light to a few colours, the good and evil that flow in the veins
of the world are only perceptible to him when he has bottled a few
samples, chosen among those around him. All good and bad then he has
in his flask, and on these he can expend his whole power of liking or
repulsion; witness the fact that to millions of excellent people the
condemnation of Dreyfus, or the sinking of the "Lusitania," remains
the crime of the century. They cannot see that the path of social
life is paved with crime, and that they walk over it in perfect
unconsciousness, profiting by injustices that they make no effort to
prevent. Of all these, which are the worst? Those which rouse long
echoes in the conscience of mankind, or those which are known alone to
the stifled victim? Naturally, our worthy friends have not arms long
enough to embrace all the misery of the world; they can only reach one
perhaps, but that they press close to their heart; and when they have
chosen a crime, they pour out upon it all the pent-up hatred within
them;--when a dog has a bone to gnaw, it is wiser not to touch him.

Clerambault had tried to take his bone away from the dog, and if he
was bitten he had no right to complain; in point of fact he did not
do so. Men are in the right to fight injustice wherever they see it;
perhaps it is not their fault if they often see no more than its big
toe, like Gulliver's at Brobdignag. Well, we must each do what we can;
and these people could bite.

It was Good Friday, and the rising tide of invasion swept up towards
the Ile de France. Even this day of sacred sorrow had not stopped the
massacre, for the lay war knows nothing of the Truce of God. Christ
had been bombarded in one of His churches, and the news of the
murderous explosion at St. Gervais that afternoon spread at nightfall
through the darkened city, wrapped in its grief, its rage, and its
fear.

The sad little group of friends had gathered at Froment's house; each
one had come hoping to meet the others, without previous appointment.
They could see nothing but violence all about them; in the present as
well as in the future, in the enemy's camp, in their own, on the side
of revolutionists, and reactionaries as well. Their agony and their
doubts met in one thought. The sculptor was saying:

"Our holiest convictions, our faith in peace and human brotherhood
rest in vain on reason and love; is there any hope then that they can
conquer men? We are too weak."