by waking up this underground life, revealed moral relationships
which no one had suspected. A sudden intimacy showed itself between
Clerambault and a brother of his wife whom he had looked upon until
now, and with good reason, as the type of a perfect Philistine.

Leo Camus was not quite fifty years old. He was tall, thin, and
stooped a little; his skin was grey, his beard black, not much hair on
his head,--you could see the bald spots under his hat behind,--little
wrinkles everywhere, cutting into each other, crossing, like a
badly-made net; add to this a frowning, sulky expression, and a
perpetual cold in the head. For thirty years he had been employed by
the State, and his life had passed in the shadow of a court-yard at
the Department. In the course of years he had changed rooms, but not
shadows; he was promoted, but always in the court-yard, never would he
leave it in this life. He was now Under-Secretary, which enabled him
to throw a shadow in his turn. The public and he had few points of
contact, and he only communicated with the outside world across a
rampart of pasteboard boxes and piles of documents. He was an old
bachelor without friends, and he held the misanthropical opinion
that disinterested friendship did not exist upon earth. He felt no
affection except for his sister's family, and the only way that he
showed that was by finding fault with everything that they did. He was
one of those people whose uneasy solicitude causes them to blame those
they love when they are ill, and obstinately prove to them that they
suffer by their own fault.

At the Clerambaults no one minded him very much. Madame Clerambault
was so easy-going that she rather liked being pushed about in this
way, and as for the children, they knew that these scoldings were
sweetened by little presents; so they pocketed the presents and let