“If you only knew how we crave a word of real sympathy; it is all very well to be hardened, or old,—­there are grey-haired, bent men among us—­but after what we have seen, suffered, and done to others, there are times when we are like lost children, looking for their mother to console them.  Even our mothers seem far away.  At times we get strange letters from home, as if we were deserted by our own flesh and blood.”

Clerambault hid his face in his hands with a groan.

“What is the matter?” said Moreau, “are you ill?”

“You remind me of all the harm that I did.”

“You?  No, it was other people that did the harm.”

“Yes, I, as much as the others.  You must try to forgive us all.”

“You are the last who ought to say so.”

“If the truth were known, I should be among the first.  For I am one of the few who see clearly how wicked I was.”  He began to inveigh against his generation, but broke off with a discouraged gesture: 

“None of that does any good....  Tell me about yourself.”

His voice was so humble that Moreau was really touched to see the older man blame himself so severely.  All his distrust melted away, and he threw wide the door of his bitter, wounded spirit, confessing that he had come several times as far as the house, but could not make up his mind to leave his letter.  He never did consent to show it.  Since he came out of the hospital he had not been able to talk to anyone; these people back here sickened him with their little preoccupations, their business, their pleasures, the restrictions to their pleasures, their selfishness, their ignorance and lack of comprehension.  He felt like a stranger among them, more than if he were with African savages.  Besides,—­he stopped, the angry words seemed to stick in his throat—­it was not only these people—­he felt a stranger to all the world, cut off from normal life, from the pleasures and work of other men by his infirmities.  He was a mere wreck, blind and maimed.  The poor fellow was absurdly ashamed of it; he blushed at the pitying glances that people threw at him in passing—­like a penny that you give, turning away your head at the same time from the unpleasant sight.  For in his sensitiveness he exaggerated his ugliness and was disgusted by his deformity.  He dwelt on his lost joys and ruined youth; when he saw couples in the street, he could not help feeling jealous; the tears would come into his eyes.

Even this was not all, and when he had poured out the bitterness of his heart—­and Clerambault’s compassion encouraged him to speak further—­he got down to the worst of the trouble, which he and his comrades felt like a cancer that one does not dare to look at.  Through his obscure, violent, and miserable talk, Clerambault at last made out what it was that tore the hearts of these young men.  It is easy enough for dried-up egotists, withered intellectuals, to sneer at this love of life in the