The Disciple

THERE is a story that has never been denied to the effect that the bourgeois of the city of Königsberg supposed that some prodigious event was disturbing the civilized world simply because the philosopher Emanuel Kant changed the direction of his daily walk. The celebrated author of the “Critique of Pure Reason” had that day learned of the breaking out of the French Revolution. Although Paris, may not be very favorable to such naïve wonders, a number of the inhabitants of the Rue Guy de la Brosse experienced an astonishment almost as great one afternoon in January, 1887, when they saw go out, toward one o’clock, a philosopher, who if less illustrious than the venerable Kant, was as regular and as peculiar in his habits, not to mention that he was even more destructive in his analysis. It was M. Adrien Sixte, whom the English call the French Spencer.

This Rue Guy de la Brosse, which leads from the Rue de Jussieu to the Rue Linné, forms part of a veritable little province bounded by the Jardin des Plantes, the Hopital de la Pitié, the wine warehouse and the first rise of Sainte-Geneviève. That is to say, that it permits those familiar inquisitions of glance impossible in the larger districts where the come-and-go of existence ceaselessly renews the tide of carriages and of people. Only persons of small incomes live here, modest professors, employees of the museum, students who wish to study, all young literary people who dread the temptations of the Latin Quarter. The shops are patronized by this clientele, which is as regular as that of a suburb. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the washerwoman, the apothecary, are all spoken of in the singular by the domestics who make the purchases.