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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

THE DISCIPLE
BY

PAUL BOURGET

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

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

[Pg vii]

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 [Pg viii] 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 [Pg ix] 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 [Pg x]
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 [Pg xi] 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 [Pg xii] 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. [Pg xiii] 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 [Pg xiv] 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 [Pg xv] 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 [Pg xvi] 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 [Pg xvii] 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.

[Pg 13]

THE DISCIPLE
I.
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.

[Pg 14]

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 [Pg 15] 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 [Pg 16] 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 [Pg 17] 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 [Pg 18] 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 [Pg 19] 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 [Pg 20] 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 [Pg 21] 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. [Pg 22] 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.

[Pg 23]

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. [Pg 24] 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 [Pg 25] 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.

[Pg 26]

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 [Pg 27] 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 [Pg 28] 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 [Pg 29] 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 [Pg 30] 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 [Pg 31] 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, [Pg 32] 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 [Pg 33] 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 [Pg 34] 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, [Pg 35] 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 [Pg 36] 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 [Pg 37] 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. [Pg 38] 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 [Pg 39] 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.

[Pg 40]

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 [Pg 41] 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.”

[Pg 42]

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.

[Pg 43]

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:

[Pg 44]

“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 [Pg 45] 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:

[Pg 46]

“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.

[Pg 47]

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 [Pg 48] 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, [Pg 49] 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 [Pg 50] 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 [Pg 51] 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 [Pg 52] 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 [Pg 53] 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.

[Pg 54]

“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 [Pg 55] 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.”

[Pg 56]

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.”

[Pg 57]

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 [Pg 58] 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 [Pg 59] 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.

[Pg 60]

“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 [Pg 61]
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 [Pg 62] 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 [Pg 63] 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:

[Pg 64]

“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.”
[Pg 65]

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 [Pg 66] 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 [Pg 67] 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 [Pg 68] 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 [Pg 69] 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 [Pg 70] 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.

[Pg 71]

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 [Pg 72] 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.

[Pg 73]

“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 [Pg 74] 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 [Pg 75] 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.

[Pg 76]

“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 [Pg 77] 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 [Pg 78] 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 [Pg 79] 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 [Pg 80] 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 [Pg 81] 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 [Pg 82] 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 [Pg 83] 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. [Pg 84] 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 [Pg 85] 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?”

[Pg 86]

“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 [Pg 87] 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 [Pg 88] 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 [Pg 89] 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.”

[Pg 90]
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 [Pg 91] 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.’

[Pg 92]

“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 [Pg 93] 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.”

[Pg 94]

§ 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 [Pg 95] 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 [Pg 96] 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.

[Pg 97]

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 [Pg 98] 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 [Pg 99] 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 [Pg 100] 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 [Pg 101] 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, [Pg 102]
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 [Pg 103] 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 [Pg 104] 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 [Pg 105] 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 [Pg 106] 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 [Pg 107] 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 [Pg 108] 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 [Pg 109] 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, [Pg 110] 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.

[Pg 111]

“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 [Pg 112] 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 [Pg 113] 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 [Pg 114]
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 [Pg 115] 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 [Pg 116] 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 [Pg 117] 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 [Pg 118] 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 [Pg 119] 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.

[Pg 120]

§ 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 [Pg 121] 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 [Pg 122] 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 [Pg 123] 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, [Pg 124] 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? [Pg
125] 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 [Pg 126] 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, [Pg 127] 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.

[Pg 128]

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.

[Pg 129]

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 [Pg 130] 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 [Pg 131] 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 [Pg 132] 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 [Pg 133] 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 [Pg 134] 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 [Pg 135] 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 [Pg 136] 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 [Pg 137] 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 [Pg 138]
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 [Pg 139] 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 [Pg 140] 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.

[Pg 141]

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 [Pg 142] 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 [Pg 143] 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.

[Pg 144]
§ 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 [Pg 145] 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 [Pg 146] 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 [Pg 147] 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.”

[Pg 148]

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 [Pg 149] 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 [Pg 150] 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.

[Pg 151]

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.

[Pg 152]

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 [Pg 153] 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 [Pg 154] 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 [Pg 155] 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: [Pg 156] 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 [Pg 157] 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 [Pg
158] 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 [Pg 159] 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. [Pg 160] 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 [Pg 161] 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, [Pg 162] 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.”

[Pg 163]

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 [Pg 164] 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, [Pg 165] 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, [Pg 166] 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 [Pg 167] “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.”

[Pg 168]

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, [Pg 169] 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 [Pg 170] 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 [Pg 171] 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 [Pg 172] 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 [Pg 173] 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 [Pg 174] 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 [Pg 175] 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 [Pg 176] 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 [Pg 177] 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.

[Pg 178]

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.

[Pg 179]

§ 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.

[Pg 180]

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 [Pg 181] 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 [Pg 182] 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 [Pg 183] 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:

[Pg 184]

“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 [Pg 185] 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 [Pg 186] 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
[Pg 187] 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.”

[Pg 188]

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.

[Pg 189]

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.

[Pg 190]

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 [Pg 191] 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. [Pg 192]

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 [Pg
193] 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 [Pg 194] 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.”

[Pg 195]

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 [Pg 196] 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.

[Pg 197]

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 [Pg 198] 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 [Pg 199] 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 [Pg 200] 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.

[Pg 201]
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 [Pg 202] 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 [Pg 203] 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?”

[Pg 204]

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.

[Pg 205]

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.

[Pg 206]

“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.

[Pg 207]

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.”

[Pg 208]

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, [Pg 209] 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 [Pg 210] 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 [Pg 211] 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 [Pg 212] 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 [Pg 213] 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 [Pg 214] 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 [Pg 215] 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 [Pg 216] 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 [Pg 217] 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 [Pg 218] 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 [Pg
219] 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 [Pg 220] 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
[Pg 221] 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 [Pg 222] 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.”

[Pg 223]

“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 [Pg 224]
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,
[Pg 225] 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 [Pg 226] 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 [Pg 227] 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 [Pg 228] 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 [Pg 229] 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!

[Pg 230]

§ 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 [Pg 231] 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 [Pg 232] 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 [Pg 233] 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 [Pg
234] 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?

[Pg 235]

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 [Pg 236] 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 [Pg 237] 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.

[Pg 238]

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 [Pg 239] 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. [Pg 240] 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 [Pg 241] 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.

[Pg 242]

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 [Pg 243] 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 [Pg 244] 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.

[Pg 245]

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 [Pg 246] 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.

[Pg 247]

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.

[Pg 248]

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 [Pg 249] 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 [Pg 250] 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 [Pg 251] 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 [Pg 252] 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.

[Pg 253]

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
[Pg 254] 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.

[Pg 255]

§ 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.

[Pg 256]

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 [Pg 257] 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.

[Pg 258]

“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 [Pg 259] 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 [Pg 260] 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.

[Pg 261]

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 [Pg 262] 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 [Pg 263] 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 [Pg 264] 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 [Pg 265] 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, [Pg 266] 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 [Pg 267] 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 [Pg 268] 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.”

[Pg 269]

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 [Pg 270] 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 [Pg 271] 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 [Pg 272] 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 [Pg 273] 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 [Pg 274] 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, [Pg 275]
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 [Pg 276] 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 [Pg 277] 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.

[Pg 278]

“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, [Pg 279] 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 [Pg 280] 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:

[Pg 281]

“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.

[Pg 282]
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,
[Pg 283] 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 [Pg 284] 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?

[Pg 285]

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, [Pg 286] 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 [Pg 287] 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 [Pg 288] 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.”

[Pg 289]

§ 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 [Pg 290] 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 [Pg 291] 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.

[Pg 292]

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.

[Pg 293]

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.
[Pg 294]

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

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

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

The philosopher, since the visit of Mme. Greslon, went and came, like one who cannot stay in
any place, who, as soon as he goes out thinks [Pg 295] 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.”

[Pg 296]

“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.

[Pg 297]

“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.

[Pg 298]

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 [Pg 299] 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 [Pg
300] 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.

[Pg 301]

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 [Pg 302] 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.

[Pg 303]

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:

[Pg 304]

“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!

[Pg 305]

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 [Pg 306] 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 [Pg 307]
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
[Pg 308] 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.

[Pg 309]
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, [Pg 310] 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 [Pg 311] 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.

[Pg 312]

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: [Pg 313] “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.

[Pg 314]

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 [Pg 315] 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, [Pg 316] 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.”

[Pg 317]

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 [Pg 318] 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 [Pg 319] 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 [Pg 320] 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 [Pg 321] 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 [Pg 322] 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 [Pg 323] 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 [Pg 324] 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.

[Pg 325]

“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 [Pg 326] 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, [Pg 327] 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 [Pg 328] 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 [Pg 329] 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 [Pg 330] 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 [Pg 331] 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.

[Pg 332]

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 [Pg 333] 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 [Pg 334] 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.

[Pg 335]

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.”

[Pg 336]

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:

[Pg 337]

“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 [Pg 338] 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.

[Pg 339]

“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.”

[Pg 340]

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 [Pg 341] 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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