Narcisse on a Tightrope

For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called "cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.) But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually ...