There was a personal note in the furious diatribe that Bertin hurled at him that Clerambault could not understand.  In the general mental confusion, Bertin, naturally shocked by Clerambault’s ideas, might have remonstrated with him frankly, face to face; but without any warning, he began by a public denunciation.  On the first page of his paper appeared an article of the utmost virulence; he attacked, not only his ideas, but his character, speaking of Clerambault’s tragic struggle with his conscience as an attack of literary megalomania, brought on by undeserved success.  It seemed as if he expressly chose words likely to wound Clerambault, and he ended by summoning him to retract his errors in a tone of the most insulting superiority.

The violence of this article, from so well-known an author, made an event in Paris of the “Clerambault Case.”  It occupied the reporters for more than a week, a long time for these feather-headed gentry.  Hardly anyone read what Clerambault had actually written; it was not worth while.  Bertin had read it, and newspaper men do not make a practice of taking unnecessary trouble; besides it was not a question of reading, but of judgment.  A strange sort of Sacred Union was formed over Clerambault; clericals and Jacobins came together to condemn him, and the man whom they admired yesterday was dragged in the mud today.  The national poet became at once a public enemy, and all the myrmidons of the press attacked him with heroic invective.  The greater number of them united bad faith with a remarkable ignorance.  Very few knew Clerambault’s works, they scarcely knew his name or the titles of his books, but that no more kept them from disparaging him now than it had hindered them from praising him when he was the fashion.  Now, in their eyes, everything that he had written was tainted with “bochism,” though all their quotations were inexact.  In the excitement of his investigation, one of them foisted upon Clerambault the authorship of another man’s book, the author of which, pale with fright, protested with indignation, dissociating himself entirely from his dangerous fellow-author.  Uneasy at their intimacy with Clerambault, some of his friends did not wait to have it recalled, but met it halfway, writing “open letters,” to which the papers gave a conspicuous place.  Some, like Bertin, coupled their public censure with a demand that he should confess himself in the wrong, and others, less considerate, cast him off in the bitterest and most insulting terms.  Clerambault was crushed by all this animosity; it could not arise solely from his articles, it must have been long dormant in the hearts of these men.  And why so much hidden hatred?—­What had he done to them?...  A successful artist does not suspect that besides the smiles of those around there are also teeth, only waiting for the opportunity to bite.