In the crisis of acute pessimism which had seized upon Clerambault during these months of inhuman isolation, he could not contemplate even the possibility of progress; that progress in which he had once believed, as men do in God.  The human species now appeared to him as devoted to a murderous destiny.  After having ravaged the planet and exterminated other species, it was now to be destroyed by its own hands.  It is the law of justice.  Man only became ruler of the world by treachery and force (above all by treachery).  Those more noble than he have perhaps—­or certainly—­fallen under his blows; he has destroyed some, degraded and brutalised others.  During the thousands of years in which he has shared life with other beings, he has feigned—­falsely—­not to comprehend them, not to see them as brothers, suffering, loving, and dreaming like himself.  In order to exploit them, to torture them without remorse, his men of thought have told him that these creatures cannot think, that he alone possesses this gift.  And now he is not far from saying the same thing of his fellow-men whom he dismembers and destroys.  Butcher, murderer, you have had no pity, why should you implore it for yourself today?...

Of all the old friendships that had once surrounded Clerambault, one only remained, his friendship with Madame Mairet, whose husband had been killed in the Argonne.

Francois Mairet was not quite forty years old when he met with an obscure death in the trenches.  He was one of the foremost French biologists, an unpretending scholar and hard worker, a patient spirit.  But celebrity was assured to him before long, though he was in no haste to welcome the meretricious charmer, as her favours have to be shared with too many wire-pullers.  The silent joys that intimacy with science bestows on her elect were sufficient for him, with only one heart on earth to taste them with him.  His wife shared all his thoughts.  She came of a scholarly family, was rather younger than he; one of those serious, loving, weak, yet proud hearts, that must give but only give themselves once.  Her existence was bound up in Mairet’s interests.  Perhaps she would have shared the life of another man equally well, if circumstances had been different, but she had married Mairet with everything that was his.  Like many of the best of women, her intelligence was quick to understand the man whom her heart had chosen.  She had begun by being his pupil, and became his partner, helping in his work and in his laboratory researches.  They had no children and had every thought in common, both of them being freethinkers, with high ideals, destitute of religion, as well as of any national superstition.

In 1914 Mairet was mobilised, and went simply as a duty, without any illusions as to the cause that he was called upon to serve by the accidents of time and country.  His letters from the front were clear and stoical; he had never ceased to see the ignominy of the war.  But he felt obliged to sacrifice himself in obedience to fate, which had made him a part of the errors, the sufferings, and the confused struggles of an unfortunate animal species slowly evolving towards an unknown end.