The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES Monomaniacs are asleep when they perform unreasonable acts. They no longer remember anything on waking. When Papavoine was arrested by the police, he calmly said to them these remarkable words: You ave taking the other for me. It was the somnambulist who was still speaking. Edgar Poe, that unhappy man of genius who used to intoxicate himself, has terribly described the somnambulism of monomaniacs. Sometimes it is an assassin who hears, and who thinks that everybody hears, through the walls of the tomb, the beating of his victim’s heart; sometimes it is a poisoner who, by dint of saying to himself, ‘I am safe, pro- vided I do not go and denounce myself,” ends by dreaming aloud that he is denouncing himself, and in fact does so. Edgar Poe himself invented neither the persons nor the facts of these strange novels; he dreamt them waking, and that is why he clothed them so well with all the colours of a shocking reality. Dr. Briére de Boismont in his remarkable work on “ Hal- lucinations,” tells the story of an Englishman otherwise quite sane, who thought that he had met a stranger and made his acquaintance, who took him to lunch at his tavern, and then having asked him to visit St. Paul’s in his company, had tried to throw him from the top of the tower which they had climbed together. From that moment the Englishman was obsessed by this stranger, whom he alone could see, and whom he always met when he was alone, and had dined well. Precipices attract; drunkenness calls to drunkenness; madness has invincible charms for madness. When a man 119