Towards the end of the autumn, in order to keep up the morale which sank before the sadness of the coming winter, the press started a new propaganda against German atrocities; it “went across” perfectly, and the thermometer of public opinion rose to fever heat.  Even in the placid Berry village for several weeks all sorts of cruel things were said; the cure took part and preached a sermon on vengeance.  Clerambault heard this from his wife at breakfast and said plainly what he thought of it before the servant who was waiting at table.  The whole village knew that he was a boche before night; and every morning after that he could read it written up on his front door.  Madame Clerambault’s temper was not improved by this, and Rosine, who had taken to religion in the disappointment of her young love, was too much occupied with her unhappy soul and its experiences to think of the troubles of others.  The sweetest natures have times when they are simply and absolutely selfish.

Left to himself alone, deprived of the means of action, Clerambault turned his heated thoughts back on himself.  Nothing now held him from the path of harsh truth; there was nothing between him and its cold light.  His soul was shrivelled like those fuorusciti who, thrown from the walls of the cruel city, gaze at it from without with faithless eyes.  It was no longer the sad vision of the first night of his trials, when his bleeding wounds still linked him with other men; all ties were now broken, as with open eyes his spirit sank down whirling into the abyss; the slow descent into hell, from circle to circle, alone in the silence.

“I see you, you myriads of herded peoples, hugging together perforce in shoals to spawn and to think!  Each group of you, like the bees, has a special sacred odour of its own.  The stench of the queen-bee makes the unity of the hive and gives joy to the labour of the bees.  As with the ants, whosoever does not stink like me, I kill!  O you bee-hives of men! each of you has its own peculiar smell of race, religion, morals and approved tradition; it impregnates your bodies, your wax, the brood-comb of your hives; it permeates your entire lives from birth to death; and woe to him who would wash himself clean of it.

“He who would sense the mustiness of this swarm-thinking, the night-sweat of a hallucinated people, should look back at the rites and beliefs of ancient history.  Let him ask the quizzical Herodotus to unroll for him the film of human wanderings, the long panorama of social customs, sometimes ignoble or ridiculous, but always venerated; of the Scythians, the Gatae, the Issedones, the Gindares, the Nasamones, the Sauromates, the Lydians, the Lybians, and the Egyptians; bipeds of all colours, from East to West and from North to South.  The Great King, who was a man of wit, asked the Greeks, who burn their dead, to eat them; and the Hindoos, who eat them, to burn them, and was much amused by their indignation.  The wise Herodotus