Simão Bacamarte recognized that, even if the accusation itself might not be true, her words were enough to show that the excellent lady was at last restored to a state of perfect mental disequilibrium, and he promptly discharged her.

Now, if you think that the alienist was delighted to see the last inmate leaving the Casa Verde, you will only be revealing how little you know our man. Plus ultra! was his motto: Ever Onward! It was not enough for him to have discovered the true theory of insanity; nor was he content to have restored the reign of reason in Itaguaí. Plus ultra! Rather than feeling elated, he grew troubled and pensive; something was telling him that his new theory held within it another, even newer theory.

“Let’s see,” he thought, “let’s see if I can finally reach the ultimate truth.”

Such were his thoughts as he paced the length of the vast room, which contained the richest library in all His Majesty’s overseas possessions. The eminent alienist’s majestic and austere body was wrapped in an ample damask robe, tied at the waist by a silken cord with gold tassels (a gift from a university). A powdered wig covered his broad and noble pate, polished smooth by daily scientific cogitations. His feet, neither slim and feminine nor large and uncouth, but entirely in proportion with his shape and size, were protected by a pair of shoes adorned with nothing but a plain brass buckle. Observe the contrast: his only luxuries were those of a scientific origin; everything that related to his own person bore the hallmark of simplicity and moderation, fitting virtues for a sage.

Thus it was that he, the great alienist, paced from one end of the vast library to the other, lost in his own thoughts, oblivious to anything beyond the darkest problems of cerebral pathology. Suddenly he stopped. Standing in front of a window, with his left elbow supported on the palm of his right hand, and his chin resting on the closed fist of his left hand, he asked himself:

“But were they really insane, and cured by me—or was what appeared to be a cure nothing more than the discovery of their natural mental disequilibrium?”

And, digging further into his thoughts, he reached the following conclusion: the well-organized brains he had been so successfully treating were, after all, just as unbalanced as all the rest. He could not pretend, he realized, to have instilled in his patients any sentiment or mental faculty they did not already possess; both of these things must have already existed, in a latent state, perhaps, but there nevertheless.