Jean-Christophe. II. Morning

I THE DEATH OF JEAN-MICHEL

A few years have passed. Christophe is about to turn eleven. He continues his musical education. He is learning harmony with Florian Holzer, the organist of Saint-Martin, a friend of his grandfather’s, a very learned man, who teaches him that the chords, the chord progressions he loves best --- harmonies that softly caress his ear and heart, and that he cannot hear without a little shiver running down his spine --- are wrong and forbidden. When he asks why, there is no answer except that it is so: the rule forbids them. Since he is naturally undisciplined, he loves them all the more for it. His joy is to find examples of them in the great musicians everyone admires, and to bring these to his grandfather or to his teacher. To this, his grandfather replies that in the great musicians such things are admirable, and that Beethoven or Bach could permit themselves anything. The teacher, less conciliatory, grows angry and says tartly that these are not the finest things they produced.

Christophe has free access to concerts and the theater; he is learning to play a little of every instrument. He is already quite accomplished on the violin; and his father has had the idea of giving him a desk in the orchestra. He holds his part so well that, after a few months as a probationer, he has been officially appointed second violin of the Hof Musik Verein. So he is beginning to earn his living; and it is not too soon, for affairs at home have been growing worse and worse. Melchior’s intemperance has worsened, and grandfather is growing old.

Christophe is fully aware of the sadness of their situation; he already has the serious, worried air of a small man. He discharges his duties valiantly, though they hardly interest him, and he is falling asleep at the orchestra in the evenings, because it is late and he is bored. The theater no longer moves him the way it did when he was small. When he was small --- four years ago now --- his supreme ambition would have been to hold the very place he occupies today. Today he dislikes most of the music he is made to play; he does not yet dare to formulate his judgment on it: at bottom, he finds it foolish; and when, by chance, beautiful things are played, he is irritated by the good-natured way in which they are played: the works he loves best end up resembling his neighbors, his fellow musicians in the orchestra, who, once the curtain has fallen and they have finished blowing or scraping, mop their brows with a smile and quietly recount their small personal stories, as if they had just done an hour of gymnastics. He has also come to know at close quarters his old passion, the fair-haired singer with bare feet; he meets her often during the intermission, in the refreshment room. Since she knows he was once in love with her, she readily gives him a kiss; he feels no pleasure in it: he is repelled by her makeup, her smell, her enormous arms, and her voracity; he hates her now.

The grand duke had not forgotten his ordinary pianist: not that the modest pension he attributed to him for that title was paid with any regularity --- it always had to be demanded; --- but from time to time Christophe received orders to present himself at the castle, when there were distinguished guests, or simply when it pleased Their Highnesses to hear him. It was almost always in the evening, at hours when Christophe would have wished to be alone. He had to drop everything and come in all haste. Sometimes he was made to wait in an antechamber because dinner was not yet finished. The servants, accustomed to seeing him, spoke to him familiarly. Then he was shown into a salon full of mirrors and lights, where stiffly formal persons stared at him with an offensive curiosity. He had to cross the over-polished floor to kiss the hand of Their Highnesses; and the taller he grew, the more awkward he became, for he felt ridiculous, and his pride suffered.

Then he would sit down at the piano and play for these imbeciles --- that was how he judged them. There were moments when the surrounding indifference, while he was playing, oppressed him so heavily that he was on the verge of stopping dead in the middle of a piece. The air around him failed; he felt as if he were suffocating; he was falling into a void. They showered him with praise when he had finished; they overwhelmed him with compliments; they introduced him from one person to another. He felt that they looked on him as a curious animal belonging to the prince’s menagerie, and that the praise was addressed more to his master than to himself. He believed himself degraded, and he became morbidly sensitive, suffering all the more because he dared not show it. He saw an affront in the most ordinary behaviors: if people laughed in a corner of the salon, he told himself it was at him; and he did not know whether it was his manners, his clothes, or his person they were mocking --- his feet, his hands. Everything humiliated him: he was humiliated if no one spoke to him, humiliated if they did speak, humiliated if they gave him sweets as if he were a child, and above all humiliated if the grand duke, as sometimes happened with a princely casualness, dismissed him by pressing a gold coin into his hand. He was miserable at being poor, at being treated as poor. One evening, on his way home, the money he had received weighed so heavily on him that he threw it through the grating of a cellar as he passed. And then, immediately afterward, he would have stooped to any baseness to get it back; for at home they were several months behind with the butcher.

His parents had little notion of these sufferings of pride. They were delighted by his favor with the prince. Good Louisa could imagine nothing finer for her boy than these evenings at the castle, in magnificent society. For Melchior, it was a subject of endless boasting among his friends. But the happiest of all was grandfather. He affected independence, a rebellious spirit, contempt for grandeur; but he had a naive admiration for money, power, honors, all social distinctions; and it was a pride without equal for him to see his grandson gaining access to those who shared in them: he enjoyed it as if the glory reflected upon himself; and despite all his efforts to remain impassive, his face was radiant. On the evenings when Christophe went to the castle, old Jean-Michel always contrived to stay at Louisa’s, on one pretext or another. He waited for his grandson’s return with a child’s impatience; and when Christophe came home, he would begin by addressing him, with an air of detachment, a few casual questions, such as:

--- Well? How did it go this evening?

Or affectionate hints, such as:

--- Here is our little Christophe, who is going to tell us something new.

Or some ingenious compliment, to put him at ease:

--- A bow to our young gentleman!

But Christophe, sullen and irritated, would reply with barely a very curt “Good evening!” and go off to sulk in a corner. The old man would press him, ask more precise questions, to which the child replied only with yes or no. The others would join in, asking for details: Christophe would grow more and more withdrawn; words had to be pulled from him one by one, until Jean-Michel, furious, would lose his temper and say wounding things. Christophe would reply with very little respect; and it would all end in a serious quarrel. The old man would leave, slamming the door. In this way Christophe spoiled all the joy of these poor people, who understood nothing of his ill humor. It was not their fault if they were servants in their souls, and could not imagine anyone being otherwise.

Christophe therefore withdrew into himself; and, without judging his family, he felt a gulf between them and himself. He no doubt exaggerated what separated them; and, despite their differences of thought, it is quite probable that he would have made himself understood if he had managed to speak with them intimately. But everyone knows there is nothing more difficult than complete intimacy between children and parents, even when there is the most tender affection between them; for on one side respect discourages confidences, while on the other the often mistaken idea of the superiority of age and experience prevents anyone from taking sufficiently seriously the feelings of a child --- feelings that are sometimes as interesting as those of adults, and almost always more sincere.

The company Christophe saw at home and the conversations he heard there estranged him still further from his own family.

There came the friends of Melchior, mostly musicians from the orchestra, drinkers and bachelors; they were not bad men, but they were vulgar; they made the house shake with their laughter and their heavy steps. They loved music, but spoke of it with a revolting stupidity. The crude indiscretion of their enthusiasm wounded the child’s delicacy of feeling to the quick. When they praised a work he loved in that way, he felt as if he himself were being insulted. He stiffened, went pale, assumed a glacial air, pretended to have no interest in music; he would have hated it, had that been possible. Melchior used to say of him:

--- That fellow has no heart. He feels nothing. I don’t know who he takes after.

Sometimes they would sing together those Germanic songs for four voices --- for four feet --- which, always the same as themselves, advance ponderous and solemnly foolish, with their flat harmonies. Christophe would then take refuge in the farthest room and rail at the walls.

Grandfather had his friends too: the organist, the upholsterer, the clockmaker, the double-bass player, garrulous old men who endlessly rehashed the same jokes and launched into interminable discussions about art, politics, or the genealogies of the local families --- far less interested in the subjects they discussed than happy to talk and to find someone to talk to.

As for Louisa, she saw only a few neighbors who brought her the gossip of the neighborhood, and occasionally a “great lady” who, under the pretext of taking an interest in her, came to engage her services for an upcoming dinner, and claimed the right to oversee the religious education of the children.

But of all the visitors, none was more disagreeable to Christophe than his uncle Théodore. He was grandfather’s stepson, the son of grandmother Clara’s first marriage --- the first wife of Jean-Michel. He was a partner in a large commercial firm that did business with Africa and the Far East. He was a fine specimen of those new-style Germans who affect to repudiate with mockery the old idealism of their race, and, intoxicated by victory, have for force and success a cult that shows they are not accustomed to finding these on their side. But, since it is difficult to transform on the spot the centuries-old nature of a people, the suppressed idealism kept breaking through at every moment in the language, the manners, the moral habits, the quotations from Goethe apropos of the most trivial domestic acts; and it was a singular mixture of conscience and self-interest, a bizarre effort to reconcile the principled honesty of the old German bourgeoisie with the cynicism of these new condottieri of commerce: a mixture that was not without a rather repugnant odor of hypocrisy --- ending in making German strength, cupidity, and self-interest the symbol of all right, all justice, and all truth.

Christophe’s integrity was deeply wounded by this. He could not judge whether his uncle was right; but he detested him, he felt in him the enemy. Grandfather did not like it either, and he rebelled against these theories; but he was quickly overwhelmed in argument by Théodore’s easy tongue, which had no difficulty in making the old man’s generous naivety look ridiculous. Jean-Michel would end by being ashamed of his good heart; and, to show that he was not as backward as people thought, he would try to speak as Théodore did: it sounded wrong in his mouth, and it made even him uncomfortable. Whatever he thought otherwise, Théodore impressed him; he felt respect for a practical ability he envied all the more because he knew himself to be utterly incapable of it. He dreamed of a similar position for one of his grandsons. This was also Melchior’s intention: he meant for Rodolphe to follow in his uncle’s footsteps. So everyone in the house went out of their way to flatter the wealthy relative from whom they hoped for favors. The latter, seeing himself indispensable, took advantage of the fact to hold forth like a master; he meddled in everything, gave his opinion on everything, and made no effort to conceal his perfect contempt for art and artists; he displayed it rather, for the pleasure of humiliating his musician relations; and he indulged in malicious jests at everyone’s expense, at which they laughed cowardly.

It was Christophe above all who served as the target for his uncle’s mockery; and he was not a patient boy. He would hold his tongue and clench his teeth, looking dangerous. The other man took pleasure in his silent fury. But one day at table, when Théodore was tormenting him more than was reasonable, Christophe, beside himself, spat in his face. It was a dreadful business. The insult was so unheard-of that the uncle was struck speechless at first; then his voice returned, along with a torrent of abuse. Christophe, petrified in his chair by the horror of what he had done, received the blows that rained down on him without feeling them; but when they tried to drag him to his knees before his uncle, he fought back, shoved his mother aside, and fled the house. He did not stop until he could no longer breathe, somewhere out in the countryside. He could hear voices calling him in the distance, and he wondered whether he ought not to throw himself into the river, since he could not throw his enemy into it. He spent the night in the fields. Toward dawn he went and knocked at his grandfather’s door. The old man had been so worried by Christophe’s disappearance --- he had not slept a wink --- that he lacked the heart to scold him. He took him back to the house, where everyone refrained from saying anything, seeing that he was still in a state of extreme agitation; they had to handle him carefully, for he was playing that evening at the château. But Melchior tormented him for several weeks with complaints he aired --- while affecting to address no one in particular --- about the pains one took to set examples of irreproachable conduct and good manners for unworthy creatures who brought nothing but dishonor. And whenever Uncle Théodore met him in the street, he would turn his head away and hold his nose, with every sign of the deepest disgust.

The little sympathy he found at home meant that he spent as little time there as possible. He chafed under the perpetual constraint they tried to impose on him: there were too many things, too many people, that he was required to respect without being permitted to question why; and Christophe had no instinct for deference. The harder they tried to discipline him and turn him into a proper little German bourgeois, the more urgently he felt the need to break free. His pleasure, after the deadly dull and stiff sessions he endured at the orchestra or at the château, would have been to roll in the grass like a young colt, to slide down the grassy hillside in his new trousers, or to have a stone-throwing fight with the ragamuffins of the neighborhood. If he did not do this more often, it was not from fear of reproaches and slaps; it was that he had no companions --- he never managed to get along with other children. Even the street boys did not like playing with him, because he took games too seriously and hit too hard. For his part, he had grown used to shutting himself away, keeping apart from children his own age: he was ashamed of being clumsy at games and did not dare join in. So he made a show of not caring, though he burned with longing to be invited to play. But no one said a word to him, and he would walk away, miserable, with an indifferent air.

His consolation was to wander with Uncle Gottfried whenever Gottfried was in the area. He drew closer and closer to him and felt a deep kinship with his independent spirit. He understood so well by now the pleasure Gottfried found in roaming the roads, bound to nothing and no one! Often they would go out together in the evening into the countryside, with no destination, straight ahead; and since Gottfried always forgot the time, they came home very late and were scolded. The real joy was to slip away at night while the others slept. Gottfried knew it was wrong; but Christophe pleaded with him, and he himself could not resist the pleasure. Around midnight he would come to the front of the house and whistle in the agreed way. Christophe had gone to bed fully dressed. He would slide out of bed, shoes in hand, and, holding his breath, creep with the cunning of a savage to the kitchen window that gave onto the road. He climbed up onto the table; Gottfried caught him on the other side, lifting him onto his shoulders. They set off, happy as schoolboys.

Sometimes they went to find Jérémie, the fisherman, a friend of Gottfried’s; and they would glide out in his boat by moonlight. The water dripping from the oars made little arpeggios, chromatic notes. A milky mist trembled on the surface of the river. The stars shivered. The roosters called to one another from bank to bank; and sometimes one heard, in the depths of the sky, the trills of larks rising from the earth, deceived by the brightness of the moon. They fell silent. Gottfried sang softly to himself. Jérémie told strange stories about the lives of animals; they seemed all the more mysterious for being told in his terse, enigmatic way. The moon hid behind the forests. They skirted the dark mass of the hills. The darkness of sky and water blurred into one. The river lay without a ripple. Every sound died away. The boat glided through the night. Was it gliding? Was it floating? Was it standing still?… The reeds parted with a silken rustle. They came to shore without a sound. They stepped out onto the bank and walked back on foot. Sometimes they did not return until dawn. They followed the river’s edge. Clouds of silver bleak, green as ears of wheat or blue as precious stones, swarmed in the first light of day; they writhed like the serpents on Medusa’s head, throwing themselves voraciously on the bread tossed to them; they swirled around it as it sank, circling in spirals, then vanished in a flash, like a ray of light. The river took on tints of rose and mauve. The birds woke one after another. They hurried home; they made their way back, with the same precautions as at their departure, to the close-aired bedroom, and to bed, where Christophe, who was dead on his feet, fell asleep at once, his body still fresh with the smell of the fields.

All went well enough, and no one would have noticed a thing, had Ernst, the younger brother, not one day reported Christophe’s outings: from then on they were forbidden, and he was kept under watch. He still managed to slip away; and he preferred the company of the little peddler and his friends to any other. His own family were scandalized. Melchior said he had the tastes of a peasant. Old Jean-Michel was jealous of Christophe’s affection for Gottfried, and he lectured him about willingly lowering himself to such vulgar company when he had the honor of moving among the élite and serving princes. They felt that Christophe lacked dignity and self-respect.

Despite the financial difficulties that grew with Melchior’s intemperance and idleness, life remained tolerable as long as Jean-Michel was there. He was the only one who had any influence over Melchior, and who held him back to some degree from sliding further into his vice. Moreover, the universal esteem the old man enjoyed was not without its use in making people overlook the drunkard’s escapades. And he was constantly coming to the aid of the household when money ran short. In addition to the modest pension he drew as a former Kapellmeister, he continued to scrape together small sums by giving lessons and tuning pianos. He turned most of this over to his daughter-in-law, whose poverty he could see despite all her efforts to hide it from him. Louisa was distressed at the thought that he was going without for their sake; and the old man deserved all the more credit for it in that he had always been accustomed to living generously and had considerable needs. Sometimes these sacrifices were not even enough, and Jean-Michel had to sell secretly some piece of furniture, some books, some keepsakes he was attached to, in order to cover a pressing debt. Melchior noticed the gifts his father made to Louisa behind his back; and very often, despite her resistance, he helped himself to them. But when the old man found out --- not from Louisa, who kept her troubles from him, but from one of his grandchildren --- he flew into a terrible rage, and there were scenes between the two men that made the walls shake. Both were extraordinarily violent, and they quickly resorted to insults and threats; they seemed on the verge of coming to blows. But even in his most violent outbursts, an invincible respect always held Melchior back; and however drunk he was, he would end by bowing his head beneath the storm of insults and humiliating reproaches his father rained upon him. He was no less watchful for the next opportunity to start again; and Jean-Michel had grim forebodings when he thought of the future.

--- My poor children, he would say to Louisa, what would become of you if I were no longer here!… Fortunately, he added, stroking Christophe’s head, I can hold on until this one gets you out of trouble.

But he was mistaken in his calculations, and he was nearing the end of his road. No one would have guessed it. He was remarkably robust. Past eighty, he still had all his hair --- a white mane with gray tufts here and there, and in his thick beard some strands that were quite black. He had no more than ten teeth left, but he wielded them vigorously. It was a pleasure to watch him at table. He had a hearty appetite; and if he reproached Melchior for drinking, he himself drank deep. He had a particular fondness for the white wines of the Moselle. As for the rest --- wines, beers, or ciders --- he knew how to do justice to everything the Lord had created that was good. He was not so foolish as to leave his wits at the bottom of his glass, and he kept within bounds. It is true that those bounds were generous ones, and that in his glass a feebler mind would have drowned without fail. He was steady on his feet, sharp-eyed, and tireless in his activity. At six o’clock he was up, performing his toilette with meticulous care, for he valued propriety and had a respect for his own person. He lived alone in his house, attending to everything himself, and would not allow his daughter-in-law to poke her nose into his affairs; he tidied his room, made his coffee, sewed on his own buttons, hammered, glued, and mended; and, going back and forth in his shirtsleeves from the top to the bottom of the house, he sang without stopping in a resonant bass voice he took pleasure in projecting, accompanying his airs with operatic gestures. --- Then he went out, in all weathers. He attended to his business, forgetting none of it; but he was rarely punctual: one would find him at every street corner, arguing with some acquaintance or joking with a neighbor whose face he liked --- for he loved pretty young faces and old friends. He lingered and never knew what time it was. He was careful not to miss the dinner hour, however: he dined wherever he happened to be, inviting himself to people’s homes. He returned only in the evening, after dark, having spent a long time with his grandchildren. He went to bed, read a page from his old Bible before closing his eyes; and during the night --- for he never slept more than an hour or two at a stretch --- he would get up and take down one of his old secondhand books: history, theology, literature, or science; he would read at random a few pages that interested him and bored him, that he did not entirely understand but not a word of which he skipped --- until sleep overtook him again. On Sundays he went to church, walked with the children, and played boules. --- He had never been ill, except for a touch of gout in his toes that made him swear in the night in the middle of his Bible reading. It seemed he might go on this way to the end of his century, and he himself saw no reason why he should not surpass it; when people predicted he would live to be a hundred, he thought, like another illustrious old man, that one must not presume to set limits on the bounty of Providence. The only signs that he was aging were that tears came more easily to his eyes and that he grew more irritable with each passing day. The slightest provocation would throw him into fits of blind rage. His red face and short neck would turn crimson. He would stammer furiously and be forced to stop, gasping for breath. The family doctor, an old friend, had warned him to watch himself and to moderate both his temper and his appetite. But stubborn as an old man, he made all the more reckless choices out of bravado, and he mocked medicine and doctors alike. He affected a grand contempt for death, and never tired of declaring that he did not fear it.

One hot summer day, after drinking heavily and quarreling on top of it, he came home and set to work in his garden. He loved turning the earth. Bareheaded, in full sunlight, still seething from his argument, he dug furiously. Christophe was sitting under the arbor with a book in his hand, but he was barely reading — he was daydreaming, listening to the drowsy rattle of the crickets, and absently watching his grandfather’s movements. The old man had his back turned; he was bent over, pulling up weeds. Suddenly Christophe saw him straighten up, flail his arms through the air, and fall like a dead weight, face down into the earth. For a moment he almost laughed. Then he saw that the old man wasn’t moving. He called to him, ran to him, shook him with all his strength. Fear was creeping over him. He knelt down and tried with both hands to lift the heavy head pressed against the ground. It was so heavy, and he was trembling so badly, that he could barely move it. But when he saw the eyes rolled back — white and bloodshot — he went cold with horror; he let the head drop and cried out sharply. He scrambled to his feet in terror, ran away, fled outside. He was crying and screaming. A man passing on the road stopped the child. Christophe was unable to speak; but he pointed toward the house; the man went in, and Christophe followed. Others had heard the cries and were coming from the neighboring houses. Soon the garden was full of people. They trampled the flowers, bent over the old man, cried out. Two or three men lifted him from the ground. Christophe, remaining at the entrance, turned toward the wall, hid his face in his hands; he was afraid to look, but he couldn’t stop himself; and when the procession passed near him, he saw, through his fingers, the old man’s great body going limp, inert: one arm trailing on the ground; the head, resting against the knee of one of the bearers, bobbing with every step; and the face swollen, covered in mud, bleeding, with the mouth open and those terrible eyes. He screamed again and fled. He ran without stopping all the way to his mother’s house, as if he were being chased. He burst into the kitchen with dreadful cries. Louisa was peeling vegetables. He threw himself at her and clutched her desperately, so that she would help him. His face convulsed with sobs, he could barely speak. But at the first word, she understood. She turned completely white, dropped what she was holding, and, without a word, rushed out of the house.

Christophe was left alone, huddled against the wardrobe, still crying. His brothers were playing. He couldn’t quite grasp exactly what had happened; he wasn’t thinking about grandfather — he was thinking about the terrifying images he had seen a little while ago; and his terror was that he would be made to see them again, to go back there.

And indeed, toward evening, when the other children, tired of getting into every kind of trouble in the house, began to whine that they were bored and hungry, Louisa came back in a rush, took them by the hand, and led them to grandfather’s house. She walked very quickly; Ernst and Rodolphe tried to grumble, as they usually did, but Louisa silenced them with such a tone that they went quiet. An instinctive dread came over them: on the point of entering, they began to cry. It was not quite dark yet; the last glimmers of the sunset kindled strange reflections inside the house, on the doorknob, the mirror, the violin hanging on the wall in the first room, half in shadow. But in the old man’s room, a candle was lit; and its wavering flame, brushing against the livid daylight that was dying out, made the heavy darkness of the bedroom more oppressive. Seated near the window, Melchior was weeping loudly. The doctor, bent over the bed, blocked the view of whoever lay there. Christophe’s heart was pounding fit to break. Louisa made the children kneel at the foot of the bed. Christophe dared to look. He had braced himself for something so terrifying, after that afternoon’s spectacle, that at first glance he was almost relieved. Grandfather was motionless and seemed to be sleeping. The child had, for a moment, the illusion that grandfather had recovered and that everything was over. But when he heard his labored breathing, when, looking more closely, he saw that swollen face where the bruise from the fall made a wide purplish stain, when he understood that the man lying there was going to die, he began to tremble; and while repeating Louisa’s prayer for grandfather to get better, he was praying inwardly that, if grandfather was not going to recover, grandfather might already be dead. He was terrified of what was about to happen.

The old man had been unconscious from the moment he fell. He regained consciousness only once, for just long enough to grasp his situation — and it was dreadful. The priest was there, reciting the last prayers over him. The old man was raised up on his pillow; he reopened his eyes heavily, eyes that seemed no longer to obey his will; he breathed noisily, looked without comprehension at the faces, the lights; and suddenly he opened his mouth; an unspeakable terror was written across his features.

--- But then… --- he stammered, --- but then, I am going to die.

The terrible accent of that voice pierced Christophe to the heart; it was never to leave his memory. The old man spoke no more — he moaned like a small child. Then the numbness took hold of him again; but his breathing grew even more painful; he complained, he moved his hands, he seemed to struggle against the mortal sleep. In his half-consciousness, he called out once:

--- Maman!

Oh, the piercing impression of that old man’s babbling, calling out for his mother in anguish, as Christophe himself might have done --- his mother, of whom he never spoke in ordinary life, and toward whom he turned now by instinct, supreme and useless refuge in the supreme terror!… He seemed to grow calm for a moment; he had one more flicker of consciousness. His heavy eyes, whose irises seemed to float adrift, found the child, frozen with fear. They brightened. The old man made an effort to smile and speak. Louisa took Christophe and brought him close to the bed. Jean-Michel moved his lips and tried to stroke the boy’s head with his hand. But immediately he sank back into his torpor. That was the end.

The children had been sent to the next room; but there was too much to do to look after them; and Christophe, drawn by horror, watched through the half-open door the tragic face thrown back against the pillow, strangled by the fierce grip tightening around the throat --- that face which was hollowing out from moment to moment --- that sinking of a being into the void, which seemed to suck him down like a pump --- and the abominable death rattle, that mechanical breathing like an air bubble bursting at the surface of water, those last breaths of the body, which insists on living when the soul is already gone. --- Then the head slid to the side of the pillow. And everything fell silent.

It was only a few minutes later, in the midst of sobs, prayers, and the confusion brought on by death, that Louisa noticed the child — ashen, eyes wide, mouth clenched, convulsively gripping the door handle. She ran to him. He was seized by a fit in her arms. She carried him away. He lost consciousness. He came to in his bed, screamed in terror because he had been left alone for a moment, suffered another fit, and fainted again. He spent the rest of that night and all the next day in fever. Finally he grew calm and fell, on the second night, into a deep sleep that lasted until midday of the following day. He had the impression that people were walking in the room, that his mother was leaning over his bed and kissing him; he thought he heard the soft and distant singing of bells. But he had no desire to move; he was as if in a dream.

When he opened his eyes, his uncle Gottfried was seated at the foot of the bed. Christophe was broken and remembered nothing. Then his memory returned, and he began to cry. Gottfried stood up and embraced him.

--- Well, my little one, well? he said gently.

--- Ah! Uncle, uncle! the child moaned, pressing close to him.

--- Cry, said Gottfried, cry!

He was crying too.

When he had grown somewhat calmer, Christophe wiped his eyes and looked at Gottfried. Gottfried understood that he wanted to ask something.

--- No, he said, putting a finger to his lips. There is no use talking. Crying is good. Talking is bad.

The child persisted.

--- It serves no purpose.

--- Just one thing, one single thing!…

--- What?

Christophe hesitated:

--- Ah! Uncle, he asked, where is he now?

Gottfried answered:

--- He is with the Lord, my child.

But that was not what Christophe was asking:

--- No, you don’t understand: Where is he?

(He meant the body.)

He went on in a trembling voice:

--- Is he still in the house?

--- The dear man was buried this morning, said Gottfried. Did you not hear the bells?

Christophe was relieved. Then, at the thought that he would never see dear grandfather again, he wept once more, bitterly.

--- Poor little cat! Gottfried kept repeating, looking at the child with compassion.

Christophe was waiting for Gottfried to comfort him; but Gottfried did not try, knowing that it is useless.

--- Uncle Gottfried, the child asked, are you not afraid of it yourself, then?

(How much he wished that Gottfried were not afraid, and that he would teach him his secret!)

But Gottfried grew troubled.

--- Hush! he said, in an altered voice…

--- And how could one not be afraid? he said after a moment. But what is to be done? That is how it is. One must submit.

Christophe shook his head in revolt.

--- One must submit, my child, Gottfried repeated. He willed it up there. One must love what He wills.

--- I hate Him! Christophe cried bitterly, shaking his fist at the sky.

Gottfried, horrified, hushed him. Christophe himself was frightened by what he had just said, and he began to pray with Gottfried. But his heart was seething; and while he repeated the words of servile humility and resignation, there was nothing in him but a feeling of passionate revolt and horror at the abominable thing, and at the monstrous Being who had been able to create it.

The days pass, and the rainy nights, over the freshly turned earth at the bottom of which poor old Jean-Michel lies abandoned. At the time, Melchior wept a great deal, cried, sobbed. But the week is not over before Christophe hears him laughing heartily. When the dead man’s name is spoken in front of him, his face falls and takes on a mournful expression; but a moment later he begins again to talk and gesticulate with animation. He is sincerely grieved; but it is impossible for him to remain under a sad impression.

Louisa, passive and resigned, has accepted this sorrow as she accepts everything. She has added a prayer to her daily prayers; she goes to the cemetery regularly and tends the grave, as if the grave were part of the household.

Gottfried has touching attentions for the little plot of earth where the old man sleeps. When he comes to the region, he brings a small offering — a cross he has made, some flowers that Jean-Michel loved. He never fails to do this, even if he passes only a few hours in town; and he does it in secret.

Louisa sometimes takes Christophe with her on her visits to the cemetery. Christophe has a dreadful aversion to that rich earth, clothed in its sinister finery of flowers and trees, and to the heavy smell that hangs in the sunlight, mingled with the breath of the whispering cypresses. But he dare not admit his repugnance, because he reproaches himself for it as cowardice and impiety. He is very unhappy. His grandfather’s death never stops haunting him. And yet it has been a long time since he knew what death was, thought about it, and feared it. But he had never yet seen it; and whoever sees it for the first time discovers that he knew nothing before — neither of death nor of life. Everything is shaken at a single blow; all the reason one possesses is of no use. One believed one was living, one believed one had some experience of life: one sees that one knew nothing, one sees that one saw nothing, that one was living wrapped in a veil of illusions that the mind had woven and that hid from one’s eyes the terrible face of reality. There is no relation between the idea of suffering and the being that bleeds and suffers. There is no relation between the thought of death and the convulsions of the flesh and the soul that struggles and dies. All human language, all human wisdom, is nothing but a puppet show of stiff automatons, beside the funereal dazzlement of reality, and the beings of mud and blood, whose every desperate and futile effort is to hold on to a life that rots a little more each day.

Christophe thought about it day and night. The memories of the agony pursued him; he heard the horrible breathing; every night, no matter what he did, he saw grandfather again. All of nature had changed; it seemed as though a mist of ice had spread over it. Around him, everywhere, whichever way he turned, he felt on his face the murderous breath of the blind and all-powerful Beast; he felt that he was under the fist of that dreadful Force of destruction, and that there was nothing to be done. But far from crushing him, this thought burned him with indignation and hatred. He was not the kind to resign himself. He threw himself headlong against the impossible; and though he broke his forehead against it again and again and recognized that he was not the stronger, he never ceased to revolt against suffering. From that time on, his life was a struggle at every moment against the ferocity of a Fate he could not accept.

The sheer harshness of life came to offer some relief from the obsession of his thoughts. The ruin of the family, which Jean-Michel alone had been holding at bay, rushed in the moment he was no longer there. With him, the Kraffts had lost their best resources; and poverty entered the house.

Melchior made things worse still. Far from working harder, he gave himself over entirely to his vice once the only check on him was removed. Nearly every night he came home drunk, and he never brought back a penny of what he had earned. For that matter, he had lost almost all his pupils. Once he had shown up at a student’s house in a state of complete inebriation: after that scandal, every household closed its doors to him. At the orchestra, he was tolerated only out of respect for his father’s memory; but Louisa trembled that he might be dismissed any day after some fresh outrage. He had already been seriously threatened with it, on certain evenings when he had arrived at his music stand toward the end of the performance. Two or three times he had forgotten to come altogether. And what was he not capable of in those moments of stupid excitement, when he was seized by an urge to say and do foolish things! Did he not take it into his head, one evening, to perform his great violin concerto in the middle of an act of the Walküre! It took enormous effort to stop him. It also happened that he burst out laughing during a performance, carried away by amusing images unfolding on the stage or in his own mind. He was the delight of his neighbors, and much was forgiven him on account of his absurdity. But that indulgence was worse than severity itself; and Christophe was dying of shame.

The boy was now first violin in the orchestra. He arranged things so as to keep watch over his father, to stand in for him when needed, to impose silence on him when Melchior was in one of his expansive moods. It was not easy, and the best approach was to pay him no attention at all; otherwise the drunkard, the moment he felt himself observed, would pull faces or launch into a speech. Christophe therefore looked away, trembling lest his father commit some eccentricity; he tried to lose himself in his work, but he could not help hearing Melchior’s remarks and the laughter of his neighbors. Tears would come to his eyes. The musicians, decent men, had noticed this, and they pitied him; they muffled their outbursts and spoke of his father out of Christophe’s earshot. But Christophe sensed their commiseration. He knew that the moment he was gone, the mockery resumed its usual course, and that Melchior was the laughingstock of the town. He could do nothing to prevent it, and it was a torment for him. He walked his father home after the performance; he gave him his arm, endured his rambling talk, did his best to conceal the unsteadiness of his gait. But who was he fooling? And despite all his efforts, it was rare that he managed to get Melchior all the way home. Arriving at the turn in the street, Melchior would declare that he had an urgent appointment with a few friends, and no argument could persuade him to miss that engagement. It was even wise not to press the matter too hard, if one did not wish to invite a scene of paternal imprecations that brought the neighbors to their windows.

Every last penny of the household money went to it. Melchior was not satisfied with drinking away what he earned. He drank away what his wife and son had worked so hard to earn. Louisa wept; but she dared not resist, since her husband had harshly reminded her that nothing in the house was hers, and that he had married her without a sou. Christophe tried to push back: Melchior cuffed him, called him a rascal, and took the money out of his hands. The boy was twelve or thirteen, sturdy, and beginning to chafe against these corrections; yet he was still afraid to revolt; and rather than expose himself to fresh humiliations of that kind, he let himself be stripped. The only recourse he and Louisa had was to hide their money. But Melchior had a singular ingenuity for discovering their hiding places whenever they were not at home.

Before long, even that was not enough for him. He sold the objects inherited from his father. Christophe watched with anguish as precious mementos departed: the books, the bed, the furniture, the portraits of musicians. He could say nothing. But one day when Melchior, having banged sharply into grandfather’s old piano, cursed with anger as he rubbed his knee and said that there was no room to move in one’s own home and that he was going to clear the house of all this old rubbish, Christophe cried out in protest. It was true that the rooms were cluttered, since grandfather’s furniture had been piled into them when his house --- the dear house where Christophe had spent the best hours of his childhood --- was sold. It was also true that the old piano was no longer worth much, that it had a quavering voice, and that Christophe had long since stopped playing it, preferring the fine new piano obtained through the prince’s generosity; but old and decrepit as it was, it was Christophe’s closest friend: it was the one that had revealed to the boy the boundless world of music; it was on its yellowed keys, polished by so many fingers, that he had discovered the kingdom of sounds and their laws; it was grandfather’s own work, who had spent months repairing it for his grandson and was proud of it: it was, in a sense, a sacred object. And so Christophe protested that they had no right to sell it. Melchior ordered him to be quiet. Christophe shouted louder that the piano was his and that he forbade anyone to touch it. He expected to receive a solid thrashing. But Melchior looked at him with a malicious smile, and said nothing.

The next day, Christophe had forgotten all about it. He came home tired but in fairly good spirits. He was struck by the furtive glances of his brothers. They both pretended to be absorbed in reading; but they followed him with their eyes, watching his every movement, and plunging back into their books the moment he looked at them. He had no doubt they had played some trick on him; he was used to that, and he was not alarmed, resolved that when he discovered it he would thrash them soundly, as was his custom. He therefore disdained to investigate and began talking with his father, who was sitting by the fire and questioning him about his day with an affectation of interest quite unlike him. While he was speaking, he noticed that Melchior was secretly exchanging winks with the two little ones. His heart tightened. He ran to his room… The piano’s place was empty! He let out a cry of pain. He heard the stifled laughter of his brothers from the other room. All the blood rushed to his face. He leapt toward them. He cried:

--- My piano!

Melchior raised his head with a look of calm bewilderment that made the children burst out laughing. He himself could not hold back when he saw Christophe’s pitiful expression; and he turned away to splutter with laughter. Christophe lost all awareness of what he was doing. He threw himself like a madman at his father. Melchior, leaning back in his armchair, had no time to defend himself. The boy had seized him by the throat and was shouting at him:

--- Thief!

It was over in a flash. Melchior shook himself free and sent Christophe rolling across the floor, clinging furiously as he fell. The boy’s head struck the andirons. Christophe got back on his knees, his forehead split open; and he kept repeating in a strangled voice:

--- Thief!… Thief who steals from us, from Mama, from me!… Thief who sells grandfather!

Melchior stood up and raised his fist over Christophe’s head. The boy stared up at him with hatred in his eyes and trembled with rage. Melchior began to tremble too. He sat down and buried his face in his hands. The two little ones had fled with sharp cries. The uproar gave way to silence. Melchior moaned vague, half-formed words. Christophe, pressed against the wall, kept his eyes fixed on him, teeth clenched, shaking in every limb. Melchior began to accuse himself:

--- I am a thief! I am stripping my own family bare. My children despise me. I would be better off dead!

When he had finished lamenting, Christophe, without moving, asked in a hard voice:

--- Where is the piano?

--- At Wormser’s, said Melchior, not daring to look at him.

Christophe took a step forward and said:

--- The money!

Melchior, crushed, drew the money from his pocket and handed it to his son. Christophe moved toward the door. Melchior called after him:

--- Christophe!

Christophe stopped. Melchior went on, in a trembling voice:

--- My little Christophe!… Don’t despise me!

Christophe threw his arms around his neck and sobbed:

--- Papa, dear Papa! I don’t despise you! I am so unhappy!

They wept noisily. Melchior lamented:

--- It’s not my fault. I am not a bad man, after all. Am I, Christophe? Come now, I am not a bad man?

He promised to drink no more. Christophe nodded skeptically; and Melchior agreed that he could not resist when he had money in his hands. Christophe thought for a moment and said:

--- You know, Papa, what we ought to do…

He stopped.

--- What?

--- I’m ashamed…

--- For whom? Melchior asked naively.

--- For you.

Melchior made a face and said:

--- Never mind that.

Christophe explained that all the family’s money, even Melchior’s salary, ought to be entrusted to someone else, who would give Melchior day by day, or week by week, what he needed. Melchior, who was in a mood for humility --- he was not entirely sober --- went even further than the suggestion and declared that he wanted to write, then and there, a letter to the grand duke, asking that the pension due to him be paid regularly in his name to Christophe. Christophe refused, blushing at his father’s humiliation. But Melchior, consumed by a thirst for self-sacrifice, insisted on writing. He was moved himself by the magnanimity of his gesture. Christophe refused to take the letter; and Louisa, who had just come home and been told the whole story, declared that she would sooner beg in the streets than force her husband to such an affront. She added that she trusted him, and was certain he would reform out of love for them and for himself. It ended in a scene of general tender emotion; and Melchior’s letter, forgotten on the table, fell beneath the wardrobe, where it lay hidden.

But a few days later, Louisa found it there while doing her housework; and as she was very unhappy at the time over Melchior’s renewed disorders, who had forgotten everything, instead of tearing the paper up she set it aside. She kept it for several months, always pushing away the thought of using it, despite the suffering she endured. But one day, when she saw Melchior once again beat Christophe and take the money from his hands, she could bear it no longer; and alone with the weeping boy, she went and fetched the letter, gave it to him, and said:

--- Go.

Christophe still hesitated; but he understood that there was no other way left, if they were to save from total ruin what little remained to them. He went to the palace. He took nearly an hour to cover a twenty-minute walk. The shame of what he was doing weighed on him. His pride, which had grown fierce in these recent years of sadness and isolation, ached at the thought of publicly acknowledging his father’s vice. With a strange and natural inconsistency, he knew that this vice was common knowledge; and he stubbornly clung to appearing unaware of it, pretending to notice nothing: he would have let himself be cut to pieces rather than admit it. And now, of his own accord, he was going to…! Twenty times he was on the verge of turning back; he circled the town two or three times, retracing his steps just as he was about to arrive. But it was not his concern alone. His mother was at stake, his brothers. Since his father was abandoning them, betraying them, it fell to him, the eldest son, to take his place, to come to their aid. There was no more room for hesitation, for pride: he had to swallow the shame. He entered the palace. On the staircase he nearly fled again. He knelt down on a step. He remained on the landing for several minutes, his hand on the door handle, until someone coming up the stairs forced him to go in.

Everyone in the offices knew him. He asked to speak with His Excellency the intendant of the theaters, Baron von Hammer Langbach. A young clerk --- plump, bald, with a rosy complexion, a white waistcoat, and a pink cravat --- shook his hand familiarly and began talking about the previous night’s opera. Christophe repeated his question. The clerk replied that His Excellency was occupied at the moment, but that if Christophe had a petition to present, it could be sent in with the other papers that were about to be brought for his signature. Christophe handed over the letter. The clerk glanced at it and exclaimed in surprise:

--- Well, I never! he said cheerfully. Now there’s a good idea! He should have thought of it long ago! It’s the best thing he’s done in his entire life. Ah, the old soak! However in the world did he bring himself to do it?

He stopped short. Christophe had snatched the paper from his hands and was crying, white with fury:

--- I forbid you…! I forbid you to insult me!

The official was stupefied:

--- But, dear Christophe, he tried to say, who is thinking of insulting you? I only said what everyone thinks. You think it yourself.

--- No! Christophe cried furiously.

--- What! You don’t think so? You don’t think he drinks?

--- That is not true! said Christophe.

He stamped his foot.

The clerk shrugged:

--- In that case, why did he write this letter?

--- Because… said Christophe --- (he no longer knew what to say) --- because, since I come to collect my salary every month, I prefer to collect my father’s at the same time. There is no need for us both to make the trip… My father is very busy.

He blushed at the absurdity of his explanation. The clerk looked at him with a mixture of irony and pity. Christophe, crumpling the paper in his hand, made as if to leave. The other man rose and took him by the arm.

--- Wait a moment, he said, I’ll sort this out.

He went into the director’s office. Christophe waited, under the eyes of the other clerks. His blood was boiling. He didn’t know what he was doing, what he was about to do, what he ought to do. He thought about slipping away before the answer came back; and he was preparing to do so when the door opened again:

--- His Excellency is pleased to receive you, the overly helpful clerk told him.

Christophe had to go in.

His Excellency the Baron de Hammer Langbach, a neat little old man with sideburns, a mustache, and a clean-shaved chin, looked at Christophe over his gold-rimmed spectacles without pausing in his writing or acknowledging with so much as a nod the boy’s awkward greetings.

--- So, he said after a moment, you are requesting, Herr Krafft?…

--- Your Excellency, Christophe said hastily, I beg you to forgive me. I have thought it over. I am no longer requesting anything.

The old man did not seek any explanation for this sudden reversal. He looked at Christophe more carefully, gave a small cough, and said:

--- Would you give me, Herr Krafft, the letter you are holding in your hand?

Christophe realized that the intendant’s gaze was fixed on the paper he was still, without thinking, crumpling in his fist.

--- It’s pointless, Your Excellency, he stammered. There’s no need for it now.

--- Give it to me, please, the old man resumed calmly, as if he had not heard.

Christophe, mechanically, handed over the crumpled letter; but he launched into a torrent of muddled words, reaching out his hand the whole time to get the letter back. His Excellency carefully unfolded the paper, read it, looked at Christophe, let him flounder through his explanations, then interrupted him and said, with a mischievous gleam in his eyes:

--- Very well, Herr Krafft. The request is granted.

With a wave of his hand he dismissed him and plunged back into his papers.

Christophe left, mortified.

--- No hard feelings, Christophe! the clerk said to him warmly as the boy passed back through the office. Christophe let his hand be taken and shaken, not daring to raise his eyes. He found himself outside the castle. He was frozen with shame. Everything that had been said to him came flooding back to his mind; and he imagined he could feel an insulting irony in the pity of the people who esteemed him and felt sorry for him. He went home and answered Louisa’s questions with barely a few irritated words, as if he held a grudge against her for what he had just done. He was torn with remorse at the thought of his father. He wanted to confess everything, to ask for forgiveness. Melchior was not there. Christophe waited for him without sleeping, until the middle of the night. The more he thought about him, the greater his remorse grew; he idealized him; he pictured him weak, good-hearted, unhappy, betrayed by his own family. The moment he heard his step on the stairs, he leaped out of bed to run and meet him and throw himself in his arms. But Melchior came home in so disgusting a state of drunkenness that Christophe hadn’t even the courage to go near him; and he went back to bed, bitterly mocking his own illusions.

When Melchior, a few days later, learned what had happened, he flew into a terrible rage; and, despite Christophe’s entreaties, went to make a scene at the palace. But he came back thoroughly crestfallen, and said not a word about what had taken place. He had been received very badly. He had been told to take a different tone --- that his pension had been kept only out of regard for his son’s merit, and that if there were the least hint of scandal from him in the future, it would be cut off entirely. And so Christophe was very surprised and very relieved to see his father accept his situation from one day to the next, and even boast of having taken the initiative in this sacrifice.

That did not prevent Melchior from going about weeping to others that he had been stripped bare by his wife and children, that he had worn himself out for them all his life, and that now they were leaving him to want for everything. He also tried to extract money from Christophe through all manner of wheedling and clever tricks, which often made Christophe want to laugh, though he had little enough reason to. But since Christophe held firm, Melchior did not press him. He felt strangely intimidated before the stern eyes of this fourteen-year-old child who was judging him. He took his revenge in secret through some small mischief or other. He would go to the tavern, drink, and treat others generously; and he paid nothing, claiming it was up to his son to settle his debts. Christophe did not protest, for fear of making the scandal worse; and, together with Louisa, they exhausted themselves paying Melchior’s debts. --- In the end, Melchior grew more and more indifferent to his duties as a violinist, now that he no longer drew the salary; and his absences from the theater became so frequent that, despite Christophe’s pleas, he was finally let go. The child thus remained alone, charged with supporting his father, his brothers, and the entire household.

And so Christophe became head of the family at fourteen.

He accepted this crushing task with resolution. His pride forbade him from relying on others’ charity. He swore to manage on his own. He had suffered too much since childhood watching his mother accept --- even seek --- humiliating handouts; it was a source of quarrels with her, whenever the good woman came home triumphant over some gift she had obtained from one of her patronesses. She saw no harm in it and rejoiced that this money allowed her to spare her Christophe a little hardship and add a dish to the meager supper. But Christophe would grow somber; he would say nothing for the rest of the evening; he would even refuse, without saying why, to touch food that had been obtained that way. Louisa would be hurt; she would clumsily urge her son to eat --- he would hold out; she would end up losing patience and say unpleasant things, to which he would reply; then he would throw his napkin on the table and walk out. His father shrugged and called him a show-off. His brothers laughed at him and ate his share.

Still, they had to find the means to live. His orchestra salary was no longer enough. He gave lessons. His talent as a performer, his good reputation, and above all the prince’s patronage, brought him a large clientele among the upper bourgeoisie. Every morning from nine o’clock onward he taught piano to young girls, often older than himself, who intimidated him terribly with their coquetries and maddened him with the vapidity of their playing. In music they were perfectly dense; but they all possessed, to a greater or lesser degree, a keen sense of the ridiculous; and their mocking glances showed no mercy for any of his awkwardnesses. It was a torment for him. Seated beside them on the edge of his chair, red-faced and stiff, bursting with anger yet not daring to stir, holding himself back with all his might to keep from saying something foolish, afraid of the sound of his own voice, struggling to get a word out of his throat, trying to look stern and feeling himself watched out of the corner of an eye, he would lose his composure, grow muddled in the middle of a remark, fear he was being ridiculous, and in fact become so, and flare up into hurtful reproaches. But his students had no trouble exacting revenge; and they never missed the opportunity, disconcerting him with a certain way of looking at him, or of asking him the simplest questions, which made him blush to the roots of his hair; or they would ask him a small favor --- such as fetching something forgotten on a piece of furniture --- which was for him the most painful ordeal; because he had to cross the room under a barrage of malicious eyes that mercilessly watched for the slightest clumsiness in his movements, his ungainly legs, his stiff arms, his body locked up with embarrassment.

From these lessons he had to rush to the theater rehearsal. Often he had no time to have lunch; he would carry a piece of bread and cold cuts in his pocket and eat it during the intermission. He sometimes stood in for Tobias Pfeiffer, the Musik Direktor, who took an interest in him and had him conduct rehearsals in his place from time to time. He also had to continue his own musical education. More piano lessons filled the rest of his day up to the hour of the performance. And very often, in the evening, after the show ended, he would be asked to play at the castle. There he would have to perform for an hour or two. The princess claimed to know something about music; she was very fond of it, without ever having been able to distinguish between the good and the bad. She imposed on Christophe bizarre programs in which flat rhapsodies rubbed shoulders with masterworks. But her greatest pleasure was to have him improvise; and she would supply the themes, of a nauseating sentimentality.

Christophe left there around midnight, exhausted, his hands burning, his head feverish, his stomach empty. He was drenched in sweat; and outside, snow was sometimes falling, or a frozen fog. He had more than half the city to cross to get home; he went on foot, teeth chattering, wanting to sleep and to cry; and he had to take care not to soil his only evening suit in the puddles.

He would come back to his room, which he still shared with his brothers; and never did the disgust and despair of his life, never did the sense of his loneliness, weigh on him so heavily as at that moment when, in that garret with its stifling smell, he was at last allowed to set down the yoke of his misery. He barely had the courage to undress. Fortunately, the moment he laid his head on the pillow, he was struck down by a heavy sleep that stripped him of all awareness of his suffering.

But at dawn in summer, and well before it in winter, he had to get up. He wanted to work for himself: it was the only free time he had, between five and eight in the morning. Even then he had to sacrifice part of it to work done to order; for his title of Hof Musicus, and his standing with the grand duke, required him to produce official compositions for the court celebrations.

And so, the very spring of his life was poisoned. Even his dreams were not free. But, as is usually the case, constraint made them stronger. When nothing impedes action, the soul has far less reason to act. The more tightly the prison of worries and petty tasks closed around Christophe, the more his rebellious heart felt its independence. In an unfettered life, he would no doubt have given himself over to the whim of each hour and the voluptuous idleness of adolescence. Because he could be free only for an hour or two a day, his energy hurled itself through that opening like a torrent between rocks. It is good discipline for art to confine one’s efforts within relentless limits. In this sense one can say that hardship is a master, not only of thought, but of style; it teaches sobriety to the mind as to the body. When time is rationed and words are counted, one says nothing superfluous and forms the habit of thinking only what is essential. And so one lives doubly, having less time to live.

That is what happened to Christophe. Under the yoke he grew fully conscious of the value of freedom; and he did not squander precious minutes on useless acts or words. His natural tendency to write with a rambling abundance, giving in to every impulse of a sincere but undiscriminating mind, found its corrective in the obligation to think and act as much as possible in as little time as possible. Nothing had so great an influence on his artistic and moral development --- neither the lessons of his teachers, nor the example of the masterworks. He formed, in those years when character takes shape, the habit of treating music as a precise language in which every note has a meaning; and he formed at the same time a hatred of musicians who speak only to say nothing.

And yet the compositions he was writing at the time were still far from expressing him fully, because he himself was still far from having fully discovered himself. He was searching for himself through the accumulation of received feelings that education imposes on a child like a second nature. He had only intimations of his true self, not yet having experienced the passions of adolescence that strip away a person’s borrowed clothing as a thunderclap purges the sky of the vapors that envelop it. Dark and powerful premonitions mingled in him with foreign reminiscences he could not shake off. He was irritated by these falsehoods. He was dismayed to see how inferior what he wrote was to what he thought. He doubted himself bitterly. But he could not resign himself to such stupid defeat; he raged to do better, to write great things. And always he failed. After a moment of illusion while he was writing, he would realize what he had written was worthless; he would tear it up, burn everything he made. And to cap his shame, he had to watch his official works --- the most mediocre of all --- be preserved beyond his reach and beyond his power to destroy them: the concerto The Royal Eagle, written for the prince’s birthday, and the cantata The Hymen of Pallas, written on the occasion of Princess Adélaïde’s marriage, published at great expense in luxury editions that would perpetuate his imbecility for centuries to come --- for he believed in centuries to come. --- He wept with humiliation.

Feverish years! No respite, no let-up. Nothing to provide any diversion from this maddening labor. No games, no friends. How could there be? In the afternoons, when other children were at play, little Christophe, his brow furrowed with concentration, sat at his music stand in the dusty, poorly lit theater hall. And in the evenings, when other children were in bed, he was still there, slumped in his chair, tense with fatigue.

No real closeness with his brothers. The younger one, Ernst, was twelve years old: a little scoundrel, vicious and brazen, who spent his days with a pack of rascals like himself, and in their company had acquired not only deplorable habits but shameful vices that the honest Christophe, who could not even have conceived of such things, had one day discovered with horror. The other, Rodolphe, Uncle Théodore’s favorite, was destined for commerce. He was orderly and quiet, but sly; he considered himself far superior to Christophe and refused to accept his authority over the household, though he found it perfectly natural to eat his bread. He had adopted Théodore’s and Melchior’s grievances against him and repeated their ridiculous gossip. Neither brother liked music; and Rodolphe, in imitation of his uncle, made a show of despising it. Uncomfortable under Christophe’s watchfulness and reprimands---for he took his role as head of the family very seriously---the two younger boys had tried to revolt; but Christophe, who had a solid pair of fists and a clear conscience of his rights, kept them in line. Still, they made him do whatever they liked; they exploited his credulity, set traps for him that he never failed to fall into, extorted money from him, lied shamelessly, and mocked him behind his back. Good-natured Christophe always let himself be caught; he had such a need to be loved that one affectionate word was enough to disarm his resentment. He would have forgiven them anything for a little love. But his trust had been cruelly shaken the day he overheard them laughing at his stupidity, after a scene of hypocritical embraces that had moved him to tears---a scene they had used to steal from him a gold watch, a gift from the prince, which they had long coveted. He despised them, and yet continued to let himself be deceived, driven by an irresistible inclination to believe and to love. He knew it; he flew into rages against himself and beat his brothers soundly whenever he discovered, once again, that they had made a fool of him. This did not prevent him from swallowing the next bait they chose to cast at him.

A more bitter suffering still awaited him. He learned through officious neighbors that his father spoke ill of him. Having been proud of his son’s successes and boasted of them everywhere, Melchior had fallen into the shameful weakness of growing jealous of them. He worked to diminish them. It was pitiful beyond words. One could only shrug with contempt; there was not even cause to be angry, for he was unconscious of what he was doing, and embittered by his own decline. Christophe held his tongue; he feared that if he spoke, he would say things too harsh to take back; but his heart was deeply wounded.

Sad gatherings, those family suppers in the evening, gathered around the lamp, over the stained tablecloth, amid the insipid conversation and the sound of chewing from these beings whom he despises, whom he pities, and whom he loves in spite of everything! With his good mother alone did Christophe feel the bond of shared affection. But Louisa, like him, was worn out by the day’s work; and in the evenings she was spent, she said almost nothing, and fell asleep in her chair after dinner while mending socks. Besides, she was so good-natured that she seemed to make no distinction in her affections between her husband and her three sons; she loved them all equally. Christophe could not find in her the confidante he so desperately needed.

And so he shut himself inside himself. He was silent for days on end, carrying out his monotonous and exhausting work with a kind of quiet fury. Such a regimen was dangerous, especially for a child, at a time of crisis, when the organism, more sensitive, is exposed to every destructive force and risks being deformed for the rest of its life. Christophe’s health suffered severely. He had inherited from his family a solid frame, sound flesh free of defect. But that vigorous body only offered more fuel to suffering once the excess of fatigue and premature worry had opened a breach through which it could enter. From a very early age he had shown fairly serious nervous disorders. As a small child he had fainting spells, convulsions, bouts of vomiting whenever he encountered some frustration. Around the age of seven or eight, at the time of his first public concerts, his sleep was troubled: he talked, cried out, laughed, wept in his sleep; and this morbid tendency recurred each time he was under intense strain. Then came cruel headaches, sometimes like sharp stabs at the back of the neck and sides of the skull, sometimes like a leaden helmet pressing down on him. His eyes troubled him: at moments it felt as though needles were being driven into his eye sockets; he had dizzy spells and could not read, and had to stop for a few minutes at a time. Inadequate or unwholesome food and irregular meals wore down his robust stomach. He was gnawed by intestinal cramps, or by a diarrhea that left him exhausted. But nothing made him suffer more than his heart: it was wildly irregular; at times it leaped and hammered in his chest as though it would burst; at other times it barely beat and seemed on the verge of stopping altogether. At night the child’s temperature swung alarmingly; it passed without transition from high fever to a state of near-collapse. He burned, he shook with cold, he felt waves of dread, his throat tightened, a knot in his neck made breathing difficult. --- Naturally, his imagination seized on all of this: he dared not speak to his family about what he was experiencing; but he analyzed it endlessly, with an attention that magnified his suffering or invented new kinds. He convinced himself, one after another, that he had every illness known to medicine; he believed he was going blind; and since he sometimes felt dizzy while walking, he feared he would suddenly drop stone dead. --- Always this terrible fear of being stopped along the way, of dying before his time, obsessed him, crushed him, and drove him forward all at once. Ah! if he had to die, then at least not now, not before he had conquered!…

Victory… the fixed idea that never stops burning in him, without his being fully aware of it, that sustains him through all the disgust, the fatigue, the stagnant swamp of this life! A dull and powerful awareness of what he will be one day, of what he already is!… What is he? A sickly, nervous child who plays violin in the orchestra and writes mediocre concertos? --- No. Far beyond that child. This is only the shell, the face of a passing day. This is not his Being. There is no connection between his Being and the present form of his face and his thought. He knows it himself. When he looks in the mirror, he does not recognize himself. That broad, ruddy face, those prominent brows, those small sunken eyes, that short nose blunt at the tip with its wide nostrils, that heavy jaw, that sulking mouth, all that ugly and common mask---it is foreign to him. He no more recognizes himself in his works. He judges himself; he knows the worthlessness of everything he does, of everything he is at this moment. And yet he is certain of what he will be and what he will do. He sometimes reproaches himself for this certainty, as if it were a lie born of pride; and he takes pleasure in humiliating himself, in bitter self-mortification, as a way of punishing himself. But the certainty persists, and nothing can alter it. Whatever he does, whatever he thinks, none of his thoughts, his actions, his works, contains or expresses him; he knows it, he has this strange feeling that what he most truly is, is not what he is now, but what he will be, what he will be tomorrow. He will be!… He burns with this faith, he is intoxicated by this light! Ah! let today not stop him along the way! Let him not stumble in one of the cunning snares that today never tires of laying beneath his feet!

And so he steers his bark through the flood of days, without turning his eyes to the right or the left, motionless at the helm, his gaze fixed and intent on the goal, the haven, the end he can just make out in the distance. In the orchestra, among the chattering musicians, at the table amid his family, in the palace, while he plays---without thinking of what he plays---for the amusement of those princely puppets, it is in that uncertain future, a future that a single atom might destroy forever---no matter!---it is there that he lives.

He is at his old piano, in his garret, alone. Night is falling. The dying light of day slides across the music score. He strains his eyes to read it, to the very last drop of light. The tenderness of great, extinguished hearts, breathing out from those silent pages, enters him gently and lovingly. His eyes fill with tears. It seems to him that a beloved being is standing behind him, that a breath caresses his cheek, that two arms are about to embrace his neck. He turns, shivering. He feels, he knows, that he is not alone. A loving and beloved soul is there, beside him. He moans at not being able to take hold of it. And yet this shadow of bitterness, mingled with his ecstasy, still holds a secret sweetness. Even sadness here is luminous. He thinks of his beloved masters, those vanished geniuses whose souls live again in these pieces of music that once lived their lives. His heart swelling with love, he imagines the superhuman happiness that must have been the portion of those glorious friends, since even a reflection of their happiness is still so burning. He dreams of being like them, of radiating that love, whose few lost rays illuminate his misery with a divine smile. To be a god in his turn, to be a hearth of joy, to be a sun of life!…

Alas! If one day he becomes the equal of those he loves, if he attains that luminous happiness he envies, he will see his illusion…

II OTTO

One Sunday when Christophe had been invited by his Musik Direktor to come to dinner at the small country house that Tobias Pfeiffer owned an hour outside the city, he took the Rhine steamer. On the deck, he sat down next to a young man his own age, who made room for him eagerly. Christophe paid no attention to this. But after a moment, sensing that his neighbor was watching him steadily, he looked him over. He was a fair-haired boy with rosy, rounded cheeks, a neat part on the side of his head, and a shadow of down on his upper lip; he had the candid look of a large baby despite the efforts he was making to appear a gentleman; he was dressed with pretentious care: a flannel suit, pale gloves, white slippers, a pale-blue cravat bow; and he held a small riding crop in his hand. He watched Christophe from the corner of his eye without turning his head, neck stiff, like a hen; and when Christophe looked back at him, he blushed all the way to his ears, pulled a newspaper from his pocket, and pretended to be absorbed in it with an air of importance. But a few minutes later he lunged forward to pick up Christophe’s hat, which had fallen. Christophe, surprised by such courtesy, looked again at the young man, who again blushed; he thanked him curtly, for he did not like that kind of obsequious eagerness, and he hated having people fuss over him. Nevertheless, he was not entirely displeased by it.

Soon he forgot about it; his attention was caught by the landscape. It had been a long time since he had been able to escape the city; and he drank in greedily the air that beat against his face, the sound of the waves against the hull, the great flat sweep of water and the ever-changing scene of the banks: gray and flat shores, willows dipping half their length into the water, towns crowned with Gothic towers and factory chimneys trailing black smoke, golden vineyards and legendary cliffs. And as he exclaimed aloud at the sight, his neighbor timidly, in a strangled voice, ventured a few historical details about the ruins they could see, skillfully restored and draped in ivy: he had the air of giving himself a lecture. Christophe, interested, asked him questions. The other hastened to reply, glad to display his knowledge; and at each sentence he addressed himself directly to Christophe, calling him: “Monsieur le Hof Violonist.”

--- You know me, then? asked Christophe.

--- Oh yes! said the boy, in a tone of naive admiration that tickled Christophe’s vanity.

They talked. The young man often saw Christophe at concerts; and his imagination had been struck by everything he had heard said about him. He did not say this to Christophe; but Christophe sensed it, and was pleasantly surprised. He was not accustomed to being spoken to in that tone of reverential emotion. He went on questioning his neighbor about the history of the regions they were passing through; the other displayed his freshly acquired knowledge; and Christophe admired his learning. But that was only the pretext for their conversation: what interested them both was getting to know each other. They did not dare approach the subject directly. They returned to it now and then through clumsy roundabout questions. At last they made up their minds; and Christophe learned that his new friend was called “monsieur Otto Diener,” and was the son of a wealthy merchant in the city. It turned out that they had acquaintances in common, and gradually their tongues loosened. They were talking with animation when the boat reached the town where Christophe was to disembark. Otto was getting off there too. This coincidence struck them as remarkable; and Christophe suggested, while waiting for his dinner hour, that they take a short walk together. They set off across the fields. Christophe had taken Otto’s arm in a familiar way and was telling him his plans, as if he had known him since birth. He had been so deprived of the company of children his own age that he felt an inexpressible joy at finding himself with this young man, educated and well-bred, who had a genuine sympathy for him.

Time passed, and Christophe took no notice of it. Diener, proud of the trust the young musician had shown him, did not dare point out that the dinner hour had already struck. At last he felt obliged to mention it; but Christophe, who had set himself on climbing up through the middle of the woods, replied that they had to reach the top first; and when they got there, he stretched out on the grass as though he intended to spend the rest of the day. After a quarter of an hour, Diener, seeing that he showed no sign of moving, slipped in timidly once more:

--- And your dinner?

Christophe, lying full length on his back, hands behind his head, said calmly:

--- To hell with it!

Then he looked at Otto, saw the look of alarm on his face, and burst out laughing:

--- It’s too nice here, he explained. I’m not going. Let them wait!

He half sat up:

--- Are you in a hurry? No, I thought not. Do you know what we should do? We’ll dine together. I know an inn.

Diener might well have had objections to raise, not because anyone was waiting for him, but because it pained him to make an unplanned decision of any kind: he was methodical and needed to prepare for things in advance. But Christophe’s question was asked in a tone that left little room for refusal. He allowed himself to be swept along, and they fell back into conversation.

At the inn, their high spirits dimmed. Both were preoccupied with the grave question of who was treating whom to dinner; and each, in secret, was determined on his honor that it should be himself --- Diener, because he was the wealthier, Christophe, because he was the poorer. Neither made any direct reference to it; but Diener did his best to assert his right, through the authoritative tone he tried to adopt when ordering the menu. Christophe understood his intention; and he topped him by ordering additional elaborate dishes; he wanted to show that he was as much at ease as anyone. And when Diener made another attempt, trying to take charge of choosing the wine, Christophe silenced him with a look, and called for a bottle of one of the most expensive vintages the inn had on offer.

Seated before a considerable spread, they were both intimidated by it. They could find nothing to say to each other; and they ate sparingly, self-conscious and cramped in their movements. They suddenly realized they were strangers to one another, and they watched themselves carefully. They made futile efforts to revive the conversation: it kept dying away. The first half-hour was deadly dull. Fortunately, the meal soon had its effect; and the two diners looked at each other with greater confidence. Christophe in particular, unaccustomed to such feasts, became remarkably talkative. He spoke of the difficulties of his life; and Otto, coming out of his reserve, confessed that he was not happy either. He was weak and timid, and his schoolmates took advantage of it. They mocked him, they would not forgive him for disapproving of their coarse ways, they played mean tricks on him. --- Christophe clenched his fists and said they would do well not to try that in his presence. --- Otto was equally misunderstood by his own family. Christophe knew that misfortune; and they commiserated over their shared miseries. Diener’s parents wanted to make him a tradesman, the successor to his father. But he wanted to be a poet. He would be a poet, even if he had to flee his town like Schiller and face down poverty! (Though, to be fair, his father’s fortune would all come to him one day, and it was considerable.) He admitted, blushing, that he had already written poems about the sadness of living; but he could not bring himself to recite them, despite Christophe’s pleading. In the end, however, he quoted two or three, stammering with feeling. Christophe found them magnificent. They exchanged their plans: one day they would work together; they would write dramas, Liederkreise. They admired each other deeply. Beyond his musical reputation, Christophe’s physical strength and his boldness of manner impressed Otto. And Christophe was susceptible to Otto’s elegance, to the refinement of his bearing --- all things being relative in this world --- and to his great learning, that learning which Christophe entirely lacked and for which he was ravenous.

Drowsy from the meal, elbows on the table, they talked and listened to each other talk, with softened eyes. The afternoon was drawing on. They had to leave. Otto made one last attempt to seize the bill; but Christophe pinned him with a sharp look that took away any desire to press the matter. Christophe had only one worry: that the bill would come to more than he had on him; he would have given his watch and everything else he carried rather than admit that to Otto. But it did not come to that; he merely spent on this dinner nearly all his money for the month.

They came back down the hill. The evening shadows were beginning to spread through the pine forest; the treetops still floated in rosy light; they swayed slowly, with the sound of swelling water; the carpet of violet needles muffled the sound of their footsteps. Both were silent. Christophe felt his heart filled with a strange and gentle restlessness; he was happy, he wanted to speak, an anguish pressed on him. He stopped for a moment, and Otto did the same. Everything was still. Flies droned high up in a shaft of sunlight. A dry branch fell. Christophe took Otto’s hand, and asked, in a voice that trembled:

--- Will you be my friend?

Otto murmured:

--- Yes.

They clasped hands; their hearts were beating fast. They barely dared look at each other.

After a moment, they started walking again. They kept a few paces apart, and said nothing more until they reached the edge of the wood: they were afraid of themselves and of their mysterious feeling; they walked very quickly and did not stop again until they had come out from under the shadow of the trees. There, they steadied themselves and took each other’s hand again. They admired the clear evening falling around them, and spoke in broken, scattered words.

On the boat, sitting at the bow in the luminous dusk, they tried to talk of indifferent things; but they did not listen to what they said; they were steeped in a happy weariness. They felt no need to speak, or to hold hands, or even to look at each other: they were there, side by side.

As they neared the landing, they agreed to meet the following Sunday. Christophe walked Otto back to his door. In the glow of the gas lamp, they smiled at each other shyly, and murmured a moved au revoir. They were relieved to part, so exhausted were they by the tension in which they had lived for the past few hours, and by the effort every word cost them whenever it broke the silence.

Christophe walked home alone through the night. His heart sang: “I have a friend, I have a friend!” He could see nothing. He heard nothing. He thought of nothing else.

He was dead on his feet, and fell asleep almost the moment he got in. But he woke two or three times in the night, as if by an obsessive thought. He repeated to himself: “I have a friend,” and fell back asleep at once.

When morning came, it seemed to him that he had dreamed the whole thing. To prove to himself it was real, he set about recalling every smallest detail of the day before. He was still absorbed in this task while giving his lessons; even that afternoon, he was so distracted at the orchestral rehearsal that by the time he left he could barely remember what he had played.

As soon as he got home, he saw a letter waiting for him. He had no need to wonder where it came from. He ran to shut himself in his room to read it. It was written on pale blue paper, in a studied, elongated, hesitant hand, with very precise flourishes:

“Dear monsieur Christophe, --- dare I say: most honored friend?

“I think constantly of our outing yesterday, and I thank you immensely for your kindness to me. I am so grateful for everything you did --- your kind words, the delightful walk, the excellent dinner! I am only sorry that you spent so much money on that dinner. What a splendid day! Is there not something providential in this astonishing encounter? It seems to me that it is Destiny itself who has wished to bring us together. How I look forward to seeing you again on Sunday! I hope you have not had too much trouble for having missed dinner at Herr Hof Musik Director’s. I would be so sorry if you had difficulties on my account!

“I am forever, most dear monsieur Christophe, your most devoted servant and friend,

“Otto Diener

“P. S. --- Please do not come to fetch me at my house on Sunday. It would be better, if you will allow it, for us to meet at the Schlossgarten.”

Christophe read this letter with tears in his eyes; he kissed it; he burst out laughing; he turned a somersault on his bed. Then he ran to his table and picked up his pen to answer at once. He could not have waited a minute. But he was not in the habit of writing; he did not know how to express what was swelling in his heart; he tore the paper with his pen and got ink all over his fingers; he stamped with impatience. At last, after sticking out his tongue and using up five or six drafts, he managed to write, in misshapen letters running in every direction, and with enormous spelling mistakes:

“My soul! How dare you speak of gratitude, because I love you? Did I not tell you how sad and lonely I was before I knew you? Your friendship is the greatest good I have. Yesterday, I was happy, happy! It is the first time in my life. I am weeping with joy as I read your letter. Yes, do not doubt it, my beloved, it is Destiny who draws us together; he wishes us to be friends, so that we may accomplish great things. Friends! What a glorious word! Can it truly be that I have a friend at last? Oh! you will not leave me anymore, will you? You will stay true to me? Always! Always!… How wonderful it will be to grow up together, to work together, to pool between us --- my own wild musical notions, all those strange things that run through my head --- and your intelligence and your astonishing learning! How much you know! I have never met a man as intelligent as you. There are moments when I feel uneasy: it seems to me that I am not worthy of your friendship. You are so noble and so accomplished, and I am so grateful to you for loving a rough creature like me!… But no! I said it just now, we must not speak of gratitude. In friendship there are no debtors, no benefactors. Favors I would not accept! We are equals, since we love each other. How I long to see you! I will not come to fetch you at your house, since you do not wish it --- though, truth be told, I do not understand all these precautions; --- but you are the wiser one, you are certainly right…

“One word only! Never speak of money again. I hate money: the word, and the thing. If I am not rich, I am always rich enough to welcome my friend; and it is my joy to give everything I have for him. Would you not do the same? And if I were ever in need, would you not be the first to give me your whole fortune? --- But that will never happen! I have strong fists and a sound head, and I shall always know how to earn my bread. --- Until Sunday! --- Good God! A whole week without seeing you! And two days ago, I did not know you! How have I lived so long without you?

“The time-beater has tried to grumble. But don’t trouble yourself about it any more than I do! What do the others matter to me? I despise what they think and what they will ever think of me. Only you matter to me. Love me well, my soul, love me as I love you! I cannot tell you how much I love you. I am yours, yours, yours, from my fingertips to the pupils of my eyes. Yours forever.

“Christophe”

Christophe tormented himself with waiting for the rest of the week. He went out of his way and made long detours to come and wander near Otto’s house --- not that he expected to see him; but the sight of his house alone was enough to make him turn pale and flush with feeling. By Thursday he could bear it no longer and sent a second letter, even more exalted than the first. Otto answered it with feeling.

Sunday came at last, and Otto was punctual. But Christophe had already spent nearly an hour devouring himself with impatience, waiting for him on the promenade. He was beginning to grow anxious at not seeing him come. He trembled that Otto might be ill; for it did not occur to him for a single instant that Otto might break his word. He kept murmuring under his breath: “Dear God, let him come!” And he knocked the little pebbles on the path with a stick; and he told himself that if he missed three times in a row, Otto would not come, but that if he hit his mark, Otto would appear at once. And despite his concentration and the ease of the test, he had just missed three times when he spotted Otto arriving at his usual calm, measured pace --- for Otto always remained composed, even when most moved. Christophe ran to him, and with a dry throat said good morning. Otto replied: good morning; and they could find nothing more to say to each other, except that the weather was very fine, and that it was five or six minutes past ten, or perhaps ten minutes past ten, since the castle clock was always behind.

They went to the station and took the train to a nearby stop, a popular excursion destination for the town. Along the way they could not manage to exchange ten words. They tried to make up for it with eloquent looks — that fared no better. No matter how much they wanted to show each other what good friends they were, their eyes said nothing at all; they were playing a role. Christophe noticed this with humiliation. He could not understand why he was unable to express — or even to feel — everything that had filled his heart an hour before. Otto perhaps did not see this failure quite so clearly, being less sincere and more indulgent toward himself when he looked inward; yet he felt the same disappointment. The truth was that both boys had spent the past week, in each other’s absence, winding their feelings to such a pitch that it was impossible to sustain it when reality intervened, and that on seeing each other again their first impression was bound to be a letdown: something had to give. But they could not bring themselves to admit it.

They wandered through the countryside all day without managing to shake off the sullen constraint that weighed on them. It was a holiday: the taverns and the woods were full of crowds of strollers --- families of petit bourgeois making a great racket and eating in every corner. This added to their ill humor; they blamed these intruders for their inability to recover the ease of that earlier walk. They talked, nonetheless, straining to find topics of conversation; they were afraid of discovering they had nothing to say to each other. Otto displayed his school learning. Christophe launched into technical explanations about musical works and the playing of the violin. They bored each other to death. They bored themselves listening to their own voices. And still they talked, terrified to stop; because when they did, abysses of silence opened up that chilled them to the bone. Otto felt like crying; and Christophe came close to simply walking away and running off at full speed, so overcome was he by shame and tedium.

Only an hour before they had to catch the train home did they thaw. Deep in the wood, a dog was baying; it was hunting on its own. Christophe suggested they hide along the quarry’s path and try to catch a glimpse of whatever was being chased. They ran into the undergrowth. The dog drew farther away, then closer again. They went right, went left, pushed forward, doubled back. The barking grew louder; the dog was choking with eagerness in its cry of carnage; it was coming toward them. Christophe and Otto lay stretched out on the dead leaves in the rut of a path, waiting, not breathing. The barking stopped; the dog had lost the scent; they heard it yelp once more, in the distance; then silence descended on the wood. Not a sound: only the mysterious teeming of millions of creatures, insects and worms, gnawing without pause and consuming the forest --- the steady breath of death, which never ceases. The boys listened, and did not move. Just as, discouraged, they were getting up to say, “It’s over. He won’t come,” --- a small hare poked out of the underbrush; it was heading straight toward them: they saw it at the same moment and let out a shriek of delight. The hare leapt in place and swerved sideways: they saw it plunge headlong into the thicket; the rustle of the crushed leaves faded like a wake on the surface of water. Although they regretted having cried out, the adventure put them in high spirits. They doubled over laughing at the thought of the hare’s startled leap, and Christophe mimicked it in a grotesque way. Otto did the same. Then they chased each other. Otto played the hare and Christophe the dog; they raced down through the woods and across the meadows, crashing through hedges and jumping over ditches. A peasant shouted at them because they had charged through a field of rye; they did not stop to listen. Christophe imitated the hoarse barking of the dog with such perfection that Otto wept with laughter. At last they let themselves roll down a slope, screaming like madmen. When they could no longer make a sound, they sat down and looked at each other with laughing eyes. They were entirely happy now and pleased with themselves. It was because they had stopped trying to play the role of heroic friends; they were frankly what they were: two children.

They went back arm in arm, singing songs that meant nothing at all. All the same, as they neared the town they thought it proper to resume their roles; and on the last tree at the edge of the wood they carved their entwined initials. But their good humor got the better of their sentimentality; and in the train on the way back they burst out laughing every time they looked at each other. They parted, each convinced they had spent a “colossally delightful” day (kolossal entzückend); and this conviction only deepened once they were alone.

They resumed their patient and ingenious work of construction, more intricate than the work of bees; for they managed to fashion from a few scraps of mediocre memories a marvelous image of themselves and their friendship. After idealizing each other all week, they would meet again on Sunday; and despite the disproportion between reality and their illusion, they grew accustomed to not noticing it and to bending things in the direction of their desire.

They took pride in being friends. The very contrast of their natures drew them together. Christophe knew nothing as beautiful as Otto. His fine hands, his pretty hair, his fresh complexion, his shy manner of speaking, the politeness of his bearing and the meticulous care of his dress delighted him. Otto was captivated by Christophe’s overflowing energy and independence. Reared by centuries of heredity to a near-religious respect for all authority, he felt a pleasure mixed with fear at associating himself with a companion so irreverently indifferent by nature to every established rule. He had a little shiver of voluptuous terror listening to him mock all the reputations in the town and impertinently impersonate the grand duke himself. Christophe noticed the fascination he exercised over his friend this way; and he exaggerated his aggressive manner; he undermined, like an old revolutionary, social conventions and the laws of the state. Otto listened, scandalized and delighted; he would venture timidly to try to fall in line; but he was careful to glance around to make sure no one could hear.

Christophe never failed, on their walks together, to jump the fences of a field the moment he saw a sign forbidding entry, or to pick fruit over the walls of private property. Otto was in an agony that they would be caught; but these alarms had for him an exquisite savor; and in the evening, when he had gone home, he felt like a hero. He admired Christophe with a kind of timid awe. His instinct for obedience found satisfaction in a friendship where all he had to do was defer to the other’s will. Christophe never troubled him with the least decision: he decided everything, decreed how their days would be spent, and already decreed how their lives would be spent, making plans for Otto’s future as for his own --- plans that admitted no discussion. Otto agreed, sometimes mildly indignant at hearing Christophe dispose of his fortune to build a theater of his own invention later on. But he did not protest, intimidated by his friend’s commanding tone and convinced by his conviction that the money amassed by Herr Commerzienrath Oscar Diener could find no nobler use. Christophe never for a moment supposed that he might be forcing Otto’s will. He was a despot by instinct and could not imagine that his friend might want anything other than what he himself wanted. Had Otto expressed a wish different from his own, he would not have hesitated to sacrifice his personal preferences. He would have sacrificed far more. He was consumed by the desire to put himself at risk for him. He yearned passionately for an occasion to put his friendship to the test. On their walks he hoped to encounter some danger and fling himself before it. He would have died with delight for Otto. In the meantime he watched over him with an anxious solicitude, taking his hand over difficult ground as one would take a little girl’s hand, worrying that he might be tired, worrying that he might be too warm, worrying that he might be too cold; he took off his jacket and threw it over Otto’s shoulders when they sat under a tree; he carried his coat when they walked; he would have carried Otto himself. He watched over him with a lover’s eyes. And in truth, he was in love.

He did not know it, not yet knowing what love was. But at moments, when they were together, they were seized by a strange unease --- the same that had gripped him on the first day of their friendship, in the pine forest --- and waves of heat rose to his face, flooding his cheeks with red. He was afraid. By some instinctive agreement, the two boys would draw shyly apart from each other, flee each other’s company, fall behind, move ahead, along the road; they would pretend to be very busy hunting for blackberries in the bushes; and they did not know what was troubling them.

But it was above all in their letters that these feelings soared. There was no risk of being contradicted by facts; and nothing came to hinder their illusions or to intimidate them. They were writing to each other now, two or three times a week, in a style of passionate lyricism. They barely touched on real events or everyday things. They wrestled with grave problems in an apocalyptic tone that passed without transition from enthusiasm to despair. They called each other “my treasure, my hope, my beloved, my other self.” They made a frightful use of the word “soul.” They painted in tragic colors the sadness of their lot, and grieved over casting the trouble of their own destiny into their friend’s life.

--- I am angry at you, my love, Christophe wrote, for the pain I cause you. I cannot bear to think that you are suffering: it must not be, I will not have it. (He underlined the words with a stroke that tore through the paper.) If you suffer, where will I find the strength to live? All my happiness is in you. Oh, be happy! All the pain I gladly take upon myself! Think of me. Love me! I have an extreme need to be loved. From your love there comes a warmth that gives me life. If you knew how I shiver! It is winter and bitter wind in my heart. I embrace your soul.

--- My thought kisses yours, Otto replied.

--- I take your head between my hands, Christophe shot back; and what I have not done and will not do with my lips, I do with my whole being: I embrace you as I love you. Take the measure of that!

Otto pretended to have doubts:

--- Do you love me as much as I love you?

--- Oh, God! Christophe cried, not as much, but ten, a hundred, a thousand times more! What! Can you not feel it? What would you have me do, that might move your heart?

--- What a beautiful friendship ours is! Otto sighed. Has there ever been one like it in history? It is sweet and fresh as a dream. Please may it never pass! If you were to stop loving me!

--- How foolish you are, my beloved, Christophe replied. Forgive me, but your pusillanimous fear fills me with indignation. How can you ask me whether I might cease to love you! To live, for me, is to love you. Death can do nothing against my love. You yourself could do nothing, even if you wished to destroy it. If you were to betray me, if you were to tear my heart to pieces, I would die blessing you for the love you inspire in me. Stop, once and for all, troubling yourself and grieving me with these cowardly anxieties!

But a week later it was he who wrote:

--- Three whole days now since I have heard a word from your lips. I am trembling. Have you forgotten me? My blood runs cold at the thought… Yes! No doubt… The other day, I had already noticed your coldness toward me. You no longer love me! You are thinking of leaving me!… Listen! If you forget me, if you ever betray me, I will kill you like a dog!

--- You insult me, my dear heart, Otto moaned. You draw tears from me. I do not deserve it. But you may do anything with me. You have taken such rights over me that, even if you shattered my soul, one living fragment would always remain to love you!

--- Heavenly powers! Christophe cried. I have made my friend weep!… Insult me! Strike me! Trample me underfoot! I am a wretch! I do not deserve your love!

They had special ways of writing each other’s address on the envelope, of placing the postage stamp --- upside down, at an angle, in the lower right-hand corner --- to distinguish their letters from those they wrote to people who meant nothing to them. These childish secrets had for them the charm of tender love mysteries.

One day, coming back from a lesson, Christophe spotted on a nearby street Otto in the company of a boy his own age. They were laughing and talking easily together. Christophe went pale and followed them with his eyes until they had disappeared around the corner of the street. They had not seen him. He went home. It was as if a cloud had passed across the sun. Everything was darkened.

When they met again the following Sunday, Christophe said nothing at first. But after half an hour of walking, he said in a strangled voice:

--- I saw you on Wednesday, in the Kreuzgasse.

--- Ah! said Otto.

And he blushed.

Christophe went on:

--- You were not alone.

--- No, said Otto, I was with someone.

Christophe swallowed and asked in a tone meant to seem indifferent:

--- Who was it?

--- My cousin Franz.

--- Ah! said Christophe.

And after a moment:

--- You hadn’t mentioned him to me.

--- He lives in Rheinbach.

--- Do you see him often?

--- He comes here sometimes.

--- And do you go to see him too?

--- Sometimes.

--- Ah! Christophe said again.

Otto, who was not unhappy to steer the conversation elsewhere, pointed out a bird pecking at a tree. They talked of other things. Ten minutes later, Christophe broke in abruptly:

--- Do you get along together?

--- With whom? asked Otto.

(He knew perfectly well with whom.)

--- With your cousin?

--- Yes. Why?

--- No reason.

Otto did not much like his cousin, who pestered him with bad jokes. But some strange instinct of malice pushed him to add, after a moment:

--- He is very agreeable.

--- Who? asked Christophe.

(He knew very well who.)

--- Franz.

Otto waited for some remark from Christophe; but Christophe seemed not to have heard — he was cutting a switch from a hazel bush. Otto continued:

--- He is amusing. He always has stories.

Christophe whistled carelessly.

Otto pressed further:

--- And he is so clever… and distinguished!…

Christophe shrugged, with an air that seemed to say:

--- What possible interest could that fellow hold for me?

And as Otto, stung, was about to go on, Christophe cut him off bluntly and pointed out a mark ahead for him to race to.

They did not touch on that subject again for the rest of the afternoon; but they were cool with each other, while affecting an exaggerated politeness, unusual between them, especially from Christophe. The words stuck in his throat. At last he could bear it no longer, and in the middle of the path, turning toward Otto, who was following five paces behind, he seized his hands impulsively and suddenly burst open:

--- Listen, Otto! I will not have it, I will not have you being so close with Franz, because… because you are my friend; and I will not have you loving anyone more than me! I will not have it! Don’t you see --- you are everything to me. You cannot… you must not… If I no longer had you, I would have nothing left but to die. I don’t know what I would do. I would kill myself. I would kill you. No. Forgive me!…

Tears were streaming from his eyes.

Otto, moved and frightened by the sincerity of a grief that rumbled with threats, hastened to swear that he loved and would never love anyone as much as Christophe, that Franz meant nothing to him, and that he would not see him again if Christophe wished it. Christophe drank in his words; his heart came back to life. He laughed and breathed deeply. He thanked Otto effusively. He was ashamed of the scene he had made; but he felt relieved of a great weight. They looked at each other, standing face to face, motionless and holding hands; they were very happy and very awkward with themselves. They walked back in silence; then they began to talk again, and they recovered their cheerfulness: they felt more united than ever.

But it was not the last scene of that kind. Now that Otto felt his power over Christophe, he was tempted to abuse it; he knew where the tender spot was, and he had an irresistible urge to press his finger on it. Not that he took pleasure in Christophe’s rages — on the contrary; they made him uneasy. But he proved his own strength to himself by making Christophe suffer. He was not wicked: he had the soul of a girl.

So he continued, despite his promises, to appear arm in arm with Franz, or with some other companion; they made a great deal of noise together, and he laughed in an affected way. When Christophe reproached him for it, he would snicker and pretend not to take it seriously, until, seeing Christophe’s eyes change and his lips tremble with anger, he too would change his tone, seized by fear, and promise not to do it again. He would do it again the next day. Christophe wrote him furious letters in which he called him:

--- Scoundrel! I never want to hear of you again! I don’t know you anymore. The devil take you, and all the curs of your kind!

But a single tearful word from Otto --- or, as he did once, the sending of a flower symbolizing his eternal constancy --- was enough for Christophe to melt into remorse and write:

--- My angel! I am a madman. Forget my stupidity. You are the best of men. Your little finger alone is worth more than all of the foolish Christophe put together. You have treasures of ingenious and delicate tenderness. I kiss your flower with tears. It is here, on my heart. I press it into my skin with my fist. I wish it would make me bleed, so that I might feel more keenly your exquisite goodness and my infamous idiocy!…

Yet they were beginning to grow weary of each other. It is false to claim that small quarrels sustain a friendship. Christophe held against Otto the injustices that Otto led him to commit. He tried to reason with himself; he blamed himself for his despotism. His loyal and impetuous nature, experiencing love for the first time, gave itself wholly to it and demanded that the other give himself wholly in return, without reserving a scrap of his heart. He would not allow sharing in friendship. Since he was ready to sacrifice everything for his friend, he found it legitimate --- even necessary --- that his friend sacrifice everything for him, and sacrifice himself. But he was beginning to feel that the world was not built in the image of his inflexible character, and that he was asking of things what they could not give. Then he tried to submit. He accused himself harshly, called himself a selfish man who had no right to infringe on his friend’s freedom or monopolize his affection. He made sincere efforts to leave Otto entirely free, whatever it cost him. He even imposed on himself, in a spirit of self-humiliation, the duty of urging Otto not to neglect Franz; he affected to persuade himself that he was glad to see Otto finding pleasure in other company than his own. But when Otto, who was not fooled, mischievously obeyed him, Christophe could not help showing a sour face; and suddenly he would flare up again.

He might, in the end, have forgiven Otto for preferring other friends; but what he could not forgive was the lying. Otto was not false, nor hypocritical: he had a natural difficulty in telling the truth, like a stammerer articulating words; what he said was never entirely true nor entirely false; whether from timidity or from uncertainty about his own feelings, he rarely spoke in a wholly clear manner, his answers were equivocal; and above all he made mysteries and little secrets about everything, which drove Christophe beside himself. When he was caught in a fault --- or in what, by the conventions of their friendship, counted as a fault --- instead of acknowledging it, he would stubbornly deny it and spin absurd stories. One day Christophe, exasperated, slapped him. He thought it was the end of their friendship and that Otto would never forgive him. But after sulking for a few hours, Otto came back to him as though nothing had happened. He bore Christophe’s violence no grudge; perhaps it was not entirely displeasing to him, and he may have found a kind of charm in it. While he quietly resented Christophe for being duped and for swallowing all his inventions with open credulity; he rather despised him for it and considered himself the superior. Christophe, for his part, held it against Otto that he accepted his rebuffs without revolting.

They no longer saw each other through the eyes of those first days. Their faults on both sides stood fully in the light. Otto found less charm in Christophe’s independence. Christophe was an awkward companion on walks. He had no concern whatsoever for social propriety. He made himself comfortable --- took off his jacket, unbuttoned his waistcoat, loosened his collar, rolled up his shirt cuffs, balanced his hat on the tip of his stick --- and breathed in the open air with expansive ease. He swung his arms as he walked, he whistled, he sang at the top of his voice; he was red, sweating, and dusty; he looked like a peasant coming back from the fair. The aristocratic Otto was mortified to be seen with him. When a carriage appeared on the road, he arranged to fall ten paces behind and feigned to be walking alone.

Christophe was no less embarrassing when, at an inn or in the railway carriage on the way home, he began to talk. He spoke loudly, said whatever came into his head, treated Otto with a revolting familiarity; he expressed the most unflattering opinions about well-known figures, or even about the physical appearance of people seated a few steps away; or else he entered into intimate details about his own health and domestic life. However much Otto rolled his eyes and made alarmed signals, Christophe seemed not to notice and made no more effort to restrain himself than if he had been alone. Otto caught smiles on the faces of their neighbors: he could have sunk into the ground. He found Christophe coarse; he could not understand how he had ever been drawn to him.

The most serious matter was that Christophe continued to treat with the same nonchalance all hedges, barriers, fences, walls, no-trespassing signs, threats of fines, Verbot of every kind, and all that presumed to limit his freedom and guarantee the sacred rights of property against it. Otto lived in constant dread, and his protests were useless: Christophe made things worse out of sheer bravado.

One day, with Otto at his heels, Christophe was strolling as if in his own garden through a private wood, despite --- or because of --- the crenellated walls topped with broken glass they had had to scale, when they came face to face with a gamekeeper who heaped insults on them, and after holding them for some time under the threat of a formal report, turned them out in the most ignominious fashion. Otto did not shine in this ordeal: he already believed himself in prison and was whimpering, foolishly protesting that he had wandered in by accident and had followed Christophe without knowing where he was going. When he found himself safe, instead of rejoicing, he made bitter reproaches to Christophe; he complained that Christophe was compromising him. The other crushed him with a look and called him a coward. They exchanged sharp words. Otto would have parted from Christophe had he known how to get home alone: he was forced to follow him; but they pretended to be unaware that they were together.

A storm was brewing. In their anger, they did not see it coming. The scorching countryside hummed with the cries of insects. Suddenly everything fell silent. They noticed the silence only after a few minutes: their ears were ringing. They raised their eyes: the sky was ominous; enormous, heavy, livid clouds had filled it; they came from every direction, like a cavalry charge. They all seemed to be rushing toward a single invisible point, drawn in by some chasm in the sky. Otto, stricken with anxiety, did not dare voice his fears to Christophe; and Christophe took malicious pleasure in pretending to notice nothing. Nevertheless they drew closer together, without speaking. They were alone in the open plain. Silence. Not a breath of air. Barely a feverish shiver that made the small tree leaves tremble now and then. Suddenly a whirlwind of wind lifted the dust, twisted the trees and lashed them furiously. And silence fell again, more ominous than before. Otto, in a trembling voice, finally spoke:

--- It is the storm. We must head back.

Christophe said:

--- Let us go back.

But it was too late. A blinding, brutal flash of light burst forth, the sky bellowed, the vault of clouds thundered. In an instant they were swallowed by the hurricane, maddened by the lightning, deafened by the thunder, soaked to the skin. They were in open country, more than half an hour from any shelter. In the swirling water, in the dead light, the enormous glare of the lightning blazed red. They wanted to run; but their clothes, plastered down by the rain, made walking difficult, their shoes splashed and squelched, water streamed over their entire bodies. They could barely breathe. Otto’s teeth were chattering, and he was wild with anger; he said hurtful things to Christophe; he wanted to stop, he claimed it was dangerous to keep walking, he threatened to sit down in the path, to lie down in the middle of the plowed fields. Christophe did not answer; he kept moving, blinded by the wind, the rain, and the lightning, stunned by the noise, a little uneasy as well, but taking great care not to admit it.

And suddenly it was over. The storm had passed as it had come. But they were both in a pitiful state. In truth, Christophe was ordinarily so disheveled that a little more disorder barely changed him. But Otto, so meticulous, so careful of his appearance, cut a sorry figure; he looked as though he had walked into a bath fully clothed; and when Christophe turned toward him, he could not, at the sight of him, suppress a burst of laughter. Otto was in such a state of collapse that he did not even have the strength to be angry. Christophe felt sorry for him and spoke to him cheerfully. Otto answered him with a furious glance. Christophe led him into a farmhouse. They dried themselves before a large fire and drank hot wine. Christophe found the adventure amusing and tried to laugh about it. But it was not to Otto’s taste; he maintained a gloomy silence for the rest of the walk. They returned home sulking and did not offer each other their hands when they parted.

In the wake of this escapade, they did not see each other for a week. They judged each other harshly. But after punishing themselves by missing one of their Sunday walks, they grew so bored that their resentment faded. Christophe made the first advances, as was his habit. Otto deigned to accept them; and they made peace.

Despite their disagreements, they found it impossible to do without each other. They had plenty of faults --- both of them were selfish. But this selfishness was artless; it did not know the calculations of maturity that make selfishness so repellent, and it did not know itself: it was almost endearing, and it did not prevent them from loving each other sincerely. They had such a need for love and sacrifice! Little Otto would weep into his pillow, spinning out stories of romantic devotion in which he was the hero; he invented pathetic adventures in which he was strong, brave, and fearless, and protected Christophe, whom he imagined himself adoring. Christophe never saw or heard anything beautiful or curious without thinking: “If only Otto were here!” He wove the image of his friend into the whole of his life; and that image was transfigured, took on such sweetness, that despite what he knew of him, he was as though intoxicated by it. Certain words of Otto’s, which he remembered long afterward and embellished in memory, made him tremble with emotion. They imitated each other mutually. Otto aped Christophe’s mannerisms, gestures, and handwriting. Christophe was irritated at times by this shadow that repeated every word he had said and served his own thoughts back to him as though they were fresh ones. But he did not notice that he himself was copying Otto --- mimicking his way of dressing, of walking, of pronouncing certain words. It was a fascination. They had penetrated each other; their hearts were flooded with tenderness. It overflowed in every direction like a spring. Each imagined that his friend was its source. They did not know that it was the awakening of their adolescence.

Christophe, who was suspicious of no one, left his papers lying about. Yet an instinctive modesty led him to put away the rough drafts of letters he scrawled to Otto, and Otto’s replies. But he did not lock them up; he simply slipped them between the pages of one of his music notebooks, where he felt certain no one would think to look. He had not reckoned with his brothers’ mischief.

For some time he had noticed them laughing and whispering while glancing at him, murmuring fragments of speeches into each other’s ears that sent them into convulsions of amusement. Christophe could not make out their words; and besides, following the tactic he habitually used with them, he feigned perfect indifference to whatever they might say or do. A few words caught his attention; he thought he recognized them. Soon he had no doubt that his brothers had read his letters. But when he confronted Ernst and Rodolphe, who were calling each other “my dear soul” with a buffoonish gravity, he could get nothing out of them. The boys pretended not to understand, and said they had every right to call each other what they liked. Christophe, who had found all his letters in their usual place, pressed the matter no further.

Shortly afterward, he caught Ernst in the act of stealing: the little rascal was rummaging in the dresser drawer where Louisa kept the household money. Christophe shook him roughly and seized the occasion to say everything that had been weighing on his heart; he enumerated, in terms that were far from polite, Ernst’s misdeeds --- and the list was not a short one. Ernst took the scolding badly; he retorted arrogantly that Christophe had no right to reproach him, and he let drop some equivocal remarks about his brother’s friendship with Otto. Christophe did not understand; but when he heard Otto’s name being dragged into their quarrel, he demanded that Ernst explain himself. The boy sniggered; then, seeing Christophe go white with fury, he took fright and refused to say any more. Christophe understood he would get nothing from him this way; he sat down, shrugging his shoulders, and affected a deep contempt for Ernst. Stung by this, Ernst recovered his insolence; he set himself to wound his brother and poured out a litany of things each more cruel and vile than the last. Christophe was holding himself back with all his strength. When he finally understood, he saw red: he leaped from his chair, and Ernst had no time to cry out. Christophe had thrown himself on him, and they rolled together across the floor, Christophe banging his head against the tiles. At the victim’s terrified screams, Louisa, Melchior, the whole household came running. Ernst was pried loose in a very bad state. Christophe would not let go: he had to be beaten off. He was called a brute --- and he looked the part. His eyes were bulging from his head, he was grinding his teeth, his only thought was to fling himself at Ernst again; when asked what had happened, his fury redoubled, and he screamed that he would kill him. Ernst also refused to speak.

Christophe could neither eat nor sleep. He trembled with fever and wept in his bed. It was not only for Otto’s sake that he suffered. A revolution was taking place within him. Ernst had no idea of the harm he had done his brother. Christophe possessed a puritan intransigence of heart that could not accept the stains of life, and was discovering them one by one with horror. At fifteen, with a free life and strong instincts, he had remained strangely naive. His natural purity and his ceaseless work had kept him sheltered. His brother’s words opened abysses before him. He would never have imagined such infamies by himself; and now that the idea had entered him, all his joy in loving and being loved was spoiled. Not only his friendship with Otto, but all friendship was poisoned.

Things grew even worse when several sarcastic allusions led him to believe --- perhaps wrongly --- that he was the object of the small town’s prurient curiosity; and above all when Melchior, some time later, made remarks to him about his walks with Otto. Melchior probably meant nothing ill by it; but Christophe, now forewarned, read suspicion into every word, and came almost to feel guilty himself. Otto, at the same time, was passing through a similar crisis.

They tried once more to see each other in secret. But it was impossible to recapture the ease of their former conversations. The openness of their relationship was damaged. These two children, who loved each other with so timid a tenderness that they had never dared exchange a brotherly kiss, and who could imagine no greater happiness than to see each other, to listen to each other, and to share their dreams --- they now felt themselves soiled by the suspicion of dishonest hearts. They had come to see evil in the most innocent acts: a glance, a handshake; they blushed, they had bad thoughts. Their relations became intolerable.

Without a word being said between them, they saw each other less often. They tried to write; but they scrutinized every expression. Their letters grew cold and insipid. They lost heart. Christophe pleaded his work, Otto his occupations, as reasons to stop corresponding. Shortly afterward, Otto left for the University; and the friendship that had illumined some months of their lives grew entirely dark.

Besides, a new love --- of which this one had been only a forerunner --- was taking hold of Christophe’s heart, and making every other light pale before it.

III MINNA

Four or five months before these events, Madame Josepha von Kerich --- recently widowed from the State Councillor Stephan von Kerich --- had left Berlin, where her husband’s duties had kept them until then, to come and settle with her daughter in the small Rhenish town that was her native place. There she had an old family house with a large garden, almost a park, that descended along the hillside down to the river, not far from Christophe’s house. From his garret, Christophe could see the heavy branches of the trees hanging over the walls, and the high ridge of the red roof with its mossy tiles. A small sloping lane where few people passed ran alongside the park on the right; from there, by climbing up onto a stone post, one could peer over the wall --- and Christophe never missed the chance. He would see the pathways overgrown with grass, the lawns like wild meadows, the trees intertwining and struggling in disorder, and the white façade with its shutters stubbornly closed. Once or twice a year a gardener came to make his rounds and air the house. But nature would then reclaim the garden, and everything sank back into silence.

This silence made an impression on Christophe. He often hoisted himself up secretly to his observation post; as he grew taller, first his eyes, then his nose, then his mouth came level with the top of the wall; now he could lay his arms over it, rising on tiptoe; and despite the discomfort of this position, he would remain there, his chin resting on the wall, watching and listening, while evening poured its soft golden waves over the lawns, waves that kindled with bluish reflections in the shadow of the fir trees. He would forget himself there until he heard footsteps approaching in the lane. At night, fragrances drifted around the garden: lilac in spring, acacia in summer, dead leaves in autumn. When Christophe came home in the evening from the castle, however tired he might be, he would stop near his door to drink in their delicious breath; and he found it hard to go back inside his stuffy room. He had also played, many times --- in the days when he still played --- on the small square with its grass-grown cobblestones in front of the Kerich house’s entrance gate. On either side of the door stood two ancient chestnut trees; grandfather used to sit at their feet smoking his pipe, and the fruit served the children as missiles and playthings.

One morning, passing through the lane, he climbed up on the stone post out of habit. He was thinking of something else and looking about distractedly. He was about to climb back down when he felt that something was different. He turned his eyes toward the house: the windows were open; sunlight was flooding inside; and though no one could be seen, the old dwelling seemed to have woken from its fifteen-year sleep and to be smiling at the awakening. Christophe went away, unsettled.

At table, his father spoke of what was the talk of the neighborhood: the arrival of Madame de Kerich and her daughter, with an incredible quantity of luggage. The chestnut-tree square was full of idlers who had come to watch the coaches being unloaded. Christophe, greatly intrigued by this news --- which, in the narrow horizon of his life, was a significant event --- went back to his work, trying from his father’s accounts, hyperbolic as usual, to imagine the inhabitants of the enchanted house. Then his task reclaimed him and he had forgotten everything, when, near to going home in the evening, it all came back to mind; and a curiosity drove him to climb to his observation post and spy on what might be happening within the walls. He saw nothing but the calm pathways, where the motionless trees seemed to sleep in the last rays of sunlight. After a few minutes he had lost sight of what had prompted his curiosity, and gave himself over, as he always did, to the sweetness of the silence. This odd position --- standing, in precarious balance on top of the stone post --- was a chosen place for his dreams. Emerging from the narrow, stuffy lane with its shade, those sun-drenched gardens had a magical radiance. His mind drifted away into those harmonious spaces, and music sang within him; he fell asleep in it, forgetting time and things, attentive only to missing none of the murmuring of his heart.

He was dreaming thus, eyes and mouth open, and he could not have said how long he had been dreaming, for he saw nothing. Suddenly he was startled. Before him, at the bend of a path, two feminine figures stood looking at him. One --- a young woman in black, with fine, irregular features, ashen-blond hair, tall and elegant, a languid ease in the tilt of her head --- was observing him with benevolent and mocking eyes. The other --- a girl of fifteen, also in deep mourning --- wore the expression of a child seized by a fit of helpless laughter; a little behind her mother, who, without looking at her, was signaling her to be quiet, she hid her mouth in her hands as though she were having the greatest difficulty keeping herself from bursting out. She was a small person with a fresh face, white, pink, and round; she had a little nose somewhat too large, a little mouth somewhat too large, a little plump chin, fine eyebrows, clear eyes, and a profusion of blond hair that, braided into plaits, wound in a crown around her head, leaving bare her round nape and her smooth white brow --- a little Cranach face.

Christophe was turned to stone by this apparition. Instead of fleeing, he stayed rooted to the spot, his mouth wide open. Only when he saw the young woman take a few steps toward him with her amiable, mocking smile did he tear himself from his immobility and jump --- tumble --- into the lane, bringing chunks of plaster down from the wall with him. He heard a kindly voice calling to him familiarly: “Boy!” and a burst of childish laughter, clear and liquid as a bird’s note. He found himself in the lane, on his hands and knees; and after a second of dazed bewilderment, he bolted at full speed, as though afraid of being pursued. He was ashamed; and this shame returned to him in waves, at home, in his room, all alone. Since then he had not dared pass through the lane, in the absurd fear that someone might be lying in wait to see him. When he was forced to venture near the house, he hugged the walls, kept his head down, and nearly ran, without looking back. At the same time, he could not stop thinking about the two figures he had seen; he would go up to the attic, removing his shoes so as not to be heard; and he strained to look through the skylight, toward the house and park of the Kerichs, though he knew perfectly well that nothing could be seen but the dome of the trees and the chimney stacks along the roof ridge.

About a month later, he performed at one of the Hof Musik Verein’s weekly concerts a concerto of his own composition for piano and orchestra. He had reached the middle of the final movement when, by chance, he caught sight across from him of Madame de Kerich and her daughter in their box, watching him. He had expected nothing of the kind, and was so startled that he nearly missed his cue when the orchestra came in. He went on playing mechanically through to the end of the piece. When it was over, he noticed --- though he avoided looking in their direction --- that madame and mademoiselle de Kerich were applauding with a slight exaggeration, as if they wanted him to see them doing so. He hurried off the stage. As he was leaving the theater, he glimpsed in the corridor, separated from him by several rows of people, Madame de Kerich, who seemed to be waiting for him to pass. It was impossible that he could not see her; yet he pretended not to, and, turning back, slipped out hastily through the theater’s stage door. Afterward, he felt guilty about it, for he understood perfectly well that Madame de Kerich meant him no harm. But he knew that if he had to do it over, he would do the same. He was terrified of running into her in the street. Whenever he glimpsed a figure in the distance that resembled her, he took another route.

It was she who came to him. She sought him out at his own home.

One morning when he came in for dinner, Louisa, bursting with pride, told him that a footman in knee-breeches and livery had come to deliver a letter addressed to him; and she handed him a large envelope bordered in black, with the Kerich coat of arms engraved on the back. Christophe opened it, trembling to read --- precisely what he read:

“Madame Josepha von Kerich invites monsieur le Hof Musicus Christophe Krafft to take tea with her today at half past five.”

--- I’m not going, Christophe declared.

--- What! exclaimed Louisa. I told them you would.

Christophe made a scene with his mother, accusing her of meddling in what was none of her concern.

--- The servant was waiting for an answer. I told him you happened to be free this afternoon. You have nothing at that hour.

However much Christophe raged and swore he would not go, he could no longer back out now. When the appointed hour came, he got ready with much grumbling: secretly, he was not entirely displeased that chance had overridden his own reluctance.

Madame de Kerich had had no trouble recognizing in the concert pianist the little wild boy whose disheveled head had appeared above her garden wall on the day of her arrival. She had made inquiries about him among the neighbors; and what she had learned of Christophe’s family, and of the child’s difficult and courageous life, had aroused in her both interest and a desire to speak with him.

Christophe, stiff in an absurd frock coat that made him look like a country parson, arrived at the house, sick with shyness. He was trying to convince himself that the ladies de Kerich had not had time to notice his face that first day they had seen him. A servant led him down a long corridor, the carpet muffling the sound of footsteps, and showed him into a room whose glass door opened onto the garden. That day there was a light cold rain; a cheerful fire burned in the fireplace. Near the window, through which the wet silhouettes of trees could be dimly seen in the mist, the two women sat --- Madame de Kerich with some needlework in her lap, and her daughter with a book she had been reading aloud when Christophe entered. On seeing him, they exchanged a knowing glance.

--- They recognize me, Christophe thought, mortified.

He struggled through a series of awkward bows.

Madame de Kerich smiled warmly and held out her hand:

--- Good day, dear neighbor, she said. I am glad to see you. Since I heard you at the concert, I have wanted to tell you what pleasure you gave me. And since the only way to tell you was to have you come, I hope you will forgive me for doing so.

Amid these pleasant, unremarkable words there was such genuine warmth --- despite a faint undercurrent of irony --- that Christophe felt himself reassured.

--- They don’t recognize me, he thought, with relief.

Madame de Kerich gestured toward her daughter, who had closed her book and was watching Christophe with open curiosity.

--- My daughter Minna, she said, who very much wanted to meet you.

--- But, Maman, said Minna, this is not the first time we’ve seen each other.

And she burst out laughing.

--- They recognized me, Christophe thought, crushed.

--- That’s true, said Madame de Kerich, laughing as well. You paid us a visit on the day we arrived.

At these words the girl laughed all the harder, and Christophe looked so pitiful that whenever Minna glanced at him her laughter redoubled. It was helpless laughter: she was in tears. Madame de Kerich, wanting to stop her, could not help laughing herself; and Christophe, despite his embarrassment, was caught by the contagion. Their good humor was irresistible: there was no taking offense at it. But Christophe lost all composure entirely when Minna, catching her breath, asked him what on earth he could have been doing on their wall. She was enjoying his confusion, and he stammered, at a loss. Madame de Kerich came to his rescue and changed the subject by having tea served.

She questioned him pleasantly about his life. But he could not settle his nerves. He did not know how to sit, he did not know how to hold his cup, which threatened to tip over; he felt obliged, every time someone offered him water, milk, sugar, or pastries, to leap to his feet and bow his thanks, stiff, constricted in his frock coat, collar, and cravat as if in a suit of armor, unable --- daring not --- to turn his head to the right or left, rattled by the torrent of Madame de Kerich’s questions and the exuberance of her manner, frozen by Minna’s gaze, which he felt fixed on his face, his hands, his movements, his clothes. They flustered him all the more by trying to put him at ease --- Madame de Kerich with her stream of talk, and Minna with the coy sidelong glances she cast at him by instinct, for her own amusement.

At last they gave up trying to draw anything from him beyond bows and monosyllables; and Madame de Kerich, who had been carrying the entire conversation by herself, asked him, with a touch of weariness, to sit at the piano. Far more intimidated than he ever was before a concert audience, he played an adagio by Mozart. Yet his very shyness, the emotion that was beginning to stir in his heart in the presence of these two women, the artless feeling swelling in his chest and making him happy and wretched at once, were in harmony with the tenderness and youthful modesty of those pages, and lent them a springlike charm. Madame de Kerich was moved; she said so with the lavish praise customary among people of society; she was no less sincere for that, and the excess of the compliment was pleasant, coming from a gracious mouth. The impish Minna said nothing, and looked with astonishment at this boy who was so dull when he spoke and yet whose fingers were so eloquent. Christophe felt their sympathy, and took courage. He went on playing; then, half turning toward Minna, with an uneasy smile and without raising his eyes:

--- That is what I was doing on the wall, he said timidly.

He played a short piece in which he had in fact developed the musical ideas that had come to him in his favorite spot, while looking down into the garden --- not, to be sure, on the evening when he had seen Minna and Madame de Kerich (for obscure reasons he was trying to persuade himself of this, reasons his heart alone could account for) --- but on many evenings before; and one could find in the tranquil sway of that andante con moto the serene impressions of birdsong, of the rustling of living things, and of the majestic drowsing of the great trees in the peace of the setting sun.

His two listeners heard him with delight. When he had finished, Madame de Kerich rose, took his hands with her usual vivacity, and thanked him effusively. Minna clapped her hands, cried that it was “wonderful,” and that, so he might compose still more works as “sublime” as this one, she would have a ladder put against the wall so he could work there entirely at his ease. Madame de Kerich told Christophe not to listen to that mad girl Minna; she invited him, since he loved her garden, to come there as often as he liked; and she added that he would not even need to come in to greet them, if that was a bother to him.

--- You needn’t come to greet us, Minna saw fit to add. Only, if you don’t come, you had better watch out!

She wagged her finger in a little air of mock menace.

Minna had no particular wish for Christophe to call on her, nor even that he should feel bound to observe the ordinary rules of politeness toward her; but she liked to produce a small effect, one that her instinct told her was charming.

Christophe blushed with pleasure. Madame de Kerich won him over completely by the tact with which she spoke to him of his mother and his grandfather, whom she had known in earlier days. The warm affection of the two women went straight to his heart; he exaggerated this easy kindness, this worldly grace, driven by his desire to believe it ran deep. He began to tell them of his plans and his hardships with a naive confidence. He no longer noticed the passing time, and gave a start of surprise when a servant came in to announce dinner. But his embarrassment turned to happiness when Madame de Kerich asked him to stay and dine with them, like the good friends they were going to be --- were already. His place was set between mother and daughter; and he gave a less flattering account of his talents at table than he had at the piano. That part of his education had been greatly neglected; he was inclined to think that at table, eating and drinking were the essential thing, and that manners hardly mattered. The tidy Minna watched him with a scandalized pout.

It was expected that he would leave immediately after supper. But he followed them into the small sitting room, took a seat with them, and showed no sign of leaving. Minna was stifling yawns and making signs to her mother. He did not notice, because he was intoxicated with happiness and assumed that others felt as he did --- because Minna, as she looked at him, went on making eyes out of habit --- and finally, because once seated, he no longer knew how to rise and take his leave. He would have stayed all night if Madame de Kerich had not dismissed him herself, with an amiable matter-of-factness.

He left, carrying within him the caressing light of Madame de Kerich’s brown eyes, of Minna’s blue ones; he felt on his hand the delicate touch of fingers soft as flowers; and a subtle fragrance, one he had never breathed before, wrapped around him, made him dizzy, left him almost faint.

He returned two days later, as they had agreed, to give Minna a piano lesson. From that point on, he came regularly on that pretext, twice a week in the mornings; and very often he went back in the evenings to make music and to talk.

Madame de Kerich welcomed him gladly. She was an intelligent and kind woman. She had been thirty-five when she lost her husband; and although young in body and in spirit, she had withdrawn without regret from the social world in which she had been so much at home since her marriage. Perhaps she could give it up the more easily because she had enjoyed it enormously and judged, with sound sense, that one cannot both have had and still have. She was attached to the memory of Monsieur de Kerich, though not because she had felt for him, at any moment of their life together, anything resembling love: a good friendship was enough for her; she had a tranquil nature and an affectionate mind.

She had devoted herself to her daughter’s education; but the same moderation she brought to love tempered what is often exalted and morbid in motherhood, when a child is the only being on whom a woman can lavish her jealous need to love and be loved. She loved Minna deeply, but saw her clearly, and concealed none of her daughter’s imperfections from herself, just as she sought no illusions about herself. Keen and sensible, she had an unerring eye for detecting at a glance the weakness and the absurdity in anyone; she took great pleasure in this, without a shadow of malice, for she was as indulgent as she was ironic, and while she was amused by people, she liked to be of service to them.

Little Christophe gave her kindness and her critical intelligence ample scope to exercise themselves. In the early days of her stay in the small town, where her deep mourning kept her apart from society, Christophe was a distraction to her. First, because of his talent. She loved music, though she was not herself a musician; she found in it a physical and moral comfort, in which her thoughts dozed pleasantly in an agreeable melancholy. Seated by the fire --- while Christophe played --- needlework in her hands, and smiling vaguely, she savored a wordless pleasure in the mechanical movement of her fingers and in the drifting of her reverie, floating among sad or gentle images from the past.

But she was even more interested in the musician than in the music. She was intelligent enough to sense Christophe’s rare gifts, though she was not capable of discerning precisely what was truly original in him. She took a curious pleasure in watching the awakening of that mysterious flame she could see beginning to glow in him. She had quickly come to appreciate his moral qualities --- his integrity, his courage, that kind of stoicism so touching in a child. She looked at him no less with her habitual clear-eyed, gently mocking gaze. She was amused by his awkwardness, his plainness, his small absurdities; she did not take him entirely seriously --- she did not take very much seriously. --- The comic outbursts, the fits of passion, the mercurial moods of Christophe made her think, besides, that he was not very well-balanced; she saw in him one of those Kraffts who were decent people and good musicians, but all a little touched.

This gentle irony was lost on Christophe; he felt only the kindness of madame de Kerich. He was so unaccustomed to anyone being kind to him! Although his duties at the palace brought him into daily contact with society, poor Christophe had remained a little savage, without education or refinement. The selfishness of the court concerned itself with him only to profit from his talent, without troubling to serve him in any way. He came to the palace, sat down at the piano, played, and left, with no one ever taking the trouble to talk with him, except to offer some vague and distracted compliment. No one, since the death of his grandfather --- neither at home nor anywhere else --- had ever given the slightest thought to helping him educate himself, to guiding him through life, to making him a man. He suffered cruelly from his ignorance and his rough manners. He sweated blood trying to form himself on his own, but he could not manage it. Books, conversation, example --- everything was lacking. He would have needed to confess his distress to a friend, but he could not bring himself to do it. Even with Otto he had not dared, because at the first tentative words he had ventured, Otto had adopted a tone of disdainful superiority that had burned him like a brand of hot iron.

And now, with madame de Kerich, everything became easy. Of her own accord, without his needing to ask for anything --- and how it cost Christophe’s pride to ask! --- she gently corrected what he ought not to do, warned him of what he ought to do, offered him advice on how to dress, to eat, to walk, to speak; she let no lapse of manners, taste, or language pass; and it was impossible to feel wounded by it, so light was her touch and so careful her attention to that prickly, childish self-regard. She also saw to his literary education, without appearing to do so; she seemed not to be surprised by his strange gaps in knowledge, but she let no opportunity slip to correct his errors --- simply, calmly, as if it were perfectly natural that he should have been mistaken. And rather than frightening him with pedantic lessons, she had hit upon the idea of filling their evening gatherings by having Minna or him read aloud fine passages of history, or of German and foreign poets. She treated him as one of the household, with small nuances of protective familiarity that he never noticed. She even concerned herself with his clothes, replacing them, knitting him a woolen muffler, giving him small gifts of toilet articles --- all with such warmth that he felt no embarrassment at these attentions and presents. In short, she had for him those small kindnesses and that quasi-maternal solicitude that every good woman instinctively feels for any child entrusted to her, or who entrusts himself to her, without her needing to feel any deep personal attachment. But Christophe believed that all this tenderness was directed at him personally, and he melted with gratitude; he had sudden, passionate outbursts that seemed a little ridiculous to madame de Kerich, but that pleased her nonetheless.

With Minna his relations were altogether different. When Christophe had seen her again for his first lesson, still intoxicated by the memories of the evening before and by the caressing glances of the young girl, he had been quite startled to find a little person entirely unlike the one he had seen a few hours earlier. She barely looked at him, did not listen to what he said; and when she did raise her eyes to his, he read in them a coldness so glacial that it stopped him cold. He tormented himself for a long time trying to discover in what way he might have offended her. He had not offended her in the least; and Minna’s feelings toward him were neither more nor less favorable today than yesterday: today as yesterday, Minna was perfectly indifferent to him. If, the first time, she had put on a show of smiles to receive him, it was out of the instinctive coquetry of a young girl amusing herself by testing the power of her eyes on the first person to come along, even if that person happened to be a dressed-up dog offering himself to her idleness. But by the next day that all-too-easy conquest held no further interest for her. She had observed Christophe carefully and judged him an ugly, poor, ill-bred boy who played the piano well but had ugly hands, who held his fork at table in an abominable way and who cut his fish with his knife. He seemed to her, therefore, quite uninteresting. She was willing enough to take piano lessons with him; she was willing, even, to amuse herself with him, because she had no other companion for the moment, and because, in spite of her pretensions to no longer being a child, there came over her in waves a wild urge to play, a need to spend her overflow of gaiety which was further excited, as with her mother, by the constraint imposed by their recent bereavement. But she cared no more about Christophe than about a domestic animal; and if it still happened, suddenly, on her coldest days, that she made eyes at him, it was out of sheer absent-mindedness, because she was thinking of something else --- or else, quite simply, so as not to lose the habit. Christophe’s heart leaped when she looked at him that way. And she barely saw him: she was telling herself stories. This young person was at the age when one caresses one’s senses with pleasant and flattering dreams. She thought constantly about love, with great interest and a curiosity that was entirely innocent only by virtue of ignorance. Besides, as a well-bred young lady, she could only imagine love in the form of marriage. The shape of her ideal was far from fixed. Sometimes she dreamed of marrying a lieutenant; at other times it was a poet in the sublime and correct style of Schiller. One plan demolished the next, and the latest arrival was always welcomed with the same seriousness and equal conviction. Moreover, all of them were ready to yield at once to any advantageous reality. For it is remarkable to observe with what ease romantic young girls ordinarily forget their dreams when a less ideal but more reliable prospect presents itself.

All in all, the sentimental Minna was, despite herself, calm and cool. In spite of her aristocratic name and the pride she drew from her particle of nobility, she had the soul of a little German housewife at the exquisite age of adolescence.

Christophe naturally understood nothing of the complicated mechanism --- more complicated in appearance than in reality --- of the feminine heart. He was often bewildered by the ways of his lovely friends; but he was so happy loving them that he gave them the benefit of the doubt on everything that worried or saddened him a little, in order to persuade himself that he was loved by them as much as he loved them. A single warm word or glance plunged him into rapture. He was sometimes so overwhelmed by it that he broke into fits of weeping.

Seated at the table in the quiet little sitting room, a few steps from madame de Kerich who was sewing by lamplight… --- (Minna was reading on the other side of the table; they were not speaking; through the half-open garden door one could see the path’s sand glittering in the moonlight; a faint murmur came from the treetops…) --- he felt his heart so swollen with happiness that suddenly, without reason, he would leap from his chair, throw himself at madame de Kerich’s knees, seize her hand --- needle or no needle --- and cover it with kisses, pressing his mouth, his cheeks, his eyes against it, sobbing. Minna would look up from her book and give a small shrug, making her little pout. Madame de Kerich would look smiling at the big boy rolling at her feet, and stroke his head with her free hand, saying in her lovely voice, affectionate and ironic:

--- Well then, you great fool, well then! What on earth is the matter?

Oh, the sweetness of that voice, that peace, that silence, that delicate atmosphere --- no shouting, no jolts, no roughness --- that oasis in the midst of rough life, and --- heroic light, gilding with its glow every object and every face --- that enchanted world summoned up by the reading of the divine poets! Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, torrents of force, of sorrow and of love!…

Minna read with her head bent over the book, her face faintly flushed with the animation of the delivery, her fresh voice that lisped a little and tried to take on an important tone when she spoke on behalf of warriors and kings. Sometimes madame de Kerich herself would take the book; she then lent to the tragic actions the spiritual and tender grace of her own being; but most often she listened, leaning back in her armchair, her eternal needlework in her lap, smiling at her own thought --- for it was always herself she found at the heart of every work.

Christophe had also tried to read aloud; but he had been forced to give it up: he stumbled along, tangled himself in the words, skipped over punctuation, seemed to understand nothing, and was so moved that he had to stop at the pathetic passages, feeling the tears coming on. Then, chagrined, he would toss the book on the table; and both his friends burst out laughing… How he loved them! He carried their image with him everywhere, and it mingled with the figures of Shakespeare and Goethe. He could barely distinguish the real from the imagined. Some tender phrase of the poet, which awakened passionate tremors in the deepest part of his being, had become inseparable for him from the dear mouth that had first made him hear it. Twenty years later he would not be able to reread or see performed Egmont or Romeo without certain lines calling up the memory of those calm evenings, those dreams of happiness, and the beloved faces of madame de Kerich and Minna.

He spent hours looking at them --- in the evenings, when they were reading; at night, when he lay awake dreaming in his bed, eyes open; during the day, when he dreamed at his orchestra stand, playing mechanically, eyelids half closed. He felt for both of them the most innocent tenderness; and not knowing love, he believed himself to be in love. But he was not quite sure whether it was with the mother or the daughter. He interrogated himself gravely and could not decide which to choose. However, since it seemed to him that he must choose at any cost, he inclined toward madame de Kerich. And indeed, the moment he had made that decision, he discovered that it was she he loved. He loved her intelligent eyes, the distracted smile of her slightly parted lips, her pretty forehead with its quality of youthfulness, with the side parting in her smooth fine hair, her faintly veiled voice with its small cough, her maternal hands, the elegance of her movements, and her unknown soul. He trembled with happiness when, seated beside him, she kindly explained some passage in a book he had not understood: she would rest her hand on Christophe’s shoulder; he felt the warmth of her fingers, her breath on his cheek, the gentle perfume of her body; he listened in ecstasy, thought no more about the book, and understood nothing. She noticed this, asked him to repeat what she had said: he sat mute; she scolded him while laughing, and pushed his nose into his book, saying he would never be anything but a little donkey. To which he replied that this was quite all right with him, so long as he was her little donkey and she didn’t send him away. She pretended to hesitate; then she said that, even though he was an ugly little donkey, quite stupid, she consented to keep him --- and perhaps even to love him --- though he was good for nothing, provided at least that he was simply good. Then they both laughed, and he swam in joy.

Since discovering that he loved madame de Kerich, Christophe was growing detached from Minna. He was beginning to be irritated by her disdainful coldness; and as, by dint of seeing her so often, he had gradually grown bold enough to recover his natural manner with her, he made no effort to conceal his bad humor. She enjoyed pricking him, and he replied sharply. They were always saying disagreeable things to each other, which madame de Kerich merely laughed at. Christophe, who did not have the upper hand in these verbal bouts, sometimes left so exasperated that he believed he hated Minna; and he convinced himself that he came back only because of madame de Kerich.

He continued to teach her the piano. Twice a week, in the morning, from nine to ten o’clock, he supervised the little girl’s scales and exercises. The room where they worked was Minna’s studio. A curious workroom it was, reflecting with amusing fidelity the baroque muddle of that small feminine mind.

On the table: tiny statuettes of musical cats --- a whole orchestra, one playing the violin, another the cello --- a little pocket mirror, toilet articles, and writing implements, perfectly arranged. On the shelf: miniature busts of musicians --- a scowling Beethoven, Wagner in his beret --- and the Apollo Belvedere. On the mantelpiece, beside a frog smoking a reed pipe, a paper fan on which was painted the theatre at Bayreuth. In the two-shelf bookcase, a few books: Lübke, Mommsen, Schiller, Sans famille, Jules Verne, Montaigne. On the walls, large photographs of the Sistine Madonna and of paintings by Herkomer, bordered in blue and green ribbons. There was also a view of a Swiss hotel in a frame of silver thistles; and above all, a profusion, everywhere, in every corner of the room, of photographs of officers, tenors, conductors, and girlfriends --- all with dedications, nearly all with verses --- or at least with what is conventionally called verse in Germany. In the middle of the room, on a marble pedestal, reigned the bearded bust of Brahms; and above the piano, dangling from a thread, swayed small plush monkeys and cotillion favors.

Minna arrived late, her eyes still heavy with sleep, wearing a sullen expression; she barely held out her hand to Christophe, offered a cool hello, and went to sit at the piano in silence, stiff and dignified. When she was alone, she enjoyed running through endless scales, because they allowed her to pleasantly prolong her half-sleeping state and the daydreams she spun for herself. But Christophe forced her to concentrate on difficult exercises --- which she avenged herself for by sometimes playing as badly as she possibly could. She was a reasonably capable musician, but she did not love music --- like many German girls. Also like them, she believed she was expected to love it; and she took her lessons fairly conscientiously, apart from certain moments of diabolical mischief designed to drive her teacher mad. She maddened him far more by the icy indifference with which she applied herself. The worst was when she decided it was her duty to put feeling into an expressive passage: she would become sentimental, without feeling anything at all.

Little Christophe, seated beside her, was not very polite. He never paid her compliments --- far from it. She bore him a grudge for it and never let an observation of his pass without a retort. She argued with everything he said, and when she was wrong she stubbornly insisted she had played exactly what was written. He grew irritated, and they went on exchanging disagreeable words and impertinences. With her eyes lowered to the keys, she never stopped watching Christophe and delighting in his fury. To relieve her boredom, she invented little stupid tricks with no purpose other than to interrupt the lesson and annoy him. She pretended to choke in order to make herself interesting; she had a coughing fit, or she suddenly had something very important to say to the chambermaid --- Christophe knew it was all theater; and Minna knew that Christophe knew it was all theater; and she was amused by that, because Christophe could not tell her what he thought.

One day when she was engaged in this entertainment, languidly coughing with her face buried in her handkerchief as though she were nearly suffocating --- while actually watching the exasperated Christophe out of the corner of her eye --- she had the clever idea of letting the handkerchief fall, to force Christophe to pick it up. Which he did with the worst possible grace. She rewarded him with a great-lady “Thank you!” that nearly made him explode.

She judged this game too good not to repeat it. The following day she tried it again. Christophe didn’t flinch --- he was seething with rage. She waited a moment, then said in a vexed tone:

--- Would you be so kind as to pick up my handkerchief?

Christophe could contain himself no longer.

--- I am not your servant! he cried rudely. Pick it up yourself!

Minna was taken aback. She rose abruptly from her stool, which toppled over:

--- Oh! that is too much, she said, striking the keyboard in a rage; and she stormed out.

Christophe waited. She did not return. He was ashamed of what he had done --- he felt he had behaved like a little lout. And yet he was at his limit; she had been mocking him with too much brazenness! He feared that Minna would complain to her mother and that he would have permanently alienated Madame von Kerich’s goodwill. He did not know what to do; because while he regretted his roughness, he would not have asked forgiveness for anything in the world.

He came back the next day on the chance, though he expected that Minna would refuse to take her lesson. But Minna, who was too proud to complain to anyone --- Minna, whose own conscience was not entirely above reproach --- reappeared, after making him wait five minutes longer than usual; and she went to sit before the piano, straight and rigid, without turning her head or uttering a word, as though Christophe did not exist for her. She took her lesson nonetheless, and all the following lessons, because she knew perfectly well that Christophe understood music and that she needed to learn to play the piano properly if she wanted to be --- what she claimed to be: a well-bred young lady of accomplished education.

But how bored she was! How bored they both were!

One foggy March morning, when small snowflakes were drifting like feathers through the grey air, they were in the studio. It was barely light. Minna was arguing, as was her habit, about a wrong note she had played, insisting that “it was written that way.” Although he knew perfectly well she was lying, Christophe leaned over the score to look closely at the passage in question. She had her hand resting on the music stand and did not move it aside. His mouth was very close to that hand. He tried to read and could not manage it: he was looking at something else --- that delicate, transparent thing, like flower petals. Suddenly --- he had no idea what came over him --- he pressed his lips with all his force upon that little hand.

They were both equally startled. He drew back; she pulled her hand away --- both of them blushing. They did not exchange a word; they did not look at each other. After a moment of confused silence, she began playing again; she was quite unsettled; her chest rose and fell slightly, as though she were short of breath; and she struck one wrong note after another. He did not notice: he was far more unsettled than she was; his temples throbbed; he heard nothing, did not know what she was playing, and, to break the silence, made a few incoherent remarks in a strangled voice. He thought he was definitively ruined in Minna’s estimation. He was confounded by what he had done and judged it stupid and vulgar. When the lesson was over, he left Minna without looking at her, and he even forgot to say goodbye. She did not hold it against him. It no longer occurred to her to find Christophe ill-mannered; and if she had played so many wrong notes, it was because she had not stopped watching him out of the corner of her eye with an astonished curiosity --- and, for the first time, with sympathy.

When she was alone, instead of going to her mother as on other days, she shut herself in her room and turned over in her mind this extraordinary event. She had propped her elbows before the mirror. Her eyes seemed to her soft and bright. She was biting her lip slightly in the effort of reflection. And all the while gazing with pleasure at her pretty face, she replayed the scene in her mind, blushing and smiling. At the table she was lively and happy. She refused to go out afterward and stayed in the sitting room for part of the afternoon; she had some needlework in her hands, and not ten stitches in it went straight --- but what did that matter! In a corner of the room, with her back to her mother, she smiled; or, seized by a sudden need to let herself go, she would spring across the room singing at the top of her lungs. Madame von Kerich startled and called her mad. Minna threw her arms around her neck, dissolving in laughter, and nearly hugged her to death.

In the evening, back in her room, she was a long time before going to bed. She kept looking at herself in the mirror, trying to remember, and thinking of nothing --- having thought all day of the same thing. She undressed slowly; she kept stopping, sitting on her bed, trying to recover the image of Christophe: a fantastical Christophe appeared to her; and now he no longer seemed so unattractive. She lay down and turned out the light. Ten minutes later, the morning’s scene came back to her suddenly and she burst out laughing. Her mother got up quietly and opened the door, thinking she was reading in bed despite being forbidden to do so. She found Minna lying quite still, her eyes wide open in the dim glow of the night-light.

--- What is it, she asked, that makes you so cheerful?

--- Nothing at all, Minna answered gravely. I’m thinking.

--- How lucky you are to enjoy your own company like that. But now you must sleep.

--- Yes, maman, replied the obedient Minna.

To herself she was muttering:

--- But go away! Go away!

until the door closed again and she could go on savoring her dreams. She drifted into a soft drowsiness. On the very edge of sleep, she started up with joy:

--- He loves me… What happiness! How kind of him to love me!… How I love him!

She hugged her pillow and fell fast asleep.

The first time the two children met again, Christophe was surprised by Minna’s amiability. She greeted him and asked how he was in a very gentle voice; she sat down at the piano with an air of demure modesty; and she was an angel of docility. None of her mischievous schoolgirl tricks appeared; instead she listened reverently to Christophe’s remarks, acknowledged their justice, gave little startled cries when she made a mistake, and applied herself to correcting it. Christophe could make nothing of it. In a very short time she made astonishing progress. Not only did she play better, but she came to love music. However little given to flattery he was, he had to compliment her on it. She flushed with pleasure and thanked him with a look brimming with gratitude. She took pains with her dress for him; she wore ribbons of an exquisite shade; she gave Christophe smiles and languishing glances that displeased him, irritated him, and stirred him to the depths of his soul. Now it was she who sought conversation; but her conversation had nothing childish about it --- she spoke seriously and quoted poets in a slightly pedantic and affected little tone. He barely responded; he was ill at ease: this new Minna, whom he did not know, surprised and unsettled him.

She was always watching him. She was waiting… For what?… Did she herself quite know?… She was waiting for him to do it again. --- He was far too careful for that, convinced he had acted like a boor; he even seemed to have forgotten the matter entirely. She grew agitated; and one day when he was sitting quietly, at a respectable distance from those dangerous little paws, an impatience seized her: with a movement so swift that she had no time to think about it, she pressed her own little hand against his lips. He was bewildered, then furious and ashamed. He kissed it nonetheless, and quite passionately. This artless boldness outraged him; he was on the verge of leaving Minna then and there.

But he could no longer. He was caught. A tumult of thoughts surged within him: he recognized none of them. Like vapors rising from a valley, they rose from the depths of his heart. He wandered in every direction, aimlessly, through that mist of love; and whatever he did, he only circled around a dark and fixed idea, an unknown Desire, dreadful and fascinating, as a flame to an insect. It was the sudden churning of the blind forces of Nature.

They passed through a period of waiting. They watched each other, desired each other, and both feared each other. They were troubled. They continued nonetheless in their small hostilities and sulks; but there was no longer any familiarity between them --- they were silent. Each was busy building their love in silence.

Love has curious retroactive effects. The moment Christophe discovered that he loved Minna, he discovered at the same stroke that he had always loved her. For three months they had seen each other nearly every day, without his having suspected this love. But since he loved her today, it was absolutely necessary that he should have loved her from all eternity.

It was a relief to him to discover at last who he loved. He had been in love so long without knowing with whom! He felt something like ease, in the manner of a sick man who, suffering from a vague and enervating general malaise, sees it sharpen into an acute pain, localized at a single point. Nothing wears more heavily than love without a definite object: it gnaws and dissolves one’s forces, like fever. A passion one recognizes stretches the mind to excess; that is exhausting --- but at least one knows why. It is overwork, not consumption. Anything rather than emptiness.

Although Minna had given Christophe good reason to believe he was not indifferent to her, he did not fail to torment himself and to think she disdained him. They had never had a very clear image of each other; but never had that image been more confused and more false than now --- it was an incoherent succession of strange imaginings that could not be made to fit together; for they swung from one extreme to the other, alternately attributing to each other faults and charms they did not possess --- the former when they were apart, the latter when they were together. They were equally mistaken in both cases.

They did not know what they themselves desired. For Christophe, his love took the form of that thirst for tenderness --- imperious, absolute, demanding reciprocation --- that had burned in him since childhood, that he had claimed from others, that he would have liked to impose on others, willingly or by force. At moments, mixed into this despotic desire for the complete sacrifice of self and of others --- of others especially, perhaps --- came gusts of brutal and obscure desire that made him dizzy and that he could not understand. Minna, above all curious and delighted to have a romance, sought to draw from it every possible pleasure of self-regard and sentimentality; she deceived herself wholeheartedly about what she felt. A good part of their love was purely bookish. They recalled the novels they had read and were constantly lending each other feelings they did not have.

But the moment was coming when all these small lies, all these small selfishnesses, would vanish before the divine radiance of love. A day, an hour, a few eternal seconds… And it came so unexpectedly!…

They were alone together one evening, talking. Shadows were falling in the sitting room. Their conversation had taken on a serious tone. They were speaking of the infinite, of life, and of death. It made a grander setting for their little passion. Minna was lamenting her loneliness, which naturally drew Christophe’s reply that she was not as alone as she said.

--- No, she said, shaking her little head, all that is just words. Everyone lives for themselves, no one is interested in you, no one loves you.

A silence.

--- And I? said Christophe abruptly, pale with emotion.

The impetuous little person leapt to her feet and seized his hands.

The door opened. They drew back from each other. Madame de Kerich came in. Christophe buried himself in a book, which he was holding upside down. Minna, bent over her needlework, drove the needle into her finger.

They were not alone again for the rest of the evening, and they were afraid of being so. When madame de Kerich got up to fetch something from the next room, Minna, who was not ordinarily so obliging, ran to get it for her; and Christophe took advantage of her absence to leave, without saying good night.

The next day they found each other again, impatient to resume the interrupted conversation. They did not manage it. Circumstances were nevertheless in their favor. They went for a walk with madame de Kerich, and had ten opportunities to talk at ease. But Christophe could not speak; and he was so miserable about it that he kept himself as far as possible from Minna on the road. She pretended not to notice his rudeness; but she was stung by it, and showed it clearly. When Christophe finally forced himself to say a few words, she listened with a cold air: he barely had the courage to reach the end of his sentence. The walk was ending. Time was passing. And he despaired at having failed to make use of it.

A week went by. They thought they had been mistaken about their feelings for each other. They were not even sure they hadn’t dreamed the scene of the other evening. Minna held a grudge against Christophe. Christophe dreaded running into her alone. They were more distant than ever.

Then came a day. --- It had rained all morning and part of the afternoon. They had stayed inside the house, not speaking to each other, reading, yawning, watching through the window; they were bored and sullen. Around four o’clock the sky cleared. They ran out to the garden. They leaned on the terrace wall, gazing down at the grassy slopes below them that descended toward the river. The earth was steaming; a warm vapor rose in the sunlight; droplets of rain sparkled on the grass; the smell of wet earth and the fragrance of flowers mingled together; around them buzzed the golden flight of bees. They were side by side and did not look at each other; they could not bring themselves to break the silence. A bee clumsily clutched a bunch of wisteria heavy with rain and sent a cascade of water tumbling over itself. They laughed at the same moment; and at once they felt that they were no longer sulking, that they were good friends again. Still they continued not to look at each other.

Suddenly, without turning her head, she took his hand and said:

--- Come!

She pulled him running toward the little wooded labyrinth with its box-bordered paths that rose at the center of the grove. They climbed the slope, slipping on the waterlogged ground; and the wet trees shook their branches over them. Near the top she stopped to catch her breath.

--- Wait… wait…, she said softly, trying to breathe again.

He looked at her. She was looking the other way: she was smiling, breathless, her mouth half open; her hand was clenched in Christophe’s hand. They felt their blood beating in their pressed palms and their trembling fingers. Around them, silence. The golden young shoots of the trees shivered in the sunlight; a light rain dripped from the leaves with a silvery sound; and through the sky passed the sharp cries of swallows.

She turned her head toward him: it was like a flash of lightning. She threw herself against his neck, he threw himself into her arms.

--- Minna! Minna! ma chérie!…

--- I love you, Christophe! I love you!

They sat down on a wet wooden bench. They were filled with love, a love soft, deep, and absurd. Everything else had vanished. No more selfishness, no more vanity, no more hidden thoughts. All the shadows of the soul were swept away by this breath of love. To love, to love --- that was what their laughing, tear-bright eyes were saying. That cold and coquettish girl, that proud boy, were consumed by the need to sacrifice themselves, to give themselves, to suffer, to die for each other. They no longer recognized themselves, they were no longer themselves; everything was transformed: their hearts, their faces, their eyes radiated a touching goodness and tenderness. Minutes of purity, of self-denial, of absolute surrender of oneself, which will not come again in life!

After a wild babbling, after passionate promises to belong to each other always, after kisses and incoherent and rapturous words, they noticed that it was late and came running back, holding hands, at risk of falling on the narrow paths, bumping into trees, feeling nothing, blind and drunk with joy.

When he had left her, he did not go home: he could not have slept. He left the town and walked through the fields; he wandered at random through the night. The air was cool, the countryside dark and deserted. An owl hooted coldly. He walked like a sleepwalker. He climbed the hill through the vineyards. The small lights of the town trembled in the plain, and the stars trembled in the dark sky. He sat on a wall beside the path, and was suddenly seized by a fit of weeping. He did not know why. He was too happy; and the excess of his joy was made of sadness and joy together; gratitude for his happiness mingled with it, pity for those who were not happy, a melancholy and tender sense of the fragility of things, the intoxication of being alive. He wept with delight, he fell asleep in the midst of his tears. When he woke it was the uncertain dawn. White mists trailed along the river and wrapped the town where Minna slept, exhausted, her heart illuminated by a smile of happiness.

From first thing in the morning they managed to meet again in the garden, and they told each other again that they were in love; but already it was no longer the divine unselfconsciousness of the evening before. She was playing the role of a lover a little; and he, though more sincere, was also performing a part. They spoke of what their life together would be. He lamented his poverty, his humble station. She affected generosity, and enjoyed her own generosity. She told herself she was indifferent to money. It was true that she was; for she did not know it, never having known its lack. He promised her he would become a great artist; she found this charming and beautiful, like a novel. She believed it her duty to conduct herself as a true sweetheart. She read poetry, she became sentimental. He was caught up by the contagion. He took care of his dress: he was ridiculous; he watched the way he spoke: he was pretentious. Madame de Kerich watched him laughing, and wondered what could have made him so stupid.

But they had moments of ineffable poetry. They would burst suddenly in the middle of somewhat pale days, like a ray of sunlight through the fog. It was a glance, a gesture, a word that signified nothing, and flooded them with happiness; it was the “Good night!” in the evening on the poorly lit staircase, the eyes that sought each other, divined each other in the half-darkness, the shiver of hands touching, the trembling of the voice, all those little nothings, the memory of which nourished them at night when they slept so lightly that the sound of each hour woke them, and when their hearts sang: “He loves me,” like the murmuring of a stream.

They discovered the charm of things. Spring smiled with a marvelous softness. The sky had a brightness, the air had a tenderness, that they had never known. The whole town, the red rooftops, the old walls, the uneven cobblestones, all took on a familiar charm that moved Christophe to tenderness. At night, when everyone was asleep, Minna would get up from bed and stand at the window, drowsy and feverish. And in the afternoons, when he was not there, she would dream, sitting in the swing, a book on her knees, her eyes half closed, drowsy with happy weariness, her body and her mind floating in the spring air. She spent hours at the piano now, repeating with a patience exasperating to everyone around her certain chords and passages that made her go quite pale and cold with emotion. She wept listening to Schumann. She felt herself full of compassion and kindness for everyone; and he was the same. They gave furtive coins to the poor they encountered, and exchanged compassionate glances: they were glad to be so good.

In truth, they were so only by fits and starts. Minna would suddenly discover how sad was the humble devoted life of old Frida, who had served in the house since her mother’s childhood; and she would run at once to throw her arms around her neck, to the great astonishment of the good old woman, who was busy darning linen in the kitchen. But this did not prevent her, two hours later, from speaking sharply to her because Frida had not come at the first ring of the bell. And Christophe, who was consumed with love for all of humanity and stepped off the road to avoid crushing an insect, was full of indifference toward his own family. By a strange reaction, the more affection he felt for the rest of humanity, the colder and drier he was with those who were his; he barely thought about them; he spoke to them brusquely and saw them with irritation. Their goodness was nothing but an overflow of tenderness, which spilled out in bursts and happened to benefit whoever crossed their path first. Outside those bursts, they were more selfish than usual; for their minds were filled by a single thought, and everything was drawn back into it.

What a place the girl’s face had taken in Christophe’s life! What emotion, when, searching for her in the garden, he caught sight from far away of the little white dress; --- when, at the theater, sitting a few steps from their still-empty seats, he heard the door of the box open and the laughing voice he knew so well; --- when, in a stranger’s conversation, the dear name of Kerich was spoken by chance! He would turn pale, then flush; for a few minutes he could neither see nor hear anything. And immediately after came a surge of blood rising through his whole body, a rush of unknown forces.

This naive and sensual little German girl had strange games. She would press her ring into a layer of flour; and each of them had to pick it up, one after the other, with their teeth, without getting their nose white. Or she would thread a string through a biscuit, each taking one end in their mouth; and the aim was to eat the string as fast as possible to be the first to bite the biscuit. Their faces drew close together, their breaths mingled, their lips touched, they laughed forced laughs, and their hands were ice-cold. Christophe felt an urge to bite, to hurt; he would jerk back abruptly; and she would continue laughing, in a strained way. They turned away from each other, pretended indifference, and watched each other on the sly.

These unsettling games had an anxious appeal for them: they sought them out and fled from them. Christophe feared them and preferred even the awkwardness of gatherings where madame de Kerich or someone else was present. No unwelcome presence could interrupt the conversation of their loving hearts; constraint only made it more intense and more sweet. Everything between them then acquired an infinite value: a word, a pursing of the lips, a glance was enough to let the rich and tender treasure of their inner life shine through the commonplace veil of ordinary life. They alone could see it --- or so they believed --- and smiled at each other, happy in their little mysteries. To listen to their words, one would have noticed nothing but a drawing-room conversation on indifferent subjects: for them, it was a perpetual song of love. They read the most fleeting nuances of each other’s faces and voices as in an open book; they might just as well have read with their eyes closed; for they had only to listen to their own heart to hear within it the echo of their beloved’s heart. They overflowed with confidence in life, in happiness, in themselves. Their hopes were boundless. They loved and were loved, happy, without a shadow, without a doubt, without a fear for the future. The singular serenity of those spring days! Not a cloud in the sky. A faith so fresh that nothing seems able to wither it ever. A joy so abundant that nothing will be able to exhaust it. Do they live? Do they dream? They dream, no doubt. There is nothing in common between life and their dream. Nothing --- except that in this magical hour they themselves are nothing but a dream: their being has melted in the breath of love.

Madame de Kerich was not slow to notice their little game, which thought itself very cunning and was very clumsy. Minna had suspected something of the kind ever since her mother had come in unexpectedly one day when she was talking to Christophe at closer range than was proper, and at the sound of the door they had hurriedly moved apart with awkward confusion. Madame de Kerich had pretended to notice nothing. Minna almost regretted it. She would have liked to have to struggle against her mother: it would have been more romantic.

Her mother was careful not to give her that opportunity; she was too intelligent to worry, or to make any observation on the subject. But in front of Minna, she spoke of Christophe with irony, and mercilessly mocked his absurdities: she demolished him in a few words. She had no calculation in it; she acted on instinct, with the natural cunning of a good woman defending what is hers. However Minna bristled, sulked, made impertinent remarks, and stubbornly denied the truth of the observations: they were only too justified, and madame de Kerich had a cruel skill at wounding in just the right place. The breadth of Christophe’s shoes, the ugliness of his clothes, his poorly brushed hat, his provincial accent, his ridiculous way of bowing, the vulgarity of his outbursts of laughter --- nothing was overlooked that might wound Minna’s pride: it was a simple remark, fired off in passing; it never took the form of a formal indictment; and when Minna, irritated, drew herself up to reply, madame de Kerich was already, with perfect innocence, busy with an entirely different subject. But the dart remained, and Minna was struck by it.

She began to look at Christophe with less indulgent eyes. He sensed it vaguely and asked her, uneasy:

--- Why are you looking at me like that?

She would answer:

--- For no reason.

But a moment later, when he was joyful, she would reproach him sharply for laughing too loudly. He was dismayed --- it would never have occurred to him that he needed to watch himself around her, even in laughter: all his happiness was spoiled. Or when he was talking with complete abandon, she would interrupt him with a distracted air to make some disagreeable remark about his clothes, or she would correct his ordinary expressions with an aggressive pedantry. He no longer felt like saying anything at all, and sometimes he grew angry. Then he would persuade himself that these mannerisms which irritated him were proof of the interest Minna took in him; and she persuaded herself of the same thing. He tried humbly to benefit from it. She gave him little credit for that; for he hardly succeeded.

But he had no time --- nor did Minna --- to notice the change taking place in her. Easter had come, and Minna was to make a short journey with her mother to visit relatives near Weimar.

During the final week before the separation, they rediscovered the intimacy of their first days. Aside from a few moments of impatience, Minna was more affectionate than ever. The evening before her departure, they walked for a long time in the park; she drew Christophe mysteriously to the far end of the arbor and slipped around his neck a small perfumed sachet in which she had enclosed a lock of her hair; they renewed their eternal vows, they swore to write to each other every day; and in the sky they chose a star, so that each evening, at the same moment, they would both look up at it.

The fateful day arrived. Ten times during the night he had asked himself: “Where will she be tomorrow?” And now he thought: “Today is the day. This morning she is still here; this evening she will be gone.” He went to her house before eight o’clock. She was not yet up. He tried to walk in the garden: he could not, and came back. The corridors were full of trunks and packages; he sat in the corner of a room, listening for the sounds of doors, the creaking of floorboards, recognizing the steps that pattered on the floor above. Madame de Kerich passed, gave a slight smile on seeing him, and tossed him a mocking good morning without stopping. Minna appeared at last; she was pale, her eyes were swollen; she had slept no more than he had that night. She gave orders to the servants with a busy air; she held out her hand to Christophe while continuing to speak to old Frida. She was already ready to leave. Madame de Kerich came back. They discussed together the matter of a hatbox. Minna seemed to pay no attention to Christophe, who stood forgotten and unhappy beside the piano. She went out with her mother, then came back in; from the threshold she called something more to Madame de Kerich. She closed the door. They were alone. She ran to him, seized his hand, and drew him into the small adjoining sitting room, whose shutters were closed. Then she abruptly pressed her face against Christophe’s and kissed him with all her strength. She asked, weeping:

--- You promise, you promise, you’ll love me always?

They sobbed quietly and made frantic efforts not to be heard. They drew apart at the sound of approaching footsteps. Minna, wiping her eyes, resumed her little air of importance with the servants; but her voice was trembling.

He managed to steal her handkerchief, which she had dropped --- her little handkerchief, dirty and crumpled, damp with her tears.

He accompanied his friends in their carriage to the station. Seated facing each other, the two children scarcely dared look at one another for fear of bursting into tears. Their hands sought each other furtively and clasped so tightly they hurt. Madame de Kerich observed them with a good-natured irony and seemed to notice nothing.

At last the hour came. Standing at the carriage door as the train began to move, Christophe started running alongside the car, not looking ahead of him, jostling the railway employees, his eyes fixed on Minna’s eyes, until the train outpaced him. He kept running until he could see nothing more. Then he stopped, out of breath; and he found himself on the station platform, surrounded by indifferent strangers. He walked home, where fortunately the others had gone out; and he wept all morning.

For the first time he knew the dreadful grief of absence. An intolerable torment for every loving heart. The world is empty, life is empty, everything is empty. The heart tightens, one can no longer breathe: it is a mortal anguish, an insurmountable difficulty of living. Above all when the material traces of the beloved’s presence persist all around you, when every object surrounding you evokes her constantly, when you remain in the familiar setting where you lived together, when you yourself insist on reliving the vanished happiness in the very same places. Then it is as though an abyss opens beneath your feet: you lean over, you feel dizzy, you are going to fall, you fall. You believe you are looking death in the face. And indeed it is death you see: absence is only one of its masks. You witness, fully alive, the disappearance of what you hold most dear: life fades away, there is the black hole, the void.

Christophe went back to revisit all the beloved places, to suffer more. Madame de Kerich had left him the key to the garden, so that he might walk there in their absence. He returned that very day, and nearly choked with pain. He had thought, in coming, that he would find there something of the one who had gone: he found her only too well; her image hovered over every lawn; he expected to see her appear at every turn of the paths; he knew perfectly well she would not appear, but he tormented himself by persuading himself otherwise, by seeking out the traces of his amorous memories --- the path through the labyrinth, the wisteria-draped terrace, the bench in the arbor; and he drove himself with a torturer’s insistence to repeat: “Eight days ago… three days ago… yesterday, it was like this, yesterday she was here… this very morning…” He plowed his heart with these thoughts until he had to stop, choking, nearly dying. Into his mourning crept anger at himself for all that beautiful time wasted, without having made the most of it. So many minutes, so many hours, when he was enjoying the infinite happiness of seeing her, breathing her in, nourishing himself on her presence! And he had not appreciated it! He had let time slip away without having savored each smallest moment! And now!… Now it was too late… Irreparable! Irreparable!

He came home. His family was odious to him. He could not bear their faces, their gestures, their insipid conversations --- the same as yesterday, the same as the days before, the same as when she was there. They went on living their accustomed lives as though such a catastrophe had not just occurred beside them. The town, too, had no inkling. People went about their business, laughing, noisy, busy; the crickets sang, the sky shone. He hated them all; he felt crushed by universal selfishness. But he was more selfish, alone, than the entire universe. Nothing had any value for him anymore. He had no more kindness. He loved no one.

He passed wretched days. His work took hold of him again in a mechanical way; but he had no more courage for living.

One evening when he was at table with his family, silent and downcast, the postman knocked at the door and handed him a letter. His heart recognized it before he had seen the handwriting. Four pairs of eyes, fixed on him with indiscreet curiosity, were waiting for him to read it, clinging to the hope of this distraction that would lift them from their usual boredom. He laid the letter beside his plate and forced himself not to open it, pretending with an air of indifference that he knew what it contained. But his brothers, offended, believed nothing of it and continued to watch him: so that he was in torment until the meal was over. Only then was he free to lock himself in his room. His heart was beating so hard that he nearly tore the letter in opening it. He trembled at what he was about to read; but as soon as he had glanced at the first words, joy flooded through him.

It was a few lines, very affectionate. Minna had written to him in secret. She called him “Dear Christlein”; she told him she had wept a great deal, that she had looked at the star each evening, that she had been to Frankfurt, which was a grandiose city with wonderful shops, but that she paid attention to nothing because she thought only of him. She reminded him that he had sworn to remain faithful to her and to see no one in her absence, so as to think only of her. She wanted him to work during all the time she was away, so that he would become famous, and she along with him. She ended by asking if he remembered the little sitting room where they had said goodbye on the morning of her departure; and she begged him to go back there one morning; she was certain she would still be there in spirit, and would say goodbye to him again in the same way. She signed it: “Eternally yours! Eternally!…”; and she had added a postscript recommending that he buy a straw boater instead of his ugly felt hat --- all the distinguished people here wore them --- a boater of thick straw with a wide blue ribbon.

Christophe read the letter four times before he managed to understand it fully. He was dazed; he no longer even had the strength to be happy; he felt so suddenly tired that he lay down, reading and kissing the letter at every moment. He put it under his pillow, and his hand kept reassuring itself that it was there. An ineffable sense of well-being spread through him. He slept straight through until the next day.

His life became more bearable. Minna’s faithful thought floated around him. He set about answering her; but he had no right to write to her freely, he had to conceal what he felt --- this was painful and difficult. He strove awkwardly to veil his love under formulas of ceremonious politeness, which he always used in a ridiculous way.

His letter sent, he waited for Minna’s reply; he lived only in that waiting. To pass the time, he tried to go for walks, to read. But he thought only of Minna; he repeated her name to himself with a monomaniac’s obstinacy; he had for that name so idolatrous a love that he carried in his pocket, wherever he went, a volume of Lessing, because Minna’s name appeared in it; and every day he made a long detour on leaving the theater, in order to pass by a haberdasher’s shop whose sign bore those five adored letters.

He reproached himself for seeking distraction when she had pressed him so insistently to work, so as to make her illustrious. The naive vanity of this request touched him, as a mark of trust. He resolved, in answer to it, to write a work that would not merely be dedicated to her but truly consecrated to her. Besides, he would not have been capable of doing anything else at that moment. No sooner had he conceived the plan than musical ideas came flooding into him. It was like a body of water that had been accumulating in a reservoir for months, suddenly collapsing and breaking its dikes. He left his room no more for eight days. Louisa would leave his dinner at the door, for he would not even let her come in.

He wrote a quintet for clarinet and strings. The first movement was a poem of hope and youthful longing; the last, an amorous playfulness into which broke the somewhat wild humor of Christophe. But the whole work had been written for the second movement: the larghetto, in which Christophe had painted an ardent and artless little soul, was --- or was meant to be --- a portrait of Minna. No one would have recognized her in it, and she least of all; but what mattered was that he recognized her perfectly; and he felt a tremor of pleasure at the illusion of having captured the being of his beloved. No work was ever easier or happier for him: it was a release from the excess of love that absence had been storing up in him; and at the same time the concern for the work of art, the effort required to dominate and concentrate passion into a beautiful and clear form, gave him a clarity of mind, an equilibrium of all his faculties, that produced in him a kind of physical pleasure. That sovereign joy, known to every creative artist: during the time he creates, he escapes entirely from the slavery of desire and pain; he becomes their master in turn; and everything that made him rejoice, and everything that made him suffer, seems then the free play of his will. Moments too brief; for afterward he finds the chains of reality heavier than before.

As long as Christophe was occupied with this work, he had barely time to think of Minna’s absence: he lived with her. Minna was no longer in Minna --- she was wholly within him. But when he had finished, he found himself alone, more alone than before, more weary, exhausted by the effort; he remembered that two weeks had passed since he had written to Minna, and that she had not replied.

He wrote to her again; and this time he could not bring himself to observe quite the restraint he had imposed upon himself in the first letter. He reproached Minna, in a tone of playful banter --- for he did not himself believe it --- for having forgotten him. He teased her about her laziness and lavished affectionate little provocations on her. He spoke of his work with great mystery, to pique her curiosity, and because he wanted to surprise her with it on her return. He described in minute detail the hat he had bought; and he recounted that, in obedience to the little despot’s orders --- for he had taken all her pretensions at their word --- he no longer left the house, and told people he was ill, so as to refuse all invitations. He did not add that he had even fallen out of favor with the grand duke, because, in the excess of his zeal, he had dispensed with attending an evening at the castle to which he had been invited. The whole letter was one of joyful abandon, full of those little secrets dear to lovers: he imagined that Minna alone held the key to them, and he considered himself very clever, because he had taken care to replace the word love everywhere with the word friendship.

After writing, he felt a momentary relief: first, because the letter had given him the illusion of a conversation with the absent one; and above all because he did not doubt that Minna would reply at once. He was therefore very patient during the three days he had allotted to the post to carry his letter to Minna and bring back her answer. But when the fourth day had passed, he began once more to be unable to live. He had no more energy, no more interest in things, except during the hour before each post arrived. Then he was trembling with impatience. He became superstitious, and sought in the smallest signs --- the crackling of the fire, a word spoken by chance --- the assurance that the letter was coming. Once the hour had passed, he fell back into his prostration. No work, no walks: the sole purpose of existence was to wait for the next mail; and all his energy was spent finding the strength to hold out until then. But when evening came, and there was no more hope for the day, then came the crushing weight: it seemed to him that he would never manage to live until the next morning; and he would sit for hours at his table, saying nothing, thinking nothing, not even having the strength to go to bed, until some remnant of will finally drove him to it; and he slept a heavy sleep, full of stupid dreams, which made him feel as though the night would never end.

This continual waiting became in time a physical torture, a genuine illness. Christophe reached the point of suspecting his father, his brothers, even the postman, of having received the letter and hiding it from him. He was gnawed by anxiety. Of Minna’s faithfulness he did not doubt for an instant. If therefore she was not writing to him, it must be because she was ill, dying, perhaps dead. He seized his pen and wrote a third letter, a few anguished lines, in which he no more thought of watching his feelings than his spelling. The post hour was pressing; he had crossed things out, smeared the page in turning it, soiled the envelope in sealing it: no matter! He could not have waited for the next collection. He ran to drop the letter at the post office, and waited in mortal anguish. On the second night, he had a vivid vision of Minna, ill, calling for him; he got up, was on the point of setting off on foot to go to her. But where? Where to find her?

On the fourth morning, Minna’s letter arrived at last --- barely half a page --- cold and tight-lipped. Minna said she did not understand what could have inspired these foolish apprehensions, that she was quite well, that she had no time to write, and that she begged him to be less excitable in future and to cease his correspondence.

Christophe was devastated. He did not question Minna’s sincerity. He blamed himself; he thought that Minna was rightly irritated by the imprudent and absurd letters he had written. He called himself an imbecile, he beat his head with his fists. But try as he might: he was forced to feel that Minna did not love him as much as he loved her.

The days that followed were so bleak that they cannot be told. A void cannot be described. Deprived of the one good thing that bound him to existence --- his letters to Minna --- Christophe lived on only in a mechanical fashion; and the sole act of his life in which he took any interest was when, in the evening, at the moment of going to bed, he crossed off, like a schoolboy, on his calendar, one of the interminable days that separated him from Minna’s return.

The date of the return had passed. They should have been back a week ago already. The prostration that had seized Christophe gave way to a feverish agitation. Minna had promised him, on leaving, to let him know the day and hour of her arrival. He waited moment by moment for the chance to go to meet them; and he lost himself in conjectures to explain the delay.

One evening, a neighbor of the house, a friend of grandfather’s, the upholsterer Fischer, had come to smoke his pipe and chat with Melchior, as he often did after dinner. Christophe, who was fretting, was about to go back up to his room, having waited in vain for the postman to pass, when a word made him start. Fischer was saying that the next morning, early, he had to go to the von Kerich house to hang some curtains. Christophe, seized with alarm, asked:

--- Are they back then?

--- You joker! You know it as well as I do, said old Fischer, with a mocking air. It’s been a good while! They came back the day before yesterday.

Christophe heard nothing more; he left the room and prepared to go out. His mother, who for some time had been keeping a quiet eye on him without his noticing, followed him into the hallway and timidly asked where he was going. He did not answer, and went out. He was suffering.

He ran to the home of the de Kerich ladies. It was nine o’clock in the evening. They were both in the drawing room, and did not appear surprised to see him. They wished him good evening with tranquility. Minna, busy writing, held out her hand to him across the table and continued her letter, asking after him with an absent air. She apologized, moreover, for her rudeness and pretended to listen to what he said; but she interrupted him to ask her mother something. He had prepared touching words about all he had suffered during their absence: he could barely stammer a few of them; no one took them up, and he did not have the courage to continue: it rang false.

When Minna had finished the letter, she picked up her needlework and, sitting a few steps away from him, began to tell him about the journey she had made. She spoke of the pleasant weeks she had spent, of the horseback rides, the life at the château, the interesting company; she grew animated little by little, and made allusions to events or to people that Christophe did not know, and whose memory made her and her mother laugh. Christophe felt himself a stranger in the midst of this account; he did not know what expression to wear, and laughed with an awkward air. He did not take his eyes off Minna’s face, calling to her eyes, imploring the alms of a glance. But when she looked at him --- which she did rarely, addressing herself more often to her mother than to him --- her eyes, like her voice, were pleasant and indifferent. Was she restraining herself because of her mother, or was he misreading her? He would have liked to speak with her, alone; but madame de Kerich did not leave them for a moment. He tried to steer the conversation to a subject that was personal to him; he spoke of his work, his plans; he was vaguely conscious that Minna was slipping away from him; and by instinct he tried to engage her interest in himself. Indeed, she seemed to listen to him with great attention; she punctuated his account with varied exclamations, which did not always fall in quite the right place, but whose tone seemed full of interest. But just as he began to hope again, intoxicated by one of her charming smiles, he saw Minna put her little hand in front of her mouth and yawn. He stopped short. She noticed it, and excused herself pleasantly, pleading tiredness. He rose, thinking he would be asked to stay; but nothing was said. He prolonged his farewells, waiting for a word to come back the next day: the subject was not raised. He had to leave. Minna did not see him out. She held out her hand to him --- an indifferent hand, that lay coldly in his hand; and he took his leave of them in the middle of the drawing room.

He went home with dread in his heart. Of the Minna of two months ago, of his dear Minna, nothing remained. What had happened? What had become of her? For a poor boy who had never yet experienced the incessant changes, the total disappearance and absolute renewal of living souls --- most of which are not souls at all but collections of souls, succeeding one another, transforming and constantly extinguishing themselves --- the simple truth was too cruel for him to bring himself to believe it. He pushed the idea away with horror, and tried to persuade himself that he had misread things, that Minna was still the same. He decided to return to her the very next morning, to speak with her at any cost.

He did not sleep. He counted, one by one, through the night, all the strikes of the clock. From the first hour he went prowling around the de Kerich house; he went in as soon as he could. It was not Minna he found, but madame de Kerich. Active and early-rising, she was busy watering the flower pots under the veranda with a carafe. She gave a mocking exclamation on seeing Christophe:

--- Ah! she said, it’s you!… You’ve come at just the right moment; I was about to speak to you. Wait, wait…

She went inside for a moment to set down the carafe and dry her hands, and came back with a little smile, seeing the crestfallen expression of Christophe, who sensed misfortune approaching.

--- Let us go into the garden, she said, we will be more comfortable there.

In the garden, so full of his love, he followed madame de Kerich. She was in no hurry to speak, amusing herself with the child’s distress.

--- Let us sit here, she said at last.

They were on the bench where Minna had lifted her lips to him the evening before her departure.

--- I think you know what this is about, said madame de Kerich, who assumed a grave air to complete his confusion. I would never have thought it of you, Christophe. I considered you a serious young man. I had complete trust in you. I would never have thought you would abuse it, to try to turn my daughter’s head. She was in your care. You should have respected her, respected me, respected yourself.

There was a slight irony in her tone --- madame de Kerich attached not the least importance to this children’s love --- but Christophe did not feel it; and these reproaches, which he took tragically, as he took everything, went straight to his heart:

--- But, madame… but, madame… he stammered, tears in his eyes. I have never abused your trust… Please don’t think so… I am not a dishonest man, I swear it!… I love mademoiselle Minna, I love her with all my soul, but I want to marry her.

Madame de Kerich smiled.

--- No, my poor boy, she said, with that benevolence so fundamentally disdainful that he was at last beginning to understand --- no, it is not possible, it is a childish fancy.

--- Why? Why? he asked.

He had taken her hands, not believing she was speaking seriously, almost reassured by her gentler voice. She continued to smile, and said:

--- Because.

He pressed on. With ironic consideration --- she did not take him entirely seriously --- she told him he had no fortune, that Minna had other tastes. He protested that none of that mattered, that he would be rich, famous, that he would have honors, money, everything Minna could want. Madame de Kerich was skeptical; she was amused by this self-confidence, and contented herself with shaking her head to say no. He persisted still.

--- No, Christophe, she said in a decided tone, no, it is pointless to argue, it is impossible. It is not only a question of money. So many things!… One’s situation…

She did not need to finish. It was a needle that pierced him to the bone. His eyes opened. He saw the irony of the friendly smile, he saw the coldness of the benevolent gaze, he understood abruptly all that separated him from this woman whom he loved with a filial love, who seemed to treat him in a maternal fashion; he felt all that was protective and disdainful in her affection. He rose, quite pale. Madame de Kerich continued to speak to him in her caressing voice; but it was finished; he no longer heard the music of her words, he pierced beneath each word the dryness of that elegant soul. He could not answer a single word. He left. Everything was spinning around him.

Back in his room, he threw himself on his bed and had a convulsion of anger and outraged pride, as he used to when he was small. He bit his pillow, he stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth so that no one would hear him cry out. He hated madame de Kerich. He hated Minna. He despised them with fury. It seemed to him that he had been slapped across the face; he was trembling with shame and rage. He had to respond, to act at once. He would die if he could not have his revenge.

He got up and wrote a letter of idiotic violence:

« Madame,

« I do not know whether, as you say, you were deceived in me. But what I do know is that I was cruelly deceived in you. I had believed that you were my friends. You said so, you made a show of being so, and I loved you more than my life. I see now that all of it was a lie, and that your affection for me was nothing but a deception: you made use of me, I amused you, I entertained you, I made music for you --- I was your servant. Your servant I am not! I am no one’s servant!

“You have made me feel, harshly, that I had no right to love your daughter. Nothing in the world can prevent my heart from loving what it loves; and if I am not of your rank, I am just as noble as you. It is the heart that ennobles a man: if I am not a count, I may have more honor in me than many counts. Valet or count, the moment he insults me, I despise him. I despise as mud everything that calls itself noble, if it does not have the nobility of the soul.

“Farewell! You have misjudged me. You have deceived me. I hate you.

“The one who loves, in spite of you, and who will love Mademoiselle Minna until his death, because she belongs to him, and because nothing can take her from him.”

Scarcely had he dropped his letter in the post when he was seized with terror at what he had done. He tried not to think about it anymore; but certain phrases kept coming back to him, and he broke into a cold sweat imagining madame de Kerich reading those monstrous things. In the first moment, he had been sustained by his very despair; but by the next day, he understood that his letter would have no other result than to separate him entirely from Minna — and that seemed to him the worst of all misfortunes. He still hoped that madame de Kerich, who knew his fits of temper, would not take this one seriously, that she would be content with a stern rebuke, and — who knows? — might even be touched by the sincerity of his passion. He needed only a word to throw himself at her feet. He waited five days. Then a letter came. It read:

“Dear Monsieur,

“Since, in your view, there has been a misunderstanding on both sides between us, the wisest course is no doubt not to prolong it. I would reproach myself for imposing further on you relations that have become painful for you. You will therefore find it natural that we discontinue them. I hope that you will not lack, in the future, other friends who will know how to appreciate you as you wish to be appreciated. I do not doubt your future, and will follow from afar, with sympathy, your progress in your musical career. My regards.

“Josepha von Kerich”

The bitterest reproaches would have been less cruel. Christophe saw himself as lost. One can answer someone who accuses you unjustly. But what can one do against the void of this polite indifference? He was beside himself. He thought that he would never see Minna again, never again; and he could not bear it. He felt how little all the pride in the world weighed against a little love. He forgot all dignity, he became cowardly, he wrote new letters begging to be forgiven. They were no less foolish than the one in which he had raged. They went unanswered. And that was the end of it.

He nearly died. He thought of killing himself. He thought of killing. Or at least he imagined he thought so. He burned with desires for destruction, for murder. One has no idea of the paroxysm of love and hate that sometimes devour certain children’s hearts. It was the most terrible crisis of his childhood. It put an end to his childhood. It tempered his will. But it came very close to breaking it forever.

He could no longer live. Leaning on his windowsill for hours, staring down at the courtyard stones, he thought, as he had when he was small, that there was a way to escape the torture of life when it became too great. The remedy was there, before his eyes, immediate… Immediate? Who could say?… Perhaps after hours — centuries — of unbearable suffering!… But so deep was his childish despair that he let himself slide toward the dizziness of these thoughts.

Louisa could see that he was suffering. She could not know precisely what was happening inside him; but her instinct warned her obscurely of the danger. She tried to draw closer to her son, to learn of his sorrows so that she might comfort him. But the poor woman had lost the habit of intimate talk with Christophe; for many years he had kept his thoughts locked within himself; and she was too absorbed in the material worries of life to have time to try to understand him. Now, when she so wanted to help him, she did not know what to do. She hovered around him like a lost soul; she wished she could find the words that would do him good; and she dared not speak, for fear of irritating him. And despite all her care, she irritated him — by her every gesture, by her very presence; for she was not very graceful, and he was not very forgiving. Yet he loved her, they loved each other. But so little is enough to separate beings who cherish and esteem each other with all their hearts! Speaking too loudly, an awkward gesture, an innocent habit of the eyes or nose, a way of eating, of walking, of laughing, a physical discomfort one cannot quite name… One tells oneself it is nothing; and yet it is a whole world. It is often enough to ensure that a mother and a son, a brother and a brother, a friend and a friend — who stand right beside each other — remain forever strangers to each other.

Christophe thus found in his mother’s affection no sufficient support for the crisis he was going through. And besides, what is the affection of others worth to the egotism of passion, which is consumed by itself alone?

One night, when the household was asleep and he sat at his table, not thinking, not moving, sinking ever deeper into his dangerous thoughts, footsteps echoed in the quiet little street, and a knock at the door pulled him from his stupor. There was a murmur of indistinct voices. He remembered that his father had not come home that evening, and he thought with irritation that they were bringing him back drunk again, as the week before, when they had found him lying across the road. For Melchior no longer observed any restraint; he gave himself over more and more to his vice, his athletic constitution apparently not suffering in the least from excesses and recklessness that would have killed another man. He ate enough for four, drank until he dropped, spent nights outdoors in the freezing rain, got beaten up in brawls, and turned up the next morning in his boisterous good humor, insisting that everyone around him be cheerful too.

Louisa, already up, hurried to open the door. Christophe, who had not moved, covered his ears so as not to hear Melchior’s wine-soaked voice and the mocking remarks of the neighbors…

…Suddenly, an inexplicable anguish seized him: he began to tremble, for no reason, his face buried in his hands. And at that same moment, a piercing cry made him raise his head. He leapt to the door…

In the middle of a group of men speaking in low voices, in the dark corridor lit by the trembling glow of a lantern, a body was lying on a stretcher — drenched with water, motionless — just as grandfather had lain, long ago. Louisa was sobbing over him. Melchior had just been found drowned in the millstream.

Christophe cried out. The whole rest of the world vanished; all his other sorrows were swept away. He threw himself down upon his father’s body, beside Louisa, and they wept together.

Sitting beside the bed, keeping watch over Melchior’s final sleep — his face now bearing a stern and solemn expression — Christophe felt the dark tranquility of the dead enter into him. His childish passion had dissolved, like a bout of fever; the icy breath of the grave had carried everything away. Minna, his pride, his love, and himself — alas! what misery! How little all of it meant beside this one reality, the only reality: death! Was it worth suffering so much, desiring so much, agitating so much, only to come to this?…

He gazed at his sleeping father and was filled with an infinite pity. He recalled the smallest acts of kindness and tenderness. For, with all his failings, Melchior was not a bad man; there was much that was good in him. He loved his family. He was honest. He had something of the uncompromising integrity of the Kraffts which, in matters of morality and honor, would brook no argument and would never have countenanced the slightest moral shabbiness of the sort that so many respectable people do not quite regard as a fault. He was brave, and in any dangerous situation he exposed himself with a kind of pleasure. If he was extravagant with himself, he was equally so with others: he could not bear to see anyone sad; and he willingly gave away what was his — and what was not his — to the poor wretches he met along the way. All his good qualities now appeared to Christophe — he was partly inventing them, or exaggerating them. It seemed to him that he had misjudged his father. He blamed himself for not having loved him enough. He saw him defeated by life; and he thought he could hear that unhappy soul, carried along adrift, too weak to struggle, groaning over a life uselessly wasted. He heard that mournful plea, whose tone had once torn him apart:

--- Christophe! Don’t despise me!

And he was overwhelmed by remorse. He threw himself on the bed and kissed the face of the dead man, weeping. He repeated, as in the old days:

--- Dear Papa, I don’t despise you, I love you! Forgive me!

But the lament would not be stilled, and returned with anguish:

--- Don’t despise me! Don’t despise me!…

And suddenly, Christophe saw himself lying in the dead man’s place; he heard those terrible words coming from his own lips, he felt bearing down on his heart the despair of a life wasted for nothing, irretrievably lost. And he thought with horror: “Ah! Anything — all the suffering, all the misery in the world — rather than come to that!”… How close he had come! Had he not nearly given in to the temptation of breaking his own life himself, to escape his pain like a coward? As if all pain, all betrayal, were not children’s sorrows beside the supreme torture and crime of betraying oneself, of denying one’s faith, of despising oneself in death!

He saw that life was a battle without truce and without mercy, in which whoever wishes to be a man worthy of the name must struggle constantly against armies of invisible enemies: the murderous forces of nature, the turbid desires, the dark thoughts that push him treacherously toward self-abasement and self-annihilation. He saw that he had been on the verge of falling into the trap. He saw that happiness and love were a moment’s deception, designed to bring the heart to disarm and abdicate. And the little puritan of fifteen heard the voice of his God:

--- Go, go, without ever resting.

--- But where shall I go, Lord? Whatever I do, wherever I go, is the end not always the same, is the final point not always there?

--- Go and die, you who must die! Go and suffer, you who must suffer! One does not live in order to be happy. One lives to fulfill my Law. Suffer. Die. But be what you must be: --- a Man.