His family and the Clerambaults had known each other in the country, before either of them were transplanted to Paris; this acquaintance formed the basis of an amicable intercourse, solid rather than intimate—­for Mairet opened his heart to no one but his wife—­but resting on an esteem that nothing could shake.

They had not corresponded since the beginning of the war; each had been too much absorbed by his own troubles.  Men who went to fight did not scatter their letters among their friends, but generally concentrated on one person whom they loved best, and to whom they told everything.  Mairet’s wife, as always, was his only confidante.  His letters were a journal in which he thought aloud; and in one of the last he spoke of Clerambault.  He had seen extracts from his first articles in some of the nationalist papers which were the only ones allowed at the front, where they were quoted with insulting comments.  He spoke of them to his wife, saying what comfort he had found in these words of an honest man driven to speak out, and he begged her to let Clerambault know that his old friendship for him was now all the warmer and closer.  He also asked Madame Mairet to send him the succeeding articles, but he died before they could reach him.

When he was gone the woman, who had lived only for him, tried to draw nearer to the people who had been near to him in the last days of his life.  She wrote to Clerambault, and he, who was eating his heart out in his provincial retreat, lacking even the energy to get away, welcomed her letter as a deliverance.  He returned at once to Paris; and they both found a bitter joy in evoking together the image of the absent.  They formed the habit of meeting on one evening in the week, when they would, so to speak, immerse themselves in recollections of him.  Clerambault was the only one of his friends who could understand the tragedy, hidden under a sacrifice gilded by no patriotic illusion.

At first Madame Mairet seemed to find comfort in showing all that she had received; she read his letters, full of disenchanted confidences; they reflected on them with deep emotion, and she brought them into the discussion of the problems that had caused the death of Mairet and of millions of others.  In this keen analysis, nothing stopped Clerambault; and she was not a woman to hesitate in the search for truth.  But nevertheless....

Clerambault soon became aware that his words made her uneasy, though he was only saying aloud things that she knew well and that were strongly confirmed by Mairet’s letters, namely, the criminal futility of these deaths, and the sterility of all this heroism.  She tried to take back her confidences, or even to minimise the meaning of them, with an eagerness that did not seem perfectly sincere.  She brought to mind sayings of her husband’s which apparently showed him more in sympathy with general opinion, and implied that he approved of it.  One day Clerambault