There were three or four inmates who had been driven to madness by love, but only two stood out because of the curious nature of their symptoms. The first, a young man of twenty-five by the name of Falcão, was convinced he was the morning star; he would stand with his legs apart and his arms spread wide like the rays of a star, and stay like that for hours on end asking if the sun had come up yet so that he could retire. The other fellow paced endlessly around the rooms or courtyard, and up and down the corridors, searching for the ends of the earth. He was a miserable wretch whose wife had left him to run off with a dandy. As soon as he discovered she was gone, he armed himself with a pistol and went after them; two hours later, he found them by a lake and murdered them both with exquisite cruelty. The avenger’s jealousy was satisfied, but at the price of his sanity. That was the beginning of his obsessive wanderings, relentlessly pursuing the fugitive lovers to the ends of the earth.

There were several interesting cases of delusions of grandeur, the most notable of which was the wretched son of a poor tailor, who would recount to the walls (for he never looked anyone in the face) his entire family pedigree, as follows:

“God begat an egg, the egg begat the sword, the sword begat David, David begat the purple, the purple begat the duke, the duke begat the marquis, the marquis begat the count, and that’s me.”

Then he would slap his forehead, snap his fingers, and repeat it again, five or six times in a row: “God begat an egg, the egg begat . . .” and so on.

Another of the same type was a humble clerk who fancied himself to be the king’s chamberlain; another was the cattle drover from Minas Gerais who had a mania for distributing herds of cattle to everyone he met: he would give three hundred head to one, six hundred to another, twelve hundred to someone else, and so on. I won’t mention the many cases of religious monomania, save for one fellow who, on account of his Christian name being João de Deus—John of God—went around saying he was John the God, and promising the kingdom of heaven to whoever would worship him and the torments of hell to everyone else. Then there was Garcia, a university graduate, who never said anything because he was convinced that if he uttered so much as a single word, all the stars would fall from the sky and set the earth on fire, for such was the power with which God had invested him.

That, at least, is what he wrote on the piece of paper provided by the alienist not so much out of charity as out of scientific interest.