Clerambault: The Story of an Independent Spirit During the War

by Romain Rolland

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,[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. 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.

[Footnote 1: "Simon and I then understood our hatred of strangers and barbarians, and our egotism, in which we included ourselves and our entire small moral family.—The first care of him who would wish to live must be to surround himself with high walls; but even in his closed garden he must introduce only those who are guided by the same feelings, and interests analogous to his own." "A Free Man."

In three lines, three times, this "free man" expresses the idea of "shutting-up," "closing," and "surrounding with walls.">[

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; and he could think of no better way to prove it now than by a ferocious hatred for those who had killed him; not, of course, reckoning himself among the number.

There were not many methods of revenge open to a man of his age, rheumatic and stiff in one arm; but he tried to enlist and was rejected. He felt that something must be done, and all that he had left was his brain. Alone in his deserted house with the memory of his dead wife and child, he sat for hours brooding on these vindictive thoughts; and like a beast shaking the bars of its cage, waiting for the chance to spring, his mind raged furiously against the inhibitions the war put upon him with its iron circle of the trenches.

The clamours of the press drew his attention to Clerambault's articles which were intensely distasteful to him. The idea of snatching his precious hatred away from between his teeth! From the slight acquaintance that he had with Clerambault before the war, he felt an antipathy for him; as a writer, on account of the new form of his art, and as a man for numerous reasons: his love of life, and other men, his democratic ideals, his rather silly optimism, and his European aspirations. At the very first glance, with the instinct of a rheumatic in mind and body, Vaucoux had classed Clerambault as one of those pestilent persons who open doors and windows and make a draught in that closed house, his Country. That is, as he understood the term, in his mind there could be no other. After this there was no need for the vociferations of the papers; in the author of "The Appeal to the Living," and the "Pardon from the Dead," he saw at once an agent of the enemy, and with his thirst for revenge, he knew the opportunity had come.

Nothing can be more convenient than to detest those who differ from you, especially when you do not understand them; but poor Clerambault had not this resource, for he did understand perfectly. These good people had had to bear injuries from the enemy; of course because they were struck by them, but also frankly, because of Injustice with a capital I; for in their short-sightedness it filled the field of vision. The capacity to feel and judge is very limited in an ordinary man; submerged as he is in the species, he clings to any driftwood; and just as he reduces the infinite number of shades in the river of light to a few colours, the good and evil that flow in the veins of the world are only perceptible to him when he has bottled a few samples, chosen among those around him. All good and bad then he has in his flask, and on these he can expend his whole power of liking or repulsion; witness the fact that to millions of excellent people the condemnation of Dreyfus, or the sinking of the "Lusitania," remains the crime of the century. They cannot see that the path of social life is paved with crime, and that they walk over it in perfect unconsciousness, profiting by injustices that they make no effort to prevent. Of all these, which are the worst? Those which rouse long echoes in the conscience of mankind, or those which are known alone to the stifled victim? Naturally, our worthy friends have not arms long enough to embrace all the misery of the world; they can only reach one perhaps, but that they press close to their heart; and when they have chosen a crime, they pour out upon it all the pent-up hatred within them;—when a dog has a bone to gnaw, it is wiser not to touch him.

Clerambault had tried to take his bone away from the dog, and if he was bitten he had no right to complain; in point of fact he did not do so. Men are in the right to fight injustice wherever they see it; perhaps it is not their fault if they often see no more than its big toe, like Gulliver's at Brobdignag. Well, we must each do what we can; and these people could bite.