r they piously kindle the flame of their faith, and
throw their bodies on the altar. The people bend their backs, and
accept with a passive, ironic resignation.... "No need to borrow
trouble." Ages and ages of misery have rolled over this stone, but in
the end stones do wear down and become mud.

Clerambault tried to talk with one and another of these people but
found himself everywhere opposed by the same hidden, half-unconscious
resistance. They were armed with the will not to hear, or rather with
a remarkable not-will to hear. Their minds were as impervious to
contrary arguments as a duck's feathers to water. Men in general are
endowed, for their comfort, with a precious faculty; they can make
themselves blind and deaf when it does not suit them to see and hear,
and when by chance they pick up some inconvenient object, they drop it
quickly, and forget it as soon as possible. How many citizens in any
country knew the truth about the divided responsibility for the
war, or about the ill-omened part played by their politicians, who,
themselves deceived, pretended with great success to be ignorant!

If everyone is trying to escape from himself, it is clear, that a man
will run faster from someone who, like Clerambault, would help him to
recover himself. In order to avoid their own conscience, intelligent,
serious, honourable men do not blush to employ the little tricks of a
woman or a child trying to get its own way; and dreading a discussion
which might unsettle them, they would seize on the first awkward
expression used by Clerambault. They would separate it from the
context, dress it up if necessary, and with raised voices and eyes
starting from their heads, feign an indignation which they ended by
feeling sincerely. They would repeat "_mordicus_," even after the
proof, and if obliged to admit it, would rush off, banging the door
after them: "Can't stand any more of that!" But two, or perhaps ten
days after, they would come back and renew the argument, as if nothing
had happened.

Some treacherous ones provoked Clerambault to say more than he
intended, and having gained their point, exploded with rage. But even
the most good-natured told him that he lacked good sense--"good," of
course, meaning "my way of thinking."

There were the clever talkers also who, having nothing to fear from a
contest of words, began an argument in the flattering hope that they
could bring the wandering sheep back to the fold. It was