genius.  But now that he had been warned to distrust everything, by the constant:  “Keep still,—­take care,” and knew that Kant led straight to Krupp, he dared admire nothing without official sanction.  The sympathetic modesty that caused him in times of peace to accept with the respect due to words of Holy Writ the publications of learned and distinguished men, now in the war took on the proportions of a fabulous credulity.  He swallowed without a gulp the strange discoveries made at this time by the intellectuals of his country, treading under foot the art, the intelligence, the science of the enemy throughout the centuries; an effort frantically disingenuous, which denied all genius to our adversary, and either found in its highest claims to glory the mark of its present infamy or rejected its achievements altogether and bestowed them on another race.

Clerambault was overwhelmed, beside himself, but (though he did not admit it), in his heart he was glad.

Seeking for someone to share in his excitement and keep it up by fresh arguments, he went to his friend Perrotin.

Hippolyte Perrotin was of one of those types, formerly the pride of the higher instruction in France but seldom met with in these days—­a great humanist.  Led by a wide and sagacious curiosity, he walked calmly through the garden of the centuries, botanising as he went.  The spectacle of the present was the object least worthy of his attention, but he was too keen an observer to miss any of it, and knew how to draw it gently back into scale to fit into the whole picture.  Events which others regarded as most important were not so in his eyes, and political agitations appeared to him like bugs on a rose-bush which he would carefully study with its parasites.  This was to him a constant source of delight.  He had the finest appreciation of shades of literary beauty, and his learning rather increased than impaired the faculty, giving to his thought an infinite range of highly-flavoured experiences to taste and compare.  He belonged to the great French tradition of learned men, master writers from Buffon to Renan and Gaston Paris.  Member of the Academy and of several Classes, his extended knowledge gave him a superiority, not only of pure and classic taste, but of a liberal modern spirit, over his colleagues, genuine men of letters.  He did not think himself exempt from study, as most of them did, as soon as they had passed the threshold of the sacred Cupola; old profesor as he was, he still went to school.  When Clerambault was still unknown to the rest of the Immortals, except to one or two brother poets who mentioned him as little as possible with a disdainful smile, Perrotin had already discovered and placed him in his collection, struck by certain pictures, an original phraseology, the mechanism of his imagination, primitive yet complicated by simplicity.  All this attracted him, and then the man interested him too.  He sent a short complimentary note to