Why did I not imitate him? I upbraided myself harshly on my lack of rational courage. For since I was the enemy of sentimental chimeras!... What could I believe in? Nothing, nothing! Duty, Honour, the Ideal? They were so many hollow sounds to me. Patriotism? No word was more foreign to me. I too was a Citizen of the World! The chauvinism of my father, a native of Lorraine, and an old soldier, seemed to me out-of-date, an ill-omened and ridiculous passion; in that, as in everything else, I was so little his son. As far back as I could remember, I had never espoused his craze for war and revenge. In former days when we used to spend our holidays at Eberménil, some miles from the frontier, nothing irritated me so much when quite a child, as to feel how immovable the people were in their wild enmity against their neighbour. They never opened their mouths without making insolent or dangerous remarks; they never dreamt, it appeared, except of bringing back a cursed year. Why this rancour? As if it ought not to have satisfied them to continue to be Frenchmen themselves? What did it matter to them that their brothers from the neighbouring villages should have changed their name. Were the former more unhappy than the latter? My handbooks of history were full of exchanges of this kind, carried out without any one rebelling against them. Grown older, I had only strengthened, by reasoning, my instinctive indifference in regard to the fate of the Lost Provinces. I had gone one better; what a high doctrine, I thought, was that of Internationalism! And convenient, too. I should have declared myself its adherent quite openly, but for my systematic slackness, my fear of committing myself. The result was that I took an interest in those theories which denied that there was any meaning in the term Fatherland. I happened to find in them the subject for some daring developments, with which during even the last few days, I had taken a delight in upsetting Jeannine Landry's convictions.