“Where are you going?” implored his mother. The young man did not answer. Perhaps he did not even hear this cry, he was in such haste to go down the stairs. The idea that Count André believed him cowardly enough to hide himself maddened him. He had not long to look for his enemy. The count was on the opposite side of the street, watching the door. Robert saw him and walked straight up to him.
“You have something to say to me, monsieur?” he asked proudly.
“Yes,” said the count.
“I am at your service,” continued Greslon, “for whatever reparation that it may please you to exact. I will not leave Riom, I give you my word.”
“No, monsieur,” responded André de Jussat, “one does not fight with such men as you, one executes them.”
He drew his revolver from his pocket, and as the other, instead of fleeing, remained standing before him and seemed to say: “I dare you,” he lodged a bullet in his head. The noise of the report, and a cry of agony were heard at the same time at the hotel, and when they ran to see the cause, they found Count André standing against the wall, who, throwing down his pistol and, folding his arms said simply, pointing to the body of his sister’s lover at his feet:
“I have executed justice.”
And he allowed himself to be arrested without any resistance.
During the night which followed this tragic scene, the admirers of the “Psychology of God” of the “Theory of the Passions” and of the “Anatomy of the Will,” would have been astonished if they could have seen what was passing in room No. 3 of the Hôtel du Commerce, and in the mind of their implacable and powerful master. At the foot of the bed on which lay the dead man, with his brow bandaged, knelt the mother of Robert Greslon.
The great negator, seated on a chair, looked at this woman praying, and at the dead man who had been his disciple, sleeping the sleep which Charlotte de Jussat was also sleeping; and, for the first time, feeling his mind powerless to sustain him, this analyst, almost inhuman by force of logic, bowed before the impenetrable mystery of destiny. The words of the only prayer he remembered: “Our Father who art in heaven,” came to his mind. Surely he did not pronounce them. Perhaps he never will pronounce them. But if he exist, then the only father toward whom they could turn in their hours of distress and in whom was their only resource, was their heavenly father. And voices of prayer the most touching went up. And if this heavenly father did only exist, should we have this hunger and not insist for him in such hours as this? “Thou wouldst not sent me if thou hadst not found me!” At that very moment, thanks to the lucidity of mind which accompanies the scholar into all crises, Adrien Sixte recalled this admirable sentence of Pascal in his “Mystère de Jésus”, and when the mother arose from her knees the philosopher was also weeping.