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 became panic-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.