There are ideas—and behind these ideas, in the recesses of consciousness, where they develop as a product of repression, of denial, of sublimation, of intuition and many other phenomena which have no name, there is a shapeless, vast, often oppressive, profound sense of being. Our thinking had its roots in despair. Nothing was to be done. This world was unacceptable in itself, and unacceptable the lot it offers us. Man is finished, lost. We are beaten in advance, whatever we do. A young anarchist midwife gave up her calling "because it is a crime to inflict life on a human being.” Years later, awakened into hope by the Russian Revolution, I wanted to reach Petrograd, then in flames, and agreed to pass through a sector of the Champagne front, at the risk either of being left there in a common grave or of killing men better than myself in the opposite trench. I wrote: “Life is not such a great benefit that it is wrong to lose it or criminal to take it.” Anatole France gave voice to some of the most characteristic of these intuitions in his work, ending his great satire of the history of France, Penguin Island, with the appraisal that the best thing to do in the circumstances was to invent some devilishly powerful machine to destroy the planet, “so as to gratify the universal conscience which didn’t exist, anyway.” Thus the litterateur of skepticism closed the vicious circle in which we were turning, and he did it out of kindness.