tely under the bush, freshly broken, between the two other
roses which remained on the branch. I returned home, then, with a much
disturbed mind; for I am certain now, certain as I am of the
alternation of day and night, that there exists close to me an
invisible being who lives on milk and on water, who can touch objects,
take them and change their places; who is, consequently, endowed with a
material nature, although imperceptible to sense, and who lives as I
do, under my roof--

August 7. I slept tranquilly. He drank the water out of my decanter,
but did not disturb my sleep.

I ask myself whether I am mad. As I was walking just now in the sun by
the riverside, doubts as to my own sanity arose in me; not vague doubts
such as I have had hitherto, but precise and absolute doubts. I have
seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent,
lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one
point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything;
till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and
went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and
terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS.

I certainly should think that I was mad, absolutely mad, if I were not
conscious that I knew my state, if I could not fathom it and analyze it
with the most complete lucidity. I should, in fact, be a reasonable man
laboring under a hallucination. Some unknown disturbance must have been
excited in my brain, one of those disturbances which physiologists of
the present day try to note and to fix precisely, and that disturbance
must have caused a profound gulf in my mind and in the order and logic
of my ideas. Similar phenomena occur in dreams, and lead us through the
most unlikely phantasmagoria, without causing us any surprise, because
our verifying apparatus and our sense of control have gone to sleep,
while our imaginative faculty wakes and works. Was it not possible that
one of the imperceptible keys of the cerebral finger-board had been
paralyzed in me? Some men lose the recollection of proper names, or of
verbs, or of numbers, or merely of dates, in consequence of an
accident. The localization of all the avenues of thought has been
accomplished nowadays; what, then, would there be surprising in the
fact that my faculty of controlling the unreality of certain
hallucinations should be destroyed for the time being?

I thought of all this as