In any other circumstances the great psychologist would have smiled at this declaration. He would have thought that the envoi came 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 Tortoni café by a moralist of the boulevard, he perceived one fact of which he had not thought, so much had the folly of abstraction withdrawn him from the social world: that this moral drama was becoming a real drama.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 by moral 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 words right and duty. 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.”