was listening while she read a letter which she had read to him before.  He noticed that she skipped a phrase in which Mairet expressed his heroic pessimism, and when he remarked on it she appeared vexed.  After this her manner became more distant, her annoyance passed into coldness, then irritation, till it even grew into a sort of smothered hostility, and finally she avoided him, though without an open rupture.  Clerambault felt that she had a grudge against him and that he should see no more of her.

The truth was that, at the same time that Clerambault pursued his relentless analysis which struck at the foundations of current beliefs, an inverse process of reconstruction and idealisation was going on in the mind of Madame Mairet.  Her grief longed to convince itself that after all there had been a holy cause, and the dead man was no longer there to help her to bear the truth.  Where two stand together there may be joy in the most terrible truths, but when one is alone they are mortal.

Clerambault understood it all, and his quick sympathies warned him of the pain he caused and shared; for he made the suffering of this woman his own.  He nearly reached the point of approving her revolt against himself, for he knew her deep hidden sorrow, and that the truth that he brought was powerless to help it—­still worse, it added one evil more....

Insoluble problem!  Those who are bereaved cannot dispense with the murderous delusions of which they are the victims, and if these are torn away their suffering becomes intolerable.  Families that have lost sons, husbands, and fathers, must needs believe that it was for a just and holy cause, and statesmen are forced to continue to deceive themselves and others.  For if this were to cease, life would be insupportable to themselves and to those whom they govern.  How unfortunate is Man; he is the prey of his own ideas, has given up everything to them, and finds that each day he must continue to give more, lest the gulf open under his feet and he be swallowed up in it.  After four years of unheard-of pain and ruin, can we possibly admit that it was all for nothing?  That not only our victory will be more ruinous still, but that we ought not to have expected anything else; that the war was absurd, and we, self-deceivers?...  Never! we would rather die to the last man.  When one man finds that he has thrown away his life, he sinks down in despair.  What would it be in the case of a nation, of ten nations, or of civilisation as a whole?...

Clerambault heard the cry that went up from the multitude:  “Life, at any cost!  Save us, no matter how!”

“But, you do not know how to save yourselves.  The road you follow only leads on to fresh catastrophes, to an infinite mass of suffering.”

“No matter how frightful they are, not as bad as what you offer us.  Let us die with our illusions, rather than live without them.  Such a life as that, is a death in life!”