“No; but one morning (now that you make me think of it) he awoke terribly frightened at a dream. ‘Ah! what a dream I have had,’ he said to me. His face looked worn and haggard, and, as I begged him to relate it, he turned away his eyes, and refused peremptorily. I insisted, but he kept silent, and I have never been able to make him relate it.”
The doctor reflected.
“Perhaps that is the whole secret,” said he. “But if we were to ask him about it now, probably to-morrow we would be obliged to confine him.”
“Confine him?” cried the baroness. “Do you think him so seriously affected?”
“Very seriously, madame, and more so as he is perfectly sane in relation to other affairs. His mania is confined to one point, and is what we call hallucination. My duty compels me to tell you, madame, that it is a case where science up to the present time has been very unsuccessful.”
“But, doctor, never was there a man less crazy. As for the pictures, which was the only passion I ever knew him to have, he prided himself on never having done a foolish thing; he only bought pictures of known value, with the signatures of the artists fully guaranteed. I, for instance, who am speaking to you, would have sometimes acted more unwisely than he. I remember once he even refused....”
“Nevertheless,” interrupted the doctor, “the case is very serious.”
The baron was alone in his room. His wife listened attentively at the door, and watched him through the key-hole. He raised the curtains, shook the cushions on the sofa, searched around, and, when convinced that he was alone, spoke in a low voice; but his wife caught his words.
“No one suspects me. No one, not even she; and yet everything should warn them, everything.... The circumstances that accompanied the act are reproduced every instant. For example, the clouds in the sky have nearly always the same form as at that moment.... The clouds do it purposely; they have assumed since that day certain positions always the same. What do they resemble? What I do not wish to say, but I know well since my dream. Oh! that dream.... I am cold, frozen. Why is it no one ever speaks to me of that dream; that no one in this house remembers it? And yet they were all there ... in the dream.... My wife was there, and the other one also,” he added, lowering his voice.
And after a silence, occasionally broken by unintelligible words, and joined to a strange pantomime, he continued: