, poor creature, if your eye
What lies beneath can hardly spy,
Think you your gaze can pierce the sky?"

He had enough sense of humour to see the justice of the comparison;
yes, he was of the number of:

"Those whom phantoms alarm
While some serious harm
Threatens them or their farm."

"Even so," he said, "do you think that your republic will have no
need of astronomers, just as the first one could get along without
chemists? Or are they all to be mobilised? In that case there would be
a good chance of your all finding yourselves together at the bottom
of the well! Is that what you want? I should not object so much if
it were only a question of sharing your fate, but when it comes to
joining in your hatreds!"

"You have some of your own, from what I have heard," said one of the
young men. Just at this moment another man came in with a newspaper in
his hand and called to Clerambault:

"Congratulations, old boy, I see your enemy Bertin is dead."

The irascible journalist had died in a few hours from an attack of
pneumonia. For the last six months he had pursued with fury anyone
whom he suspected of working for peace, or even of wishing for it.
From one step to another he had come to look upon, not only the
country, as sacred, but the war also, and among those whom he attacked
most fiercely, Clerambault had a foremost place. Bertin could not
pardon the resistance to his onslaughts; Clerambault's replies had at
first only irritated him, but the disdainful silence with which his
latest invectives had been met drove him beside himself. His swollen
vanity was deeply wounded, and nothing would have satisfied him but
the total annihilation of his adversary. To him Clerambault was not
only a personal enemy, but a foe to the public; and in the endeavour
to prove this, he made him the centre of a great pacifist plot. At any
other time, this would have seemed absurd in everyone's eyes, but now
no one had eyes to see with. During the last weeks Bertin's fury and
violence had gone beyond anything that he had written before; they
were a threat against anyone who was convicted or suspected of the
dangerous heresy of Peace.

In this little reunion the news of his death was received with noisy
satisfaction; and his funeral oration was preached with an energy
that yielded nothing in this line to the efforts of the most famous
masters. But Clerambault, absorbed in the newspaper account, scarcely
seemed to hear. One