The Count of Monte Cristo

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"Insane?"

"Raving mad; his head becomes weaker. Sometimes he weeps bitterly,
sometimes laughs boisterously, at other time he passes hours on
the seashore, flinging stones in the water and when the flint makes
'duck-and-drake' five or six times, he appears as delighted as if he had
gained another Marengo or Austerlitz. Now, you must agree that these are
indubitable symptoms of insanity."

"Or of wisdom, my dear baron--or of wisdom," said Louis XVIII.,
laughing; "the greatest captains of antiquity amused themselves
by casting pebbles into the ocean--see Plutarch's life of Scipio
Africanus."

M. de Blacas pondered deeply between the confident monarch and the
truthful minister. Villefort, who did not choose to reveal the whole
secret, lest another should reap all the benefit of the disclosure, had