This is perhaps the best summation of skepticism in the novel, and a key to understanding Decoud's complex character. Again the narrator calls Decoud's skepticism an "affectation," i.e., a dream-ideal and specifically a social one, since it has no place in solitude. We may define the "affectation" of skepticism as the ideal of having no ideals. What happens in this passage is that Decoud in a sense succeeds: he passes from the social ideal of skepticism to the real, full-blown thing, which is a state of "utter unbelief."

The metaphor of "exile," comparing mental unbelief to a person ejected from society, continues the parallel Conrad has been drawing all along between political society and "belief." The society and the mind are held together by exactly the same illusion-ideal; to attack one is to lose the other. Having attacked patriotism, Decoud has become not merely a political exile but an exile from the sustaining illusion at every level.