The Madness of Crowds (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #17)

by Louise Penny

All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well. It was a quote from one of Gamache’s favorite writers, the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Who’d offered hope in a time of great suffering.

It was rare, she knew, to have some space between thought and action. Most people didn’t. They thought they did, but most acted on impulse, even instinct, then justified it.

Professor Robinson knew that that gap, that pause, meant the person had control over their actions. Had choices. And with those choices came power.

It was the courage that came with conviction, with absolute certainty. When all doubt was banished. It was the courage of the zealot.

“There are,” said the Chief, unbothered and undeterred by what he’d just heard, “four sentences that lead to wisdom. Do with them as you will.”

I’m sorry.’ ‘I was wrong.’ ‘I don’t know.’” As he listed them, Chief Inspector Gamache raised a finger, until his palm was open. “‘I need help.’”

As Jean-Guy slipped by, Armand laid a hand on his arm. “You don’t look anything like me,” he said. “But you’re still my son.”

Though Haniya Daoud had certainly seen into him. If not his head, then she’d seen through the cracks, into his broken heart. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. Armand wondered if Florence understood that line from The Little Prince.

Brave girl, her grandfather thought. Armand knew the terror of that first step. He also knew that the key to a full life was taking it. The trick wasn’t necessarily having less fear, it was finding more courage.

It’s become known as the hundredth monkey effect. Whether it was a hundred monkeys or not, the point was that when a tipping point is reached, when a certain number of monkeys—” “—or people,” said Stephen. “—start doing the same thing—” “—or believing the same thing,” said Stephen. “Exactly,” said Vincent. “The idea explodes.

Whenever he approached the log cabin, he was reminded of Thoreau, who’d said of his own cabin on Walden Pond, “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

“Ça va bien aller,” Gilbert had whispered, as the pain and fear threatened to overwhelm Jean-Guy. “It’ll be all right.”

“They’re kind. Content. They don’t judge. They don’t hide their feelings. There’s no hidden agenda. Complete acceptance. If that isn’t grace, I don’t know what is. I’m not saying people with Down syndrome are perfect or always easy. That would be to trivialize them, make them sound like pets. What I am saying is that in my experience they make better humans than most.”

I aspire to be as decent, as optimistic, as forgiving.”

And when he falls, thought Gamache, he falls like Lucifer. Never to hope again.

I think she puts on a hair shirt every day and goes out to spout crap she doesn’t necessarily support.”

It’s about what happens when gullibility and fear meet greed and power.”

“People will believe anything. Doesn’t make them stupid, just desperate.

Almost everywhere he looked were books. It was the literary equivalent of a blizzard. They were stacked up against the walls, as though blown there. In some places they were four, five feet deep.

Long dead and buried in another town My mother isn’t finished with me yet.

“This’s mine,” she said. He knew what she meant. Not her button, but what was written on it. Or will it be, as always was, too late?

She went to her sent file. Sure enough, there was her reply. No fucking way. Sincerely, Ruth Zardo. “Well, that seems clear.”

“Amelia Earhart,” said Ruth. “We found her. She and Jimmy Hoffa are shacked up down the Old Stage Road.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir found the caretaker, Éric Viau, in the basement of the old gym wiping everything down with disinfectant.

To him it looked like something out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, or one of the darker fables of La Fontaine.

Through his small son, Jean-Guy discovered that libraries held treasures. Not just the written word, but things that couldn’t be seen. Like le Petit Prince said, in the book Jean-Guy had first read as he’d read it to Honoré.

What is essential is invisible to the eye. Knowledge, ideas, thoughts. Imagination. All invisible. All lived in libraries.

Ruth lost her footing. Haniya grabbed her before she fell. She held Ruth’s hand for the rest of the way, and wondered if maybe the key was not in being held, but in holding.

Before dipping into the last box, she sat back on the sofa, put her feet up, and quietly sipped her drink, staring into the fireplace, the lit tree in the background. They’d take it down, along with the other decorations, on January 5th. The eve of the Twelfth Night.

Who hurt you once so far beyond repair That you would greet each overture with curling lip?

But they, better than most, knew that no place was really safe from physical harm. Anything could happen to anyone, at any moment. What made a place safe were the people.

One of Gilbert’s favorite quotes was from Henry David Thoreau. The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

When Thoreau was arrested for protesting an injustice, Ralph Waldo Emerson had visited him in prison and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau had replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”

“If not the father, then my money’s on Abigail,” said Beauvoir. “Especially given that she’s traveling the country arguing that anyone with severe disabilities is an unnecessary burden. She’s trying to justify what she did. Making it legal, even moral, in retrospect.”

“Now it is now, and the dark thing is here,” said Gilbert, quietly. “It’s not dark yet,” said Gamache. “But it’s getting there.”

And that brings me to the title. It’s taken from a book, which is real and is also in Gamache’s library, called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It was first published in 1841 by Charles Mackay. It’s a series of nonfiction essays looking at why sane people believe the nuttiest things.