lt was always the Parisian in their eyes;
he belonged to another tribe, and if they had thoughts, they would not
tell them to him.

This lack of response stifled Clerambault's words; impressionable
as he was, he could no longer hear himself. All was silence; he had
friends unknown, and at a distance, who tried to communicate with
him, but their voices were intercepted by postal spies--one of
the disgraces of our time. On the pretext of suppressing foreign
espionage, our Government made spies of its own citizens, and not
content with a watch on politics, it violated a man's thoughts, and
taught its agents how to listen at doors like lackeys. The premium
thus put on baseness filled this country--and all the others--with
volunteer detectives, gentlemen, men of letters, many of them
slackers, who bought their own security with the safety of others,
calling their denunciations by the name of patriotism.

Thanks to these informers, those of liberal opinions could not get in
touch with one another; that great monster, the State--pricked by
its bad conscience--suspected and feared half a dozen liberal-minded
people, alone, weak, and destitute; and each one of these liberals
surrounded by spies, ate his heart out in his jail, and ignorant that
others suffered with him, felt himself slowly dying, freezing in the
polar ice of his despair.

Clerambault was too hot-blooded to let himself be buried under this
snowy shroud; but the soul is not all, the body is a plant which
needs human soil, Deprived of sympathy, reduced to feed on itself,
it perishes. In vain did Clerambault try to prove to himself that
millions of other minds were in agreement with his own; it could not
replace the actual contact with one living heart. Faith is sufficient
for the spirit, but the heart is like Thomas, it must touch to be
convinced.

Clerambault had not foreseen this physical weakness; he felt stifled,
his body seemed on fire, his skin burning, his life seemed to be
drying up at the source. It was as if he were under an exhausted
vacuum-bell. A wall kept him from the air.

One evening, like a consumptive after a bad day, he had been wandering
about the house from room to room, as if in search of a breath of
fresh air, when a letter came that had somehow slipped through the
meshes of the net. An old man like himself, a village schoolmaster in
a remote valley of Dauphiny wrote thus:

"The war has taken everything from me; of those whom I used to