also make it susceptible to attacks of hysteria, but I am of opinion that any people is manly only by accident, if by a man you mean a reasonable creature—­a flattering but baseless idea.  Men only use their reason from time to time, and are soon worn out by the effort of thinking; so those do them a favour who act for them, encouraging them in the direction of the least effort, and not much is required to hate a new idea.  Do not condemn them; the Friend of all who are persecuted has said with His heroic indulgence:  “They know not what they do.”

An active nationalist newspaper was eager in stirring up the evil instincts that lay below the surface.  It lived on the exploitation of hatred and suspicion, which it called “working for the regeneration of France,”—­France being reduced to this paper and its friends.  It published “Cleramboche,” a collection of sanguinary articles, like those which succeeded so well against Jaures; it roused people by declaring that the traitor owed his safety to occult influences, and that he would make his escape, if he were not carefully watched; and finally it appealed to popular justice.

Victor Vaucoux hated Clerambault; not that he knew him at all; it is not necessary to know a man in order to hate him; but if he had known him he would have detested him still more.  He was his born enemy before he even knew that Clerambault existed.  There are races among minds more antagonistic to each other, in all countries, than those divided by a different skin or uniform.

He was a well-to-do bourgeois from the west of France and belonged to a family of former servants of the Empire who had been sulking for the last forty years in a sterile opposition.  He had a small property in the Charente, where he spent the summer, and passed the rest of the time in Paris.  Having instincts for government which he could not satisfy, he laid the blame for this on his family and on life, and thus thwarted, his character had grown tyrannical so that he acted the despot unconsciously to those nearest to him, as a right and duty that could not be disputed.  The word tolerance had no meaning for him; for he could not make a mistake.  Nevertheless he possessed intelligence, and moral vigour; he even had a heart, but all wrapped about and knotted like an old tree-trunk till such forces of expansion as he had within him were stunted.  He could absorb nothing from the outside; when he read or travelled he saw everything with hostile eyes, his one wish was to go home; and as the bark was too thick to be penetrated, all his sap came from the foot of the tree—­from the dead.