“To tell you all in a few words, my dear master, though once more I say that I did not kill Mlle. de Jussat, I have been connected in the closest manner with the drama of her poisoning, and I feel remorse, although the doctrines in which I believe, the truths which I know, and the convictions which form the essence of my intellect, make me consider remorse the most silly of human illusions.
“These convictions are powerless to procure me the peace of certainty, which once was mine. I doubt with my heart that which my mind recognizes as truth. I do not think that for a man whose youth was consumed by intellectual passions, there can be a worse punishment than this. But why try to interpret by literary phrases a mental condition which I wish to expose to you in detail—to you the great connoisseur in maladies of the mind—in order that you may give me the only aid which can do me any good; some word which shall explain me to myself, which shall attest to me that I am not a monster, which shall sustain me in the disorder of my beliefs, which shall prove to me that I have not been deceived all these years, in adhering to the new faith with all the energy of a sincere being.
“Indeed, my dear master, I am very miserable, and I must speak out all my misery. To whom shall I address myself, if not to you, since I should have no hope of being intelligible to any one not familiar with the psychology in which I have been educated.
“Since coming to this prison, two months ago, the moment I resolved to write to you has been the only one in which I have been what I was before these terrible events occurred. I had tried to become absorbed in some work of an entirely abstract order, but found myself unable to master it.
“I have considered only this for four days, and, thanks to you, the power of thought has returned. I have found something of the pleasure which was mine when I wrote my first essays, in resuming, for this work, the cold severity of my method—your method. I wrote out yesterday a plan of this monograph of my actual self, in practising the division by paragraphs which you have adopted in your works. I have proved the persistent vigor of my reflection in reconstructing my life from its origin, as I would resolve a problem of geometry by synthesis.
“I see distinctly at the present time that the crisis from which I suffer has for its factors, first my heredities, then the medium of ideas in which I was educated, finally the medium of facts into which I was transplanted by my introduction among the Jussat-Randons. The crisis itself and the questions which it raises in my mind shall be the last fragments of a study which I shall strip of insignificant recollections, to reduce it to what a master of our time calls generatrices. At least I shall have furnished you an exact document upon the modes of feeling which I formerly believed to be very precious and very rare, and I shall have proved to you in two ways, first by my confidence in your absolute discretion, and second by my appeal for your philosophical support, what you have been to him who writes these lines, and who asks your pardon for this long preamble and begins at once his dissection.”
§ I. MY HEREDITIES.
As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity.
At this very hour and knowing that I am in prison, accused of a capital crime, blasted in honor, and overwhelmed in sadness, knowing that it is this very I, Robert Greslon, born at Clermont the 5th of September, 1865, and not another, I think of this situation as a spectacle at which I am a stranger. Is it even exact to say I? Evidently not. For my true self is, properly speaking, neither the one who suffers not the one who looks on. It is made up of both, and I have had a very clear perception of this duality, although I was not then capable of comprehending this psychological disposition exaggerated to an anomaly, from my childhood, the childhood which I wish to recall with the impartiality of a disinterested historian.
My first recollections are of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, and of a house which stood on a promenade now very much changed by the recent construction of the artillery school. The house, like all the houses in this city, was built of Volvic stone, a gray stone which darkens with age, and which gives to the tortuous streets the appearance of a city of the middle ages.