a cause which ought to be explained, and which no materialist can explain.  It is easy to declare that a disturbance of the cerebral lobes produces assassins and demonomaniacs.  The famous alienists of our time claim that analysis of the brain of an insane woman disclosed a lesion or a deterioration of the grey matter.  And suppose it did!  It would still be a question whether, in the case of a woman possessed with demonomania, the lesion produced the demonomania, or the demonomania produced the lesion....  Admitting that there was a lesion!  The spiritual Comprachicos have never resorted to cerebral surgery.  They don’t amputate the lobes—­supposed to be reliably identified—­after carefully trepanning.  They simply act upon the pupil by inculcating ignoble ideas in him, developing his bad instincts, pushing him little by little into the paths of vice; and if this gymnastic of persuasion deteriorates the cerebral tissues in the subject, that proves precisely that the lesion is only the derivative and not the cause of the psychological state.

“And then, and then, these doctrines which consist nowadays in confounding the criminal with the insane, the demonomaniac with the mad, have absolutely no foundation.  Nine years ago a lad of fourteen, Felix Lemaire, assassinated a little boy whom he did not know.  He just wanted to see the child suffer, just wanted to hear him cry.  Felix slashed the little fellow’s stomach with a knife, turned the blade round and round in the warm flesh, then slowly sawed his victim’s head off.  Felix manifested no remorse, and in the ensuing investigation proved himself to be intelligent and atrocious.  Dr. Legrand Du Saule and other specialists kept him under vigilant surveillance for months, and could not discover the slightest pathological symptom.  And he had had fairly good rearing and certainly had not been corrupted by others.

“His behaviour was like that of the conscious or unconscious demonomaniacs who do evil for evil’s sake.  They are no more mad than the rapt monk in his cell, than the man who does good for good’s sake.  Anybody but a medical theorist can see that the desire for good and the desire for evil simply form the two opposing poles of the soul.  In the fifteenth century these extremes were represented by Jeanne d’Arc and the Marshal de Rais.  Now there is no more reason for attributing madness to Gilles than there is for attributing it to Jeanne d’Arc, whose admirable excesses certainly have no connection with vesania and delirium.

“All the same, some frightful nights must have been passed in that fortress,” said Durtal.  He was thinking of the chateau de Tiffauges, which he had visited a year ago, believing that it would aid him in his work to live in the country where Gilles had lived and to dig among the ruins.

He had established himself in the little hamlet which stretches along the base of the abandoned donjon.  He learned what a living thing the legend of Bluebeard was in this isolated part of La Vendee on the border of Brittany.