[...] he knew neither what he should believe nor what he should do; he knew nothing at all. He was still dazed, as if he'd been hit a heavy blow on the head. Obviously, George hadn't invented everything. Maybe, even, it was true! There were camps in which fifteen million workers were being reduced to a sub-human state, but thanks to those camps Nazism had been defeated and a great country was being built, a country which held out the only hope for a thousand million sub-humans slowly dying of hunger in China and India, the only hope for millions of workers enslaved to inhuman conditions, our only hope. 'Will it, too, fail us?' he wondered fearfully. He realized he had never seriously questioned it. He knew of the abuses, the imperfections of the Soviet Union; nevertheless, socialism, true socialism, the one in which justice and freedom belong to all men, would one day finish by triumphing in the Soviet Union, and through the Soviet Union. If, this evening, that certainty left him, then the whole future would sink into the shadows; nowhere else in the world could even a glimmer of hope be seen. 'Is that why I'm taking refuge in doubt?' he asked himself. 'Am I rejecting the evidence out of cowardice, because the air wouldn't be breathable if there were no longer a corner of the earth towards which mankind could turn with a little confidence? Or, on the other hand,' he thought, 'maybe I'm cheating by complacently accepting those horrifying pictures. Unable to rally to Communism, it would be a relief to hate it resolutely. If only you could be completely for, or completely against! But to be against, you've got to have other hopes to offer mankind. And it's only too evident that revolution will come about through the Soviet Union, or there'll be no revolution. And yet, if Russia has merely substituted one system of oppression for another, if she's reestablished slavery, how can one have the least friendship for her? . .. Perhaps evil is everywhere,' Henri said to himself. He remembered that night in a shelter in the Cevennes Mountains when he had voluptuously drowsed off in innocent delight. But if evil were everywhere, innocence didn't exist. Whatever he did, he'd be wrong: wrong if he printed a garbled truth; wrong if he hid the truth, even though it was garbled. He went down to the walk alongside the river. If evil is everywhere, there's no way out, neither for humanity nor for oneself. Would he have to come around to thinking that? He sat down and in a daze watched the water flowing by.