Rose and John, after a torrent of invectives, left that part of the country. An income of 10,000 francs signified poverty for them. They fled to Paris, where in less than a year John lost down to his last penny in speculations. After that they went their respective ways, Rose to sing in a café-concert of the Faubourg St. Martin, John to take employment with a booking agency for the races. He has as yet only been sentenced to one month's imprisonment for a swindling card-game. Admirable results of an Evil Beneficence! IX A MAD THINKER Among the wise, some will perhaps agree with me, the maddest madmen are not those who are commonly called so. In great walled and barred and guarded buildings--prisons where people who are condemned by "science," just as elsewhere people are condemned by "law," expiate the crime of a psychological disorder greater than that of the majority--unfortunate beings are kept behind bolts and triple locks, for the incoherence of their syllogisms, while fellow mortals no more mentally stable are allowed to do their raving out on the world's stage. For one whole year in my youth I dwelt among the lunatics of Bicêtre. I had many interviews with "impulsives," whom a sudden disturbance of the organism had made dangerously violent, and who talked pathetically about their "illness," believing it cured, whereas it was not. I held discussions with patients suffering from more or less specific delusions. From those now long-past associations I have retained a habit of comparing the mentalities inside asylums with those outside, which proceeding leads rather to the proposal than the solution of problems. What seems clear, however, is that we have not discovered a standard of good sense, a way of measuring reason, by which we could definitely separate sane from morbid psychology; that, furthermore, such a method, had we discovered it, would not help us much, considering the disconcerting ease with which men pass from the normal to the pathological state, and vice versa. We should need too many asylums, and there would be too continual a coming and going in and out of them. We should not have time, between sojourns there, to study what we wanted to learn, to teach what we knew, to prove to each other that we are all afloat in a sea of errors, to quarrel, to vote, to kill one another, and to reproduce ourselves for the sake of perpetuating the balance of unbalance amid which fate has placed us.