Clerambault, and his character, scarcely freed from the conventions in which it had been bound, took on suddenly a vital complexity. Good, tender, combative, irritable, always in extremes--he knew it, and that made him worse--tearful, sarcastic, sceptical, yet believing, he was surprised when he saw himself in the mirror of his writings. All his vitality, hitherto prudently shut into his _bourgeois_ life, now burst forth, developed by moral solitude and the hygiene of action.
Clerambault saw that he had not known himself; he was, as it were, new-born, since that night of anguish. He learned to taste a joy of which he had never before had an idea--the giddy joy of the free lance in a fight; all his senses strung like a bow, glad in a perfect well-being.
