Note: Borderline genre; this story reflects on madness and the possibility of escape from reality. First published in Gil Blas, 18 January 1887.

Synopsis: This story starts with the narrator expressing conflicted feelings of attraction and repulsion toward madness. On the one hand madness seems like freedom-- without reason, anything should be possible. On the other hand, the concerns of insane people are built of the same quotidian stuff as other people's, and thus not really an escape. He illustrates this by telling his encounter with Madame Hermet, a patient at an asylum. She was once a great beauty. Her son contracted smallpox, and she was too much afraid of the disfiguring effects of the illness to visit him when he was dying. Her conflicting emotions were so great that she lost her reason; now her preoccupation circles incessantly around worrying about the state of her face, and fretting about pockmarks that she is certain are daily appearing there.