asks death for life. Far down in the depths of human nature is
this slaughter-house in the ditch, never filled up but covered with
the veil of a false civilisation, over which hangs a faint whiff from
the butcher's shop.... This filthy odour finally sobered Clerambault;
with horror he tore off the skin of the beast whose prey he had been.

Ah, how thick it was,--warm, silky, and beautiful, and at the same
time stinking and bloody, made of the lowest instincts, and the
highest illusions. To love, give ourselves to all, be a sacrifice for
all, be but one body and one soul, our Country the sole life!... What
then is this Country, this living thing to which a man sacrifices
his life, the life of all but his conscience and the consciences of
others? What is this blind love, of which the other side of the shield
is an equally blinded hate?

... "It was a great error to take the name of reason from that of
love," says Pascal, "and we have no good cause to think them opposed,
for love and reason are in truth the same. Love is a precipitation of
thought to one side without considering everything; but it is always
reason." ...

Well, let us consider everything. Is not this love in a great measure
the fear of examining all things, as a child hides his head under the
sheet, so as not to see the shadow on the wall?

Country? A Hindoo temple: men, monsters, and gods. What is she? The
earth we tread on? The whole earth is the mother of us all. The
family? It is here and there, with the enemy as with ourselves, and it
asks nothing but peace. The poor, the workers, the people, they are
on both sides, equally miserable, equally exploited. Thinkers have a
common field, and as for their rivalries and their vanities, they are
as ridiculous in the East as in the West; the world does not go to war
over the quarrels of a Vadius or a Trissotin. The State? But the State
and the Country are not the same thing. The confusion is made by those
who find profit in it; the State is our strength, used and abused by
men like ourselves, no better than ourselves, often worse. We are not
duped by them, and in times of peace we judge them fairly enough, but
let a war come on, they are given _carte blanche_, they can appeal to
the lowest instincts, stifle all control, suppress liberty and truth,
destroy all humanity; they are masters, we must stand shoulder to
shoulder to defend the honour and the mistakes of these Masacarilles
arrayed in borrowed plumes