One characteristic which further distinguishes mattoids from criminals and from many of the actually insane is an extreme abstemiousness, which sometimes equals the excesses of the early Cenobites. Bosisio lived on polenta without salt; Passanante on bread only; Lazzaretti often on nothing but a few potatoes; Mangione on peas, beans, rice, &c., at thirteen sous a day. This may be explained by their finding sufficient support and comfort in their own grotesque lucubrations,[349] as is the case with ascetics and great thinkers; and besides, being usually poor, they prefer to spend their small means in securing the triumph of their ideas rather than in satisfying their stomachs; all the more so, as nearly all of them (Cianchettini, Bosisio, F----, for instance) were scrupulously honest, and almost excessively methodical, keeping account even of scraps of waste-paper, which they catalogued with singular order. In short, such men, certainly insane in their writings, and sometimes as much so as any patient in an asylum, are scarcely so in the ordinary acts of life, in which they show themselves full of good sense, shrewdness, and even of a sense of order; so that they are quite the reverse of men of real genius--especially those inspired by madness, whose ability in literature is nearly always in inverse proportion to their aptitude for practical life. This is how it happens that many authors of medical eccentricities are practitioners of great repute. Three such are directors of hospitals. The author of the _Scottatinge_ is a captain and commissariat officer. Another, the inventor of almost prehistoric machines, and author of works which are more than humorous, fills an office which exposes him to continual contact with cultivated men who have never suspected him of madness. Five are professors, two of whom are attached to a university; three are deputies, two senators, one is a counsellor of state, one counsellor of prefecture, and another counsellor of the Court of Cassation. Three are provincial counsellors, and five, priests; and nearly all of them are of advanced age and respected in their vocations. Frecot was mayor of Hesloup, Leroux and Asgill were members of parliament. Mattoid theologians--Simon Morin, Lebreton, Geoffroi Vallee, Vanini--have unfortunately been taken so seriously as to be burned alive or hanged. Joris’s bones were burned with his writings under the gallows at Bâle. Kehler was beheaded for the sole offence of having corrected Joris’s proofs. We shall see, in the following chapter, how many others--Smith, Fourier, Kleinov, Fox--found fanatical followers. That calmness, in spite of obstinate persistence in a delusion, which distinguishes them from more ordinary insane patients, may also be observed in monomaniacs--in even their most prominent characteristic--and is not rarely found in some of the stages of inebriety.