THE DISCIPLE
THERE is a story that has never been denied to the effect that the bourgeois of the city of Königsberg supposed that some prodigious event was disturbing the civilized world simply because the philosopher Emanuel Kant changed the direction of his daily walk. The celebrated author of the “Critique of Pure Reason” had that day learned of the breaking out of the French Revolution. Although Paris, may not be very favorable to such naïve wonders, a number of the inhabitants of the Rue Guy de la Brosse experienced an astonishment almost as great one afternoon in January, 1887, when they saw go out, toward one o’clock, a philosopher, who if less illustrious than the venerable Kant, was as regular and as peculiar in his habits, not to mention that he was even more destructive in his analysis. It was M. Adrien Sixte, whom the English call the French Spencer.
This Rue Guy de la Brosse, which leads from the Rue de Jussieu to the Rue Linné, forms part of a veritable little province bounded by the Jardin des Plantes, the Hopital de la Pitié, the wine warehouse and the first rise of Sainte-Geneviève. That is to say, that it permits those familiar inquisitions of glance impossible in the larger districts where the come-and-go of existence ceaselessly renews the tide of carriages and of people. Only persons of small incomes live here, modest professors, employees of the museum, students who wish to study, all young literary people who dread the temptations of the Latin Quarter. The shops are patronized by this clientele, which is as regular as that of a suburb. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the washerwoman, the apothecary, are all spoken of in the singular by the domestics who make the purchases.
There is little room for competition in this square, which is ornamented by a fountain capriciously encumbered with figures of animals in honor of the Jardin des Plantes. Visitors to the garden seldom enter by the gate, which is opposite the hospital; so that even on fine spring days when crowds of people gather under the trees of the park, which is a favorite resort of the military and of nursemaids, the Rue Linné is as quiet as usual, and so also are the adjacent streets. If occasionally there is an unusual flow of people into thiscorner of Paris, it is when the doors of the hospital are opened to visitors, and then a line of sad and humble figures stretches along the sidewalks. These pilgrims of poverty come furnished with dainties for their friends who are suffering behind the gray old walls of the hospital, and the inhabitants of ground-floors, lodges, and shops are not interested in them. They hardly notice these sporadic promenaders, and their entire attention is reserved for the persons who go by every day at the same hour. There are for shopkeepers andconcierges, as for sportsmen in the country, unfailing indications of the time and of the weather, that there will be in this quarter, where resound the savage calls of some beast in the neighboring menagerie; of an ara that cries, and elephant that trumpets, an eagle that screams, or a tiger that mews. When they see the free professor jogging along with his old green leather case under his arm, nibbling at a penny bun which he has bought on his way, these spies know that it is about to strike eight. When the restaurant boy passes with his covered dishes they know that it is eleven o’clock, that the retired captain of battalion is soon to have his breakfast, and thus in succession for every hour of the day. A change in the toilette of the women who here display their finery, is noted and critically interpreted by twenty babbling and not overindulgent tongues. In fine, to use a verypicturesque expression common in central France, the most trifling movements of the frequenters of these four or five streets are at the end of the tongues, and those of M. Adrien Sixte even more than those of many others. This will be readily understood by a simple sketch of the person. And beside, the details of the life led by this man will furnish to students of human nature an authentic document upon a rare species—that of philosopher by profession. Some examples have been given to us by the ancients, and more recently by Colerus, in reference to Spinoza, and by Darwin and John Stuart Mill in reference to themselves. But Spinoza was a Hollander of the eighteenth century, Darwin and Mill grew up among the wealthy and active English middle class, whereas M. Sixte lived in the heart of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. In my youth, when studies of this kind interested me, I knew several individuals just as entirely given up to abstract speculations. I have, however, never met one who has made me comprehend so well the existence of a Descartes—in his little room in the depth of the Netherlands, or that of the thinker of the Ethics, who, as we know, had no other distraction from his reveries than smoking a pipe and fighting spiders.
It was fourteen years after the war when M. Sixte came to live in theRue Guy de la Brosse, where every denizen knows him to-day. He was at that time a man thirty-four years of age, in whom all physiognomy of youth had been destroyed by the absorption of his mind in ideas, so that his smoothly-shaven face indicated neither age nor profession. Some physicians, some priests, and some actors offer to our regard, for different reasons, faces at once cold, smooth, intent and inexpressive. A forehead high and tapering, a mouth prominent and obstinate, with thin lips, a bilious complexion, eyes affected by too much reading and hidden behind dark spectacles, a slim, big boned body, always clothed in a shaggy cloth overcoat in winter, and in some thin material in summer. His shoes tied with strings, his hair long and prematurely gray and very fine, under one of those hats calledgibus, which fold up mechanically—such was the appearance presented by this savant, whose every action was as scrupulously regulated as those of an ecclesiastic. He occupied an apartment at a rent of seven hundred francs on the fourth floor, which consisted of a bedroom, a study, a dining-room about as large as the cabin of a wherry, a kitchen and a servant’s room, the whole commanding a very extensive view. The philosopher could see from his windows the Jardin des Plantes with the hills of Père-la-Chaise in the distance; beyond, to the left, a kindof hollow which marked the course of the Seine. The Orléans station and the dome of La Salpêtrière rose directly in front; and, to the right, the mass of cedars looked black against the green or bare trees of the labyrinth. The smoke of factories wreathed upward on a clear or gray sky from every corner of the wide landscape, from which arose a sound like the roar of a distant ocean, broken by the whistlings of steam engines. In choosing this Thebais, M. Sixte had no doubt yielded to a general though inexplicable law of meditative nature. Are not nearly all cloisters built in places which permit an extended view? Perhaps these unlimited and confused prospects favor concentration of the mind, which might otherwise be distracted by details too near and circumstantial? Perhaps recluses find the pleasure of contrast between their dreamy inaction and the breadth of the field in which the activity of other men is developed? Whatever may be the solution of this little problem so closely related to another which is too little studied, namely, the animal sensibility of intellectual men—it is certain that the melancholy landscape had, for fifteen years, been the companion with whom the quiet worker had most frequently conversed. His house was kept by one of those servants who are the ideals of all old bachelors, who never suspect that the perfection of certain services implies a corresponding regularity of existence on the partof the master. On his arrival, the philosopher had simply asked theconciergeto find some one to keep his rooms in order, and to recommend a restaurant from which he could order his meals. By this request he risked obtaining a service decidedly bad and a very uncertain sort of nourishment. It resulted, however, in unexpectedly introducing into the home of Adrien Sixte precisely the person who realized his most chimerical wishes, if an extractor of quintessences, as Rabelais calls this sort of dreamer, still preserves the leisure to form wishes.
Thisconcierge—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 theRue Guy de la Brosse. Old Carbonnet, in whose register the newcomer had simply signed himselfrentier, 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 theservant 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 oldconcierge: “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 thecafé, 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 allusionof 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 andby 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 themorning, 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, hatedin 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 asavant 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) asincomprehensible; 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 acriminal, 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: “Weknowwell that we shall die, but we do notbelieveit.”
The philosopher, when he is one by passion and by constitution, does not conceive this duality, this life divided between contradictorysensations 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 theeffect 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 onmen 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.”
This work of almost sixty pages revealed an intellect so prematurely subtle, an acquaintance so exact with the most recent theories of contemporaneous psychology, and finally such ingenuity of analysis, that M. Sixte had believed it a duty to respond by a long letter.
A note of thanks had come back immediately, in which the young man announced that, being obliged to go to Paris for the oral examination of the normal school he would have the honor to present himself, to the master.
The latter had then seen enter his study one afternoon, a young man of about twenty years with fine black eyes, lively and changeable, which lighted up a countenance which was almost too pale. This was the only detail of physiognomy which remained in the memory of the philosopher.Like all other speculative persons, he received only a floating impression of the visible world and he retained but a remembrance as vague as this impression. His memory of ideas was, however, surprising, and he recalled to the smallest detail his conversation with Robert Greslon.
Among the young men whom his renown attracted to him, none had astonished him more by the truly extraordinary precocity of his erudition and his reasoning. No doubt there floated in the mind of this youth much of the effervescence of mind which assimilates too quickly vast quantities of diverse knowledge; but what marvelous facility of deduction! What natural eloquence, and what visible sincerity of enthusiasm.
The savant could see him gesticulating a little and saying: “No, monsieur, you do not know what you are to us, nor what we feel in reading your books. You are the one who accepts the whole truth, the one in whom we can believe. Why, the analysis of love in your “Theory of the Passions” is our breviary. The book is forbidden at the Lyceum. I had it at home and two of my comrades copied certain chapters during the holidays.”
As there is the author’s vanity hidden in the soul of every man who has had his prose printed, be he even so absolutely sincere as M. Adrien Sixte certainly was, this worship of a group of scholars, soingenuously expressed by one of them, had particularly flattered the philosopher.
Robert Greslon had solicited the honor of a second visit, and then while confessing a failure at the normal school, he disclosed a little of his projects.
M. Sixte, contrary to all his habits, had questioned him upon the most minute details. He had thus learned that the young man was the only son of an engineer who had died without leaving a fortune, and that his mother had made many sacrifices in order to educate him. “But I will accept no more,” said Robert, “it is my intention to take my degree next year, then I shall ask for a chair of philosophy in some college, and I will write an extended work on the variation of personality, of which the essay that I submitted to you is the embryo.” And the eyes of the young psychologist grew more brilliant as he formulated this programme of life.
These two visits dated from August, 1885, the second was in February, 1887, and since then, M. Sixte had received five or six letters from his young disciple. The last announced the entrance of Robert Greslon as preceptor, into a noble family that was passing the summer months in a château near one of the pretty lakes of the Auvergne Mountains—Lake Aydat.
A simple detail will give the measure of the preoccupation into which M. Sixte was thrown by the coincidence between the letter from the office of the judge and the note of Mme. Greslon. Although there were upon his table, the proofs of a long article for thePhilosophical Reviewto correct, he began searching for the correspondence with the young man. He found it readily in the box in which he carefully arranged his smallest papers. It was classed with others of the same kind, under the head: “Doctrines contemporaneous on the formation of mind.”
It made nearly thirty pages, which the savant read again with special care, without finding anything but reflections of an entirely intellectual order, various questions upon some readings, and the statements of certain projects for memories.
What thread could connect such preoccupations with the criminal process of which the mother spoke? Was this process the cause of the summons otherwise inexplicable? This boy whom he had seen only twice must have made a strong impression on the philosopher, for the thought that the mystery hidden behind this call from the Palais de Justice was the same as that which caused the sudden visit of this despairing mother kept him awake a part of the night.
For the first time in all these years he was sharp with Mlle. Trapenard because of some slight negligence, and when he passed in front ofthe lodge at one o’clock in the afternoon his face, usually so calm, expressed anxiety so plainly that Father Carbonnet, already prepared by the letter of citation which had arrived unsealed, according to a barbarous custom, and which he had read, and as was right confided to his wife—it was now the talk of the whole quarter—said:
“I am not inquisitive about other people’s business, but I would give years of my life as landlord to know what justice can want of poor M. Sixte that he should come down at this time of day.”
“Why, M. Sixte has changed his hour for walking,” said the baker’s daughter to her mother, as she sat behind the counter in the shop, “it seems that he is going to have a lawsuit over an inheritance.”
“Strike me if that isn’t old Sixte going by, the old zebra! It appears that justice is after him,” said one of the two pupils in pharmacy to his comrade; “these old fellows look very innocent, but at bottom they are all rogues.”
“He is more of a bear than usual, he will not even speak to us.” This was said by the wife of the professor of the College of France who lived in the same house with the philosopher and who had just met him. “So much the better, and they say he is going to be prosecuted for writing such books. I am not sorry for that.”
Thus we see how the most modest men, and those who believe themselves to be the least noticed, can not stir a step without incurring the comments of innumerable tongues, even though they live in what Parisians are pleased to call a quiet quarter. Let us add that M. Sixte would have cared as little for this curiosity, even if he had suspected it, as he cared for a volume of official philosophy. This was for him an expression of extreme contempt.