great deal from chemistry. Yet I do not guarantee anything. It is
possible that our race will persist in melancholy, delirium, mania,
dementia, and stupor until its lamentable end amid ice and darkness.
This world is perhaps irremediably wicked. At all events, I shall have
got plenty of amusement out of it. It affords those who are in it an
interesting spectacle, and I am beginning to think that Chevalier was
madder than the rest in that he voluntarily left his seat."

Nanteuil took a pen from the desk, and held it out, dipped in ink, to
the doctor.

He began to write:

"Having been called on several occasions to attend----"

He interrupted himself to ask Chevalier's Christian name.

"Aime," replied Nanteuil.

"Aime Chevalier, I have noticed in his system certain disorders of
sensibility, vision and motor control, ordinary indications of----"

He went to fetch a book from a shelf of his library.

"It's a thousand chances that I shall find something to confirm my
diagnosis in the lectures of Professor Ball on mental diseases."

He turned over the leaves of the book.

"Just see, my dear Romilly, this is what I find to begin with; in the
eighteenth lecture, page 389: 'Many madmen are to be met with among
actors.' This remark of Professor Ball's reminds me that the celebrated
Cabanis one day asked Dr. Esprit Blanche whether the stage was not a
cause of madness."

"Really?" asked Romilly uneasily.

"Not a doubt of it," replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball
says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are
excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among
medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are
the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is
the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius
are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. Still, a man is not a
reasoning being merely because he is an idiot."

After glancing a little further through the pages of Professor Ball's
lectures, he resumed his writing:

"Ordinary indications of maniacal excitement, and, if it be taken into
consideration that the subject was of a neuropathic temperament, there
is reason to believe that his constitution predisposed him to insanity,
which, according to the highest authorities, is merely an exaggeration
of the habitual temperament of the individual, and hence it is not
possible to credit