“And is it necessary that I accompany monsieur.”
“No, that is useless,” said M. Sixte, “come, you have no time to lose.”
“Oh! if he only does not think of killing himself,” said Carbonnet when Mariette had told of this new move, almost as extraordinary in this little corner of the world as if the philosopher had announced his marriage.
“Ah!” said the servant, following up his idea, “if he only would take me with him! If I have to pay out of my own pocket, I will go.”
This sublime cry, in the mouth of a creature who had come from Péaugres in Ardèche, to be a servant and who carried economy so far as to make her home dresses from the old redingotes of the savant, will demonstrate better than any analysis what uneasiness the metamorphosis of this man who was passing through a moral crisis, which was terrible for him, inspired in these humble people.
Not realizing that he was observed, he showed the intensity of it in his slightest gestures as well as in the features of his face. Since the death of his mother he had not known such unhappy hours, and the suffering inflicted by the irreparable separation was entirely sentimental; but the reading of Robert Greslon’s memoir had attacked him in the center of his being, his intellectual life, his sole reason for living.
At the moment he gave Mariette the order to prepare his valise, he was as much overcome by fright as on the night he turned over the pages of the notebook of confidences. This fright began from the first pages of this narrative in which a criminal aberration of mind was studied, as if spread out for display, with such a mixture of pride and of shame, of cynicism and of candor, of infamy and of superiority.
At meeting the phrase in which Robert Greslon had declared himself united to him by a cord as close as it was unbreakable, the great psychologist had trembled, and he had trembled at every repetition of his name in this singular analysis, at every citation of one of his works, which proved the right of this abominable libertine to call himself his pupil.
A fascination made up of horror and curiosity had constrained him to go straight through to the end of this fragment of biography in which his ideas, his cherished ideas, his science, his beloved science, appeared united with acts so shameful.
Ah! if they had been united! But no, these ideas, this science, the accused claimed them as the excuse, as the cause of the most monstrous, the most complaisant depravity! As he advanced into the manuscript he felt that a little of his inmost person became soiled, corrupted, gangrened; he found so much of himself in this young man, but a “himself” made up of sentiments which he detested the most in the world. For in this illustrious philosopher the holy virginities of conscience remained intact, and, behind the bold nihilism of mind, the noble heart of an ingenuous man was hidden.