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.
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