his
wife. Like a schoolboy trying to spirit away his bad marks he watched
for the post so as to suppress the obnoxious sheets, but at last their
venom seemed to poison the very air. Among their friends in society,
Madame Clerambault and Rosine had to bear many painful allusions,
small affronts, even insults. With the instinct of justice which
characterises the human beast, and especially the female, they were
held responsible for Clerambault's ideas, though his wife and daughter
knew little of them and disapproved what they knew. (Their critics did
not understand them either.) The more polite were reticent, taking
pains not to mention Clerambault's name, or ask after him,--you
don't speak of ropes, you know, in the house of a man who has been
hanged.... And this calculated silence was worse than open abuse.
You would have said that Clerambault had done something dishonest or
immodest. Madame Clerambault would come back full of bitterness, and
Rosine suffered too, though she pretended not to mind. One day, a
friend, whom they met in the street, crossed to the other side,
turning away her head so as to avoid bowing to them; and Rosine was
excluded from a benevolent society where she had worked hard for
years.

Women were particularly active in this patriotic reprobation.
Clerambault's appeal for reconciliation and pardon had no more violent
opponents--and it was the same everywhere. The tyranny of public
opinion is an engine of oppression, invented by the modern State, and
much more despotic than itself. In times of war certain women have
proved, its most ferocious instruments. Bertrand Russell cites the
case of an unfortunate man, conductor on a tramway, married, with
children, and honourably discharged from the army, who killed himself
on account of the insults and persecutions of the women of Middlesex.
In all countries, poor wretches like him have been pursued, crazed,
driven to death, by these war-maddened Bacchantes. This ought not to
surprise us; if we have not foreseen this madness, it is because we,
like Clerambault hitherto, have lived on comfortable accepted opinions
and idealisations. In spite of the efforts of woman to approximate the
fallacious ideal imagined by man for his pleasure and tranquillity,
the woman of the present day, weak, cut-off, trimmed into shape as she
is, comes much closer than man to the primitive earth. She is at the
source of our instincts, and more richly endowed with forces, which