The disciple

By Paul Bourget

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Title: The disciple

Author: Paul Bourget

Release date: May 16, 2024 [eBook #73638]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: C. Scribner's sons, 1901

Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DISCIPLE ***

THE DISCIPLE

PAUL BOURGET

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901

Norwood Press:
Berwick & Smith, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. A MODERN PHILOSOPHER 13

II. THE GRESLON AFFAIR 43

III. SIMPLE GRIEF 65

IV. CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD 90

I. My Heredities 94

II. The Medium Of Ideas 120

III. Transplantation 144

IV. The First Crisis 179

V. The Second Crisis 230

VI. The Third Crisis 255

VII. Conclusion 289

V. TORMENT OF IDEAS 294

VI. COUNT ANDRÉ 317

_TO A YOUNG MAN_

I DEDICATE this book to you, my young countryman, with whom I am so
well acquainted, although I may not know your place of birth, your
name, your parents, your fortune or your ambitions--nothing but that
you are over eighteen and under twenty-five years of age, and that you
will search in our books for the answers to the questions which are
troubling you. And the answers which you will find depend a little upon
your moral life, a little upon your own soul, for your moral life is
the moral life of France itself--your soul is her soul. In twenty years
from now you and your brothers will hold in your hands the destiny
of this ancient country, which is our common mother--you will be the
nation itself. What will you have learned from our teachings? No man
of letters, however insignificant he may be, but should tremble at the
responsibility.

You will find in “The Disciple” the study of one of these
responsibilities. May you find here a proof that the friend who writes
these lines has the merit, if he possesses no other, of believing
profoundly in the seriousness of his art. May you also find that he
thinks of you with great concern. Yes, he has thought of you ever
since the days when you were learning to read, when we who are now
approaching our fortieth year were scribbling our first verses to the
noise of the cannon which roared over Paris. We, in our study chambers,
were not gay at that period. The oldest of us had just gone to the war,
and those of us who were obliged to remain at college already felt
the duty of our country’s rehabilitation press heavily upon us. We
often thought of you in that fatal year, 1871. O! young Frenchmen of
to-day--all of us who were intending to devote ourselves to literature,
my friends and I, repeated the beautiful verses of Theodore de Banville:

Ye in whom I hail the light.
All ye who will love me,
O young men of the coming fight,
O holy battalions!

We wished this dawn of light to be as bright as ours had been gloomy
and misty with a vapor of blood. We wished to be worthy of your love,
in leaving to you that which we valued more than we valued ourselves.
We said that our work was to make of you and for you, by our public
and private acts, by our words, by our fervor, and by our example,
a new France, a France redeemed from defeat, a France reconstructed
in its external and in its internal life. Young as we were then we
knew, because we had learned it from our masters, and this was their
best teaching--that triumphs and defeats from without interpreted the
qualities and insufficiencies within; we knew that the resurrection of
Germany at the beginning of the century had been above all a work of
soul, and we recognized that the soul of France had been terribly hurt
in 1870, and that it must be helped, healed and cured. We were not the
only ones to comprehend in the generous ingenuousness of our youth that
the moral crisis was then as it always is, the great crisis of this
country; for in 1873 the most valiant of our leaders, Alexandre Dumas,
said in the preface to “La Femme de Claude,” addressing the Frenchmen
of his age as I am addressing you, my younger brother: “Take care, you
are passing through troublous times. You have just paid death and are
not through paying for your earlier faults. It is no time to be a wit,
a trifler, a libertine, a scoffer, a skeptic, or a wanton; we have
had enough of these for a time at least. God, nature, work, marriage,
love, children, all these are serious, very serious things, and rise up
before you. _All these must live or you will die_”.

I cannot say of the generation to which I belong, and which kindled
the noble hope of reconstructing France, that it has succeeded, or
that it has even been sufficiently devoted to its work. But I do know
that it has labored, and labored hard. We have plodded away without
much method, alas! but with a continuous application which touches
me when I think how little the men in power have done for us, how
much we have been left to our own resources, of the indifference felt
toward us by those who directed affairs, and who never once thought
to encourage, support or direct us. Ah! the brave middle class, the
solid and valiant _bourgeoisie_ which France still possesses! What
laborious officers, what skillful and tenacious diplomatic agents, what
excellent professors, what honest artisans has this _bourgeoisie_
furnished for the past twenty years! I sometimes hear: “What vitality
there is in this country! It has survived where another would have
perished.” Yes, it lives because this young _bourgeoisie_ has
made every sacrifice in order to serve the country. It has seen the
masters of a day proscribe its most cherished beliefs in the name of
liberty, chance politicians play universal suffrage as an instrument
by which to rule and install their lying mediocrity in the highest
places. This universal suffrage has undergone the most monstrous and
the most iniquitous of tyrannies; for the force of numbers is the most
brutal of forces, possessing neither talent nor audacity. The young
_bourgeoisie_ has resigned itself to everything, has accepted
everything in order to have the right to do the necessary work. If
our soldiers come and go, if foreign powers hold us in respect,
if our higher education is being developed, if our arts and our
literature continue to assert the national genius, we owe it to the
_bourgeoisie_. It is true that this generation of young men of the
war has no victory for its activity. It could not establish a definite
form of government, or solve the formidable problems of foreign
politics and of socialism. However, young man of to-day, do not despise
it. Learn to render justice to your elders. It is through them that
France has lived!

How will she live through you is the question which at the present time
troubles all those who have retained their faith in the restoration of
France. You have not to see the Prussian cavalry galloping victoriously
among the poplars of your native land to sustain you. And of the
horrible civil war, you have only the picturesque ruins of the Cour
des Comptes, or the trees putting forth luxuriant vegetation among
the scorched stones which lend poetic attraction to the old palaces.
We have never been able to conclude that the peace of ’71 has settled
everything for all time. How I should like to know if you think as we
do! How I should like to be sure that you are not ready to renounce
the secret dream, the consolatory hope which each one of us had, even
of those of us who never spoke of it! But I am sure that you feel sad
whenever you pass the Arc de Triomphe where others have passed, even on
those beautiful summer evenings in company with the one you love. You
would leave her cheerfully to-morrow to go to the front if it should
be necessary, I am sure of it. But it is not enough to know how to
die. Have you resolved to know how to live? When you look at this Arc
de Triomphe and recall the epoch of the Grande Armée, do you regret
that you did not feel the heroic breath of the conscripts of that
time? When you recall 1830, and the glorious struggles of Romanticism,
do you experience nostalgia at not having, like those of Hernani, a
great literary standard to defend? Do you feel, when you meet one of
the masters of to-day--a Dumas, a Taine, a Leconte de Lisle--that you
are in the presence of one of the depositaries of the genius of your
race? When you read such books as must be written when it is necessary
to depict the criminal passions and their martyrdom, do you wish to
love more wisely than the authors of these books have loved? Have you,
my brother, more of the Ideal than we have--have you more faith than
we have--more hope than we? If you have, give me your hand and let me
thank you.

But suppose you have not? There are two types of young men that I see
before me, and before you also, like two forms of temptation, equally
formidable and fatal. One is cynical and usually jovial. He is about
twenty years of age, he appraises life at a discount, and his religion
consists in enjoying himself--which may be translated by success.
Let him be occupied with politics or business, with literature or
art, engaged in sport or in industry, let him be officer, diplomat or
advocate--his only God is himself; he is his only principle, his only
object. He has borrowed from the natural philosophy of the times the
great law of vital concurrence, and he applies it to the advancement
of his fortune with an ardor of positivism which makes him a civilized
barbarian; the most dangerous kind. Alphonse Daudet, who understands so
well how to describe him, has christened him the “struggle-for-lifer.”
He respects nothing but success, and in success nothing but money. He
is convinced when he reads this--for he reads what I write as he reads
everything else, if only to be in the current--that I am laughing at
the public in tracing this portrait, but that I myself am like him. For
he is so profoundly nihilistic in his manner that the Ideal appears to
him like a comedy, for example, when he judges it proper to lie to the
people to secure their votes. Is not this young man a monster? For one
is a monster who is only twenty-five years old and has for a soul a
calculating machine in the service of a machine of pleasure.

I fear him less, however, on your account than I do the other one
who possesses all the aristocracies of nerves and mind, and who is
an intellectual and refined epicurean as the former is a brutal and
scientific one. How dreadful to encounter this dainty nihilist, and
yet how he abounds! At twenty-five he has run the gamut of all ideas.
His critical mind, precociously awake, has comprehended the final
results of the most subtle philosophies of the age. Do not speak to
him of impiety or of materialism. He knows that the word “matter” has
no precise meaning, and beside he is too intelligent not to admit that
all religions have been legitimate in their time. Only, he has never
believed, and he never will believe in them, any more than he will ever
believe in anything whatever, except in the amusing play of his mind
which he has transformed into a tool of elegant perversity. The good
and the bad, beauty and deformity, vices and virtues are to him simply
objects of curiosity. The human soul so far as he is concerned is a
skillful piece of mechanism in the dissection of which he is interested
as a matter of experience. To him nothing is true, nothing is false,
nothing is moral, nothing is immoral. He is a subtle and refined
egotist whose whole ambition, as that remarkable analyst, Maurice
Barrès, has said in his beautiful romance of “L’Homme Libre”--that
_chef-d’œuvre_ of irony which lacks only conclusion--consists “in
adoring himself,” and to acquire new sensations. The religious life of
humanity is to him only a pretext for these sensations, as are also the
intellectual and the sentimental life. His corruption is otherwise
as profound as that of the voluptuous barbarian; it is differently
complicated, and the fine name of dilettantism with which he adorns it,
conceals its cold ferocity, its frightful barrenness. Ah! we know this
young man too well; we have all wished to be in his place, for we have
been so charmed by the paradoxes of too eloquent teachers; we all have
been like him at some time. And so I have written this book to show
you, who are not yet like him, you child of twenty years, whose soul is
in process of formation, what villainy this egoism may conceal.

Be neither of these young men, my young friend! Be neither the brutal
positivist who abuses the world of sense, nor the disdainful and
precocious sophist who abuses the world of thought and feeling. Let
neither the pride of life nor that of intellect make of you a cynic
and a juggler of ideas! In such times of troubled conscience and
conflicting doctrines cling as you would to a safe support to Christ’s
words: “The tree is known by its fruit.” There is one reality which
you cannot doubt, for you possess it, you feel it, you see it every
moment, it is your own soul. Among the thoughts which assail you, are
those which render your soul less capable of loving, less capable of
desire. Be sure that these ideas are false to a degree, however subtle
they seem, adorned as they are with the finest names and sustained by
the magic of the most splendid talents. Exalt and cultivate these
two great virtues, these two energies, without which only blight and
final agony ensue--Love and Will. The sincere and modest Science of
to-day recognizes that the realm of the Unknowable extends beyond the
limit of its analysis. The venerable Littré, who was a saint, has
magnificently spoken of this ocean of mystery which beats against our
shore, which we see stretching before us, and for which we have neither
bark nor sail. Have the courage to respond to those who will tell you
that beyond this ocean is emptiness, an abyss of darkness and death;
“You do not know that.” And since you know, since you feel that there
is a soul within you, labor to keep it alive lest it die before you.
I assure you, my boy, France has need that you should think thus, and
may this book help you so to think. Do not look here for allusions to
recent events, for you will not find them. The plan was marked out and
a part of the book written before two tragedies, the one French, the
other European, occurred, to attest that the same trouble of ideas and
of sentiments agitates both high and humble destinies at the present
time. Do me the honor to believe that I have not speculated on the
dramas in which too many persons have suffered, and still suffer. The
moralist, whose business it is to seek for causes, sometimes encounters
analogies of situation which attest that they have seen correctly. They
would rather have been deceived. I, myself, for example, would wish
that there never had been in real life a person like the unfortunate
Disciple who gives name to this romance! But if there had not been, if
none existed, I should not have said what I am going to say to you, my
young countryman, you to whom I wish to be a benefactor, you by whom I
so earnestly wish to be loved--and to be worthy of your love.

PAUL BOURGET.

Paris, June 5, 1889.

THE DISCIPLE

A MODERN PHILOSOPHER.

THERE is a story that has never been denied to the effect that the
bourgeois of the city of Königsberg supposed that some prodigious event
was disturbing the civilized world simply because the philosopher
Emanuel Kant changed the direction of his daily walk. The celebrated
author of the “Critique of Pure Reason” had that day learned of the
breaking out of the French Revolution. Although Paris, may not be very
favorable to such naïve wonders, a number of the inhabitants of the
Rue Guy de la Brosse experienced an astonishment almost as great one
afternoon in January, 1887, when they saw go out, toward one o’clock,
a philosopher, who if less illustrious than the venerable Kant, was
as regular and as peculiar in his habits, not to mention that he was
even more destructive in his analysis. It was M. Adrien Sixte, whom the
English call the French Spencer.

This Rue Guy de la Brosse, which leads from the Rue de Jussieu to the
Rue Linné, forms part of a veritable little province bounded by the
Jardin des Plantes, the Hopital de la Pitié, the wine warehouse and
the first rise of Sainte-Geneviève. That is to say, that it permits
those familiar inquisitions of glance impossible in the larger
districts where the come-and-go of existence ceaselessly renews the
tide of carriages and of people. Only persons of small incomes live
here, modest professors, employees of the museum, students who wish
to study, all young literary people who dread the temptations of the
Latin Quarter. The shops are patronized by this clientele, which is as
regular as that of a suburb. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the
washerwoman, the apothecary, are all spoken of in the singular by the
domestics who make the purchases.

There is little room for competition in this square, which is
ornamented by a fountain capriciously encumbered with figures of
animals in honor of the Jardin des Plantes. Visitors to the garden
seldom enter by the gate, which is opposite the hospital; so that even
on fine spring days when crowds of people gather under the trees of the
park, which is a favorite resort of the military and of nursemaids,
the Rue Linné is as quiet as usual, and so also are the adjacent
streets. If occasionally there is an unusual flow of people into this
corner of Paris, it is when the doors of the hospital are opened to
visitors, and then a line of sad and humble figures stretches along
the sidewalks. These pilgrims of poverty come furnished with dainties
for their friends who are suffering behind the gray old walls of the
hospital, and the inhabitants of ground-floors, lodges, and shops are
not interested in them. They hardly notice these sporadic promenaders,
and their entire attention is reserved for the persons who go by every
day at the same hour. There are for shopkeepers and _concierges_,
as for sportsmen in the country, unfailing indications of the time
and of the weather, that there will be in this quarter, where resound
the savage calls of some beast in the neighboring menagerie; of an
ara that cries, and elephant that trumpets, an eagle that screams,
or a tiger that mews. When they see the free professor jogging along
with his old green leather case under his arm, nibbling at a penny
bun which he has bought on his way, these spies know that it is about
to strike eight. When the restaurant boy passes with his covered
dishes they know that it is eleven o’clock, that the retired captain
of battalion is soon to have his breakfast, and thus in succession
for every hour of the day. A change in the toilette of the women who
here display their finery, is noted and critically interpreted by
twenty babbling and not overindulgent tongues. In fine, to use a very
picturesque expression common in central France, the most trifling
movements of the frequenters of these four or five streets are at the
end of the tongues, and those of M. Adrien Sixte even more than those
of many others. This will be readily understood by a simple sketch
of the person. And beside, the details of the life led by this man
will furnish to students of human nature an authentic document upon a
rare species--that of philosopher by profession. Some examples have
been given to us by the ancients, and more recently by Colerus, in
reference to Spinoza, and by Darwin and John Stuart Mill in reference
to themselves. But Spinoza was a Hollander of the eighteenth century,
Darwin and Mill grew up among the wealthy and active English middle
class, whereas M. Sixte lived in the heart of Paris at the end of the
nineteenth century. In my youth, when studies of this kind interested
me, I knew several individuals just as entirely given up to abstract
speculations. I have, however, never met one who has made me comprehend
so well the existence of a Descartes--in his little room in the depth
of the Netherlands, or that of the thinker of the Ethics, who, as we
know, had no other distraction from his reveries than smoking a pipe
and fighting spiders.

It was fourteen years after the war when M. Sixte came to live in the
Rue Guy de la Brosse, where every denizen knows him to-day. He was at
that time a man thirty-four years of age, in whom all physiognomy of
youth had been destroyed by the absorption of his mind in ideas, so
that his smoothly-shaven face indicated neither age nor profession.
Some physicians, some priests, and some actors offer to our regard, for
different reasons, faces at once cold, smooth, intent and inexpressive.
A forehead high and tapering, a mouth prominent and obstinate, with
thin lips, a bilious complexion, eyes affected by too much reading and
hidden behind dark spectacles, a slim, big boned body, always clothed
in a shaggy cloth overcoat in winter, and in some thin material in
summer. His shoes tied with strings, his hair long and prematurely
gray and very fine, under one of those hats called _gibus_,
which fold up mechanically--such was the appearance presented by this
savant, whose every action was as scrupulously regulated as those of
an ecclesiastic. He occupied an apartment at a rent of seven hundred
francs on the fourth floor, which consisted of a bedroom, a study, a
dining-room about as large as the cabin of a wherry, a kitchen and
a servant’s room, the whole commanding a very extensive view. The
philosopher could see from his windows the Jardin des Plantes with the
hills of Père-la-Chaise in the distance; beyond, to the left, a kind
of hollow which marked the course of the Seine. The Orléans station
and the dome of La Salpêtrière rose directly in front; and, to the
right, the mass of cedars looked black against the green or bare trees
of the labyrinth. The smoke of factories wreathed upward on a clear
or gray sky from every corner of the wide landscape, from which arose
a sound like the roar of a distant ocean, broken by the whistlings of
steam engines. In choosing this Thebais, M. Sixte had no doubt yielded
to a general though inexplicable law of meditative nature. Are not
nearly all cloisters built in places which permit an extended view?
Perhaps these unlimited and confused prospects favor concentration
of the mind, which might otherwise be distracted by details too near
and circumstantial? Perhaps recluses find the pleasure of contrast
between their dreamy inaction and the breadth of the field in which the
activity of other men is developed? Whatever may be the solution of
this little problem so closely related to another which is too little
studied, namely, the animal sensibility of intellectual men--it is
certain that the melancholy landscape had, for fifteen years, been the
companion with whom the quiet worker had most frequently conversed.
His house was kept by one of those servants who are the ideals of
all old bachelors, who never suspect that the perfection of certain
services implies a corresponding regularity of existence on the part
of the master. On his arrival, the philosopher had simply asked the
_concierge_ to find some one to keep his rooms in order, and
to recommend a restaurant from which he could order his meals. By
this request he risked obtaining a service decidedly bad and a very
uncertain sort of nourishment. It resulted, however, in unexpectedly
introducing into the home of Adrien Sixte precisely the person who
realized his most chimerical wishes, if an extractor of quintessences,
as Rabelais calls this sort of dreamer, still preserves the leisure to
form wishes.

This _concierge_--according to the use and custom of all such
functionaries in small apartment houses--increased the revenue of his
lodgings by working at a trade. He was a shoemaker, “in new and old,”
as a placard read which was pasted on a window toward the street.
Among his customers, old man Carbonnet--this was his name--counted a
priest who lived in the Rue Cuvier. This aged priest had a servant,
Mlle. Mariette Trapenard, a woman nearly forty years old, who had been
accustomed for some years to rule in her master’s house while still
remaining a true peasant woman, with no ambition to play the lady,
faithful in her work, but unwilling to enter at any price a house where
she would be subject to feminine authority. The old priest died quite
suddenly the week preceding the installation of the philosopher in the
Rue Guy de la Brosse. Old Carbonnet, in whose register the newcomer had
simply signed himself _rentier_, had no trouble in recognizing the
class to which this M. Sixte belonged, first from the number of books
which composed his library, and also through the account of a servant
belonging to a professor of the College of France, who lived on the
first floor.

In these phalansteries of the Parisian bourgeois everything becomes
an event. The maid told her mistress the name of her future neighbor;
the mistress told her husband; she spoke of M. Sixte at table in such
a way that the maid comprehended enough to surmise that the new lodger
was “in books like monsieur.” Carbonnet would not have been worthy
of drawing the cord in a Parisian lodging-house, if his wife and he
had not immediately felt the necessity of bringing M. Adrien Sixte
and Mlle. Trapenard together. They felt this the more because Mme.
Carbonnet, who was old and almost disabled, had already too much to do
to take care of three households, to undertake this one. The taste for
intrigue which flourishes in lodging-houses like fuchsias, geraniums,
and basils induced this couple to assure the savant that the cooking at
the eating-houses was wretched, that there was not a single housekeeper
whom they could recommend in the whole neighborhood, and that the
servant of the late M. l’Abbé Vayssier was a “pearl” of discretion,
order, economy, and culinary skill. Finally, the philosopher consented
to see this model housekeeper. The visible honesty of the woman pleased
him and also the reflection that this arrangement would simplify his
existence, by relieving him from the odious task of giving a certain
number of positive orders. Mlle. Trapenard entered the service of this
master for fifty francs a month, which was soon increased to sixty.
The savant gave her fifty francs in New-Year gifts beside. He never
examined his accounts, but settled them every Sunday morning without
question. It was Mlle. Trapenard who did the business with all the
tradesmen without any interference on the part of M. Sixte.

In a word she reigned absolute mistress, a situation, as may be
imagined, which excited the universal envy of the little world
incessantly going up and down the common staircase so zealously
scrubbed every Monday.

“I say, Mam’zelle Mariette, you have drawn the lucky number,” said
Carbonnet as the housekeeper stopped a minute to chat with her
benefactor, who was now much older.

He wore spectacles on his square nose, and it was with some difficulty
that he adjusted the blows of his hammer to the heads of the nails
which he drove into the boot-heels closely pressed between his legs.
For some years he had taken care of a cock named Ferdinand--why, no
one knew. This creature wandered about among the bits of leather,
exciting the admiration of all visitors by his eagerness to peck at
the buttons of the boots. In his moments of fright this pet cock
would take refuge with his master, plunge one of his feet into the
pocket of the cobbler’s vest and hide his head under the arm of the
old _concierge_: “Come, Ferdinand, say good-day to Mam’zelle
Mariette,” resumed Carbonnet. And the cock gently pecked the woman’s
hand, while his master continued:

“I always say, ‘Never despair at one bad year, two good ones are bound
to come immediately after.’”

“There we agree,” responded Mariette, “for monsieur is a good man,
though as to religion he is a regular pagan; he has not been to mass
these fifteen years.”

“There are plenty who do go,” replied Carbonnet, “who are sad dogs, and
lead anything but a quiet life between four and midnight--without your
knowing anything about it.”

This fragment of conversation perhaps shows the type of opinion which
Mariette held in regard to her master; but this opinion would be
unintelligible if we did not recall here the works of the philosopher,
and the trend of his thought.

Born in 1839 at Nancy, where his father kept a little watchmaker’s
shop, and remarkable for the precocity of his intellect, Adrien Sixte
left among his comrades the remembrance of a child thin and taciturn,
endowed with a strength of moral resistance which always discouraged
familiarity. At first he was very brilliant in his studies, then
mediocre, until in the class in philosophy which then bore the name
of Logic, he distinguished himself by his exceptional aptitude. His
professor, struck by his metaphysical talent, wished him to prepare
for the normal school examination. Adrien refused and declared beside
to his father that, taking one trade with another, he preferred manual
labor. “I will be a watchmaker like you,” was his sole answer to the
objurgations of his father, who, like the innumerable artisans, or
French merchants whose children attend college, cherished the dream
that his son might be a civil officer.

M. and Mme. Sixte could not reproach this son, who did not smoke,
never went to the _café_, was never seen with a girl, in fine,
who was their pride, and to whose wishes they resigned themselves with
a broken heart. They renounced a career for him, but they would not
consent to putting him to an apprenticeship, hence, the young man lived
at home with no other occupation than to study as suited his fancy.
He employed ten years in perfecting himself in the study of English
and German philosophy, in the natural sciences and especially in the
physiology of the brain and in the mathematical sciences; finally,
he gave himself, as one of the great thinkers of our epoch has said
of himself, that “violent inflammation of the brain,” that kind of
apoplexy of positive knowledge which was the process of education of
Carlyle and of Mill, of Taine and Renan, and of nearly all the masters
of modern philosophy. In 1868, the son of the watchmaker of Nancy, then
twenty-five years of age, published a large volume of five hundred
pages entitled: “Psychology of God,” which he did not send to more
than fifteen persons, but which had the unexpected fortune of causing
a scandalous echo. This book, written in the solitude of the most
honest thought, presented the double character of a critical analysis,
keen to severity, and an ardor in negation exalted to fanaticism. Less
poetic than M. Taine, incapable of writing the magnificent preface to
the “Intelligence,” and the essay upon universal phenomena; less dry
than M. Ribot, who already preluded by his “English Psychologists” the
beautiful series of his studies, the “Psychology of God,” combined the
eloquence of one with the penetration of the other, and it had the
chance, unsought, of directly attacking the most exciting problem of
metaphysics. A pamphlet by a well-known bishop, an unworthy allusion
of a cardinal in a discourse to the senate, a crushing article by the
most brilliant critical spiritualist in a celebrated review, sufficed
to point out the work to the curiosity of the youth over whom passed
a revolutionary wind, the herald of future overthrow. The thesis of
the author consisted in demonstrating the necessary production of
“the hypothesis--God,” by the action of some psychologic laws, which
are themselves connected with some cerebral modifications of an
entirely physical order, and this thesis was established, supported,
and developed with an acrimony of atheism which recalled the fury of
Lucretius against the beliefs of his time. It happened then to the
hermit of Nancy, that his work, which was conceived and written as if
in the solitude of a cell, was at once in the midst of the noise of the
battle of contemporaneous ideas. For years there had not been seen such
power of general ideas wedded to such amplitude of erudition, nor so
rich an abundance of points of view united to so audacious a nihilism.
But while the name of the author was becoming celebrated in Paris, his
parents were bowed to the earth by his success. Some articles in the
Catholic journals filled Mme. Sixte with despair. The old watchmaker
trembled lest he should lose his customers among the aristocracy of
Nancy.

All the miseries of the province crushed the philosopher, who was about
to leave his home, when the German invasion and the fearful national
shipwreck turned the attention of his countrymen away from him. His
parents died in the spring of 1871. In the summer of the same year, he
lost an aunt, and so in the autumn of 1872 having settled his affairs,
he came to establish himself in Paris. His resources, thanks to the
inheritance of his parents and of his aunt, consisted in eight thousand
francs income invested in a life-interest. He had resolved never to
marry, never to go into society, never to be ambitious of honor, of
place nor of reputation. The whole formula of his life was contained in
the words: _To think_!

In order to better define this man of a quality so rare that this
sketch after nature will risk appearing untruthful to the reader who
is unfamiliar with the biographies of the great manipulators of ideas,
it is necessary to give a rapid glance at some of the days of this
powerful thinker.

Summer and winter, M. Sixte sat down to his work at six o’clock in the
morning, refreshed by a single cup of black coffee. At ten o’clock he
took his breakfast, a summary operation which permitted him to be at
the gate of the Jardin des Plantes at half-past ten. He walked in the
garden until noon, sometimes extending his stroll toward the quays and
by the way of Notre Dame.

One of his favorite pleasures consisted in long séances in front of
the cages of the monkeys and the lodges of the elephants. The children
and servants who saw him laugh, long and silently, at the ferocities
and cynicisms of the baboons and ouistitis, never suspected the
misanthropic thoughts which this spectacle brought to the mind of the
savant who compared in himself the human to the simian comedy, as he
compared our habitual folly with the wisdom of the noble animal that,
before us, was king of the earth.

Toward noon M. Sixte returned to his home and worked again until four
o’clock. From four to six he received three times a week, visitors who
were nearly always students, masters occupied with the same studies
as himself, or foreigners attracted by a reputation which to-day is
European. Three other days he went out to make some indispensable
visits. At six o’clock he dined and then went out again, this time
going the length of the closed garden to the Orléans station. At eight
o’clock he returned, regulated his correspondence or read. At ten
o’clock the lights were extinguished in his house.

This monastic existence had its weekly rest on Monday, the philosopher
having observed that Sunday emptied an obstructing tide of pleasure
seekers into the country. On these days, he went out very early in the
morning, boarded a suburban train, and did not return until evening.

Not once in fifteen years had he departed from this absolute
regularity. Not once had he accepted an invitation to dine nor taken a
stall in a theater. He never read a newspaper, relying on his publisher
for marked copies pertaining to his own works.

His indifference to politics was so complete that he had never drawn
his elector’s card. It is proper to add, in order to fix the principal
features of this singular being, that he had broken off all connection
with his family, and that this rupture was founded, like the smallest
act of his life, upon a theory. He had written in the preface to his
second book, “Anatomy of the Will,” this significant sentence: “The
social attachments should be reduced to their minimum for the man who
wishes to know and speak the truth in the domain of the psychologic
sciences.”

From a similar motive this man, who was so gentle that he had not
given three commands to his servant in fifteen years, systematically
forbade himself all charity. On this point he agreed with Spinoza who
has written in the fourth book of the Ethics: “Pity, for a wise man who
lives according to reason, is bad and useless.” This Saint Lais, as he
might have been called as justly as the venerable Emile Littré, hated
in Christianity the excessive fondness for humanity. He gave these two
reasons for it: first that the hypothesis of a Heavenly Father and of
eternal happiness had developed to excess the distaste for the real
and had diminished the power to accept the laws of nature; second, in
establishing the social order upon love, that is, upon sensibility,
this religion had opened the way to all the caprices of the most
personal doctrines.

He did not suspect that his faithful servant had sewed consecrated
medals into all his vests, and his indifference with regard to the
external world was so complete that he went without meat on Fridays and
on other days prescribed by the Church, without perceiving this effort
on the part of the old maid to assure the salvation of a master of whom
she sometimes said, repeating unconsciously a celebrated saying:

“The good God would not be the good God, if he had the heart to damn
him.”

These years of continuous labor in this hermitage of the Rue Guy de
la Brosse had produced, beside the “Anatomy of the Will,” a “Theory
of the Passions,” in three volumes, whose publication would have been
still more scandalous than that of the “Psychology of God,” if the
extreme liberty of the press for ten years had not accustomed readers
to audacities of description which the mild, technical ferocity of a
savant could not equal.

In these two books is found, precisely stated, the doctrine of M. Sixte
which it is necessary to take up again here, in some of its general
features, for the intelligent understanding of the drama to which this
short biography serves as prologue. With the critical school sprung
from Kant, the author of these three treatises admits that the mind
is powerless to know causes and substances, and that it ought only to
co-ordinate phenomena.

With the English psychologists, he admits that one group among these
phenomena, those which are classed under the name of soul, may be the
object of scientific knowledge, on condition of their being studied
after a scientific method.

Up to this point, as we all see, there is nothing in these theories
which distinguishes them from those which Messrs. Taine, Ribot and
their disciples have developed in their principal works.

The two original characteristics of M. Sixte’s inquiries are found
elsewhere. The first resides in a negative analysis of what Herbert
Spencer calls the Unknowable. We know that the great English thinker
admits that all reality rests upon a First Cause which it is impossible
to penetrate; consequently it is necessary to use the formula of
Fichte, to comprehend this First Cause (_arrière-fonds_) as
incomprehensible; but as the beginning of the “First Principles”
strongly attests this Unknowable is real to Mr. Spencer. It exists
since we derive our existence from it. From this there is only a step
to apprehend that this First Cause of all reality involves a mind and a
soul since one finds their source in it. Many excellent minds foresee
a probable reconciliation between science and religion on this ground
of the Unknowable. For M. Sixte this is a last form of metaphysical
illusion which he is rabid to destroy with an energy of argument that
has not been seen to this degree since Kant.

His second title of honor as psychologist consists in an exposé, quite
novel and very ingenious, of the animal origin of human sensibility.

Thanks to an exhaustive reading and a minute knowledge of the natural
sciences, he has been able to attempt for the genesis of human thought
the work which Darwin attempted for the genesis of the forms of life.
Applying the law of evolution to all the facts which constitute the
human heart, he has claimed to show that, our most refined sensations,
our most subtile moral delicacies as well as our most shameful
failures, are the latest development, the supreme metamorphosis of very
simple instincts, which are themselves transformations of the primitive
cellule; so that the moral universe exactly reproduces the physical,
and the former is the consciousness, either painful or pleasurable, of
the latter.

This conclusion presented under the title of hypothesis because of
its metaphysical character, is the result of a marvelous series of
analyses, among which it is proper to cite two hundred pages on love,
which are so audacious as to be almost ludicrous from the pen of so
chaste a man. But has not Spinoza himself given us a theory of jealousy
which has not been equalled in brutality by any modern novelist? And
does not Schopenhauer rival Chamfort in the spirit of his tirades
against women?

It is almost unnecessary to add that the most complete positivism
pervades these books from one end to the other. We owe to M. Sixte
some sentences which express with extreme energy this conviction that
everything in the mind is there of necessity, even the illusion, that
we are free. “Every act is only an addition. To say he is free, is to
say that there is in the total more than there is in the sum of all
the parts. That is as absurd in psychology as it is in arithmetic.”
And again: “If we could know correctly the relative position of all
the phenomena which constitute the actual universe, we could, from the
present, calculate with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers
the day, the hour, the minute when England, for example, will evacuate
India, or Europe will have burned her last piece of coal, or such a
criminal, still unborn, will assassinate his father, or such a poem,
not yet conceived will be written. The future is contained in the
present as all the properties of the triangle are contained in its
definition.” Mohammedan fatalism itself is not expressed with more
absolute precision.

“With speculations of this order, only the most frightful aridity of
imagination would seem to comport. Thus that which M. Sixte so often
said of himself: I take life on its poetic side,” appeared to those
who heard it the most absurd of paradoxes. And yet nothing is truer
with regard to the special nature of the minds of philosophers. What
essentially distinguishes the born philosopher from other men is that
ideas instead of being formulas of the mind more or less exact, are to
him real and living things. Sensibility, with him, models itself upon
the thought instead of establishing a divorce more or less complete,
between the heart and the brain, as with the rest of us.

A Christian preacher has admirably shown the nature of this divorce
when he uttered this strange and profound sentence: “We _know_
well that we shall die, but we do not _believe_ it.”

The philosopher, when he is one by passion and by constitution, does
not conceive this duality, this life divided between contradictory
sensations and reflections.

This universal necessity, this indefinite and constant metamorphosis of
phenomena, this colossal work of nature ceaselessly making and unmaking
itself, with no point of departure, no point of arrival, by the play
of the primitive cells alone, this parallel work of the human mind
reproducing under the form of thoughts and volitions the movement of
physiological life, was not for M. Sixte a simple object of speculation.

He plunged into the contemplation of these ideas with a kind of
vertigo, he felt them with all his being, so that this simple man
seated at his table, waited upon by his old housekeeper, in a study
whose shelves were laden with books, this man of poor appearance, with
his feet in a carriage boot (_chancelière_) to keep them warm, and
his body wrapped in a shabby great-coat, participated in imagination in
the labor of the universe.

He lived the life of every creature. He slept with the mineral,
vegetated with the plant, moved with the rudimentary beasts, confounded
himself with the superior organisms, and at last expanded into the
fullness of a mind capable of reflecting the vast universe.

These are the delights of general ideas, analogous to those of opium,
which render these dreamers indifferent to the small accidents of the
external world, and also, why shall we not say it? almost absolute
strangers to the ordinary affections of life.

We become attached to that which we feel to be very real; now to these
singular minds, it is abstraction which is reality, and the daily
reality is only a shadow, only a gross and degraded impression of the
invisible laws. Perhaps M. Sixte had loved his mother, but surely this
was the limit of his sentimental existence.

If he was gentle and indulgent to all, it was from the same instinct
which made him take hold of a chair gently, when he wished to move it
out of his way; but he had never felt the need of a warm and loving
tenderness, of family, of devotion, of love, nor even of friendship. He
sometimes conversed with some savants with whom he was associated, but
always professionally on chemistry with one, on the higher mathematics
with another, and on the diseases of the nervous system with a third.
Whether these men were married, occupied in rearing families, anxious
to make a career for themselves or not, was of no interest to him in
his relations with them; but however strange such a conclusion must
appear after such a sketch, he was happy.

Given such a man, such a home and such a life, let us imagine the
effect produced in this study in the Rue Guy de la Brosse by two events
which occurred one after the other in the same afternoon: first, a
summons addressed to M. Adrien Sixte, to appear at the office of M.
Valette, Judge of Instruction, for the purpose of being questioned,
“upon certain facts and circumstances of which he would be informed;”
second, a card bearing the name of Mme. Greslon and asking M. Sixte to
receive her the next day toward four o’clock, “to talk with him about
the crime of which her son was falsely accused.”

I have said that the philosopher never read a newspaper. If by chance
he had opened one a fortnight before he would have found allusions to
this history of the young Greslon which more recent trials have caused
to be forgotten. For want of this information the summons and the note
of the mother had no definite meaning for him. However, by the relation
between them he concluded that they were probably connected, and he
thought they concerned a certain Robert Greslon, whom he had known the
preceding year, in quite simple circumstances. But these circumstances
contrasted too strongly with the idea of a criminal process, to guide
the conjectures of the savant, and he remained a long time looking at
the summons turn by turn with the card, a prey to that almost painful
anxiety which the least event of an unexpected nature does inflict on
men of fixed habits.

Robert Greslon? M. Sixte had read this name for the first time two
years before, at the bottom of a note accompanying a manuscript.
This manuscript bore the title: “Contribution to the Study of the
Multiplication of Self,” and the note modestly expressed the wish
that the celebrated writer would glance at the first essay of a very
young man. The author had added to his signature: “Veteran pupil of
philosophy at the Clermont-Ferrand Lyceum.”

This work of almost sixty pages revealed an intellect so prematurely
subtle, an acquaintance so exact with the most recent theories of
contemporaneous psychology, and finally such ingenuity of analysis,
that M. Sixte had believed it a duty to respond by a long letter.

A note of thanks had come back immediately, in which the young man
announced that, being obliged to go to Paris for the oral examination
of the normal school he would have the honor to present himself, to the
master.

The latter had then seen enter his study one afternoon, a young man of
about twenty years with fine black eyes, lively and changeable, which
lighted up a countenance which was almost too pale. This was the only
detail of physiognomy which remained in the memory of the philosopher.
Like all other speculative persons, he received only a floating
impression of the visible world and he retained but a remembrance as
vague as this impression. His memory of ideas was, however, surprising,
and he recalled to the smallest detail his conversation with Robert
Greslon.

Among the young men whom his renown attracted to him, none had
astonished him more by the truly extraordinary precocity of his
erudition and his reasoning. No doubt there floated in the mind of this
youth much of the effervescence of mind which assimilates too quickly
vast quantities of diverse knowledge; but what marvelous facility
of deduction! What natural eloquence, and what visible sincerity of
enthusiasm.

The savant could see him gesticulating a little and saying: “No,
monsieur, you do not know what you are to us, nor what we feel in
reading your books. You are the one who accepts the whole truth, the
one in whom we can believe. Why, the analysis of love in your “Theory
of the Passions” is our breviary. The book is forbidden at the Lyceum.
I had it at home and two of my comrades copied certain chapters during
the holidays.”

As there is the author’s vanity hidden in the soul of every man who
has had his prose printed, be he even so absolutely sincere as M.
Adrien Sixte certainly was, this worship of a group of scholars, so
ingenuously expressed by one of them, had particularly flattered the
philosopher.

Robert Greslon had solicited the honor of a second visit, and then
while confessing a failure at the normal school, he disclosed a little
of his projects.

M. Sixte, contrary to all his habits, had questioned him upon the most
minute details. He had thus learned that the young man was the only son
of an engineer who had died without leaving a fortune, and that his
mother had made many sacrifices in order to educate him. “But I will
accept no more,” said Robert, “it is my intention to take my degree
next year, then I shall ask for a chair of philosophy in some college,
and I will write an extended work on the variation of personality, of
which the essay that I submitted to you is the embryo.” And the eyes
of the young psychologist grew more brilliant as he formulated this
programme of life.

These two visits dated from August, 1885, the second was in February,
1887, and since then, M. Sixte had received five or six letters from
his young disciple. The last announced the entrance of Robert Greslon
as preceptor, into a noble family that was passing the summer months in
a château near one of the pretty lakes of the Auvergne Mountains--Lake
Aydat.

A simple detail will give the measure of the preoccupation into which
M. Sixte was thrown by the coincidence between the letter from the
office of the judge and the note of Mme. Greslon. Although there were
upon his table, the proofs of a long article for the _Philosophical
Review_ to correct, he began searching for the correspondence with
the young man. He found it readily in the box in which he carefully
arranged his smallest papers. It was classed with others of the same
kind, under the head: “Doctrines contemporaneous on the formation of
mind.”

It made nearly thirty pages, which the savant read again with special
care, without finding anything but reflections of an entirely
intellectual order, various questions upon some readings, and the
statements of certain projects for memories.

What thread could connect such preoccupations with the criminal process
of which the mother spoke? Was this process the cause of the summons
otherwise inexplicable? This boy whom he had seen only twice must have
made a strong impression on the philosopher, for the thought that the
mystery hidden behind this call from the Palais de Justice was the same
as that which caused the sudden visit of this despairing mother kept
him awake a part of the night.

For the first time in all these years he was sharp with Mlle. Trapenard
because of some slight negligence, and when he passed in front of
the lodge at one o’clock in the afternoon his face, usually so calm,
expressed anxiety so plainly that Father Carbonnet, already prepared
by the letter of citation which had arrived unsealed, according to a
barbarous custom, and which he had read, and as was right confided to
his wife--it was now the talk of the whole quarter--said:

“I am not inquisitive about other people’s business, but I would give
years of my life as landlord to know what justice can want of poor M.
Sixte that he should come down at this time of day.”

“Why, M. Sixte has changed his hour for walking,” said the baker’s
daughter to her mother, as she sat behind the counter in the shop, “it
seems that he is going to have a lawsuit over an inheritance.”

“Strike me if that isn’t old Sixte going by, the old zebra! It appears
that justice is after him,” said one of the two pupils in pharmacy to
his comrade; “these old fellows look very innocent, but at bottom they
are all rogues.”

“He is more of a bear than usual, he will not even speak to us.” This
was said by the wife of the professor of the College of France who
lived in the same house with the philosopher and who had just met him.
“So much the better, and they say he is going to be prosecuted for
writing such books. I am not sorry for that.”

Thus we see how the most modest men, and those who believe themselves
to be the least noticed, can not stir a step without incurring the
comments of innumerable tongues, even though they live in what
Parisians are pleased to call a quiet quarter. Let us add that M. Sixte
would have cared as little for this curiosity, even if he had suspected
it, as he cared for a volume of official philosophy. This was for him
an expression of extreme contempt.

II.

THE GRESLON AFFAIR.

THE celebrated philosopher was in everything methodically punctual.
Among the maxims which he had adopted at the beginning, in imitation of
Descartes, was this: “Order enfranchises the mind.”

He arrived, therefore, at the Palais de Justice five minutes before
the time appointed. He had to wait a half-hour in the corridor before
the judge called him. In this long passage, with its long, bare, white
walls, and furnished with a few chairs and tables for the use of the
messengers, all voices were lowered, as is usual in all official
antechambers.

There were six or seven other persons. The savants companions were an
honest bourgeois and his wife, some shopkeepers of the neighborhood
who were very much out of their element. The sight of this person,
with his smoothly-shaven face, his eyes hidden behind the dark, round
glasses of his spectacles, with his long redingote and his inexplicable
physiognomy made these people so uneasy that they left the place where
they were whispering together:

“He is a detective,” whispered the husband to his wife.

“Do you think so?” asked the woman regarding the enigmatic and
immovable figure in terror. “_Dieu_! but he has a false look!”

While this profoundly comic scene was being acted, without the
professional observer of the human heart suspecting for a moment the
effect he was producing, nor even noticing that there was any one
beside him awaiting audience, the Judge of Instruction was talking with
a friend in a small room adjoining his office.

Adorned with the autographs and portraits of some famous criminals,
this apartment served M. Valette for toilet-room, smoking-room, and
also a place of retreat when he wished to chat out of the inevitable
presence of his clerk.

The judge was a man less than forty years of age, with a handsome
profile, clothes cut in the latest fashion and with rings on his
fingers, in fact, a magistrate of the new school. He held in his hand
the paper on which the savant had written his name in a clear, running
hand and passed it to his friend, a simple man of leisure, with one
of those physiognomies at once nervous and expressionless which are
only seen in Paris. Would you try to read their tastes, habits, or
character? It is impossible, so manifold and contradictory are the
sensations which have passed over the countenance. This _viveur_
was one of those men who are always present at first representations,
who visit painters’ studios, who attend sensational trials, and who
pride themselves on being _au courant_ with the affairs of the
day, “in the swim,” as they say to-day.

After reading the name of Adrien Sixte, he exclaimed:

“Well, old fellow, have you the chance of talking with that man! You
remember his chapter on love in some old book or other. Ah! he’s a
lascar who knows all about the women. But what the devil are you going
to question him about?”

“About this Greslon case,” replied the judge; “the young man has often
been to his house, and the defense has summoned him as witness for the
prisoner. A commission of examination has been issued, nothing more.”

“I wish I could see him,” said the other.

“Would it give you pleasure? Nothing easier. I am going to have him
called. You will go out as he comes in. Well, it is settled that we
will meet at Durand’s at eight o’clock, is it? Will Gladys be there?”

“Of course. Do you know Gladys’ latest?” We were reproaching Christine
in her presence for deceiving Jacques, when she said:

“But she must have two lovers, for she spends in one year twice what
each one gives her!”

“Faith,” said Valette, “I believe that she surpasses, in the philosophy
of love, all the Sixtes in the world and in the demi-world too.”

The two friends laughed gayly, then the judge gave the order to call
the philosopher. The curious one, while shaking hands with Vilette and
saying: “Good-by till evening, precisely at eight o’clock,” winked
his eye behind his single eyeglass in order the better to unmask the
illustrious writer whom he knew from having read the piquant extracts
from the “Theory of the Passions,” in the newspapers.

The appearance of the good man, at once timid and eccentric, who
entered the judge’s office with the most visible embarrassment,
contradicted so plainly the idea of the biting misanthrope, cruel
and disillusioned, who was outlined in their imagination, that the
man-about-town and the magistrate exchanged a look of astonishment.
A smile came irresistibly to their lips, but only for a moment. The
friend was already gone. The other motioned to the witness to take a
seat in one of the green velvet arm chairs with which the room was
furnished, a luxury completed, in the administrative manner, by a green
moquette carpet and a mahogany writing desk. The face of the judge had
resumed its gravity.

These changes from one attitude to another are much more sincere than
those imagine who observe these contrasts of bearing between the
private man and the functionary. The perfect social comedian, who holds
his profession in perfect contempt, is happily a very rare monster. We
have not this strength of scepticism in the service of our hypocrisies.
The witty M. Valette, so popular in the demi-monde, the friend of
sporting men, emulated by journalists in witticisms, and who had just
now commented gayly upon the remark of a bold woman with whom he should
dine in the evening, found no trouble to give place to the severe and
coolly skillful magistrate whose business it was to find out the truth
in the name of the law. If his eye became suddenly acute it was that he
might penetrate to the bottom of the consciousness of the newcomer.

In these first moments of conversation with one whom it is their
purpose to make talk, even against his own will, born magistrates
experience a kind of awakening of their militant nature, like fencers
who try the play of an unknown adversary.

The philosopher found that his presentiments had not deceived him,
for he saw, written in large letters on the bundle of papers which M.
Valette took up these words: “Greslon Case.”

Silence reigned in the room broken only by the rustling of paper
and the scratching of the clerk’s pen. This person was preparing to
take down the interrogatory with that impersonal indifference which
distinguishes men accustomed to play the part of machine in the drama
of judicial life. One case to them is as much like another as one death
is like another to an employee of an undertaker, or one invalid like
another to a hospital attendant.

“I will spare you, monsieur,” said the judge at last, “the usual
questions. There are some names and some men of which we are not
permitted to be ignorant.”

The philosopher did not even incline his head at this compliment. “Not
used to the world,” thought the judge, “this is one of those literary
men who think it their duty to despise us,” and then aloud: “I come to
the fact which was the motive of the summons addressed to you. You know
the crime of which young Greslon is accused?”

“Pardon, monsieur,” interrupted the philosopher, changing the position
which he had instinctively taken to listen to the judge, his elbow on
the chair, his chin in his hand, and his index finger on his cheek, as
in his grand, solitary meditations, “I have not the least idea.”

“It was reported in all the papers with an exactness to which the
gentlemen of the press have not accustomed us,” responded the judge,
who thought it his duty to reply to the scorn of literature for the
robe diagnostic by a little persiflage; and he said to himself: “He is
dissimulating--Why? To play sharp? How stupid!”

“Pardon, monsieur,” said the philosopher again, “I never read the
papers.”

The judge looked at him keenly and ejaculated an “Ah!” in which there
was more irony than astonishment. “Very good,” thought he, “you want
to compel me to state the case, wait a little.” There was a certain
irritation in his voice as he said:

“Very well, monsieur, I will sum up the accusation in a few words,
regretting that you are not better informed of an affair which may very
seriously affect your moral if not your legal responsibility.” Here the
philosopher raised his head with an anxiety which delighted the judge’s
heart. “Caught, my good man,” said he to himself; and aloud: “In any
case, you know, monsieur, who Robert Greslon is, and the position which
he held in the family of the Marquis Jussat Randon. I have here among
these papers copies of several letters which you addressed to him at
the château, and which testify that you were--how shall I express
it?--the intellectual guide of the accused.” The philosopher again made
a motion of the head. “I shall ask you presently to tell me if this
young man ever spoke to joy of the domestic life of the family and in
what terms. I give you no information probably when I tell you that
the family was composed of a father, mother, a son who is a captain of
dragoons now in garrison at Lunéville, a second son who was Greslon’s
pupil, and a young girl of nineteen, Mlle. Charlotte.”

“The daughter was betrothed to the Baron de Plane, an officer in the
same company as her brother. The marriage had been delayed some months
for family reasons which have nothing to do with the affair. It had
been definitely fixed for the fifteenth of last December.”

“Now, one morning of the week which preceded the arrival of the
_fiancé_ and of Count André, the brother of Mlle. de Jussat, the
maid entering the room of her young mistress at the usual hour found
her dead in her bed.”

The magistrate made a pause, and while continuing to turn over the
papers in his packet, looked with half-closed eyes at the witness. The
stupor which was depicted on the face of the philosopher, showed such
sincerity that the judge himself was astonished.

“He knew nothing about it,” said he to himself, “that is very strange.”

He studied anew, without changing his preoccupied and indifferent air,
the countenance of the celebrated man; but he lacked the gifts which
would have rendered this abstracted person intelligible, this union
of a brain all-powerful in the realm of ideas with an ingenuousness,
a timidity almost comical in the domain of facts. He could understand
nothing of it, and he resumed his recital.

“Though the physician who was hastily summoned was only a modest,
country practitioner, he did not hesitate a minute in recognizing that
the appearance of the body contradicted all idea of a natural death.
The face was livid, the teeth set, the pupils extraordinarily dilated,
and the body, bent in an arch, rested on the nape of the neck and on
the heels. In brief, these were the signs of poisoning by strychnine.

“A glass upon the night-table contained the last drops of a potion
which Mlle. de Jussat must have taken during the night, as was her
custom, for insomnia. She had been suffering for nearly a year from
a nervous malady. The doctor analyzed these drops and found traces
of nux vomica. This, as you know, is one of the forms in which the
terrible poison is sold as medicine. A small bottle without any label,
containing some drops of a dark color, was picked up by a gardener
under the window of the room. This had been thrown from the window that
it might be broken, but it had fallen on the soft earth of a freshly
dug flower-bed. These brownish drops were also drops of nux vomica.

“There was no doubt that Mlle. de Jussat had been poisoned. This was
demonstrated at the autopsy. “Was it a suicide or a murder? If a
suicide, what motive had this young girl, who was soon to be married
to a charming man whom she loved, for killing herself? and in such a
way, without a word of explanation, without a letter of farewell to her
parents! Beside, how had she procured the poison?

“The investigation of this matter put justice on the track of the
prisoner. Being questioned, the apothecary of the village deposed that
six weeks before the tutor at the château had bought some nux vomica to
take for a disorder of the stomach.

“Now the tutor went to Clermont under pretext of visiting his sick
mother, on the very day of the discovery of the dead body, having been
summoned, as he said, by a telegraphic despatch. It was shown that
this telegram had never been received, that on the night of the crime
a servant had seen him coming out of Mlle. de Jussat’s room; finally,
that the bottle of poison which had been bought at the druggist’s, and
was found again in the room of the young man, had been partly emptied
and then refilled with water.

“Other witnesses reported that Robert Greslon had been very assiduous
in his attentions to the young girl, without the knowledge of her
parents. A letter was even discovered which he had written to her
and dated eleven months before, but which might be interpreted as a
skillful attempt at a beginning of courtship. The servants and even the
young lad who was his pupil testified that, for the past eight days,
the relations between Mlle. de Jussat and the tutor had been strained.
She would scarcely respond to his salutations. From these facts the
following hypothesis was deduced:

“Robert Greslon, being in love with this young girl, had courted her
in vain and then poisoned her to prevent her marriage with another.
This hypothesis was strengthened by the lies of which the young man
had been guilty when he was questioned. He denied that he had ever
written to Mlle. de Jussat; the letter was shown him, and even half of
an envelope, with his handwriting upon it, was found among the remains
of burned papers in the fireplace of the victim’s room. He denied
going out of Mlle. Charlotte’s room on the night in question, and he
was brought face to face with the footman who had seen him, and who
supported his assertion with the greater energy that he confessed that
he had gone to keep an appointment with one of the maids with whom he
was in love, at the same hour.

“Beside, Greslon could not explain why he had bought the nux vomica.

“It was proved that he had never before complained of any stomach
trouble. He could neither explain the invention of the dispatch, his
sudden departure, nor his frightful agitation at the news of the
discovery of the poisoning. Beside, no other motive than a lover’s
vengeance was admissible, from the simple fact that the victim’s
jewelry and money were not taken and her body bore no mark of violence.

“This is the way it was presumably done: Greslon entered Mlle. de
Jussat’s room, knowing that she usually slept until two o’clock, when
she awoke to take her potion. He put into this potion enough nux vomica
to so overpower the girl that she had only time to replace the glass
upon the table, but was unable to call for help. Then, fearing that his
emotion would betray him, he went away before the body was discovered.

“The empty bottle which was found on the ground he had thrown from the
study window which opened directly above that of Mlle. Charlotte. The
other bottle he had refilled with water by one of those unskillful
ruses which betray the novice in crime.

“In brief, Greslon is now confined in the jail at Riom and will appear
at the assizes of that city, in February, or early in March, accused of
poisoning Mlle. de Jussat Randon.

“The charge against him is made more overwhelming by his attitude
since his arrest. He has shut himself up in absolute silence, since his
falsehoods were confounded, and refuses to answer any question put to
him, simply saying he is innocent and has no need to defend himself. He
has refused counsel and is in a state of so profound melancholy that we
must believe that he is haunted by a terrible remorse.

“He reads and writes a great deal, but what seems very strange, and
shows the strength of the comedy with this young man of twenty, he
reads and writes only on subjects of pure philosophy, no doubt to
counteract the bad impression made by his gloominess, and also to prove
his entire freedom of mind. The nature of the prisoner’s occupations
leads me, monsieur, after this prolonged statement, to the reason for
which your evidence is desired in this case, by the mother of the
young man, who naturally rebels against the evidence, and who is dying
of grief, but is unable to overcome her son’s silence. Your books,
with those of some English psychologists, are the only ones which the
prisoner has asked for. I will add that your books were found on the
shelves of his library, in a condition which show that they have been
most assiduously read, and between the printed leaves there are other
leaves filled with comments, sometimes more developed than the text
itself. You shall judge for yourself.”

While speaking M. Valette handed the philosopher a copy of the
“Psychology of God,” which the latter opened mechanically. He could see
at each printed page a corresponding leaf covered with writing similar
to his own, but more confused and nervous.

In the tendency of the lines to fall, a graphologue would have
discovered a tendency to easy discouragement. This similarity of
writing impressed the philosopher for the first time, and gave him a
singularly painful sensation. He closed the book and returning it to
the judge said:

“I am painfully surprised, monsieur, at the revelations you have just
made to me; but I confess I do not understand what sort of relation
exists between this crime and my books or my person, nor what can be
the nature of the testimony I can be called upon to give.”

“That is very simple, however,” replied the judge. “However grave
the charges against Robert Greslon may be they rest upon certain
hypotheses. There are terrible presumptions against him, but there is
no absolute certainty. So you see, monsieur, to use the language of the
science in which you excel, that a question of psychology will rule the
contest. What were the thoughts, what was the character of this young
man? It is evident that, if he were much interested in abstract studies
the chances of his guilt diminish.”

While making this assertion, in which the savant did not suspect a
snare, Valette seemed more and more indifferent. He did not add that
one of the arguments of the prosecution, brought forward by the old
Marquis de Jussat was that Robert Greslon had been corrupted by his
reading. He wished to bring M. Sixte to characterize the principles
with which the young man had been impregnated.

“Question me, monsieur,” responded the savant.

“Shall we begin at the beginning?” said the judge. “In what
circumstances and at what date did you make the acquaintance of Robert
Greslon?”

“Two years ago,” said the savant, “in relation to a work of a purely
speculative kind upon human personality, which he came to submit to me.”

“Did you see him often?”

“Twice only.”

“What impression did he make on you?”

“That of a young man admirably endowed for psychological work,” replied
the philosopher, weighing his words, so that the judge felt convinced
that he wished to see and speak the truth; “so well endowed even that I
was almost frightened at his precocity.”

“He did not converse with you about his private life?”

“Very little,” said the philosopher; “he only told me that he lived
with his mother, and that he intended to make teaching his profession
and at the same time work at some books.”

“Indeed,” replied the judge, “that was one of the articles laid down
in a sort of programme of life which was found among the prisoner’s
papers, among those that are left. For it is one of the charges
against him that, between his examination and his written attestation,
he destroyed the most of them. Could you,” he added, “give any
explanation of one sentence of this programme which is very obscure
to the profane who are not conversant with modern philosophy? Here is
the sentence,” taking a sheet from among the others: “Multiply to the
utmost psychological experiences.” “What do you think Robert Greslon
understands by that?”

“I am very much puzzled to answer you, monsieur,” said M. Sixte after a
silence; but the judge began to see that it was useless to use artifice
with a man so simple, and he understood that his silence simply showed
that he was seeking an exact expression for his thoughts. “I only
know the meaning which I myself should attach to this formula, and
probably this young man was too well instructed in works of psychology
not to think the same. It is evident that in the other sciences of
observation, such as physics or chemistry, the counter-verification of
any law whatever exacts a positive and concrete application of that
law. When I have decomposed water, for example, into its elements,
I ought to be able, all conditions being equal, to reconstruct
water out of these same elements. That is an experience of the most
ordinary kind, but which suffices to summarize the method of the
modern sciences. To know by an experimental knowledge is to be able
to reproduce at will such or such a phenomenon, by reproducing its
conditions.”

“Is such a procedure admissible with moral phenomena? I, for
my part, believe that it is, and definitely this that we call
education is nothing more than a psychological experience more or
less well established, since it sums up thus: having given such a
phenomenon--which sometimes is called a virtue, such as patience,
prudence, sincerity; sometimes an intellectual aptitude, such as a
dead or a living language, orthography, calculation--to find the
conditions in which this phenomenon produces itself the most easily.
But this field is very limited, for if I wished, for instance, the
exact conditions of the birth of such passion being once known, to
produce at will this passion in a subject, I should immediately come
up against insoluble difficulties of law and morals. There will come a
time perhaps, when such experiments will be possible.

“My opinion is that, for the present, we psychologists must keep to
the experiences established by law and by accident. With memoirs, with
works of literature or art, with statistics, with law reports, with
notes on forensic medicine, we have a world of facts at our service.

“Robert Greslon had, in fact, discussed this _desideratum_ of our
science with me. I recollect, he regretted that those condemned to
death could not be placed in special conditions, which would permit
of experimenting upon them certain moral phenomena. This was simply
a hypothetical opinion, of a very young mind, who did not consider
that, to work usefully in this order of ideas, it is necessary to
study one case for a very long time. It would be best to experiment on
children, but how could we make any one believe that it would be useful
to science to produce in them certain defects or certain vices for
example?”

“Vices!” exclaimed the judge astounded by the tranquillity with which
the philosopher pronounced this phrase.

“I speak as a psychologist,” responded the savant who smiled in his
turn at the exclamation of the judge; “that is just why, monsieur, our
science is not susceptible of certain progress. Your exclamation proves
that if I had needed any proof. Society cannot get beyond the theory
of the good and the bad which for us has no other meaning than to mark
a collection of conventions sometimes useful, sometimes puerile.”

“You admit, however, that there are good actions and bad actions,” said
M. Valette; then the magistrate asserting himself and turning this
general discussion to the profit of his inquiry: “This poisoning of
Mlle. de Jussat,” he insinuated, “for example, you will admit that this
is a crime?”

“From the social point of view, without doubt,” responded M. Sixte.
“But for philosophy there is neither crime nor virtue. Our volitions
are facts of a certain order governed by certain laws, that is all.
But, monsieur,” and here the naïve vanity of the writer showed itself,
“you will find a demonstration of these theories, which I venture to
think conclusive, in my ‘Anatomy of the Will.’”

“Did you sometimes approach these subjects with Robert Greslon?” asked
the judge, “and do you believe that he shared your views?”

“Very probably,” said the philosopher.

“Do you know, monsieur,” asked the magistrate, unmasking his batteries,
“that you come very near justifying the accusations of monsieur the
Marquis de Jussat, who claims that the doctrines of contemporary
materialists have destroyed all moral sense in this young man, and
have made him capable of this murder?”

“I do not know what matter is,” said M. Sixte, “so I am not a
materialist. As to throwing upon a doctrine the responsibility of the
absurd interpretation which a badly balanced brain gives to it, that is
almost as bad as to reproach the chemist who discovered dynamite for
the crimes in which this substance is employed. That is an argument
which has no force.”

The tone in which the philosopher pronounced these words revealed the
invincible strength of spiritual resistance which profound faith gives,
as a timidity almost infantile, in the midst of the stir of material
life, was revealed in the accent with which he suddenly asked:

“Do you believe that I shall be obliged to go to Riom to testify?”

“I think not, monsieur,” said the judge who could not help noticing
with new astonishment the contrast between the firmness of thought in
the first part of his discourse and the anxiety with which this last
sentence had been uttered, “for I see that your interviews with the
prisoner have been more superficial than his mother believed, if indeed
they were limited to those two visits and to a correspondence which
appears to have been exclusively philosophical. But have you never
received any confidences relating to his life with the Jussats?”

“Never; beside he ceased to write to me almost immediately after he
entered that family, said M. Sixte.”

“In his last letters was there no trace of new aspirations, of
inquietude of a curiosity of unknown sensations?”

“I have not noticed any,” said the philosopher.

“Well, monsieur,” replied M. Valette after a brief silence, during
which he studied anew this singular witness, “I will not detain
you any longer. Your time is too precious. Permit me to go over
the few responses you have made, to my clerk. He is not accustomed
to examinations that bear upon matters so elevated. You will sign
afterward.”

While the magistrate was dictating to his clerk what he thought would
be of interest to justice in the deposition of the savant, the latter,
who was evidently confused by the horrible revelation of the crime of
Robert Greslon and by his conversation with the judge, listened without
making any remarks, almost without comprehending what was being said.
He signed his name without looking, after M. Valette had read aloud to
him the pages on which his answers were recorded, and once more before
taking leave he said:

“Then I can be very sure that I shall not have to go down there?”

“I hope not,” said the judge, conducting him to the door; and he
added: “in any case it would only be for a day or two,” feeling a
secret pleasure at the childish anguish depicted on the good man’s
face. Then when M. Sixte had left his office. “There are some fools
that it would be well to shut up,” said he to his clerk, who assented
by a nod. “It is through ideas like those of this fellow upon crime
that young people are ruined. He seems to be sincere. He would be less
dangerous if he were a scoundrel. Do you know that he might easily cut
off his disciple’s head with his paradoxes? But that appears to be all
right. He is only anxious to know if he will have to go to Riom. What
a maniac!” And the judge and his clerk shrugged their shoulders and
laughed. Then the former after a reverie of some minutes, in which he
went over the various impressions he had received in regard to this
being absolutely enigmatical to him, added:

“Faith, little did I ever suspect the famous Adrien Sixte was anything
like that. It is inconceivable.”

III.

SIMPLE GRIEF.

THE epithet by which the Judge of Instruction condemned the
impassibility of the savant would have been more energetic still, if he
could have followed M. Sixte and read the philosopher’s thoughts during
the short time which separated this examination from the rendezvous
fixed by the unhappy mother of Robert Greslon.

Having arrived in the great court of the Palais de Justice, he whom M.
Vilette at that very moment was calling a maniac looked first at the
clock, as became a worker so minutely regular.

“Quarter-past two,” he thought, “I shall not be home before three.
Madame Greslon ought to be there at four. I shall not be able to do any
work. That is very disagreeable.” And he resolved on the spot to take
his daily walk, the more readily that he could reach the Jardin des
Plantes along the river and through the city, whose old physiognomy and
quiet peacefulness he loved.

The sky was blue with the clear blue of frosty days, vaguely tinted
with violet at the horizon. The Seine flowed under the bridges green
and gayly laborious, with its loaded boats on which smoked the chimneys
of small wooden houses whose windows were adorned with familiar plants.
The horses trotted swiftly over the dry pavement.

If the philosopher saw all these details in the time that he took to
reach the sidewalk of the quay, with the precaution of a provincial
afraid of the carriages, it was for him a sensation even more
unconscious than usual. He continued to think of the surprising
revelation which the judge had just made to him; but a philosopher’s
head is a machine so peculiar that events do not produce the direct
and simple impression which seems natural to other persons. This one
was composed of three individuals fitted into one; there was the
simple-minded, Sixte, an old bachelor, a slave to the scrupulous care
of his servant and anxious first of all for his material tranquillity.
Then there was the philosophical polemic, the author, animated, unknown
to himself, by a ferocious self-love common to all writers. And last,
the great psychologist, passionately attached to the problems of the
inner life; and in order that an idea should accomplish its full action
upon this mind, it was necessary for it to pass through these three
compartments.

From the Palais de Justice to the first step on the border of the
Seine, it was the bourgeois who reasoned: “Yes,” said he to himself,
repeating the words which the sight of the clock had called forth,
“that is very disagreeable. A whole day lost, and why? I wonder what I
have to do with all that story, of assassination, and what information
my testimony has brought to the examination!”

He did not suspect that, in the hands of a skillful advocate, his
theory of crime and responsibility might become the most formidable of
weapons against Greslon.

“It was not worth the trouble to disturb me,” continued he. “But these
people have no idea of the life of a man who writes. What a stupid that
judge was with his imbecile questions! I hope I shall not have to go to
Riom to appear before some others of the same sort!”

He saw the picture of his departure painted afresh in his imagination
in characters of odious confusion which a derangement of this kind
represents to a man of study whom action unsettles and for whom
physical ennui becomes a positive unhappiness. Great abstract
intellects suffer from these puerilities. The philosopher saw in a
flash of anguish his trunk open, his linen packed, the papers necessary
to his work placed near his shirts, his getting into a cab, the tumult
of the station, the railway carriage, and the coarse familiarity of
proximity, the arrival in an unknown town, the miseries of the hotel
chamber without the care of Mlle. Trapenard, who had become necessary
to him, although he was as ignorant of it as a child.

This thinker, so heroically independent that he would have marched
to martyrdom for his convictions, with the firmness of a Bruno or a
Vanini, was seized by a sort of vertigo at the picture of an event so
ordinary.

He saw himself in the Hall of Assizes, constrained to answer questions,
in the presence of an attentive crowd, and that without an idea to
support him against his native timidity.

“I will never receive a young man again,” he concluded, “yes, I will
shut my door henceforth. But I will not anticipate. Perhaps I shall not
have to go through this unpleasant task and all is ended. Ended?” And
already the home-keeping citizen gave place in this inward monologue
to the second person hidden within the philosopher, namely, the writer
of books which were discussed with passion by the public. “Ended?”
Yes, for him who comes and goes, who lives in the Rue Guy de la Brosse
and who would be very much annoyed if he had to go to Auvergne in the
winter, it may be. But what about my books and my ideas? What a strange
thing is this instinctive hate of the ignorant for the systems which
they cannot even comprehend.

“A jealous young man murders a young girl to prevent her marrying
another. This young man has been in correspondence with a philosopher
whose works he studies. It is the philosopher who is guilty. And I am a
materialist forsooth, I who have proved the nonexistence of matter!”

He shrugged his shoulders, then a new image crossed his memory,
the image of Marius Dumoulin, the young substitute at the College
of France, the man whom he most detested in the world. He saw, as
if they were there before his eyes, some of the formulæ so dear to
this defender of spiritualism: “Fatal doctrines. Intellectual poison
distilled from pens which one would like to believe are unconscious.
Scandalous exposure of a psychology of corruption.” “Yes,” said Adrien
Sixte to himself with bitterness, “if some one does not catch up this
chance which makes an assassin of one of my pupils, it will not be he!
Psychology will have done it all.”

It is proper to state that, Dumoulin had, on the appearance of the
“Anatomy of the Will,” pointed out a grave error. Adrien Sixte had
based one of his most ingenious chapters upon a so-called discovery of
a German physician which was proved to be incorrect. Perhaps Dumoulin
dwelt on this inadvertence of the great analyst with a severity of
irony far too disrespectful.

M. Sixte, who rarely noticed criticisms, had replied to this one. While
confessing the error, he proved without any trouble, that this point
of detail did not affect the thesis as a whole. But he cherished an
unpardonable rancor against the spiritualist.

“It is as if I heard him!” thought Sixte. “What he may say of my books
is nothing but psychology? Psychology! This is the science on which
depends the future of our beloved France.”

As we see, the philosopher, like all other systematics, had reached
the point where he made his doctrines the pivot of the universe. He
reasoned about like this: Given a historic fact, what is the chief
cause of it? The general condition of mind. This condition is derived
from the current ideas. The French Revolution, for example, proceeded
entirely from a false conception of man which springs from the
Cartesian philosophy and from the “Discourse on Method.”

He concluded that to modify the march of events, it was necessary to
modify the received notions upon the human mind, and to install in
their place some precise notions whence would result a new education
and politics. So in his indignation against Dumoulin he sincerely
believed that he was indignant at an obstacle to the public good.

He had some unpleasant moments while thus figuring to himself this
detested adversary, taking as a text the death of Mlle. de Jussat for a
vigorous sortie against the modern science of the mind.

“Shall I have to answer him again?” asked Sixte, who already was sure
of the attack of his rival, such power have the passions to consider
real that which they only imagine. “Yes,” he insisted, and then aloud,
“I will reply in my best manner!”

He was by this time behind the apsis of Notre Dame and he stopped
to survey the architecture of the cathedral. This ancient edifice
symbolized to him the complex character of the German intellect
which he contrasted in thought with the simplicity of the Hellenic
mind, reproduced for him in a photograph of the Parthenon, which he
had often contemplated in the Library of Nancy. The remembrance of
Germany changed the current of his thoughts for a moment. He recalled,
almost unconsciously, Hegel, then the doctrine of the identity of
contrarieties, then the theory of evolution which grew out of it. This
last idea, joined itself to those which had already agitated him, and
resuming his walk, he began to argue against the anticipated objections
of Dumoulin in the case of young Greslon.

For the first time the drama of the Château Jussat-Randon appeared
real to his mind, for he was thinking of it with the most real part
of his nature, his psychologic faculty. He forgot Dumoulin as well as
the inconveniences of the possible journey to Riom, and his mind was
completely absorbed by the moral problem which the crime presented.

The first question would naturally have been: “Did Robert Greslon
really assassinate Mlle. de Jussat?” But the philosopher did not think
of that, yielding to this defect of generalizing minds, that never more
than half verify the ideas upon which they speculate. Facts are, to
them, only matter for theoretic using, and they distort them wilfully
the better to build up their systems. The philosopher again took up
the formula by which he summed up this drama: “A young man who becomes
jealous and commits a murder, this is one more proof in support of my
theory that the instinct of destruction and that of love awake at the
same time in the male.” He had used this principle to write a chapter
of extraordinary boldness on the aberrations of the generative faculty
in his ‘Theory of the Passions.’

The reappearance of fierce animality among the civilized would alone
suffice to explain this act. It would be necessary also to study the
personal heredity of the assassin. He forced himself to see Robert
Greslon without any other traits than those which confirmed the
hypothesis already outlined in his mind.

“Those very brilliant black eyes, those too vivacious gestures, that
brusque manner of entering into relations with me, that enthusiasm
in speaking to me, there was nervous derangement in this fellow. The
father died young? If it could be proved that there was alcoholism
in the family, then there would be a beautiful case of what Legrand
Du Saulle calls _épilepsie larvée_. In this way his silence may
be explained, and his denials may be sincere. This is the essential
difference between an epileptic and the deranged. The last remembers
his act, the epileptic forgets them. Would this then be a _larval
epileptic_?”

At this point of his reverie the philosopher experienced a moment of
real joy. He had just constructed a building of ideas which he called
an explanation, following the habit so dear to his race. He considered
this hypothesis from different points, recalling several examples cited
by his author in his beautiful treatise on forensic medicine, until he
arrived at the Jardin des Plantes, which he entered by the large gate
of the Quay Saint Bernard.

He turned to the right into an avenue planted with old trees whose
distorted trunks were inclosed in iron and coated with whitewash.
There floated in the air a musty smell emanating from the tawny beasts
which moved around in their barred cages nearby. The philosopher was
distracted from his meditations by this odor, and he turned to look at
a large, old wild-boar with an enormous head, which, standing on his
slender feet, held his mobile and eager snout between the bars.

“And,” thought the savant, “we know ourselves but little better than
this animal knows himself. What we call our person is a consciousness
so vague, so disturbed by operations which are going on within us,”
and returning to Robert Greslon: “Who knows? This young man who was so
preoccupied by the multiplicity of the self? Did he not have an obscure
feeling that there were in himself two distinct conditions, a primary
and secondary condition as it were--two beings in fact, one, lucid,
intelligent, honest, loving works of the intellect, the one whom I
knew; and another, gloomy, cruel, impulsive, the one who has committed
murder. Evidently this is a case. I am very happy to have come across
it.” He forgot that on leaving the Palais de Justice he had deplored
his relations with the accused. “It will be a fortunate thing to study
the mother now. She will furnish me with facts about the ancestors.
That is what is lacking to our psychology; good monographs made _de
visu_ upon the mental structure of great men and of criminals. I
will try to write out this one.”

All sincere passion is egoistic, the intellectual as well as the
others. Thus the philosopher, who would not have harmed a fly
walked with a more rapid step in going toward the gate at the Rue
Cuvier whence he would reach the Rue Jussieu, then the Rue Guy de la
Brosse--he was about to have an interview with a despairing mother who
was coming, without doubt, to entreat him to aid her in saving the
head of a son who was perhaps innocent! But the possible innocence of
the prisoner, the grief of the mother, the part which he himself would
be called to play in this novel scene, all were effaced by the fixed
idea of the notes to be taken, of the little insignificant facts to be
collected.

Four o’clock struck when this singular dreamer, who no more
suspected his own ferocity than does a physician who is charmed by a
beautiful autopsy, arrived in front of his house. On the threshold
of the _porte cochère_ were two men: Father Carbonnet and the
_commissionaire_ usually stationed at the corner of the street.
With their back turned to the side from which Adrien Sixte came, they
were laughing at the stumblings of a drunken man on the opposite walk,
and saying such things as a spectacle of that character suggests to the
common people. The cock Ferdinand, brown and lustrous, hopped about
their feet and picked between the stones of the pavement.

“That fellow has taken a drop too much for sure,” said the
_commissionaire_.

“What if I should tell you,” responded Carbonnet, “that he has not
drunk enough? For if he had drunk more, he would have fallen down at
the wineseller’s. Good! see him stumble up against the lady in black.”

The two speakers, who had not seen the philosopher, continued to bar
the way. The last; with the customary amenity of his manners, hesitated
to disturb them.

Mechanically he turned his eyes in the direction of the drunken man. He
was an unfortunate fellow in rags; his head was covered with a high hat
weakened by innumerable falls; his feet danced in his wornout boots. He
had just knocked against a person in deep mourning who was standing at
the angle of the Rue Guy de la Brosse and the Rue Linné. Without doubt
she was looking at some one on the side of this latter street, some one
in whom she was interested, for she did not turn at once.

The man in rags, with the persistency of drunken people, was excusing
himself to this woman, who then first became aware of his presence.
She drew back with a gesture of disgust. The drunken man became
angry, and supporting himself against the wall, hurled at her some
offensive language; a crowd of children soon collected around him.
The _commissionaire_ began to laugh, and so did Carbonnet. Then
turning around to look for the cock, muttering: “Where has he gone
to crow, the runaway?” he saw Adrien Sixte, behind whom Ferdinand had
taken refuge, and who was also regarding the scene between the drunken
man and the unknown lady.

“Ah! Monsieur Sixte,” said the _concierge_, “that lady in black
has been twice to ask for you in the last quarter of an hour. She said
that you were expecting her.”

“Bring her here,” responded the savant. “It is the mother,” thought
he. His first impulse was to go in at once, then a kind of timidity
came over him, and he remained at the door while the _concierge_,
followed by the cock, went over to the group collected on the corner of
the street.

The woman no sooner heard Carbonnet’s words than she turned toward the
philosopher’s house, leaving Ferdinand’s master to scold the drunkard.

The philosopher, instinctively continuing his reasoning, instantly
noticed a singular resemblance between the mysterious person and the
young man about whom he had been questioned. There were the same bright
eyes, in a very pale face, and the same cast of features. There was
not the least doubt, and immediately the implacable psychologist,
curious only about a case to be studied, gave place to the awkward,
simple-minded man, unskillful in practical life, embarrassed by his
long body and not knowing how to say the first word. Mme. Greslon, for
it was she, relieved him by saying: “I am, monsieur, the person who
wrote to you yesterday.”

“Very much honored, madame,” stammered the philosopher, “I regret that
I was not at home earlier. But your letter said four o’clock. And then
I have just come from the Judge of Instruction, where I was summoned to
testify in the case of this unhappy child.”

“Ah! monsieur,” said the mother, touching M. Sixte upon the arm to call
his attention to the _commissionaire_ who stood in the angle of
the door to listen.

“I beg your pardon,” said the savant, who comprehended the cruelty of
his abstraction. “Permit me to pass before you to show you the way.”

He proceeded to mount the stairs which began to be dark at this time
of a winter’s day. He went up slowly to suit the lassitude of his
companion, who held by the rail, as if she had scarcely energy enough
to ascend the four flights. Her short breath which could be heard in
the provincial silence of this empty house, betrayed the feebleness of
the unhappy woman.

As little sensitive as was the philosopher to the outer world, he was
filled with pity when, entering his study with its closed shutters
which the fire and the lamp already lighted by his servant softly
illumined, he saw his visitor face to face. The wrinkle plowed from the
corners of the mouth to the _ala_ of the nose, the lips scorched
by fever, the eyebrows contracted, the darkness about the eyelids, the
nervousness of the hands in their black gloves, in which she held a
roll of paper, without doubt some justifying memoir--all these details
revealed the torture of a fixed idea; and scarcely had she fallen into
a chair when she said in a broken voice:

“My God! my God! I am then too late. I wished to speak to you,
monsieur, before your conversation with the judge. But you defended
him, did you not? You said that it was not possible; that he had not
done what they accuse him of? You do not believe him guilty, monsieur,
you whom he called his master, you whom he loved so much?”

“I did not have to defend him, madame,” said the philosopher; “I was
asked what had been my relations with him, and as I had seen him only
twice, and he spoke only of his studies----”

“Ah!” interrupted the mother with an accent of profound anguish; and
she repeated: “I have come too late. But no,” she continued, clasping
her trembling hands. “You will go before the Court of Assizes to
testify that he cannot be guilty, that you know he cannot be? One does
not become an assassin, a poisoner, in a day. The youth of criminals
prepares the way for their crimes. They are bad persons, gamblers,
frequenters of the saloons. But he has always been with his books, like
his poor father. I used to say to him: ‘Come, Robert run out, you must
take the air, you must amuse yourself.’ If you could have seen what a
quiet little life we lead, he and I, before he went into this accursed
family. And it was for my sake that he should not cost me anything more
that he went into it, and that he might go on with his studies.”

“He would have been admitted in three or four years and then perhaps
have taken a position in a lyceum at Clermont. I should have had him
marry. I have seen a good _parti_ for him. I should have remained
with him, in some corner, to take care of his children. Ah! monsieur!”
and she sought in the philosopher’s eyes, a response in harmony with
her passionate desire; “tell me, if it is possible for a son who had
such ideas to do what they say he has done? It is infamous; is it not
infamous, monsieur?”

“Be calm, madame, be calm.” These were the only words which Adrien
Sixte could find to say to this mother who wept over the ruin of her
most cherished hopes. Beside, being still under the impression of his
conversation with the judge, she seemed to him to be so wildly beyond
the truth, a prey to illusions so blind that he was stupefied, and
also, why not confess it? the renewed prospect of the journey to Riom
frightened him as much as the grief of the mother affected him.

These different impressions showed themselves in his manner by an
uncertainty, an absence of warmth which did not deceive the mother.
Extreme suffering has infallible intuitions of instinct. This woman
understood that the philosopher did not believe in the innocence of her
son, and with a gesture of extreme depression, recoiling from him with
horror, she moaned:

“Monsieur, you too, you are with his enemies. You--you?”

“No, madame, no,” gently responded Adrien Sixte, “I am not an enemy.
I ask nothing better than to believe what you believe. But you will
permit me to speak frankly? Facts are facts, and they are terribly
against him. The poison bought clandestinely, the bottle thrown out of
the window, the other bottle half emptied then refilled with water,
the going out of the girl’s room on the night of her death; the false
dispatch, his sudden departure, those burned letters, and then his
denial of it all.”

“But, monsieur, there is no proof in all that,” interrupted the mother,
“no proof at all. What of his sudden departure? He had been wishing for
more than a month to get away from the place, I have a letter in which
he speaks of his plan, and beside his engagement was almost at an end.
He fancied that they wished to retain him and he was tired of the life
of a tutor, and then, as he is so timid, he gave a false pretext and
invented this unfortunate dispatch that is all. And as to the poison
he did not buy it secretly. He has suffered for years from a stomach
trouble. He has studied too hard immediately after his meals. Who saw
him go out of that room? A servant! What if the real murderer paid
this servant to accuse my son? Do we know anything about this girl’s
intrigues and who were interested in killing her?”

“Do you not see that all these and the letters and the bottle are parts
of the plan for making suspicion fall on him? How? Why? That will be
found out some day. But what I do know is that my son is not guilty. I
swear it by the memory of his father. Ah! do you believe I would defend
him like this if I felt him to be a criminal? I would ask for pity,
I would weep, I would pray, but now I cry for justice, justice! No,
these people have no right to accuse him, to throw him into prison, to
dishonor our name, for nothing, for nothing. You see, monsieur, I have
shown you that they have not a single proof.”

“If he is innocent, why this obstinacy in keeping silent?” asked the
philosopher, who thought that the poor woman had shown nothing except
her desperation in struggling against the evidence.

“Ah! if he were guilty he would talk,” cried Mme. Greslon, “he would
defend himself, he would lie! No,” added she in a hollow voice, “there
is some mystery. He knows something, that I am sure of, something which
he does not wish to tell. He has some reason for not speaking. Perhaps
he does not wish to dishonor this young girl, for they claim that he
loved her. Oh! monsieur, I have wanted to see you at any risk, for you
are the only one who can make him speak, who can make him tell what he
has resolved not to tell. You must promise me to write to him, to go to
him. You owe this to me,” she insisted in a hard tone. “You have made
me suffer so much.”

“I?” exclaimed the philosopher.

“Yes, you,” replied she bitterly, and as she spoke her face betrayed
the strength of old grudges; “whose fault is it that he has lost
faith? Yours, monsieur, through your books. My God! How I did hate you
then! I can still see his face when he told me he would not commune
on All-Soul’s day, because he had doubts. ‘And thy father?’ said I to
him, ‘All-Soul’s day!’ said he: ‘Leave me alone, I do not believe in
that any longer, that is done with.’ He was sitting at his table and he
had a volume before him which he closed while he was talking to me.
I remember. I read the name of the author mechanically. It was yours,
monsieur.

“I did not argue with him that day; he was a great savant already, and
I a poor, ignorant woman. But the next day, while he was at college I
took M. the Abbé Martel, who had educated him, into his room to show
him the library. I had a presentiment that it was the reading which had
corrupted my son. Your book, monsieur, was still on the table. The abbé
took it up and said to me: ‘This is the worst of them all.’

“Monsieur, pardon me, if I wound you, but do you see, if my son were
still a Christian, I would go and pray his confessor to command him
to speak. You have taken away his faith, monsieur, I do not reproach
you any more; but what I would have asked of the priest, I have come
to ask of you. If you had heard him when he came back from Paris! He
said to me, speaking of you: ‘If you knew him _maman_, you would
venerate him, for he is a saint.’ Ah! promise me to make him speak.
Let him speak for me, for his father, for those who love him, for you,
monsieur, who cannot have had an assassin for a pupil. For he is your
pupil, you are his master; he owes it to you to defend himself, as much
as to me his mother.”

“Madame,” said the savant with deep seriousness, “I promise you
to do all that I can.” This was the second time to-day that this
responsibility of master and pupil had been thrust upon him. Once
by the judge, repelled by the resistance of the thinker who repels
with disdain a senseless reproach. The words of this good woman,
quivering with this human grief to which he was so little accustomed,
touched other fibres than those of pride. He was still more strangely
affected when Mme. Greslon, seizing his hand with a gentleness which
contradicted the bitterness of her last words, said:

“He spoke the truth when he said you were good. I came too,” she
continued drying her tears, “to requite myself of a commission with
which the poor child charged me. And see if there is not in it a proof
that he is innocent. In his prison during these two months, he has
written a long work on philosophy. He considers it by far his best work
and I am charged to hand it to you.” She gave the savant the roll of
paper which she had held on her lap. “It is just as he gave it to me.
They let him write as much as he likes, everybody loves him. They do
not allow me to speak to him except in the frightful parlor where there
is always the guard between us. Will you look?” she insisted, and in an
altered tone: “He has never lied to me, and I believe whatever he has
told me. If, however, he had only thought to write to you what he will
not confide to any one else?”

“I will see immediately,” said Adrien Sixte, who unfolded the roll.
He threw his eyes over the first page of the manuscript and he saw
the words: “Modern Psychology,” then on the second sheet another
title, “Memoir upon Myself,” and underneath were the following lines:
“I write to my dear master. Monsieur Adrien Sixte, and engage his
word to keep to himself the pages which follow. If he do not agree
to make this engagement with his unhappy pupil, I ask him to destroy
this manuscript, confiding in his honor not to deliver it to any one
whomsoever, even to save my life.” And the young man had simply signed
his initials.

“Well?” asked the mother as the philosopher continued to turn over the
leaves, a prey to profound anxiety.

“Well!” responded he, closing the manuscript and holding the first
page before the curious eyes of Mme. Greslon, “this is only a work on
philosophy, as he told you. See.”

The mother had a question on her lips, and suspicion in her eyes while
she was reading the technical formula which was unintelligible to her
poor mind. She had observed Adrien Sixte’s hesitation. But she did not
dare to ask, and she rose saying:

“You will excuse me for having kept you so long, monsieur. I have
placed my last hope upon you, and you will not deceive a mother’s
heart. I carry your promise with me.”

“All that it will be possible for me to do that the truth may be
known,” said the philosopher gravely, “I will do, madame, I promise you
again.”

When he had conducted the unhappy woman to the door, and was again
alone in his study Adrien Sixte remained for a long time plunged in
reflection. Taking up the manuscript, he read and reread the sentence
written by the young man, and pushing away the tempting manuscript, he
paced the floor. Twice he seized the sheets and approached the fire,
but he did not throw them into the flames. A combat was going on in his
mind between a devouring curiosity, and apprehensions of very different
kinds. To contract the engagement which this reading would impose on
him, and to learn what could be learned from these pages would throw
him, perhaps, into a horrible situation. If he were going to hold in
his hands the proof of the young man’s innocence without the right
to use it, or what he suspected still more, the proof of his guilt,
what then? Without being conscious of it he trembled in his inmost
nature, lest he find in this memoir if there were crime, the trace of
his own influence, and the cruel accusations already twice formulated,
that his books were mixed up with this sinister history. On the other
hand, the unconscious egoism of studious men who have a horror of all
confusion, forbade him to enter any further into a drama with which he
had definitely nothing to do.

“No,” he concluded, “I will not read this memoir; I will write to this
boy as I have promised the mother to do, then it will be ended.”

However, his dinner had come in the midst of his reflections. He ate
alone, as always, seated in the corner by a porcelain stove, the
weather being very chilly, the heat was his only comfort, and before a
little round table, covered with a piece of oilcloth. The lamp which
served for his work lighted his frugal repast, consisting, as usual, of
soup and one dish of vegetables with some raisins for dessert, and for
drink water alone.

Ordinarily he took one of the books which had been exiled from the
too-crowded study, or he listened while Mlle. Trapenard exposed the
details of the housekeeping. On this evening he did not look for a
book, and his housekeeper tried in vain to discover if the lady’s
visit and the summons had any connection. The wind rose, a winter’s
wind whose plaint from across the empty space died gently against
the shutters. Seated in his armchair after his dinner, with Robert
Greslon’s manuscript before him, the savant listened for a long time
to this monotonous but sad music. His hesitation returned. Then
psychology drove away all scruples, and when later Mariette came to
announce that his bed was ready, he told her to retire. Two o’clock
struck and he was still reading the strange piece of self-analysis
which Robert Greslon called a memoir upon himself, but whose correct
title should have been:

“Confession of a Young Man of the Period.”

IV.

CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD.

“THE JAIL AT RIOM, January, 1887.

“I WRITE to you, monsieur, this memoir of myself which I have refused
to the counsel in spite of my mother’s entreaties. I write it to you,
who in reality know so little of me, and at what a moment of my life!
for the same reason that led me to bring my first work to you. There is
my illustrious master, between you and myself, your pupil accused of
a most infamous crime, a bond which men could not understand, and of
which you yourself are ignorant, but which I feel to be as close as it
is indissoluble. I have lived with your thought, and by your thought so
passionately, so entirely at the most decisive period of my life! Now
in the distress of my mental agony, I turn to the only being of whom I
can expect hope, implore aid.

“Ah! do not misunderstand me, venerated master, and believe that the
terrible trouble with which I am struggling is caused by the vain
forms of justice which surround me. I should not be worthy the name
of philosopher if I had not, long ago, learned to consider my thought
as the only reality, and the external world an indifferent and fatal
succession of appearances. From my seventeenth year, I have adopted
as a rule to be repeated in the hours of small or great annoyances,
the formula of our dear Spinoza: ‘The force by which man perseveres in
existence is limited, and that of external causes infinitely surpass
it.’

“I shall be condemned to death in six weeks, for a crime of which I am
innocent, and from which I can not clear myself, you will understand
why, after having read these pages--and I shall go to the scaffold
without trembling. I shall support this event with the same effort
at composure as if a physician, after having auscultated me, should
diagnose an advanced disease of the heart. Condemned, I shall have
to conquer first the revolt of the animal nature and then to support
myself against the despair of my mother.

“I have learned from your works the remedy for such feelings, and in
opposing to the image of approaching death the sentiment of inevitable
necessity, and in diminishing the vision of my mother’s grief by the
recollection of the psychological laws which govern consolations, I
shall arrive at a relatively calm state of mind. Certain sentences of
yours will suffice for this, that, for example, in the fifth chapter of
the second volume of your “Anatomy of the Will,” which I know by heart:

“‘The universal interweaving of phenomena causes each to bear the
weight of all the others, in the same way that each portion of the
universe, and at each moment, may be considered as a _résumé_ of
all that has been, of all that is, and of all that will be. It is in
this sense that it is permissible to say that the world is eternal in
its detail as well as in its whole.’

“What a sentence, and how it envelops, as well as affirms and
demonstrates the idea that everything is necessary in and around us
since we too are a parcel and a moment of this eternal world! Alas! why
is it that this idea which is so lucid when I reason, as one ought to
reason, with my mind, and in which I acquiesce with all the strength
of my being, cannot overcome in me a species of suffering so peculiar,
which invades my heart when I recall certain actions which I have
willed, and others of which I am the author, although indirectly, in
the drama through which I have passed?

“To tell you all in a few words, my dear master, though once more I
say that I did not kill Mlle. de Jussat, I have been connected in the
closest manner with the drama of her poisoning, and I feel remorse,
although the doctrines in which I believe, the truths which I know,
and the convictions which form the essence of my intellect, make me
consider remorse the most silly of human illusions.

“These convictions are powerless to procure me the peace of certainty,
which once was mine. I doubt with my heart that which my mind
recognizes as truth. I do not think that for a man whose youth was
consumed by intellectual passions, there can be a worse punishment than
this. But why try to interpret by literary phrases a mental condition
which I wish to expose to you in detail--to you the great connoisseur
in maladies of the mind--in order that you may give me the only aid
which can do me any good; some word which shall explain me to myself,
which shall attest to me that I am not a monster, which shall sustain
me in the disorder of my beliefs, which shall prove to me that I have
not been deceived all these years, in adhering to the new faith with
all the energy of a sincere being.

“Indeed, my dear master, I am very miserable, and I must speak out
all my misery. To whom shall I address myself, if not to you, since I
should have no hope of being intelligible to any one not familiar with
the psychology in which I have been educated.

“Since coming to this prison, two months ago, the moment I resolved
to write to you has been the only one in which I have been what I was
before these terrible events occurred. I had tried to become absorbed
in some work of an entirely abstract order, but found myself unable to
master it.

“I have considered only this for four days, and, thanks to you, the
power of thought has returned. I have found something of the pleasure
which was mine when I wrote my first essays, in resuming, for this
work, the cold severity of my method--your method. I wrote out
yesterday a plan of this monograph of my actual self, in practising the
division by paragraphs which you have adopted in your works. I have
proved the persistent vigor of my reflection in reconstructing my life
from its origin, as I would resolve a problem of geometry by synthesis.

“I see distinctly at the present time that the crisis from which I
suffer has for its factors, first my heredities, then the medium of
ideas in which I was educated, finally the medium of facts into which
I was transplanted by my introduction among the Jussat-Randons. The
crisis itself and the questions which it raises in my mind shall be
the last fragments of a study which I shall strip of insignificant
recollections, to reduce it to what a master of our time calls
generatrices. At least I shall have furnished you an exact document
upon the modes of feeling which I formerly believed to be very precious
and very rare, and I shall have proved to you in two ways, first by my
confidence in your absolute discretion, and second by my appeal for
your philosophical support, what you have been to him who writes these
lines, and who asks your pardon for this long preamble and begins at
once his dissection.”

§ I. MY HEREDITIES.

As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the
one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small,
and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power
and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were,
two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another
who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable
curiosity.

At this very hour and knowing that I am in prison, accused of a capital
crime, blasted in honor, and overwhelmed in sadness, knowing that it
is this very I, Robert Greslon, born at Clermont the 5th of September,
1865, and not another, I think of this situation as a spectacle at
which I am a stranger. Is it even exact to say I? Evidently not. For
my true self is, properly speaking, neither the one who suffers not
the one who looks on. It is made up of both, and I have had a very
clear perception of this duality, although I was not then capable of
comprehending this psychological disposition exaggerated to an anomaly,
from my childhood, the childhood which I wish to recall with the
impartiality of a disinterested historian.

My first recollections are of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, and of a
house which stood on a promenade now very much changed by the recent
construction of the artillery school. The house, like all the houses in
this city, was built of Volvic stone, a gray stone which darkens with
age, and which gives to the tortuous streets the appearance of a city
of the middle ages.

My father, who died when I was very young, was of Lorraine extraction.
He held at Clermont the position of engineer of roads and bridges.
He was a slender man of feeble health, with a face almost beardless,
and marked with a melancholy serenity which touched me, when I think
of him, after all these years. I see him again in his study, through
whose windows may be viewed the immense plain of the Limagne, with the
graceful eminence of the Puy de Crouël quite near, and in the distance
the dark line of the mountains of Forez.

The railway station was near our house, and the whistling of the
trains was constantly heard in this quiet study. I used to sit on the
carpet in the corner by the fire, playing without making any noise, and
this strident call produced on my mind a strange impression of mystery,
of distance, of the flight of time, and of life which endures to the
present.

My father traced with his chalk upon a blackboard enigmatic signs,
geometric figures or algebraic formulas, with that clearness of the
curves, or the letters which revealed the habitual method of his
being. At other times he wrote, standing at an architect’s table which
he preferred to his desk, a table consisting simply of a white wood
board placed on trestles. The large books on mathematics arranged with
the most minute care in the bookcase, and the cold faces of savants,
engraved in copperplate and framed under glass, were the only objects
of art with which the walls were decorated.

The clock which represented the globe of the world, two astronomical
maps which hung above the desk, and upon this desk the calculating
ruler with its figures and its copper slide, the square, the compass,
the T rule. I recall them all, at will, the smallest details of this
room whose whole atmosphere was thought, and these images aid me
to comprehend how from my infancy the dream of a purely ideal and
contemplative existence became elaborated in me, favored by heredity.

My later reflections have shown me, in several traits of my character,
the result transmitted under form of instinct of the life of abstract
study that my father led. I have, for example, always felt a singular
horror of action, so much so that, making a simple visit caused my
heart to pant and the slightest physical exercise was intolerable to
me, such as wrestling with another person; even to discuss my most
cherished ideas appeared to me, and still appears, almost impossible.

This dread of action is explained by the excess of brainwork which,
pushed too far, isolates man in the midst of the realities which he
hardly endures, because he is not habitually in contact with them. I
feel that this difficulty of adapting myself to facts comes to me from
this poor father; from him also comes this faculty of generalization,
which is the power, but at the same time the mania of my mind; and it
is also his work that a morbid predominance of the nervous system has
rendered my will so wild at certain times.

My father, who was still young when he died, had never been robust. He
was obliged at the growing age to undergo the trial of preparation for
the Polytechnic School which is ruinous to the soundest health. With
narrow shoulders and with limbs weakened by long sittings at sedentary
meditations, this savant with transparent hands seemed to have in his
veins, instead of red globules of generous blood, a little of the dust
of the chalk which he handled so much.

He did not transmit to me muscles capable of counterbalancing the
excitability of my nerves, so that with this faculty of abstraction, I
owe to him a kind of ungovernable intemperance of desire. Every time
that I have ardently wished for anything it has been impossible to
repress this covetousness. This is a hypothesis which has often come to
me when I have been analyzing myself, that abstract natures are more
incapable than others of resisting passion, when passion is aroused,
perhaps because the daily relation between action and thought is broken
in them.

Fanatics would be the most signal proofs of this. I have seen my
father, usually so patient and gentle, so overcome by the violence of
anger as almost to faint. In this I am also his son, and through him
the descendant of a grandfather as ill-balanced, a sort of primitive
genius, who, half-peasant, had risen by force of mechanical inventions
to be a civil engineer, and was then ruined by lawsuits.

On this side of my race there has always been a dangerous element,
something wild, at times, by the side of constant intellectuality.
I formerly considered this double nature a superior condition; the
possible ardor of passion joined with this continuous energy of
abstract thought. It was my dream to be at the same time frenzied and
lucid, the subject and the object, as the Germans say, of my analysis;
the subject who studies himself and finds in this study a means of
exaltation and of scientific development. Alas! Whither has thy chimera
led me? But it is not the time to speak of effects, we are still with
the causes.

Among the circumstances which affected me during my childhood, I
believe the following to be one of the most important: Every Sunday
morning, and as soon as I could read, my mother took me with her to
mass. This mass was celebrated at eight o’clock in the Church of the
Capuchins recently built on a boulevard shaded by Plantanes which led
from Sablon Court to Laureau Square, along the Jardin des Plantes.

At the door of the church, there used to sit, in front of a portable
shop, a cake seller called Mother Girard, with whom I was well
acquainted, for I had bought of her little bunches of cherries in the
spring. This was the first fruit of the season that I might eat. This
dainty, acid and fresh, was one of the sensualities of these days of
childhood, and any one who had observed me, might have seen this frenzy
of desire of which I have spoken. I was almost in a fever when on my
way to this shop.

This was not the only reason why I preferred the Church of the
Capuchins with its extremely plain architecture, to the subterranean
crypts of Notre-Dame-du-Port and to the vaults of the cathedral upheld
by it elegant clustered columns. At the Capuchins the choir was closed.
During the offices, invisible mouths behind the grating chanted the
canticles, which strangely effected my childish imagination; they
seemed to me to come from so far off, an abyss or a tomb. I looked at
my mother praying beside me with the fervor which was shown in her
smallest actions, and I thought that my father was not there, that he
never came to church. My child’s brain was so puzzled by this absence,
that, one day, I asked:

“Why does not papa come to mass with us?”

My inquiring child’s eyes had no trouble to see the embarrassment into
which this question threw my mother. She withdrew from it, however, by
an answer analogous to hundreds of others which a woman so essentially
enamored of fixed principles and of obedience has since given me.

“He goes to another mass, at an hour which suits him better, and then
I have already told you that children ought never to ask why their
parents do this or that.”

All the difference of mind which separated my mother and myself is
found in this sentence, uttered one cold morning in winter, while
walking under the trees of Sablon Court. I can see her now in her
pelerine, her hands in her muff lined with brown silk from which her
book came halfway out, and the sincerity of her face even in her pious
falsehood. I can see her eyes, which so many times since have regarded
me with a look which did not comprehend me, and at this period she
did not suspect that for my meditative childish nature to think, was
already to ask, always and in relation to everything; why? Yes, why had
my mother deceived me? For I knew that my father went to no kind of
office. And why did he not go?

While the grave and sad voices of the concealed monks were intoning the
responses of the mass, I was absorbed in this question. I knew without
being able to appreciate the reasons of the superiority that my father
was accounted among the first of the city. How many times in walking
were we stopped by some friend, who tapping me on the cheek would say:
“Well, will we get to be a great savant like the father some day?”

When my mother took his advice, she listened with the greatest respect.
She thought it natural that he did not perform certain duties which,
for us, were obligatory. We had not the same duties. This idea was not
formulated then in my childish brain with this positive distinctness,
but it developed there the germ of that which later became one of the
convictions of my youth--to know that the same rules do not govern
intellectual minds that control other men.

It was there in that little church, quietly bending over my prayer
book, that the great principle of my life had birth, not to consider
as a law for thinking men that which is and ought to be a law for
others--just as I received from the conversations with my father,
during our excursions, the first germs of my scientific view of the
world.

The country around Clermont is marvelous, and although I am the reverse
of poetical, a man for whom the external world means very little, I
have always retained in my memory the pictures of the landscapes which
surrounded these walks. While the city on one side looks toward the
plain of the Limagne, on the other it stands on the foothills of the
Dôme Mountains. The slope of the extinct craters, the undulations
caused by old eruptions and the streams of hardened lava give to the
outlines of these volcanic mountains a resemblance to the landscapes in
the moon as discovered by the telescope in that dead planet.

On one side is the savage and sublime memorial of the most terrible
convulsions of the globe, and on the other the prettiest rusticity
of stony roads among the vineyards, of murmuring brooks under the
willows and chestnuts. The great pleasures of my childhood were the
interminable wanderings with my father in all the paths which lead from
the Puy de Crouël to Gergovie, from Royat to Durtol, from Beaumont to
Gravenoire.

Simply in writing these names, my memory rejuvenates my heart. I see
myself again the little boy, whom a portrait represents with long
hair, with his legs in cloth leggings, who walks along holding his
father’s hand. Whence came this love for the fields to him, the learned
mathematician, the man of study and of reflection? I have often thought
of it since, and I believe I have discovered a law of the development
of mind;--our youthful tastes persist even when we are developed in a
sense contrary to them, and we continue to exercise these tastes while
justifying them by intellectual reasons which would exclude such things.

I will explain. My father naturally loved the country because he was
brought up in a village, and when he was small had passed whole days on
the banks of the brooks among the insects and the flowers. Instead of
yielding to these tastes in a simple manner, he mingled them with his
present occupations. He would not have pardoned himself for going to
the mountains without studying there the formation of the land; for
looking at a flower without determining its character and discovering
its name; for taking up an insect without recalling its family and its
habits.

Thanks to the rigor of his method in all work he arrived at a very
complete knowledge of the country; and, when we walked together, this
knowledge was the sole subject of our conversation. The landscape of
the mountains became a pretext for explaining to me the revolutions
of the earth; he passed from that with a clearness of speech which
made such ideas intelligible to me, to the hypothesis of Laplace
upon nebula, and I saw distinctly in my imagination the planetary
protuberances flying off from the burning nucleus, from this torrid sun
in rotation.

The heavens at night in the beautiful summer months became a kind of
map which he deciphered for me, and on which I distinguished the Pole
Star, the seven stars of the Chariot, Vega of the Lyre, Sirius, all
those inaccessible and formidable worlds of which science knows the
volume, the position and almost the very metals of which they are
composed.

It was the same with the flowers which he taught me to arrange in an
herbarium, with the stones which I broke with a little iron hammer,
with the insects which I fed or pinned up, as the case might be. Long
before object lessons were practiced in the college my father applied
to my education first this great maxim: “Give a scientific account of
anything we may encounter.”

Thus reconciling the pleasantry of his first impressions with the
precision acquired in his mathematical studies. I attribute to this
teaching the precocious spirit of analysis which was developed in me
during my early youth, and which, without doubt, would have turned
toward the positive studies if my father had lived. But he could not
complete this education, undertaken after a prepared plan of which I
have since found trace among his papers.

In the course of one of our walks, and on one of the warmest days of
summer, in my tenth year, we were overtaken by a storm which wet us to
the bones. During the time that it required to reach home in our soaked
clothes my father took cold. In the evening he complained of a chill.
Two days after an inflammation of the lungs declared itself, and the
week following he died.

As I wish, in this summary indication of diverse causes which formed my
mind, to avoid at any cost that which I hate most of anything in the
world, the display of subjective sentimentality, I will not recount
to you, my dear master, any further details of this death. They were
heartrending, but I felt their sadness only in a far-off way, and that
later.

I recollect, though I was a large and remarkably developed boy, to
have felt more wonder than sorrow. It is now that I truly regret my
father--that I comprehend what I lost in losing him. I believe you
have seen exactly what I owe to him; the taste and the facility for
abstraction, the love of the intellectual life, faith in science and
the precocious management of method--these for the mind; for the
character, the first divination of the pride of intellect, and also
an element slightly morbid, this difficulty of action which has as
its consequence the difficulty in resisting the passions when one is
tempted.

I wish also to mark distinctly what I owe to my mother. And from the
first I perceive this fact that this second influence acts upon me by
reaction, while the first had acted directly. To speak truly, this
reaction only began when she became a widow and wished to direct my
education. Until then she had entirely given me up to my father.

It may seem strange that, alone in the world, she and I, she so
energetic, so devoted, and I so young, we did not live, at least during
those years, in perfect communion of heart. There exists in fact, a
rudimentary psychology for which these words--mother and son--are
synonyms of absolute tenderness, of perfect agreement of soul. Perhaps
it is so in the families of ancient tradition, although in human nature
I believe very little in the existence of entire sympathy between
persons of different ages and sexes.

In any case, modern families present under conventional etiquette the
most cruel phenomena of secret divorce, of complete misunderstanding,
sometimes of hate, which are too well understood when we think of their
origin. They come from the mixture for a hundred years of province with
province, race with race, which has charged the blood of nearly all
of us with hereditary opposites. So people find themselves nominally
of the same family who have not a common trait either in their moral
or mental structures; consequently the daily intimacy between persons
becomes a cause of daily conflicts or of constant dissimulation. My
mother and I are an example of it which I would qualify as excellent,
if the pleasure of finding very clear proof of a psychologic law was
not accompanied by keen regret at having been its victims.

My father, I have told you, was an old pupil of the Polytechnic School
and the son of a civil engineer. I have also said he was of Lorraine
race. There is a proverb which says: “Lorraine traitor to its king and
even to God.” This epigram expresses in a unique form the idea that
there is something complex in the mind of this frontier population.

The people of Lorraine have always lived on the border of two races and
of two existences, the German and the French. What is this disposition
to treachery if not the depravity of another taste, admirable from
the intellectual point of view, that of sentimental complication?
For my part, I attribute to this atavism the power of doubling of
which I spoke at the beginning of this analysis. I ought to add that,
when I was a child, I often felt a strange pleasure in disinterested
simulation which proceeded from the same principle. I recounted to my
comrades all sorts of inexact details concerning myself, about my place
of birth, my father’s birthplace, about a walk which I was intending to
take, and this not to boast, but simply to be some one else.

I found singular pleasure later in advancing opinions the most opposed
to those which I considered the true ones from the same _bizarre_
motive. To play a rôle different from my true nature appeared to me an
enrichment of my person, so strong was the instinct to resolve myself
into a character, a belief, a passion.

My mother is a woman of the South, absolutely rebellious against
all complexity, to whom ideas of things alone are intelligible. In
her imagination the forms of life are reproduced concrete, precise
and simple. When she thinks of religion, she sees her church, her
confessional, the communion cloth, the few priests whom she has known,
the catechism in which she studied. When she thinks of a career, she
sees positive activity and benefits. The professorate, for example,
which she desired me to enter, was for her M. Limasset, the professor
of mathematics, the friend of my father, and she saw me, like him,
going across the city twice a day in an alpaca coat and Panama hat
in summer, and my feet protected in winter by clogs, and my body in
a furred overcoat, with a fixed salary, the perquisites of private
tuition and the sweet assurance of a pension.

I have been able by studying her to learn how completely this order of
imagination renders those whom it governs incapable of comprehending
other souls. It is often said of such people that they are despotic and
personal, or that they have bad characters. In reality, they are before
those with whom they associate like a child before a watch. He sees the
hands move, he knows nothing of the wheels which make them move. So
when these hands do not go to suit his fancy there is the stupidity of
impatience to force them and to warp the springs.

My poor mother was like this with me, and that from the week which
followed our trouble. I felt almost immediately an indefinable
discomfort in her presence. The first circumstance which enlightened me
in regard to this separation which had begun between us, so far as my
childish mind could be enlightened, dates from an afternoon of autumn,
nearly four months after my father’s death.

The impression received was so strong that I recall it as if it had
happened yesterday. We had changed apartments, and had rented the third
floor of a house in the Rue Billard, a narrow lane which distorts the
shadows of Des Petits-Abres, in front of the palace of the Prefecture.
My mother had chosen it because there was a balcony in which I was
playing on this beautiful afternoon. My play--you will here recognize
the scientific turn given by my father to my imagination--consisted in
taking a pebble, which represented a great explorer, from one end of
the balcony to the other, and among other stones which I had taken from
the flower pots.

Some of these stones represented cities, others curious animals of
which I had read descriptions. One of the parlor windows opened on
the balcony. It was partly open, and my play having led me thither I
heard my mother talking to a visitor. I could not help listening with
that beating of the heart which the hearing my personality discussed
has always produced. I learned afterward that between our real nature
and the impression produced on our relations, and even on our friends,
there is no more similarity than there is between the exact color of
the face and its reflection in a blue, green, or yellow glass.

“Perhaps,” said the visitor, “you are mistaken in regard to poor
Robert, at ten years the character is not at all formed.”

“God grant that it may be so,” replied my mother, “but I am afraid
he has no heart. You cannot imagine how hard he has been since his
father’s death. The next day even he seemed to have forgotten all about
it. And he has never said a word since--such a word as makes you feel
that one is thinking of another you now. When I speak to him of his
father, he hardly answers me. You would think he had never known the
man who was so good to him.”

I have read somewhere that when Merimée was quite a child he was
one day scolded by his mother and then sent out of the room. He was
scarcely gone when his mother burst out laughing. The child heard the
laugh which showed him that the irritation had been feigned, and he
felt a feeling of distrust rise in his heart which always remained.
This anecdote impressed me very strongly.

The impression of the celebrated writer offered a startling analogy
with the effect which this fragment of conversation produced upon me.
It was very true that I never spoke of my father, but how false that
I had forgotten him! On the contrary, I thought of him constantly. I
never walked along the street, I could not look at any piece of our
furniture without the remembrance of his death taking such possession
of me that I was almost ill. But with this was mingled a fearful
astonishment that he had gone forever, and it was all confounded in a
kind of anxious apprehension, which closed my mouth when any one talked
with me about him.

I know now that my mother could have known nothing of the workings of
my mind. But, at that time, as I heard her thus condemn my heart, I
experienced a profound humiliation. It seemed to me that she was not
acting toward me as it should be her duty to act. I felt that she was
unjust, and because I was timid, being still a young boy and shy, I
became irritated at her injustice, instead of trying to tell her how I
felt.

From that moment it became impossible for me to show myself to her as I
was. And whenever her eyes sought mine to learn my emotions I felt an
irresistible desire to conceal from her my inmost being.

That was the first scene--if anything so insignificant can be dignified
by so big a name--followed by a second which I will notice in spite of
its apparent unimportance. Children would not be children if the events
important to their sensibility were not puerile.

I was, at this period, already passionately fond of reading, and
chance had put into my hands a very different kind of books from those
which are given as prizes at school. It was this way: although my
father as a mathematician knew little of general literature, he loved
a few authors whom he understood in his way; and when afterward I
found some of his notes on these authors, I learned to appreciate the
degree to which the feeling for literature is a personal, irreducible,
incommensurable thing to borrow a word from his favorite science there
is no common measure between the reasons for which two minds like or
dislike the same writer.

Among other works my father owned a translation of Shakespeare in two
volumes, which they put on my chair to raise my seat at table. They
left me without thinking how these volumes illustrated by engravings
would very soon incite my curiosity to read the text. There was a Lady
Macbeth rubbing her hands in presence of a frightened physician and a
servant, and Othello entering Desdemona’s chamber with a poniard in
his hand, and bending his black face toward the white, sleeping form,
a King Lear tearing his clothing under the zigzags of the lightning, a
Richard III. asleep in his tent and surrounded by specters.

From the accompanying text I read, before my tenth year, fragments
which made me familiar with all these dramas which exalted my
imagination, in so far as I could seize the meaning of them, without
doubt because they were written for popular audiences, and admit an
element of primitive poetry, and an infantine exaggeration.

I loved these kings, who, joyous or despairing, defiled past at the
head of their armies, who lost or gained battles in a few minutes, I
enjoyed this slaughter accompanied by a flourish of trumpets behind
the scenes, the rapid passages from one country to another, and the
chimerical geography. In brief, whatever there is in these dramas
and especially in the chronicles that is very much abridged, almost
rudimentary, so charmed me, that when I was alone I played with the
chairs, imagining them to be Lancaster, Warwick, or Gloucester.

My father, who had an extreme repugnance to the troublesome realities
of life, relished in Shakespeare that which is simple and touching, the
profiles of women so delicately drawn; Imogene and Desdemona, Cordelia
and Rosalind pleased him, though the comparison may seem strange, for
the same reason that he enjoyed the romances of Dickens, Topffer and
even the child’s play of Florian and Berquin.

Here we may see the contrasts which prove the incoherence of artistic
judgments which are founded upon sentimental impression. I also read
all these books, and those of Walter Scott, as well as the rural tales
of George Sand, in an illustrated edition. It would certainly have
been better for me not to have nourished my imagination on elements
so incongruous and sometimes dangerous. But at my age I could not
understand more than a quarter of the sentences, and while my father
was toiling at his blackboard, combining his formulas, I believe that
the lightning might have struck the house without his knowing it,
carried away as he was by the all-powerful demon of abstraction.

My mother, to whom this demon is as much a stranger as the beast of the
Apocalypse, did not wait long, after the first hours of our trouble had
passed, before she rummaged the room in which I studied; and, under an
exercise, she discovered a large, open book--Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”

“What book is this?” she asked, “who permitted you to take it?”

“But I have read it once already,” I replied.

“And these?” she continued, in looking over the little library where by
the side of schoolbooks, were, beside the Shakespeare, the “Nouvelles
Génevoises” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Rob Boy” and “La Mare au Diable.”
“These are not suitable for a person of your age,” she insisted, “and
you may help me carry all these books into the parlor, and put them in
your father’s library.”

So I carried them, three at a time, some almost too heavy for my small
arms, into the cool room furnished in haircloth. With her white hands
in their black mitts, she took the books and arranged them alongside
of the big treatises on mathematics. She closed the glass door of the
bookcase, locked it, and put the key on the ring with others, which she
always carried with her. Then she added severely:

“When you wish a book you may ask me for it.”

I ask her for one of those books, but which one? I knew so well that
she would refuse me all those which I had any desire to read! I have
already shown too plainly that we did not think alike on any point.
I complain of her having put a stop to my liveliest pleasure, less
perhaps because of the prohibition than for the reason she gave. For
she believed it to be her duty to repeat the phrases on the danger of
romances, no doubt borrowed from some manual of piety, which appeared
to me to express exactly the contrary to that which I had experienced.

She made the danger I had run in this indiscriminate reading the
pretext for occupying herself more closely with my studies and
directing my education. This was her duty, but the contrast was too
great between the ideas into which my father had precociously initiated
me and the poverty of her mind, which was furnished with impressions
positive, mean, and almost vulgar.

I went to walk with her now, and she talked with me. Her conversation
was confined to my bearing, my manners, my little comrades, and their
parents. My intellect, which had been too early trained in the pleasure
of thought, felt stifled and oppressed.

The motionless landscape of extinct volcanoes recalled to me the grand
convulsions of the terrestrial drama which my father formerly traced.
The flowers which I plucked my mother would hold for a few minutes,
and then let fall almost without looking at them. She was ignorant of
their names, as she was of those of the insects which she compelled me
to throw down as soon as I had picked them up, saying they were unclean
and venomous.

The roads among the vines no longer led to the discovery of the vast
world to which the genial word of the dead had invited me. They were
simply a continuation of the streets of the city and the misery of
daily cares. I seek in vain for suitable words to express the vague
and singular ennui of a mutilated mind, of a rarefied atmosphere which
these walks inflicted on me.

Language was created by men to express the ideas of men. The terms are
lacking which correspond to the incomplete perceptions of children, to
their penumbra of soul. How can I tell the suffering, which I did not
myself comprehend, of a mind in which were fermenting high and broad
conceptions, of a brain upon the border of the great intellectual
horizon, and which had to submit to the unconscious tyranny of another
brain, narrow and weak, a stranger to all general ideas, to every view
either ample or profound?

Now that I have passed through this period of repressed and thwarted
youth, I interpret the smallest episodes by the laws of the
constitution of mind, and I take into account that fate, in confiding
the education of such a child as I was to the woman who was my mother,
had associated two forms of thought as irreducible the one to the other
as two different species.

These details, in which I find the proof of this constitutive
antithesis between our two natures, come to me by thousands. I have
said enough on this point so that I may content myself by noting with
precision the result of this silent collision of our minds, and to
borrow formulas in the philosophic style, I believe, that by this wrong
education, two germs were prepared in me: the germ of a sentiment and
the germ of a faculty; the sentiment was that of the solitude of the
individual, the faculty that of internal analysis.

I have said that in the order of sensibility as in that of thought,
I had almost immediately felt that I could not show myself to my
mother as I was. I thus learned, though I was scarcely born into the
intellectual life that there is in us an obscure incommunicable
element. This was in my case a timidity at first--then it grew into a
pride. But have not all forms of pride a common origin?

Not to dare to show ourselves is to become isolated; and to become
isolated is very soon to prefer one’s self. I have since found, in
some recent philosophers, M. Renan, for example, this sentiment of
the solitude of the soul, but it was transformed into a triumphant
and transcendental disdain; I have found it changed into disease and
barrenness in the Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, aggressive and ironical
in Beyle.

In the poor little collegian of a provincial lyceum, who trotted
through the slippery streets of his mountain town in winter, with his
cartable under his arm and his feet in galoshes, it was only an obscure
and painful instinct; but this instinct, after being applied to my
mother, grew more and more applying itself to my comrades and to my
masters. I felt that I was different from them with this difference:
I believed that I understood them perfectly and that they did not
understand me. Reflection has taught me that I did not understand them
any better than they understood me; but I also see now that there was
really this difference between us, that they accepted their person and
mine simply, purely, bravely, while I had already begun to complicate
myself by thinking too much of myself. If I had very early felt that,
contrary to the word of Christ, I had no neighbor, it was because I had
begun very early to exasperate the consciousness of my own soul, and
consequently to mate of myself an _exemplaire_, without analogy,
of excessive individual sensibility.

My father had endowed me with a premature curiosity of mind. As he was
not there to direct me toward the world of positive knowledge, this
curiosity fell back upon myself. The mind is a living creature, and
as with all other creatures, every power is accompanied by a want. It
would be necessary to reverse the old proverb and say: To be able is to
wish. A faculty in us always leads to the wish to exercise it.

Mental hereditary and my early education made an intellectual being of
me before my time. I continued to be such a being, but all my intellect
was applied to my own emotions. I became an absolute egoist with an
extraordinary energy of disdain with regard to everyone else. These
traits of my character appeared later under the influence of the crises
of ideas though which I have passed and of which I owe you the history.

§ II. THE MEDIUM OF IDEAS.

The diverse influences which I have just rather abstractly summarized,
but in terms which you will understand, my dear master, had first
this unexpected result, to make of me a very pious child, between my
eleventh and my fifteenth year. If I had been placed in the college
as a boarder, I should have grown like my comrades whom I have since
studied and for whom there has never been a religious crisis.

At the period of which I am writing, and which marked the definite
advent of the democratic party in France, a great wave of free thought
rolled from Paris into all the provinces; but I was the son of a very
devout woman, and I was subjected to all the observances of religion.
I find a proof of what I have told you of my precocious taste for
analysis in the fact that unlike all my young companions, I was
delighted with the confessional. I can say that, during the four years
of the mystic crisis of youth, from 1876 to 1880, the great events of
my life were these long séances in the narrow wooden box in the church
Des Minimes, which was our parish church, where I went every fortnight
to kneel down and speak in a low voice, with a beating heart, of what
was passing within me.

The approach of my first communion marked the birth of this feeling
for the confessional, mixed with contradictory elements. I believed,
consequently, my little sins appeared to me to be veritable crimes, and
to confess them made me ashamed. I repented, and I had the certainty
that I rose pardoned, with the delight of a conscience washed from
every stain. I was an imaginative and nervous child, and there was for
me in the scenery of the sacrament, in the cold silence of the church,
in the odor of vault and incense which filled it, in the stammering of
my own voice saying, “My father,” and in the whispering of the priest
responding, “my son,” from behind the grating, a poetry of mystery
which I felt without understanding.

United with this, there was a singular impression of fear, which was
derived from the teaching of Abbé Martel, the priest who prepared us
for our first communion. He was a small, short man, with an apoplectic
face, and a grave, hard blue eye, a man who had been educated in a
provincial seminary still penetrated with Jansenism. His eyes, when
from the pulpit of Des Minimes he was talking to us of hell, saw
visions of terror, and this sensation he communicated to us.

I rejoice that he is dead, for if he were living I might see him enter
my prison, and who knows what might happen then? Perhaps I should
suffer a recurrence of those emotions of terror which his presence used
to inflict. The constant themes of his discourse were the small number
of the elect and the divine vengeance.

“Who could hinder God,” said the priest, “since he is all-powerful,
from forcing the soul of the man who has committed murder to remain
near the body from which it is separated? The soul would be there,
in the mortuary chamber, hearing the sobs, seeing the tears of the
friends, and yet forbidden to console them. It would be imprisoned in
the winding-sheet, and there during days and days and nights and nights
it would be present at the corruption of the flesh, which was once its
own, there among the worms and the rot.”

Such images and such ferocity of invention abounded in his bitter
mouth; they followed me into my sleep; the fear of hell was excited in
me almost to madness. The Abbé Martel employed the same eloquence in
presenting the decisive importance to our salvation which the approach
to the communion table would have, and so my fear of eternal punishment
led to a scrupulous examination of my conscience.

Soon these close meditations, this looking as through a magnifying
glass at my slightest deviations, this continuous scrutiny of my inmost
self, interested me to such a degree that no sport had any attraction
for me in comparison. I had found, for the first time since the death
of my father, an employment for this power of analysis which was
already definitive and almost constitutive in me.

The development thus given to my acute sense of the inner life ought
to have produced an amelioration of my moral being. On the contrary,
it resulted in a subtility which, in itself alone, was a corruption,
at least from the point of view of strict Catholic discipline. I
became, in the course of these examinations of conscience, into which
entered more of pleasure than of repentance, extremely ingenious, and
discovering peculiar motives behind my most simple actions. The Abbé
Martel was not a psychologist sufficiently acute to discern this shadow
and to comprehend that to cut the soul to pieces in this way would
lead me to prefer the fleeting complexities of sin to the simplicity
of virtue. He recognized only the zeal of a very fervent child. For
example, on the morning of my first communion I went in tears to
confess to him once more.

In turning over and over again the soil and the subsoil of my memory,
I had discovered a singular sin, the fear of man. Six weeks before, I
had heard two boys, my comrades, at the door of the Lyceum, mocking an
old lady who was entering the church Des Carmes, just opposite. I had
laughed at their words instead of reproving them.

The old lady was going to mass; to ridicule her was to ridicule a pious
action. I had laughed, why? from false shame. Then I had participated
in it. Was it not my duty to find the two mockers and to show them
their impiety, and make them promise repent? I had not done so. Why?
From false shame; from respect for man, according to the definition
of the catechism. I passed the whole night preceding the great day of
the first communion in wondering if I could see the Abbé Martel early
enough the next day to confess this sin. I recall the smile with which
he tapped my cheek after having given me absolution in order to quiet
me. I hear the tone of his voice which had grown very sweet as he said
to me:

“May you always be what you are now.”

He did not suspect that this puerile scruple was the sign of an
exaggeratedly unhealthy reflection, nor that this reflection would
poison the delights of the Eucharist for which I had so ardently
wished. I had not been satisfied, in the course of the preceding weeks,
to analyze the conscience to its most delicate fibres, I had abandoned
myself to the imagination of sentiment which is the forced consequence
of this spirit of analysis. I had anticipated with extreme precision
the sentiments which I should experience in receiving the host upon my
lips. In my imagination I advanced toward the rail of the altar which
was draped in a white cloth, with a tension of my whole being which
I have never since experienced, and I felt, in communing, a kind of
chilling deception, an ecstatic exhaustion of which I cannot describe
the discomfort. I have since spoken of this impression to a friend who
was still a Christian and he said: “You were not simple enough.” His
piety had given to him the insight of a professional observer. It was
too true. But what could I do?

The great event of my youth, which was the loss of my faith, did not,
however, date from this deception. The causes which determined this
loss were very numerous, and I have never clearly comprehended them
until now. They were slow and progressive at first, and acted upon my
mind as the worm upon the fruit, devouring the interior without any
other sign of this ravage than a small speck, almost invisible, on the
beautiful purple rind. The first was, it seems to me, the application
to my confessor of this terrible critical spirit, a faculty destructive
of all confidence, which, from my infancy, had so separated me from my
mother.

I pushed my examinations of conscience to the most subtle delicacy and
still the Abbé Martel did not perceive this work of secret torture
which completely anatomatized my soul. My scruples appeared to him, as
they were, childish; but they were the childishness of a very complex
boy, and one who could not be directed unless he might feel that he was
understood.

In my conversations with this rude and primitive priest I soon
experienced the contrary feeling. This was enough to deprive this
director of my youth of all authority over my mind. At the same time,
and this is the second of the causes which detached me from the church,
I found among men whom I then considered superior the same indifference
to religious observances that I had observed in my father. I knew
that the young professors, those who had come from Paris with the
prestige of having gone through the Normal School, were all atheists
and skeptics. I heard the abbé pronounce these words with concentrated
indignation, in the visits which he made to my mother. When I
accompanied her to the offices of Des Minimes as I had formerly to
those of the Capuchins, I reflected on the poverty of intellect of the
devotees who crowd to mass on Sunday mornings and mutter their prayers
in the silence of the ceremony, broken only by the noise of displaced
chairs. The flame of a clear and living thought had never been lighted
in the heads that bowed with so submissive a fervor at the elevation of
the host.

I did not at that time formulate this contrast with this distinctness,
but I recalled the picture of those young masters as they emerged
from the Lyceum, talking with each other in conversations which I
imagined were like those of my father, where the smallest sentence was
charged with science; and a spirit of doubt arose in my mind as to the
intellectual value of Catholic beliefs.

This distrust was fed by a kind of naïve ambition which made me desire
with an incredible ardor to be as intelligent as the most intelligent
and not to vegetate among those of second rank. I confess that a good
deal of pride was mingled with this desire, but I do not blush at this
avowal. It was a purely intellectual pride, completely foreign to any
desire for outward success. And, if I hold myself erect at this moment,
and in this fearful drama, I owe it first of all to this pride--it is
this which permits me to describe my past with this cold lucidity,
instead of running away like an ordinary suspect, from the noisy events
of this drama. I can see so clearly that the first scenes of this
tragedy began with the college youth in whom was acting the young man
of to-day.

The third of the causes which concurred in this slow disintegration of
my Christian faith was the discovery of contemporaneous literature,
which dates from my fourteenth year. I have told you that my mother,
shortly after my father’s death, suppressed certain books. This
severity had not relaxed with time, and the key of the paternal
bookcase continued to click on the steel ring between that of the
pantry and of the cellar. The most evident result of this prohibition
was, to heighten the charm of the remembrance which these books
had left of the half-comprehended pieces from Shakespeare, and the
half-forgotten romances of George Sand.

Chance willed that, at the commencement of my thirteenth year, I should
come across some examples of modern poetry in the book of French
authors which served for the year’s recitations. There were fragments
of Lamartine, a dozen of Hugo’s pieces, the “Stances à la Malibran” of
Alfred de Musset, some bits of Sainte-Beuve, and of Leconte de Lisle.

These pages were sufficient to make me appreciate the absolute
difference of inspiration between the modern and the ancient masters,
as one can appreciate the difference of aroma between a bouquet of
roses and a bouquet of lilacs, with his eyes shut. This difference,
which I divine by an unreasoning instinct, resides in the fact that,
until the Revolution, writers had never taken sensibility as the
subject and the only rule of their works. It has been the contrary
since eighty-nine. From this there results among the new writers a
certain painful, ungovernable something, a search after moral and
physical emotion which has become almost morbid, and which attracted me
immediately.

The mystical sensuality of the “Stances du Lac” and of the “Crucifix,”
the changing splendors of several “Orientales,” fascinated me; but
above all I was charmed at something culpable which breathes in
the eloquence of “L’Espoir en Dieu” and in some fragments of the
“Consolations.” I began to feel for the rest of the works of these
masters that strong and almost insane curiosity which marks the middle
period of adolescence. One is then on the border of life, and he
hears without seeing, as it were, the murmur of a waterfall through a
cluster of trees, and how this sound intoxicates him with expectation!
A friendship with a comrade who lived on the first floor of our house
exasperated this curiosity still more.

This friend, who died young, and who was named Emile, was also an
inveterate reader, but more fortunate than I, he suffered from no
surveillance. His father and mother, who were already old, lived on a
small income and passed the long hours of the day in playing, in front
of the window which opened on the Rue de Billard, interminable games
of bezique, with cards bought in a _café_ and still smelling of
tobacco. Emile alone in his room, could abandon himself to all his
fancies in reading.

As we were in the same class, and as we went to and from the Lyceum
together, my mother willingly permitted me to pass whole hours with
this charming lad, who soon shared my taste for the verses which I so
much admired, and my desire to know more of their authors.

On our way to the college, we took the narrow streets of the old town
and passed the stall of an old bookseller of whom we had bought some
second-hand classics. We discovered here a copy of the poetry of
Musset in rather a bad condition, which would cost forty sous. At first
we contented ourselves with occasional readings at the stall, but soon
we felt that it was impossible to do without it. By putting together
our spending money for two weeks, we were able to buy it, and then, in
Emile’s little room, he on his bed and I on a chair, we read Don Paez,
the Marrons du feu, Portia, Mardoche and Rolla. I trembled as if I were
committing a great fault, and we imbibed this poetry as if it had been
wine, slowly, sweetly, passionately.

I read afterward in this same room, and also in my own, thanks to the
ruses of a lover in danger, many clandestine volumes which I very much
enjoyed, from the “Peau de chagrin,” of Balzac, to the “Fleurs du mal,”
of Baudelaire, not to mention the poems of Heinrich Heine and the
romances of Stendhal.

I have never felt an emotion comparable to that of my first encounter
with the genius of the author of “Rolla.” I was neither an artist nor a
historian. Was I therefore indifferent to their value more or less real
or their meaning more or less actual? Not at all. This was an elder
brother who had come to reveal to me the dangerous world of sentimental
experience.

The intellectual inferiority of piety to impiety which I had obscurely
felt appeared now in a strangely new light. All the virtues that had
been preached to me in my childhood seemed poor and mean and humble,
and meaner beside the opulence and the frenzy of certain vices. The
devotees who were my mother’s friends, sadly old and shriveled,
represented faith. Impiety was a handsome young man who awakes and
looks at the crimson aurora, and in a glance discovers the whole
horizon of history and legends, and then again lays his head on the
bosom of a girl as beautiful as his most beautiful dream. Chastity
and marriage were the _bourgeois_ whom I knew who went to hear
the music in the Jardin des Plantes, every Thursday and Sunday, and
who said the same things in the same way. My imagination painted, in
the chimerical colors of the most burning poetry, the faces of the
libertines of the Contes d’Espagne and of the fragments which follow.
There was Dalti murdering the husband of Portia, then wandering with
his mistress over the dark waters of the lagoon among the stairways
of the antique palaces. There were Don Paez assassinating Juana after
folding her to himself in a fond embrace; Frank and his Belcolore,
Hassan and his Namouna, l’Abbé Cassio and his Luzon.

I was not competent to criticize the romantic falsity of all this fine
setting, nor to separate the sincere from the literary portion of these
poems. The complete profligacy of soul appeared to me through these
lines, and it tempted me; it excited in my mind, already eager for new
sensations, the faculty of analysis already too much aroused.

The other works which I have cited were the pretext for a temptation
which was similar but not so strong.

In the contemplation of the sores of the human heart which they exposed
with so much complaisance, I was like those saints of the middle ages
who were hypnotized by contemplation of the wounds of the Saviour.
The strength of their piety caused the miraculous stigmata to appear
on their hands and the ardor of my imagination, at the age of holy
ignorances and immaculate purities, opened in my soul the stigmata of
moral ulcers which are draining the life blood of all the great modern
invalids.

Yes, in the years when I was only the collegian, the friend of little
Emile, I assimilated in thought the emotions which the timid teachings
of my masters indicated as the most criminal. My mind was tainted with
the most dangerous poisons, while, thanks to my power of duplication, I
continued to play the part of a very good child, very assiduous at my
tasks, very submissive to my mother, and very pious. But no. However
strange this must appear to you, I did not play that rôle. I was
pious, with a spontaneous contradiction which, perhaps, has directed
my thought to the psychological work to which I consecrated my first
efforts.

When I read in your work on the will those suggestive indications on
the theory of the multiplicity of self, I seized upon them immediately,
after having passed through such epochs as I am describing to you
to-day and in which I have really been several distinct beings.

This crisis of imaginative sensibility had continued the attack upon
my religious faith by offering the temptation of subtile sin and also
that of painful scepticism. The sensuality crisis which resulted from
it failed to revive this faith in my heart. I ceased to be pure when
I was seventeen years old, and this happened as usual, in very dull
and prosaic circumstances. From that time, beside the two persons
who already existed in me, between the youth who was still fervent,
regular, pious, and the youth romantically imaginative, a third
individual was born and grew, a sensual being, tormented by the basest
desires. However, the taste for the intellectual life was so strong, so
definite, that although suffering from this singular condition, I felt
a sensation of superiority in recognizing and studying it.

What was more strange, I did not yield to this last disposition more
than I did to the others, with a clear and lucid consciousness. I
remained a youth through all these troubles, that is to say a being
still uncertain and incomplete, a being in whom could be discerned the
lineaments of the soul to come.

I did not assert my mysticism, for at bottom I was ashamed to
believe, as if to believe were something inferior; nor my sentimental
imaginations, for I considered them as simple sports of literature; nor
my sensuality for I was disgusted with it. And beside, I had neither
the theory nor the audacity of my curiosity in regard to my faults.

Emile, who died the following winter, of disease of the lungs, was
very ill at this time and did not go out of the house. He listened to
my confidences with a frightened interest which flattered my self-love
by making me think that I was different from others. This did not
prevent my being afraid, as on the evening before my first communion,
at the look which l’Abbé Martel gave me when he met me. He had without
doubt spoken to my mother-so far as the secrecy of the confessional
permitted, for she watched my goings out but without the power to
hinder them entirely, and above all without suspecting any other than
the possible causes of temptation, so well did I envelop myself in
hypocrisy.

The illness of my best friend, the surveillance of my mother, the
apprehension of the priest’s eyes enervated me, and perhaps the more
that it seemed in this volcanic country as if the summer’s heat drew
from the sun a more ardent and intoxicating vapor. I knew at that
time, days literally maddening, so made up were they of contradictory
hours, days in which I arose a more fervent Christian than ever. I
read a little in the “Imitation,” I prayed, I went to my class with
the firm determination to be perfectly regular and good. As soon as I
returned I prepared my lessons, then I went down to Emile’s room. We
gave ourselves up to the reading of some exciting book. His father and
mother, who knew that he could not live, humored him in everything and
allowed him to take from the library any work that he pleased.

We now had in hand the most modern writers, whose books having recently
come from Paris, exhaled an odor of new paper and fresh ink. In this
way we brought upon ourselves a chill of the brain which accompanied
me all the afternoon after I returned to my classroom. There, in the
stifling heat of the day, I could see through the open door, the short
shadows of the trees in the yard, and hear the far-off voices of some
professor dictating the lessons; I could see the figure of Marianne,
and then began a temptation which at first was vague and remote, but
which grew and continued to grow. I resisted it, while knowing that I
should succumb, as if the struggle against my obscure desire made me
the more feel its strength and acuteness.

I went home. I hurried through my duties with a kind of diabolical
verve, finding some power in the disorder of my too susceptible nerves.
After dinner I went downstairs under pretext of seeing Emile and
hastened toward Marianne’s. On my return I passed some hours at my
window, looking at the stars of the vast sky of summer, recalling my
dead father, and what he had said to me of these far-off worlds. Then
an extraordinary impression of the mystery of nature would seize me, of
the mystery of my own soul, living in the midst of nature, and I do not
know which I admired more, the depths of the taciturn heavens, or the
abysses which a day thus employed revealed in my heart.

Such were the habits of my inner life, my dear master, when I entered
the class which would decide my development--the class of philosophy.
My enchantment began in the first week of the course. What a course,
however, and how crammed with the rubbish of the classic psychology!
No matter, inexact and incomplete official and conventional as it
was, this psychology enamored me. The method employed, the personal
reflection and the minute analysis: the object to be studied, the human
“I,” considered in his faculties and passions; the result sought, a
system of general ideas capable of summing up in brief formulas a
vast pile of phenomena; all in this new science, harmonized too well
with the species of mind which my heredity, my education, and my own
tendencies had fashioned in me.

I forgot even my favorite reading and plunged into these works of an
order until now unknown with the more frenzy that the death of my
only friend which occurred at this time imposed on my mind, which was
naturally so meditative, this problem of destiny which I already felt
myself powerless to solve by my early faith.

My ardor was so lively that soon I was no longer satisfied to follow
the course. I sought other books which would complete the teaching of
the masters, and in this way, I one day came upon the “Psychology de
Dieu.” It impressed me so profoundly that I immediately obtained the
“Theory of the Passions” and the “Anatomy of the Will.” These were in
the realm of pure thought, the same thunderbolt as were the works of
De Musset in the realm of delirious sensations. The veil fell. The
darkness of the external and of the internal world became light. I had
found my way. I was your pupil.

In order to explain to you in a very clear manner how your thought
penetrated mine, permit me to pass immediately to the result of this
reading, and the meditations which followed. You will see how I was
able to draw from your works a complete system of ethics, and which
properly arranged in a marvelous manner the scattered elements which
were floating about within me.

I found in the first of these three works, the “Psychology of God,” a
definite alleviation of the religious anguish in which I had continued
to live, in spite of temptation and of doubts. Certainly, objections
to the dogmas had not been lacking, as I had read so many books which
manifested the most audacious irreligion, and I had been drawn toward
skepticism, as I have told you, because I found in it the double
character of intellectual superiority and of sentimental novelty.

I had felt, among other influences, that of the author of the “Life
of Jesus.” The exquisite magic of his style, the sovereign grace of
his dilettanteism, the languorous poetry of his pious impiety had
affected me deeply, but it was not for nothing that I was the son of
a geometrician, and I had not been satisfied with what there was of
uncertainty, of shadow in this incomparable artist.

It was the mathematical rigor of your book which at once took
possession of my mind. You demonstrated with irresistible dialectics,
that any hypothesis upon the first cause is nonsense, even the idea
of this first cause is an absurdity, nevertheless this nonsense and
this absurdity are as necessary to our mind as is the illusion to our
eyes of a sun turning around the earth, although we know that the sun
is immovable and that the earth itself is in motion. The all-powerful
ingenuity of this reasoning charmed my intellect, which docilely
yielded to your vision of the lucid and rational world. I perceived the
universe as it is, pouring out without beginning, and without end, the
tide of inexhaustible phenomena. The care which you have taken to found
all your arguments upon facts taken from science corresponded too well
with the teaching of my father not to have subdued me.

I read your pages over and over again, summarized them, commented upon
them, applied them with the ardor of a neophyte, in order to assimilate
all the substance. The intellectual pride which I had felt from my
childhood became exalted in the young man who learned from you the
renunciations of the sweetest, of the most comforting topics.

Ah! how shall I tell you of the fervor of an initiation which was like
a first love in the delights of its enthusiasm? I felt it a physical
joy to overthrow, with your books in my hand, the entire edifice of
beliefs in which I had grown up. Yes, this was the masculine felicity
which Lucretius has celebrated, that of the liberating negation, and
not the cowardly melancholy of a Jouffroy.

This hymn to science, of which each of your pages is a strophe, I
listened to with a delight as much more intense as the faculty of
analysis, the principal reason of my piety, had found, thanks to you,
another way to exercise itself than at the confessional, and that your
two great treatises had enlightened me as to my inner being, at the
same time that your “Psychology of God” enlightened me in regard to
the external universe, with a light which, even to-day, is my last, my
inextinguishable beacon in the midst of the tempest.

How you explained to me all the incoherences of my youth! This moral
solitude in which I had suffered so much with my mother, with the Abbé
Martel, with my comrades, with everyone, even Emile--I now understood.
Have you not demonstrated, in your “Theory of the Passions,” that we
are powerless to get away from Self, and that all relation between two
beings reposes, like everything else, upon illusion?

Tour “Anatomy of the Will” revealed to me the necessary motives, the
inevitable logic of the yielding to the temptations of the senses for
which I had suffered remorse so severe. The complications with which I
reproached myself as a lack of frankness, you showed to be the very law
of existence imposed by heredity. I found also, that, in searching the
romancers and poets of the century for culpable and morbid conditions
of soul, I had, without suspecting it, followed the inborn vocation of
psychologist. Have you not written:

“All souls must be considered by the psychologist as experiences
instituted by nature. Among these experiences, some are useful to
society and are called virtues; others are injurious and are called
vices or crimes. These last are however, the more significant, and
there would lack an essential element to the science of the mind, if
Nero, for example, or some Italian tyrant of the fifteenth century had
not existed?”

On those warm summer days, I walked out, with one of these books in my
pocket, and, when alone in the country, I read some of these sentences
and became absorbed in meditation on their meaning. I applied to the
country which surrounded me the philosophical interpretation of what
we agree to call evil. Without doubt the eruptions which had raised
the chain of the Domes, at whose feet I wandered, had devastated with
burning lava the neighboring plain and destroyed living beings, but
they had produced this magnificence of scenery which charmed me, when
my eyes contemplated the graceful group of the Pariou, the Puy de Dôme
and all the line of these noble mountains.

The road was verdant with euphorbias in bloom, whose stems I broke
to see the milk-white poison exuding from them. But these poisonous
plants nourished the beautiful tithymal caterpillar, green with dark
spots, from which a butterfly would be born, a sphinx with colored
wings of the finest tint.

Sometimes a viper glided among the stones of these dusty roads, which
I watched as it moved away, gray against the puzzuolana red, with his
flat head and the suppleness of his spotted body. The dangerous reptile
appeared to me a proof of the indifference of nature whose only care is
to multiply life, beneficent or murderous, with the same inexhaustible
prodigality.

I learned then, with inexpressible force, the same lesson which I
learned from your works, to know that we have nothing for our own
but ourselves, that the “I” alone is real, that nature ignores us,
as do men, that from her as from them we have nothing to ask if not
some pretexts for feeling or for thinking. My old beliefs, in a
God, the father and judge, seemed like the dreams of a sick child,
and I expanded to the extreme limits of the vast landscape, to the
depths of the immense void heaven, in thinking that as a youth I had
already reflected enough to understand of this world what none of the
countrymen whom I saw pass could ever comprehend.

They came from the mountains, leading their oxen harnessed to their
large carts, and saluted the cross devoutly. With what delight I
scorned their gross superstition, theirs and the Abbé Martel’s and my
mother’s, though I had not decided to declare my atheism, foreseeing
too plainly what scenes this declaration would provoke! But these
scenes are of no more importance, and I come now to the _exposé_
of a drama which would have had no meaning if I had not first admitted
you into the intimacy of my mind and its formation.

§ III. TRANSPLANTATION.

By too close attention to study during this year, I brought on quite a
serious illness, which forced me to interrupt my preparation for the
Normal School. When I had recovered I doubled my lessons in philosophy,
at the same time following a part of the rhetorical course.

I presented myself at the school about the time in which I had the
honor of being received by you. You are acquainted with the events
which followed. I failed at the examination. My compositions lacked
that literary brilliancy which is acquired only at the Lyceums of Paris.

In November, 1885, I accepted the position of preceptor in the
Jussat-Randon family. I wrote to you then that I renounced my
independence in order that I might not be any further expense to my
mother. Joined with this reason there was the secret hope that the
savings realized in this preceptorate would permit me, my licentiate
once passed, to prepare for my fellowship examination in Paris. A
residence in that city attracted me, my dear master, by the prospect of
living near the Rue Guy de la Brosse.

My visit to your hermitage had made a profound impression. You appeared
to me as a kind of modern Spinoza, so completely identical with your
books by the nobility of a life entirely consecrated to thought. I
created beforehand a romance of felicity at the idea that I should
know the hours of your walks, that I should form the habit of meeting
you in the old Jardin des Plantes, which undulates under your windows,
that you would consent to direct me, that aided and sustained by you, I
could also make my place in science; in fine you were for me the living
certainty, the master, what Faust is for Wagner in the psychologic
symphony of Goethe. Beside, the conditions which this preceptorate
offered were particularly easy. I was above all to be the companion of
a child twelve years of age, the second son of the Marquis de Jussat.

I learned afterward why this family had retired for the whole winter
to this château, near Lake Aydat, where they usually passed the autumn
months only. M. de Jussat, who is originally from Auvergne, and who
has held the office of minister plenipotentiary under the emperor, had
just lost a large sum on the Bourse. His property being hypothecated,
and his income greatly diminished, he had let his house on the
Champs-Elysées furnished at a very high rent.

He had arrived at his Jussat estate a little earlier, expecting to go
directly to his villa at Cannes. An advantageous chance to let this
villa also offered. The desire to free his property had tempted him,
the more as an increasing hypochondria made it easier to face the
prospect of an entire year passed in solitude. He had been surprised
by the sudden departure of his son Lucien’s preceptor, who without
doubt did not care to bury himself in the country for so many months,
and so he had come to Clermont. He had studied his mathematics there
thirty-five years before, under M. Limasset, the old professor who was
my father’s friend. The idea had come to him to ask his old master
to recommend an intelligent young man, capable of taking charge of
Lucien’s studies for the whole year. M. Limasset naturally thought
of me, and I consented, for the reasons which I have given, to be
presented to the marquis as a candidate for the place.

In the parlor of one of the hotels on the Place de Jande, I found a man
quite tall, very bald, with clear gray eyes in a very red face, who did
not even take the trouble to examine me. He begun at once to talk, and
he talked all the time, intermingling the details of his health--he
was one of the imaginary invalids--with the most lively criticisms
on modern education. I can hear him now using pellmell phrases which
revealed in a way the different phases of his character.

“Well, my poor Limasset, when are you coming down to see us? The air
is excellent down there. That is what I need. I cannot breathe in
Paris. We never breathe enough. I hope, monsieur,” and he turned to
me, “that you are not an advocate of these new methods of teaching.
Science, nothing but science; and my God, gentlemen scholars, what do
you make of it?” Then returning to M. Limasset: “In my day, in our
day, I may say, everybody had a respect for authority and for duty.
Education was not absolutely neglected for instruction. You remember
our chaplain, the Abbé Habert, and how he could talk? What health he
had! How he could walk in all sorts of weather without an overcoat! But
you, Limasset, how old are you? Sixty-five, hey? Sixty-five, and not an
ache! not one? Do you not think I am better since I have lived among
the mountains? I am never very ill, but there is always some little
thing the matter with me. Indeed, I would rather be really ill. At
least I should get well then.”

If I repeat these incoherent words, as they come back to my memory, my
dear master, it is first, that you may know the value of the intellect
of this man who, as my mother has told me, has brought your venerated
name into my case; it is also that you understand with what feelings I
arrived, four days after, at the château when I ran into so terrible
dangers.

The marquis had accepted me at the first visit, and insisted upon
taking me with him in his landau. During the journey from Clermont to
Aydat, he had leisure to tell me about his family. He explained with
his invincible garrulity, constantly interrupted by some remarks about
his person, that his wife and daughter did not care much for society,
and that they were excellent housekeepers; that his oldest son Count
André, was home for a fortnight and that I must not be annoyed at his
brusqueness, for it covered the best of hearts, that his other son,
Lucien, had been ailing and that his restoration to health was the most
important thing of all. Then at the word health he started, and, after
an hour of confidences regarding his headaches, his digestion, his
sleep, his ailments past, present, and future, being fatigued no doubt
by the keen air and the flux of words, he fell asleep in a corner of
the carriage.

I recall the plans which I formed when, freed from this tormentor,
who was already the object of my contempt, I looked at the beautiful
country through which we were passing between mountain ravines and
woods, now turning yellow in the autumn, with the Puy de la Vache at
the horizon, with the hollow of its crater all plowed up, and quite red
with volcanic dust.

What I had already seen of the marquis, and what he had told me of his
family, had convinced me that I was about to be exiled among people
whom I called barbarians. I had given this name to those persons whom I
judge to be irreparable strangers to the intellectual life.

The prospect of this exile did not alarm me. The doctrine by which I
should regulate my existence was so clear to my mind! I was so resolved
to live only in myself, to defend myself against all intrusion from
without. The château to which I was going, and the people who inhabited
it would be only subjects for the most profitable study.

My programme was made out: during the twelve or fourteen months that
I should live there I would employ my leisure in studying German, and
in mastering the contents of “Beaunais’ Physiology,” which was in my
small trunk, bound behind the carriage, together with your works, my
dear master, my “Ethics,” several volumes of M. Ribot, of M. Taine, of
Herbert Spencer, some analytical romances and the books necessary to
the preparation for my licentiate. I intended to pass this examination
in July.

A new notebook awaited the notes which I proposed to make upon the
character of my hosts. I had promised myself to take them to pieces,
wheel by wheel, and I had bought for this purpose a book, closed by a
lock and key, upon the fly-leaf of which I had written this sentence
from the “Anatomy of the Will.”

“Spinoza boasts of having studied human sentiments as the mathematician
studies his geometric figures; modern psychology must study them as
chemical combinations elaborated in a retort, while regretting that
this retort may not be as transparent and as manageable as those of the
laboratory.”

I tell you this childishness to prove the degree of my sincerity, and
to show how little I resemble the poor and ambitious young man that so
many romances have described.

With my taste for duplication, I remember to have remarked this
difference with pleasure. I recalled Julien Sorel of “Rouge et Noir,”
arriving at the house of M. de Rênal, the temptations of Rubempré, in
Balzac, in front of the house of the Bargetons, some pages also of the
“Vingtras de Vallés.” I analyzed the sensations which were concealed
behind the lusts and the revolts of these different heroes.

There is always a surprise in passing from one society to another, but
there was not a trace of envy or maliciousness in me. I looked at the
marquis as he slept, wrapped, on this cool November afternoon, in a
furred coat whose turned-up collar half-concealed his face. A robe of
dark soft wool covered his legs. Dark embroidered skin gloves protected
his hands. His hat of felt as fine as silk was pulled down over his
eyes. I only felt that these details represented a kind of existence
very different from ours with the poor and petty economy of our home
which only my mother’s scrupulous neatness saved from meanness.

I rejoiced that I did not feel any envy, not the least atom, at
the sight of these signs of prosperous fortune, neither envy nor
embarrassment. I had myself completely under control, and was steeled
against all vulgar prejudice by my doctrine, your doctrine, and by
the sovereign superiority of my ideas. I will have traced a perfect
portrait of my mind at this time if I add that I had resolved to erase
love from the programme of my life. I had had, since my adventure with
Marianne, another little experience, with the wife of a professor at
the Lyceum, so absolutely silly and withal so ridiculously pretentious
that I came out of it strengthened in my contempt for the “Dame,”
speaking after Schopenhauer, and also in my disgust for sensuality.

I attribute to the profound influences of Catholic discipline this
repulsion from the flesh which has survived the dogmas of spirituality.
I know very well, from an experience too often repeated, that this
repulsion was insufficient to hinder profound relapses, but I depended
upon the silence of the château to free me from all temptation and to
practice in its full rigor the great maxim of the ancient sage: “Force
all your sex to mount to the brain.” Ah! this idolatry of the brain,
of my thinking Self, it has been so strong in me that I have thought
seriously of studying the monastic rules that I might apply them to
the culture of my mind. Yes, I have contemplated making my meditations
every day, like the monks, upon the articles of my philosophic
_credo_, of celebrating every day, like the monks, the _fête_
of one of my saints, of Spinoza, of Hobbes, of Stendhal, of Stuart
Mill, of you, my dear master, in evoking the image and the doctrines of
the initiative thus chosen, and impregnating myself with his example.

I know that all this was very youthful and very naïve, but, you see, I
was not such a man as this family stigmatizes to-day, the intriguing
plebeian who was dreaming of a fine marriage, and the idea connecting
my life with that of Mlle, de Jussat was implanted, inspired, so to
speak, by circumstances.

I do not write to you to paint myself in a romantic light, and I do
not know why I should conceal from you that, among the circumstances
which urged me toward this enterprise so far from my thought on my
arrival, the first was the impression produced on me by Count André
the brother of the poor dead girl, whose remembrance, now that I am
approaching the drama, becomes almost a torture; but let us go back to
this arrival.

It is almost five o’clock. The landau moves rapidly along. The marquis
is awake. He points out the frozen bosom of the little lake, all
rosy under a setting sun, which empurples the dried foliage of the
beeches and oaks; and, beyond the château, a large building of modern
construction, white, with its slender towers and its pepper-box roof,
grows nearer at every turn of the gray road.

The steeple of a village, rather of a hamlet, raises its slates above
some houses with thatched roofs. It is passed. We are now in the avenue
of trees which leads to the château, then before the _perron_ and
immediately in the vestibule.

We entered the salon. How peaceful it was, lighted by lamps with large
shades, with the fire burning gayly in the chimney. The Marquise de
Jussat with her daughter, was working at some knitting for the poor; my
future pupil was looking over a book of engravings, as he stood against
the open piano; Mlle. Charlotte’s governess and a _religieuse_
were seated, farther off, sewing. Count André was reading a paper,
which he put down at the moment of our arrival.

Yes, this was a peaceful place, and who could have told that my
entrance would be the end of all peace for these persons who in an
instant were impressed on my memory with the distinctness of portraits?

I noticed first the face of the marquise, a tall and strong woman with
features slightly gross, so different from what my imagination had
conceived of a great lady. She was truly the model housekeeper whom the
marquis had described, but a housekeeper with a finished education, and
who put me at once at my ease simply by speaking of the beautiful day
that we had had for our journey.

I perceived the inexpressive face of Mlle. Eliza Largeyx, the
governess, with its ever-approving smile; she was the innocent type of
happy servility, of a life all complaisance and of material happiness.

There was sister Anaclet with her peasant’s eyes and her thin mouth.
She lived permanently at the château that she might serve as nurse for
the marquis who was always apprehensive of a possible attack.

There was little Lucien with the fat cheeks of the idle child. There,
too, was the young girl, who is no more, with her beautiful form in
its light dress, her gentle gray eyes, her chestnut hair, and the
delicate outline of her oval face. I can still see the gesture with
which she offered her hand to her father and a cup of tea to me. I hear
her voice saying to the marquis:

“Father, did you see how rosy the little lake was this evening?”

And the voice of M. de Jussat responding between two swallows of his
grog:

“I saw that there was some fog in the meadows and some rheumatism in
the air.”

And the voice of Count André:

“Yes, but what fine shooting to-morrow!” then turning to me: “Do you
shoot, Monsieur Greslon?”

“No, monsieur,” I answered.

“Do you ride?” he asked again.

“I do not.”

“I pity you,” said he, laughing; “after war, these are the two greatest
pleasures that I know of.”

This is nothing, this bit of dialogue, and, thus transcribed, it will
not explain why these simple phrases were the cause of my regarding
André de Jussat as a being apart from any I had known until then; why,
when I had gone to my room, where a servant commenced to unpack my
trunk, I thought more of him than of his fragile and graceful sister:
nor why, at dinner and all the evening, I had eyes only for him.

My naïve astonishment in the presence of this proud and manly fellow
was derived, however, from a very simple fact; I had grown up in a
purely intellectual medium in which the only estimable forms of life
were the intellectual. I had had for comrades the first of my class,
all as delicate and frail as I was myself, without condescending ever
to notice those who excelled in the exercises of the body, and who
beside only found in these exercises an excuse for brutality.

All my masters whom I liked best, and the few old friends of my father,
were also able men. When I had pictured the heroes of romance, they
were always mental machines more or less complicated; but I had never
imagined their physical condition.

If I had ever thought of the superiority which the beautiful and
firm animal energy of man represents, it was in an abstract manner,
but I had never felt it. Count André, who was thirty years old,
presented an admirable example of this superiority. Figure to
yourself a man of medium size, but lusty as an athlete, with broad
shoulders and a slender waist, gestures which betrayed strength
and suppleness--gestures in which one felt that the movement was
distributed with that perfection which gives adroit and precise
agility--hands and feet nervous, showing race, with a martial
countenance, one of those _bistre_ complexions behind which the
blood flows, rich in iron and in globules; a square forehead under
bushy black hair, a mustache of the same color over a firm and tightly
closed mouth, brown eyes, very near to a nose which was slightly
arched, which gives to the profile a vague suggestion of a bird of
prey. Last a bold chin, squarely cut, completed the physiognomy of a
character of invincible will. And the will is the whole person; action
made man.

It seemed as if there were in this officer, broken to all bodily
exercises, ready for all exploits, no rupture of equilibrium between
thought and action, and that his whole being passed entire into his
smallest gestures.

I have seen him mount a horse so as to realize the ancient fable of the
Centaur, put ten balls in succession at thirty paces into a playing
card, leap ditches with the lightness of a professional gymnast, and
sometimes, to amuse his young brother, leap over a table, only touching
it with his hands.

I knew that, during the war and though only sixteen years old, he had
enlisted and made the campaign of the Loire, bearing all fatigues and
inspiring even the veterans with courage. As I saw him at dinner this
first evening, eating steadily, with that fine humor of appetite which
reveals the fall life; speaking little, but with a commanding voice, I
felt in a surprising degree the impression that I was in the presence
of a creature different from myself, but finished and complete of his
kind.

It seems to me as though this scene dates from yesterday, and that I am
there, while the marquis plays bezique with his daughter, talking with
the marquise, and stealthily watching Count André play at billiards
alone. I saw him through the open door, supple and robust in his
evening dress of some light material, a cigar in the corner of his
mouth, pushing the balls about with a precision so perfect that it was
beautiful; and I, your pupil, I, so proud of the amplitude of my mind,
followed with open mouth the slightest gestures of this young man who
was absorbed in a sport so vulgar, with the kind of envious admiration
which a learned monk of the middle ages, unskillful in all muscular
games, must have felt in presence of a knight in armor.

When I use the word envy I beg you to understand me, and not to
attribute to me a baseness which was never mine. Neither this evening
nor during the days which followed was I ever jealous of the name of
Count André, nor of his fortune, nor of any of the social advantages
which he possessed, and of which I was so deprived. Neither have I felt
that strange hate of the male for the male, very finely noted by you
in your pages on love.

My mother had had the weakness to tell me often in my childhood that
I was a pretty boy. Without being a coxcomb, I may say that there was
nothing displeasing in me, neither in my face nor in my figure. I say
this to you, not from vanity, but to prove that there was not an atom
of vanity in the sort of sudden rivalry which made me an adversary,
almost an enemy, of Count André from this first evening. There was as
much admiration as envy in this antipathy. Upon reflection, I find in
the sentiment which I have tried to define the probable trace of an
unconscious atavism.

I questioned the marquis later, whose aristocratic pride I thus
flattered, upon the genealogy of the Jussat-Randons, and I believe
that they are of a pure and conquering race, while in the veins of the
descendant of the Lorraine farmers who writes these lines to you flows
the blood of ancestors who had been slaves of the soil for centuries.
Certainly, between my brain and that of Count André there is the same
difference as there is between mine and yours, greater, since I can
comprehend you and I defy him to follow my reasonings, even that which
I am pursuing now, upon our relations.

To speak frankly, I am a civilized being, he is only a barbarian.
But I felt immediately the sensation that my refinement was less
aristocratic than his barbarism. I felt there, at once, and in the
depths of this instinct of life, into which the mind descends with much
difficulty, the revelation of this precedence of race which modern
science affirms of all nature and which, by consequence, must be true
also of man.

Why even use this word envy, which serves as the label of irrational
hostilities like those with which the count immediately inspired
me? Why should not this hostility be inherited like the rest? Any
human acquisition whatever, that for example of character and of
active energy, implies that, during centuries and centuries, files
of individuals of which one is the supreme addition, have acted and
willed. During this long succession of years, an antipathy, sometimes
clear and sometimes obscure, has rendered the individuals of the first
group odious to individuals of the second, and when two representatives
of this sovereign labor of ages, also typical each in his kind as were
the count and myself, meet, why not stand up the one in face of the
other, like two beasts of different species?

The horse that has never been near a lion trembles with fright when
his bed is made of the straw upon which one of these creatures has
slept. Then fear is inherited, and is not fear one form of hate? Why
is not all hate inherited? And in hundreds of cases envy would be, as
it surely was in mine, only the echo of hates formerly felt by those
whose sons we are, and who continue to pursue, through us, the combats
of heart begun centuries ago.

There is a current proverb that antipathies are mutual, and if it
is admitted my hypothesis upon the secular origin of antipathies
becomes very simple. It happens, however, that this antipathy does not
manifest itself in the two beings at once. This is the case when one
of the two does not deign to notice the other, and also when the other
dissimulates.

I do not believe that Count André experienced at first the aversion
that he would have felt if he had read to the bottom of my soul. In the
beginning he paid very little attention to a young man of Clermont who
had come to the château to be tutor; then I had decided on a constant
dissimulation of my real Self, imprisoned among strangers. I felt no
more repugnance for this defensive hypocrisy than the gardener would
have had in putting straw around the currant bushes to preserve their
fruit against snows and frosts. The falseness of attitude corresponded
too well with my intellectual pride to prevent me from giving myself up
to it with delight.

On the other hand Count André had no motive for concealing his
character from me, and on this same evening, at the hour of retiring,
he asked me to come into his study to talk a little. He had hardly
looked at me, and I understood plainly that his intention was not to
put any more familiarity between us, but to give me his opinions on my
rôle as preceptor.

He occupied a suite of three rooms in a wing of the château, a bedroom,
a dressing-room and the smoking-room in which we now found ourselves.
A large upholstered divan, several armchairs and a massive desk,
constituted the furniture of this room.

On the walls glittered arms of all kinds, guns of Tangiers, sabres and
muskets of the first empire, and a Prussian helmet, which the count
pointed out to me almost as soon as we had entered. He had lighted a
short brierwood pipe, prepared two glasses of brandy mixed with seltzer
water, and lamp in hand, he showed me the helmet saying:

“I am very sure that I knocked that fellow over. You do not know
anything about the sensation of holding an enemy at the point of your
gun, of taking aim, of seeing him fall, and thinking: Another one
gone? It happened in a village not far from Orléans. I was on guard at
daybreak, in a corner of the cemetery. I saw a head above the wall,
it looked over, then the shoulders followed. It was this inquisitive
fellow who wanted to see what we were doing. He did not go back to
tell.”

He put down the lamp, and, after laughing a little at this remembrance,
he became serious. I had felt obliged, for the sake of politeness, to
moisten my lips in the mixture of gaseous water and alcohol, and the
count continued:

“I wished to talk with you about Lucien, monsieur, to explain his
character and in what way he is to be directed. His old tutor was an
excellent man, but very weak, very indolent. I have encouraged your
coming because you are a young man, and a young man is more suitable
for Lucien. Teaching, monsieur, is worse than nothing, sometimes, when
it falsifies ideas. The great thing in this life, I ought almost say
the only thing, is character.”

He made a pause as if to ask my opinion, I answered with some
_banal_ phrase which supported his view.

“Very well,” he continued, “we understand one another. At present, for
a man of our name, there is in France only one profession, that of a
soldier. So long as our country is in the hands of the _canaille_
and so long as we have the Germans to fight, our duty is in the only
place that remains to us--the army. Thank God my father and my mother
share these opinions. Lucien will be a soldier, and a soldier has no
need of knowing all that the people prate about to-day. Having honor,
sangfroid, muscles and loving France, everything is right. I had
all the trouble in the world to take my degree. This year must be
for Lucien, above everything else, a year of outdoor life; and, for
studies, these must be conversations only. It is to your talks with him
that I wish to call your attention. You must insist on the practical,
on the positive, and on principles. He has some faults which must be
corrected. You will find him very good, but very soft; he must learn to
endure.”

“Insist, for example, upon his going out in all sorts of weather,
that he walk two or three hours every day. He is very inexact, and
I insist that he shall become as punctual as a chronometer. He also
is untruthful. I think this the most horrible of vices. I can pardon
everything, yes, many, many follies. I never forgive a falsehood. We
have had, from my father’s old master, such good recommendation of you,
of your life with your mother, of your dignity, of your strictness,
that we depend very much on your influence. Your age permits you to
be as much a companion as a preceptor for Lucien. Example, you see,
is the best kind of teaching. Tell a conscript that it is a noble and
fine thing to march up to the fire, and he will listen to you without
understanding you. March in front of him, swaggering, and he becomes
more of a blusterer than you are.

“As for me, I rejoin my regiment in a few days, but absent or present,
you can depend on my support; if it should ever be a question what to
do, that this child become what he ought to become, a man who can serve
his country bravely, and, if God permit, his king.”

This discourse, which I believe I have faithfully reproduced, did not
at all astonish me. It was quite natural in a house in which the father
was an old monomaniac, the mother a simple housekeeper, the sister
young and timid, that the oldest brother should hold a directing place,
and talk with the new preceptor. It was also quite natural that a
soldier and a gentleman educated in the ideas of his class and of his
profession should speak as a soldier and a gentleman.

You, my dear master, with your universal comprehension of natures, with
your facility in disentangling the line which unites the temperament
and the medium of ideas, you would have seen in Count André a very
definite and significant case. And for what had I prepared my locked
notebook if not to collect documents of this kind upon human nature?
And was there not here everything new in the person of this officer,
so single and so simple, who manifested a mode of thought evidently
identical with his mode of being, breathing, moving, smoking and eating?

Ah! I see too well that my philosophy was not as blood in my veins,
as marrow in my bones, for this discourse and the convictions it
expressed, instead of pleasing me by this rare encounter of logic, only
enlarged the wound of antipathy which had been already opened, I knew
not where, in my self-love perhaps, for I was weak and frail in the
presence of the strong--surely in my inmost sensibility.

None of the count’s ideas had the least value in my eyes. They were for
me pure foolishness, and instead of despising this foolishness, as I
should have despised it in any other case, I began to hate it in his
mouth.

A soldier’s profession? I considered it so wretched, because of its
brutal associations and the time lost, that I was glad that I was the
son of a widow that I might escape the barbarity of the barracks and
the miseries of its discipline.

The hatred of Germany? I had tried to destroy it in myself, as the
worst of prejudices, from disgust of the imbecile comrades whom I saw
exalt it into an ignorant patriotism, and also from admiration for
the people to whom psychology owes Kant and Schopenhauer, Lotze and
Fechner, Helmholz and Wundt.

Political faith? I professed an equal disdain for the gross hypotheses
which, under the name of legitism, republicanism, Cæsarism, pretended
to govern a country _a priori_. I dreamed with the author of the
“Dialogues Philosophiques,” of an oligarchy of savants, a despotism of
psychologists and economists, of physiologists and historians.

Practical life? This was a diminished life for me, who saw in the
external world only a field of experiences in which an enfranchised
soul ventures with prudence, just far enough to collect emotions.
Finally this contempt for falsehood which the count professed struck
me as an affront, at the same time that his absolute confidence in my
morality, based upon a false impression of me, embarrassed me, chilled
me, hurt me.

Certainly the contradiction was piquant; I considered the portrait
which my father’s old friend had drawn; it pleased me in a certain way
that they should believe it like me, and I felt irritated that he,
Count André, did not distrust me. But what does that prove, if not
that we never thoroughly know ourselves? You have magnificently said,
my dear master: “Our states of consciousness are like islands upon an
ocean of darkness whose foundations are forever being removed. It is
the work of the psychologist to divine by soundings the ground which
makes of these isles the visible summits of a mountain chain, invisible
and immovable under the moving mass of waters.”

I have not described this first evening at the château because it had
any immediate consequences, for I retired after assuring Count André
that I was entirely of his opinion in regard to his young brother, and,
having reached my room, I confined myself to consigning these words to
my notebook, with comments more or less disdainful; but these first
impressions will help you to understand some analogous impressions
which followed, and the unexpected crisis which resulted from them.

It is one of those submarine chains of which you speak, and which I
find to-day when I throw the sound to the very bottom of my heart.
Under the influence of your books, and of your example, I became
more and more intellectualized, and I believed that I had definitely
renounced the morbid curiosity of the passions which had made me find
exquisite pleasure in my guilty readings. Thus we retain portions of
the soul which were very much alive, and which we believe to be dead,
but which are only drowsing.

And so little by little, after an acquaintance of only fifteen days
with this man, my elder by nine or ten years, and who was, all reality,
all energy, this purely speculative existence of which I had so
sincerely dreamed, began to seem--how shall I express it? Inferior?
Oh, no, for I would not have consented, at the price of an empire,
to become Count André, even with his name, his fortune, his physical
superiority, and his ideas. Discolored? Not even that. The word
incomplete appears to me the only one which expresses the singular
disfavor which the sudden comparison between the count and myself
diffused over my own convictions.

It is in this feeling of incompleteness that the principal temptation
of which I was the victim resides. There is nothing very original, I
believe, in the state of mind of a man who, having cultivated to excess
the faculty of thought, meets another man having cultivated to the
same degree the faculty of action and who feels himself tormented with
nostalgia in presence of this action, however despised.

Goethe has drawn the whole of his Faust from this nostalgia. I was not
a Faust. I had not, like the old doctor, drained the cup of Science;
and yet, I must believe that my studies of these last years, by
overexciting me in one direction, had left in me unemployed powers,
which trembled with emulation at the approach of this representative of
another race of men.

While admiring him, envying and despising him at the same time, during
the days which followed, I could not prevent my mind from thinking.
And I thought: “That man who would value him for his activity and me
for my thought, would truly be the superior man that I have desired to
become.”

But do not action and thought exclude one another? They were not
incompatible at the Renaissance and later, Goethe has incarnated in
himself the double destiny of Faust, by turns philosopher and courtier,
poet and minister; Stendhal was romancer and lieutenant of dragoons;
Constant was the author of “Adolphe” and a fiery orator, as well as
duelist, actor and libertine.

This finished culture of the “I,” which I had made the final result,
the supreme end of my doctrines, was it without this double play of the
faculties, this parallelism of the life lived and the life thought?

Probably my first regret at feeling myself thus dispossessed of a
whole world, that of fact, was only pride. But with me, and by the
essentially philosophic nature of my being, sensations are immediately
transformed into ideas.

The smallest accidents appear in my mind to state general problems.
Every event of my destiny leads me to some theory on the destiny of
all. Here, where another man would have said: “It is a pity that fate
should have permitted a single kind of development,” I took it on
myself to ask if I were not deceived in the law of all development.

Since I had, thanks to your admirable books, freed my soul and cast
to earth my vain religious terrors, I had retained only one of my old,
pious practices, the habit of daily examining my conscience, under
the form of a journal, and from time to time I made what I called an
orison. I transported, with a singular enjoyment, the terms of religion
into the realm of my personal sensibility. I called that again the
liturgy of the “I.”

One evening of the second week of my stay at the château, I employed
several hours in writing out a general confession, that is to say, in
drawing a picture of my diverse instincts since the first awakening
of my consciousness. I arrived at this conclusion, that the essential
trait of my nature, the characteristic of my inmost being, had always
been the faculty of duplication. That means that I had always felt
a tendency to be at once passionate and reflective, to live and to
see myself live. But by imprisoning myself, as I wished, in pure
reflection, by neglecting to live and to have only one eye open upon
life, did I not risk resembling that Amiel whose dolorous journal
appeared at that time, and sterilizing myself by the abuse of analysis
to emptiness?

In vain did your image return to me to reinforce me in my resolution to
live an abstract existence. I recall the phrases on love in the “Theory
of the Passion,” and I saw you, at my age, abandoning yourself to the
culpable experiences which already obscurely tempted me. I do not know
if this chemistry of soul, so very complex and very sincere, will seem
sufficiently lucid. The work by which an emotion is elaborated in us,
and ends by resolving itself into an idea, remains so obscure that the
idea is, sometimes, exactly contrary to that which simple reason could
have foreseen!

Would it not have been natural, for example, that the kind of admiring
antipathy roused in me by my encounter with Count André should have
ended either in a declared repulsion, or in a definite admiration? In
the first case, I should have thrown myself more into science, and
in the other, have desired a more active morality, a more practical
virility in my actions. But the natural for each one, is his own
nature. Mine willed that the admiring antipathy for the count should
become a principle of criticism, in regard to myself, that this
criticism should produce a new theory of life, that this theory should
reveal my native disposition for passional curiosity, that the whole
should dissolve itself into a nostalgia of sentimental experiences and
that, just at this moment, a young girl should enter into my life whose
presence alone would have sufficed to provoke the desire to please in
any young man of my age.

But I was too intellectual for this desire to be born in my heart
without passing through my head. At least, if I felt the charm of grace
and delicacy which emanated from this child of twenty years, I felt it
while believing that I reasoned about it. There are times when I ask
myself if it was so, times when all my history appears more simple, and
I say:

“I was honestly in love with Charlotte, because she was pretty, refined
and tender, and I was young; then I gave some pretexts of the brain
because I was a man proud of ideas and did not wish to love like other
men.”

Ah! what a comfort when I persuade myself to speak in this way! I can
pity myself instead of being a horror to myself, as happens when I
recall the cold resolution, which I cherished in my mind, consigned to
my notebook, and verified alas! by the event, the resolution, to injure
this girl without loving her, from motives of purely psychological
curiosity, from the pleasure of acting, of governing a living soul, of
contemplating at will and directly this mechanism of passion which I
had until then only studied in books, from the vanity of enriching my
mind by a new experience.

But it is well, I could not have wished otherwise, impelled as I was
by my heredities and my education, removed into the new medium where I
was thrown by chance, and bitten, as I was by this ferocious spirit of
rivalry against the insolent young man who was my opposite?

But this pure and tender girl was worthy of meeting a man who was not a
cold and murderous calculating machine. Only to think of her melts and
rends my heart.

I did not notice at first sight that perfection of the lines of the
face, that brilliance of complexion, that royalty of bearing which
distinguishes the very beautiful woman. Everything in her physiognomy
was a delicate demi-tint, from the shade of her chestnut hair to the
misty gray of her eyes and to her complexion which was neither pale
nor rosy. One thought of modesty when studying her expression, and of
fragility when remarking her feet, and hands, and the almost too minute
grace of her movements.

Although she was rather short, she appeared tall because of the noble
way in which her head was set on her slender neck. If Count André
reproduced one of their common ancestors by an evident atavism, she
resembled her father, but with so charming an ideality of lines that
one could not admit the resemblance unless they were side by side. It
was easy, however, to recognize in her the nervous disposition which
produced hypochondria in her father.

Charlotte had a sensibility which was almost morbid, which was revealed
at times by a slight tremulousness of hands and lips, those beautiful
sinuous lips where dwelt a goodness almost divine. Her firm chin showed
a rare strength of will in so frail an envelope, and I now understand
that the depth of her eyes, sometimes motionless as if fixed on some
object visible to herself alone, betrayed a fatal tendency to a fixed
idea.

The first trait that I specially observed was her extreme kindness, and
this was brought to my notice by little Lucien. The child told me that
his sister had several times wished him to ask me if there was anything
lacking in my room.

This is a very puerile detail, but it touched me because I felt very
lonely in this great house where no person, since my arrival, had
seemed to pay the least attention to me. The marquis appeared only
at dinner, wrapped in a _robe-de-chambre_ and groaning over his
health or politics. The marquise was occupied in making the château
comfortable, and held long conferences with an upholsterer from
Clermont. Count André rode in the morning, hunted in the afternoon,
and, in the evening, smoked his cigars without ever addressing a word
to me. The governess and the _religieuse_ looked at one another
and looked at me with a discretion which froze me.

My pupil was an idle and dull boy, who had the redeeming quality of
being very simple, very confiding, and of telling me all that I wished
to know of himself and the rest of his family. I learned in this way
that their stay in the country this year was the work of Count André,
which did not astonish me in the least, for I felt more and more that
he was the real head of the family; I learned that the year preceding
he had wished to marry his sister to one of his comrades, a M. de
Plane, whom Charlotte had refused, and who had gone to Tonquin.

In our two daily classes, one in the morning from eight o’clock to
half-past nine, the other in the afternoon from three o’clock until
half-past four, I had a great deal of trouble to fix the attention of
the little idler. Seated on his chair, opposite me on the other side of
the table, and rolling his tongue against his cheek, while he covered
the paper with his big awkward writing, he would now and then glance up
at me.

He noticed on my face the least sign of abstraction. With the animal
and sure instinct of children, he soon saw that I would make him go on
with his lessons less quickly when he talked to me of his brother or
sister, and so this innocent mouth revealed to me that there was, in
this cold, strange house, some one who thought of me and of my comfort.

My mother had failed so much in this regard, although I might not wish
to confess it! And it was this act of simple politeness which made me
regard Mlle. de Jussat with more attention.

The second trait that I discovered in her was a taste for the romantic,
not that she had read many romances, but as I have already told you,
her sensibility was extreme, and this had given her an apprehension of
the real.

Without herself suspecting it she was very different from her father,
her mother and her brothers; and she could neither show herself to them
in the truth of her nature, nor see them in the truth of theirs without
suffering. So she did show herself, and she forced herself not to see
them. She formed, spontaneously and ingenuously, opinions of those she
loved which were in harmony with her own heart and so directly contrary
to the evidence that they would have seemed false or flattering in
the eyes of a malevolent observer. She would say to her mother, who
was so ordinary and material: “Mamma, you are so quick to see;” to
her father so cruelly egotistical: “You are so kind, papa,” and to
her brother who was so positive, so self-sufficient: “You understand
everything,” and she believed it. But the delusion in which this gentle
creature imprisoned herself, left her a prey to the most complete moral
solitude, and deprived her, to a very dangerous degree, of all judgment
of character.

She was as ignorant of herself as of others. She languished, unknown
to herself, for the society of some one who should have sentiments in
harmony with her own. For example, I observed in the first walks that
we took together, that she was the only one who could really feel the
beauty of the landscape formed by the lake, the woods that surround
it, the distant volcanoes and the autumn sky, often more blue than the
sky of summer because of the contrast of its azure with the gold of
the leaves, and which was sometimes so veiled, so sadly vaporous and
distant.

She would fall into silence without any apparent reason, but really
because her whole being became dissolved into the charm of things
about her. She possessed in the state of pure instinct and unconscious
sensation the faculty which makes the great poets and the great lovers,
namely, the faculty of forgetting oneself, of dispelling oneself, of
losing oneself entirely in whatever touches the heart, whether it be a
veiled horizon, a silent and yellow-tinted forest, a piece of music or
a touching story.

I did not, at the beginning of our acquaintance, formulate the contrast
between that combative animal her brother and this creature of
sweetness and grace who ran up the stone staircases of the château with
a step so light that it seemed scarcely poised, and whose smile was so
welcoming and yet so timid.

I will dare to tell all, since I repeat it, I am not writing in order
to paint myself in beautiful colors, but to show myself as I am. I will
not say that the desire to make myself beloved by this adorable child,
in whose atmosphere I began to feel so much pleasure, was not caused by
this contrast between her and her brother.

Perhaps the soul of this young girl became as a field of battle for
the secret, the obscure antipathy which two weeks had transformed into
hate? Perhaps there was concealed the cruel pleasure of humiliating
the soldier, the gentleman, by outraging him in what he held most
precious? I know that this is horrible, but I should not be worthy of
being your pupil if I did not disclose the lowest depth of my heart.
And, after all, this odious cloud of sensations may be only a necessary
phenomenon, like the others, like the romantic grace of Charlotte, like
the simple energy of her brother, and like my own complexities--so
obscure even to myself.

§ IV. THE FIRST CRISIS.

I remember very distinctly the day on which the project of winning the
love of the sister of Count André presented itself to me, no longer
as a romantically visionary idea, but as a precise possibility, near,
almost immediate.

After I had been at the château two months I went to Clermont to pass
the New-Year holidays with my mother, and I had been back a week.
The snow had been falling for forty-eight hours. The winters in our
mountains are so severe that nothing but the marquis’ monomania can
explain his obstinacy in remaining in this savage lone waste, which is
indefinitely swept by sudden and violent gusts of wind.

It is proper to state that the marquise watched over the comfort of the
household with a marvelous adjustment of daily resources, and although
Aydat is considered isolated by the inhabitants of Saint-Saturnin and
Saint-Amand-Tallende, the communication with Clermont remains open even
in the worst rigor of the season. Then the season offers sudden and
radiant changes, mornings of storm are suddenly succeeded by evenings
of incomparable azure in which the country beams as if transformed by
the enchantment of light.

This was the case on the day my fatal resolution became fixed and took
form. I can see the lake now, covered with a thin sheet of ice, under
which the supple shivering of the water could be discerned. I see the
vast slope of the Cheyre, white with snow, its whiteness broken by dark
spots of lava; and perfectly white, without a spot, rises the circle
of mountains, the Puy de Dôme, the Puy de la Vache, that of Vichatel,
that of De la Rodde, that of Mont Redon, while the forest of Rouillet
stands out against the background of snow and azure.

Some minute details rise again before my eyes which were then scarcely
noticed and have remained concealed, one knows not in what hiding-place
of the memory. I see a cluster of birches whose despoiled branches are
tinted with rose. I see the crystals which sparkle at the end of a
tuft of broom which, thin and still green, marks the tracks of a fox
on the immaculate carpet, and the flight of a magpie which cries out
in the middle of the road, and this sharp cry renders the silence of
this immense horizon almost perceptible. I see some yellow and brown
sheep which are driven by a shepherd clothed in a blue blouse, wearing
a large, low, round hat, and accompanied by a red and shaggy dog with
shining yellow eyes, very near together.

Yes, I can see all this landscape, and the four persons who are
walking on the road which leads toward Fontfrède: Mlle. Largeyx, Mlle.
de Jussat, my pupil and myself. Charlotte wore an Astrakhan jacket;
a fur boa was wrapped around her neck making her head appear still
more petite and graceful under its Astrakhan toque. After the long
imprisonment in the château the keen air seemed to intoxicate her. Her
cheeks were red, her small feet plunged radiantly into the snow, where
they left their slight trace, and her eyes sparkled with delight at
the beauty of nature--a privilege of simple hearts which is never felt
when the soul has become desiccated by force of reasoning, abstract
theories and certain kinds of reading.

I walked beside her and so rapidly that we were soon far ahead of
Mlle. Largeyx, whose clogs slipped on the road. The child, sometimes
in front, sometimes behind, stopped or ran on with the vivacity of a
young animal. In the company of these two gay creatures I grew gloomy
and taciturn. Was this the nervous irritation which makes us at certain
times antipathetic to the joy which we see around us without sharing
it? Was it the half-unconscious outline of my future plan, and did
I wish to force the young girl to notice me by a kind of hostility
against her pleasure?

During the whole of this walk, I, who had formed the habit of talking
a great deal with her, scarcely responded by monosyllables to the
admiring remarks which she addressed to me, as if she wished me to
share in the pleasure of her emotions.

By brusque replies, and by silence, my bad humor became so evident that
Mlle. de Jussat, in spite of her enthusiasm, could not fail to notice
it. She glanced at me two or three times, with a question on her lips
which she did not dare to formulate, then her face became sad. Her
gayety fell little by little at contact with my sulkiness, and I could
trace upon her transparent face the passage, by which she ceased to be
sensible to the beauty of things and was conscious only of my sadness.

The moment came when she could no longer control the impression which
this sadness made upon her, and, in a voice which timidity rendered a
little stifled, she asked:

“Are you suffering. Monsieur Greslon?”

“No, mademoiselle,” I replied with a _brusquerie_ which must have
wounded her, for her voice trembled as she said:

“Then some one has done something to you? You are not as you usually
are.”

“No one has done anything to me,” I answered, shaking my head; “but
it is true,” I added, “that I have reasons for being sad, very sad,
to-day. It is the anniversary of a great grief, which I cannot tell
you.”

She looked at me again, and I could follow in her eyes the movements
which agitated her, as one follows the movements of a watch through a
glass case. I had seen her so uneasy at my attitude that she lost her
feeling for the divine landscape. I saw her now, comforted that I had
no cause for grief against her, but touched by my melancholy, curious
to know the cause, and not daring to ask me. She only said:

“Pardon me for questioning you.” Then she was silent.

These few minutes sufficed to show me the place which I already
occupied in her thoughts. Ah! before the proof of this delicate and
noble interest, I should have been ashamed of my falsehood, for so it
was, this _soi-disant_ recollection of a great grief--a gratuitous
and instantaneous falsehood whose sudden invention has often astonished
myself.

Why had I suddenly thought to clothe myself in the poetry of a great
grief, I whose life, since the death of my father, had been so quiet,
so free from any sacrifices? Had I yielded to the innate taste for
duplicating myself always so strong? This romantic affectation, did it
show the hysteria of vanity which urges some children to lie, without
reason and with so much unexpectedness? Did a vague intuition cause me
to see in this play of deception and melancholy the surest means of
interesting the Count’s sister?

I cannot tell the precise motives which governed me at that moment.
Assuredly I did not foresee either the effect of my assumed sadness
or of my falsehood, but I remember that as soon as the effect was
known a resolution was formed in my mind to go on to the end and
see what impression I could produce on the soul of this young girl,
by continuing, with consciousness and calculation, the comedy
half-instinctively begun in this luminous afternoon of January in
presence of a magnificent landscape, which should have served as a
frame for other dreams.

Now that the irreparable is accomplished, and by a retrospective
penetration, horribly painful--for it convicts me of ignorance and of
cruelty--I understand that I had already inspired Charlotte with the
truest and the tenderest feelings. All the diplomatic psychology which
I employed was only the odious and ridiculous work of a scholar in the
science of the heart. I understand that I did not know how to inhale
the flowers which bloomed naturally for me in this soul. I had only to
let myself know and enjoy the emotions which presented themselves, to
live a sentimental life as exalted and extended as that of my intellect.

Instead, I paralyzed my heart by ideas. I wished to conquer a soul
already conquered, to play a game of chess, where I needed only to be
simple, and I have not even the proud consolation of saying to myself
that I have, at least, directed the drama of my destiny as I pleased,
that I have combined the scenes, provoked the episodes, conducted the
intrigue.

It was played entirely in her, and without my comprehending it in the
least, this drama in which Death and Love, the two faithful workers
of implacable nature, acted without my order while mocking at the
complications of my analysis.

Charlotte loved me for reasons quite different from those which my
ingenious psychology had arranged. She died in despair, when by the
light of a tragic explanation she saw me in my true nature. Then I was
so horrible to her that she thus gave me irrefutable proof that my
subtle reflections were nothing to her.

I believed I could solve in this amour a problem of mental mechanism.
Alas! I had simply met, without feeling its charm, a sincere and
profound tenderness. Why did I not then divine what I see to-day with
the clearness of the most cruel evidence?

Misled by the romantic side of her character, it was natural that
this child should be deceived in me. My long studies had given me the
appearance of not being quite well, which always interests a woman who
is truly feminine. Having been brought up by my mother, my manners were
gentle, my voice and gestures refined, and I was scrupulously careful
of my person.

I had been introduced by the old master who recommended me, as a person
of irreproachable nobility of ideas and character. This was enough to
cause a very sensitive young girl to become interested in me in a very
particular manner. Ah, well! I had no sooner recognized this interest
than I thought how to abuse it instead of being touched by it.

Any one who had seen me in my room on the evening which followed
this afternoon, seated at my table and writing, with a big book of
analysis near me, would never have believed that this was a young man
of scarcely twenty-two years, meditating on the sentiments which he
inspired or wished to inspire in a young girl of twenty.

The château was asleep. I could hear only the steps of the footman as
he extinguished the lamps on the staircase and in the corridors. The
wind enveloped the vast building in its groanings, now plaintive, now
soothing. The west wind is terrible on these heights, where, sometimes,
it carries away in a single breath all the slates of a roof.

This lamentation of the wind has always increased in me the feeling
of internal solitude. My fire burned gently, and I scribbled in my
notebook, which I burned before my arrest, the occurrences of the day
and the programme of the experience which I proposed to attempt upon
the mind of Mlle. de Jussat. I had copied the passage on pity which
is found in your “Theory of the Passions;” you remember it, my dear
master, it begins:

“There is in the phenomenon of pity a physical element, and which,
especially in women, is confined to the sexual emotion.”

It was through pity then, that I proposed to act first upon Charlotte.
I would profit by the first falsehood by which I had already moved
her, combining with it a succession of others, and thus make her love
me by making her pity me. There was, in this use of the most respected
of human sentiments for the profit of my curious fancy, something
particularly contrary to the general prejudice, which flattered my
pride most exquisitely.

While I wrote out this plan with philosophical text to support it,
I imagined what Count André would think, if he could, as in the old
legends, from the depths of his garrison town decipher the words which
I had traced with my pen.

At the same time, the idea alone of directing at will the subtle
movements of a woman’s brain, all this sentimental and intellectual
clockwork so complicated and so tenuous, made me compare myself
to Claude Bernard, to Pasteur and to their pupils. These savants
vivisected animals. Was not I going to vivisect at length, a human soul?

In order to draw from this pity which had been surprised rather than
provoked, all the result demanded, it must first be prolonged. To this
end, I resolved to keep up the comedy of sadness by preparing for the
day of an explanatory conversation, more or less distant, a long,
touching romance of false confidences.

I devoted myself, during the week following our walk, to feigning a
melancholy more or less absorbing, and to feigning it, not only in the
presence of Charlotte, but also during the hours in which I was alone
with my pupil, sure that the child would report to his sister the
impressions of our _tête-à-tête_.

You see here, my dear master, the proof of the useless machinery I was
preparing to employ. Was there any need of involving this boy, who had
been confided to me, in this sad intrigue, and why should I join this
ruse with the others, when Mlle. de Jussat did not for a moment doubt
my sincerity?

We had our lessons, Lucien and I, in a large room dignified by the
name of library, because of the shelves which furnished one side of
the wall. There, behind the gratings lined with green linen, were
innumerable volumes bound in sheepskin, notably all the volumes of the
Encyclopedia. This was a legacy from the founder of the château, a
great philosopher, who had built this habitation among the mountains
for the purpose of bringing up his children in the midst of nature and
after the precepts of Emile.

The portrait of this gentleman free-thinker, a mediocre painting in the
taste of the period, with its powder, and a smile both sceptical and
sensible, adorned one side of the door; on the other side was that of
his wife, quite coquettish under a high coiffure and with patches on
her cheeks.

In looking at these two paintings, while Lucien translated a bit from
Ovid or from Titus Livius, I asked myself what my ancestors were doing
for me during the century in which these two persons lived who were
represented in these portraits. I imagined, these rustics from whom I
am descended pushing the plow, pruning the vine, harrowing the ground
in the foggy plains of Lorraine, like the peasants who passed on the
road in front of the château, in all weathers, and who with boots to
their knees, dragged a metal-tipped stick fastened to the wrist by a
strap.

This mental picture gave the charm of a kind of lawful vengeance to the
care I took to compose my physiognomy. It is a singular thing, that
although I might detest in theory the doctrines of the Revolution and
the mediocre spiritualism which they conceal, I became again a plebeian
in my profound joy in thinking that I, the great-grandson of these
farmers, should perhaps by the force of my mind alone bring to disgrace
the great-granddaughter of this great lord and this great lady.

I leaned my chin upon my hand, I forced my brow and my eyes to look
sad, knowing that Lucien was watching the expression of my face, in
the hope of interrupting his task by a talk. When he had several times
observed that he did not see the welcoming smile, nor the indulgent
look, he himself became very anxious. As is natural, the poor boy took
my sadness for severity, my silence for displeasure One morning he
ventured to ask:

“Are you angry with me, monsieur?”

“No, my child,” I replied, patting his fresh cheek with my hand; and I
continued to preserve my troubled look, while contemplating the snow
which beat against the panes. It fell now from morning till evening in
large whirling stars, covering and putting to sleep the whole country,
and in the warm rooms of the château there was the silent charm of
intimacy, a distant death of all the noises of the mountains; while
through the window panes, covered with frost on the outside and a vapor
within, the light sifted languorously.

This gave a background of mystery to the figure of melancholy which
I made, and which I imposed on the observation of Charlotte whenever
we met. When the breakfast bell reunited us in the dining-room, I
surprised in the eyes with which she received me the same timid and
compassionate curiosity which I had noticed during our walk, whence
dated what I called in my journal my entrance into my laboratory.

She regarded me with the same look when we were all again together,
in the salon at tea, under the light of the early lamps, then at the
dinner table and again in the long solitude of the evening, unless,
under pretext of having work to finish, I retired to my room.

The monotony of life and of conversation was so complete that there was
nothing to help her to shake off the impression of mournful mystery
which I had inflicted upon her.

The marquis, a prey to the contrasts of his character, cursed his fatal
resolution to remain in this isolation. He announced for the next clear
day a departure which he knew would be impossible. It would cost too
much now, and beside, where could he go? He calculated the chances of
seeing his Clermont friends who had several times breakfasted with him,
but it was before the four hours between Aydat and the city had been
doubled by the bad weather.

Then he installed himself at the card table, while the marquise,
the governess and the _religieuse_ applied themselves to their
unending work.

It was my duty to look after Lucien who turned the leaves of a book
of engravings or played at patience. I placed myself so that when
she raised her eyes from the cards which she held in her hands while
playing with her father, the young girl was obliged to see me. I had
been interested in hypnotism, and I had in particular studied in all
its details, in your “Anatomy of the Will,” the chapter devoted to the
singular phenomena of certain moral denominations, which you have
entitled: “Some demi-suggestions.” I depended on taking possession
of this unoccupied mind, until the propitious moment in which, to
complete this work of daily intercourse, I should decide to relate to
her my story which, justifying my sadness, should end by engrossing her
imagination.

This story I had manufactured upon two principles which you lay down,
my dear master, in your beautiful chapter on Love. This chapter, the
theories of the Ethics on the passions, and M. Ribot’s book on the
“Maladies of the Will,” had become my breviaries. Permit me to recall
these two principles, at least in their essence.

The first is that the majority of beings have sentiment only by
imitation; abandoned to simple nature, love, for example, would be for
them as for the animals, only a sensual instinct, dissipated as soon as
satiated.

The second is that jealously may exist before love; consequently it
may sometimes create it, and may often survive it. Much struck by the
justness of this double remark, I argued that the romance which I
should relate to Mlle. de Jussat ought to excite her imagination and
irritate her vanity. I had succeeded in touching the cord of pity, I
wished to touch that of sentimental emulation and that of self-love.

I had then, founded my story on this idea, that every woman interested
in a man, is wounded in her vanity if this man shows that he is
thinking of another woman. But twenty pages would be necessary to show
you how I studied over the problem of the invention of this fable.

The occasion to relate it to her was furnished by the victim herself,
fifteen days after I had begun to put at work what I proudly called
my experience. The marquis had been told that one volume of the
Encyclopedia was devoted to cards. He wished to find there how to play
some old games such as Imperiale, Ombre, and Manilla. This brilliant
idea had come to him after breakfast, on seeing in a journal a report
of a new game called Poker, apropos of which the journalist gave a list
of old-fashioned games.

When this maniac had conceived a fancy he could not wait, and his
daughter was obliged to go at once to the library, where I was occupied
in taking notes. I laid aside Helvétius upon the “Mind,” which I had
discovered among some other books of the eighteenth century. I placed
myself at the disposition of Mlle. de Jussat to take down the volume
which she desired, and, when she took it from my hands, she said with
her habitual grace:

“I hope that we shall find here some game in which you can take a hand
with us. We are so afraid that you do not feel at home here, you are
always so sad.”

She said these words as if asking pardon for an indelicacy, which had
impressed me before, and escaping the familiarity of her remark by a
“we” which I too well knew to be untruthful. Her voice was so gentle,
we were so alone that the time seemed to have come to explain my
feigned sadness.

“Ah! mademoiselle,” I answered, “if you only knew my history.”

If Charlotte had not been the credulous creature, the romantic child
that she was, in spite of her two or three seasons in Paris, she would
have seen that I was beginning a tale prepared beforehand, by this
introduction, by the turn of the sentences with which I continued. I
was too clumsy, too awkwardly affected.

I told her then that I had been betrothed at Clermont to a young girl,
but secretly. I thought to make this adventure more poetical in her
eyes by insinuating that this girl was a foreigner, a Russian visiting
one of her relations. I added that this girl had allowed me to tell her
that I loved her, and she had also told me that she loved me. We had
exchanged vows, then she had gone away. A rich marriage offered, and
she had betrayed me for money.

I was careful to insist on my poverty, and let her understand that
my mother lived almost entirely on what I earned. This was a detail
invented on the spot, for hypocrisy doubles itself in expression. In
truth this was a scene of a childish and rascally comedy, which I
played with very little skill. But the reasons which determined me to
lie in this fashion were so special that they exacted an extraordinary
penetration to be comprehended, a total attention of my mind, almost
your genius, my dear master. The visible embarrassment of my position
could so easily be attributed to the trouble inseparable from such
remembrances. As I was perfectly cool while I was telling this fable,
I could observe Charlotte. She listened without any sign of emotion,
her eyes lowered on the big book which supported her hand. She took the
book when I had finished, and replied in a blank voice, as they say,
one of those voices which betrays no sentiment of the speaker:

“I do not understand how you could have had any confidence in this
young girl, since she listened to you without the knowledge of her
parents.”

And she went away with a simple inclination of her graceful head,
carrying the book with her. How pretty she was in her dress of fine,
light cloth, with her slender form, her small waist, her face quite
long and lighted up by her thoughtful gray eyes! She was like a Madonna
engraved after Memling, whose profile I had formerly so much admired,
fervent, lovely and mournful, on the first page of a large copy of the
“Imitation,” belonging to the Abbé Martel.

Explain to me this other enigma of the heart, you, the great
psychologist; never have I felt more the charm of this pure and gentle
being than at the moment when I had just lied to her, and lied so
uselessly as I imagined from her response.

Yes, I took this response literally, which, on the contrary, should
have encouraged me to hope. I did not guess that to have only listened
to a confidence so intimate was for a being so proud and so reserved,
so far above me, a proof of a very powerful sympathy. I did not
consider that this almost severe remark was dictated in part by the
secret jealousy which I had desired to arouse in her, in part by a need
to strengthen herself in her own principles so as to justify to herself
her excessive familiarity.

As she had not been able to read the falsehood in my story, so I had
not seen the truth behind her reply.

I felt all the hopes which I had been building up for the past
fortnight crumble before me. No. She was not interested in me with a
genuine interest which I could transform into passion. I drew up the
balance sheet of our relations. What proof had I of this interest? The
delicacy of the material cares with which she had surrounded me? This
was a simple effect of her goodness. Her attempt to find out the cause
of my melancholy? Ah, well! she had been curious, that was all. The
timid accent of her voice when she questioned me? I had been a fool
not to recognize the habitual modesty of a delicate girl. Conclusion:
my comedy of these two weeks, my grimaces _à la_ Chatterton, the
falsehood of my so-called drama, so many ridiculous maneuvers, had not
advanced me a line in the heart I wished to conquer.

I turned again to my book, but I was no longer capable of fixing
my attention on the abstract text of Helvétius. I recall this
childishness, my dear master, that you may the better perceive what a
strange mixture of innocence and depravity was elaborated in my mind.

What did this unexpected deception prove, if not that I had imagined I
could direct the thought of Charlotte, by applying to her the laws of
psychology borrowed from the philosophers, as absolutely as her brother
directed the billiard balls? The white touches the red a little to the
left, goes on the cushions, and returns to the other white. That is
outlined by the hand on the paper, that is explained by a formula, that
is foreseen and is done ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, ten
thousand times.

In spite of my enormous reading, perhaps because of it, I saw the play
of the passions in this state of ideal simplicity. I did not comprehend
till later how much I was deceived. In order to define the phenomena
of the heart we must go to the vegetable, and not to the mechanical
world for analogies, and to direct these phenomena we must employ the
methods of the botanist, patient graftings, long waiting, careful
training.

A sentiment is born, grows, expands, withers like a plant, by an
evolution sometimes retarded, sometimes rapid, but always unconscious.
The germ of pity, of jealousy, and of dangerous example planted by my
ruse in the soul of Charlotte must develop its action, but only after
days and days, and this action would be the more irresistible as she
believed me to be in love with another and that in consequence she
would not think to defend herself against me.

But to account in advance for this work and to discount the hope of it,
one would have to be a Ribot, a Horwicz, an Adrien Sixte, that is, a
connoisseur of souls, instead of one like me, ignorant that the plain
over which he is walking will be covered with grain and not suspecting
the approaching harvest.

The conviction that I had definitely failed in my first effort
increased during the days which followed this false confidence. For
Charlotte scarcely spoke to me.

I know now, from her own confession, that she concealed under this
coldness a growing agitation which disconcerted her by its novelty, its
force and its depth. In the meantime she appeared absorbed in the game
of backgammon which the marquis had discovered in the Encyclopedia.

Recollecting that this had been the favorite pastime of his
grandfather, the _emigré_, he had given up all other games. A
merchant of Clermont had been able to send him the necessary articles
with which to satisfy this caprice.

The backgammon table was installed in the salon and father and daughter
passed their evenings in throwing the dice, which made a dry noise
against the wooden ledge. The cabalistic terms of little table,
big table, outer table, double ace, double threes, two fives, were
intermingled now with the words of the marquise and her two companions.

Sometimes the curé of Aydat, the Abbé Barthomeuf, an old priest who
said mass in the chapel of the château on Thursdays when the weather
was very severe, would relieve Charlotte by playing with the marquis.
Although the marquis treated me with irreproachable politeness, he had
never asked me if I wished to learn to play. The difference which he
established between the abbé and myself humiliated me, by the oddest
contradiction, for I much preferred to remain in my low chair reading
a book, or observing the character of the different persons from their
physiognomies.

Is it not always so when one is in a position which is thought to be
inferior? Any inequality of treatment wounds the self-love. I took my
revenge in observing the ridiculousness of the abbé, who professed,
for the château in general and the marquis in particular, an almost
idolatrous admiration. His face which was always red became apoplectic
when he took his seat opposite the marquis, and the prospect of winning
the silver coins designed to make the game more interesting made the
dice-cup tremble in his hand at the decisive throws.

This observation did not occupy me long, and I turned to follow the
young girl, who seated herself at her work near her mother.

The failure of my attempt to win her love had made me more cruel, in
proportion to the admiration I had before felt for the innocent grace
of this child. To confess all, I began to feel, in her atmosphere,
emotions of an order more sensual than psychological. I was a young
man, and I had in my flesh, in spite of my philosophical resolutions,
the memory of sex of which you have so authoritatively analyzed the
persistent fatality and the invincible reviviscence.

How long this period of inertia at once impassioned and discouraged,
might have lasted, I do not know. We were, Mlle. de Jussat and I, in
a very peculiar situation, impelled one toward the other, she by a
budding love of which she was ignorant, I by all the confused reasons
which I have analyzed.

Although we were together so many hours of the day, neither of us then
suspected the sentiments of the other. In such circumstances, one does
not consider whether the events which mark a new crisis are effects or
causes, whether their importance resides in themselves or whether they
simply serve to manifest the latent conditions of the soul. But may we
not put this question apropos of each destiny taken in its whole? How
many times, above all since I consume my hours in this cell between
these four whitewashed walls, seeing only the empty sky through four
openings at the edge of the roof, in searching and searching again into
my short history, have I asked myself if our fate creates our mind, or
if it is not our mind which creates our fate, even our external destiny?

It happened one evening that the marquis, seated with his back to the
fire in the _robe-de-chambre_, which he sometimes wore all day,
spoke at length to his wife of an article in the morning paper. I was
holding this paper at the time, and M. de Jussat said to me quite
suddenly:

“Would you read this article, Monsieur Greslon?”

I admired, once more, the art with which this grand seigneur rendered
the most trifling demands insolent. His tone alone was sufficient to
chill me. I obeyed however, and began to read this chronicle, more
finely written than such articles usually are, and in which were
revived all the picturesqueness and coloring of a fancy ball, with a
curious mixture of reporting and poetry.

During the reading the marquis regarded me in astonishment. I must tell
you, my dear master, that at the time of my friendship with Emile, I
had acquired a real talent for diction. During his illness my little
comrade had no greater pleasure than to hear me read.

“You read very well, very well!” cried M. de Jussat when I had finished.

His astonishment made his eulogy a new wound to my self-esteem. It
was too plain that he did not expect to find much talent in a silent
and timid young man of Clermont, who had come to the château on the
recommendation of old Limasset, to be a _valet de lettres_. Then,
following as usual, the impulse of his caprice, he continued:

“That is an idea. You shall read for us in the evening. That will amuse
us a little better than this _trictrac_. Little _jan_, big
_jan_, it is always the same thing, and then the noise of the dice
sets my teeth on edge. This beastly country! If the snow ever stops
again, we will not stay here eight days. And what book are you going to
begin with?”

Thus I found myself promoted to a new service, without even being
allowed to consider whether it would interfere with my studies or not,
for I often brought into the salon some of my books that I might study
a little without leaving Lucien. But I did not for a moment think of
evading this task. First the brusqueness of the marquis had brought me
a glance almost supplicating from Charlotte, one of those glances by
which a woman knows how to ask pardon, for the error of some one whom
she loves. Then, a new project took form in my mind. Might not this
task be utilized to the profit of the enterprise commenced, abandoned,
and which the look of Mlle. de Jussat made me think was still possible?

To the question of the marquis upon the choice of the book, I responded
that I would consider. And I looked for a work which would permit me to
approach the prey around which I turned, as I once saw, near the Puy du
Dôme, a kite wheel around and above a poor little bird.

Was not this an opportunity to try by another method this influence of
imitation, which I had vainly hoped from my false confidence? It is to
you, my dear master, that we owe the strongest pages which have been
written upon that which you so justly call the Literary Mind, upon this
unconscious modeling of our heart to the resemblance of the passions
painted by the poets.

I saw in this then, a means of acting upon Charlotte which I reproached
myself for not having thought of before. But how was I to find a
romance which was passionate enough to excite her, and outwardly
correct enough to be read before the assembled family? I literally
ransacked the library. Its incoherent and contrasted composition,
reflected the residence of its successive masters and the chances of
their taste.

There were all the principal works of the eighteenth century of which
I have spoken--then a hiatus. During the emigration the château had
remained unoccupied. Then a lot of romantic books in their first
editions attested the literary aspirations of the father of the
marquis, who had been the friend of Lamartine. Then came the worst
of contemporaneous romances, those which are bought on the railway,
half-bound, cut sometimes with the finger, or a page lost, and some
treatises on political economy, an abandoned hobby of M. de Jussat.

At last I discovered amid all this rubbish a “Eugénie Grandet,” which
appeared to me to fill the conditions desired. There is nothing more
attractive to a fresh imagination than these idyls at once chaste and
fervid in which innocence envelops passion in a penumbra of poesy. But
the marquis must have known this celebrated romance by heart, and I
apprehended that he would refuse to listen to it.

“Bravo!” he replied when I submitted my idea to him, “that is one of
the books that one reads once, talks about always and entirely forgets.
I saw this Balzac once in Paris, at the Castries. It is more than forty
years ago. I was a youngster then. But I remember him well, fat, short
and stubby, noisy, important, with beautiful bright eyes and a common
air.”

The fact is that after the first pages, he fell asleep, while the
marquise. Mlle. Largeyx and the _religieuse_ knit, and Lucien, who
had recently come into possession of a box of colors conscientiously
illuminated the illustrations of a large volume.

While reading I observed Charlotte, and it was not difficult to see
that this time my calculation had been correct, and that she vibrated
under the phrases of the romance as a violin under a skillful bow.
Everything was prepared to receive this impression, from her feelings
already stirred to her nerves strained by an influence of a physical
kind. One cannot live with impunity for weeks in such an atmosphere as
that of the château, always warm, nearly stifling.

From that evening, this child hung on my lips as the ingenuous loves of
Eugénie and her cousin Charles disclosed their touching episodes. The
same instinct of comedy which had guided me in my false confidence made
me throw into every phrase the intonation which I thought would please
her most.

I certainly enjoyed this book, although I preferred ten other of
Balzac’s works, such, for example, as the “Curé de Tours,” which are
veritable literary compendiums, each phrase of which contains more
philosophy than a scholium of Spinoza.

I forced myself to appear touched by the misfortunes of the miser’s
daughter, in my most secret fibres; and my voice grew pitiful over the
sweet recluse of Saumur.

Here, as before, I gave myself useless trouble. There was no need of an
art so complicated. In the crisis of imaginative sensibility through
which Charlotte was passing, any romance of love was a peril.

If the father and mother had possessed, even in a feeble degree, that
spirit of observation which parents ought to exercise without ceasing,
they would have divined this peril of their daughter, more and more
captivated during the three evenings that this reading lasted. The
marquise simply remarked that characters so black as father Grandet and
the cousin did not exist. As for the marquis, he knew too much of the
world to proffer any such opinion, he formulated the cause of his ennui
during the reading.

“It is decidedly overdrawn. These unfinished descriptions, these
analyses, these numerical calculations! They are all very good, I do
not say they are not. But when I read a romance I wish to be amused.”

And he concluded that he must send to the Library of Clermont
immediately for the comedies of Labiche. I was in despair at this new
fancy. I would again be powerless to act upon the imagination of the
young girl, just at the moment when I could feel success probable.
This showed that I did not know the need which this soul, already
touched, felt, unknown to herself, the need of drawing near to me, of
comprehending me and making herself comprehended by me, of living in
contact with my mind.

The next day after that on which the marquis had issued the decree of
proscription against analytical romances, Mlle. de Jussat entered the
library at the hour I was there with her brother. She came to replace
the volume of the Encyclopedia; and with a half-embarrassed smile:

“I would like to ask a favor of you,” she said timidly. “I have a great
deal of time here, with which I do not know very well what to do. I
would like to have your advice in regard to my reading. The book which
you chose the other day gave me a great deal of pleasure.” She added:
“Ordinarily romances weary me, but that one was very interesting.”

I felt, at hearing her speak in that way, the joy which Count André
must have tasted when he saw the enemy whom he killed during the war
put his inquisitive head above the wall. It seemed to me as if I, too,
held my human game at the end of my gun.

The response to this request appeared to me so important that I feigned
to be very much embarrassed. In thanking her for her confidence I said
to her that she had charged me with a very delicate mission for which
I felt myself incapable. In brief, I made believe to decline a favor,
which I was charmed to intoxication to have obtained. She insisted, and
I promised to give her the next day a list of books.

I passed the evening and a part of the night in taking and rejecting
in my mind hundreds of volumes. At last I repeated aloud my father’s
favorite formula: “Let us proceed methodically,” and I asked myself how
books had acted on my imagination, in my adolescence, and what books?

I stated that I had been attracted most of all toward literature by
the unknown of sentimental experience. It was the desire to assimilate
unexperienced emotions which had bewitched me. I concluded that this
was the general law of literary intoxication. I must then choose for
this girl some books which should awake in her the same ideas while
taking into account the difference of our characters.

Charlotte was refined, pure and tender. She must be led into the
dangerous road of romantic curiosity by descriptions of sentiments
analogous to her own heart. I judged that the “Dominique” of
Fromentin, the “Princesse de Clèves,” “Valérie,” “Julia de Trécœur,”
the “Lys dans la vallée,” the “Reisebilder” of Heine, certain comedies
of Musset, in particular “On ne badine pas avec l’amour,” the first
poetry of Sully Prudhomme and that of Vigny, would best serve my
purpose.

I took the trouble to write out this list, accompanying it with a
tempting commentary, in which I indicated in my best manner the shade
of delicacy proper to each of these writers. That is the letter which
the poor child had kept, and of which the magistrates said it seemed
like the beginning of courtship. Ah! the strange courtship, and so
different from the vulgar ambition of the marriage with which these
gross minds have stupidly reproached me! If I had not a reason of pride
for refusing to defend myself which I will give you at the end of this
memoir, I would be silent from disgust of these low intelligences,
of which not one would be able to comprehend an action dictated by
pure reason. If they had only made you, my dear master, and the other
princes of modern thought, my judges! Then I would speak, as I am
speaking now to you.

The works thus designated arrived from Clermont. They were the object
of no remark on the part of the marquis. It is necessary to have
another reach of mind than that of this poor man to comprehend that
there are no bad books. There are bad moments in which to read the
best of books. You have a comparison so just in your chapter on “L’âme
littéraire,” when you liken the sore opened in certain imaginations
by certain readings to the well-known phenomenon produced on the body
poisoned by diabetes. The most inoffensive prick becomes envenomed with
gangrene.

If there were need of a proof of this theory of “the preliminary
state,” as you say again, I should find it in the fact that Mlle. de
Jussat sought in these books for things so diverse, for information
about me, my manner of feeling, of thinking, of understanding life and
character.

Every chapter, every page of these dangerous volumes became an occasion
for questioning me long, passionately, and ingenuously. I am certain
that she was sincere, and that she did not imagine she was doing
anything wrong when she came to talk with me apropos of such or such
a phrase about Dominique or Julia, Félix de Vandenesse or Perdican.
I remember the horror which she felt for the young man, the most
captivating and the most guilty of Musset’s heroes, and the heat with
which I stigmatized his duplicity of heart between Camille and Rosette.

Now, there was no personage in any book, who pleased me to the same
degree as this lover at once traitorous and sincere, disloyal and
loving, _ingénu_ and _roué_, who achieved, in his way, his
experience of sentimental vivisection upon his pretty and proud cousin.

I have cited this example, among twenty others, to give you an idea of
the conversations which we had now in this château in which we were so
strangely isolated. No one watched us. The dissimulation in which I had
masked myself on my arrival continued to cover me.

The marquis and the marquise had formed from the first an image
entirely different from my real nature. They took no pains to verify
whether this first impression were exact or false.

The good Mlle. Largeyx, installed in the comfort of her complacent
parasitism, was much too innocent to suspect the thoughts of depravity
perfectly intellectual which were revolving in my mind.

The Abbé Bartholomew and Sister Anaclet, whom a secret rivalry
separated, concealed under the form of an amiability quite
ecclesiastic, had only one care, that of pleasing the master and
mistress of the château, the priest for the benefit of his church, and
the _religieuse_ for that of her order.

Lucien was too young, and, as for the domestics, I had not yet learned
what perfidy was veiled under the impassibility of their smooth faces
and the irreproachable appearance of their brown livery with its gold
buttons.

We were then free, Charlotte and I, to talk the whole day. She appeared
first in the morning, in the dining-room where my pupil and I took our
tea, and there, under the pretext of breakfasting together, we talked
at one corner of the table, she in all the perfumed freshness of her
bath, with her hair hanging down in a heavy plait, and the suppleness
of her lovely form visible under the material of her half-fitting
morning dress.

I saw her again in the library where she always had some excuse for
coming; and by this time her hair was dressed, and she had assumed the
toilette of the day. We met again in the drawing-room before the second
breakfast and still again; and she waited upon us with her customary
grace, distributing the coffee a little hurriedly that she might linger
near me whom she served last, which permitted us to talk in an angle of
the window.

When the weather would permit we went out, the governess, Charlotte,
my pupil, and I, in the afternoon. At five-o’clock tea we were again
together, then at dinner, when I sat near her, and in the evening we
conversed almost as if we were really alone.

I mentally compared the phenomena which were taking place in this
girl, to that which I had observed several times in taming animals. At
one time I had written some chapters on animal psychology. A theorem
of Spinoza had served me for a starting point. I cannot now recall the
text, but this is the sense: to reproduce a movement, you must do it
yourself. That is true of man, and it is true of the animal. A savant
of rare merit and whom you know well, M. Espinas, has explained that
all society is founded on resemblance. I have concluded that for a man
to tame an animal, to bring it to live in his society, he must, in his
relations with this animal, make only those movements which the animal
can reproduce, that is to resemble him.

I have verified this law in establishing the species of analogy of
expression between a hunter and his dog, for example. I found--and this
was the sign that Mlle. de Jussat was becoming a little tamer each
day--that we began to employ analogous expressions, turns of thought
almost the same. I found myself accenting my words as she did hers, and
I observed in her gestures which resembled mine. In fine, I became a
part of her life, without her perceiving it, so careful was I not to
startle this soul just ready to be taken by a word that would cause her
to feel her danger.

This life of watchful diplomacy, to which I was condemned during
nearly two months that these simply intellectual relations lasted, did
not pass without almost daily internal struggles. To interest this
mind, to invade this imagination little by little, was not all of my
programme. I wished to be loved, and I knew that this moral interest
was only the beginning of passion. This beginning ought to lead in
order not to remain useless to something more than a sentimental
intimacy.

There is in your “Theory of the Passions,” my dear master, a note
which I read so much at that time that I know the text by heart: “A
well-prepared study of the lives of professional libertines,” say you,
“would throw a definite light upon the problem of the birth of love.
But the documents are lacking. These men have nearly all been men of
action, and who, in consequence, did not know how to relate. However,
some works of a superior psychological interest, the “Memoires” of
Casanova, the “Private Life of Marshal de Richelieu,” the chapter of
Saint-Simon on Lauzun, authorize us to say that nineteen times out
of twenty audacity and physical familiarity are the surest means of
creating love. This hypothesis confirms our doctrine on the animal
origin of this passion.”

Sometimes when we were alone together, and she moved, and her feet
approached mine, and when she breathed and I felt that she was a living
creature, the feverish wave of intoxication ran through my veins, and
I was obliged to turn my eyes away, for their expression would have
made her afraid. Often also, when I was away from her, it seemed to me
that audacity would be much more easy as it would be more complete.
I resolved then to clasp her in my arms, to press my lips to hers.
I saw her feeling badly at my caress, overcome, confounded by this
revelation of my ardor. What would happen then? My heart beat at this
idea. It was not the fear of being driven from the château that held
me back. It was more shameful to my pride not to dare. And I did not
dare. The inability to act is a trait of my character, but only when I
am not sustained by an idea. Let the idea be there and it infuses an
invincible energy into my being. To go to my death would be easy. You
will see that, if I am condemned. No, what paralyzed me near Mlle. de
Jussat as by a magnetic influence was _her purity_! At least I
have felt, with singular force, this recoil before innocence.

Often when I felt this invisible barrier between Charlotte and myself,
I have recalled the legends of guardian angels, and comprehended the
birth of this poetic conceit of Catholicism.

Reduced to reality by analysis, this phenomenon simply proves that in
the relations between two beings, there is a reciprocity of action
of one upon the other unknown to either. If by calculation I forced
myself to resemble this girl in order to tame her, I experienced
without calculation the species of moral suggestion which all true
character imposes upon us. The extreme simplicity of her mind triumphed
at times over my ideas, my remembrances, and my desires.

Finally, although judging this weakness to be unworthy of a brain like
mine, I respected her, as if I had not known the value of this word
respect, and that it represents the most stupid of all our ignorances.
Do we respect the player who ten times in succession strikes the rouge
or the noir? Well, in this hazardous lottery of the universe, virtue
and vice are the rouge and noir. An honest woman and a lucky player
have equal merit.

The spring arrived in the midst of these agitating alternations of
audacious projects, stupid timidity, contradictory reasonings, wise
combinations and ingenuous ardors. And such a spring! One must have
experienced the severity of winter among these mountains, then the
sudden sweetness of the renewal of nature, to appreciate the charm of
life which floats in this atmosphere when April and May bring back the
sacred season.

It comes first across the meadows in an awaking of the water which
shudders under the thin ice; it bursts through and then runs singing
on, light, transparent and free.

It comes through the woods in a continuous murmur of snow which
detaches itself piece by piece and falls upon the evergreen branches of
the pines and the yellow and dried leaves of the oaks. The lake freed
from its ice takes to shivering under the wind which sweeps away the
clouds, and the azure appears, the azure of a mountain sky, clearer,
deeper than that of the plain; and in some days the uniform color of
the landscape is tinted with colors tender and young.

The delicate buds begin to appear on the naked branches. The greenish
aments of hazels alternate with the yellowish catkins of the willows.
Even the black lava of the Cheyre appears to be animated. The velvety
fructifications of the mosses mingle with the whitening spots of the
lichens. The craters of the Puy de la Vache and of the Puy de Lassolas
disclose little by little the splendor of their red gravel. The silvery
trunks of the birches and the changeable trunks of the beeches shine in
the sun with a lively splendor.

In the thickets, the beautiful flowers which I had formerly picked with
my father, and whose corollas looked at me as if they were eyes, and
whose aroma followed me like a breath, began to bloom. The periwinkle,
the primrose, and the violet appeared first, then in succession the
cuckoo-flower with its shade of lilac, the daphne which bears its pink
flowers before it has any leaves, the white anemone, the two-leaved
harebell, with its odor of hyacinth, Solomon’s seal with its white
bells and its mysterious root which walks under the ground, the
lily-of-the-valley in the hollows, and the eglantine along the hedges.

The breeze which came from the white domes of the mountain passed over
these flowers. It brought with it perfumes something of the sun and
the snow, so caressing and so fresh, that only to breathe was to be
intoxicated with youth, was to participate in the renewal of the vast
world; and I, fixed as I was in my doctrines and my theories, felt the
puberty of all nature. The ice of abstract ideas in which my soul was
imprisoned melted.

When I read over the pages of my journal, now destroyed, in which I had
noted my sensations, I am astonished to see with what force the sources
of ingenuousness were reopened in me under this influence, and with
what a rushing flood they inundated my heart. I am vexed with myself
for thinking of it in this cowardly spirit. However, I experience a
pleasure in remembering that at this period I sincerely loved her who
is now no more. I repeat it with a real relief, that at least on the
day that I dared to tell her of my love--fatal day which marked the
beginning of our separation--I was the sincere dupe of my own words.

The declaration on which I had deliberated so much was, however, simply
the effect of chance. It was the 12th of May. Ah! it is less than a
year ago! In the morning the weather had been even more than usually
fine, and in the afternoon Mlle. Largeyx, Lucien, Charlotte and I
started to go to the village of Saint-Saturnin through a wood of oaks,
of birches and hazels which separated this village from the ruined
château of Montredon, and which is called the Pradat wood. We had taken
the little English cart which could hold four if necessary.

Never was a day more warm, a sky more blue, never was the odor of
spring borne by the wind more exhilarating.

We had not walked a league when Mlle. Largeyx, fatigued by the sun,
took her seat in the cart which was driven by the second coachman. The
rogue has sworn cruelly against me, and has recalled all that he knew
or guessed of what I myself am going to relate to you. Lucien also soon
declared himself tired, and joined the governess, so that I was left to
walk alone with Mlle. de Jussat.

She had taken it into her head to make a bouquet of
lilies-of-the-valley, and I helped her in this work. We were busy under
the branches, which were covered with a sort of delicate green cloud
of the scarcely opened foliage. She walked ahead, drawn far from the
edge of the wood in her search for the flowers. We found ourselves at
last in a clearing, and so far away that we could not see the group
made by the cart and the three persons. Charlotte first perceived our
solitude. She listened, and not hearing the noise of the horse’s feet
on the road, she cried out with the laughter of a child:

“We are lost. Fortunately the road is not hard to _rembourser_, as
poor Sister Anaclet says. Will you wait until I arrange my bouquet? It
would be a pity to have these beautiful flowers spoil.”

She sat down on a rock which was bathed in sunlight, and spread the
flowers on her lap, taking up the sprays of lilies one by one. I
inhaled the musky perfume of these pale racemes, seated on the other
extremity of the stone. Never had this creature, toward whom all my
thoughts had tended for months, appeared so adorably delicate and
refined as at this moment with her face daintily colored by the fresh
air, with the deep red of her lips which were bent in a half-smile,
with the clear limpidity of her gray eyes, with the symmetry of her
entire being.

She harmonized in a manner almost supernatural with the country about
us by the charm of youth which emanated from her person. The longer I
looked at her the more I was convinced that if I did not seize this
occasion to tell her what I had wished to declare for so long a time, I
should never again find another opportunity so propitious.

This idea grew in my mind, mingled with the remorse of seeing her, so
confident, so unsuspicious of the patient work by which, abusing our
daily intimacy, I had brought her to treat me with a gentleness almost
fraternal.

My heart beat violently. The magic of her presence excited my entire
being. Unfortunately she turned toward me for a moment, to show me
the bouquet which was nearly finished. No doubt she saw in my face
the trace of the emotion which my pride of thought raised in me, for
her face which had been so joyous, so frank, suddenly grew anxious.
I ought to say that during our conversations of these two months we
had avoided, she from delicacy, I from shrewdness, any allusion to
the romance of deception by which I had tried to excite her pity. I
understood how thoroughly she had believed in this romance and that
she had not ceased to think of it, when she said with an involuntary
melancholy in her eyes:

“Why do you spoil this beautiful day by sad remembrances? I thought you
had become more reasonable.”

“No!” I responded; “you do not know what makes me sad. Ah! it is not
remembrances. You refer to my former griefs. You are mistaken. There is
no more place in my mind for memories than there is on these branches
for last year’s leaves.”

I heard my voice as if it had been that of some one else, at the same
time I read in her eyes that, in spite of the poetical comparison by
which I had concealed the direct meaning of this phrase, she understood
me.

How was it that what had been so impossible now seemed easy? How was
it that I dared to do what I had believed I should never dare to do? I
took her hand which trembled in mine as if the child were seized with
a frightful terror. She rose to go away, but her knees trembled so
that I had no difficulty in constraining her to sit down again. I was
so overcome by my own audacity that I could not control myself, and I
began to tell her my feelings for her in words which I cannot recall
now.

All the emotions through which I had passed, since my arrival at the
château, yes all, even from the most detestable, those of my envy of
Count André, to the best, my remorse at abusing the confidence of
a young girl, were dissolved in an adoration almost mystical, and
half-mad, for this trembling, agitated, and beautiful creature. I
saw her while I was speaking grow as pale as the flowers which were
scattered in her lap. I remember that words came to me which were
excited to madness, wild to imprudence, and that I ended by repeating:

“How I love you! Ah! How I love you!”

Clasping her hand in mine and drawing her nearer and nearer to me. I
passed my free arm around her waist without even thinking, in my own
agitation, of kissing her. This gesture, by alarming her, gave her the
energy to rise and disengage herself. She moaned rather than said:

“Leave me, leave me.”

And stepping backward, her hands held out in front of her as if to
defend herself, she went to the trunk of a birch tree. There she
leaned, panting with emotion, while the big tears rolled down her
cheeks. There was so much of wounded modesty in these tears, so painful
a revulsion, in the tremulousness of her half-open lips, that I
remained where I was muttering:

“Pardon.”

“Be still,” said she, making a motion with her hand.

We remained thus opposite one another and silent for a time which must
have been very short, but which seemed an eternity to me. All at once
a cry crossed the wood, at first distant, then nearer, that of a voice
imitating the cry of the cuckoo. They had grown uneasy at our absence,
and it was Lucien who gave the usual signal for rallying.

At this simple reminder of reality Charlotte shivered. The blood
came back to her cheeks. She looked at me with eyes in which pride
had driven away fear. She looked like one who had just awaked from
a horrible sleep. She looked at her hands, which still shook, and,
without another word, she took up her gloves and her flowers, and began
to run, yes, to run like a pursued animal, in the direction of the
voice. Ten minutes after we were again on the road.

“I do not feel very well,” she said to her governess, as if to
anticipate the question which her disturbed face would provoke; “will
you give me a place in the carriage? We are going home.”

“It is the heat which has made you feel badly,” replied the old
demoiselle.

“And M. Greslon?” asked Lucien when his sister had taken her seat and
he was in behind.

“I will walk,” I answered.

The cart moved lightly on, in spite of its quadruple burden, while
Lucien waved me an adieu. I could see the hat of Mlle. de Jussat
immovable by the side of the shoulder of the coachman, who gave a “pull
up” to his horse, then the carriage disappeared and I walked along
alone, under the same blue sky, and between the same trees covered with
an impalpable verdure. But an extraordinary anguish had replaced the
cheerfulness and the happy ardor of the beginning of the walk.

This time the die had been thrown. I had given battle, I had lost; I
should be sent away from the château ignobly. It was less this prospect
which overcame me than a strange mingling of regret and of shame.

Behold whither my learned psychology had led me! Behold the result
of this siege _en règle_ undertaken against the heart of this
young girl! Not a word on her part in response to the most impassioned
declaration, and I, at the moment for action, what had I found to do
but recite some romantic phrases? And she, by a simple gesture, had
fixed me to my place!

I saw in imagination the face of Count André. I saw in a flash the
expression of contempt when they should tell him of this scene.
Finally, I was no longer the subtle psychologist or the excited young
man, I was a self-love humiliated to the dust by the time I reached the
gate of the château.

In recognizing the lake, the line of the mountains, the front of the
house, pride gave place to a frightful apprehension of what I was going
to suffer, and the project crossed my mind to flee, to go back directly
to Clermont, rather than experience anew the disdain of Mlle. de
Jussat, and the affront which her father would inflict upon me. It was
too late, the marquis himself came to meet me, in the principal avenue,
accompanied by Lucien who called me. This cry of the child had the
customary intonation of familiarity, and the reception of the father
proved that I had been wrong to feel myself lost so soon.

“They abandoned you,” said he, “and did not even think of sending
the carriage back for you. You must have walked a good stretch!” He
consulted his watch. “I am afraid that Charlotte has taken cold,” he
added, “she went to bed as soon as she came in. These spring suns are
so treacherous.”

“So Charlotte had said nothing yet. She is suffering this evening. That
will be for to-morrow,” thought I, and I began that evening to pack my
papers. I held to them with so ingenuous a confidence in my talent as a
philosopher!

The next day arrived. Nothing vet. I was again with Charlotte at
the breakfast table; she was pale, as if she had passed through a
crisis of violent pain. I saw that the sound of my voice made her
tremble slightly. Then this was all. Ah! what a strange week I
passed, expecting each morning that she had spoken, crucified by this
expectation and incapable of taking the first step myself or of going
away from the château! This was not alone for want of a pretext to
give. A burning curiosity held me there. I had wished to live as much
as to think. Well! I was living, and in what a fever!

At last, the eighth day, the marquis asked me to come into his study.

“This time,” said I to myself, “the hour has struck. I like this
better.”

I expected to see a terrible countenance, and to hear some almost
insulting words. I found, on the contrary, the hypochondriac smiling,
his eyes bright, his manner young again.

“My daughter,” said he, “continues to be very unwell. Nothing very
serious, but some odd nervous symptoms. She wishes positively to
consult a Paris physician. You know she has been very ill and was
cured by a physician in whom she has confidence. I shall not be sorry
to consult him also for myself. I am going with her the day after
to-morrow. It is possible that we shall take a little journey to amuse
her. I desired to give you some particular directions in regard to
Lucien during my absence, though I am very well pleased with you,
my dear Monsieur Greslon, very well pleased. I wrote so to Limasset
yesterday. It is a good thing for me that you are here.”

You will judge my dear master, by what I have shown you of my
character, that these compliments must have flattered me as evidence
of the perfection with which I had filled my rôle, and by reassuring
me after my fears of the last days. I saw this very clear and positive
fact: Charlotte had not wished to tell of my declaration, and I asked
at once: Why? Instead of interpreting this silence in a sense favorable
to me, I saw in it this idea: she did not wish through pity to take
away my means of making a living, but it was not the kind of pity which
I had wished to provoke.

I had no sooner imagined this explanation than it became evident and
insupportable.

“No,” said I, “that shall not be, I will not accept the alms of this
outraging indulgence. When Mlle. de Jussat returns, she will not find
me here. She shows me what I ought to do, what I will do. I have
desired to interest her, I have not even excited her anger. I will
leave at least some other remembrance than that of a vulgar pedant who
keeps his place in spite of the worst affronts.”

I was so baffled in my projects; the hope which had sustained me all
winter was so dead that I wrote out, on the night following this
conversation, a letter in the place of the one in which I had thought
to make her love me, again asking for pardon.

I comprehend, said I, that any relation is impossible between us, and I
added that on her return she would not have to endure the odiousness of
my presence. The next morning in the confusion of departure, I found a
moment when her mother having called her, I could slip into her room. I
hastened to put my letter on her bureau. There, among the books ready
to be put into her trunk, was her blotting case. I opened it and found
an envelope upon which were the words: May 12, 1886. This was the day
of the fatal declaration. I opened this envelope. It contained some
sprigs of dried lilies-of-the-valley, and I remember to have given her,
in this last walk, some sprigs more beautiful than the others and she
had put them in her corsage. She had preserved them then. She had kept
them in spite of what I had said to her--because of what I had said to
her.

I do not believe that I ever experienced an emotion comparable to that
which seized me there, before this simple envelope, to the flood of
pride which suddenly inundated my heart. Yes. Charlotte had repulsed
me. Yes, she had fled from me. But she loved me! I closed the case,
I went up to my room in haste, for fear that she would surprise me,
without leaving my letter, which I instantly destroyed. Ah! there was
no question of my going away now.

I must wait until she should return, and, this time, I would act, I
would conquer. She loved me!

§ V. THE SECOND CRISIS.

She loved me. The experience instituted by my pride and my curiosity
had succeeded. This evidence--for I did not for a moment doubt the
proof, rendered the departure of the young girl not only supportable,
but almost sweet. Her flight was explained by a fear of her own
emotions which proved to me their depth. And then, by going away for a
few weeks, she relieved me from a cruel embarrassment.

How should I act? By what politic safeguard should I push on to success
from this unhoped-for point? I was about to have leisure to think of
this during her absence, which could not last long, since the Jussats
had now no house except in Auvergne.

Deferring then until later the formation of a new plan, I gave myself
up to the intoxication of triumphant self-love which I witnessed in
the departure of Charlotte and of her father. I had taken leave of
them in the drawing-room in order not to embarrass the final adieus,
and returned to my room. The warm, cordial hand-shake of the marquis,
proved once more how strongly I was anchored in the house, and I had
divined behind the cool farewell of the girl the palpitation of a heart
which did not wish to yield.

I inhabited in the second story a corner room with a window on the
front of the château I placed myself behind the curtain so that I could
see them as they entered the carriage. It was a victoria encumbered
with wraps and drawn by the same light bay horse that had drawn the
English cart. There was also the same coachman on the seat, whip in
hand, and with the same immobility of countenance.

The marquis appeared, then Charlotte. Under the veil and from such
a height, I could not distinguish her features, and when she raised
the veil to dry her eyes, I could not have told whether it were the
last kisses of her mother and her brother which caused this access of
nervous emotion or despair at a too painful resolution. But, when the
carriage turned away toward the gate, I saw her turn her head; and as
the family had already gone in what could she be looking at so long, if
not at the window from whose shelter I was regarding her? Then a clump
of trees hid the carriage, which reappeared at the border of the lake
to disappear again and plunge into the road which crosses the wood of
Pradat--that road where a souvenir awaited her, which I was certain
would make her heart beat more quickly--that troubled, conquered heart.

This sentiment of pride satisfied me for an entire month, without
a minute’s interruption, and--proof that I was still entirely
intellectual and psychological in my relations with this young girl, my
mind was never more clear, more supple, more skillful in the handling
of ideas than at this period.

I wrote then my best pages, a treatise on the working of the will
during sleep. I put into it, with the delight of a savant which you
will understand, all the details which I had noted, for some months,
on the goings and comings, the heights and depths of my resolutions.
I had kept, as I have told you, a most precise journal, analyzing, in
the evening before going to sleep, and in the morning, as soon as I was
awake, the least shades of every state of mind.

Yes, these were days of a singular fullness. I was very free. Mlle.
Largeyx and Sister Anaclet kept the marquise company. My pupil and I
took advantage of the beautiful and mild days for walking. Under the
pretext of teaching I had cultivated in him a love of butterflies.
Armed with a long cane and a net of green gauze, he constantly ran
after the Auroras with wings bordered with orange, the blue Arguses,
the brown Morio’s, the mottled Vulcans and the gold-colored Citrons. He
left me alone with my thoughts.

Sometimes we took the Pradat road which was now adorned with all the
verdure of spring, sometimes we went toward Verneuge, toward the valley
of Saint-Genès-Champanelle, which is as gracefully pretty as its name.
I would seat myself upon a block of lava, some small fragment of the
enormous stream poured out by the Puy de la Vache, and there, without
troubling my head about Lucien, I abandoned myself to this strange
disposition which has always appeared to me in the midst of this savage
nature, as a striking symbol of my doctrines, a type of implacable
fatality, a council of absolute indifference to good or ill.

I looked at the leaves of the trees as they unfolded in the sunlight,
and I recalled the known laws of vegetable respiration, and how, by a
simple modification of light, the life of the plant can be changed. In
the same way, one ought to be able at will to direct the life of the
soul, if he could exactly know its laws.

I had already succeeded in creating the commencement of a passion in
the soul of a young girl, separated from me by an abyss. What new
procedures applied with rigor would permit me to increase the intensity
of this passion?

I forgot the magnificence of the heavens, the freshness of the wood,
the majesty of the volcanoes, the vast landscape spread out before
me, in seeing only the formulas of moral algebra. I hesitated between
diverse solutions for the next day on which I should have Mlle. de
Jussat face to face with me in the solitude of the château.

Ought I on her return to feign indifference, to disconcert her, to
subdue her, first by astonishment and then by self-love and grief?
Should I pique her jealousy by insinuating that the foreigner of my
_soi-disant_ romance had returned to Clermont and had written to
me? Should I, on the contrary, continue the burning declarations, the
audacities which surround, the follies which intoxicate?

I replaced these hypotheses successively by still others. I pleased
myself by saying that I was not in love, that the philosopher ruled the
lover, that myself, this dear self of whom I had constituted myself the
priest, remained superior and lucid. I branded as unworthy weaknesses
the reveries which at other times replaced these subtle calculations.

It was in the house that these reveries took hold upon me, when I
looked at the portraits of Charlotte which were scattered about
everywhere on the walls of the salon, on the tables and in Lucien’s
room. Photographs of all sizes represented her at six years, at ten
years, at fifteen, and I could trace the growth of her beauty from
the _mignonne_ grace of her first years to the delicate charm of
to-day.

The features of these photographs changed, but the expression never.
It was the same in the eyes of the child and in those of the young
girl, with something of seriousness, of tenderness and of fixedness
which revealed profound sensibility. It was impressed upon me, and the
remembrance of it agitates me with a confused emotion. Ah! Why did I
not give myself up to it entirely.

But why was Charlotte, in so many of these portraits by the side of her
brother André? What secret fibre of hate had this man, by his existence
alone, touched in my heart, that simply to see his image near that of
his sister dried up my tenderness and left in me only one wish?

I dared to formulate it, now that I believed I had taken this heart
in my snare. Yes, I wished to be Charlotte’s lover. And after? After?
I forced myself not to think of that, as I forced myself to destroy
the instinctive scruples of violated hospitality. I collected the
most masculine energies of my mind and I plunged more deeply into my
theories upon the cultivation of self.

I would go out of this experience enriched by emotions and
remembrances. Such would be the moral issue of the adventure. The
material issue would be the return to my mother’s house when my
preceptorate was ended.

When scruples became aroused, and a voice said: “And Charlotte? Have
you the right to treat her as a simple object of experience?” I took my
Spinoza, and I read there the theorem in which it is written that our
right is only limited by our power.

I took your “Theory of the Passions” and I studied there your phrases
on the duel between the sexes in love.

“It is the law of the world,” I reasoned, “that all existence should
be a conquest, executed and maintained by the strongest at the expense
of the feeblest. That is as true of the moral universe as of the
physical. There are some souls of prey as there are wolves, tigers and
hawks.”

This formula seemed to me strong, new and just. I applied it to myself,
and I repeated:

“I am a soul of prey, a soul of prey,” with a furious attack of what
the mystics call the pride of life, among the fresh verdure, under the
blue sky, on the bank of the clear river which flows from the mountains
to the lake. This exhilaration at my victorious pride was dissipated by
a very simple fact. The marquis wrote that he would return, but alone.
Mlle. de Jussat, who was still unwell, would remain with a sister of
her mother. When the marquise communicated this news to us we were at
table. I felt a spasm of anger so violent that it astonished myself,
and on the plea of sudden indisposition I left the dinner table.

I should like to have cried out, broken something or manifested in
some foolish way the rage which shook my soul. In the fever of vanity
which had exalted me since the departure of Charlotte, I had foreseen
everything, except that this girl would have character enough not
to return to Aydat. The way which she had found to escape from her
sentiment was so simple, but so sovereign, so complete.

The marvelous tactics of my psychology became as vain as the mechanism
of the best cannon against an enemy out of reach of its shot.

What could I do if she were not there? The vision of my weakness
rose up so strong, so painful, that it excited my nervous system so
profoundly that I neither ate nor slept until the arrival of the
marquis. I should then learn if this resolution excluded all hope of
a counter order--if there were any chance that the young girl would
return by the end of July, or in August, or in September. My engagement
would last until the middle of October.

My heart beat, my throat was choked while we walked, Lucien and I, in
the railroad station of Clermont, waiting for the train from Paris. In
the excess of my impatience I had obtained permission to come to meet
the father. The locomotive entered the station. M. de Jussat put his
head through a doorway. I said at the risk of revealing my feelings:

“And Mlle. Charlotte?”

“Thank you, thank you,” he answered, pressing my hand with feeling,
“the physician says that she has a very serious nervous trouble. It
seems that the mountains are not good for her. And I am well only high
up! Ah! This is painful, very painful. We shall try for a time, the
cold-water cure at Paris, and then at Néris perhaps.”

She would not return!

If ever I have regretted, my dear master, the notebook which I burned,
it is assuredly now, and this daily record of my thoughts from the
evening on which the marquis thus announced the definite absence of
his daughter. This record continued until October, when a circumstance
brusquely changed the probable course of things.

You would have found there, as in an atlas of moral anatomy, an
illustration of your beautiful analysis of love, desire, regret,
jealousy, and hate. Yes, during those four months I went through all
these phases. It was an insane attempt, but quite natural, persuaded as
I was that Charlotte’s absence only proved her passion.

I wrote to her. In that letter, deliberately composed, I began by
asking her pardon for my audacity in the Pradat wood, and I renewed
this audacity in a worse manner, by drawing a burning picture of my
despair away from her.

This letter was a wilder declaration than the other, and so bold that
once the envelope had disappeared in the box at the village post-office
whither I had carried it myself, my fears were renewed. Two days, three
days, and there was no reply. The letter at least was not returned, as
I had feared, without even being opened.

At this time the marquise had finished her preparations to join her
daughter. Her sister occupied at Paris in the Rue de Chanaleilles, a
house large enough to give to these ladies all the rooms they needed.
Hôtel de Sermoises, Rue de Chanaleilles, Paris, what emotions I have
had in writing this address, not only once, but five or six times.

I calculated that the aunt would not watch the correspondence of the
young girl very strictly, while the mother would watch her. It was
necessary to take advantage of the time the latter still remained at
Aydat, to strengthen the impression certainly produced by my letter. I
wrote every day, until the departure of the marquise, letters like the
first, and I found no trouble in playing the lover.

My passionate desire to have Charlotte return was sincere--as sincere
as unreasonable. I have known since that, at every arrival of these
dangerous missives, she struggled for hours against the temptation to
open the envelope. At last she opened it. She read and reread the pages
and their poison acted surely. As she was ignorant of the discovery I
had made of her secret, she did not think to defend herself against the
opinion that I could have conceived of her.

These letters affected her so much that she preserved them. The ashes
were found in the chimney of her room where she had burned them the
night of her death. I much suspected the troubling effect of these
pages which I scratched off in the night, excited by the thought that
I was firing my last cartridges, which resembled shots in a fog, since
no sign gave notice that every time I aimed I struck right into her
heart.

This absolute uncertainty I at first interpreted to my advantage; then,
when the mother had left the château and I saw the impossibility of
writing, I found in Charlotte’s silence the most evident proof, not
that she loved me, but that she was using her whole will to conquer
this love and that she would succeed.

“Ah, well!” I thought, “I shall have to give her up, since I cannot
reach her, and all is over.” I pronounced these words aloud alone in
my room as I heard the carriage which took the marquise roll away. M.
de Jussat and Lucien accompanied her as far as Martris-de-Veyre, where
she went to take the train. “Yes,” I repeated, “all is ended. What
difference does it make since I do not love her?”

At the moment this thought left me relatively tranquil and with no
other trouble than a vague feeling of uneasiness in the chest, as
happens when we are annoyed. I went out for the purpose of shaking off
even this uneasiness, and, in one of those fits of bravado, by which I
was pleased to prove my strength, I went to the place in which I had
dared to speak to Charlotte of my love.

In order the better to attest my liberty of soul, I had taken under my
arm a new book which I had just received, a translation of Darwin’s
letters.

The day was misty, but almost scorching. A kind of simoon of wind
from the south parched the branches of the trees with its breath. As
I went on this wind affected my nerves. I desired to attribute to its
influence the increase of my uneasiness. After some fruitless search in
the wood of Pradat, I at last found the clearing where we had been--the
stone--the birch.

It trembled constantly in the breath of the wind, with its dentated
foliage which was now much thicker. I had intended to read my book
here. I sat down and opened the book. I could not get beyond a half
page. The memories overcame me, took possession of me, showing me this
girl upon this same stone, arranging the sprays of her lilies, then
standing, leaning against this tree, then frightened and fleeing over
the grass of the path.

An indefinable grief took possession of me, oppressing my heart,
stifling my respiration, filling my eyes with scalding tears, and I
felt, with terror, that through so any complications of analysis and of
subtleties, I was desperately in love with the child who was not there,
who would never be there again.

This discovery, so strangely unexpected, and of a sentiment so
contrary to the programme I had arranged, was accompanied almost
immediately by a revulsion against this sentiment and against the image
of her who had caused me this pain. There was not a day during the long
weeks that followed that I did not struggle against the shame of having
been taken in my own snare and without feeling a bitter spite against
the absent one.

I recognized the depth of his spite at the infamous joy which filled
my heart when the marquis received a letter from Paris, which he read
with a frown and sighed as he said: “Charlotte is still unwell.” I felt
a consolation, a miserable one, but a consolation all the same, in
saying to myself that I had wounded her with a poisonous wound and one
which would be slow to heal. It seemed to me that this would be my true
revenge, if she should continue to suffer, and I should be the first to
cure her.

I appealed to the philosopher that I was so proud of being to drive out
the lover. I resumed my old reasoning. “There are laws of life and of
mind and I know them. I cannot apply them to Charlotte, since she has
fled from me. Shall I be incapable of applying them to myself?” And I
meditated on this new question: “Are there remedies against love? Yes,
there are, and I have found them.”

My quasi-mathematical habits of analysis were at my service in my
project of healing, and I resolved the problem into its elements, after
the manner of geometricians.

I reduced this question to this other: “What is love?” to which I
answered brutally by your definition: “Love is the obsession of sex.”
Now, how is this combated? By physical fatigue, which suspends, or at
least lessens, the action of the mind.

I compelled myself and I compelled my pupil to take long walks. The
days on which he had no lessons, Sundays and Thursdays, I went out
alone at the break of day, after having arranged the hour and the
place in which Lucien should join me with the carriage. I awoke at two
o’clock. I went out from the château, in the cold of the half-twilight
which precedes the dawn.

I went straight before me, frantically, choosing the worst paths,
ascending the nearest peaks by the most abrupt and almost inaccessible
sides. I risked breaking my limbs in descending the yielding sand of
the craters, or upon the crests of basalt. No matter.

The orange line of the aurora gained the border of the sky. The wind
of the new day beat against my face. The stars like precious stones
melted away, drowned in the flood of azure, now pale, now darker. The
sun lighted up, on the flowers, the trees and the grass a flashing of
sparkling dew.

Persuaded as I am, of the laws of prehistoric atavism, I aroused in
myself, by the sensation of the forced march and of the heights, the
rudimentary mind of the ancestral brute, of the man of the caves from
whom I, as well as the rest of mankind, am descended.

I attained in this way a sort of savage delirium, but it was neither
the dreamed-of joy nor peace, and it was interrupted by the smallest
reminiscence of my relations with Charlotte. The turn of a road which
we had followed together, the blue bosom of the lake seen from some
height, the outline of the slated roofs of the château, less than
that, even the trembling foliage of a birch and its silvery trunk, the
name of a village of which she had spoken, on an advertisement, was
sufficient, and this factitious frenzy gave place to the keen regret
that she was not near me.

I heard her say in her finely-toned voice: “Look then--” as she would
say when we wandered together, through this same region, which was then
covered with ice and snow--but the flower of her beauty was then in
bloom, now it was adorned with verdure, but the living flower was gone.

And this sensation became more intolerable still when I met Lucien, who
never failed to talk of her. He loved her, he admired her so lovingly,
and in his ingenuousness he gave me so many proofs that she was worthy
of being loved and admired. Then physical weariness resolved itself
into a worse enervation, and nights followed in which I suffered from
an excited insomnia, in which I would weep aloud, calling her name like
one deranged.

“It is through the mind that I suffer,” I said after having in vain
sought the remedy in great fatigue. “I will attack mind through mind.”

I undertook that study the most completely opposed to all feminine
preoccupation. I despoiled in less than a fortnight, pen in hand, two
hundred pages of that “Physiology” of Beaunis which I had brought in
my trunk and the hardest for me, those which treat of the chemistry of
living bodies.

My efforts to understand and to sum up these analyses which demand the
laboratory, were supremely in vain. I only succeeded in stupefying my
intellect and in making myself less capable of resisting a fixed idea.

I saw that I had again taken the wrong road. Was not the true method
rather that which Goethe professed--to apply the mind to that from
which we wish to be delivered? This great mind, who knew how to live,
thus put in practice the theory set up in the fifth book of Spinoza,
and which consists in evolving from the accidents of our personal life
the law which unites us to the great life of the universe.

M. Taine, in his eloquent pages on Byron, advises the same, “the
light of the mind produces in us serenity of the heart.” And you, my
dear master, what else say you in the preface to your “Theory of the
Passions.” “To consider one’s own destiny as a corollary in this living
geometry of nature, and as an inevitable consequence of this eternal
axiom whose infinite development is prolonged through time and space,
is the only principle of enfranchisement.”

And what else am I doing, at this hour, in writing out this memoir, but
conforming to these maxims? Can they serve me now any better than they
did then? I tried at that time to resume in a kind of new autobiography
the history of my feelings for Charlotte. I supposed--see how chance
sometimes strangely realizes our dreams--a great psychologist to be
consulted by a young man; and, toward the last, the psychologist
wrote out for the use of the moral invalid a passional diagnosis with
indication of causes.

I wrote this piece during the month of August and under the exhausting
influence of the most torrid heat. I devoted to it about fifteen
séances, lasting from ten o’clock in the evening to one o’clock in the
morning, all the windows open, with the space around my lamp brightened
by large night-moths, by these large velvet butterflies which bear on
their bodies the imprint of a death’s head.

The moon rose, inundating with its bluish light the lake over which ran
the pearly reflections; the woods whose mystery grew more profound, and
the line of the extinct volcanoes. I put down my pen to lose myself, in
presence of this mute landscape, in one of those cosmogonic reveries
to which I was accustomed. As at the time in which the words of my
poor father revealed to me the history of the world, I saw again the
primitive nebulousness, then the earth detached from it, and the moon
thrown off from the earth.

That moon was dead, and the earth would die also. She was becoming
chilled second by second; and the imperceptible consequence of
these seconds, added together during millions of years, had already
extinguished the fire of the volcanoes from which formerly flowed the
burning and devastating lava on which the château now stood.

In cooling this lava had raised a barrier to the course of the water
which spread into a lake, and the water of this lake was being
evaporated as the atmosphere diminished--these forty poor kilometers of
respirable air which surround the planet.

I closed my eyes, and I felt this mortal globe roll through the
infinite space, unconscious of the little worlds that come and go upon
it, as the immensity of space is unconscious of the suns, the moons
and the earths. The planet will roll on when it will be only a ball
without air and without water, from which man has disappeared, as well
as animals and plants.

Instead of bringing to me the serenity of contemplation, this
vision threw me back upon myself and made me feel with terror the
consciousness of my own person, the only reality that I could possess,
and for how long? Scarcely a point and a moment!

Then, in this irreparable flight of things, this point and this moment
of our consciousness remains our only good, we must exalt it by
increasing its intensity. I felt, with a frightful force, that this
sovereign intensity of emotion Charlotte alone could give me if she
were in this room, seated in this chair, uniting her condemned soul to
my condemned soul, her fleeting youth to my fleeting youth, and as all
the instruments of an orchestra harmonize to produce a single tone, all
the separate forces of my being, the intellectual, the sentimental, the
sensual united in a yearning for Charlotte.

Alas! The vision of the universe heightened the frenzy of the personal
life instead of calming it. I said to myself that without doubt I had
been deceived in believing myself a purely abstract and intellectual
being. During the months in which I had been entirely chaste had I not
lived contrary to my nature?

Under pretext of some family business to regulate I obtained of the
marquis a vacation of eight days. I went to Clermont and sought for
Marianne. I soon found her. She was no longer the simple working-woman.
A country proprietor had settled her, dressed her in fine clothes, and
coming to the city only one day in eight, left her a sort of liberty.
This re-entrance into the world affected me as a renewal of initiation.
I was desirous of knowing to what degree the memory of Charlotte
gangrened my soul. Ah! how the image of Mlle. de Jussat presented
itself at that moment with her Madonna-like profile and the delicacy
of her whole being. It was impossible for me to return to these base
idols. I passed the days which remained to me in walking with my
mother, who seeing me so melancholy became uneasy and increased my
sadness by her questions.

I saw the time of my return to the château approach with pleasure. At
least I could live there among my memories. But a terrible blow awaited
me, which was given me by the marquis on my arrival.

“Good news,” said he as soon as he saw me. “Charlotte is better. And
there is more just as good. She is going to be married. Yes, she
accepts M. de Plane. It is true, you do not know him, a friend of André
whom she refused once, and now she is willing.” And he continued, going
back to himself as usual: “Yes, it is very good news, for, you see, I
have not much longer to live. I am broken, very much broken.”

He might detail to me his imaginary ills, analyze his stomach as much
as he wished, his gout, his intestines, his heart, his head--I listened
no more than a condemned man to whom his sentence has been announced
listens to the words of his jailer. I saw only the fact so painful to
me. You who have written some admirable pages upon jealousy, my dear
master, and upon the ravages which the thought alone of the caress of a
rival produces in the imagination of a lover, can divine what smarting
poison this news poured into my wound.

May, June, July, August, September--nearly five months since Charlotte
had gone, and this wound instead of healing had become enlarged,
poisoned until this last stroke which finished me. This time I did not
have the cruel consolation that my suffering was shared. This marriage
proved to me that she was cured of her sentiment for me, while I was
agonized by mine for her.

My fury was exasperated at the thought that this love had been snatched
from me just at the moment I was about to be able to develop it in
its fullness, at the very time of decisive action. I saw Charlotte in
Paris, where M. de Plane was passing his leave of absence, receiving
her _fiancé_ in the partial _tête-à-tête_ with a familiarity
permitted under the indulgent eyes of the marquise. They were for this
man now, these smiles at once proud and timid, these tender and anxious
looks, these passages of paleness and modest red over her delicate
face, these gestures of a grace always a little wild.

Finally she loved him, since she was willing to marry him. And he
seemed to me like Count André whose detestable influence I found
even here, and whom I again hated in the _fiancé_ of his sister
confounding these two gentlemen, these two elders, these two officers,
in the same furious antipathy. Vain and puerile anger which I took with
me into the wood already reclothed with those vague tints which would
soon change to russet.

The swallows were assembling for their departure. As the hunting season
had begun there was firing all around them, and frightened, they rose
in a flight such as that by which the wild bird had escaped which I had
thought to bring down some day.

Toward Saint-Saturnin, the hills were planted with vines whose grapes
would soon be ripe for the vintage. I saw the stocks widowed of fruit,
those which the hailstorms of the spring had destroyed in their flower.
Thus had died on the spot, before being ripe, my vintage, vintage of
intoxicating emotions, of sweet felicities, of burning ecstasies.

I felt a gloomy and indefinable pleasure in seeking everywhere in the
country some symbol of my sentiment, since I was, for a short time,
purified from all calculation by the alchemy of grief.

If I was ever a true lover and given up to regrets, memories and
despairs, it was in those days which must be the last of my stay at
Aydat. In fact, the marquis announced his intention to hasten his
departure. He had abdicated his hypochondria, and he cheerfully said to
me:

“I adore my future son-in-law. I wish that you could know him. He is
loyal, he is brave, he is good, he is proud. True gentlemanly blood in
his veins. Do you understand the women? Here is one who is no sillier
than the rest, is it not so? Two years ago he offered himself to her.
She said no. Then my boy goes away to come back half-dead. And then
it is yes. Do you know, I have always thought that there was some
love-affair in her nervous malady. I knew it. I said to myself: she is
in love with some one. It was he. And what if he had not wanted her,
all the same?”

No, it was not M. de Plane whom Charlotte had loved that winter; but
she had loved, that was certain. Our existences had crossed at one
point, like the two roads which I saw from my window, the one which
descends the mountains and goes toward the fatal wood of Pradat, the
other which leads toward the Puy de la Rodde.

I happened to see, at the close of the day the carriages following
these two roads. After almost grazing each other, they were lost in
opposite directions. Thus were our destinies separated forever. The
Baroness de la Plane would live in the world, at Paris, and that
represented to me a whirlpool of unknown and fascinating sensations.

I knew too well my future life. In thought, I awoke again in the little
room of the Rue du Billard. In thought I followed the three streets
which it is necessary to take to go from there to the Faculty. I
entered the palace of the Academy, built in red brick, and I reached
the _salle des conférences_ with its bare walls garnished with
blackboards. I listened to the professor analyzing some author on
license or admission. That lasted an hour and a half, then I returned,
my serviette under my arm, through the cold streets of the old town,
for it was necessary for me to pass still another year, as I had not
studied hard enough to submit to my examination with success.

I should continue to go and come among these dark houses, with this
horizon of snowy mountains, to see the father and mother of Emile
sitting at their window and playing at cards, the old Limasset reading
his paper in the corner of the Café de Paris, the omnibuses of Royat at
the corner of Jande.

Yes, I come down to that, my dear master, to this misery of minds
without psychology which attach themselves to the external form of life
without penetrating its essence. I disregarded my old faith in the
superiority of science, to which only three square metres of room are
necessary in order that a Spinoza or an Adrien Sixte may there possess
the immense universe.

Ah! I was very mediocre in that period of powerless desires and
conquered love! I detested, and with what injustice, that life of
abstract study which I was about to resume! And how I wish to-day
that this might be my fate, and that I might awake a poor student
near the Faculty of Clermont, tenant of the father of Emile, pupil of
old Limasset, the morose traveler through those black streets--but an
innocent man! an innocent man! And not the man who has gone through
what I have gone through, and which he finds it a necessity to tell.

§ VI. THIRD CRISIS.

Toward the end of this severe month of September, Lucien complained of
not being quite well, which the doctor attributed at first to a simple
cold. Two days after the symptoms became aggravated. Two physicians
of Clermont, called in haste, diagnosed scarlet fever, but of a mild
character.

If my mind had not been entirely absorbed by the fixed idea which
made of me at this period a veritable monomaniac, I should have
found material enough to fill my notebook. I had only to follow the
evolutions of the mind of the marquis and the struggle in his heart
between hypochondria and paternal love.

Sometimes, in spite of the reassuring words of the doctors, he became
so uneasy about his son that he passed the night in watching him.
Sometimes he was seized with the fear of contagion; he went to bed,
complained of imaginary pains, and counted the hours until the visit of
the physician. Sometimes, so grave did his symptoms seem to himself,
that the marquis must have the first visit. Then he would be ashamed of
his panic. He arose, he chastised himself for his terrors with bitter
phrases on the feebleness which age brings, and returned to the bedside
of his son. His first intention was to conceal from the marquise and
Charlotte and André the illness of the child; but after two weeks,
these alternations of zeal and of terror having exhausted his energy,
he felt the need of having his wife with him to sustain him, and the
incoherence of his ideas was so great that he consulted me:

“Do you not think it is my duty?”

There are some lying souls, my dear master, who excel in excusing by
fine motives their most villainous actions. If I were of this number
I could make a merit of having insisted that the marquis should not
recall his wife. Surely I knew the full import of my response and of
the resolution that M. de Jussat was about to take. I knew that, if he
informed the marquise, she would arrive by the first train, and I also
knew Charlotte well enough to be assured that she would come with her
mother. I should see her again, I should have a supreme opportunity to
reawaken in her the love of which I had surprised the proof. I could
say that it was loyalty on my part, the advice to leave Mme. de Jussat
in Paris. I should have the appearance of loyalty. Why? If I were
not convinced that there is no effect without a cause and no loyalty
without a secret egoism, I should recognize a horror in using to the
profit of a culpable passion the noblest of sentiments, that of a
sister for a brother.

Here is the naked truth: in trying to dissuade M. de Jussat, I was
convinced that all effort to regain the heart of Charlotte would be
useless. I foresaw in this return only certain humiliation. Worn out by
these long months of internal struggle, I no longer felt the strength
to maneuver. There was then no virtue in representing to the marquis
the inconveniences, the dangers even, of the stay of these two women in
the château, near an invalid who might communicate to them his disease.

“And how about me?” responded he ingenuously, “am I not exposed every
day? But you are right for Charlotte; I will write that I do not want
her.”

“Ah! Greslon,” said he two days after, on the receipt of a telegram,
“see what they do--read.” He handed me the dispatch which announced
the arrival of Mlle. de Jussat and her mother. “Naturally,” moaned the
hypochondriac, “she wanted to come, without thinking that I should be
spared such emotions.”

The marquis spoke to me in this way at two o’clock in the afternoon.
I knew that the train left Paris at nine o’clock in the evening and
arrived at Clermont toward five in the morning. Mme. de Jussat and
Charlotte would be at the château before ten o’clock. I passed a
fearful evening and night, deprived now of that philosophic tension,
outside of which I float, a creature without energy, the sport of
nervous and irresistible impressions.

Good sense, however, indicated a very simple solution. My engagement
would end the 15th of October. It was now the 5th. The child was
convalescent. He had his mother and his sister with him. I could return
home without any scruple and under any pretext. I could do it and I
must--for the sake of my dignity as well as for my repose.

In the morning, I had taken this resolution and I was going to speak
about it to the marquis immediately; he did not let me say a word, he
was so agitated by the arrival of his daughter: “Very well,” said he,
“by and by, I have no head for anything now. This willfulness! That is
why I have grown old so fast. Always new shocks!”

Who knows? my destiny may have entirely depended on the humor by which
this old fool refused to hear me. If I had spoken to him at that
moment, and if we had fixed my departure, I should have been obliged
to have gone; instead, the sole presence of Charlotte changed the
project of going into a project of remaining, as a lamp carried into a
room immediately changes this darkness into light. I repeat it, I was
convinced that she had absolutely ceased to be interested in me on the
one hand, and, on the other, that I was passing through a crisis, not
of genuine love, but of wounded vanity, and of morbid brooding.

Ah, well! To see her descend from the carriage before the
_perron_, to see that my presence overcame her, as hers affected
me, I understood two things: first, that it would be physically
impossible for me to leave the château while she should be there; then
that she had passed through trouble similar to mine, if not worse.
She must have fled from me with the most sincere courage, not to have
replied to my letters, not to have read them, to have become betrothed
in order to place an insurmountable barrier between us, to have
believed even that she no longer loved me, and to have returned to the
château with this persuasion.

She loved me!

I had no need of a detailed analysis like those in which I was too
complaisant and in which I was so much deceived, to recognize this
fact. It was an intuition, sudden, unreasoning, invincible, one to make
me believe that the theories on the double life, so much discussed by
Science, are absolutely true.

I read it, this unhoped for love, in the troubled eyes of this child,
as your read the words by which I am trying to reproduce here the
lightning and the thunderbolt of this evidence.

She was before me in her traveling costume, and white, white as this
sheet of paper. I should have explained this pallor by the fatigue
of the night passed in the carriage, and by her uneasiness at her
brother’s illness. Her eyes, in meeting mine, trembled with emotion.
That might be offended modesty? She had fallen away, and when she took
off her cloak I saw that her dress, a dress which I recognized, was
wrinkled around the shoulders.

Ah! I, who had believed so strongly in the method, the inductions, and
the complications of reasoning, how I felt the omnipotence of instinct
against which nothing could provide.

She had loved me all the time. She loved me more than ever. What matter
that she had not given me her hand at our first meeting; that she had
scarcely spoken to me in the vestibule; that she went up the grand
staircase with her mother without turning her head?

She loved me. This certainty, after so long a period of doubt and
anxiety, inundated my heart with a flood of joy, so that I was almost
overcome, there, on the carpet of the staircase which I must also climb
to go to my room. What was I to do? With my elbows on the table and
pressing my hands against my forehead to repress the throbbing of my
temples I put this question without finding any other answer than that
I could not go away; that absence and silence could not end all between
Charlotte and myself; finally that we were approaching an hour in which
so many reciprocal efforts, hidden struggles, combated desires on the
part of both, was precipitating us toward a supreme scene, and this, I
could feel was near, tragic, decisive, inevitable.

At first Charlotte was constrained to submit to my presence. We must
meet at the bedside of her brother, and the very morning of her
arrival, when it was my turn to keep the invalid company, toward
eleven o’clock, I found her there talking with him, while the marquise
questioned Sister Anaclet, both speaking in low tones and standing
near the window.

Lucien, from whom the coming of his mother and sister had been
concealed, showed in his face and in his gestures the excited and
almost feverish joy which is seen in convalescents; he saluted me with
his gayest smile, and taking my hand said to his sister:

“If you only knew how good M. Greslon has been to me all these days!”

She did not reply, but I saw that her hand, which lay on the pillow
near her brother’s cheek, shook as with a chill. She made an effort to
look at me without betraying herself. Without doubt my face expressed
an emotion that touched her. She felt that to leave unnoticed the
innocent remark of her brother would make me feel badly, and, in the
voice of past days, her sweet and living voice, she said, without
addressing me directly:

“Yes, I know it and I thank him for it. We all thank him very much.”

She did not add another word. I am sure that if I had taken her hand at
that moment she would have fainted before me, she was so moved by this
simple conversation.

I stammered a vague response: “It is quite natural,” or something
similar. I was not very collected myself. Lucien, however, who had
noticed neither the altered tone of his sister, nor my embarrassment,
continued:

“And isn’t André coming to see me?”

“You know he has gone back to his regiment,” said she.

“And Maxime?” insisted the child. I knew that this was the name of the
_fiancé_ of Mlle. de Jussat. These two syllables had no sooner
left the lips of her brother than the paleness of her face gave way to
a sudden wave of blood. There was an interval of silence during which I
could hear the murmuring of Sister Anaclet, the crackling of the fire
in the chimney, the swinging of the pendulum, and the child himself
astonished at this silence.

“Yes, Maxime, is not he coming either?”

“M. de Plane has also gone back to his regiment,” said Charlotte.

“Are you going away already, M. Greslon?” asked Lucien as I rose
brusquely.

“I am coming back,” I replied; “I have forgotten a letter on my table.”
And I went out, leaving Lucien with a smile on his face, and Charlotte
with her eyes cast down.

Ah! my dear master, you must believe what I am telling you; in spite of
the incoherencies of a heart almost unintelligible to itself, you must
not doubt my sincerity in that moment. I have so great need not to
doubt it myself; need to say to myself that I was not lying then.

There was not an atom of voluntary comedy in the sudden movement by
which I rose at the simple mention of the name of the man to whom
Charlotte ought to belong, to whom she did belong. There was no
comedy in the tears which burst from my eyes, as soon as I passed the
threshold of the door, nor in those which I wept during the night which
followed, in despair at this double and frightful certainty that we
loved one another, and that never, never, could we be anything one to
the other; no comedy in the starts of pain which her presence inflicted
on me during the days which followed. Her pale face, her emaciated
profile, her suffering eyes were there to disturb me, and this pallor
rent my soul, and this spare outline of her body made me love her more,
and those eyes besought me.

“Do not speak. I know that you are unhappy too. It would be cruel to
reproach me, to complain, to show your hurt.”

Tell me, if I had not been sincere in those days, would I have let
them pass without acting, when their hours were counted? But I do not
recall a single reflection, a single combination. I do recall confusing
sensations, something burning, frantic, intolerable, a prostrating
neuralgia of my inmost being, a lancination continuous, and growing,
growing always, the dream of putting an end to it, a project of suicide.

You see that I truly loved, since all my subtleties were melted in
the flame of this passion, as lead in a furnace; since I did not find
material for analysis in what was a real alienation, an abdication of
my old self in this martyrdom. This thought of death came from the
inmost depths of my being, this obscure appetite for the grave of which
I was possessed as of physical thirst and hunger, in which, my dear
master, you will recognize a necessary consequence of this disease of
love, so admirably studied by you.

This instinct of destruction, of which you point out the mysterious
awaking at the same time as that of sex, was turned against myself.
This was shown first by an infinite lassitude, the lassitude of feeling
much but never expressing anything. For the anguish in Charlotte’s
eyes, when they met mine, defended her better than all words could have
done.

Beside, we were never alone, except sometimes for a few minutes in
the salon, by chance, and these minutes passed in a silence which we
could not break. To speak at such times is as impossible as for a
paralytic to move his feet. A superhuman effort would not suffice. One
experiences how emotion, to a certain degree of intensity, becomes
incommunicable. One feels himself imprisoned, walled up in his self,
and he would like to get away from this unhappy self, to plunge, to
lose himself in the coldness of death is where all ended.

That continued with a kind of delirious desire to make on the heart of
Charlotte an imprint which could not be effaced, with an insane desire
to give her some proof of love, against which neither the tenderness
of her future husband nor the magnificence of her social surroundings,
could ever prevail.

“If I die of despair at being separated from her forever, she must
remember the simple preceptor, the poor provincial, capable of
sentiments so powerful!”

It seems to me that I formulated these reflections. You notice that
I say: “It seems to me.” For in truth, I did not comprehend myself
at that period. I did not recognize myself in the fever of violence
and of tragedy by which I was consumed. Scarcely do I discern in this
ungovernable come-and-go of my thoughts a kind of auto-suggestion,
as you say. I was hypnotized, and it was as a somnambulist that I
determined to kill myself at such a day, at such an hour, as I was
going to the druggist to procure the fatal bottle of nux vomica.

During all these preparations and under the influence of this
resolution, I hoped for nothing, I calculated nothing. A force entirely
foreign to my own consciousness was acting on me. At no time was I the
spectator of my gestures, my thoughts and my actions, with an exterior
of the acting “I” in relation to the thinking “I.” But I have written
a note upon this point, which you will find on the fly leaf, in my
_exemplaire_ of the book of Brière de Boismont on suicide.

I experienced in these preparations an indefinable sensation of a
waking dream, of lucid automatism. I attribute these strange phenomena
to a nervous disorder, almost a madness, caused by the ravages of
a fixed idea. It was only on the morning of the day chosen for the
execution of my project that I thought of making a last attempt to win
Charlotte.

I sat down at my table to write her a letter of farewell. I saw her
reading this letter, and this question suddenly presented itself to me:
“What would she do?” Was it possible that she might not be moved by
this announcement of my intended suicide? Would she hasten to prevent
it? Yes, she would run to my room and find me dead. At least, should I
not wait for the effect of this last proof?

Here I am very sure that I saw myself clearly. I know that hope was
born in me exactly in this way and precisely at this point of my
project. “Ah, well!” said I, “I will try.”

I resolved that if, at midnight, she had not come, I would drink the
poison. I had studied the effects of it, and hoped I should not suffer
very long.

It is strange that all that day was passed in a singular serenity. I
was as if relieved of a weight, as if really detached from myself, and
my anxiety commenced only toward ten o’clock, when, having retired
first, I had placed the letter on the table in the room of the young
girl.

At half-past ten I heard through my partly-open door the marquis, the
marquise and Charlotte ascending the stairs. They stopped to talk a few
minutes in the passage, then there were the customary good-nights, and
each entered a separate chamber.

Eleven o’clock--a quarter-past eleven.

Still nothing.

I looked at my watch, placed in front of me, near three letters
prepared for M. de Jussat, for my mother, and for you, my dear master.

My heart beat as if it would burst; but I wish you to note that my will
was firm and cool. I had told Mlle. de Jussat that she would not see me
the next day. I was sure of not failing my word if--I did not dare to
strengthen what hope this “if” contained.

I watched the second-hand go round and I made a mechanical calculation,
an exact multiplication: “at sixty seconds a minute, I shall see the
hand go round so many times, for at midnight I shall kill myself.”

A noise of furtive and light steps on the stairs, which I perceived
with supreme emotion, interrupted my calculation. These steps
approached. They stopped before my door. Suddenly the door was opened.
Charlotte was before me. I arose.

We rested thus face to face, both standing. Her face was distorted by
the shock of her own action, very pale, and her eyes shone with an
extraordinary brilliancy, nearly black, so dilated was the pupil by
emotion, almost covering the iris.

I noticed this detail because it transformed her physiognomy.
Ordinarily so reserved, her face betrayed the wildness of a being ruled
by a passion stronger than her will. She must have lain down, then
arose again, for her hair was braided in a large plait instead of being
knotted on her head. A white _robe-de-chambre_, fastened by a cord
and tassel was folded around her form, and in her haste she had slipped
her bare feet into her slippers without thinking.

Evidently an insupportable anguish had precipitated her from her
chamber into my room. She did not care what I might think of her nor
what I might be tempted to say. She had read my letter, and she came, a
prey to an excitement so intense that she did not tremble.

“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.

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?”

He returned, resolved to review his whole life. He saw himself a little
child, working at his tasks with a minuteness of conscientiousness
worthy of his father the clock maker. Then when he had begun to think,
what did he love, what did he wish? The truth. When he had taken the
pen, why did he write, to serve what cause, if not that of truth? To
the truth he had sacrificed everything; fortune, place, family, health,
love, friendship. And what did even Christianity teach, the doctrine
the most penetrated by ideas different from his own? “Peace on earth,
to men of good will,” that is to those who have sought for the truth.
Not a day, not an hour in all that past, which he scrutinized with
the force of the most subtle genius put to the service of the most
honest conscience, had he failed in the ideal programme of his youth
formulated in this noble and modest device: “To say what he thought, to
say only what he thought.”

“This is duty, for those who believe in duty,” said he, “and I have
fulfilled it.”

The night after this courageous meditation, this great, honest man
slept at last and with a sleep that the remembrance of Robert Greslon
did not trouble.

On awaking, Adrien Sixte was still calm. He was too well accustomed
to study himself not to seek for a cause for this facing about of
his impressions, and too sincere not to recognize the reason. This
momentary lull of remorse must arise from the simple fact of having
admitted as true some ideas upon the moral life which his reason
condemned.

“There are then beneficent ideas, and malevolent ideas,” he concluded.
“But what? Does the malevolence of an idea prove its falsity? Let us
suppose that the death of Charlotte be concealed from the Marquis de
Jussat, he is quieted by the idea that his daughter is living. The
idea would be salutary to him. Would it be true for that reason? And
inversely.”

Adrien Sixte had always considered as a sophism, as cowardly, the
argument directed by certain spiritualistic philosophers against the
fatal consequences of new doctrines, and generalizing the problem, he
said again: “As is the mind so is the doctrine. The proof of it is that
Robert Greslon has transformed religious practices into an instrument
of his own perversity.”

He again took up the memoir to find the pages consecrated by the
accused to his sentiments for the church, then he became again
fascinated and reread this long piece of analysis, but giving
particular attention this time to each passage in which his own name,
his theories, his works were mentioned.

He applied all the strength of his mind to prove to himself that every
phrase cited by Greslon had been justified by acts absolutely contrary
to those which the morbid young man had justified by them.

This reperusal, attentive and minute, had the effect of throwing him
into a new attack of his trouble.

With his magnificent sincerity, the philosopher recognized that the
character of Robert Greslon, dangerous by nature, had met in his
doctrines, as it were, a land where were developed his worst instincts,
and that Adrien Sixte found himself radically powerless to respond to
the supreme appeal made to him by his disciple from the depths of his
dungeon.

Of all the memoir, the last lines touched the deepest chord. Although
the word debt had not been pronounced, he felt that this unfortunate
had a claim on him. Greslon said truly: a master is united to the mind
that he has directed, even if he has not willed this direction, even if
this mind has not rightly interpreted the teaching, by a sort of mystic
cord, and one which does not permit of casting it to certain moral
agony with the indifferent gesture of Pontius Pilate. Here was a second
crisis, more cruel perhaps than the first. When he had been fully
impressed by the ravages produced by his works, the savant became
panic-stricken. Now that he was calm, he measured, with frightful
precision the powerlessness of his psychology, however learned it might
be, to handle the strange mechanism of the human soul.

How many times he began letters to Robert Greslon which he was
unable to finish! What could he say to this miserable child? Must
he accept the inevitable in the internal as well as in the external
world--accept his mind as one accepts his body? Yes, was the result of
all his philosophy. But in this inevitable there was the most hideous
corruption in the past and in the present.

To advise this man to accept himself, with all the profligacy of such
a nature, was to make himself an accomplice in this profligacy. But to
blame him? In the name of what principle had he done it, after having
professed that virtue and vice are additions, good and evil, social
labels without value; finally that everything is of necessity in each
detail of our being as well as in the whole of the universe.

What counsel could he give him for the future? By what counsel prevent
this brain of twenty-two years from being ravaged by pride and
sensuality, by unhealthy curiosity and depraving paradoxes? Would one
prove to a viper, if it could comprehend reasoning, that it ought not
to secrete venom? “Why am I a viper?” it would respond.

Seeking to state his thought with precision, Adrien Sixte compared the
mental mechanism taken to pieces by Robert Greslon, with the watches
which he had seen in his father’s establishment. A spring goes, a
movement follows, then another, and another. The hands move. If a
single part were touched the whole would stop.

To change anything in the mind would be to stop life. Ah! If the
mechanism could only modify its own wheels and their movement! But if
the watchmaker take the watch to pieces and make it over again!

There are persons who turn from the evil to the good, who fall and rise
again, who are cast down and are again built up in their morality. Yes,
but there is the fallacy of repentance which presupposes the delusion
of liberty and of a judge, of a Heavenly Father. Could he, Adrien
Sixte, write to this young man: “Repent; cease to believe that which I
have shown you to be true?”

And yet it was frightful to see a soul die without trying to do
something to save it. At this point of his meditation the thinker was
brought to a stand by the insoluble problem of the unexplained life of
the soul, as desperate for the psychologist as is the unexplained life
of the body for the physiologist.

The author of the book upon God and who had written this sentence:
“There is no mystery; there are only ignorances,” refused the
contemplation of the beyond, which, showing an abyss behind all
reality, leads science to bow before the enigma and say: “I do not
know, I shall never know,” and which permits religion to interpose.

He felt his incapacity for doing anything for this young soul in
distress, and who had need of supernatural aid. But to only speak of
such a formula, with his ideas, was as foolish as to talk of squaring
the circle, or of giving three right angles to a triangle.

A very simple event rendered this struggle more tragic by imposing
the necessity for immediate action. An anonymous hand sent him a
paper which contained an article of extreme violence against himself
and his influence in regard to Robert Greslon. The writer, evidently
inspired by some relation or some friend of the Jussats, branded modern
philosophy and its doctrines, incarnated in Adrien Sixte and in several
other savants.

Then he called up an example. In a final paragraph, improvised in the
modern style, with the realism of imagery which is the rhetoric of
to-day, as the poesy of the metaphor was that of the past, he showed
the assassin of Mlle. de Jussat mounting the scaffold, and a whole
generation of young decadents cured of their pessimism by this example.

In any other circumstances the great psychologist would have smiled
at this declaration. He would have thought that the _envoi_ came
from his enemy Dumoulin, and resumed his work with the tranquillity of
Archimedes tracing his geometrical figures on the sand during the sack
of the city. But in reading this chronicle, scribbled without doubt on
the corner of a table in the Tortoni _café_ by a moralist of the
boulevard, he perceived one fact of which he had not thought, so much
had the folly of abstraction withdrawn him from the social world: that
this moral drama was becoming a real drama.

In a few weeks, perhaps in a few days, he of whose innocence he held
the proof, would be judged. Now, according to the justice of men,
the supposed assassin of Mlle. de Jussat was innocent; and if this
memoir did not constitute a decisive proof, it offered an indisputable
character of veracity which was sufficient to save a life.

Would he allow this head to fall, he, the confidant of the misery,
the shame, the perfidy of the young man, but who also knew that this
intellectual scoundrel was not an actual murderer?

Without doubt he was bound by the tacit engagement contracted in
opening the manuscript; but was this engagement valid in the presence
of death? There was, in this solitary being assailed for a month by
moral torment, such a need of escaping from the ineffectual and sterile
corrosion of his thoughts by a positive volition, that he felt it a
relief when he had at last decided on a part.

From other journals which he anxiously consulted, he learned that the
Greslon case would come before the assizes of Riom, on Friday, March
11th.

On the 10th he gave Mariette the order to prepare his valise, and
the same evening he took the train after posting a letter addressed
to M. the Count André de Jussat, Captain of Dragoons in garrison at
Lunéville. This letter, not signed, simply contained the lines:

“Monsieur, Count de Jussat has in his hands a letter from his sister
which contains the proof of the innocence of Robert Greslon. Will he
permit an innocent man to be condemned?”

The nihilistic psychologist had not been able to write the words
_right_ and _duty_. But his resolution was taken. He would
wait until the trial was ended, and if M. de Jussat were still silent,
if Greslon were condemned, he would place the memoir in the hands of
the president.

“He took his ticket for Riom,” said Mlle. Trapenard to Father Carbonnet
on returning from the station whither she had accompanied her master,
almost in spite of himself, “but the idea of his going away off there,
alone, and in this cold, when he is so comfortable here!”

“Be easy, Mlle. Mariette,” said the astute porter. “We shall know
all some day. But nothing will make me think that there is not an
illegitimate son in it somewhere.”

VI.

COUNT ANDRÉ.

AT the moment when the note which had been put into the box by Adrien
Sixte arrived at Lunéville, Count André was himself at Riom. Chance
willed that these two men should not meet, for the celebrated writer,
on leaving the train, took his place at a venture in the omnibus for
the Hôtel du Commerce, while the count had his apartment at the Hôtel
de l’Univers.

There in a parlor furnished with old furniture, hung with a faded
paper, with worn curtains and a patched carpet, and on the morning
of this Friday, March 11, 1887, on which the Greslon trial opened,
the brother of poor Charlotte was walking up and down. Noon was about
to strike from the clock of ornamented copper, which decorated the
chimney-piece.

Outside, the sky was covered with clouds, one of those Auvergne skies
which brings the icy wind of the mountains.

The count’s orderly, a dragoon with a jovial physiognomy, had brought
a little military order into this salon, and, after having wound the
clock stirred up the fire he began to set the table for two. From time
to time he watched his captain, who, stroking his mustache with one
hand, biting his lips, wrinkling his brow, wore the expression of the
most painful anxiety. But Joseph Pourat, this was the orderly’s name,
simply thought that the count was scarcely master of himself, while
they were trying the assassin of his sister. For him, as for all who
were in any way connected with the Jussat-Randons and who had known
Charlotte, there was no doubt of Robert Greslon’s guilt. What the
faithful soldier less understood, knowing the energy of his officer,
was that he had allowed the old marquis to go to the trial alone.

“That will do very well,” said the count, and Pourat, who placed the
plates and forks after having wiped them, a necessary preliminary,
thought in presence of the visible agony of his master:

“He has a good heart all the same, if he is a little brusque. How much
he loved her!”

André de Jussat did not seem to even suspect there was any one in
the room beside himself. His brown eyes close to his nose, which had
astonished, almost disturbed Robert Greslon, by their resemblance to
those of a bird of prey, no longer shot forth that proud look which
goes straight to an object, and takes hold of it. No, there was a
species of shrinking back, almost a shame, like a fear of showing
his inmost suffering. They were the eyes of a man whom a fixed idea
possesses and whom the sting of an intolerable pain constantly touches
in the most sensitive part of his soul.

This pain dated from the day on which he had received his sister’s
letter revealing her terrible project of suicide. A dispatch had
arrived almost at the same moment, announcing the death of Charlotte,
and he had taken the train for Auvergne precipitately, without knowing
how to inform his father of the fearful truth, but decided to have a
just revenge on Greslon. And the marquis had received him with these
words: “You received my dispatch? We have the assassin.”

The count had said nothing, comprehending that there must be a
misunderstanding; and the marquis had stated the suspicions against the
preceptor, also the fact that he had just been arrested.

Immediately this idea imposed itself upon the brother, who was mad with
grief, that destiny offered him this vengeance, the only object of his
thought since he had read the confession of the dead and the detail of
her misery, of her errors, her resistances her atrocious deception, of
her fatal resolution.

He had only not to hide the letter, and the cowardly moral assassin of
the young girl would be accused, imprisoned, no doubt condemned. The
honor of Charlotte would be saved, for Robert Greslon could not prove
his relations with the girl. The marquis and the marquise, the father
and the mother, so confiding so penetrated by the truest love for the
memory of their poor child, would at least be ignorant of the fault of
this dear one which would be to them a new despair greater than the
girl’s tragic death.

And Count André was silent. Not, however, without a violent effort over
himself. This courageous man who possessed by nature and by will the
true virtues of a soldier, detested perfidy, compromises of conscience,
all expedients and all dastardliness.

He had felt that it was his duty to speak, not to allow an innocent
person to be accused. He had in vain said to himself that this Greslon
was the moral assassin of Charlotte, and that this assassination
merited a punishment as well as the other; this sophism of his hate
had not quite controlled the other voice, that which forbids us to
become accomplices in an iniquity, and the condemnation of Greslon as a
poisoner was certainly iniquitous.

An unexpected and to him an almost monstrous circumstance had
completely overwhelmed André de Jussat; the silence of the accused.

If Greslon had spoken, recounted his amours, defending his life at the
price of the honor of his victim, the count could not have despised
him enough. By a contrast of character which must appear still more
inexplicable to a simple mind, this infamous man suddenly displayed the
generosity of a gentleman in not speaking a word which could soil the
memory of one whom he had drawn into so detestable an ambuscade.

This scoundrel was brave in the presence of justice, almost heroic in
his way. In any case he ceased to be worthy of disgust only. André said
to himself that this might be the tactics of the court of assizes, a
proceeding to obtain an acquittal in the absence of proofs. But, on the
other hand, he knew by the letter of his sister of the existence of
the journal in which the details of the scientific experiment had been
consigned hour by hour. This journal singularly diminished the chances
of conviction, and Greslon did not produce it.

The officer could not have explained why this dignity of attitude on
the part of his enemy so angered him, that he had a frantic desire to
rush to the magistrate, in order that the truth might be brought to
light, and the dead should owe nothing, not an atom of her posthumous
honor to this scoundrel who had won her love.

When he thought of his sister, the sweet creature whom he had loved,
with so virile and noble an affection, that of an elder brother for
a frail refined child, in the possession of this clown, this chance
preceptor, him who had inflicted on his race an outrage so abject he
could have roared with fury, as when, during the war, it had been
necessary to assist at the capitulation of Metz and to give up his arms.

He felt then a solace in thinking that the bench of infamy on which
were seated burglars, swindlers, and murderers was waiting for this
man, and then the scaffold or the galleys. And he stifled the voice
which said: “You ought to speak.”

My God! what agony for him in these three months, during which there
had not been five minutes in which he had not struggled against these
contradictory sentiments.

On the field of drill, for he had returned to service; on horseback,
galloping over the roads of Lorraine; in his room thinking, over this
question: “What was he to do?”

Weeks had passed without any answer, but the moment had come when it
was necessary to act and to decide, for in two days--the trial must
occupy four sessions--Greslon would be judged and condemned. There
would be still some time after the conviction; but what of it! The
same debate would only have to be gone over again. He had not decided
to be silent until the last. He refrained from speaking, but he had
not vowed to himself that he would refrain from speaking. This was
the reason it had been physically impossible for him to accompany his
father to the Palais de Justice during this first session, of which he
should soon hear the account, as twelve was striking, twelve very harsh
strokes followed by a carillon in the steeple of a neighboring church.

“My captain, here is M. the Marquis,” said the orderly, who had heard
the rolling of a carriage, then its stop before the hotel, after which
he took a look out of the window.

“Ah, well, my father?” asked André anxiously as soon as the marquis had
entered.

“Ah, well! the jury is for us,” responded M. de Jussat. He was no
longer the broken down monomaniac whom Greslon had so bitterly mocked
in his memoir. His eyes were brilliant and there was youth in his
voice and gestures. The passion for vengeance, instead of breaking him
down, sustained him. He had forgotten his hypochondria, and his speech
was quick, impetuous, and clear. “They were drawn this morning. Among
the twelve jurors, there are three farmers, two retired officers, a
physician, two shopkeepers, two proprietors, a manufacturer, and a
professor, all good men, men of family, and who would wish to make
an example. The procureur-général is sure of a conviction. Ah! the
scoundrel! but I was happy, the only time in three months, when I saw
him between two gendarmes! But what audacity! He looked around the
hall. I was on the first bench. He saw me. Would you believe it, he
did not turn away his eyes? He looked at me fixedly as if he wished to
brave me. Ah! we must have his head, and we will have it.”

The old man had spoken with a savage accent and he had not noticed the
painful expression that his words had brought to the face of the count.
This last, at the picture of his enemy, thus conquered by public force,
seized by the gendarmes, as if caught in the gear of that anonymous
and invincible machine of justice, trembled with a chill of shame, the
shame of a man who has employed bravos in a work of death.

These gendarmes, and these magistrates, were really the bravos employed
in doing what he would so much have liked to do himself, with his own
hands and upon his own responsibility. Decidedly, it was cowardly not
to have spoken.

Then the look thrown by Greslon at the Marquis de Jussat, what did it
mean? Did he know that Charlotte had written her letter of confession
the evening before her suicide? And if he knew it, what did he think?
The idea alone that this young man could suspect the truth and despise
them for their silence lighted a fever in the blood of the count.

“No,” said he to himself when the marquis had gone back for the
afternoon session after a dinner eaten in haste, “I cannot keep silent.
I will speak, or I will write.”

He seated himself and began to trace mechanically these words at the
head of a sheet:

“Monsieur the President:”

The night fell while this unhappy man was still in the same place, his
brow in his hand, and not having written the first line of this letter.
He waited for the news of the second session, and it was with a shock
that he heard his father recount the details of it.

“Ah! my dear André! You were right not to come! What infamy! Ah! what
infamy! Greslon was questioned. He continues his system and refuses
to say anything. That is nothing. The experts reported the results of
their analyses. Our good doctor first. His voice trembled, the dear
man, when he described his impression at seeing our poor Charlotte,
you know, in her room. And then Professor Armand; you could not have
endured this horrible thing, this autopsy of our angel in that room in
which there were certainly five hundred persons. And then the Paris
chemist. If there could be any doubt after that! The bottle which that
monster used, was on the table. I saw it. And then--how did he dare?
His lawyer, an official advocate, however, and who has not even the
excuse of being the friend of his client. His advocate. But how shall I
tell you? He asked if Charlotte had had a lover. There was a murmur of
disgust in the hall, of indignation from everybody. She, my child, so
pure, so noble, a saint! I could have choked the man. Even the assassin
was moved, he whom nothing touches. I saw him. At that moment he put
his head in his hands and wept. Answer, ought it not to be forbidden
by law, to speak in that way of a victim in open court? What did this
rogue believe then, that she had a lover? A lover! She a lover!”

The old man’s indignation was so strong that he suddenly burst into
tears. The son, in presence of this touching grief felt his heart melt
and the tears fill his eyes, and the two men embraced one another
without a word.

“You see,” resumed the father when he was able to speak, “this is
the dreadful side of these trials, the public discussion of the most
private matters. I have told you before that I was sure she was unhappy
all winter because Maxime was absent. She loved him, but was not
willing that it should be seen. It was this that aroused Greslon’s
jealousy when he came to the house and found her so gracious, so
unpretentious, he believed that he could win her. How could she have
suspected such a thing, when I who have had so much experience of men,
never saw or guessed any thing?”

Once started on this subject the marquis talked all through the dinner,
then during the whole evening. He enjoyed the consolation, the only one
possible in certain crises, of recollecting aloud. And the religious
worship which the unhappy father preserved for the dead was for the
son, who listened without responding, something tragical at this moment
when he was preparing to do what? Was he really about to bring this
terrible blow on the old man? In his own room, with the great silence
of a provincial city around him, he took up his sister’s letter and
read it again, although he knew by heart every phrase in it. There
arose from these pages traced by the hand forever still, a sigh so
profound, a breath of agony so sad and so heartrending! The illusion of
the girl had been so mad, her struggles so sincere, her awakening so
bitter, that the count felt again the tears flow down his cheeks. This
was the second time that he had wept that day, he who, since the death
of Charlotte, had kept his eyes dry and burning with hate.

He said: “Greslon has deserved--” He remained motionless some
minutes, and, walking toward the chimney in which the fire was just
extinguished, he placed on the half-consumed log the leaves of the
letter. He struck a match and slipped it under the paper. He saw the
line of flame develop all around, then again the frail writing, then
transform this only proof of the miserable amour and suicide into a
blackish mass.

The brother finished by mixing this debris with the ashes. He lay down
saying aloud: “It is done,” and he slept, as on the night after his
first battle, the exhausted sleep which succeeds with men of action,
great expenditure of will, and he did not open his eyes until nine
o’clock the next day.

“Monsieur, the marquis forbade me to wake you,” said Pourat when,
called by his master, he opened the shutters. The sunlight entered,
the bright sunlight instead of the sad and lowering sky of the evening
before. “He has been gone an hour. My captain knows that to-day they
are going to take the accused by the subterranean passage, everybody is
so excited against him.”

“What subterranean passage?” asked André.

“That one which goes from the jail to the Palais de Justice. They
use it for great criminals, those who might be torn to pieces by the
public. Faith, captain, if I saw that fellow go by, I believe I should
feel like knocking him over on the spot. Those enraged dogs do not
judge, they kill. But,” he continued, “I have forgotten the morning’s
letters in the salon.”

He returned in a minute, having in his hand three envelopes. André, who
threw a glance at the first two, saw at once from whom they came. The
third was in an unknown hand. It had been addressed to Lunéville, from
Paris, then sent on to Riom. The count opened it, and read the three
lines which Sixte had written before taking the train for Riom. The
hands of this brave officer who did not know the meaning of the word
fear, began to tremble. He became as pale as the paper which he held in
his trembling hands, so pale that Pourat said to him with fear:

“My captain is ill.”

“Leave me,” said the count brusquely. “I will dress myself alone.”

He had need to recover from the sudden blow which had just struck him.
There was some one in the world who knew the terrible secret, some
one who knew the mystery of Charlotte’s death and who was not Robert
Greslon, for he had seen some of the young man’s writing and this was
quite unlike it.

This was a shock of terror such as the most courageous might feel
before a fact so absolutely unexpected that it takes on a supernatural
character. If the brother of Charlotte had seen his sister, alive there
before him, he could not have been more prostrated with astonishment.

Some one knew of the suicide of the young girl, and of the letter
written by her before her death, and possibly all the rest. And this
some one, this mysterious witness of the truth, what did he think of
him? The question with which the note ended told plainly enough.

Suddenly the count remembered what he had dared to do. He remembered
the letter thrown into the fire, and the purple of shame rushed to his
cheeks. The resolution, taken the evening before, could not be kept.
That any man should have the right to say: “The Count de Jussat has
committed a cowardly act,” was more than this gentleman so proud of his
honor, was able to endure. The trouble of the night before, that he
had believed ended, revived, and was rendered more intolerable by the
return of his father who said:

“They have heard all the witnesses. I have deposed. But what was very
hard was to find myself in the small hall with Greslon’s mother. It
is a chance if she does not come down here. She is at the Hôtel du
Commerce, where she has begged me to come to talk with her. Ah! what a
scene! She has a face not to be forgotten, a severe face, with black
eyes which have, as it were, a fire in their tears. She walked up to
me and spoke to me. She adjured me to say that her son was innocent,
that I knew it, that I had no right to depose against him. Yes, it was
a terrible scene, and the gendarme interrupted it. The unhappy woman!
I cannot feel hard toward her. He is her son. What a strange thing
that a rascal like him can still have in the world a heart that loves
him, even as I loved Charlotte, as I love you! Alas!” continued the old
man. “It is one o’clock. The attorney-general is going to speak. Then
the defense. Between five and six o’clock we shall have the verdict.
Ah, but that will satisfy the heart to see him when the sentence is
pronounced! It is only just. He has committed murder. He ought to die.”

When the count was again alone, he began to walk up and down, as the
evening before, while Pourat with the valet of M. de Jussat, cleared
away the table. These two men have since declared that their master had
never seemed so violently uneasy, as during the thirty minutes that
they were busy in the room. Their astonishment was very great when he
asked to have his uniform got ready.

In a quarter of an hour he was dressed and left the hotel. One
detail made the brave Pourat shiver. He stated that the officer took
his revolver with him which had been placed for two nights on the
nightstand. The soldier communicated his fears to his companion.

“If this Greslon is acquitted,” said he, “the captain is the man to
blow his brains out on the spot.”

“We ought to follow him, perhaps?” responded the
_valet-de-chambre_.

While the two servants were deliberating, the count followed the main
street which led to the Palais de Justice. He knew it, for he had
often been to Riom in his childhood. This old parliamentary city, with
its large hotels with the high windows, built in black Volvic stone,
seemed more empty, more silent, more dead than usual as the brother of
Charlotte walked toward the court.

Near the approaches to Palais there was a dense crowd which filled
the narrow Rue Saint-Louis by which one reaches the hall of assize.
The Greslon case had attracted all who had an hour to spare. André
could scarcely force his way through the mass of people, composed of
countrymen and small shopkeepers who were conversing with passionate
animation.

He arrived at the steps which lead to the vestibule. Two soldiers
guarded the door, charged to keep back the crowd. The count seemed to
hesitate, then, instead of entering, he pushed on to the end of the
street. He reached a terrace, which, situated between the sinister
walls of the central building and the dark mass of the Palais, gave a
view of the immense plain of the Limagne.

A fountain charmed the silence of this spot, and the sound of its
murmuring could be heard even above the noise of the crowd in the
neighboring street. André sat down on a bench near the fountain. He
was never able to tell why he remained there more than half an hour,
nor the exact reason why he arose, walked toward the Palais, wrote his
name and some words on a card, and gave this card to a soldier to be
carried by the bailiff to the president.

He had the very distinct feeling that he must act, almost in spite
of himself, and as in a dream. His resolution nevertheless was taken
and he felt that he should not weaken again, although he apprehended
with horrible anguish the meeting with his father, who was over there,
beyond those people whose heads were bent forward, their shoulders
curved.

He felt in his agony the only solace he could experience when the
bailiff came for him. For, instead of introducing him at once into the
hall, this man led him through a passage to a small room which was,
without doubt, the office of the president. Some packets were lying
on the table. An overcoat and a hat hung on a peg. Arrived there, his
guide said to him:

“Monsieur the president will come to you as soon as the
attorney-general has finished.” What unexpected consolation in his
pain! The punishment of deposing in public and before his father
would be spared him! This hope was of short duration. The officer had
not been ten minutes in the office of the president when the latter
entered: a large old man, with a face yellow from bile and with gray
hair, whom the contrast of his red robe made look greenish. After the
first words and before the affirmation of the count that he brought
proof of the innocence of the accused:

“On these conditions, monsieur,” said the president, “I cannot receive
your confidences. The audience is to be resumed and you will be heard
as a witness, provided neither the prosecution nor the defense object.”

Thus none of the stations toward his Calvary could the brother of
Charlotte avoid. He was about to come in contact with this impassible
machinery of justice, which does not stop, which cannot stop on account
of human sensibility. He must seat himself in the witness chamber, and
recall the scene which had passed there between his father and the
mother of Greslon, then enter the hall of assize. He could see the
bare wall with the image of the crucified which overlooked this hall,
the heads turned toward him in supreme attention, the president among
his judges, and the attorney-general, all in their red robes; the
jurors on the left of the court. Robert Greslon was on the right on the
prisoner’s bench, his arms folded, livid but impassible, and everybody
crowded everywhere, behind the magistrates, in the tribunes.

On the witness bench André recognized his father and his white hairs.
Ah! how this sight cut him to the heart--the heart which did not
falter however, when the president, after asking the counsel and
attorney-general if they did not object to hearing the witness, asked
him to state his name and title and take oath according to the formula.
The magistrates who assisted at this scene are unanimous in declaring
that they never experienced an emotion in court at all comparable to
that which seized the audience and themselves when this man, whose
heroic past all were acquainted with through the articles published
in the journals, began in a firm voice, but one which betrayed
excruciating grief:

“Gentlemen of the jury: I have only a few words to say. My sister was
not assassinated, she killed herself. The night before her death she
wrote me a letter in which she announced her resolution to die, and
why. Gentlemen, I believe that I had the right to conceal this suicide,
I burned this letter. If the man whom you have before you,” and he
indicated Greslon with his left hand--“did not give the poison, he
has done worse. But this is not for your justice to consider, and he
ought not to be convicted as an assassin. He is innocent. In default of
material proof which I can no longer give, I bring you my word.”

These sentences fell one by one, amid the anguish of the whole
audience. There was a cry followed by groans.

“He is mad,” said a voice, “he is mad, do not listen to him.”

“No, my Father,” replied Count André, who recognized the voice of the
marquis, and who turned toward the old man, who lay back, crushed, on
his bench. “I am not mad. I have done what honor compelled. I hope,
monsieur the president, that I may be spared from saying any more.”

There was entreaty in his voice, the voice of this proud man, as he
uttered this last sentence, and it so affected the hearers that a
murmur ran through the crowd when the president replied:

“To my great regret, monsieur, I cannot grant what you ask. The extreme
importance of the deposition which you have just made does not permit
justice to rest upon the information which is our duty--a very painful
duty--to ask you to state precisely.”

“That is well, monsieur, I also will do my duty to the end.”

There was in the accent with which the witness uttered this sentence
such resolution that the murmur of the crowd gave way suddenly to
silence, and the president was heard saying:

“You spoke of a letter, monsieur, which your sister had written to you.
Permit me to say that it is at least extraordinary that your first idea
was not to enlighten justice by communicating it at once.”

“It contained,” said the count, “a secret which I would have been
willing to conceal at the price of my blood.”

He has since told the friend who remained so true to the end of this
drama, Maxime de Plane, that this was the most terrible moment of
his sacrifice--but his emotion was suppressed by its very excess. He
was obliged to give all the details of the letter--and recount his
own sensations, and confess all his agonies. As to what followed, he
has declared that he could recall only a few material details--and
those the most unexpected--the coldness to his hand of an iron column
against which he was leaning when he ought to have been sitting on the
witness bench from which some one came to take him to his father who
had fainted at the last words of his deposition. He noticed also the
drawling Lorraine accent of the procureur-général who had risen to
abandon the prosecution.

How much time elapsed between the speeches of the procureur and of
Greslon’s counsel, the retiring of the jury and its re-entrance with a
negative verdict, he never knew. He has never known how he employed
his evening, after the doorkeeper had invited him to leave. He
remembers to have walked a great distance. Some citizens of Combronde
met him on the road to this village. He went to an inn where he wrote
some letters, addressed, one to his father, one to his mother and a
third to his colonel, and a last to Maxime de Plane. At nine o’clock he
knocked at the door of the Hôtel du Commerce, where his father had told
him the mother of Greslon had gone, and he asked the _concierge_
if M. Greslon was there. This fellow had heard of the dramatic scene.
He guessed from the uniform of the captain who he was, and had the good
sense to reply that M. Robert Greslon had not appeared. Unfortunately
he thought it right to inform the young man, who was at that moment
with his mother and M. Adrien Sixte. This last could not resist the
supplications of the widow who, having met him in the corridor of the
hotel, had conjured him to aid her in comforting her son.

“Monsieur,” said the _concierge_ to Robert after having asked
permission to speak to him apart, “be careful, M. de Jussat is looking
for you.”

“Where is he?” asked Greslon feverishly.

“He cannot have left the street,” responded the _concierge_, “but
I told him that you were not here.”

“You did wrong,” replied Greslon. And taking his hat, he rushed toward
the stairs.

“Where are you going?” implored his mother. The young man did not
answer. Perhaps he did not even hear this cry, he was in such haste to
go down the stairs. The idea that Count André believed him cowardly
enough to hide himself maddened him. He had not long to look for his
enemy. The count was on the opposite side of the street, watching the
door. Robert saw him and walked straight up to him.

“You have something to say to me, monsieur?” he asked proudly.

“Yes,” said the count.

“I am at your service,” continued Greslon, “for whatever reparation
that it may please you to exact. I will not leave Riom, I give you my
word.”

“No, monsieur,” responded André de Jussat, “one does not fight with
such men as you, one executes them.”

He drew his revolver from his pocket, and as the other, instead of
fleeing, remained standing before him and seemed to say: “I dare you,”
he lodged a bullet in his head. The noise of the report, and a cry of
agony were heard at the same time at the hotel, and when they ran to
see the cause, they found Count André standing against the wall, who,
throwing down his pistol and, folding his arms said simply, pointing to
the body of his sister’s lover at his feet:

“I have executed justice.”

And he allowed himself to be arrested without any resistance.

During the night which followed this tragic scene, the admirers of the
“Psychology of God” of the “Theory of the Passions” and of the “Anatomy
of the Will,” would have been astonished if they could have seen what
was passing in room No. 3 of the Hôtel du Commerce, and in the mind of
their implacable and powerful master. At the foot of the bed on which
lay the dead man, with his brow bandaged, knelt the mother of Robert
Greslon.

The great negator, seated on a chair, looked at this woman praying, and
at the dead man who had been his disciple, sleeping the sleep which
Charlotte de Jussat was also sleeping; and, for the first time, feeling
his mind powerless to sustain him, this analyst, almost inhuman by
force of logic, bowed before the impenetrable mystery of destiny. The
words of the only prayer he remembered: “Our Father who art in heaven,”
came to his mind. Surely he did not pronounce them. Perhaps he never
will pronounce them. But if he exist, then the only father toward whom
they could turn in their hours of distress and in whom was their only
resource, was their heavenly father. And voices of prayer the most
touching went up. And if this heavenly father did only exist, should we
have this hunger and not insist for him in such hours as this? “Thou
wouldst not sent me if thou hadst not found me!” At that very moment,
thanks to the lucidity of mind which accompanies the scholar into all
crises, Adrien Sixte recalled this admirable sentence of Pascal in
his “Mystère de Jésus”, and when the mother arose from her knees the
philosopher was also weeping.

THE END.

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