Jean-Christophe. III. The Adolescent

I THE EULER HOUSE

The house was sunk in silence. Since the father’s death, everything seemed dead. Now that Melchior’s loud voice had been stilled, nothing could be heard from morning to evening but the weary murmur of the river.

Christophe had thrown himself into stubborn work. He punished himself with a mute fury for having wanted to be happy. To the condolences and the kind words he said nothing, stiffened in his pride. Without a word, he drove himself through his daily tasks and gave his lessons with a glacial attention. His pupils, who knew of his misfortune, were shocked by his apparent insensibility. But those who were older and had some experience of grief knew what that outward coldness could conceal, in a young man, of suffering; and they pitied him. He felt no gratitude for their sympathy. Music itself brought him no relief. He made music without pleasure, as a duty. One might have thought he found a cruel satisfaction in having no more pleasure in anything --- or in persuading himself that he did not --- in stripping himself of every reason to live, and living on nonetheless.

His two brothers, frightened by the silence of the house in mourning, had hastened to flee it. Rodolphe had gone into the trading house of his uncle Théodore, and was lodging with him. As for Ernst, after trying two or three trades, he had shipped out on one of the Rhine boats that run service between Mayence and Cologne; and he reappeared only when he needed money. Christophe was thus left alone with his mother in the too-large house; and the narrowness of their means, along with certain debts that had come to light after the father’s death, had decided them --- much as it pained them --- to find another lodging, humbler and less costly.

They found a small flat --- two or three rooms on the second floor of a house on the rue du Marché. The neighborhood was noisy, at the center of town, far from the river, far from the trees, far from the countryside and all the familiar places. But reason had to be consulted, not feeling; and Christophe found there a fine opportunity to satisfy his grim need for mortification. Besides, the owner of the house, the old court clerk Euler, was a friend of his grandfather’s and knew the whole family: that was enough to decide Louisa, who was lost in her empty house and irresistibly drawn toward those who had known the people she had loved.

They prepared to leave. They savored at length the bitter melancholy of those last days spent in the sad and beloved home they were quitting forever. They scarcely dared share their grief with each other; they were ashamed of it, or afraid. Each thought it wrong to show weakness to the other. At table, the two of them alone in a gloomy room with the shutters half-closed, they dared not raise their voices; they ate quickly and avoided looking at each other, for fear of being unable to hide their distress. They parted as soon as the meal was done. Christophe went back to his affairs; but the moment he had a free instant, he returned, slipped inside on the sly, and made his way on tiptoe to his room or up to the attic. There he shut the door, sat down in a corner on an old trunk or on the windowsill, and remained without thinking, filling himself with the indefinable hum of the old house that trembled at every footfall. His heart trembled with it. He listened anxiously to the faintest stirrings from within and without --- the creaking of the floorboards, the imperceptible and familiar sounds he knew them all. He lost consciousness of himself; his thoughts were flooded by images of the past; he did not rouse from his numbness until the clock of Saint-Martin struck and reminded him it was time to go.

On the floor below, Louisa’s footstep went softly back and forth. For hours at a stretch she could not be heard at all; she made no sound. Christophe strained to listen. He went down, a little uneasy --- as one remains for a long time after a great sorrow. He pushed the door open: Louisa had her back to him; she was seated before a wardrobe, in the middle of a jumble of things --- rags, old clothes, mismatched objects, keepsakes she had taken out on the pretext of sorting them. But her strength failed her: each one recalled something; she turned it over and over between her fingers and fell to dreaming; the object slipped from her hands; and she sat for hours with 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 so stingy with joy toward her; but she was so accustomed to suffering that she kept her gratitude for even the smallest kindnesses, and the pale gleams that shone here and there across the course of her mediocre days were enough 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 quickly regretted, she had given herself with all her heart; she had believed herself loved as she herself loved; and she had kept toward Melchior a tender gratitude ever after. What he had become in later years she made no effort to understand. Incapable of seeing reality as it is, she knew only how to bear it as it is --- as a humble and brave woman who has no need to understand life in order to live it. What she could not explain to herself, she left for God to explain. By a singular piety, she assigned to God the responsibility for all the injustices she had suffered at the hands of Melchior and others, attributing to them only the good she had received. And so that life of hardship had left her no bitter memories. She felt only worn out --- frail as she was --- by those years of deprivation and toil; and now that Melchior was no longer there, now that two of her sons had flown from the nest, and the third seemed able to do without her, she had lost all will to act; she was weary, drowsy, her will numbed. She was passing through one of those crises of neurasthenia that often strike, at the decline of life, active and hardworking people when an unforeseen blow takes away their every reason to live. She no longer had the will to finish the stocking she was knitting, to sort the drawer she was searching through, to get up and close the window: she sat, her mind vacant, without strength --- except to remember. She was aware of her own decline and burned with shame at it as at something disgraceful; she struggled to hide it from her son; and Christophe, absorbed in the egoism of his own grief, had noticed nothing. No doubt he had often felt a secret impatience with his mother’s slowness --- her slowness now in speaking, in acting, in doing the smallest things; but however unlike they were to her habitual energy, he had not troubled himself about them until now.

It struck him, suddenly, that day, for the first time, when he came upon her amid the rags scattered across the floor, piled at her feet, filling her hands and covering her knees. Her neck was craned forward, her head bent, her face tense and rigid. Hearing him enter, she gave a start; a flush rose to her white cheeks; by an instinctive movement, she tried to hide the objects she was holding, and she murmured, with an embarrassed smile:

--- You see, I was sorting things…

He felt the piercing anguish of that poor soul stranded among the relics of her past, and he was seized with compassion. Yet he adopted a slightly brusque and scolding tone, to jolt her from her apathy:

--- Come now, Maman, come now, you mustn’t sit like this, in all this dust, in a shut-up room! It’s doing you harm. You must shake yourself, you must get through all this sorting.

--- Yes, she said docilely.

She tried to stand up and put the objects back in the drawer. But she sat back down at once, dropping with discouragement what she had picked up.

--- Oh! I can’t, I can’t, she moaned, I’ll never get to the end of it!

He was frightened. He bent over her. He stroked her forehead with his hands.

--- Come now, Maman, what is the matter? he said. Do you want me to help? Are you ill?

She did not answer. She had a kind of inward sob. He took her hands and knelt in front of her, to see her better in the half-dark of the room.

--- Maman! he said, alarmed.

Louisa, her forehead resting on his shoulder, gave herself up to a fit of tears.

--- My dear one, she kept repeating, pressing herself against him, my dear one!… You won’t leave me? Promise me you won’t leave me?

His heart was torn with pity:

--- Of course not, Maman, I won’t leave you. What put that idea in your head?

--- I’m so unhappy! They’ve all left me, all of them…

She gestured at the objects around 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 any more. I promise you.

She went on weeping, unable to stop. He wiped her eyes with his handkerchief.

--- What is it, dear Maman? Are you suffering?

--- I don’t know, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

She made an effort to calm herself and to smile.

--- I try to reason with myself --- but at the slightest thing 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 heart for anything. I’m no use to anyone anymore. I’d like to be buried along with all of it…

He pressed her to his heart like a child.

--- Don’t torment yourself, rest, stop thinking…

She grew calm little by little.

--- It’s absurd, I’m ashamed… But what’s wrong with me? what’s wrong with me?

That old workhorse of a woman could not understand why her strength had suddenly given way; and she was humiliated by it to the very depths of her being. He pretended not to notice.

--- A little fatigue, Maman, he said, trying to keep his voice indifferent. It’s nothing, you’ll see…

But he was worried too. Since childhood he had been used to seeing her valiant, resigned, silently resistant to every trial. And he was astonished to see her suddenly broken: he was afraid.

He helped her put away the things scattered across the floor. Now and then she lingered over some object; but he gently took it from her hands, and she let him.

From that moment on, he made himself stay with her more. As soon as he had finished his work, instead of shutting himself in his room as he liked to do, he came to be with her. He understood now how alone she was, and that she was not strong enough to bear it: there was danger in leaving her like that.

He sat beside her in the evenings, near the open window that looked out onto the road. The countryside faded slowly. People returned to their homes. Small lights came on in the distant houses. They had seen all this a thousand times. But soon they would see it no longer. They exchanged broken words. They pointed out to each other the smallest familiar, expected incidents of the evening with an interest that never flagged. They fell into long silences; or Louisa would recall, for no apparent reason, a memory, a disconnected story that passed through her mind. Her tongue loosened a little now that she felt a loving heart beside her. She made an effort to speak. It was difficult for her; she had gotten into the habit of keeping apart from her own family --- she looked on her sons and her husband as too intelligent to talk with her, and did not dare join their conversations. Christophe’s devoted attention was something new and infinitely sweet to her, but it also made her timid. She searched for her words, struggled to express herself; her sentences remained unfinished, obscure. Sometimes she was ashamed of what she was saying; she looked at her son and stopped in the middle of a story. But he squeezed her hand, and she felt reassured. He was filled with love and pity for that childlike, maternal soul in which he had nestled as a child and which was now seeking in him a support. And he took a melancholy pleasure in those little conversations that would have meant nothing to anyone but him, in those insignificant memories of a life always mediocre and joyless, which seemed to Louisa of infinite worth. He tried sometimes to interrupt her; he feared those memories were saddening her still further, and urged her to go to bed. She understood his intention, and told him 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 somewhat relieved at having unburdened herself of part of her sorrows, he with a somewhat heavier heart, from this new burden added to the one he already carried.

The day of departure arrived. The evening before, they stayed longer than usual in the darkened room. They did not speak to each other. From time to time Louisa moaned: “Oh, dear God!” Christophe tried to occupy his attention with the thousand small details of the next day’s move. She did not want to go to bed. He gently made her. But he himself, back in his own room, did not lie down for a long time. Leaning out the window, he strained to pierce the darkness, to see one last time the shifting shadows of the river at the foot of the house. He heard the wind in the great trees of Minna’s garden. The sky was black. Not a soul on the street. A cold rain was beginning to fall. The weathervanes creaked. In a neighboring house, a child was crying. The night pressed down upon the earth and upon the soul with a crushing sadness. The monotonous hours, the halves and quarters from the cracked bell, fell one after another into the dreary silence, punctuated by the sound of the rain on the rooftops and the cobblestones.

When Christophe finally resolved to go to bed, his heart and body numb with cold, he heard the window below him being shut. And lying in his bed, he thought with anguish how cruel it is for poor people to grow attached to the past; for they have no right to a past, as the rich do; they have no home, no corner of the earth where they can shelter their memories: their joys, their sorrows, all their days are scattered to the wind.

The next day, through driving rain, they moved their meager furniture to the new lodgings. Fischer, the old upholsterer, had lent them a cart and his small horse, and came himself to lend a hand. But they could not take all the furniture, for the apartment they were moving to was much smaller than the old one. Christophe had to persuade his mother to leave behind the oldest and most useless pieces. It was no easy matter; even the smallest things had value for her: a lame table, a broken chair --- she would sacrifice nothing. Fischer, drawing on the authority his long friendship with grandfather gave him, had to add his grumbling voice to Christophe’s, and even, good-natured man that he was, understanding her pain, he promised to keep several of those precious remnants in storage until the day she could reclaim them. Only then did she consent to be parted from them, and even so it was a wrench.

The two brothers had been told of the move; but Ernst had come the evening before to say he would not be able to be there, and Rodolphe appeared only for a moment around noon, watched the furniture being loaded, offered a few pieces of advice, and left with an air of preoccupation.

The procession set out through the muddy streets. Christophe held the horse by the bridle as it slipped on the slick cobblestones. Louisa, walking beside her son, tried to shelter him from the rain that fell without letting up. And then came the dismal settling-in to the damp apartment, made darker still by the wan light reflected from the low sky. They would not have withstood the discouragement that oppressed them without the attentions of their hosts. But after the cart had left and their furniture was piled pell-mell in the room, as night was falling, Christophe and Louisa, exhausted, slumped --- one on a crate, the other on a sack --- heard a dry little cough on the staircase; someone knocked at their door. Old Euler entered. He apologized ceremoniously for disturbing his dear tenants; he added that, to celebrate the first evening of this happy arrival, he hoped they would be willing to join the family for supper. Louisa, sunk in her sadness, wanted to refuse. Christophe was not much tempted by the prospect of a family gathering either; 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, pressed 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, slightly younger than Christophe. They all fussed around them, bidding them welcome, asking whether they were tired, whether they were pleased with their rooms, whether they needed anything, asking ten questions at once, to which the bewildered Christophe could make neither head nor tail, for they were all speaking at the same time. The soup was already served; they sat down at the table. But the noise continued. Amalia, Euler’s daughter, had immediately set about briefing Louisa on every local particular: the layout of the neighborhood, the habits and conveniences of the house, the hour the milkman came, the hour she herself got up, the various suppliers and the prices she paid. She would not let her go until she had explained everything. Louisa, drowsy, made an effort to show interest in all this information; but the remarks she ventured to make showed she had understood nothing, and provoked, along with Amalia’s indignant exclamations, a redoubling of information. Old clerk Euler was explaining to Christophe the difficulties of a musical career. Christophe’s other neighbor at table, 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 immediately started up again. Vogel, morose, complained about what he was eating. This sparked passionate discussions. Amalia, Euler, the little girl --- all interrupted their own conversations to take part in the debate, and endless controversies arose over whether there was too much salt in the stew or too little: they called each other to witness, and naturally, not one opinion matched another. Each person despised their neighbor’s taste and believed their own to be the only sound and reasonable one. They could have argued about it until the Last Judgment.

But in the end they all agreed to lament in common over the wickedness of the times. They commiserated warmly over the sorrows of Louisa and Christophe, whose courageous conduct they praised in terms that genuinely moved him. They took pleasure in recalling not only their guests’ misfortunes but their own, and those of their friends and of all those they knew; and they fell into agreement that the good were always unhappy, and that joy was reserved only for the selfish and the dishonest. They concluded that life was sad, that it served no purpose, and that it would be far better to be dead, were it not, no doubt, the will of God that one should live in order to suffer. Since these ideas were close to Christophe’s own current pessimism, he felt a greater esteem for his hosts and closed his eyes to their small faults.

When he went back upstairs with his mother to the disordered room, they felt sad and weary, but a little less alone; and as Christophe lay with eyes open in the dark, unable to sleep for exhaustion and the noise of the neighborhood, listening to the heavy carts shaking 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, at least less unhappy here, among these good people --- a bit tiresome, truth be told --- who suffered from the same ills as he did, who seemed to understand him, and whom he believed he understood.

But having at last dropped off, he was disagreeably awakened at dawn by the voices of his neighbors beginning to argue, and by the screeching of the pump being worked by an impatient hand before proceeding to sluice down the courtyard and the staircase with great quantities of water.

Justus Euler was a small, stooped old man with restless, sullen eyes, a red, wrinkled, lumpy face, a toothless jaw, and a poorly kept beard that he endlessly worried with his hands. A thoroughly decent man, a little pompous, deeply moral, he had got along well enough with grandfather. People claimed he resembled him. And in truth he was of the same generation and had been raised on the same principles; but he lacked Jean-Michel’s robust physical vitality --- which is to say that, though he agreed with him on any number of points, at bottom he resembled him very little; for what makes men what they are is temperament far more than ideas, and whatever the divisions, artificial or real, that the intellect has erected between them, the great division of humanity is that between those who are in good health and those who are not. Old Euler did not belong to the first group. He spoke of morality, as grandfather did; 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 frugal and constricted plan. Forty years a civil servant, now retired, he suffered from that tristesse of inaction so heavy among old men who have not provided themselves, for their last years, with the resource of an inner life. All his natural or acquired habits, and all those of his trade, had given him something fussy and aggrieved that showed itself to some degree in each of his children.

His son-in-law, Vogel, a clerk at the palace chancellery, was around fifty. Tall, solidly built, entirely bald, gold-rimmed spectacles pressed to his temples, and of reasonably good appearance, he believed himself to be ill --- and doubtless was, though he clearly did not have all the ailments he attributed to himself --- his mind soured by the tedium of his work and his body somewhat worn down by his sedentary life. Hardworking nonetheless, not without merit, even possessing a certain culture, he was a victim of the absurd conditions of modern life, and like so many clerks chained to their desks, he was succumbing to the demon of hypochondria. One of those unfortunates whom Goethe called “ein trauriger ungriechischer Hypochondrist” --- “a morose and un-Greek hypochondriac” --- and whom he pitied, but whom he took good care to avoid.

Amalia did neither the one nor the other. Robust, noisy, and energetic, she had no sympathy for her husband’s complaints; she shook him roughly out of them. But when two people live constantly together, no strength can hold out; and when one of the pair in a household is neurasthenic, there is every chance that after a few years they will both be. However loudly Amalia had railed at Vogel, and however loudly she went on railing out of habit and necessity: the next moment she would be groaning more than he did over his condition; and, swinging without transition from sharp rebukes to lamentations, she did him no good at all --- on the contrary, she multiplied his suffering tenfold by giving trifles a deafening resonance. She ended up not only finishing off the wretched Vogel, who was terrified by the proportions his own complaints assumed when amplified by this echo, but wearing down everyone around her and wearing down herself as well. She in turn fell into the habit of groaning without cause over her own robust health, and over that of her father, her daughter, and her son. It became a mania; by saying it often enough, she convinced herself of it. The slightest cold was treated as a tragedy; everything became a source of anxiety. More than that: when everyone was well, she still fretted, thinking about the illness that must surely be coming. And so life passed in perpetual dread. For all that, no one was any worse off for it; and it seemed that this state of constant complaint actually served to maintain the general health. Everyone ate, slept, worked as usual; the life of the household was not slowed in the least. Amalia’s energy was not content to be spent from morning to night up and down the house: everyone had to bustle around her; and there was a perpetual shifting of furniture, washing of tiles, polishing of floors, a noise of voices and footsteps, a vibration, a ceaseless movement.

The two children, crushed by this loud authority that left no one free, seemed to find it natural to submit to it. The boy, Leonhard, had a pretty, unremarkable face and stiff, affected manners. The girl, Rosa, a blonde, with rather beautiful eyes --- blue, gentle, and warm --- would have been pleasant, above all for the freshness of her delicate complexion and her kind air, were it not for a somewhat large and awkwardly placed nose that weighed down her face and gave it a rather simple expression. She recalled a young girl in a Holbein at the Basel museum --- the daughter of Burgomaster Meier --- seated with downcast eyes, her hands in her lap, her pale hair loose over her shoulders, looking ill at ease and ashamed of her unbecoming nose. But so far Rosa troubled herself little over it, and it in no way checked her tireless chatter. One heard her shrill voice constantly spinning out stories, always breathless, as though she never had time to say everything, always animated and full of spirit, despite the scoldings she received from her mother, her father, even the grandfather himself, who were exasperated less because she was always talking than because she prevented them from talking. For these excellent people --- good, loyal, devoted, the very cream of honest folk --- had almost every virtue; but they lacked one that is essential, and gives life its charm: the virtue of silence.

Christophe was in a mood for patience. His griefs had tempered his intolerant and impetuous nature. The experience he had had of the cruel indifference of elegant souls inclined him to feel more keenly the worth of decent people --- graceless, and damnably dull, but who held an austere view of life, and who, because they lived without joy, seemed to him to live without weakness. Having decided that they were excellent and that they ought to please him, he strove, German that he was, to persuade himself that they did please him indeed. But he could not manage it: he lacked that complaisant Germanic idealism which refuses to see, and does not see, what it would find disagreeable to notice, from fear of disturbing the comfortable peace 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 had wished to love them entirely, without any reservation --- it was a kind of unconscious loyalty and an irresistible need for truth, which made him, in spite of himself, more clear-sighted and more demanding toward those who were most dear to him. So it was not long before he felt a dull irritation at his hosts’ failings. These, for their part, made no attempt to disguise them. Contrary to what usually happens, they put on full display everything about themselves that was insufferable; and the best that was in them remained hidden. This was what Christophe told himself, and, accusing himself of injustice, he set out to look past his first impressions and to discover the excellent qualities they concealed with such care.

He tried to strike up a conversation with old Justus Euler, who was only too glad. He felt a secret sympathy for him, in memory of his grandfather who had loved and praised him. But the good Jean-Michel had, more than Christophe, the happy faculty of deluding himself about his friends; and Christophe soon saw this plainly. In vain did he try to draw from Euler any recollections of his grandfather. He succeeded only in extracting a colorless and fairly caricatured portrait of Jean-Michel, and scraps of conversation utterly without interest. Invariably, Euler’s stories began with:

--- As I was saying to your poor grandfather…

He remembered nothing else. He had heard nothing but what he himself had said.

Perhaps Jean-Michel had been no different as a listener. Most friendships are hardly more than mutual arrangements of convenience, for talking about oneself with another person. But at least Jean-Michel, naively as he gave himself over to the pleasure of holding forth, always had a sympathy ready to spend itself indiscriminately on everything. He was interested in everything; he was forever lamenting that he was no longer fifteen, so as to see the marvelous inventions of the new generations and share in their thinking. He had this quality --- perhaps the most precious in life --- a freshness of curiosity that the years could not dim, and that was reborn with each new morning. He had not enough talent to make use of this gift; but how many talented men might have envied him for it! Most men die at twenty or thirty: past that age, they are nothing but their own reflection; the rest of their lives flows by in aping themselves, repeating in a manner ever more mechanical and ever more distorted what they said, did, thought, or loved, in the time when they were.

Old Euler had been so long ago, and had been so little, that what remained of him now was quite meager and a little ridiculous. Beyond his old trade and his family life, he knew nothing and wished to know nothing. He had on every subject ready-made opinions that dated from his adolescence. He claimed to know something about the arts; but he kept to certain hallowed names, about which he never failed to trot out his emphatic formulas --- everything else was null and void. When someone spoke to him of modern artists, he did not listen, and spoke of something else. He called himself passionately fond of music, and would ask Christophe to play. But the moment Christophe, having been caught once or twice, began to play, the old man would start talking, aloud, with his daughter-in-law, as though the music doubled his interest in everything that was not music. Christophe, exasperated, would get up in the middle of a piece: no one noticed. Only a few old tunes --- three or four --- some very beautiful, others very ugly, but all equally consecrated, had the privilege of obtaining a relative silence and an absolute approval. At the first notes, the old man would fall into ecstasy, and tears came to his eyes, less for the pleasure he was taking in it than for the pleasure he had once taken in it. Christophe ended by holding these tunes in horror, though some of them, like Beethoven’s Adelaide, were dear to him --- the old man constantly hummed their opening bars, and never failed to declare that “now that was music,” comparing it contemptuously with “all this damned modern music, which has no melody.” --- It was true that he knew nothing of it.

His son-in-law, better educated, kept abreast of the artistic world; but that was even worse, for he brought to his judgments a spirit of perpetual disparagement. He lacked neither taste nor intelligence; but he could not bring himself to admire anything modern. He would just as readily have disparaged Mozart and Beethoven had they been his contemporaries, and recognized the merit of Wagner or Richard Strauss had they been dead for a century. His sour instinct refused to admit that there could still exist, in his own day, during his own lifetime, great men who were alive: the thought displeased him. He was so embittered by his failed life that he felt compelled to persuade himself it had failed for everyone, that it could not be otherwise, and that those who believed the contrary, or who claimed to, were one of two things: fools or frauds.

So he spoke of every new celebrity only in a tone of bitter irony; and, since he was not stupid, he never failed to spot, at first glance, its weak and ridiculous sides. Every new name put him on his guard; before knowing anything about it, he was disposed to criticize --- since he did not know it. If he had any sympathy for Christophe, it was because he believed this misanthropic young man found life as wretched as he did, and that he was, besides, without genius. Nothing draws sickly and discontented little souls together like the recognition of their shared impotence. Nor does anything contribute more to restoring a taste for health and life in those who are healthy and made for living, than contact with this foolish pessimism of mediocrities and the sick, who, because they are not happy, deny the happiness of others. Christophe felt this keenly. These gloomy thoughts were, after all, familiar enough to him; but he was astonished to find them in Vogel’s mouth, and to no longer recognize them --- more than that, they had become hostile to him; they wounded him.

He was still more revolted by Amalia’s ways. The good woman was, after all, merely applying Christophe’s own theories about duty. She had this word perpetually on her lips. She worked without cease, and wanted everyone to work as she did. This labor had no aim of making herself and the others happier --- on the contrary. One might almost say that its principal object was to be a burden to everyone, and to make life as unpleasant as possible, in order to sanctify it. Nothing could have induced her to interrupt, even for a moment, the sacred office of housekeeping, that hallowed institution which, in so many women, takes the place of every other moral and social duty. She would have thought herself lost had she not, on the same days, at the same hours, scrubbed the floor, washed the windows, polished the door handles, beaten the carpets with all her might, moved the chairs, tables, and wardrobes. She made a show of it. One would have said it was a matter of honor. And is it not, after all, with that same spirit that many women conceive of and defend their honor? It is a kind of furniture that must be kept gleaming --- a well-waxed floor, cold, hard --- and slippery.

The fulfillment of her task did not make madame Vogel any more agreeable. She threw herself at the pettiness of housekeeping as if it were a duty imposed by God. And she despised those who did not do as she did, who took their rest, who managed between their tasks to enjoy life a little. She would seek out Louisa in her room, where Louisa would sometimes sit down to dream in the middle of her work. Louisa would sigh, but submit, with a confused smile. Fortunately Christophe knew nothing of this: Amalia waited until he had gone out before making these incursions into their apartment; and so far she had not attacked him directly --- he would not have borne it. He felt toward her in a state of latent hostility. What he forgave her least was her noise. He was maddened by it. Shut in his room --- a small, low-ceilinged space looking out onto the courtyard --- his window hermetically closed despite the lack of air, so as not to hear the uproar of the house, he still could not defend himself against it. Involuntarily, with strained attention, he found himself following the slightest sounds from below; and when the terrible voice, which pierced through the walls, rose again after a momentary lull, he was seized with rage: he would shout, stamp his foot, hurl a collection of insults at her through the wall. In the general din, no one even noticed --- they thought he was composing. He consigned madame Vogel to all the devils. There was no respect, no esteem, that could hold. It seemed to him, at such moments, that he would have preferred the most dissolute of women, and the most stupid, as long as she kept silent, to all the intelligence, honesty, and every virtue in the world, when they made too much noise.

This hatred of noise drew him closer to Leonhard. The young man was the only one, amid the general commotion, who remained always tranquil, never raising his voice higher at one moment than another. He expressed himself correctly and deliberately, choosing every word, never hurrying. The impetuous Amalia did not have the patience to wait until he had finished; they all exclaimed over his slowness. He was not troubled by it. Nothing disturbed his calm and his respectful deference. Christophe was all the more drawn to him because he had learned that Leonhard was destined for the ecclesiastical life; and his curiosity was keenly aroused.

Christophe found himself at that time in a rather strange state with respect to religion --- he did not know himself what state he was in. He had never had time to think about it seriously. He was not learned enough, and was far too absorbed by the difficulties of existence, to have been able to analyze himself and bring order to his thoughts. Violent as he was, he swung from one extreme to the other, from complete faith to absolute denial, without troubling himself about whether he was consistent with himself or not. When he was happy, he thought little of God, but was inclined enough to believe in him. When he was unhappy, he thought of him, but believed in him little --- it seemed to him impossible that a God would permit misery and injustice. These difficulties occupied him very little otherwise. 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 something for those who are weak, or weakened --- for anemic lives. They aspire toward God as a plant toward the sun. The dying cling to life. But one who carries the sun and life within himself --- why would he go looking for them outside?

Christophe would probably never have troubled himself over these questions, had he lived alone. But the obligations of social life forced him to fix his thoughts on these puerile and idle problems that take up a disproportionate place in the world, and on which one must take sides, since they are encountered at every step. As if a healthy soul, generous, brimming with strength and love, had not a thousand more pressing things to do than to worry whether God exists or not!… If only it were merely 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! Concerning that, Christophe did not even give it a thought. 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 reproached himself for this sometimes, it grieved him, he could not understand why he took no greater interest in the matter. Yet he practiced his faith, as all his family did; his grandfather read the Bible without cease; he himself attended mass regularly; he served it, in a sense, since he was the organist; and he applied himself to his work with exemplary conscientiousness. But he would have been hard pressed, on leaving the church, to say what he had been thinking about. He took to reading the Holy Books in order to fix his ideas, and found amusement in them, even pleasure, but as one finds in beautiful and curious books that do not differ essentially from other books that no one thinks to call sacred. To tell the truth, if Jesus was sympathetic to him, Beethoven was far more so. And at his organ in Saint-Florian, where he accompanied the Sunday service, he was more absorbed in his organ than in the mass, and more devout on the days when the choir played Bach than on the days when it played Mendelssohn. Certain ceremonies brought him an exalted fervor. But was it truly God he loved in those moments, or only the music --- as a careless priest had once said to him in jest, never suspecting the turmoil that his offhand remark would cause? Another person would not have taken notice, and would have changed nothing in his way of living --- (so many people are content not to know what they think!) --- But Christophe was afflicted with a troublesome need for sincerity, which inspired scruples in him at every turn. And from the day he had them, it became impossible for him not to have them always. He tormented himself; it seemed to him that he was acting with duplicity. Did he believe, or did he not?… He had neither the material nor the intellectual means --- (knowledge and leisure are required) --- to resolve the question alone. And yet it had to be resolved, on pain of being either indifferent or a hypocrite. He was, however, as incapable of being one as the other.

He tried timidly to probe the people around him. They all appeared sure of themselves. Christophe burned to know their reasons. He could not get at them. He was almost never given a precise answer: there were always remarks beside the point. Some treated him as arrogant, telling him that it is not a matter for discussion, that thousands of people more intelligent than he and better, had believed without questioning, and that he had only to do as they did. There were even those who assumed an offended air, as if it were a personal insult to put such a question to them; and yet these were perhaps not the most certain of their ground. Others shrugged their shoulders and said with a smile: “Bah! It can do no harm.” And their smile said: “And it’s so convenient!…” Those, Christophe despised with his whole heart.

He had tried to confide his anxieties to a priest; but the attempt discouraged him. He could not discuss the matter seriously with him. However affable his interlocutor was, he made it politely felt that there was no real equality between Christophe and himself; it seemed understood in advance that the priest’s superiority was uncontested, and that the discussion could not go beyond the limits he assigned to it without a certain impropriety: it was a parlor game, entirely harmless. When Christophe had tried to press further, and to ask questions it did not please the worthy man to answer, he had managed with a patronizing smile, a few Latin citations, and a paternal injunction to pray, to pray, so that God might enlighten him. --- Christophe had left the interview humiliated and stung by that tone of polite superiority. Rightly or wrongly, he would not for anything in the world have had recourse to a priest again. He readily granted that these men were superior to him in intelligence and by their sacred office; but when one is arguing, there is no longer superior or inferior, no titles, no age, no name: nothing counts but the truth, and before truth everyone is equal.

So he was glad to find a young man his own age who believed. He himself asked for nothing better than to believe; and he hoped that Leonhard would give him good reasons. He made overtures to him. Leonhard responded with his habitual gentleness, but without eagerness: he brought that quality to nothing. Since one could not have a sustained conversation at home without being interrupted at every moment by Amalia or by the old man, Christophe suggested a walk one evening after dinner. Leonhard was too polite to refuse, though he would gladly have excused himself; for his indolent nature was averse to walking, to conversation, and to anything that required effort.

Christophe was ill at ease about how to begin. After two or three clumsy sentences on indifferent subjects, he plunged, with a somewhat blunt abruptness, into the question that lay closest to his heart. He asked Leonhard whether he truly intended to become a priest, and whether it was of his own choice. Leonhard, taken aback, cast an uneasy glance at him; but when he saw that Christophe had no hostile intention, he was reassured:

--- Yes, he replied. How could it be otherwise?

--- Ah! said Christophe. You are very fortunate!

Leonhard caught a note of envy in Christophe’s voice, and felt agreeably flattered by it. He changed his manner at once, became expansive, his face brightened:

--- Yes, he said. I am happy.

He was radiant.

--- How do you manage that? asked Christophe.

Before answering, Leonhard suggested they sit down on a quiet bench in a gallery of the cloister of Saint-Martin. From there one could see a corner of the little square planted with acacias, and beyond it the town, the countryside, bathed in the evening haze. The Rhine flowed at the foot of the hill. An old abandoned cemetery, whose graves were drowned beneath a flood of weeds, slept beside them behind its locked gate.

Leonhard began to speak. He said, his eyes shining with contentment, how sweet it was to escape from life, to have found the shelter where one is and shall be forever safe. Christophe, still bruised from his recent wounds, felt that longing for rest and oblivion passionately; but it was mingled with regret. He asked with a sigh:

--- And yet, does it not cost you something to give up life altogether?

--- Oh! said the other calmly, what is there to regret? Is it not sad and ugly?

--- There are beautiful things too, said Christophe, looking out at the lovely evening.

--- There are some beautiful things, but few.

--- Even that few is still a great deal to me!

--- Oh, well, it’s a simple matter of common sense. On one side, a little good and much evil; on the other, neither good nor evil, on earth; and afterward, an infinite happiness: can one hesitate?

Christophe did not much care for this arithmetic. Such an economical existence seemed very poor to him. Nevertheless he tried to persuade himself that this was wisdom.

--- So, he asked with a slight irony, there is no risk that you will let yourself be seduced by an hour of pleasure?

--- What foolishness! when one knows that it is only an hour, and that all eternity comes after!

--- Then you are quite certain of that eternity?

--- Naturally.

Christophe questioned him further. He felt a trembling of desire and hope. If Leonhard would at last furnish him with the invincible proof he needed to believe! With what passion he would himself renounce all the rest of the world, to follow him in God.

At first, Leonhard, proud of his role as apostle, and convinced that Christophe’s doubts were merely for form’s sake and would have the good taste to yield before the first arguments, fell back on the holy books, the authority of the Gospel, miracles, tradition. But he began to grow somber when Christophe, after listening for a few minutes, stopped him by saying that this was answering the question with the question, and that he was not asking to have laid out before him what was precisely the object of his doubt, but the means to resolve it. Leonhard had then to acknowledge that Christophe was far more seriously afflicted than he had seemed, and that he had the pretension of being persuaded only by reason. He still thought, however, that Christophe was playing the freethinker --- (he could not imagine that anyone could be one sincerely). --- So he was not discouraged, and, confident in his recent learning, appealed to his schoolroom knowledge; he spread out pell-mell, with more authority than order, his metaphysical proofs for the existence of God and of the immortal soul. Christophe, his mind strained, his brow creased with effort, struggled silently; he made Leonhard repeat his words, labored to penetrate their meaning, to drive it into himself, to follow the reasoning. Then he burst out suddenly, declaring that they were making a fool of him, that all this was mere word-play, the jokes of smooth talkers who manufactured words and then amused themselves by believing that those words were things. Leonhard, stung, vouched for the good faith of his authors. Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said, swearing, that if they weren’t charlatans, they were consummate men of letters; and he demanded other proofs.

When Leonhard recognized with astonishment that Christophe was irremediably afflicted, he took no further interest in him. He remembered that he had been advised not to waste his time arguing with unbelievers --- at least when they persist in refusing to believe. It risks troubling oneself without any benefit to the other. It is better to abandon the unfortunate man to the will of God, who, if it is His design, will know how to enlighten him; or if not, who would dare go against the will of God? Leonhard therefore did not persist in prolonging the discussion. He contented himself with saying gently that nothing could be done for the moment, that no argument was capable of showing the way so 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 it, in order to believe.

Will it? Christophe thought bitterly. So God will exist because I will Him to exist! So death will cease to 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 fashion themselves compliant dreams in which to sleep in comfort! In such a bed Christophe was quite certain he would never sleep…

Leonhard went on talking. He had fallen back on his favorite subject: the charms of the contemplative life; and on this safe ground he was inexhaustible. In his monotone voice trembling with pleasure, he spoke of the joys of life in God, outside, above the world, far from its noise, of which he spoke with an unexpected accent of hatred (he detested it almost as much as Christophe did), far from its violence, far from its mockeries, far from the small miseries one suffers every day, in the warm and safe nest of faith, from which one peacefully contemplates the sorrows of the distant, foreign world. Christophe, listening to him, saw through the selfishness of this faith. Leonhard sensed the suspicion; he hastened to explain himself. The contemplative life was not a life of idleness. On the contrary; one acts more through prayer than through action; what would the world be without prayer? One atones for others, takes on their faults, offers them one’s merits, intercedes between the world and God.

Christophe listened in silence, with a growing hostility. He sensed in Leonhard the hypocrisy of this renunciation. He was not unjust enough to attribute it to all who believe. He knew well that this abdication of life is for a small number an impossibility of living, a piercing despair, a call to death --- that it is, for an even smaller number, a passionate ecstasy… (How long does it last?)… But in most men, is it not too often the cold calculation of souls more enamored of their own tranquility than of the happiness of others, or of truth? And if sincere hearts are aware of this, how they must suffer from this profanation of their ideal!…

Leonhard, thoroughly content, was now setting forth the beauty and harmony of the world as seen from his divine perch: below, everything was dark, unjust, painful; from above, everything became clear, luminous, ordered; the world was like a perfectly regulated clockwork mechanism…

Christophe was listening with only a distracted ear. He was asking himself: “Does he believe, or does he merely 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 touch it…

Night was falling over the city. The bench where they sat was in shadow; the stars were kindling, a white mist rose from the river, and crickets rustled beneath the cemetery trees. The bells began to ring: the highest first, alone, like a plaintive bird questioning the sky; then the second, a third lower, mingled with its lament; and finally came the deepest, at the fifth, which seemed to offer them an answer. The three voices merged. 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 is the music of musicians beside this ocean of music, in which thousands of beings rumbled --- it is wild fauna, the free world of sound, beside the domesticated world, catalogued and coldly labeled by human intelligence. He lost himself in that boundless, shoreless sonic immensity…

And when the great murmur fell silent, when its last tremors had faded in the air, Christophe awoke. He looked around him, bewildered… He no longer recognized anything. Everything had changed around him, within him. There was no longer a God…

Just as faith is, so too is the loss of faith often a stroke of grace, a sudden light. Reason plays no part in it; and the merest nothing is enough: a word, a silence, the sound of a bell. One is out walking, dreaming, expecting nothing. And then, abruptly, everything collapses. One finds oneself surrounded by ruins. One is alone. One believes no more.

Christophe, terrified, could not understand why or how this had come about. It was like, in spring, the breaking up of a river’s ice…

Leonhard’s voice went on resonating, more monotonous than a cricket’s. Christophe no longer heard it, no longer heard anything. Night had fully come. Leonhard stopped. Surprised by Christophe’s stillness, uneasy at the late hour, he suggested they head back. Christophe did not answer. Leonhard took his arm. Christophe startled and looked at Leonhard with wild eyes.

--- Christophe, we have to go back, said Leonhard.

--- Go to the devil! cried Christophe furiously.

--- Good God! Christophe, what have I done to you? asked Leonhard, bewildered and frightened.

Christophe collected himself.

--- Yes, you’re right, my friend, he said in a gentler tone. I don’t know what I’m saying. Go to God! Go to God!

He remained alone. His heart was full of anguish.

--- Ah! my God! my God! he cried, clenching his hands, lifting his head passionately toward the black sky. Why do I no longer believe? Why can I no longer believe? What has happened inside me?…

There was too great a disproportion between the ruin of his faith and the conversation he had just had with Leonhard: it was plain that this conversation was no more the cause of it than Amalia’s nagging and the ridiculous ways of his hosts were the cause of the shaking that had been going on for several days in his moral resolutions. These were mere pretexts. The disturbance did not come from without. The disturbance was within him. He felt unknown monsters stirring in his heart, and he dared not lean over his own thoughts to look his malady in the face… 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 gave way at once. He felt suddenly the vast world, burning, savage, the immeasurable world,… how far it overflows God!…

It lasted only a moment. But all the equilibrium of his former life was from that point forward broken.

Of all the family, there was only one person to whom Christophe had paid no attention: that was little Rosa. She was not pretty; and Christophe, who was himself very far from handsome, proved extremely demanding in the matter of others’ beauty. He had the calm cruelty of youth, for which a woman does not exist when she is plain --- unless she has passed the age at which one inspires tenderness, and one has nothing left to feel toward her but grave, peaceful, quasi-religious sentiments. Rosa was besides distinguished by no special gift, though she was not without intelligence; and she was burdened with a talkativeness that drove Christophe away. So he had not troubled himself to know her, judging that there was nothing in her to know; and he had barely glanced at her.

Yet she was worth more than many young women; she was worth more, in any case, than Minna, so dearly loved. She was a good-natured girl, without coquetry, without vanity, who until Christophe’s arrival had not noticed that she was plain, or had not worried about it; for no one around her worried about it either. If it happened that her grandfather or her mother told her so in a moment of scolding, she would only laugh: she did not believe it, or attached no importance to it; and neither did they. So many others, just as plain or plainer, had found someone to love them! Germans have a happy indulgence for physical imperfections: they can simply fail to see them; they can even manage to beautify them, by virtue of a compliant imagination that discovers unexpected likenesses between the face before them and the most illustrious examples of human beauty. One would not have had to press old Euler much to get him to declare that his granddaughter had the nose of the Ludovisi Juno. Fortunately, he was too gruff to pay compliments; and Rosa, indifferent to the shape of her nose, took pride only in fulfilling, according to their rites, the famous duties of the household. She had accepted as gospel truth everything she had been taught. Rarely leaving home, she had few points of comparison, admired her family naively, and believed what they said. By nature expansive, trusting, easily satisfied, she tried to attune herself to the household’s mournful tone, and dutifully repeated the pessimistic reflections she heard. She had the most devoted heart --- always thinking of others, seeking to give pleasure, sharing worries, divining desires, needing to love, with no thought of return. Naturally, her family took advantage of this, though they were kind and loved her; but one is always tempted to take advantage of the love of those who give themselves over entirely. Her attentions were so certain that no one felt grateful for them: whatever she did, more was expected. Besides, she was clumsy; she had an awkwardness, a rashness, sudden boyish movements, and outbursts of tenderness that brought disasters in their wake. A glass broken, a carafe overturned, a door slammed shut: all things that unleashed the indignation of the whole household against her. Constantly scolded, the little one would go off to cry in a corner. Her tears never lasted long. She would resume her cheerful air and her chatter, with not a shadow of resentment against anyone.

Christophe’s arrival was a considerable event in her life. She had often heard him spoken of. Christophe held a place in the gossip of the city: he was something of a local minor celebrity; his name came up often in conversation at home, especially in the days when old Jean-Michel was still alive and, proud of his grandson, would go sing his praises to all his acquaintances. Rosa had caught sight of the young musician once or twice at concerts. When she learned he was coming to board with them, she clapped her hands. Severely reprimanded for this lack of decorum, she became all confused. She meant nothing by it. In a life as uneventful as hers, a new lodger was an unhoped-for diversion. She spent the last days before his arrival in a fever of anticipation. She was in a state of dread that the house might not please him, and she took pains to make the apartment as welcoming as possible. She even brought, on the morning of the move, a little bunch of flowers to set on the mantelpiece as a welcome. As for herself, she had taken no care to appear to advantage; and the first glance Christophe threw her was enough to make him judge her plain and badly turned out. She did not judge him the same, though she would have had good reason to; for Christophe, exhausted, harried, poorly groomed, was even plainer than usual. But Rosa, who was incapable of thinking the slightest ill of anyone, Rosa, who regarded her grandfather, her father, and her mother as perfectly beautiful, naturally saw Christophe as she had expected to see him, and admired him with all her heart. She was greatly intimidated to have him as 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, and that first evening remained a luminous memory in her life. Alone in her room after they had gone back upstairs, she heard the new lodgers’ footsteps moving above her head; and that sound resonated joyfully within her: the house seemed to her to come alive again.

The next day, for the first time, she looked at herself in the mirror with an anxious attention; and, without yet fully grasping the extent of her misfortune, she began to sense it. She tried to judge her features one by one, but could not manage it. She had unhappy forebodings. She sighed deeply, and tried to introduce a few changes into her appearance. She only succeeded in making herself plainer still. She had the further unfortunate idea of burdening Christophe with her attentiveness. 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, bringing each time some useless object, insisting on helping them, always laughing, talking, calling out. Only her mother’s impatient voice, calling for her, could interrupt her zeal and her discourse. Christophe wore a sour face; without the good resolutions he had made, he would have burst out twenty times. He held on for two days; on the third, he locked his door. Rosa knocked, called, understood, went back downstairs in confusion, and did not try again. He explained, when he saw her, that he was occupied with pressing work and could not be disturbed. She apologized humbly. She could not deceive herself about the failure of her innocent advances: they were working directly against their purpose, they were pushing Christophe away. He no longer took the trouble to hide his ill humor; he no longer even listened when she spoke, and made no effort to conceal his impatience. She felt that her chatter irritated him; and she managed, by an effort of will, to keep silent for part of the evening; but it was stronger than she was: she would suddenly burst out, and the words came tumbling more tumultuously than ever. Christophe would leave her there in the middle of a sentence. She bore him no grudge. She bore herself a grudge. She judged herself stupid, tiresome, ridiculous; all her faults loomed enormous; she wanted to overcome them; but she was discouraged by the failure of her first attempts, told herself she never could, that she lacked the strength. Yet she tried again.

But there were other faults against which she could do nothing: what was one to do about her plainness? She could no longer doubt it. The certainty of her misfortune had burst upon her suddenly, one day as she was looking in the mirror: it had been like a thunderbolt. Naturally, she exaggerated the ill still further; she saw her nose ten times larger than it was; it seemed to her to occupy her entire face; she no longer dared to show herself, she would have wanted to die. But there is in youth such a force of hope that these fits of discouragement did not last; she would then imagine she had been mistaken; she tried to believe it, and she would even manage at moments to find her nose quite ordinary, and almost well enough shaped. Her instinct led her then to seek out, but very clumsily, a few childish stratagems --- a way of doing her hair that would leave her forehead less exposed and not so sharply emphasize the disproportions of her face. Yet she put no coquetry into it; no thought of love had crossed her mind, or if it had, it was without her knowledge. She asked for little: nothing more than a little friendship; and this little, Christophe seemed not disposed to grant her. It seemed to Rosa that she would have been perfectly happy if he had been willing simply to say, when they met, a good morning, a friendly good evening, with a touch of kindness. But Christophe’s gaze was ordinarily so hard and so cold! It chilled her. He said nothing unpleasant to her; but she would have preferred reproaches to that cruel silence.

One evening, Christophe was at his piano, playing. He had settled himself in a narrow attic room at the very top of the house, to be less disturbed by the noise below. Rosa listened from downstairs, moved. She loved music, though her taste was poor, having never been formed. As long as her mother was in the room, she stayed in a corner, bent over her sewing, apparently absorbed in her work; but her whole soul was fastened to the sounds drifting down from above, and she did not want to miss a single note. The moment Amalia stepped out on some errand in the neighborhood, Rosa would leap up, toss her sewing aside, and climb breathlessly to the attic threshold, heart pounding. She held her breath and pressed her ear against the door. She stayed there until Amalia came back, moving on tiptoe, careful not to make a sound; but since she was not very graceful, and always in a hurry, she was forever nearly tumbling down the stairs. One time, as she was listening with her body leaning forward and her cheek pressed to the keyhole, she lost her balance and bumped the door with her forehead. She was so horrified that she could not breathe. The piano stopped at once: she had no strength to flee. She was still picking herself up when the door swung open. Christophe saw her, shot her a furious look, then, without a word, shoved her roughly aside, came downstairs in anger, and went out. He did not return until dinner, paid no attention to her desperate, pleading glances, acted as though she did not exist, and for several weeks stopped playing altogether. Rosa wept freely over it, in secret; no one noticed, no one paid her any mind. She prayed to God ardently… for what? She hardly knew. She needed somewhere to put her grief. She was certain Christophe despised her.

And yet, in spite of everything, she hoped. It was enough that Christophe seemed to show her some small sign of interest, appeared to listen to what she was saying, squeezed her hand more warmly than usual…

A few careless words from her family sent her imagination charging down a treacherous path.

The whole household felt warmly toward Christophe. This serious, solitary boy of sixteen, who held a high idea of his duties, inspired in them all a kind of respect. His fits of ill humor, his stubborn silences, his gloomy air, his brusque manner were hardly likely to surprise in a household like that one. Even Madame Vogel, who regarded every artist as a layabout, did not dare reproach him outright, much as she wanted to, for the hours he spent gazing into the air of an evening from the window of his attic, motionless, leaning over the courtyard until night came; for she knew that the rest of the day he wore himself out at his lessons. She handled him carefully --- as did the others --- for an unspoken reason they all knew and no one named.

Rosa had caught glances exchanged between her parents, and hushed whispers, when she happened to be talking with Christophe. At first she paid it no mind. Then it intrigued her, stirred her; she burned to know what they were saying, but would not have dared to ask.

One evening she had climbed up on a garden bench to untie a rope stretched between two trees for drying laundry, and leaned on Christophe’s shoulder to jump down. At that precise moment her gaze met those of her grandfather and her father, who were sitting against the wall of the house, smoking their pipes. The two men exchanged a glance; and Justus Euler said to Vogel:

--- That would make a lovely pair.

With a nudge from Vogel, who saw that the girl was listening, he covered his remark very skillfully --- or so he supposed --- with a booming “hm! hm!” that could have drawn attention twenty paces away. Christophe, with his back turned, noticed nothing; but Rosa was so shaken that she forgot she was jumping, and twisted her foot. She would have fallen if Christophe had not caught her, muttering under his breath about the eternal clumsy girl. She had hurt herself quite badly; but she showed nothing, barely thought about it, her mind fixed entirely on what she had just heard. She made her way to her room; every step was painful, and she stiffened herself so no one would notice. She was flooded with a delicious confusion. She let herself sink onto the chair at the foot of her bed and buried her face in the covers. Her face burned; she had tears in her eyes, and she was laughing. She was ashamed, she wanted to sink into the earth, she could not hold any thought steady; her temples throbbed, her ankle stabbed with sharp pain, she was in a state of torpor and fever. She heard vaguely the sounds from outside, the cries of children playing in the street; and her grandfather’s words kept sounding in her ear; she shuddered, laughed softly, blushed with her face buried in the eiderdown, she prayed, she gave thanks, she longed, she feared --- she loved.

Her mother called. She tried to stand. At the first step she felt a pain so unbearable that she nearly fainted; her head swam. She thought she was going to die, she wanted to die, and at the same time she wanted to live with every fiber of her being, to live for the promised happiness. Her mother came at last, and soon the whole house was in an uproar. Scolded as usual, bandaged, put to bed, she drifted into a stupor from the thrumming of her physical pain and her inward joy. Sweet night… The smallest memories of that dear evening remained sacred to her. She did not think about Christophe, she hardly knew what she was thinking. She was happy.

The next day, Christophe, feeling somewhat responsible for the accident, came to ask after her; and for the first time he showed her a semblance of affection. She was filled with gratitude, and blessed her injury. She would have been glad to suffer all her life long to have such joy all her life long. --- She had to lie still for several days without moving; she spent them turning over and over the grandfather’s words and debating them; for doubt had crept in. Had he said:

--- That would make…

Or else:

--- That would have made…?

But was it even possible that he had said anything of the kind? --- Yes, he had indeed said it, she was certain… What! Could they really not see that she was plain, and that Christophe could not stand her?… But it was so good to hope! She came at last to believe that perhaps she had been wrong, that she was not as plain as she thought; she would raise herself in her chair to try to see herself in the mirror hanging across the room above the fireplace: she no longer knew what to think. After all, her grandfather and her father were better judges than she was; one cannot judge oneself… Dear God! If it were possible!… If, by some chance…, if, without her suspecting it, if… if she were pretty!… Perhaps too she had exaggerated the unfriendly feelings Christophe had for her. No doubt the indifferent boy, after the signs of interest he had shown her in the days after the accident, no longer gave her a thought; he forgot to ask how she was; but Rosa made excuses for him: he was preoccupied with so many things! How could he have thought of her? One must not judge an artist by the same standard as other men…

And yet, resigned as she was, she could not help waiting, heart beating, whenever he passed near her, for some word of warmth. A single word, a single glance…: her imagination did the rest. The beginnings of love need so little to feed on! It is enough to see each other, to brush past in passing; such a force of dream pours from the soul in those moments that it can almost suffice to create its own love; the slightest thing plunges it into raptures that it will scarcely find again later, when, grown more demanding as it grows more satisfied, it finally possesses the object of its desire. --- Rosa lived entirely, without anyone knowing it, inside a novel she had fabricated from whole cloth: Christophe loved her in secret and did not dare tell her, out of timidity, or for some inept reason, romantic and fanciful, that pleased the imagination of this sentimental little goose. She built on this foundation endless stories, perfectly absurd: she knew it herself, but she did not want to know it; she deceived herself voluptuously, day after day, bent over her sewing. She forgot to speak; her whole flood of words had turned back inward, like a river that suddenly disappears underground. But there, underground, it took its revenge. What a debauch of speeches, of mute conversations that no one heard but herself! Sometimes one could see her lips moving, like those people who must, when they read, spell out the syllables softly to understand them.

Coming out of these reveries, she was happy and sad. She knew perfectly well that things were not as she had just been telling herself; but a reflection of happiness lingered in her, and she went back to life with more confidence. She did not despair of winning Christophe.

Without admitting it to herself, she set about doing so. With the sure instinct that deep affection confers, the awkward, ignorant girl found, at once, the way 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 move freely through the house again, she drew closer to Louisa. Any pretext served. She found a thousand small services to render her. Whenever she went out she never failed to run her errands; she spared her trips to the market, disputes with shopkeepers, went to fetch her water from the pump in the courtyard, even did part of her housekeeping, washed the floor tiles, scrubbed the floorboards, despite Louisa’s protests --- embarrassed that she was not doing her tasks alone, but too weary to resist the help. Christophe was away all day. Louisa felt abandoned, and the company of this affectionate, lively girl did her good. Rosa made herself at home with her. She would bring her sewing, and they would sit and talk. The girl, with clumsy cunning, tried to steer the conversation to Christophe. Just hearing him spoken of, hearing his name alone, made her happy; her hands trembled, and she avoided raising her eyes. Louisa, delighted to speak of her dear Christophe, would tell little stories of his childhood, trifling ones, slightly ridiculous; but there was no risk of Rosa judging them that way; it gave her an indescribable joy and emotion to picture Christophe as a small child, doing the foolish or endearing things of that age; the maternal tenderness that lies in the heart of every woman blended deliciously in her with the other tenderness; she laughed wholeheartedly, and her eyes were moist. Louisa was moved by the interest Rosa showed her. She guessed, dimly, what was passing in the girl’s heart, and gave no sign; but she rejoiced in it; for she, alone in the household, knew what that heart was worth. Sometimes she would stop speaking to look at her. Rosa, startled by the silence, would raise her eyes from her sewing. Louisa smiled at her. Rosa would throw herself into her arms with a passionate abruptness, hiding her face in Louisa’s breast. Then they would go back to their work and their talking, as if nothing had happened.

In the evening, when Christophe came home, Louisa --- grateful for Rosa’s attentions and carrying forward the small plan she had formed --- never tired of praising her young neighbor. Christophe was touched by Rosa’s kindness. He saw the good she was doing his mother, whose face had grown more serene; and he thanked her warmly. Rosa stammered, and fled to hide her confusion: she seemed a thousand times more intelligent that way, and more likable to Christophe, than if she had spoken to him directly. He looked at her with less prejudice, and did not conceal his surprise at discovering in her qualities he would never have suspected. Rosa saw this; she noticed the progress of his warmth, and believed that warmth was on its way to becoming love. She gave herself over more than ever to her dreams. She was on the verge of believing, with the fine presumption of youth, that what one desires with one’s whole being will always eventually come to pass. --- Besides, was there anything unreasonable in her desire? Ought not Christophe, more than anyone, to have been moved by her kindness, by the affectionate need she had to give herself?

But Christophe was not thinking of her. He esteemed her; but she occupied no place in his thoughts. He had entirely different preoccupations just then. Christophe was no longer himself. He no longer recognized himself. A tremendous transformation was at work in him, sweeping everything away, overturning him to his very depths.

Christophe felt an extreme weariness and restlessness. He was broken for no reason, his head heavy, his eyes, his ears, all his senses drunk and buzzing. Impossible to fix his mind on anything. It leaped from object to object in an exhausting fever. This perpetual flickering of images made him dizzy. He put it down at first to overwork and the irritability of spring days. But spring passed, and his affliction only grew.

It was what the poets --- who touch things with an elegant hand --- call the restlessness of adolescence, the trouble of Cherubino, the awakening of amorous desire in youthful flesh and heart. As if the terrifying crisis of an entire being that is cracking apart, dying, and being reborn in every direction --- as if that cataclysm, in which everything: faith, thought, action, life itself, seems on the verge of annihilation and is reforged in the convulsions of pain and joy, could be reduced to a child’s foolishness!

His whole body and soul were fermenting. He watched them, powerless to fight, with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion. He did not understand what was happening inside him. His entire being was coming apart. He spent his days in an overwhelming torpor. Working was a torture. At night he had heavy, broken sleep, monstrous dreams, surges of desire: a beast’s soul raging within him. Burning, drenched in sweat, he looked at himself with horror; he tried to shake off the foul and demented thoughts, and wondered whether he was going mad.

Daytime offered no protection from these brutish thoughts. He could feel himself sinking into the lowest depths of the soul: nothing to hold on to; no barrier to set against the chaos. All his armor, all those fortresses whose fourfold rampart had so proudly encircled him---his God, his art, his pride, his moral faith---all of it was crumbling, falling away from him piece by piece. He saw himself naked, bound, laid out, unable to move, like a corpse on which vermin crawls. He jolted into rebellion: what had become of his will, of which he had been so proud? He called out to it in vain: it was like the efforts one makes in sleep, when one knows one is dreaming and wants to wake. One only succeeds in rolling from dream to dream, like a mass of lead, and in feeling more suffocating the asphyxia of the enchained soul. In the end he found it less painful not to struggle. He made his peace with it, in an apathetic and discouraged fatalism.

The regular flow of his life seemed interrupted. At times it seeped into underground crevices, where it was on the verge of disappearing; at times it sprang back with a jerky violence. The chain of days was broken. In the middle of the flat plain of the hours, gaping holes opened up, swallowing the self whole. Christophe watched this spectacle as though it were foreign to him. Everything and everyone---and himself---became foreign. He went on about his business, performed his duties, in an automatic way; it seemed to him that the machinery of his life was about to stop at any moment: the gears were broken. At table with his mother and the lodgers, in the orchestra pit, surrounded by musicians and audience, a void would suddenly open in his mind: he would stare in bewilderment at the grimacing faces around him, and understand nothing. He asked himself:

--- What connection is there between these people 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 watched his own gestures from far away, from above---from the top of a tower. He passed his hand across his forehead with a bewildered air. He was very close to extravagant acts.

This was especially true when he was most visible, when he was most obliged to keep watch over himself. On the evenings when he went to the castle, for instance, or when he played in public, he would be seized by a sudden imperious urge to make some grimace, to blurt out something monstrous, to tweak the Grand Duke’s nose, or to plant his foot in a lady’s behind. He struggled, an entire evening when he was conducting the orchestra, against the insane desire to undress himself in public; and from the moment he tried to push the idea away, it haunted him; he needed all his strength not to give in to it. When this imbecile battle was over, he was drenched in sweat and his mind was emptied. He was truly going mad. He had only to think that he must not do a certain thing for that thing to impose itself upon him, with the maddening tenacity of an obsession.

So his life went by in a succession of demented forces and falls into the void. A furious wind in the desert. Where did this gust come from? What was this madness? From what abyss did these desires arise that twisted his limbs and his mind? He was like a bow that a frenzied hand bends to the breaking point---toward some unknown target---and then tosses aside like a piece of dead wood. Whose prey was he? He did not dare probe it. He felt defeated, humiliated, and he avoided looking his defeat in the face. He was tired and cowardly. He understood now those people he had once despised: those who refuse to see an uncomfortable truth. In these hours of nothingness, when the memory came back to him of passing time, of abandoned work, of a lost future, he was frozen with dread. But he did not react; and his cowardice found excuses in the despairing assertion of nothingness; he tasted a bitter voluptuousness in surrendering to it, like a piece of wreckage drifting on the current. What was the use of struggling? There was nothing---nothing beautiful, nothing good, no God, no life, no being of any kind. In the street, as he walked, the ground would suddenly give way beneath him; there was no more earth, no air, no light, no self; there was nothing. He fell, his head pulling him forward, brow first; he could barely catch himself at the edge of the fall. He thought he was about to die, suddenly, struck down. He thought he was dead…

Christophe was shedding his old skin. Christophe was shedding his old soul. And watching the worn and withered soul of his childhood fall away, he had no idea that a new one was growing in its place, younger and more powerful. As we change bodies over the course of life, we change souls too; and the metamorphosis does not always happen slowly, day by day: there are hours of crisis when everything renews itself all at once. The adult changes souls. The old husk dies. In those hours of anguish, the self believes everything is finished. And everything is about to begin. One life dies. Another has already been born.

He was alone in his room one night, leaning on his elbows at the table in the light of a candle. His back was to the window. He was not working. It had been weeks since he could 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 thrown himself into a jumble of reading drawn at random from the eclectic library of his grandfather or from Vogel’s: books of theology, science, philosophy, often incomplete sets, in which he understood nothing, having everything still to learn; he could finish none of them, and lost himself in the middle amid endless digressions and wanderings that left a weariness, a void, a deathly sadness.

And so that evening he sat absorbed 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 stared like a dull-witted man at the candle burning down in the candlestick. He could not go to bed. He thought of nothing. He felt that emptiness hollowing out moment by moment. He strained not to see the abyss drawing him in; and yet, against his will, he leaned over the edge, plunged his gaze into the depths of the night. In the void the chaos stirred, the darkness seethed. An anguish penetrated him, his back shivered, his skin bristled, he clutched the table so as not to fall. He was in the convulsive expectation of unspeakable things, of a miracle, of a God…

Suddenly, like a floodgate opening, behind him in the courtyard, a deluge of water, a heavy, broad, straight rain crashed down. The still air shuddered. The hard dry ground rang like a bell. And the enormous scent of the earth, burning and warm as an animal, the smell of flowers, of fruit, of amorous flesh, rose up in a spasm of fury and pleasure. Christophe, hallucinated, taut with his whole being, shuddered to the core. He trembled… The veil was torn. It was a blaze of light. In the flash of lightning, he saw, in the depths of the night, he saw---he was God. God was in him; He burst through the ceiling of the room, the walls of the house; He shattered 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, swept up in 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-chasm! Blaze of Being! Hurricane of life! The madness of living---without purpose, without restraint, without reason---for the fury of living!

When the crisis subsided, he fell into a deep sleep, such as he had not known in a long time. The next morning, waking, his head was spinning; he was shattered, as though he had been drinking. But he kept in the depths 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 eluded him. From that moment on, all his energy was constantly strained in the effort to revive the vision of a single instant. Useless attempts. Ecstasy did not answer to the command of the will.

Yet this episode of mystical delirium did not remain isolated; it recurred several times, but never with the intensity of the first. It was always in the moments when Christophe least expected it, in brief seconds, so brief, so sudden---just time to raise his eyes or reach out an arm---that the vision had passed before he had time to realize what it was; and he wondered afterward whether he had not been dreaming. After the blazing fireball that had burned through the night, there was now a luminous dust, small fleeting glimmers that the eye could barely catch in passing. But they reappeared more and more often; they ended by surrounding Christophe with a halo of perpetual, diffuse dreaming in which his spirit dissolved. Anything that might distract him from this half-hallucination irritated him. Impossible to work: he no longer even thought of it. All company was hateful to him; and more than any other, that of his closest intimates, even his mother’s, because they claimed to assert greater rights over his soul.

He left the house, fell into the habit of spending his days outdoors, and returned only at nightfall. He sought the solitude of the fields, to give himself over there, to his heart’s content, like a maniac who does not want to be disturbed by anything, to the obsession of his fixed ideas. --- But in the great cleansing open air, in contact with the earth, this obsession loosened its grip, these ideas lost their spectral quality. His exaltation did not diminish: it redoubled, rather; but it was no longer a dangerous delirium of the mind---it was a wholesome intoxication of the whole being: body and soul, drunk with strength.

He rediscovered the world, as if he had never seen it. It was a new childhood. It seemed as though a magic word had pronounced an: “Open, Sesame!” --- Nature blazed with joy. The sun seethed. The liquid sky flowed like a transparent river. The earth groaned and smoked with voluptuousness. Plants, trees, insects, innumerable creatures were like the scintillating tongues of the great fire of life spiraling upward into the air. Everything cried out with pleasure.

And this joy was his. This force was his. He no longer distinguished himself from the rest of things. Until now, even in the happy days of childhood when he had looked upon nature with an ardent and delighted curiosity, living beings had seemed to him like small closed worlds, frightening or comical, unrelated to him, which he could not understand. Was he even sure they felt, that they were alive? They were strange mechanisms; and Christophe had sometimes been able, with the unconscious cruelty of childhood, to tear apart unfortunate insects without thinking that they suffered---for the pleasure of watching their grotesque contortions. Uncle Gottfried, usually so calm, had been forced one day to wrench out of his hands, with indignation, a poor fly he was tormenting. The boy had tried to laugh at first; then he had burst into tears, moved by his uncle’s emotion: he was beginning to understand that his victim truly existed, just as much as he did, and that he had committed a crime. But if for nothing in the world would he ever since have harmed an animal, he felt no sympathy for them; he passed them by without trying to sense what stirred within their small machines; he was rather afraid to think about it: it seemed like a bad dream. --- And now everything was illuminated. These humble and obscure consciousnesses in turn became centers of light.

Sprawled in the grass teeming with creatures, in the shade of trees humming with insects, Christophe watched the feverish activity of ants, the long-legged spiders that seem to dance as they walk, the leaping grasshoppers that jump sideways, the heavy and hurrying beetles, and the naked worms, smooth and pink, with elastic skin marbled with white patches. Or, hands behind his head, eyes closed, he listened to the invisible orchestra: clouds of insects circling frenetically in a sunbeam around the fragrant fir trees, the fanfares of mosquitoes, the organ notes of wasps, swarms of wild bees vibrating like bells at the tops of the woods, and the divine murmur of the swaying trees, the soft trembling of the breeze in the branches, the faint rustling of the rippling grass, like a breath that wrinkles the limpid brow of a lake, like the brushing of a light dress and of loving footsteps that draw near, pass by, and dissolve into the air.

All these sounds, all these cries, he heard them within himself. From the least to the greatest of these creatures, the same river of life was flowing: it bathed him too. Thus he was one of them, of their blood, and he could hear the fraternal echo of their joys and their sufferings; their strength mingled with his own, as a river swollen by a thousand streams. He drowned himself in them. His chest was on the verge of bursting under the violence of the air, too abundant, too powerful, shattering the windows and flooding into the sealed house of his suffocating heart. The change was too abrupt: after having found nothingness everywhere, when he had been consumed only by his own existence, feeling it slip away and dissolve like rain, here now he found Being everywhere, without end and without measure, now that he longed to forget himself, to be reborn in the universe. It seemed to him that he was emerging from the tomb. He swam voluptuously in life flowing to its very brim; and, carried along by it, he believed himself entirely free. He did not know that he was less free than ever, that no being is free, that even the law governing the universe is not free, that death alone --- perhaps --- delivers.

But the chrysalis emerging from its stifling sheath was stretching with delight in its new casing, and had not yet had time to recognize the limits of its new prison.

A new cycle of days began. Days of gold and fever, mysterious and enchanted, as when he had been a child discovering things one by one for the very first time. From dawn to dusk he lived in a perpetual mirage. All his occupations were abandoned. The conscientious young man who, for years, had not missed a single lesson or orchestral rehearsal, even when ill, now found at every turn some flimsy pretext to dodge work. He did not hesitate to lie. He felt no remorse. The stoic principles of life under which he had until now taken pleasure in bending his will --- morality, Duty --- appeared to him now without truth, without reason. Their jealous despotism shattered against Nature. Sound, strong, free human nature: there was the only virtue. To the devil with everything else! There was cause for pitying laughter at the sight of the little fussy rules of prudent conduct that the world adorns with the name of morality and in which it claims to contain life. Ridiculous molehills, a people of ants! Life takes it upon itself to bring them to reason. It need only pass, and everything is swept away…

Christophe, bursting with energy, was seized at moments by an urge to destroy, to burn, to smash, to satisfy through blind and frenzied acts the force that was smothering him. These fits ordinarily ended in sudden releases: he wept, he threw himself on the ground, he embraced the earth, he would have liked to sink his teeth and hands into it, to feed on it, to merge with it; he trembled with fever and desire.

One evening he was walking at the edge of a wood. His eyes were dazed with light, his head was spinning; he was in that state of exaltation in which every being and every thing was transfigured. The soft, velvety evening light added its own magic. Rays of purple and gold floated beneath the trees. Phosphorescent glimmers seemed to rise from the meadows. The sky was voluptuous and gentle as a pair of eyes. In a nearby field, a girl was turning hay. In her shift and short skirt, neck and arms bare, she was raking the grass and piling it up. She had a short nose, broad cheeks, a round forehead, a kerchief over her hair. The setting sun reddened her sun-burnished skin like pottery, which seemed to drink in 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. Everything else had disappeared. 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 down to gather the grass, through her open shift he could see a blond down at the nape of her neck and along her spine. The obscure desire swelling within him burst all at once. He threw himself on her from behind, seized her by the neck and the waist, forced her head back, drove his mouth into her half-open mouth. He kissed the dry and chapped lips, he struck against her teeth, which bit him in anger. His hands ran over her rough arms, over the sweat-soaked shift. She struggled. He held tighter, he wanted to strangle her. She broke free, cried out, spat, wiped her lips with her hand, and covered him with insults. He had let her go and was fleeing across the fields. She threw stones at him and went on hurling a litany of filthy names. He blushed, less from what she might say or think than from what he himself was thinking. The sudden unconsciousness of his act filled him with terror. What had he done? What was he about to do? What he could understand of it inspired only disgust in him. And he was tempted by that disgust. He struggled against himself, and he did not know which side held the true Christophe. A blind force assailed him; he fled it in vain: it was to flee himself. What would it make of him? What would he do tomorrow… in an hour… in the time it took only to run across that plowed field, to reach the road?… Would he even reach it? Would he not stop, turn back, and run toward that girl? And then?… He recalled the second of delirium when he had her by the throat. Every act was possible. Every act was equal to any other. Even a crime… Yes, even a crime… The tumult in his heart made him gasp. When he reached the road he stopped to catch his breath. Far off, the girl was talking to another girl drawn by her cries; and, fists on their hips, they stared at him, laughing uproariously.

He went home. He shut himself in for several days without moving. He went out, even into the city, only when forced to. He fearfully avoided every opportunity to pass through the gates, to venture into the fields: he was afraid of encountering there the breath of madness that had fallen upon him like a gust of wind in the stillness of a storm. He believed that the walls of the city might protect him from it. He did not think that it suffices, for an enemy to slip through, to have an imperceptible crack between two closed shutters, the thickness of a single glance.

II SABINE

In one wing of the house, on the far side of the courtyard, a young woman of twenty lived on the ground floor, widowed a few months earlier, with a small daughter. Madame Sabine Froehlich was also a tenant of old Euler. She occupied the shop opening onto the street, and in addition had two rooms overlooking the courtyard, with use of a small strip of garden separated from the Eulers’ by a simple wire fence twined with ivy. One rarely saw her there; the child played alone all day from morning to night, digging in the dirt; and the garden grew as it pleased, to the great displeasure of old Justus, who liked raked paths and tidy flower beds. He had tried to offer his tenant a few remarks on the subject; but that was probably the reason she no longer showed herself there, and the garden fared no better for it.

Madame Froehlich kept a small haberdashery that might have done rather good business, given its location on a busy commercial street in the heart of the city; but she devoted no more attention to it than she did to the garden. Instead of doing her housework herself, as befitted a self-respecting woman --- especially, according to Madame Vogel, when one’s financial circumstances did not allow, let alone excuse, idleness --- she had taken on a little servant girl, a girl of fifteen, who came for a few hours each morning to do the rooms and mind the shop, while the young woman lingered lazily in her bed or at her dressing table.

Christophe sometimes caught glimpses of 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 too indolent to bother going to draw them. Christophe, more modest than she, would step back from his window so as not to disturb her; but the temptation was strong. With a slight blush he would steal a sideways glance at the bare arms, a little thin, languorously raised around her loose hair, hands clasped behind the nape of her neck, losing herself in that pose until her arms grew numb and she let them fall. Christophe persuaded himself that it was by accident that he caught sight in passing of this pleasing spectacle, and that it did not disturb his musical meditations; but he developed a taste for it, and ended up spending as much time watching Madame Sabine as she spent at her toilette. Not that she was vain: she was more often negligent, and brought to her appearance none of the meticulous care that Amalia or Rosa lavished on theirs. If she lingered endlessly before her dressing table, it was out of sheer laziness; with each pin she inserted, she needed to rest afterward from that great effort, making little mournful faces at herself in the mirror. By the end of the day she was not yet fully dressed.

Often the maid went out before Sabine was ready, and a customer would ring at the shop door. She would let them ring and call once or twice before deciding to rise from her chair. She would arrive, smiling, unhurried --- unhurried, she looked for the item they asked for --- and if she could not find it after a brief search, or even (it happened) if reaching it required too much trouble, moving the ladder from one end of the room to the other, for instance --- she would say calmly that she no longer had the item in stock; and since she did not trouble herself to bring more order to her shop in future, or to restock the missing articles, customers grew weary and went elsewhere. Without any hard feelings, for that matter. How could one be angry with this amiable person who spoke in a soft voice and was never upset by anything! Whatever anyone said to her was a matter of perfect indifference to her; and one felt it so keenly that those who began to complain lacked even the heart to go on: they left, answering her charming smile with a smile of their own, but they did not return. She was not troubled by this. She kept smiling.

She had the look of a small Florentine figure. Arched, finely drawn brows, grey eyes half-open beneath the curtain of her lashes. The lower eyelid slightly swollen, with a faint line pressed beneath it. The small delicate nose curved lightly upward at the tip. Another small curve separated it from the upper lip, which turned up above the half-open mouth in a pout of smiling weariness. The lower lip was a little full; the lower part of her face, rounded, had the childlike seriousness of the little virgins of Filippo Lippi. Her complexion was somewhat muddy, her hair light brown with disordered curls and a haphazard chignon. She had a slight body, with delicate bones and languid movements. Dressed without much care --- a jacket that gaped open, missing buttons, ugly worn shoes, a slightly slovenly air --- she charmed by her youthful grace, her gentleness, her instinctive cattishness. When she came to take the air at the shop doorway, the young men passing by looked at her with pleasure; and though she gave no thought to them, she never failed to notice it. Her gaze would then take on that grateful and joyful expression found in the eyes of any woman who feels herself looked upon with warmth. It seemed to say:

--- Thank you!… Again! Again! Look at me!…

But whatever pleasure she took in pleasing, her nonchalance would never have made the slightest effort to do so.

She was a source of scandal to the Euler-Vogels. Everything about her offended them: her indolence, the disorder of her house, the negligence of her dress, her polite indifference to their observations, her eternal smile, the impertinent serenity with which she had accepted the death of her husband, the ailments of her child, her failing business, the large and small vexations of daily life, without any of it changing her cherished habits or her perpetual idling --- everything about her offended them: and worst of all, that being as she was, she pleased. Madame Vogel could not forgive her for it. One would have thought that Sabine did it on purpose, to inflict by her conduct an ironic rebuttal on the solid traditions, the true principles, the insipid duty, the joyless work, the agitation, the noise, the quarrels, the lamentations, the wholesome pessimism that was the raison d’être of the Euler family, as of all decent people, and made of their life an anticipated purgatory. That a woman who did nothing and enjoyed herself all the blessed day should presume to mock them with her insolent calm, while they worked themselves to the bone like galley slaves --- and that the world should, on top of it all, take her side --- that exceeded all bounds, it was enough to discourage one from being honest!… Fortunately, thank God! there were still a few sensible people left on earth. Madame Vogel consoled herself with them. They exchanged the day’s observations on the little widow, whom they kept watch over through their shutters. This gossip was the joy of the family in the evening when gathered at table. Christophe listened with half an ear. He was so accustomed to hearing the Vogels set themselves up as censors of their neighbors’ conduct that he paid it no attention any longer. Besides, he still knew of Madame Sabine only her nape and her bare arms, which, pleasant enough though they were, did not allow him to form a definitive opinion of her person. He felt nonetheless full of indulgence toward her; and, out of a spirit of contradiction, he was grateful to her above all for not pleasing Madame Vogel.

In the evenings after dinner, when the heat was especially oppressive, no one could bear to stay in the stifling courtyard where the sun had beaten down all afternoon. The only part of the house where one could breathe was the side facing the street. 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 kept inside by household duties; madame Vogel prided herself on making it clear she had no time to idle about; and she would say, loudly enough to be heard, that all those people sitting there yawning in their doorways without lifting a finger got on her nerves. Since she could not --- (much as she regretted it) --- force them to keep busy, she resolved to ignore them and went back inside to work with ferocious energy. Rosa felt obliged to follow her example. Euler and Vogel found drafts everywhere, feared catching a chill, and retreated upstairs; they went to bed very early and would have felt utterly lost had they altered their routine by the slightest detail. After nine o’clock, only Louisa and Christophe remained. Louisa spent her days in her room; and in the evenings Christophe would make himself, whenever he could, keep her company, so as to draw her out into the fresh air for a while. Left alone, she would never have gone outside: the noise of the street alarmed her. Children ran shrieking after one another. All the neighborhood dogs answered with their barking. Piano notes drifted out, a clarinet a little farther off, and from a nearby street a cornet. Voices called to one another. People came and went in groups before their houses. Louisa would have felt lost if left alone in the middle of all that commotion. But beside her son, she found it almost pleasant. The noise gradually settled. The children and dogs were the first to go to bed. The groups thinned and drifted apart. The air grew cleaner. Silence descended. Louisa recounted in her light, thin voice the small bits of news she had gathered from Amalia or Rosa. She took no great interest in them herself. But she could think of nothing else to talk to her son about, and she felt the need to draw nearer to him, to say something. Christophe, sensing this, pretended to take an interest in what she was telling him; but he was not really listening. He let himself drift into a vague drowsiness, turning over the events of his day.

One evening as they sat there like this --- while his mother was speaking, he saw the door of the neighboring haberdashery open. A woman’s figure slipped out silently and sat down in the street. A few steps separated her chair from Louisa’s. She had settled in the deepest shadow. Christophe could not see her face; but he recognized her. His drowsiness fell away. The air seemed softer. Louisa had not noticed Sabine’s presence and went on with her quiet murmuring. Christophe listened to her more attentively now, and he felt the urge to weave in his own thoughts, to speak, perhaps to be heard. The slight silhouette sat motionless, leaning a little forward, her legs loosely crossed, her hands lying one over the other flat on her knees. She looked straight ahead and appeared to hear nothing. Louisa dozed off. She went inside. Christophe said he wanted to stay out a little longer.

It was nearly ten o’clock. The street had emptied. The last neighbors were going in one by one. One could hear the sound of shop shutters closing. Lit windows winked and went dark. One or two lingered still --- then died. Silence… They were alone; they did not look at one another; they held their breath; they seemed unaware that they were side by side. From distant fields came the scent of mown meadows, and from a nearby balcony the fragrance of a pot of wallflowers. The air was perfectly still. The Milky Way flowed above their heads. To the right, Jupiter blazed red. Above a chimney stack, David’s Chariot tilted on its axles; its stars bloomed in the pale green sky like daisies. From the parish church eleven o’clock struck, repeated all around by other churches in voices clear or rusted, and from inside the houses by the muffled chimes of clocks, or by the hoarse calls of cuckoos.

They woke abruptly from their reverie and rose at the same moment. And as they were about to go in, each on their own side, they both nodded to one another, without a word. Christophe went up to his room. He lit his candle, sat down at his table with his head in his hands, and stayed a long time without thinking. Then he sighed and went to bed.

The next morning, on getting up, he went mechanically to the window and looked toward Sabine’s room. But the curtains were drawn. They were drawn all morning. They were drawn from then on always.

Christophe suggested to his mother the following evening that they go again to sit in front of the house. It became his habit. Louisa was glad of it; she had been worried to see him shut himself away in his room right after dinner, window closed, shutters closed. --- The small silent shadow also returned without fail to her accustomed place. They exchanged a quick nod of the head, without Louisa noticing. Christophe talked with his mother. Sabine smiled at her little girl, who was playing in the street; around nine o’clock she went to put her to bed, then came back quietly. If she was a little slow in returning, Christophe began to fear she might not come back at all. He listened for the sounds of the house, for the little girl’s laughter as she resisted sleep; he could make out the rustle of Sabine’s dress before she had appeared on the shop threshold. Then he looked away and spoke to his mother in a livelier voice. He had the sense sometimes that Sabine was watching him. He would cast furtive glances in her direction. But their eyes never met.

The child became the link between them. She ran in the street with the other little ones. They amused themselves tormenting a good-natured dog who was dozing with his muzzle stretched out between his paws; he would open one red eye and eventually give a grumpy growl: at which they scattered, shrieking with delicious fright. The little girl let out piercing squeals and glanced behind her as though she were being chased: she would fling herself against Louisa’s legs, who laughed fondly. Louisa would catch the child and ask her questions; and a conversation began with Sabine. Christophe took no part in it. He did not speak to Sabine. Sabine did not speak to him. By some tacit agreement they pretended not to know one another was there. But he missed not a word of what passed over his head. His silence struck Louisa as unfriendly. Sabine did not take it that way; but it made her uneasy, and she grew slightly flustered in her answers. So she would find a reason to go inside.

For a whole week, Louisa, who had caught a cold, stayed in her room. Christophe and Sabine found themselves alone. The first time, they were both frightened by it. Sabine, to give herself something to do, held the little girl in her lap and smothered her with kisses. Christophe, ill at ease, did not know whether he ought to go on pretending to ignore what was happening beside him. It was growing difficult: although they had never yet spoken to one another directly, an acquaintance had been formed, through Louisa. He tried to coax one or two sentences out of his throat; but the words stopped halfway. Once again the little girl rescued them from their predicament. As she played at hide-and-seek she circled round Christophe’s chair, and he caught her as she passed and kissed her. He did not much care for children; but he felt a singular sweetness in kissing this one. The little girl wriggled, intent on her game. Christophe teased her; she bit his hands; he let her slip down to the ground. Sabine laughed. They exchanged, watching the child, a few words of no consequence. Then Christophe tried --- (he felt it was required of him) --- to start up a proper conversation; but he had no great store of words, and Sabine did nothing to make it easier; she contented herself with echoing whatever he had just said:

--- The evening was pleasant.

--- Yes, the evening was very fine.

--- One couldn’t breathe in the courtyard.

--- Yes, the courtyard was stifling.

The conversation grew painful. Sabine took advantage of the fact that it was time to bring the little one inside and went in with her; and she was not seen again that evening.

Christophe feared she would do the same on the evenings that followed, and avoid being alone with him as long as Louisa was away. But it was quite the opposite; and the next day Sabine tried to resume the conversation. She did so more from an effort of will than from pleasure; one could feel that she was working very hard to find topics, and that she herself was bored by the questions she posed: both questions and answers fell into the middle of painful silences. Christophe recalled his first tête-à-têtes with Otto; but with Sabine, the subjects were even more limited, and she lacked Otto’s patience. When she saw how little her attempts succeeded, she did not persist: it required too much effort, it no longer interested her. She fell silent, and he did the same.

At once, everything became very gentle again. The night resumed its calm, and their hearts their own thoughts. Sabine rocked slowly in her chair, dreaming. Christophe dreamed beside her. They said nothing. After half an hour, Christophe, speaking almost to himself, murmured his delight at the intoxicating sweetness carried by the warm breeze that had just passed over a cart of strawberries. Sabine answered with two or three words. They fell silent again. They savored the charm of those indefinite silences, those inconsequential words. They were caught in the same dream, filled with a single thought; they did not know what it was, they did not admit it even to themselves. When eleven o’clock struck, they parted with a smile.

The following evening they made no attempt at all to resume conversation: they returned to their cherished silence. Now and then a few monosyllables served to let each other know they were thinking of the same things.

Sabine began to laugh:

--- How much better it is, she said, not to force oneself to speak! One feels obliged to, and it’s so tiresome!

--- Ah! said Christophe, with feeling, if only everyone thought as you do!

They both laughed. They were thinking of madame Vogel.

--- Poor woman! said Sabine, how exhausting she is!

--- She never tires, replied Christophe, with a mournful air.

Sabine was amused by his expression and his words.

--- You find that funny? he said. Easy for you. You’re out of range.

--- Indeed I am, said Sabine. I lock myself in.

She had a small soft laugh, almost soundless. Christophe listened to it, enchanted, in the stillness of the night. He drew in the cool air with delight.

--- Ah! how good it is to say nothing! he said, stretching.

--- And how pointless it is to speak! she said.

--- Yes, said Christophe, one understands so well without words!

They sank back into their silence. The darkness kept them from seeing one another. They were both smiling.

And yet, though they felt alike when they were together --- or imagined they did --- they knew in reality nothing of one another. Sabine was not at all troubled by this. Christophe was more curious. One evening he asked her:

--- Do you like music?

--- No, she said simply. It bores me. I don’t understand it at all.

This candor charmed him. He was worn down by people who claimed to be mad about music and died of boredom when they heard it: it seemed to him almost a virtue not to like it and to say so. He asked whether Sabine read.

--- No. For one thing, she had no books.

He offered her his.

--- Serious books? she asked, alarmed.

--- Not serious ones, if she didn’t want. Poetry.

--- But those are serious books!

--- Novels, then.

She made a face.

--- That didn’t interest her?

--- Yes, it interested her; but it was always too long; she never had the patience to reach the end. She would forget the beginning, skip chapters, and then understand nothing. So she would put the book down.

--- A fine proof of interest!

--- Oh well, it was quite enough for a story that wasn’t true. She saved her interest for things other than books.

--- The theater, perhaps?

--- Certainly not!

--- Didn’t she go?

--- No. It was too hot. There were too many people. One is much better off at home. The lights hurt one’s eyes. And the actors are so ugly!

On this point he agreed with her. But the theater offered something else as well: the plays.

--- Yes, she said absently. But I don’t have time.

--- What can you possibly do from morning to night?

She smiled:

--- There is so much to do!

--- Of course, he said, you have your shop.

--- Oh! she said serenely, that doesn’t keep me very busy.

--- Your little girl takes up all your time, then?

--- Oh! no, poor little thing! She’s very good, she plays by herself.

--- Well then?

He apologized for his impertinence. But she was amused by it.

--- There were so many, so many things!

--- Such as?

--- She couldn’t say. All sorts of things. Simply 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 really must have a little time for doing nothing as well!…

--- And you’re never bored?

--- Never.

--- Not even when you’re doing nothing?

--- Especially when I’m doing nothing. It’s far more doing something that bores me.

They looked at one another and laughed.

--- How happy you are! said Christophe. I can’t do nothing.

--- It seems to me you do it very well.

--- I’ve been learning these past few days.

--- Then you’ll get there.

His heart was peaceful and rested after talking with her. It was enough just to see her. The anxieties fell away, the irritations, that nervous anguish that knotted his chest. No turmoil when he spoke to her. No turmoil when he thought of her. He didn’t dare admit it to himself; but the moment he was near her, he felt a delicious torpor steal through him, he nearly dozed off. At night, he slept as he had never slept before.

Coming home from work, he would glance into the interior of the shop. He rarely failed to see Sabine. They would smile and greet each other. Sometimes she was at the threshold, and they exchanged a few words; or else he would half-open the door, call to the little girl, and slip a paper cone of sweets into her hand.

One day he made up his mind to go in. He claimed he needed buttons for his jacket. She set about looking for them; but she couldn’t find them. All the buttons were jumbled together --- impossible to make sense of it. She was a little embarrassed for him to see such disorder. He found it entertaining, and leaned in curiously for a better look.

--- No! she said, trying to hide the drawers with her hands. Don’t look! It’s a terrible mess…

She went back to searching. But Christophe was distracting her. She grew exasperated, and pushed the drawer shut:

--- I can’t find it, she said. Go to Lisi’s, on the next street over. She’s sure to have them. She has everything anyone could want.

He laughed at this way of doing business.

--- Do you send all your customers to her like that?

--- Honestly, it wouldn’t be the first time, she replied cheerfully.

She felt a little ashamed, all the same.

--- It’s too tiresome to put things in order, she went on. I keep putting it off day after day… But I’ll certainly do it tomorrow.

--- Would you like me to help? said Christophe.

She refused. She would have very much liked to accept; but she didn’t dare, because of the gossips. And besides, it mortified her.

They went on talking.

--- And your buttons? said Sabine to Christophe, after a moment. Aren’t you going to Lisi’s?

--- Never in my life, said Christophe. I’ll wait until you’ve tidied up.

--- Oh! said Sabine, who had already forgotten what she had just said, don’t wait that long!

This cry from the heart put them both in high spirits.

Christophe stepped toward the drawer she had pushed shut:

--- Let me look, will you?

She rushed over to stop him:

--- No, no, please, I’m sure I don’t have---

--- I’ll bet you do.

On the very first try, he pulled out, triumphant, the very button he needed. He needed more. He wanted to keep rummaging; but she snatched the box from his hands, and, stung by pride, began searching herself.

The light was fading. She moved closer to the window. Christophe sat down a few steps 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 could see the nape of her neck and a little of her cheek. --- And as he watched her, he saw that she was blushing. And he blushed too.

The child kept talking. No one answered her. Sabine had stopped moving. Christophe could not see what she was doing --- he was certain she was doing nothing, that she wasn’t even looking at the box she held. The silence stretched on. The little girl, growing uneasy, slid down from Christophe’s knees:

--- Why aren’t you saying anything anymore?

Sabine turned sharply and gathered the child in her arms. The box spilled onto the floor; the little girl cried out with delight and went scrambling 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 lost in gazing at the street outside.

--- Goodbye, said Christophe, unsettled.

She did not move her head, and said very softly:

--- Goodbye.

On Sunday afternoons, the house was empty. The whole family went to church for vespers. Sabine never went. Christophe, half-joking, reproached her for it one day when he spotted her sitting outside her door in the little garden, while the fine bells were straining themselves to call her. She replied in the same spirit that only Mass was obligatory; vespers were not: it was therefore unnecessary, and even a little indiscreet, to exceed one’s duty; and she liked to think that God, rather than holding it against her, would be grateful.

--- You make God in your own image, said Christophe.

--- It would bore me so terribly to be in His place! she said with conviction.

--- You wouldn’t concern yourself with the world very often, if you were in His place.

--- All I would ask is that He not concern Himself with me.

--- Things might not go any worse for it, said Christophe.

--- Hush! cried Sabine. We’re saying impious things!

--- I don’t see what’s impious about saying that God resembles you. I’m sure He’s flattered.

--- Will you please be quiet! said Sabine, half laughing, half cross. She was beginning to fear that God might be scandalized. She hastened to change the subject.

--- And besides, she said, it’s the only time of the week when one can enjoy the garden in peace.

--- Yes, said Christophe. They’re not here.

They looked at each other.

--- What silence! said Sabine. We’re not used to it… One hardly knows where one is…

--- Oh! cried Christophe suddenly, with anger, there are days when I want to strangle him!

There was no need to explain who he meant.

--- And the others? asked Sabine cheerfully.

--- That’s true, said Christophe, discouraged. There’s Rosa.

--- Poor girl! said Sabine.

They fell silent.

--- If it could always be like this!… sighed Christophe.

She lifted her laughing eyes toward him, then lowered them again. He noticed that she was working.

--- What are you doing there? he asked.

(He was separated from her by the curtain of ivy stretched between the two gardens.)

--- You can see perfectly well, she said, raising a bowl she was holding in her lap; I’m shelling peas.

She heaved a long sigh.

--- But it’s not unpleasant! he said, laughing.

--- Oh! she replied, it’s deadly dull, always having to think about one’s dinner!

--- I’ll wager, he said, that if it were possible, you’d rather go without dinner than have the bother of preparing it.

--- Of course! she cried.

--- Wait! I’ll come and help you.

He climbed over the fence and came to her side.

She was seated on a chair at the entrance to her house. He sat down on a step at her feet. From the folds of her dress gathered in her lap, he scooped up handfuls of green pods; and he poured the little round balls into the bowl resting between Sabine’s knees. He looked at the ground. He could see Sabine’s black stockings molding her ankles and her feet, one of which had slipped halfway out of its shoe. He didn’t dare raise his eyes toward her.

The air was heavy. The sky was very white, very low, without a breath of wind. Not a leaf stirred. The garden was enclosed by high walls: the world ended there.

The child had gone out with a neighbor. They were alone. They said nothing. They could no longer say anything. Without looking, he took more handfuls of peas from Sabine’s lap; his fingers trembled as they touched her: they met, amid the fresh smooth pods, Sabine’s fingers, which were trembling too. They could not go on. They sat motionless, not looking at each other: she, leaning back in her chair, lips parted, arms hanging at her sides; he, seated at her feet, leaning back against her; he felt along his shoulder and arm the warmth of Sabine’s leg. They were breathless. Christophe pressed his hands against the stone to cool them: one of his hands grazed Sabine’s foot, slipped from its shoe, and came to rest upon it, and could not pull away. A shiver ran through them both. They were on the edge of vertigo. Christophe’s hand closed around the small slender toes of Sabine’s foot. Sabine, flushed and ice-cold, leaned toward Christophe…

Familiar voices tore them from that intoxication. They started. Christophe leaped to his feet and crossed back over the fence. Sabine gathered up the pea pods in her dress and went inside. From the courtyard he turned around. She was at the threshold. They looked at each other. Little drops of rain were beginning to patter on the leaves of the trees… She closed her door. Madame Vogel and Rosa were coming back… He went upstairs…

As the yellowish daylight faded, drowned in torrents of rain, he rose from his table, driven by an irresistible impulse; he ran to his closed window and stretched his arms toward the window across the way. At that same moment, at the window across the way, behind the closed panes, in the half-shadow of the room, he saw --- he thought he saw --- Sabine stretching her arms toward him.

He rushed out of his room. He came down the stairs. He ran to the garden fence. At the risk of being seen, he was about to climb over it. But as he looked at the window where she had appeared to him, he saw that all the shutters were closed. The house seemed to be asleep. He hesitated to go on. Old Euler, on his way to the cellar, spotted him and called out to him. He retraced his steps. He thought he must have been dreaming.

Rosa was not long in noticing what was happening. She was trusting by nature, and had not yet learned what a jealous feeling was. She was ready to give everything and asked nothing in return. But if she resigned herself with a certain sadness to Christophe’s not loving her, she had never considered the possibility that Christophe might love someone else.

One evening after dinner, she had just finished a tedious piece of needlework she had been at for months. She felt happy, and was seized with a desire to allow herself a little freedom, just this once, to go and chat with Christophe. She took advantage of her mother’s back being turned to slip out of the room. She stole out of the house like a guilty schoolchild. She was looking forward to confounding Christophe, who had scornfully declared that she would never finish her work. She was delighted to surprise him in the street. The poor girl, knowing full well what Christophe’s feelings toward her were, was nonetheless always inclined to judge the pleasure others would have at meeting her by the pleasure she felt at seeing them.

She went out. In front of the house, as usual, Christophe and Sabine were sitting together. Rosa’s heart tightened. Yet she didn’t dwell on that irrational impression; and cheerfully she called out to Christophe. The sound of her shrill voice in the silence of the night had on Christophe the effect of a wrong note. He started in his chair and grimaced with irritation. Rosa was triumphantly waving her needlework under his nose. Christophe pushed it away impatiently.

--- It’s finished, finished! Rosa insisted.

--- Well then, go start another one! said Christophe curtly.

Rosa was mortified. All her joy collapsed.

Christophe went on, cruelly:

--- And when you’ve made thirty of them, when you’re quite old, at least you’ll be able to tell yourself you haven’t wasted your life!

Rosa felt like crying:

--- Good Lord, how unkind you are, Christophe! she said.

Christophe felt ashamed and said a few friendly words to her. She needed so little that she immediately recovered her confidence; and she launched again into her noisy chatter with redoubled energy; she couldn’t speak quietly, she cried everything at the top of her voice, as was the custom of the household. Despite all his efforts, Christophe could not hide his ill temper. He answered first with a few irritated monosyllables; then nothing at all, he turned his back and shifted in his chair, grinding his teeth at her rattle-like notes. Rosa could see that she was trying his patience, she knew she ought to be quiet; but she only went on all the louder for it. Sabine, silent, in the shadows, a few steps away, watched the scene with an impassive irony. Then, tired of it, and sensing that the evening was lost, she rose and went inside. Christophe only noticed her departure after she was gone. He got up at once and, without even excusing himself, disappeared on his own side with a curt goodnight.

Rosa, left alone in the street, stared in dismay at the door through which he had just gone in. Tears were coming. She went back in quickly, climbed the stairs without making a sound so as not to have to speak to her mother, undressed in frantic haste, and once in bed, buried under her sheets, she sobbed. She made no effort to think over what had happened; she did not ask herself whether Christophe loved Sabine, whether Christophe and Sabine could not stand her; she knew that everything was lost, that life had no more meaning, that nothing remained for her but to die.

The next morning, reflection returned along with the eternal and deceptive power of hope. Going back over the events of the previous evening, she persuaded herself that she had been wrong to attach such importance to them. No doubt Christophe did not love her; she resigned herself to it, keeping in the depths of her heart the unacknowledged thought that she would eventually make herself loved, through the force of her own love. But where had she gotten the idea that there was something between Sabine and him? How could he have loved, intelligent as he was, a little nobody, whose insignificance and mediocrity were plain for all to see? She felt reassured --- and she nonetheless began to keep watch on Christophe. She saw nothing, all day long, since there was nothing to see; but Christophe, who on the other hand saw her hovering around him all day without understanding why, conceived a strange irritation over it. She put the finishing touch on it that evening, when she reappeared and settled herself decisively beside them in the street. It was a repeat of the scene from the night before: only Rosa spoke. But Sabine did not wait as long before going back inside; and Christophe followed her example. Rosa could no longer pretend to herself that her presence was welcome; but the wretched girl tried to deceive herself. She did not see that she could do nothing worse than try to impose herself; and, with her usual clumsiness, she kept on doing so in the days that followed.

The next day, Christophe, with Rosa at his side, waited in vain for Sabine to appear.

The day after, Rosa found herself alone. They had given up the struggle. But she gained nothing from it except Christophe’s resentment — he was furious at being deprived of his beloved evenings, his only happiness. He was all the less forgiving in that, absorbed as he was in his own feelings, it had never once occurred to him to guess at Rosa’s.

Sabine had known them for some time: she knew Rosa was jealous before she even knew whether she herself was in love; but she said nothing about it; and, with the natural cruelty of any pretty woman who knows she will win, she watched in silence, with a faintly mocking air, the clumsy rival’s futile efforts.

Rosa, left mistress of the battlefield, surveyed the results of her strategy with dismay. The wisest course for her would have been not to persist, and to leave Christophe in peace, at least for the time being — and so, naturally, that was not what she did; and since the worst thing she could do was to speak to him of Sabine, that was precisely what she did.

Her heart pounding, she said to him timidly, feeling her way, that Sabine was pretty. Christophe replied curtly that she was very pretty. And though Rosa had foreseen the answer she was drawing out of him, it struck her like a blow to the heart to hear it. She knew perfectly well that Sabine was pretty; but she had never really noticed it before; she was seeing her for the first time through Christophe’s eyes — she saw her fine features, her little nose, her small mouth, her slight body, her graceful movements… Ah, what pain!… What would she not have given to inhabit that body! She understood only too well why it was preferred to her own!… Her own!… What had she done to deserve it? How it weighed on her! How ugly it seemed to her! It was hateful to her. And to think that nothing but death would ever free her from it!… She was too proud and too humble at once to complain of not being loved: she had no right to it; and she tried to humble herself still further. But her instinct revolted… No, it was not fair!… Why this body, hers, hers, and not Sabine’s?… And why was Sabine loved? What had she done to deserve it?… Rosa saw her without indulgence — idle, careless, selfish, indifferent to everyone, paying no attention to her house, her child, or anyone at all, loving only herself, living only to sleep, to lounge, and to do nothing… And that was what was pleasing… what pleased Christophe,… Christophe, who was so demanding, Christophe who knew how to judge, Christophe whom she esteemed and admired above all else! Ah, it was too unjust! It was too senseless as well!… How could Christophe not see it? --- She could not help letting slip, from time to time, some disparaging remark about Sabine. She did not want to; but it was stronger than she was. She always regretted it afterward, because she was kind-hearted and disliked speaking ill of anyone. But she regretted it still more because it drew from him cruel responses that showed her how deeply Christophe was smitten. He spared nothing then. Wounded in his affection, he set out to wound in return — and he succeeded. Rosa would not answer back, and went away with her head down, her lips pressed tight so as not to cry. She thought it was her own fault, that she only got what she deserved, for having hurt Christophe by attacking what he loved.

Her mother was less patient. Madame Vogel, who saw everything, had not been slow to notice, along with old Euler, Christophe’s conversations with his young neighbor: it was not difficult to guess the story. The plans they had secretly formed to marry Rosa to Christophe one day were being frustrated; and this seemed to them a personal offense on Christophe’s part, even though he could hardly be expected to know that they had disposed of him without consulting him. But Amalia’s despotism could not admit that anyone might think differently from her; and it struck her as scandalous that Christophe had overridden the contemptuous opinion she had expressed, on more than one occasion, about Sabine.

She had no hesitation in repeating it to him. Whenever he was present, she found a pretext to speak of the neighbor; she sought out the most wounding things to say, those most likely to sting Christophe; and with her blunt eye and blunt tongue, she had no difficulty finding them. The ferocious instinct of woman — so superior to man’s in the art of doing harm, as well as of doing good — made her dwell less on Sabine’s idleness and moral failings than on her slovenliness. Her indiscreet and prying eye had gone hunting for evidence of it through the windowpanes, all the way into the depths of the house, into the private details of Sabine’s toilet; and she laid them out with coarse relish. When decency prevented her from saying everything, she implied still more.

Christophe went pale with shame and anger; he turned white as a sheet, and his lips trembled. Rosa, who could see what was coming, begged her mother to stop; she even tried to defend Sabine. But she only made Amalia more aggressive.

And suddenly Christophe would spring from his chair. He would bang on the table and begin shouting that it was a disgrace to talk about a woman that way, to spy on her in her own home, to parade her miseries; one would have to be genuinely wicked to keep hounding a good, charming, peaceful creature who kept to herself, who harmed no one, who spoke ill of no one. But people were greatly mistaken if they thought to damage her by such means: all they did was make her more sympathetic and throw her kindness into sharper relief.

Amalia sensed she had gone too far; but she was stung by the lecture; and, shifting the argument to different ground, she said it was all too easy to talk about kindness: with that word, one could excuse anything. Heavens! It was very convenient to pass for a good person while never bothering about anything or anyone, never doing one’s duty!

To which Christophe retorted that the first duty was to make life agreeable for others, but that there were people for whom duty was nothing but what is ugly, what is sour, what is tedious, what constrains the freedom of others, what vexes and wounds the neighbor, the servants, one’s family, and oneself. God save us from such people and such duty, as from the plague!…

The quarrel grew bitter. Amalia became very sharp. Christophe gave no ground. --- And the clearest result of all this was that from then on Christophe made a point of being seen constantly with Sabine. He would knock on her door. He would chat cheerfully and laugh with her. He chose to do so at moments when Amalia and Rosa could see him. Amalia avenged herself with furious words. But the innocent Rosa had her heart torn by this refinement of cruelty; she sensed that he hated them, that he wanted to get back at them; and she wept bitterly.

And so Christophe, who had suffered so many times from injustice, learned how to inflict suffering unjustly.

Some time after this, Sabine’s brother, a miller at Landegg, a small town a few leagues from the city, was celebrating the baptism of a son. Sabine was the godmother. She had Christophe invited. He did not care for such occasions; but for the satisfaction of annoying the Vogels and being with Sabine, he accepted with eagerness.

Sabine had the mischievous pleasure of inviting Amalia and Rosa as well, certain they would refuse. They did not disappoint her. Rosa was dying to accept. She did not hate Sabine; she even felt her heart full of tenderness for her at times, because Christophe loved her; she felt the urge to tell her so, to throw her arms around her neck. But her mother was there, and her mother’s example. She stiffened in her pride and refused. Then, when they had gone, and she thought that they were together, that they were happy together, that they were walking at that very moment through the countryside, on this fine July day, while she stayed shut up in her room with a pile of mending, beside her grumbling mother, it seemed to her she was suffocating; and she cursed her pride. Ah, if there had still been time!… If there had still been time, alas, she would have done the same…

The miller had sent his wagon to fetch Christophe and Sabine. Along the way they picked up a few guests from the town, or from farms along the road. The weather was cool and dry. The bright sun made the red clusters of the rowan trees gleam along the road, and the cherry trees in the fields. Sabine was smiling. Her pale face had been touched with pink by the sharp air. Christophe held the little girl on his knees. They made no effort to speak to one another; they spoke to their neighbors, to anyone about anything — it did not matter to whom or about what: they were content to hear each other’s voices, they were content to be carried along in the same carriage. They exchanged looks of childlike joy, pointing out a house, a tree, a passerby. Sabine loved the countryside; but she went there almost never: her incurable laziness forbade her any excursion; it had been nearly a year since she had left the city, and so she savored the slightest things she saw. They were not new to Christophe; but he loved Sabine; and like all those who are in love, he saw everything through her, he felt each of her little tremors of pleasure, he intensified the emotions she experienced; for in merging with the beloved, he lent her his own being.

Arriving at the mill, they found in the courtyard all the farm people and the other guests, who received them with a deafening uproar. The hens, the ducks, and the dogs joined in the chorus. The miller Bertold, a strapping blond man, square-headed and square-shouldered, as large and solid as Sabine was slight, scooped his little sister up in his arms and set her down gently on the ground, as if afraid of breaking her. It did not take Christophe long to see that the little sister was doing, as usual, exactly as she pleased with the giant, and that while he made a great show of mocking her whims, her idleness, and her thousand and one faults, he served her hand and foot. She was accustomed to it and found it perfectly natural. She found everything natural and was surprised by nothing. She made no effort to be loved: it seemed quite simple to her that she should be; and if she was not, she did not trouble herself about it — which was why everyone loved her.

Christophe made another discovery, which gave him less pleasure. A baptism, it turned out, presupposes not only a godmother but a godfather, and the godfather has certain claims on the godmother that he is careful not to forgo, especially when the godmother is young and pretty. He realized this abruptly when he saw a farmer with curly blond hair and rings in his ears come up to Sabine, laughing, and kiss her on both cheeks. Instead of telling himself that he was a fool for having forgotten it, and a bigger fool still for taking offense, he held it against Sabine, as though she had deliberately lured him into this ambush. His ill humor grew when he found himself separated from her in the rest of the ceremony. Sabine turned around from time to time in the procession winding its way through the meadows, and threw him a friendly glance. He affected not to see her. She could tell he was angry; she guessed why; but it barely troubled her — she was rather amused by it. Even had she had a genuine falling-out with someone she loved, for all the pain it would have caused her, she would never have made the slightest effort to clear up the misunderstanding: it required too much trouble. Everything would sort itself out in the end.

At table, seated between the miller’s wife and a plump girl with red cheeks whom he had escorted to the church without deigning to pay her any attention, Christophe had the idea of looking at his neighbor; and, finding her passable, he paid her, by way of revenge, a noisy court calculated to attract Sabine’s attention. He succeeded; but Sabine was not the sort of woman to be jealous of anyone or anything: as long as she was loved, it mattered nothing to her whether others were loved or not; and instead of being piqued, she was delighted to see Christophe enjoying himself. From the far end of the table she gave him her most charming smile. Christophe was disconcerted; he no longer doubted Sabine’s indifference; and he fell back into his sulky silence, from which nothing could draw him out — neither teasing nor toasts. At last, as he was dozing off, asking himself furiously what he had come to do in the middle of this interminable feast, he failed to hear the miller propose a boat trip to take certain guests back to their farms. Nor did he notice Sabine signaling him to come to her side and take the same boat. By the time he thought of it, there was no room left for him; and he had to climb into another boat. This fresh disappointment would not have made him any more agreeable, had he not soon discovered that he would be dropping off nearly all his companions along the way. He relaxed then and put on a cheerful face for them. Besides, that lovely afternoon on the water, the pleasure of rowing, the good humor of these simple people, ended by dispelling all his ill humor. With Sabine no longer there, he stopped watching himself, and had no more scruples about enjoying himself frankly, like the others.

They were in three boats. They followed close on one another’s heels, each trying to pull ahead. They called cheerful insults from boat to boat. When the boats drew alongside each other, Christophe caught Sabine’s smiling glance; and he could not help smiling back at her: they felt that peace had been made. For he knew that soon they would be going home together.

They began to sing four-part songs. Each group in turn would take a verse; the chorus was taken up by all together. The boats, spread out along the water, answered each other in echoes. The sounds glided over the surface like birds. From time to time a boat would pull up to the bank: one or two peasants would climb out; they stood at the edge and waved to the boats drifting away. The little party scattered. Voices dropped away one by one from the concert. In the end, there were only three of them: Christophe, Sabine, and the miller.

They came back in the same boat, floating downstream with the current. Christophe and Bertold held the oars but did not row. Sabine, seated at the stern facing Christophe, chatted with her brother and watched Christophe. This conversation allowed them to look at each other in peace. They could never have done so if the lying words had fallen silent. The words seemed to say: “It is not you I see.” But the eyes said: “Who are you? Who are you? You whom I love!… you whom I love, whoever you may be!…”

The sky clouded over; mists rose from the meadows; the river steamed; the sun went out in a haze of vapors. Sabine drew her small black shawl around her shoulders and head, shivering. She seemed tired. As the boat, following the bank, slid beneath the outstretched branches of the willows, she closed her eyes: her tiny face was wan; her lips held a pained fold; she no longer moved --- she seemed to be suffering --- to have suffered --- to be dead. Christophe felt his heart clench. He leaned toward her. She opened her eyes again, saw Christophe’s anxious gaze questioning her, and smiled at him. It was like a ray of sunlight. He asked quietly:

--- Are you unwell?

She shook her head and said:

--- I’m cold.

The two men spread their coats over her; they wrapped her feet, her legs, and her knees as one tucks a child into bed. She let them do it, and thanked them with her eyes. A fine, icy rain began to fall. They took up the oars and hurried back. Heavy clouds extinguished the sky. The river rolled waves of ink. Lights came on in farmhouse windows here and there across the fields. By the time they reached the mill, the rain was falling in torrents and Sabine was chilled to the bone.

A large fire was lit in the kitchen, and they waited for the downpour to pass. But it only redoubled, and the wind joined in. They had three leagues to cover by carriage to get back to town. The miller declared he would not let Sabine leave in weather like this, and he proposed that both of them spend the night at the farm. Christophe hesitated to accept; he sought guidance in Sabine’s eyes, but Sabine’s eyes were fixed stubbornly on the flames of the hearth, as though afraid of influencing Christophe’s decision. But when Christophe had said yes, she turned her flushing face toward him --- (was it the firelight’s reflection?) --- and he saw that she was glad.

A dear evening… The rain raged outside. The fire flung swarms of golden sparks into the black chimney. They gathered around it in a circle. Their fantastic silhouettes stirred on the wall. The miller was showing Sabine’s little girl how to make shadow figures with his hands. The child laughed and was not entirely reassured. Sabine, bent over the fire, was absently stirring it with a heavy poker; she was a little weary, and was daydreaming with a smile, while, without really listening, she nodded her head at the chatter of her sister-in-law, who was telling her about domestic matters. Christophe, seated in the shadow beside the miller, was gently tugging at the child’s hair and watching Sabine’s smile. She knew he was watching her. He knew she was smiling for him. They had no opportunity to speak to each other once that entire evening, nor to look each other in the face: they did not seek it.

They parted early. Their rooms were adjacent. An interior door connected them. Christophe automatically checked that the bolt had been drawn on Sabine’s side. He lay down and tried to sleep. The rain lashed the windowpanes. The wind howled in the chimney. A door banged on the floor above. A poplar, battered by the gale, creaked outside the window. Christophe could not close his eyes. He thought that they were under the same roof, beside her. A wall separated them. He heard no sound from Sabine’s room. But he believed he could see her. Raised up on his bed, he called to her softly through the wall, spoke tender and passionate words to her, held out his arms. And it seemed to him that she was reaching out her arms as well. He heard within himself the beloved voice answering him, repeating his words, calling to him in a whisper; and he did not know whether it was he who was speaking and answering, or whether she truly spoke. At a stronger call, he could resist no longer: he threw himself out of bed; groping in the darkness, he approached the door; he did not want to open it, he felt reassured by this closed door. And as he touched the handle again, he saw that the door was opening…

He was seized with fright. He drew it softly shut, then opened it again, then shut it once more. Had it not been locked just now? Yes, he was certain of it. Who then had opened it?… The beating of his heart was suffocating him. He leaned against his bed, sat down to breathe; he was overwhelmed by passion. It robbed him of the power to see, to hear, to make any movement: his whole body was seized with trembling. He felt terror before this unknown joy, which he had been summoning for months and which was there, close to him, with nothing any longer standing between them. This violent young man, possessed by love, suddenly felt nothing but dread and revulsion before his desire fulfilled. He was ashamed of it, ashamed of what he was about to do. He loved too much to dare to possess what he loved; he shrank from it rather: he would have done everything to avoid being happy. To love, to love --- is it possible only at the price of profaning what one loves?…

He had gone back to the door; and, trembling with love and fear, his hand on the latch, he could not bring himself to open it.

And on the other side of the door, her bare feet on the floor, shivering with cold, Sabine stood.

Thus they hesitated… how long? Minutes? Hours?… They did not know that the other was there; and yet they knew. They reached out their arms --- he, crushed by a love so powerful that he lacked the courage to enter --- she, calling to him, waiting for him, and trembling lest he enter… And when he finally resolved to enter, she had just resolved to push the bolt.

Then he called himself a fool. He pressed on the door with all his force. His mouth pressed to the lock, he pleaded:

--- Open!

He called to Sabine, barely above a whisper; she could hear his gasping breath. She remained near the door, motionless, frozen, her teeth chattering, with no strength either to open or to go back to bed…

The storm went on making the trees crack and the doors of the house slam… They each returned to their beds, their bodies broken, their hearts full of sadness. The cocks crowed in hoarse voices. The first glimmers of dawn appeared through the misted panes. A wretched dawn, pale and bleached, drowned in the relentless rain…

Christophe rose as soon as he could; he went down to the kitchen and talked with the household. He was eager to be gone, and he dreaded finding himself alone in Sabine’s presence. It was almost a relief when the farmer’s wife came to say that Sabine was unwell, that she had caught cold on yesterday’s excursion, and that she would not be leaving this morning.

The journey back was dismal. He had refused the carriage and was returning on foot through the wet countryside, in the yellowish fog that wrapped the earth, the trees, the houses, in a shroud. Like the light, life itself seemed extinguished. Everything had the look of ghosts. He was like a ghost himself.

At home, he found irritated faces. Everyone was scandalized that he had spent the night, God knew where, with Sabine. He shut himself in his room and set to work. Sabine returned the next day and shut herself in on her side. They took care not to meet. The weather, besides, was rainy and cold: neither of them went out. They saw each other through their closed windows. Sabine sat wrapped up by the fireside and brooded. Christophe was buried in his papers. They greeted each other from window to window with a slightly cold reserve, then pretended to be absorbed once more in what they were doing. They could not say exactly what they felt: they resented each other, they resented themselves, they resented things in general. The night at the farm had been pushed from their thoughts: they blushed at it, and did not know whether they blushed more at their madness or at not having yielded to it. It was painful to see each other, for the sight recalled memories they wished to flee; and by unspoken agreement they each withdrew to the depths of their rooms, to forget one another entirely. But this was impossible, and they suffered from the secret hostility they felt between them. Christophe was haunted by the expression of mute rancor he had once glimpsed on Sabine’s frozen face. She suffered no less from these thoughts; however hard she fought them, even denied them, she could not free herself from them. To these was added the shame that Christophe had guessed what was passing within her --- and the shame of having offered herself… the shame of having offered herself and yet not having given herself.

Christophe eagerly accepted the opportunity that presented itself to play in a few concerts at Cologne and at Düsseldorf. He was glad to spend two or three weeks away from home. The preparation of these concerts and the composition of a new work he intended to perform there absorbed him entirely, and he finally forgot the troublesome memories. They were fading from Sabine’s mind as well, as she was reclaimed by the torpor of her habitual life. They came to think of each other with indifference. Had they truly loved each other? They doubted it. Christophe was on the verge of leaving for Cologne without having said goodbye to Sabine.

The evening before his departure, something --- he could not have said what --- brought them together again. It was one of those Sunday afternoons when everyone was at church. Christophe too had gone out to finish his preparations for the journey. Sabine, seated in her tiny garden, was warming herself in the last rays of sunlight. Christophe came back: he was in a hurry, and his first impulse on seeing her was to greet her and pass on. But something held him back as he was passing: was it Sabine’s pallor, or some indefinable feeling --- remorse, fear, tenderness?… He stopped, turned toward Sabine, and leaning on the garden fence, he wished her good evening. Without replying, she held out her hand. Her smile was full of kindness --- a kindness he had never seen in her before. Her gesture seemed to say: “Peace between us…” He took her hand across the railing, leaned over it, and kissed it. She made no effort to draw it back. He wanted to fall to his knees and say to her: “I love you”… They looked at each other in silence. But they said nothing. After a moment, she freed her hand and turned her head away. He looked away too, to hide his emotion. Then they looked at each other again with calmer eyes. The sun was setting. Subtle tints, violet, orange, and mauve, ran through the cold, clear sky. She gathered her shawl more closely around her shoulders with a habitual gesture of hers. He asked:

--- How are you?

She gave a little shrug, as if it were not worth answering. They went on watching each other, happy. It seemed to them that they had lost each other and had just found each other again…

He broke the silence at last, and said:

--- I’m leaving tomorrow.

Sabine’s face fell:

--- You’re leaving? she repeated.

He hurried to add:

--- Oh, only for two or three weeks.

--- Two or three weeks! she said with a look of dismay.

He explained that he had committed himself to the concerts, but that once he was back he would not stir for the whole winter.

--- Winter, she said, is a long way off…

--- Not at all, he said, it will come before you know it.

She shook her head, without looking at him.

--- When will we see each other again? she said, after a moment.

He did not quite understand the question: he had already answered it.

--- As soon as I’m back: in two weeks, three at most.

She kept her stricken look. He tried to make light of it:

--- The time won’t drag, he said. You’ll sleep through it.

--- Yes, said Sabine.

She was looking at the ground, trying to smile; but her lip trembled.

--- Christophe!… she said suddenly, looking up at him.

There was a note of distress in her voice. She seemed to be saying:

--- Stay! Don’t leave!…

He seized her hand, he looked at her, he did not understand the importance she attached to this journey of two weeks; but he was waiting only for a word from her to say to her:

--- I’ll stay…

At the moment she was about to speak, the street door opened and Rosa appeared. Sabine withdrew her hand from Christophe’s and hurried inside. On the threshold, she looked at him once more --- and vanished.

Christophe expected to see her again that evening. But, watched by the Vogels, followed everywhere by his mother, and behind as always in his preparations for the journey, he could not find a single moment to slip away from home.

The next day he left very early. Passing in front of Sabine’s door, he felt the urge to go in, to knock at the window: it pained him to leave without having said goodbye to her --- for Rosa had interrupted him before he’d had the chance. But he thought she was asleep, and that she would resent being woken. Besides, what would he say to her? It was too late now to give up the trip; and what if she asked him to?… In truth, he would not admit to himself that he was not entirely displeased to test his power over her --- to cause her a little pain, if need be… He did not take seriously the grief his departure would cause Sabine; and he thought this brief absence would deepen whatever tenderness she might have for him.

He hurried to the station. For all that, he felt a few pangs of remorse. But as soon as the train began to move, everything was forgotten; he felt his heart brimming with youth. He saluted the old city cheerfully, its rooftops and the tops of its towers blushing in the morning sun; and with the carelessness of those who leave, he said farewell to those who stayed behind and thought no more of them.

For the entire time he was in Düsseldorf and Cologne, Sabine did not cross his mind once. Absorbed from morning to night by rehearsals and concerts, by dinners and conversations, occupied with a thousand new things and with the proud satisfaction of his successes, he had no time to remember. Only once, on the fifth night after his departure, waking suddenly from a nightmare, he realized he had been thinking of her in his sleep, and that this thought had woken him; but he could not remember how he had been thinking of her. He felt anxious and unsettled. That was hardly surprising: he had played that evening in a concert, and coming out of the hall he had let himself be drawn to a late supper where he had drunk several glasses of champagne. Unable to sleep, he got up. A musical idea was haunting him. He told himself it was this that had been tormenting him in his sleep, and he wrote it down. Reading it back, he was struck to see how sad it was. He had felt no sadness while writing it --- at least, so it seemed to him. But he recalled that at other times, when he was sad, he could write only joyful music, whose gaiety wounded him. He did not dwell on it further. He was accustomed, without understanding them, to the surprises of his inner world. He fell back asleep immediately, and remembered nothing the next morning.

He extended his trip by three or four days. He enjoyed prolonging it, knowing that he had only to wish it to return at once: he was in no hurry to go home. It was only in the railway carriage, on the way back, that the thought of Sabine returned to him. He had not written to her. He had been so careless, in fact, that he had not even troubled to collect at the post office any letters that might have been sent to him. He took a secret pleasure in this silence; he knew that back home someone was waiting for him, that someone loved him… Loved him? She had never told him so, he had never told her. No doubt they knew it without needing to say it. And yet, nothing equaled the certainty of that avowal. Why had they waited so long to make it? Whenever they were on the verge of speaking, something --- always some chance thing, some awkwardness --- had stopped them. Why? Why? How much time they had lost!… He burned to hear the dear words fall from those beloved lips. He burned to say them to her; he said them aloud, in his empty compartment. As he drew nearer, impatience gripped him, a kind of anguish… Faster! Faster! Oh! To think that in an hour he would see her again!…

It was half past six in the morning when he entered the house. No one was up yet. Sabine’s windows were closed. He crossed the courtyard on tiptoe so she would not hear him. He laughed at the thought of surprising her. He went up to his room. His mother was asleep. He washed and dressed without a sound. He was hungry, but he was afraid of waking Louisa by rummaging in the sideboard. In the courtyard he heard footsteps; he gently opened his window and saw Rosa, who, up first as usual, was beginning to sweep. He called to her in a low voice. She started with surprised delight at the sight of him; then she put on a stern expression. He thought she was still angry with him; but he was in excellent spirits just then. He went down to her.

--- Rosa, Rosa, he said in a cheerful voice, give me something to eat, or I’ll eat you! I’m dying of hunger!

Rosa smiled and led him into the ground-floor kitchen. As she poured him a bowl of milk, she could not help pelting him with a stream of questions about his trip and his concerts. But although he was inclined to answer --- (in the happiness of being back, he was almost glad to find Rosa’s chatter again) --- Rosa kept breaking off abruptly in the middle of her questions; her face would fall, she would look away, she seemed troubled. Then the chatter would resume; but it seemed she blamed herself for it, and again she would stop short. He finally noticed and said:

--- What’s the matter with you, Rosa? Are you sulking?

She shook her head vigorously to say no; and, turning toward him with her usual bluntness, she took his arm in both her hands:

--- Oh! Christophe!… she said.

He was seized with a sudden dread. He let fall the piece of bread he was holding.

--- What! What is it? he said.

She kept repeating:

--- Oh! Christophe!… Something terrible has happened!…

He pushed back the table. He stammered:

--- Here?

She gestured toward the house on the other side of the courtyard.

He cried out:

--- Sabine!

She wept:

--- She is dead.

Christophe saw nothing more. He rose; he felt himself falling; he clutched at the table, overturning everything on it; he tried to cry out. He was wracked with agonizing pain. He was seized with nausea.

Rosa, terrified, hovered around him; she held his head, weeping.

As soon as he could speak, he said:

--- It isn’t true!

He knew it was true. But he wanted to deny it, he wanted to undo what had been done. When he saw Rosa’s face streaming with tears, he could doubt no longer, and he sobbed.

Rosa raised her head:

--- Christophe! she said.

Collapsed over the table, he had hidden his face. She bent toward him:

--- Christophe!… Mama is coming!…

Christophe straightened up:

--- No, no, he said, I don’t want her to see me.

She took his hand and guided him, stumbling, blinded by his tears, to a small woodshed that opened onto the courtyard. She closed the door behind them. They found themselves in darkness. He sat down wherever he could, on a chopping block used for splitting wood. She sat on some bundles of kindling. The sounds from outside reached them muffled and distant. Here he could weep without fear of being heard. He gave himself over to his sobs with a fury. Rosa had never seen him cry; she had never even imagined he could cry; she knew only her own girlish tears, and this man’s despair filled her with dread and pity. She felt for Christophe a passionate love. That love had nothing selfish about it: it was an immense need for self-sacrifice, a maternal abnegation, a thirst to suffer for him, to take all his pain upon herself. She put her arm over his shoulder:

--- Dear Christophe, she said, don’t cry!

Christophe turned away:

--- I want to die!

Rosa clasped her hands:

--- Don’t say that, Christophe!

--- I want to die. I cannot go on… I cannot go on living… What is the use of living?

--- Christophe, my dear Christophe! You are not alone. You are loved…

--- What does that matter to me? I love nothing anymore. The rest of the world may live or die. I love nothing, I loved only her, only her!

He sobbed more violently, his face hidden in his hands. Rosa could say nothing more. The selfishness of Christophe’s passion stabbed her. At the very moment when she thought she was closest to him, she felt more isolated and more wretched than ever. Grief, instead of bringing them together, separated them still further. She wept bitterly.

After a while, Christophe broke off weeping and asked:

--- But how? How?…

Rosa understood:

--- She caught influenza the evening you left. She was carried off at once…

He moaned:

--- My God!… Why didn’t someone write to me?

She said:

--- I did write. I didn’t know your address: you had told us nothing. I went to the theater to ask. No one knew it there.

He knew how shy she was, and how much that errand must have cost her. He asked:

--- Did she… did she ask you to do it?

She shook her head:

--- No. But I thought…

He thanked her with a look. Rosa’s heart melted.

--- My poor… poor Christophe! she said.

She threw herself around his neck, weeping. Christophe felt the worth of this pure tenderness. He had such need of being consoled! He embraced her:

--- You are good, he said. So you loved her, then?

She drew back from him; she gave him a passionate look, said nothing, and began to weep again.

That look was a revelation to him. That look said:

--- It was not her I loved…

Christophe saw at last what he had not known --- what he had not wanted to see for months. He saw that she loved him.

--- Hush! she said. Someone is calling me.

They could hear Amalia’s voice.

Rosa asked:

--- Do you want to go back to your room?

He said:

--- No, I couldn’t yet, I couldn’t talk to my mother… Later…

She said:

--- Stay. I’ll be back soon.

He stayed in the dark woodshed, where a thread of daylight fell from a narrow air vent draped in cobwebs. A street vendor’s cry could be heard outside; against the wall, in a neighboring stable, a horse snorted and stamped its hoof. The revelation Christophe had just had gave him no pleasure; but it occupied his mind for a moment. He now understood many things that had puzzled him before. A host of small details he had paid no attention to came back to him and became clear. He was astonished to find himself thinking about this, indignant at letting himself be distracted, even for a single minute, from his misery. But that misery was so atrocious, so unbearable, that the instinct of self-preservation, stronger than his will, his courage, his love, compelled him to look away from it, and flung itself upon this new thought, as a drowning man despite himself grasps the first object that might help him --- not to save himself, but to keep himself above water a moment longer. Besides, it was because he was suffering that he now felt what another was suffering --- suffering on his account. He understood the tears he had just caused to be shed. He pitied Rosa. He thought how cruel he had been to her --- how cruel he would be still. For he did not love her. What good did it do that she loved him? Poor girl!… He told himself she was good --- she had just proved it. But what did her goodness matter to him? What did her life matter to him?… He thought:

--- Why is it not she who is dead, and the other who is alive?

He thought:

--- She lives, she loves me, she can tell me so today, tomorrow, all my life; --- and the other, the only one I love, she is dead without having told me she loved me, I never told her I loved her, I shall never hear her say it, she will never know…

And the memory of their last evening came back to him all at once: he recalled that they were about to speak, when Rosa’s arrival had prevented them. And he hated Rosa…

The door of the woodshed opened again. Rosa called Christophe in a low voice, searched for him in the dark by touch. She took his hand. He felt a revulsion at having her close to him: he reproached himself for it in vain, it was stronger than he was.

Rosa was silent: the depth of her compassion had taught her silence. Christophe was grateful to her for not troubling his grief with useless words. Yet he wanted to know… she was the only one who could speak to him of her. He asked in a whisper:

--- When did she…?

(He did not dare say: die.)

She answered:

--- It will be a week ago last Saturday.

A memory passed through his mind. He said:

--- In the night.

Rosa looked at him, surprised, and said:

--- Yes, in the night, between two and three o’clock.

The funeral melody came back to him.

He asked, trembling:

--- Did she suffer much?

--- No, no, thank God, dear Christophe, she scarcely suffered at all. She was so weak! She put up no resistance. From the very first, one could see she was lost.

--- And she --- did she know it?

--- I don’t know. I think so…

--- Did she say anything?

--- No, nothing. She moaned, like a little child.

--- Were you there?

--- Yes, the first two days I was there alone, before her brother came.

He squeezed her hand in a surge of gratitude.

--- Thank you.

She felt the blood rush back to her heart.

After a silence, he said --- he stammered the question that was choking him:

--- She said nothing… about me?

Rosa shook her head sadly. She would have given much to be able to give him the answer he was waiting for; she almost blamed herself for not knowing how to lie. She tried to console him:

--- She was no longer conscious.

--- Was she speaking?

--- One could not make it out very well. She spoke very softly.

--- Where is the little girl?

--- Her brother took her home with him, to his part of the country.

--- And she?

--- She is there too. Last Monday, she left here.

They began to weep again.

Madame Vogel’s voice called Rosa back inside. Christophe, alone once more, relived those days of death. Eight days --- it had already been eight days… O God! What had become of her? How it had rained that week, over the earth!… And he, all that time, had been laughing, had been happy!

He felt in his pocket a packet wrapped in tissue paper: they were silver buckles he had brought back for her shoes. He remembered the evening when his hand had rested on the small unshod foot. Her little feet --- where were they now? How cold they must be!… He thought that the memory of that warm contact was the only one he had of that beloved body. He had never dared to touch her, to take her in his arms, to press her against him. She had gone, wholly unknown to him, forever. He knew nothing of her, neither her soul nor her flesh. He had not one memory of her form, her life, her love… Her love?… What proof did he have of it?… He had not a single letter, not a single relic --- nothing. Where could he seize her, where could he seek her, within himself, outside himself?… O nothingness! Nothing of her remained to him except the love he bore her; only that remained to him --- And yet, despite everything, his maddened desire to snatch her from destruction, his need to deny death, made him cling to this last wreckage, in an act of desperate faith:

« … Ne son gia morto ; e ben c’albergo cangi, resto in te vivo, c’or mi vedi e piangi, se l’un nell’altro amante si trasforma. »

… I am not dead; and though I change my dwelling, I remain alive in you, who see me and weep. In the soul of the lover, the beloved soul is transformed.

He had never read those sublime words; but they were already within him. Each person in turn climbs again the calvary of the centuries. Each person rediscovers the sorrows, each person rediscovers the desperate hope and the madness of the centuries. Each person sets his steps in the steps of those who were, of those who struggled before him against death, denied death --- and are dead.

He shut himself away in his room. His shutters remained closed all day long, so as not to see the windows of the house across the street. He avoided the Vogel family: they were hateful to him. He had nothing to reproach them with: they were too decent, and too pious, not to have silenced their feelings in the face of death. They knew of Christophe’s grief and they respected it, whatever they might think of it; they took care not to pronounce Sabine’s name in front of him. But they had been her enemies when she lived: that was enough for him to be theirs, now that she lived no more.

Besides, they had not changed any of their noisy habits; and despite the sincere but fleeting pity they had felt, it was evident that at bottom this misfortune was a matter of indifference to them --- (which was only too natural) --- : they might even have felt a secret sense of relief. Christophe at least imagined as much. Now that the Vogels’ intentions toward him were becoming clear, he was inclined to exaggerate them. In reality, they cared very little about him; and he attributed too much importance to himself. But he had no doubt that Sabine’s death, by removing the principal obstacle to his hosts’ plans, seemed to them to leave the field open for Rosa. And so he detested her. That someone --- (the Vogels, Louisa, even Rosa) --- had tacitly disposed of him, without even consulting him, would have been enough in any situation to strip away all his feeling for the one he was supposed to love. He reared up each time anyone seemed to touch his bristling freedom. But here he was not the only one concerned. The rights others were arrogating over him did not merely infringe on his rights, but on those of the dead woman to whom his heart had given itself. And so he defended them fiercely, though no one was attacking them. He suspected the kindness of Rosa, who suffered to see him suffer, and who often came to knock on his door to console him and speak to him of the other. He did not turn her away: he needed to speak of Sabine with someone who had known her; he wanted to know the smallest details of what had happened during the illness. But he felt no gratitude toward Rosa for this; he attributed interested motives to her heart. Could he not see that the family --- even Amalia --- permitted these visits and these long conversations, which she would never have allowed if she had not found something to gain from them? Was Rosa not in agreement with her family? He could not believe that her compassion was entirely sincere and free of personal thoughts.

And indeed, it was not entirely sincere. Rosa pitied Christophe with all her heart. She made an effort to see Sabine through Christophe’s eyes, to love her through him; she reproached herself severely for the ill feelings she had harbored against her, and asked her forgiveness in her evening prayers. But could she forget that she herself was alive, that she saw Christophe at every hour of the day, that she loved him, that she need no longer fear the other, that the other was fading away, that even her memory would fade in turn, that she alone remained, that perhaps one day… ? Could she, in the midst of her grief, amid the grief of her friend --- which was more her own than her own --- could she suppress a sudden surge of joy, an unreasoning hope? She reproached herself for it afterward. It was no more than a flash. It was enough. He had seen it. He threw her a look that froze her heart: she read hateful thoughts in it; he held it against her that she was alive, when the other was dead.

The miller came with his cart to collect Sabine’s few pieces of furniture. Coming home from a lesson, Christophe saw spread out before the door, in the street, the bed, the wardrobe, the mattresses, the linen, everything that had been hers, everything that remained of her. It was an odious sight. He hurried past. Under the archway he ran into Bertold, who stopped him:

--- Ah! my dear monsieur, he said, wringing his hand effusively, well! who would have thought it when we were all together? How happy we all were! And yet it was from that day, from that accursed trip on the water, that she began to go downhill. Well! there is no use complaining! She is dead. After her, it will be our turn. That is life… And you, how are you? Me, very well, God be thanked!

He was red-faced, sweating, and smelled of wine. The thought that this was her brother, that he had rights over her memory, wounded Christophe. He suffered to hear this man speak of the woman he loved. The miller, for his part, was glad to find a friend with whom to talk about Sabine; he could not understand Christophe’s coldness. He had no idea of all the suffering that his presence, the sudden evocation of the day at the farm, the happy memories he recalled so heavily, the poor relics of Sabine scattered across the ground, which he pushed aside with his foot as he talked, stirred up in Christophe’s soul. The mere name of Sabine, each time it returned to the miller’s lips, tore at Christophe. He searched for a pretext to silence Bertold. He made for the staircase; but the other clung to him, stopping him on the steps, continuing his account. At last, as the miller recounted Sabine’s illness with the strange pleasure that certain people --- especially working people --- take in speaking of illnesses, with a profusion of distressing details, Christophe could bear it no longer: (he was bracing himself so as not to cry out in pain), he cut him off sharply:

--- Forgive me, he said, with an icy curtness, I must leave you.

He left him without another word.

This insensitivity revolted the miller. He had not failed to guess the secret attachment between his sister and Christophe. That Christophe should display such indifference struck him as monstrous: he concluded that Christophe had no heart.

Christophe had fled to his room: he was suffocating. For as long as the removal lasted, he did not leave his apartment. He had sworn not to look out the window, but he could not help himself; and, hidden in a corner behind his curtains, he followed the departure of those beloved belongings with anguished attention. Watching them disappear forever, he was on the verge of running into the street, of crying out: “No! No! Leave them to me! Don’t take them away!” He wanted to beg that at least one object, just one object, be given to him, that she not be taken from him entirely. But how could he have dared to ask the miller? He was nothing to him. His love --- even she had not known of it: how could he have dared to reveal it to another? And if he had tried to say a word, he would have burst into sobs… No, no, he had to stay silent, he had to witness this total disappearance without being able to --- without daring to do anything to save a fragment from the wreck…

And when it was all over, when the house was empty, when the carriage gate had closed behind the miller, when the wheels of the cart had moved away, rattling the windowpanes, when their sound faded, he threw himself on the floor, without a single tear left, without a single thought with which to suffer or to struggle, frozen, as though dead himself.

There was a knock at the door. He lay still. There was another knock. He had forgotten to lock the door. Rosa came in. She let out a cry when she saw him lying on the floor, and stopped, frightened. He raised his head, furiously:

--- What? What do you want? Leave me alone!

She did not go; she remained, hesitating, leaning against the door, repeating:

--- Christophe…

He rose in silence; he was ashamed that she had seen him like that. Brushing himself off with his hand, he asked harshly:

--- Well, what do you want?

Rosa, flustered, said:

--- Forgive me… Christophe… I came in… I was bringing you…

He saw that she was holding something in her hand.

--- Here, she said, holding it out to him. I asked Bertold to give me a keepsake of her. I thought it would please you…

It was a small silver hand mirror, the pocket mirror she used to gaze into for hours, less out of vanity than from having nothing to do. Christophe took it, and seized the hand that held it out:

--- Oh! Resi!… he said.

He was moved by her kindness, and by the sense of his own injustice. In a passionate gesture, he knelt before her and kissed her hand:

--- Forgive me… forgive me… he said.

Rosa did not understand at first; then she understood all too well; she blushed, she trembled, she began to weep. She understood that he meant:

Forgive me for being unjust… forgive me for not loving you… forgive me for not being able to… for not being able to love you, for never being able to love you!…

She did not take her hand away; she knew it was not her that he was kissing. And with his cheek resting on Rosa’s hand, he wept in great hot tears, knowing that she could read him through and through: he felt a bitter sorrow at being unable to love her, at causing her pain.

They remained like that, both weeping, in the gathering dusk of the room.

At last she freed her hand. He went on murmuring:

--- Forgive me!…

She laid her hand gently on his head. He rose. They embraced in silence, and felt on their lips the sharp taste of their tears.

--- We will always be friends, he said very softly.

She shook her head, and left him, too sad to speak.

They both felt that the world is badly made. The one who loves is not loved. The one who is loved does not love. The one who loves and is loved is, sooner or later, one day separated from his love… One suffers. One causes suffering. And the most wretched is not always the one who suffers.

Christophe began again to flee the house. He could no longer live there. He could not face the uncurtained windows, the empty apartment.

He came to know a crueler grief. Old Euler hastened to rent out the ground floor again. One day, Christophe saw unfamiliar faces in Sabine’s room. New lives were erasing the last traces of the vanished life.

It became impossible for him to stay at home. He spent whole days outside; he returned only at nightfall, when he could no longer see anything. Once more he took up his walks in the countryside. They drew him irresistibly back to Bertold’s farm. But he did not go in; he did not dare to draw near; he circled around it from a distance. He had found a spot on a hill from which one could look down over the farm, the plain, and the river: this became his habitual destination. From there, he followed with his eyes the meanders of the water, all the way to the clumps of willows beneath which he had watched the shadow of death pass across Sabine’s face. From there, he could make out the two windows of the rooms where they had kept watch, side by side, so close, so far apart, separated by a door --- the door of eternity. From there, he looked down over the cemetery. He had not been able to bring himself to go in: since childhood he had felt a horror of those rotting fields, and refused to attach to them the image of those he loved. But from above and from a distance, the little field of the dead had nothing sinister about it; it was calm, it slept in the sunlight… To sleep!… She had loved to sleep! Nothing would disturb her there. The crowing of cocks called to one another across the plain. From the farm rose the humming of the mill, the cackling of the poultry yard, the cries of the children at play. He could see Sabine’s little girl; he watched her run; he could make out her laughter. Once, he lay in wait for her near the farm gate, in a bend of the sunken lane that ran around the walls; he seized her as she passed and kissed her wildly. The child was frightened and began to cry. She had nearly forgotten him already. He asked her:

--- Are you happy here?

--- Yes, I’m having fun…

--- You don’t want to come back?

--- No!

He had let her go. The child’s indifference crushed him. Poor Sabine!… And yet this was her, a little of her… So little! The child did not resemble her mother: she had passed through her, but was not her; from that mysterious passage the child had barely kept the faintest perfume of the vanished being---a turn of voice, a small pursing of the lips, a way of tilting the head. The rest of the person was an entirely different being; and that being, mingled with Sabine’s, repelled Christophe, though he would not admit it to himself.

It was only within himself that Christophe found Sabine’s image again. She followed him everywhere, floating around him; but he only truly felt her presence when he was alone. Nowhere was she closer to him than in that refuge on the hill, far from all eyes, in the midst of countryside full of her memory. He would walk miles to get there, climbing it at a run, heart pounding, as if to a rendezvous---and so it was, in fact. The moment he arrived he lay down on the ground---that same ground where her body lay---and closed his eyes: and she flooded through him. He could not see her features, could not hear her voice; he had no need of them; she entered him, took hold of him, and he possessed her entirely. In that state of passionate hallucination he had not even the strength to think; he did not know what was happening, he knew nothing, except that he was with her.

That state lasted only briefly. --- To tell the truth, it was entirely genuine only once. By the following day, the will had already begun to play a part in it. And from then on, Christophe strained in vain to make it live again. It was only then that he thought to evoke Sabine’s exact figure and form within himself---until that moment, the idea had not occurred to him. He succeeded, in flashes, and those moments illuminated him completely. But they cost him hours of waiting and darkness.

--- Poor Sabine! he thought. They are all forgetting you, I alone love you, I alone keep you forever, O my precious treasure! I have you, I hold you, I will not let you slip away!…

He spoke this way because she was already slipping away: she fled from his thought like water through fingers, and still he kept returning, faithful to the rendezvous. He would will himself to think of her and close his eyes. But it would happen, after half an hour, an hour, sometimes two hours, that he would realize he had thought of nothing at all. The sounds of the valley, the churning of the sluice gates, the bells of two goats grazing on the hill, the sound of wind in the small spare trees at whose foot he lay---all of it soaked into his porous, yielding thought like into a sponge. He grew indignant with his own mind: it struggled to obey him, to hold fast to the vanished image to which he wished to anchor his life; but his mind fell back, exhausted and sore, and surrendered once more, with a sigh of relief, to the lazy current of sensation.

He shook off his torpor. He roamed the countryside in every direction, searching for Sabine. He looked for her in the mirror where her smile had once passed. He looked for her at the edge of the river where her hands had dipped. But mirror and water gave back only his own reflection. The excitement of walking, the fresh air, his vigorous blood beating through him, woke music in him. He tried to deceive himself:

--- O Sabine!… he sighed.

He dedicated these songs to her, he set out to revive in his music his love and his grief… But try as he might, love and grief did come alive---yet poor Sabine had no part in it. Love and grief looked toward the future, not the past. Christophe could do nothing against his own youth. The sap rose in him with renewed impetuosity. His sorrow, his regrets, his chaste and burning love, his stifled desires---all of it inflamed his fever. In spite of his mourning, his heart beat with vigorous and joyful rhythms; bold songs leaped on intoxicated meters: everything celebrated life, even sadness took on the character of a celebration. Christophe was too honest to persist in deceiving himself, and he despised himself for it. But life carried him forward; and sad, his soul full of death and his body full of life, he surrendered to his reawakening force, to the delirious and absurd joy of living that grief, pity, despair, the tearing wound of irreparable loss, all the torments of death, do nothing but sharpen and intensify in the strong, ploughing their sides with a furious spur.

Christophe knew, besides, that he kept within him, in the underground retreats of the soul, an inaccessible, inviolable sanctuary where Sabine’s shadow was enclosed. The torrent of life could not carry it away. Each person carries within himself a kind of small cemetery for those he has loved. They sleep there for years without anything disturbing them. But a day comes---one knows it will---when the grave opens again. The dead emerge from their tombs and smile with their colorless lips---loving still, always---at the one who loves them, the beloved, in whose heart their memory rests, like a child asleep in its mother’s womb.

III ADA

After the rainy summer, autumn blazed. In the orchards, fruit weighed down every branch. Red apples gleamed like ivory marbles. Some trees were already hastily putting on their bright late-season plumage: the color of fire, the color of fruit, the color of ripe melon, of orange, of lemon, of savory cooking, of sizzling meat. Tawny glows kindled everywhere in the woods; and from the meadows rose the small pink flames of translucent autumn crocuses.

He was coming down a hill. It was a Sunday afternoon. He walked with long strides, almost running, carried along by the slope. He was humming a phrase whose rhythm had been haunting him since the start of his walk. Flushed and disheveled, he went along swinging his arms and rolling his eyes like a madman, when at a bend in the road he came suddenly face to face with a tall blonde girl who, perched on a wall and tugging with all her strength at a large branch, was greedily gorging herself on small purple plums. They were equally startled. She looked at him, wide-eyed, her mouth full; then she burst out laughing. He did the same. She was a pleasant sight, with her round face framed by curly blonde hair that formed a kind of haze of sunlight around her, her full rosy cheeks, her wide blue eyes, her nose slightly broad and impudently turned up, her small and very red mouth showing white teeth with strong, forward-jutting canines, her greedy chin, and her entire abundant person---tall and full-figured, well-made, solidly built. He called out to her:

--- Bon appétit!

and made to continue on his way. But she called after him:

--- Monsieur! Monsieur! Would you be kind enough to help me down? I can’t manage…

He came back and asked how she had managed to get up.

--- With my claws… It’s always easy to get up…

--- Especially when there are tempting fruits hanging just above your head…

--- Yes… But once you’ve eaten, you lose all your nerve. You can’t find your way back down.

He looked up at her perched there. He said:

--- You look perfectly fine up there. Stay put and keep still. I’ll come back to see you tomorrow. Good evening!

But he didn’t move, standing planted directly below her.

She pretended to be frightened, and begged him with little coaxing faces not to abandon her. They stood looking at each other, laughing. She said, pointing to the branch she was hanging from:

--- Would you like some?

Any respect for private property had failed to develop in Christophe since his wanderings with Otto; he accepted without hesitation. She amused herself by pelting him with plums. When he had finished eating, she said:

--- Now then!…

He took a mischievous pleasure in keeping her waiting. She grew impatient on her wall. At last he said:

--- Very well!

and held out his arms to her.

But at the moment of jumping, she thought better of it:

--- Wait! We need to make provisions first!

She picked the finest plums within her reach and filled her rounded bodice with them:

--- Careful! Don’t crush them!

He was almost tempted to do exactly that.

She leaned down from the wall and jumped into his arms. Though he was solid, he buckled under her weight and nearly tumbled over backward. They were the same height. Their faces touched. He kissed her lips, moist and sweet with the juice of the plums; and she returned his kiss without ceremony.

--- Where are you going? he asked.

--- I don’t know.

--- Were you walking alone?

--- No. I’m with some friends. But I’ve lost them… Hey ho! she suddenly cried out, calling with all her might.

Nothing answered.

She didn’t trouble herself further about it. They started walking at random, straight ahead.

--- And you, where are you going? she said.

--- I don’t know either.

--- Very well then. We’ll go together.

She took a plum from her half-open bodice and began to crunch it.

--- You’ll make yourself ill, he said.

--- Never! I eat them all day long.

Through the opening of her bodice he could see her chemise.

--- They’re quite warm now, she said.

--- Let’s see.

She held one out to him, laughing. He ate it. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, sucking at her fruit like a child. He had little idea how the adventure would end. It is probable that she at least had a notion. She was waiting.

--- Hey ho! cried a voice from the woods.

--- Hey ho! she answered… Ah! Here they are! she said to Christophe. It’s about time!

She thought, on the contrary, that it was rather unfortunate. But speech was not given to women so that they might say what they think… Thank God for that! Otherwise there would be no morality left on earth…

The voices drew closer. Her friends were about to emerge onto the road. She leaped across the roadside ditch, climbed the bank along its edge, and hid behind the trees. He watched her, astonished. She gestured imperiously for him to follow. He did. She plunged deeper into the woods.

--- Hey ho! she called again, once they were far enough away… They need to come looking for me! she explained to Christophe.

The people had stopped on the road and were listening to work out where the voice was coming from. They answered and entered the woods in their turn. But she did not wait for them. She amused herself by making wide zigzags left and right. They shouted themselves hoarse calling for her. She let them carry on, then would call out again from the opposite direction. At last they grew tired of it, and, certain that the best way to bring her back was not to look for her, they cried out:

--- Bon voyage!

and went off singing.

She was furious that they should care so little about her. She had perfectly well tried to shake them off; but she could not accept that they should take it so easily in stride. Christophe cut a rather foolish figure: this game of hide-and-seek with a girl he didn’t know was providing him only middling entertainment, and he gave no thought to taking advantage of their solitude. She thought no more of it than he did: in her irritation, she had forgotten Christophe entirely.

--- Oh, this is too much, she said, clapping her hands, they just leave me like that?

--- But, said Christophe, that’s what you wanted.

--- Not at all!

--- You were running away from them.

--- If I run away from them, that’s my business, not theirs. They’re supposed to come looking for me. What if I were lost?…

She was already feeling sorry for herself about what might have happened, if… if the opposite of what was had been.

--- Oh! I’m going to give them a piece of my mind! she said.

She turned back, striding fast.

On the road, she remembered Christophe, and looked at him again. --- But it was too late. She began to laugh. The little demon that had been in her a moment before was gone. While she waited for another to come, she regarded Christophe with indifferent eyes. And besides, she was hungry. Her stomach was reminding her that it was suppertime; she was eager to rejoin her friends at the inn. She took Christophe’s arm and leaned on it with all her weight, whimpering and claiming she was exhausted. This did not stop her from dragging Christophe along a slope at a run, shrieking and laughing like a madwoman.

They talked. She learned who he was; she did not know his name, and seemed to attach only moderate importance to his title of musician. He learned that she was a shopgirl at a milliner’s on the Kaisersstrasse---the most elegant street in town; her name was Adelheid---Ada, to her friends. Her walking companions were one of her colleagues from the same establishment and two very respectable young men, a clerk at the Weiller bank and a shop assistant at a large dry-goods store. They were making the most of their Sunday; they had decided to have dinner at the Pike Inn, which has a fine view over the Rhine, and then to return by boat.

The company was already settled at the inn when they arrived. Ada did not fail to make a scene with her friends: she complained of their cowardly desertion and introduced Christophe, saying that he had saved her. They paid no attention to her grievances; but they knew Christophe---the clerk by reputation, the shop assistant from having heard some pieces of his---he saw fit to hum one immediately---and the respect they showed him made an impression on Ada, all the more so because Myrrha, the other young woman---(her real name was Hansi, or Johanna)---a dark-haired girl with blinking eyes, a bony forehead, and drawn-back hair, a somewhat grimacing Chinese-looking face, but clever and not without charm, with her goat-like muzzle and her oily golden complexion---hastened to make advances to monsieur le Hof-Musicus. They asked him to be so good as to honor their dinner with his presence.

He had never found himself at such a feast; for everyone showered him with attentions, and the two women, as good friends do, tried to steal him from each other. Both of them courted him: Myrrha, with ceremonious manners and shifty eyes, pressing her leg against his under the table, --- Ada, shamelessly, playing with her beautiful dark eyes, her beautiful mouth, and all the seductive resources of her beautiful person. These rather coarse flirtations embarrassed and unsettled Christophe. These two bold young women were a change from the ungrateful faces that surrounded him at home. Myrrha interested him; he sensed she was more intelligent than Ada; but her obsequious ways and her ambiguous smile produced in him a mixture of attraction and repulsion. She could not compete with the radiance of life and pleasure that emanated from Ada; and she knew it well. When she saw that the match was lost for her, she did not press on, withdrew into herself, kept on smiling, and waited patiently for her moment. Ada, seeing herself mistress of the field, made no effort to press her advantage; what she had done was chiefly to annoy her friend: she had succeeded, and she was satisfied. But in playing the game she had caught herself in it. In Christophe’s eyes, she felt the passion she had kindled; and that passion was kindling in her as well. She fell silent, she ceased her vulgar teasing: they looked at each other in silence; they had the taste of their kiss still on their lips. From time to time, in bursts, they took noisy part in the jokes of the other guests; then they fell back into their silence, glancing at each other furtively. At last they no longer even looked at each other, as if they feared to betray themselves. Absorbed within themselves, they nursed their desire.

When the meal was over, they prepared to leave. They had two kilometers to cover, through the woods, to reach the boat landing. Ada was the first to rise, and Christophe followed her. They waited on the porch for the others to be ready; --- without speaking, side by side, in the thick fog that barely yielded to the single lantern lit outside the inn door. --- Myrrha was lingering in front of the mirror.

Ada seized Christophe’s hand and drew him along the side of the house, toward the garden, into the shadow. Under a balcony, from which a curtain of Virginia creeper hung down, they hid themselves. Heavy darkness surrounded them. They could not even see each other. The wind stirred the tops of the firs. He felt, twined between his fingers, the warm fingers of Ada, and the perfume of a heliotrope blossom she wore at her breast.

Abruptly, she drew him against her; Christophe’s mouth met Ada’s hair, damp with fog, kissed her eyes, her lashes, her nostrils, and her full cheeks, and the corner of her mouth, seeking, finding her lips, and staying fastened there.

The others had come out. Someone called:

--- Ada!…

They were motionless, barely breathing, pressing mouth to mouth and body to body.

They heard Myrrha:

--- They’ve gone on ahead.

Their companions’ footsteps faded into the night. They held each other tighter, in silence, stifling against their lips a passionate murmur.

A village clock struck in the distance. They tore themselves from their embrace. They would have to run to the landing. Without a word, they set off, arms and hands intertwined, matching their steps to each other’s pace --- a quick, decided little step, like hers. The road was deserted, the countryside empty of any living thing; they could not see ten paces ahead; they went, serene and sure, into the beloved night. They never stumbled against the stones of the path. As they were running late, they took a shortcut. The path, after descending for a time through the vineyards, began to climb again, and wound at length along the hillside. They heard, in the fog, the murmur of the river and the splashing paddles of the approaching boat. They left the path and ran across the fields. They found themselves at last on the bank of the Rhine, but still some distance from the landing. Their serenity was undisturbed by this. Ada had forgotten her evening weariness. It seemed to them they could have walked all night, like this, over the silent grass, in the drifting mist, heavier and denser along the river wrapped in a lunar whiteness. The boat’s siren bellowed; the invisible monster drew away ponderous. They said, laughing:

--- We’ll take the next one.

On the river’s shore, a gentle ripple of waves broke softly at their feet.

At the boat landing, they were told:

--- The last one just left.

Christophe’s heart beat faster. Ada’s hand gripped her companion’s arm more tightly:

--- Bah! she said. There’ll be another one tomorrow.

A few steps away, in a halo of fog, the faint glow of a lantern hanging from a post, on a terrace at the river’s edge. A little farther, a few lit windowpanes, a small inn.

They went into the tiny garden. The gravel crunched under their feet. They groped their way to the steps. Inside the house, when they entered, they were beginning to put out the lights. Ada, on Christophe’s arm, asked for a room. The room they were shown looked out on the little garden. Christophe, leaning from the window, saw the phosphorescent glimmer of the river, and the eye of the lantern, against whose glass long-winged mosquitoes were crushing themselves. The door closed again. Ada stood near the bed and smiled. He did not dare look at her. She did not look at him either; but through her lashes she followed Christophe’s every movement. The floorboards creaked at each step. Every small sound of the house could be heard. They sat on the bed and held each other in silence.

The flickering gleam from the garden went out. Everything went out…

The night… The abyss… Neither light nor consciousness… Being. The force of Being, dark and devouring. The all-powerful joy. The piercing joy. The joy that draws being in, as the void draws a stone. The whirlwind of desire that sucks away thought. The absurd and delirious Law of the blind and drunken worlds that spin in the night…

The night… Their mingled breath, the golden warmth of two bodies fusing together, the abysses of torpor into which they fall together… the night that is all nights, the hours that are centuries, the seconds that are death… The shared dreams, the words spoken with eyes closed, the soft and furtive touchings of bare feet seeking each other in half-sleep, the tears and the laughter, the happiness of loving each other in the emptiness of things, of sharing together the nothingness of sleep, the tumultuous images floating through the mind, the hallucinations of the murmuring night… The Rhine laps in a cove at the foot of the house; in the distance, its currents over shoals make a sound like light rain falling on sand. The ferry pontoon creaks and groans under the press of the water. The chain that moors it stretches and slackens with a clinking of worn iron. The river’s voice rises, filling the room. The bed seems a boat. They are carried side by side by the vertiginous current --- suspended in the void, like a bird that glides. The night grows blacker, and the void more void. They press more tightly against each other. Ada weeps, Christophe loses consciousness, they both disappear under the waves of the night…

The night… Death… --- Why come back to life?…

The early-morning light rubs at the damp windowpanes. The light of life rekindles in their languid bodies. He wakes. Ada’s eyes are watching him. Their heads rest on the same pillow. Their arms are entwined. Their lips touch. An entire life passes in a few minutes; days of sunlight, of greatness and calm…

“Where am I? And am I two? Am I still here? I no longer feel my own being. The infinite surrounds me: I have the soul of a statue, with wide tranquil eyes, filled with Olympian peace…”

They fall back into centuries of sleep. And the familiar sounds of dawn, the distant bells, a boat passing, two oars from which water drips, the footsteps on the path, caress without disturbing their sleeping happiness, reminding them that they are alive, and letting them savor it…

The boat that snorted outside the window tore Christophe from his stupor. They had agreed to leave at seven, so as to be back in town in time for their usual occupations. He whispered:

--- Can you hear?

She did not open her eyes; she smiled, she pursed her lips, she made an effort to kiss him, then let her head fall back onto Christophe’s shoulder… Through the windowpanes he saw the boat’s smokestack glide across the white sky, the empty gangway, and torrents of smoke. He grew drowsy again…

An hour slipped by without his noticing it. Hearing it strike, he started with surprise:

--- Ada!… he said softly in his friend’s ear. Hedi! he repeated. It’s eight o’clock.

Eyes still closed, she knit her brows and her mouth with bad humor.

--- Oh! let me sleep! she said.

And, freeing herself from his arms with a weary sigh, she turned her back to him and fell asleep again on the other side.

He lay stretched out beside her. An even warmth flowed through their two bodies. He began to dream. His blood flowed in broad, calm currents. His clear senses took in the slightest impressions with an ingenuous freshness. He delighted in his strength and his youth. He felt, without willing it, the pride of being a man. He smiled at his happiness, and felt himself alone: alone, as he had always been, perhaps still more alone, but without any sadness, with a divine solitude. No more fever. No more shadows. Nature could freely reflect itself in his serene soul. Lying on his back, facing the window, his eyes drowned in the dazzling air of luminous mist, he smiled:

--- How good it is to be alive!…

To live!… A boat passed… He thought suddenly of those who were alive no longer, of a boat that had passed where they had been together: he --- she --- … She?… Not this one, the one who sleeps beside him. --- She, the only one, the beloved, the poor little dead one. --- But who then is this one? How is she here? How did they come to this room, to this bed? He looks at her; he does not know her: she is a stranger; yesterday morning she did not exist for him. What does he know of her? --- He knows she is not intelligent. He knows she is not kind. He knows she is not beautiful at this moment, with her bloodless face swollen with sleep, her low forehead, her mouth open to breathe, her swollen taut lips set in a carp’s pout. He knows that he does not love her. And a sharp pain pierces him when he thinks that he has kissed those strange lips, from the very first minute, that he has taken that beautiful indifferent body, from the very first night they saw each other, --- and that the one he loved, he watched live and die beside him, and never dared to brush her hair, and will never know the perfume of her being. Nothing left. Everything has dissolved. The earth has taken everything from him. He did not defend her…

And while he leaned over the innocent sleeper and, studying her features, looked at her with unkind eyes, she felt his gaze. Uneasy at being watched, she made a great effort to lift her heavy eyelids, and to smile; and she said, with uncertain tongue, like a child waking:

--- Don’t look at me, I’m ugly…

She fell back at once, overcome by sleep, smiled again, murmured:

--- Oh! I’m so… so sleepy!…

and drifted back into her dreams.

He could not help laughing; he kissed tenderly her childlike mouth and nose. Then, after watching this great little girl sleep a moment longer, he stepped over her body and got up without a sound. She breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone, and stretched out full length across the empty bed. He took care not to wake her as he washed and dressed, though there was little risk of it; and when that was done, he sat on the chair by the window, looked at the misty, steaming river, which seemed to roll blocks of ice; and he sank into a reverie in which a music of melancholy pastorale floated.

From time to time, she would half-open her eyes, look at him vaguely, take a few seconds to recognize him, smile at him, and pass from one sleep into another. She asked him the time.

--- Quarter to nine.

She reflected, half-asleep:

--- What could quarter to nine possibly mean?

At half past nine, she stretched, sighed, and said she was getting up.

Ten o’clock struck before she had stirred. She was annoyed:

--- Striking again!… The hour is always advancing!…

He laughed and came to sit on the bed beside her. She put her arms around his neck and told him her dreams. He did not listen very attentively, and interrupted her with little tender words. But she hushed him and went on with great seriousness, as if these had been stories of the highest importance:

--- She was at dinner: the grand duke was there; Myrrha was a Newfoundland dog… no, a curly sheep, who was waiting at table… Ada had found a way to rise above the ground, to walk, to dance, to lie down in the air. It was quite simple, really; you only had to do… like this… like this…; and there it was…

Christophe made fun of her. She laughed too, a little stung that he laughed. She shrugged:

--- Ah! you don’t understand a thing!…

They had breakfast on her bed, from the same cup, with the same spoon.

She got up at last; she threw back her covers, put out her beautiful large white feet, her beautiful full legs, and let herself slide down to the bedside rug. Then she sat to catch her breath, and looked at her feet. At last, she clapped her hands and told him to leave; and as he did not hurry, she took him by the shoulders and pushed him to the door, which she locked behind her.

After she had dawdled to her heart’s content, looking about and stretching each of her lovely limbs, singing a sentimental lied in fourteen verses while she washed, splashing water in Christophe’s face as he drummed on the window, and picking the last rose from the garden on her way out, they took the boat. The fog had not yet lifted, but the sun was shining through it: they floated in the middle of a milky light. Ada, seated at the stern with Christophe, drowsy and sulky, grumbled that the light was hurting her eyes and that she would have a headache all day long. And since Christophe did not take her complaints seriously enough, she retreated into a sullen silence. Her eyes were barely open, and she had the charming gravity of children who have just woken up. But when an elegant lady came and sat not far from her at the next stop, she brightened immediately and made every effort to say refined and sentimental things to Christophe. She had reverted to the ceremonious “vous” with him.

Christophe was worrying about what she would say to her employer to excuse her lateness. She gave it little thought:

--- Bah! It’s not the first time.

--- The first time for what?…

--- That I’ve been late, she said, annoyed by the question.

He did not dare ask the cause of these previous latencies.

--- What will you tell her?

--- That my mother is sick, dead… how should I know?

He was troubled by how casually she spoke.

--- I wouldn’t want you to lie.

She took offense:

--- For one thing, I never lie… And besides, I can hardly tell her the truth…

He asked, half joking, half serious:

--- Why not?

She laughed, shrugged her shoulders, and told him he was crude and badly brought up, and that she had asked him not to address her with “tu” anymore.

--- Don’t I have the right to?

--- Not at all.

--- After what happened between us?

--- Nothing happened.

She looked at him with a laughing, defiant air; and even though she was joking, the most striking thing --- (he felt it) --- was that it would not have cost her much more to say it seriously, and to almost believe it herself. But some amusing memory must have cheered her, for she burst out laughing as she looked at Christophe and kissed him noisily, without caring about the people around them, who seemed unsurprised by it in any case.

He now accompanied her on all her outings, in the company of shop girls and store clerks whose vulgarity did not please him much, and whom he tried to lose along the way; but Ada, out of contrariness, was no longer inclined to wander off into the woods. When it rained, or when for some other reason they did not leave the city, he took her to the theater, the museum, the Thiergarten; for she liked to be seen with him. She even wanted him to accompany her to religious services; but he was so absurdly sincere that he refused to set foot inside a church now that he no longer believed --- (he had given up his organist position under another pretext) --- and at the same time, without knowing it, he had remained far too religious not to find Ada’s suggestion sacrilegious.

In the evenings he visited her. He would find Myrrha there, who lodged in the same building. Myrrha held no grudge against him; she extended her caressing, soft hand, made conversation about indifferent or risqué matters, and discreetly slipped away. The two women had never seemed better friends than since they had fewer reasons to be: they were always together. Ada had no secrets from Myrrha; she told her everything; Myrrha listened to everything; they both seemed to take equal pleasure in it.

Christophe felt ill at ease in the company of these two women. Their friendship, their strange conversations, their free manner, the crude way in which Myrrha in particular saw things and talked about them --- (less so in his presence than when he was not there; but Ada repeated it all to him), --- their indiscreet and talkative curiosity, constantly turning toward trivial subjects or toward a rather low sensuality, all this equivocal and faintly animal atmosphere troubled him deeply, yet interested him too; for he had known nothing like it. He was lost in the conversation of these two little creatures who talked fashion to each other, traded nonsense, laughed absurdly, and whose eyes lit up with pleasure whenever they were on the trail of a bawdy story. He felt relieved when Myrrha departed. These two women together were like a foreign country whose language he did not know. It was impossible to make himself understood: they were not even listening to him; they mocked the foreigner.

When he was alone with Ada, they continued to speak two different languages; but at least they made an effort, both of them, to understand each other. The truth was, the better he understood her, the less he understood her. She was the first woman he had ever known. For though poor Sabine had been one, he had never realized it: she had always remained for him a phantom of his heart. Ada undertook to help him make up for lost time. He in turn tried to solve the enigma of woman --- an enigma that perhaps is one only for those who seek a meaning in it.

Ada had no intelligence: that was the least of her faults. Christophe might have made peace with it, had she done the same. But though she was occupied entirely with foolishness, she pretended to understand matters of the mind; and she passed judgment on everything with confidence. She talked about music, she explained to Christophe what he knew best, she issued rulings and absolute vetoes. It was useless to try to persuade her of anything: she had pretensions and touchiness about everything; she was finicky, stubborn, vain; she would not --- she could not understand anything. If only she had consented to understand nothing at all! How much better he liked her when she was willing to resign herself to being what she was, simply, with her good qualities and her faults, instead of trying to impress others and herself!

In fact, she cared very little for thinking. She cared about eating, drinking, singing, dancing, shouting, laughing, sleeping; she wanted to be happy; and it would have been a fine thing already if she had succeeded. But though well equipped for it --- greedy, lazy, sensual, possessed of a candid selfishness that revolted and amused Christophe, in short, though she had nearly all the vices that make life agreeable to their lucky possessor, if not to his friends --- (and then again, does a happy face, provided it is pretty, not radiate happiness onto all who come near it?) --- despite so many reasons, then, to be satisfied with life and with herself, Ada did not even have the wit to be so. This beautiful, strong girl, fresh and cheerful, healthy-looking, of overflowing gaiety and fierce appetite, worried about her health. She groaned about her weakness while eating like four people. She complained of everything: she could barely drag herself around, she could barely breathe, she had a headache, her feet ached, her eyes ached, her stomach ached, her soul ached. She was afraid of everything; she was wildly superstitious; she saw signs everywhere: at table, knives and forks crossed, the number of guests, an overturned salt cellar --- these required a whole series of rites to be performed to ward off misfortune. On walks, she counted crows and never failed to note which direction they flew; she watched the path anxiously beneath her feet, and lamented whenever she saw a spider crossing it in the morning: she then wanted to turn back, and the only recourse, if one wished to continue the walk, was to persuade her that it was past noon, so that the omen had shifted from ill to good. She was afraid of her dreams: she recounted them to Christophe at length; she would spend hours searching for a detail she had forgotten; she spared him none of it --- a string of absurdities involving outlandish weddings, deaths, dressmakers, princes, burlesque and sometimes obscene things. He had to listen, had to give his opinion. Often she would remain obsessed all day long by these meaningless images. She found life ill-made, she saw things and people in a raw light, she wore Christophe down with her lamentations; and it had hardly been worth his while to leave his morose little bourgeois behind, only to encounter here the eternal enemy: the “trauriger ungriechischer Hypochondrist.”

Then, abruptly, in the middle of these sulking complaints, gaiety would return, loud and exaggerated; and there was no more sense in arguing with it than with the sullenness that had come before: there were bursts of laughter that, being without reason, threatened to be without end, wild runs across the fields, madcap antics, children’s games, a delight in acting foolishly, in poking at the earth, at dirty things, at creatures --- spiders, ants, worms --- teasing them, hurting them, making them devour one another, birds eaten by cats, worms by hens, spiders by ants, without malice, or through an entirely unconscious instinct for harm, out of curiosity, out of idleness. There was a tireless need to say foolish things, to repeat meaningless words fifty times over, to irritate and provoke and harass, to drive someone out of their mind. And her flirtations the moment anyone appeared --- anyone at all --- on the path!… At once she spoke with animation, laughed, made noise, made faces, drew attention to herself; she adopted an affected, jerky walk. Christophe sensed with dread that she was about to say something meaningful. --- And indeed: she never failed to. She turned sentimental. She was sentimental without measure, as she was everything else; she gushed noisily. Christophe suffered; he wanted to hit her. Above all things, he could not forgive her for being insincere. He did not yet know that sincerity is as rare a gift as intelligence or beauty, and that one cannot without injustice demand it of everyone. He could not endure lying; and Ada gave him his full measure of it. She lied constantly, calmly, in the face of plain evidence. She had that astonishing faculty women possess who live from hour to hour --- of forgetting what displeases them, or even what has pleased them.

And in spite of everything, they loved each other, they loved each other with all their hearts. Ada was as sincere as Christophe in her love. Without being founded on any sympathy of the mind, this love was no less real; it had nothing in common with base passion. It was a fine young love; and however sensual it was, there was nothing vulgar in it, because everything in it was young; it was naive, almost chaste, washed clean by the burning ingenuousness of pleasure. Though Ada was, by a long measure, not as ignorant as Christophe, she still possessed the divine privilege of an adolescent heart and body, that freshness of the senses, clear and quick as a stream, which gives almost the illusion of purity and which nothing can replace. Selfish, mediocre, insincere in ordinary life --- love made her simple, honest, almost good; she came to understand the joy one could find in forgetting oneself for another. Christophe watched this with delight, and would have died for her. Who can say all that a loving soul brings, in its love, of ridiculous and touching illusion! And the natural illusion of the lover was multiplied a hundredfold in Christophe by the illusory power innate to every artist. A smile from Ada held deep meanings for him; an affectionate word was proof of her goodness of heart. He loved in her everything that was good and beautiful in the universe. He called her his self, his soul, his being. They wept together for love.

It was not only pleasure that bound them; it was an indefinable poetry of memories and dreams --- theirs? or those of beings who had loved before them, who had existed before them --- in them --- ?… They preserved, without saying so, without perhaps knowing it, the spell of the first moments when they had met in the wood, of the first days, the first nights spent together, those hours of sleep in each other’s arms, motionless, without thought, drowned in a torrent of love and silent joy. Sudden evocations, images, half-formed thoughts whose lightest brush made them secretly grow pale and melt with pleasure, surrounded them like the hum of bees. A burning and tender light… The heart falters and falls still, overwhelmed by too great a sweetness. Silence, the languor of fever, the mysterious and weary smile of the earth trembling in the first suns of spring… A fresh love between two youthful bodies is an April morning. It passes like April. The youth of the heart is a meal in sunlight.

Nothing was better calculated to strengthen Christophe’s love for Ada than the way others judged her.

From the very day after their first meeting, the whole neighborhood was informed. Ada did nothing to conceal the affair; she wanted to take pride in her conquest. Christophe would have preferred more discretion; but he felt pursued by the curiosity of people around him; and since he did not want to appear to be fleeing from it, he went about openly with Ada. The little town gossiped. Christophe’s colleagues in the orchestra paid him mocking compliments, which he did not answer, since he did not admit that anyone had the right to meddle in his affairs. At the palace, his lack of propriety was censured. The bourgeoisie judged his conduct severely. He lost his music lessons in certain households. In others, mothers felt obliged henceforth to sit in on their daughters’ lessons, with a suspicious air, as though Christophe had any intention of running off with these precious young ladies. The girls were supposed to know nothing about it. Naturally, they knew everything; and while they gave Christophe the cold shoulder for his lack of taste, they were dying for more details. It was only among small tradespeople and shop employees that Christophe was popular; but this did not last: he was as irritated by the approval of the one side as by the blame of the other; and since he could do nothing against the blame, he arranged matters so as not to retain the approval --- which was not very difficult. He was outraged by the general indiscretion.

The most incensed against him were Justus Euler and the Vogel family. Christophe’s misconduct seemed to them a personal affront. They had never actually built any serious plans around him: they were suspicious --- madame Vogel most of all --- of artistic temperaments. But since they were by nature aggrieved in spirit and always inclined to believe that fate had it in for them, they convinced themselves that they had been deeply invested in Christophe’s marriage to Rosa, the moment they were quite certain that marriage would not happen: they saw in this one more mark of their customary ill fortune. Logic would have demanded that if fate was responsible for their disappointment, Christophe was not; but the Vogels’ logic was the kind that allowed them to find the greatest number of reasons to complain. They therefore decided that if Christophe behaved badly, it was not only for his own pleasure, but to offend them. They were scandalized besides. Very religious, moral, full of family virtue, they were among those for whom sins of the flesh are the most shameful of all, the most serious, nearly the only ones that matter, because they are the only ones that pose any real danger --- (it is altogether too obvious that respectable people will never be tempted to steal or kill). --- And so Christophe struck them as fundamentally dishonorable, and they changed their manner toward him. They gave him an icy look and turned away when he passed. Christophe, who had no interest in their company, shrugged off all these theatrics. He pretended not to notice Amalia’s insolences; she, while making a show of avoiding him with contempt, did everything she could to make him approach her, so that she might tell him what was on her mind.

Christophe was touched only by Rosa’s attitude. The girl condemned him more harshly than any of her family. Not that this new love of Christophe’s seemed to her to destroy the last chances she had of being loved by him: she knew she had none --- (though she may have continued to hope;… she always hoped!). --- But she had made an idol of Christophe; and that idol was crumbling. It was the worst pain… yes, a pain more cruel, given the innocence and honesty of her heart, than being scorned and forgotten by him. Raised in a puritanical fashion, in a narrow morality she believed in passionately, what she had learned of Christophe had not only saddened her but sickened her. She had already suffered when he loved Sabine; she had begun to lose certain illusions about her hero. That Christophe could love a soul as mediocre as Sabine’s seemed to her inexplicable and less than glorious. But at least that love had been pure, and Sabine was not unworthy of it. And then death had passed over it all, and sanctified everything… But that Christophe should immediately afterward love another --- and what another! --- that was low, that was odious! She had come to take the dead woman’s side against him. She could not forgive him for forgetting her… --- Alas! he thought of her more than Rosa did; but Rosa could not imagine that there might be room in a passionate heart for two feelings at once; she believed one could only remain faithful to the past by sacrificing the present. Pure and cold, she had no understanding of life, nor of Christophe; everything seemed to her as it should be: pure, narrow, and subject to duty, as she was. Modest in all her soul and in her whole person, she had only one pride: that of purity; she demanded it of herself and of others. That Christophe had so debased himself, she could not forgive him, and she never would.

Christophe tried to speak with her, if not to explain himself to her. --- (What would he have said? What could he have said to a girl as puritanical and naive as she was?) --- He wanted to assure her that he was her friend, that he valued her esteem, and that he still had a right to it. He wanted to prevent her from absurdly turning away from him. --- But Rosa fled from him with a stern silence; and he felt that she despised him.

He was hurt and angry. He was aware that he did not deserve that contempt; and yet he ended up being shaken by it: he judged himself guilty. The bitterest reproaches came from himself, when he thought of Sabine. He tormented himself:

--- My God! How is this possible? What kind of person am I?…

But he could not resist the current that was carrying him away. He thought that life was criminal; and he closed his eyes so as not to see it, and to go on living. He had such a need to live, to be happy, to love, to believe!… No, there was nothing contemptible in his love! He knew that in loving Ada he might not be wise, or intelligent, or even very happy; but where was the vileness in that? Even supposing --- (he tried hard to doubt it) --- that Ada had no great moral worth, in what way did the love he felt for her become less pure? Love lies in the one who loves, not in the one who is loved. The worth of love is the worth of the lover. All is pure in the pure. All is pure in the strong and the wholesome. Love, which clothes certain birds in their most beautiful colors, draws from honest souls what is noblest in them. The desire to show the other nothing unworthy of them causes one to take pleasure only in thoughts and acts that are in harmony with the beautiful image love has sculpted. And the bath of youth in which the soul renews itself, the sacred radiance of strength and joy, are beautiful and life-giving, and enlarge the heart.

That his friends misjudged him filled him with bitterness. But what was most serious was that his mother had herself begun to worry.

The good woman was far from sharing the Vogels’ narrowness of principle. She had seen too much of real sorrow to go looking for invented kinds. Humble, broken by life, having received few joys from it and having asked even fewer of it, resigned to whatever came and making no effort to understand it, she would have been careful never to judge or censure others: she did not think she had the right. She felt herself too simple to presume that others were wrong when they did not think as she did; it would have seemed absurd to her to want to impose on people the inflexible rules of her morality and her faith. Besides, her morality and her faith were entirely instinctive: pious and pure for herself, she closed her eyes to others’ conduct with the common people’s indulgence for certain failings or certain weaknesses. This had once been one of the grievances her father-in-law Jean-Michel held against her: she did not make sufficient distinction between respectable persons and those who were not; she was not afraid, in the street or at the market, to stop and shake hands and chat warmly with pleasant girls well known throughout the neighborhood, whom respectable women were supposed to pretend not to know. She left it to God to distinguish good from evil, and to punish or to forgive. She asked of others only a little of that warm sympathy which is so necessary for lightening one another’s burden in life. Provided one was kind --- that was what mattered to her.

But since she had been living with the Vogels, she was being changed. The family’s fault-finding spirit had made her its prey all the more easily because she was then crushed and without strength to resist. Amalia had taken hold of her; and from morning to night, in those long tête-à-têtes where the two women worked together and only Amalia spoke, Louisa, passive and overwhelmed, unwittingly acquired the habit of judging and criticizing everything. Madame Vogel did not fail to tell her what she thought of Christophe’s conduct. Louisa’s calm irritated her. She found it indecent that Louisa should worry so little about what was driving all of them to distraction; she was not satisfied until she had succeeded in thoroughly unsettling her. Christophe noticed it. Louisa did not dare reproach him; but every day there were timid, anxious, insistent little remarks; and when he answered them brusquely out of impatience, she said nothing more; but he went on reading sorrow in her eyes; and when he came home he sometimes saw that she had been crying. He knew his mother too well not to be certain that these worries did not originate in her. --- And he knew where they did originate.

He resolved to put an end to it. One evening when Louisa, unable to hold back her tears any longer, had risen from the table in the middle of supper, without Christophe being able to learn what was distressing her, he went down the staircase four steps at a time and knocked at the Vogels’ door. He was boiling with anger. He was not only outraged at the way madame Vogel was treating his mother; he had scores to settle over what she had breathed into Rosa’s ear against him, over her harassment of Sabine, over everything he had been forced to tolerate from her for months. For months he had been carrying a load of accumulated grievances he was eager to be rid of.

He burst into madame Vogel’s apartment and, in a voice that meant to be calm but trembled with fury, demanded to know what she had been telling his mother to put her in such a state.

Amalia took it very badly; she replied that she said what she liked, that she was accountable to no one for her conduct --- to him least of all. And seizing the opportunity to deliver the speech she had prepared, she added that if Louisa was unhappy, he need look no further than his own conduct, which was a disgrace to him and a scandal to everyone.

Christophe had only been waiting for an attack in order to attack. He cried out furiously that his conduct was his own business, that he cared very little whether it pleased madame Vogel or not, that if she wished to complain about it she could complain to him, that she was quite welcome to say everything she liked: it would be like talking to a wall, but that he forbade her --- (did she understand?) --- he forbade her to say anything of the kind to his mother, and that it was cowardly to set upon a poor sick old woman.

Madame Vogel shrieked. No one had ever dared speak to her in that tone. She said she would not allow herself to be lectured by a scoundrel --- and in her own home! --- And she treated him in the most outrageous fashion.

At the noise of the scene the others came in --- except Vogel, who fled anything that might disturb his health. Old Euler, called as a witness by the indignant Amalia, sternly requested that Christophe spare them his observations and his visits in future. He said they had no need of him to know what they ought to do, that they did their duty, and always would.

Christophe declared that he was leaving, and that he would never set foot in their home again. He did not leave, however, before unburdening himself of what he still had to say to them about that famous Duty, which had become for him a personal enemy. He said that Duty of theirs was capable of making him love vice. People like them discouraged goodness by making it so sullen. They were responsible for the attraction one finds, by contrast, in those who are dishonest but charming and cheerful. It is a profanation of the name of duty to apply it to everything, to the most trivial chores, to indifferent acts, with a stiff, arrogant strictness that ends by darkening and poisoning life. Duty is exceptional: it must be reserved for moments of real sacrifice, and one must not use that name to cover one’s own bad temper and one’s desire to be disagreeable to others. There is no reason, just because one has the misfortune or the failing of being sad, to want everyone else to be sad as well, and to impose one’s invalid’s regimen on all. The first of virtues is joy. Virtue must wear a happy, free, unconstrained face. The one who does good must give himself pleasure in doing it. But this perpetual so-called duty, this schoolmaster’s tyranny, this shrill tone, these idle arguments, this sour and puerile hair-splitting, this noise, this gracelessness, this life stripped of all charm, all courtesy, all silence, this petty pessimism that misses no opportunity to make existence poorer than it already is, this proud stupidity that finds it easier to despise others than to understand them, this whole bourgeois morality, without grandeur, without happiness, without beauty --- all of it is hateful and harmful: it makes vice seem more human than virtue.

So thought Christophe; and in his desire to wound those who had wounded him, he did not notice that he was being just as unjust as those of whom he spoke.

No doubt, these poor people were more or less as he saw them. But it was not their fault: it was the fault of the thankless life that had made their faces, their gestures, and their thoughts thankless. They had undergone the deformations of poverty --- not the great poverty that falls all at once and kills, or forges --- but of bad luck, constantly repeated, of the small misery that seeps in drop by drop, from the first day to the last… A great sadness! For beneath those rough exteriors, what stores of uprightness, of kindness, of silent heroism!… All the strength of a people, all the sap of the future.

Christophe was not wrong to believe that duty is exceptional. But love is no less so. Everything is exceptional. Everything of worth has no worse enemy --- not what is evil (vices have their value) --- but what is habitual. The mortal enemy of the soul is the wearing-down of days.

Ada was beginning to tire. She was not intelligent enough to find renewal in a nature as abundant as Christophe’s. Her senses and her vanity had extracted from that love all the pleasure she could find in it. All that remained was the pleasure of destroying it. She had that secret instinct, common to so many women, even good ones, to so many men, even intelligent ones, who create nothing --- no works, no children, no action, nothing of any kind: no life --- and who yet have too much vitality to endure, apathetic and resigned, their own uselessness. They would have others be as useless as themselves, and they work at it as best they can. Sometimes it is in spite of themselves; and when they catch sight of this criminal desire, they push it away with indignation. But often they nurse it; and they apply themselves, to the extent of their powers --- some modestly, within their small intimate circle --- others on a grand scale, across vast publics --- to destroying everything that lives, everything that loves living, everything that deserves to live. The critic who labors to cut great men and great ideas down to his own size --- and the girl who amuses herself by degrading her lovers, are two harmful creatures of the same kind. --- But the second is more agreeable.

Ada would therefore have liked to corrupt Christophe a little, in order to humiliate him. In truth, she was not up to it. It would have required more intelligence, even in corruption. She felt this; and it was not the least of her hidden grievances against Christophe, that her love could do him no harm. She would not admit to herself the desire she had to harm him; and she might not have done so, even if she could. But she found it impertinent not to be able to. It is to show a want of love toward a woman, not to leave her the illusion of her power --- for good or ill --- over the one who loves her; and it irresistibly pushes her to put it to the test. Christophe paid no attention to this. When Ada asked him, playfully:

--- Would you give up your music for me?

(though she had no wish that he should),

he would answer frankly:

--- Oh! That, my dear, neither you nor anyone else can touch. I’ll always go on making it.

--- And you claim to love me? she would cry, vexed.

She hated that music --- all the more because she understood nothing of it, and found it impossible to locate the joint by which she might reach that invisible enemy and wound Christophe in his passion. When she tried to speak of it with contempt, or to dismiss his compositions disdainfully, he burst out laughing; and in spite of her exasperation, Ada resigned herself to silence; for she realized she was making herself ridiculous.

But if there was nothing to be done on that side, she had discovered in Christophe another vulnerable point, where she could reach him more easily: his moral faith. Despite his quarrel with the Vogels, and despite the intoxication of his adolescence, Christophe had preserved an instinctive modesty, a need for purity of which he was unaware, but which must at first have struck, attracted and charmed, then amused, then vexed, then finally irritated to the point of hatred a woman like Ada. She did not attack it head-on. She would ask insidiously:

--- Do you love me?

--- Of course!

--- How much do you love me?

--- As much as one can love.

--- That’s not much… Oh well!… What would you do for me?

--- Whatever you want.

--- Would you do something dishonest?

--- A strange way to love!

--- That’s not the point. Would you?

--- It’s never necessary.

--- But if I wanted it?

--- You would be wrong.

--- Perhaps… Would you do it?

He tried to kiss her. But she pushed him away.

--- Would you do it, yes or no?

--- No, my dear.

She turned her back on him, furious.

--- You don’t love, you don’t know what it means to love.

--- That’s quite possible, he said, good-naturedly.

He knew perfectly well that he was capable, like anyone else, of committing in a moment of passion some foolishness, some dishonesty perhaps, and --- who knows? --- worse; but he would have found it shameful to boast of this in cold blood, and dangerous to admit it to Ada. An instinct warned him that the dear enemy was lying in wait, and taking note of his every word: he had no wish to give her a hold over him.

At other times, she would return to the attack; she would ask him:

--- Do you love me because you love me, or because I love you?

--- Because I love you.

--- So, if I didn’t love you, you’d still love me?

--- Yes.

--- And if I loved someone else, would you still love me?

--- Ah! That I don’t know… I don’t think so… In any case, you’d be the last person I’d go to tell.

--- What would be different?

--- Many things. I, perhaps. Certainly, you.

--- What does it matter if I change?

--- It matters everything. I love you as you are. If you become someone else, I can no longer answer for loving you.

--- You don’t love, you don’t love! What is all this hair-splitting? One loves, or one doesn’t. If you love me, you must love me as I am, whatever I do, always.

--- That would be to love you like an animal.

--- That is how I want to be loved.

--- Then you’ve made a mistake, he said, laughing, I’m not what you’re looking for. Even if I wished it, I couldn’t. And I don’t wish it.

--- You’re very proud of your intelligence! You love your intelligence more than you love me.

--- But it’s you I love, ungrateful girl, more than you love yourself. I love you all the more as you are more beautiful and better.

--- You’re a schoolmaster, she said, with displeasure.

--- What can I say? I love what is beautiful. What is ugly disgusts me.

--- Even in me?

--- Especially in you.

She stamped her foot in rage:

--- I will not be judged.

--- Then complain of the fact that I judge you and that I love you, he said tenderly, trying to soothe her.

She let herself be taken in his arms, and even deigned to smile and allow him to kiss her. But after a moment, when he thought she had forgotten, she asked, uneasily:

--- What do you find ugly in me?

He was careful not to tell her; he answered cowardly:

--- I find nothing ugly.

She thought for a moment, smiled, and said:

--- Listen, Christli, you say you don’t like lying?

--- I despise it.

--- You’re right, she said, I despise it too. Besides, I’m quite at ease --- I never lie.

He looked at her: she was sincere. That unconsciousness disarmed him.

--- So then, she continued, putting her arms around his neck, why would you hold it against me if I loved someone else, and told you so?

--- Stop tormenting me!

--- I’m not tormenting you: I’m not saying I love someone else; I’m even saying I don’t… But later, if I did…?

--- Well, let’s not think about it.

--- I want to think about it… You wouldn’t hold it against me? You can’t hold it against me?

--- I wouldn’t hold it against you, I would leave you, that’s all.

--- Leave me? But why? If I still loved you…?

--- While loving someone else?

--- Of course. It happens.

--- Well, it won’t happen with us.

--- Why?

--- Because the day you love someone else, I won’t love you anymore, my dear, not at all, not at all.

--- A moment ago you said perhaps… Ah! You see, you don’t love!

--- So be it. That’s better for you.

--- Because…?

--- Because if I did love you, when you loved someone else, things could go badly for you, for me, and for the other.

--- There you go!… You’re mad now. So I’m condemned to stay with you my whole life?

--- Don’t worry. You’re free. You may leave me whenever you like. Only, it won’t be goodbye for now, it will be goodbye for good.

--- But if I still love you?

--- When people love each other, they sacrifice themselves for one another.

--- Well then, sacrifice yourself!

He could not help laughing at her egotism; and she laughed too.

--- The sacrifice of one alone, he said, makes only one person’s love.

--- Not at all. It makes the love of both. I’ll love you much more if you sacrifice yourself for me. And think, Christli, how much you yourself will love me, since having sacrificed yourself, you’ll be very happy.

They laughed, pleased to distract themselves from the seriousness of their disagreement.

He laughed, and he looked at her. Deep down, as she herself had said, she had no desire to leave Christophe just now; if he irritated and bored her often, she knew the worth of a devotion like his; and she loved no one else. She spoke this way half in play, partly because she knew it annoyed him, and partly because she took pleasure in toying with dubious and unseemly ideas, like a child who delights in dabbling in dirty water. He knew it. He didn’t hold it against her. But he was weary of these unhealthy discussions, of the muffled struggle being waged against this uncertain and murky nature, whom he loved, who perhaps loved him; he was weary of the effort he had to make to deceive himself about her, weary sometimes to the point of tears. He thought: “Why, why is she like this? Why is anyone like this? How mediocre life is!”… At the same time, he smiled, looking at the pretty face that leaned toward him, her blue eyes, her flower-fresh complexion, her laughing and chattering mouth, a little foolish, half-open on the fresh gleam of her tongue and her moist teeth. Their lips nearly touched; and he looked at her as from afar, from very far, from another world; he watched her drift further and further away, dissolving into a mist… And then, he could no longer see her. He could no longer hear her. He fell into a kind of smiling forgetfulness, where he thought of his music, his dreams, a thousand things foreign to Ada. He heard a melody. He composed quietly… Ah! what beautiful music!… so sad, mortally sad! and yet good, loving… ah! how it does one good!… that’s it, that’s it… The rest was not real…

Someone was shaking him by the arm. A voice was crying at him:

--- Well now, what’s the matter with you? Are you quite mad? Why are you looking at me like that? Why don’t you answer?

He saw again the eyes that were watching him. Who was it?… --- Ah! yes… --- He sighed.

She examined him. She tried to discover what he was thinking. She didn’t understand; but she felt that do what she might, she could not hold him entirely --- there was always a door by which he could escape. She grew secretly irritated.

--- Why are you crying? she asked him one day, as he emerged from one of these strange journeys into another life.

He passed his hand over his eyes. He felt that they were wet.

--- I don’t know, he said.

--- Why don’t you answer? That’s the third time I’ve said the same thing to you.

--- What do you want? he asked softly.

She took up her absurd topics of discussion again.

He made a gesture of weariness.

--- Yes, she said, I’ll finish soon. Just one more word!

And she started up again with renewed vigor.

Christophe shook himself off angrily.

--- Will you leave me in peace with your filth!

--- I’m joking.

--- Find cleaner subjects!

--- At least argue. Tell me why it displeases you.

--- Not in the least! There’s no need to argue over why dung stinks. It stinks, that’s all! I hold my nose and walk away.

He went away, furious; he walked with long strides, breathing the icy air.

But she would start again, once, twice, ten times. She raised every subject that could shock and wound his conscience.

He thought it was only an unhealthy game of a neurasthenic girl amusing herself by provoking him. He shrugged his shoulders or pretended not to listen: he did not take her seriously. He had nonetheless an occasional urge to throw her out the window; for neurasthenia and neurotics were very little to his taste…

But ten minutes away from her was enough for him to have forgotten everything that displeased him. He returned to Ada with a fresh supply of hopes and new illusions. He loved her. Love is an act of perpetual faith. Whether God exists or not matters little: one believes because one believes. One loves because one loves: there’s no need for so many reasons!…

After the scene Christophe had made at the Vogels’, it had become impossible to remain in the house, and Louisa had been obliged to find other lodgings for her son and herself.

One day, Christophe’s youngest brother, Ernst, from whom they had had no news for a long time, fell suddenly upon them. He was out of work, having been dismissed successively from every position he had tried; his purse was empty, and his health was broken: so he had judged it best to come and recover at his mother’s house.

Ernst was on bad terms with neither of his two brothers; he was little esteemed by both, and he knew it; but he bore them no ill will, for it was all the same to him. They bore him none either. It would have been wasted effort. Everything said to him slid off without leaving a trace. He smiled with his lovely cajoling eyes, tried to assume a contrite expression, thought of something else, agreed, gave thanks, and always ended by extorting money from one or the other of his brothers. In spite of himself, Christophe felt affection for this charming rogue, who resembled --- more than Christophe did --- their father Melchior. Tall and strong like Christophe, he had regular features, an open look, clear eyes, a straight nose, a laughing mouth, fine teeth, and winning manners. Whenever Christophe saw him, he was disarmed and did not deliver half the reproaches he had prepared; at bottom, he felt a kind of maternal indulgence toward this handsome young man of his own blood, who did him credit, at least physically. He did not think him wicked; and Ernst was not foolish. Without cultivation, he was not without wit; he was not even incapable of taking an interest in things of the mind. He took genuine pleasure in listening to music; and, without understanding his brother’s, he listened to it with curiosity. Christophe, who was not spoiled by the sympathy of those around him, had been glad to notice him at certain of his concerts.

But Ernst’s chief talent was his knowledge of the characters of his two brothers and his skill in playing upon them. However well Christophe knew his selfishness and indifference, however clearly he saw that Ernst thought of his mother and himself only when he needed them, he always let himself be won back by Ernst’s affectionate ways, and it was rare indeed that he refused him anything. He much preferred Ernst to his other brother, Rodolphe, who was orderly and correct, attentive to his business, highly moral, who never asked for money --- nor would ever have given any --- and who came to see his mother regularly, every Sunday, for an hour, spoke only of himself, boasted, praised his household and everything connected with him, never inquired after the others, took no interest in them, and left when the hour struck, satisfied that duty had been done. That one Christophe could not endure. He arranged to be out at the hour when Rodolphe came. Rodolphe was jealous of him: he despised artists, and Christophe’s successes were painful to him. He did not fail, however, to profit from their modest celebrity in the commercial circles he frequented; but he never breathed a word of it to his mother or to Christophe --- he affected to be unaware of it. On the other hand, he never missed the least unpleasant event that befell Christophe. Christophe scorned these pettinesses and feigned not to notice them; but what would have stung him more, and what he would never have suspected, was that a portion of the malicious reports that Rodolphe had about him came from Ernst. The little scoundrel drew a very clear distinction between Christophe and Rodolphe: there was no doubt that he recognized Christophe’s superiority, and that he even felt a sympathy --- slightly ironic --- for his guilelessness. But he took very good care to profit from it; and while despising Rodolphe’s base feelings, he exploited them shamelessly. He flattered his vanity and jealousy, accepted his rebukes with deference, and kept him abreast of the town’s scandalous gossip, in particular everything concerning Christophe --- about whom he was always marvelously well informed. He achieved his ends; and Rodolphe, despite his avarice, let himself be swindled by Ernst, just like Christophe.

So Ernst made use of and made fools of both of them, impartially. And so both of them loved him.

For all his cunning, Ernst was in a sorry state when he appeared at his mother’s door. He had come from Munich, where he had found and, following his usual habit, very nearly at once lost his latest position. He had been obliged to walk most of the way, through torrential rain, sleeping God knows where. He was covered in mud, in tatters, like a beggar, and coughing miserably; for he had picked up a bad case of bronchitis along the way. So Louisa was shaken, and Christophe ran to him, moved, when they saw him come in. Ernst, who was easily brought to tears, did not miss the effect; and there was a general wave of tenderness --- all three of them wept in one another’s arms.

Christophe gave him his room; the bed was warmed, the sick man settled into it, and he seemed near to giving up the ghost. Louisa and Christophe installed themselves at his bedside, taking turns to watch over him. A doctor was needed, medicines, a good fire in the room, special food.

Then it became necessary to clothe him from head to foot: linen, shoes, clothing --- everything had to be replaced. Ernst let it all be done. Louisa and Christophe bled themselves dry to meet the expenses. They were in considerable difficulty at the moment: the new move, a more expensive lodging, though equally inconvenient, fewer pupils for Christophe and far more outgoings. They were barely managing to make ends meet. They fell back on extreme measures. Christophe could no doubt have turned to Rodolphe, who was better placed than he was to help Ernst; but he would not: he made it a point of honor to support his brother on his own. He believed himself bound to do so, as the eldest brother --- and because he was Christophe. Blushing with shame, he had to accept, and even to seek out, an offer he had rejected with indignation a fortnight before --- the proposal made to him through an intermediary, on behalf of an unknown wealthy amateur who wished to purchase a musical work to issue under his own name. Louisa hired herself out by the day to do mending. They hid their sacrifices from each other; they lied to each other about the money they brought home.

Ernst, convalescing, curled up in his corner by the fire, admitted one day between two fits of coughing that he had some debts. --- They were paid. No one reproached him for it. That would not have been generous toward a sick man, and a prodigal son who had returned repentant. For Ernst seemed transformed by hardship and illness. He spoke, with tears in his voice, of his past errors; and Louisa, embracing him, begged him to think of them no more. He was tender and coaxing; he had always known how to charm his mother with demonstrations of affection; Christophe had once been a little jealous of this. Now he found it natural that the youngest son, and the weakest, should also be the most loved. He himself, though there was little difference in their ages, regarded Ernst almost as a son rather than as a brother. Ernst showed him great respect; he would sometimes allude to the burdens Christophe had taken on, to the financial sacrifices… but Christophe would not let him continue, and Ernst resigned himself to acknowledging them with a humble and affectionate look. He agreed with the advice Christophe gave him; he seemed inclined to change his ways and work seriously, once he had recovered.

He was recovering; but the convalescence was long. The doctor had declared that his health, which he had abused, would require careful handling. So he continued to stay at his mother’s, to share Christophe’s bed, to eat with good appetite the bread his brother earned, and the little savory dishes that Louisa took pains to prepare for him. He said nothing of leaving. Louisa and Christophe said nothing of it to him either. They were too happy to have recovered the son, the brother they loved.

Little by little, in the long evenings he spent with Ernst, Christophe allowed himself to speak to him more intimately. He needed to confide in someone. Ernst was intelligent; he had a quick mind and understood --- or seemed to understand --- at half a word. There was pleasure in talking with him. And yet Christophe dared say nothing of what lay deepest in his heart: his love. He was held back by a kind of modesty. Ernst, who knew everything, showed him nothing of it.

One day, Ernst, quite recovered, took advantage of a sunny afternoon to stroll along the Rhine. Passing in front of a noisy tavern, a little outside town, where people came to dance and drink on Sundays, he caught sight of Christophe sitting at a table with Ada and Myrrha, who were making a great commotion. Christophe saw him too, and flushed. Ernst played at being discreet and walked past without approaching him.

Christophe was greatly discomfited by this encounter: it made him feel more keenly what sort of company he was in; and it was painful to him that his brother should see him there --- not only because he now forfeited the right to judge Ernst’s conduct, but because he held a very lofty, very naive, somewhat archaic idea of his duties as eldest brother, one that many people would have found ridiculous: he felt that by failing in those duties, as he was doing, he degraded himself in his own eyes.

That evening, when they were back in their shared room, he waited for Ernst to make some allusion to what had happened. But Ernst kept prudent silence, and waited too. Then, while they were undressing, Christophe made up his mind to speak of his love. He was so agitated that he did not dare look at Ernst; and, out of shyness, he adopted a brusque manner of speaking. Ernst gave him no help whatsoever; he remained silent, did not look at him either, but saw him nonetheless; and he missed nothing of what was comical in Christophe’s awkwardness and clumsy words. Christophe barely dared name Ada; and the portrait he drew of her could have served equally well for any woman in love. But he spoke of his love; and gradually giving way to the flood of tenderness that filled his heart, he said what a blessing it was to love, how miserable he had been before he found this light in his darkness, and that life was nothing without a deep and dear love. The other listened gravely; he answered with tact, asked no questions; but an emotional handshake showed that he felt as Christophe did. They exchanged their thoughts on love and life. Christophe was happy to be so well understood. They embraced like brothers before falling asleep.

Christophe fell into the habit --- though always with a great deal of shyness and reserve --- of confiding his love to Ernst, whose discretion reassured him. He let him glimpse his anxieties about Ada; but he never accused her: he accused himself; and, with tears in his eyes, he declared that he could no longer live if he were to lose her.

He did not forget to speak of Ernst to Ada: he praised his wit and his looks.

Ernst made no advances to Christophe, asking to be introduced to Ada; but he shut himself away melancholically in his room and refused to go out, saying he knew no one. Christophe felt guilty, on Sundays, for continuing his outings in the country with Ada while his brother stayed home. It was painful to him, all the same, not to be alone with his love; but he accused himself of selfishness, and he proposed to Ernst that he come along with them.

The introduction took place at Ada’s door, on the landing of her floor. Ernst and Ada greeted each other ceremoniously. Ada was going out, followed by her inseparable Myrrha, who, on seeing Ernst, gave a little cry of surprise. Ernst smiled, stepped forward, and kissed Myrrha, who seemed to find it quite natural.

--- What! You know each other? asked Christophe, astonished.

--- Of course! said Myrrha, laughing.

--- Since when?

--- Oh, it’s been ages!

--- And you knew? Christophe asked Ada. Why didn’t you tell me?

--- As if I know all of Myrrha’s lovers! said Ada, shrugging her shoulders.

Myrrha took up the word and pretended, for sport, to take offense. Christophe could never learn any more. He was saddened. It seemed to him that Ernst, that Myrrha, that Ada had lacked candor, though in truth he had no actual lie to hold against them; but it was very hard to believe that Myrrha, who kept no secrets from Ada, had kept this one from her, or that Ernst and Ada did not already know each other. He observed them. But they exchanged only a few commonplace words, and Ernst occupied himself with no one but Myrrha for the rest of the walk. Ada, for her part, spoke only to Christophe; and she was far more amiable toward him than usual.

From then on, Ernst joined all their outings. Christophe could well have done without him; but he did not dare say so. Not that he had any other motive for wanting to keep his brother away than shame at having him as a companion in pleasure. He was without suspicion. Ernst gave him no reason for any: he appeared smitten with Myrrha, and he maintained toward Ada a polite reserve, even an affectation of consideration, that was almost excessive; it was as if he wished to reflect upon his brother’s mistress a little of the respect he showed to Christophe himself. Ada was not surprised by this, and she was no less watchful of herself.

They went on long walks together. The two brothers walked ahead; Ada and Myrrha, laughing and whispering, followed a few steps behind. They would stop for long stretches to talk, planted in the middle of the road. Christophe and Ernst would stop as well, to wait for them. Christophe would end by growing impatient and setting off again; but he soon turned back, vexed, on hearing Ernst laugh and talk with the two chatterboxes. He would have liked to know what they were saying; but whenever they caught up with him, their conversation stopped.

--- What are you always plotting together? he would ask.

They answered with a joke. All three of them were as thick as thieves.

Christophe had just had a fairly sharp quarrel with Ada. They had been sulking since morning. Unusually, Ada had not assumed the dignified and wounded air she adopted on such occasions in order to take her revenge by making herself as insufferably tedious as possible. This time she simply pretended to be unaware of Christophe’s existence, and was in excellent spirits with the other two companions. One might have thought she was not altogether displeased with the quarrel.

Christophe, for his part, had a great desire to make peace; he was more in love than ever. To his tenderness was joined a feeling of gratitude for all that their love had given him, a regret at squandering its hours in stupid quarrels and dark thoughts --- and an inexplicable fear, a mysterious sense that this love was about to end. He looked with melancholy at Ada’s pretty face, which pretended not to see him, and laughed with the others; and that face awakened in him so many dear memories, such deep love, such sincere intimacy --- that charming face had even, at moments --- (it had now) --- such goodness, and so pure a smile, that Christophe asked himself why things were not better between them, why they took such pleasure in ruining their own happiness, why she persisted in forgetting the luminous hours, in denying or fighting against what was brave and honest in herself --- what strange satisfaction she could find in troubling, in soiling, even if only in thought, the purity of their affection. He felt an immense need to believe in what he loved, and he tried, once more, to delude himself. He blamed himself for being unjust; he felt remorse for the thoughts he had attributed to her, and for his lack of indulgence.

He drew near to her and tried to speak to her: she answered him with a few curt words; she had no desire to be reconciled with him. He insisted, he begged her in a low voice to hear him out, just for a moment, apart from the others. She followed him with a rather ill grace. When they were a few steps away, and neither Myrrha nor Ernst could see them any longer, he suddenly took her hands, begged her forgiveness, and knelt before her there in the wood, amid the dead leaves. He told her he could no longer live this way, at odds with her; he could no longer enjoy the walk, the fine day, he could no longer enjoy anything, he could not even breathe, knowing she hated him; he needed her to love him. Yes, he was often unjust, violent, disagreeable; he implored her to forgive him: the fault lay in his very love; he could not tolerate anything mediocre in himself, anything that was not entirely worthy of her and of the memories of their dear shared past. He recalled those memories to her, he recalled their first meeting, their first days together; he said he loved her as much as ever, that he would love her always. Let her not draw away from him! She was everything to him…

Ada listened, smiling, moved, almost tender. She gave him her warm look, the look that says one is in love and no longer angry. They embraced and walked close together through the bare wood. She found Christophe sweet, and she was grateful to him for his tender words; but she surrendered nothing on that account of the malicious whims she had fixed in her head. She hesitated, though; she was no longer so set on them. Yet she did exactly what she had planned. Why? Who can say?… Because she had promised herself, beforehand, that she would?… Who knows? Perhaps she found it more piquant to betray her lover that day, to prove to him, to prove to herself, her freedom. She did not think she would lose him: she would not have wished it. She believed herself more sure of him than ever.

They had arrived at a clearing in the forest. Two paths branched off from it. Christophe took one. Ernst maintained that the other led more quickly to the hilltop where they meant to go. Ada agreed with him. Christophe, who knew the way well from having often taken it, insisted they were wrong. They would not yield. It was agreed, then, to put it to the test; and each wagered that they would arrive first. Ada left with Ernst. Myrrha accompanied Christophe; she pretended to be convinced that he was right, and added: “As always.” Christophe had taken the game seriously; and, since he disliked losing, he walked fast, too fast for Myrrha’s liking, as she was in far less of a hurry than he:

--- Don’t rush so, my friend, she said to him in her tranquil, ironic tone, we’ll get there first all the same.

He was struck by a scruple:

--- True, he said, I think I’m going a little too fast: that’s not quite sporting.

He slowed his pace.

--- But I know them, he went on, I’m sure they’re running to get there before us.

Myrrha burst out laughing:

--- No, no, don’t worry!

She hung on his arm, pressing herself close against him. A little shorter than Christophe, she lifted toward him, as they walked, her intelligent and caressing eyes. She was truly pretty and alluring. He scarcely recognized her: no one was more changeable. In ordinary life she had a face that was a little pale and puffy; and then, the slightest excitement, a joyful thought, or the desire to please was enough to make that aging look vanish, her cheeks to grow rosy, the folds of skin beneath and around her eyes to smooth away, her gaze to light up, and her whole countenance to take on a youthfulness, a liveliness, and a spirit that Ada’s had never possessed. Christophe was surprised by the transformation, and he turned his eyes away from hers: he was a little unsettled to be alone with her. She made him uneasy, she kept him from dreaming at his ease; he did not listen to what she was saying, he did not answer her, or else answered absently: he was thinking --- he wanted to think only of Ada. He thought of the warm look she had given him a little while before, of her smile, her kiss; and his heart overflowed with love. Myrrha wanted him to admire how beautiful the woods were, with their slender little branches against the clear sky… Yes, everything was beautiful: the cloud had lifted, Ada had come back to him, he had managed to break the ice between them; they loved each other again; near or far from one another, they were one. He breathed with relief: how light the air was! Ada had come back to him… Everything reminded him of her… It was a little damp: might she not be cold?… The pretty trees were dusted with frost: what a pity she could not see them!… But he remembered the wager they had made, and he quickened his pace; he was intent on not missing the path. He triumphed when he reached the goal:

--- We’re first!

He waved his hat in delight. Myrrha watched him with a smile.

The spot where they stood was a long, steep rock in the midst of the woods. From the flat summit, bordered with hazel shrubs and stunted little oaks, they looked out over the wooded slopes, over the treetops of the firs wrapped in a violet haze, and over the long ribbon of the Rhine in the blue-tinged valley below. No birdsong. No voice. Not a breath. A still, gathered winter’s day, warming itself thinly in the pale rays of a drowsy sun. Now and then, far off, the brief whistle of a train in the valley. Christophe stood at the edge of the rock and contemplated the landscape. Myrrha contemplated Christophe.

He turned back to her with an air of good humor:

--- Well! The lazybones --- I told them so!… Fine! Nothing to do but wait for them…

He stretched out in the sun on the cracked earth.

--- Yes, let us wait…, said Myrrha, taking off her hat.

There was something so mocking in her tone that he sat up and looked at her.

--- What is it? she asked calmly.

--- What did you say?

--- I said: Let us wait. It wasn’t worth making me run so fast.

--- True.

They waited, both lying on the rough ground. Myrrha hummed a tune. Christophe murmured a few phrases of it. But he kept breaking off, ears pricked:

--- I think I hear them.

Myrrha went on singing.

--- Be quiet a moment, would you?

Myrrha stopped.

--- No, it’s nothing.

She took up her song again.

Christophe could no longer keep still:

--- Maybe they’ve gotten lost.

--- Lost? One can’t get lost here. Ernst knows all the paths.

An odd idea crossed Christophe’s mind:

--- What if they arrived first, and left again before we got here!

Myrrha, lying on her back and looking at the sky, burst into a fit of laughter in the middle of her song and nearly choked. Christophe persisted. He wanted to go back down to the station, where he said their friends must already be waiting. Myrrha finally brought herself to stir from her stillness.

--- That would be the surest way to miss them!… There was never any question of the station. This is where we’re to meet.

He sat down again beside her. She was amused by his anxiety. He could feel her ironic gaze observing him. He was beginning to worry in earnest --- to worry about them: he suspected nothing. He stood up again. He talked of going back into the wood, of searching for them, of calling out. Myrrha gave a little chuckle; she had drawn from her pocket a needle, scissors, and thread; and she was calmly unstitching and repinning the feathers on her hat; she seemed settled in for the whole day:

--- No, no, you great fool, she said. If they wanted to come, do you think they wouldn’t come on their own?

The words struck him to the heart. He turned to her: she was not looking at him, she was busy with her work. He stepped closer:

--- Myrrha! he said.

--- Hm? she answered, without looking up.

He knelt down to look at her more closely:

--- Myrrha! he repeated.

--- Well then? she asked, raising her eyes from her work and looking at him with a smile. What is it?

She wore a mocking expression as she saw his face, shaken and undone.

--- Myrrha! he asked, his throat tight, tell me what you’re thinking…

She shrugged, smiled, and went back to her work.

He took her hands and pulled away the hat she was stitching:

--- Leave that, leave that, and tell me…

She looked him full in the face and waited. She saw Christophe’s lips trembling.

--- You think, he said very quietly, that Ernst and Ada… ?

She smiled:

--- Of course!

He started in indignation:

--- No! No! It’s not possible! You don’t think that!… No! No!

She placed her hands on his shoulders and doubled over with laughter:

--- How foolish you are, how foolish you are, my dear!

He shook her violently:

--- Don’t laugh! Why are you laughing? You wouldn’t laugh if it were true. You love Ernst…

She kept laughing, and, drawing him toward her, she kissed him. Against his will, he returned her kiss. But when he felt against his lips those lips, still warm from her accomplice’s kisses, he pulled back, held her head at some distance from his own, and asked:

--- You knew? It was arranged between you?

She said “yes” with a laugh.

Christophe did not cry out; he made no movement of anger. He opened his mouth as though he could no longer breathe; he closed his eyes and pressed his chest with his hands: his heart was bursting. Then he lay down on the ground, his head buried in his hands, and was shaken by a convulsion of disgust and despair, as when he was a child.

Myrrha, who was not very tender, took pity on him; she felt, unbidden, a surge of maternal compassion; she bent over him, she spoke to him affectionately, she tried to make him breathe from her smelling-salts. But he pushed her away with horror, and sat up so abruptly that she was frightened. He had neither the strength nor the desire to take revenge. He looked at her with a face convulsed with pain:

--- Wretch, he said, crushed, you don’t know all the harm you do…

She tried to hold him back. He fled through the woods, spitting out his disgust for these foul things, for these mud-hearted creatures, and for the incestuous exchange to which they had tried to bring him. He wept, he trembled, he sobbed with revulsion. He loathed her, loathed all of them, loathed himself, his body, and his heart. A hurricane of contempt broke loose in him: it had been long in building; sooner or later, the reaction had to come against the lowness of thought, the degrading compromises, the stale and poisoned atmosphere in which he had been living for the past several months; but the need to love, the need to deceive himself about what he loved, had delayed the crisis as long as possible. Now it broke out all at once: and that was better. It was a great rush of air and bitter purity, an icy wind sweeping away the miasma. Disgust had killed, in a single blow, his love for Ada.

If Ada had believed that this act would establish her hold over Christophe more firmly, it proved, once again, her gross failure to understand the man who loved her. Jealousy, which binds tainted hearts together, could only revolt a nature as young, proud, and pure as Christophe’s. But what he could not forgive above all, what he would never forgive, was that this betrayal was not in Ada the act of a passion, barely even one of those absurd and degrading caprices --- often irresistible --- to which a woman’s reason sometimes struggles not to yield. No --- he understood it now --- it was in her a secret desire to degrade him, to humiliate him, to punish him for his moral resistance, for his alien faith, to drag him down to the common level, to lay him at her feet, to prove to herself her own power to do harm. And he asked himself with horror: but what is this need to defile --- which is in most people --- to defile what is pure in themselves and in others --- these souls of swine, who take a voluptuous pleasure in rolling in filth, happy when not a single clean spot remains on the whole surface of their skin!…

Ada waited two days for Christophe to come back. Then she began to grow anxious, and sent him an affectionate note that made no allusion to anything that had happened. Christophe did not even reply. He hated Ada with a hatred so deep that he no longer had words to express it. He had struck her from his life. She no longer existed for him.

Christophe was free of Ada, but he was not free of himself. In vain he tried to deceive himself, to return to the chaste and steadfast calm of the past. One cannot return to the past. One must go on; and there is no use looking back, except to see the places one passed through, the distant smoke of the roof beneath which one slept fading on the horizon, in the haze of memory. But nothing removes us further from our former selves than a few months of passion. The road bends sharply, the landscape changes; it seems that we are saying farewell, for the last time, to what we leave behind.

Christophe could not accept this. He reached his arms toward the past; he persisted in trying to revive his old solitary and resigned soul. But it no longer existed. Passion is less dangerous in itself than in the ruins it leaves behind. For all that Christophe no longer loved, for all that he despised love --- if only for a time --- he bore its mark; his whole being had been kneaded by it; there was a void in his heart that had to be filled. In the absence of that terrible need for tenderness and pleasure which consumes those who have once tasted it, some other passion was needed --- even the opposite passion: the passion of contempt, of proud purity, of faith in virtue. --- These were not enough, they were no longer enough to satisfy his hunger; they were only a momentary nourishment. His life was a series of violent reactions --- leaps from one extreme to the other. At times he wanted to subject it to the rules of an inhuman asceticism: eating nothing, drinking water, exhausting his body with walking, fatigue, and sleeplessness, denying himself every pleasure. At other times he persuaded himself that strength is the true morality for people of his kind; and he threw himself into the pursuit of joy. In either case, he was miserable. He could no longer bear to be alone. He could no longer bear not to be.

The one salvation for him would have been to find a true friendship --- Rosa’s perhaps: he might have taken refuge there. But the break was complete between the two families. They no longer saw each other. Only once had Christophe encountered Rosa. She was coming out of Mass. He had hesitated to approach her; and she, for her part, had made a movement on seeing him as if to come toward him; but when he tried to reach her through the stream of the faithful descending the steps, she looked away; and when he drew near, she greeted him coldly and passed on. He felt in the young woman’s heart an intense and icy contempt. And he could not sense that she still loved him and would have wanted to tell him so; but she reproached herself for it, as for a fault and a foolishness; she believed Christophe to be wicked and corrupt, further from her than ever. And so they lost each other forever. And that was perhaps fortunate, for both of them. In spite of her kindness, she was not alive enough to understand him. In spite of his need for affection and esteem, he would have suffocated in a mediocre and narrow life, without joy, without sorrow, without air. They would both have suffered. They would both have suffered from causing each other to suffer. The ill fortune that separated them was, in the end, perhaps good fortune --- as so often happens, as it always happens, to those who are strong and endure.

But in the moment, it was a great sadness and a great misfortune for them. For Christophe especially. That intolerance of virtue, that narrowness of heart which sometimes seems to deprive entirely of intelligence those who have the most of it, and of goodness those who are the best --- it irritated him, wounded him, drove him in protest toward a freer life.

In the course of his wanderings with Ada through the taverns on the outskirts of town, he had made the acquaintance of a few good-natured fellows --- bohemians, whose carelessness and free manner had not entirely displeased him. One of them, Friedemann, a musician like himself, an organist, around thirty years old, was not without wit, and knew his trade well enough; but he was afflicted with an incurable laziness, and would sooner have let himself die of hunger --- though perhaps not of thirst --- than make the slightest effort to rise above his mediocrity. He consoled himself for his indolence by speaking ill of those who bustle about in life, God knows why; and his mockery, a little heavy-handed, still managed to raise a laugh. Freer than his colleagues, he was not afraid --- though still very timidly, with winks and hints --- to take jabs at men of position; he was even capable of not holding ready-made opinions in music, and of slyly driving a pickaxe into the usurped reputations of the great men of the day. Women fared no better before him; he enjoyed repeating, in jest, an old saying of a misogynist monk, whose sharpness Christophe could appreciate at that moment better than anyone:

“Femina mors animae.”

In his confusion, Christophe found some distraction in talking with Friedemann. He judged him --- he could not long take pleasure in that spirit of vulgar mockery: that tone of constant ridicule and negation quickly grew irritating, and smelled of impotence; but it was a relief from the self-satisfied stupidity of the Philistines. While despising his companion inwardly, Christophe could no longer do without him. They were always seen together, seated at tables with the shady and declassed characters of Friedemann’s circle, who were worth even less than he was. They played cards, they held forth, they drank entire evenings away. Christophe would suddenly come to himself, in the nauseating smell of cold cuts and tobacco; he would look at those around him with lost eyes: he no longer recognized them; and he thought with anguish:

--- Where am I? Who are these people? What have I to do with them?

Their talk and their laughter sickened him. But he did not have the strength to leave; he was afraid to go home, to find himself alone, face to face with his soul, his desires, and his remorse. He was losing himself, he knew he was losing himself; he sought --- he saw in Friedemann, with a cruel lucidity, the degraded image of what he was --- of what he would one day become; and he passed through a phase of such discouragement and disgust that instead of being jolted awake by this threat, it only finished him off.

He would have been lost, if he could have been. Fortunately, he possessed, as beings of his kind do, a resilience and a resource against destruction that others lack: his strength first of all, his instinct to live, not to let himself die --- more intelligent than his intelligence, stronger than his will. And he had also, without knowing it, the strange curiosity of the artist, that impassioned impersonality which every being truly endowed with the creative power carries within him. No matter how much he loved, suffered, gave himself entirely to all his passions: he watched them. They were in him, but they were not him. A myriad of small souls revolved obscurely within him, drawn toward a fixed point, unknown yet certain --- like the planetary world drawn through space by a mysterious abyss. This perpetual state of unconscious splitting was most manifest in those vertiginous moments when daily life falls asleep and from the depths of sleep and night there rises the gaze of the sphinx, the multiform face of Being. Especially in the past year, Christophe had been haunted by dreams in which he felt clearly, in a single instant, with absolute illusion, that he was simultaneously several different beings, often distant, separated by countries, by worlds, by centuries. In waking life, Christophe retained from these dreams a haunting disturbance, without any memory of what had caused it. It was like the fatigue of a vanished fixed idea, whose trace persists without one’s being able to understand it. But while his soul struggled painfully in the net of daily life, another soul attended within him, attentive and serene, to those desperate efforts. He could not see it; but it cast on him the reflection of its hidden light. This soul was avid and joyful in feeling everything, suffering everything, in observing and understanding these men, these women, this earth, this life, these desires, these passions, these thoughts --- even the tormenting ones, even the mediocre, even the vile; --- and this was enough to communicate a little of its light to them, to save Christophe from nothingness. It made him feel that --- he knew not how --- he was not entirely alone. This love of all beings and all knowledge, this second soul, opposed its rampart to the destructive passions.

But if it was enough to keep his head above water, it did not allow him to climb out with his own strength alone. He could not manage to see clearly within himself, to master himself and collect himself. All work was impossible for him. He was passing through an intellectual crisis, the most fertile of his life --- all his future life was already in germ within it --- but this inner richness expressed itself for the moment only in extravagances; and the immediate effects of such superabundance were no different from those of the most impoverished sterility. Christophe was submerged by his life. All his forces had undergone a tremendous surge and grown too quickly, all at once, all together. His will alone had not grown as fast; and it was overwhelmed by this crowd of monsters. His personality was cracking on all sides. Of this earthquake, this inner cataclysm, others saw nothing. Christophe himself saw nothing but his incapacity to will, to create, to be. Desires, instincts, thoughts emerged one after another, like clouds of sulfur from the fissures of a volcano; and he kept asking himself:

--- And now, what will come next? What will become of me? Will it always be like this, or will it be entirely over? Will I never be anything?

And now the hereditary instincts were surging up --- the vices of those who had come before him. --- He began to drink.

He would come home smelling of wine, laughing, dulled.

Poor Louisa would watch him, sigh, say nothing, and pray.

But one evening, as he was leaving a tavern at the edge of town, he caught sight on the road, a few steps ahead of him, of uncle Gottfried’s slight shadow, his bundle on his back. For months the little man had not returned to the town, and his absences were growing ever longer. Christophe called out to him, delighted. Gottfried, bent under his load, turned around; he looked at Christophe, who was making extravagant gestures, and sat down on a boundary stone to wait for him. Christophe, his face flushed and animated, came up with a sort of skip, and shook his uncle’s hand with great demonstrations of affection. Gottfried looked at him for a long moment, then said:

--- Good evening, Melchior.

Christophe thought his uncle had made a mistake, and burst out laughing:

--- Poor man, he thought, he’s slipping --- losing his memory.

Gottfried did indeed look older, shrunken, wizened, gnarled; he breathed with short, labored little breaths. Christophe continued to hold forth. Gottfried hoisted his bundle back onto his shoulders and resumed his walk in silence. They made their way back side by side, Christophe gesticulating and talking at the top of his voice, Gottfried coughing quietly, saying nothing. And when Christophe addressed him, Gottfried called him Melchior again. This time, Christophe asked him:

--- What’s the matter with you, calling me Melchior? My name is Christophe, you know that perfectly well. Have you forgotten my name?

Gottfried, without stopping, lifted his eyes toward him, looked at him, shook his head, and said flatly:

--- No, you are Melchior. I recognize you well enough.

Christophe stopped, stunned. Gottfried kept trotting on. Christophe followed him without a word. He was sober now. Passing near the door of a music hall, he went to the bleak mirrors that reflected the gas jets of the entrance and the empty cobblestones, and looked at himself: he recognized Melchior. He went home, shaken to the core.

He spent the night --- a night of anguish --- questioning himself, probing his soul. He understood now. Yes, he recognized the instincts and vices that had risen in him: they horrified him. He thought of the vigil beside Melchior’s body, of the vows he had made, and he reviewed his life since that night: he had betrayed them all. What had he done in the past year? What had he done for his God, for his art, for his soul? What had he done for his eternity? Not a single day that had not been lost, squandered, defiled. Not one work, not one thought, not one lasting effort. A chaos of desires destroying one another. Wind, dust, nothingness… What had it profited him to have willed anything? He had done nothing that he had willed. He had done the opposite of what he had willed, had become what he had not wanted to become: there was the balance sheet of his life.

He did not go to bed. Toward six in the morning --- it was still dark --- he heard Gottfried preparing to leave. --- For Gottfried had not wanted to linger longer. Passing through the town, he had come, as was his custom, to embrace his sister and his nephew; but he had announced that the following morning he would be on his way again.

Christophe came downstairs. Gottfried saw his pale face, hollowed by a night of pain. He smiled at him affectionately, and asked if he wanted to walk along with him for a while. They went out together, before dawn. They had no need to speak: they understood each other. Passing near the cemetery, Gottfried said:

--- Shall we go in?

He never failed to pay a visit to Jean-Michel and Melchior when he came to town. Christophe had not entered there in a year. Gottfried knelt before Melchior’s grave, and said:

--- Let us pray, so that they may sleep well, and not trouble us.

His thinking was a mixture of strange superstitions and clear common sense: it sometimes startled Christophe; but this time, he understood it all too well. They said nothing more until they had left the cemetery.

When they had pulled shut the creaking gate and were following, along the wall, through the chilly fields that were just waking, the little path that ran beneath the graveyard cypresses dripping with melting snow, Christophe began to weep:

--- Ah, uncle, he said, how I suffer!

He dared not speak to him of the ordeal he had gone through with love, out of a strange fear of embarrassing or wounding Gottfried; but he spoke of his shame, his mediocrity, his cowardice, his broken promises.

--- Uncle, what am I to do? I wanted to, I struggled; and after a year I am in the same place as before. Not even that! 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:

--- It won’t be the last time, my boy. We don’t do what we want. We want, and we live: those are two different things. One must console oneself. The essential thing, you see, is not to grow weary of wanting and living. The rest is not up to us.

Christophe kept repeating in despair:

--- I have broken my oath!

--- Do you hear them? said Gottfried…

(The roosters were crowing in the countryside.)

--- They crowed like that for another man who broke his oath. They crow for each of us, every morning.

--- A day will come, said Christophe bitterly, when they will crow no more 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 good is it to want, if wanting leads to nothing?

--- Watch and pray.

--- I no longer believe.

Gottfried smiled:

--- You would not be alive 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 is dawning. Don’t think about what will be in a year, in ten years. Think about today. Leave your theories aside. All theories, you see --- even those about virtue --- are bad, are foolish, do harm. Don’t do violence to life. Live today. Be reverent toward each day. Love it, respect it, above all don’t blight it, don’t keep it from flowering. Love it, even when it is gray and sad, as it is today. Don’t trouble yourself. Look. It is winter now. Everything sleeps. The good earth will wake again. One need only be good earth, and patient as the earth is. Be reverent. Wait. If you are good, all will be well. If you are not, if you are weak, if you do not succeed --- well, you must be content even so. It simply means you can do no more. Then why want more? Why grieve over what you cannot do? One must do what one can… Als ich kann.

--- That is too little, said Christophe, making a face.

Gottfried laughed warmly:

--- It is more than anyone else 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 it this way: a hero is someone who does what he can. Other people don’t even do that.

--- Ah! sighed Christophe, then what is the point of living? It isn’t worth the trouble. And yet there are people who say that “to will is to be able”!…

Gottfried laughed again, gently:

--- Yes?… Well, they are great liars, my boy. Or else they don’t want very much…

They had reached the top of the hill; they embraced warmly. The little peddler set off again at his weary pace. Christophe stood watching him go, lost in thought. He turned the uncle’s words over in his mind:

--- Als ich kann (As I can).

And he smiled, thinking:

--- Yes… All the same… That is enough.

He walked back toward the town. The hardened snow crunched under his shoes. The sharp winter wind made the bare branches of the stunted trees tremble on the hillside. It reddened his cheeks, burned his skin, lashed his blood. The red rooftops of the houses below laughed in the brilliant, cold sunlight. The air was strong and harsh. The frozen earth seemed to exult with a bitter joy. Christophe’s heart was like it. He thought:

--- I will wake again too.

He still had tears in his eyes. He wiped them with the back of his hand and looked with a laugh at the sun sinking behind a curtain of mist. The clouds, heavy with snow, swept over the town, whipped by the squall. He thumbed his nose at them. The icy wind blew…

--- Blow, blow!… Do what you will with me! Carry me away!… I know well enough where I am going.