of large heart would experience an anguish of an analogous order if,
having established the theory of a remedy, he learned that one of his
assistants had tried the application of it, and that all in one ward of
the hospital were in agony from its effects. To do wrong, knowing it
and willing it, is very bitter to a man who is better than his deeds.
But to have devoted thirty years to a work, to have believed this work
useful, to have pursued it sincerely, simply, to have repelled as
insulting the accusations of immorality thrown at him by his angry
adversaries, and, suddenly, by the light of a frightful revelation, to
hold an indisputable proof, a proof real as life itself, that this work
has poisoned a mind, that it carries in it a principle of death, that
it is spreading this principle to all the corners of the earth--ah!
what a cruel shock, what a savage wound to receive, if the shock should
last only an hour, and the wound be closed at once!
All revolutionary thinkers have known such hours of anguish. But
most pass quickly through them, and for this reason it is rare for a
man to be thrust into the battle of ideas without his becoming soon
the comedian of his first sincerities. He sustains his rôle. He has
partisans, and more than all he soon comes, by friction with life,
to that conception of the _à peu près_ almost, which makes him
admit, as inevitable, a certain falling away from his ideal. He says to
himself that one does evil here, right elsewhere, and sometimes, that
after all, the world and the people will always go the same.
With Adrien Sixte sincerity was too complete for any such reasoning
to be possible. He had neither rôle to play nor faithful adherents
to manage. He was alone. His philosophy, and he made only one, and
the compromises by which all great fame is accompanied, had in no way
impaired his fierce and proud mind.
We must add that he had found the means, thanks to his perfect good
faith, of passing through society without ever seeing it. The passions
which he had depicted, the crimes which he had studied, he saw as
persons who designate medical observation, “A thirty-five years, such
profession, unmarried.” And the exposition of the case is developed
without a detail which gives to the reader the sensation of the
individual.
Always the rigorous theorizer on the passions, the minute anatomist of
the will, he had never fairly seen face to face a creature of flesh
and blood; so that the memoir of Robert Greslon did not speak only to
his consciousness as an honest man. So, during the eight days which
followed the first reading, there was a continual obsession, and
this increased the moral pain by uniting it with a sort of physical
uneasiness.
The psychologist saw his ill-fated disciple as he had looked upon him
here in this same room, with his feet on the same carpet, leaning his
arms on this same table, breathing, moving.
Behind the words on the paper he heard that voice a little dull which
pronounced the terrible phrase: “I have lived with your mind and of
your mind, so passionately, so completely;” and the words of the
confession, instead of being simple characters written with cold ink
upon inert paper, became animated into words behind which he felt a
living being:
“Ah!” thought he when this image became too strong, “why did the mother
bring this notebook to me?”
It would have been so natural for the unhappy woman, a prey to mad
anxiety, to prove the innocence of her son by violating this trust. But
no, Robert had without doubt deceived her with the hypocrisy of which
he so boasted, the miserable fellow, as if it were a psychological
conquest.
The haunting hallucination of the face of the young man would have
sufficed to overcome Adrien Sixte. When the mother had cried: “You have
corrupted my son,” his learned serenity had been scarcely disturbed.
In like manner, he had opposed only contempt to the accusation of the
elder Jussat, repeated by the judge, and to the remarks of the latter
on moral responsibility.
How tranquil he had gone out of the Palais de Justice! And now there
was no more contempt in him; that serenity was conquered, and he, the
negator of all liberty, he the fatalist who decomposed virtue and vice
with the brutality of a chemist studying a gas, he the bold prophet
of universal mechanism, and who until then had always experienced
the perfect harmony of mind and heart, suffered with a suffering in
contradiction to all his doctrines--he felt remorse, he felt himself
responsible!
It was only after these eight clays of the first shock, during which
the memoir had been read and reread, so that he could repeat all the
phrases of it, that this conflict of heart and mind became clear to
Adrien Sixte, and the philosopher tried to recover himself.
He walked to the Jardin des Plantes, one afternoon toward the end of
February, an afternoon as mild as spring. He sat down on a bench in his
favorite walk, that which runs along the Rue de Buffon, and at the foot
of a Virginia acacia, propped up with crutches, adorned with plaster
like a wall, and with knotty branches like the fingers of a gouty giant.
The author of the “Psychology of God” loved this old trunk whose sap
was all dried up because of the date inscribed on the placard and which
constituted the civil status of the poor tree. “Planted in 1632.” The
year of the birth of Spinoza.
The sun of the early afternoon was very soft and this impression
relaxed the nerves of the promenader. He looked around him absently,
and was pleased to follow the movements of two children who were
playing near their mother. They were collecting sand with little wooden
shovels with which to build an imaginary house. Suddenly one of them
rose up brusquely and struck his head against the bench which was
behind him. He must have hurt himself, for his face contracted into
a grimace of pain, and, before bursting into tears, there were the
few seconds of suffocated silence which precede the sobs of children.
Then, in a fit of furious rage, he turned to the bench and struck it
furiously with his fist.
“Are you stupid, my poor Constant,” said his mother to him, shaking him
and drying his eyes; “come, let me wipe your nose,” and she wiped it;
“it will do you much good to be angry at a piece of wood.”
This scene diverted the philosopher. When he rose to continue his walk
under this pleasant sun, he thought of it for a long time.
“I am like that little boy,” said he to himself: “In his childishness,
he gives life to an inanimate object, he makes it responsible. And what
else have I been doing for more than a week?”
For the first time since the reading of the memoir, he dared to
formulate his thought with the clearness which was the proper
characteristic of his mind and of his works: “I have believed myself
responsible for a part in this frightful adventure. Responsible? There
is no sense in that word.”
While passing toward the gate of the garden, then in the direction of
the isle Saint Louis and toward Notre Dame, he took up the detail of
the reasoning against this notion of responsibility in the “Anatomy of
the Will,” above all his critique of the idea of cause. He had always
particularly held to this piece. “That is evident,” he concluded.
Then, after he was once more assured of the certainty of his own
intellect, he constrained himself to think of the Robert Greslon, now
a prisoner in cell number seven in the jail of Riom, and of the Robert
Greslon formerly a young student of Clermont leaning over the pages of
the “Theory of the Passions” and of the “Psychology of God.”
He felt anew an insupportable sensation that his books should have been
thus handled, meditated upon, loved by this child.
“But we are double!” thought he, “and why this powerlessness to conquer
illusions which we know to be false?”
All at once a phrase of the memoir came to his mind: “I have remorse,
when the doctrines which form the very essence of my intelligence make
me consider remorse as the most foolish of human illusions.”
The identity between his moral condition and that of his pupil appeared
so hateful to him that he tried to get rid of it by new reasoning.
“Ah, well!” said he to himself, “let us imitate the geometrician,
let us admit to be true what we know to be false. Let us proceed
by absurdity. Yes, man is an agent and a free agent. Then he is
responsible. Maybe. But when, where, how have I acted badly? Why do I
have remorse because of this scoundrel? What is my fault?”
He returned, resolved to review his whole life. He saw himself a little
child, working at his tasks with a minuteness of conscientiousness
worthy of his father the clock maker. Then when he had begun to think,
what did he love, what did he wish? The truth. When he had taken the
pen, why did he write, to serve what cause, if not that of truth? To
the truth he had sacrificed everything; fortune, place, family, health,
love, friendship. And what did even Christianity teach, the doctrine
the most penetrated by ideas different from his own? “Peace on earth,
to men of good will,” that is to those who have sought for the truth.
Not a day, not an hour in all that past, which he scrutinized with
the force of the most subtle genius put to the service of the most
honest conscience, had he failed in the ideal programme of his youth
formulated in this noble and modest device: “To say what he thought, to
say only what he thought.”
“This is duty, for those who believe in duty,” said he, “and I have
fulfilled it.”
The night after this courageous meditation, this great, honest man
slept at last and with a sleep that the remembrance of Robert Greslon
did not trouble.
On awaking, Adrien Sixte was still calm. He was too well accustomed
to study himself not to seek for a cause for this facing about of
his impressions, and too sincere not to recognize the reason. This
momentary lull of remorse must arise from the simple fact of having
admitted as true some ideas upon the moral life which his reason
condemned.
“There are then beneficent ideas, and malevolent ideas,” he concluded.
“But what? Does the malevolence of an idea prove its falsity? Let us
suppose that the death of Charlotte be concealed from the Marquis de
Jussat, he is quieted by the idea that his daughter is living. The
idea would be salutary to him. Would it be true for that reason? And
inversely.”
Adrien Sixte had always considered as a sophism, as cowardly, the
argument directed by certain spiritualistic philosophers against the
fatal consequences of new doctrines, and generalizing the problem, he
said again: “As is the mind so is the doctrine. The proof of it is that
Robert Greslon has transformed religious practices into an instrument
of his own perversity.”
He again took up the memoir to find the pages consecrated by the
accused to his sentiments for the church, then he became again
fascinated and reread this long piece of analysis, but giving
particular attention this time to each passage in which his own name,
his theories, his works were mentioned.
He applied all the strength of his mind to prove to himself that every
phrase cited by Greslon had been justified by acts absolutely contrary
to those which the morbid young man had justified by them.
This reperusal, attentive and minute, had the effect of throwing him
into a new attack of his trouble.
With his magnificent sincerity, the philosopher recognized that the
character of Robert Greslon, dangerous by nature, had met in his
doctrines, as it were, a land where were developed his worst instincts,
and that Adrien Sixte found himself radically powerless to respond to
the supreme appeal made to him by his disciple from the depths of his
dungeon.
Of all the memoir, the last lines touched the deepest chord. Although
the word debt had not been pronounced, he felt that this unfortunate
had a claim on him. Greslon said truly: a master is united to the mind
that he has directed, even if he has not willed this direction, even if
this mind has not rightly interpreted the teaching, by a sort of mystic
cord, and one which does not permit of casting it to certain moral
agony with the indifferent gesture of Pontius Pilate. Here was a second
crisis, more cruel perhaps than the first. When he had been fully
impressed by the ravages produced by his works, the savant became
panic-stricken. Now that he was calm, he measured, with frightful
precision the powerlessness of his psychology, however learned it might
be, to handle the strange mechanism of the human soul.
How many times he began letters to Robert Greslon which he was
unable to finish! What could he say to this miserable child? Must
he accept the inevitable in the internal as well as in the external
world--accept his mind as one accepts his body? Yes, was the result of
all his philosophy. But in this inevitable there was the most hideous
corruption in the past and in the present.
To advise this man to accept himself, with all the profligacy of such
a nature, was to make himself an accomplice in this profligacy. But to
blame him? In the name of what principle had he done it, after having
professed that virtue and vice are additions, good and evil, social
labels without value; finally that everything is of necessity in each
detail of our being as well as in the whole of the universe.
What counsel could he give him for the future? By what counsel prevent
this brain of twenty-two years from being ravaged by pride and
sensuality, by unhealthy curiosity and depraving paradoxes? Would one
prove to a viper, if it could comprehend reasoning, that it ought not
to secrete venom? “Why am I a viper?” it would respond.
Seeking to state his thought with precision, Adrien Sixte compared the
mental mechanism taken to pieces by Robert Greslon, with the watches
which he had seen in his father’s establishment. A spring goes, a
movement follows, then another, and another. The hands move. If a
single part were touched the whole would stop.
To change anything in the mind would be to stop life. Ah! If the
mechanism could only modify its own wheels and their movement! But if
the watchmaker take the watch to pieces and make it over again!
There are persons who turn from the evil to the good, who fall and rise
again, who are cast down and are again built up in their morality. Yes,
but there is the fallacy of repentance which presupposes the delusion
of liberty and of a judge, of a Heavenly Father. Could he, Adrien
Sixte, write to this young man: “Repent; cease to believe that which I
have shown you to be true?”
And yet it was frightful to see a soul die without trying to do
something to save it. At this point of his meditation the thinker was
brought to a stand by the insoluble problem of the unexplained life of
the soul, as desperate for the psychologist as is the unexplained life
of the body for the physiologist.
The author of the book upon God and who had written this sentence:
“There is no mystery; there are only ignorances,” refused the
contemplation of the beyond, which, showing an abyss behind all
reality, leads science to bow before the enigma and say: “I do not
know, I shall never know,” and which permits religion to interpose.
He felt his incapacity for doing anything for this young soul in
distress, and who had need of supernatural aid. But to only speak of
such a formula, with his ideas, was as foolish as to talk of squaring
the circle, or of giving three right angles to a triangle.
A very simple event rendered this struggle more tragic by imposing
the necessity for immediate action. An anonymous hand sent him a
paper which contained an article of extreme violence against himself
and his influence in regard to Robert Greslon. The writer, evidently
inspired by some relation or some friend of the Jussats, branded modern
philosophy and its doctrines, incarnated in Adrien Sixte and in several
other savants.
Then he called up an example. In a final paragraph, improvised in the
modern style, with the realism of imagery which is the rhetoric of
to-day, as the poesy of the metaphor was that of the past, he showed
the assassin of Mlle. de Jussat mounting the scaffold, and a whole
generation of young decadents cured of their pessimism by this example.
In any other circumstances the great psychologist would have smiled
at this declaration. He would have thought that the _envoi_ came
from his enemy Dumoulin, and resumed his work with the tranquillity of
Archimedes tracing his geometrical figures on the sand during the sack
of the city. But in reading this chronicle, scribbled without doubt on
the corner of a table in the Tortoni _café_ by a moralist of the
boulevard, he perceived one fact of which he had not thought, so much
had the folly of abstraction withdrawn him from the social world: that
this moral drama was becoming a real drama.
In a few weeks, perhaps in a few days, he of whose innocence he held
the proof, would be judged. Now, according to the justice of men,
the supposed assassin of Mlle. de Jussat was innocent; and if this
memoir did not constitute a decisive proof, it offered an indisputable
character of veracity which was sufficient to save a life.
Would he allow this head to fall, he, the confidant of the misery,
the shame, the perfidy of the young man, but who also knew that this
intellectual scoundrel was not an actual murderer?
Without doubt he was bound by the tacit engagement contracted in
opening the manuscript; but was this engagement valid in the presence
of death? There was, in this solitary being assailed for a month by
moral torment, such a need of escaping from the ineffectual and sterile
corrosion of his thoughts by a positive volition, that he felt it a
relief when he had at last decided on a part.
From other journals which he anxiously consulted, he learned that the
Greslon case would come before the assizes of Riom, on Friday, March
11th.
On the 10th he gave Mariette the order to prepare his valise, and
the same evening he took the train after posting a letter addressed
to M. the Count André de Jussat, Captain of Dragoons in garrison at
Lunéville. This letter, not signed, simply contained the lines:
“Monsieur, Count de Jussat has in his hands a letter from his sister
which contains the proof of the innocence of Robert Greslon. Will he
permit an innocent man to be condemned?”
The nihilistic psychologist had not been able to write the words
_right_ and _duty_. But his resolution was taken. He would
wait until the trial was ended, and if M. de Jussat were still silent,
if Greslon were condemned, he would place the memoir in the hands of
the president.
“He took his ticket for Riom,” said Mlle. Trapenard to Father Carbonnet
on returning from the station whither she had accompanied her master,
almost in spite of himself, “but the idea of his going away off there,
alone, and in this cold, when he is so comfortable here!”
“Be easy, Mlle. Mariette,” said the astute porter. “We shall know
all some day. But nothing will make me think that there is not an
illegitimate son in it somewhere.”
VI.
COUNT ANDRÉ.
AT the moment when the note which had been put into the box by Adrien
Sixte arrived at Lunéville, Count André was himself at Riom. Chance
willed that these two men should not meet, for the celebrated writer,
on leaving the train, took his place at a venture in the omnibus for
the Hôtel du Commerce, while the count had his apartment at the Hôtel
de l’Univers.
There in a parlor furnished with old furniture, hung with a faded
paper, with worn curtains and a patched carpet, and on the morning
of this Friday, March 11, 1887, on which the Greslon trial opened,
the brother of poor Charlotte was walking up and down. Noon was about
to strike from the clock of ornamented copper, which decorated the
chimney-piece.
Outside, the sky was covered with clouds, one of those Auvergne skies
which brings the icy wind of the mountains.
The count’s orderly, a dragoon with a jovial physiognomy, had brought
a little military order into this salon, and, after having wound the
clock stirred up the fire he began to set the table for two. From time
to time he watched his captain, who, stroking his mustache with one
hand, biting his lips, wrinkling his brow, wore the expression of the
most painful anxiety. But Joseph Pourat, this was the orderly’s name,
simply thought that the count was scarcely master of himself, while
they were trying the assassin of his sister. For him, as for all who
were in any way connected with the Jussat-Randons and who had known
Charlotte, there was no doubt of Robert Greslon’s guilt. What the
faithful soldier less understood, knowing the energy of his officer,
was that he had allowed the old marquis to go to the trial alone.
“That will do very well,” said the count, and Pourat, who placed the
plates and forks after having wiped them, a necessary preliminary,
thought in presence of the visible agony of his master:
“He has a good heart all the same, if he is a little brusque. How much
he loved her!”
André de Jussat did not seem to even suspect there was any one in
the room beside himself. His brown eyes close to his nose, which had
astonished, almost disturbed Robert Greslon, by their resemblance to
those of a bird of prey, no longer shot forth that proud look which
goes straight to an object, and takes hold of it. No, there was a
species of shrinking back, almost a shame, like a fear of showing
his inmost suffering. They were the eyes of a man whom a fixed idea
possesses and whom the sting of an intolerable pain constantly touches
in the most sensitive part of his soul.
This pain dated from the day on which he had received his sister’s
letter revealing her terrible project of suicide. A dispatch had
arrived almost at the same moment, announcing the death of Charlotte,
and he had taken the train for Auvergne precipitately, without knowing
how to inform his father of the fearful truth, but decided to have a
just revenge on Greslon. And the marquis had received him with these
words: “You received my dispatch? We have the assassin.”
The count had said nothing, comprehending that there must be a
misunderstanding; and the marquis had stated the suspicions against the
preceptor, also the fact that he had just been arrested.
Immediately this idea imposed itself upon the brother, who was mad with
grief, that destiny offered him this vengeance, the only object of his
thought since he had read the confession of the dead and the detail of
her misery, of her errors, her resistances her atrocious deception, of
her fatal resolution.
He had only not to hide the letter, and the cowardly moral assassin of
the young girl would be accused, imprisoned, no doubt condemned. The
honor of Charlotte would be saved, for Robert Greslon could not prove
his relations with the girl. The marquis and the marquise, the father
and the mother, so confiding so penetrated by the truest love for the
memory of their poor child, would at least be ignorant of the fault of
this dear one which would be to them a new despair greater than the
girl’s tragic death.
And Count André was silent. Not, however, without a violent effort over
himself. This courageous man who possessed by nature and by will the
true virtues of a soldier, detested perfidy, compromises of conscience,
all expedients and all dastardliness.
He had felt that it was his duty to speak, not to allow an innocent
person to be accused. He had in vain said to himself that this Greslon
was the moral assassin of Charlotte, and that this assassination
merited a punishment as well as the other; this sophism of his hate
had not quite controlled the other voice, that which forbids us to
become accomplices in an iniquity, and the condemnation of Greslon as a
poisoner was certainly iniquitous.
An unexpected and to him an almost monstrous circumstance had
completely overwhelmed André de Jussat; the silence of the accused.
If Greslon had spoken, recounted his amours, defending his life at the
price of the honor of his victim, the count could not have despised
him enough. By a contrast of character which must appear still more
inexplicable to a simple mind, this infamous man suddenly displayed the
generosity of a gentleman in not speaking a word which could soil the
memory of one whom he had drawn into so detestable an ambuscade.
This scoundrel was brave in the presence of justice, almost heroic in
his way. In any case he ceased to be worthy of disgust only. André said
to himself that this might be the tactics of the court of assizes, a
proceeding to obtain an acquittal in the absence of proofs. But, on the
other hand, he knew by the letter of his sister of the existence of
the journal in which the details of the scientific experiment had been
consigned hour by hour. This journal singularly diminished the chances
of conviction, and Greslon did not produce it.
The officer could not have explained why this dignity of attitude on
the part of his enemy so angered him, that he had a frantic desire to
rush to the magistrate, in order that the truth might be brought to
light, and the dead should owe nothing, not an atom of her posthumous
honor to this scoundrel who had won her love.