mbault, who felt helpless before
this unexpected hostility.

"There is no time to be lost," declared Camus, "you must answer."

"Answer? But what can I say?"

"The first thing, of course, is to deny it as a base invention."

"But it is not an invention," said Clerambault, looking Camus in the
face. It was the turn of the latter to look as if he had been struck
by lightning.

"You say it is not,--not?" he stammered.

"I wrote the pamphlet," said Clerambault, "but the meaning has been
distorted by this article."

Camus could not wait for the end of the sentence, but began to howl:
"You wrote a thing like that!... You, a man like you!"

Clerambault tried to calm his brother-in-law, begging him not to judge
until he knew all; but Camus would do nothing but shout, calling him
crazy, and screaming: "I don't know anything about all that. Have you
written against the war, or the country. Yes, or no?"

"I wrote that war is a crime, and that all countries are stained by
it...."

Without allowing Clerambault to explain himself farther, Camus sprang
at him, as if he meant to shake him by the collar; but restraining
himself, he hissed in his face that he was the criminal, and deserved
to be tried by court-martial at once.

The raised voices brought the servant to listen at the door, and
Madame Clerambault ran in, trying to appease her brother, in a high
key. Clerambault volunteered to read the obnoxious pamphlet to Camus,
but in vain, as he refused furiously, declaring that the papers had
told him all he wanted to know about such filth. (He said all papers
were liars, but acted on their falsehoods, none the less.) Then, in a
magisterial tone, he called on Clerambault to sit down and write on
the spot a public recantation. Clerambault shrugged his shoulders,
saying that he was accountable to nothing but his own conscience--that
he was free.

"No!" roared Camus.

"Do you mean that I am not free to say what I think?"

"You are not free, you have no right to say such things," cried the
exasperated Camus. "Your country has claims on you, and your family
first of all. They ought to shut you up."

He insisted that the letter should be written that very moment, but
Clerambault simply turned his back on him. So he left, banging the
door after him, and vowing that he would never set foot there again,
that all was over between them.

After this poor Clerambault had to submit to a string of questions
from his wife who, wit