The violence of this article, from so well-known an author, made an
event in Paris of the "Clerambault Case." It occupied the reporters
for more than a week, a long time for these feather-headed gentry.
Hardly anyone read what Clerambault had actually written; it was not
worth while. Bertin had read it, and newspaper men do not make a
practice of taking unnecessary trouble; besides it was not a question
of reading, but of judgment. A strange sort of Sacred Union was formed
over Clerambault; clericals and Jacobins came together to condemn him,
and the man whom they admired yesterday was dragged in the mud today.
The national poet became at once a public enemy, and all the myrmidons
of the press attacked him with heroic invective. The greater number
of them united bad faith with a remarkable ignorance. Very few knew
Clerambault's works, they scarcely knew his name or the titles of his
books, but that no more kept them from disparaging him now than it had
hindered them from praising him when he was the fashion. Now, in their
eyes, everything that he had written was tainted with "bochism,"
though all their quotations were inexact. In the excitement of his
investigation, one of them foisted upon Clerambault the authorship of
another man's book, the author of which, pale with fright, protested
with indignation, dissociating himself entirely from his dangerous
fellow-author.
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