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dread, and a nameless third emotion that reminds me of the first time I saw a corpse. I was twelve then, and the body was that of Georg Hellmann; a week before, I had been playing with him, now he lay there amid wreaths and flowers, a thing unspeakably alien, made of yellow wax, a thing that, in a horrible way, had nothing more to do with us, that had departed for an unthinkable eternity and yet was still there, a speechless, strange, chill threat. Of course, later, in the war, I saw countless dead men and felt scarcely any more emotion than if I had been in a slaughterhouse—but that first one I never forgot, just as one never forgets any first time. He was death. And it is this same death that sometimes peers at me from the extinguished eyes of the madmen, a living death, more bewildering, almost, and more incomprehensible than that other, silent one. 
    Only with Isabelle it is different.
    I see her coming toward me along the path from the women's pavilion. A yellow dress billows around her like a bell of shantung silk, and in her hand she is carrying a broad, flat straw hat.
    I get up and go to meet her. Her face is narrow, and one really sees only the eyes and mouth. The eyes are gray and green and very transparent; the mouth is as red as that of a consumptive or as though it were heavily painted. The eyes, however, can suddenly become shallow, slate-colored, and small, and the mouth narrow and bitter like that of an old maid. When she is that way, she is Jennie, a distrustful, unattractive person, discontented with everything you do —otherwise she is Isabelle. Both are illusions, for in reality she is Geneviève Terhoven and is suffering from an illness that has the ugly and rather spectral name of schizophrenia —a division of consciousness, a split personality—and that is the reason she considers herself either Isabelle or Jennie —someone other than she really is. She is one of the youngest patients in the asylum. Her mother is said to live in Alsace and to be quite rich but to pay little attention to her. In any event, I have not seen her here since I have known Geneviève, and that is now six weeks.
    Today she is Isabelle, as I see immediately. At such times she lives in a dream world divorced from reality and seems light and weightless and I would not be surprised if the sulphur butterflies, playing around us, came and settled on her shoulders.
    "There you are again!" she says, smiling. "Where have you been all this time?"
    When she is Isabelle she says du to me. This is no partic ular distinction; at such times she says du to everyone. "Where have you been?" she asks again.
    I make a gesture in the direction of the gate. "Somewhere —out there—"
    She looks at me for an instant inquiringly. "Out there? Why? Are you looking for something?"
    "I guess so—if I only knew what!"
    She comes close to me. "Give it up, Rolf. One never finds anything."
    I recoil at the name Rolf. Unfortunately, she often calls me that, for just as she takes herself for someone else, so, too, does she me, and not always for the same person. She alternates between Rolf and Rudolf, and once a certain Raoul turned up. Rolf is a boring fellow whom I cannot stand; Raoul seems to be a sort of gay deceiver—what I like best is when she calls me Rudolf, then she is enthusiastic and in love. My real name, Ludwig Bodmer, she ignores. I have told it to her often, but it simply does not make any impression.
    During the first weeks this was all very confusing, but now I am accustomed to it. At that time I had the common conception of mental illnesses: nothing but continuous violence, attempts at murder, and gibbering idiots. They exist, of course, and they are more frequent than the other; but just by contrast Geneviève is all the more surprising. At first I could hardly believe that she was sick at all, so playful seemed her alternations of name and personality, and even now that still sometimes happens to me. Finally I realized, however,