Nothing can be more convenient than to detest those who differ from you, especially when you do not understand them; but poor Clerambault had not this resource, for he did understand perfectly. These good people had had to bear injuries from the enemy; of course because they were struck by them, but also frankly, because of Injustice with a capital I; for in their short-sightedness it filled the field of vision. The capacity to feel and judge is very limited in an ordinary man; submerged as he is in the species, he clings to any driftwood; and just as he reduces the infinite number of shades in the river of light to a few colours, the good and evil that flow in the veins of the world are only perceptible to him when he has bottled a few samples, chosen among those around him. All good and bad then he has in his flask, and on these he can expend his whole power of liking or repulsion; witness the fact that to millions of excellent people the condemnation of Dreyfus, or the sinking of the "Lusitania," remains the crime of the century. They cannot see that the path of social life is paved with crime, and that they walk over it in perfect unconsciousness, profiting by injustices that they make no effort to prevent. Of all these, which are the worst? Those which rouse long echoes in the conscience of mankind, or those which are known alone to the stifled victim? Naturally, our worthy friends have not arms long enough to embrace all the misery of the world; they can only reach one perhaps, but that they press close to their heart; and when they have chosen a crime, they pour out upon it all the pent-up hatred within them;--when a dog has a bone to gnaw, it is wiser not to touch him. Clerambault had tried to take his bone away from the dog, and if he was bitten he had no right to complain; in point of fact he did not do so. Men are in the right to fight injustice wherever they see it; perhaps it is not their fault if they often see no more than its big toe, like Gulliver's at Brobdignag. Well, we must each do what we can; and these people could bite. It was Good Friday, and the rising tide of invasion swept up towards the Ile de France. Even this day of sacred sorrow had not stopped the massacre, for the lay war knows nothing of the Truce of God. Christ had been bombarded in one of His churches, and the news of the murderous explosion at St. Gervais that afternoon spread at nightfall through the darkened city, wrapped in its grief, its rage, and its fear. The sad little group of friends had gathered at Froment's house; each one had come hoping to meet the others, without previous appointment. They could see nothing but violence all about them; in the present as well as in the future, in the enemy's camp, in their own, on the side of revolutionists, and reactionaries as well. Their agony and their doubts met in one thought. The sculptor was saying: