his face was worn and kind, and you were struck by the
strange expression of his eyes; one seemed to look sharply at you, and
the other was sad and dreamy.

There was little resemblance between these men who sometimes met at
the invalid's house. All shades of thought could be found in the
group, from the Catholic to the freethinker and the bolshevist--one of
Froment's young friends professed to be of this opinion. In them you
could find the traces of the most various intellectual ancestry; the
ironic Lucian appeared in the old professor; the Count de Coulanges
was wont to solace himself in the evenings on his estate with
cattle and fertiliser, but also revelled in the gorgeous texture of
Froissart's style, like cloth of gold, and the countrified, juicy
talk of that rascal Gondi--the count certainly had the old French
chroniclers in his veins. The sculptor wrinkled his brow in the effort
to find metaphysics in Rodin and Beethoven; and Dr. Verrier had a
streak of the marvellous in his disposition. This he satisfied by the
hypotheses of biology, and the wonders of modern chemistry, though he
would glance at the paradise of religion with the disenchanted smile
of the man of science. He bore his part in the sad trials of the time,
but the era of war with all its gory glory faded for him before
the heroic discoveries of thought made by a new Newton, the German
Einstein, in the midst of the general distraction.

These men all differed in the form of their minds and in their
temperament; but they all agreed in this, they belonged to no party,
each thought for himself, and each respected and loved liberty in
himself or in others. What else mattered? In our day, all the old
framework is broken down; religious, political, or social. It is but
small progress if we call ourselves socialists, or republicans, rather
than monarchists, if these castes accept nationalism of State, faith,
or class. There are now only two sorts of minds: those shut up behind
bars, and those open to all that is alive, to the entire race of man,
even our enemies. These men, few though they may be, compose the true
"International" which rests on the worship of truth and universal
life. They know well that they are each too weak to embrace alone
their great ideal, but it is infinite and can embrace them all. United
in one object, they push on by their separate ways towards the unknown
God.

These independent spirits were all drawn towards Edme Froment at th