Tell me, what man among us did not, at the outset of the present great catastrophe, interrogate his own fate with a double anguish: the anguish to know what sufferings were in store for him, the fear also that he might not suffer enough, that he might not receive, and quickly, an adequate share of the ordeal. III This religious respect we experience in the face of grief gives its meaning and beauty to the feeling of sympathy. We do not wish to admit that a great grief can live side by side with us without demanding that we should share it. As a man of lowly station wistfully approaches the table of princes, so we revolve about the grief of others in the hope of being invited to partake of it. It is an overmastering impulsion that rises from the depths of our natures. The eagerness we are able to bring to the sharing of others’ joys is but lukewarm beside the insurmountable urge that makes us share in their sorrow. This is because our taste for joy is stamped with a keen quality of reserve, an irreducible delicacy. The joy even of those who are nearest to us can easily become repugnant to us. We are too proud to seem eager for it. True grief, on the contrary, attracts us, fascinates us. It disarms our critical sense and leaves us only an obscure feeling of envy. Sympathy stirs us gently without overwhelming us; it is for this reason too that we find it so full of savor. Although we recoil from the terrors of the leading part, sympathy permits us to play passionately the rôle of supernumeraries. It is not we who are struck down and yet we can taste the mystic horror of the wound. The chosen victim bestows alms upon us and we accept them without shame. We have the perfume of the Host on our lips and it is not our blood that has paid the sacrifice. We are the guests at a sumptuous and tragic feast. We bear the reflected light of the great funeral pyre, without undergoing the flames and the destruction. That explains our leaning toward those works of art that find their strength and their subjects in human grief. It is for this reason, surely, that we love so dearly to shed tears at the theater. The great artists have drawn from grief their most beautiful inspirations. We vow eternal gratitude to those who can revive in us a faithful image of our torments and call them back to our forgetful souls, to those who know so well how to give us a foretaste of the delights that future suffering has in store for us. IV Not all griefs exalt us and add to us. There are some that are sterile, withering, unconfessable. Such griefs bring only misery and impoverishment. In the moral order they stand for debts and failures. However great may be our blind indulgence for ourselves, we cannot, on principle, impute them to ourselves. They do not bear the stamp of destiny but of our own baseness. Who, indeed, would wish to share them with us, when we do not even let them appear?