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.

Upon reaching this conclusion, the eminent alienist experienced two opposing sensations, one of pleasure, the other of dejection. The pleasure was on seeing that, at the end of long and patient investigation, involving unrelenting work and a monumental struggle against the entire population, he could now confirm the following truth: there were no madmen in Itaguaí; the town possessed not one single lunatic. But no sooner had this idea refreshed his soul than another appeared, completely neutralizing the effect of the first: a doubt. What! Not one single well-adjusted brain in the whole of Itaguaí? Would such an extreme conclusion not, by its very nature, be erroneous? And would it not, moreover, destroy the entire majestic edifice of his new psychological doctrine?

The chroniclers of Itaguaí describe the illustrious Simão Bacamarte’s anguish as one of the most terrifying moral maelstroms ever to afflict mankind. But such tempests only terrify the weak; the strong brace themselves and stare into the eye of the storm. Twenty minutes later, the alienist’s face lit up with a gentle glow.

“Yes, that must be it,” he thought.