François Mairet was not quite forty years old when he met with an obscure death in the trenches. He was one of the foremost French biologists, an unpretending scholar and hard worker, a patient spirit. But celebrity was assured to him before long, though he was in no haste to welcome the meretricious charmer, as her favours have to be shared with too many wire-pullers. The silent joys that intimacy with science bestows on her elect were sufficient for him, with only one heart on earth to taste them with him. His wife shared all his thoughts. She came of a scholarly family, was rather younger than he; one of those serious, loving, weak, yet proud hearts, that must give but only give themselves once. Her existence was bound up in Mairet's interests. Perhaps she would have shared the life of another man equally well, if circumstances had been different, but she had married Mairet with everything that was his. Like many of the best of women, her intelligence was quick to understand the man whom her heart had chosen. She had begun by being his pupil, and became his partner, helping in his work and in his laboratory researches. They had no children and had every thought in common, both of them being freethinkers, with high ideals, destitute of religion, as well as of any national superstition.
In 1914 Mairet was mobilised, and went simply as a duty, without any illusions as to the cause that he was called upon to serve by the accidents of time and country. His letters from the front were clear and stoical; he had never ceased to see the ignominy of the war. But he felt obliged to sacrifice himself in obedience to fate, which had made him a part of the errors, the sufferings, and the confused struggles of an unfortunate animal species slowly evolving towards an unknown end.
His family and the Clerambaults had known each other in the country, before either of them were transplanted to Paris; this acquaintance formed the basis of an amicable intercourse, solid rather than intimate—for Mairet opened his heart to no one but his wife—but resting on an esteem that nothing could shake.
They had not corresponded since the beginning of the war; each had been too much absorbed by his own troubles. Men who went to fight did not scatter their letters among their friends, but generally concentrated on one person whom they loved best, and to whom they told everything. Mairet's wife, as always, was his only confidante. His letters were a journal in which he thought aloud; and in one of the last he spoke of Clerambault. He had seen extracts from his first articles in some of the nationalist papers which were the only ones allowed at the front, where they were quoted with insulting comments. He spoke of them to his wife, saying what comfort he had found in these words of an honest man driven to speak out, and he begged her to let Clerambault know that his old friendship for him was now all the warmer and closer. He also asked Madame Mairet to send him the succeeding articles, but he died before they could reach him.
When he was gone the woman, who had lived only for him, tried to draw nearer to the people who had been near to him in the last days of his life. She wrote to Clerambault, and he, who was eating his heart out in his provincial retreat, lacking even the energy to get away, welcomed her letter as a deliverance. He returned at once to Paris; and they both found a bitter joy in evoking together the image of the absent. They formed the habit of meeting on one evening in the week, when they would, so to speak, immerse themselves in recollections of him. Clerambault was the only one of his friends who could understand the tragedy, hidden under a sacrifice gilded by no patriotic illusion.
At first Madame Mairet seemed to find comfort in showing all that she had received; she read his letters, full of disenchanted confidences; they reflected on them with deep emotion, and she brought them into the discussion of the problems that had caused the death of Mairet and of millions of others. In this keen analysis, nothing stopped Clerambault; and she was not a woman to hesitate in the search for truth. But nevertheless….
Clerambault soon became aware that his words made her uneasy, though he was only saying aloud things that she knew well and that were strongly confirmed by Mairet's letters, namely, the criminal futility of these deaths, and the sterility of all this heroism. She tried to take back her confidences, or even to minimise the meaning of them, with an eagerness that did not seem perfectly sincere. She brought to mind sayings of her husband's which apparently showed him more in sympathy with general opinion, and implied that he approved of it. One day Clerambault was listening while she read a letter which she had read to him before. He noticed that she skipped a phrase in which Mairet expressed his heroic pessimism, and when he remarked on it she appeared vexed. After this her manner became more distant, her annoyance passed into coldness, then irritation, till it even grew into a sort of smothered hostility, and finally she avoided him, though without an open rupture. Clerambault felt that she had a grudge against him and that he should see no more of her.
The truth was that, at the same time that Clerambault pursued his relentless analysis which struck at the foundations of current beliefs, an inverse process of reconstruction and idealisation was going on in the mind of Madame Mairet. Her grief longed to convince itself that after all there had been a holy cause, and the dead man was no longer there to help her to bear the truth. Where two stand together there may be joy in the most terrible truths, but when one is alone they are mortal.
Clerambault understood it all, and his quick sympathies warned him of the pain he caused and shared; for he made the suffering of this woman his own. He nearly reached the point of approving her revolt against himself, for he knew her deep hidden sorrow, and that the truth that he brought was powerless to help it—still worse, it added one evil more….
Insoluble problem! Those who are bereaved cannot dispense with the murderous delusions of which they are the victims, and if these are torn away their suffering becomes intolerable. Families that have lost sons, husbands, and fathers, must needs believe that it was for a just and holy cause, and statesmen are forced to continue to deceive themselves and others. For if this were to cease, life would be insupportable to themselves and to those whom they govern. How unfortunate is Man; he is the prey of his own ideas, has given up everything to them, and finds that each day he must continue to give more, lest the gulf open under his feet and he be swallowed up in it. After four years of unheard-of pain and ruin, can we possibly admit that it was all for nothing? That not only our victory will be more ruinous still, but that we ought not to have expected anything else; that the war was absurd, and we, self-deceivers?… Never! we would rather die to the last man. When one man finds that he has thrown away his life, he sinks down in despair. What would it be in the case of a nation, of ten nations, or of civilisation as a whole?…