He was delirious. "The first symptoms of cerebral fever," the doctors had said, and these words were repeated by all his fellow office workers as they returned in groups of two or three from the asylum where they had gone to visit him. It seemed that as they passed the news along to the few latecomer colleagues they would meet on the street, they felt a particular delight in using the scientific terms they had just learned from the doctors: "Frenzy, frenzy." "Encephalitis." "Inflammation of the membrane." "Cerebral fever." They wanted to appear saddened, but in the depths of their hearts they were quite happy, if only because they had fulfilled their duty, and because, being in the best of health, they had left that sad asylum and were now outside under the joyful blue sky of that wintry morning. "Will he die? Will he go mad?" "Who knows?" "It seems he won't actually die..." "But what does he say? What does he say?" "Always the same thing.
