An active nationalist newspaper was eager in stirring up the evil instincts that lay below the surface. It lived on the exploitation of hatred and suspicion, which it called “working for the regeneration of France,”—France being reduced to this paper and its friends. It published “Cleramboche,” a collection of sanguinary articles, like those which succeeded so well against Jaurès; it roused people by declaring that the traitor owed his safety to occult influences, and that he would make his escape, if he were not carefully watched; and finally it appealed to popular justice.
Victor Vaucoux hated Clerambault; not that he knew him at all; it is not necessary to know a man in order to hate him; but if he had known him he would have detested him still more. He was his born enemy before he even knew that Clerambault existed. There are races among minds more antagonistic to each other, in all countries, than those divided by a different skin or uniform.
He was a well-to-do bourgeois from the west of France and belonged to a family of former servants of the Empire who had been sulking for the last forty years in a sterile opposition. He had a small property in the Charente, where he spent the summer, and passed the rest of the time in Paris. Having instincts for government which he could not satisfy, he laid the blame for this on his family and on life, and thus thwarted, his character had grown tyrannical so that he acted the despot unconsciously to those nearest to him, as a right and duty that could not be disputed. The word tolerance had no meaning for him; for he could not make a mistake. Nevertheless he possessed intelligence, and moral vigour; he even had a heart, but all wrapped about and knotted like an old tree-trunk till such forces of expansion as he had within him were stunted. He could absorb nothing from the outside; when he read or travelled he saw everything with hostile eyes, his one wish was to go home; and as the bark was too thick to be penetrated, all his sap came from the foot of the tree—from the dead.
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 Barrès, and his dwarfed hero,3 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. As his son, or his victim, could not get away from him, he inoculated him with all his own mental diseases; like those insects which deposit their eggs in the living bodies of others. And when the war broke out, he took him at once to a recruiting station and made him enlist. For a man of his sort, “Country” was the noblest of things—the holy of holies; he did not need to breathe the thrilling suggestion of the crowd, his head was already turned, and, besides, he never went with the crowds; he carried “Country” about with him;—The Country and The Past—The Eternally Past.
His son was killed, like Clerambault’s son, and the sons of millions of other fathers, for the faith and the ideals of those fathers in which they did not believe.
Vaucoux had none of Clerambault’s doubts; he did not know the meaning of the word, and if he could have permitted himself such a feeling he would have despised the idea. Hard man as he was, he had loved his son passionately, though he had never shown it;
