling of the crowd I thought, not without irony, of my terrors
and surmises of the previous week, because I believed, yes, I believed,
that an invisible being lived beneath my roof. How weak our mind is;
how quickly it is terrified and unbalanced as soon as we are confronted
with a small, incomprehensible fact. Instead of dismissing the problem
with: "We do not understand because we cannot find the cause," we
immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers.

July 14. Fete of the Republic. I walked through the streets, and the
crackers and flags amused me like a child. Still, it is very foolish to
make merry on a set date, by Government decree. People are like a flock
of sheep, now steadily patient, now in ferocious revolt. Say to it:
"Amuse yourself," and it amuses itself. Say to it: "Go and fight with
your neighbor," and it goes and fights. Say to it: "Vote for the
Emperor," and it votes for the Emperor; then say to it: "Vote for the
Republic," and it votes for the Republic.

Those who direct it are stupid, too; but instead of obeying men they
obey principles, a course which can only be foolish, ineffective, and
false, for the very reason that principles are ideas which are
considered as certain and unchangeable, whereas in this world one is
certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is deception.

July 16. I saw some things yesterday that troubled me very much. I was
dining at my cousin's, Madame Sable, whose husband is colonel of the
Seventy-sixth Chasseurs at Limoges. There were two young women there,
one of whom had married a medical man, Dr. Parent, who devotes himself
a great deal to nervous diseases and to the extraordinary
manifestations which just now experiments in hypnotism and suggestion
are producing.

He related to us at some