has been twice to ask for you in the last quarter of an hour. She said
that you were expecting her.”
“Bring her here,” responded the savant. “It is the mother,” thought
he. His first impulse was to go in at once, then a kind of timidity
came over him, and he remained at the door while the _concierge_,
followed by the cock, went over to the group collected on the corner of
the street.
The woman no sooner heard Carbonnet’s words than she turned toward the
philosopher’s house, leaving Ferdinand’s master to scold the drunkard.
The philosopher, instinctively continuing his reasoning, instantly
noticed a singular resemblance between the mysterious person and the
young man about whom he had been questioned. There were the same bright
eyes, in a very pale face, and the same cast of features. There was
not the least doubt, and immediately the implacable psychologist,
curious only about a case to be studied, gave place to the awkward,
simple-minded man, unskillful in practical life, embarrassed by his
long body and not knowing how to say the first word. Mme. Greslon, for
it was she, relieved him by saying: “I am, monsieur, the person who
wrote to you yesterday.”
“Very much honored, madame,” stammered the philosopher, “I regret that
I was not at home earlier. But your letter said four o’clock. And then
I have just come from the Judge of Instruction, where I was summoned to
testify in the case of this unhappy child.”
“Ah! monsieur,” said the mother, touching M. Sixte upon the arm to call
his attention to the _commissionaire_ who stood in the angle of
the door to listen.
“I beg your pardon,” said the savant, who comprehended the cruelty of
his abstraction. “Permit me to pass before you to show you the way.”
He proceeded to mount the stairs which began to be dark at this time
of a winter’s day. He went up slowly to suit the lassitude of his
companion, who held by the rail, as if she had scarcely energy enough
to ascend the four flights. Her short breath which could be heard in
the provincial silence of this empty house, betrayed the feebleness of
the unhappy woman.
As little sensitive as was the philosopher to the outer world, he was
filled with pity when, entering his study with its closed shutters
which the fire and the lamp already lighted by his servant softly
illumined, he saw his visitor face to face. The wrinkle plowed from the
corners of the mouth to the _ala_ of the nose, the lips scorched
by fever, the eyebrows contracted, the darkness about the eyelids, the
nervousness of the hands in their black gloves, in which she held a
roll of paper, without doubt some justifying memoir--all these details
revealed the torture of a fixed idea; and scarcely had she fallen into
a chair when she said in a broken voice:
“My God! my God! I am then too late. I wished to speak to you,
monsieur, before your conversation with the judge. But you defended
him, did you not? You said that it was not possible; that he had not
done what they accuse him of? You do not believe him guilty, monsieur,
you whom he called his master, you whom he loved so much?”
“I did not have to defend him, madame,” said the philosopher; “I was
asked what had been my relations with him, and as I had seen him only
twice, and he spoke only of his studies----”
“Ah!” interrupted the mother with an accent of profound anguish; and
she repeated: “I have come too late. But no,” she continued, clasping
her trembling hands. “You will go before the Court of Assizes to
testify that he cannot be guilty, that you know he cannot be? One does
not become an assassin, a poisoner, in a day. The youth of criminals
prepares the way for their crimes. They are bad persons, gamblers,
frequenters of the saloons. But he has always been with his books, like
his poor father. I used to say to him: ‘Come, Robert run out, you must
take the air, you must amuse yourself.’ If you could have seen what a
quiet little life we lead, he and I, before he went into this accursed
family. And it was for my sake that he should not cost me anything more
that he went into it, and that he might go on with his studies.”
“He would have been admitted in three or four years and then perhaps
have taken a position in a lyceum at Clermont. I should have had him
marry. I have seen a good _parti_ for him. I should have remained
with him, in some corner, to take care of his children. Ah! monsieur!”
and she sought in the philosopher’s eyes, a response in harmony with
her passionate desire; “tell me, if it is possible for a son who had
such ideas to do what they say he has done? It is infamous; is it not
infamous, monsieur?”
“Be calm, madame, be calm.” These were the only words which Adrien
Sixte could find to say to this mother who wept over the ruin of her
most cherished hopes. Beside, being still under the impression of his
conversation with the judge, she seemed to him to be so wildly beyond
the truth, a prey to illusions so blind that he was stupefied, and
also, why not confess it? the renewed prospect of the journey to Riom
frightened him as much as the grief of the mother affected him.
These different impressions showed themselves in his manner by an
uncertainty, an absence of warmth which did not deceive the mother.
Extreme suffering has infallible intuitions of instinct. This woman
understood that the philosopher did not believe in the innocence of her
son, and with a gesture of extreme depression, recoiling from him with
horror, she moaned:
“Monsieur, you too, you are with his enemies. You--you?”
“No, madame, no,” gently responded Adrien Sixte, “I am not an enemy.
I ask nothing better than to believe what you believe. But you will
permit me to speak frankly? Facts are facts, and they are terribly
against him. The poison bought clandestinely, the bottle thrown out of
the window, the other bottle half emptied then refilled with water,
the going out of the girl’s room on the night of her death; the false
dispatch, his sudden departure, those burned letters, and then his
denial of it all.”
“But, monsieur, there is no proof in all that,” interrupted the mother,
“no proof at all. What of his sudden departure? He had been wishing for
more than a month to get away from the place, I have a letter in which
he speaks of his plan, and beside his engagement was almost at an end.
He fancied that they wished to retain him and he was tired of the life
of a tutor, and then, as he is so timid, he gave a false pretext and
invented this unfortunate dispatch that is all. And as to the poison
he did not buy it secretly. He has suffered for years from a stomach
trouble. He has studied too hard immediately after his meals. Who saw
him go out of that room? A servant! What if the real murderer paid
this servant to accuse my son? Do we know anything about this girl’s
intrigues and who were interested in killing her?”
“Do you not see that all these and the letters and the bottle are parts
of the plan for making suspicion fall on him? How? Why? That will be
found out some day. But what I do know is that my son is not guilty. I
swear it by the memory of his father. Ah! do you believe I would defend
him like this if I felt him to be a criminal? I would ask for pity,
I would weep, I would pray, but now I cry for justice, justice! No,
these people have no right to accuse him, to throw him into prison, to
dishonor our name, for nothing, for nothing. You see, monsieur, I have
shown you that they have not a single proof.”
“If he is innocent, why this obstinacy in keeping silent?” asked the
philosopher, who thought that the poor woman had shown nothing except
her desperation in struggling against the evidence.
“Ah! if he were guilty he would talk,” cried Mme. Greslon, “he would
defend himself, he would lie! No,” added she in a hollow voice, “there
is some mystery. He knows something, that I am sure of, something which
he does not wish to tell. He has some reason for not speaking. Perhaps
he does not wish to dishonor this young girl, for they claim that he
loved her. Oh! monsieur, I have wanted to see you at any risk, for you
are the only one who can make him speak, who can make him tell what he
has resolved not to tell. You must promise me to write to him, to go to
him. You owe this to me,” she insisted in a hard tone. “You have made
me suffer so much.”
“I?” exclaimed the philosopher.
“Yes, you,” replied she bitterly, and as she spoke her face betrayed
the strength of old grudges; “whose fault is it that he has lost
faith? Yours, monsieur, through your books. My God! How I did hate you
then! I can still see his face when he told me he would not commune
on All-Soul’s day, because he had doubts. ‘And thy father?’ said I to
him, ‘All-Soul’s day!’ said he: ‘Leave me alone, I do not believe in
that any longer, that is done with.’ He was sitting at his table and he
had a volume before him which he closed while he was talking to me.
I remember. I read the name of the author mechanically. It was yours,
monsieur.
“I did not argue with him that day; he was a great savant already, and
I a poor, ignorant woman. But the next day, while he was at college I
took M. the Abbé Martel, who had educated him, into his room to show
him the library. I had a presentiment that it was the reading which had
corrupted my son. Your book, monsieur, was still on the table. The abbé
took it up and said to me: ‘This is the worst of them all.’
“Monsieur, pardon me, if I wound you, but do you see, if my son were
still a Christian, I would go and pray his confessor to command him
to speak. You have taken away his faith, monsieur, I do not reproach
you any more; but what I would have asked of the priest, I have come
to ask of you. If you had heard him when he came back from Paris! He
said to me, speaking of you: ‘If you knew him _maman_, you would
venerate him, for he is a saint.’ Ah! promise me to make him speak.
Let him speak for me, for his father, for those who love him, for you,
monsieur, who cannot have had an assassin for a pupil. For he is your
pupil, you are his master; he owes it to you to defend himself, as much
as to me his mother.”
“Madame,” said the savant with deep seriousness, “I promise you
to do all that I can.” This was the second time to-day that this
responsibility of master and pupil had been thrust upon him. Once
by the judge, repelled by the resistance of the thinker who repels
with disdain a senseless reproach. The words of this good woman,
quivering with this human grief to which he was so little accustomed,
touched other fibres than those of pride. He was still more strangely
affected when Mme. Greslon, seizing his hand with a gentleness which
contradicted the bitterness of her last words, said:
“He spoke the truth when he said you were good. I came too,” she
continued drying her tears, “to requite myself of a commission with
which the poor child charged me. And see if there is not in it a proof
that he is innocent. In his prison during these two months, he has
written a long work on philosophy. He considers it by far his best work
and I am charged to hand it to you.” She gave the savant the roll of
paper which she had held on her lap. “It is just as he gave it to me.
They let him write as much as he likes, everybody loves him. They do
not allow me to speak to him except in the frightful parlor where there
is always the guard between us. Will you look?” she insisted, and in an
altered tone: “He has never lied to me, and I believe whatever he has
told me. If, however, he had only thought to write to you what he will
not confide to any one else?”
“I will see immediately,” said Adrien Sixte, who unfolded the roll.
He threw his eyes over the first page of the manuscript and he saw
the words: “Modern Psychology,” then on the second sheet another
title, “Memoir upon Myself,” and underneath were the following lines:
“I write to my dear master. Monsieur Adrien Sixte, and engage his
word to keep to himself the pages which follow. If he do not agree
to make this engagement with his unhappy pupil, I ask him to destroy
this manuscript, confiding in his honor not to deliver it to any one
whomsoever, even to save my life.” And the young man had simply signed
his initials.
“Well?” asked the mother as the philosopher continued to turn over the
leaves, a prey to profound anxiety.
“Well!” responded he, closing the manuscript and holding the first
page before the curious eyes of Mme. Greslon, “this is only a work on
philosophy, as he told you. See.”
The mother had a question on her lips, and suspicion in her eyes while
she was reading the technical formula which was unintelligible to her
poor mind. She had observed Adrien Sixte’s hesitation. But she did not
dare to ask, and she rose saying:
“You will excuse me for having kept you so long, monsieur. I have
placed my last hope upon you, and you will not deceive a mother’s
heart. I carry your promise with me.”
“All that it will be possible for me to do that the truth may be
known,” said the philosopher gravely, “I will do, madame, I promise you
again.”
When he had conducted the unhappy woman to the door, and was again
alone in his study Adrien Sixte remained for a long time plunged in
reflection. Taking up the manuscript, he read and reread the sentence
written by the young man, and pushing away the tempting manuscript, he
paced the floor. Twice he seized the sheets and approached the fire,
but he did not throw them into the flames. A combat was going on in his
mind between a devouring curiosity, and apprehensions of very different
kinds. To contract the engagement which this reading would impose on
him, and to learn what could be learned from these pages would throw
him, perhaps, into a horrible situation. If he were going to hold in
his hands the proof of the young man’s innocence without the right
to use it, or what he suspected still more, the proof of his guilt,
what then? Without being conscious of it he trembled in his inmost
nature, lest he find in this memoir if there were crime, the trace of
his own influence, and the cruel accusations already twice formulated,
that his books were mixed up with this sinister history. On the other
hand, the unconscious egoism of studious men who have a horror of all
confusion, forbade him to enter any further into a drama with which he
had definitely nothing to do.
“No,” he concluded, “I will not read this memoir; I will write to this
boy as I have promised the mother to do, then it will be ended.”
However, his dinner had come in the midst of his reflections. He ate
alone, as always, seated in the corner by a porcelain stove, the
weather being very chilly, the heat was his only comfort, and before a
little round table, covered with a piece of oilcloth. The lamp which
served for his work lighted his frugal repast, consisting, as usual, of
soup and one dish of vegetables with some raisins for dessert, and for
drink water alone.
Ordinarily he took one of the books which had been exiled from the
too-crowded study, or he listened while Mlle. Trapenard exposed the
details of the housekeeping. On this evening he did not look for a
book, and his housekeeper tried in vain to discover if the lady’s
visit and the summons had any connection. The wind rose, a winter’s
wind whose plaint from across the empty space died gently against
the shutters. Seated in his armchair after his dinner, with Robert
Greslon’s manuscript before him, the savant listened for a long time
to this monotonous but sad music. His hesitation returned. Then
psychology drove away all scruples, and when later Mariette came to
announce that his bed was ready, he told her to retire. Two o’clock
struck and he was still reading the strange piece of self-analysis
which Robert Greslon called a memoir upon himself, but whose correct
title should have been:
“Confession of a Young Man of the Period.”
IV.
CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD.
“THE JAIL AT RIOM, January, 1887.
“I WRITE to you, monsieur, this memoir of myself which I have refused
to the counsel in spite of my mother’s entreaties. I write it to you,
who in reality know so little of me, and at what a moment of my life!
for the same reason that led me to bring my first work to you. There is
my illustrious master, between you and myself, your pupil accused of
a most infamous crime, a bond which men could not understand, and of
which you yourself are ignorant, but which I feel to be as close as it
is indissoluble. I have lived with your thought, and by your thought so
passionately, so entirely at the most decisive period of my life! Now
in the distress of my mental agony, I turn to the only being of whom I
can expect hope, implore aid.
“Ah! do not misunderstand me, venerated master, and believe that the
terrible trouble with which I am struggling is caused by the vain
forms of justice which surround me. I should not be worthy the name
of philosopher if I had not, long ago, learned to consider my thought
as the only reality, and the external world an indifferent and fatal
succession of appearances. From my seventeenth year, I have adopted
as a rule to be repeated in the hours of small or great annoyances,
the formula of our dear Spinoza: ‘The force by which man perseveres in
existence is limited, and that of external causes infinitely surpass
it.’
“I shall be condemned to death in six weeks, for a crime of which I am
innocent, and from which I can not clear myself, you will understand
why, after having read these pages--and I shall go to the scaffold
without trembling. I shall support this event with the same effort
at composure as if a physician, after having auscultated me, should
diagnose an advanced disease of the heart. Condemned, I shall have
to conquer first the revolt of the animal nature and then to support
myself against the despair of my mother.
“I have learned from your works the remedy for such feelings, and in
opposing to the image of approaching death the sentiment of inevitable
necessity, and in diminishing the vision of my mother’s grief by the
recollection of the psychological laws which govern consolations, I
shall arrive at a relatively calm state of mind. Certain sentences of
yours will suffice for this, that, for example, in the fifth chapter of
the second volume of your “Anatomy of the Will,” which I know by heart:
“‘The universal interweaving of phenomena causes each to bear the
weight of all the others, in the same way that each portion of the
universe, and at each moment, may be considered as a _résumé_ of
all that has been, of all that is, and of all that will be. It is in
this sense that it is permissible to say that the world is eternal in
its detail as well as in its whole.’
“What a sentence, and how it envelops, as well as affirms and
demonstrates the idea that everything is necessary in and around us
since we too are a parcel and a moment of this eternal world! Alas! why
is it that this idea which is so lucid when I reason, as one ought to
reason, with my mind, and in which I acquiesce with all the strength
of my being, cannot overcome in me a species of suffering so peculiar,
which invades my heart when I recall certain actions which I have
willed, and others of which I am the author, although indirectly, in
the drama through which I have passed?
“To tell you all in a few words, my dear master, though once more I
say that I did not kill Mlle. de Jussat, I have been connected in the
closest manner with the drama of her poisoning, and I feel remorse,
although the doctrines in which I believe, the truths which I know,
and the convictions which form the essence of my intellect, make me
consider remorse the most silly of human illusions.
“These convictions are powerless to procure me the peace of certainty,
which once was mine. I doubt with my heart that which my mind
recognizes as truth. I do not think that for a man whose youth was
consumed by intellectual passions, there can be a worse punishment than
this. But why try to interpret by literary phrases a mental condition
which I wish to expose to you in detail--to you the great connoisseur
in maladies of the mind--in order that you may give me the only aid
which can do me any good; some word which shall explain me to myself,
which shall attest to me that I am not a monster, which shall sustain
me in the disorder of my beliefs, which shall prove to me that I have
not been deceived all these years, in adhering to the new faith with
all the energy of a sincere being.
“Indeed, my dear master, I am very miserable, and I must speak out
all my misery. To whom shall I address myself, if not to you, since I
should have no hope of being intelligible to any one not familiar with
the psychology in which I have been educated.
“Since coming to this prison, two months ago, the moment I resolved
to write to you has been the only one in which I have been what I was
before these terrible events occurred. I had tried to become absorbed
in some work of an entirely abstract order, but found myself unable to
master it.
“I have considered only this for four days, and, thanks to you, the
power of thought has returned. I have found something of the pleasure
which was mine when I wrote my first essays, in resuming, for this
work, the cold severity of my method--your method. I wrote out
yesterday a plan of this monograph of my actual self, in practising the
division by paragraphs which you have adopted in your works. I have
proved the persistent vigor of my reflection in reconstructing my life
from its origin, as I would resolve a problem of geometry by synthesis.
“I see distinctly at the present time that the crisis from which I
suffer has for its factors, first my heredities, then the medium of
ideas in which I was educated, finally the medium of facts into which
I was transplanted by my introduction among the Jussat-Randons. The
crisis itself and the questions which it raises in my mind shall be
the last fragments of a study which I shall strip of insignificant
recollections, to reduce it to what a master of our time calls
generatrices. At least I shall have furnished you an exact document
upon the modes of feeling which I formerly believed to be very precious
and very rare, and I shall have proved to you in two ways, first by my
confidence in your absolute discretion, and second by my appeal for
your philosophical support, what you have been to him who writes these
lines, and who asks your pardon for this long preamble and begins at
once his dissection.”
§ I. MY HEREDITIES.
As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the
one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small,
and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power
and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were,
two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another
who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable
curiosity.
At this very hour and knowing that I am in prison, accused of a capital
crime, blasted in honor, and overwhelmed in sadness, knowing that it
is this very I, Robert Greslon, born at Clermont the 5th of September,
1865, and not another, I think of this situation as a spectacle at
which I am a stranger. Is it even exact to say I? Evidently not. For
my true self is, properly speaking, neither the one who suffers not
the one who looks on. It is made up of both, and I have had a very
clear perception of this duality, although I was not then capable of
comprehending this psychological disposition exaggerated to an anomaly,
from my childhood, the childhood which I wish to recall with the
impartiality of a disinterested historian.
My first recollections are of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, and of a
house which stood on a promenade now very much changed by the recent
construction of the artillery school. The house, like all the houses in
this city, was built of Volvic stone, a gray stone which darkens with
age, and which gives to the tortuous streets the appearance of a city
of the middle ages.
My father, who died when I was very young, was of Lorraine extraction.
He held at Clermont the position of engineer of roads and bridges.
He was a slender man of feeble health, with a face almost beardless,
and marked with a melancholy serenity which touched me, when I think
of him, after all these years. I see him again in his study, through
whose windows may be viewed the immense plain of the Limagne, with the
graceful eminence of the Puy de Crouël quite near, and in the distance
the dark line of the mountains of Forez.