The mind of Clerambault was alien to all this; he and these people did not speak the same language.  They exchanged some vague condolences, but when he is talking to a bourgeois a peasant always complains; it is a habit, a way of defending himself against a possible appeal to his pocketbook; they would have talked in the same way about an epidemic of fever.  Clerambault was always the Parisian in their eyes; he belonged to another tribe, and if they had thoughts, they would not tell them to him.

This lack of response stifled Clerambault’s words; impressionable as he was, he could no longer hear himself.  All was silence; he had friends unknown, and at a distance, who tried to communicate with him, but their voices were intercepted by postal spies—­one of the disgraces of our time.  On the pretext of suppressing foreign espionage, our Government made spies of its own citizens, and not content with a watch on politics, it violated a man’s thoughts, and taught its agents how to listen at doors like lackeys.  The premium thus put on baseness filled this country—­and all the others—­with volunteer detectives, gentlemen, men of letters, many of them slackers, who bought their own security with the safety of others, calling their denunciations by the name of patriotism.

Thanks to these informers, those of liberal opinions could not get in touch with one another; that great monster, the State—­pricked by its bad conscience—­suspected and feared half a dozen liberal-minded people, alone, weak, and destitute; and each one of these liberals surrounded by spies, ate his heart out in his jail, and ignorant that others suffered with him, felt himself slowly dying, freezing in the polar ice of his despair.

Clerambault was too hot-blooded to let himself be buried under this snowy shroud; but the soul is not all, the body is a plant which needs human soil, Deprived of sympathy, reduced to feed on itself, it perishes.  In vain did Clerambault try to prove to himself that millions of other minds were in agreement with his own; it could not replace the actual contact with one living heart.  Faith is sufficient for the spirit, but the heart is like Thomas, it must touch to be convinced.

Clerambault had not foreseen this physical weakness; he felt stifled, his body seemed on fire, his skin burning, his life seemed to be drying up at the source.  It was as if he were under an exhausted vacuum-bell.  A wall kept him from the air.

One evening, like a consumptive after a bad day, he had been wandering about the house from room to room, as if in search of a breath of fresh air, when a letter came that had somehow slipped through the meshes of the net.  An old man like himself, a village schoolmaster in a remote valley of Dauphiny wrote thus: 

“The war has taken everything from me; of those whom I used to know, some have been killed, and the rest are so altered that I hardly recognise them.  They have trampled on all that made life worth having to me; my hope of progress, my faith in a future of brotherly reason.