"Admirable," said the padre, "admirable! But tell me, O'Grady, how is it that an old sinner like you knows the Holy Scriptures so well?"
"I studied the Book of Samuel a good deal from an asylum doctor's point of view," said the doctor. "Saul's neurasthenia interested me. His attacks are very well described. I have also diagnosed the madness of Nebuchadnezzar. They were two very different types. Saul was apathetic and Nebuchadnezzar violent."
"I wish you would leave Nebuchadnezzar alone," said the colonel.
"I am very much afraid of asylum doctors," said Major Parker. "Violent, depressed, or apathetic, we are all mad, according to them."
"What do you call mad?" said the doctor. "I certainly can see in you, and in the colonel, and Aurelle, all the phenomena which I observed in the asylum."
"Ugh!" said the colonel, horrified.
"But I do, sir. Between Aurelle, who forgets the war by reading Tolstoi, and some of my old friends who thought they were Napoleon or Mahomet, there is a difference in degree but not in nature. Aurelle browses on novels from a morbid desire to live the life of someone else; my patients substitute for their miserable life that of some great personage whose history they have read and whose lot they envy.
"Oh, I know your objections, Aurelle. You know, all the time you are dreaming of the loves of Prince Bolkonsky, that you are the Interpreter Aurelle, attached to the Lennox Highlanders, but when Queen Elizabeth is scrubbing the floor of my office, she does not know that she is Mrs. Jones, charwoman, of Hammersmith. But incoherence is not the monopoly of madness: all the main ideas of a sane man are irrational erections built up, for better or worse, to express his deepest feelings."
"Parker," said the colonel, "can you think of anything to stop him?"
"A No. 5 grenade, sir," said the major.