The haunting hallucination of the face of the young man would have sufficed to overcome Adrien Sixte. When the mother had cried: “You have corrupted my son,” his learned serenity had been scarcely disturbed. In like manner, he had opposed only contempt to the accusation of the elder Jussat, repeated by the judge, and to the remarks of the latter on moral responsibility. How tranquil he had gone out of the Palais de Justice! And now there was no more contempt in him; that serenity was conquered, and he, the negator of all liberty, he the fatalist who decomposed virtue and vice with the brutality of a chemist studying a gas, he the bold prophet of universal mechanism, and who until then had always experienced the perfect harmony of mind and heart, suffered with a suffering in contradiction to all his doctrines--he felt remorse, he felt himself responsible! It was only after these eight clays of the first shock, during which the memoir had been read and reread, so that he could repeat all the phrases of it, that this conflict of heart and mind became clear to Adrien Sixte, and the philosopher tried to recover himself. He walked to the Jardin des Plantes, one afternoon toward the end of February, an afternoon as mild as spring. He sat down on a bench in his favorite walk, that which runs along the Rue de Buffon, and at the foot of a Virginia acacia, propped up with crutches, adorned with plaster like a wall, and with knotty branches like the fingers of a gouty giant. The author of the “Psychology of God” loved this old trunk whose sap was all dried up because of the date inscribed on the placard and which constituted the civil status of the poor tree. “Planted in 1632.” The year of the birth of Spinoza. The sun of the early afternoon was very soft and this impression relaxed the nerves of the promenader. He looked around him absently, and was pleased to follow the movements of two children who were playing near their mother. They were collecting sand with little wooden shovels with which to build an imaginary house. Suddenly one of them rose up brusquely and struck his head against the bench which was behind him. He must have hurt himself, for his face contracted into a grimace of pain, and, before bursting into tears, there were the few seconds of suffocated silence which precede the sobs of children. Then, in a fit of furious rage, he turned to the bench and struck it furiously with his fist. “Are you stupid, my poor Constant,” said his mother to him, shaking him and drying his eyes; “come, let me wipe your nose,” and she wiped it; “it will do you much good to be angry at a piece of wood.” This scene diverted the philosopher. When he rose to continue his walk under this pleasant sun, he thought of it for a long time. “I am like that little boy,” said he to himself: “In his childishness, he gives life to an inanimate object, he makes it responsible. And what else have I been doing for more than a week?”