Jean-Christophe. I. The Dawn

I

Come, quando i vapori umidi e spessi a diradar cominciansi, la spera del sol debilemente entra per essi…

Purg. XVII

The roar of the river rises behind the house. Rain has been beating against the windowpanes since the beginning of the day. A film of water streams down the glass at its cracked corner. The yellowish daylight fades. The room is warm and stale.

The newborn stirs in his cradle. Though the old man left his wooden clogs at the door before coming in, his step has made the floor creak: the child begins to whimper. The mother leans out of her bed to reassure him; and the grandfather fumbles to light the lamp, so that the little one won’t be frightened by the dark when he wakes. The flame lights up the ruddy face of old Jean-Michel, his white and coarse beard, his gruff manner and his sharp eyes. He comes near the cradle. His coat smells of the rain; he shuffles along in his thick blue slippers. Louisa signals him not to come too close. She is fair, almost white-haired; her features are drawn; her gentle, mild face is marked with freckles; she has pale, full lips that can never quite close, and that smile with a kind of timidity; she watches over the child with her eyes --- very blue eyes, very vague, the pupils tiny points, but infinitely tender.

The child wakes and cries. His unfocused gaze shifts restlessly. Alas! what terror! The darkness, the brutal glare of the lamp, the hallucinations of a mind barely freed from chaos, the smothering and swarming night that surrounds him, the bottomless shadow out of which sharp sensations, pains, phantoms burst like blinding shafts of light --- those enormous faces bending over him, those eyes that pierce him, that press into him, that he cannot understand!… He has not the strength to cry out; terror nails him motionless, his eyes and mouth wide open, drawing breath from the back of his throat. His large, puffy head creases into pitiful and grotesque grimaces; the skin of his face and hands is brown, purplish, blotched with yellow.

--- Good God! what an ugly thing he is! said the old man, with conviction.

He went and set the lamp back on the table.

Louisa made the pout of a scolded little girl. Jean-Michel glanced at her from the corner of his eye and laughed.

--- You wouldn’t want me to tell you he’s beautiful? You wouldn’t believe me. Come now, it’s not your fault. They’re all like that.

The child pulled himself out of the dull stupor into which the lamp’s flame and the old man’s gaze had plunged him. He began to cry. Perhaps he sensed instinctively in his mother’s eyes a tenderness that invited him to complain. She held out her arms and said:

--- Give him to me.

The old man began with his usual theorizing:

--- You shouldn’t give in to children when they cry. You have to let them wail.

But he came over, picked up the little one, and grumbled:

--- I’ve never seen one so ugly.

Louisa seized the child with her feverish hands and pressed him against her breast. She gazed at him with a confused and delighted smile:

--- Oh! my poor little thing, she said, quite abashed, how ugly you are, how ugly you are --- how I love you!

Jean-Michel went back to the fire: he began poking it with an air of displeasure; but a smile belied the sullen solemnity of his face.

--- Good girl, he said. Go on, don’t torment yourself --- he has time to change. And besides, what does it matter? There’s only one thing we ask of him, and that’s to become a decent man.

The child had grown calm at the touch of his mother’s warm body. He could be heard feeding with a greedy, panting eagerness. Jean-Michel leaned back slightly in his chair and repeated with emphasis:

--- There is nothing finer than an honest man.

He was silent for a moment, wondering whether he ought to elaborate on this thought; but he found nothing more to say; and, after a pause, he resumed in an irritated tone:

--- How is it that your husband isn’t here?

--- I believe he’s at the theater, said Louisa timidly. He has a rehearsal.

--- The theater is closed. I just walked past it. It’s another one of his lies.

--- No, don’t always accuse him! I must have misunderstood. He must have been kept by one of his lessons.

--- He ought to be home, said the old man, displeased. He hesitated a moment, then asked in a lower tone, somewhat ashamed:

--- Has he… again?…

--- No, father, no, father, said Louisa quickly.

The old man looked at her; she avoided his gaze:

--- That’s not true. You’re lying.

She wept in silence.

--- Good God! cried the old man, kicking the hearth. The poker fell with a clatter. The mother and the child both flinched.

--- Father, please, said Louisa, he’ll cry.

The child hesitated for a few seconds whether he should cry or continue his meal; but since he could not do both at once, he returned to the latter.

Jean-Michel went on in a lower voice, with bursts of anger:

--- What did I do to the good Lord to have a drunkard for a son? A fine lot of good it did me to live as I have lived, to have gone without everything my whole life! --- But you --- you --- are you really not capable of stopping him? After all, good God, that’s your role. If you could only keep him at home!…

Louisa wept harder.

--- Don’t scold me again --- I’m miserable enough already! I’ve done everything I could. If you knew how frightened I am when I’m alone! It always seems to me that I can hear his step on the stairs. Then I wait for the door to open, and I ask myself: My God! what state will he be in?… It makes me ill to think about it.

She was shaken by sobs. The old man grew concerned. He came near her, pulled the disheveled covers back over her trembling shoulders, and stroked her head with his big hand.

--- Come now, come, don’t be afraid --- I’m here.

She calmed herself for the sake of the little one, and tried to smile.

--- I was wrong to tell you all that.

The old man looked at her, shaking his head:

--- My poor girl, I didn’t give you much of a gift there.

--- It’s my own fault, she said. He shouldn’t have married me. He regrets what he did.

--- What is there for him to regret?

--- You know very well. You yourself were upset that I became his wife.

--- Let’s not speak of that again. It’s true --- I was a little pained. A boy like him --- I can say so without wounding you --- a boy I had raised with care, a distinguished musician, a true artist --- he might have aimed higher than you, who had nothing, who were of a lower station, and not even of the trade. A Krafft marrying a girl who wasn’t a musician --- that hadn’t been seen in more than a hundred years! --- But you know all the same that I never held it against you, and that I’ve had an affection for you since I came to know you. And besides, once the choice is made, there’s no going back: all that’s left is to do one’s duty, honestly.

He returned to his seat, paused, and said with the solemnity he brought to all his aphorisms:

--- The first thing in life is to do one’s duty.

He waited for a rebuttal, spat into the fire; then, since neither mother nor child raised any objection, he meant to continue --- and fell silent.

They said nothing more. Jean-Michel, near the fire, and Louisa, sitting up in her bed, both fell into sad reveries. The old man, whatever he had said, was thinking of his son’s marriage with bitterness. Louisa was thinking of it too, and blaming herself, though she had nothing to reproach herself for.

She had been a domestic servant when, to the surprise of everyone --- and most of all to her own --- she had married Melchior Krafft, the son of Jean-Michel. The Kraffts had no fortune, but they were respected in the small Rhenish town where the old man had settled nearly half a century before. They were musicians from father to son, known to musicians throughout the region between Cologne and Mannheim. Melchior was a violinist at the Hof-Theater; and Jean-Michel had once conducted the concerts of the grand duke. The old man had been deeply humiliated by Melchior’s marriage; he had built great hopes on his son; he had wanted to make of him the eminent man he himself had never been. This rash act had ruined his ambitions. So at first he had raged and heaped curses on Melchior and Louisa. But, being a decent man, he had forgiven his daughter-in-law once he had come to know her better; and he had even grown fond of her with a paternal affection that most often expressed itself as rebuffs.

No one could understand what had driven Melchior to that marriage --- Melchior least of all. It was certainly not Louisa’s beauty. Nothing about her was made to seduce: she was small, pallid, and frail; and she made a striking contrast with Melchior and Jean-Michel, both of them tall, broad, colossal figures with red faces and solid fists, who ate heartily, drank hard, loved to laugh, and made a great deal of noise. She seemed crushed by them; no one paid her much notice, and she sought to make herself even less visible. Had Melchior been good-hearted, one might have believed he had preferred Louisa’s simple goodness above every other advantage; but he was the vainest man alive. It seemed a wager that a fellow of his type --- quite handsome and well aware of it, very conceited, not without talent, in a position to aspire to some wealthy match, capable even --- who knows? --- of turning the head of one of his bourgeois pupils, as he boasted of doing --- should have abruptly chosen a girl of the people, poor, uneducated, with no beauty and no charms, who had made no advances to him.

But Melchior was one of those men who always do the opposite of what others expect of them --- and of what they expect of themselves. Not that they aren’t warned --- a word to the wise, they say… They make a point of being no one’s fool, of steering their vessel with certainty toward a precise destination. But they reckon without themselves, for they do not know themselves. In one of those moments of inner emptiness that are habitual with them, they let go of the helm; and naturally enough, when things are left to run their own course, they take a malicious pleasure in thwarting their masters. The boat set free goes straight for the reef, and the scheming Melchior married a cook. He was neither drunk nor stupid the day he bound himself to her for life; and he was not swept away by any passionate impulse --- far from it. But perhaps there are in us other forces than reason and feeling, other even than the senses --- mysterious forces that take command in the vacant moments when the others sleep; and perhaps it was these that Melchior had encountered in the depths of the pale eyes that watched him shyly, one evening when he had met the young woman on the bank of the river and sat down near her, in the reeds --- without knowing why --- to give her his hand.

Hardly married, he had shown himself devastated by what he had done; and he made no secret of it to poor Louisa, who, utterly humble, begged his pardon for it. He was not unkind, and forgave her willingly enough; but a moment later his regrets returned, in the company of his friends, or at the homes of his wealthy pupils --- now disdainful --- who no longer trembled at the brush of his hand when he sought to correct the position of their fingers at the keyboard. He would come home then with a dark expression that Louisa, her heart heavy, read at a glance for its habitual reproaches; or he would linger at a tavern, where he found self-satisfaction and indulgence for others. On such evenings he came home with bursts of laughter that seemed sadder to Louisa than the innuendo and the muffled resentment of other days. She felt herself partly responsible for the fits of foolishness in which, each time, the household money disappeared along with what little remained of her husband’s common sense. Melchior was sinking deeper day by day. At an age when he should have been working without rest to develop his middling talent, he let himself slide along the slope; and others took his place.

But what did it matter, no doubt, to the unknown force that had drawn him toward the flaxen-haired servant girl? He had fulfilled his role; and little Jean-Christophe had just taken his footing on this earth, to which his destiny was driving him.

Night had fully fallen. Louisa’s voice drew old Jean-Michel out of the torpor into which he had surrendered himself before the fire, thinking of present and past sorrows.

--- Father, it must be late, said the young woman affectionately. You should go home --- you have a long way to go.

--- I’m waiting for Melchior, replied the old man.

--- No, please, I’d rather you didn’t stay.

--- Why?

The old man raised his head and looked at her attentively.

She did not answer.

He went on:

--- You’re afraid --- you don’t want me to run into him?

--- Well, yes; it would only make things worse: you’d quarrel; I don’t want that. Please!

The old man sighed, rose, and said:

--- Very well.

He came near her and grazed her forehead with his rough beard; he asked if she needed anything, turned down the lamp, and went out, bumping into the chairs in the dark room. But he was barely on the stairs before he was thinking of his son coming home drunk; and he stopped at each step; he imagined a thousand dangers in leaving him to come home alone…

In the bed, close to his mother, the child stirred again. An unknown suffering rose from the depths of his being. He braced himself against it. He twisted his body, clenched his fists, knitted his brows. The pain grew, calm, certain of its strength. He did not know what it was, or how far it would go. It seemed to him immense, and destined never to end. And he began to cry pitifully. His mother stroked him with gentle hands. Already the suffering was becoming less sharp. But he went on weeping; for he still felt it near him, inside him. --- The man who suffers can diminish his pain by knowing where it comes from; he confines it by thought to some part of his body, which can be healed, or torn away if need be; he fixes its boundaries, he separates it from himself. --- The child has no such deceptive resource. His first encounter with pain is more tragic and more true. Like his very being, it seems to him without limits; he feels it settled in his breast, seated in his heart, mistress of his flesh. And so it is: it will not leave until it has gnawed him through.

His mother presses him close to her, murmuring soft words:

“It’s over, it’s over, we won’t cry anymore, my Jesus, my little golden fish”… He keeps on with his broken sobbing. One might think this wretched unconscious and formless little mass has a foreboding of all the life of sorrows that awaits it. And nothing can calm it…

The bells of Saint-Martin sang in the night. Their voice was deep and slow. Through the rain-damp air it moved like a footstep on moss. The child fell silent in the middle of a sob. The wonderful music flowed gently into him, like a stream of milk. The night grew bright, the air was tender and warm. His pain faded away, his heart began to laugh; and he slipped into dream with a sigh of surrender.

The three quiet bells went on ringing in the feast of the next day. Louisa was dreaming too, as she listened, of her past miseries and of what the dear little child sleeping beside her would one day become. She had been lying in her bed for hours now, weary and aching. Her hands and body burned; the heavy feather quilt pressed down on her; she felt bruised all over and oppressed by the darkness; but she dared not move. She looked at the child; and the night did not prevent her from reading in his old-looking features. Sleep was overtaking her, feverish images drifted through her mind. She thought she heard Melchior open the door, and her heart leaped. At moments, the rumbling of the river rose more powerfully in the silence, like the bellowing of a beast. The windowpane rang once or twice more under the finger of the rain. The bells, more slowly, sang and faded; and Louisa fell asleep beside her child.

Meanwhile, old Jean-Michel waited before the house, shivering in the rain, his beard wet with fog. He was waiting for his miserable son to return; for his mind, which was always working, kept telling him tragic stories conjured up by drink; and although he did not believe them, he could not have slept a minute that night if he had gone away without seeing him come in. The singing of the bells made him very sad; for it reminded him of his broken hopes. He thought about what he was doing there, at that hour, in the street; and from shame, he wept.

The vast flood of days unfolds slowly. Unchanging, day and night rise and fall like the tide and ebb of an infinite sea. Weeks and months flow away and begin again. And the succession of days is like a single day,

An immense, silent day, marked by the even rhythm of shadow and light, and by the rhythm of life of the benumbed being who dreams at the bottom of his cradle, --- his imperious needs, painful or joyful, so regular, that the day and night which bring them back seem to be brought back by them.

The pendulum of life swings heavily. The being is absorbed entirely in its slow pulsation. All else is only dreams, fragments of dreams, formless and swarming, a dust of atoms dancing at random, a dizzying whirlpool that passes and provokes laughter or horror. Clamors, moving shadows, grimacing shapes, pains, terrors, laughter, dreams, dreams… --- All is only dream, both day and night… --- And amid this chaos, the light of friendly eyes that smile at him, the flood of joy that pours from the maternal body, from the breast swollen with milk, into his body, --- the force that is in him, the enormous and unconscious force accumulating, the boiling ocean that rumbles in the narrow prison of this little child’s body. Whoever could read within him would see worlds half-buried in shadow, nebulae organizing themselves, a universe in formation. His being is without limits. He is all that is…

The months pass… Islands of memory begin to rise from the river of life. At first they are narrow little islets, scattered rocks barely surfacing above the water. Around them, after them, in the half-light that breaks, the great quiet expanse continues to spread. Then new islets, gilded by the sun.

So certain forms, certain scenes of strange clarity emerge from the abyss of the soul. In the boundless day that begins again, eternally the same, with its monotonous and powerful swaying, the round dance of days that join hands begins to take shape, and their faces, some laughing, others sad. But the links of the chain are constantly breaking, and memories rejoin one another over the heads of weeks and months…

The River… The Bells… As far back as he can remember, --- in the distant reaches of time, at whatever hour of his life, --- always their deep and familiar voices sing…

The night, --- half asleep: --- A pale glimmer whitens the windowpane… The river rumbles. In the silence, its voice rises all-powerful; it reigns over all living things. Sometimes it caresses their sleep, and seems about to drowse itself, in the murmur of its waters. Sometimes it grows angry, it howls, like a maddened beast that wants to bite. The clamoring subsides: now it is a murmur of infinite sweetness, silvery tones, like clear little bells, like children’s laughter, tender voices singing, a dancing music. Great maternal voice, that never sleeps! It rocks the child, as it rocked for centuries, from birth to death, the generations that came before him; it penetrates his thought, it impregnates his dreams, it wraps him in the mantle of its fluid harmonies, which will still envelop him when he lies in the little cemetery that sleeps at the water’s edge, bathed by the Rhine…

The bells… Here is the dawn! They answer one another, doleful, a little sad, friendly, tranquil. At the sound of their slow voices, swarms of dreams arise, dreams of the past, desires, hopes, regrets for the vanished beings whom the child never knew, and yet whom he was, since he was in them, since they live again in him. Centuries of memory vibrate in this music. So many bereavements, so many feasts! --- And from the depths of the room, hearing them, it seems as though one can see the beautiful waves of sound flowing through the light air, the free birds, and the warm breath of the wind. A patch of blue sky smiles at the window. A ray of sunlight slips across the bed through the curtains. The little familiar world before the child’s eyes, all that he sees from his bed each morning on waking, all that he is just barely beginning, at such great effort, to recognize and name in order to be its master, --- his kingdom glows with light. Here is the table where they eat, the cupboard where he hides to play, the diamond-patterned tiles over which he crawls, and the wallpaper with its grimaces that tell him burlesque or frightening stories, and the clock that chatters halting words which he alone can understand. How many things in this room! He does not know them all. Each day he sets out again to explore this universe that belongs to him: --- everything is his. --- Nothing is indifferent, everything is equally worthwhile, a man or a fly; everything is equally alive: the cat, the fire, the table, the specks of dust dancing in a ray of sunlight. The room is a country; a day is a lifetime. How to find one’s way through these immense spaces? The world is so large! One gets lost in it. And those faces, those gestures, that movement, that noise, making a perpetual whirlpool around him!… He is tired, his eyes close, he falls asleep. The sweet, deep sleeps that overtake him all at once, at any hour, anywhere, wherever he may be, on his mother’s lap, or under the table where he loves to hide!… It is warm. One is at ease…

Those first days hum in his head like a field of wheat, or like a forest stirred by the wind, across which pass the great shadows of clouds…

The shadows flee, the sun pierces the forest. Christophe begins to find his way through the labyrinth of the day.

The morning… His parents are sleeping. He is in his little bed, lying on his back. He watches the bright streaks dancing on the ceiling. It is an endless amusement. At a certain moment, he laughs out loud, one of those wholehearted children’s laughs that dilate the hearts of those who hear it. His mother leans toward him and says: “What’s got into you, little fool?” Then he laughs all the more, and perhaps even forces himself to laugh, because he has an audience. Mama puts on a stern look and places a finger to her lips so he will not wake his father; but her tired eyes laugh in spite of herself. They whisper together… Suddenly, an furious grunt from his father. They both start. Mama turns her back hastily, like a guilty little girl, pretending to be asleep. Christophe burrows down into his bed and holds his breath… Dead silence.

After a while, the little face tucked under the sheets resurfaces. On the roof, the weathervane creaks. The drainpipe drips. The Angelus rings. When the wind blows from the East, from very far away the bells of the villages on the other bank of the river answer back. The sparrows, gathered in a flock in the ivy-covered wall, make a deafening racket, in which, as in the play of a band of children, three or four voices stand out, always the same ones, shriller than the rest. A pigeon coos at the top of a chimney. The child lets himself be rocked by these sounds. He hums softly, then less softly, then out loud, then very loud, until the exasperated voice of his father shouts again: “Will that donkey ever be quiet! Just wait, I’ll pull your ears!” Then he burrows back into his sheets, and doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He is frightened and humiliated; and at the same time, the image of the donkey he has been compared to makes him snicker. From deep in the bed, he imitates its braying. This time he gets a whipping. He cries his heart out. What did he do? He so wants to laugh, to move! And he is forbidden to stir. How do they manage to sleep so long? When will they be able to get up?…

One day, he can bear it no longer. He has heard in the street a cat, a dog, something curious. He slips out of bed, and his little bare feet pattering clumsily on the tiles, he tries to go downstairs to see; but the door is shut. To open it, he climbs on a chair: everything collapses, he hurts himself badly, he howls; and on top of it all, he gets another whipping. He is always getting whipped!…

He is at church with grandfather. He is bored. He is not very comfortable. He is forbidden to fidget, and people say words together that he cannot understand, and then fall silent together. They all wear solemn and gloomy faces. These are not their everyday faces. He watches them, intimidated. Old Lina, the neighbor, seated beside him, has taken on a wicked look; at moments he can barely recognize even grandfather. He is a little afraid. Then he grows used to it, and seeks to relieve his boredom by every means at his disposal. He sways, he cranes his neck to look at the ceiling, he makes faces, he tugs grandfather by his coat, he studies the rushes of his chair, tries to poke a hole in them with his fingers, listens to the cries of birds, yawns fit to dislocate his jaw.

Suddenly, a cascade of sounds; the organ plays. A shiver runs down his spine. He turns around, his chin resting on the back of his chair, and sits very still. He understands nothing of this noise, he does not know what it means: it shines, it swirls, nothing can be made out. But it is good. It is as though one were no longer sitting, for the past hour, on a chair that hurts, in a dull old house. One is suspended in the air, like a bird; and when the river of sound streams from one end of the church to the other, filling the vaults, splashing back against the walls, one is swept along with it, one flies at full wing, this way and that, one has only to let it happen. One is free, one is happy, the sun shines… He dozes off.

Grandfather is displeased with him. He does not behave properly at Mass.

He is at home, sitting on the floor, his feet in his hands. He has just decided that the doormat is a boat, the tiles a river. He believes he would drown if he stepped off the rug. He is surprised and a little annoyed that the others pay no attention to this as they pass through the room. He stops his mother by the hem of her skirt: “Can’t you see it’s water! You have to cross by the bridge.” --- The bridge is a series of branches between the red diamond shapes. --- His mother passes without even listening. He is vexed, in the manner of a playwright who sees the audience chatting during his play.

A moment later, he has forgotten all about it. The floor tile is no longer a sea. He is lying flat on top of it, stretched out at full length, his chin on the stone, humming music of his own composition and solemnly sucking his thumb, drooling. He is sunk in contemplation of a crack between the flagstones. The diamond-shaped lines twist into faces. The tiny hole grows, becomes a valley; mountains rise around it. A centipede stirs: it is as large as an elephant. Thunder could crack the sky and the child would not hear it.

No one takes any notice of him, and he needs no one. He can even do without the doormat-boats and the tile-floor caverns with their fantastic fauna. His own body is enough. What a source of amusement! He spends hours looking at his fingernails, laughing aloud. Each one has a different expression and resembles someone he knows. He makes them talk to one another and dance, or fight. --- And the rest of the body!… He continues his inspection of everything that belongs to him. So many astonishing things! Some of them are quite strange; he stares at them with absorbed curiosity.

He was sharply scolded on occasion, when someone caught him at it.

On certain days, he takes advantage of his mother’s turned back to slip out of the house. At first they run after him and catch him. Then they grow accustomed to letting him go alone, provided he doesn’t wander too far. The house sits at the edge of the village; the countryside begins almost immediately beyond. As long as he is in sight of the windows, he walks without stopping, with small, deliberate steps, occasionally hopping on one foot. But as soon as he has rounded the bend in the path and the bushes hide him from view, he changes completely. He begins by stopping, one finger in his mouth, to decide which story he will tell himself today; for he is full of them. It is true that they all resemble one another and that each could be told in three or four lines. He chooses. Usually he picks up the same one --- sometimes from where he left off the day before, sometimes from the beginning again, with variations; but the least thing, a word heard by chance, is enough to send his thoughts racing down a new path.

Chance was rich in resources. One cannot imagine what could be made of a simple piece of wood, a broken branch, such as one always finds along the hedgerows. (When one cannot find one, one breaks one.) It was a fairy wand. Long and straight, it became a lance, or perhaps a sword; a single brandish was enough to summon armies. Christophe was their general; he marched ahead of them, he led by example, he stormed the embankments. When the branch was flexible, it became a whip. Christophe mounted his horse, leaped across chasms. Sometimes the mount slipped; and the rider found himself at the bottom of a ditch, looking sheepishly at his dirty hands and scraped knees. If the wand was short, Christophe became a conductor; he was the conductor and he was the orchestra; he directed and he sang; and then he bowed to the bushes, whose small green heads the wind set nodding.

He was also a magician. He walked with great strides across the fields, looking at the sky and waving his arms. He commanded the clouds. He wanted them to go to the right. But they went to the left. Then he hurled insults at them and repeated his order. He watched them out of the corner of his eye, his heart beating, hoping that at least one small one might obey him; but they went on drifting calmly toward the left. Then he stamped his foot, threatened them with his stick, and angrily ordered them to go to the left --- and indeed, this time, they obeyed perfectly. He was happy and proud of his power. He touched flowers, commanding them to turn into gilded coaches, as he had been told they did in fairy tales; and though it never happened, he was convinced that it would, with a little patience. He looked for a cricket to turn into a horse: he gently laid his wand across its back and pronounced a formula. The insect fled; he blocked its path. After a few moments he was lying flat on his stomach beside it, watching it. He had forgotten his role as a magician and was amusing himself by turning the poor creature onto its back, laughing aloud at its contortions.

He also thought of tying an old piece of string to his magic stick and casting it gravely into the river, waiting for a fish to bite. He knew perfectly well that fish are not in the habit of nibbling at a string with no bait and no hook; but he thought that just this once, and for his sake, they might make an exception to the rule; and in his inexhaustible confidence he even took to fishing in the street with a whip, through the grate of a drain. He pulled his whip out from time to time, very excited, imagining that the line was heavier this time and that he was about to haul up a treasure, as in a story his grandfather had once told him…

Without fail, in the middle of all these games, he would have sudden moments of strange reverie and complete forgetfulness. Everything around him would fade; he no longer knew what he was doing, he no longer remembered even himself. It came upon him unawares. Walking, climbing the stairs, a sudden emptiness would open inside him. It seemed as though he were thinking of nothing at all. But when he came back to himself, he felt dizzy to find himself in the same spot, in the dark stairwell. It was as though he had lived an entire lifetime --- in the space of a few steps.

Grandfather often took him along on his evening walks. The little one trotted at his side, holding his hand. They went along the paths, through the plowed fields that smelled rich and strong. Crickets crackled. Enormous crows, perched sideways in the middle of the road, watched them approach from far off and lumbered heavily into the air as they drew near.

Grandfather gave a little cough. Christophe knew very well what that meant. The old man was burning to tell a story, but he wanted the child to appear to ask for one. Christophe never failed him. They understood each other. The old man had immense affection for his grandson, and it was a great joy to find in him an obliging audience. He loved to recount episodes from his own life, or the stories of great men ancient and modern. His voice would become emphatic and moved; it trembled with a childlike joy he tried to hold back. One could feel that he listened to himself with delight. Unfortunately, words failed him at the moment of speaking. This was a disappointment he knew well, since it recurred as often as his surges of eloquence. And because he forgot it after each attempt, he could never quite make his peace with it.

He spoke of Regulus, of Arminius, of the Lützow Jägers, of Körner and of Friedrich Staps, the one who had wanted to kill the Emperor Napoleon. His face glowed as he recounted deeds of unheard-of heroism. He pronounced the famous historical words in so solemn a tone that it became impossible to understand them; and he believed it a great art to keep his listener in suspense at the breathless moments: he would stop, pretend to choke, blow his nose loudly; and his heart exulted when the little one asked, in a voice strangled with impatience: “And then, grandfather?”

The day came, when Christophe was older, that he saw through his grandfather’s method; and he took malicious pleasure in putting on an air of indifference at the climax of the story --- which pained the poor old man. --- But for now, he is entirely under the storyteller’s spell. His blood beat faster at the dramatic passages. He had little sense of who was involved, or where, or when these exploits had taken place; whether grandfather had known Arminius personally, and whether Regulus was not --- God knows why --- someone he had seen at church last Sunday. But his heart and the old man’s expanded with joy and pride at the recounting of heroic deeds, as though they themselves had performed them: for the old man and the child were as much children as each other.

Christophe was less happy when, at a pathetic moment, grandfather inserted one of his suppressed speeches that he held so dear. These were moral reflections, generally reducible to some honest but rather familiar thought, such as: “Gentleness is better than violence,” --- or: “Honor is dearer than life,” --- or: “It is better to be good than wicked” --- only they were a great deal more muddled. Grandfather did not fear the criticism of his young audience, and gave himself over to his customary grandiloquence; he was not afraid to repeat the same words, to leave his sentences unfinished, or even, when he lost his way in the middle of his speech, to say whatever came into his head to fill the gaps in his thought; and he punctuated his words, to give them greater force, with gestures that went against the grain of what he was saying. The little one listened with deep respect; and he thought that grandfather was very eloquent, but a little boring.

They both loved to return again and again to the fabulous legend of that Corsican conqueror who had seized Europe. Grandfather had known him. He had very nearly fought against him. But he knew how to recognize the greatness of his adversaries; he had said so twenty times: he would have given one of his arms for such a man to have been born on this side of the Rhine. Fate had willed it otherwise: he had admired him and had fought against him --- that is, he had been on the verge of fighting him. But when Napoleon was still ten leagues away and they were marching to meet him, a sudden panic had scattered the little troop through a forest and each man had fled shouting, “We are betrayed!” In vain, grandfather recounted, had he tried to rally the fugitives; he had thrown himself in their path, threatening and weeping: he had been swept along by the flood and had found himself the next day at a surprising distance from the battlefield --- that was how he referred to the scene of the rout. --- But Christophe impatiently called him back to the exploits of the hero, and was in ecstasy over those marvelous rides across the world. He saw him followed by countless peoples crying out with love, whom a single gesture from him sent whirling like a tempest against enemies always in flight. It was a fairy tale. Grandfather embellished it somewhat; he conquered Spain, and very nearly England, which he could not abide.

It sometimes happened that old Krafft wove into his enthusiastic narratives indignant outbursts aimed at his hero. The patriot awoke in him --- perhaps more so at the moment of the Emperor’s defeats than at the battle of Jena. He would break off to shake his fist at the river, spit with contempt, and utter noble imprecations --- he did not stoop to lesser ones. He called him: scoundrel, savage beast, man without morality. And if this language was meant to restore in the child’s mind some sense of justice, one must admit that it missed its mark; for childish logic was quite liable to conclude: “If a great man like that had no morality, then morality cannot amount to much, and the first thing is to be a great man.” But the old man was far from suspecting the thoughts that went trotting along beside him.

They fell silent together, each ruminating in his own way on these admirable stories --- unless, on the road, grandfather happened to meet one of his noble clients out for a walk. He would stop indefinitely, bow very low, and lavish formulas of obsequious politeness. The child would blush without understanding why. But grandfather had at the bottom of his heart a deep respect for established powers, for people who had “arrived”; and it was possible that he loved the heroes of his stories so much precisely because he saw in them men who had arrived higher than anyone else.

When it was very hot, old Krafft would sit under a tree and before long would doze off. Then Christophe would sit near him, on a pile of loose stones, on a milestone, or on some odd high seat that was strange and uncomfortable; and he would swing his little legs, humming and daydreaming. Or he would lie on his back and watch the clouds drift by: they looked like oxen, giants, hats, old women, vast landscapes. He murmured to them under his breath; he took an interest in the little cloud that the big one was about to swallow; he was afraid of those that were very black, almost blue, or that raced along very fast. It seemed to him that they held an enormous place in life, and he was surprised that neither his grandfather nor his mother paid them any attention. They were terrible beings, if they chose to do harm. Fortunately they passed by, good-natured and a little grotesque, and they did not stop. The child began to feel dizzy from watching them so long, and he wriggled his feet and hands as if he were about to fall up into the sky. His eyelids fluttered, sleep crept over him… Silence… The leaves tremble and quiver softly in the sun, a light haze drifts through the air, indolent flies sway back and forth, humming like an organ; grasshoppers drunk on summer rasp with sharp and joyful insistence: everything falls still… Beneath the vault of the woods, the cry of the woodpecker rings with a magical tone. Far off in the plain, a peasant’s voice calls to his oxen; a horseshoe strikes the white road. Christophe’s eyes close. Nearby, an ant makes its way along a dead branch lying across a furrow. He loses consciousness… Centuries pass. He wakes. The ant has not yet finished crossing the twig.

Grandfather sometimes slept too long; his face would go rigid, his long nose would sharpen, his mouth fall open. Christophe watched him with unease, afraid of seeing his head slowly transform into some fantastic shape. He would sing louder to wake him, or let himself tumble off his perch on the pile of stones with a great crash. One day he hit on the idea of tossing a few pine needles at his grandfather’s face and telling him they had fallen from the tree. The old man believed him: Christophe found it highly amusing. But he had the bad idea of trying it again; and just at the moment he raised his hand, he saw grandfather’s eyes looking straight at him. That was a serious business; the old man was solemn and would not suffer any mockery of the respect he felt was his due: they remained on cool terms for more than a week.

The worse the road, the more beautiful Christophe found it. Every stone had its meaning for him; he knew them all. The relief of a rut seemed to him a geographical feature of roughly the same order as the Taunus massif. He carried in his head a map of every hollow and rise in the whole countryside within two kilometers of his house. And so, when he altered the established arrangement of the furrows, he considered himself no less important than an engineer commanding a work crew; and when he had crushed the dry crest of a clod of earth with his heel and filled in the little valley forming at its foot, he felt his day had not been wasted.

Sometimes on the main road they would meet a peasant in his cart. He knew grandfather. They would climb up beside him. It was paradise on earth. The horse moved quickly, and Christophe laughed with joy --- unless other walkers happened to cross their path: then he would put on a grave and easy air, as someone accustomed to riding in carriages; but his heart was flooded with pride. Grandfather and the man talked on without paying him any mind. Wedged between their knees, squeezed by their thighs, barely seated, and often not seated at all, he was perfectly happy; he talked aloud without troubling about replies. He watched the horse’s ears move. What strange creatures those ears were! They went in every direction, right, left, they pointed forward, they drooped to the side, they swiveled backward, in a way so comical that he burst out laughing. He pinched his grandfather to make him notice them. But grandfather had no interest in them. He pushed Christophe away, telling him to leave him alone. Christophe reflected: he thought that when you are grown up, nothing surprises you anymore, you are strong, you know everything. And he tried to be grown up too, to hide his curiosity, to seem indifferent.

He fell silent. The rolling of the cart made him drowsy. The horse’s bells danced. Dig, ding, dong, ding. Melodies woke in the air; they fluttered around the silver bells like a swarm of bees; they swayed gaily to the rhythm of the cart; it was an inexhaustible source of songs: one followed another. Christophe found them magnificent. There was one in particular that seemed to him so beautiful that he wanted to draw grandfather’s attention to it. He sang it louder. No one took notice. He began it again a note higher, --- then once more, at the top of his lungs, --- until old Jean-Michel said with irritation: “Will you be quiet, for heaven’s sake! You’re maddening with that trumpet noise!” --- That cut his breath short; he flushed to the nose and fell silent, mortified. He crushed with his contempt the two dull fools who could not understand what was sublime in his song, a song that opened the sky! He found them very ugly, with a week’s worth of stubble, and they smelled bad.

He consoled himself by watching the horse’s shadow. That too was an astonishing spectacle. The all-black creature ran along the road, lying on its side. In the evening, on the way home, it spread across part of the meadow; they would meet a haystack, and the head climbed over it and found its place again on the other side; the muzzle was stretched like a burst balloon; the ears were long and pointed like candles. Was it truly a shadow, or was it a living thing? Christophe would not have liked to meet it alone. He would not have run after it, as he did after grandfather’s shadow, to tread on its head and stamp all over it. --- The shadow of the trees, too, as the sun fell, was a subject of meditation. It formed barriers across the road. It had the look of sad and grotesque phantoms saying: “Go no farther”; and the creaking axles and the horse’s hooves repeated: “No farther!”

Grandfather and the carter went on tirelessly with their interminable chatter. Their voices often rose, especially when they spoke of local affairs and wounded interests. The child stopped dreaming and watched them uneasily. It seemed to him they were angry with each other, and he feared they might come to blows. In fact it was precisely at those moments that they were in the best agreement, united in a shared grievance. Most of the time, indeed, they felt no grievance at all, nor the slightest passion: they spoke of indifferent things, shouting at the top of their voices, for the pleasure of shouting, as is the joy of common folk. But Christophe, who understood nothing of their conversation, only heard their bursts of sound, saw their contorted faces, and thought with anguish: “How fierce he looks! They hate each other, surely. How he rolls his eyes! how he opens his mouth! He spat in my face in his fury. Good God! he’s going to kill grandfather…”

The cart stopped. The peasant said: “Here you are.” The two mortal enemies shook hands. Grandfather climbed down first. The peasant handed him the little boy. A crack of the whip at the horse. The cart moved off; and they found themselves at the entrance to the little sunken lane, near the Rhine. The sun was sinking into the fields. The path wound almost level with the water. The thick soft grass bent underfoot with a rustling sound. Alders leaned over the river, bathed to the waist. A cloud of midges danced. A boat passed soundlessly, carried by the quiet current with its long easy strides. The waves sucked at the willow branches with a soft sound of lips. The light was fine and misty, the air cool, the river silver-grey. They came home, and the crickets sang. And at the threshold smiled the dear face of mother…

O sweet memories, kindly images, that will hum like a harmonious flight throughout a whole life!… The journeys one makes later, the great cities, the moving seas, the landscapes of dreams, the beloved faces, do not engrave themselves in the soul with the unerring exactness of those childhood walks, or of the simple garden corner glimpsed every day from the window, through the little haze of steam that a bored child’s mouth makes against the pane…

Now it is evening in the closed house. The house…, the refuge from everything frightening: the dark, the night, fear, unknown things. Nothing hostile could cross the threshold… The fire blazes. A golden goose turns slowly on the spit. A delicious smell of fat and crackling flesh fills the room. Joy of eating, incomparable happiness, religious enthusiasm, stamping with joy! The body grows numb with gentle warmth, the day’s fatigue, the sound of familiar voices. Digestion plunges it into an ecstasy in which faces, shadows, the lamp’s shade, the tongues of flame that dance with a shower of stars in the black chimney, everything takes on a joyful and magical appearance. Christophe presses his cheek against his plate, to better savor all this happiness…

He is in his warm bed. How did he get there? Pleasant weariness overwhelms him. The murmur of voices in the room and the images of the day mingle in his mind. His father takes up his violin; the sharp sweet sounds lament in the night. But the greatest happiness of all is when mother comes, when she takes the hand of drowsy Christophe and, bending over him, at his request, sings softly an old song whose words mean nothing. Father finds this music stupid; but Christophe never tires of it. He holds his breath; he wants to laugh and cry; his heart is drunk. He does not know where he is, he overflows with tenderness; he throws his little arms around his mother’s neck and holds her as tight as he can. She says to him, laughing:

--- Are you trying to strangle me?

He holds her tighter still. How he loves her! How he loves everything! All people, all things! Everything is good, everything is beautiful… He falls asleep. The cricket calls from the hearth. Grandfather’s stories, heroic figures drift through a happy night… To be a hero like them!… yes, he will be!… he is one!… Ah! how good it is to be alive!…

What an abundance of strength, joy, pride is in this small being! What an excess of energy! His body and his mind are always in motion, swept along in a dance that spins breathlessly. Like a little salamander, he dances day and night in a flame. An enthusiasm that nothing wearies, and that everything feeds. A delirious dream, a leaping spring, a treasure of inexhaustible hope, a laugh, a song, a perpetual intoxication. Life does not yet hold him; at every moment he escapes it; he swims in the infinite. How happy he is! how made to be happy! Nothing in him that does not believe in happiness, that does not strain toward it with all his small passionate forces!…

Life will quickly set about bringing him to his senses.

II

L’alba vinceva l’ora mattutina che fuggia innanzi, si che di lontano connobbi il tremolar della marina…

Purg. I

The Kraffts were originally from Antwerp. Old Jean-Michel had left the country in the wake of youthful follies, a violent brawl --- as he often had, for he was devilishly combative --- which had this time come to an unfortunate conclusion. He had come to settle, nearly half a century ago, in the small princely town whose pointed red rooftops and shady gardens, terraced on the slope of a gentle hill, are mirrored in the pale green eyes of the Vater Rhein. An excellent musician, he quickly made himself appreciated in a land where everyone is musical. He had put down roots by marrying, past forty, Clara Sartorius, the daughter of the prince’s Kapellmeister, who transferred his position to him. Clara was a placid German woman with two passions: cooking and music. She had a devotion to her husband matched only by the devotion she had for her father. Jean-Michel admired his wife no less. They had lived in perfect harmony for fifteen years; and they had had four children. Then Clara died; and Jean-Michel, after mourning her greatly, married five months later Ottilie Schütz, a twenty-year-old girl, red-cheeked, robust, and merry. Ottilie had exactly as many virtues as Clara, and Jean-Michel had loved her exactly as much. After eight years of marriage, she too died, not before having had time to give him seven children. Eleven children in all, of whom only one had survived. Though he loved them dearly, so many repeated blows had not shaken his solid good humor. The hardest trial had been the death of Ottilie, three years ago now, at an age when it is difficult to remake a life and establish a new home. But after a moment of disarray, old Jean-Michel had recovered his moral equilibrium, which no misfortune was capable of disturbing.

He was an affectionate man; but with him, good health came before everything. He had a physical repulsion for sadness and a need for gaiety, a robust gaiety, Flemish in style, an enormous and childlike laughter. Whatever grief he felt, he drank not a drop less and lost not a bite at table; and music never ceased. Under his direction, the Court orchestra acquired a small celebrity in the Rhenish lands, where Jean-Michel had become legendary for his athletic stature and his fits of rage. He could not master them, despite all his efforts; for this violent man was at bottom timid, and feared to compromise himself; he loved decorum and dreaded the opinion of others. But his blood would get the better of him: he saw red; and he was seized suddenly by wild impatience, not only at orchestral rehearsals but in the middle of concerts, where it had happened that, before the prince himself, he threw down his baton in fury and stamped like a man possessed, berating one of his musicians in a furious and spluttering voice. The prince found it amusing; but the artists thus singled out held it against him. In vain Jean-Michel, ashamed of his outburst, would strive in the next moment to make it forgotten through exaggerated obsequiousness: at the first occasion he would explode again more violently; and this extreme irritability, growing with age, finally made his position difficult. He felt it himself; and one day when one of his fits of rage had nearly brought about a strike of the entire orchestra, he offered his resignation. He hoped that after his years of service, there would be difficulty in accepting it, that he would be begged to stay: nothing of the kind happened; and since he was too proud to go back on his offer, he left, heartbroken, blaming the ingratitude of men.

Since that time, he had not known how to fill his days. He was past seventy; but he was still vigorous, and he went on working and hurrying about the city from morning till evening, giving lessons, arguing, holding forth, involving himself in everything. He was resourceful, and sought every means of keeping occupied: he took up repairing musical instruments; he experimented, tried things out, and sometimes hit upon improvements. He also composed --- he strained himself to compose. He had once written a Missa solemnis, which he spoke of often and which was the glory of the family. It had cost him such effort that he had nearly had a stroke while writing it. He tried to persuade himself that it was a work of genius; but he knew very well in what an emptiness of thought he had written it; and he no longer dared look at the manuscript, because each time he recognized in the phrases he believed were his own the fragments of other composers, painfully stitched end to end by sheer force of will. This was a great sadness to him. Ideas would sometimes come to him that he found admirable. He would rush to his table, trembling --- had he at last caught inspiration, this time? --- But scarcely had he pen in hand than he found himself alone, in silence; and all his efforts to call back the vanished voices only succeeded in making him hear familiar melodies by Mendelssohn or Brahms.

“There are,” says George Sand, “unhappy geniuses who lack the power of expression, who carry to the grave the unknown of their meditation” --- as one member of that great family of the mute or illustrious stammerers put it: Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. --- The old Jean-Michel belonged to that family. He could no more succeed in expressing himself in music than in speech; and always he deceived himself: how dearly he would have loved to speak, to write, to be a great musician, an eloquent orator! It was his secret wound; he said nothing of it to anyone, he did not admit it to himself, he tried not to think of it; but he thought of it in spite of himself, and it put the shadow of death into his soul.

Poor old man! In nothing could he fully be himself. There were so many fine and powerful seeds in him; but they could not come to growth. A deep and touching faith in the dignity of art, in the moral worth of life --- but it expressed itself most often in a bombastic and ridiculous way. So much noble pride; and in life, an almost servile admiration for his superiors. So high a desire for independence; and in practice, absolute docility. Pretensions to being a freethinker; and all the superstitions. A passion for heroism, a genuine courage; and such timidity! --- A nature that stops halfway.

Jean-Michel had transferred all his ambitions to his son; and Melchior at first promised to realize them. From childhood he showed great gifts for music. He learned with remarkable ease, and early on acquired, as a violinist, a virtuosity that made him for a long time the favorite, almost the idol, of the court concerts. He also played very agreeably on piano and other instruments. He was a fine talker, well-built, though a little heavy, and the type of what passes in Germany for classical good looks: a broad expressionless forehead, large regular features, and a curly beard --- a Jupiter from the banks of the Rhine. Old Jean-Michel savored his son’s successes; he was in raptures over the virtuoso’s feats of skill --- he who had never managed to play any instrument cleanly. Certainly it was not Melchior who would have been at a loss to express what he thought.

The trouble was that he thought nothing; and he did not even care. He had precisely the soul of a mediocre actor who tends his vocal inflections without troubling himself about what they express, and watches with anxious vanity their effect on the audience.

The strangest thing was that in him, despite his constant concern for his stage presence --- just as in Jean-Michel, despite his timid respect for all social conventions --- there was always something jerky, unexpected, harebrained, which made people say that all the Kraffts were a little cracked. This did him no harm at first; it seemed as though these very eccentricities were proof of the genius attributed to him, since it is understood among sensible people that an artist cannot possibly have any. But people were not long in being enlightened about the nature of these extravagances: their usual source was the bottle. Nietzsche says that Bacchus is the god of music; and Melchior’s instinct was of the same opinion; but in that case his god was very ungrateful to him --- far from giving him the ideas he lacked, it took away the few he had. After his absurd marriage --- absurd in the eyes of the world, and consequently in his own --- he let himself go more and more. He neglected his playing --- so sure of his superiority that in a short time he lost it. Other virtuosos came along and succeeded him in public favor: this was bitter to him; but instead of rousing his energy, his failures completed his discouragement. He avenged himself by railing against his rivals with his companions at the tavern. He counted, in his absurd pride, on succeeding his father as director of music: someone else was appointed. He believed himself persecuted and adopted the manner of an unrecognized genius. Thanks to the esteem enjoyed by old Krafft, he kept his seat as violinist in the orchestra; but he lost, little by little, almost all his private pupils in the city. And if this blow was the most painful to his self-regard, it was still more damaging to his purse. For some years, the family’s resources had greatly diminished, owing to various reverses of fortune. After having known genuine abundance, hardship had come and grew from day to day. Melchior refused to notice it; he spent not a penny less on his clothes and his pleasures.

He was not a bad man, but a half-good man, which is perhaps worse --- weak, with no resilience, no moral fiber; believing himself besides to be a good father, a good son, a good husband, a good man, and perhaps being so, if to be so it is enough to have an easy kindness that is readily moved to emotion, and that animal affection which makes one love one’s family as a part of oneself. One could not even say that he was very selfish: he lacked enough personality for that. He was nothing. It is a terrible thing in life, these people who are nothing. Like a dead weight left hanging in the air, they tend to fall, they must inevitably fall; and they drag down in their fall everything that is with them.

It was at the moment when the family’s situation was becoming most difficult that little Christophe began to understand what was happening around him.

He was no longer the only child. Melchior gave his wife a child every year, without troubling himself about what would come of it later. Two had died in infancy. Two others were three and four years old. Melchior never concerned himself with them. Louisa, forced to go out, entrusted them to Christophe, who was now six.

It cost Christophe something; for he had to give up for this duty his pleasant afternoons in the fields. But he was proud to be treated as a man, and he carried out his task with gravity. He amused the little ones as best he could, showing them his games; and he took pains to talk to them the way he had heard his mother chat with the baby. Or else he carried them in his arms, one after the other, as he had seen others do; he staggered under the weight, gritting his teeth, pressing his little brother against his chest with all his strength so that he would not fall. The little ones always wanted to be carried, they never tired of it; and when Christophe could do no more, there were tears without end. They gave him a great deal of trouble and he was often at a complete loss with them. They were dirty and needed motherly care. Christophe did not know what to do. They took advantage of him. He sometimes felt like slapping them; but he thought: “They’re small, they don’t know any better”; and he let himself be pinched, hit, and tormented, with magnanimity. Ernst howled for nothing; he stamped his feet, he rolled about in fits of rage --- he was a nervous child, and Louisa had told Christophe not to thwart his whims. As for Rodolphe, he had the mischief of a monkey: he always took advantage of Christophe being occupied with Ernst to commit every sort of mischief behind his back; he broke toys, knocked over the water, dirtied his dress, and sent dishes crashing to the floor by rummaging in the cupboard.

So when Louisa came home, instead of praising Christophe, she would say to him, without scolding but with a troubled look, on seeing the damage:

--- My poor boy, you’re not very clever at this.

Christophe was mortified, and his heart was heavy.

Louisa, who let slip no chance of earning a little money, continued to hire herself out as a cook on exceptional occasions, at wedding or christening feasts. Melchior pretended to know nothing of it: it wounded his pride; but he was not sorry that she did it without his knowing. Little Christophe had as yet no notion of life’s difficulties; he knew of no limits to his will other than those of his parents, which were not very constraining since he was left to grow up more or less as he pleased; he only aspired to growing big so that he could do as he liked. He could not imagine the constraints one runs into at every step; and above all he would never have thought that his parents were not entirely masters of themselves. The day he caught his first glimpse of the fact that among men there are those who command and those who are commanded, and that his family and he were not among the former, his whole being reared up: it was the first crisis of his life.

It was an afternoon. His mother had dressed him in his cleanest clothes, old clothes that had been given away, out of which Louisa’s resourceful patience had managed to make something presentable. He went to join her, as had been arranged, in the house where she was working. He was intimidated at the idea of going in alone. A manservant was idling in the gateway; he stopped the child and asked him in a patronizing tone what he had come for. Christophe stammered, blushing, that he had come to see “madame Krafft” --- as he had been told to say.

--- Madame Krafft? What do you want with madame Krafft? --- the servant continued, laying an ironic stress on the word: madame. --- Is she your mother? Go up. You’ll find Louisa in the kitchen, at the end of the corridor.

He went, growing redder and redder; he was ashamed to hear his mother called by her first name, familiarly: Louisa. He was humiliated; he wanted to flee, to run to his beloved river, sheltered by the bushes, where he told himself stories.

In the kitchen, he found himself in the middle of other servants, who greeted him with loud exclamations. In the back, near the stove, his mother smiled at him with a tender and slightly embarrassed look. He ran to her and buried himself against her legs. She had on a white apron and was holding a wooden spoon. She only added to his confusion by insisting that he lift his chin so that people could see his face, and go and shake hands with each of the persons present, saying good day to them. He would not consent to this; he turned toward the wall and hid his face in his arm. But gradually he grew bolder, and he risked from his hiding place a quick bright little eye that disappeared again each time anyone looked at him. He observed the people on the sly. His mother had a busy and important air he had never seen in her; she moved from one pot to another, tasting, giving her opinion, explaining recipes in a confident tone, which the regular cook listened to with respect. The child’s heart swelled with pride to see how much his mother was valued, and what a role she played in this fine room, adorned with magnificent objects of gleaming gold and copper.

Suddenly all the conversations stopped. The door opened. A lady entered with a rustling of stiff fabrics. She cast a suspicious glance around her. She was no longer young; and yet she wore a light dress with wide sleeves; she held her train in her hand so as not to brush against anything. This did not prevent her from coming near the stove, looking at the dishes, and even tasting them. When she raised her hand slightly, the sleeve fell back and her arm was bare to the elbow; which Christophe found ugly and indecent. What a dry and peremptory tone she used with Louisa! And how humbly Louisa answered her! Christophe was struck by it. He tried to hide himself in his corner so as not to be noticed; but it was no use. The lady asked who that little boy was; Louisa came and took him by the hand and presented him; she held his hands to prevent him from hiding his face; and although he wanted to struggle and run, Christophe sensed instinctively that this time he must make no resistance. The lady looked at the child’s frightened face; and her first impulse, wholly maternal, was to smile at him pleasantly. But she immediately resumed her patronizing air, and asked him questions about his conduct and his piety, to which he said nothing in reply. She also examined how his clothes fit; and Louisa hastened to show that they were splendid. She pulled at the jacket to smooth out the creases; Christophe wanted to cry out, he was so tightly squeezed. He did not understand why his mother kept thanking her.

The lady took him by the hand and said she wanted to bring him to her children. Christophe cast a desperate glance toward his mother; but she was smiling at the mistress of the house with such eagerness that he saw there was nothing to hope from her; and he followed his guide like a sheep being led to the slaughterhouse.

They arrived in a garden, where two sullen-looking children, a boy and a girl roughly the same age as Christophe, appeared to be quarreling with each other. Christophe’s arrival provided a diversion. They drew closer to examine the newcomer. Christophe, abandoned by the lady in the middle of the children, stood planted in a garden path, not daring to raise his eyes. The other two, motionless a few steps away, looked him up and down, nudged each other, and sniggered. At last they made up their minds. They asked him who he was, where he came from, and what his father did. Christophe said nothing, petrified---he was intimidated to the point of tears, especially by the little girl, who had blonde braids, a short skirt, and bare legs.

They began to play. Just as Christophe was starting to feel a little more at ease, the small bourgeois boy stopped short in front of him and, touching his jacket, said:

--- Hey, that’s mine!

Christophe didn’t understand; outraged by this claim that his jacket could belong to someone else, he shook his head vigorously to deny it.

--- I know it well enough, said the boy; it’s my old blue vest---there’s a stain right here.

And he put his finger on it. Then, continuing his inspection, he examined Christophe’s feet and asked what his patched shoe-tips were made of. Christophe turned crimson. The little girl made a face and whispered to her brother---Christophe heard her---that he was a little poor boy. Christophe recovered his voice at that. He thought he could victoriously combat this insulting opinion by stammering in a strangled voice that he was the son of Melchior Krafft, and that his mother was Louisa, the cook. He felt that this title was as fine as any other---and he was quite right to think so. But the two other children, though the information interested them, seemed no more impressed by it. On the contrary, they adopted a tone of condescension. They asked him what he would do when he grew up---whether he would be a cook too, or a coachman. Christophe fell back into silence. He felt something like ice seeping into his heart.

Emboldened by his silence, the two well-off children, who had taken against the poor boy with the sudden, cruel, and baseless antipathy of childhood, looked for some amusing way to torment him. The little girl was particularly relentless. She noticed that Christophe had trouble running because of his tight clothes, and she had the refined idea of making him clear obstacles. A barrier was built from small benches, and Christophe was ordered to jump it. The poor boy did not dare say what was preventing him from jumping; he gathered his strength, lunged forward---and fell flat on the ground. They burst out laughing around him. He had to try again. With tears in his eyes, he made a desperate effort, and this time managed to clear it. But this did not satisfy his tormentors, who decided the barrier wasn’t high enough; they added more to it, until it became an unfailing death-trap. Christophe tried to revolt; he declared he would not jump. Then the little girl called him a coward and said he was afraid. Christophe could not bear that; and, certain he would fall, he jumped---and fell. His feet caught in the obstacle: everything came down with him. He scraped his hands, nearly cracked his head open; and to cap his misfortune, his clothes split at the knees and elsewhere. He was sick with shame; he could hear the two children dancing with joy around him; he was suffering in an atrocious way. He felt that they despised him, that they hated him---why? why? He wanted to die!---There is no pain more cruel than that of the child who discovers for the first time the cruelty of others; he believes himself persecuted by the entire world, and has nothing to sustain him: there is nothing left, nothing at all!… Christophe tried to get up: the bourgeois boy pushed him and knocked him down again; the little girl kicked him. He tried once more; they both threw themselves on him, sitting on his back, pressing his face into the ground. Then a fury seized him: this was too much misery! His burning hands, his fine jacket torn---a catastrophe for him!---the shame, the grief, the revolt against injustice, so many miseries at once all fused into a wild, blind rage. He braced himself on his knees and hands, shook himself like a dog, sent his persecutors rolling; and as they came back at him, he charged them headfirst, slapped the little girl across the face, and sent the boy flying with one punch into the middle of a flower bed.

There were screams. The children fled into the house with shrill cries. Doors could be heard slamming, and voices exclaiming in anger. The lady came running, as fast as the train of her dress would allow. Christophe saw her coming and made no move to flee; he was terrified by what he had done---it was an unheard-of thing, a crime---but he regretted nothing. He waited. He was finished. So much the better. He had been driven to despair.

The lady fell upon him. He felt himself struck. He heard her speaking to him in a furious voice, with a flood of words; but he could make nothing out. His two little enemies had come back to witness his humiliation and were shrieking at the top of their lungs. There were servants there; it was a confusion of voices. To complete his undoing, Louisa, who had been summoned, appeared; and, instead of defending him, she began by slapping him too, before knowing anything at all, and demanded that he ask forgiveness. He refused with rage. She shook him harder and dragged him by the hand toward the lady and the children, to make him kneel. But he stamped his feet, howled, and bit his mother’s hand. He escaped at last through the midst of the laughing servants.

He went away with his heart swollen, his face burning from the anger and the blows he had received. He tried not to think, and quickened his pace, because he did not want to cry in the street. He wanted to be home so he could give way to his tears; his throat was tight, the blood rushed to his head, he was on the verge of bursting.

At last he arrived; he ran up the old dark staircase to his usual nook in a window embrasure above the river; he threw himself into it breathless; and there was a flood of tears. He did not quite know why he was crying; but he had to cry; and when the first wave had more or less passed, he cried again, because he wanted to cry, with a kind of rage, to make himself suffer, as if he were thereby punishing the others as well as himself. Then he thought that his father would be coming home, that his mother would tell him everything, and that his misfortunes were far from over. He resolved to run away, anywhere, and never come back.

Just as he was going downstairs, he ran straight into his father coming in.

--- What are you doing there, boy? Where are you going? asked Melchior.

He didn’t answer.

--- You’ve done something stupid. What did you do?

Christophe kept an obstinate silence.

--- What did you do? Melchior repeated. Are you going to answer me?

The child began to cry, and Melchior to shout, each louder than the other, until they heard the hurried footsteps of Louisa coming up the stairs. She arrived, still completely distraught. She began with violent reproaches, mixed with fresh slaps, to which Melchior, as soon as he understood---and probably before---added blows that would have felled an ox. They were both shouting. The child was howling. They ended up quarreling with each other in the same fury. While beating his son, Melchior said the boy was right, that this is what you get for going to serve people who think everything is allowed because they have money. And while striking the child, Louisa cried at her husband that he was a brute, that she would not allow him to touch the boy, and that he had hurt him. Indeed, Christophe’s nose was bleeding a little; but he scarcely noticed, and felt no gratitude toward his mother for pressing a damp cloth roughly against it, since she went on scolding him all the while. In the end, they shoved him into a dark corner, where he was locked up without supper.

He could hear them shouting at each other; and he did not know which one he hated more. He thought it was his mother; for he would never have expected such cruelty from her. All the day’s miseries weighed on him at once: everything he had suffered, the injustice of the children, the injustice of the lady, the injustice of his parents, and---what he felt too, like a raw wound, without quite understanding it---the humiliation of his parents, of whom he was so proud, before these other people, cruel and contemptible. This cowardice, of which he had a vague awareness for the first time, seemed to him ignoble. Everything within him was shaken: his admiration for his family, the religious respect they inspired in him, his trust in life, the naive need he had to love others and be loved by them, his moral faith---blind, but absolute. It was a total collapse; he was crushed by brute force, with no means of defending himself, of ever escaping. He choked. He thought he was dying. He stiffened every fiber of his being in a desperate revolt. He beat his fists, his feet, his head against the wall, howled, was seized by convulsions, and fell to the ground, bruising himself against the furniture.

His parents, who rushed in, took him in their arms. Now each of them competed to be the most tender with him. His mother undressed him, carried him to his bed, sat at his bedside and stayed with him until he was calmer. But he would not give way; he forgave her nothing, and pretended to be asleep so as not to have to embrace her. His mother seemed to him wicked and cowardly. He had no idea of all the suffering she endured to keep them alive, or of what it had cost her to take sides against him.

After he had exhausted to the last drop the incredible supply of tears that a child’s eyes hold, he felt a little relieved. He was weary and broken; but his nerves were too taut for him to sleep. The images of earlier began to drift again through his half-stupor. Above all, he kept seeing the little girl, with her bright eyes, her small nose tilted in that scornful way, her hair on her shoulders, her bare legs, and her childish, affected words. He shuddered, thinking he could hear her voice again. He remembered how stupid he had been in front of her; and he felt a savage hatred toward her; he could not forgive her for having humiliated him; he was consumed with the desire to humiliate her in turn, to make her cry. He searched for the means and found none. There was no likelihood she would ever trouble herself about him. But, to console himself, he imagined everything as he wished it. He therefore established that he had become very powerful and glorious; and he decided at the same time that she was in love with him. Then he began to tell himself one of those absurd stories that he ended up believing were more real than reality.

She was dying of love; but he disdained her. When he passed by her house, she watched him go by, hidden behind the curtains; and he knew he was being watched; but he pretended not to notice, and talked gaily. He even left the country and traveled far away, to deepen her grief. He did great things.---Here he introduced into his tale certain chosen passages from his grandfather’s heroic stories.---She, meanwhile, was falling ill with sorrow. Her mother, the proud lady, came to beg him: “My poor daughter is dying. Please, come!” He came. She was lying down. Her face was pale and hollow. She held out her arms to him. She could not speak; but she took his hands and kissed them weeping. Then he looked at her with admirable kindness and gentleness. He told her to get well, and consented to let her love him. Having reached this point in the tale, as he enjoyed prolonging its pleasures by repeating the attitudes and words several times over, sleep came and took him, and he fell asleep consoled.

But when he opened his eyes, day had come; and this day no longer shone with the carelessness of the previous morning: something had changed in the world. Christophe knew injustice.

There were periods of very tight hardship at home. They grew more and more frequent. The meals were meager on those days. No one noticed it more keenly than Christophe. His father saw nothing; he helped himself first and always had enough for himself. He talked loudly, burst out laughing at his own remarks, and never noticed his wife’s gaze---she laughed with a forced air, watching him as he served himself. The dish, when it was passed along, was half empty. Louisa served the little ones: two potatoes each. By the time it reached Christophe, there were often only three left on the plate, and his mother had not yet been served. He knew this in advance; he had counted them before they reached him. Then he would summon his courage and say in an offhand tone:

--- Just one, maman.

She would look a little worried.

--- Two, like the others.

--- No, please, just one.

--- Aren’t you hungry?

--- No, I’m not very hungry.

But she would take only one as well, and they would peel it with care, slice it into very small pieces, and try to eat it as slowly as possible. His mother would watch him. When he had finished:

--- Go on, take it then!

--- No, maman.

--- Are you ill, then?

--- I’m not ill, but I’ve had enough.

It sometimes happened that his father accused him of being fussy, and helped himself to the last potato. But Christophe was on his guard now; he kept it on his plate for Ernst, the little brother, always ravenous, who had been eyeing it from the corner of his eye since the beginning of dinner, and who would finally ask him:

--- You’re not eating that? Give it to me, go on, Christophe.

Ah! how Christophe hated his father, how angry he was that he never thought of them, never even suspected that he was eating their share! He was so hungry that he hated him for it, and would have liked to say so; but he thought, in his pride, that he had no right to speak, as long as he was not earning his own living. That bread his father took from him, his father had earned it. He himself was good for nothing; he was a burden to everyone; he had no right to speak. Later he would speak --- if later ever came. Oh! he would starve to death before then!…

He suffered more than another child would have from these cruel fasts. His robust stomach was in agony; sometimes he trembled from it; his head ached; there was a hollow in his chest, a hollow that turned and widened like a drill being driven in. But he did not complain; he felt his mother watching him, and he put on an air of indifference. Louisa, her heart tight, dimly understood that her little boy was going without food so that the others might have more; she pushed the thought away, but kept returning to it. She did not dare to press the matter, to ask Christophe whether it was true; for if it had been true, what could she have done? She herself had been used to privation since she was small. What is the use of complaining when you can do nothing else? She did not suspect, with her frail health and her modest needs, that the child must be suffering more than she was. She said nothing to him; but once or twice, when the others had gone out --- the children into the street, Melchior about his affairs --- she would ask her eldest to stay, to help her with some small task. Christophe would hold her skein while she wound it. Then suddenly she would drop everything and draw him to her passionately; she would put him on her knee, though he was already quite heavy; she would press him close. He threw his arms around her neck with fierce tenderness, and they wept together, embracing each other like two people in despair.

--- My poor little boy!…

--- Mama, dear mama!…

They said nothing more; but they understood each other.

Christophe was quite a long time in noticing that his father drank. Melchior’s intemperance did not, at least in the beginning, exceed certain limits. It was not violent. It showed itself rather in outbursts of excessive gaiety. He would say foolish things, sing at the top of his lungs for hours at a time, banging on the table; and sometimes he would insist on dancing with Louisa and the children. Christophe could see well enough that his mother looked sad; she would withdraw to one side and keep her eyes on her work; she avoided looking at the drunkard; and she would try gently to silence him when he said coarse things that made her blush. But Christophe did not understand; and he had such a need for cheerfulness that he almost looked forward to these noisy homecomings of his father’s. The house was gloomy, and these foolish scenes were a release for him. He laughed wholeheartedly at Melchior’s grotesque gestures and stupid jokes; he sang and danced with him; and he thought it very wrong when his mother, in an angry voice, ordered him to stop. How could it be wrong, since his father was doing it? Although his keen little powers of observation, which forgot nothing they had seen, had already noted several things about his father’s conduct that ran counter to his childlike and imperious instinct for justice, he continued nonetheless to admire him. It is such a deep need in a child! It is, no doubt, one of the forms of the eternal love of self. When a man is, or feels himself to be, too weak to fulfill his desires and satisfy his pride, he transfers them --- as a child onto his parents, as a man defeated by life onto his children in turn. They are, or they will be, everything he dreamed of being: his champions, his avengers; and in this proud self-abdication in their favor, love and egoism mingle with an intoxicating power and sweetness. And so Christophe forgot all his grievances against his father and worked hard to find reasons to admire him: he admired his height, his powerful arms, his voice, his laugh, his gaiety; and he swelled with pride when he heard his father’s virtuosity praised, or when Melchior himself recounted, with embellishments, the compliments he had received. He believed his boasting; and he looked on his father as a genius, a hero of the grandfather’s stamp.

One evening, around seven o’clock, he was alone in the house. The little brothers were out walking with Jean-Michel. Louisa was washing linen at the river. The door burst open and Melchior came crashing in. He was hatless and disheveled; he executed a sort of entrechat on his way in, then collapsed onto a chair in front of the table. Christophe began to laugh, thinking this was one of his usual antics, and came toward him. But as soon as he looked closely, he had no more desire to laugh. Melchior was sitting with his arms dangling, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing, his eyes blinking; his face was crimson; his mouth was open; from it came, from time to time, a cluck of stupid laughter. Christophe was shaken. He thought at first that his father was playing a trick; but when he saw that he did not move, fear seized him.

--- Papa! Papa! he cried.

Melchior kept clucking like a hen. Christophe seized his arm in despair and shook it with all his strength:

--- Papa, dear papa, answer me! Please!

Melchior’s body swayed like something boneless, nearly fell; his head tilted toward Christophe’s; he looked at him, gurgling incoherent, irritated syllables. When Christophe’s eyes met those clouded eyes, a wild terror took hold of him. He fled to the far end of the room, fell to his knees in front of the bed, and buried his face in the sheets. They remained like that for a long time. Melchior rocked heavily on his chair, sniggering. Christophe stuffed his fingers in his ears to avoid hearing, and trembled. What was happening inside him was beyond expression: a terrible upheaval, a dread, a pain, as if someone had died --- someone dear and venerated.

No one came home; they were left alone together: night fell, and Christophe’s fear grew with every passing minute. He could not keep himself from listening, and his blood ran cold at that voice he no longer recognized: the silence made it more frightening still; the limping clock kept time with that senseless babbling. He could bear it no longer; he wanted to flee. But to get out he would have to pass in front of his father; and Christophe shuddered at the thought of seeing those eyes again --- it seemed to him that it would kill him. He tried to slip along on his hands and knees toward the bedroom door. He did not breathe, he did not look up, he stopped at the slightest movement from Melchior, whose feet he could see under the table. One of the drunkard’s legs was trembling. Christophe reached the door; with a shaking hand he pressed the handle down; but in his agitation he let it go: it snapped shut. Melchior turned to look; the chair on which he had been rocking lost its balance: he crashed to the floor. Christophe, terrified, no longer had the strength to run. He stood pinned against the wall, looking at his father stretched out at his feet, and he screamed for help.

The fall sobered Melchior a little. After cursing and swearing, pounding the chair that had played him this trick, after failing several times to get to his feet, he steadied himself in a sitting position, his back propped against the table; and he took stock of his surroundings. He saw Christophe crying and called to him. Christophe wanted to run but could not move. Melchior called again; and as the child did not come, he swore in anger. Christophe approached, trembling in every limb. Melchior drew him close and sat him on his knee. He began by pulling his ears, and delivered, in a thick and stumbling tongue, a sermon on the respect a child owes his father. Then he abruptly changed his mind and bounced him in his arms, spouting nonsense: he was convulsed with laughter. From there, without transition, he shifted to melancholy; he grew sentimental over the boy and over himself; he squeezed him until he nearly choked, covered him with kisses and tears; and finally rocked him, intoning the De Profundis. Christophe made no move to free himself; he was frozen with horror. Smothered against his father’s chest, feeling on his face the wine-laden breath and the hiccups of the drunkard, wet from his revolting kisses and tears, he was dying of disgust and fear. He wanted to cry out, and no cry could come from his mouth. He remained in that dreadful state for what seemed to him a century --- until the door opened and Louisa came in, a basket of laundry on her arm. She let out a cry, dropped the basket, rushed toward Christophe, and with a violence no one would have thought her capable of, tore him from Melchior’s arms:

--- Ah! you miserable drunkard! she cried.

Her eyes blazed with anger.

Christophe thought his father would kill her. But Melchior was so stunned by his wife’s threatening apparition that he said nothing in reply, and began to weep. He rolled on the floor, beating his head against the furniture, saying she was right, that he was a drunkard, that he was ruining his family, destroying his poor children, and that he wanted to die. Louisa had turned her back on him with contempt; she carried Christophe into the next room, caressed him, tried to calm him. The little boy went on trembling and did not answer his mother’s questions; then he burst into sobs. Louisa bathed his face with water; she kissed him, spoke to him tenderly, wept with him. At last they both grew calm. She knelt down, drew him to his knees beside her. They prayed that the good Lord would cure his father of his vile habit, and that Melchior would become once again the good, decent man he had been before. Louisa put the child to bed. He wanted her to stay beside him and hold his hand. Louisa spent part of the night sitting at Christophe’s bedside, for he had a fever. The drunkard snored on the floor.

Some time after this, at school, where Christophe spent his time watching flies on the ceiling and punching his neighbors to knock them off the bench, the teacher, who had taken a dislike to him because he was always fidgeting, always laughing, and never learned anything, made an indecent remark one day when Christophe had himself tumbled to the floor --- an allusion to a certain well-known personage whose brilliant example he seemed to be following. All the children burst out laughing; and some of them took it upon themselves to make the allusion explicit in commentary that was as clear as it was forceful. Christophe got to his feet, red with shame, seized his inkwell, and flung it with all his might at the head of the first child he saw laughing. The teacher came down on him with his fists; he was thrashed, put on his knees, and sentenced to an enormous imposition.

He went home pale, seething in silence; and he announced coldly that he would not be going back to school. No one paid attention to his words. The next morning, when his mother reminded him it was time to leave, he replied calmly that he had said he would not go. Louisa begged, shouted, threatened: nothing worked. He sat in his corner, his forehead set and stubborn. Melchior beat him soundly: he howled; but at every summons issued after each thrashing, he answered more furiously: “No!” They asked him at least to say why: he clenched his teeth and would say nothing. Melchior grabbed him, carried him to school, and handed him over to the teacher. Back at his bench, he began by methodically breaking everything within reach: his inkwell, his pen; he tore up his notebook and his book --- all in full view, looking at the teacher with a defiant air. He was locked in the dark closet. --- A few moments later the teacher found him there with his handkerchief knotted around his neck, pulling as hard as he could on both ends: he was trying to strangle himself.

He had to be sent home.

Christophe was tough against illness. He had inherited from his father and grandfather their robust constitution. No one was soft in the family: sick or not, no one ever complained, and nothing could alter the habits of the two Kraffts, father and son. They went out in all weather, summer and winter alike, stayed for hours in the rain or the sun, sometimes bareheaded and with their clothes open, out of carelessness or bravado, walked for miles without ever tiring, and looked with contemptuous pity on poor Louisa, who said nothing, but who was forced to stop, white-faced, her legs swollen, her heart beating fit to burst. Christophe was not far from sharing their disdain for his mother; he could not understand being ill; when he fell, or knocked himself, or cut himself, or burned himself, he did not cry --- but he was angry at the offending object. His father’s brutality and that of his small companions, the street ruffians with whom he brawled, toughened him thoroughly. He did not fear blows; and he came home more than once with a bleeding nose and lumps on his forehead. One day he had to be pulled, nearly suffocated, from one of those furious melees in which he had gone down under his opponent, who was ferociously smashing his head against the pavement. He found this natural, being ready to do to others exactly what was done to him.

Nevertheless, he was afraid of an infinite number of things; and, though no one knew it --- for he was very proud --- nothing made him suffer as much as those unrelenting terrors, which haunted a good part of his childhood. For two or three years in particular they raged inside him like a sickness.

He was afraid of the mysterious thing that shelters in shadow, of the malevolent powers that seem to lie in wait for life, of the swarming of monsters that every child’s mind carries within itself with dread and mingles with everything it sees: the last remnants, no doubt, of a vanished fauna, of the hallucinations of the first days close to nothingness, of the fearful sleep in the womb, of the stirring of the larva deep in matter.

He was afraid of the attic door. It opened onto the staircase and was almost always left ajar. Whenever he had to pass it, he felt his heart beat; he gathered his courage and jumped past without looking. It seemed to him that there was someone, or something, behind it. On the days when it was closed, he could hear plainly through the half-open cat-flap something moving on the other side. This was not surprising, since there were large rats there; but he imagined a monstrous being, jagged bones, flesh like rags, a horse’s head, eyes that killed, incoherent shapes; he did not want to think of it and thought of it in spite of himself. He checked with a trembling hand that the latch was properly set --- which did not prevent him from turning back ten times as he went down the stairs.

He was afraid of the night outdoors. It sometimes happened that he would linger at his grandfather’s house, or be sent there in the evening on some errand. Old Krafft lived a little outside town, in the last house on the road to Cologne. Between that house and the first lit windows of the town there were two or three hundred paces, which seemed fully three times that distance to Christophe. For a few moments the path bent around a curve where nothing could be seen. The countryside was deserted at dusk; the earth turned black and the sky a frightening pallor. When one emerged from the bushes that lined the road and climbed up onto the embankment, one could still see a yellowish gleam at the edge of the horizon; but that gleam shed no light and was more oppressive than the darkness itself; it made the shadows deeper all around it --- it was a light like a death knell. The clouds descended almost to the level of the ground. The bushes grew enormous and stirred. The skeletal trees looked like grotesque old men. The milestones along the road gleamed with the sheen of pale shrouds. The shadows moved. There were dwarfs crouching in the ditches, lights in the grass, frightening things flying through the air, shrill cries of insects that came from nowhere anyone could say. Christophe was always in an anxious dread of some sinister eccentricity of nature. He ran, and his heart leaped in his chest.

When he saw the light in his grandfather’s room, he was reassured. But the worst of it was that old Krafft had often not yet come home. Then it was more frightening still. That old house, lost in the countryside, intimidated the child even in broad daylight. He forgot his fears when his grandfather was there; but sometimes the old man would leave him alone and go out without warning. Christophe had not noticed. The room was peaceful. All the objects were familiar and friendly. There was a large white-wood bed; at its head, a heavy Bible on a small shelf, artificial flowers on the mantelpiece, with photographs of two wives and eleven children --- the old man had written below each one the date of birth and the date of death. On the walls, framed Scripture verses, and poor chromolithographs of Mozart and Beethoven. A small piano in one corner, a cello in another; shelves of books in disarray, pipes hanging on the wall, and on the windowsill pots of geraniums. One felt surrounded by friends. The old man’s footsteps came and went in the next room; one could hear him planing or hammering: he talked to himself, called himself an idiot, or sang in his great voice, turning out a medley of scraps of chorale, sentimental lieder, martial marches, and drinking songs. One felt safe. Christophe sat in the large armchair near the window, a book on his knees; bent over the pictures, he lost himself in them; the daylight faded; his eyes grew blurred: at last he stopped looking and drifted into vague dreaming. The wheel of a cart rumbled far off on the road. A cow lowed in the fields. The church bells of the town, weary and drowsy, rang the evening Angelus. Uncertain longings, obscure premonitions stirred in the heart of the dreaming child.

Suddenly Christophe would wake, seized by a dull uneasiness. He looked up: night. He listened: silence. Grandfather had just gone out. A shiver ran through him. He leaned out the window, trying to catch sight of him on the road: the road was deserted; things were beginning to take on a threatening face. God! What if she were to come! --- Who? --- He could not have said. The thing of terror. --- The doors shut badly. The wooden staircase creaked as if under a footstep. The child leaped up, dragged the armchair, the two chairs, and the table into the most sheltered corner of the room; he arranged them as a barricade: the armchair pushed against the wall, a chair to the right, a chair to the left, the table in front. In the middle he set up a stepladder; and, perched at the top with his book and a few others as munitions in case of siege, he breathed more easily, having decided within himself, in his childish imagination, that the enemy could under no circumstances cross the barricade: that was simply not allowed.

But the enemy sometimes sprang from the book itself. --- Among the old volumes his grandfather had bought here and there, there were some with pictures that made a deep impression on the child: they drew him and frightened him. They were fantastical visions, temptations of Saint Anthony, where the skeletons of birds fouled the insides of decanters, where myriads of eggs wriggled like worms inside disemboweled frogs, where heads walked on legs, where backsides played the trumpet, and where household utensils and animal carcasses advanced gravely, wrapped in great sheets, with the curtsies of old ladies. Christophe was horrified by them, and always came back, drawn in by his very disgust. He studied them at length and from time to time threw a furtive glance around him to see what was stirring in the folds of the curtains. --- An image of a flayed man in an anatomy book was even more repellent to him. He trembled to turn the page as he neared the place in the book where it lay. Those shapeless daubs had for him a prodigious intensity. The creative power inherent in a child’s mind made up for what the staging lacked. He saw no difference between those scrawlings and reality. At night they acted more powerfully on his dreams than the living images he had glimpsed during the day.

He was afraid of sleep. For several years nightmares poisoned his rest: --- He wandered through cellars and saw the grinning flayed man enter through the air vent. --- He was alone in a room and heard the brushing of footsteps in the corridor; he threw himself at the door to close it, barely managing to seize the handle in time; but someone pulled it from the outside; he could not turn the key, he was losing strength, he called for help. And on the other side, he knew all too well who wanted to enter. --- He was in the middle of his family; and suddenly their faces changed; they began doing mad things. --- He was reading quietly; and he felt an invisible being near him. He wanted to flee, he felt himself bound. He wanted to cry out, he was gagged. A repulsive grip closed around his throat. He woke, gasping, teeth chattering; and he went on trembling long after waking; he could not shake off his anguish.

The room where he slept was a windowless, doorless closet; an old curtain hung on a rod above the entrance was all that separated it from his parents’ room. The stale air suffocated him. His brothers, who slept in the same bed, kicked him. His head burned and he was prey to a half-hallucination in which all the small worries of the day echoed back to him, enlarged beyond measure. In this state of extreme nervous tension, close to nightmare, the slightest jolt was agony. The creak of the floorboards terrified him. His father’s breathing swelled in a fantastic way; it no longer seemed a human breath; that monstrous sound filled him with dread: it was as if some beast lay there. The night crushed him; it would never end; it would always be like this; he had been lying there for months. He panted, half-raised himself on his bed, sat up, wiped his sweat-covered face with the sleeve of his shirt. Sometimes he nudged his brother Rodolphe to wake him; but the other grunted, pulled the rest of the blankets to himself, and fell solidly back to sleep.

He lay there in the anguish of fever until a pale strip appeared on the floor at the bottom of the curtain. That timid whiteness of the distant dawn sent peace flooding down into him all at once. He felt it steal into the room even before any eye could have distinguished it from shadow. Immediately his fever broke, his blood grew calm like a river in flood returning to its banks; an even warmth flowed through his whole body, and his eyes, burning from sleeplessness, closed in spite of him.

In the evening he watched the hour of sleep approach with dread. He promised himself not to give in to it, to stay awake all night, for terror of the nightmares. But fatigue always won in the end; and it was always when he least expected it that the monsters returned.

Dreadful night! So sweet to most children, so terrible to some of them!… He was afraid to sleep. He was afraid not to sleep. Waking or sleeping, he was surrounded by monstrous images, the phantoms of his mind, the larvae that float in the half-light of childhood’s twilight, as in the sinister chiaroscuro of sickness.

But these imaginary terrors were soon to fade before the great Terror --- the one that gnaws at all men, and that wisdom strives in vain to forget or deny: Death.

One day, rummaging through a cupboard, he came upon various objects he did not recognize: a child’s dress, a striped cap. He carried them triumphantly to his mother, who, instead of smiling at him, put on a displeased expression and told him to take them back where he had found them. As he lingered in the asking of why, she snatched them from his hands without answering and put them on a shelf out of his reach. Very intrigued, he pressed her with questions. She finally said that they had belonged to a little brother who had died before he himself had come into the world. He was devastated: he had never heard a word about him. He stood silent for a moment, then tried to find out more. His mother seemed distracted; she told him, however, that the brother had been named Christophe like him, but that he had been better-behaved. He asked her more questions; but she did not like to answer. She said only that he was in heaven and prayed for them all. Christophe could get nothing more out of her; she told him to be quiet and let her work. She seemed indeed to lose herself in her sewing: she looked troubled and did not lift her eyes. But after a while she glanced at him in the corner where he had gone to sulk, began to smile again, and told him gently to go and play outside.

These scraps of conversation stirred Christophe deeply. So there had been a child, a little boy of his mother’s, just like him, who had the same name, who was nearly the same --- and who had died! --- Death, he didn’t quite know what it was; but it was something terrible. --- And no one ever spoke of that other Christophe; he was entirely forgotten. Would it be the same for him, if he were to die in his turn? --- This thought still troubled him that evening when he sat at the table with all his family and watched them laughing and talking of indifferent things. So people could be cheerful after he was dead! Oh! he never would have believed his mother was selfish enough to laugh after the death of her little boy! He hated them all; he wanted to weep for himself, for his own death, in advance. At the same time he longed to ask a whole flood of questions; but he didn’t dare; he remembered the tone with which his mother had silenced him. --- At last he could bear it no longer; and as he was being put to bed he asked Louisa, who had come to kiss him goodnight:

--- Maman, did he sleep in my bed?

The poor woman started: and in a voice she tried to make sound indifferent, she asked:

--- Who?

--- The little boy… who died, said Christophe, lowering his voice.

His mother’s hands gripped him suddenly:

--- Hush, hush, she said.

Her voice was trembling: Christophe, who had his head resting against her chest, heard her heart beating. There was a moment of silence; then she said:

--- We must never speak of that again, my darling… Sleep quietly… No, it isn’t his bed.

She kissed him; he thought he could feel that her cheek was wet, he would have liked to be sure. He felt a little relieved; she was grieving after all! And yet he doubted it again a moment later, when he heard her in the next room speaking in a calm voice, her everyday voice. Which was true --- now, or just before? --- He tossed in his bed for a long time without finding an answer. He would have liked his mother to be in pain: not that thinking of her sadness didn’t cause him pain as well --- but it would have done him, in spite of everything, such good! He would have felt less alone. --- He fell asleep, and the next day thought no more of it.

A few weeks later, one of the boys he played with in the street didn’t come at the usual hour. Someone in the group said he was sick; and they grew accustomed to not seeing him at their games: they had an explanation, it was simple enough. --- One evening, Christophe was in bed; it was still early; and from the alcove where his bed stood, he could see the light in his parents’ room. Someone knocked at the door. A neighbor came to chat. He listened distractedly, spinning a story to himself as was his habit; not all the words of the conversation reached him. Suddenly he heard the neighbor saying that “he had died.” His blood stopped; for he had understood who they were talking about. He listened, holding his breath. His parents exclaimed. Melchior’s loud voice cried:

--- Christophe, do you hear? Poor Fritz is dead.

Christophe made an effort and replied in a calm tone:

--- Yes, Papa.

His chest was squeezed as if in a vise.

Melchior pressed further:

--- Yes, Papa. Is that all you can say? Doesn’t it make you sad?

Louisa, who understood the child, said:

--- Shh! Let him sleep!

And they spoke more quietly. But Christophe, straining his ears, was tracking every detail: the illness, a typhoid fever, the cold baths, the delirium, the parents’ grief. He could no longer breathe; a kind of lump was choking him, rising into his throat; he was shivering: all these horrible things were being carved into his mind. Most of all he retained that the disease was contagious --- meaning he could die the same way himself --- and terror froze him; for he remembered that he had shaken hands with Fritz the last time he had seen him, and that very day he had walked past his house. --- Yet he made no sound, so as not to be forced to speak; and when his father asked him, after the neighbor left, “Christophe, are you asleep?”, he didn’t answer. He heard Melchior say to Louisa:

--- That child has no heart.

Louisa said nothing in reply; but a moment later she came quietly and lifted the curtain and looked at the little bed. Christophe just had time to close his eyes and imitate the steady breathing he heard from his brothers when they slept. Louisa moved away on tiptoe. And yet how he had wanted to hold her back! How he had wanted to tell her how frightened he was, to beg her to save him, to reassure him at least! But he was afraid they would mock him, treat him as a coward --- and besides, he already knew too well that anything anyone might say would be useless. And for hours he lay full of anguish, believing he could feel the sickness creeping into him, pains in his head, a heaviness in his heart, thinking in terror: “It’s over, I’m sick, I’m going to die, I’m going to die!…” Once he sat up in bed and called to his mother in a low voice; but they were asleep and he didn’t dare wake them.

From that time on, his childhood was poisoned by the idea of death. His nerves surrendered to all sorts of small causeless ailments --- a tightness in the chest, sharp pains, sudden feelings of suffocation. His imagination ran wild before these aches, seeing in each of them the murderous beast that would take his life. How many times he suffered the agony, a few steps from his mother, sitting close beside him, without her suspecting a thing! For in his cowardice he had the courage to lock his terrors inside himself, through a strange mixture of feelings: the pride of not having recourse to others, the shame of being afraid, the scruples of an affection that does not wish to cause worry. But he thought constantly: “This time I am sick, I am seriously sick. It’s the beginning of a throat illness…” He had picked up that name for a throat ailment by chance… “My God! Not this time!…”

He had religious ideas: he willingly believed what his mother told him, that after death the soul rose before the Lord, and that if it had been pious it entered the garden of paradise. But he was far more frightened than attracted by this journey. He did not envy at all the children whom God, as a reward, so his mother said, took away in the middle of their sleep and called back to himself, without making them suffer. He trembled, as he was falling asleep, that God might take it into his head to do the same to him. It must be terrible to feel oneself suddenly torn from the warmth of the bed and drawn into the void, brought face to face with God. He imagined God as an enormous sun that spoke with a voice of thunder: what pain that must cause! It burned the eyes, the ears, the whole soul! Then God could punish --- one never knew… --- Besides, that did nothing to ward off all the other horrors, which he didn’t know well but had been able to guess from conversations: the body in a box, all alone at the bottom of a hole, lost in the middle of the crowd in those revolting cemeteries where they had taken him to pray… God! God! What a sadness!…

And yet it was not cheerful to be alive --- to be hungry, to see a drunken father, to be bullied, to suffer in so many ways, from the cruelty of other children, from the insulting pity of grown-ups, and to be understood by no one, not even by his mother. Everyone humiliates you, no one loves you, you are alone, utterly alone, and you count for so little! --- Yes; but it was precisely this that made him want to live. He felt within himself a seething force of anger. What a strange thing this force was! It could still do nothing; it was as if far away and gagged, swaddled, paralyzed; he had no idea what it wanted, what it would become. But it was in him: he was certain of it, he could feel it stirring and rumbling. Tomorrow, tomorrow, how it would take its revenge! He had a furious desire to live, to avenge himself for all the wrongs, for all the injustices, to punish the wicked, to do great things. “Oh! Let me only live…” --- he thought for a moment --- “…only until I am eighteen!” --- Other times he went as far as twenty-one. That was the outer limit. He believed that would be enough to dominate the world. He thought of those heroes he held dear, of Napoleon, of that other one more distant but whom he loved best, Alexander the Great. Surely he would be like them, if only he could live another twelve years… ten years. He didn’t think to pity those who died at thirty. They were old; they had enjoyed life: it was their own fault if it had come to nothing. But to die now --- what despair! It is too cruel to disappear so small, and to remain forever, in people’s minds, a little boy whom everyone feels entitled to reproach! He wept with rage, as if he were already dead.

This anguish of death tormented years of his childhood --- offset only by his disgust with life, the sadness of his life.

It was in the midst of the heavy darkness of this life, in the suffocating night that seemed to thicken hour by hour around him, that there began to shine, like a star lost in somber space, the light that was to illuminate his life: divine music…

Grand-père had just given his children an old piano, which one of his clients had asked him to take off his hands, and which his patient ingenuity had brought back to more or less working order. The gift had not been very warmly received. Louisa found the room quite small enough already, without cluttering it further; and Melchior said that Papa Jean-Michel hadn’t ruined himself --- it was firewood. Only little Christophe was glad of the new arrival, without quite knowing why. It seemed to him like a magic box, full of wonderful stories, like that book of tales --- a volume of the Thousand and One Nights --- from which grand-père sometimes read him a few pages, enchanting them both. The first day he had heard his father, trying the notes, draw from it a little shower of arpeggios, like the one that a breath of warm wind shakes down, after a rainstorm, from the wet branches of a wood. He had clapped his hands and cried, “Again!”; but Melchior disdainfully closed the piano, saying it was worthless. Christophe pressed no further; but since then he had been constantly prowling around the instrument; and the moment backs were turned, he would lift the lid and gently press a key, the way one might poke with a finger at the green shell of some large beetle: he wanted to make the creature trapped inside come out. Sometimes, in his haste, he struck a little too hard; and his mother would cry at him: “Will you stop fidgeting? Don’t touch everything!” Or else he would pinch himself cruelly when closing the lid again, and pull pitiful faces as he sucked his bruised finger…

Now his greatest joy is when his mother has to spend the day in service or run an errand in town. He listens to her footsteps going down the stairs: there they are in the street; they grow distant. He is alone. He opens the piano, pulls up a chair, climbs onto it; his shoulders reach to the level of the keyboard: that is enough for what he wants. Why does he wait until he is alone? No one would stop him from playing, as long as he didn’t make too much noise. But he feels shy before others, he doesn’t dare. And besides, there is talking, there is movement; that spoils the pleasure. It is so much more beautiful when one is alone! --- Christophe holds his breath to make it still more silent, and also because he is a little moved, the way one is before firing a cannon. His heart beats as he presses his finger onto the key; sometimes he lifts it, having pushed it halfway down, to place it on another. Who can know what will come from one rather than another? --- All at once, the sound rises: some are deep, some are sharp, some ring out, others rumble. The child listens to them long, one by one, diminishing and fading; they sway like bells when one is in the fields and the wind carries them near and then far in turn; then, when one listens close, other different voices can be heard in the distance, mingling and turning, like swarms of insects; they seem to call to you, to draw you far away… far… farther and farther, into mysterious retreats where they plunge and sink… There they go, gone!… No! they are still murmuring… A small beating of wings… --- How strange it all is! They are like spirits. That they should obey in this way, that they should be held captive in this old box --- this simply cannot be explained!

But the most beautiful thing of all is when you press two fingers on two keys at once. You never know exactly what is going to happen. Sometimes the two spirits are enemies; they bristle, they strike each other, they hate each other, they hum with an air of vexation; their voice swells; it cries out, now with anger, now with a kind of tenderness. Christophe adores this: it is like chained monsters biting their bonds, hurling themselves against the walls of their prison; it seems they are about to break free and burst outward, like those in the book of tales --- the genies imprisoned in Arabian caskets under the seal of Solomon. --- Others flatter you: they try to wheedle you; but you can feel they are only waiting for the chance to bite, that they are burning with fever. Christophe does not know what they want; but they draw him in and trouble him; they make him almost blush. --- And other times still, there are notes that love one another: the sounds intertwine, the way arms do when people embrace; they are graceful and gentle. These are the good spirits; they have smiling, unlined faces; they love little Christophe, and little Christophe loves them; tears come to his eyes when he hears them, and he never tires of calling them back. They are his friends, his dear and tender friends…

So the child wanders through the forest of sounds, and feels around him thousands of unknown forces, watching for him and calling to him, to caress him or to devour him…

One day Melchior surprised him there. He made him jump with fright by bellowing in his great voice. Christophe, believing he had done something wrong, clapped his hands quickly over his ears to protect them from the fearsome slaps. But Melchior, unusually, was not scolding; he was in a good mood, he was laughing.

--- So it interests you, does it, you little rascal? he asked, giving him a friendly thump on the head. Do you want me to teach you to play?

Did he want to!… He murmured yes, overjoyed. They sat down together at the piano, Christophe perched this time on a stack of heavy books; and, paying close attention, he took his first lesson. He learned first that these buzzing spirits had singular names --- names of a Chinese sort, a single syllable, or even a single letter. He was astonished; he had imagined them differently: with beautiful, caressing names, like the princesses in fairy tales. He did not like the familiarity with which his father spoke of them. And besides, when Melchior summoned them, they were no longer the same beings; they assumed an indifferent air as they unrolled themselves beneath his fingers. Even so, Christophe was glad to learn the relationships between them, their hierarchy, these scales that resemble a king commanding an army, or a chain of slaves bound one behind the other. He saw with astonishment that each soldier, or each slave, could in turn become monarch, or the head of a similar column, and even that whole battalions of them could be unrolled from top to bottom of the keyboard. He amused himself holding the thread that made them march. But all of it had become more childlike than what he had first seen there: he could no longer find his enchanted forest. Nevertheless he applied himself; for it was not boring, and he was surprised by his father’s patience. Melchior never tired; he made him repeat the same thing ten times. Christophe could not understand why he took such pains: so his father did love him? How good he was! The child worked on, his heart full of gratitude.

He would have been less obedient had he known what was going on in his teacher’s head.

From that day on, Melchior took him along to a neighbor’s house, where chamber music sessions had been organized three times a week. Melchior played first violin. Jean-Michel the cello. The other two were a bank clerk and the old clockmaker of the Schillerstrasse. From time to time the pharmacist would join them and bring his flute. They arrived at five o’clock and stayed until nine. Between each piece they drank beer. Neighbors came and went, listened without a word, standing against the wall, nodding their heads, tapping their feet in time, and filling the room with clouds of tobacco smoke. Pages followed pages, pieces followed pieces, and nothing could exhaust the performers’ patience. They did not speak, contracted with concentration, brows furrowed, emitting now and then a grunt of pleasure, quite incapable, moreover, not only of expressing the beauty of a piece but even of feeling it. They played neither very accurately nor very much in time; but they never went off the rails, and they faithfully observed the dynamics that were marked. They possessed that musical facility which is content with very little, that perfection in mediocrity which abounds in the race said to be the most musical in the world. They also had its voracious appetite for music --- not very particular about the quality of what it consumed, provided the quantity was there, that robust hunger for which all music is good, the more substantial the better --- and which makes no distinction between Brahms and Beethoven, or, within the work of a single master, between a hollow concerto and a moving sonata, because they are of the same substance.

Christophe kept apart, in a corner that belonged to him, behind the piano. No one could disturb him there; to get in, he had to crawl on all fours. It was half-dark inside, and the child just had room to stretch out on the floor, curled up on himself. Tobacco smoke entered his eyes and throat, and dust too --- great clumps of it, like tufts of wool --- but he paid no attention, and listened gravely, sitting cross-legged in the Turkish fashion, widening the holes in the piano’s canvas with his small dirty fingers. He did not love everything that was played; but nothing that was played bored him, and he never tried to formulate his opinions, because he believed he was too small and knew nothing about it. Only, the music sometimes lulled him to sleep and sometimes woke him wide awake; in neither case was it disagreeable. Without his knowing it, it was almost always the good music that excited him. Sure of not being seen, he made faces with his whole face: he scrunched up his nose, clenched his teeth, or stuck out his tongue, made his eyes look fierce or languorous, moved his arms and legs with an air of defiance and bravery, felt the urge to march, to strike, to grind the world to powder. He fidgeted so much that in the end a head would lean over the piano and shout at him: “Well, boy, have you gone mad? Will you leave that piano alone? Take your hand away! I’ll box your ears!” --- which left him mortified and furious. Why did people come to disturb his pleasure? He was doing no harm. They always had to persecute him! His father joined in the chorus. They reproached him for making noise, for not loving music. He ended by believing it himself. --- The respectable functionaries busily grinding out their concertos would have been very surprised had anyone told them that the only one among them who truly felt the music was this small boy.

If they wanted him to keep still, why did they play tunes that made you want to march? In those pages there were runaway horses, swords, the cries of battle, the pride of triumph; and they would have liked him to sit there as they did, merely nodding his head and marking time with his foot! They need only play him placid reveries, or those chatty pages that speak without saying anything --- there is no shortage of them in music: that piece by Goldmark, for instance, of which the old clockmaker had just been saying, with a delighted smile: “It’s pretty. There are no rough edges. All the corners are rounded…” The little fellow was perfectly calm then. He grew drowsy. He did not know what was being played; he even ended by no longer hearing it; but he was happy, his limbs growing numb, his mind drifting.

His reveries were not connected stories; they had neither head nor tail. Only now and then did he glimpse a precise image: his mother making a cake and scraping the dough from between her fingers with a knife; --- a water rat he had seen the day before swimming in the river; --- a whip he wanted to make from a willow switch… God knows why those memories came back to him now! --- But most often he saw nothing at all; and yet he felt an infinity of things. It was as though there were a great mass of very important things that could not be said, or that it was pointless to say, because one knew them perfectly well, and because this was how it had always been. Some of them were sad, mortally sad; but they held nothing painful, as the things one encounters in life do; they were not ugly and degrading, the way it was when Christophe had been slapped by his father, or when he thought back, his heart sick with shame, on some humiliation: they filled the mind with a calm melancholy. And there were luminous ones that poured out torrents of joy; and Christophe thought: “Yes, that is how… how I shall do it later.” He had no idea at all what how meant or why he said it; but he felt that he had to say it, and that it was as clear as day. He heard the sound of a sea very close to him, separated from it only by a wall of dunes. Christophe had no notion of what that sea was, or what it wanted of him; but he was aware that it would rise above the barriers, and then!… Then, everything would be well, he would be entirely happy. Simply hearing it there, so near, rocking himself to the sound of its great voice, all the small sorrows and humiliations were quieted; they remained sad still, but they were no longer shameful or wounding: everything seemed natural, and almost full of sweetness.

Very often it was mediocre music that communicated this intoxication to him. Those who had written it were poor wretches who thought of nothing but earning money, or of deceiving themselves about the emptiness of their lives by stringing notes together according to familiar formulas, or --- to be original --- contrary to those formulas. But there is in sounds, even when handled by a fool, such a power of life that they can unleash storms in a naive soul. Perhaps the dreams suggested by fools are even more mysterious and free than those breathed by an imperious thought that carries you off by force; for motion without content and hollow chatter do not disturb the mind from its own contemplation…

So the child remained there, forgotten, forgetting, in his corner behind the piano --- until all at once he felt pins and needles climbing up his legs. And he remembered then that he was a small boy, with dirty fingernails, rubbing his nose against the whitewashed wall while holding his feet in his hands.

The day when Melchior had tiptoed in and surprised the child sitting before the keyboard that was too high for him, he had watched him for a moment; and a sudden illumination had flashed through his mind: “A little prodigy!… How had he not thought of it?… What a fortune for a family!… No doubt he had assumed this boy would be nothing but a little dullard, like his mother. But it cost nothing to try. What a stroke of luck this could be! He would take him on tour through Germany, perhaps even abroad. It would be a merry life, and a noble one at that.” --- Melchior never failed to seek out the hidden nobility in all his actions; and it was rare that he did not find it, after a little reflection.

Fortified by this assurance, immediately after supper, the very last bite barely swallowed, he planted the child before the piano again and made him repeat the day’s lesson until his eyes closed with fatigue. Then the next day, three times over. Then the day after. And every day since. Christophe quickly grew tired; then bored to death; finally he could bear it no longer and attempted to rebel. What they made him do was senseless; it was nothing but running as fast as possible over the keys while tucking the thumb under, or loosening the fourth finger, which kept awkwardly sticking between its two neighbors. It set his nerves on edge, and there was nothing beautiful about it. Gone were the magic resonances, the fascinating monsters, the universe of dreams glimpsed for a moment… Scales and exercises followed one after another, dry, monotonous, insipid --- more insipid than the conversations at table, which were always the same, always revolving around the dishes, always the same dishes. The child began by listening distractedly to his father’s lessons. Sharply scolded, he continued with bad grace. The cuffings were not long in coming: he met them with the foulest temper. What brought things to a head was hearing one evening Melchior reveal his plans in the next room. So it was in order to exhibit him like a performing animal that they bored him in this fashion, that they obliged him all day long to move pieces of ivory! He no longer even had time to go visit his dear river. What had he done that they should hound him like this? --- He was indignant, wounded in his pride and his freedom. He decided that he would play no more music, or would play as badly as possible, to discourage his father. It would be somewhat hard; but he had to save his independence.

At the very next lesson, he tried to put his plan into action. He applied himself conscientiously to hitting the wrong notes and botching every passage. Melchior shouted; then he bellowed; and the blows began to rain down. He had a heavy ruler. At every wrong note he struck the child’s fingers with it, while at the same time screaming into his ear, enough to deafen him. Christophe winced with pain; he bit his lips to keep from crying, and, stoically, went on hitting the wrong notes, hunching his head between his shoulders each time he felt a blow coming. But the strategy was a poor one, and he soon realized it. Melchior was just as stubborn as he was; and he swore that, even if it took two days and two nights, he would not let a single note pass until it had been played correctly. Besides, Christophe was putting too much deliberateness into never playing a thing right; and Melchior was beginning to suspect the ruse, watching how at each passage the little hand dropped heavily to the side with unmistakable ill will. The blows of the ruler redoubled; Christophe could no longer feel his fingers. He wept wretchedly, in silence, sniffling, swallowing his sobs and his tears. He understood that he had nothing to gain by continuing this way, and that he had to take a desperate stand. He stopped, and, trembling in advance at the storm he was about to unleash, he said courageously:

--- Papa, I don’t want to play anymore.

Melchior was speechless.

--- What! What!… he cried.

He shook the boy’s arm as if to wrench it off. Christophe, trembling more and more, and raising his elbow to ward off the blows, went on:

--- I don’t want to play anymore. First, because I don’t want to be hit. And then…

He could not finish. An enormous slap knocked the breath out of him. Melchior roared:

--- Ah! You don’t want to be hit? You don’t?…

It was a hail of blows. Christophe wailed through his sobs:

--- And then… I don’t like music!… I don’t like music!…

He let himself slip from his seat. Melchior shoved him back onto it brutally, and beat his wrists against the keyboard. He shouted:

--- You will play!

And Christophe shouted:

--- No! No! I won’t play!

Melchior had to give up. After thrashing him soundly, he put him out the door, telling him he would have nothing to eat for the entire day, for the entire month, until he had played all his exercises without missing a single one. He pushed him out with a kick to the backside and slammed the door behind him.

Christophe found himself on the staircase, the dirty and dark staircase with its worm-eaten steps. A draft came through the broken pane of a skylight; damp oozed down the walls. Christophe sat down on one of the greasy steps; his heart leaped in his chest with anger and distress. Under his breath, he cursed his father:

--- Animal! That’s what you are! An animal… a vulgar creature… a brute! Yes, a brute!… And I hate you, I hate you… oh! I wish you were dead, I wish you were dead!

His chest swelled. He stared in despair at the sticky staircase, at the spiderweb that the wind swayed above the broken pane. He felt alone, lost in his misery. He looked at the void between the banister railings… What if he threw himself down?… or out the window?… Yes, what if he killed himself to punish them? What remorse they would feel! He heard the sound of his fall on the stairs. The door above opened suddenly. Anguished voices cried: “He fell! He fell!” Footsteps came tumbling down the stairs. His father, his mother, threw themselves over his body, weeping. She sobbed: “It’s your fault! You killed him!” He waved his arms, threw himself on his knees, beat his head against the railing, crying: “I’m a wretch! I’m a wretch!” --- This scene softened his pain. He was on the verge of feeling sorry for those who were mourning him; but then he thought it served them right, and he savored his revenge…

When he had finished his story, he found himself still at the top of the staircase, in the shadow; he looked down one more time, and had no desire whatsoever to throw himself there. In fact, he felt a little shiver, and moved back from the edge, thinking that he might fall. Then he felt himself utterly a prisoner, like a poor caged bird, a prisoner forever, with no recourse but to dash his head and hurt himself badly. He wept, he wept; and he rubbed his eyes with his little dirty hands, until in a moment his face was thoroughly smeared. Even while weeping, he went on watching the things around him; and they distracted him. He paused for a moment in his wailing to watch the spider, which had just moved. Then he started again, but with less conviction. He listened to himself cry and kept up his mechanical droning, no longer quite sure why he was doing it. He got up soon; the window drew him. He sat on the inner sill, cautiously retreating into the recess, keeping one eye on the spider, which interested but revolted him.

The Rhine flowed far below, at the foot of the house. From the staircase window, one was suspended above the river as if in a moving sky. Christophe never failed to gaze at it for a long while when he came limping down the steps; but never before had he seen it as he saw it today. Grief sharpens the senses; it seems that everything imprints itself more deeply in the eye once tears have washed away the faded residue of memory. The river appeared to the child as a living being --- an inexplicable being, but how much more powerful than any he knew! Christophe leaned forward to see better; he pressed his mouth and flattened his nose against the pane. Where was it going? What did it want? It seemed free, certain of its path… Nothing could stop it. Whatever hour of day or night, rain or sun overhead, joy or grief in the house, it kept passing; and you felt that all this was of no concern to it, that it never suffered, and that it reveled in its own strength. What a joy to be like it, to run through meadows, willow branches, bright little pebbles, crackling sand, and to care for nothing, to be hindered by nothing, to be free!…

The child watched and listened greedily; it seemed to him that he was carried along by the river, that he was passing with it… When he closed his eyes, he saw colors: blue, green, yellow, red, and great racing shadows, and sheets of sunlight… The images grew more distinct. Here was a broad plain, reeds, grain rippling in a breeze that smelled of fresh grass and mint. Flowers everywhere, cornflowers, poppies, violets. How beautiful! How delicious the air! How wonderful it must be to lie in the thick soft grass!… Christophe felt joyful and a little giddy, the way he felt when his father, on a feast day, had poured a finger of Rhine wine into his big glass… --- The river passes… The landscape has changed… Now there are trees leaning over the water; their jagged leaves, like small hands, dip and stir and turn under the current. A village nestled among the trees mirrors itself in the river. Above the white wall licked by the current, you can see the cypresses and crosses of the churchyard. Then come rocks, a mountain pass, grapevines on the slopes, a small stand of firs, and ruined burgs… --- And again, the plain, the grain, the birds, the sun…

The great green mass of the river continues to pass, one as a single thought, without waves, almost without ripple, with shining, rich moiré patterns. Christophe no longer sees it; he has closed his eyes entirely, to hear it better. This continuous roaring fills him and makes him dizzy; he is drawn into this eternal and commanding dream that goes no one knows where. Over the tumultuous ground of the current, rushing rhythms leap with ardent joy. And along those rhythms, music rises like a vine climbing a trellis: arpeggios from silvery keyboards, aching violins, velvety flutes with their rounded tones… The landscapes have disappeared. The river has disappeared. A strange atmosphere floats, tender and twilit. Christophe’s heart trembles with emotion. What is it he sees now? Oh! What charming faces!… --- A little girl with dark curls calls to him, languid and mocking… A pale-faced young boy with blue eyes watches him with melancholy… More smiles, more eyes --- curious and provocative eyes, whose gaze makes him blush --- and affectionate, sorrowful eyes, like the kind look of a dog --- and imperious eyes, and eyes full of suffering… And that woman’s face, pallid, with black hair and a closed mouth, whose eyes seem to devour half her face, and fix him with a violence that hurts… And the dearest of all, the one who smiles at him with her clear gray eyes, her mouth slightly open, her small bright teeth… Ah! What an indulgent and loving smile! It melts the heart with tenderness! How good it feels, how one loves it! More! Smile at me again! Don’t go!… --- alas! it has vanished! But it leaves in the heart an ineffable sweetness. There is no more evil, there is no more sadness, there is nothing more… Nothing but a light dream, a serene music, floating in a ray of sunlight, like the gossamer threads of the Virgin Mary drifting on beautiful summer days… --- What just passed? What are these images that fill the child with a sweet and sorrowful disturbance? He had never seen them before; and yet he knew them: he recognized them. Where do they come from? From what dark abyss of Being? Is it from what was… or from what will be?…

Now everything fades, every form has dissolved. --- One last time, through a veil of mist, as though one hovered very high above it, the overflowing river appears, covering the fields, rolling by in its majesty, slow, almost motionless. And far away in the distance, like a gleam of steel at the edge of the horizon, a liquid cry, a line of trembling waves --- the Sea. The river runs toward it. The sea seems to run toward it. It draws the river in. The river wants it. It goes there to disappear… --- The music swirls, the beautiful dance rhythms sway in dizzy abandon; everything is swept away in their triumphant whirlpool… The free soul cleaves the air like the flight of swallows, drunk on wind, crossing the sky with shrill cries… Joy! Joy! There is nothing more!… Oh, infinite happiness!…

The hours had passed, evening had come, the staircase was in darkness. Raindrops made circles on the robe of the river, which the current carried off in dancing. From time to time a branch, a few black scraps of bark passed silently and drifted away. The murderous spider had retreated, sated, into the darkest corner. --- And little Christophe was still leaning at the edge of the skylight, his face pale, smeared, radiant with happiness. He was asleep.

III

E la faccia del sol nascere ombrata

Purg. XXX

He had been forced to give in. Despite the stubbornness of a heroic resistance, the blows had overcome his defiance. Every morning, three hours, and every evening, three hours, Christophe was placed before the instrument of torture. Rigid with concentration and boredom, great tears streaming down his cheeks and his nose, he moved his little red hands --- often stiff with cold --- over the black and white keys, under threat of the ruler that came down at every wrong note, and under the torrent of his teacher’s screaming, which was even more hateful to him than the blows. He thought he hated music. And yet he applied himself with a tenacity that fear of Melchior alone could not explain. Certain words of his grandfather had made an impression on him. The old man, watching his grandson weep, had told him with that gravity he never abandoned with the child, that it was well worth suffering a little for the most beautiful and noble art ever given to men, for their consolation and their glory. And Christophe, who was grateful to his grandfather for speaking to him as to a grown person, had been secretly moved by that simple word, which accorded with his childish stoicism and his budding pride.

But more than any argument, the deep memory of certain musical emotions bound him, in spite of himself, enslaved him for life to that detested art against which he struggled in vain to revolt.

In the town, as is customary in Germany, there was a theater that put on opera, comic opera, operetta, drama, comedy, vaudeville, and whatever else could be staged, in every genre and style. Performances were held three times a week, from six to nine in the evening. Old Jean-Michel never missed one, and showed equal enthusiasm for all of them. He took his grandson with him once. Several days in advance, he had told the boy at length the story of the play. Christophe had understood nothing of it; but he had gathered that there would be terrible things; and, while burning with desire to see them, he was deeply afraid, though he would not admit it even to himself. He knew there would be a storm, and he feared being struck by lightning. He knew there would be a battle, and he was not certain he would not be killed. The night before, in his bed, he had been seized by real dread; and on the day of the performance, he almost wished that his grandfather would be prevented from coming. But as the hour drew near and grandfather still had not arrived, he began to fret, and looked out the window every few moments. At last the old man appeared, and they set off together. His heart leaped in his chest; his tongue was dry, he could not form a syllable.

They arrived at that mysterious edifice, which came up so often in the household’s conversations. At the door, Jean-Michel ran into acquaintances; and the little boy, who was gripping his hand very tight for fear of losing him, could not understand how they were able to chat calmly and laugh at such a moment.

Grand-père settled into his usual seat in the front row, just behind the orchestra. He leaned on the balustrade and immediately struck up an interminable conversation with the double-bass player. He was in his element here; people listened to him talk, out of respect for his musical authority, and he made the most of it --- one might even say he abused it. Christophe was unable to take in anything. He was overwhelmed by anticipation of the performance, by the aspect of the hall, which struck him as magnificent, and by the crowd of people, who intimidated him terribly. He didn’t dare turn his head, convinced that every eye in the place was fixed on him.

He clutched his little cap convulsively between his knees and stared at the magic curtain with round, unblinking eyes.

At last the three knocks sounded. Grand-père blew his nose, drew the libretto from his pocket --- which he never failed to follow scrupulously, so closely that he sometimes neglected what was happening on stage --- and the orchestra began to play. At the very first chords Christophe felt himself grow calm. In this world of sound he was at home; and from that moment on, however extravagant the spectacle became, everything seemed natural to him.

The curtain had risen to reveal cardboard trees and beings who were scarcely more real. The little boy looked on, gaping with wonder; yet he was not surprised. The piece was set in a fantastical Orient of which he could have had no idea. The libretto was a tissue of absurdities, impossible to follow. Christophe understood none of it: he confused one character with another, tugged his grandfather’s sleeve to ask senseless questions that proved he had grasped nothing at all. And yet not only was he not bored --- he was passionately absorbed. On the idiotic libretto he had built a novel of his own invention, which bore no relation to what was actually being performed; at every turn the events on stage contradicted his version, forcing him to revise it, but this did not trouble the child in the least. He had chosen his favorites among the figures moving across the stage with their varied cries, and he followed the fates of those who had won his sympathy with breathless intensity. Above all he was captivated by a handsome woman of uncertain age who had long auburn hair, eyes of an exaggerated width, and who walked barefoot. The monstrous improbabilities of the staging did not trouble him at all. His sharp child’s eyes failed to notice the grotesque ugliness of the actors --- enormous and fleshy, the chorus members in all their misshapen variety lined up in two rows, the inanity of their gestures, the congested faces straining with bellowing, the bushy wigs, the tenor’s high heels, and the makeup on his beautiful companion, whose face was tattooed with strokes of multicolored pencil. He was in the state of a man in love, whose passion no longer allows him to see the beloved as she really is. The marvelous power of illusion that belongs to children caught each unpleasant sensation as it arrived and transformed it on the spot.

Music above all worked these miracles. It bathed every object in a vaporous atmosphere in which everything became beautiful, noble, and desirable. It stirred in the soul a desperate need to love; and at the same time, it offered on all sides phantoms of love, to fill the void it had itself created. Little Christophe was beside himself with emotion. There were words, gestures, musical phrases that made him uneasy; he no longer dared raise his eyes, he didn’t know whether what he felt was good or bad, he blushed and went pale by turns: there were moments when drops of sweat stood on his forehead, and he trembled for fear that everyone in the house would notice his distress. When the inevitable catastrophes came raining down on the lovers in the fourth act --- those catastrophes that operas provide in order to give the tenor and the prima donna the opportunity to display their shrillest cries --- the child felt he was going to suffocate; his throat ached as it did when he’d caught a cold; he pressed his hands around his neck, he could no longer swallow his own saliva: he was swollen with tears, his hands and feet were ice cold. Fortunately, grand-père was scarcely less moved. He enjoyed the theater with a child’s naïveté. At the dramatic passages he coughed lightly with an air of indifference to conceal his emotion; but Christophe could see through it plainly, and that pleased him. It was stifling hot, Christophe was falling asleep on his feet, and the seat was terribly uncomfortable. But he thought only: Is there much more? Please don’t let it be over! --- And then suddenly it was all over, without his understanding why. The curtain fell, everyone rose, the spell was broken.

They made their way home through the night, the two children together --- the old man and the little one. What a beautiful night! What still, clear moonlight! They were both silent, turning their memories over and over. At last the old man said:

--- Are you happy, little one?

Christophe could not answer; he was still entirely overwhelmed by his emotion, and he did not want to speak for fear of breaking the spell; he had to make an effort to murmur very softly, with a deep sigh:

--- Oh! Yes!

The old man smiled. After a moment he went on:

--- Do you see what an admirable thing it is to be a musician? To create such beings, such marvelous spectacles --- is there anything more glorious? It is to be God on earth.

The little boy was struck to the heart. What! A man had created all of that! He had not thought of it that way. It had seemed to him almost as if it had happened of its own accord, as if it were the work of nature. A man, a musician --- such as he would be one day! Oh! To be that, one day, even one single day! And afterward… afterward, whatever one wished! To die, if need be! He asked:

--- Who is it, grand-père, the one who made all that?

Grand-père told him about François-Marie Hassler, a young German artist who lived in Berlin and whom he had known long ago. Christophe listened with both ears wide open. Then suddenly he said:

--- And you, grand-père?

The old man gave a start.

--- What? he asked.

--- Have you made those things too?

--- Certainly, said the old man in a vexed voice.

He fell silent; and after a few steps he sighed deeply. It was one of the sorrows of his life. He had always longed to write for the theater, and inspiration had always betrayed him. He did have one or two acts of his own composition in his desk drawers; but he held so little illusion about their worth that he had never dared submit them to anyone’s judgment.

They did not say another word to each other until they were home. Neither of them slept. The old man was troubled; he had taken out his Bible to console himself. --- Christophe lay in bed going over every event of the evening; he recalled the smallest details, and the barefoot girl kept reappearing to him. When he was on the verge of drifting off, a musical phrase would ring in his ear as distinctly as if the orchestra were right there; he would start up with his whole body; he would raise himself on his pillow, his head swimming with music, and think: One day I’ll write music too. Oh! Will I ever be able to?

From that moment on, he had only one desire: to go back to the theater; and he threw himself back into his work with all the greater ardor because the theater was made the reward for his practice. He thought of nothing else: the first half of the week he was still reliving the last performance, and the second half he was already living for the next one. He trembled at the thought of falling ill before a performance, and his anxiety regularly produced in him the symptoms of three or four different ailments. On the day itself he couldn’t eat dinner, he paced about like a lost soul, he looked at the clock fifty times, convinced that evening would never come; and finally, unable to bear it any longer, he would leave the house a full hour before the box office opened, afraid there would be no seat left --- and since he was always first in the empty hall, he would promptly begin to worry. His grandfather had once told him that two or three times, when the audience was too sparse, the performers had preferred not to play and had refunded the ticket prices. He watched each new arrival, counting them: Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five… oh, that’s not enough… it will never be enough! And when some person of importance came in to the stalls or the gallery, his heart lifted; he told himself: They won’t dare send that one home. They’ll play for him, certainly. --- But he was never quite convinced; he only began to feel reassured when the musicians were taking their places. Even then he feared, right up to the last moment, that the curtain would rise and an announcement would be made --- as happened one evening --- of a change in the program. He peered with his little lynx eyes at the double-bass player’s music stand to see whether the title on the page matched the piece he was expecting. And having looked carefully, two minutes later he would look again to make sure he hadn’t been mistaken. --- The conductor wasn’t there yet. He must be ill. --- There was movement behind the curtain, voices and hurrying footsteps could be heard. An accident? Some unforeseen disaster? --- Silence fell again. The conductor was at his podium. Everything seemed finally ready… They weren’t starting! What on earth was happening? --- He boiled with impatience. --- At last the signal sounded. His heart hammered. The orchestra played its opening measures; and for a few hours Christophe swam in a happiness troubled only by the knowledge that it would soon be over.

Not long after, a musical event came along to excite Christophe’s thoughts still further. François-Marie Hassler, the composer of the first opera that had so profoundly shaken him, was coming. He was to conduct a concert of his own works. The town was in an uproar. The young master was being hotly debated throughout Germany, and for a fortnight nothing but Hassler was talked about in any conversation. Things grew far more intense when he actually arrived. Melchior’s friends and Jean-Michel’s friends came constantly to exchange news, and they brought back extravagant stories about the musician’s habits and eccentricities. The child followed these accounts with passionate attention. The idea that the great man was here, in his town, breathing the same air, walking the same streets, threw him into a state of mute exaltation. He could think of nothing but the hope of seeing him.

Hassler had taken up residence at the palace, where the grand duke had offered him his hospitality. He rarely went out except to go to the theater to conduct rehearsals, which Christophe was not admitted to; and being exceedingly indolent, he always made the journey in the prince’s carriage. Christophe therefore had very few opportunities to observe him, and he only once managed to catch a glimpse, in passing, of his fur-lined coat at the back of the carriage --- though he had spent hours waiting in the street, throwing elbows and fists in every direction to win and hold his place in the front row of bystanders. He consoled himself by spending half his days watching the windows of the palace that had been pointed out to him as those of the master’s rooms. Most of the time he saw nothing but the shutters, since Hassler slept late and the windows stayed closed almost all morning. This had led the well-informed to say that Hassler could not bear daylight and lived in perpetual night.

At last Christophe was admitted to approach his hero. It was the day of the concert. The whole town was there. The grand duke and his court occupied the great princely box, surmounted by a crown borne aloft, with a wide circling of legs, by two chubby-cheeked cherubs. The theater had a gala air. The stage was decorated with branches of oak and flowering laurel. Every musician of any standing had considered it an honor to take his place in the orchestra. Melchior was at his post, and Jean-Michel was conducting the chorus.

When Hassler appeared, an acclamation rose from every side, and the ladies stood up to see him better. Christophe devoured him with his eyes. Hassler had a young, fine-featured face, but already a little puffy and tired; his temples were thinning; an early baldness showed at the crown of his head, amid the curling blond hair. His blue eyes had a vague, unfocused gaze. He wore a small blond moustache, and an expressive mouth that rarely stayed still, contracted by a thousand imperceptible movements. He was tall and carried himself poorly — not from awkwardness, but from fatigue or boredom. He conducted with a capricious suppleness, his whole gangling body swaying and undulating, like his music, with gestures by turns caressing and abrupt. One could see that he was prodigiously nervous; and his music was his exact reflection. This trembling, jerky vitality penetrated the orchestra’s usual torpor. Christophe was breathless; despite his fear of drawing eyes toward him, he could not stay still in his seat; he fidgeted, he rose up, and the music struck him with such violent and unexpected jolts that he was compelled to move his head, his arms, his legs, to the great annoyance of his neighbors, who shielded themselves as best they could from his kicks. For the rest, the entire audience was in raptures, swept up by the spectacle of success far more than by the works themselves. At the end, there was a storm of applause and cries, into which the orchestra’s trumpets, following the German custom, mingled their triumphal fanfares to salute the conqueror. Christophe shuddered with pride, as though these honors were meant for him. He reveled in watching Hassler’s face light up with a childlike satisfaction. Ladies threw flowers, men waved their hats; and there was a rush of the audience toward the stage. Everyone wanted to shake the master’s hand. Christophe saw one of the enthusiasts lift that hand to her lips, and another steal the handkerchief Hassler had left at the corner of his music stand. He too wanted to reach the stage, though he had no clear idea why; for had he found himself near Hassler at that moment, he would have fled at once, undone by emotion and terror. But he was driving with all his force, head-first like a ram, into the gowns and legs that separated him from Hassler. --- He was too small. He could not get through.

Fortunately, his grandfather came to find him at the concert’s end, to take him to a serenade being given in Hassler’s honor. It was nighttime; torches had been lit. All the musicians of the orchestra were there. Everyone was talking only of the marvelous works they had just heard. They arrived before the palace and arranged themselves quietly beneath the master’s windows. They affected an air of mystery, though everyone — including Hassler — already knew what was about to happen. In the beautiful silence of the night, they began to play certain famous pages of Hassler’s. He appeared at the window with the prince, and there was a great shout in their honor. Both of them bowed. A servant came, on the prince’s behalf, to invite the musicians inside. They crossed rooms whose walls were daubed with paintings depicting naked men in helmets: they were a reddish color and struck poses of defiance. The sky above was covered in heavy clouds, like sponges. There were also marble men and women dressed in loincloths of sheet metal. They walked over carpets so soft they could not hear their own footsteps; and they entered a room as bright as broad daylight, where tables were laden with drinks and fine things to eat.

The Grand Duke was there; but Christophe did not see him — he had eyes only for Hassler. Hassler stepped forward to greet them and offered his thanks; he searched for his words, tangled himself in a sentence, and extricated himself with a comic sally that made everyone laugh. They began to eat. Hassler drew four or five musicians aside. He singled out Jean-Michel and said a few very flattering words to him; he remembered that Jean-Michel had been among the first to have his works performed, and said that he had often heard of his grandfather’s merit from a friend who had been his pupil. Jean-Michel buried Hassler in thanks; then he returned the compliment with praises so excessive that, in spite of his adoration for Hassler, the boy felt ashamed. But Hassler seemed to find them altogether pleasant and natural. Finally, Jean-Michel, having lost himself completely in his effusions, took Christophe by the hand and presented him to Hassler. Hassler smiled at Christophe, absently ruffled his hair; and when he learned that the boy loved his music and had not slept for several nights in the anticipation of seeing him, he took him in his arms and questioned him warmly. Christophe, red with pleasure and struck dumb with emotion, did not dare to look at him. Hassler took his chin and forced him to lift his face. Christophe ventured a glance: Hassler’s eyes were kind and laughing; and Christophe began to laugh too. Then he felt so happy, so overwhelmingly happy in the arms of his beloved great man, that he dissolved in tears. Hassler was moved by this artless love; he became still more affectionate, he embraced the boy, and spoke to him with a maternal tenderness. At the same time, he made little jokes and tickled him to make him laugh; and Christophe could not help laughing through his tears. Soon he was entirely at ease; he answered Hassler without any awkwardness; and on his own he began whispering into Hassler’s ear all his little plans, as though Hassler and he were old friends: how he wanted to be a musician like Hassler, to make beautiful things like Hassler, to become a great man. He, who was always ashamed of himself, spoke with complete confidence; he did not know what he was saying; he was in a kind of ecstasy. Hassler laughed at his chatter. He said:

--- When you’re grown up, when you’ve become a proper musician, you’ll come and see me in Berlin. I’ll make something of you.

Christophe was too elated to respond. Hassler teased him:

--- You don’t want to?

Christophe shook his head vigorously, five or six times, to affirm that yes, he did.

--- Then it’s agreed?

Christophe repeated his performance.

--- At least give me a kiss!

Christophe threw his arms around Hassler’s neck and held him with all his strength.

--- Come now, devil, you’re getting me wet! Let go! Go blow your nose, will you!

Hassler laughed, and he wiped the nose of the abashed and happy child himself. He set him down on the floor, then took him by the hand, led him to a table, stuffed his pockets with cakes, and left him with the words:

--- Goodbye! Don’t forget what you’ve promised me.

Christophe was swimming in happiness. The rest of the world had ceased to exist for him. He remembered nothing more of what happened that evening; he followed Hassler’s every expression and gesture with love. One word of his struck him. Hassler was holding a glass; he spoke, and his face had suddenly contracted; he said:

--- The joy of such days must not make us forget our enemies. One must never forget one’s enemies. It did not depend on them that we were not crushed. It will not depend on us that they are not crushed. This is why my toast will be: there are people to whose health… we do not drink!

Everyone had applauded and laughed at this original toast; and Hassler had laughed with the rest and recovered his good humor. But Christophe felt uneasy. Though he would never have presumed to question his hero’s actions, he was displeased that Hassler had thought of ugly things on an evening when there should have been only bright faces and bright thoughts. But he could not quite account for what he felt; and the impression was quickly swept away by the flood of his joy, and the small sip of champagne he drank from his grandfather’s cup.

On the way home, his grandfather talked to himself without stopping: the praises he had received from Hassler filled him with elation; he kept exclaiming that Hassler was a genius such as comes along only once in a century. Christophe was silent, holding his lovesick intoxication close in his heart: He had embraced him, He had held him in his arms! How good He was! How great He was!

--- Ah! he thought, in his little bed, passionately embracing his pillow, I would like to die, to die for him!

The brilliant meteor that had passed for one evening through the sky of the small town had a decisive influence on Christophe’s mind. Throughout his entire childhood, it was the living model on which his eyes remained fixed; and it was following that example that the little six-year-old decided, for his own part, that he too would write music. To be sure, he had long been making it without realizing it; and he had not waited to know that he was composing before he began to compose.

Everything is music for a musical heart. Everything that vibrates and stirs and trembles and pulses — sunny summer days, nights when the wind whistles, flowing light, the glitter of stars, storms, birdsong, the humming of insects, the shivering of trees, voices loved or hated, the familiar sounds of home, a creaking door, blood surging through the arteries in the silence of the night --- all that exists is music: one need only hear it. All this music of living things resonated within Christophe. Everything he saw, everything he felt transformed into music without his awareness. He was like a humming beehive. But no one noticed. Least of all himself.

Like all children, he hummed constantly. At every hour of the day, whatever he was doing --- whether strolling along the street, hopping on one foot; --- or lying sprawled on his grandfather’s floor, his head in his hands, absorbed in the images of a book; --- or sitting in his little chair in the darkest corner of the kitchen, daydreaming of nothing in particular as the night fell --- one could always hear the monotone murmur of his little trumpet, his mouth closed, his cheeks puffed out, or his lips sputtering. It went on for hours without his growing tired of it. His mother paid it no attention; then, suddenly, it made her shout with impatience.

When he grew tired of this half-drowsy state, he was seized by a need to move and make noise. Then he would create music for himself, which he sang at the top of his lungs. He had composed pieces for every occasion in his life. He had one for when he splashed in his washbasin in the morning, like a little duck. He had one for when he climbed onto the piano stool before the detested instrument --- and above all for when he climbed down from it: --- this second one was far more brilliant than the first. --- He had one for when his mother brought the soup to the table: --- he would precede her then, sounding fanfares. --- He staged triumphant marches for himself as he proceeded solemnly from the dining room to his bedroom. Sometimes, for this occasion, he organized processions with his two little brothers: all three would file gravely one behind the other; and each had his march. But Christophe reserved for himself, as was only right, the most beautiful of all. Each piece of music was rigorously assigned to a specific occasion; and Christophe would never have thought of mixing them up. Anyone else would have confused them; but he distinguished between them with a luminous precision.

One day at his grandfather’s house, he was circling the room, heels striking the floor, head thrown back and stomach thrust forward, going round and round without stopping until he made himself dizzy, performing one of his compositions --- when the old man, who was shaving, stopped his razor and, his face all lathered with soap, watched him and said:

--- What on earth are you singing there, boy?

Christophe replied that he didn’t know.

--- Do it again! said Jean-Michel.

Christophe tried: he could never recover the tune. Proud of his grandfather’s attention, he wanted to display his fine voice by singing in his own fashion a grand operatic air; but that was not what the old man was asking for. Jean-Michel fell silent and seemed to pay no more attention to him. But he left the door to his room slightly ajar while the boy amused himself alone in the next room.

A few days later, Christophe was in the middle of playing, with chairs arranged in a circle around him, a musical comedy he had put together from scraps of memories from the theater; and he was performing with great solemnity, to a minuet tune, as he had seen done, steps and bows directed at the portrait of Beethoven hanging above the table. Spinning around in a pirouette, he saw through the half-open door his grandfather’s head watching him. He thought the old man was making fun of him: he was deeply ashamed; he stopped dead; and, running to the window, he pressed his face against the glass as though absorbed in a contemplation of the highest interest. But the old man said nothing: he came toward him, and embraced him; and Christophe could see plainly that he was pleased. His small vanity wasted no time working on this material: he was sharp enough to sense that he had been appreciated — but he was not sure exactly what his grandfather had admired most in him: whether it was his talents as a playwright, a musician, a singer, or a dancer. He leaned toward the last; for he set great store by them.

A week later, when he had forgotten everything, his grandfather told him with a mysterious air that he had something to show him. He opened his writing desk, drew out a music notebook, placed it on the piano stand, and told the child to play. Christophe, deeply intrigued, sight-read as best he could. The notebook was written by hand, in the old man’s large script, which he had taken particular care with for the occasion. The headings were adorned with loops and flourishes. --- After a moment, grandfather, who was sitting beside Christophe and turning the pages, asked him what this music was. Christophe, too absorbed in his playing to distinguish what he was playing, replied that he had no idea.

--- Pay attention. You don’t recognize this?

Yes, he thought he did recognize it; but he couldn’t place where he had heard it. --- Grandfather laughed:

--- Think harder.

Christophe shook his head:

--- I don’t know.

In truth, glimmers were passing through his mind; it seemed to him that these tunes… But no! he didn’t dare… He didn’t want to acknowledge it:

--- Grandfather, I don’t know.

He was blushing.

--- Come now, you silly boy, can’t you see these are your own tunes?

He had been certain of it; but hearing it said aloud struck him like a blow to the heart:

--- Oh! Grandfather!…

The old man, beaming, explained the notebook to him:

--- Look: Aria. That’s what you were singing on Tuesday, when you were sprawled out on the floor. --- March. That’s what I asked you to play again last week, and you could never find it again. --- Minuet. That’s what you were dancing in front of my armchair… Look here.

On the cover was written, in magnificent Gothic lettering:

Les Plaisirs du Jeune Âge : Aria, Minuetto, Walzer, e Marcia, op. i de Jean-Christophe Krafft.

Christophe was dazzled. To see his name, that beautiful title, that thick notebook, his work!… He kept stammering: --- “Oh! Grandfather! Grandfather!…”

The old man drew him close. Christophe threw himself onto his knees, and buried his face in Jean-Michel’s chest. He was blushing with happiness. The old man, even happier than he was, resumed in a tone he tried to make sound indifferent --- for he could feel himself on the verge of tears:

--- Naturally, I added the accompaniment and the harmonies in the spirit of the melody. And then… --- (he coughed) --- and then, I also added a trio to the minuet, because… because that’s the custom…; and then… well, I think it doesn’t come out badly.

He played it. --- Christophe was very proud to be collaborating with grandfather:

--- But then, grandfather, you must put your name on it too.

--- It isn’t worth the trouble. There’s no need for anyone else to know. Only… --- (here his voice trembled) --- only, later on, when I am no longer here, it will remind you of your old grandfather, won’t it? You won’t forget him?

The poor old man didn’t say that he had been unable to resist the pleasure, an innocent enough one, of slipping one of his own unfortunate tunes into his grandson’s work --- a work he sensed would outlive him; but his desire to share in that imaginary glory was humble and touching, since it was enough for him to pass on, anonymously, a fragment of his thought, so as not to die entirely. --- Christophe, deeply moved, covered his face with kisses. The old man, letting himself grow more and more tender, kissed the boy’s hair.

--- You will remember, won’t you? Later on, when you have become a fine musician, a great artist, one who brings honor to his family, to his art, and to his country --- when you are famous, you will remember that it was your old grandfather who first saw what you were, who predicted what you would become?

He had tears in his eyes from hearing himself speak. He did not want to show this sign of weakness. He had a fit of coughing, put on a gruff expression, and sent the boy away, carefully tucking away the manuscript.

Christophe went home, dizzy with joy. The stones danced around him. The reception he got from his family sobered him a little. As he naturally rushed to tell them, full of glory, about his musical exploit, they raised a great outcry. His mother mocked him. Melchior declared that the old man was mad, and that he would do far better to look after himself than to turn the boy’s head; as for Christophe, he would please him by putting aside all these foolish notions at once, sitting himself down at the piano illico, and playing exercises for four hours. Let him first learn to play properly: as for composition, he would always have time to attend to that later, when he had nothing better to do.

This was not, as these wise words might suggest, because Melchior was concerned with protecting the child against the dangerous excitement of a premature vanity. He would soon prove the opposite. But having never himself had any idea to express in music, nor the slightest need to express one, he had arrived, in his virtuoso’s conceit, at the view that composition was a secondary thing, to which only the performer’s art gave real value. He was certainly not insensible to the enthusiasm aroused by great composers like Hassler; he had for such ovations the respect he always felt toward success --- secretly mingled with a touch of jealousy --- for it seemed to him that those applause were somehow stolen from him. But he knew from experience that the successes of great virtuosos are no less thunderous, and that they are even more personal and more productive of agreeable and flattering consequences. He affected to pay profound homage to the genius of the master musicians; but he took keen pleasure in recounting ridiculous anecdotes about them, which painted their intelligence and their habits in a sorry light. He placed the virtuoso at the summit of the artistic scale; for, as he said, it is well known that the tongue is the noblest part of the body; and what would thought be without speech? What would music be without the performer?

Whatever the true reason for the dressing-down he gave Christophe, that dressing-down was not without value in restoring to the boy the good sense that grandfather’s praises were very much in danger of costing him. It was scarcely enough, even so. Christophe naturally concluded that his grandfather was far more intelligent than his father; and if he sat down at the piano without protest, it was much less out of obedience than to be free to daydream at his ease, as was his habit, while his fingers ran mechanically over the keys. All through his interminable exercises, a proud voice kept repeating inside him: “I am a composer, a great composer.”

From that day on, since he was a composer, he set about composing. Before he could barely write his letters, he exerted himself to scrawl quarter-notes and eighth-notes on scraps of paper that he tore from the household account books. But the effort it cost him to know what he was thinking, and to fix it on paper, meant that he was no longer thinking anything at all, except that he wanted to think something. He persisted no less stubbornly in building musical phrases; and since he was naturally musical, he managed it after a fashion, even though they signified nothing. Then he would go and bring them, triumphant, to grandfather, who wept with joy --- he wept easily now that he was growing old --- and proclaimed them admirable.

There was enough there to ruin him entirely. Fortunately his natural good sense saved him, aided by the influence of a man who made no pretense of exercising any influence over anyone, and who appeared to the world to be anything but an example of good sense. --- This was Louisa’s brother.

He was small like her, thin, slight, a little stooped. His age was uncertain; he couldn’t have been past forty, but he looked well over fifty, and more. He had a small, wrinkled, rosy face, with kind pale blue eyes, like forget-me-nots beginning to fade. When he removed his cap --- which he kept on everywhere out of a chilly fear of drafts --- he revealed a small bare skull, pink and conical in shape, which was a source of endless delight to Christophe and his brothers. They never tired of teasing him about it, asking what he had done with his hair and threatening to whip him, egged on by Melchior’s heavy jokes. He was the first to laugh at it, and bore it all with patience. He was a small traveling peddler; he went from village to village with a large pack on his back containing a bit of everything: groceries, stationery, confectionery, handkerchiefs, scarves, shoes, canned goods, almanacs, song sheets, and medicines. Several times people had tried to settle him somewhere, to set him up with a small shop, a general store, a haberdasher’s. But he could not adapt to it: one night he would get up, slip the key under the door, and set off again with his pack. Weeks, even months would pass without anyone seeing him. Then he would reappear: one evening, there would be a scratching at the door; it would open a crack, and the small bald head, politely uncovered, would appear with its kind eyes and its timid smile. He would say: “Good evening to all the company,” take care to wipe his shoes before entering, greet everyone in turn, beginning with the eldest, and go and sit in the most modest corner of the room. There he would light his pipe and hunch his shoulders, waiting patiently for the usual hail of mockery to pass. The two Kraffts, grandfather and father, regarded him with scornful amusement. This runt struck them as ridiculous; and their pride was wounded by the peddler’s lowly station. They made sure he felt it; but he seemed not to notice, and he showed them a deep respect that disarmed them, especially the old man, who was very sensitive to the regard others showed him. They contented themselves with crushing him under heavy jokes that often made the color rise to Louisa’s face. She, accustomed to bowing without argument before the Kraffts’ superiority of mind, had no doubt that her husband and father-in-law were right; but she loved her brother tenderly, and her brother had a silent adoration for her. They were both all that remained of their family, and both humble, self-effacing, crushed by life: a bond of mutual pity and of shared suffering, secretly borne, bound them together with a quiet sadness. In the midst of the Kraffts --- robust, loud, brutal, solidly built for life, and for a joyful life --- these two gentle, weak creatures, who were, so to speak, outside the frame, outside or beside life, understood each other and pitied each other, without ever saying a word of it.

Christophe, with the cruel carelessness of childhood, had not failed to share his father’s and grandfather’s contempt for the little peddler. He was amused by him as by a comic figure; he harassed him with stupid teasing, which the other bore with his unshakeable calm. Yet Christophe loved him, without quite realizing it. He loved him first as a willing toy that one can do anything with. He also loved him because there was always something good to be expected from him: a sweet, a picture, an entertaining invention. The little man’s return was a joy for the children; for he always brought them some surprise. Poor as he was, he managed to bring a keepsake for each one: and he never forgot anyone in the family’s birthday. He would appear punctually on the solemn dates: and he would pull from his pocket some charming gift, chosen with feeling. Everyone was so accustomed to it that they scarcely thought to thank him: it seemed natural, and he appeared sufficiently rewarded by the pleasure he took in giving. But Christophe, who did not sleep very soundly, and who in the night would turn the day’s events over and over in his mind, would sometimes reflect that his uncle was very good; and there would come over him for the poor man surges of grateful feeling, none of which he showed him once daylight came, because by then he thought only of making fun of him. Besides, he was still too young to attach to goodness its full value: in children’s language, good and simple are nearly synonymous; and Uncle Gottfried seemed the living proof of it.

One evening when Melchior was dining out, Gottfried, left alone in the downstairs room while Louisa put the two little ones to bed, went outside and sat down a few paces from the house, at the edge of the river. Christophe followed him there out of idleness; and, as usual, pestered him with the nipping and teasing of a young pup, until he was out of breath and let himself roll onto the grass at Gottfried’s feet. Lying on his belly, he buried his nose in the turf. When he had caught his breath, he cast about for some new piece of nonsense to say; and, having found one, shouted it out, convulsed with laughter, his face still pressed into the ground. Nothing answered him. Surprised by the silence, he lifted his head and got ready to repeat his witticism. His gaze met Gottfried’s face, lit by the last glimmers of the day dying away in golden haze. The words stuck in his throat. Gottfried was smiling, eyes half closed, lips slightly parted; and his sickly face wore an expression of unspeakable sadness and gravity. Christophe, propped on his elbows, began to watch him. Night was coming on; Gottfried’s face faded little by little. Silence reigned. Christophe was caught in turn by those mysterious impressions that were mirrored on Gottfried’s face. He fell into a vague torpor. The earth lay in shadow while the sky was still clear: the stars were being born. The little waves of the river lapped against the bank. The child grew numb; he chewed, without noticing, small stems of grass. A cricket cried nearby. He felt that he was about to fall asleep. --- Then, abruptly, in the darkness, Gottfried sang. He sang in a weak, veiled, inward voice; one could not have heard it twenty paces away. But there was in it a moving sincerity; it was as though he were thinking aloud, and as though through this music, like transparent water, one could read all the way to the bottom of his heart. Christophe had never heard anyone sing like that. And he had never heard a song like that. Slow, simple, childlike, it moved with a grave, sad, slightly monotonous step, never hurrying --- with long silences --- then set off again, unconcerned with arriving, and losing itself in the night. It seemed to come from very far away, and went no one knew where. Its serenity was full of unease; and beneath its apparent peace slept an anguish of centuries. Christophe had stopped breathing, he dared not stir, he was chilled through with emotion. When it was over, he crawled toward Gottfried, his throat tight:

--- Uncle!… he asked.

Gottfried did not answer.

--- Uncle! the child repeated, resting his hands and chin on Gottfried’s knees.

Gottfried’s affectionate voice said:

--- My little one…

--- What was that, uncle? Tell me! What were you singing?

--- I don’t know.

--- Tell me what it is!

--- I don’t know. It’s a song.

--- Is it a song of yours?

--- No, not mine! What an idea!… It’s an old song.

--- Who made it?

--- No one knows…

--- When?

--- No one knows…

--- When you were little?

--- Before I was in the world, before my father was, and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father… It has always been.

--- How strange! No one ever told me of it.

He thought for a moment:

--- Uncle, do you know others?

--- Yes.

--- Sing another one, will you?

--- Why sing another? One is enough. You sing when you need to sing, when you must. You mustn’t sing for amusement.

--- But still, when one makes music?

--- This is not music.

The boy stayed thoughtful. He did not quite understand. But he asked for no explanation: it was true, this was not music, not music like the rest. He went on:

--- Uncle, have you ever made any?

--- Made what?

--- Songs!

--- Songs? Oh, how should I make any? That is not done.

The child pressed on with his usual logic:

--- But, uncle, it was done once all the same…

Gottfried shook his head stubbornly:

--- It has always been.

The child came back at him:

--- But, uncle, can’t one make new ones, new songs?

--- Why make them? There are enough for everything. There are some for when you are sad, and some for when you are glad; for when you are tired and thinking of home that is far away; for when you despise yourself because you have been a vile sinner, a worm in the earth; for when you feel like weeping because people have not been kind to you; and for when your heart is joyful because the day is fair, and you can see God’s sky, which is always good and seems to smile at you… There are songs for everything, for everything. Why should I make more?

--- To be a great man! said the boy, full of his grandfather’s lessons and his own naive dreams.

Gottfried gave a soft little laugh. Christophe, somewhat stung, asked:

--- Why are you laughing?

Gottfried said:

--- Oh! I am nothing.

And stroking the child’s head, he asked:

--- So you want to be a great man, do you?

--- Yes, Christophe answered proudly. He thought Gottfried would admire him. But Gottfried replied:

--- What for?

Christophe was taken aback. After searching, he said:

--- To make beautiful songs!

Gottfried laughed again, and said:

--- You want to make songs to be a great man; and you want to be a great man to make songs. You’re like a dog chasing its own tail.

Christophe was deeply offended. At any other moment, he would not have tolerated his uncle --- whom he was accustomed to mock --- mocking him in return. And at the same time, he would never have thought that Gottfried could be clever enough to embarrass him with an argument. He searched for a counter-argument, or an impertinence to throw back, and found nothing. Gottfried continued:

--- Even if you grew as tall as from here to Coblenz, you will never make a single song.

Christophe rebelled:

--- And if I want to make one!…

--- The more you want, the less you can. To make them, you have to be like them. Listen…

The moon had risen, round and bright, above the fields. A silver mist floated close to the earth and over the shimmering water. The frogs were talking, and through the meadows one could hear the melodious fluting of the toads. The shrill tremolo of the crickets seemed to answer the trembling of the stars. The wind softly rustled the branches of the alders. Down from the hills above the river drifted the frail song of a nightingale.

--- What need have you to sing? sighed Gottfried, after a long silence. --- (One could not tell whether he was speaking to himself or to Christophe.) --- Don’t they sing better than anything you could ever do?

Christophe had heard all these sounds of the night many times, and he loved them. But he had never heard them like this. It was true: what need had anyone to sing?… He felt his heart swelling with tenderness and sorrow. He longed to embrace the meadows, the river, the sky, the dear stars. And he was filled with love for Uncle Gottfried, who seemed to him now the best, the most intelligent, the most beautiful of all. He thought how badly he had judged him; and he thought that his uncle was sad because Christophe had judged him badly. He was full of remorse. He felt the urge to cry out: “Uncle, don’t be sad any more! I won’t be wicked any more! Forgive me, I love you!” But he did not dare. --- And all at once he threw himself into Gottfried’s arms; but the words would not come; he could only repeat: “I love you!” and kissed him passionately. Gottfried, surprised and moved, kept saying: “What’s all this? What’s all this?” and kissed him back. --- Then he stood up, took the boy’s hand, and said: “Time to go in.” Christophe walked home feeling sad that his uncle had not understood. But as they reached the house, Gottfried said to him: “Other evenings, if you like, we’ll go out again to hear the good Lord’s music, and I’ll sing you other songs.” And when Christophe kissed him, full of gratitude, saying goodnight, he could see clearly that his uncle had understood.

From then on, they often went walking together in the evenings; and they walked without speaking, along the river or across the fields. Gottfried smoked his pipe slowly, and Christophe held his hand, a little intimidated by the darkness. They would sit down in the grass; and, after a few moments of silence, Gottfried would speak to him of the stars and the clouds; he taught him to tell apart the breathings of earth and air and water, the songs, the cries, the sounds of the small world fluttering, crawling, leaping, and swimming that teems in the dark, and the harbingers of rain and fine weather, and the countless instruments of the symphony of the night. Sometimes Gottfried sang sad or glad airs, but always of the same kind; and every time Christophe heard them, he felt the same stirring. But he never sang more than one song an evening; and Christophe had noticed that he did not sing willingly when asked; it had to come from himself, when he felt moved. One often had to wait a long time, without speaking; and it was at the very moment when Christophe thought: “That’s it --- he won’t sing tonight…” that Gottfried would make up his mind.

One evening when Gottfried was definitely not going to sing, Christophe had the idea of sharing with him one of his little compositions, which gave him so much trouble and pride. He wanted to show him what an artist he was. Gottfried listened calmly; then he said:

--- How ugly that is, my poor Christophe!

Christophe was so mortified that he could find nothing to say. Gottfried went on, with commiseration:

--- Why did you make that? It is so ugly! No one made you do it.

Christophe protested, red with anger:

--- Grandfather finds my music very fine, he cried.

--- Ah! said Gottfried, untroubled. No doubt he is right. He is a very learned man. He knows about music. I know nothing about it myself…

And, after a moment:

--- But I find it very ugly.

He looked at Christophe calmly, saw his crestfallen face, smiled, and said:

--- Have you made other tunes? Perhaps I shall like the others better than this one.

Christophe thought that his other tunes would indeed erase the impression of the first; and he sang them all. Gottfried said nothing; he waited for it to be over. Then he shook his head and said with deep conviction:

--- That is uglier still.

Christophe pressed his lips together; his chin was trembling: he wanted to cry. Gottfried, as if dismayed himself, pressed on:

--- How ugly it is!

Christophe, his voice full of tears, cried out:

--- But then, why do you say it’s ugly?

Gottfried looked at him with his honest eyes:

--- Why?… I don’t know… Wait… It is ugly,… first because it is stupid… Yes, that’s it… It is stupid, it means nothing… There you are. When you wrote that, you had nothing to say. Why did you write it?

--- I don’t know, said Christophe in a doleful voice. I wanted to write a pretty piece.

--- There! You wrote for the sake of writing. You wrote to be a great musician, to be admired. You were vain, you lied: you were punished… There! One is always punished when one is vain and lies, in music. Music wants to be modest and sincere. Otherwise, what is it? An impiety, a blasphemy against the Lord, who gave us the gift of beautiful song to speak true and honest things.

He noticed the child’s distress and wanted to embrace him. But Christophe turned away angrily; and for several days he sulked. He hated Gottfried. --- But however much he told himself: “He’s a fool! He knows nothing, nothing! Grandfather, who is far more intelligent, finds my music very fine”--- deep within himself, he knew that it was his uncle who was right; and Gottfried’s words were engraved deeply in him: he was ashamed of having lied.

And so, despite his stubborn resentment, he now always thought of Gottfried when he was writing music: and often he tore up what he had written, ashamed of what Gottfried might have thought of it. When he went ahead and wrote a tune he knew was not quite sincere, he hid it carefully from his uncle; he trembled at his judgment, and was overjoyed when Gottfried said simply of one of his pieces: “That is not too ugly… I like it…”

Sometimes too, by way of revenge, he would play the sly trick of presenting to him, as his own, tunes by great composers; and he was jubilant when Gottfried, by some chance, found them detestable. But Gottfried was not troubled. He laughed heartily when he saw Christophe clap his hands and dance around him with glee; and he always came back to his usual argument: “It may be well written, but it says nothing.” --- He never wanted to attend any of the little concerts given at the house. However fine the piece, he would begin to yawn and put on a glazed look of boredom. Before long he could bear it no more, and would slip away quietly. He would say:

--- You see, little one: everything you write indoors is not music. Music indoors is like sunlight in a closed room. Music is outside, when you breathe the dear fresh little air of God.

He was always talking about the good Lord; for he was very devout, unlike the two Kraffts, father and son, who played the freethinkers, while being careful not to eat meat on Fridays.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Melchior changed his mind. Not only did he approve of grandfather’s having collected Christophe’s inspirations; but, to the latter’s great surprise, he spent several evenings making two or three copies of the manuscript. To every question put to him on the subject, he replied with an air of importance that “one would see…”; or else he rubbed his hands together laughing, vigorously ruffled the boy’s head by way of a joke, or administered a series of resounding slaps on his backside with cheerful abandon. Christophe detested these familiarities bitterly; but he could see that his father was pleased, and he did not know why.

Then there were mysterious consultations between Melchior and grandfather. And one evening, a very astonished Christophe learned that he --- he, Christophe --- had dedicated to H.S.H. the Grand Duke Leopold The Pleasures of Youth. Melchior had sounded out the prince’s intentions; the prince had shown himself graciously disposed to accept the tribute. Whereupon the triumphant Melchior declared that no time was to be lost: primo, drafting the official petition to the prince; --- secundo, publishing the work; --- tertio, organizing a concert so that it might be heard.

There followed further long conferences between Melchior and Jean-Michel. For two or three evenings they argued animatedly. No one was permitted to disturb them. Melchior wrote, crossed out, crossed out, wrote. The old man spoke aloud, as though reciting verse. At times they quarreled, or banged on the table, because they could not find a word.

Then Christophe was summoned, seated before the table with a pen between his fingers, flanked on his right by his father and on his left by his grandfather; and the latter began dictating to him a text he could make nothing of, because he had enormous difficulty writing each word, because Melchior was shouting in his ear, and because the old man was declaiming in so emphatic a tone that Christophe, rattled by the sound of the words, could no longer even think of listening to their meaning. The old man himself was no less agitated. He had been unable to stay seated; he was pacing the room, involuntarily acting out the expressions of his text; but at every moment he would come and peer over the boy’s page; and Christophe, intimidated by those two large heads looming over his shoulders, stuck out his tongue, lost control of his pen, his eyes went blurry, he made extra downstrokes or smudged everything he had written; --- and Melchior howled; and Jean-Michel stormed; --- and they had to start over, and start over again; and just when they thought they had finally reached the end, a magnificent blot fell onto the immaculate page: --- then they pulled his ears; and he dissolved in tears; but they forbade him to cry, because he would stain the paper; --- and they resumed the dictation from the first line; and he thought it would go on like this until the end of his life.

At last they finished; and Jean-Michel, leaning against the mantelpiece, reread the work aloud in a voice trembling with pleasure, while Melchior, tilted back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, nodding his chin and savoring the style of the following epistle like a connoisseur:

« Highly Worthy, Most Sublime Highness! Most Gracious Lord!

« Since my fourth year, Music has become the foremost of my youthful occupations. As soon as I entered into commerce with the noble Muse, who incited my soul to pure harmonies, I loved her; and, as it seemed to me, she returned my feeling. Now I have reached my sixth year; and for some time past, my Muse has frequently, in hours of inspiration, whispered in my ear: “Dare! Dare! Write down at last the harmonies of your soul!” --- Six years! I thought; and how shall I dare; What will men learned in the art say of me? » --- I hesitated. I trembled. But my Muse willed it: --- I obeyed. I wrote.

« And now, shall I,

O Most Sublime Highness!

shall I have the reckless audacity to lay at the steps of Thy Throne the first fruits of my young labors?… Shall I have the boldness to hope that Thou wilt let fall upon them the august approbation of Thy paternal regard?…

« Oh! yes! for the Sciences and the Arts have always found in Thee their wise Maecenas, their magnanimous champion; and talent flourishes beneath the aegis of Thy holy protection.

« Full of this deep and assured faith, I dare therefore to approach Thee with these youthful essays. Receive them as a pure offering of my childlike veneration, and deign, in kindness,

O Most Sublime Highness!

to cast Thine eyes upon them, and upon their young author, who bows at Thy feet in deepest submission!

Of His Highly Worthy, Most Sublime Highness the perfectly submissive, faithfully, most obedient servant,

Jean-Christophe Krafft.

Christophe heard none of it: he was too happy to be done with the ordeal; and for fear they would make him start all over again, he fled to the fields. He had no idea what he had written, and cared nothing about it. But the old man, having finished his reading, went through it once more to savor it better; and when it was done, Melchior and he declared it a masterpiece. The Grand Duke, to whom the letter was presented along with a copy of the musical work, was of the same opinion. He was gracious enough to send word that both were of a charming style. He authorized the concert, ordered the hall of his Academy of Music to be placed at Melchior’s disposal, and deigned to promise that he would have the young artist presented to him on the day of his performance.

Melchior therefore set about organizing the concert as quickly as possible. He secured the participation of the Hof Musik Verein; and, as the success of his first overtures had inflated his ideas of grandeur, he undertook at the same time to bring out a magnificent edition of The Pleasures of Youth. He would have liked to have Christophe’s portrait engraved on the cover --- Christophe at the piano, with himself, Melchior, standing beside him, violin in hand. This had to be abandoned, not on account of the cost --- Melchior shrank from no expense --- but for lack of time. He fell back on an allegorical composition depicting a cradle, a trumpet, a drum, and a wooden horse surrounding a lyre from which rays of sunlight burst forth. The title bore, along with a lengthy dedication in which the prince’s name stood out in enormous characters, the notation that “Monsieur Jean-Christophe Krafft was six years of age.” --- He was, in truth, seven and a half. --- The engraving of the piece was extremely costly; to pay for it, grandfather had to sell an old eighteenth-century chest with carved figures, which he had never been willing to part with despite the repeated offers of Wormser the dealer. But Melchior had no doubt that the subscriptions would more than cover the expenses of the piece.

Another matter occupied him: the costume Christophe would wear on the day of the concert. A family council was convened on the subject. Melchior would have wished that the boy might be presented in a short dress with bare calves, like a four-year-old child. But Christophe was very sturdy for his age, and everyone knew him: there was no hope of deceiving anyone. Melchior then had a triumphant idea. He decided that the child would be put in a tail coat with a white cravat. In vain did good Louisa protest that they wanted to make her poor boy look ridiculous. Melchior was counting precisely on the success of gentle amusement produced by this unexpected apparition. It was done accordingly, and the tailor came to take measurements for the little man’s dress coat. Fine linen and patent-leather pumps were also required; and all of this again cost a small fortune. Christophe was greatly uncomfortable in his new clothes. To accustom him to them, he was made to rehearse his pieces in costume several times. For a month he had not left the piano stool. He was also being taught how to bow. He had not a moment of freedom. He was furious, but did not dare rebel; for he felt he was about to perform a momentous act, and he was filled with pride and fear. He was also being pampered; they worried he might catch cold; they wrapped his neck in scarves; they warmed his shoes for fear they might be damp; and at table, he was given the best morsels.

At last the great day arrived. The hairdresser came to preside over the preparations and curl Christophe’s rebellious hair; he would not leave off until he had turned it into a sheep’s fleece. The whole family filed past Christophe and declared he looked superb. Melchior, after eyeing him and turning him over on all sides, struck his forehead and went to fetch a large flower, which he pinned to the boy’s buttonhole. But Louisa, when she caught sight of it, threw up her hands and exclaimed with distress that he looked like a monkey --- which mortified him cruelly. He himself did not know whether he should feel proud or ashamed of his get-up. By instinct, he felt humiliated. He would feel far more so at the concert; that was to be the dominant feeling of this memorable day.

The concert was about to begin. Half the hall was empty. The Grand Duke had not come. A well-informed and amiable friend, as there always is one, had lost no time in bringing the news that there was a Council meeting at the palace and that the Grand Duke would not be coming: he had it from a reliable source. Melchior, devastated, paced about, went back and forth, leaned out the window. Old Jean-Michel was also anxious; but it was on account of his grandson: he was pestering him with advice. Christophe was catching the fever from those around him; he had no worry about his pieces; but the thought of the bows he would have to make to the audience troubled him; and the more he thought about it, the more it became a torment.

Still, it was necessary to begin: the audience was growing impatient. The orchestra of the Hof Musik Verein struck up the Coriolan Overture. The child knew neither Coriolanus nor Beethoven; for though he had often heard passages of the latter, it was without knowing it; he never troubled himself about the names of pieces he heard; he called them by names of his own invention, fashioning around them little stories or little landscapes; he generally classified them in three categories: fire, earth, and water, with a thousand varied shades. Mozart almost always belonged to water: he was a meadow by a river’s edge, a transparent mist floating over a stream, a little spring rain, or else a rainbow. Beethoven was fire: sometimes a conflagration with gigantic flames and great billows of smoke, sometimes a burning forest, a heavy and terrible cloud from which lightning flashes, sometimes a great sky full of trembling stars, where one watches, with a quickened heart, a star break loose, slide, and softly die on a beautiful September night. This time again, the imperious ardors of that heroic soul burned him like fire. Everything else disappeared: what did anything else matter to him? The stricken Melchior, the anguished Jean-Michel, all those bustling people, the audience, the Grand Duke, the little Christophe --- what had he to do with all those people? What connection was there between them and him? Was all that truly him? He was in that furious will that was sweeping him away. He followed it breathlessly, tears in his eyes, legs numb, clenched from the palms of his hands to the soles of his feet; his blood was charging; and he trembled in every limb. --- And as he listened thus, ear strained, hidden behind a wing, he felt a violent shock at his heart: the orchestra had stopped abruptly in the middle of a measure; and, after an instant of silence, it struck up with a great clamor of brass and drums a military march of official pomposity. The transition from one music to the other was so brutal and so unexpected that Christophe ground his teeth and stamped his foot in anger, shaking his fist at the wall. But Melchior was exultant: it was the prince entering, whom the orchestra was saluting with the national anthem. And Jean-Michel was giving his grandson, in a trembling voice, his final instructions.

The overture began again and this time concluded. It was Christophe’s turn. Melchior had ingeniously arranged the program so as to showcase at once the virtuosity of son and father: they were to play together a Mozart sonata for piano and violin. To grade the effects, it had been decided that Christophe would enter alone first. He was led to the edge of the stage, shown the piano at the front of the platform, given a final explanation of everything he had to do, and pushed out from the wings.

He was not overly frightened, having long been accustomed to theater halls; but when he found himself alone on the platform, before hundreds of eyes, he was suddenly so intimidated that he made an instinctive move to retreat, and even turned back toward the wings to flee into them: there he caught sight of his father, who was gesturing furiously and shooting him fierce looks. He had to go on. Besides, he had already been spotted in the hall. As he advanced, a murmur of curiosity rose and was soon followed by laughter that spread from row to row. Melchior had not been wrong, and the little one’s outfit produced every effect one could have hoped for. The hall broke into uproar at the appearance of the child with the long hair and the gypsy complexion, trotting timidly in the evening dress of a well-appointed man of the world. People stood to get a better look; soon it became a general hilarity, nothing malicious about it, but the kind that would have made the most resolute virtuoso lose his head. Christophe, terrified by the noise, the stares, the opera glasses trained on him from every side, had but one thought: to reach the piano as quickly as possible, which appeared to him as a refuge, an island in the middle of the sea. Head down, looking neither right nor left, he trotted at an accelerated pace along the footlights; and on arriving at the center of the stage, instead of bowing to the audience as had been agreed, he turned his back to them and plunged straight for the piano. The chair was too high for him to sit down without his father’s help: in his agitation, instead of waiting, he clambered up on his knees. This added to the hall’s delight. But now Christophe was safe: face to face with his instrument, he feared no one.

Melchior finally arrived; he benefited from the audience’s good humor, which greeted him with fairly warm applause. The sonata began. The little man played it with imperturbable assurance, his mouth tightened with concentration, his eyes fixed on the keys, his small legs dangling on either side of the chair. As the notes unfolded, he felt more at ease; he was like someone among friends he knew. A murmur of approval reached him; and waves of proud satisfaction rose to his head at the thought that all these people were silent to hear him, and were admiring him. But no sooner had he finished than the fear returned; and the acclamations that greeted him brought him more shame than pleasure. That shame redoubled when Melchior, taking him by the hand, advanced with him to the edge of the footlights and made him bow to the audience. He obeyed, and bowed very low, with an amusing awkwardness; but he was humiliated, he blushed at what he was doing, as at something ridiculous and shameful.

He was sat back down before the piano; and he played alone Les Plaisirs du Jeune âge. It was delirium. After each piece, the audience cried out with enthusiasm; they wanted him to begin again; and he was proud to have succeeded and almost wounded at the same time by these approvals that were commands. At the end, the entire hall rose to acclaim him; the grand duke was setting the signal for the applause. But since Christophe was alone on the stage this time, he no longer dared move from his chair. The acclamations redoubled. He lowered his head more and more, scarlet and looking sheepish; and he stared obstinately in the direction opposite the hall. Melchior came and took him; he carried him in his arms and told him to blow kisses: he was pointing toward the grand duke’s box. Christophe pretended not to hear. Melchior grabbed his arm and threatened him in a low voice. Then he performed the gestures mechanically; but he looked at no one, he did not raise his eyes, he continued to turn his head away, and he was miserable: he was suffering, he did not know from what; he was suffering in his self-regard, he did not like these people in the least. No matter how loudly they applauded, he did not forgive them for laughing, for amusing themselves at his humiliation; he did not forgive them for seeing him in this ridiculous posture, suspended in the air, blowing kisses; he was almost angry at them for applauding him. And when Melchior at last set him down on the ground, he bolted toward the wings. A lady tossed him a small bunch of violets in passing, which grazed his face; he was seized with panic and ran as fast as his legs would carry him, knocking over a chair that stood in his path. The more he ran, the more they laughed; and the more they laughed, the more he ran.

At last he reached the back of the stage, crowded with onlookers, pushed his way through them with his head, and ran to hide deep in the green room. Grand-père was exultant and covered him with blessings. The orchestra musicians burst out laughing and congratulated the little one, who refused to look at them or give them his hand. Melchior, his ear cocked, was gauging the acclamations that would not cease, and wanted to bring Christophe back on stage. But the child refused furiously, clinging to grand-père’s frock coat and kicking out at anyone who came near. He ended up in a fit of tears, and they had to leave him be.

Just at that moment, an officer came to say that the grand duke was asking for the artists in his box. How could they show the child in such a state? Melchior swore with rage; and his outburst only redoubled Christophe’s weeping. To put an end to the flood, grand-père promised a pound of chocolates if Christophe would be quiet; and Christophe, who was greedy, stopped short, swallowed his tears, and let himself be carried off; but they first had to swear to him in the most solemn fashion that they would not take him back to the stage by surprise.

In the salon of the princely box, he was brought before a gentleman in a frock coat with the face of a bulldog, bristling mustaches, and a short pointed beard, short, red-faced, slightly obese, who addressed him with mocking familiarity, patted his cheeks with fat hands, and called him: “Mozart redivivus!” That was the grand duke. --- Then he passed through the hands of the grand duchess, her daughter, and their retinue. But since he did not dare raise his eyes, the only memory he kept of that brilliant assembly was of a series of gowns and uniforms seen from the waist down. Seated on the young princess’s lap, he did not dare move or breathe. She asked him questions, to which Melchior replied in an obsequious voice with formulas of groveling respect; but she did not listen to Melchior, and was teasing the little one. He felt himself blushing more and more; and thinking that everyone was noticing his blush, he wanted to explain it, and said with a deep sigh:

--- I’m red, I’m hot.

Which made the young girl burst into laughter. But Christophe bore her no ill will as he had borne it to the audience a moment ago; for this laughter was pleasant; and she kissed him: which did not displease him in the least.

At that moment he caught sight of grand-père in the corridor, at the entrance to the box, radiant and embarrassed, who would have very much liked to show himself and put in a word, but who did not dare, since no one had spoken to him: he was enjoying his grandson’s glory from afar. Christophe felt a surge of tenderness, an irresistible need for justice to be done to the poor old man as well, for people to know what he was worth. His tongue was loosened; he leaned up to his new friend’s ear and whispered:

--- I want to tell you a secret.

She laughed and asked:

--- Which one?

--- You know, he continued, the pretty trio in my minuetto, the minuetto I played?… You remember?… --- (He hummed it softly.) --- … Well! it’s grand-père who composed it, not me. All the other pieces are mine. But that one is the most beautiful. It’s grand-père’s. Grand-père doesn’t want anyone to say so. You won’t repeat it?… --- (And, pointing to the old man): There is grand-père. I love him dearly. He is very kind to me.

Whereupon the young princess laughed all the more, cried that he was a darling, smothered him with kisses, and, to the consternation of Christophe and grand-père, repeated the whole thing to everyone. All joined in her laughter; and the grand duke congratulated the old man, who stood there utterly abashed, trying in vain to explain himself, and stuttering like someone caught in the act. But Christophe did not say another word to the young girl; and despite her coaxing, he remained silent and rigid: he despised her for having broken her word. His idea of princes suffered a profound blow from this act of disloyalty. He was so indignant that he no longer heard anything that was said around him, nor that the prince was laughingly naming him his ordinary pianist, his Hof Musicus.

He left with his family, and found himself surrounded, in the corridors of the theater and even in the street, by people who complimented him or kissed him, to his great displeasure; for he did not like to be kissed, and he did not accept that anyone should dispose of him without asking his permission.

At last they arrived home, where, the door barely closed, Melchior began by calling him “little idiot” for having told everyone that the trio was not his own work. Since the child knew perfectly well that he had done something admirable, worthy of praise and not reproach, he revolted and said impertinent things. Melchior grew angry and said he would box his ears, that if his pieces hadn’t been played well enough, his imbecility had ruined the entire effect of the concert. Christophe had a deep sense of justice: he went to sulk in a corner; he lumped his father, the princess, and the whole world together in his contempt. He was also wounded that the neighbors came to congratulate his parents and laugh with them, as if it were his parents who had played the pieces, and as if he were merely their possession.

In the midst of all this, a court servant came to deliver, on behalf of the grand duke, a fine gold watch, and on behalf of the young princess, a box of excellent sweets. Both gifts gave Christophe great pleasure; and he hardly knew which gave him more; but he was in such a foul humor that he would not admit it, even to himself; and he continued to sulk, squinting toward the sweets and wondering whether it would be proper to accept gifts from someone who had betrayed his trust. Just as he was on the point of yielding, his father insisted that he sit down at once at the writing table and write under his dictation a letter of thanks. That was too much, in the end! Whether from the nervous strain of the day, or from an instinctive shame at beginning his letter, as Melchior wished, with the words:

“The little servant and musician, --- Knecht und Musicus, --- of Your Highness…”,

he burst into tears, and nothing more could be got from him. The servant waited, smirking. Melchior had to write the letter himself. This did not make him more indulgent toward Christophe. To crown his misfortune, the child let his watch fall and it broke. A shower of abuse rained down on him. Melchior shouted that he would be deprived of dessert; Christophe said furiously that that was exactly what he wanted. To punish him, Louisa announced that she was beginning by confiscating his sweets. Christophe, exasperated, said she had no right to do that, that the bag was his, his, and no one else’s: no one would take it! He received a slap, flew into a rage, and, snatching the bag from his mother’s hands, threw it on the floor and stamped on it. He was whipped, carried to his room, undressed, and put to bed.

That evening he heard his parents dining with friends, the magnificent dinner that had been prepared for eight days in honor of the concert. He nearly died of rage on his pillow at such an injustice. The others laughed loudly and clinked their glasses. The guests had been told that the little one was tired; and no one gave him a thought. Only, after dinner, when the guests were about to take their leave, a shuffling step slipped into his room, and old Jean-Michel leaned over his bed and kissed him with emotion, saying: “My dear little Christophe!…” Then, as if ashamed, he slipped away without another word, having tucked some sweets into his hand that he had hidden in his pocket.

That was sweet to Christophe. But he was so worn out from all the emotions of the day that he had not the strength to reflect on what grand-père had just done; he did not even have the strength to touch the good things he had given him. He was broken with fatigue, and fell asleep almost at once.

His sleep was fitful. He had sudden nervous starts, like electric shocks, that jolted his body. A wild music pursued him in his dreams. In the night he awoke. The Beethoven overture he had heard at the concert was thundering in his ear. It filled the room with its panting breath. He sat up in bed, rubbed his eyes and his ears, wondering whether he was still asleep. --- No, he was not asleep. He recognized it well. He recognized those howls of fury, those furious barkings; he heard the beating of that frenzied heart leaping in the chest, that tumultuous blood; he felt on his face those frantic gusts of wind that lash and crush, and then suddenly stop, broken by a Herculean will. That gigantic soul entered into him, stretched his limbs and his soul, and seemed to give them colossal proportions. He walked upon the world. He was like a mountain, and storms were blowing within him. Storms of fury! Storms of pain!… Ah! what pain!… But it didn’t matter! He felt himself so strong!… Suffer! suffer still!… Ah! how good it is to be strong! How good it is to suffer, when one is strong!…

He laughed. His laughter rang out in the silence of the night. His father awoke and cried:

--- Who’s there?

The mother whispered:

--- Hush! it’s the child dreaming!

All three fell silent. Everything fell silent around them. The music faded away. And all that could be heard was the steady breathing of the sleeping figures in the room --- companions in misery, lashed side by side by fate in the same fragile vessel, which some vertiginous force carries off into the night.