One morning, after this had been going on for about three weeks, Crispim Soares received a message that the alienist wished to see him.

“He says it’s important,” added the messenger.

The druggist turned pale. Something must have happened to his wife! The chroniclers of Itaguai, it should be noted, dwell upon Crispim’s love for his Cesaria and point out that they had never been separated in their thirty years of marriage. Only against this background can one explain the monologue, often overheard by the servants, with which the druggist reviled himself: “You miss your wife, do you? You’re going crazy without her? It serves you right! Always truckling to Dr. Bacamarte! Who told you to let Cesaria go traveling? Dr. Bacamarte, that’s who. Anything he says, you say amen. So now see what you get for it, you vile, miserable, groveling little lackey! Lickspittle! Flunky!” And he added many other ugly names that a man ought not call his enemies, much less himself. The effect of the message on him, in this state of mind, can be readily imagined. He dropped the drugs he had been mixing and fairly flew to the Green House. Simão Bacamarte greeted him joyfully, but he wore his joy as a wise man should—buttoned up to the neck with circumspection.

“I am very happy,” he said.

“Some news of our wives?” asked the druggist in a tremulous voice.

The alienist made a magnificent gesture and replied:

“It is something much more important—a scientific experiment. I say ‘experiment,’ for I do not yet venture to affirm the correctness of my theory. Indeed, this is the very nature of science, Soares: unending inquiry. But, although only an experiment as yet, it may change the face of the earth. Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.”

He fell silent for a while, enjoying the druggist’s amazement. Then he explained his theory at length. The number of persons suffering from insanity, he believed, was far greater than commonly supposed; and he developed this idea with an abundance of reasons, texts, and examples. He found many of these examples in Itaguai, but he recognized the fallacy of confining his data to one time and place and he therefore resorted to history. He pointed in particular to certain historical celebrities: Socrates, who thought he had a personal demon; Pascal, who sewed a report of an hallucination into the lining of his coat; Mohammed, Caracalla, Domitian, Caligula, and others. The druggist’s surprise at Bacamarte’s mingling of the vicious and the merely ridiculous moved the alienist to explain that these apparently inconsistent attributes were really different aspects of the same thing.

“The grotesque, my friend, is simply ferocity in disguise.”

“Clever, very clever!” exclaimed Crispim Soares.