“Dear sir,”—­he affected in writing the studied, ceremonious formulas of Monsieur de Port-Royal—­“I am ready to obey any suggestions of my country, for me they are commands.  My conscience is at her service, according to the duty of every good citizen.”

One of the most curious effects of the war on the mind, was that it aroused new affinities between individuals.  People who up to this time had not a thought in common discovered all at once that they thought alike; and this resemblance drew them together.  It was what people called “the Sacred Union.”  Men of all parties and temperaments, the choleric, the phlegmatic, monarchists, anarchists, clericals, Calvinists, suddenly forgot their everyday selves, their passions, their fads and their antipathies,—­shed their skins.  And there before you were now creatures, grouped in an unforeseen manner, like metal filings round an invisible magnet.  All the old categories had momentarily disappeared, and no one was astonished to find himself closer to the stranger of yesterday than to a friend of many years’ standing.  It seemed as if, underground, souls met by secret roots that stretched through the night of instinct, that unknown region, where observation rarely ventures.  For our psychology stops at that part of self which emerges from the soil, noting minutely individual differences, but forgetting that this is only the top of the plant, that nine-tenths are buried, the feet held by those of other plants.  This profound, or lower, region of the soul is ordinarily below the threshold of consciousness, the mind feels nothing of it; but the war, by waking up this underground life, revealed moral relationships which no one had suspected.  A sudden intimacy showed itself between Clerambault and a brother of his wife whom he had looked upon until now, and with good reason, as the type of a perfect Philistine.

Leo Camus was not quite fifty years old.  He was tall, thin, and stooped a little; his skin was grey, his beard black, not much hair on his head,—­you could see the bald spots under his hat behind,—­little wrinkles everywhere, cutting into each other, crossing, like a badly-made net; add to this a frowning, sulky expression, and a perpetual cold in the head.  For thirty years he had been employed by the State, and his life had passed in the shadow of a court-yard at the Department.  In the course of years he had changed rooms, but not shadows; he was promoted, but always in the court-yard, never would he leave it in this life.  He was now Under-Secretary, which enabled him to throw a shadow in his turn.  The public and he had few points of contact, and he only communicated with the outside world across a rampart of pasteboard boxes and piles of documents.  He was an old bachelor without friends, and he held the misanthropical opinion that disinterested friendship did not exist upon earth.  He felt no affection except for his sister’s family, and the only way that he showed that was by finding fault with everything that they did.  He was one of those people whose uneasy solicitude causes them to blame those they love when they are ill, and obstinately prove to them that they suffer by their own fault.