Clerambault. Romain Rolland
and re-read them in silence, then went away without a word. After the anxious waiting of the preceding days, with crowds around the newspaper booths, people sitting on the sidewalk, watching for the news, and when the paper was issued gathering in groups to read it, this was certainty. It was also a relief. An obscure danger, that one feels approaching without knowing when or from where, makes you feverish, but when it is there you can take breath, look it in the face, and roll up your sleeves. There had been some hours of deep thought while Paris made ready and doubled up her fists. Then that which swelled in all hearts spread itself abroad, the houses were emptied and there rolled through the streets a human flood of which every drop sought to melt into another.
Clerambault fell into the midst and was swallowed up. All at once. He had scarcely left the station, or set his foot on the pavement. Nothing happened; there were no words or gestures, but the serene exaltation of the flood flowed into him. The people were as yet pure from violence; they knew and believed themselves innocent, and in these first hours when the war was virgin, millions of hearts burned with a solemn and sacred enthusiasm. Into this proud, calm intoxication there entered a feeling of the injustice done to them, a legitimate pride in their strength, in the sacrifices that they were ready to make, and pity for others, now parts of themselves, their brothers, their children, their loved ones. All were flesh of their flesh, closely drawn together in a superhuman embrace, conscious of the gigantic body formed by their union, and of the apparition above their heads of the phantom which incarnated this union, the Country. Half-beast, half-god, like the Egyptian Sphinx, or the Assyrian Bull; but then men saw only the shining eyes, the feet were hid. She was the divine monster in whom each of the living found himself multiplied, the devouring Immortality where those about to die wished to believe they would find life, super-life, crowned with glory. Her invisible presence flowed through the air like wine; each man brought something to the vintage, his basket, his bunch of grapes;—his ideas, passions, devotions, interests. There was many a nasty worm among the grapes, much filth under the trampling feet, but the wine was of rubies and set the heart aflame;—Clerambault gulped it down greedily.
Nevertheless he was not entirely metamorphosed, for his soul was not altered, it was only forgotten; as soon as he was alone he could hear it moaning, and for this reason he avoided solitude. He persisted in not returning to St. Prix, where the family usually stayed in summer, and reinstalled himself in his apartment at Paris, on the fifth floor in the Rue d'Assas. He would not wait a week, or go back to help in the moving. He craved the friendly warmth that rose up from Paris, and poured in at his windows; any excuse was enough to plunge into it, to go down into the streets, join the groups, follow the processions, buy all the newspapers—which he despised as a rule. He would come back more and more demoralised, anaesthetised as to what passed within him, the habit of his conscience broken, a stranger in his house, in himself;—and that is why he felt more at home out of doors than in.
Madame Clerambault came back to Paris with her daughter, and the first evening after their arrival Clerambault carried Rosine off to the Boulevards. The solemn fervour of the first days had passed. War had begun, and truth was imprisoned. The press, the arch-liar, poured into the open mouth of the world the poisonous liquor of its stories of victories without retribution; Paris was decked as for a holiday; the houses streamed with the tricolour from top to bottom, and in the poorer quarters each garret window had its little penny flag, like a flower in the hair.
On the corner of the Faubourg Montmartre they met a strange procession. At the head marched a tall old man carrying a flag. He walked with long strides, free and supple as if he were going to leap or dance, and the skirts of his overcoat flapped in the wind. Behind came an indistinct, compact, howling mass, gentle and simple, arm in arm—a child carried on a shoulder, a girl's red mop of hair between a chauffeur's cap and the helmet of a soldier. Chests out, chins raised, mouths open like black holes, shouting the Marseillaise. To right and left of the ranks, a double line of jail-bird faces, along the curbstone, ready to insult any absent-minded passer-by who failed to salute the colours. Rosine was startled to see her father fall into step at the end of the line, bare-headed, singing and talking aloud. He drew his daughter along by the arm, without noticing the nervous fingers that tried to hold him back.
When they came in Clerambault was still talkative and excited. He kept on for hours, while the two women listened to him patiently. Madame Clerambault heard little as usual, and played chorus. Rosine did not say a word, but she stealthily threw a glance at her father, and her look was like freezing water.
Clerambault was exciting himself; he was not yet at the bottom, but he was conscientiously trying to reach it. Nevertheless there remained to him enough lucidity to alarm him at his own progress. An artist yields more through his sensibility to waves of emotion which reach him from without, but to resist them he has also weapons which others have not. For the least reflective, he who abandons himself to his lyrical impulses, has in some degree the faculty of introspection which it rests with him to utilise. If he does not do this, he lacks good-will more than power; he is afraid to look too clearly at himself for fear of seeing an unflattering picture. Those however who, like Clerambault, have the virtue of sincerity without psychological gifts, are sufficiently well-equipped to exercise some control over their excitability.
One day as he was walking alone, he saw a crowd on the other side of the street, he crossed over calmly and found himself on the opposite sidewalk in the midst of a confused agitation circling about an invisible point. With some difficulty he worked his way forward, and scarcely was he within this human mill-wheel, than he felt himself a part of the rim, his brain seemed turning round. At the centre of the wheel he saw a struggling man, and even before he grasped the reason for the popular fury, he felt that he shared it. He did not know if a spy was in question, or if it was some imprudent speaker who had braved the passions of the mob, but as cries rose around him, he realised that he, yes he, Clerambault, had shrieked out: … "Kill him." …
A movement of the crowd threw him out from the sidewalk, a carriage separated him from it, and when the way was clear the mob surged on after its prey. Clerambault followed it with his eyes; the sound of his own voice was still in his ears—he did not feel proud of himself. …
From that day on he went out less; he distrusted himself, but he continued to stimulate his intoxication at home, where he felt himself safe, little knowing the virulence of the plague. The infection came in through the cracks of the doors, at the windows, on the printed page, in every contact. The most sensitive breathe it in on first entering the city, before they have seen or read anything; with others a passing touch is enough, the disease will develop afterwards alone. Clerambault, withdrawn from the crowd, had caught the contagion from it, and the evil announced itself by the usual premonitory symptoms. This affectionate tender-hearted man hated, loved to hate. His intelligence, which had always been thoroughly straightforward, tried now to trick itself secretly, to justify its instincts of hatred by inverted reasoning. He learned to be passionately unjust and false, for he wanted to persuade himself that he could accept the fact of war, and participate in it, without renouncing his pacifism of yesterday, his humanitarianism of the day before, and his constant optimism. It was not plain sailing, but there is nothing that the brain cannot attain to. When its master thinks it absolutely necessary to get rid for a time of principles which are in his way, it finds in these same principles the exception which violates them while confirming the rule. Clerambault began to construct a thesis, an ideal—absurd enough—in which these contradictions could be reconciled: War against War, War for Peace, for eternal Peace.
The enthusiasm of his son was a great help to him. Maxime had enlisted. His generation was carried away on a wave of heroic joy; they had waited so long—they had not dared to expect an opportunity for action and sacrifice.
Older men who had never tried to understand them, stood amazed; they remembered their own commonplace, bungling youth, full of petty egotisms, small ambitions, and mean pleasures. As they could not recognise themselves in their children they attributed to the war this flowering of virtues which had been growing up for twenty years around their indifference and which the war was about to reap. Even near a father as large-minded as Clerambault, Maxime was blighted. Clerambault was interested in spreading his own overflowing diffuse nature, too much so to see clearly and aid those whom he loved: he brought to them the warm shadow of his thought, but he stood between them and the sun.