He was the type of that portion of the race which, stubborn but outworn, has not life enough to spread itself abroad, and shrinks into a sentiment of aggressive self-defence.  This looks with suspicion and antipathy on the young forces which overflow 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 would have despised the idea.  Hard man as he was, he had loved his son passionately, though he had never shown it; and he could think of no better way to prove it now than by a ferocious hatred for those who had killed him; not, of course, reckoning himself among the number.