And yet it was frightful to see a soul die without trying to do something to save it. At this point of his meditation the thinker was brought to a stand by the insoluble problem of the unexplained life of the soul, as desperate for the psychologist as is the unexplained life of the body for the physiologist. The author of the book upon God and who had written this sentence: “There is no mystery; there are only ignorances,” refused the contemplation of the beyond, which, showing an abyss behind all reality, leads science to bow before the enigma and say: “I do not know, I shall never know,” and which permits religion to interpose. He felt his incapacity for doing anything for this young soul in distress, and who had need of supernatural aid. But to only speak of such a formula, with his ideas, was as foolish as to talk of squaring the circle, or of giving three right angles to a triangle. A very simple event rendered this struggle more tragic by imposing the necessity for immediate action. An anonymous hand sent him a paper which contained an article of extreme violence against himself and his influence in regard to Robert Greslon. The writer, evidently inspired by some relation or some friend of the Jussats, branded modern philosophy and its doctrines, incarnated in Adrien Sixte and in several other savants. Then he called up an example. In a final paragraph, improvised in the modern style, with the realism of imagery which is the rhetoric of to-day, as the poesy of the metaphor was that of the past, he showed the assassin of Mlle. de Jussat mounting the scaffold, and a whole generation of young decadents cured of their pessimism by this example. In any other circumstances the great psychologist would have smiled at this declaration. He would have thought that the _envoi_ came from his enemy Dumoulin, and resumed his work with the tranquillity of Archimedes tracing his geometrical figures on the sand during the sack of the city. But in reading this chronicle, scribbled without doubt on the corner of a table in the Tortoni _café_ by a moralist of the boulevard, he perceived one fact of which he had not thought, so much had the folly of abstraction withdrawn him from the social world: that this moral drama was becoming a real drama. In a few weeks, perhaps in a few days, he of whose innocence he held the proof, would be judged. Now, according to the justice of men, the supposed assassin of Mlle. de Jussat was innocent; and if this memoir did not constitute a decisive proof, it offered an indisputable character of veracity which was sufficient to save a life. Would he allow this head to fall, he, the confidant of the misery, the shame, the perfidy of the young man, but who also knew that this intellectual scoundrel was not an actual murderer?