ser. He also asked Madame Mairet to send him the
succeeding articles, but he died before they could reach him.

When he was gone the woman, who had lived only for him, tried to draw
nearer to the people who had been near to him in the last days of his
life. She wrote to Clerambault, and he, who was eating his heart
out in his provincial retreat, lacking even the energy to get away,
welcomed her letter as a deliverance. He returned at once to Paris;
and they both found a bitter joy in evoking together the image of the
absent. They formed the habit of meeting on one evening in the week,
when they would, so to speak, immerse themselves in recollections of
him. Clerambault was the only one of his friends who could understand
the tragedy, hidden under a sacrifice gilded by no patriotic illusion.

At first Madame Mairet seemed to find comfort in showing all that she
had received; she read his letters, full of disenchanted confidences;
they reflected on them with deep emotion, and she brought them into
the discussion of the problems that had caused the death of Mairet
and of millions of others. In this keen analysis, nothing stopped
Clerambault; and she was not a woman to hesitate in the search for
truth. But nevertheless....

Clerambault soon became aware that his words made her uneasy, though
he was only saying aloud things that she knew well and that were
strongly confirmed by Mairet's letters, namely, the criminal futility
of these deaths, and the sterility of all this heroism. She tried to
take back her confidences, or even to minimise the meaning of them,
with an eagerness that did not seem perfectly sincere. She brought
to mind sayings of her husband's which apparently showed him more in
sympathy with general opinion, and implied that he approved of it. One
day Clerambault 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