Page:Rolland - Clerambault, tr. Miller, 1921.djvu/291

 looked back on his attempts, his efforts, his impulses, his mistakes; how little remained of his life, for nearly all that he had built up he had afterwards destroyed with his own hands. He had first stated, then denied, and had never ceased to wander in the forest of doubts and contradictions; often torn and bruised, with no guide but the stars half-seen through the branches. What meaning had there been in this long troubled course, now ending in darkness? One only, he had been free.

Free!... What was this freedom, then, which intoxicated him so completely? This liberty of which he was the master and the slave--this imperious need to be free? He knew well enough that no more than others was he emancipated from the eternal bonds; but the orders that he obeyed differed from others; all are not alike. The word liberty is only one of the clear high commands of the invisible sovereign who rules the world ... whom we call necessity. She it is who excites those of the advance-guard to rebel, and causes them to break with the heavy past which the blind multitude drags along behind it; for she is the battle-field of the eternal present, where the past and the future must ever strive together, and on this field the ancient laws are conquered, that they may give place to new laws, which will be conquered in their turn.

O Liberty! Thou art always in chains, but they are not the heavy fetters of the past; for each struggle has enlarged thy prison. Who can tell? Perhaps later, when the prison walls have been thrown down.... But in the meanwhile, those whom thou wouldst save resist thee. Thou art called the Public Enemy, or The One against All. To think that this nickname should have been fastened on the weak, ordinary Clerambault! But he did not remember that at this moment, his thoughts were filled with the one who has always existed, ever since man has been known on the