emotion and timidity put her to flight.  He was vexed all the same, but the approval of the outside world healed this slight wound.  His poems appeared in the bourgeois papers, and proved the most striking success of Clerambault’s career, for no other work of his had raised such unanimous admiration.  A poet is always pleased to have it said that his last work is his best, all the more when he knows that it is inferior to the others.

Clerambault knew it perfectly well, but he swallowed all the fawning reviews of the press with infantile vanity.  In the evening he made Camus read them aloud in the family circle, beaming with joy as he listened.  When it was over he nearly shouted: 

“Encore!”

In this concert of praise one slightly flat note came from Perrotin.  (Undoubtedly he had been much deceived in him, he was not a true friend.) The old scholar to whom Clerambault had sent a copy of his poems did not fail to congratulate him politely, praising his great talent, but he did not say that this was his finest work; he even urged him, “after having offered his tribute to the warlike Muse, to produce now a work of pure imagination detached from the present.”  What could he mean?  When an artist submits his work for your approval, is it proper to say to him:  “I should prefer to read another one quite different from this?” This was a fresh sign to Clerambault of the sadly lukewarm patriotism that he had already noticed in Perrotin.  This lack of comprehension chilled his feeling towards his old friend.  The war, he thought, was the great test of characters, it revised all values, and tried out friendships.  And he thought that the loss of Perrotin was balanced by the gain of Camus, and many new friends, plain people, no doubt, but simple and warm-hearted.

Sometimes at night he had moments of oppression, he was uneasy, wakeful, discontented, ashamed; ... but of what?  Had he not done his duty?

The first letters from Maxime were a comforting cordial; the first drops dissipated every discouragement, and they all lived on them in long intervals when no news came.  In spite of the agony of these silences, when any second might be fatal to the loved one, his perfect confidence (exaggerated perhaps, through affection, or superstition) communicated itself to them all.  His letters were running over with youth and exuberant joy, which reached its climax in the days that followed the victory of the Marne.  The whole family yearned towards him as one; like a plant the summit of which bathes in the light, stretching up to it in a rapture of mystic adoration.

People who but yesterday were soft and torpid, expanded under the extraordinary light when fate threw them into the infernal vortex of the war, the light of Death, the game with Death; Maxime, a spoiled child, delicate, overparticular, who in ordinary times took care of himself like a fine lady, found an unexpected flavour in the privations and trials of his new life, and wondering at himself he boasted of it in his charming, vainglorious letters which delighted the hearts of his parents.