There were not many methods of revenge open to a man of his age, rheumatic and stiff in one arm; but he tried to enlist and was rejected.  He felt that something must be done, and all that he had left was his brain.  Alone in his deserted house with the memory of his dead wife and child, he sat for hours brooding on these vindictive thoughts; and like a beast shaking the bars of its cage, waiting for the chance to spring, his mind raged furiously against the inhibitions the war put upon him with its iron circle of the trenches.

The clamours of the press drew his attention to Clerambault’s articles which were intensely distasteful to him.  The idea of snatching his precious hatred away from between his teeth!  From the slight acquaintance that he had with Clerambault before the war, he felt an antipathy for him; as a writer, on account of the new form of his art, and as a man for numerous reasons:  his love of life, and other men, his democratic ideals, his rather silly optimism, and his European aspirations.  At the very first glance, with the instinct of a rheumatic in mind and body, Vaucoux had classed Clerambault as one of those pestilent persons who open doors and windows and make a draught in that closed house, his Country.  That is, as he understood the term, in his mind there could be no other.  After this there was no need for the vociferations of the papers; in the author of “The Appeal to the Living,” and the “Pardon from the Dead,” he saw at once an agent of the enemy, and with his thirst for revenge, he knew the opportunity had come.

Nothing can be more convenient than to detest those who differ from you, especially when you do not understand them; but poor Clerambault had not this resource, for he did understand perfectly.  These good people had had to bear injuries from the enemy; of course because they were struck by them, but also frankly, because of Injustice with a capital I; for in their short-sightedness it filled the field of vision.  The capacity to feel and judge is very limited in an ordinary man; submerged as he is in the species, he clings to any driftwood; and just as he reduces the infinite number of shades in the river of 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.