"Ha! Meanwhile, this place here, for its part, is well enough, as aforesaid, a _torre del filosopho, quai de Voltaire_, and Shakespeare's street, and whatever else one might, could, would, or should name. Moreover, I always hear by night one or another man speak close by me, and so I have no fear at all that the 'I' will come. I throw every day five little bread-balls: if they form a cross, then it signifies (think what thou wilt) that I do not yet appear to myself. But they always make one. I have been, in this Anticyra here, so quieted about so many a phantom, even by those books,--look at them, nothing but treatises on madness,--that I, although it touches my Mordian[137] quite as little as it does me, am glad to have been here. My intercourse is not the safest, I own, though I talk with the keeper and wife alone (a rhyme), both of whom cleverly understand the prison-fever that prevails here. The man has got the fixed idea into his head, and his wife thereby into hers, that he is our present overseer, and has to assist, oversee, and read excellent books which fall in with his office. Those treatises are by the fool. It is to be presumed he has let his overseeing idea peep out too broadly in the city, and the medical college clapped him in with his serviceable idea; because, in the end, to be sure, every overseer must have it in order to exercise his office, whether he is mad or not. Amongst all here in the house, we two please each other most. He sounded me to my advantage, and I can make great use of him for my liberty, only I must not attack his foul, fixed spot. Only I often improvisate for them an evening blessing,--because they have no prayer-book,--and weave in with the blessing hints which might be of medical service to the pair, if they chose. So we two wander round in the mazes of this labyrinth along before the patients,--behind him, the incurable hub of the whole wheel, I walk quite tolerant. In the club, universal polemics and scepticism reign as in no other university hall. 'It is a thing to make one become crazy,' he says to me, in a low tone. 'To make one _be_ crazy,[138] they say in this _palais d'égalité_,' I reply. I cut him out the profiles of the patients for his manuscript. As children still have something which appears to them childish, so have madmen something which seems even to them madness. But I never become any more pointed with him, and keep sharper jokes to myself. Ah, what is man, especially a discreet one, and how thin are his sticks and staves! Is there anything about me that moves thee, Albano? My dull, pale face, perhaps?"