ost curious effects of the war on the mind, was that it
aroused new affinities between individuals. People who up to this time
had not a thought in common discovered all at once that they thought
alike; and this resemblance drew them together. It was what people
called "the Sacred Union." Men of all parties and temperaments,
the choleric, the phlegmatic, monarchists, anarchists, clericals,
Calvinists, suddenly forgot their everyday selves, their passions,
their fads and their antipathies,--shed their skins. And there before
you were now creatures, grouped in an unforeseen manner, like metal
filings round an invisible magnet. All the old categories had
momentarily disappeared, and no one was astonished to find himself
closer to the stranger of yesterday than to a friend of many years'
standing. It seemed as if, underground, souls met by secret roots that
stretched through the night of instinct, that unknown region, where
observation rarely ventures. For our psychology stops at that part
of self which emerges from the soil, noting minutely individual
differences, but forgetting that this is only the top of the plant,
that nine-tenths are buried, the feet held by those of other plants.
This profound, or lower, region of the soul is ordinarily below the
threshold of consciousness, the mind feels nothing of it; but the war,
by waking up this underground life, revealed moral relationships
which no one had suspected. A sudden intimacy showed itself between
Clerambault and a brother of his wife whom he had looked upon until
now, and with good reason, as the type of a perfect Philistine.

Leo Camus was not quite fifty years old. He was tall, thin, and
stooped a little; his skin was grey, his beard black, not much hair on
his head,--you could see the bald spots under his hat behind,--little
wrinkles everywhere, cutting into each other, crossing, like a
badly-made net; add to this a frowning, sulky expression, and a
perpetual cold in the head. For thirty years he had been employed by
the State, and his life had passed in the shadow of a court-yard at
the Department. In the course of years he had changed rooms, but not
shadows; he was promoted, but always in the court-yard, never would he
leave it in this life. He was now Under-Secretary, which enabled him
to throw a shadow in his turn. The public and he had few points of
contact, and he only communicated with the outside world across a
rampart of pasteboard boxes and piles of docu