The telephone bell made them start.  Someone was calling Clerambault, who went slowly to answer, half-asleep and absent so that at first he did not understand; “Hullo! is that you, old man?” as he recognised the voice of a brother-author in Paris, telephoning him from a newspaper office.  Still he could not seem to understand; “I don’t hear,—­Jaures?  What about Jaures?...Oh, my God!” Maxime full of a secret apprehension had listened from a distance; he ran and caught the receiver from his father’s hand, as Clerambault let it drop with a despairing gesture.  “Hullo, Hullo!  What do you say?  Jaures assassinated!...”  As exclamations of pain and anger crossed each other on the wire, Maxime made out the details, which he repeated to his family in a trembling voice.  Rosine had led Clerambault back to the table, where he sat down completely crushed.  Like the classic Fate, the shadow of a terrible misfortune settled over the house.  It was not only the loss of his friend that chilled his heart,—­the kind gay face, the cordial hand, the voice which drove away the clouds,—­but the loss of the last hope of the threatened people.  With a touching, child-like confidence he felt Jaures to be the only man who could avert the gathering storm, and he fallen, like Atlas, the sky would crumble.

Maxime rushed off to the station to get the news in Paris, promising to come back later in the evening, but Clerambault stayed in the isolated house, from which in the distance could be seen the far-off phosphorescence of the city.  He had not stirred from the seat where he had fallen stupified.  This time he could no longer doubt, the catastrophe was coming, was upon them already.  Madame Clerambault begged him to go to bed, but he would not listen to her.  His thought was in ruins; he could distinguish nothing steady or constant, could not see any order, or follow an idea, for the walls of his inward dwelling had fallen in, and through the dust which rose, it was impossible to see what remained intact.  He feared there was nothing left but a mass of suffering, at which he looked with dull eyes, unconscious of his falling tears.  Maxime did not come home, carried away by the excitement at Paris.

Madame Clerambault had gone to bed, but about one o’clock she came and persuaded him to come up to their room, where he lay down; but when Pauline had fallen asleep—­anxiety made her sleepy—­he got up and went into the next room.  He groaned, unable to breathe; his pain was so close and oppressive, that he had no room to draw his breath.  With the prophetic hyper-sensitiveness of the artist, who often lives in tomorrow with more intensity than in the present moment, his agonised eyes and heart foresaw all that was to be.  This inevitable war between the greatest nations of the world, seemed to him the failure of civilisation, the ruin of the most sacred hopes for human brotherhood.  He was filled with horror at the vision of a maddened humanity, sacrificing