All revolutionary thinkers have known such hours of anguish. But most pass quickly through them, and for this reason it is rare for a man to be thrust into the battle of ideas without his becoming soon the comedian of his first sincerities. He sustains his rôle. He has partisans, and more than all he soon comes, by friction with life, to that conception of the _à peu près_ almost, which makes him admit, as inevitable, a certain falling away from his ideal. He says to himself that one does evil here, right elsewhere, and sometimes, that after all, the world and the people will always go the same. With Adrien Sixte sincerity was too complete for any such reasoning to be possible. He had neither rôle to play nor faithful adherents to manage. He was alone. His philosophy, and he made only one, and the compromises by which all great fame is accompanied, had in no way impaired his fierce and proud mind. We must add that he had found the means, thanks to his perfect good faith, of passing through society without ever seeing it. The passions which he had depicted, the crimes which he had studied, he saw as persons who designate medical observation, “A thirty-five years, such profession, unmarried.” And the exposition of the case is developed without a detail which gives to the reader the sensation of the individual. Always the rigorous theorizer on the passions, the minute anatomist of the will, he had never fairly seen face to face a creature of flesh and blood; so that the memoir of Robert Greslon did not speak only to his consciousness as an honest man. So, during the eight days which followed the first reading, there was a continual obsession, and this increased the moral pain by uniting it with a sort of physical uneasiness. The psychologist saw his ill-fated disciple as he had looked upon him here in this same room, with his feet on the same carpet, leaning his arms on this same table, breathing, moving. Behind the words on the paper he heard that voice a little dull which pronounced the terrible phrase: “I have lived with your mind and of your mind, so passionately, so completely;” and the words of the confession, instead of being simple characters written with cold ink upon inert paper, became animated into words behind which he felt a living being: “Ah!” thought he when this image became too strong, “why did the mother bring this notebook to me?” It would have been so natural for the unhappy woman, a prey to mad anxiety, to prove the innocence of her son by violating this trust. But no, Robert had without doubt deceived her with the hypocrisy of which he so boasted, the miserable fellow, as if it were a psychological conquest.