3rd April 1897
Dear Captain Simonini,
This morning I woke with a heavy head and a strange taste in my mouth. God forgive me...it was the taste of absinthe! I assure you that I hadn't yet read your account of last night. How could I know what you had been drinking unless I'd drunk it myself? And how could a priest recognize the taste of something forbidden and therefore unfamiliar? Or perhaps my head is confused. Perhaps I'm writing about the taste I felt in my mouth when I woke up, but am writing after reading your diary, and what you wrote has influenced me. I have never tasted absinthe, so how could I know that the taste in my mouth is absinthe? It is the taste of something else, which your diary has induced me to think is absinthe.
Oh, good Lord, the fact remains that I woke in my own bed, and everything seemed normal, as if I had done nothing else all last month. Except that I knew I had to go to your apartment. Having reached there, or rather here, I read those pages of your diary, which I hadn't yet seen. I saw your mention of Boullan and some vague, confused picture came to mind.
I repeated that name aloud several times, and it produced a sudden flash in my mind, as if your Doctors Bourru and Burot had touched a piece of magnetized metal to some part of my body, or a Doctor Charcot had waved—I don't know what—a finger, a key, a hand before my eyes and had sent me into a state of lucid somnambulism.
I saw the image of a priest spitting into the mouth of a woman possessed.