III.SIMPLE GRIEF.
THE epithet by which the Judge of Instruction condemned the impassibility of the savant would have been more energetic still, if he could have followed M. Sixte and read the philosopher’s thoughts during the short time which separated this examination from the rendezvous fixed by the unhappy mother of Robert Greslon.
Having arrived in the great court of the Palais de Justice, he whom M. Vilette at that very moment was calling a maniac looked first at the clock, as became a worker so minutely regular.
“Quarter-past two,” he thought, “I shall not be home before three. Madame Greslon ought to be there at four. I shall not be able to do any work. That is very disagreeable.” And he resolved on the spot to take his daily walk, the more readily that he could reach the Jardin des Plantes along the river and through the city, whose old physiognomy and quiet peacefulness he loved.
The sky was blue with the clear blue of frosty days, vaguely tintedwith violet at the horizon. The Seine flowed under the bridges green and gayly laborious, with its loaded boats on which smoked the chimneys of small wooden houses whose windows were adorned with familiar plants. The horses trotted swiftly over the dry pavement.
If the philosopher saw all these details in the time that he took to reach the sidewalk of the quay, with the precaution of a provincial afraid of the carriages, it was for him a sensation even more unconscious than usual. He continued to think of the surprising revelation which the judge had just made to him; but a philosopher’s head is a machine so peculiar that events do not produce the direct and simple impression which seems natural to other persons. This one was composed of three individuals fitted into one; there was the simple-minded, Sixte, an old bachelor, a slave to the scrupulous care of his servant and anxious first of all for his material tranquillity. Then there was the philosophical polemic, the author, animated, unknown to himself, by a ferocious self-love common to all writers. And last, the great psychologist, passionately attached to the problems of the inner life; and in order that an idea should accomplish its full action upon this mind, it was necessary for it to pass through these three compartments.
From the Palais de Justice to the first step on the border of theSeine, it was the bourgeois who reasoned: “Yes,” said he to himself, repeating the words which the sight of the clock had called forth, “that is very disagreeable. A whole day lost, and why? I wonder what I have to do with all that story, of assassination, and what information my testimony has brought to the examination!”
He did not suspect that, in the hands of a skillful advocate, his theory of crime and responsibility might become the most formidable of weapons against Greslon.
“It was not worth the trouble to disturb me,” continued he. “But these people have no idea of the life of a man who writes. What a stupid that judge was with his imbecile questions! I hope I shall not have to go to Riom to appear before some others of the same sort!”
He saw the picture of his departure painted afresh in his imagination in characters of odious confusion which a derangement of this kind represents to a man of study whom action unsettles and for whom physical ennui becomes a positive unhappiness. Great abstract intellects suffer from these puerilities. The philosopher saw in a flash of anguish his trunk open, his linen packed, the papers necessary to his work placed near his shirts, his getting into a cab, the tumult of the station, the railway carriage, and the coarse familiarity ofproximity, the arrival in an unknown town, the miseries of the hotel chamber without the care of Mlle. Trapenard, who had become necessary to him, although he was as ignorant of it as a child.
This thinker, so heroically independent that he would have marched to martyrdom for his convictions, with the firmness of a Bruno or a Vanini, was seized by a sort of vertigo at the picture of an event so ordinary.
He saw himself in the Hall of Assizes, constrained to answer questions, in the presence of an attentive crowd, and that without an idea to support him against his native timidity.
“I will never receive a young man again,” he concluded, “yes, I will shut my door henceforth. But I will not anticipate. Perhaps I shall not have to go through this unpleasant task and all is ended. Ended?” And already the home-keeping citizen gave place in this inward monologue to the second person hidden within the philosopher, namely, the writer of books which were discussed with passion by the public. “Ended?” Yes, for him who comes and goes, who lives in the Rue Guy de la Brosse and who would be very much annoyed if he had to go to Auvergne in the winter, it may be. But what about my books and my ideas? What a strange thing is this instinctive hate of the ignorant for the systems whichthey cannot even comprehend.
“A jealous young man murders a young girl to prevent her marrying another. This young man has been in correspondence with a philosopher whose works he studies. It is the philosopher who is guilty. And I am a materialist forsooth, I who have proved the nonexistence of matter!”
He shrugged his shoulders, then a new image crossed his memory, the image of Marius Dumoulin, the young substitute at the College of France, the man whom he most detested in the world. He saw, as if they were there before his eyes, some of the formulæ so dear to this defender of spiritualism: “Fatal doctrines. Intellectual poison distilled from pens which one would like to believe are unconscious. Scandalous exposure of a psychology of corruption.” “Yes,” said Adrien Sixte to himself with bitterness, “if some one does not catch up this chance which makes an assassin of one of my pupils, it will not be he! Psychology will have done it all.”
It is proper to state that, Dumoulin had, on the appearance of the “Anatomy of the Will,” pointed out a grave error. Adrien Sixte had based one of his most ingenious chapters upon a so-called discovery of a German physician which was proved to be incorrect. Perhaps Dumoulin dwelt on this inadvertence of the great analyst with a severity ofirony far too disrespectful.
M. Sixte, who rarely noticed criticisms, had replied to this one. While confessing the error, he proved without any trouble, that this point of detail did not affect the thesis as a whole. But he cherished an unpardonable rancor against the spiritualist.
“It is as if I heard him!” thought Sixte. “What he may say of my books is nothing but psychology? Psychology! This is the science on which depends the future of our beloved France.”
As we see, the philosopher, like all other systematics, had reached the point where he made his doctrines the pivot of the universe. He reasoned about like this: Given a historic fact, what is the chief cause of it? The general condition of mind. This condition is derived from the current ideas. The French Revolution, for example, proceeded entirely from a false conception of man which springs from the Cartesian philosophy and from the “Discourse on Method.”
He concluded that to modify the march of events, it was necessary to modify the received notions upon the human mind, and to install in their place some precise notions whence would result a new education and politics. So in his indignation against Dumoulin he sincerely believed that he was indignant at an obstacle to the public good.
He had some unpleasant moments while thus figuring to himself this detested adversary, taking as a text the death of Mlle. de Jussat for a vigorous sortie against the modern science of the mind.
“Shall I have to answer him again?” asked Sixte, who already was sure of the attack of his rival, such power have the passions to consider real that which they only imagine. “Yes,” he insisted, and then aloud, “I will reply in my best manner!”
He was by this time behind the apsis of Notre Dame and he stopped to survey the architecture of the cathedral. This ancient edifice symbolized to him the complex character of the German intellect which he contrasted in thought with the simplicity of the Hellenic mind, reproduced for him in a photograph of the Parthenon, which he had often contemplated in the Library of Nancy. The remembrance of Germany changed the current of his thoughts for a moment. He recalled, almost unconsciously, Hegel, then the doctrine of the identity of contrarieties, then the theory of evolution which grew out of it. This last idea, joined itself to those which had already agitated him, and resuming his walk, he began to argue against the anticipated objections of Dumoulin in the case of young Greslon.
For the first time the drama of the Château Jussat-Randon appeared real to his mind, for he was thinking of it with the most real partof his nature, his psychologic faculty. He forgot Dumoulin as well as the inconveniences of the possible journey to Riom, and his mind was completely absorbed by the moral problem which the crime presented.
The first question would naturally have been: “Did Robert Greslon really assassinate Mlle. de Jussat?” But the philosopher did not think of that, yielding to this defect of generalizing minds, that never more than half verify the ideas upon which they speculate. Facts are, to them, only matter for theoretic using, and they distort them wilfully the better to build up their systems. The philosopher again took up the formula by which he summed up this drama: “A young man who becomes jealous and commits a murder, this is one more proof in support of my theory that the instinct of destruction and that of love awake at the same time in the male.” He had used this principle to write a chapter of extraordinary boldness on the aberrations of the generative faculty in his ‘Theory of the Passions.’
The reappearance of fierce animality among the civilized would alone suffice to explain this act. It would be necessary also to study the personal heredity of the assassin. He forced himself to see Robert Greslon without any other traits than those which confirmed the hypothesis already outlined in his mind.
“Those very brilliant black eyes, those too vivacious gestures, that brusque manner of entering into relations with me, that enthusiasm in speaking to me, there was nervous derangement in this fellow. The father died young? If it could be proved that there was alcoholism in the family, then there would be a beautiful case of what Legrand Du Saulle callsépilepsie larvée. In this way his silence may be explained, and his denials may be sincere. This is the essential difference between an epileptic and the deranged. The last remembers his act, the epileptic forgets them. Would this then be alarval epileptic?”
At this point of his reverie the philosopher experienced a moment of real joy. He had just constructed a building of ideas which he called an explanation, following the habit so dear to his race. He considered this hypothesis from different points, recalling several examples cited by his author in his beautiful treatise on forensic medicine, until he arrived at the Jardin des Plantes, which he entered by the large gate of the Quay Saint Bernard.
He turned to the right into an avenue planted with old trees whose distorted trunks were inclosed in iron and coated with whitewash. There floated in the air a musty smell emanating from the tawny beasts which moved around in their barred cages nearby. The philosopher was distracted from his meditations by this odor, and he turned to look ata large, old wild-boar with an enormous head, which, standing on his slender feet, held his mobile and eager snout between the bars.
“And,” thought the savant, “we know ourselves but little better than this animal knows himself. What we call our person is a consciousness so vague, so disturbed by operations which are going on within us,” and returning to Robert Greslon: “Who knows? This young man who was so preoccupied by the multiplicity of the self? Did he not have an obscure feeling that there were in himself two distinct conditions, a primary and secondary condition as it were—two beings in fact, one, lucid, intelligent, honest, loving works of the intellect, the one whom I knew; and another, gloomy, cruel, impulsive, the one who has committed murder. Evidently this is a case. I am very happy to have come across it.” He forgot that on leaving the Palais de Justice he had deplored his relations with the accused. “It will be a fortunate thing to study the mother now. She will furnish me with facts about the ancestors. That is what is lacking to our psychology; good monographs madede visuupon the mental structure of great men and of criminals. I will try to write out this one.”
All sincere passion is egoistic, the intellectual as well as the others. Thus the philosopher, who would not have harmed a flywalked with a more rapid step in going toward the gate at the Rue Cuvier whence he would reach the Rue Jussieu, then the Rue Guy de la Brosse—he was about to have an interview with a despairing mother who was coming, without doubt, to entreat him to aid her in saving the head of a son who was perhaps innocent! But the possible innocence of the prisoner, the grief of the mother, the part which he himself would be called to play in this novel scene, all were effaced by the fixed idea of the notes to be taken, of the little insignificant facts to be collected.
Four o’clock struck when this singular dreamer, who no more suspected his own ferocity than does a physician who is charmed by a beautiful autopsy, arrived in front of his house. On the threshold of theporte cochèrewere two men: Father Carbonnet and thecommissionaireusually 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 thecommissionaire.
“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. Thecommissionairebegan to laugh, and so did Carbonnet. Then turning around to look for the cock, muttering: “Where has he goneto 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 theconcierge, “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 theconcierge, 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 hislong 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 thecommissionairewho 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 softlyillumined, he saw his visitor face to face. The wrinkle plowed from the corners of the mouth to thealaof 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 criminalsprepares 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 goodpartifor 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, andalso, 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 whichhe 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 excepther 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 himmaman, 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 thisresponsibility 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’sheart. 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 allconfusion, 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 toannounce 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.”