oud--but now they had
vanished like faces that you catch a glimpse of from a moving train.
The train flies on and the vision disappears in the roaring tunnel....
There is the sombre sky again, and the mysterious star, still falling.
Silent spaces around, the clear darkness, and the cool fresh air
blowing on his soul; all infinity in one tiny drop of life, in a heart
whose spark flickers to its end, but knows it is free, and that its
vast home is near.

Like a good steward of the treasure placed in his charge, Clerambault
made up the account of his day. He looked back on his attempts, his
efforts, his impulses, his mistakes; how little remained of his life,
for nearly all that he had built up he had afterwards destroyed with
his own hands. He had first stated, then denied, and had never ceased
to wander in the forest of doubts and contradictions; often torn and
bruised, with no guide but the stars half-seen through the branches.
What meaning had there been in this long troubled course, now ending
in darkness? One only, he had been free.

Free!... What was this freedom, then, which intoxicated him so
completely? This liberty of which he was the master and the
slave--this imperious need to be free? He knew well enough that no
more than others was he emancipated from the eternal bonds; but the
orders that he obeyed differed from others; all are not alike. The
word liberty is only one of the clear high commands of the invisible
sovereign who rules the world ... whom we call necessity. She it is
who excites those of the advance-guard to rebel, and causes them to
break with the heavy past which the blind multitude drags along behind
it; for she is the battle-field of the eternal present, where the
past and the future must ever strive together, and on this field the
ancient laws are conquered, that they may give place to new laws,
which will be conquered in their turn.

O Liberty! Thou art always in chains, but they are not the heavy
fetters of the past; for each struggle has enlarged thy prison. Who
can tell? Perhaps later, when the prison walls have been thrown down....
But in the meanwhile, those whom thou wouldst save resist thee.
Thou art called the Public Enemy, or The One against All. To think
that this nickname should have been fastened on the weak, ordinary
Clerambault! But he did not remember that at this moment, his thoughts
were filled with the one who has always existed, ever since man has
been known on the ear