O Thought! monstrous and splendid flower springing from the humus of our time-honoured instincts!...  In truth, thou art an element penetrating and impregnating man, but thou dost not spring from him, thy source is beyond him, and thy strength greater than his.  Our senses are fairly well-adapted to our needs but our thought is not, it overflows and maddens us.  Very, very few among us men can guide themselves on this torrent; the far greater number are swept along, at random, trusting to chance.  The tremendous power of thought is not under man’s control; he tries to make it serve him, and his greatest danger is that he believes that it does so; but he is like a child handling explosives; there is no proportion between these colossal engines and the purpose for which his feeble hands employ them.  Sometimes they all blow up together....

How guard against this danger?  Shall we stifle thought, uproot living ideas?  That would mean the castration of man’s brain, the loss of his chief stimulus in life; but nevertheless the eau-de-vie of his mind contains a poison which is the more to be dreaded because it is spread broadcast among the masses, in the form of adulterated drugs....  Rouse thee, Man, and sober thyself!  Look about; shake off ideas.  Free thyself from thine own thoughts and learn to govern thy gigantic phantoms which devour themselves in their rage....  And begin by taking the capitals from the names of those great goddesses, Country, Liberty, Right.  Come down from Olympus into the manger, and come without ornaments, without arms, rich only in your beauty, and our love....  I do not know the gods of Justice and Liberty; I only know my brother-man, and his acts, sometimes just, sometimes unjust; and I also know of peoples, all aspiring to real liberty but all deprived of it, and who all, more or less, submit to oppression.

The sight of this world in a fever-fit would have filled a sage with the desire to withdraw until the attack was over; but Clerambault was not a sage.  He knew this, and he also knew that it was vain to speak; but none the less he felt that he must, that he should end by speaking.  He wished to delay the dangerous moment, and his timidity, which shrank from single combat with the world, sought about him for a companion in thought.  The fight would not be so hard if there were two or three together.

The first whose feeling he cautiously sounded were some unfortunate people who, like him, had lost a son.  The father, a well-known painter, had a studio in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs.  His name was Omer Calville and the Clerambaults were neighbourly with him and his wife, a nice old couple of the middle class, devoted to each other.  They had that gentleness, common to many artists of their day, who had known Carriere, and caught remote reflections of Tolstoism, which, like their simplicity, appeared a little artificial, for though it harmonised with their real goodness of heart, the fashion of the time had added a touch of exaggeration.