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 always particularly 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 is responsible. 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.”