Chapter I: DEDICATE this book to you, my young countryman, with whom I am so (8)

“Ah!” said she in a broken voice after the silence of the first minute. “God be praised, I am not too late. Dead! I believed you were dead! Ah! that is horrible! But that is all over, is it not? Say that you will obey me, say that you will not kill yourself. Ah! swear, swear it to me.”

She took my hand in hers with a supplicating gesture. Her fingers were like ice. There was something so decisive in this entrance, such a proof of love in a moment in which I was so excited that I did not reflect, and, without replying to her, I took her in my arms, weeping, my lips sought her lips, and through the most scalding tears I gave her the most loving, the most sincere kisses; that was a moment of infinite ecstasy, of supreme felicity, and as she drew away from me, with the shame at what she had permitted depicted on her face, always wild.

“Wretched creature that I am!” said she, “Ah! I must go away! Let me go away! Do not come near me.”

“You see that I must die,” I responded, “for you do not love me, you are going to be the wife of another, we shall be separated, and forever.”

I took the dark vial from the table and showed it to her by the light of the lamp.

“Only a fourth of this flask,” I continued, and it is the remedy for much suffering. “In five minutes it will be ended,” and gently and without making a single gesture that would force her to defend herself: “Go away now, and I thank you for having come. Before a quarter of an hour I shall have ceased to feel what I am feeling now, this intolerable privation of you for so many months. Come, adieu, do not take away my courage.”

She had trembled when the flame had lighted up the black liquid. She extended her hand and snatched the flask away, saying: “No! No!” She looked at it, read the inscription on the red label and trembled. Her countenance became still more changed. A wrinkle hollowed itself between her eyebrows. Her lips trembled. Her eyes expressed the agony of a last anxiety, then, in a voice almost harsh, jerking her words as if they were drawn from her by a torturing and irresistible power.

“I, too,” said she, “I have suffered much, I have struggled hard. No,” she continued, advancing toward me and taking me by the arm, “you must not go alone, not alone. We will die together. After what I have done, it is all that is left.” She put the vial to her lips, but I took it away from her, and with a smile almost insane she continued: “To die, yes, to die here, near you, with you,” and she approached again, laying her head on my shoulder, so that I felt her soft hair against my cheek. “So! Ah! it is a long time that I have loved you, so long I can tell you the truth now, since I shall pay for it with my life. You will take me with you, we will go away together, both of us.”

“Yes! yes,” I answered, “we will die together. I swear it to you. But not immediately. Ah! leave me time to feel that you love me.” Our lips were again united, but this time she returned my kisses. Ah! Those were kisses in which the ecstasy of the senses and of the soul were deliciously confounded, in which the past, the present, the future were abolished to give place to love alone, to the painful, the intoxicating madness of love. This frail body, this living statuette of Tanagra was mine in its grace and innocence, and it seemed to me that this hour was not real, it so far surpassed my hopes, almost my desire.

In the softened light of the lamp and of the half-extinguished fire, the delicacy of her features, her consummate pallor, her disordered hair, made her seem an apparition, and it was with a phantom’s voice, a voice beyond life, that she spoke to me, relating the long history of her sentiments for me.

She said that she had loved at the first look and without suspecting it; then how she had suffered at my sadness and at my confidence; how she had dreamed of being my friend, a friend who would gently console me; then the fearful light which my declaration in the forest had suddenly thrown upon her heart, and that she had sworn to put an abyss between us.

She recounted her struggles when she received my letters, and her vain resolutions not to read them, and the folly of her engagement in order that all might be irremediable, and her return, and the rest. She found, to reveal to me the secret and cruel romance of her tenderness, phrases modest and impassioned, which fell from the mysterious brim of the soul as tears fall from the brim of the eyes. She said: “I could not if I wished efface these griefs, so much do I need to feel that I have lived for you.” She said: “You will let me die first, that I may not see you suffer.” And she wrapped me in her hair, and upon her face which I had known so controlled was a kind of ecstasy of martyrdom, a supernatural joy mingled with a profound grief, an exaltation mingled with remorse.

When she was silent, clasped in my arms, absorbed in me, we could hear the wind which moaned outside the closed windows, and this sleeping château, in its peaceful silence, was already the tomb, the tomb toward which we were going, drawn out of life by the ardor of love which had thus thrown us heart to heart.

It is here, my dear master, where comes the most singular episode of this adventure, the one which men will call the most shameful; but for you and me these words have no meaning, and I will have the courage to tell you all.

I had been sincere, and sincere without the shadow of calculation, in the resolution of suicide which caused me to buy the nux vomica, and then to write to Charlotte. When she had come, when she had fallen into my arms and cried: “Let us die together!” I responded: “Let us die together,” with the most perfect good faith. It had appeared so simple, so natural, so easy for us to go away together. You, who have written some strong pages upon the vapor of illusion created in us by physical causes, which is like that intoxication produced by wine, you will not judge me a monster for having felt this vapor dissipate, this intoxication disappear with possession.

Charlotte had placed her head on my breast and she fell asleep, exhausted by the excess of her emotions. I looked at her and I felt, without knowing how, that I fell back from my state before this happiness, to the reflective, philosophic, and lucid one which had been mine, and which a sorcery had metamorphosed into another.

I looked at Charlotte, and thought that in a few hours this adorable body, animated at this moment by all the ardors of life, would be immovable, cold, dead--dead this mouth which trembled still with my kiss, dead these beautiful eyes shaded under their trembling lids, dead this mind filled with me, intoxicated of me!

I repeated mentally several times this word: “Dead, dead, dead,” and what it represents of a sudden falling into the night, of an irreparable fall into the darkness, the cold, the emptiness, oppressed my heart.

This entrance into the gulf without bottom of annihilation which had seemed, not only easy, but profoundly desirable when the fury of unfortunate love dominated me--suddenly, and this fury once appeased, appeared to me the most formidable of actions, the most foolish, the most impossible of execution. Charlotte continued to keep her eyes closed. The emaciation of her poor face, rendered more perceptible by the way in which the softened light revealed her features, told too plainly what she had felt for days. And I was going to kill her, or at least, to assist her to destroy herself. We were about to kill ourselves.

A shudder ran through me at the thought, and I was afraid. For her? For myself? For both? I do not know. I was afraid, afraid of feeling to grow numb in my most secret being, the soul of my soul, the indefinable center of all our energy. And suddenly by a sudden facing about of ideas like to that of the dying who throw a last look upon their existence, and who perceive, in the mirage of a secret regret, the joys known or coveted, the vision was evoked of that life, all thought of which I had turn by turn desired and abjured.

I saw you in your little cell, my dear master, in meditation, and the universe of intelligence developed before me the splendor of its horizons. My personal works, this brain of which I had been so proud, this Self cultivated so complaisantly, I was about to sacrifice all these treasures.

“To your pledged word,” ought I to have responded? “To a caprice of excitement,” I did respond. Strictly, this suicide had a signification, when to be forever separated from Charlotte filled me with despair. But now? We love each other, we belong to each other. Who can prevent us, young and free, from fleeing together, if on the next day we cannot endure separation? This hypothesis of an elopement brought before my mind the image of Count André. Why not make a note of this also? An exhilarating titillation of self-love ran through my heart at this souvenir.

I looked at Charlotte again, and I felt filled with the most ferocious pride. The rivalry instituted by my secret envy between her brother and myself awoke again in a start of triumph. There is a celebrated proverb which says that all animals are sad after pleasure: “_Omne animal_.” It was not sadness that I felt then, but an absolute drying up of my tenderness, a rapid return--rapid as the action of a chemical precipitation--to a state of mind anterior.

I do not believe that this displacement of sensibility could have taken more than half an hour. I continued to regard Charlotte, while abandoning myself to these passage of ideas, with the delight of a reconquered liberty.

The fullness of the voluntary and reflective life flowed in me now, as the water of a river whose dam has been raised. The passion for this absent child had raised up a barrier against which the flood of my old sentiment was dammed up. This barrier thrown down, I became myself again. She was sleeping. I heard her light, equal breath, then suddenly a great sob, and she awoke:

“Ah!” said she, pressing me to her in a convulsive fashion, “you are here, you are here. I had lost consciousness. I dreamed. Ah! what a dream! I saw my brother come toward you. Oh! the horrible dream!”

She kissed me again, and, as her mouth was pressed to mine, the clock struck. She listened and counted the strokes.

“Four o’clock,” said she, “it is time--farewell, my love, farewell.”

She embraced me again. Her face had become calm in her exaltation, almost smiling.

“Give me the poison,” said she in a firm voice.

I remained immovable without answering.

“You are afraid for me,” she resumed; “I shall know how to die. Give it to me.” I rose, still without replying. She sat up and clasped her hands without looking at me. Was she praying? Was this the last effort of this soul to extract the love of life which pushes its roots so deeply in a creature of twenty years?

My resolution to prevent this double suicide was now absolute. I had the coolness to seize the brown vial from the table and carry it to a wardrobe and lock it. These preparations of which she took no notice no doubt seemed long to Charlotte, for she turned toward me:

“I am ready,” said she.

She saw my empty hands. The ecstatic expression changed to one of extreme anguish, and her voice grew harsh as she said:

“The poison! Give me the poison!” Then as if responding to a thought which suddenly came to her mind, she added feverishly: “No, it is not possible.”

“No,” cried I, falling on my knees before her, and seizing her hands. “No, you are right, it is not possible. I cannot let you die before me, for I should be your assassin. I pray you, Charlotte, do not ask me to realize this fatal project. When I bought the poison I was mad, I thought that you did not love me. I wished to kill myself. Oh! how sincerely! But now that you do love me, that I know it, that you have given yourself to me, no I cannot, I will not. Let us live, my love, let us live, consent to live. We will go away together, if you will. And if you will not, if you repent of this confession of your regard, well! I will suffer the martyrdom; but, I swear to you, this shall be as if it had never been--I will not trouble your life. But to help you to die, to kill yourself, you so young, so fair, oh no, no, do not ask me to do it.”

How many times I spoke thus to her, I do not know. I saw on her face a sweet emotion, a woman’s feebleness, the “yes” of the look which gives the lie to the “no” of the mouth. She was silent, then she fixed her eyes on me, and now they were bright with a tragic fire. She had withdrawn her hands from mine, crossed her arms upon her breast, and with her hair falling all around her, as if withdrawn from me by an invincible horror, she said, when I had ceased to supplicate her:

“So you will not keep your word?”

“No,” I stammered, “I cannot. I cannot. I did not know what I said.”

“Ah!” said she with a cruel disdain on her beautiful lips, “but tell me then that you are afraid! Give me the poison. I will give you back your word. I will die alone. But to have drawn me thus into the snare, you coward! coward! coward!”

Why did I not spring up under this outrage, why did I not take the bottle of poison, why did I not put it to my lips there before her and say: “See if I am a coward?” I do not understand why I did not when I think of it, when I remember the implacable contempt printed on her face. It must be that I was afraid, I who would now go to the scaffold without trembling, I who have had the courage to be silent for three months, thus risking my life. But now an idea sustains me, coldly, intellectually conceived while during that frightful scene there was a confusion of all the forces of my mind, between my surcharged sensations of the last months and those of the present hour, and, sitting down on the carpet, as if I had no longer energy enough to hold myself up, I shook my head, and said: “No, no.”

This time it was she who did not respond. I saw her mass her beautiful hair and twist it into a knot; put her feet into her slippers, and wrap her white robe around her. She sought with her eyes for the dark flask with the red label, and, seeing it no longer on the table, she walked toward the door, then, without even turning her head, she disappeared after darting at me the terrible word:

“Coward! coward!”

I remained there a long time. Suddenly a frightful uneasiness seized my heart. If Charlotte, exasperated as she was, should attempt her life! A prey to the terrors of this new anguish, I dared to cross the corridors and go down the stairs to her room, and then, putting my ear against the door, I heard a noise, a moaning, a sign of what drama was being acted behind this thin rampart of wood which I could have burst open with my shoulder quickly enough to bring help.

The first noises of the château were rising from the basement. The servants were getting up. I must go back to my room. At six o’clock I was in the garden under the young girl’s window.

My imagination had shown me Charlotte, throwing herself from the window, and lying dead on the ground with her limbs broken. I saw her shutters closed, and below, the plat-band in order with its line of rose bushes on which bloomed the last roses of the autumn.

She had told me, this night, of the charm which she tasted, in her hours of distress, when she loved me in silence, in leaning above this bed of roses and inhaling the aroma of these sweet flowers, spread on the breeze.

I picked one, and its perfume almost made me faint.

To deceive an anxiety which each moment made more intense, I walked straight on, into the country bathed in vapor, in this gray morning of November. I went very far, since I passed the village of Saulzet-le-Froid, and yet, at eight o’clock, I was back taking my breakfast, or seeming to do so, in the dining-room of the château.

This was the time, I knew, for the maid to go into Mlle. de Jussat’s room. If anything had happened this girl would call out immediately. With what inexpressible comfort I saw her come down and go toward the kitchen with the salver prepared for the tea!

Charlotte had not taken her life.

Hope returned to me then. Upon reflection, and her first feeling of anger passed, perhaps she would interpret as a proof of love my refusal to die and to let her die. I should know that also. It would be sufficient to wait for her in her brother’s room. The little invalid was at the end of his convalescence, and, though deprived of walks, he displayed the gayety of a child about to be born again into life.

He received me with all sorts of pretty ways, and his gracious humor redoubled my hope. He would break the ice between his sister and me. The hands of a young man and of a young girl join so easily when they touch around an innocent and curly head. But when Charlotte appeared, so white in a dress which brought out her paleness still more, pretending a headache to avoid the pranks of Lucien, the eyes burning with fever, I understood that I had believed too readily in a possible reconciliation.

I saluted her. She found a way to not even respond to my salutation. I had known three persons in her already; the creature tender, delicate, compassionate, the young girl easily startled, the lover impassioned almost to ecstasy. I saw now upon this noble visage the coldest, the most impenetrable mark of contempt.

Ah! the old and banal formula: the patrician pride--I was able to account for it and that certain silences kill as surely as the headman’s ax. This impression was so bitter that I could not resign myself to it. This very day I watched to have a word with her, and, at the moment when she was going to her room toward the close of the afternoon, to dress herself for dinner, I went to her on the stairs. She put me by with a gesture so haughty, with so cruel a “Monsieur, I do not know you any longer!” upon her trembling lips, a look so indignant in her eyes that I could not find a word to say to her.

She had judged me and I was condemned. Yes, condemned. She despised me for my fear of death; and it was true, I had felt that cowardly chill before the black hole, while she dared face the worst. I certainly had the right to say to myself that this alone would not have arrested me before the suicide of both, if pity for her had not been joined with it and my ambition as a thinker. No matter. She had given herself to me under one condition, and to this tragic condition I had responded “yes” before, and “no” after. Ah, well. She scorned me, but she had been mine. I had held her in my arms, these arms, and I was the first to kiss those lips.

Yes, I suffered cruelly between this night and my definite departure from the house. However, it was not the arid and conquered despair of the summer, the total abdication in distress.

I retained at the bottom of my heart, I cannot say a happiness, but a something of satisfaction which sustained me in this crisis. When Charlotte passed me without noticing me any more than some object forgotten there by a servant, I contemplated her response to my declaration of love. For another experience of that happiness, perhaps, I would have accepted anew the fatal compact, with the cold resolve to keep it. But this happiness had none the less been true.

And was this love really, irremediably ended? In doing as she had done Mlle, de Jussat had proved a very deep passion. Was it possible that nothing remained of it in this romantic heart?

To-day and in the light of the tragedy which ended this lamentable adventure, I comprehend that it was precisely this romantic character which prevented any return of love into this heart. She had loved in me a mirage, a being absolutely different from myself, and the sudden vision of my true nature having at a blow dispelled her illusions, she hated me with all the power of her old love.

Alas! with all my pretensions to the learned psychologist, I did not see the evolution of this mind, then! I did not even suspect that she would seek at any price the means of knowing me better, and that she would go, in the distraction of her actual disgust, so far as to treat me as judges treat the accused; in fine that she would read my papers and would not recoil before any scruple.

I did not even know enough to guess that she was not the girl to survive such a shock as the revelation of my cold-blooded resolutions written in my notebook brought upon her, and I did not think to destroy the bottle of poison which I had refused to give her.

I believed myself to be a great observer because I reflected a great deal. The quibbles of my analysis concealed from me its falsity. It was not necessary to reflect at this period, but to observe. Instead, deceived by this reasoning which I have just gone over to you, and persuaded that Charlotte loved me still in spite of her contempt, I tried to recall this love by the most simple means, the most ineffective at that moment.

I wrote to her.

I found my letter on my bureau the same day, unopened. I went to her door at night and called to her. This door was locked and no one replied. I tried to stop her again. She waved me off with more authority than the first time, without looking at me.

Finally, the heartbreak of this continuous insult was stronger than the ardors of passion which had begun to kindle in me. On the evening of the day in which she had thus repulsed me, I wept much, then I resolved upon a definite course. A little of my old energy had returned, for it was needed for this part which I had undertaken.

The next week M. de Plane and Count André were coming. This would have decided me if I had still hesitated. Their presence, in this double and sinister disaster of my love and of my pride, no, I would not, I could not endure it.

This, then, is what I had decided: The marquis had asked me to prolong my stay until the 15th of November. It was now the 3d. I announced, on the morning of this fatal 3d of November, that I had just received from my mother a letter which made me a little uneasy; then in the forenoon, I said that a dispatch had still further increased my anxiety. I asked then of M. de Jussat permission to go to Clermont early the next day, adding that if I did not return, would he be so good as to box the articles I had left and send them to me. I held this conversation in the presence of Charlotte, assured that she would interpret it in its true significance: “He is going away not to return.” I expected that the news of this separation would move her, and, wishing to profit by this emotion, I had the audacity to write to her another note, these two lines only:

“On the point of leaving you forever, I have the right to ask a last interview. I will come to you at eleven o’clock.”

It was necessary that she should not return this note without reading it. I placed it open upon her table, at the risk of losing all if the chambermaid should see it. Ah! how my heart beat, when at five minutes to eleven o’clock, I took my way to her room and tried the door.

It was not bolted. She was waiting for me. I saw at the first glance that the struggle would be hard. Her somber countenance showed too plainly that she had not permitted me to come that she might forgive me. She wore a dark silk dress, and never had her eyes been more fixed, more implacably fixed and cold.

“Monsieur,” said she as soon as I had shut the door, “I am ignorant of what you intend to say to me--I am ignorant of it and I do not wish to know. It is not to listen to you that I have allowed you to come. I swear to you, and I know how to keep my word--if you take a step toward me and if you try to speak to me without my permission, I will call and you shall be thrown from the window like a thief.”

While speaking she had put her finger on the button of the electric bell. Her brow, her mouth, her gestures, her voice showed such resolution that I did not dare to speak. She continued: “You have, monsieur, caused me to commit very unworthy actions. The first has for excuse that I did not believe you capable of the infamy you have employed. Beside I should have known how to expiate it,” she added, as if speaking to herself. “The second. I do not look for any excuse.” And her face became purple with shame. “It was too insupportable to think that you had acted thus. I wished to be sure of what you are. I wished to know. You had told me that you kept a journal. I desired to read it and I have done so. I went into your room when you were not there, and forced the lock of your notebook. Yes, yes, I did that! I have been punished, since I have read your infamous plans. The third. In telling you I acquit the debt which I have contracted with you by the second. The third,” and she hesitated, in my indignation, “I wrote to my brother. He knows everything!”

“Ah!” cried I, “then you are lost.”

“You know what I have sworn,” she interrupted; and she put her finger again on the bell. “Be quiet. Nothing worse can befall me than has already happened,” she continued, “and no one will do anything more for or against me. My brother will know that also, and what I have resolved. The letter will reach him to-morrow morning. I ought to warn you since you hold your life so dear. And now, go away.”

“Charlotte,” I implored.

“If in one minute you have not gone out,” said she, looking at the clock, “I will call.”

§ VII. CONCLUSION.

And I obeyed!

The next day, at six o’clock I left the château, a prey to the most sinister presentiments, trying in vain to persuade myself that this scene would not be followed by some terrible effect; that Count André would arrive soon enough to save her from a desperate resolution; that she would hesitate at the last moment; that some unexpected thing would happen.

As to fleeing from the possible vengeance of the brother, I did not for a moment think of it. This time, I had resumed my character because I had an idea to sustain me, that of allowing no person to humiliate me any further. Yes, although I had faltered before a loving girl and in the weakness of happy love, I would not do so before the threat of a man.

I arrived at Clermont, devoured by an anxiety which did not last very long, for I learned of the suicide of Mlle. de Jussat and was arrested at the same moment.

From the first words of the Judge of Instruction I reconstructed all the details of the suicide: Charlotte had taken from the flask which I had bought as much as she thought sufficient to cause her death. She had done that on the very day she had read my journal, whose lock I found had been forced. I had not noticed it because my mind was so filled with other things than these sterile notes.

She had been careful, in order to turn away my suspicions, to replace with water the quantity of nux vomica thus taken. She had thrown the flask out of the window because she did not wish her father and mother to learn of her suicide excepting through her brother. And I, who know the whole truth of this horrible drama, who could at least give my journal as a presumption of my innocence, destroyed this journal after my first examination; I have refused to speak, to defend myself--because of this brother! I have told you, I have drained to the bottom the cup of humiliation and I will do no more.

This man whom I so much envied from the first day, this man who represents death to me now, and who, knowing the whole truth, must consider me the lowest of the low. I do not wish that he should have the right to quite despise me, and he has not the right. He does not because we both are silent. But this for me, is to risk my life in order to save the honor of the dead, and for him to sacrifice an innocent person to this honor.

Of us two, of me who will not defend myself by taking shelter behind the dead body of Charlotte, and of him who, having the letter which proves her suicide, keeps it, to avenge himself on the lover of his sister by allowing him to be condemned as an assassin, which is the brave man? Which is the gentleman? All the shame of my weakness--if there be any shame, I wipe out by not defending myself, and I feel a proud pleasure, as a revenge for those terrible last days, at not having killed myself, at not asking of death the oblivion of so many tortures.

Count André must also reach the bottom of his infamy. If I am condemned, he knowing me to be innocent, he having the proof of it, he keeping silent, ah well! the Jussat-Randons will have nothing with which to reproach me--we will be quits.

However, I have told all to you, my venerated, my dear master; I have opened my soul to you, and in confiding this secret to your honor, I know too well whom I am addressing even to insist upon the promise I have taken the liberty to exact on the first page of this memoir.

But, you see, I am stifled by this silence; I stifle with the weight which is always, always upon me. To say all in a word, and applied to my sensation, it is legitimate, I stifle with remorse. I want to be understood, consoled, loved; I want some one to pity me and say words to me which shall dissipate the phantoms, the evil spirits, the torturing phantoms.

I made out, when I began these pages, a list of questions which I wished to ask you at the end. I flattered myself that I could recount to you my history as you state your problems in psychology in your books which I have read so much, and now I find nothing to say to you only the word of despair: “_De profundis_!”

Write to me, my dear master, direct me. Strengthen me in the doctrine which was, which is still mine, in the conviction of universal necessity which wills that even our most detestable actions, even this cold enterprise in which I embarked in the interest of science, even my weakness before the compact of death, are a part of the laws of this immense universe.

Tell me that I am not a monster, that there are no monsters, that you will, if I emerge from this supreme crisis, have me for your disciple, your friend. If you were a physician, and a sick man came to you, you would heal him for humanity’s sake. You are a physician, a great physician of souls. Ah! mine is badly hurt and bleeding. I pray you for a word to comfort me, a word, a single word, and you will be forever blessed by your faithful.

ROBERT GRESLON.

V.

TORMENT OF IDEAS.

A MONTH had passed since the mother of Robert Greslon had brought into the hermitage of the Rue Guy de la Brosse the strange manuscript which Adrien Sixte had hesitated to read. And the philosopher, after these four weeks, was still the slave of the trouble inflicted by the reading, to such an extent that even his humble neighbors noticed it.

There were continual consultations between Mlle. Trapenard and the Carbonnets, in the lodging filled with its odor of leather, where the faithful servant and the judicious _concierges_ discussed the cause of the strange change in the manners of the celebrated analyst.

The admirable, automatic regularity of his goings out and comings in, which had made him a living chronometer for the whole quarter, had been suddenly transformed into a febrile and inexplicable anxiety.

The philosopher, since the visit of Mme. Greslon, went and came, like one who cannot stay in any place, who, as soon as he goes out thinks he will return, and as soon as he has come in, cannot endure his room. In the street, instead of walking along with the methodical step which reveals a nervous machine perfectly balanced, he hurried on, he stopped, he gesticulated, as if disputing with himself. This enervation was betrayed by signs still more strange. Mlle. Trapenard had told to the Carbonnets that her master did not go to bed now, before two or three o’clock in the morning:

“And it is not because he is writing,” insisted the good woman, “for he walks and walks. The first time I thought he was ill. I got up to ask him if he wished some infusion. He, who is always so polite, so gentle, that you would not suspect him to be a man who knows so much, he sent me away in a brutal manner.”

“And I who saw him the other day,” responded Mother Carbonnet, “as I was returning from a course at the _café_! I would not believe my eyes. He was there, behind the window reading a paper. If I had not known him I should have been afraid. You ought to have seen him--that knit brow and that mouth.”

“At the _café_!” cried Mlle. Trapenard. “For the fifteen years I have been with him I have never seen him open a paper but once.”

“That man,” concluded Father Carbonnet, “has some trouble which overheats his blood. And trouble you see, Mlle. Mariette, is, so to speak, like the tun of Adelaide, it has no bottom. For a fact, it commenced with the summons of the judge and the visit of the lady in black. And do you know what I think? Perhaps it is about a son of his who is doing badly.”

“_Mon Dieu_!” exclaimed Mariette, “he have a son?”

“And why not?” continued the _concierge_, winking one eye behind his spectacles; “don’t you think he gallivanted around like other folks when he was young?”

Then he communicated to Mlle. Trapenard the frightful reports which were going about in the _rez-de-chaussées_ concerning poor M. Sixte, since his visible change of habits. All the malicious tongues agreed in attributing the trouble of the philosopher to the citation of the judge. The washerwoman pretended to have it from a countryman of M. Sixte, that his fortune proceeded from a trust which his father had abused, and that he would have to return it. The butcher told those who would listen that the savant was married, and that his wife had made a terrible scene and was going to bring a suit against him. The coal merchant had insinuated, that the worthy man was the brother of an assassin whose execution under the false name of Campi still tormented the popular mind.

“I will never go to their houses again,” moaned Mlle. Trapenard; “is it possible to imagine such horrors!”

And the poor girl left the lodge completely heartbroken. This great creature, high in color, strong as an ox in spite of her fifty-five years, with her big shoulders, her blue wool stockings which she had herself knit, and her cap fitting closely over her compact chignon, felt a strong affection for her master because all the different elements of her frank and simple nature were involved in it.

She respected the gentleman, the educated man who was often mentioned in the papers. She cherished, in the old bachelor who never examined his accounts, and left her mistress of the house, an assured source of comfort for her old age. Finally, this solid and robust creature protected the man, feeble in body and so _simplet_, as she said, that a child ten years old might have cheated him.

Such words mortified her pride at the same time that the sudden change of humor of the philosopher rendered their residence together uncomfortable. From genuine affection she became anxious because her master did not eat or sleep. She saw that he was sad, anxious, and ill, but she could do nothing to make him cheerful, nor even guess the cause of his melancholy and agitation.

What did she think when, one afternoon in the month of March, M. Sixte came in about five o’clock, after having had his breakfast outside, and said to her: “Is the valise in good order, Mariette?”

“I do not know, monsieur. Monsieur has not used it since I came into the house.”

“Go and get it,” said the philosopher. Mariette obeyed. She brought from a loft which served as lumber-room and woodhouse together a small, dusty leather trunk, with rusty locks and keys entirely lacking.

“Very well,” said M. Sixte, “you may go and buy a little one like that, immediately, and you may put into it whatever is necessary for a journey.”

“Is monsieur going away?” asked Mariette.

“Yes,” said the philosopher, “for a few days.”

“But monsieur has nothing that he needs,” insisted the old servant, “monsieur cannot go away like that, without any traveling rugs, without----”

“Procure what is needed,” interrupted the philosopher, “and hasten--I take the train at nine o’clock.”

“And is it necessary that I accompany monsieur.”

“No, that is useless,” said M. Sixte, “come, you have no time to lose.”

“Oh! if he only does not think of killing himself,” said Carbonnet when Mariette had told of this new move, almost as extraordinary in this little corner of the world as if the philosopher had announced his marriage.

“Ah!” said the servant, following up his idea, “if he only would take me with him! If I have to pay out of my own pocket, I will go.”

This sublime cry, in the mouth of a creature who had come from Péaugres in Ardèche, to be a servant and who carried economy so far as to make her home dresses from the old redingotes of the savant, will demonstrate better than any analysis what uneasiness the metamorphosis of this man who was passing through a moral crisis, which was terrible for him, inspired in these humble people.

Not realizing that he was observed, he showed the intensity of it in his slightest gestures as well as in the features of his face. Since the death of his mother he had not known such unhappy hours, and the suffering inflicted by the irreparable separation was entirely sentimental; but the reading of Robert Greslon’s memoir had attacked him in the center of his being, his intellectual life, his sole reason for living.

At the moment he gave Mariette the order to prepare his valise, he was as much overcome by fright as on the night he turned over the pages of the notebook of confidences. This fright began from the first pages of this narrative in which a criminal aberration of mind was studied, as if spread out for display, with such a mixture of pride and of shame, of cynicism and of candor, of infamy and of superiority.

At meeting the phrase in which Robert Greslon had declared himself united to him by a cord as close as it was unbreakable, the great psychologist had trembled, and he had trembled at every repetition of his name in this singular analysis, at every citation of one of his works, which proved the right of this abominable libertine to call himself his pupil.

A fascination made up of horror and curiosity had constrained him to go straight through to the end of this fragment of biography in which his ideas, his cherished ideas, his science, his beloved science, appeared united with acts so shameful.

Ah! if they had been united! But no, these ideas, this science, the accused claimed them as the excuse, as the cause of the most monstrous, the most complaisant depravity! As he advanced into the manuscript he felt that a little of his inmost person became soiled, corrupted, gangrened; he found so much of himself in this young man, but a “himself” made up of sentiments which he detested the most in the world. For in this illustrious philosopher the holy virginities of conscience remained intact, and, behind the bold nihilism of mind, the noble heart of an ingenuous man was hidden.

It was in this inviolate conscience, in this irreproachable honesty, that the master of this felon preceptor felt himself suddenly lacerated. This sinister history of a love affair, so basely carried on, of a treason so black, of a suicide so melancholy, brought him face to face with the most frightful vision; that of his mind acting and corrupting, his, who had lived in voluntary renunciation, in daily purity.

The whole adventure of Robert Greslon showed to him the complexities of a hideous pride and of an abject sensuality, to him who had labored only to serve psychology, to him a modest worker in a labor which he believed beneficent, and in the most severe asceticism, in order that the enemies of his doctrines could not argue from his example against his principles.

This impression was the more violent as it was unexpected. A physician of large heart would experience an anguish of an analogous order if, having established the theory of a remedy, he learned that one of his assistants had tried the application of it, and that all in one ward of the hospital were in agony from its effects. To do wrong, knowing it and willing it, is very bitter to a man who is better than his deeds. But to have devoted thirty years to a work, to have believed this work useful, to have pursued it sincerely, simply, to have repelled as insulting the accusations of immorality thrown at him by his angry adversaries, and, suddenly, by the light of a frightful revelation, to hold an indisputable proof, a proof real as life itself, that this work has poisoned a mind, that it carries in it a principle of death, that it is spreading this principle to all the corners of the earth--ah! what a cruel shock, what a savage wound to receive, if the shock should last only an hour, and the wound be closed at once!

All revolutionary thinkers have known such hours of anguish. But most pass quickly through them, and for this reason it is rare for a man to be thrust into the battle of ideas without his becoming soon the comedian of his first sincerities. He sustains his rôle. He has partisans, and more than all he soon comes, by friction with life, to that conception of the _à peu près_ almost, which makes him admit, as inevitable, a certain falling away from his ideal. He says to himself that one does evil here, right elsewhere, and sometimes, that after all, the world and the people will always go the same.

With Adrien Sixte sincerity was too complete for any such reasoning to be possible. He had neither rôle to play nor faithful adherents to manage. He was alone. His philosophy, and he made only one, and the compromises by which all great fame is accompanied, had in no way impaired his fierce and proud mind.

We must add that he had found the means, thanks to his perfect good faith, of passing through society without ever seeing it. The passions which he had depicted, the crimes which he had studied, he saw as persons who designate medical observation, “A thirty-five years, such profession, unmarried.” And the exposition of the case is developed without a detail which gives to the reader the sensation of the individual.

Always the rigorous theorizer on the passions, the minute anatomist of the will, he had never fairly seen face to face a creature of flesh and blood; so that the memoir of Robert Greslon did not speak only to his consciousness as an honest man. So, during the eight days which followed the first reading, there was a continual obsession, and this increased the moral pain by uniting it with a sort of physical uneasiness.

The psychologist saw his ill-fated disciple as he had looked upon him here in this same room, with his feet on the same carpet, leaning his arms on this same table, breathing, moving.

Behind the words on the paper he heard that voice a little dull which pronounced the terrible phrase: “I have lived with your mind and of your mind, so passionately, so completely;” and the words of the confession, instead of being simple characters written with cold ink upon inert paper, became animated into words behind which he felt a living being:

“Ah!” thought he when this image became too strong, “why did the mother bring this notebook to me?”

It would have been so natural for the unhappy woman, a prey to mad anxiety, to prove the innocence of her son by violating this trust. But no, Robert had without doubt deceived her with the hypocrisy of which he so boasted, the miserable fellow, as if it were a psychological conquest.

The haunting hallucination of the face of the young man would have sufficed to overcome Adrien Sixte. When the mother had cried: “You have corrupted my son,” his learned serenity had been scarcely disturbed. In like manner, he had opposed only contempt to the accusation of the elder Jussat, repeated by the judge, and to the remarks of the latter on moral responsibility.

How tranquil he had gone out of the Palais de Justice! And now there was no more contempt in him; that serenity was conquered, and he, the negator of all liberty, he the fatalist who decomposed virtue and vice with the brutality of a chemist studying a gas, he the bold prophet of universal mechanism, and who until then had always experienced the perfect harmony of mind and heart, suffered with a suffering in contradiction to all his doctrines--he felt remorse, he felt himself responsible!

It was only after these eight clays of the first shock, during which the memoir had been read and reread, so that he could repeat all the phrases of it, that this conflict of heart and mind became clear to Adrien Sixte, and the philosopher tried to recover himself.

He walked to the Jardin des Plantes, one afternoon toward the end of February, an afternoon as mild as spring. He sat down on a bench in his favorite walk, that which runs along the Rue de Buffon, and at the foot of a Virginia acacia, propped up with crutches, adorned with plaster like a wall, and with knotty branches like the fingers of a gouty giant.

The author of the “Psychology of God” loved this old trunk whose sap was all dried up because of the date inscribed on the placard and which constituted the civil status of the poor tree. “Planted in 1632.” The year of the birth of Spinoza.

The sun of the early afternoon was very soft and this impression relaxed the nerves of the promenader. He looked around him absently, and was pleased to follow the movements of two children who were playing near their mother. They were collecting sand with little wooden shovels with which to build an imaginary house. Suddenly one of them rose up brusquely and struck his head against the bench which was behind him. He must have hurt himself, for his face contracted into a grimace of pain, and, before bursting into tears, there were the few seconds of suffocated silence which precede the sobs of children. Then, in a fit of furious rage, he turned to the bench and struck it furiously with his fist.

“Are you stupid, my poor Constant,” said his mother to him, shaking him and drying his eyes; “come, let me wipe your nose,” and she wiped it; “it will do you much good to be angry at a piece of wood.”

This scene diverted the philosopher. When he rose to continue his walk under this pleasant sun, he thought of it for a long time.

“I am like that little boy,” said he to himself: “In his childishness, he gives life to an inanimate object, he makes it responsible. And what else have I been doing for more than a week?”

For the first time since the reading of the memoir, he dared to formulate his thought with the clearness which was the proper characteristic of his mind and of his works: “I have believed myself responsible for a part in this frightful adventure. Responsible? There is no sense in that word.”

While passing toward the gate of the garden, then in the direction of the isle Saint Louis and toward Notre Dame, he took up the detail of the reasoning against this notion of responsibility in the “Anatomy of the Will,” above all his critique of the idea of cause. He had always particularly held to this piece. “That is evident,” he concluded.

Then, after he was once more assured of the certainty of his own intellect, he constrained himself to think of the Robert Greslon, now a prisoner in cell number seven in the jail of Riom, and of the Robert Greslon formerly a young student of Clermont leaning over the pages of the “Theory of the Passions” and of the “Psychology of God.”

He felt anew an insupportable sensation that his books should have been thus handled, meditated upon, loved by this child.

“But we are double!” thought he, “and why this powerlessness to conquer illusions which we know to be false?”

All at once a phrase of the memoir came to his mind: “I have remorse, when the doctrines which form the very essence of my intelligence make me consider remorse as the most foolish of human illusions.”

The identity between his moral condition and that of his pupil appeared so hateful to him that he tried to get rid of it by new reasoning.

“Ah, well!” said he to himself, “let us imitate the geometrician, let us admit to be true what we know to be false. Let us proceed by absurdity. Yes, man is an agent and a free agent. Then he is responsible. Maybe. But when, where, how have I acted badly? Why do I have remorse because of this scoundrel? What is my fault?”