For the first time the drama of the Château Jussat-Randon appeared real to his mind, for he was thinking of it with the most real part of his nature, his psychologic faculty. He forgot Dumoulin as well as the inconveniences of the possible journey to Riom, and his mind was completely absorbed by the moral problem which the crime presented.
The first question would naturally have been: “Did Robert Greslon really assassinate Mlle. de Jussat?” But the philosopher did not think of that, yielding to this defect of generalizing minds, that never more than half verify the ideas upon which they speculate. Facts are, to them, only matter for theoretic using, and they distort them wilfully the better to build up their systems. The philosopher again took up the formula by which he summed up this drama: “A young man who becomes jealous and commits a murder, this is one more proof in support of my theory that the instinct of destruction and that of love awake at the same time in the male.” He had used this principle to write a chapter of extraordinary boldness on the aberrations of the generative faculty in his ‘Theory of the Passions.’
The reappearance of fierce animality among the civilized would alone suffice to explain this act. It would be necessary also to study the personal heredity of the assassin. He forced himself to see Robert Greslon without any other traits than those which confirmed the hypothesis already outlined in his mind.
“Those very brilliant black eyes, those too vivacious gestures, that brusque manner of entering into relations with me, that enthusiasm in speaking to me, there was nervous derangement in this fellow. The father died young? If it could be proved that there was alcoholism in the family, then there would be a beautiful case of what Legrand Du Saulle calls épilepsie larvée. In this way his silence may be explained, and his denials may be sincere. This is the essential difference between an epileptic and the deranged. The last remembers his act, the epileptic forgets them. Would this then be a larval epileptic?”
At this point of his reverie the philosopher experienced a moment of real joy. He had just constructed a building of ideas which he called an explanation, following the habit so dear to his race. He considered this hypothesis from different points, recalling several examples cited by his author in his beautiful treatise on forensic medicine, until he arrived at the Jardin des Plantes, which he entered by the large gate of the Quay Saint Bernard.
He turned to the right into an avenue planted with old trees whose distorted trunks were inclosed in iron and coated with whitewash. There floated in the air a musty smell emanating from the tawny beasts which moved around in their barred cages nearby. The philosopher was distracted from his meditations by this odor, and he turned to look at a large, old wild-boar with an enormous head, which, standing on his slender feet, held his mobile and eager snout between the bars.
“And,” thought the savant, “we know ourselves but little better than this animal knows himself. What we call our person is a consciousness so vague, so disturbed by operations which are going on within us,” and returning to Robert Greslon: “Who knows? This young man who was so preoccupied by the multiplicity of the self? Did he not have an obscure feeling that there were in himself two distinct conditions, a primary and secondary condition as it were—two beings in fact, one, lucid, intelligent, honest, loving works of the intellect, the one whom I knew; and another, gloomy, cruel, impulsive, the one who has committed murder. Evidently this is a case. I am very happy to have come across it.” He forgot that on leaving the Palais de Justice he had deplored his relations with the accused. “It will be a fortunate thing to study the mother now. She will furnish me with facts about the ancestors. That is what is lacking to our psychology; good monographs made de visu upon the mental structure of great men and of criminals. I will try to write out this one.”
All sincere passion is egoistic, the intellectual as well as the others. Thus the philosopher, who would not have harmed a fly walked with a more rapid step in going toward the gate at the Rue Cuvier whence he would reach the Rue Jussieu, then the Rue Guy de la Brosse—he was about to have an interview with a despairing mother who was coming, without doubt, to entreat him to aid her in saving the head of a son who was perhaps innocent! But the possible innocence of the prisoner, the grief of the mother, the part which he himself would be called to play in this novel scene, all were effaced by the fixed idea of the notes to be taken, of the little insignificant facts to be collected.
Four o’clock struck when this singular dreamer, who no more suspected his own ferocity than does a physician who is charmed by a beautiful autopsy, arrived in front of his house. On the threshold of the porte cochère were two men: Father Carbonnet and the commissionaire usually stationed at the corner of the street. With their back turned to the side from which Adrien Sixte came, they were laughing at the stumblings of a drunken man on the opposite walk, and saying such things as a spectacle of that character suggests to the common people. The cock Ferdinand, brown and lustrous, hopped about their feet and picked between the stones of the pavement.
“That fellow has taken a drop too much for sure,” said the commissionaire.