He saw the picture of his departure painted afresh in his imagination in characters of odious confusion which a derangement of this kind represents to a man of study whom action unsettles and for whom physical ennui becomes a positive unhappiness. Great abstract intellects suffer from these puerilities. The philosopher saw in a flash of anguish his trunk open, his linen packed, the papers necessary to his work placed near his shirts, his getting into a cab, the tumult of the station, the railway carriage, and the coarse familiarity of proximity, the arrival in an unknown town, the miseries of the hotel chamber without the care of Mlle. Trapenard, who had become necessary to him, although he was as ignorant of it as a child. This thinker, so heroically independent that he would have marched to martyrdom for his convictions, with the firmness of a Bruno or a Vanini, was seized by a sort of vertigo at the picture of an event so ordinary. He saw himself in the Hall of Assizes, constrained to answer questions, in the presence of an attentive crowd, and that without an idea to support him against his native timidity. “I will never receive a young man again,” he concluded, “yes, I will shut my door henceforth. But I will not anticipate. Perhaps I shall not have to go through this unpleasant task and all is ended. Ended?” And already the home-keeping citizen gave place in this inward monologue to the second person hidden within the philosopher, namely, the writer of books which were discussed with passion by the public. “Ended?” Yes, for him who comes and goes, who lives in the Rue Guy de la Brosse and who would be very much annoyed if he had to go to Auvergne in the winter, it may be. But what about my books and my ideas? What a strange thing is this instinctive hate of the ignorant for the systems which they cannot even comprehend. “A jealous young man murders a young girl to prevent her marrying another. This young man has been in correspondence with a philosopher whose works he studies. It is the philosopher who is guilty. And I am a materialist forsooth, I who have proved the nonexistence of matter!” He shrugged his shoulders, then a new image crossed his memory, the image of Marius Dumoulin, the young substitute at the College of France, the man whom he most detested in the world. He saw, as if they were there before his eyes, some of the formulæ so dear to this defender of spiritualism: “Fatal doctrines. Intellectual poison distilled from pens which one would like to believe are unconscious. Scandalous exposure of a psychology of corruption.” “Yes,” said Adrien Sixte to himself with bitterness, “if some one does not catch up this chance which makes an assassin of one of my pupils, it will not be he! Psychology will have done it all.”