Clerambault did his best to conceal the insults in the papers from his wife.  Like a schoolboy trying to spirit away his bad marks he watched for the post so as to suppress the obnoxious sheets, but at last their venom seemed to poison the very air.  Among their friends in society, Madame Clerambault and Rosine had to bear many painful allusions, small affronts, even insults.  With the instinct of justice which characterises the human beast, and especially the female, they were held responsible for Clerambault’s ideas, though his wife and daughter knew little of them and disapproved what they knew. (Their critics did not understand them either.) The more polite were reticent, taking pains not to mention Clerambault’s name, or ask after him,—­you don’t speak of ropes, you know, in the house of a man who has been hanged....  And this calculated silence was worse than open abuse.  You would have said that Clerambault had done something dishonest or immodest.  Madame Clerambault would come back full of bitterness, and Rosine suffered too, though she pretended not to mind.  One day, a friend, whom they met in the street, crossed to the other side, turning away her head so as to avoid bowing to them; and Rosine was excluded from a benevolent society where she had worked hard for years.

Women were particularly active in this patriotic reprobation.  Clerambault’s appeal for reconciliation and pardon had no more violent opponents—­and it was the same everywhere.  The tyranny of public opinion is an engine of oppression, invented by the modern State, and much more despotic than itself.  In times of war certain women have proved, its most ferocious instruments.  Bertrand Russell cites the case of an unfortunate man, conductor on a tramway, married, with children, and honourably discharged from the army, who killed himself on account of the insults and persecutions of the women of Middlesex.  In all countries, poor wretches like him have been pursued, crazed, driven to death, by these war-maddened Bacchantes.  This ought not to surprise us; if we have not foreseen this madness, it is because we, like Clerambault hitherto, have lived on comfortable accepted opinions and idealisations.  In spite of the efforts of woman to approximate the fallacious ideal imagined by man for his pleasure and tranquillity, the woman of the present day, weak, cut-off, trimmed into shape as she is, comes much closer than man to the primitive earth.  She is at the source of our instincts, and more richly endowed with forces, which are neither moral nor immoral but simply animal.  If love is her chief function, it is not the passion sublimated by reason but love in the raw state, splendidly blind, mingling selfishness and sacrifice, equally irresponsible, and both subservient to the deep purposes of the race.  The tender, flowery embellishments with which the couple always try to veil the forces that affright them, are like arches of tropical vines over a rushing stream; their object is to deceive.  Man could not bear life if his feeble soul saw the great forces, as they are, that carry him along.