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. It was in this inviolate conscience, in this irreproachable honesty, that the master of this felon preceptor felt himself suddenly lacerated. This sinister history of a love affair, so basely carried on, of a treason so black, of a suicide so melancholy, brought him face to face with the most frightful vision; that of his mind acting and corrupting, his, who had lived in voluntary renunciation, in daily purity. The whole adventure of Robert Greslon showed to him the complexities of a hideous pride and of an abject sensuality, to him who had labored only to serve psychology, to him a modest worker in a labor which he believed beneficent, and in the most severe asceticism, in order that the enemies of his doctrines could not argue from his example against his principles. This impression was the more violent as it was unexpected. A physician of large heart would experience an anguish of an analogous order if, having established the theory of a remedy, he learned that one of his assistants had tried the application of it, and that all in one ward of the hospital were in agony from its effects. To do wrong, knowing it and willing it, is very bitter to a man who is better than his deeds. But to have devoted thirty years to a work, to have believed this work useful, to have pursued it sincerely, simply, to have repelled as insulting the accusations of immorality thrown at him by his angry adversaries, and, suddenly, by the light of a frightful revelation, to hold an indisputable proof, a proof real as life itself, that this work has poisoned a mind, that it carries in it a principle of death, that it is spreading this principle to all the corners of the earth--ah! what a cruel shock, what a savage wound to receive, if the shock should last only an hour, and the wound be closed at once!