He is dead, and I do not care a jot about him, I repeat. It is the three assistants who trouble me. Where are they? What are they doing? That is the question. They possess the Circeean formula, and must be using it for their own profit, in order to indulge in the traffic in personalities.
In spite of his rebuffs, Klotz-Lerne had induced several people to submit to his malevolent surgery, and to exchange their souls for somebody else’s. The three Germans are daily adding to the number of those poor creatures who are craving for money, youth or health. There are in the world, unsuspected men and women who are not themselves.
I am no longer certain of anything. Faces seem to be masks. Perhaps I might have known this sooner. There are certain people whose physiognomy reflects a soul the very opposite of their own; people virtuous and honest, who, for a moment, give glimpses of unexpected vices and monstrous passions, which strike terror like a miracle. They have to-day their soul of yesterday.
Sometimes in the eyes of the man who speaks to me there passes a strange flash—an idea which does not belong to him. He will contradict it immediately after expressing it, and he will be the first to be astonished that he could have thought of it.
I know people whose opinions vary day by day, and that is very illogical.
Lastly, there is often an imperious something, which eludes me—a brutal overmastering power thrusting me back into myself, so to speak, and commanding my nerves and muscles—evil actions or words I regret, a cuff or a curse.
I know, I know! Everybody feels those unreflecting movements, and always has felt them, but the reason has become obscure and mysterious to me.
It is called fever, anger, want of thought—just as customs or decorum are called calculation, hypocrisy or diplomacy. This is the way people account for these sudden revelations, which I have noted so often in my fellow-creatures, and which the world says, can only be failures to comply with those great powers, or revolts against them.
Might not the science of a wizard be the real prime cause?
Clearly the mental stage in which I am is exhausting me, and requires treatment. Now, it is kept alive by the obsession of the fateful time I spent at Fonval. That is why, since my return, realizing that I must rid myself of the remembrance of it, I have resolved to test myself by telling the story—not, Good Heavens! with any ambition to write a book, but in the hope that if one put it down on paper, it would get out of my head, and that to put it down would be to drive it away.