Ordinarily he took one of the books which had been exiled from the too-crowded study, or he listened while Mlle. Trapenard exposed the details of the housekeeping. On this evening he did not look for a book, and his housekeeper tried in vain to discover if the lady’s visit and the summons had any connection. The wind rose, a winter’s wind whose plaint from across the empty space died gently against the shutters. Seated in his armchair after his dinner, with Robert Greslon’s manuscript before him, the savant listened for a long time to this monotonous but sad music. His hesitation returned. Then psychology drove away all scruples, and when later Mariette came to announce that his bed was ready, he told her to retire. Two o’clock struck and he was still reading the strange piece of self-analysis which Robert Greslon called a memoir upon himself, but whose correct title should have been:
“Confession of a Young Man of the Period.”
IV.
CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD.
“THE JAIL AT RIOM, January, 1887.
“I WRITE to you, monsieur, this memoir of myself which I have refused to the counsel in spite of my mother’s entreaties. I write it to you, who in reality know so little of me, and at what a moment of my life! for the same reason that led me to bring my first work to you. There is my illustrious master, between you and myself, your pupil accused of a most infamous crime, a bond which men could not understand, and of which you yourself are ignorant, but which I feel to be as close as it is indissoluble. I have lived with your thought, and by your thought so passionately, so entirely at the most decisive period of my life! Now in the distress of my mental agony, I turn to the only being of whom I can expect hope, implore aid.
“Ah! do not misunderstand me, venerated master, and believe that the terrible trouble with which I am struggling is caused by the vain forms of justice which surround me. I should not be worthy the name of philosopher if I had not, long ago, learned to consider my thought as the only reality, and the external world an indifferent and fatal succession of appearances. From my seventeenth year, I have adopted as a rule to be repeated in the hours of small or great annoyances, the formula of our dear Spinoza: ‘The force by which man perseveres in existence is limited, and that of external causes infinitely surpass it.’
“I shall be condemned to death in six weeks, for a crime of which I am innocent, and from which I can not clear myself, you will understand why, after having read these pages—and I shall go to the scaffold without trembling. I shall support this event with the same effort at composure as if a physician, after having auscultated me, should diagnose an advanced disease of the heart. Condemned, I shall have to conquer first the revolt of the animal nature and then to support myself against the despair of my mother.
“I have learned from your works the remedy for such feelings, and in opposing to the image of approaching death the sentiment of inevitable necessity, and in diminishing the vision of my mother’s grief by the recollection of the psychological laws which govern consolations, I shall arrive at a relatively calm state of mind. Certain sentences of yours will suffice for this, that, for example, in the fifth chapter of the second volume of your “Anatomy of the Will,” which I know by heart:
“‘The universal interweaving of phenomena causes each to bear the weight of all the others, in the same way that each portion of the universe, and at each moment, may be considered as a résumé of all that has been, of all that is, and of all that will be. It is in this sense that it is permissible to say that the world is eternal in its detail as well as in its whole.’
“What a sentence, and how it envelops, as well as affirms and demonstrates the idea that everything is necessary in and around us since we too are a parcel and a moment of this eternal world! Alas! why is it that this idea which is so lucid when I reason, as one ought to reason, with my mind, and in which I acquiesce with all the strength of my being, cannot overcome in me a species of suffering so peculiar, which invades my heart when I recall certain actions which I have willed, and others of which I am the author, although indirectly, in the drama through which I have passed?