Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11 The Moscow doctor, being questioned in his turn, def-
initely and emphatically repeated that he considered the
prisoner’s mental condition abnormal in the highest degree.
He talked at length and with erudition of ‘aberration’ and
‘mania,’ and argued that, from all the facts collected, the
prisoner had undoubtedly been in a condition of aberration
for several days before his arrest, and, if the crime had been
committed by him, it must, even if he were conscious of it,
have been almost involuntary, as he had not the power to
control the morbid impulse that possessed him.
But apart from temporary aberration, the doctor di-
agnosed mania, which promised, in his words, to lead to
complete insanity in the future. (It must be noted that I
report this in my own words, the doctor made use of very
learned and professional language.) ‘All his actions are in
contravention of common sense and logic,’ he continued.
‘Not to refer to what I have not seen, that is, the crime itself
and the whole catastrophe, the day before yesterday, while
he was talking to me, he had an unaccountably fixed look in
his eye. He laughed unexpectedly when there was nothing to
laugh at. He showed continual and inexplicable irritability,
using strange words, ‘Bernard!’ ‘Ethics!’ and others equally
inappropriate.’ But the doctor detected mania, above all, in
the fact that the prisoner could not even speak of the three
thousand roubles, of which he considered himself to have
been cheated, without extraordinary irritation, though he
could speak comparatively lightly of other misfortunes and
grievances. According to all accounts, he had even in the
past, whenever the subject of the three thousand roubles