Note 272 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Sollier, op. cit., p. 123: ‘The imbecile is refined in his persecutions, and that knowingly. He loves to see suffering. He skins a bird alive, laughs on hearing its cries and seeing its struggles. He tears off the feet of a frog, looks at its suffering for a moment, then abruptly crushes it, or kills it in some other way, as one of the imbeciles at Bicêtre does.... The imbecile is as cruel to his fellow-creature as to animals, and that even in his jesting. Thus he will laugh maliciously and mock at a comrade who has become crippled.’