Robert Greslou, the Disciple of our story, is not indeed made to kill such a young girl, but in a singularly detestable fashion to render it inevitable that she should kill herself. The author has taken care that we should have no feeling but loathing for this creature of his brain. We cannot even extend to him that pity and half-forgiveness that the instinctive man commonly feels for the aberrations of passion. To Robert the whole episode was a carefully planned piece of psychological research,--a vivisection of the emotional life. The author, in his anxiety that we should not be tempted to excuse, but should confine ourselves to understanding, has created a monster. “Non, monsieur,” says André de Jussat, the brother of Charlotte, to Robert who has offered him all the satisfaction left in his power, “Non, monsieur, people do not fight men like you, they execute them.” Now, Bourget’s interest in the situation thus created I conceive to be this: May we not gain sufficient insight into the causes of this young man’s conduct to make it appear as inevitable as the fall of the rock from the cliff? And if we do this, must we not view the catastrophe in which a human being happens to play a part as no less void of moral aspects than that in which a falling mass is concerned? There we could not blame the stone; here, if the case is made out, we should not blame the man. In neither situation is it meaningful to blame the facts and laws of nature. It is for the right so to regard his own conduct that the Disciple pleads with his old master, Adrien Sixte. At the end of his autobiography he makes a tragic appeal to the man whose writings had formed his mind. “I felt assured,” he writes, “that I should be able to tell you my story as you develop your problems of psychology in the books I have so constantly read, and having finished, I find nothing to offer you but the despairing cry, De profundis! Write to me, cher maître, guide me. Strengthen me in the doctrine which was, which still _is_, my own,--in that conviction of universal necessity which holds that even our most detestable, our most damning acts, even this cold enterprise of seduction, even my weakness when it came to keeping my side of the compact of death, are the outcome of laws that govern this immense universe. Tell me that I am not a monster, that there is no such thing as a monster, that you will still be there when I come out of this supreme crisis to welcome me as your disciple, as your friend.” * * * * * What, then, is the philosophy of this Adrien Sixte that, having brought a human being to such a pass, it could still be appealed to to bring him through?