better informed as to the facts who furnished him with the necessary information.  A short time before there had been formed in France a little society, semi-clandestine, for independent study and free criticism on the war, and the causes that had led up to it.  The Government, always vigilant and ready to crush any attempt at freedom of thought, nevertheless did not consider this society dangerous.  Its members were prudent and calm, men of letters before all, who avoided notoriety, and contented themselves with private discussion; it was thought better policy to keep them under observation, and between four walls.

These calculations proved to be wrong, for truth modestly and laboriously discovered, though known only to five or six, cannot be uprooted; it will spring from the earth with irresistible force.  Clerambault now learned for the first time of the existence of these passionate seekers after truth, who recalled the times of the Dreyfus case.  In the general oppression, their apostolate behind closed doors took on the appearance of a little early-Christian group in the catacombs.  Thanks to them, he discovered the falsehoods as well as the injustices of the “Great War.”  He had had a faint suspicion of them, but he had not dreamed how far the history that touches us most closely had been falsified, and the knowledge revolted him.  Even in his most critical moments, his simplicity would never have imagined the deceptive foundations on which reposes a Crusade for the Right, and as he was not a man to keep his discovery to himself, he proclaimed it loudly, first in articles which were forbidden by the censor, and then in the shape of sarcastic apologues, or little symbolic tales, touched with irony.  The Voltairian apologues slipped through sometimes, owing to the inattention of the censor, and in this way Clerambault was marked out to the authorities as a very dangerous man.

Those who thought they knew him best were surprised.  His adversaries had called him sentimental, and assuredly so he was, but he was aware of it, and because he was French he could laugh at it, and at himself.  It is all very well for sentimental Germans to have a thick-headed belief in themselves; deep down in an eloquent and sensitive creature like Clerambault, the vision of the Gaul—­always alert in his thick woods—­observes, lets nothing escape, and is ready for a laugh at everything.  The surprising thing is that this under-spirit will emerge when you least expect it, during the darkest trials and in the most pressing danger.  The universal sense of humour came as a tonic to Clerambault, and his character, scarcely freed from the conventions in which it had been bound, took on suddenly a vital complexity.  Good, tender, combative, irritable, always in extremes—­he knew it, and that made him worse—­tearful, sarcastic, sceptical, yet believing, he was surprised when he saw himself in the mirror of his writings.  All his vitality, hitherto prudently shut into his bourgeois life, now burst forth, developed by moral solitude and the hygiene of action.