Part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I?” exclaimed the philosopher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Confession of a Young Man of the Period.”

IV.

CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD.

“THE JAIL AT RIOM, January, 1887.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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