V.TORMENT OF IDEAS.
A MONTH had passed since the mother of Robert Greslon had brought into the hermitage of the Rue Guy de la Brosse the strange manuscript which Adrien Sixte had hesitated to read. And the philosopher, after these four weeks, was still the slave of the trouble inflicted by the reading, to such an extent that even his humble neighbors noticed it.
There were continual consultations between Mlle. Trapenard and the Carbonnets, in the lodging filled with its odor of leather, where the faithful servant and the judiciousconciergesdiscussed the cause of the strange change in the manners of the celebrated analyst.
The admirable, automatic regularity of his goings out and comings in, which had made him a living chronometer for the whole quarter, had been suddenly transformed into a febrile and inexplicable anxiety.
The philosopher, since the visit of Mme. Greslon, went and came, like one who cannot stay in any place, who, as soon as he goes out thinkshe will return, and as soon as he has come in, cannot endure his room. In the street, instead of walking along with the methodical step which reveals a nervous machine perfectly balanced, he hurried on, he stopped, he gesticulated, as if disputing with himself. This enervation was betrayed by signs still more strange. Mlle. Trapenard had told to the Carbonnets that her master did not go to bed now, before two or three o’clock in the morning:
“And it is not because he is writing,” insisted the good woman, “for he walks and walks. The first time I thought he was ill. I got up to ask him if he wished some infusion. He, who is always so polite, so gentle, that you would not suspect him to be a man who knows so much, he sent me away in a brutal manner.”
“And I who saw him the other day,” responded Mother Carbonnet, “as I was returning from a course at thecafé! I would not believe my eyes. He was there, behind the window reading a paper. If I had not known him I should have been afraid. You ought to have seen him—that knit brow and that mouth.”
“At thecafé!” cried Mlle. Trapenard. “For the fifteen years I have been with him I have never seen him open a paper but once.”
“That man,” concluded Father Carbonnet, “has some trouble which overheats his blood. And trouble you see, Mlle. Mariette, is, so to speak, like the tun of Adelaide, it has no bottom. For a fact, it commenced with the summons of the judge and the visit of the lady in black. And do you know what I think? Perhaps it is about a son of his who is doing badly.”
“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Mariette, “he have a son?”
“And why not?” continued theconcierge, winking one eye behind his spectacles; “don’t you think he gallivanted around like other folks when he was young?”
Then he communicated to Mlle. Trapenard the frightful reports which were going about in therez-de-chausséesconcerning poor M. Sixte, since his visible change of habits. All the malicious tongues agreed in attributing the trouble of the philosopher to the citation of the judge. The washerwoman pretended to have it from a countryman of M. Sixte, that his fortune proceeded from a trust which his father had abused, and that he would have to return it. The butcher told those who would listen that the savant was married, and that his wife had made a terrible scene and was going to bring a suit against him. The coal merchant had insinuated, that the worthy man was the brother of an assassin whose execution under the false name of Campi still tormented the popular mind.
“I will never go to their houses again,” moaned Mlle. Trapenard; “is it possible to imagine such horrors!”
And the poor girl left the lodge completely heartbroken. This great creature, high in color, strong as an ox in spite of her fifty-five years, with her big shoulders, her blue wool stockings which she had herself knit, and her cap fitting closely over her compact chignon, felt a strong affection for her master because all the different elements of her frank and simple nature were involved in it.
She respected the gentleman, the educated man who was often mentioned in the papers. She cherished, in the old bachelor who never examined his accounts, and left her mistress of the house, an assured source of comfort for her old age. Finally, this solid and robust creature protected the man, feeble in body and sosimplet, as she said, that a child ten years old might have cheated him.
Such words mortified her pride at the same time that the sudden change of humor of the philosopher rendered their residence together uncomfortable. From genuine affection she became anxious because her master did not eat or sleep. She saw that he was sad, anxious, and ill, but she could do nothing to make him cheerful, nor even guess the cause of his melancholy and agitation.
What did she think when, one afternoon in the month of March, M. Sixte came in about five o’clock, after having had his breakfast outside, and said to her: “Is the valise in good order, Mariette?”
“I do not know, monsieur. Monsieur has not used it since I came into the house.”
“Go and get it,” said the philosopher. Mariette obeyed. She brought from a loft which served as lumber-room and woodhouse together a small, dusty leather trunk, with rusty locks and keys entirely lacking.
“Very well,” said M. Sixte, “you may go and buy a little one like that, immediately, and you may put into it whatever is necessary for a journey.”
“Is monsieur going away?” asked Mariette.
“Yes,” said the philosopher, “for a few days.”
“But monsieur has nothing that he needs,” insisted the old servant, “monsieur cannot go away like that, without any traveling rugs, without——”
“Procure what is needed,” interrupted the philosopher, “and hasten—I take the train at nine o’clock.”
“And is it necessary that I accompany monsieur.”
“No, that is useless,” said M. Sixte, “come, you have no time to lose.”
“Oh! if he only does not think of killing himself,” said Carbonnet when Mariette had told of this new move, almost as extraordinary in this little corner of the world as if the philosopher had announced hismarriage.
“Ah!” said the servant, following up his idea, “if he only would take me with him! If I have to pay out of my own pocket, I will go.”
This sublime cry, in the mouth of a creature who had come from Péaugres in Ardèche, to be a servant and who carried economy so far as to make her home dresses from the old redingotes of the savant, will demonstrate better than any analysis what uneasiness the metamorphosis of this man who was passing through a moral crisis, which was terrible for him, inspired in these humble people.
Not realizing that he was observed, he showed the intensity of it in his slightest gestures as well as in the features of his face. Since the death of his mother he had not known such unhappy hours, and the suffering inflicted by the irreparable separation was entirely sentimental; but the reading of Robert Greslon’s memoir had attacked him in the center of his being, his intellectual life, his sole reason for living.
At the moment he gave Mariette the order to prepare his valise, he was as much overcome by fright as on the night he turned over the pages of the notebook of confidences. This fright began from the first pages of this narrative in which a criminal aberration of mind was studied, asif spread out for display, with such a mixture of pride and of shame, of cynicism and of candor, of infamy and of superiority.
At meeting the phrase in which Robert Greslon had declared himself united to him by a cord as close as it was unbreakable, the great psychologist had trembled, and he had trembled at every repetition of his name in this singular analysis, at every citation of one of his works, which proved the right of this abominable libertine to call himself his pupil.
A fascination made up of horror and curiosity had constrained him to go straight through to the end of this fragment of biography in which his ideas, his cherished ideas, his science, his beloved science, appeared united with acts so shameful.
Ah! if they had been united! But no, these ideas, this science, the accused claimed them as the excuse, as the cause of the most monstrous, the most complaisant depravity! As he advanced into the manuscript he felt that a little of his inmost person became soiled, corrupted, gangrened; he found so much of himself in this young man, but a “himself” made up of sentiments which he detested the most in the world. For in this illustrious philosopher the holy virginities of conscience remained intact, and, behind the bold nihilism of mind, the noble heart of an ingenuous man was hidden.
It was in this inviolate conscience, in this irreproachable honesty, that the master of this felon preceptor felt himself suddenly lacerated. This sinister history of a love affair, so basely carried on, of a treason so black, of a suicide so melancholy, brought him face to face with the most frightful vision; that of his mind acting and corrupting, his, who had lived in voluntary renunciation, in daily purity.
The whole adventure of Robert Greslon showed to him the complexities of a hideous pride and of an abject sensuality, to him who had labored only to serve psychology, to him a modest worker in a labor which he believed beneficent, and in the most severe asceticism, in order that the enemies of his doctrines could not argue from his example against his principles.
This impression was the more violent as it was unexpected. A physician of large heart would experience an anguish of an analogous order if, having established the theory of a remedy, he learned that one of his assistants had tried the application of it, and that all in one ward of the hospital were in agony from its effects. To do wrong, knowing it and willing it, is very bitter to a man who is better than his deeds. But to have devoted thirty years to a work, to have believed this work useful, to have pursued it sincerely, simply, to have repelled as insulting the accusations of immorality thrown at him by his angryadversaries, and, suddenly, by the light of a frightful revelation, to hold an indisputable proof, a proof real as life itself, that this work has poisoned a mind, that it carries in it a principle of death, that it is spreading this principle to all the corners of the earth—ah! what a cruel shock, what a savage wound to receive, if the shock should last only an hour, and the wound be closed at once!
All revolutionary thinkers have known such hours of anguish. But most pass quickly through them, and for this reason it is rare for a man to be thrust into the battle of ideas without his becoming soon the comedian of his first sincerities. He sustains his rôle. He has partisans, and more than all he soon comes, by friction with life, to that conception of theà peu prèsalmost, which makes him admit, as inevitable, a certain falling away from his ideal. He says to himself that one does evil here, right elsewhere, and sometimes, that after all, the world and the people will always go the same.
With Adrien Sixte sincerity was too complete for any such reasoning to be possible. He had neither rôle to play nor faithful adherents to manage. He was alone. His philosophy, and he made only one, and the compromises by which all great fame is accompanied, had in no way impaired his fierce and proud mind.
We must add that he had found the means, thanks to his perfect good faith, of passing through society without ever seeing it. The passions which he had depicted, the crimes which he had studied, he saw as persons who designate medical observation, “A thirty-five years, such profession, unmarried.” And the exposition of the case is developed without a detail which gives to the reader the sensation of the individual.
Always the rigorous theorizer on the passions, the minute anatomist of the will, he had never fairly seen face to face a creature of flesh and blood; so that the memoir of Robert Greslon did not speak only to his consciousness as an honest man. So, during the eight days which followed the first reading, there was a continual obsession, and this increased the moral pain by uniting it with a sort of physical uneasiness.
The psychologist saw his ill-fated disciple as he had looked upon him here in this same room, with his feet on the same carpet, leaning his arms on this same table, breathing, moving.
Behind the words on the paper he heard that voice a little dull which pronounced the terrible phrase: “I have lived with your mind and of your mind, so passionately, so completely;” and the words of the confession, instead of being simple characters written with cold ink upon inert paper, became animated into words behind which he felt a living being:
“Ah!” thought he when this image became too strong, “why did the mother bring this notebook to me?”
It would have been so natural for the unhappy woman, a prey to mad anxiety, to prove the innocence of her son by violating this trust. But no, Robert had without doubt deceived her with the hypocrisy of which he so boasted, the miserable fellow, as if it were a psychological conquest.
The haunting hallucination of the face of the young man would have sufficed to overcome Adrien Sixte. When the mother had cried: “You have corrupted my son,” his learned serenity had been scarcely disturbed. In like manner, he had opposed only contempt to the accusation of the elder Jussat, repeated by the judge, and to the remarks of the latter on moral responsibility.
How tranquil he had gone out of the Palais de Justice! And now there was no more contempt in him; that serenity was conquered, and he, the negator of all liberty, he the fatalist who decomposed virtue and vice with the brutality of a chemist studying a gas, he the bold prophet of universal mechanism, and who until then had always experienced the perfect harmony of mind and heart, suffered with a suffering in contradiction to all his doctrines—he felt remorse, he felt himself responsible!
It was only after these eight clays of the first shock, during which the memoir had been read and reread, so that he could repeat all the phrases of it, that this conflict of heart and mind became clear to Adrien Sixte, and the philosopher tried to recover himself.
He walked to the Jardin des Plantes, one afternoon toward the end of February, an afternoon as mild as spring. He sat down on a bench in his favorite walk, that which runs along the Rue de Buffon, and at the foot of a Virginia acacia, propped up with crutches, adorned with plaster like a wall, and with knotty branches like the fingers of a gouty giant.
The author of the “Psychology of God” loved this old trunk whose sap was all dried up because of the date inscribed on the placard and which constituted the civil status of the poor tree. “Planted in 1632.” The year of the birth of Spinoza.
The sun of the early afternoon was very soft and this impression relaxed the nerves of the promenader. He looked around him absently, and was pleased to follow the movements of two children who were playing near their mother. They were collecting sand with little wooden shovels with which to build an imaginary house. Suddenly one of them rose up brusquely and struck his head against the bench which was behind him. He must have hurt himself, for his face contracted into a grimace of pain, and, before bursting into tears, there were thefew seconds of suffocated silence which precede the sobs of children. Then, in a fit of furious rage, he turned to the bench and struck it furiously with his fist.
“Are you stupid, my poor Constant,” said his mother to him, shaking him and drying his eyes; “come, let me wipe your nose,” and she wiped it; “it will do you much good to be angry at a piece of wood.”
This scene diverted the philosopher. When he rose to continue his walk under this pleasant sun, he thought of it for a long time.
“I am like that little boy,” said he to himself: “In his childishness, he gives life to an inanimate object, he makes it responsible. And what else have I been doing for more than a week?”
For the first time since the reading of the memoir, he dared to formulate his thought with the clearness which was the proper characteristic of his mind and of his works: “I have believed myself responsible for a part in this frightful adventure. Responsible? There is no sense in that word.”
While passing toward the gate of the garden, then in the direction of the isle Saint Louis and toward Notre Dame, he took up the detail of the reasoning against this notion of responsibility in the “Anatomy of the Will,” above all his critique of the idea of cause. He had alwaysparticularly held to this piece. “That is evident,” he concluded.
Then, after he was once more assured of the certainty of his own intellect, he constrained himself to think of the Robert Greslon, now a prisoner in cell number seven in the jail of Riom, and of the Robert Greslon formerly a young student of Clermont leaning over the pages of the “Theory of the Passions” and of the “Psychology of God.”
He felt anew an insupportable sensation that his books should have been thus handled, meditated upon, loved by this child.
“But we are double!” thought he, “and why this powerlessness to conquer illusions which we know to be false?”
All at once a phrase of the memoir came to his mind: “I have remorse, when the doctrines which form the very essence of my intelligence make me consider remorse as the most foolish of human illusions.”
The identity between his moral condition and that of his pupil appeared so hateful to him that he tried to get rid of it by new reasoning.
“Ah, well!” said he to himself, “let us imitate the geometrician, let us admit to be true what we know to be false. Let us proceed by absurdity. Yes, man is an agent and a free agent. Then he isresponsible. Maybe. But when, where, how have I acted badly? Why do I have remorse because of this scoundrel? What is my fault?”
He returned, resolved to review his whole life. He saw himself a little child, working at his tasks with a minuteness of conscientiousness worthy of his father the clock maker. Then when he had begun to think, what did he love, what did he wish? The truth. When he had taken the pen, why did he write, to serve what cause, if not that of truth? To the truth he had sacrificed everything; fortune, place, family, health, love, friendship. And what did even Christianity teach, the doctrine the most penetrated by ideas different from his own? “Peace on earth, to men of good will,” that is to those who have sought for the truth. Not a day, not an hour in all that past, which he scrutinized with the force of the most subtle genius put to the service of the most honest conscience, had he failed in the ideal programme of his youth formulated in this noble and modest device: “To say what he thought, to say only what he thought.”
“This is duty, for those who believe in duty,” said he, “and I have fulfilled it.”
The night after this courageous meditation, this great, honest man slept at last and with a sleep that the remembrance of Robert Greslon did not trouble.
On awaking, Adrien Sixte was still calm. He was too well accustomed to study himself not to seek for a cause for this facing about of his impressions, and too sincere not to recognize the reason. This momentary lull of remorse must arise from the simple fact of having admitted as true some ideas upon the moral life which his reason condemned.
“There are then beneficent ideas, and malevolent ideas,” he concluded. “But what? Does the malevolence of an idea prove its falsity? Let us suppose that the death of Charlotte be concealed from the Marquis de Jussat, he is quieted by the idea that his daughter is living. The idea would be salutary to him. Would it be true for that reason? And inversely.”
Adrien Sixte had always considered as a sophism, as cowardly, the argument directed by certain spiritualistic philosophers against the fatal consequences of new doctrines, and generalizing the problem, he said again: “As is the mind so is the doctrine. The proof of it is that Robert Greslon has transformed religious practices into an instrument of his own perversity.”
He again took up the memoir to find the pages consecrated by the accused to his sentiments for the church, then he became again fascinated and reread this long piece of analysis, but giving particular attention this time to each passage in which his own name,his theories, his works were mentioned.
He applied all the strength of his mind to prove to himself that every phrase cited by Greslon had been justified by acts absolutely contrary to those which the morbid young man had justified by them.
This reperusal, attentive and minute, had the effect of throwing him into a new attack of his trouble.
With his magnificent sincerity, the philosopher recognized that the character of Robert Greslon, dangerous by nature, had met in his doctrines, as it were, a land where were developed his worst instincts, and that Adrien Sixte found himself radically powerless to respond to the supreme appeal made to him by his disciple from the depths of his dungeon.
Of all the memoir, the last lines touched the deepest chord. Although the word debt had not been pronounced, he felt that this unfortunate had a claim on him. Greslon said truly: a master is united to the mind that he has directed, even if he has not willed this direction, even if this mind has not rightly interpreted the teaching, by a sort of mystic cord, and one which does not permit of casting it to certain moral agony with the indifferent gesture of Pontius Pilate. Here was a second crisis, more cruel perhaps than the first. When he had been fully impressed by the ravages produced by his works, the savant becamepanic-stricken. Now that he was calm, he measured, with frightful precision the powerlessness of his psychology, however learned it might be, to handle the strange mechanism of the human soul.
How many times he began letters to Robert Greslon which he was unable to finish! What could he say to this miserable child? Must he accept the inevitable in the internal as well as in the external world—accept his mind as one accepts his body? Yes, was the result of all his philosophy. But in this inevitable there was the most hideous corruption in the past and in the present.
To advise this man to accept himself, with all the profligacy of such a nature, was to make himself an accomplice in this profligacy. But to blame him? In the name of what principle had he done it, after having professed that virtue and vice are additions, good and evil, social labels without value; finally that everything is of necessity in each detail of our being as well as in the whole of the universe.
What counsel could he give him for the future? By what counsel prevent this brain of twenty-two years from being ravaged by pride and sensuality, by unhealthy curiosity and depraving paradoxes? Would one prove to a viper, if it could comprehend reasoning, that it ought not to secrete venom? “Why am I a viper?” it would respond.
Seeking to state his thought with precision, Adrien Sixte compared the mental mechanism taken to pieces by Robert Greslon, with the watches which he had seen in his father’s establishment. A spring goes, a movement follows, then another, and another. The hands move. If a single part were touched the whole would stop.
To change anything in the mind would be to stop life. Ah! If the mechanism could only modify its own wheels and their movement! But if the watchmaker take the watch to pieces and make it over again!
There are persons who turn from the evil to the good, who fall and rise again, who are cast down and are again built up in their morality. Yes, but there is the fallacy of repentance which presupposes the delusion of liberty and of a judge, of a Heavenly Father. Could he, Adrien Sixte, write to this young man: “Repent; cease to believe that which I have shown you to be true?”
And yet it was frightful to see a soul die without trying to do something to save it. At this point of his meditation the thinker was brought to a stand by the insoluble problem of the unexplained life of the soul, as desperate for the psychologist as is the unexplained life of the body for the physiologist.
The author of the book upon God and who had written this sentence:“There is no mystery; there are only ignorances,” refused the contemplation of the beyond, which, showing an abyss behind all reality, leads science to bow before the enigma and say: “I do not know, I shall never know,” and which permits religion to interpose.
He felt his incapacity for doing anything for this young soul in distress, and who had need of supernatural aid. But to only speak of such a formula, with his ideas, was as foolish as to talk of squaring the circle, or of giving three right angles to a triangle.
A very simple event rendered this struggle more tragic by imposing the necessity for immediate action. An anonymous hand sent him a paper which contained an article of extreme violence against himself and his influence in regard to Robert Greslon. The writer, evidently inspired by some relation or some friend of the Jussats, branded modern philosophy and its doctrines, incarnated in Adrien Sixte and in several other savants.
Then he called up an example. In a final paragraph, improvised in the modern style, with the realism of imagery which is the rhetoric of to-day, as the poesy of the metaphor was that of the past, he showed the assassin of Mlle. de Jussat mounting the scaffold, and a whole generation of young decadents cured of their pessimism by this example.
In any other circumstances the great psychologist would have smiled at this declaration. He would have thought that theenvoicame from his enemy Dumoulin, and resumed his work with the tranquillity of Archimedes tracing his geometrical figures on the sand during the sack of the city. But in reading this chronicle, scribbled without doubt on the corner of a table in the Tortonicaféby a moralist of the boulevard, he perceived one fact of which he had not thought, so much had the folly of abstraction withdrawn him from the social world: that this moral drama was becoming a real drama.
In a few weeks, perhaps in a few days, he of whose innocence he held the proof, would be judged. Now, according to the justice of men, the supposed assassin of Mlle. de Jussat was innocent; and if this memoir did not constitute a decisive proof, it offered an indisputable character of veracity which was sufficient to save a life.
Would he allow this head to fall, he, the confidant of the misery, the shame, the perfidy of the young man, but who also knew that this intellectual scoundrel was not an actual murderer?
Without doubt he was bound by the tacit engagement contracted in opening the manuscript; but was this engagement valid in the presence of death? There was, in this solitary being assailed for a month bymoral torment, such a need of escaping from the ineffectual and sterile corrosion of his thoughts by a positive volition, that he felt it a relief when he had at last decided on a part.
From other journals which he anxiously consulted, he learned that the Greslon case would come before the assizes of Riom, on Friday, March 11th.
On the 10th he gave Mariette the order to prepare his valise, and the same evening he took the train after posting a letter addressed to M. the Count André de Jussat, Captain of Dragoons in garrison at Lunéville. This letter, not signed, simply contained the lines:
“Monsieur, Count de Jussat has in his hands a letter from his sister which contains the proof of the innocence of Robert Greslon. Will he permit an innocent man to be condemned?”
The nihilistic psychologist had not been able to write the wordsrightandduty. But his resolution was taken. He would wait until the trial was ended, and if M. de Jussat were still silent, if Greslon were condemned, he would place the memoir in the hands of the president.
“He took his ticket for Riom,” said Mlle. Trapenard to Father Carbonnet on returning from the station whither she had accompanied her master, almost in spite of himself, “but the idea of his going away off there,alone, and in this cold, when he is so comfortable here!”
“Be easy, Mlle. Mariette,” said the astute porter. “We shall know all some day. But nothing will make me think that there is not an illegitimate son in it somewhere.”