wable for a
reasonable and serious man to have such hallucinations.

But was it a hallucination? I turned round to look for the stalk, and I
found it immediately under the bush, freshly broken, between two other
roses which remained on the branch, and I returned home then, with a
much disturbed mind; for I am certain now, as certain as I am of the
alternation of day and night, that there exists close to me an invisible
being that lives on milk and on water, which can touch objects, take
them and change their places; which is, consequently, endowed with a
material nature, although it is imperceptible to our senses, and which
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 river side, 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 have been quite intelligent,
lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point.
They spoke clearly, readily, profoundly on everything, when suddenly
their thoughts struck upon the breakers of their madness and broke to
pieces there, and were dispersed and foundered in that furious and
terrible sea, full of bounding waves, fogs and squalls, which is called
_madness_.

I certainly should think that I was mad, absolutely mad, if I were not
conscious, did not perfectly know my state, if I did not fathom it by
analyzing it with the most complete lucidity. I should, in fact, be a
reasonable man who was 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 the dreams which lead us through the most unlikely phantasmagoria,
without causing us any surprise, because our verifying apparatus and our
sense of control has gone to sleep, while our imaginative faculty wakes
and works. Is it not possible that one of the imperceptible keys of the
cerebral finger-board has 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