holding by the other's
hand. Before you insult me, poor little author, descend into your own
heart, examine yourself. The gift of speech was given you to guide
your people, and you have used it to deceive yourself and lead them
astray. You have added to their error instead of saving them, even to
the point that you have laid your own son whom you loved on the altar
of your untruth_.

_Now at least dare to show to others the ruin that you are, and say:
"See what I am, and take warning!" ...Go! And may your misfortunes
save those that come after from the same fate! Dare to speak, and cry
out to them: "You are mad, peoples of the earth; instead of defending
your Country, you are killing her_. You _are your Country and the
enemies are your brothers. Millions of God's creatures" love one
another_.

The same silence as before seemed to swallow up this last cry.
Clerambault lived outside of popular circles where he would have found
the warm sympathy of simple, healthy minds. Not the slightest echo of
his thought came to him.

He knew that he was not really alone, though he seemed so. Two
apparently contradictory sentiments--his modesty and his faith--united
to say to him: "What you thought, others have thought also; you are
too small, this truth is too great, to exist only in you. The light
that your weak eyes have seen has shone also for others. See where now
the Great Bear inclines to the horizon,--millions of eyes are looking
at it, perhaps; but you cannot see them, only the far-off light makes
a bond between their sight and yours."

The solitude of the mind is only a painful delusion; it has no real
existence, for even the most independent of us are members of a
spiritual family. This community of spirit has no relation to time
or space; its elements are dispersed among all peoples and all ages.
Conservatives see them in the past, but the revolutionists and the
persecuted look to the future for them. Past and future are not less
real than the immediate present, which is a wall beyond which the calm
eyes of the flock can see nothing. The present itself is not what the
arbitrary divisions of states, nations, and religions would have us
believe. In our time humanity is a bazaar of ideas, unsorted and
thrown together in a heap, with hastily constructed partitions between
them, so that brothers are separated from brothers, and thrown in with
strangers. Every country has swallowed up different races, not formed
to th