r part of his visits was spent in reducing
Clerambault's illusions to fragments, but they had as many lives as
a cat, and every time he came it had to be done over again. This
irritated Camus, but secretly pleased him for he needed a pretext
constantly renewed to think the world bad, and men a set of imbeciles.
Above all he had no mercy on politicians; this Government employee
hated Governments, though he would have been puzzled to say what
he would put in their places. The only form of politics that he
understood was opposition. He suffered from a spoiled life and
thwarted nature. He was a peasant's son and born to raise grapes, or
else to exercise his authoritative instincts over the field labourers,
like a watch-dog. Unfortunately, diseases of the vines interfered and
also the pride of a quill-driver; the family moved to town, and now he
would have felt it a derogation to return to his real nature, which
was too much atrophied, even if he had wished it. Not having found his
true place in society, he blamed the social order, serving it, as do
millions of functionaries, like a bad servant, an underhand enemy.

A mind of this sort, peevish, bitter, misanthropical, it seems would
have been driven crazy by the war, but on the contrary it served to
tranquilise it. When the herd draws itself together in arms against
the stranger it is a fall for those rare free spirits who love the
whole world, but it raises the many who weakly vegetate in anarchistic
egotism, and lifts them to that higher stage of organised selfishness.
Camus woke up all at once, with the feeling that for the first time he
was not alone in the world.

Patriotism is perhaps the only instinct under present conditions which
escapes the withering touch of every-day life. All other instincts and
natural aspirations, the legitimate need to love and act in social
life, are stifled, mutilated and forced to pass under the yoke of
denial and compromise. When a man reaches middle life and turns to
look back, he sees these desires marked with his failures and his
cowardice; the taste is bitter on his tongue, he is ashamed of them
and of himself. Patriotism alone has remained outside, unemployed
but not tarnished, and when it re-awakes it is inviolate. The soul
embraces and lavishes on it the ardour of all the ambitions, the
loves, and the longings, that life has disappointed. A half century of
suppressed fire bursts forth, millions of little cages in the social
pris