Ordinarily he took one of the books which had been exiled from the too-crowded study, or he listened while Mlle. Trapenard exposed the details of the housekeeping. On this evening he did not look for a book, and his housekeeper tried in vain to discover if the lady’s visit and the summons had any connection. The wind rose, a winter’s wind whose plaint from across the empty space died gently against the shutters. Seated in his armchair after his dinner, with Robert Greslon’s manuscript before him, the savant listened for a long time to this monotonous but sad music. His hesitation returned. Then psychology drove away all scruples, and when later Mariette came to announce that his bed was ready, he told her to retire. Two o’clock struck and he was still reading the strange piece of self-analysis which Robert Greslon called a memoir upon himself, but whose correct title should have been: “Confession of a Young Man of the Period.” IV. CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD. “THE JAIL AT RIOM, January, 1887. “I WRITE to you, monsieur, this memoir of myself which I have refused to the counsel in spite of my mother’s entreaties. I write it to you, who in reality know so little of me, and at what a moment of my life! for the same reason that led me to bring my first work to you. There is my illustrious master, between you and myself, your pupil accused of a most infamous crime, a bond which men could not understand, and of which you yourself are ignorant, but which I feel to be as close as it is indissoluble. I have lived with your thought, and by your thought so passionately, so entirely at the most decisive period of my life! Now in the distress of my mental agony, I turn to the only being of whom I can expect hope, implore aid. “Ah! do not misunderstand me, venerated master, and believe that the terrible trouble with which I am struggling is caused by the vain forms of justice which surround me. I should not be worthy the name of philosopher if I had not, long ago, learned to consider my thought as the only reality, and the external world an indifferent and fatal succession of appearances. From my seventeenth year, I have adopted as a rule to be repeated in the hours of small or great annoyances, the formula of our dear Spinoza: ‘The force by which man perseveres in existence is limited, and that of external causes infinitely surpass it.’ “I shall be condemned to death in six weeks, for a crime of which I am innocent, and from which I can not clear myself, you will understand why, after having read these pages--and I shall go to the scaffold without trembling. I shall support this event with the same effort at composure as if a physician, after having auscultated me, should diagnose an advanced disease of the heart. Condemned, I shall have to conquer first the revolt of the animal nature and then to support myself against the despair of my mother.