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Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant
page 84 of 350 (24%)
sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS.

I certainly should think that I was mad, absolutely mad, if I
were not conscious that I knew my state, if I could not fathom it
and analyze it with the most complete lucidity. I should, in
fact, be a reasonable man laboring under a hallucination. Some
unknown disturbance must have been excited in my brain, one of
those disturbances which physiologists of the present day try to
note and to fix precisely, and that disturbance must have caused
a profound gulf in my mind and in the order and logic of my
ideas. Similar phenomena occur in dreams, and lead us through the
most unlikely phantasmagoria, without causing us any surprise,
because our verifying apparatus and our sense of control have
gone to sleep, while our imaginative faculty wakes and works. Was
it not possible that one of the imperceptible keys of the
cerebral finger-board had been paralyzed in me? Some men lose the
recollection of proper names, or of verbs, or of numbers, or
merely of dates, in consequence of an accident. The localization
of all the avenues of thought has been accomplished nowadays;
what, then, would there be surprising in the fact that my faculty
of controlling the unreality of certain hallucinations should be
destroyed for the time being?

I thought of all this as I walked by the side of the water. The
sun was shining brightly on the river and made earth delightful,
while it filled me with love for life, for the swallows, whose
swift agility is always delightful in my eyes, for the plants by
the riverside, whose rustling is a pleasure to my ears.

By degrees, however, an inexplicable feeling of discomfort seized
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