"DEAR SIR,"--he affected in writing the studied, ceremonious formulas
of _Monsieur de Port-Royal_--"I am ready to obey any suggestions of my
country, for me they are commands. My conscience is at her service,
according to the duty of every good citizen."





One of the most 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,