ow around it, at home and
abroad; growing nations and classes, all the passionate awkward
attempts at social and moral improvement. Like poor Barres, and his
dwarfed hero,[1] such people want walls and barriers, frontiers, and
enemies. In this state of siege Vaucoux lived, and his family was
forced to live in the same way. His wife who was a sweet, sad, effaced
kind of person, found the only method of escape--and died. Left alone
with his grief--of which he made a kind of rampart, as of everything
about him--having only one son thirteen years of age, he had mounted
guard before his youth and brought him up to do the same; strange that
a man should bring a son into the world to fight against the future!
Perhaps the boy, if let alone, would have found out life by instinct,
but in the father's shut-up house, a sort of jail, he was his father's
prey. They had few friends, few books, few, or rather one, newspaper
whose petrified principles corresponded to Vaucoux' need for
conservation, in the corpse-like meaning of the word. As his son, or
his victim, could not get away from him, he inoculated him with all
his own mental diseases; like those insects which deposit their eggs
in the living bodies of others. And when the war broke out, he took
him at once to a recruiting station and made him enlist. For a man of
his sort, "Country" was the noblest of things--the holy of holies; he
did not need to breathe the thrilling suggestion of the crowd, his
head was already turned, and, besides, he never went with the crowds;
he carried "Country" about with him;--The Country and The Past,--The
Eternally Past.

[Footnote 1: "Simon and I then understood our hatred of strangers and
barbarians, and our egotism, in which we included ourselves and our
entire small moral family.--_The first care of him who would wish to
live must be to surround himself with high walls; but even in his
closed garden he must introduce only those who are guided by the same
feelings, and interests analogous to his own_." "A Free Man."

In three lines, three times, this "free man" expresses the idea of
"shutting-up," "closing," and "surrounding with walls."]

His son was killed, like Clerambault's son, and the sons of millions
of other fathers, for the faith and the ideals of those fathers in
which they did not believe.

Vaucoux had none of Clerambault's doubts; he did not know the meaning
of the word, and if he could have permitted himself such a feeling he
wo