egally, the advantages
he concedes in exchange for certain forfeits. Our very willingness to
make a pact with him must be able often to produce his infusion into us.

"All the modern theories of the followers of Maudsley and Lombroso do
not, in fact, render the singular abuses of the Marshal comprehensible.
Nothing could be more just than to class him as a monomaniac, for he was
one, if by the word monomaniac we designate every man who is dominated
by a fixed idea. But so is every one of us, more or less, from the
business man, all whose thoughts converge on the one idea of gain, to
the artist absorbed in bringing his masterpiece into the world. But why
was the Marshal a monomaniac, how did he become one? That is what all
the Lombrosos in the world can't tell you. Encephalic lesions, adherence
of the _pia mater_ to the cerebrum, mean absolutely nothing in this
question. For they are simple resultants, effects derived from a cause
which ought to be explained, and which no materialist can explain. It is
easy to declare that a disturbance of the cerebral lobes produces
assassins and demonomaniacs. The famous alienists of our time claim that
analysis of the brain of an insane woman disclosed a lesion or a
deterioration of the grey matter. And suppose it did! It would still be
a question whether, in the case of a woman possessed with demonomania,
the lesion produced the demonomania, or the demonomania produced the
lesion.... Admitting that there was a lesion! The spiritual Comprachicos
have never resorted to cerebral surgery. They don't amputate the
lobes--supposed to be reliably identified--after carefully trepanning.
They simply act upon the pupil by inculcating ignoble ideas in him,
developing his bad instincts, pushing him little by little into the
paths of vice; and if this gymnastic of persuasion deteriorates the
cerebral tissues in the subject, that proves precisely that the lesion
is only the derivative and not the cause of the psychological state.

"And then, and then, these doctrines which consist nowadays in
confounding the criminal with the insane, the demonomaniac with the mad,
have absolutely no foundation. Nine years ago a lad of fourteen, Felix
Lemaire, assassinated a little boy whom he did not know. He just wanted
to see the child suffer, just wanted to hear him cry. Felix slashed the
little fellow's stomach with a knife, turned the blade round and round
in the warm flesh, then slowly sawed his victim's head