Part 2
This _concierge_--according to the use and custom of all such functionaries in small apartment houses--increased the revenue of his lodgings by working at a trade. He was a shoemaker, “in new and old,” as a placard read which was pasted on a window toward the street. Among his customers, old man Carbonnet--this was his name--counted a priest who lived in the Rue Cuvier. This aged priest had a servant, Mlle. Mariette Trapenard, a woman nearly forty years old, who had been accustomed for some years to rule in her master’s house while still remaining a true peasant woman, with no ambition to play the lady, faithful in her work, but unwilling to enter at any price a house where she would be subject to feminine authority. The old priest died quite suddenly the week preceding the installation of the philosopher in the Rue Guy de la Brosse. Old Carbonnet, in whose register the newcomer had simply signed himself _rentier_, had no trouble in recognizing the class to which this M. Sixte belonged, first from the number of books which composed his library, and also through the account of a servant belonging to a professor of the College of France, who lived on the first floor.
In these phalansteries of the Parisian bourgeois everything becomes an event. The maid told her mistress the name of her future neighbor; the mistress told her husband; she spoke of M. Sixte at table in such a way that the maid comprehended enough to surmise that the new lodger was “in books like monsieur.” Carbonnet would not have been worthy of drawing the cord in a Parisian lodging-house, if his wife and he had not immediately felt the necessity of bringing M. Adrien Sixte and Mlle. Trapenard together. They felt this the more because Mme. Carbonnet, who was old and almost disabled, had already too much to do to take care of three households, to undertake this one. The taste for intrigue which flourishes in lodging-houses like fuchsias, geraniums, and basils induced this couple to assure the savant that the cooking at the eating-houses was wretched, that there was not a single housekeeper whom they could recommend in the whole neighborhood, and that the servant of the late M. l’Abbé Vayssier was a “pearl” of discretion, order, economy, and culinary skill. Finally, the philosopher consented to see this model housekeeper. The visible honesty of the woman pleased him and also the reflection that this arrangement would simplify his existence, by relieving him from the odious task of giving a certain number of positive orders. Mlle. Trapenard entered the service of this master for fifty francs a month, which was soon increased to sixty. The savant gave her fifty francs in New-Year gifts beside. He never examined his accounts, but settled them every Sunday morning without question. It was Mlle. Trapenard who did the business with all the tradesmen without any interference on the part of M. Sixte.
In a word she reigned absolute mistress, a situation, as may be imagined, which excited the universal envy of the little world incessantly going up and down the common staircase so zealously scrubbed every Monday.
“I say, Mam’zelle Mariette, you have drawn the lucky number,” said Carbonnet as the housekeeper stopped a minute to chat with her benefactor, who was now much older.
He wore spectacles on his square nose, and it was with some difficulty that he adjusted the blows of his hammer to the heads of the nails which he drove into the boot-heels closely pressed between his legs. For some years he had taken care of a cock named Ferdinand--why, no one knew. This creature wandered about among the bits of leather, exciting the admiration of all visitors by his eagerness to peck at the buttons of the boots. In his moments of fright this pet cock would take refuge with his master, plunge one of his feet into the pocket of the cobbler’s vest and hide his head under the arm of the old _concierge_: “Come, Ferdinand, say good-day to Mam’zelle Mariette,” resumed Carbonnet. And the cock gently pecked the woman’s hand, while his master continued:
“I always say, ‘Never despair at one bad year, two good ones are bound to come immediately after.’”
“There we agree,” responded Mariette, “for monsieur is a good man, though as to religion he is a regular pagan; he has not been to mass these fifteen years.”
“There are plenty who do go,” replied Carbonnet, “who are sad dogs, and lead anything but a quiet life between four and midnight--without your knowing anything about it.”
This fragment of conversation perhaps shows the type of opinion which Mariette held in regard to her master; but this opinion would be unintelligible if we did not recall here the works of the philosopher, and the trend of his thought.
Born in 1839 at Nancy, where his father kept a little watchmaker’s shop, and remarkable for the precocity of his intellect, Adrien Sixte left among his comrades the remembrance of a child thin and taciturn, endowed with a strength of moral resistance which always discouraged familiarity. At first he was very brilliant in his studies, then mediocre, until in the class in philosophy which then bore the name of Logic, he distinguished himself by his exceptional aptitude. His professor, struck by his metaphysical talent, wished him to prepare for the normal school examination. Adrien refused and declared beside to his father that, taking one trade with another, he preferred manual labor. “I will be a watchmaker like you,” was his sole answer to the objurgations of his father, who, like the innumerable artisans, or French merchants whose children attend college, cherished the dream that his son might be a civil officer.
M. and Mme. Sixte could not reproach this son, who did not smoke, never went to the _café_, was never seen with a girl, in fine, who was their pride, and to whose wishes they resigned themselves with a broken heart. They renounced a career for him, but they would not consent to putting him to an apprenticeship, hence, the young man lived at home with no other occupation than to study as suited his fancy. He employed ten years in perfecting himself in the study of English and German philosophy, in the natural sciences and especially in the physiology of the brain and in the mathematical sciences; finally, he gave himself, as one of the great thinkers of our epoch has said of himself, that “violent inflammation of the brain,” that kind of apoplexy of positive knowledge which was the process of education of Carlyle and of Mill, of Taine and Renan, and of nearly all the masters of modern philosophy. In 1868, the son of the watchmaker of Nancy, then twenty-five years of age, published a large volume of five hundred pages entitled: “Psychology of God,” which he did not send to more than fifteen persons, but which had the unexpected fortune of causing a scandalous echo. This book, written in the solitude of the most honest thought, presented the double character of a critical analysis, keen to severity, and an ardor in negation exalted to fanaticism. Less poetic than M. Taine, incapable of writing the magnificent preface to the “Intelligence,” and the essay upon universal phenomena; less dry than M. Ribot, who already preluded by his “English Psychologists” the beautiful series of his studies, the “Psychology of God,” combined the eloquence of one with the penetration of the other, and it had the chance, unsought, of directly attacking the most exciting problem of metaphysics. A pamphlet by a well-known bishop, an unworthy allusion of a cardinal in a discourse to the senate, a crushing article by the most brilliant critical spiritualist in a celebrated review, sufficed to point out the work to the curiosity of the youth over whom passed a revolutionary wind, the herald of future overthrow. The thesis of the author consisted in demonstrating the necessary production of “the hypothesis--God,” by the action of some psychologic laws, which are themselves connected with some cerebral modifications of an entirely physical order, and this thesis was established, supported, and developed with an acrimony of atheism which recalled the fury of Lucretius against the beliefs of his time. It happened then to the hermit of Nancy, that his work, which was conceived and written as if in the solitude of a cell, was at once in the midst of the noise of the battle of contemporaneous ideas. For years there had not been seen such power of general ideas wedded to such amplitude of erudition, nor so rich an abundance of points of view united to so audacious a nihilism. But while the name of the author was becoming celebrated in Paris, his parents were bowed to the earth by his success. Some articles in the Catholic journals filled Mme. Sixte with despair. The old watchmaker trembled lest he should lose his customers among the aristocracy of Nancy.
All the miseries of the province crushed the philosopher, who was about to leave his home, when the German invasion and the fearful national shipwreck turned the attention of his countrymen away from him. His parents died in the spring of 1871. In the summer of the same year, he lost an aunt, and so in the autumn of 1872 having settled his affairs, he came to establish himself in Paris. His resources, thanks to the inheritance of his parents and of his aunt, consisted in eight thousand francs income invested in a life-interest. He had resolved never to marry, never to go into society, never to be ambitious of honor, of place nor of reputation. The whole formula of his life was contained in the words: _To think_!
In order to better define this man of a quality so rare that this sketch after nature will risk appearing untruthful to the reader who is unfamiliar with the biographies of the great manipulators of ideas, it is necessary to give a rapid glance at some of the days of this powerful thinker.
Summer and winter, M. Sixte sat down to his work at six o’clock in the morning, refreshed by a single cup of black coffee. At ten o’clock he took his breakfast, a summary operation which permitted him to be at the gate of the Jardin des Plantes at half-past ten. He walked in the garden until noon, sometimes extending his stroll toward the quays and by the way of Notre Dame.
One of his favorite pleasures consisted in long séances in front of the cages of the monkeys and the lodges of the elephants. The children and servants who saw him laugh, long and silently, at the ferocities and cynicisms of the baboons and ouistitis, never suspected the misanthropic thoughts which this spectacle brought to the mind of the savant who compared in himself the human to the simian comedy, as he compared our habitual folly with the wisdom of the noble animal that, before us, was king of the earth.
Toward noon M. Sixte returned to his home and worked again until four o’clock. From four to six he received three times a week, visitors who were nearly always students, masters occupied with the same studies as himself, or foreigners attracted by a reputation which to-day is European. Three other days he went out to make some indispensable visits. At six o’clock he dined and then went out again, this time going the length of the closed garden to the Orléans station. At eight o’clock he returned, regulated his correspondence or read. At ten o’clock the lights were extinguished in his house.
This monastic existence had its weekly rest on Monday, the philosopher having observed that Sunday emptied an obstructing tide of pleasure seekers into the country. On these days, he went out very early in the morning, boarded a suburban train, and did not return until evening.
Not once in fifteen years had he departed from this absolute regularity. Not once had he accepted an invitation to dine nor taken a stall in a theater. He never read a newspaper, relying on his publisher for marked copies pertaining to his own works.
His indifference to politics was so complete that he had never drawn his elector’s card. It is proper to add, in order to fix the principal features of this singular being, that he had broken off all connection with his family, and that this rupture was founded, like the smallest act of his life, upon a theory. He had written in the preface to his second book, “Anatomy of the Will,” this significant sentence: “The social attachments should be reduced to their minimum for the man who wishes to know and speak the truth in the domain of the psychologic sciences.”
From a similar motive this man, who was so gentle that he had not given three commands to his servant in fifteen years, systematically forbade himself all charity. On this point he agreed with Spinoza who has written in the fourth book of the Ethics: “Pity, for a wise man who lives according to reason, is bad and useless.” This Saint Lais, as he might have been called as justly as the venerable Emile Littré, hated in Christianity the excessive fondness for humanity. He gave these two reasons for it: first that the hypothesis of a Heavenly Father and of eternal happiness had developed to excess the distaste for the real and had diminished the power to accept the laws of nature; second, in establishing the social order upon love, that is, upon sensibility, this religion had opened the way to all the caprices of the most personal doctrines.
He did not suspect that his faithful servant had sewed consecrated medals into all his vests, and his indifference with regard to the external world was so complete that he went without meat on Fridays and on other days prescribed by the Church, without perceiving this effort on the part of the old maid to assure the salvation of a master of whom she sometimes said, repeating unconsciously a celebrated saying:
“The good God would not be the good God, if he had the heart to damn him.”
These years of continuous labor in this hermitage of the Rue Guy de la Brosse had produced, beside the “Anatomy of the Will,” a “Theory of the Passions,” in three volumes, whose publication would have been still more scandalous than that of the “Psychology of God,” if the extreme liberty of the press for ten years had not accustomed readers to audacities of description which the mild, technical ferocity of a savant could not equal.
In these two books is found, precisely stated, the doctrine of M. Sixte which it is necessary to take up again here, in some of its general features, for the intelligent understanding of the drama to which this short biography serves as prologue. With the critical school sprung from Kant, the author of these three treatises admits that the mind is powerless to know causes and substances, and that it ought only to co-ordinate phenomena.
With the English psychologists, he admits that one group among these phenomena, those which are classed under the name of soul, may be the object of scientific knowledge, on condition of their being studied after a scientific method.
Up to this point, as we all see, there is nothing in these theories which distinguishes them from those which Messrs. Taine, Ribot and their disciples have developed in their principal works.
The two original characteristics of M. Sixte’s inquiries are found elsewhere. The first resides in a negative analysis of what Herbert Spencer calls the Unknowable. We know that the great English thinker admits that all reality rests upon a First Cause which it is impossible to penetrate; consequently it is necessary to use the formula of Fichte, to comprehend this First Cause (_arrière-fonds_) as incomprehensible; but as the beginning of the “First Principles” strongly attests this Unknowable is real to Mr. Spencer. It exists since we derive our existence from it. From this there is only a step to apprehend that this First Cause of all reality involves a mind and a soul since one finds their source in it. Many excellent minds foresee a probable reconciliation between science and religion on this ground of the Unknowable. For M. Sixte this is a last form of metaphysical illusion which he is rabid to destroy with an energy of argument that has not been seen to this degree since Kant.
His second title of honor as psychologist consists in an exposé, quite novel and very ingenious, of the animal origin of human sensibility.
Thanks to an exhaustive reading and a minute knowledge of the natural sciences, he has been able to attempt for the genesis of human thought the work which Darwin attempted for the genesis of the forms of life. Applying the law of evolution to all the facts which constitute the human heart, he has claimed to show that, our most refined sensations, our most subtile moral delicacies as well as our most shameful failures, are the latest development, the supreme metamorphosis of very simple instincts, which are themselves transformations of the primitive cellule; so that the moral universe exactly reproduces the physical, and the former is the consciousness, either painful or pleasurable, of the latter.
This conclusion presented under the title of hypothesis because of its metaphysical character, is the result of a marvelous series of analyses, among which it is proper to cite two hundred pages on love, which are so audacious as to be almost ludicrous from the pen of so chaste a man. But has not Spinoza himself given us a theory of jealousy which has not been equalled in brutality by any modern novelist? And does not Schopenhauer rival Chamfort in the spirit of his tirades against women?
It is almost unnecessary to add that the most complete positivism pervades these books from one end to the other. We owe to M. Sixte some sentences which express with extreme energy this conviction that everything in the mind is there of necessity, even the illusion, that we are free. “Every act is only an addition. To say he is free, is to say that there is in the total more than there is in the sum of all the parts. That is as absurd in psychology as it is in arithmetic.” And again: “If we could know correctly the relative position of all the phenomena which constitute the actual universe, we could, from the present, calculate with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers the day, the hour, the minute when England, for example, will evacuate India, or Europe will have burned her last piece of coal, or such a criminal, still unborn, will assassinate his father, or such a poem, not yet conceived will be written. The future is contained in the present as all the properties of the triangle are contained in its definition.” Mohammedan fatalism itself is not expressed with more absolute precision.
“With speculations of this order, only the most frightful aridity of imagination would seem to comport. Thus that which M. Sixte so often said of himself: I take life on its poetic side,” appeared to those who heard it the most absurd of paradoxes. And yet nothing is truer with regard to the special nature of the minds of philosophers. What essentially distinguishes the born philosopher from other men is that ideas instead of being formulas of the mind more or less exact, are to him real and living things. Sensibility, with him, models itself upon the thought instead of establishing a divorce more or less complete, between the heart and the brain, as with the rest of us.
A Christian preacher has admirably shown the nature of this divorce when he uttered this strange and profound sentence: “We _know_ well that we shall die, but we do not _believe_ it.”
The philosopher, when he is one by passion and by constitution, does not conceive this duality, this life divided between contradictory sensations and reflections.
This universal necessity, this indefinite and constant metamorphosis of phenomena, this colossal work of nature ceaselessly making and unmaking itself, with no point of departure, no point of arrival, by the play of the primitive cells alone, this parallel work of the human mind reproducing under the form of thoughts and volitions the movement of physiological life, was not for M. Sixte a simple object of speculation.
He plunged into the contemplation of these ideas with a kind of vertigo, he felt them with all his being, so that this simple man seated at his table, waited upon by his old housekeeper, in a study whose shelves were laden with books, this man of poor appearance, with his feet in a carriage boot (_chancelière_) to keep them warm, and his body wrapped in a shabby great-coat, participated in imagination in the labor of the universe.
He lived the life of every creature. He slept with the mineral, vegetated with the plant, moved with the rudimentary beasts, confounded himself with the superior organisms, and at last expanded into the fullness of a mind capable of reflecting the vast universe.
These are the delights of general ideas, analogous to those of opium, which render these dreamers indifferent to the small accidents of the external world, and also, why shall we not say it? almost absolute strangers to the ordinary affections of life.
We become attached to that which we feel to be very real; now to these singular minds, it is abstraction which is reality, and the daily reality is only a shadow, only a gross and degraded impression of the invisible laws. Perhaps M. Sixte had loved his mother, but surely this was the limit of his sentimental existence.
If he was gentle and indulgent to all, it was from the same instinct which made him take hold of a chair gently, when he wished to move it out of his way; but he had never felt the need of a warm and loving tenderness, of family, of devotion, of love, nor even of friendship. He sometimes conversed with some savants with whom he was associated, but always professionally on chemistry with one, on the higher mathematics with another, and on the diseases of the nervous system with a third. Whether these men were married, occupied in rearing families, anxious to make a career for themselves or not, was of no interest to him in his relations with them; but however strange such a conclusion must appear after such a sketch, he was happy.
Given such a man, such a home and such a life, let us imagine the effect produced in this study in the Rue Guy de la Brosse by two events which occurred one after the other in the same afternoon: first, a summons addressed to M. Adrien Sixte, to appear at the office of M. Valette, Judge of Instruction, for the purpose of being questioned, “upon certain facts and circumstances of which he would be informed;” second, a card bearing the name of Mme. Greslon and asking M. Sixte to receive her the next day toward four o’clock, “to talk with him about the crime of which her son was falsely accused.”
I have said that the philosopher never read a newspaper. If by chance he had opened one a fortnight before he would have found allusions to this history of the young Greslon which more recent trials have caused to be forgotten. For want of this information the summons and the note of the mother had no definite meaning for him. However, by the relation between them he concluded that they were probably connected, and he thought they concerned a certain Robert Greslon, whom he had known the preceding year, in quite simple circumstances. But these circumstances contrasted too strongly with the idea of a criminal process, to guide the conjectures of the savant, and he remained a long time looking at the summons turn by turn with the card, a prey to that almost painful anxiety which the least event of an unexpected nature does inflict on men of fixed habits.
Robert Greslon? M. Sixte had read this name for the first time two years before, at the bottom of a note accompanying a manuscript. This manuscript bore the title: “Contribution to the Study of the Multiplication of Self,” and the note modestly expressed the wish that the celebrated writer would glance at the first essay of a very young man. The author had added to his signature: “Veteran pupil of philosophy at the Clermont-Ferrand Lyceum.”