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

by Louise Penny

It wasn’t joy, wasn’t happiness, wasn’t optimism that had propelled that couple almost a thousand kilometers from their home in a different province, through the night, along snowy and icy roads, to here. It wasn’t pleasure that had lifted others

Abigail Robinson was not simply an academic, she was an alchemist.

“‘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.’”

Perhaps, he thought, the burden wasn’t Idola. It was the shame.

Of course, if Professor Robinson’s findings were implemented, it meant the right to die became the obligation to die, but sacrifices needed to be made. In a free society.

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.

“Oh, you’d be surprised how clearly the heart can see. What I do know is that how we feel drives what we think, and that determines what we do. Our actions leave behind evidence, those facts you mention. But it all starts with an emotion.”

But correct and right were two different things. As were facts and truth.

Like a forest after a fire, he thought, as he took their coats to a back room where a bed was heaped high with them. There was loss, but vivid new life had also emerged from the ash.

Gamache nodded. 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.” Vincent Gilbert had two chairs.

“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.”

“Either. Both. She’s like an addict. So bound to something that she can’t let it go, even though she knows it’s self-destructive.”

Olivier was afraid of disapproval. He hated disapproval even more than he wanted approval. A vestige of childhood, Myrna knew. How horrible it must have been when the boy realized he was gay and destined for a lifetime of judgment.

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

Thus human courts acquit the strong, And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.

Only in the winter was it possible to see both the forest and the trees. Homicide, she thought, was a perpetual winter.

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

“I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.”

Everyone was quick to say what happened was heartbreaking. But really, privately, they considered the tragedies of the pandemic a cull. Of the weak.

And Armand Gamache knew that the underlying condition, the infirmity everyone talked about, did not lie with those who died, but with those who had allowed it to happen.

“Well,” she finally said, “all I can say is your investigation must be a real shit show if you still suspect me. That is the expression, isn’t it? ‘Shit show’? I learned it from Ruth. She was describing Clara’s career as an artist.”