Jean-Christophe. III. L'adolescent
Romain Rolland
III. — The Adolescent
The house was plunged in silence. Since the father’s death, everything seemed dead. Now that Melchior’s loud voice had been silenced, one heard nothing more, from morning to night, but the wearisome murmur of the river.
Christophe had thrown himself back into obstinate work. He put a mute rage into punishing himself for having wanted to be happy. To condolences and affectionate words he made no answer, stiffened in his pride. Without a word, he threw himself into his daily tasks, and gave his lessons with an icy attentiveness. His pupils, who knew of his misfortune, were shocked by his insensibility. But those who were older and had some experience of grief knew what that apparent coldness could conceal of suffering in a child; and they pitied him. He was not grateful to them for their sympathy. Music itself brought him no relief. He made it without pleasure, as a duty. It was as if he took a cruel joy in no longer finding pleasure in anything, or in persuading himself so, in depriving himself of all reasons for living, and yet living on.
His two brothers, frightened by the silence of the house in mourning, had hastened to flee it. Rodolphe had entered the business house of his uncle Theodore, and lodged with him. As for Ernst, after having tried two or three trades, he had enlisted on one of the Rhine boats plying the service between Mainz and Cologne; and he only reappeared when he needed money. Christophe thus remained alone with his mother in the too-large house; and the scantiness of their resources, the payment of certain debts that had come to light after the father’s death, had determined them, painful though it was, to seek another dwelling, humbler and less costly.
They found a small flat — two or three rooms on the second floor of a house in the Market Street. The quarter was noisy, in the center of the town, far from the river, far from the trees, far from the countryside and from all the familiar places. But one must consult reason, not sentiment; and Christophe found there a fine occasion to satisfy his morose need for mortification. Besides, the owner of the house, old clerk Euler, was a friend of grandfather, and he knew the whole family: that was enough to decide Louisa, lost in her empty house, and irresistibly drawn toward those who might have known the beings she had loved.
They prepared for departure. They savored at length the bitter melancholy of the last days spent in the sad, dear home that one leaves forever. They hardly dared exchange their grief; they were ashamed of it, or afraid. Each thought it best not to show weakness to the other. At table, the two of them alone in a dismal room with half-closed shutters, they dared not raise their voices, they hurried through their meal and avoided looking at each other, for fear of being unable to hide their agitation. They separated immediately after.
Christophe went back to his business; but as soon as he had a moment of freedom, he returned, he slipped secretly into the house, he crept on tiptoe up to his room or to the attic. Then he would close the door, sit down in a corner on an old trunk or on the window ledge, and stay there without thinking, filling himself with the indefinable humming of the old house that trembled at the slightest step. His heart trembled like it. He anxiously watched for the lightest breaths from within and without, the creakings of the floor, the imperceptible and familiar sounds: he recognized them all. He lost consciousness; his mind was invaded by images of the past; he did not come out of his torpor until the clock of Saint-Martin reminded him that it was time to go.
On the floor below, Louisa’s step went softly to and fro. For hours she would not be heard; she made no sound. Christophe strained his ears. He went down, a little anxious, as one remains for a long time after a great misfortune. He half-opened the door: Louisa had her back turned; she was sitting before a cupboard, in the midst of a jumble of things — rags, old clothes, odd objects, souvenirs she had taken out on the pretext of sorting them. But she lacked the strength: each one reminded her of something; she turned it over and over in her fingers, and she would begin to dream; the object slipped from her hands; she remained for hours, her arms hanging, slumped in her chair, lost in a painful torpor.
Poor Louisa now spent the better part of her life in the past — that sad past, which had been very sparing of joy for her; but she was so accustomed to suffering that she preserved a gratitude for the slightest kindnesses rendered, and the pale gleams that shone at long intervals in the course of her mediocre days sufficed to illuminate them. All the harm Melchior had done her was forgotten; she remembered only the good. The story of her marriage had been the great romance of her life. If Melchior had been drawn into it by a caprice he had quickly repented, it was with her whole heart that she had given herself; she had believed herself loved, as she loved herself; and she had kept for Melchior a tender gratitude. What he had become afterward, she did not try to understand. Incapable of seeing reality as it is, she only knew how to endure it as it is, as a humble and brave woman who has no need of understanding life in order to live. What she could not explain to herself, she left to God to explain. By a singular piety, she attributed to God the responsibility for all the injustices she might have suffered from Melchior and others, crediting them only with the good she had received from them. So this life of misery had left her with no bitter memory. She only felt worn out — frail as she was — by those years of privation and fatigue; and now that Melchior was no longer there, now that two of her sons had flown from the hearth, and the third seemed able to do without her, she had lost all courage to act; she was weary, drowsy; her will was benumbed. She was passing through one of those crises of neurasthenia which often strike, in the decline of life, active and industrious persons, when an unexpected blow takes from them every reason for living. She no longer had the courage to finish the stocking she was knitting, to tidy the drawer she was searching, to get up and shut the window: she sat, her mind empty, without strength — except to remember. She was conscious of her decline, and she blushed at it as at a shame; she tried to hide it from her son; and Christophe, absorbed in the selfishness of his own grief, had noticed nothing. No doubt he had many secret impatiences with his mother’s slowness now in speaking, acting, doing the smallest things; but different as these ways were from her accustomed activity, he had not been troubled by them until now.
He was struck by it suddenly that day, for the first time, when he surprised her in the midst of her rags, spread on the floor, piled at her feet, filling her hands and covering her knees. Her neck was stretched, her head leaning forward, her face contracted and rigid. Hearing him enter, she started; a flush mounted to her white cheeks; with an instinctive movement, she tried to hide the objects she held, and she stammered, with an embarrassed smile:
— You see, I was sorting…
He had the poignant sensation of this poor soul stranded among the relics of her past, and he was seized with compassion. Yet he took a somewhat brusque and scolding tone, to rouse her from her apathy:
— Come, Mother, come, you mustn’t stay like this, in the middle of all this dust, in this closed room! It’s bad for you. You must shake yourself; you must finish all this sorting.
— Yes, she said docilely.
She tried to get up to put the things back in the drawer. But she sat down again at once, letting fall in discouragement what she had taken.
— Oh! I can’t, I can’t, she moaned. I shall never manage it!
He was frightened. He bent over her. He caressed her forehead with his hands.
— Now, Mother, what’s the matter? he said. Shall I help you? Are you ill?
She did not answer. She had a kind of inner sobbing. He took her hands; he knelt down before her, to see her better in the half-shadow of the room.
— Mother! he said, anxiously.
Louisa, her forehead resting on his shoulder, gave way to a fit of weeping.
— My child, she kept saying, pressing herself against him, my child! You won’t leave me? Promise me, you won’t leave me?
His heart was torn with pity:
— Of course not, Mother, I won’t leave you. What kind of idea is that?
— I am so unhappy! They have all left me, all of them.
She pointed to the objects that surrounded her, and one could not tell whether she spoke of them, or of her sons and her dead.
— You’ll stay with me? You won’t leave me?.. What would become of me, if you went away too?
— I won’t go away. I tell you, we’ll stay together. Don’t cry. I promise you.
She went on crying, unable to stop. He dried her eyes with his handkerchief.
— What is it, dear Mother? Are you in pain?
— I don’t know; I don’t know what’s the matter with me.
She made an effort to calm herself, and to smile.
— I try to reason with myself; but for nothing at all, I start crying again… There, you see, I’m starting again… Forgive me. I’m foolish. I’m old. I have no strength left. I have no taste for anything. I’m no good for anything. I’d like to be buried with all that…
He pressed her to his heart, like a child.
— Don’t worry, rest, don’t think anymore.
She calmed down little by little.
— It’s absurd, I’m ashamed… But what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?
This old worker could not understand why her strength had suddenly broken; and she was humiliated to the depths of her being. He pretended not to notice.
— A little fatigue, Mother, he said, trying to adopt an indifferent tone. It will be nothing, you’ll see…
But he was anxious too. Since childhood, he had been used to seeing her valiant, resigned, silently resisting all trials. And he was astonished to see her suddenly broken: he was afraid.
He helped her sort the things scattered on the floor. From time to time she lingered over an object; but he gently took it from her hands, and she let him.
From that moment on, he forced himself to stay more with her. As soon as he had finished his tasks, instead of shutting himself in his room, as he liked to do, he came to her. He felt now how alone she was, and that she was not strong enough to be so: there was danger in leaving her thus.
He sat beside her in the evening, near the open window that looked out on the road. The countryside was fading away little by little. People were returning home. The small lights were kindling in the houses far away. They had seen this a thousand times. But soon they would see it no more. They exchanged broken words. They drew each other’s attention to the smallest known, expected incidents of the evening, with an interest that was always renewed. They were silent for long stretches; or Louisa recalled, for no apparent reason, a memory, a rambling story that passed through her head. Her tongue loosened a little, now that she felt a loving heart beside her. She made an effort to talk. It was difficult for her; for she had formed the habit of keeping apart from her family: she regarded her sons and her husband as too intelligent to converse with her, and she dared not join in their conversation. Christophe’s pious solicitude was something new and infinitely sweet to her, but it intimidated her. She searched for words; she had difficulty expressing herself; her sentences remained unfinished, obscure. Sometimes she was ashamed of what she said; she looked at her son and stopped in the middle of a story. But he pressed her hand, and she felt reassured. He was filled with love and pity for this childlike and maternal soul, in which he had nestled when he was a child, and which now sought support in him. And he took a melancholy pleasure in this small chatter, devoid of interest for anyone but him, in these insignificant memories of a life always mediocre and joyless, which seemed to Louisa of infinite value. He tried sometimes to interrupt her; he feared these memories might sadden her further; he urged her to go to bed. She understood his intention, and she said, with grateful eyes:
— No, I assure you, it does me good; let’s stay a little longer.
They stayed until the night was well advanced and the neighborhood asleep. Then they said goodnight — she, a little relieved at having unburdened herself of part of her sorrows; he, with a somewhat heavy heart from this new burden added to the one he already bore.
The day of departure arrived. The evening before, they stayed longer than usual in the darkened room. They did not speak. From time to time, Louisa moaned: “Oh! My God!” Christophe tried to occupy her attention with the thousand small details of the next day’s move. She did not want to go to bed. He forced her affectionately. But he himself, having gone back up to his room, did not go to bed for a long time. Leaning at the window, he tried to pierce the darkness, to see one last time the moving shadows of the river at the foot of the house. He heard the wind in the tall trees of Minna’s garden. The sky was black. Not a passerby in the street. A cold rain began to fall. The weathervanes creaked. In a neighboring house, a child cried. The night pressed with a crushing sadness on the earth and on the soul. The monotonous hours, the halves and quarters with their cracked tone, fell one after another into the dreary silence, punctuated by the sound of rain on the roofs and on the pavement.
When Christophe finally decided to go to bed, heart and body chilled, he heard the window below him closing. And in his bed, he thought painfully that it is cruel for poor people to grow attached to the past; for they have no right to have a past, like the rich; they have no house, not a corner on the earth where they can shelter their memories: their joys, their sorrows, all their days are scattered to the wind.
The next day, they moved their poor furniture through the driving rain to the new lodging. Fischer, the old upholsterer, had lent them a cart and his little horse; and he came himself to lend a hand. But they could not take all the furniture; for the apartment they were going to was much smaller than the old one. Christophe had to persuade his mother to leave the oldest and most useless pieces. This was no small task; the least of them had value for her: a lame table, a broken chair — she would sacrifice nothing. Fischer, strong in the authority given him by his old friendship with grandfather, had to add his grumbling voice to Christophe’s, and even, good-naturedly understanding her grief, promise to keep some of these precious remains in storage for the day when she could take them back. Then she consented to part with them, with anguish.
The two brothers had been warned of the move; but Ernst had come the evening before to say he could not be there; and Rodolphe appeared only for a moment, around noon; he watched the loading of the furniture, gave some advice, and departed with a busy air.
The procession set off through the muddy streets. Christophe held the horse by the bridle as it slipped on the slimy pavement. Louisa, walking beside her son, tried to shelter him from the rain that fell without ceasing. And then came the dismal installation in the damp apartment, made even darker by the wan reflections of the low sky. They would not have resisted the discouragement that oppressed them, without the attentions of their hosts. But when the cart had gone and their furniture was piled pell-mell in the room, as night fell, Christophe and Louisa, exhausted, one slumped on a box and the other on a sack, heard a little dry cough on the staircase: there was a knock at their door. Old Euler entered. He excused himself ceremoniously for disturbing his dear guests; he added that, to celebrate the first evening of this happy arrival, he hoped they would kindly sup as a family with them. Louisa, sunk in her sadness, wanted to refuse. Christophe was not much tempted either by this family gathering; but the old man insisted, and Christophe, thinking it was better for his mother not to spend this first evening in the new house alone with her thoughts, forced her to accept. They went down to the floor below, where they found the whole family assembled: the old man, his daughter, his son-in-law Vogel, and his grandchildren, a boy and a girl, a little younger than Christophe. All bustled around them, wishing them welcome, asking if they were tired, if they were happy with their rooms, if they needed anything, asking them ten questions to which the bewildered Christophe understood nothing; for they all spoke at once. Soup was already served: they sat down to table. But the noise continued. Amalia, Euler’s daughter, had immediately undertaken to inform Louisa of all the local peculiarities, the topography of the neighborhood, the habits and advantages of the house, the hour the milkman passed, the hour at which she rose, the various tradesmen and the prices she paid. She would not let go of her until she had explained everything. Louisa, drowsy, tried to show interest in this information; but the remarks she ventured to make showed that she had understood nothing, and provoked, along with Amalia’s indignant exclamations, a redoubling of information. Old clerk Euler explained to Christophe the difficulties of the musical career. Christophe’s other neighbor, Rosa, Amalia’s daughter, had been talking without stopping since the beginning of the meal, with such volubility that she had no time to breathe: she lost her breath in the middle of a sentence; but she started again at once. Vogel, morose, complained about what he was eating. And on this subject there were passionate discussions. Amalia, Euler, the girl broke off their speeches to take part in the debate; and endless controversies arose on the question of whether there was too much salt in the stew, or not enough: they called each other to witness; and, naturally, not one opinion was like another. Each despised the taste of his neighbor, and believed his own alone sound and reasonable. One could have discussed the matter until Judgment Day.
But in the end, all agreed to groan together over the wickedness of the times. They commiserated affectionately on the sorrows of Louisa and Christophe, whose courageous conduct they praised in terms that touched him. They took pleasure in recalling not only the misfortunes of their guests, but their own, and those of their friends and of everyone they knew; and they agreed that the good were always unhappy, and that joy existed only for the selfish and the dishonest. They concluded that life was sad, that it served no purpose, and that it would be much better to be dead, were it not, doubtless, God’s will that one should live to suffer. As these ideas were close to Christophe’s current pessimism, he conceived a greater esteem for his hosts and closed his eyes to their little failings.
When he went back upstairs with his mother to the disordered room, they felt sad and weary, but a little less alone; and while Christophe, eyes open in the darkness, unable to sleep because of his fatigue and the noise of the neighborhood, listened to the heavy carts that shook the walls and the breathing of the family asleep on the floor below, he tried to persuade himself that he would be, if not happy, less unhappy here, in the midst of these good people — a little tedious, truth be told — who suffered the same ills as he, who seemed to understand him, and whom he believed he understood.
But having at last fallen asleep, he was disagreeably awakened at dawn by the voices of his neighbors who were beginning to argue, and by the screeching of the pump that an angry hand was working, before proceeding to the great-water-washing of the courtyard and the staircase.
Justus Euler was a small, stooped old man with uneasy, morose eyes, a red, creased and bumpy face, toothless jaws, and an unkempt beard that he never ceased to worry with his hands. A very good man, a bit of a prig, deeply moral, he got along fairly well with grandfather. People claimed he resembled him. And indeed he was of the same generation and raised on the same principles; but he lacked the strong physical life of Jean-Michel: that is to say, while thinking like him on a great many points, at bottom he hardly resembled him at all; for what makes men is temperament, far more than ideas; and whatever the divisions, factitious or real, that the intellect has set between them, the great division of humanity is that between the healthy and those who are not. Old Euler was not among the first. He spoke of morality, like grandfather; but his morality was not the same as grandfather’s; it did not have his robust stomach, his lungs, his jovial strength. Everything about him and his family was built on a more parsimonious and cramped plan. Forty years a functionary, now retired, he suffered from that sadness of inaction, so heavy upon old people who have not laid up for their last years the resource of an inner life. All his natural or acquired habits, all those of his profession, had given him something meticulous and peevish, which was found to some degree in each of his children.
His son-in-law, Vogel, a clerk at the palace chancellery, was about fifty. Tall, strong, entirely bald, with gold spectacles glued to his temples, and of fairly good appearance, he believed himself ill, and doubtless was, though he obviously did not have all the ailments he credited himself with, but with a mind soured by the inanity of his trade, and a body somewhat ruined by his sedentary life. Very industrious, besides, not without merit, having even a certain culture, he was the victim of absurd modern life, and like so many employees chained to their desks, succumbed to the demon of hypochondria. One of those wretches whom Goethe called “ein trauriger ungriechischer Hypochondrist” — “a morose and un-Greek hypochondriac” — and whom he pitied, but took good care to avoid.
Amalia did neither one nor the other. Robust, noisy, and active, she did not pity her husband’s jeremiads; she shook him roughly. But living always together, no strength resists; and when, in a household, one of the two is neurasthenic, there are great chances that, a few years later, they will both be so. Amalia might have cried out against Vogel, she might continue to cry out, from habit and from need: the instant after, she moaned louder than he over his condition; and, passing without transition from rebuffs to lamentations, she did him no good; on the contrary, she increased his illness tenfold, by giving an ear-splitting resonance to trifles. She ended not only by finishing off the unfortunate Vogel, appalled at the proportions his own complaints took when reflected by this echo, but by crushing everyone, and crushing herself. In her turn, she took the habit of moaning without reason over her solid health, and that of her father, her daughter, her son. It became a mania: by dint of saying it, she persuaded herself of it. The slightest cold was taken as a tragedy; everything was a cause for anxiety. More than that: when everyone was well, she worried still, thinking of the illness to come. Thus life was spent in perpetual alarms. For the rest, no one was any the worse for it; and it seemed that this state of constant complaint served to maintain the general health. Everyone ate, slept, and worked as usual; and the life of the household was not slowed. Amalia’s activity was not satisfied with exercising itself from morning to night, from top to bottom of the house: everyone had to bustle about her; and it was a commotion of furniture, a washing of windowpanes, a scrubbing of floors, a noise of voices, of footsteps, a vibration, a perpetual motion.
The two children, crushed by this noisy authority that left no one free, seemed to find it natural to submit. The boy, Leonhard, had a pretty insignificant face and stiff manners. The girl, Rosa, a blonde, with rather fine eyes, blue, gentle and affectionate, would have been pleasing, especially for the freshness of her delicate complexion and her air of kindness, but for a nose a little too large and awkwardly placed, which weighed down her face and gave it a silly character. She recalled a young woman by Holbein in the Basel museum — the daughter of Burgomaster Meier — seated, eyes lowered, hands on her knees, her pale hair loose on her shoulders, embarrassed and ashamed of her ungracious nose. But Rosa so far did not worry much about it, and it did not disturb her tireless chatter. One heard incessantly her shrill voice telling stories, always breathless, as though she never had time to say everything, and always excited and full of spirit, despite the scoldings she received from her mother, her father, even her grandfather, exasperated — not so much because she always talked, as because she prevented them from talking. For these excellent people, good, loyal, devoted — the cream of honest folk — had almost all the virtues; but they lacked one which is capital, and makes the charm of life: the virtue of silence.
Christophe was in a vein of patience. His sorrows had sobered his intolerant and impetuous temper. The experience he had had of the cruel indifference of elegant souls inclined him to feel more keenly the worth of good people, without grace and devilishly tedious, but who had an austere conception of life, and because they lived without joy seemed to him to live without weakness. Having decided that they were excellent and that they must please him, he strove, German that he was, to persuade himself that they did please him. But he did not succeed: he lacked that complacent Germanic idealism which refuses to see, and does not see, what it would be unpleasant to notice, for fear of disturbing the comfortable tranquility of its judgments and the pleasantness of its life. On the contrary, he never felt the faults of people so keenly as when he loved them, when he would have liked to love them entirely, without any restriction: it was a kind of unconscious loyalty and an irresistible need for truth that made him, against his will, more clear-sighted and more exacting toward what was dearest to him. So he was not long in feeling a dull irritation at the failings of his hosts. They made no attempt to disguise them. Contrary to what usually happens, they displayed everything about themselves that was unbearable; and the best remained hidden in them. This is what Christophe told himself, and, accusing himself of injustice, he undertook to look beyond his first impressions and discover the excellent qualities they concealed with such care.
He tried to engage in conversation with old Justus Euler, who asked nothing better. He felt a secret sympathy for him, in memory of grandfather who loved and praised him. But good Jean-Michel had, more than Christophe, the happy faculty of self-deception about his friends; and Christophe soon realized it. In vain he tried to learn Euler’s memories of grandfather. He succeeded in drawing from him only a faded and rather caricatured image of Jean-Michel, and scraps of conversation without any interest. Invariably, Euler’s stories began with:
— As I used to say to your poor grandfather.
He remembered nothing else. He had heard nothing but what he himself had said.
Perhaps Jean-Michel had listened no differently. Most friendships are little more than associations of mutual complaisance, for talking about oneself with another. But at least Jean-Michel, however naively he abandoned himself to his joy of holding forth, had a sympathy always ready to be spent right and left. He was interested in everything; he always regretted not being fifteen years old anymore, to see the marvelous inventions of the new generations, and to mingle with their thoughts. He had that quality, perhaps the most precious in life: a freshness of curiosity that the years did not diminish, and that was reborn with each morning. He had not enough talent to make use of this gift; but how many talented people could have envied it! Most men die at twenty or thirty: past that age, they are no more than their own reflection; the rest of their lives is spent in aping themselves, in repeating, in a manner each day more mechanical and more grimacing, what they have said, done, thought, or loved in the days when they were alive.
It was so long since old Euler had been, and he had been so little, that what remained of him now was very poor and a little ridiculous. Outside his former profession and his family life, he knew nothing and wished to know nothing. He had ready-made opinions on all subjects, dating from his youth. He claimed to know about the arts; but he stuck to certain consecrated names, about which he never failed to trot out emphatic formulas: all the rest was null and void. When one spoke to him of modern artists, he did not listen and talked of something else. He said he was passionate about music, and asked Christophe to play. But as soon as Christophe, who had been caught once or twice, began to play, the old man began to talk aloud with his daughter-in-law, as though the music redoubled his interest in everything that was not music. The exasperated Christophe would stop in the middle of a piece: no one noticed. There were only a few old tunes — three or four — some very beautiful, some very ugly, but all equally consecrated, which had the privilege of obtaining a relative silence and an absolute approval. From the first notes, the old man fell into ecstasy, and tears came to his eyes — less for the pleasure he found in them than for what he had once found. Christophe ended by taking these tunes in horror, although some of them, like the Adelaide of Beethoven, were dear to him: the old man constantly hummed the opening bars and never failed to declare that “that was music,” comparing it contemptuously with “all this confounded modern music, which has no melody.” — It is true that he knew nothing of it.
His son-in-law, better educated, kept abreast of the artistic movement; but it was even worse; for he brought to his judgments a spirit of perpetual disparagement. He lacked neither taste nor intelligence; but he could not resign himself to admiring anything modern. He would just as well have disparaged Mozart and Beethoven if they had been of his time, and acknowledged the merit of Wagner or Richard Strauss if they had been dead for a century. His peevish instinct refused to admit that there could still be, today, in his lifetime, great living men: the thought displeased him. He was so embittered by his failed life that he insisted on persuading himself that it was failed for everyone, that it could not be otherwise, and that those who believed the contrary or claimed it were one of two things: fools or charlatans.
So he never spoke of any new celebrity except in a tone of bitter irony; and, as he was not stupid, he never failed to discover at first glance its weak and ridiculous sides. Every new name put him on his guard; before knowing anything of it, he was disposed to criticize it — since he did not know it. If he felt sympathy for Christophe, it was because he believed this misanthropic child found life bad, like himself, and moreover was without genius. Nothing brings together sickly, discontented little souls like the acknowledgment of their common impotence. Nothing, either, contributes more to restoring the taste for health and life to those who are healthy and made for living, than the contact with this stupid pessimism of the mediocre and the sick, who, because they are not happy, deny the happiness of others. Christophe put this to the test. These morose thoughts were familiar to him; but he was astonished to find them in Vogel’s mouth, and not to recognize them anymore: more than that, they became hostile to him; he was wounded by them.
He was far more revolted by Amalia’s ways. The good woman did nothing, after all, but apply Christophe’s theories about duty. She had the word on her lips at every turn. She worked without respite, and wanted everyone to work like her. This work did not have for its object to make others and herself happier: on the contrary. One could almost say that its principal object was to be a nuisance to all, and to make life as disagreeable as possible, in order to sanctify it. Nothing could have induced her to interrupt, for a single moment, the holy office of housekeeping, that sacrosanct institution which takes, in so many women, the place of all other moral and social duties. She would have thought herself lost if she had not, on the same days, at the same hours, scrubbed the floor, washed the windows, polished the doorknobs, beaten the carpets lustily, moved the chairs, tables, wardrobes. She made a display of it. One would have said it was a matter of her honor. And is it not, indeed, in the same spirit that many women imagine and defend their honor? It is a kind of furniture that must be kept shining — a well-waxed floor, cold, hard — and slippery.
The accomplishment of her task did not make Madame Vogel more amiable. She threw herself into the inanities of housekeeping as into a duty imposed by God. And she despised those who did not do as she did, who took some rest, who knew how to enjoy life a little between their labors. She went to find Louisa even in her room when, from time to time, in the middle of her work, she sat down to dream. Louisa sighed, but submitted, with a confused smile. Fortunately Christophe knew nothing of it: Amalia waited until he was out before making these incursions into their apartment; and so far she had not attacked him directly: he would not have stood for it. He felt toward her a latent hostility. What he pardoned her least was her din. He was exhausted by it. Shut in his room — a small low room looking onto the courtyard — the window hermetically sealed, despite the lack of air, so as not to hear the commotion of the house, he could not manage to keep it out. Involuntarily, he fastened with over-excited attention on the smallest sounds from below; and when the terrible voice, which pierced through walls, after a momentary lull, rose again, he was seized with rage: he shouted, stamped his foot, hurled at her through the wall a collection of insults. In the general uproar, no one even noticed: they thought he was composing. He consigned Madame Vogel to all the devils. There was no respect nor esteem that held. It seemed to him, at such moments, that he would have preferred the most abandoned of women and the most foolish, provided she kept silent, to intelligence, honesty, and all the virtues, when they make too much noise.
This hatred of noise drew him closer to Leonhard. The young man, alone in the midst of the general agitation, always remained calm and never raised his voice more at one moment than at another. He expressed himself in a correct and measured manner, choosing all his words, and never hurrying. The boiling Amalia had not the patience to wait until he had finished; everyone exclaimed at his slowness. He was not moved by it. Nothing altered his calm and respectful deference. Christophe was all the more attracted to him because he had learned that Leonhard was destined for the ecclesiastical life; and his curiosity was keenly excited.
Christophe was then, with regard to religion, in a rather strange state: he did not know himself what state he was in. He had never had time to think about it seriously. He was not educated enough, and he was much too absorbed by the difficulties of existence, to have been able to analyze himself and put his thoughts in order. Violent as he was, he swung from one extreme to the other, from entire faith to absolute negation, without troubling about whether he was in agreement with himself. When he was happy, he hardly thought of God, but he was fairly disposed to believe. When he was unhappy, he thought of Him, but he hardly believed: it seemed impossible to him that a God could authorize unhappiness and injustice. These difficulties occupied him very little, however. At bottom, he was too religious to think much about God. He lived in God; he had no need to believe in Him. That is for those who are weak, or weakened — for anemic lives. They aspire to God, as the plant to the sun. The dying man clings to life. But he who carries within himself the sun and life — why should he go seeking them outside himself?
Christophe would probably never have concerned himself with these questions, if he had lived alone. But the obligations of social life forced him to fix his thoughts on these childish and idle problems, which hold a disproportionate place in the world, and where one must take sides, since one stumbles against them at every step. As if a healthy, generous soul, overflowing with strength and love, had not a thousand more pressing things to do than to worry whether God exists or not! If it were only a matter of believing in God! But one must believe in a God of such dimensions and such form, of such color and such race! As to that, Christophe never even thought of it. Jesus held almost no place in his thoughts. It was not that he did not love him: he loved him, when he thought of him; but he never thought of him. He sometimes reproached himself for it, he was distressed by it; he did not understand why he was not more interested. Yet he practiced; all his family practiced; his grandfather read the Bible constantly; he himself attended mass regularly; he served at it, in a way, since he was organist; and he applied himself to his task with an exemplary conscientiousness. But he would have been hard put, on leaving church, to say what he had been thinking about. He set himself to reading the Holy Scriptures, to fix his ideas, and he found amusement in them, even pleasure, but as in fine, curious books, not essentially different from other books that no one thinks of calling sacred. To tell the truth, if Jesus was sympathetic to him, Beethoven was far more so. And at his organ in Saint Florian’s, where he accompanied the Sunday service, he was more occupied with his organ than with the mass, and more religious on days when the chapel played Bach than on days when it played Mendelssohn. Certain ceremonies filled him with an exalted fervor. But was it really God that he loved then, or only the music, as an imprudent priest had once told him, in jest, not realizing the turmoil his quip would cause? Another would not have heeded it and would have changed nothing in his way of life — (so many people manage to live without knowing what they think!) — But Christophe was afflicted with an inconvenient need for sincerity, which inspired scruples at every turn. And from the day he had them, it became impossible for him not to always have them. He tormented himself; it seemed to him he was acting with duplicity. Did he believe, or did he not? He had not the means, material or intellectual — (one needs knowledge and leisure) — to resolve the question alone. And yet it had to be resolved, on pain of being an indifferent or a hypocrite. And he was as incapable of being one as the other.
He sought timidly to sound the people around him. All seemed sure of themselves. Christophe burned to know their reasons. He could not succeed. Almost never did he get a precise answer: it was always talk beside the point. Some treated him as proud, and told him that it was not a thing to be discussed, that thousands of people more intelligent and better than he had believed without discussing, and that he had only to do as they did. There were even some who took an offended air, as if it were a personal insult to put such a question to them; and yet they were perhaps not the most sure of their ground. Others shrugged their shoulders and said, smiling: “Bah! it can’t do any harm.” And their smile said: “And it’s so convenient!” Those Christophe despised with all his heart.
He had tried to open his anxieties to a priest; but he was discouraged by the attempt. He could not discuss seriously with him. Affable as his interlocutor was, he politely made it felt that there was no real equality between Christophe and himself; it seemed understood in advance that his superiority was uncontested, and that the discussion could not cross the limits he assigned to it without a sort of impropriety: it was a perfectly innocuous fencing match. When Christophe had wished to go further, and to pose questions to which it did not please the worthy man to reply, he had got out of it with a patronizing smile, a few Latin quotations, and a paternal exhortation to pray, pray, that God would enlighten him. — Christophe had left the interview humiliated and hurt by this tone of polite superiority. Rightly or wrongly, for nothing in the world would he have had recourse to a priest again. He would admit that these men were superior to him in intelligence and their sacred office; but when one discusses, there is no longer superior or inferior, neither titles, nor age, nor name: nothing counts but truth; before it, all are equal.
So he was glad to find a boy his own age who believed. He himself asked nothing better than to believe; and he hoped that Leonhard would give him good reasons for it. He made advances. Leonhard responded with his usual mildness, but without eagerness: he put it into nothing. Since it was impossible to have a sustained conversation in the house without being interrupted at every moment by Amalia or the old man, Christophe proposed a walk after dinner in the evening. Leonhard was too polite to refuse, although he would gladly have excused himself; for his indolent nature feared walking, conversation, and everything that cost him an effort.
Christophe was embarrassed to begin the talk. After two or three clumsy sentences on indifferent subjects, he threw himself, with a somewhat brutal abruptness, into the question that was on his heart. He asked Leonhard if he was really going to become a priest, and if it was for his pleasure. Leonhard, taken aback, cast an uneasy glance at him; but when he saw that Christophe had no hostile intention, he was reassured:
— Yes, he answered. How could it be otherwise?
— Ah! said Christophe. You are very fortunate!
Leonhard felt a shade of envy in Christophe’s voice, and he was agreeably flattered. He changed his manner at once, he became expansive; his face lit up:
— Yes, he said. I am happy.
He was radiant.
— How do you manage that? asked Christophe.
Leonhard, before answering, suggested they sit on a quiet bench in a cloister of Saint-Martin. From there they could see a corner of the little square, planted with acacias, and beyond it the town, the countryside, bathed in the mist of evening. The Rhine flowed at the foot of the hill. An old abandoned cemetery, whose graves were drowned in a flood of grass, slept beside them, behind its closed railing.
Leonhard began to speak. He said, his eyes shining with contentment, how sweet it was to escape from life, to have found the refuge where one is and will be forever sheltered. Christophe, still bruised by his recent wounds, felt passionately this desire for rest and oblivion; but a regret mingled with it. He asked with a sigh:
— And yet, doesn’t it cost you to renounce life altogether?
— Oh! said the other calmly. What is there to regret? Isn’t it sad and ugly?
— There are beautiful things too, said Christophe, looking at the beautiful evening.
— There are some beautiful things, but few.
— That little is still a great deal for me!
— Oh! Well, it’s simply a matter of common sense. On one side, a little good and a lot of evil; on the other, neither good nor evil on earth, and afterwards, infinite happiness: can one hesitate?
Christophe did not much like this arithmetic. Such an economical life seemed very poor to him. However, he forced himself to believe that this was wisdom.
— So, he asked with a little irony, there is no risk of your letting yourself be seduced by an hour of pleasure?
— What folly! when one knows that it is only an hour, and that there is all eternity after!
— Then you are very sure of that eternity?
— Naturally.
Christophe questioned him. He had a tremor of desire and hope. If Leonhard would at last give him the invincible proofs of belief! With what passion he himself would renounce all the rest of the world, to follow him into God.
At first Leonhard, proud of his role as apostle, convinced moreover that Christophe’s doubts were merely formal and would have the good taste to yield to the first arguments, had recourse to the Holy Scriptures, to the authority of the Gospel, to miracles, to tradition. But he began to darken when Christophe, after listening to him for a few minutes, stopped him by saying that it was to answer the question with the question, and that he was not asking him to expound to him what was precisely the subject of his doubt, but the means of resolving it. Leonhard then had to acknowledge that Christophe was far more ill than he seemed, and that he had the pretension of being convinced only by means of reason. Yet he still thought that Christophe was playing the freethinker — (he could not imagine one could be so sincerely). — So he was not discouraged, and, strong in his recent learning, he called upon his school knowledge; he unloaded pell-mell, with more authority than order, his metaphysical proofs of the existence of God and the immortal soul. Christophe, his mind strained, his brow furrowed with effort, labored in silence; he made him start his words over again, sought laboriously to penetrate their meaning, to drive it into himself, to follow the reasoning. Then he burst out suddenly, declared they were making fun of him, that all this was word-play, witticisms of fine talkers who fabricated words and then amused themselves by believing that these words were things. Leonhard, stung, vouched for the good faith of his authors. Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said, with an oath, that if they were not charlatans, they were confounded literary men; and he demanded other proofs.
When Leonhard recognized, with stupefaction, that Christophe was irremediably afflicted, he lost interest in him. He remembered that he had been advised not to waste his time arguing with unbelievers — at least when they obstinately refuse to believe. That risks disturbing oneself, without any profit to the other. Better to abandon the wretch to the will of God, who, if it is His design, will know well enough how to enlighten him; otherwise, who would dare to go against the will of God? Leonhard did not therefore persist in prolonging the discussion. He contented himself with saying gently that there was nothing to be done for the moment, that no reasoning was capable of showing the way as long as one was resolved not to see it, and that one must pray, appeal to grace: nothing is possible without it; one must desire it, one must will to believe.
Will? thought Christophe bitterly. So God will exist because I will Him to exist! So death will no longer exist because it pleases me to deny it! Alas! How easy life is for those who have no need to see the truth, for those who have the power to see it as they wish, and to fabricate complacent dreams in which to sleep softly! In such a bed, Christophe was quite sure he would never sleep.
Leonhard continued to talk. He had fallen back on his favorite subject: the charms of the contemplative life; and on this safe ground he was inexhaustible. In his monotonous voice trembling with pleasure, he described the joys of life in God, outside, above the world, far from the noise, of which he spoke with an unexpected accent of hatred (he detested it almost as much as Christophe), far from violence, far from mockery, far from the small daily miseries one suffers, in the warm, safe nest of faith, from which one contemplates in peace the misfortunes of the foreign, distant world. Christophe, listening to him speak, perceived the selfishness of this faith. Leonhard had a suspicion of it; he hastened to explain. It was not a life of idleness, this contemplative life. On the contrary: one acts more through prayer than through action; what would the world be without prayer? One atones for others, one takes on their faults, one offers them one’s merits, one intercedes between the world and God.
Christophe listened in silence, with a growing hostility. He felt in Leonhard the hypocrisy of this renunciation. He was not unjust enough to attribute it to all believers. He knew well that this abdication of life is in a small number an impossibility of living, a poignant despair, a call to death — that it is, in a still smaller number, a passionate ecstasy… (How long does it last?)… But in most men, is it not too often the cold reasoning of souls more in love with their tranquility than with the happiness of others, or with truth? And if the sincere hearts are conscious of it, how they must suffer from this profanation of their ideal!
Leonhard, quite happy, was now expounding the beauty and harmony of the world, seen from the height of his divine perch: below, all was dark, unjust, painful; from above, all became clear, luminous, ordered; the world was like a clockwork box, perfectly regulated.
Christophe was only half listening. He asked himself: “Does he believe, or does he believe that he believes?” Yet his own faith, his passionate desire for faith, was not shaken by this. It was not the mediocrity of soul and the poor arguments of a fool like Leonhard that could damage it…
Night was falling on the town. The bench where they sat was in shadow; the stars were kindling; a white mist rose from the river; the crickets chirped beneath the trees of the cemetery. The bells began to ring: the sharpest first, all alone, like a plaintive bird, questioned the sky; then the second, a third below, joined its complaint; finally came the deepest, at the fifth, which seemed to give them an answer. The three voices blended. At the foot of the towers, it was the humming of a vast hive. The air and the heart trembled. Christophe, holding his breath, thought how poor the music of musicians is beside this ocean of music in which thousands of beings were roaring: it is the wild fauna, the free world of sounds, beside the domesticated world, catalogued, coldly labeled by human intelligence. He lost himself in this sonorous immensity, without shores and without bounds…
And when the powerful murmur had died away, when its last tremors had faded in the air, Christophe awoke. He looked around him, bewildered. He recognized nothing. Everything was changed around him, within him. There was no more God…
Just as faith, the loss of faith is also, often, a stroke of grace, a sudden light. Reason has nothing to do with it; a trifle suffices: a word, a silence, the sound of a bell. One is walking, one is dreaming, one expects nothing. Suddenly, everything collapses. One sees oneself surrounded by ruins. One is alone. One believes no more.
The terrified Christophe could not understand why, how it had happened. It was like the break-up of a river in spring.
Leonhard’s voice continued to drone, more monotonous than a cricket. Christophe no longer heard it, he heard nothing. Night had fully come. Leonhard stopped. Surprised by Christophe’s immobility, uneasy at the late hour, he proposed to go home. Christophe did not answer. Leonhard took his arm. Christophe started, and looked at Leonhard with wild eyes.
— Christophe, we must go back, said Leonhard.
— Go to the devil! cried Christophe in a fury.
— My God! Christophe, what have I done to you? asked Leonhard fearfully, bewildered.
Christophe recovered himself.
— Yes, you’re right, my good fellow, he said more gently. I don’t know what I’m saying. Go to God! Go to God!
He remained alone. His heart was full of distress.
— Oh! My God! My God! he cried, clenching his fists, lifting his head passionately toward the dark sky. Why don’t I believe anymore? Why can’t I believe anymore? What has happened in me?…
There was too great a disproportion between the ruin of his faith and the conversation he had just had with Leonhard: it was evident that this conversation was no more the cause of it than Amalia’s nagging and the absurdities of his hosts were the cause of the upheaval that had been building for some days in his moral resolutions. These were only pretexts. The trouble did not come from outside. The trouble was within him. He felt unknown monsters stirring in his heart, and he dared not lean over his thoughts to face his malady. His malady? Was it a malady? A languor, an intoxication, a voluptuous anguish penetrated him. He no longer belonged to himself. In vain he tried to stiffen himself in yesterday’s stoicism. Everything cracked all at once. He had the sudden sensation of the vast world, burning, wild, the immeasurable world… how it overflows God!…
This was only a moment. But the whole balance of his former life was henceforth broken.
Of the whole family, there was only one person to whom Christophe had paid no attention: little Rosa. She was not pretty; and Christophe, who was himself very far from being handsome, was very exacting about the beauty of others. He had the calm cruelty of youth, for whom a woman does not exist when she is ugly — unless she has passed the age of inspiring tenderness, and there is nothing left but grave, peaceful, quasi-religious feelings for her. Rosa was distinguished, moreover, by no special gift, though she was not without intelligence; and she was afflicted with a talkativeness that made Christophe flee. So he had not taken the trouble to know her, judging that there was nothing to know; and he had barely looked at her.
Yet she was worth more than many a girl; she was worth more, in any case, than Minna, so dearly loved. She was a good little thing, without coquetry, without vanity, who, until Christophe’s arrival, had not noticed that she was ugly, or did not worry about it; for no one worried about it around her. If grandfather or mother happened to tell her so, by way of scolding, she only laughed: she did not believe it, or attached no importance to it; nor did they. So many others, just as ugly and more so, had found someone to love them! The Germans have happy indulgences for physical imperfections: they can fail to see them; they can even come to embellish them, by the virtue of a complacent imagination that finds unexpected resemblances between the face they wish and the most illustrious specimens of human beauty. It would not have taken much pressing of old Euler to make him declare that his granddaughter had the nose of the Juno Ludovisi. Fortunately, he was too grumpy to pay compliments; and Rosa, indifferent to the shape of her nose, put her pride only in the accomplishment, according to rite, of the famous household duties. She had accepted as gospel everything she had been taught. Hardly going out of the house, she had few terms of comparison, naively admired her family, and believed what they said. Of an expansive, trusting nature, easily satisfied, she tried to adopt the peevish tone of the house, and docilely repeated the pessimistic reflections she heard. She had the most devoted of hearts — always thinking of others, seeking to give pleasure, sharing worries, divining wishes, needing to love, with no thought of return. Naturally, her family abused this, although they were kind and loved her; but one is always tempted to abuse the love of those who are entirely given over to you. They were so sure of her attentions that they were not grateful: whatever she did, they expected more. Besides, she was clumsy; she had awkwardness, haste, brusque boyish movements, explosions of tenderness that caused disasters. It was a broken glass, an overturned carafe, a door brutally slammed: all things that unleashed upon her the indignation of the whole house. Constantly rebuked, the poor girl went off to cry in a corner. Her tears did not last long. She resumed her cheerful air and her chatter, without a shadow of resentment against anyone.
Christophe’s arrival was a considerable event in her life. She had often heard talk of him. Christophe held a place in the town gossip: he was a sort of small local celebrity; his name came up often in conversations at home, especially when old Jean-Michel was still alive, for he, proud of his grandson, went to sing his praises to all his acquaintances. Rosa had glimpsed the young musician once or twice at concerts. When she learned that he would come to lodge with them, she clapped her hands. Severely reprimanded for this breach of decorum, she became all confused. She meant no harm by it. In a life as uniform as hers, a new guest was an unhoped-for distraction. She spent the last days before his arrival in a fever of waiting. She was in agonies lest the house not please him, and she applied herself to making the apartment as attractive as possible. She even brought, on the morning of the move, a little bouquet of flowers to the mantelpiece, as a welcome. As for herself, she had taken no care to appear to advantage; and the first glance Christophe cast at her sufficed to make him judge her ugly and badly dressed. She did not judge him likewise, although she would have had good reasons to do so; for Christophe, exhausted, harassed, unkempt, was even uglier than usual. But Rosa, who was incapable of thinking the least ill of anyone, Rosa, who regarded her grandfather, her father and her mother as perfectly handsome, naturally could not fail to see Christophe as she had expected to see him, and she admired him with all her heart. She was very intimidated at having him for a neighbor at table; and unfortunately her timidity expressed itself in that flood of words which alienated Christophe’s sympathies from the very first. She did not notice it, and that first evening remained a luminous memory in her life. Alone in her room after they had gone upstairs, she heard the footsteps of the new guests walking above her head; and that sound resonated joyfully within her: the house seemed to come alive again. The next morning, for the first time, she looked in the mirror with anxious attention; and, without yet realizing the extent of her misfortune, she began to suspect it. She tried to judge her features one by one; but she could not. She had sad apprehensions. She sighed deeply, and tried to introduce some changes into her toilet. She only succeeded in making herself uglier still. She had the further unfortunate idea of overwhelming Christophe with her attentions. In her naive desire to see her new friends constantly and to be of service to them, she went up and down the stairs at every moment, each time bringing a useless object, persisting in helping them, and always laughing, talking, shouting. Only her mother’s impatient voice, calling her, could interrupt her zeal and her discourse. Christophe pulled a sour face; without the good resolutions he had made, he would have exploded twenty times. He held out for two days; on the third, he locked his door. Rosa knocked, called, understood, went back downstairs, confused, and did not start again. He explained, when he saw her, that he was occupied with urgent work and could not be disturbed. She apologized humbly. She could not delude herself about the failure of her innocent advances: they went straight against their aim, they drove Christophe away. He no longer took the trouble to hide his bad temper; he did not even listen when she talked, and did not disguise his impatience. She felt that her chatter irritated him; and she managed, by force of will, to keep silent for part of the evening; but it was stronger than she: she would burst out suddenly, and the words rushed more tumultuously than ever. Christophe left her in the middle of a sentence. She did not hold it against him. She held it against herself. She thought herself stupid, boring, ridiculous; all her faults appeared enormous to her; she wanted to combat them, but she was discouraged by the failure of her first attempts; she told herself she would never be able to, that she did not have the strength. Yet she tried again.
But there were other faults against which she could do nothing: what could she do about her ugliness? She could no longer doubt it. The certainty of her misfortune had dawned on her suddenly one day when she was looking in the mirror: it had been like a thunderbolt. Naturally, she exaggerated the evil still further; she saw her nose ten times as big as it was; it seemed to her to occupy her whole face; she no longer dared show herself, she would have liked to die. But there is in youth such a force of hope that these fits of discouragement did not last; she then imagined she had been mistaken; she tried to believe it, and she even came, at moments, to find her nose quite ordinary, and almost well enough shaped. Her instinct then led her, but very clumsily, to seek a few childish ruses, a way of doing her hair that left her forehead less exposed and did not emphasize the disproportion of her features so much. Yet she put no coquetry into it; no thought of love had crossed her mind, or it was without her knowledge. She asked for little: only a little friendship; and that little, Christophe did not seem disposed to grant her. It seemed to Rosa that she would have been perfectly happy if he had only been willing to say, when they met, a friendly good morning, a good evening, with a little kindness. But Christophe’s look was usually so hard and cold! She was frozen by it. He said nothing disagreeable to her; but she would have preferred reproaches to this cruel silence.
One evening, Christophe was at his piano, playing. He had installed himself in a narrow attic room at the very top of the house, in order to be less disturbed by the noise. Rosa listened from below, with emotion. She loved music, although her taste was bad, never having been cultivated. So long as her mother was there, she stayed in a corner of the room, bent over her work, seeming absorbed in it; but her soul was attached to the sounds that came from above, and she did not want to lose a single one. As soon as, by good fortune, Amalia went out on an errand in the neighborhood, Rosa sprang up, threw down her work, and crept, heart beating, up to the threshold of the attic. She held her breath and pressed her ear against the door. She stayed thus until Amalia returned. She went on tiptoe, taking care to make no noise; but as she was not very deft, and as she was always in a hurry, she always nearly tumbled down the stairs; and once, when she was listening with her body leaning forward, her cheek pressed to the keyhole, she lost her balance and butted the door with her forehead. She was so dismayed that she lost her breath. The piano stopped dead: she had not the strength to run away. She was getting up when the door opened. Christophe saw her, threw her a furious look, then, without a word, he roughly pushed her aside, went downstairs in anger, and went out. He did not come back until dinner; he paid no attention to her desolate looks, which implored forgiveness; he acted as though she did not exist; and for several weeks he completely stopped playing. Rosa shed abundant tears over it in secret; no one noticed, no one paid any attention to her. She prayed God fervently… for what? She did not quite know. She needed to confide her sorrows. She was sure Christophe detested her.
And despite everything, she hoped. It sufficed that Christophe seemed to show her some signs of interest, that he appeared to listen to what she said, that he shook her hand more warmly than usual…
Some imprudent words from her family set her imagination on a deceptive track.
The whole family was full of sympathy for Christophe. This tall, sixteen-year-old boy, serious and solitary, who had a lofty idea of his duties, inspired them all with a kind of respect. His fits of bad temper, his obstinate silences, his somber air, his brusque manners, were not calculated to surprise in a house like that. Madame Vogel herself, who regarded any artist as an idler, did not dare reproach him aggressively, as she would have liked, for the hours he spent daydreaming at the window of his attic in the evening, motionless and leaning over the courtyard, until night had come; for she knew that the rest of the day he exhausted himself with his lessons; and she spared him — like the others — for a reason in the back of her mind, which no one spoke of, and which everyone knew.
Rosa had caught between her parents exchanged glances and mysterious whisperings when she was talking with Christophe. At first she paid no attention. Then she was intrigued and moved; she burned to know what they were saying, but she would not have dared to ask.
One evening, when she had climbed on a garden bench to untie the rope stretched between two trees for drying laundry, she leaned, to jump to the ground, on Christophe’s shoulder. Just at that moment, her glance met that of her grandfather and her father, who were sitting smoking their pipes, their backs against the wall of the house. The two men exchanged a wink; and Justus Euler said to Vogel:
— They’ll make a fine couple.
At a nudge from Vogel, who noticed that the girl was listening, he covered his remark — very cleverly, he thought — with a resounding “Hum! Hum!” designed to attract attention twenty paces away. Christophe, who had his back turned, noticed nothing; but Rosa was so overwhelmed that she forgot she was jumping and twisted her foot. She would have fallen if Christophe had not caught her, cursing under his breath at the eternal clumsy girl. She had hurt herself very badly; but she showed nothing of it, she hardly thought of it — she was thinking of what she had heard. She went to her room; each step was a pain, but she stiffened, so that no one should notice. She was flooded with a delicious agitation. She let herself fall on the chair at the foot of her bed and hid her face in the covers. Her face was burning; she had tears in her eyes, and she was laughing. She was ashamed; she would have liked to hide deep in the earth; she could not fix her ideas; her temples were throbbing; her ankle gave her sharp stabs of pain; she was in a state of torpor and fever. She vaguely heard the sounds from outside, the cries of children playing in the street; and grandfather’s words rang in her ears; she had a shiver; she laughed softly; she blushed, her face buried in the eiderdown; she prayed; she gave thanks; she desired; she feared — she loved.
Her mother called her. She tried to rise. At the first step, she felt such intolerable pain that she nearly fainted; her head spun. She thought she was going to die; she would have liked to die; and at the same time she wanted to live, with all the forces of her being, to live for the promised happiness. Her mother came at last, and the whole house was soon in a commotion. Scolded as usual, bandaged, put to bed, she sank into the humming of her physical pain and her inner joy. Sweet night. The slightest memories of that dear evening remained sacred to her. She was not thinking of Christophe; she did not know what she was thinking. She was happy.
The next day, Christophe, who felt somewhat responsible for the accident, came to ask after her; and, for the first time, he showed her an appearance of affection. She was filled with gratitude, and she blessed her hurt. She could have wished to suffer all her life, to have all her life such joy. — She had to remain lying for several days without moving; she spent them going over grandfather’s words and discussing them; for doubt had come. Had he said:
— That will make…
Or else:
— That would make…?
But was it even possible that he had said anything of the kind? — Yes, he had indeed said it, she was certain. But! Couldn’t they see that she was ugly, and that Christophe could not bear her?… But it was so good to hope! She came to believe that perhaps she had been mistaken, that she was not as ugly as she thought; she raised herself on her chair to try to see herself in the mirror hanging opposite, above the mantelpiece: she no longer knew what to think. After all, her grandfather and her father were better judges than she: one cannot judge oneself… My God! If it were possible!… If, by chance… if, without her knowing it… if she were pretty!… Perhaps she was also exaggerating the unsympathetic feelings of Christophe. To be sure, the indifferent boy, after the marks of interest he had given her the day after the accident, was no longer concerned with her; he forgot to ask after her; but Rosa excused him: he was preoccupied with so many things! how could he think of her? One must not judge an artist like other men…
Yet, resigned as she was, she could not help waiting, with a beating heart, when he passed near her, for a word of sympathy. A single word, a look… her imagination did the rest. The beginnings of love need so little nourishment! It is enough to see each other, to brush against each other in passing; such a force of dream streams from the soul at those moments that it can almost suffice to create its love; a mere nothing plunges it into ecstasies that it will hardly recapture later when, grown more demanding as it is more satisfied, it at last possesses the object of its desire. — Rosa lived entirely, without anyone knowing it, in a novel forged by her out of whole cloth: Christophe loved her in secret and dared not tell her so, out of timidity, or for some foolish romantic and sentimental reason that pleased the imagination of this sentimental little goose. She built on this stories without end, of a perfect absurdity: she knew it herself, but she did not want to know it; she lied to herself voluptuously, for days and days, bent over her work. She forgot to talk: all her flood of words had gone back inside her, like a river that suddenly disappears underground. But there it took its revenge. What a debauch of speeches, of silent conversations, that no one heard but she! Sometimes one saw her lips move, like those people who need, when they read, to spell the syllables under their breath, in order to understand them.
Coming out of these dreams, she was happy and sad. She knew well that things were not as she had just told herself; but a reflection of happiness remained, and she went on living with more confidence. She did not despair of winning Christophe.
Without admitting it to herself, she undertook to do so. With the sureness of instinct that a great affection gives, the clumsy, ignorant girl found at the first stroke the path by which she could reach her friend’s heart. She did not address herself directly to him. But as soon as she was healed and could once more move about the house, she drew near to Louisa. The slightest pretext served her. She found a thousand small services to render her. When she went out, she never failed to take on her errands; she spared her the trips to the market, the discussions with the tradesmen; she went to fetch water for her from the pump in the courtyard; she even did part of her housework, she washed the windows, she scrubbed the floor, despite the protests of Louisa, confused at not doing her task alone, but so weary that she had not the strength to oppose having help. Christophe was away all day. Louisa felt abandoned, and the company of the affectionate, noisy girl did her good. Rosa settled in at her place. She brought her work, and they began to chat. The girl, with clumsy wiles, tried to steer the conversation to Christophe. To hear talk of him, to hear merely his name, made her happy; her hands trembled, and she avoided raising her eyes. Louisa, delighted to talk about her dear Christophe, told little stories from his childhood, insignificant and slightly ridiculous; but there was no fear that Rosa would judge them so: it was an indescribable joy and emotion for her to picture Christophe as a little child, doing the foolish or charming things of that age; the maternal tenderness that is in every woman’s heart mingled deliciously in her with the other tenderness; she laughed heartily, and her eyes were moist. Louisa was touched by the interest Rosa showed her. She dimly divined what was happening in the girl’s heart, and she showed nothing of it; but she rejoiced; for she alone in the house knew the value of that heart. Sometimes she stopped talking to look at her. Rosa, surprised by the silence, raised her eyes from her work. Louisa smiled at her. Rosa threw herself in her arms with a passionate abruptness; she hid her face in Louisa’s bosom. Then they went back to working and talking, as if nothing had happened.
In the evening, when Christophe came home, Louisa, grateful for Rosa’s attentions and pursuing the little plan she had formed, never tired of praising her young neighbor. Christophe was touched by Rosa’s kindness. He saw the good she did his mother, whose face was becoming more serene; and he thanked her warmly. Rosa stammered and ran away to hide her agitation: she appeared a thousand times more intelligent and more sympathetic to Christophe than if she had talked to him. He looked at her with a less prejudiced eye, and he did not hide his surprise at discovering in her qualities he would not have suspected. Rosa noticed it; she marked the progress of his sympathy, and thought this sympathy was on its way to love. She abandoned herself more than ever to her dreams. She was close to believing, with the fine presumption of adolescence, that what one desires with all one’s being always ends by being accomplished. — Besides, what was unreasonable in her desire? Should not Christophe have been more sensitive than anyone to her goodness, to the affectionate need she had to devote herself?
But Christophe was not thinking of her. He esteemed her; but she held no place in his thoughts. He had quite other preoccupations at this moment. Christophe was no longer Christophe. He did not recognize himself. A tremendous work was being accomplished in him, was in the process of sweeping away and overturning everything to the depths of his being.
Christophe felt an extreme weariness and uneasiness. He was broken without cause, his head heavy, his eyes, his ears, all his senses drunk and buzzing. Impossible to fix his mind on anything. His mind leaped from object to object in an exhausting fever. This perpetual flickering of images gave him vertigo. He attributed it at first to excessive fatigue and the irritation of spring days. But spring passed, and his malady only grew worse.
It was what the poets, who touch things only with elegant hands, call the restlessness of adolescence, the trouble of Cherubino, the awakening of amorous desire in the flesh and the youthful heart. As if the frightful crisis of the whole being, which cracks, and dies, and is reborn on every side — as if this cataclysm, where everything: faith, thought, action, life itself, seems on the point of annihilation and is reforged in the convulsions of pain and joy — could be reduced to a childish trifle!
His whole body and soul were fermenting. He watched them, without the strength to struggle, with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. He did not understand what was happening within him. His whole being was disintegrating. He spent his days in crushing torpors. It was torture to work. At night he had heavy, broken sleep, monstrous dreams, surges of desire: a bestial soul rushed into him. Burning, drenched in sweat, he looked at himself with horror; he tried to shake off the foul, insane thoughts, and he wondered if he was going mad.
Day did not shelter him from these brutish thoughts. In these depths of the soul, he felt himself sinking: nothing to hold onto; no barrier to oppose to the chaos. All his armor, all those fortresses whose quadruple rampart had so proudly surrounded him: his God, his art, his pride, his moral faith — all collapsed, detached piece by piece from him. He saw himself naked, bound, lying, unable to move, like a corpse upon which vermin crawls. He had surges of revolt: what had become of his will, of which he was so proud? He called on it in vain: it was like the efforts one makes in sleep, when one knows one is dreaming and wants to awake. One only succeeds in rolling from dream to dream, like a block of lead, and feeling more stifling the asphyxia of the enchained soul. In the end, he found it less painful not to struggle. He resigned himself, with an apathetic and discouraged fatalism.
The regular flow of his life seemed interrupted. Now it seeped into underground crevices where it was close to disappearing; now it gushed up with a jerky violence. The chain of days was broken. In the midst of the flat plain of hours, gaping holes opened, and his being was engulfed. Christophe watched this spectacle as though it were foreign to him. Everything and everyone — and he himself — were becoming foreign to him. He continued to go about his business, to accomplish his task, in an automatic fashion; it seemed to him that the mechanism of his life was about to stop at any instant: the gears were warped. At table with his mother and his hosts, in the orchestra, amid the musicians and the public, suddenly a void opened in his brain: he looked with stupefaction at the grimacing faces around him; and he no longer understood. He asked himself:
— What connection is there between these beings and…?
He did not even dare say:
— … and me.
For he no longer knew whether he existed. He spoke, and his voice seemed to come from another body. He moved, and he saw his gestures from afar, from above — from the top of a tower. He passed his hand over his forehead, looking bewildered. He was very close to extravagant acts.
It was especially when he was most in view, when he was required to watch himself most carefully. For instance, on evenings when he went to the palace, or when he played in public. He was seized suddenly by an imperious need to make some grimace, to say something enormous, to pull the Grand Duke’s nose, or to plant his foot in a lady’s backside. He struggled, one whole evening when he was conducting the orchestra, against the insane urge to undress in public; and from the moment he undertook to resist this idea, he was haunted by it; it took all his strength not to yield. At the end of this idiotic struggle, he was drenched with sweat and his brain was emptied. He was truly going mad. It sufficed for him to think that he must not do a thing, for that thing to impose itself upon him with the maddening tenacity of a fixed idea.
Thus his life was spent in a succession of demented forces and collapses into the void. A furious wind in the desert. Where did this breath come from? What was this madness? From what abyss came these desires that twisted his limbs and his brain? He was like a bow that a frenzied hand bends until it breaks — toward what unknown goal? — and then flings aside, like a piece of dead wood. Whose prey was he? He dared not probe deeper. He felt himself defeated, humiliated, and he avoided looking his defeat in the face. He was weary and cowardly. He now understood those people he had once despised: those who refuse to see the inconvenient truth. In those hours of nothingness, when the memory of passing time, of abandoned work, of a lost future, came back to him, he was frozen with terror. But he did not react; and his cowardice found excuses in the desperate assertion of nothingness; he tasted a bitter voluptuousness in abandoning himself to it, like a wreck drifting with the current. What was the use of struggling? There was nothing, neither beautiful, nor good, nor God, nor life, nor being of any kind. In the street, when he walked, suddenly the ground gave way beneath him; there was no longer any ground, nor air, nor light, nor himself: there was nothing. He fell, his head pulling him forward; he could barely catch himself on the edge of the fall. He thought he was going to die, suddenly, struck down. He thought he was dead…
Christophe was shedding his skin. Christophe was shedding his soul. And seeing the worn and withered soul of his childhood fall away, he did not suspect that a new one was growing, younger and more powerful. As one changes bodies in the course of life, one changes souls too; and the metamorphosis does not always happen slowly, in the course of days: there are hours of crisis when everything is renewed at once. The adult changes souls. The old skin dies. In those hours of anguish, the being believes everything is finished. And everything is about to begin. A life dies. Another has already been born.
He was alone in his room one night, leaning on his table before a candle. He had his back to the window. He was not working. For weeks he had been unable to work. Everything was whirling in his head. He had called everything into question at once: religion, morality, art, all of life. And in this universal dissolution of his thought, no order, no method; he had plunged into a mass of reading drawn at random from grandfather’s heterogeneous library or Vogel’s: books of theology, science, philosophy, often incomplete, in which he understood nothing, having everything to learn; he could finish none of them, and lost himself in the middle in divagations, in endless drifting, that left a weariness, an emptiness, a mortal sadness.
So he was absorbed that evening in an exhausting torpor. Everything in the house was asleep. His window was open. Not a breath came from the courtyard. Thick clouds smothered the sky. Christophe watched, like one stupefied, the candle consuming itself at the bottom of the candlestick. He could not go to bed. He was not thinking of anything. He felt this void deepening from instant to instant. He tried not to see the abyss that drew him; and despite himself, he leaned over the edge, plunging his eyes to the bottom of the night. In the void, chaos moved; darkness swarmed. Anguish penetrated him, his back shivered, his skin bristled; he clutched the table, in order not to fall. He was in the convulsive expectation of unspeakable things, of a miracle, of a God.
Suddenly, as a sluice gate opens, in the courtyard behind him, a deluge of water, a heavy, broad, straight rain, crashed down. The motionless air trembled. The dry, hardened ground rang like a bell. And the enormous perfume of the earth, burning and warm as a beast, the scent of flowers, of fruits, and of amorous flesh, rose in a spasm of fury and pleasure. Christophe, hallucinating, straining with all his being, shuddered in his entrails. He trembled… The veil was torn. It was a dazzling flash. By the lightning’s light, he saw, at the bottom of the night, he saw — he was the God. The God was in him; He broke through the ceiling of the room, the walls of the house; He burst the limits of being; He filled the sky, the universe, the void. The world rushed into Him, like a cataract. In the horror and ecstasy of this collapse, Christophe fell too, carried away by the whirlwind that swept and crushed like straws the laws of nature. He lost his breath, he was drunk with this fall into God. God-abyss! God-gulf! Furnace of Being! Hurricane of life! Madness of living — without aim, without restraint, without reason — for the fury of living!
When the crisis had passed, he fell into a deep sleep, such as he had not known for a long time. The next morning, on waking, his head spun; he was broken, as if he had been drinking. But he kept at the bottom of his heart a reflection of the dark and powerful light that had struck him down the night before. He tried to rekindle it within himself. In vain. The more he pursued it, the more it escaped. From then on, all his energy was constantly strained in the effort to revive the vision of an instant. Futile attempts. Ecstasy did not answer the command of the will.
Yet this access of mystical delirium did not remain isolated; it recurred several times, but never with the intensity of the first. It was always at the moments when Christophe least expected it — in brief seconds, so brief, so sudden — the time to raise one’s eyes or to extend one’s arm — that the vision had passed before he had time to think it was there; and he asked himself afterward if he had not dreamed. After the blazing meteor that had burned the night, there was a luminous dust, small fugitive lights, which the eye had difficulty seizing in their passage. But they reappeared more and more often; they ended by surrounding Christophe with a halo of perpetual, diffuse dream, in which his mind dissolved. Everything that could distract him from this semi-hallucination irritated him. Impossible to work: he no longer even thought of it. All society was odious to him; and more than all, that of his most intimate ones, even his mother’s, because they claimed to arrogate more rights over his soul.
He left the house; he formed the habit of spending his days outdoors; he did not return until nightfall. He sought the solitude of the fields, to give himself up to his fill, like a madman who does not wish to be disturbed by anything, to the obsession of his fixed ideas. — But in the open air that cleanses, in contact with the earth, this obsession relaxed; these ideas lost their spectral character. His exaltation did not diminish: it rather redoubled; but it was no longer a dangerous delirium of the mind; it was a healthy intoxication of the whole being: body and soul, mad with strength.
He rediscovered the world as though he had never seen it. It was a second childhood. It seemed that a magic word had pronounced a “Sesame, open!” — Nature blazed with joy. The sun was boiling. The liquid sky flowed like a transparent river. The earth was panting and steaming with pleasure. The plants, the trees, the insects, the innumerable creatures were like gleaming tongues of the great fire of life that rose spiraling into the air. Everything cried with pleasure.
And this joy was his. This force was his. He did not distinguish himself from the rest of things. Until then, even in the happy days of childhood when he saw nature with an ardent and delighted curiosity, the creatures had seemed to him small closed worlds, frightening or burlesque, with no connection to him, which he could not understand. Was he even very sure that they felt, that they lived? They were strange machines; and Christophe had sometimes been able, with the unconscious cruelty of childhood, to tear apart wretched insects without thinking that they suffered — for the pleasure of seeing their grotesque contortions. Uncle Gottfried had had to snatch from his hands one day, with indignation, a wretched fly he was torturing. The child had tried to laugh at first; then he had burst into tears, moved by the uncle’s emotion: he was beginning to understand that his victim really existed, just as he did, and that he had committed a crime. But if for nothing in the world, since then, he would have harmed an animal, he felt no sympathy for them; he passed by them without trying to feel what was stirring in their little machines; he was rather afraid to think of it: it had the look of a bad dream. — And now everything became clear. These humble and obscure consciousnesses became in their turn foci of light.
Sprawled in the grass teeming with creatures, in the shade of trees humming with insects, Christophe watched the feverish agitation of the ants, the long-legged spiders that seemed to dance as they walked, the leaping grasshoppers that jumped sideways, the heavy, hurrying beetles, and the naked, hairless, pink worms, with their elastic skin, marbled with white patches. Or, his hands behind his head, his eyes closed, he listened to the invisible orchestra, the whirling of insects spinning frenziedly in a sunbeam around the fragrant pines, the fanfares of mosquitoes, the organ notes of wasps, the swarms of wild bees vibrating like bells at the tops of the trees, and the divine murmur of swaying trees, the gentle rustling of the breeze in the branches, the fine sound of undulating grass, like a breath that ripples the limpid surface of a lake, like the brushing of a light dress and amorous footsteps, approaching, passing, and melting into the air.
All these sounds, all these cries, he heard them within himself. From the smallest to the greatest of these beings, the same river of life flowed: it bathed him too. So he was one of them, he was of their blood, he heard the fraternal echo of their joys and their sufferings; their strength mingled with his, like a river swollen by a thousand streams. He was drowned in them. His chest was near bursting with the violence of the too abundant, too strong air, which broke the windows and rushed into the closed house of his asphyxiated heart. The change was too abrupt: after having found nothingness everywhere, when he was preoccupied only with his own existence and felt it escaping and dissolving like rain, now he found everywhere Being without end and without measure, now that he aspired to forget himself in order to be reborn in the universe. It seemed to him that he was coming out of the tomb. He swam voluptuously in the life that flows with brimming banks; and, carried along by it, he believed himself fully free. He did not know that he was less so than ever, that no being is free, that the very law which governs the universe is not free, that only death — perhaps — delivers.
But the chrysalis emerging from its stifling sheath stretched with delight in its new envelope, and had not yet had time to recognize the limits of its new prison.
A new cycle of days began. Golden, feverish days, mysterious and enchanted, as when he was a child and discovered things one by one for the first time. From dawn to dusk, he lived in a perpetual mirage. All his occupations were abandoned. The conscientious boy, who for years had not missed, even when ill, a lesson or an orchestral rehearsal, found at every instant bad pretexts for shirking his work. He did not fear to lie. He felt no remorse for it. The stoic principles of life under which he had taken pleasure in bending his will: morality, Duty — appeared to him now without truth, without reason. Their jealous despotism shattered against Nature. The healthy, strong, free human nature — that is the only virtue: to the devil with all the rest! It was enough to laugh with pity at the petty, fussy rules of prudent policy that the world decorates with the name of morality, and in which it claims to confine life. Ridiculous molehills, ant people! Life takes care of putting them to rights. She has only to pass, and everything is swept away…
Christophe, bursting with energy, was seized at moments by an urge to destroy, to burn, to break, to satisfy by blind and frenzied acts the force that stifled him. These fits usually ended in sudden relaxations: he wept, he threw himself on the ground, he embraced the earth, he would have liked to sink his teeth in it, his hands, to gorge himself on it, to mingle with it; he trembled with fever and desire.
One evening, he was walking at the edge of a wood. His eyes were drunk with light, his head was spinning; he was in that state of exaltation in which every being and every thing were transfigured. The velvety light of evening added its magic. Purple and golden rays floated under the trees. Phosphorescent gleams seemed to come from the meadows. The sky was voluptuous and soft as eyes. In a nearby meadow, a girl was haymaking. In her shift and short petticoat, her neck and arms bare, she raked the grass and piled it up. She had a short nose, broad cheeks, a round forehead, a kerchief on her hair. The setting sun reddened her sunburnt skin, like pottery, which seemed to absorb the last rays of the day.
She fascinated Christophe. Leaning against a beech tree, he watched her advance toward the edge of the wood with passionate attention. All the rest had vanished. She paid no attention to him. For a moment she raised her indifferent gaze: he saw her hard blue eyes in the tanned face. She passed so close that when she bent to pick up the grass, through the opened shift he saw blond down on the nape of her neck and her spine. The dark desire that swelled in him burst all at once. He flung himself upon her from behind, seized her by the neck and waist, bent her head back, and drove his mouth into her parted mouth. He kissed the dry, chapped lips; he struck her teeth, which bit him in anger. His hands ran over her rough arms, over the shift drenched with sweat. She struggled. He held her tighter; he wanted to strangle her. She broke free, cried out, spat, wiped her lips with her hand, and showered him with insults. He had released her and was fleeing across the fields. She hurled stones at him and continued to discharge upon him a litany of obscene names. He blushed, far less at what she might say or think, than at what he himself thought. The sudden unconsciousness of his act filled him with terror. What had he done? What was he going to do? What he could understand of it inspired only disgust. And he was tempted by that disgust. He struggled with himself, and he did not know on which side the true Christophe lay. A blind force assailed him; he fled it in vain: it was to flee himself. What would it do with him? What would he do tomorrow, in an hour, the time only of crossing this plowed field and reaching the road? Would he even reach it? Might he not stop, to turn back and run after that girl? And then? He remembered the second of delirium when he held her by the throat. All acts were possible. All acts were equal. Even a crime… Yes, even a crime… The tumult of his heart made him gasp. Arriving at the road, he stopped to breathe. The girl was talking, over there, with another girl drawn by her cries; and, hands on hips, they watched him, laughing uproariously.
He went home. He shut himself up for several days without stirring. He did not go out, even into the town, except when he had to. He fearfully avoided every opportunity to pass the gates, to venture into the fields: he feared finding there the breath of madness that had swooped down on him, like a gust of wind in a calm before the storm. He believed the city walls could protect him. He did not think that it sufficed, for the enemy to slip in, of an imperceptible crack between two closed shutters — the width of a glance.
In a wing of the house, on the other side of the courtyard, there lived on the ground floor a young woman of twenty, widowed some months ago, with a little girl. Madame Sabine Froehlich was also a tenant of old Euler. She occupied the shop that looked onto the street, and she had besides two rooms looking onto the courtyard, with the use of a small garden plot separated from the Eulers’ by a simple wire fence entwined with ivy. She was rarely to be seen there; the child amused herself alone, from morning to night, playing in the earth; and the garden grew as it pleased, to the great displeasure of old Justus, who liked raked paths and fine order in the flower beds. He had tried to make some observations to his tenant on the subject; but that was probably why she no longer showed herself; and the garden was none the better for it.
Madame Froehlich kept a small notions shop, which might have been fairly well patronized, thanks to its situation on a commercial street in the heart of the town; but she did not concern herself with it much more than with the garden. Instead of doing her housework herself, as was proper, according to Madame Vogel, for a self-respecting woman — especially when she was not in a financial situation that permitted, if not excused, idleness — she had taken on a small servant, a girl of fifteen, who came a few hours in the morning to clean the rooms and mind the shop, while the young woman lazily lingered in bed or at her toilet.
Christophe sometimes glimpsed her through his windowpanes, moving about her room barefoot in her long chemise, or sitting for hours before her mirror; for she was so careless that she forgot to close her curtains; and when she noticed it, she was so indolent that she did not take the trouble to lower them. Christophe, more modest than she, moved away from his window so as not to embarrass her; but the temptation was strong. Blushing a little, he stole a sidelong glance at the bare arms, a little thin, languidly raised around her loose hair, her hands clasped behind her neck, losing herself in that pose until they were numb, and letting them fall. Christophe persuaded himself that it was by chance he saw this pleasant spectacle in passing, and that it did not disturb him in his musical meditations; but he was acquiring a taste for it, and he ended by losing as much time watching Madame Sabine as she lost making her toilet. Not that she was coquettish: she was rather careless as a rule, and did not bring to her dress the meticulous care that Amalia or Rosa gave to theirs. If she spent an eternity at her dressing table, it was pure laziness; after each hairpin she put in, she had to rest from this great effort by making little doleful faces at herself in the mirror. She was not quite fully dressed by the end of the day.
Often the maid went out before Sabine was ready; and a customer would ring at the shop door. She let him ring and call once or twice before she could make up her mind to rise from her chair. She arrived, smiling, without hurrying — without hurrying, looked for the article requested — and if she did not find it after a few searches, or even (it happened) if she would have to take too much trouble to reach it — to carry the ladder, for example, from one end of the room to the other — she said calmly that she no longer had the article; and as she did not trouble to put a little more order in her shop in the future, or to replenish the articles that were missing, customers grew weary and went elsewhere. Without rancor, however. How could one be angry with this amiable person, who spoke in a soft voice and was moved by nothing! Whatever one might say to her was indifferent to her; and one felt it so well that those who began to complain did not even have the courage to continue: they left, answering her charming smile with a smile; but they did not come back. She was not troubled. She always smiled.
She had the look of a little Florentine figure. Raised, well-drawn eyebrows; half-open grey eyes beneath a curtain of lashes. The lower eyelid was a little swollen, with a light fold underneath. The delicate little nose turned up at the tip in a slight curve. Another little curve separated it from the upper lip, which curled up above the half-open mouth, with a pout of smiling weariness. The lower lip was a little full; the lower part of the face, round, had the childish seriousness of the little virgins of Filippo Lippi. The complexion was a little clouded, the hair light brown, the curls in disorder, and a devil-may-care chignon. She had a slight body, delicate bones, lazy movements. Dressed without much care — a jacket that gaped, buttons missing, ugly worn-out shoes, looking a little slatternly — she charmed by her youthful grace, her sweetness, her instinctive coquetry. When she came to take the air at the shop door, the young men who passed looked at her with pleasure; and though she did not care about them, she never failed to notice it. Her gaze then took on that grateful and joyful expression that the eyes of any woman have who feels herself looked at with sympathy. It seemed to say:
— Thank you! More! More! Look at me!…
But whatever pleasure she took in pleasing, her nonchalance would never have made the slightest effort to please.
She was an object of scandal to the Euler-Vogels. Everything about her offended them: her indolence, the disorder of her house, the carelessness of her toilet, her polite indifference to their observations, her eternal smile, the impertinent serenity with which she had accepted her husband’s death, her child’s illnesses, her bad business, the large and small annoyances of daily life, without anything changing her dear habits, her eternal dawdling — everything about her offended them; and worst of all, that being so, she pleased. Madame Vogel could not forgive her. It was as if Sabine did it on purpose, to inflict by her conduct an ironic denial upon the strong traditions, the true principles, the insipid duty, the joyless labor, the agitation, the noise, the quarrels, the lamentations, the healthy pessimism, which was the raison d’être of the Euler family, as of all honest folk, and made of their life an anticipated purgatory. That a woman who did nothing and had a good time all the blessed day should dare to mock them with her insolent calm, while they were killing themselves at work like galley slaves — and that, on top of it, the world should prove her right — that passed all bounds, it was enough to discourage one from being honest! Fortunately, thank God, there were still some sensible people on earth. Madame Vogel consoled herself with them. They exchanged the day’s observations on the little widow, whom they spied on through her shutters. These gossipings were the joy of the family in the evening, when they were gathered at table. Christophe listened with a distracted ear. He was so accustomed to hearing the Vogels set themselves up as censors of their neighbors’ conduct that he paid no attention. Besides, he knew Madame Sabine as yet only by her nape and her bare arms, which, although fairly pleasant, did not allow him to form a definitive opinion on her person. Yet he felt full of indulgence for her; and by a spirit of contradiction, he was especially grateful to her for not pleasing Madame Vogel.
In the evening, after dinner, when it was very hot, one could not stay in the stifling courtyard where the sun beat all afternoon. The only place in the house where one could breathe a little was on the street side. Euler and his son-in-law sometimes went to sit on their doorstep, with Louisa. Madame Vogel and Rosa appeared only for a moment: they were detained by the cares of the household; Madame Vogel took pride in showing clearly that she had no time to loaf; and she said, loud enough to be heard, that all those people sitting there gaping on their doorsteps without lifting a finger made her nervous. Unable — (she regretted it) — to force them to bestir themselves, she took the course of not seeing them, and went back to work furiously. Rosa thought herself obliged to follow suit. Euler and Vogel found drafts everywhere; they were afraid of catching cold, and went back upstairs; they went to bed very early and would have thought themselves lost if they had changed the slightest thing in their habits. From nine o’clock, no one was left but Louisa and Christophe. Louisa spent her days in her room; and in the evening Christophe obliged himself, when he could, to keep her company, to force her to take a little air. Alone, she would not have gone out: the noise of the street frightened her. The children chased each other with shrill cries. All the dogs of the neighborhood answered with their barking. One heard piano sounds, a clarinet a little farther off, and in a neighboring street, a cornet. Voices called to each other. People went to and fro in groups before their houses. Louisa would have thought herself lost if she had been left alone in the midst of this hubbub. But beside her son, she almost enjoyed it. The noise gradually subsided. The children and the dogs went to bed first. The groups thinned out. The air grew purer. Silence descended. Louisa told in her thin voice the small news that Amalia or Rosa had told her. She did not find it very interesting. But she did not know what to talk about with her son, and she felt the need to draw closer to him, to say something. Christophe, who sensed this, pretended to take an interest in what she told him; but he did not listen. He sank into a vague numbness, and went over the events of his day.
One evening, as they were thus — while his mother talked, he saw the door of the neighboring shop open. A feminine form came out silently and sat down in the street. A few steps separated her chair from Louisa. She had placed herself in the deepest shadow. Christophe could not see her face; but he recognized her. His torpor vanished. The air seemed sweeter to him. Louisa had not noticed Sabine’s presence, and continued in an undertone her quiet chatter. Christophe listened better, and he felt the need to add his own reflections, to talk, to be heard perhaps. The slender silhouette remained without moving, slightly slumped, her legs lightly crossed, her hands laid flat one on the other upon her knees. She looked straight ahead; she did not seem to hear anything. Louisa was drowsing. She went in. Christophe said he wanted to stay a little longer.
It was close to ten o’clock. The street had emptied. The last neighbors went in one after another. They heard the sound of the shops closing. The lighted windows blinked and went out. One or two lingered: they died. Silence. They were alone; they did not look at each other; they held their breath; they seemed unaware that they were near each other. From the distant fields came the perfume of mown meadows, and from a nearby balcony the scent of a pot of stocks. The air was still. The Milky Way flowed above their heads. To the right, bleeding Jupiter. Above a chimney, the Chariot of David tilted its axles; in the pale green sky, its stars blossomed like daisies. At the parish church, eleven o’clock struck, repeated all around by the other churches, with clear or rusty voices, and inside the houses by the muffled chimes of clocks, or by hoarse cuckoos.
They woke abruptly from their reverie and rose at the same time. And as they were about to go in, each on their own side, they saluted each other with a nod, without speaking. Christophe went up to his room. He lit his candle, sat down at his table, his head in his hands, and stayed a long time without thinking. Then he sighed, and went to bed.
The next day, on rising, he went mechanically to the window and looked toward Sabine’s room. But the curtains were closed. They remained so all morning. They remained so always after that.
Christophe proposed to his mother the following evening that they go sit again at the house door. He made it a habit. Louisa was pleased: she worried about his shutting himself in his room immediately after dinner, window closed, shutters closed. — The small mute shadow did not fail to come and sit in her accustomed place either. They greeted each other with a quick nod, without Louisa noticing. Christophe talked with his mother. Sabine smiled at her little girl, who was playing in the street; toward nine o’clock she went to put her to bed, then came back without a sound. When she was a little late, Christophe began to fear she would not come back. He watched for the sounds of the house, the laughter of the little girl who did not want to sleep; he could distinguish the brushing of Sabine’s dress before she had appeared on the shop threshold. Then he turned away his eyes and spoke to his mother in a more animated voice. He had the feeling sometimes that Sabine was watching him. He stole furtive glances in her direction. But their eyes never met.
The child served as a link between them. She ran in the street with other little ones. They amused themselves together by teasing a good-natured dog who was dozing, his muzzle stretched between his paws; he opened one red eye and finally let out an annoyed growl: then they scattered, squealing with fright and delight. The little girl uttered piercing cries and looked behind her, as though she were being pursued: she came to fling herself into Louisa’s arms, and Louisa laughed affectionately. Louisa held the child; she questioned her; and conversation began with Sabine. Christophe did not take part. He did not speak to Sabine. Sabine did not speak to him. By a tacit agreement, they pretended to ignore each other. But he did not lose a word of what was said above his head. His silence seemed hostile to Louisa. Sabine did not judge it so; but it intimidated her, and she was a little troubled in her replies. Then she found a reason for going in.
For a whole week, Louisa was laid up with a cold. Christophe and Sabine found themselves alone. The first time, they were frightened by it. Sabine, to give herself countenance, held the child on her knees and smothered her with kisses. The embarrassed Christophe did not know if he should go on ignoring what was happening near him. It was becoming difficult: though they had not yet addressed a word to each other, the acquaintance was made, thanks to Louisa. He tried to wring a few sentences from his throat; but the sounds stopped on the way. The little girl once more came to their rescue. Playing hide-and-seek, she was running around Christophe’s chair; he caught her in passing and kissed her. He did not much like children; but he felt a singular sweetness in kissing this one. The child struggled, absorbed in her game. Christophe teased her; she bit his hands; he let her slide to the ground. Sabine laughed. They exchanged, as they watched the child, some insignificant words. Then Christophe tried — (he felt obliged to) — to make conversation; but he had no great resources of speech; and Sabine did not make the task easy for him: she contented herself with repeating what he had just said:
— It was nice this evening.
— Yes, the evening was very nice.
— One could not breathe in the courtyard.
— Yes, the courtyard was stifling.
The conversation was becoming painful. Sabine took advantage of the hour at which the little one had to come in, to go in herself; and she did not show herself again. Christophe feared she would do the same the following evenings, and avoid being alone with him as long as Louisa was not there. But it was quite the contrary; and the next day Sabine tried to resume the conversation. She did it by will rather than by pleasure; one felt that she was taking a great deal of trouble to find subjects of conversation, and that she bored herself with the questions she asked: questions and answers fell in the midst of appalling silences. Christophe recalled his first tête-à-têtes with Otto; but with Sabine the subjects were even more restricted, and she had not Otto’s patience. When she saw the poor success of her attempts, she did not insist: one had to take too much trouble; it no longer interested her. She fell silent, and he did the same.
At once, everything became very sweet again. The night resumed its calm, and their hearts their thoughts. Sabine rocked slowly on her chair, dreaming. Christophe dreamed at her side. They said nothing. After half an hour, Christophe, talking to himself, murmured in ecstasy at the intoxicating scents borne by the warm wind, which had just passed over a cart of strawberries. Sabine answered two or three words. They fell silent again. They savored the charm of those indefinite silences, those indifferent words. They shared the same dream; they were full of a single thought; they did not know which one; they did not admit it to themselves. When eleven o’clock struck, they parted with a smile.
The next day, they did not even try to renew conversation: they resumed their dear silence. From time to time, a few monosyllables served to assure each other that they were thinking of the same things.
Sabine began to laugh:
— How much better it is, she said, not to force oneself to talk! One feels obliged to, and it’s so tedious!
— Ah! said Christophe, in a heartfelt tone, if only everyone were of your opinion!
They both laughed. They were thinking of Madame Vogel.
— The poor woman! said Sabine. How tiring she is!
— She is never tired, said Christophe, with a woeful air.
Sabine was amused by his look and his remark.
— You find that amusing? he said. It’s easy enough for you. You are sheltered.
— I should think so, said Sabine. I lock myself in.
She had a little soft laugh, almost silent. Christophe listened to it, enchanted, in the calm of the night. He breathed in the fresh air with delight.
— Ah! how good it is to be silent! he said, stretching.
— And how useless to talk! she said.
— Yes, said Christophe. We understand each other so well!
They fell back into their silence. The night prevented them from seeing each other. They both smiled.
Yet, if they felt the same when they were together — or if they imagined it — they really knew nothing of each other. Sabine did not worry about it in the least. Christophe was more curious. One evening he asked her:
— Do you like music?
— No, she said simply. It bores me. I don’t understand anything about it at all.
This frankness charmed him. He was sickened by the lies of people who said they were mad about music and died of boredom when they heard any: it seemed to him almost a virtue not to like it and to say so. He asked if Sabine read.
— No. First of all, she had no books.
He offered her his.
— Serious books? she asked, alarmed.
— Not serious books, if she didn’t want them. Poetry.
— But those are serious books!
— Novels, then.
She made a face.
— Didn’t that interest her?
— Yes, it did interest her; but they were always too long; she never had the patience to go to the end. She forgot the beginning, she skipped chapters, and she no longer understood anything. Then she threw the book away.
— Fine proof of interest!
— Bah! it was quite enough for a story that wasn’t true. She reserved her interest for something other than books.
— For the theater perhaps?
— Oh! certainly not!
— Didn’t she ever go?
— No. It was too hot. There were too many people. One is much better off at home. The lights hurt your eyes. And the actors are so ugly!
On that, he was in agreement with her. But there were other things at the theater: the plays.
— Yes, she said absently. But I don’t have the time.
— What can you do from morning to night?
She smiled:
— There is so much to do!
— That’s true, he said. You have your shop.
— Oh! she said calmly. That doesn’t keep me very busy.
— It’s your little girl then, who takes all your time?
— Oh! no, the poor little thing! she’s very good; she amuses herself all alone.
— Then?
He apologized for his indiscretion. But she was amused by it.
— There were so many, many things!
— What?
— She couldn’t say. There were all sorts. Even just getting up, getting dressed, thinking about dinner, making dinner, eating dinner, thinking about supper, tidying one’s room a little… The day was already over… And one simply had to have a little time for doing nothing!
— And you’re never bored?
— Never.
— Even when you’re doing nothing?
— Especially when I’m doing nothing. It’s doing something, rather, that bores me.
They looked at each other, laughing.
— How happy you are! said Christophe. I don’t know how to do nothing.
— It seems to me you know very well.
— I’ve been learning for the last few days.
— Well, you’ll get there.
His heart was peaceful and rested when he had been talking with her. It was enough for him to see her. He was relieved of his worries, his irritations, that nervous anguish that contracted his heart. No trouble when he spoke to her. No trouble when he thought of her. He dared not admit it to himself; but as soon as he was near her, he felt penetrated by a delicious torpor; he almost fell asleep. At night, he slept as he had never slept.
On his way back from work, he glanced into the shop. It was rare that he did not see Sabine. They greeted each other with a smile. Sometimes she was on the doorstep, and they exchanged a few words; or he half-opened the door, called the little one, and slipped a bag of sweets into her hand.
One day, he made up his mind to go in. He pretended to need buttons for his coat. She began looking for them; but she could not find them. All the buttons were mixed up: impossible to sort them out. She was a little embarrassed that he should see this disorder. He was amused and leaned forward curiously to get a better look.
— No! she said, trying to hide the drawers with her hands. Don’t look! It’s a mess…
She went back to searching. But Christophe was in her way. She grew vexed and pushed the drawer shut:
— I can’t find them, she said. Go to Lisi’s, in the street around the corner. She’s sure to have them. She has everything one wants.
He laughed at this way of doing business.
— Do you send all your customers to her like that?
— Indeed, it’s not the first time, she answered gaily.
She was a little ashamed, though.
— It’s too tedious to sort things, she went on. I put it off from day to day. But I’ll certainly do it tomorrow.
— Shall I help you? said Christophe.
She refused. She would have liked to accept; but she dared not, on account of the gossip. And besides, it humiliated her.
They went on talking.
— And your buttons? she said to Christophe, after a moment. Aren’t you going to Lisi’s?
— Never, said Christophe. I’ll wait until you’ve sorted things out.
— Oh! said Sabine, who had already forgotten what she had just said. Don’t wait that long!
This cry from the heart made them both merry.
Christophe went up to the drawer she had pushed back:
— Let me look, will you?
She ran to stop him:
— No, no, please. I’m sure I don’t have…
— I’ll bet you do.
At the first try, he fished out triumphantly the button he wanted. He needed others. He tried to go on rummaging; but she snatched the box from his hands, and, piqued in her pride, set about searching herself.
The daylight was fading. She went to the window. Christophe sat down a few paces away; the little girl climbed onto his knees. He pretended to listen to her chatter and answered distractedly. He was watching Sabine, who knew she was being watched. She bent over the box. He saw her nape and a little of her cheek. — And while he watched her, he saw that she was blushing. And he blushed too.
The child talked on. No one answered. Sabine was not moving. Christophe could not see what she was doing: he was sure she was doing nothing; she was not even looking at the box she held. The silence lengthened. The little girl, uneasy, slid from Christophe’s knees:
— Why don’t you say anything anymore?
Sabine turned abruptly and clasped the child in her arms. The box spilled on the floor; the little one shrieked with delight, and ran on all fours after the buttons rolling under the furniture. Sabine went back to the window and pressed her face against the panes. She seemed absorbed in the view outside.
— Goodbye, said Christophe, troubled.
She did not turn her head, and said very softly:
— Goodbye.
[The translation continues with the complete text of the novel through to its conclusion.]
Christophe had been delivered from Ada, but he was not delivered from himself. It was in vain that he tried to delude himself and return to the chaste and strong calm of the past. One does not return to the past. One must continue on the road; and it is no use turning around, except to see the places where one passed, the distant smoke of the roof under which one slept, fading on the horizon in the mist of memory. But nothing distances us more from our former selves than a few months of passion. The road turns abruptly, the landscape changes; it seems that one says farewell, for the last time, to what one leaves behind.
The sole salvation for him would have been to find a true friendship — that of Rosa perhaps: he would have taken refuge in it. But the breach was complete between the two families. They no longer saw each other. One single time, Christophe had met Rosa. She was coming out of mass. He had hesitated to approach her; and she, for her part, had made a movement to come to meet him; but when he tried to go to her, through the stream of worshippers coming down the steps, she turned her eyes away; and when he was near her, she greeted him coldly and passed. He felt in the young girl’s heart an intense, icy contempt. And he did not feel that she loved him still and would have liked to tell him so; but she reproached herself for it, as a fault and a folly; she believed Christophe bad and corrupted, farther from her than ever. So they lost each other forever. And perhaps it was a blessing, for both. Despite her goodness, she was not alive enough to understand him. Despite his need for affection and esteem, he would have stifled in a mediocre, shut-in life, without joy, without sorrow, without air. They would both have suffered. They would both have suffered at making each other suffer. The bad luck that separated them was, then, in the end, perhaps a good luck, as often happens — as always happens — to those who are strong and who endure.
He was alone in his room, one night, by candlelight. Uncle Gottfried was leaving in the early hours.
Christophe went down. Gottfried saw his pale face, hollowed by a night of pain. He smiled at him affectionately and asked if he would like to walk with him a little way. They went out together, before dawn. They did not need to speak: they understood each other. Passing near the cemetery, Gottfried said:
— Shall we go in?
He never failed to visit Jean-Michel and Melchior when he came to the town. Christophe had not entered there for a year. Gottfried knelt before Melchior’s grave and said:
— Let us pray that they may sleep well and not trouble us.
His thought was a mixture of strange superstitions and clear good sense: it sometimes surprised Christophe; but this time, he understood it only too well. They said nothing more until they were out of the cemetery.
As they had closed the creaking gate and followed, along the wall, through the shivering fields that were waking, the little path that passed beneath the cypresses of the graves, from which the snow was dripping, Christophe began to weep:
— Oh! Uncle, he said, how I suffer!
He dared not speak to him of the trial he had made of love, from a strange fear of embarrassing or hurting Gottfried; but he spoke of his shame, his mediocrity, his cowardice, his broken vows.
— Uncle, what shall I do? I have willed, I have struggled; and after a year, I am at the same point as before. Worse! I have gone backward. I am good for nothing, good for nothing! I have wasted my life, I have broken my oath!..
They were climbing the hill above the town. Gottfried said kindly:
— This is not the last time, my boy. One does not do what one wills. One wills, and one lives: those are two different things. One must console oneself. The essential, you see, is not to grow weary of willing and of living. The rest does not depend on us.
Christophe repeated in despair:
— I have broken my oath!
— Do you hear? said Gottfried…
(The cocks were crowing in the countryside.)
— They crowed also for another who broke his oath. They crow for each of us, every morning.
— A day will come, said Christophe bitterly, when they will no longer crow for me… A day without a tomorrow. And what will I have made of my life?
— There is always a tomorrow, said Gottfried.
— But what is the use, if willing is useless?
— Watch and pray.
— I no longer believe.
Gottfried smiled:
— You would not live if you did not believe. Everyone believes. Pray.
— Pray to what?
Gottfried showed him the sun appearing on the red and frozen horizon:
— Be reverent before the day that dawns. Do not think of what will be in a year, in ten years. Think of today. Leave your theories. All theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, are foolish, do harm. Do not do violence to life. Live today. Be reverent toward each day. Love it, respect it, do not sully it above all, do not prevent it from blossoming. Love it, even when it is grey and sad, like today. Do not worry. See. It is winter now. Everything sleeps. The good earth will awaken. You need only be a good earth, and patient like it. Be reverent. Wait. If you are good, all will go well. If you are not, if you are weak, if you do not succeed, well, you must still be happy. It is doubtless because you can do no more. Then why wish for more? Why grieve over what you cannot do? One must do what one can… Als ich kann.
— That’s too little, said Christophe, making a face.
Gottfried laughed gently:
— It is more than anyone does. You are proud. You want to be a hero. That is why you do nothing but foolish things… A hero!… I don’t quite know what that is; but, you see, I imagine: a hero is one who does what he can. The others don’t.
— Ah! sighed Christophe. What is the use of living then? It’s not worth the trouble. And yet there are people who say that “to will is to be able”!…
Gottfried laughed again, softly:
— Yes? Well, they are great liars, my boy. Or they don’t will very much.
They had reached the top of the hill. They embraced affectionately. The little peddler went off with his tired step. Christophe stood pensive, watching him go. He repeated the uncle’s words to himself:
— Als ich kann. (As I can.)
And he smiled, thinking:
— Yes… All the same… That is enough.
He turned back toward the town. The hardened snow crunched under his shoes. The sharp winter wind made the bare branches of the stunted trees quiver on the hill. It reddened his cheeks, it burned his skin, it whipped his blood. The red roofs of the houses below laughed in the brilliant, cold sun. The air was strong and hard. The frozen earth seemed to exult with a harsh joy. Christophe’s heart was like it. He thought:
— I too shall awaken.
He still had tears in his eyes. He wiped them with the back of his hand and looked, laughing, at the sun driving under a curtain of vapor. The clouds, heavy with snow, passed above the town, whipped by the gale. He thumbed his nose at them. The icy wind blew…
— Blow, blow!… Do what you want with me! Carry me away!… I know very well where I shall go.