In vain did Clerambault try to prove to himself that
millions of other minds were in agreement with his own; it could not
replace the actual contact with one living heart. Faith is sufficient
for the spirit, but the heart is like Thomas, it must touch to be
convinced.
Clerambault had not foreseen this physical weakness; he felt stifled,
his body seemed on fire, his skin burning, his life seemed to be
drying up at the source. It was as if he were under an exhausted
vacuum-bell. A wall kept him from the air.
One evening, like a consumptive after a bad day, he had been wandering
about the house from room to room, as if in search of a breath of
fresh air, when a letter came that had somehow slipped through the
meshes of the net. An old man like himself, a village schoolmaster in
a remote valley of Dauphiny wrote thus:
"The war has taken everything from me; of those whom I used to know,
some have been killed, and the rest are so altered that I hardly
recognise them. They have trampled on all that made life worth having
to me; my hope of progress, my faith in a future of brotherly reason.
"I was ready to die in my despair, when a paper in which you were
spoken of insultingly, drew my attention to your articles: _To the
Dead_ and _To Her Whom We Loved_.
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