divine paintings while he descended Lauzun's staircase, in a promenade
that seemed to have lasted twenty years. He does not appear to have
repeated the intoxication. Yet, on receiving another unkind epistle
from Eve, shortly afterwards, he mentioned the possibility of arming
himself against his sea of troubles through the drug's lethal
properties.

In anything that had to do with the function of the brain, he was as
interested as if medicine had been his profession. A book of Dr.
Moreau's on madness, which he read during these months of mental
relaxation, drew from him an acknowledgment wherein he foreshadowed
his intention of studying anatomy and myology. "I believe," he said,
"we shall do no good until we have determined the action exercised by
the physical organs of thought in the production of madness. The
organs are the containing sheaths of some fluid or other as yet
inappreciable. I hold this for proved. Well! there are a certain
number of organs which are vitiated by their lack, by their
constitution, others which are vitiated by an excess of afflux.
People, who, like Cuvier and Voltaire, have exercised their organs
early, have rendered them so powerful that no excess can affect them;
whereas those who keep to certain portions of the ideal encephalos,
which we represent as the laboratory of thought--the poets, who leave
deduction and analysis inactive and exploit the heart and imagination
exclusively--may become mad. In short, there would be a fine
experiment to make. I have thought of it for twenty years. This would
be to reconstitute the brain of an idiot, to demonstrate whether a
thinking apparatus can be created by developing its rudiments. Only by
building up a brain shall we know how one is demolished."

The beginning of the new year did not bring back his former zeal for