French champions were no less eager to enter the lists as soon as the publication of the essay _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ was reported. Difficult as it seems to realize the fact to-day, the French newspapers were forbidden to reprint this manifesto, but fragments became known to the public in the attacks wherein Rolland was pilloried as an antipatriot. Professors at the Sorbonne and historians of renown did not shrink from leveling such accusations. Soon the campaign was systematized. Newspaper articles were followed by pamphlets, and ultimately by a large volume from the pen of a carpet hero. This book was furnished with a thousand proofs, with photographs, and quotations; it was a complete dossier, avowedly intended to supply materials for a prosecution. There was no lack of the basest calumnies. It was asserted that since the beginning of the war Rolland had joined the German society "Neues Vaterland"; that he was a contributor to German newspapers; that his American publisher was a German agent. In one pamphlet he was accused of deliberately falsifying dates. Yet more incriminatory charges could be read between the lines. With the exception of a few newspapers of advanced tendencies and comparatively small circulation, the whole of the French press combined to boycott Rolland. Not one of the Parisian journals ventured to publish a reply to the charges. A professor triumphantly announced: "Cet auteur ne se lit plus en France." His former associates withdrew in alarm from the tainted member of the flock. One of his oldest friends, the "ami de la première heure," to whom Rolland had dedicated an earlier work, deserted at this decisive hour, and canceled the publication of a book upon Rolland which was already in type. The French government likewise began to watch Rolland closely, dispatching agents to collect "materials." A number of "defeatist" trails were obviously aimed in part at Rolland, whose essay was publicly stigmatized as "abominable" by Lieutenant Mornet, the tiger of these prosecutions. Nothing but the authority of his name, the inviolability of his public life, and the fact that he was a lonely fighter (this making it impossible to show that he had any suspect associations), frustrated the well-prepared plan to put Rolland in the dock among adventurers and petty spies. All this lunacy is incomprehensible unless we reconstruct the forcing-house atmosphere of that year. It is difficult to-day, even from a study of all the pamphlets and books bearing on the question, to grasp the way in which Rolland's fellow-countrymen had become convinced that he was an antipatriot. From his own writings, it is impossible for the most fanciful brain to extract the ingredients for a "cas Rolland." From a study of his own writings alone it is impossible to understand the frenzy felt by all the intellectuals of France towards this lonely exile, who tranquilly and with a full sense of responsibility continued to develop his ideas.