Jean-Christophe. IV. Revolt. 1. Shifting Sands

I QUICKSAND

Free! He felt free!… Free of others and of himself! The web of passions that had bound him for a year had suddenly snapped. How? He had no idea. The threads had given way under the pressure of his being. It was one of those growth crises in which robust natures violently tear off the dead shell of the year just past, the old soul in which they have been suffocating.

Christophe breathed with full lungs, without quite understanding what had happened. A whirlwind of icy north wind was funneling under the great city gate when he came in, having just walked Gottfried home. People were bowing their heads against the gale. The girls heading off to work struggled in frustration against the wind that threw itself into their skirts; they stopped a moment to catch their breath, noses and cheeks red, expressions furious; they felt like crying. Christophe laughed with joy. He was not thinking about the storm. He was thinking about the other storm, the one he had just come through. He looked at the winter sky, the city wrapped in snow, the people passing by in their struggle; he looked around him, and within him: nothing bound him to anything anymore. He was alone… Alone! What happiness to be alone, to belong to oneself! What happiness to have escaped his chains, the torture of his memories, the hallucination of loved and hated faces! What happiness to live at last, without being life’s prey, to have become its master!…

He came into his house white with snow. He shook himself off cheerfully, like a dog. Passing his mother, who was sweeping the hallway, he lifted her off the ground with inarticulate, affectionate cries, the kind one makes to small children. Old Louisa struggled in her son’s arms, wet with melting snow; and she called him “you great beast!” laughing a good childlike laugh.

He bounded up to his room, four steps at a time. He could barely see himself in his little mirror, the day was so dark. But his heart was jubilant. His narrow, low-ceilinged room, where he could hardly turn around, seemed to him a kingdom. He locked the door and laughed with contentment. At last he was going to find himself again! How long had it been since he’d lost himself! He was eager to plunge into his own thoughts, the way a swimmer plunges into water. His thoughts appeared to him as a great lake dissolving in the distance into blue and golden mist. After a night of fever and crushing heat, he found himself at the edge, his legs bathed in the coolness of the water, his body caressed by the breeze of a summer morning. He threw himself in to swim; he didn’t know where he was going, and it hardly mattered: the joy was in swimming at random. He fell silent, laughing, listening to the thousand sounds of his soul: it swarmed with living things. He could distinguish nothing in it, his head was spinning; he felt only a dazzling happiness. He took pleasure in feeling those unknown forces within him; and, lazily putting off for later any test of his powers, he let himself drift in the proud intoxication of this interior flowering, which, compressed for months, was bursting open like a sudden spring.

His mother called him for lunch. He came downstairs, his head giddy, as after a day in the open air; but such joy was radiating from him that Louisa asked what was the matter. He didn’t answer; he caught her by the waist and made her dance a turn around the table, where the soup tureen was steaming. Louisa, out of breath, cried that he was mad; then she clapped her hands.

--- Good Lord! she said, alarmed. I’ll bet he’s in love again!

Christophe burst out laughing. He tossed his napkin into the air:

--- In love!… he cried. Good God!… No, no! That’s enough of that! You can rest easy. It’s over, over, over for life!… Phew!

He drank a large glass of water.

Louisa looked at him, reassured, shook her head, smiled:

--- A fine drunkard’s oath! she said. It’ll last until evening.

--- That’s something gained, at any rate, he replied, in good humor.

--- Of course! she said. So then, what is it that makes you so happy?

--- I’m happy. That’s all!

Elbows on the table, sitting across from her, he wanted to tell her everything he would do later on. She listened with an affectionate skepticism, and gently pointed out that the soup was getting cold. He knew she wasn’t really hearing what he was saying; but he didn’t care: he was talking for himself.

They looked at each other, smiling: he talking; she barely listening. Though she was proud of her son, she didn’t attach much importance to his artistic plans; she thought: “He’s happy: that’s what matters.” --- While intoxicating himself with his own words, he watched his mother’s dear face, with its black kerchief tied severely around her head, her white hair, her young eyes that gazed at him with love, her beautiful, indulgent calm. He could read all her thoughts in her. He said to her, teasingly:

--- It makes absolutely no difference to you, does it? Everything I’m telling you?

She protested weakly:

--- Of course it does, of course it does!

He kissed her:

--- But it doesn’t, it doesn’t! Come on, don’t deny it. You’re right. Just love me. I don’t need to be understood --- not by you, not by anyone. I don’t need anyone anymore, or anything, now: I have everything inside me…

--- Well then, said Louisa, here he is with a new obsession!… Still, if he has to have one, I prefer this one.

What delicious happiness, to let oneself float on the lake of one’s thoughts!… Lying at the bottom of a boat, the body bathed in sunlight, the face kissed by the light breeze that skims the surface of the water, he falls asleep, suspended above the sky. Beneath his outstretched body, beneath the rocking boat, he feels the deep current; his hand plunges idly into it. He raises himself up; and, with his chin resting on the edge of the boat, as he did when he was a child, he watches the water go by. He sees shimmering strange creatures dart past like flashes of light… Others, then more… They are never the same. He laughs at the fantastic spectacle unfolding within him; he laughs at his own thoughts; he has no need to fix them anywhere. To choose --- why choose among these thousands of dreams? He has plenty of time!… Later!… Whenever he wants, he need only cast his nets, to pull out the monsters he sees gleaming in the water. He lets them pass… Later!…

The boat drifts at the mercy of the warm wind and the imperceptible current. It is mild, sunny, and silent.

Languidly at last, he drops his nets. Bent over the water that hisses and sparkles, he follows them with his gaze until they have disappeared. After a few minutes of torpor, he draws them back without haste; as he pulls them in, they grow heavier; at the moment of drawing them out, he pauses to catch his breath. He knows he has caught his prey; he doesn’t know what his prey is; he prolongs the pleasure of anticipation.

At last he makes up his mind: the fish with their iridescent armor break the surface; they writhe like a nest of serpents. He looks at them curiously, he nudges them with his finger, he wants to hold the most beautiful ones for a moment in his hand; but the moment he lifts them from the water, their colors fade, they dissolve between his fingers. He throws them back in, and begins to fish for others. He is more eager to see them one by one, all the dreams stirring within him, than to keep any of them: they seem more beautiful to him when they float freely in the transparent lake…

He fished up all kinds of them, each more extravagant than the last. For months ideas had been accumulating in him, unused, and he was bursting with riches to spend. But everything was jumbled together: his mind was a shambles, a Jewish bric-à-brac shop, where rare objects, precious fabrics, scrap metal, and rags were piled together in the same room. He could not distinguish what had the most value: everything amused him equally. There were brushings of chords, colors that rang like bells, harmonies that hummed like bees, melodies smiling like loving lips. There were visions of landscapes, figures, passions, souls, characters, literary ideas, metaphysical ideas. There were grand projects, enormous and impossible --- tetralogies, decalogies --- with the ambition of painting everything in music and embracing whole worlds. And most often there were dark and blazing sensations, suddenly evoked by nothing at all, a tone of voice, a person passing in the street, the patter of rain, an inner rhythm. --- Many of these projects had no existence beyond their title; most reduced to one or two strokes, no more: that was enough. Like the very young, he believed he had created what he only dreamed of creating.

But he was too alive to satisfy himself for long with such vapors. He grew tired of illusory possession; he wanted to seize hold of his dreams. --- Which one to begin with? They all seemed equally important to him. He turned them over and over; he threw them aside, picked them up again… No, he didn’t pick them up again: they weren’t the same ones anymore; they wouldn’t let themselves be caught twice; they were constantly changing, changing in his hands, before his eyes, as he watched them. He had to hurry; and he could not: he was confounded by his own slowness at work. He would have liked to do everything in a single day, and yet had a terrible difficulty executing even the least significant piece. The worst was that he grew sick of it when it was barely begun. His dreams moved on, and he moved on himself; while doing one thing, he regretted not doing another. It seemed that he had only to choose one of his fine subjects for that fine subject to interest him no longer. Thus all his riches were useless to him. His thoughts were alive only on the condition that he left them untouched: everything he actually managed to reach was already dead. It was the torment of Tantalus: within arm’s reach, fruits that turned to stone the moment he took them; near his lips, fresh water that fled when he bent toward it.

To quench his thirst, he tried to refresh himself at the sources he had already won, at his earlier works… What a disgusting drink! At the first sip he spat it out, swearing. What! this tepid water, this insipid music --- this was his music? --- He reread his compositions one after another. This reading devastated him: he understood nothing in them anymore, he could not even understand how he had managed to write them. He blushed. Once, after a page more inane than the others, he found himself turning around to see if there was anyone in the room, and going to hide his face in his pillow, like a child who is ashamed. At other times, the ridiculousness of his works struck him as so absurd that he forgot they were his own…

--- Ah! what an idiot! he cried, doubling over with laughter.

But nothing affected him more than the compositions in which he had tried to express passionate feelings: griefs or joys of love. He would spring up in his chair as if stung by a fly; he hammered his table with his fists and struck his head, howling with rage; he berated himself coarsely, calling himself a pig, a triple scoundrel, a blithering idiot, and a clown. He would spend a quarter of an hour working through his entire rosary of curses. In the end he would go plant himself in front of his mirror, red in the face from shouting; he would grab himself by the chin, and say:

--- Look, look, you cretin, what a jackass face you’ve got! I’ll teach you to lie, you rogue! Into the water with you, monsieur, into the water!

He would plunge his face into his washbasin and hold it under the water until he was suffocating. When he came up from that, scarlet, eyes bulging, blowing like a seal, he went straight to his table without bothering to blot the water streaming in rivulets around him; he seized the accursed compositions and tore them to shreds with a fury, growling:

--- There, you scoundrel!… There, there, there!…

Then he felt relief.

What exasperated him most in these works was their dishonesty. Nothing felt. A phraseology learned by heart, a schoolboy’s rhetoric: he spoke of love the way a blind man speaks of colors; he spoke of it by hearsay, repeating the usual inanities. And it wasn’t only love --- it was all the passions he had used as themes for his declamations. --- Yet he had always striven to be sincere. --- But it is not enough to want to be sincere: one must be capable of it; and how could one be, when one still knows nothing of life? What had just revealed the falsity of these works, what had suddenly dug a gulf between him and his past, was the ordeal he had just undergone, these six months of real life. He had come out of the world of phantoms; there was now within him a real measure, against which he could test all his thoughts to judge their degree of truth or falsehood.

The disgust inspired in him by his earlier compositions --- produced without passion --- meant that, with his habitual tendency toward excess, he resolved to write nothing more unless he were compelled to write it by a passionate necessity; and, leaving off his pursuit of ideas, he swore to renounce music forever if creation did not impose itself upon him, with thunderclaps.

He spoke this way because he knew perfectly well that the storm was coming.

Thunder falls where it will, and when it will. But there are summits that draw it. Certain places --- certain souls --- are nests of storms: they create them or draw them in from every point on the horizon; and just as certain months of the year, certain ages of life are so saturated with electricity that lightning strikes occur --- if not at will --- at least at the expected hour.

The whole being is stretched taut. Often, for days and days, the storm is gathering. A burning wadding lines the white sky. Not a breath of air. The motionless air ferments, seems to boil. The earth is silent, crushed under torpor. The brain hums with fever: all of nature awaits the explosion of the accumulating force, the blow of the hammer lifting heavily, about to fall with a single stroke on the anvil of the clouds. Great shadows, dark and hot, pass by; a wind of fire rises; the nerves tremble through the whole body, like leaves… Then silence falls again. The sky continues to brood over the lightning.

There is a voluptuous anguish in this waiting. In spite of the unease that oppresses you, you feel the fire that burns the universe passing through your veins. The drunken soul seethes in the furnace, like grapes in the vat. Thousands of seeds of life and death are working within it. What will come of it? It does not know. Like a pregnant woman, it is silent, its gaze turned inward, it listens, anxious, to the quickening of its depths, and thinks: “What will be born of me?”…

Sometimes the waiting is in vain. The storm dissipates without breaking; and one wakes with a heavy head, disappointed, worn, disgusted. But it is only postponed: it will always break; if not today, then tomorrow; the longer it has delayed, the more violent it will be…

Here it is!… The clouds have surged from every recess of the being. Thick masses of blue-black, torn by the frantic jolts of lightning, they advance in a vertiginous and heavy flight, encircling the horizon of the soul, and suddenly sweeping both wings across the suffocating sky, extinguishing the light. An hour of madness!… The Elements, exasperated, unchained from the cage where the Laws that ensure the balance of the mind and the existence of things hold them imprisoned, reign, formless and colossal, in the night of consciousness. One feels oneself in agony. One no longer longs to live. One longs only for the end, for the death that delivers…

And suddenly, the lightning!

Christophe howled with joy.

Joy, fury of joy, sun that illuminates all that is and all that will be, the divine joy of creating! There is no joy except in creating. There are no true beings except those who create. All others are shadows, drifting over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are joys of creating: love, genius, action --- flames of force sprung from the single furnace. Even those who cannot find a place around the great hearth --- the ambitious, the selfish, the sterile debauched --- struggle to warm themselves at its faded reflections.

To create, in the order of the flesh or in the order of the spirit, is to escape the prison of the body, to hurl oneself into the hurricane of life, to be the One Who Is. To create is to kill death.

Woe to the sterile being who remains alone and lost upon the earth, contemplating his withered body and the night within him, from which no flame of life will ever emerge! Woe to the soul that does not feel itself fertile, heavy with life and love, like a tree in blossom in spring! The world may heap it with honors and happiness: it crowns a corpse.

When Christophe was struck by the jet of light, an electric discharge ran through his body; he trembled with the shock. It was as though, in the open sea, in the middle of the night, he suddenly saw land. Or it was as though, passing through a crowd, he had just received the blow of two deep eyes meeting his. It came to him often after hours of prostration during which his mind had been struggling desperately in the void. But more often still, it was at moments when he was thinking of something else entirely, talking with his mother, or walking in the street. If he was in the street, a certain self-consciousness prevented him from expressing his joy too noisily. But at home, nothing held him back. He would stamp his feet. He would sound a fanfare of triumph; his mother knew it well, and she had come to understand what it meant. She told Christophe he was like a hen that has just laid an egg.

He was pierced through and through by the musical idea. Sometimes it had the form of an isolated, complete phrase; more frequently, of a great nebula enveloping an entire work: the structure of the piece, its broad outlines, could be glimpsed through a veil, which was lacerated here and there by dazzling phrases that detached themselves from the shadow with sculptural clarity. It was only a flash; sometimes others followed, in rapid succession: each one illuminated different corners of the night. But ordinarily the capricious force, having manifested itself once, unexpectedly, would disappear for several days into its mysterious retreats, leaving behind it a luminous trail.

This pleasure of inspiration was so keen that Christophe came to feel disgust for everything else. The experienced artist knows well that inspiration is rare, and that it is for intelligence to complete the work of intuition; he puts his ideas under the press and forces out of them the last drop of divine juice that swells them --- (he does not even shrink, when occasion demands, from diluting them with plain water.) --- Christophe was too young and too sure of himself not to despise such miserable means. He dreamed the impossible dream of producing nothing that was not entirely spontaneous. Had he not willfully blinded himself, he would have had no difficulty recognizing the absurdity of his aim. Certainly, he was then in a period of inner abundance where there was no gap, no void, through which boredom or emptiness could slip in. Everything served him as a pretext for this inexhaustible fertility: everything his eyes saw, everything his ears heard, everything his being encountered in daily life; every glance, every word, caused harvests of dreams to rise in his soul. In the boundless sky of his thought, he saw millions of milky stars flowing, rivers of living light. --- And yet, even then, there were moments when everything was extinguished all at once. And though the darkness did not last, though he had scarcely time to suffer again from the soul’s prolonged silences, he could not help a secret dread of this unknown power, which came to visit him, left him, returned, disappeared… for how long this time? Would it ever come back? --- His pride repelled the thought, and said: “This force is me. From the day it is no more, I shall be no more: I will kill myself.” --- He could not help trembling; but it was one pleasure more.

Yet, even though for the present there was no danger that the source would run dry, Christophe could already recognize that it was never sufficient to sustain an entire work on its own. Ideas appeared almost always in their raw state: they had to be laboriously extracted from the matrix. And they always appeared without continuity, in leaps and jerks; to connect them one to another required the admixture of an element of considered intelligence and cold will, which forged with them a new being. Christophe was too much of an artist not to do this; but he refused to admit it; he acted in bad faith, persuading himself that he was merely transcribing his inner model, when he was always forced to transform it more or less in order to make it intelligible. --- More than that: it happened that he falsified its meaning entirely. However violently the musical idea struck him, he would often have been unable to say what it signified. It burst in from the underground depths of Being, far beyond the frontiers where consciousness begins; and in this utterly pure Force, which escaped all common measure, consciousness could recognize none of the preoccupations that agitated it, none of the human feelings it defines and classifies: joys, sorrows, they were all mingled in a single passion, unintelligible because it stood above intelligence. Nevertheless, whether it understood or not, intelligence needed to give a name to this force, to attach it to one of the logical constructions that man builds tirelessly in the hive of his brain.

Thus Christophe convinced himself --- he wanted to convince himself --- that the obscure power which agitated him had a precise meaning, and that this meaning accorded with his will. The free instinct, sprung from the deep unconscious, was, willy-nilly, compelled to couple itself, under the yoke of reason, with clear ideas that bore no relation to it whatsoever. Thus a given work was nothing but a mendacious juxtaposition of one of those grand subjects that Christophe’s mind had laid out for itself, and of those wild forces which had an altogether different meaning --- one he himself did not know.

He moved forward blindly, head down, swept along by the contradictory forces colliding within him, and casting at random into incoherent works a smoky and powerful life that he did not know how to express, but which he felt with proud joy.

The awareness of his new vigor made him dare, for the first time, to look squarely at everything around him, everything he had been taught to honor, everything he respected without having questioned it --- and he judged it at once with an insolent freedom. The veil was torn: he saw the German lie.

Every race, every art has its hypocrisy. The world sustains itself on a little truth and a great deal of falsehood. The human spirit is feeble; it accommodates itself poorly to pure truth; its religion, its morality, its states, its poets, its artists must present truth to it wrapped in falsehoods. These falsehoods adapt themselves to the spirit of each race; they vary from one to another: it is they that make it so difficult for peoples to understand one another, and so easy for them to despise one another. Truth is the same among all peoples; but each people has its lie, which it calls its idealism; every being breathes it in from birth to death: it has become for them a condition of life; only a few geniuses can free themselves from it, through heroic crises in which they find themselves alone, in the free universe of their thought.

It was an insignificant occasion that suddenly revealed to Christophe the lie of German art. If he had not seen it until then, it was not for want of having always had it before his eyes; but he was too close to it, he lacked perspective. Now, the mountain appeared to him, because he had moved away from it.

He was at a concert at the Städtische Tonhalle. The concert was held in a vast hall, occupied by ten or twelve rows of café tables --- about two or three hundred. At the far end, the stage, where the orchestra sat. Around Christophe were officers strapped into their long dark frock coats --- broad, clean-shaved faces, red, serious, and bourgeois; ladies who talked and laughed uproariously, displaying an exaggerated naturalness; good little girls smiling a smile that showed all their teeth; and stout men sunk into their beards and spectacles, who resembled good-natured round-eyed spiders. They rose at each glass to propose a toast; they brought to this act a religious gravity; their faces and their tone changed at such moments: they seemed to be saying mass, offering libations, drinking the chalice, with a mixture of solemnity and buffoonery. The music was lost amid the conversations and the clatter of dishes. Yet everyone made an effort to talk and eat quietly. The Herr Konzertmeister, a tall old stooped man with a white beard that hung like a pigtail from his chin, and a long hooked nose fitted with spectacles, had the look of a philologist. --- All these types had long been familiar to Christophe. But he had a tendency, that day --- he did not know why --- to see them as caricatures. There are days like that when, for no apparent reason, the grotesqueness of people and things, which in ordinary life passes unnoticed, suddenly leaps to the eye.

The orchestral program comprised the overture to Egmont, a waltz by Waldteufel, the Pèlerinage de Tannhäuser à Rome, the overture to Nicolai’s Merry Wives, the religious march from Athalie, and a fantasy on L’Étoile du Nord. The orchestra played the Beethoven overture correctly, and the waltz with fury. During the Pèlerinage de Tannhäuser, one could hear bottles being uncorked. A stout man seated at the table next to Christophe’s was beating time to the Merry Wives while miming Falstaff. A large, elderly lady in a sky-blue dress with a white belt, a gold pince-nez on her flat nose, red arms, and an ample waist, sang Lieder by Schumann and Brahms in a powerful voice. She raised her eyebrows, made sidelong eyes, fluttered her eyelids, nodded her head to the right, to the left, smiled a broad frozen smile in her moon-face, spent an exaggerated mimicry that at moments might have risked evoking the music hall, were it not for the majestic respectability that radiated from her; this mother of a family was playing the coquette, playing youth, playing passion; and Schumann’s poetry took on, vaguely, a stale nursery smell. The audience was in raptures. --- But attention grew solemn when the choral society of “South German Men” (Süddeutschen Männer Liedertafel) appeared, who alternately murmured and bellowed choral pieces full of feeling. There were forty of them singing like four; it seemed as though they had applied themselves to erasing every trace of properly choral style from their performance: it was a pursuit of small melodic effects, of small timid and whining nuances, of expiring pianissimi, with sudden thundering starts like blows from a bass drum; a lack of fullness and balance, a cloying style: one thought of Bottom:

“Let me play the lion. I will roar so gently that it will do any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar so that I will make the Duke say, ‘Let him roar again; let him roar again.’”

Christophe had been listening from the start with a growing stupefaction. None of this was new to him. He knew these concerts, this orchestra, this audience. But suddenly everything seemed false. Everything --- even what he loved best, that Egmont overture, whose pompous disorder and studied agitation now wounded him like a lack of honesty. No doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann he was hearing, but their ridiculous interpreters, their ruminating public, whose thick stupidity spread around the works like a heavy fog. --- Never mind; there was in the works themselves, even in the finest of them, something troubling that Christophe had never before felt. --- But what? He did not dare analyze it, thinking it sacrilege to question his beloved masters. But try as he might not to see, he had seen. And despite himself he kept on seeing; like the Vergognosa of Pisa, he looked through his fingers.

He saw German art stripped bare. All of them --- the great and the foolish alike --- displayed their souls with tender self-indulgence. Emotion overflowed, moral nobility poured down in streams, hearts melted in frantic outpourings; the floodgates of that formidable German sensibility were thrown open; it diluted the energy of the strongest, it drowned the weak beneath its gray, spreading sheets of water: it was an inundation, and German thought slept somewhere at the bottom. And what a thought --- sometimes --- that of a Mendelssohn, a Brahms, a Schumann, and behind them the whole legion of little composers of emphatic, whimpering Lieder! All sand. No rock. A shapeless, sodden clay. --- All of it was so vapid and so childish, so often, that Christophe could not believe the audience was not struck by it. He looked around him; but he saw only blissful faces, convinced in advance of the beauties they were hearing and of the pleasure they were required to take in them. How could they have permitted themselves to judge for themselves? They were filled with reverence for these consecrated names. What did they not revere? They were respectful before their programs, before their drinking glasses, before themselves. One felt that mentally they addressed everything remotely connected with themselves as “Your Excellency.”

Christophe looked alternately at the public and at the works: the works reflected the public, the public reflected the works, like a garden mirror-ball. Christophe felt laughter rising in him, and he made faces. He held himself back, however. But when “the men of the South” came to sing with great solemnity the blushing Confession of a girl in love, Christophe could contain himself no longer. He burst out laughing. Indignant shushing arose on all sides. His neighbors looked at him with alarm; those good scandalized faces filled him with delight --- he laughed all the harder, he laughed until he wept. At that, people grew angry. Cries of “Out! Out!” rang out. He stood up and left, shrugging his shoulders, his back still shaking with a fit of helpless laughter. The scene caused a scandal. It was the beginning of hostilities between Christophe and his city.

In the aftermath of this ordeal, Christophe went home and sat down to reread the works of the “consecrated” composers. He was dismayed to discover that certain of the masters he loved best had lied. He struggled at first to doubt it, to believe he was mistaken. --- But no, there was no getting around it. He was seized by the sheer quantity of mediocrity and falsehood that constitutes the artistic treasure of a great people. How few pages held up under examination!

From that point on, he could only approach the reading of other works, other masters he held dear, with a pounding heart… Alas! It was as though he were under a spell --- everywhere the same disappointment. In the case of certain composers, it was a heartbreak for him; it was as if he were losing a beloved friend, as if he suddenly discovered that this friend, in whom he had placed his entire trust, had been deceiving him for years. He wept over it. At night he could no longer sleep; he lay tormenting himself. He accused himself: had he lost the ability to judge? Had he become a complete idiot? --- No, no --- more than ever he saw the radiant beauty of the day, more freshly and lovingly than ever he felt the generous abundance of life: his heart was not deceiving him…

For a long while still he dared not touch those who were for him the finest, the most pure --- the Holy of Holies. He trembled at the thought of shaking his faith in them. But how could he resist the pitiless instinct of a brave and truth-loving soul that wants to go all the way and see things as they are, whatever suffering it must bring? --- He opened the sacred works, then, he threw in the last reserve, the Imperial Guard… At first glance, he saw that these too were no more immaculate than the others. He did not have the courage to go on. At certain moments he stopped, closed the book; like the son of Noah, he cast the mantle over his father’s nakedness…

Afterward he lay prostrate in the midst of those ruins. He would sooner have lost an arm than touched his cherished illusions. It was a mourning in his heart. But there was such vitality in him, such a renewal of life, that his faith in art was not shaken by it. With the naïve presumption of a young man, he began life over again, as if no one had lived it before him. In the intoxication of his fresh strength, he felt --- not without reason, perhaps --- that with few exceptions there was almost no correspondence between living passions and the expression that art had labored to give them. But he was wrong to think that he himself was more fortunate or more truthful when he expressed them. Since he was entirely full of his passions, he could easily rediscover them through what he wrote; but no one else would have recognized them beneath the imperfect vocabulary with which he designated them. Many of the artists he condemned were in the same position. They had felt and translated deep emotions; but the secret of their language had died with them.

Christophe was no psychologist; he did not burden himself with all these reasons. What was dead for him had always been so. He revised all his judgments on the past with the self-assured and ferocious injustice of youth. He laid bare the noblest souls without mercy for their absurdities. There was the comfortable melancholy, the distinguished whimsy, the right-thinking emptiness of Mendelssohn. There was the glass beads and tinsel of Weber, his dryness of heart, his cerebral emotion. There was Liszt --- the noble father, the circus rider, the neo-classicist and showman, blended in equal parts of genuine grandeur and false grandeur, of serene idealism and disgusting virtuosity. There was Schubert, engulfed beneath his own sensibility as beneath kilometers of transparent, insipid water. The ancients of the heroic ages, the demigods, the Prophets, the Fathers of the Church --- none were spared. Even great Sebastian, that man two or three centuries old who carried the past and the future within him --- Bach --- was not free of all falsehood, all fashionable inanity, all scholastic chatter. This man who had seen God, this man who lived in God, sometimes seemed to Christophe to profess a religion that was insipid and saccharine, Jesuit in style, rococo. In his cantatas there were airs of languishing, amorous piety --- (dialogues of the Soul as it flirts with Jesus) --- that turned Christophe’s stomach: he seemed to see chubby cherubs, curtseying and bowing with billowing draperies. Then he had the feeling that the brilliant Cantor always wrote in a sealed room: it smelled of staleness; there was not in his music that strong outdoor air that blows through other composers, lesser musicians perhaps, but greater men --- more fully men --- than he, like Beethoven or Hændel. What also wounded him in all of them, principally in the classicists, was their lack of freedom: almost everything in their works was “constructed.” At times an emotion was amplified through all the commonplaces of musical rhetoric; at other times it was a simple rhythm, an ornamental figure, repeated, inverted, combined in every direction in a mechanical fashion. These symmetrical, repetitive constructions --- classical and neo-classical sonatas and symphonies --- exasperated Christophe, who was not at this moment sensitive to the beauty of order, to vast and well-conceived design. It seemed to him the work of masons rather than musicians.

One should not suppose he was any less severe toward the Romantics. Curiously --- and he was the first to be surprised by it --- there were no musicians who irritated him more than those who had claimed to be --- who had truly been --- the most free, the most spontaneous, the least given to construction; those who, like Schumann, had poured their entire lives, drop by drop and minute by minute, into their innumerable small works. He attacked them with all the greater fury because he recognized in them his own adolescent soul and all the inanities he had sworn to tear from it. Certainly, the candid Schumann could not be accused of falseness: he almost never said anything he had not truly felt. But precisely his example led Christophe to understand that the worst falseness of German art lay not in artists who tried to express feelings they did not feel, but rather in artists who tried to express feelings they did feel --- and which were themselves false. Music is an implacable mirror of the soul. The more naive and good-faith a German musician is, the more he reveals the weaknesses of the German soul --- its uncertain foundations, its soft sensibility, its want of frankness, its slightly furtive idealism, its incapacity to see itself, to dare look itself in the face. This false idealism was the plague even of the greatest --- of Wagner. Rereading his works, Christophe ground his teeth. Lohengrin struck him as a lie loud enough to make one howl. He hated that bargain-basement chivalry, that hypocritical piety, that fearless and heartless hero, incarnation of a self-admiring, self-adoring egoistic and cold virtue that sacrifices others to itself without difficulty. He knew the type too well; he had seen him in real life --- that German Pharisee, handsome, impeccable and hard, in adoration before his own image, to the divinity of which he has no difficulty sacrificing others. The Flying Dutchman oppressed him with its massive sentimentality and its bleak tedium. The decadent barbarians of the Tetralogy were, in love, of a nauseating insipidity. Siegmund, carrying off his sister, tenorized a drawing-room ballad. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, like a good German married couple in the Götterdämmerung, paraded their conjugal passion before each other and above all before the audience --- pompous and long-winded. Every variety of falsehood had gathered together in that work: false idealism, false Christianity, false Gothic, false legend, false divinity, false humanity. Never had a more enormous convention displayed itself than in this theater that claimed to overturn all conventions. Neither eyes nor mind nor heart could be deceived by it for a single moment; for them to be deceived, they had to will it. --- They willed it. Germany delighted in this antiquated and childish art, the art of unchained brutes and simpering little mystical girls.

And Christophe was helpless: the moment he heard this music, he was swept up again, like the others, more than the others, by the torrent and by the diabolical will of the man who had unleashed it. He laughed, and he trembled, and his cheeks were burning, and he felt armies of horsemen riding through him! And he thought that all was permitted to those who carried such storms within them. What cries of joy he let out when, in the sacred works he now could only leaf through trembling, he rediscovered his old emotion, as ardent as ever, with nothing to cloud the purity of what he loved! Those were the glorious fragments he saved from the wreck. What happiness it gave him! It seemed to him that he was saving a part of himself. And was it not himself? These great Germans against whom he raged --- were they not his blood, his flesh, his most precious being? He was so severe toward them only because he was severe toward himself. Who loved them better than he? Who felt more than he the goodness of Schubert, the innocence of Haydn, the tenderness of Mozart, the great heroic heart of Beethoven? Who had taken refuge more often than he in the rustling forests of Weber, and in the great shadows of Jean-Sébastien’s cathedrals, rising against the gray sky of the North above the German plain, their mountains of stone and their gigantic towers with their fretted spires? --- But he suffered from their falsehoods and could not forget them. He attributed those falsehoods to the race, and their greatness to themselves. He was wrong. Greatness and weakness belong equally to the race, whose powerful and turbid thought rolls on like the broadest river of music and poetry, at which Europe comes to drink. --- And in what other people could he have found the naïve purity that allowed him, at this very moment, to condemn it so harshly?

He had no idea. With the ingratitude of a spoiled child, he turned against his mother the weapons she herself had given him. Later, later, he was to feel all that he owed her, and how dear she was to him…

But he was in a period of blind reaction against all the idols of his childhood. He resented himself and he resented them for having believed in them with such passionate abandon. --- And it was well that it was so. There is an age in life when one must dare to be unjust, when one must dare to sweep the table clean of all the admiration and all the respect one has been taught, and to deny everything --- lies and truths alike --- everything one has not recognized as true by oneself. Through his entire upbringing, and through all that he sees and hears around him, the child absorbs such a mass of falsehoods and foolishness mixed in with the essential truths of life, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to become a sound man is to disgorge it all.

Christophe was passing through this crisis of robust disgust. His instinct drove him to eliminate from his being all the indigestible elements that were encumbering it.

Above all, that nauseating sentimentality, seeping from the German soul like damp from a musty cellar. Light! Light! A rough, dry wind to sweep away the swamp miasmas, the insipid reek of those Lieder, those Liedchen, those Liedlein, as numberless as raindrops, in which the Germanic Gemüt endlessly pours itself out: those countless Sehnsucht (Longing), Heimweh (Homesickness), Aufschwung (Soaring), Frage (Question), Warum? (Why?), an den Mond (To the Moon), an die Sterne (To the Stars), an die Nachtigall (To the Nightingale), an den Frühling (To the Spring), an den Sonnenschein (To the Sunshine); those Frühlingslied (Spring Song), Frühlingslust (Spring Joy), Frühlingsgruss (Spring Greeting), Frühlingsfahrt (Spring Journey), Frühlingsnacht (Spring Night), Frühlingsbotschaft (Spring Message); those Stimme der Liebe (Voice of Love), Sprache der Liebe (Language of Love), Trauer der Liebe (Sorrow of Love), Geist der Liebe (Spirit of Love), Fülle der Liebe (Fullness of Love); those Blumenlied (Song of Flowers), Blumenbrief (Letter of Flowers), Blumengruss (Greeting of Flowers); those Herzeleid (Heartache), mein Herz ist schwer (My heart is heavy), mein Herz ist betrübt (My heart is troubled), mein Aug ist trüb (My eye is dim); those artless, simpering dialogues with the Röselein (little rose), with the brook, with the turtledove, with the swallow; those absurd questions: --- “Whether the wild rose ought to be without thorns,” --- “Whether it was with an old husband that the swallow made her nest, or whether she had only just become engaged”: --- all this flood of tepid tenderness, tepid emotion, tepid melancholy, tepid poetry… How many beautiful things profaned, rare things worn threadbare on every occasion and on no occasion at all! For the worst of it was that all of it was pointless; it was a habit of baring one’s heart in public, an affectionate and foolish propensity of good German souls to confide in one another at full volume. Nothing to say, and always talking! Would this chatter never end? --- Ho there! Silence, frogs of the swamp!

It was above all in the expression of love that Christophe felt the lie most rawly; for here he was better placed to compare it against the truth. That convention of love songs --- tearful and decorous --- answered to nothing in the desires of a man, or in the heart of a woman. And yet the people who had written such things must have loved, at least once in their lives! Was it possible that they had loved like this? No, no! They had lied, lied as always, lied to themselves; they had wanted to idealize… Idealize! That meant: being afraid to look life in the face, being incapable of seeing things as a man sees them, as they are. --- Everywhere, the same timidity, the same lack of virile honesty. Everywhere, the same cold enthusiasm, the same pompous and deceitful solemnity --- in patriotism, in drinking, in religion. The Trinklieder (drinking songs) were extended apostrophes to wine or to the cup: “Du herrlich Glas…” (“You, noble glass…”). Faith --- the thing in all the world that should be most spontaneous, springing from the soul like a sudden, unforeseen flood --- had become a manufactured article, a common commodity. The patriotic songs were made for herds of docile sheep bleating in time… --- Then howl! --- What! Will you go on lying --- “idealizing” --- even through drunkenness, even through slaughter, even through madness!…

Christophe had reached the point of hating all idealism. He preferred frank brutality to such a lie. --- At bottom, he was more of an idealist than any of them, and he had --- he was bound to have --- no more genuine enemies than those brutal realists he believed he preferred.

He was blinded by his passion. He felt himself chilled by the fog, by the anemic lie, by “the sunless phantom-Ideas.” He yearned for sunlight with every fiber of his being. In his youthful contempt for the hypocrisy around him --- or for what he called such --- he could not see the high practical wisdom of the race, which had slowly built up its grandiose idealism in order to master its savage instincts or to turn them to account. It is not arbitrary reasons, moral and religious rules, not legislators and statesmen, priests and philosophers, who transform the souls of peoples and sometimes impose a new nature upon them: that is the work of centuries of misfortune and trial, which forge for life the peoples who mean to live.

Meanwhile Christophe was composing; and his compositions were not free from the very faults he accused others of. That was because creation was in him an irresistible need that did not submit to the rules his intelligence laid down. One does not create by reason. One creates by necessity. --- Then, too, it is not enough to have recognized the lie and the bombast inherent in most emotions, in order to stop falling back into them: it takes long and painful effort; nothing is more difficult than to be entirely truthful in modern society, weighed down as one is by the crushing inheritance of lazy habits transmitted through generations. This is especially difficult for people --- or for peoples --- who have the indiscreet mania of letting their hearts speak --- of making them speak --- without rest, when, more often than not, those hearts would do better to keep silent.

Christophe’s heart was thoroughly German in this: he had not yet learned the virtue of silence; besides, it was not the virtue of his age. He had inherited from his father the need to speak, and to speak loudly. He was aware of this and fought against it; but the struggle paralyzed a part of his strength. --- He was waging another struggle against the no less unfortunate heredity he had from his grandfather: an extreme difficulty in expressing himself exactly. --- He was the son of a virtuoso. He felt in himself the dangerous lure of virtuosity: --- physical pleasure, the pleasure of skill, of agility, of satisfied muscular activity, the pleasure of conquering, of dazzling, of subjugating through his own person that many-headed public; a pleasure excusable enough, almost innocent in a young man, but deadly nonetheless to art and to the soul: --- Christophe knew it; it was in his blood; he despised it, but he yielded to it all the same.

And so, torn between the instincts of his race and those of his genius, weighed down by the burden of a parasitic past that had encrusted itself into him and from which he could not shake free, he advanced stumbling, and was much closer than he imagined to all that he condemned. All his works of that period were a mixture of truth and inflation, of lucid vigor and stammering stupidity. It was only at moments that his personality managed to break through the shell of those dead personalities that bound all his movements.

He was alone. He had no guide to help him out of the quagmire. When he thought he was free of it, he sank in deeper than ever. He went forward blindly, squandering his time and strength in failed attempts. No experience was spared him; and in the disorder of his creative striving, he could not tell what was most worth keeping among all that he created. He tangled himself in absurd projects --- symphonic poems with philosophical pretensions and monstrous dimensions. His mind was too honest to stay bound to them for long; and he abandoned them with disgust before he had sketched a single section. Or else he undertook to translate in overtures the most inaccessible works of poetry. Then he floundered in a domain that was not his own. When he devised his own scenarios --- for he had no doubts about anything --- they were sheer nonsense; and when he attacked the great works of Goethe, Kleist, Hebbel, or Shakespeare, he misconstrued them entirely. It was not lack of intelligence, but lack of critical sense; he did not yet know how to understand others --- he was too preoccupied with himself: it was himself he found everywhere, with his naïve and inflated soul.

Alongside these monsters that were not made to live, he wrote a quantity of small works that were the direct expression of passing emotions --- the most enduring of all: musical thoughts, Lieder. Here, as elsewhere, he was in passionate reaction against prevailing habits. He took up the most celebrated poems, already set to music, and had the impertinence to want to do it differently and more truly than Schumann and Schubert. Sometimes he tried to restore to Goethe’s poetic figures --- his Mignon, the Harpist of Wilhelm Meister --- their individual character, precise and troubled. At other times he attacked certain love Lieder that the weakness of artists and the insipidity of the public, in tacit accord, had grown accustomed to draping in sugary sentimentality; and he stripped them: he gave back their raw, sensual wildness. In a word, he meant to make passions and characters live for themselves, and not to serve as playthings for German families in search of easy emotions on a Sunday afternoon, gathered around a table at some Biergarten.

But as a rule he found the poets, even the greatest, too literary; and he preferred to seek out the simplest texts: texts from old Lieder, old devotional songs, which he had found in a book of edification. He was careful not to preserve their character of chorales: he treated them in an audaciously secular, free, and living way. Or they were passages from the Gospels, or proverbs, sometimes even words overheard in passing, scraps of popular dialogue, children’s remarks: --- texts that were often awkward and prosaic, containing nothing but the pure feeling. There he was at ease, and he reached a depth that he did not have in his other compositions, and of which he himself was unaware.

Good or bad --- and more often bad than good --- the body of these works overflowed with life. Not all of it was new, far from it. Christophe was often banal, even by virtue of his sincerity; he would repeat forms already used by others because they rendered exactly what he thought, because he himself also felt in that way and not otherwise. For nothing in the world would he have sought to be original: it seemed to him that one had to be very mediocre to trouble oneself with such an idea. He sought to be himself and to say what he felt, without caring whether what he said had been said before him or not. He had the pride of believing that this was still the best way of being original, and that Jean-Christophe had been and would never be more than once. With the magnificent impudence of youth, nothing seemed to him already done, and everything seemed to him still to be done --- or to be done again. And the sense of that inner fullness, of a limitless life before him, flung him into a state of exuberant and somewhat indiscreet happiness. It was a jubilation at every moment. It had no need of joy; it could accommodate itself to sadness: its source lay in his overabundance of life, in his strength --- the mother of all happiness and all virtue. To live, to live too much!… Whoever does not feel in himself this intoxication of strength, this jubilation in living --- even in the depths of misery --- is no artist. That is the touchstone. True greatness is recognized by the power to rejoice, in joy and in pain alike. A Mendelssohn or a Brahms, gods of October mists and drizzling rain, have never known this divine power.

Christophe felt it in himself; and he displayed his joy with an imprudent artlessness. He saw no harm in it; he only wanted to share it with others. He did not notice how wounding that joy was to most people, who would never possess it and would always envy it. Moreover, he did not care about pleasing or displeasing; he was sure of himself, and nothing seemed simpler to him than communicating his conviction to others --- than winning them over. Instinctively he compared his own riches to the general poverty of the note-manufacturers, and he thought it would be easy enough to have his superiority recognized. Too easy, even. He had only to show himself.

He showed himself.

They were waiting for him.

Christophe had made no secret of his feelings. Since he had become conscious of the German pharisaism that refuses to see things as they are, he had made it a rule to be absolutely, continually, uncompromisingly sincere --- applying it to everything, with no regard for any consideration of work or of person, or for himself. And since he could not do anything without pushing it to the extreme, he went as far as extravagance; he said outrageous things and scandalized people a thousand times less naïve than himself. He was of a prodigious naïveté. He confided to anyone who would listen what he thought of German art, with the satisfaction of a man who does not want to keep inestimable discoveries to himself. He could not imagine that anyone might hold it against him. When he had just recognized the stupidity of some consecrated work, full of his subject, he hastened to share it with whoever he met: musicians of the orchestra, or amateur acquaintances of his. He delivered the most absurd judgments with a beaming expression. At first no one took him seriously; people laughed at his outbursts. But it was not long before they found that he came back to them too often, with a persistence that was in poor taste. It became plain that Christophe believed in his paradoxes; and that seemed less amusing. He was an embarrassment; he displayed his noisy irony openly in the middle of concerts, or expressed his contempt for the glorious masters in the least veiled way, wherever he happened to be.

Everything made the rounds in the small town: not one of his words was lost. People already resented him for his behavior the previous year. They had not forgotten the scandalous way he had flaunted himself with Ada, and the troubled hours that followed. He himself no longer remembered it; the days erased the days, and he was far removed now from what he had been two months before. But others remembered for him: those whose social function, in every small town, is to make scrupulous note of all faults, all blemishes, all the sad, ugly, disagreeable events that concern their neighbors, so that none of it shall ever be lost. Christophe’s new extravagances found their natural place beside the old ones in the register bearing his name. Each set illuminated the other. To the resentments of wounded morality were added those of scandalized good taste. The most indulgent said of him:

--- He’s trying to set himself apart.

But most declared:

--- Total verrückt! (Utterly mad.)

An opinion no less severe and still more dangerous had begun to spread --- an opinion whose illustrious source assured its success. Word had it that at the castle, where Christophe continued to go regularly for his official duties, he had had the bad taste, while speaking to the grand duke in person, to express himself with revolting indecency about revered masters; he had allegedly called Mendelssohn’s Elijah “the mumbled prayers of a hypocrite clergyman,” and dismissed certain Lieder by Schumann as “music for a Backfisch” --- and this at the very moment when the august princes had just declared their preference for these works! The grand duke had put an end to these impertinences by saying dryly:

--- One would sometimes doubt, monsieur, hearing you speak, that you are German.

This avenging remark, fallen from such heights, could not fail to roll very low; and all those who believed they had cause for resentment against Christophe, whether on account of his successes or for some other, more personal reason --- if no more stinging --- were quick to recall that he was, in fact, not a pure German. His paternal family was --- as one will remember --- originally from Belgium. There was nothing surprising, then, that this immigrant should denigrate the national glories. This finding explained everything, and Germanic self-regard found in it reason to think better of itself, while at the same time looking down on its adversary.

To this revenge, entirely platonic as it was, Christophe came, of his own accord, to furnish more substantial fuel. It is most imprudent to criticize others when one is on the verge of exposing oneself to criticism. A more cunning and less candid artist would have shown greater modesty and more respect for his predecessors. But Christophe saw no reason to conceal his contempt for mediocrity or his delight in his own strength. This delight manifested itself in an immoderate fashion. Although Christophe had, since childhood, been accustomed to withdraw into himself for lack of anyone to confide in, he had lately been seized by a need to open up. It was too much joy for one man alone; his chest was too small to hold it; he would have burst had he not shared his exhilaration. For want of a friend, he had taken as his confidant his colleague in the orchestra, the second Kapellmeister Siegmund Ochs, a young Württemberger, good-natured and sly, who showed him an overflowing deference. He did not distrust him; and even had he distrusted him, how could he ever have imagined there was any harm in sharing his joy with a stranger, or even an enemy? Should they not rather have been grateful to him for it? Was he not working for them as well? He was bringing happiness to all --- friends and enemies alike. --- He did not suspect that there is nothing more difficult to make men accept than a new happiness; they would almost prefer an old unhappiness: they require nourishment that has been chewed over for centuries. But what is especially intolerable to them is the thought of owing that happiness to another. They forgive this offense only when they have no further means of escaping it; and in any case they arrange to make it dearly paid for.

There were therefore a thousand reasons why Christophe’s confidences would not be warmly received by anyone at all. But there was a thousand and one reasons why they would not be received by Siegmund Ochs. The first Kapellmeister, Tobias Pfeiffer, could not be long in retiring; and Christophe, despite his youth, stood every chance of succeeding him. Ochs was too good a German not to recognize that Christophe deserved this position, since the court was on his side. But he had too high an opinion of himself not to believe he would have deserved it more, had the court known him better. And so he received Christophe’s effusions with a peculiar smile whenever Christophe arrived at the theater in the morning, his face struggling to look serious but radiating in spite of himself.

--- Well, he said, teasing, as he passed by him, another new masterpiece?

Christophe took him by the arm:

--- Ah, my friend! This one surpasses everything… If you could only hear it!… The devil take me! It’s too beautiful! Nothing like it has ever existed. God help the poor souls who hear it! Afterward one can have only one desire in one’s soul: to die.

These words did not fall on deaf ears. Instead of smiling, or even gently teasing this childlike enthusiasm with Christophe --- who would have been the first to laugh at himself and apologize, had anyone made him feel how ridiculous it sounded --- Ochs reacted with ironic wonder; he goaded Christophe into letting slip more outrageous declarations; and after leaving him, he hurried to repeat them everywhere, making them still more grotesque. They caused great amusement in the small circle of musicians, and everyone waited impatiently for the chance to judge the unfortunate works. --- They were all condemned in advance.

At last they appeared. --- Christophe had chosen, from the mass of his compositions, an overture for Hebbel’s Judith, whose savage energy had drawn him in --- a reaction against German torpor --- though he was already beginning to tire of it a little, having sensed what is strained in the deliberate resolve to have genius, always and at any cost. To this he had added a symphony, bearing the emphatic title of Böcklin of Basel: “The Dream of Life,” and the epigraph: “Vita somnium breve.” A selection of his Lieder completed the program, along with some classical works and a Festmarsch by Ochs, which Christophe had offered, out of collegiality, to include in his concert, though he felt its mediocrity.

Little had leaked out from the rehearsals. Although the orchestra understood absolutely nothing of the works it was performing, and although each musician was, privately, quite taken aback by the peculiarities of this new music, they had not had time to form an opinion; above all, they were incapable of forming one before the public had pronounced. Besides, Christophe’s self-assurance commanded the respect of the players, docile and disciplined as any good German orchestra. The only difficulties came from the singer. She was the lady in blue from the Tonhalle concert. She was a celebrity of song in Germany: this mother of a family performed Brünnhilde and Kundry in Dresden and Bayreuth with an undeniable breadth of lung. But if she had learned from the Wagnerian school the art --- of which that school is justly proud --- of articulating clearly, projecting consonants across the hall, and hammering vowels like club-blows on the gaping audience, she had not learned there --- and with good reason --- the art of being natural. She made something of every word: everything was accented; the syllables trudged along on leaden soles, and there was a tragedy in every phrase. Christophe asked her to moderate her dramatic power somewhat. At first she complied with reasonable grace; but her natural heaviness and the need to project her voice prevailed. Christophe grew nervous. He pointed out to the respectable lady that he had meant to portray living people, not the serpent Fafner speaking through a megaphone. She took --- as one might imagine --- great offense at this insolence. She said that she knew, thank God, what singing was, that she had had the honor of performing Maître Brahms’s Lieder in the presence of that great man, and that he never tired of hearing her sing them.

--- Too bad! Too bad! cried Christophe.

She asked him, with a haughty smile, to be so good as to explain the meaning of this enigmatic exclamation. He replied that since Brahms had never in his life known what naturalness was, his praise was the worst possible censure, and that though he --- Christophe --- was sometimes rather rude, as she had quite rightly pointed out, he would never have permitted himself to say anything so unkind to her.

The discussion continued in this vein; and the lady persisted in singing in her own way, with crushing pathos and melodrama effects, --- until the day Christophe declared coldly that he could see it plainly: such was her nature, nothing could be done about it; but since the Lieder could not be sung as they ought to be, they would not be sung at all: he was withdrawing them from the program. --- It was the eve of the concert, people were counting on these Lieder; she herself had spoken of them; she was musician enough to have appreciated certain qualities in them; Christophe was insulting her; and since she was not certain that the following day’s concert would not establish the young man’s reputation, she had no wish to quarrel with a rising star. She therefore yielded at once; and during the last rehearsal she submitted docilely to everything Christophe asked of her. But she was quite resolved --- at the concert itself --- to do entirely as she pleased.

The day came. Christophe had no anxiety. He was too full of his music to be able to judge it. He was well aware that his works, in places, laid themselves open to ridicule. But what did it matter? One cannot write anything great without risking ridicule. To get to the bottom of things, one must brave the fear of others’ judgment, politeness, modesty, the concern for the social lies beneath which the heart lies smothered. If one wishes to offend no one and achieve success, one must resign oneself, all one’s life, to remaining within an agreed-upon average and offering the mediocre nothing but the mediocre truth --- diluted, watered-down, in doses they can assimilate; one must remain on the near side of life. One is great only when one has trampled this anxiety underfoot. Christophe stood on it. Let them hiss him: he was sure of leaving no one indifferent. He amused himself imagining the faces certain people he knew would make, hearing this or that somewhat risky passage. He expected sharp criticism: he smiled at it in advance. In any case, one would have to be blind --- or deaf --- to deny that there was a force here --- lovable or not, what did it matter? --- Lovable! Lovable!… Force! That is enough. Let it go its way, and carry everything before it, like the Rhine!…

He had his first disappointment. The grand duke did not come. The princely box was occupied only by stand-ins: a few ladies-in-waiting. Christophe felt a dull irritation at this. He thought: “The imbecile is sulking. He doesn’t know what to think of my works: he’s afraid of compromising himself.” He shrugged, pretending not to care about such foolishness. Others took more notice: it was a first lesson given, and a threat for the future.

The audience had shown itself barely more eager than the sovereign: a good third of the hall was empty. Christophe could not help thinking bitterly of the packed houses at his childhood concerts. He would not have been surprised by the change had he been more experienced; he would have found it natural that fewer people should come to hear him when he made good music than when he made bad: for it is not the music but the musician that interests the greater part of the public; and it is perfectly obvious that a musician who is a man and resembles everyone else offers far less interest than a musician in knee-breeches or a child’s skirt, who touches the sentimental and entertains the gawkers.

Christophe, having waited in vain for the hall to fill, made up his mind to begin. He tried to persuade himself it was better this way: “Few friends, but good ones.” --- His optimism did not last long.

The pieces unfolded in silence. --- There is a silence from an audience that one feels swollen with love and ready to overflow. But in this one there was nothing. Nothing. Complete torpor. Nothingness. One felt that every phrase was sinking into abysses of indifference. Christophe, his back to the audience, occupied with his orchestra, nevertheless perceived everything happening in the hall, with those inner antennae with which every true musician is gifted, which allow him to sense whether what he is playing finds an echo in the hearts surrounding him. He continued to beat time and urge himself on, chilled by the fog of boredom rising from the stalls and the boxes behind him.

At last the overture ended, and the hall applauded. It applauded politely, coldly, and fell silent. Christophe would have preferred to be hissed… A whistle! A single whistle! Something that would have been a sign of life, of reaction at least against his work!… --- Nothing. --- He looked at the audience. The audience looked at one another. They searched for an opinion in each other’s eyes. They did not find it, and sank back into their indifference.

The music resumed. It was the symphony’s turn. --- Christophe had a great deal of difficulty getting through to the end. Several times he was on the verge of throwing down his baton and fleeing. The apathy was infecting him; he ended up no longer understanding himself what he was conducting, he could not breathe, he had the distinct impression of falling into an unfathomable boredom. There were not even the ironic whispers he had expected at certain passages: the audience was absorbed in reading the program. Christophe heard the pages turning all at once, with a dry rustling; and then silence again until the final chord, where the same polite applause attested that people had understood the work was finished. --- Yet three or four isolated claps resumed after the others had ceased: but they woke no echo and fell silent, ashamed; the emptiness seemed emptier than before, and this small incident served to cast faint light on the boredom the audience had felt.

Christophe had sat down in the middle of his orchestra; he dared look neither right nor left. He felt like weeping; and at the same time he trembled with rage. He longed to stand up and shout at them all: “You bore me! Oh, how you bore me! I can’t take any more!… Go away! Go away, all of you!…”

The audience was waking up a little: it was waiting for the singer --- it was accustomed to applauding her. In this ocean of new works, where it wandered without a compass, she at least was a certainty, a known and solid ground where there was no risk of getting lost. Christophe read their thoughts exactly; and he gave a bitter laugh. The singer was no less aware of the audience’s expectation: Christophe could see it in her queenly manner when he went to tell her it was her turn to appear. They eyed each other with hostility. Instead of offering her his arm, Christophe thrust his hands into his pockets and let her go in alone. She swept past, furious and flustered. He followed, with an air of boredom. The moment she appeared, the hall gave her an ovation: it was a relief to everyone; faces brightened, the audience came alive, all the opera glasses trained on her. Sure of her power, she launched into the Lieder in her own fashion, of course, taking no account whatever of the observations Christophe had made to her the day before. Christophe, accompanying her at the piano, went pale. He had foreseen this rebellion. At the first change she made, he rapped on the piano and said angrily:

--- No!

She continued. He hissed at her back in a low, furious voice:

--- No! No! That’s not it!… Not like that!…

Rattled by these furious growlings, which the audience could not hear but the orchestra missed nothing of, she dug in her heels, slowing to absurd extremes, inserting pauses and fermatas. He paid no attention and pressed ahead: they ended up a full measure apart. The audience did not notice --- it had long since accepted that Christophe’s music was not made to sound agreeable or correct to the ear --- but Christophe, who was not of that opinion, was making the grimaces of a man possessed; and he finally exploded. He stopped dead in the middle of a phrase:

--- Enough! he cried at the top of his lungs.

Carried forward by her own momentum, she went on for half a measure, then stopped in turn.

--- Enough! he repeated curtly.

There was a moment of stupefaction in the hall. After a few seconds he said, in a glacial tone:

--- We begin again!

She stared at him, dumbfounded; her hands were trembling; for a moment she thought of throwing her score at his head; she could never understand, afterward, how she had failed to do so. But she was crushed by Christophe’s authority and his tone that admitted no reply: --- she began again. She sang the entire cycle of Lieder without altering a single nuance or tempo, for she felt he would show her no mercy; and she shuddered at the thought of another humiliation.

When she had finished, the audience recalled her with frenzy. It was not the Lieder they were applauding --- (had she sung different ones, they would have applauded all the same) --- it was the celebrated singer, old in the harness: they knew they could admire her with complete safety. They also wished to repair the effect of the scene a moment ago. Without being entirely certain of it, they had vaguely grasped that the singer had been at fault; but they found it indecent that Christophe had made her see it. The pieces were encored. But Christophe resolutely closed the piano.

She did not notice this fresh insolence; she was too agitated to think of beginning again. She rushed offstage, locked herself in her dressing room; and there, for a quarter of an hour, she relieved her heart of the flood of rancor and rage that had accumulated in it: a fit of nerves, a deluge of tears, indignant invectives, imprecations against Christophe --- nothing was lacking. Her shrieks of fury could be heard through the closed door. Those of her friends who managed to get in came out and told everyone that Christophe had behaved like a boor. Opinion spreads quickly in a concert hall. So when Christophe returned to the podium for the final piece, the audience was in an ugly mood. But this piece was not his: it was the Festmarsch by Ochs, which Christophe had amicably added to his program. The audience --- which, moreover, felt quite at ease with this bland music --- found a perfectly simple way to show its disapproval of Christophe without going so far as the audacity of booing him: it acclaimed Ochs with ostentation, calling the composer out two or three times, and Ochs did not fail to appear. And so the concert ended.

It goes without saying that the grand duke and all the court --- that petty provincial town, gossiping and bored --- missed none of the details of what had happened. The papers friendly to the singer made no allusion to the incident; but they were all of one mind in exalting the singer’s art, contenting themselves with mentioning, as a point of information, the Lieder she had sung. On Christophe’s other works, a few lines barely, nearly identical in all the papers: ”…Contrapuntal craft. Complicated writing. Lack of inspiration. No melody. Writes with his head, not his heart. Absence of sincerity. Striving for originality…” --- This was followed by a paragraph on true originality, that of the masters who are dead and buried --- Mozart, Beethoven, Loewe, Schubert, Brahms, “those who are original without having tried to be.” --- Then, by a natural transition, the piece moved on to the new revival at the grand-ducal theater of Konradin Kreutzer’s Nachtlager von Granada; a lengthy notice followed on “this delightful music, fresh and sprightly as on the first day.”

In sum, Christophe’s works met, among the best-disposed critics, with total and bewildered incomprehension; --- among those who bore him no goodwill, with a furtive hostility that was arming itself for later; --- and finally, from the general public, which no friendly or hostile critic was guiding, silence. Left to its own thoughts, the general public thinks nothing --- that goes without saying.

Christophe was devastated.

His failure had nothing surprising about it, however. There were three reasons, each sufficient on its own, for his works to displease. They were insufficiently matured. They were, in the second place, too advanced to be understood at first hearing. And finally, people were only too glad to teach a lesson to this impertinent young man. --- But Christophe’s mind was not calm enough to accept the legitimacy of his defeat. What he lacked above all was the serenity that comes to the true artist from the painful experience of long incomprehension on the part of men and their incurable stupidity. His naïve confidence in the public and in success --- which he had simply believed he would attain because he deserved it --- collapsed. He would have found it natural to have enemies. But what stupefied him was to find himself without a single friend. Those he had counted on, those who until now had seemed to take an interest in what he wrote, had not said a single word of encouragement to him since the concert. He tried to sound them out: they retreated behind vague words. He pressed further, wanting to know their true thoughts: the most candid held his earlier works up against him, his foolishness of his early years. --- More than once in the course of his life he would hear his new works condemned in the name of his old ones --- and this at the hands of the same people who, a few years before, had condemned his old works when they were new: such is the common rule. Christophe was not used to it; he raised an outcry. That people did not love him --- well and good, he accepted that; it even pleased him, he had no wish to be everybody’s friend. But that people should claim to love him while refusing to let him grow, that they should try to oblige him to remain a child all his life --- that went beyond all limits! What had been good at twelve was no longer good at twenty; and he hoped he was not going to stop there, to keep changing, always changing… The fools who would arrest life!… What was interesting in his childhood compositions was not his childish inanities, but the force smoldering for the future. And that future they wanted to kill!… No, they had never understood what he was, not once; they had never loved him, not yesterday any more than today; they loved only what was weak in him, what was vulgar, what he shared with others --- not what was truly him: their friendship had been nothing but a misunderstanding…

He was perhaps exaggerating. It is a common enough case: decent people incapable of loving a new work who love it sincerely when it is twenty years old. New life has too strong a smell for their feeble heads: the smell must evaporate in the breath of time. A work of art only begins to be intelligible to them when it is coated in the grime of years.

But Christophe could not accept being misunderstood when he was present, and understood when he was past. He preferred to believe that he was not understood at all, in any case, never. And he raged. He had the absurdity of wanting to make himself understood, of explaining himself, of arguing, even though it served no purpose: what would have been needed was to reform the taste of the age. But he doubted nothing. He was resolved to carry out, whether people liked it or not, a thorough cleansing of German taste. The means to do so were lacking: it was not through a few conversations, in which he struggled to find his words and expressed himself with exaggerated violence about the great composers and even about the people he was speaking with, that he could convince anyone; he succeeded only in making a few more enemies. He would have needed to be able to prepare his thoughts at leisure, and then compel the public to listen…

And at just that moment, as if on cue, his star --- his unlucky star --- came to offer him the means.

He was seated at a table in the theater restaurant, surrounded by a circle of orchestra musicians whom he was scandalizing with his artistic judgments. They were not all of the same opinion; but all were grated by this freedom of speech. Old Krause, the viola player, an honest man and a good musician who sincerely liked Christophe, would have liked to steer the conversation elsewhere; he kept coughing, or watching for an opening to let loose a pun. But Christophe paid no attention; he went at it harder than ever; and Krause grew despondent; he thought:

--- Why does he need to say all this? May God bless him! One can think these things; but one doesn’t say them, for goodness’ sake!

The curious thing was that “these things” --- he thought them too, at least he had his suspicions of them, and Christophe’s words stirred up in him many a doubt; but he lacked the courage to admit them to himself, let alone aloud --- partly from fear of compromising himself, partly from modesty, from distrust of himself.

Weigl, the hornist, wanted to know nothing about it; he wanted to admire, whoever it was, whatever it was, good or bad, star or streetlamp: everything was on the same level; there was no more or less in his admiration --- he admired, admired, admired. It was a vital need for him; he suffered when anyone tried to limit it.

The cellist Kuh suffered considerably more. He loved bad music with all his heart. Everything that Christophe pursued with his sarcasms and invectives was infinitely dear to him: by instinct, it was to the most conventional works that his preference turned; his soul was a reservoir of lachrymose and pompous emotion. Certainly he was not lying in his tender devotion to all the false great men. It was when he persuaded himself that he admired the true ones that he lied to himself --- in perfect innocence. There are “Brahminists” who believe they find in their god the breath of past geniuses: they love Beethoven in Brahms. Kuh went further: it was Brahms he loved in Beethoven.

But the most indignant at Christophe’s paradoxes was the bassoonist Spitz. It was not so much his musical instinct that was wounded as his natural servility. One of the Roman emperors wished to die on his feet. Spitz wished to die flat on his face, as he had lived: that was his natural position; he took exquisite pleasure in groveling at the feet of everything official, consecrated, “arrived”; and he was beside himself that anyone should try to prevent him from playing the lackey to his heart’s content.

So Kuh groaned, Weigl made desperate gestures, Krause talked nonsense, and Spitz cried out in a sharp voice. But Christophe, imperturbable, shouted louder than all the others; and he said outrageous things about Germany and the Germans.

At a nearby table, a young man was listening to him, doubled over with laughter. He had black curly hair, fine intelligent eyes, a substantial nose that, having nearly reached its tip, could not decide whether to go right or left, and rather than going straight ahead went both ways at once; thick lips, and a witty, mobile face that followed everything Christophe said, hanging on his words, reflecting each one with an expression of sympathetic mockery, creasing into little wrinkles at the forehead, the temples, the corners of the eyes, along the nostrils and cheeks, contorting with laughter, his whole body shaken now and then by a convulsive fit. He took no part in the conversation, but he missed not a word. He showed particular delight whenever he saw Christophe, bogged down in an argument and badgered by Spitz, floundering, mumbling, stammering with fury, until at last he found the word he was after --- a boulder to crush his adversary. And his pleasure knew no bounds when Christophe, swept by passion well beyond his actual thinking, uttered monstrous paradoxes that made his audience trumpet with outrage.

At last they parted, exhausted from asserting each other’s superiority. As Christophe, the last one remaining in the room, was about to cross the threshold, he was approached by the young man who had taken such pleasure in listening to him. He had not noticed him before. The other, hat politely removed, was smiling and asking permission to introduce himself:

--- Franz Mannheim.

He apologized for having been indiscreet enough to follow the discussion, and congratulated Christophe on the maestria with which he had pulverized his adversaries. He was still laughing at the thought of it. Christophe looked at him, pleased but slightly wary:

--- Are you serious? he asked. You’re not making fun of me?

The other swore on everything sacred. Christophe’s face lit up:

--- Then you think I’m right, don’t you? You agree with me?

--- Listen, said Mannheim, to tell the truth, I’m not a musician, I know nothing about music. The only music I enjoy --- (what I’m about to say isn’t very flattering) --- is yours… Well, I say this just to show you that my taste isn’t entirely bad…

--- Ha! Ha! --- said Christophe, skeptical yet flattered all the same, --- that’s not exactly proof.

--- You’re hard to please… Very well!… I agree with you: that’s not proof. So I won’t venture to judge what you say about German musicians. But it’s perfectly true, in any case, of Germans in general, of old Germans, of all those Romantic idiots with their rancid thinking, their lachrymose emotions, those senile repetitions they expect us to admire --- “that eternal Yesterday, which always was, and always will be, and will be law tomorrow because it was law today…!”

He recited a few lines from the famous passage in Schiller:

”… Das ewig Gestrige Das immer war und immer wiederkehrt…”

--- And he was the first of them! --- he broke off in the middle of his recitation.

--- Who? asked Christophe.

--- The pompous fool who wrote that!

Christophe did not understand. But Mannheim went on:

--- For my part, I would like every fifty years to carry out a general cleaning of art and thought --- to let nothing survive of everything that came before.

--- That’s a bit radical, said Christophe, smiling.

--- Not at all, I assure you. Fifty years is even too long; you’d have to say: thirty… And even then!… It’s a matter of hygiene. You don’t keep your grandfathers’ collection in your house. When they die, you politely send them off to rot somewhere else, and put stones on top of them, to make sure they don’t come back. Delicate souls also put flowers. Fine, I don’t mind. All I ask is that they leave me in peace. I certainly leave them in peace! Each to his own side: the side of the living; the side of the dead.

--- Some of the dead are more alive than the living.

--- No, no! It would be truer to say there are living people who are more dead than the dead.

--- Perhaps. In any case, there are old things that are still young.

--- Well, if they’re still young, we’ll rediscover them on our own… But I don’t believe it. What was good once is never good a second time. Only change is good. Above all, we must rid ourselves of the old. There are too many old things in Germany. Death to the old!

Christophe listened to these sallies with great attention and took considerable pains to argue against them; he sympathized with them in part, recognizing in them some of his own thoughts; and at the same time he felt uncomfortable hearing them pushed to a caricature’s extreme. But since he attributed his own seriousness to others, he told himself that perhaps his interlocutor, who seemed better educated and spoke with greater ease, was right and was merely drawing the logical consequences of his own principles. The proud Christophe, whom so many people could not forgive for believing in himself, was on the contrary possessed of a naive modesty that often made him a dupe before those who had received a better education than he --- when, at any rate, they consented not to flaunt that education in order to avoid an awkward argument. Mannheim, who was amused by his own paradoxes and who, riposte after riposte, arrived at extravagant absurdities at which he was laughing inwardly, was not accustomed to being taken seriously; he was delighted by the pains Christophe took to argue with his blunders, or even to understand them; and while mocking him, he was grateful for the importance Christophe accorded him: he found him ridiculous and charming.

They parted the best of friends; and Christophe was not a little surprised to see, three hours later at the theatre rehearsal, Mannheim’s head emerge from the small door leading to the orchestra pit --- radiant and grimacing, making mysterious signals to him. When the rehearsal was over, Christophe went to him. Mannheim took him familiarly by the arm:

--- Do you have a moment?… Listen. I’ve had an idea. You may find it absurd… Wouldn’t you like, just once, to write down what you think about music and musicians? Instead of wearing out your voice haranguing four idiots from your group who are good for nothing but blowing and scraping on pieces of wood, wouldn’t you do better to address the general public?

--- If I wouldn’t do better? If I would want to?… Of course! And where exactly would you have me write? You make it sound easy!…

--- Here’s what I’m proposing… Some friends and I --- Adalbert von Waldhaus, Raphael Goldenring, Adolf Mai, and Lucien Ehrenfeld --- we’ve founded a journal, the only intelligent journal in the city: the Dionysos. --- (You certainly know it?…) --- We all admire you, and we’d be delighted to have you among us. Would you be willing to take charge of the music criticism?

Christophe was embarrassed by such an honor: he was dying to accept; he only feared he might not be worthy of it --- he didn’t know how to write.

--- Never mind that, said Mannheim, I’m sure you write very well. And besides, once you’re a critic, you have every right. There’s no need to stand on ceremony with the public. They’re stupid beyond all measure. Being an artist is nothing: an artist is a kind of performer, someone who can be booed. But a critic is someone who has the right to say: “Boo that man!” The entire audience offloads onto him the difficulty of thinking. Think whatever you like. Just appear to be thinking something. As long as you give these geese their feed, it doesn’t matter what kind: they’ll swallow anything.

Christophe finally agreed, thanking him effusively. He only set one condition --- that he would have the right to say everything:

--- Of course, of course, said Mannheim. Absolute freedom! Each of us is free.

He came to find him at the theatre a third time, that evening after the performance, to introduce him to Adalbert von Waldhaus and his friends. They welcomed him warmly.

With the exception of Waldhaus, who belonged to one of the old noble families of the region, all of them were Jewish, and all were quite wealthy: Mannheim, the son of a banker; Goldenring, of the owner of renowned vineyards; Mai, of the director of a metallurgical firm; and Ehrenfeld, of a prominent jeweler. Their fathers belonged to the old Israelite generation --- hardworking and tenacious, attached to the spirit of their race, building their fortunes with fierce energy and taking more pleasure in that effort than in the wealth itself. The sons seemed made to destroy what the fathers had built: they mocked the family prejudices and that mania of thrifty, burrowing ants; they played at being artists, affected contempt for money, and professed to throw it out the window. But in reality very little of it slipped through their fingers; and whatever follies they committed, they never quite managed to lose their clarity of mind or their practical sense. Besides, their fathers kept watch and held them on a short rein. The most extravagant, Mannheim, would have sincerely given away everything he possessed --- but he never possessed anything; and although he railed loudly against his father’s miserliness, inwardly he laughed at it and thought his father was right. In the end, it was really only Waldhaus, master of his own fortune, who put in fair coin and fair play, funding the journal out of his own pocket. He was a poet. He wrote “Polymètres” in the manner of Arno Holz and Walt Whitman --- verses alternately very long and very short, in which periods, double and triple ellipses, dashes, silences, capitals, italics, and underlined words played a very great role, as did alliterations and repetitions --- of a word, --- of a line, --- of an entire sentence. He inserted words from every language. He claimed to be doing in verse --- (no one had ever understood why) --- what Cézanne did in paint. In truth, he had a fairly poetic soul, one that felt with a certain distinction things that were utterly bland. He was sentimental and dry, naïve and a dandy; his labored verses affected a cavalier negligence. He might have been a good poet for society drawing rooms. But there are far too many of that kind, in journals and salons; and he wanted to stand alone. He had set himself on playing the great lord who stands above the prejudices of his caste. He had more of those than anyone. He did not admit them to himself. He had taken pleasure in surrounding himself exclusively with Jews at the journal he directed, so as to outrage his family --- fiercely antisemitic --- and to prove to himself his own freedom of mind. With his colleagues he affected a tone of courteous equality. But at bottom he harbored for them a tranquil and boundless contempt. He was well aware that they were glad to make use of his name and his money; and he let them do so, for the pleasure of despising them.

And they despised him in turn for letting them do so: for they knew perfectly well that he found his advantage in it. Give and take. Waldhaus brought them his name and his fortune; and they brought him their talent, their business sense, and a readership. They were considerably more intelligent than he. Not that they had more originality. Perhaps they had even less. But in this small city, they were, as everywhere and always --- by virtue of the difference of their race, which for centuries had isolated them and sharpened their faculty for mocking observation --- they were the most forward-looking minds, the most sensitive to the absurdity of worm-eaten institutions and decrepit ideas. Only, since their character was less free than their intelligence, this did not prevent them, even as they mocked, from being far more interested in profiting from those institutions and ideas than in reforming them. Despite their professions of independence, they were, just as much as the nobleman Adalbert, provincial little snobs, wealthy idle young men who dabbled in literature as a sport and a flirtation. They were glad to give themselves the air of iconoclasts; but they were decent fellows, and only attacked people who were harmless, or whom they judged incapable of ever harming them. They were careful not to fall out with a society in which they knew perfectly well they would one day re-enter, to live quietly the life of everyone else, embracing all the prejudices they had fought. And when they ventured to make a splash, or to advertise themselves, to march noisily to war against some idol of the day --- one that was already beginning to totter --- they took care not to burn their bridges: in case of danger, they could always re-embark. Whatever the outcome of the campaign, moreover --- once it was over, a long time would pass before they started again; the Philistines could sleep in peace. All these new Davidsbündler sought was to create the impression that they could have been terrible, had they chosen: --- but they chose not to be. They preferred to be on familiar terms with artists and to sup with actresses.

Christophe found himself ill at ease in that circle. They talked mostly of women and horses, and they talked of them without grace. They were stiff. Adalbert expressed himself in a flat, slow voice, with a refined, bored, and boring politeness. Adolf Mai, the editorial secretary, heavy, thickset, his head sunk between his shoulders, with a brutal air, always wanted to be right; he cut everyone off, never listened to what was said in reply, seemed to despise his interlocutor’s opinion and, even more, his interlocutor himself. Goldenring, the art critic, who had nervous tics and eyes perpetually blinking behind large spectacles --- no doubt in imitation of the painters he frequented --- wore his hair long, smoked in silence, chewed on scraps of phrases he never finished, and made vague gestures in the air with his thumb. Ehrenfeld, small, bald, smiling, with a blond beard and a fine, weary face with a hooked nose, wrote the fashion column and society chronicle for the journal. He said very crude things in a caressing voice; he had wit, but it was malicious, and often vile. --- All these young millionaires were anarchists, as was fitting: it is the supreme luxury, when one possesses everything, to deny society; for in doing so one sheds whatever one owes it. Like a thief who, having stripped a passerby, says to him: “What are you still doing here? Be off with you! I have no more use for you.”

Christophe felt sympathy, within the whole group, only for Mannheim: he was assuredly the most alive of the five; he was amused by everything he himself said and by everything others said; stammering, spluttering, stumbling over words, snickering, jumping from one thing to another, he was incapable of following an argument or of knowing quite what he thought himself; but he was a good fellow, without malice toward anyone, and without the shadow of ambition. In truth, he was not very sincere: he was always playing a role; but it was innocently done, and it harmed no one. He threw himself into every baroque utopia --- generous ones, more often than not. He was too shrewd and too mocking to believe in them altogether; he knew very well how to keep his head, even in his enthusiasms, and he never compromised himself by putting his theories into practice. But he needed a hobby-horse: it was a game for him, and he changed it frequently. For the moment, his hobby-horse was kindness. It was not enough for him to be kind, naturally; he wanted to appear kind; he professed kindness, he performed it. Out of a spirit of contradiction against the dry, hard activity of his family, and against German rigorism, militarism, and philistinism, he was a Tolstoyan, a Nirvanist, an evangelist, a Buddhist --- he himself was not quite sure --- apostle of a limp and boneless morality, indulgent, full of blessings, easy to live with, which forgave all sins with effusion, especially sensual sins, and made no secret of its preference for them, which forgave virtues far less readily --- a morality that was nothing but a treatise on pleasure, a libertine association of mutual indulgences, that amused itself by wearing the halo of sainthood. There was in all this a mild hypocrisy that did not smell entirely fresh to delicate nostrils, and that might even have been frankly nauseating, had it taken itself seriously. But it made no such claim; it amused itself at its own expense. This mischievous Christianity, moreover, was only waiting for an opportunity to step aside for some other hobby-horse --- any at all: the hobby-horse of brute force, of imperialism, of “lions that laugh.” --- Mannheim was putting on a show for himself; he put it on with his whole heart; he donned in turn every feeling he did not possess, before reverting to being a good old Jew like the rest, with all the wit of his race. He was very likable and extremely irritating.

Christophe was, for a time, one of his hobby-horses. Mannheim swore by no one but him. He trumpeted his name everywhere. He dinned his family’s ears with dithyrambs about him. To hear him tell it, Christophe was a genius, an extraordinary man who made comical music, and above all talked about it in a stunning way, who was full of wit --- and handsome besides: a fine mouth, magnificent teeth. He added that Christophe admired him. --- He ended by bringing him to dinner one evening at his home. Christophe found himself face to face with his new friend’s father, the banker Lothar Mannheim, and with Franz’s sister, Judith.

It was the first time he had ever entered a Jewish household. Although quite numerous in the small city, and holding an important place there by virtue of their wealth, their cohesion, and their intelligence, Jewish society lived somewhat apart from the rest. Moreover, there persisted in the general population, with regard to them, a tenacious prejudice and a secret hostility, good-natured yet insulting. These were the sentiments of Christophe’s family. His grandfather did not like Jews; but the irony of fate had made his two finest music pupils --- one of whom had become a composer, the other an illustrious virtuoso --- both Jewish; and the good man was deeply troubled: for there were moments when he would have liked to embrace these two fine musicians; but then he remembered with sadness that they had put God on the cross, and he did not know how to reconcile these irreconcilable feelings. In the end, he embraced them. He was inclined to believe that God would forgive them, because they had loved music so greatly. --- Christophe’s father, Melchior, who fancied himself a freethinker, had fewer scruples about taking money from Jews; and he in fact found it quite agreeable: but he laughed at their expense and held them in contempt. --- As for his mother, she was not certain she was not committing a sin when she went to work in their homes as a cook. Those she had dealt with were rather haughty toward her; yet she bore them no ill will, she bore no one any ill will, she was full of pity for these unfortunates whom God had damned; she sometimes grew tender when she saw the daughter of the house pass by, or heard the joyful laughter of the children:

--- Such a beautiful person!… Such pretty little ones!… What a pity!… she would think.

She said nothing to Christophe when he told her he would be dining that evening at the Mannheims’; but her heart was a little heavy. She thought that one should not believe all the wicked things said about Jews --- (people say wicked things about everyone) --- and that there are decent people everywhere, but that it was better all the same, and more proper, for everyone to stay in their own circle, Jews on one side, and Christians on the other.

Christophe had none of these prejudices. With his perpetual spirit of reaction against his surroundings, he was rather drawn to this different race. But he knew very little of it. He had had some dealings only with the most common elements of the Jewish population: the small tradesmen, the common people who swarmed in certain streets between the Rhine and the cathedral, still forming, by that instinct of the herd that lives in all men, a kind of small ghetto. He would often enough wander through that quarter, watching with a curious and fairly sympathetic eye certain types of women with hollow cheeks, prominent lips and cheekbones, a Vinci-like smile, somewhat debased, whose coarse speech and jerky laughter unfortunately destroyed the harmony of the face at rest. Even in the dregs of that populace, in those beings with large heads, glassy eyes, often brutish faces, squat and low to the ground --- these degenerate descendants of the noblest of races --- there were, amid the heavy, fetid mire, strange phosphorescences that lit up like will-o’-the-wisps dancing over a marsh: marvelous glances, luminous intelligences, a subtle electricity that rose from the slime, and that fascinated and unsettled Christophe. He thought that beautiful souls were struggling there, great hearts seeking to climb out of the mire; and he would have liked to meet them, to come to their aid; he loved them without knowing them, while fearing them a little. But he had never been intimate with any of them. And above all he had never had occasion to approach the elite of Jewish society.

The dinner at the Mannheims’ held for him, therefore, the attraction of novelty, and, in some measure, of forbidden fruit. The Eve who offered him this fruit made it all the more savory. From the moment he had entered, Christophe had eyes only for Judith Mannheim. She belonged to a species unlike any woman he had known until then. Tall and slender, slightly thin yet solidly built, her face framed by black hair, not abundant but thick, growing low, covering her temples and her bony, golden forehead; slightly nearsighted; heavy-lidded; her eye slightly prominent; her nose rather strong, with flared nostrils; her cheeks with an intelligent thinness; her chin heavy; her complexion fairly high-colored --- she had a handsome profile, energetic and clean; seen from the front, the expression was more troubled, uncertain, composite; her eyes and cheeks were uneven. One sensed in her a powerful race, and, cast confusedly in the mold of that race, multiple, disparate elements, of unequal and doubtful quality, some very fine, some very common. Her beauty resided above all in her silent mouth and in her eyes, which seemed deeper on account of her nearsightedness, and darker for the effect of their bluish shadows.

One would have needed to be more accustomed than Christophe to those eyes, which belong to a race more than to an individual, to read beneath their damp and ardent veil the real soul of the woman before him. It was the soul of the people of Israel that he discovered in those burning and somber eyes, which bore it within them without knowing it themselves. He was lost in it. It was only much later, little by little, after having often gone astray in such depths, that he learned to find his way again on that eastern sea.

She looked at him; and nothing came to hinder the lucidity of her gaze; nothing of that Christian soul seemed to escape her. He felt it himself. He felt, beneath the seduction of that feminine gaze, a virile will, clear and cold, that probed into him with a kind of indiscreet brutality. That brutality held nothing malevolent. It was taking possession of him. Not in the manner of a coquette, who wishes to seduce without caring to know whom she seduces. A coquette she was, more than anyone; but she knew her power, and she trusted her natural instinct to exercise it of its own accord --- especially when she had to do with as easy a prey as Christophe. --- What interested her more was to know her adversary: --- (every man, every stranger was an adversary for her --- an adversary with whom one might later, if occasion arose, sign a pact of alliance). --- She wanted to know what was in him. Life being a game in which the most intelligent won, the thing was to read her adversary’s hand and not show her own. To succeed at it gave her the pleasure of a victory. It mattered little whether she could turn it to account or not. It was for the pleasure of it. She had a passion for intelligence. Not for abstract intelligence, though her mind was solid enough that she could have succeeded, had she wished, in any branch of science, and that she would have made a far truer successor to the banker Lothar Mannheim than her brother. But she preferred living intelligence, the kind that applies itself to human beings. She took pleasure in penetrating a soul, in weighing its worth --- (she brought to it as much scrupulous attention as the Jewess of Matsys weighing her coins); --- she knew, with a marvelous intuition, how to find in no time the chink in the armor, the flaws and weaknesses that are the key to a soul --- to take possession of its secrets: that was her way of feeling herself mistress of it. But she did not linger over her victory; and of her prize she made nothing. Once her curiosity and her pride were satisfied, she lost interest, and moved on to another object. All this force remained sterile. In that so-vivid soul there was something dead. She carried within her the genius of curiosity and of boredom.

So she looked at Christophe, who looked at her. She barely spoke. A barely perceptible smile at the corner of her mouth was enough: Christophe was hypnotized by it. The smile would fade at moments, her face would grow cold, her eyes indifferent; she would attend to the service and speak to the servant in a glacial tone; it seemed she was no longer listening. Then her eyes would brighten again; and three or four precise words showed that she had heard everything and understood everything.

She was coldly revising her brother’s judgment of Christophe: she knew Franz’s boastfulness; her irony had had easy sport when Christophe appeared, for her brother had praised to her his beauty and his distinction --- (it seemed Franz had a special gift for seeing the opposite of what was evident; or perhaps he took a paradoxical amusement in believing it). --- But as she studied Christophe more closely, she recognized that not everything Franz had said was false; and as she pressed on in her exploration, she found in Christophe a force that was still uncertain and poorly balanced, but robust and bold: she took pleasure in it, knowing better than anyone how rare force was. She knew how to make Christophe speak on everything she wished, to lay bare his thinking, to make him display the limits and lacunae of his mind; she had him play the piano: she did not love music, but she understood it; and she saw clearly enough the musical originality of Christophe, even though his music had inspired in her no emotion of any kind. Without altering the courteous coldness of her manner, a few brief, precise, by no means flattering remarks showed the growing interest she was taking in Christophe.

Christophe noticed it; and he was proud: for he felt the worth of such a judgment and the rarity of her approval. He did not hide his desire to win it; and into the effort he put a naivety that made his three hosts smile: he spoke only to Judith, and for Judith; he paid no more attention to the other two than if they had not existed.

Franz watched him talk; he followed his every word with eyes and lips, in a mixture of admiration and mockery; and he spluttered with laughter, trading amused glances with his father and his sister, who sat impassive, pretending not to notice them.

Lothar Mannheim --- a tall old man, solidly built, slightly stooped, with a ruddy complexion, gray hair cropped close, very dark mustache and eyebrows, a heavy but energetic and sardonic face that gave an impression of powerful vitality --- had also been studying Christophe during the first part of the dinner, with a shrewd good humor; and he, too, had recognized at once that there was “something” in this young man. But he took no interest in music or in musicians: that was not his domain, he knew nothing about it, and he made no secret of it; he even boasted of it --- (when a man of that sort admits an ignorance, it is to turn it into a point of vanity.) --- Since Christophe, for his part, made it equally clear, with an artless rudeness, that he could do without the company of Monsieur the banker without any regret, and that the conversation of Mademoiselle Judith Mannheim was quite sufficient to occupy his evening, old Lothar, amused, had settled himself in the corner by the fire; and he read his newspaper, listening vaguely with an ironic ear to Christophe’s nonsense and his strange music, which made him laugh silently now and then, at the thought that there could be people who understood such things and found pleasure in them. He no longer even took the trouble to follow the conversation; he left it to his daughter’s intelligence to tell him what the newcomer was really worth. She performed this duty conscientiously.

When Christophe had gone, Lothar asked Judith:

--- Well, you’ve had quite enough time to examine him: what do you make of the artist?

She laughed, thought for a moment, totted up her verdict, and said:

--- He’s a little erratic; but he’s not stupid.

--- Good, said Lothar: that’s much what I thought. So he might succeed?

--- Yes, I think so. He has strength.

--- Very well, --- said Lothar, with the magnificent logic of strong men, who take an interest only in other strong men, --- then we shall have to help him.

Christophe carried away with him, for his part, the admiration of Judith Mannheim. He was not, however, in love with her, as Judith believed. Both of them --- she with her sharpness, he with the instinct that served him in place of cleverness --- were equally mistaken about each other. Christophe was fascinated by the enigma of her face and by the intensity of her intellectual life; but he did not love her. His eyes and his mind were engaged: his heart was not. --- Why? --- It would have been rather difficult to say. Because he glimpsed in her something doubtful and unsettling? --- In other circumstances, that would have been for him an additional reason to love: love is never stronger than when it senses it is moving toward what will make it suffer. --- If Christophe did not love Judith, it was the fault of neither one. The real reason, embarrassing enough for both of them, was that he was still too close to his last love. Experience had not made him wiser. But he had loved Ada so intensely, had consumed in that passion so much faith, strength, and illusion, that he had not enough left, at this moment, for a new passion. Before another flame could be kindled, he needed to build within his heart another pyre: until then, there could only be a few passing fires, remnants of the old blaze that had escaped by chance, asking for nothing but to burn, throwing off a brief and brilliant light before going out for lack of fuel. Six months later, perhaps, he would have loved Judith blindly. Today, he saw in her nothing more than a friend --- admittedly a somewhat disturbing one; --- but he tried to dismiss that disturbance: it reminded him of Ada; that was a memory with no appeal --- he preferred not to think of it. What drew him to Judith was what was different about her from other women, not what she had in common with them. She was the first truly intelligent woman he had ever met. Intelligent she was, from head to toe. Even her beauty --- her gestures, her movements, her features, the set of her lips, her eyes, her hands, her elegant slenderness --- was a reflection of her intelligence; her body had been shaped by her intelligence; without her intelligence she would have passed unnoticed; and she might even have seemed plain to most people. This intelligence enchanted Christophe. He believed it to be broader and freer than it was; he could not yet know how disappointing it would prove. He had an ardent desire to confide in her, to share his thoughts with her. He had never found anyone who took an interest in his dreams; he was locked within himself: what a joy it would have been to find a friend! The lack of a sister had been one of the great regrets of his childhood --- it had always seemed to him that a sister would have understood him, better than any brother ever could. And, after meeting Judith, he felt that childish, illusory hope of a brotherly friendship stir to life again. He did not think of love. Not being in love, he found love seemed a lesser thing, beside friendship.

Judith soon perceived the distinction, and it stung her. She did not love Christophe, and she already inspired other passions among the young men of the city --- wealthy men, of better standing --- so that it could hardly have given her great satisfaction to know that Christophe was in love with her. But knowing that he was not, she felt vexed. No doubt she was grateful to him for sharing his plans with her: she was not surprised by it; but it was a little mortifying to see that she could exercise over him only an influence of reason --- (an influence that bypasses reason is worth far more to a woman’s soul). --- She did not even exercise that: Christophe went his own way. Judith had an imperious mind. She was accustomed to kneading at will the rather soft opinions of the young men she knew. Since she judged them mediocre, she found little pleasure in dominating them. With Christophe, there was more interest, because there was more difficulty. His plans left her indifferent; but it would have pleased her to direct this fresh thinking, this raw unpolished strength, and to put them to good use --- in her own way, of course, not Christophe’s, which she made no effort to understand. She had immediately seen that it would not be without a struggle; she had noted in Christophe all sorts of fixed ideas and notions that seemed to her extravagant and childish: these, for her, were weeds to be pulled up. She had no doubt she could pull them out. She pulled out not one. She did not obtain even the smallest satisfaction to her pride. Christophe was immovable. Not being in love, he had no reason to yield an inch of his thinking.

She rose to the challenge and, by instinct, tried for a time to conquer him. It came very close: Christophe, for all the clarity of mind he then possessed, nearly let himself be caught again. Men are easily fooled by what flatters their pride and their desires; and an artist is twice as easily fooled as other men, because he has more imagination. It required only that Judith choose to draw Christophe into a dangerous flirtation, which would once more have undone him --- perhaps more thoroughly than before. But, as usual, she tired of it quickly; she decided the conquest was not worth the effort: Christophe already bored her; she could no longer follow him.

She could no longer follow him beyond a certain point. Up to that point, she understood everything. To go further, her admirable intelligence was no longer enough: it would have required feeling, or, in its absence, what gives the illusion of feeling for a time: love. She understood well enough Christophe’s criticisms of people and things: they amused her, and she found them fairly true; she was not without having thought them herself. But what she did not understand was how those thoughts could have any bearing on practical life, when their application was dangerous or inconvenient. The stance of revolt that Christophe adopted against everyone and everything led nowhere: he could not imagine that he was going to reform the world… So?… It was a waste of time, beating his head against a wall. An intelligent man judges other men, secretly mocks them, thinks a little less of them; but he does as they do --- only slightly better: that is the only way to gain mastery over them. Thought is one world; action is another. What need is there to make oneself a victim of what one thinks? To think truly: certainly! But what good is it to speak truly? Since men are foolish enough to be unable to bear the truth, must one force it upon them? To accept their weakness, to appear to yield to it while remaining inwardly free in one’s contemptuous heart --- is there not a secret pleasure in that? The pleasure of an intelligent slave? So be it. But slave for slave, since that is always where it ends and since protest serves no purpose, it is better to be so by one’s own will and to avoid ridiculous and pointless struggles. Besides, the worst slavery of all is to be enslaved to one’s own thoughts, and to sacrifice everything to them. One must not be duped by oneself. --- She saw clearly that if Christophe persisted, as he seemed resolved to do, in this path of aggressive intransigence against the prejudices of German art and German thought, he would turn everyone against him, even his patrons: he was headed inevitably for defeat. She did not understand why he seemed bent on working against himself, on ruining himself for no reason.

To understand it, she would have had to understand as well that success was not his aim --- that his aim was his faith. He believed in art, he believed in his art, he believed in himself, as in realities superior not only to every consideration of self-interest, but to his very life. When, a little impatient with her observations, he told her so, with a naïve vehemence, she began by shrugging her shoulders: she did not take him seriously. She saw nothing but grand words there, like those she was accustomed to hearing from her brother, who periodically announced absurd and sublime resolutions, which he was always careful never to carry out. Then, when she saw that Christophe was genuinely taken in by those words, she judged him a fool and lost interest in him.

From that point on, she took no further trouble to appear to advantage, and showed herself as she was: far more German, and middling German at that, than she had at first seemed --- and perhaps than she herself had realized. --- It is commonly and quite wrongly charged against Israelites that they belong to no nation and form across the length and breadth of Europe a single homogeneous people, impervious to the influence of the different peoples among whom they live. In reality, there is no race that more readily takes on the imprint of the countries through which it passes; and if there are indeed certain traits in common between a French Israelite and a German Israelite, there are far more that differ, traits belonging to their new homeland, whose habits of mind they absorb with incredible speed: more accurately, the habits rather than the mind. But since habit, which is a second nature in all men, is for most men the only and unique nature, the result is that the majority of the native-born citizens of a country would be poorly placed to reproach Israelites for lacking a deep and reasoned national spirit that they themselves possess in no degree whatsoever.

Women, always more sensitive to outside influences, quicker to adapt to the conditions of life and to change with them --- the women of Israel take on, all across Europe, often in exaggerated form, the physical and moral fashions of the country where they live --- without losing, however, the silhouette and the troubled, heavy, haunting quality of their race. --- Christophe was struck by this. At the Mannheims’ he encountered aunts, cousins, friends of Judith. However un-German some of these faces might be --- with their burning eyes set close to the nose, the nose set close to the mouth, the strong features, the red blood beneath thick and swarthy skin, however ill-suited almost all of them seemed to be for being German --- all of them were more German than could be reasonably accounted for: the same manner of speaking, of dressing, --- sometimes to the point of excess. --- Judith was far superior to all of them; and the comparison only brought out what was exceptional in her intelligence, what in her person was her own achievement. She was nonetheless not without most of the others’ faults. Far freer than they --- almost entirely free --- on the moral plane, she was no freer than they on the social plane; or at least, her practical self-interest here took the place of her free reason. She believed in society, in classes, in prejudices, because, all things considered, she found them to her advantage. She might mock the German spirit; she was nonetheless attached to German fashion. She had the intelligence to see the mediocrity of this or that recognized artist; but she could not help respecting him, because he was recognized; and if she happened to know him personally, she admired him: for her vanity was flattered by it. She had little love for the works of Brahms, and secretly suspected him of being an artist of the second rank; but his fame impressed her; and since she had received five or six letters from him, it had become evident to her that he was the greatest musician of the age. She had no doubts about Christophe’s real worth, nor about the stupidity of first lieutenant Detlev von Fleischer; but she was more flattered by the latter’s condescension in paying court to her millions than by Christophe’s friendship: for a foolish officer is nonetheless a man of another caste; and it is harder for a German Jewess than for other women to enter that caste. Though she was not taken in by these feudal absurdities, and knew perfectly well that if she were to marry first lieutenant Detlev von Fleischer, it would be she who did him the great honor, she still strove to win him; she humbled herself to make eyes at this cretin and flatter his vanity. The proud Jewess, who had a thousand reasons for her pride --- the intelligent and disdainful daughter of the banker Mannheim aspired to descend, to do as the commonest of those petty German bourgeois women she despised.

The experience was brief. Christophe lost his illusions about Judith almost as quickly as he had formed them. It must be said to Judith’s credit that she did nothing to help him keep them. From the day a woman of her temper has judged you, from the day she has detached herself from you, you no longer exist for her: she no longer sees you, and she no more troubles herself to lay her soul bare before you, with a tranquil shamelessness, than she would before her dog, her cat, or any other domestic animal. Christophe saw Judith’s selfishness, her coldness, her mediocrity of character. He had not had time to be truly caught. It was already enough to make him suffer, to give him a kind of fever. Without loving Judith, he loved what she might have been --- what she should have been. Her beautiful eyes exercised a painful fascination over him: he could not forget them; though he now knew the bleak soul that slept at their depths, he continued to see them as he wished to see them, as he had first seen them. This was one of those hallucinations of love without love which occupy such a large place in the hearts of artists when they are not entirely absorbed by their work. A passing face is enough to bring it on; they see in it all the beauty that is in it, beauty the face itself is unaware of, beauty it does not care about. And they love it all the more because they know it does not care. They love it as a beautiful thing that is going to die without anyone having known its worth, or even that it was alive.

Perhaps he was deceiving himself, and Judith Mannheim could never have been anything more than what she was. But Christophe, for a moment, had had faith in her; and the spell persisted: he could not judge her impartially. All that was beautiful in her seemed to him entirely her own, to be her whole self. All that was vulgar in her he attributed to her double race: Jewish and German; and perhaps he resented the latter more than the former, for it had made him suffer more. Since he still knew no other nation, the German spirit served him as a kind of scapegoat: he loaded it with all the sins of the world. The disappointment Judith caused him gave him one more reason to fight against it: he could not forgive it for having broken the impetus of such a soul.

Such was his first encounter with Israel. He had hoped for much from it. He had hoped to find in this strong and separate race an ally in his struggle. He lost that hope. With the rapid mobility of passionate intuition that made him leap from one extreme to the other, he immediately convinced himself that this race was far weaker than it was said to be, and far more open --- far too open --- to outside influences. It was weak with its own weakness and with all the weaknesses of the world gathered up along its way. Here was not the place where he could find the fulcrum on which to rest the lever of his art. He risked being swallowed up with it in the desert sand.

Having seen the danger, and not feeling sure enough of himself to brave it, he abruptly stopped going to the Mannheims’. He was invited several times and made his excuses, giving no reasons. Since up to then he had shown excessive eagerness to come, so sudden a change was noticed: it was attributed to his “eccentricity”; but none of the three Mannheims doubted that Judith’s beautiful eyes had something to do with it; it became a subject for jokes at the dinner table on the part of Lothar and Franz. Judith shrugged, saying it was quite a conquest; and she curtly asked her brother “not to get her hopes up.” But she left nothing undone to bring Christophe back. She wrote to him, under the pretext of some musical question that no one else could answer; and at the end of the letter she made a friendly allusion to the rarity of his visits and to the pleasure it would give everyone to see him. Christophe replied, provided the information, pleaded his obligations, and did not appear. They sometimes met at the theater. Christophe obstinately turned his eyes away from the Mannheim box; and he pretended not to see Judith, who held ready for him her most charming smile. She did not insist. Since she cared nothing for him, she found it unseemly that this little artist should leave her to bear all the expense, to no avail. If he wanted to come back, he would come back. If not --- well, one could manage without him.

One did manage; and in fact his absence left no great void at the Mannheim evenings. But Judith, in spite of herself, harbored a grudge against Christophe. She found it natural not to care about him when he was there, and she allowed him to show his displeasure at this; but that this displeasure should go so far as to break off all relations seemed to her a stupidly proud and more selfish than lovestruck heart. --- Judith could not tolerate in others her own faults.

She nonetheless followed with all the more attention everything Christophe did and wrote. Without letting it show, she was glad to steer her brother onto this subject; she had him recount his conversations of the day with Christophe; and she punctuated the account with ironic and intelligent observations that let no ridiculous detail escape and gradually undermined Franz’s enthusiasm without his noticing it.

At first, everything had gone perfectly well at the Revue. Christophe had not yet seen through the mediocrity of his fellow contributors; and they, since he was one of them, acknowledged his genius. Mannheim, who had discovered him, repeated on all sides, without having read a word of his work, that Christophe was an admirable critic who had until now mistaken his vocation, and that he, Mannheim, had revealed it to him. They announced his articles in advance in mysterious terms that piqued curiosity; and his first chronicle was, in fact, like a stone dropping into a duck pond in the torpor of the small city. It was titled: Too Much Music!

--- “Too much music, too much drink, too much food; --- wrote Christophe. --- People eat, drink, and listen without hunger, without thirst, without need, out of sheer habit of gluttony. It is the regimen of the Strasbourg goose. This people is sick with bulimia. It matters little to them what they are given: Tristan or the Trompeter von Säckingen, Beethoven or Mascagni, a fugue or a march, Adam, Bach, Puccini, Mozart, or Marschner: they do not know what they are eating; the important thing is that they eat. They no longer even find pleasure in it. Watch them at a concert. People speak of German gaiety! These people have no idea what gaiety is: they are always gay! Their gaiety, like their sadness, disperses in a drizzle: it is joy reduced to dust; it is flat and without force. They would sit for hours absorbing sounds, sounds, sounds with a vague smile. They think nothing, they feel nothing: they are sponges. True joy, or true pain --- force --- is not dispensed by the hour, like beer from a barrel. It seizes you by the throat and fells you; and afterward one has no desire to absorb anything more: one has had one’s fill!…

“Too much music! You are killing yourselves and killing it. That you kill yourselves is your own affair, I can do nothing about it. But as for music --- stop right there! I will not allow you to degrade all that is beautiful in the world by throwing everything into the same basket, sacred things and ignominies together, by giving, as you commonly do, the prelude to Parsifal between a fantasy on La Fille du Régiment and a saxophone quartet, or a Beethoven adagio flanked by a cakewalk tune and some piece of filth by Leoncavallo. You boast of being the great musical people. You claim to love music. What music do you love? The good or the bad? You applaud them equally. In the end, make a choice! What is it you want, exactly? You do not know yourselves. You do not want to know: you are too afraid of taking sides, of committing yourselves… The devil take your caution! --- You are above parties, you say? --- Above: that means below…”

And he quoted them the lines of old Gottfried Keller, the rough bourgeois of Zurich --- one of the German writers he most loved for his vigorous honesty and his tart earthiness:

Wer über den Partein sich wähnt mit stolzen Mienen, Der steht zumeist vielmehr beträchtlich unter ihnen.

(“He who flatters himself with proud airs that he stands above parties, most often remains immeasurably below them.”)

--- “Have the courage to be true, he continued. Have the courage to be ugly. If you love bad music, say so frankly. Show yourselves, see yourselves as you are. Wash your soul free of the disgusting makeup of all your compromises and equivocations. Rinse it clean with fresh water. How long has it been since you saw your own face in a mirror? I am going to show it to you. Composers, virtuosos, conductors, singers, and you, dear public, you will know once and for all who you are… --- Be whatever you wish; but, for all the devils in hell! be true! Be true, though artists and art --- though I myself be the first to suffer from it! If art and truth cannot live together, let art disappear! Truth is life. Death is the lie.”

This juvenile, excessive, all-of-a-piece and rather tasteless outburst naturally provoked an outcry. Yet since everyone was targeted, but no one in a precise way, no one was careful to recognize himself. Besides, everyone is, believes himself to be, or claims to be the best friend of truth: there was therefore little risk of anyone attacking the article’s conclusions. People were merely offended by the general tone; there was agreement that it was unsuitable, especially from a semi-official artist. A few musicians began to stir and protested sharply: they foresaw that Christophe would not stop there. Others thought themselves cleverer for congratulating Christophe on his act of courage: they were among the least easy about the articles to come.

Both tactics had the same result. Christophe was launched: nothing could stop him; and, as he had promised, everything came in for it: composers and performers alike.

The first to be cut down were the Kapellmeister. Christophe did not confine himself to general observations on the art of conducting an orchestra. He named his colleagues in the city and neighboring towns by name; or if he did not name them outright, the allusions were clear enough that no one was deceived. Everyone recognized the apathetic court conductor, Alois von Werner, a cautious old man laden with honors, who feared everything, who was careful of everything, who was afraid to say a word of correction to his musicians and docilely followed whatever tempo they chose to take, --- who hazarded nothing on his programs that had not been consecrated by twenty years of success, or, at the very least, covered by the official stamp of some academic distinction. Christophe applauded him ironically for his daring; he congratulated him on having discovered Gade, Dvorak, or Tschaikowsky; he went into raptures over the immutable correctness, the metronomic evenness, the eternally fein-nuanciert (finely nuanced) playing of his orchestra; he proposed to orchestrate Czerny’s School of Velocity for his next concert; and he begged him not to tire himself so, not to throw himself into such passion, to take care of his precious health. --- Or there were cries of indignation over the way he had conducted Beethoven’s Eroica:

--- “A cannon! A cannon! Mow these people down!… But have you no idea whatsoever of what a battle is, the struggle against human stupidity and ferocity, --- and the force that tramples them underfoot with a laugh of joy? --- And how should you know? It is you that force combats! All the heroism that is in you, you spend listening to, or playing without yawning, Beethoven’s Eroica, --- (for it bores you… Admit then that it bores you, that you are dying of boredom!) --- or in braving a draft, bareheaded and back bent, when some Serene Highness passes.”

He had sarcasms enough for those pontificating Conservatoire men interpreting the great men of the past as “classics.”

--- “Classic! That word says it all. Free passion, arranged and expurgated for use in schools! Life, that immense plain swept by the winds, --- shut up between the four walls of a gymnasium courtyard! The wild and proud rhythm of a trembling heart, reduced to the pendulum tick-tock of a four-four time signature that goes quietly on its little way, limping and leaning imperturbably on the crutch of the strong beat!… To enjoy the Ocean, you would need to put it in a fishbowl, with goldfish. You understand life only when you have killed it.”

If he was not gentle with the “taxidermists,” as he called them, he was even less so with the circus riders of the orchestra, the celebrated Kapellmeister who came on tour to display their arm flourishes and their made-up hands, those who practiced their virtuosity on the backs of the great masters, strained to render the most familiar works unrecognizable, and performed somersaults through the hoop of the Symphony in C minor. He called them old coquettes, primadonnas of the orchestra, gypsies and tightrope dancers.

The virtuosos naturally furnished him with rich material. He recused himself when called upon to judge their sleight-of-hand performances. He said that these mechanical exercises fell within the province of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and that it was not musical criticism but graphs recording the duration, the number of notes, and the energy expended that could assess the merit of such labors. Sometimes he challenged a celebrated piano virtuoso, who had just surmounted, in a two-hour concert, the most formidable difficulties with a smile on his lips and his lock of hair over his eyes, --- to perform a simple childlike Mozart andante. --- Certainly, he by no means denied the pleasure of difficulty overcome. He too had tasted it: it was for him one of the joys of life. But to see only the most material side of it, and end by reducing all the heroism of art to that, struck him as grotesque and degrading. He did not forgive the “lions,” or the “panthers of the piano.” --- But neither was he very indulgent toward the honest pedants, celebrated in Germany, who, rightly concerned not to alter the masters’ text, carefully suppress every impulse of thought, and, like E. d’Albert and H. de Bülow, when they play a passionate sonata, always seem to be giving a lesson in diction.

The singers had their turn. Christophe had a great deal to say to them about their barbaric heaviness and their provincial pomposity. It was not only the memory of his recent misadventures with the lady in blue. It was the accumulated resentment of so many performances that had been a torment to him. One scarcely knew which suffered the more: the ears or the eyes. Christophe could not have enough terms of comparison to guess at the ugliness of the staging, the graceless costumes, the colors that screamed. He was only struck by the vulgarity of types, gestures, and attitudes, by the unnatural acting, by the performers’ inability to inhabit souls other than their own, and by the stupefying indifference with which they moved from one role to another, so long as it was written in roughly the same vocal register. Opulent, cheerful, well-rounded matrons exhibited themselves in turn as Isolde and Carmen. Amfortas played Figaro. --- But what was, naturally, most painful to Christophe was the ugliness of the singing, above all in the classical works whose melodic beauty is an essential element. Germany had forgotten how to sing the perfect music of the late eighteenth century: no one took the trouble any longer. The clean and pure style of Gluck and Mozart, which seems, like that of Goethe, all bathed in Italian light, --- that style which was already beginning to change, to grow vibrant and glittering with Weber, --- that style ridiculed by the heavy caricatures of the author of Il Crociato, --- had been annihilated by the triumph of Wagner. The savage flight of the Valkyries with their shrill cries had passed across the sky of Greece. Odin’s heavy clouds smothered the light. No one now thought of singing the music: they sang the poems. People made light of the ugly passages and the careless details, even the wrong notes, on the pretext that only the whole of the work, only the thought, mattered…

--- “The thought! Let us speak of that. As if you understood it!… But whether you understand it or not, respect, if you please, the form it chose for itself. Above all, let the music be and remain music!”

Moreover, that great concern which German artists professed to have for expression and deep thought was, in Christophe’s view, a fine joke. Expression? Thought? Yes, they put them everywhere --- everywhere, equally. They would have found thought in a woolen slipper, just as readily --- no more, no less --- as in a statue by Michelangelo. They played with the same energy for anyone, anything. At bottom, in most of them, the essence of music was --- so he claimed --- the volume of sound, musical noise. The pleasure of singing, so powerful in Germany, was in a sense the pleasure of vocal gymnastics. The thing was to fill oneself well with air and expel it vigorously, loudly, for a long time, and in time. --- And he bestowed upon a certain celebrated female singer, by way of a compliment, a certificate of good health.

He was not content with flaying the artists. He leapt across the footlights and laid into the audience, which attended these performances with its mouth wide open. The audience, bewildered, did not know whether to laugh or take offense. It had every right to cry injustice: it had taken great care never to involve itself in any artistic battle; it stayed prudently outside every burning question; and, for fear of being wrong, it applauded everything. And now here was Christophe making a crime of applauding!… Applauding bad works? --- That would have been something! But Christophe went further: what he reproached it most for applauding was the great works:

--- “Charlatans,” he told them, “you want to make people believe you have all that enthusiasm?… Come now! Don’t put yourselves to such trouble! You are proving exactly the opposite of what you wish to prove. Applaud, if you like, the works or the passages that in some measure call for applause. Applaud the noisy conclusions, which were made, as Mozart said, ‘for long ears.’ There, give yourselves free rein: the braying is expected; it is part of the concert. --- But after Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis!… Wretches!… It is the Last Judgment; you have just watched the maddening Gloria unfurl like a storm over the ocean; you have seen pass the waterspout of an athletic and frenzied will that stops, breaks, catches itself on the clouds, gripping with both fists above the abyss, and hurls itself once more into space at full swing. The gust howls and writhes. And it is, at the height of the hurricane, a sudden modulation, a shimmer of key that pierces the darkness of the sky and falls on the livid sea like a sheet of light. It is the end: the furious flight of the destroying angel stops dead, its wings nailed by three thunderclaps. Everything still hums and trembles around you. The dazzled eye stares fixedly ahead. The heart pounds, the breath stops, the limbs are paralyzed… And barely has the last note sounded when you are already merry and cheerful, you shout, you laugh, you criticize, you applaud!… But you have seen nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, understood nothing, nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing! The sufferings of an artist are a spectacle to you. You judge the death-agonies of a Beethoven finely painted. You would cry ‘Bis!’ at the Crucifixion. A great soul struggles, all its life, in pain, to entertain, for one hour, your gaping curiosity!…”

In this way, without realizing it, he was commenting on Goethe’s great saying; but he had not yet attained to its lofty serenity:

“The people make a game of the sublime. If they saw it as it truly is, they would not have the strength to bear the sight of it.”

Had he stopped there! --- But, carried away by his momentum, he went beyond the public and fell, like a cannonball, into the sanctuary, the tabernacle, the inviolable refuge of mediocrity: --- Criticism. He bombarded his colleagues. One of them had dared to attack the most gifted of the living composers, the most advanced representative of the new school, Hassler, author of program symphonies, admittedly rather extravagant ones, but full of genius. Christophe, who, --- as one may perhaps recall, --- had been introduced to him as a child, still cherished a secret tenderness for him, in gratitude for the enthusiasm and emotion he had felt in those days. To see a stupid critic, whose ignorance he knew well, lecturing a man of that stature and calling him back to order and sound principles, drove him out of his mind:

--- “Order! Order! --- he cried --- you know no other order than that of the police. Genius does not allow itself to be led along well-worn paths. It creates order, and erects its will into law.”

After this proud declaration, he seized the unfortunate critic, and, cataloguing all the inanities he had written over a period of time, gave him a thoroughgoing dressing-down.

The whole critical fraternity felt the affront. Until then it had held itself apart from the battle. They had no desire to risk a rebuff: they knew Christophe, they knew his competence, and they also knew that he was not patient. At most, some of them had discreetly expressed regret that a composer so gifted should lose his way in a trade that was not his own. Whatever their opinion might be (when they had one), and however wounded they were by Christophe’s, they respected in him their own privilege of being able to criticize everything without themselves being criticized. But when they saw Christophe brutally breaking the tacit convention that bound them, they immediately recognized him as an enemy of public order. By common accord, it seemed to them outrageous that so young a man should dare to show disrespect to the national glories; and they launched against him a relentless campaign. It was not long articles, sustained arguments; --- (they did not willingly venture onto that terrain with an adversary better armed than themselves: although a journalist has the special faculty of being able to argue without taking his opponent’s arguments into account, and even without having read them); --- but long experience had shown them that, a newspaper’s reader always being of his newspaper’s opinion, it was to weaken one’s credit with him even to pretend to argue: one must affirm, or better still, deny. --- (Negation has twice the force of affirmation; it is a direct consequence of the law of gravity: it is easier to let a stone fall than to hurl it into the air.) --- They confined themselves, therefore, preferably to a system of small, treacherous, ironic, and offensive notes, repeated every day, in a prominent position, with tireless obstinacy. These held the insolent Christophe up to ridicule, without always naming him, but designating him in a transparent fashion. They distorted his words so as to make them absurd; they told anecdotes about him, the starting point of which was sometimes true, but the rest of which was a tissue of lies, skillfully calculated to set him at odds with the whole city, and, even more, with the court; they even attacked his physical person, his features, his dress, of which they drew a caricature that, by dint of repetition, ended by seeming like a likeness.

All of this would have been of little concern to Christophe’s friends, had their journal not also taken some blows in the fray. In truth, the blows were more in the nature of a warning; there was no attempt to draw it fully into the quarrel — the aim was rather to separate it from Christophe. People professed surprise that the journal was compromising its good name in this way, and let it be understood that if nothing were done about it, one would be obliged, however regretfully, to turn on the rest of the editorial staff as well. A preliminary round of attacks, mild enough, against Adolf Mai and Mannheim, stirred up the hornets’ nest. Mannheim only laughed: he thought it would infuriate his father, his uncles, his cousins, and his innumerable family, who claimed the right to monitor everything he did and to be scandalized by it. But Adolf Mai took it very seriously, and reproached Christophe for compromising the journal. Christophe told him to go to the devil. The others, not having been touched, found it rather amusing that Mai, who pontificated among them, should be the one to catch the blows meant for them. Waldhaus took secret pleasure in this: he said that there was no battle without a few cracked heads. Naturally, he meant that his own head would not be among them; he believed himself safe from attack, by virtue of his family situation and his connections; and he saw no harm in seeing the Jews, his allies, get a little roughed up. Ehrenfeld and Goldenring, unscathed up to that point, would not have been troubled by a few attacks: they were capable of defending themselves. What hurt them far more was the stubborn determination with which Christophe kept putting them at odds with all their friends, and above all with their lady friends. At the first articles, they had laughed a great deal and found the affair a fine joke: they admired the vigor with which Christophe smashed windows; they believed that a single word would be enough to temper his combative ardor, to deflect his blows at least from those — men and women — whom they would point out to him. --- Not a bit of it. Christophe listened to nothing: he paid no heed to any recommendation, and he carried on like a madman. If he were left to his own devices, there would be no living in this place. Already, their lady friends, in tears and furious, had come to make scenes at the journal. Ehrenfeld and Goldenring spent all their diplomacy trying to persuade Christophe to soften at least certain of his judgments: Christophe changed nothing. They grew angry: Christophe grew angry too, but he changed nothing. Waldhaus, amused by the distress of his friends, which touched him not at all, took Christophe’s side just to enrage them further. Perhaps he was in any case more capable than they of appreciating the generous extravagance of Christophe, who threw himself headlong against everyone, without reserving any line of retreat, any refuge for the future. As for Mannheim, he was royally entertained by the uproar: it seemed to him a fine joke to have introduced this madman among those respectable people, and he was convulsed with laughter equally at the blows Christophe dealt and those he received. Although he was beginning to think, under his sister’s influence, that Christophe was decidedly a little unhinged, he liked him all the better for it — (he had a need to find those he was fond of slightly ridiculous) --- and so he continued, with Waldhaus, to support Christophe against the others.

Since he was not without practical sense, despite all his efforts to give himself the illusion of the contrary, he had the very apt idea that it would be advantageous for his friend to ally his cause with that of the most advanced musical party in the region.

There was in the city, as in most German cities, a Wagner-Verein, which represented the new ideas against the conservative faction. --- And of course, one no longer ran much risk in defending Wagner, now that his glory was universally acknowledged and his works inscribed in the repertoire of every opera house in Germany. Yet his victory had been imposed by force rather than freely embraced; and in the depths of their hearts, the majority remained stubbornly conservative, especially in small cities like this one, which had remained somewhat removed from the great modern currents and was proud of an ancient reputation. More than anywhere else, there prevailed that mistrust, innate in the German people, against anything new — that kind of reluctance to feel something true and powerful that had not already been chewed over by several generations. One could sense it in the poor grace with which new works inspired by the Wagnerian spirit were received — not the works of Wagner himself, which no one any longer dared dispute, but everything else. The Wagner-Vereine might thus have had a genuinely useful task to perform, had they taken it to heart to defend everywhere the young and original forces of art. They did so sometimes, and Bruckner, or Hugo Wolf, found in some of them their best allies. But too often the master’s egotism weighed upon his disciples; and, just as Bayreuth served only for the monstrous glorification of a single man, the filiales of Bayreuth were little churches where mass was said eternally in honor of the one God. At most, the faithful disciples were admitted into the side chapels — those who applied the sacred doctrines to the letter and who worshipped, prostrate with their faces in the dust, the single Divinity in its many faces: music, poetry, drama, and metaphysics.

This was precisely the case with the city’s Wagner-Verein. --- Yet it observed certain proprieties; it was always willing to recruit talented young men who seemed likely to be of use; and it had long had its eye on Christophe. Discreet overtures had been made to him, to which he had paid no attention, since he felt no need whatsoever to associate himself with anyone; he could not understand what necessity drove all his compatriots to group themselves together like flocks, never able to do anything alone: not sing, not walk, not drink. He had an aversion to all Vereinswesen. But, all things considered, he was better disposed toward a Wagner-Verein than toward any other Verein: it was at least a pretext for fine concerts; and though he did not share all the Wagnerians’ ideas about art, he was closer to them than to any other musical grouping. He might, it seemed, find common ground with a party that showed itself just as unjust as he was toward Brahms and the “Brahmins.” So he allowed himself to be introduced. Mannheim served as the intermediary: he knew everyone. Without being a musician, he was a member of the Wagner-Verein. --- The governing committee had not failed to follow the campaign Christophe was waging in the journal. Certain executions he had carried out in the opposing camp seemed to them to testify to a vigorous grip, which it would be good to have in one’s service. Christophe had also let fly a few disrespectful darts at the sacred idol; but they had preferred to turn a blind eye to that — and perhaps these first attacks, still inoffensive enough, had not been entirely unrelated, though no one would admit it, to the haste with which they sought to capture Christophe before he had time to go further. They came to ask him very amiably for permission to perform some of his songs at one of the Association’s upcoming concerts. Christophe, flattered, accepted: he came to the Wagner-Verein; and, urged on by Mannheim, he ended by allowing himself to be enrolled.

At the head of the Wagner-Verein at that time were two men, one of whom enjoyed a certain notoriety as a writer, the other as a conductor. Both had a Mohammedan faith in Wagner. The first, Josias Kling, had compiled a Dictionary of Wagner — a Wagner-Lexikon --- allowing one to know, at a moment’s notice, the master’s opinion de omni re scibili: it had been the great work of his life. He would have been capable of reciting whole chapters of it at table, as the provincial bourgeois of France recited cantos from la Pucelle. He also published articles in the Bayreuther Blätter on Wagner and the Aryan spirit. It goes without saying that Wagner was for him the type of the pure Aryan, of whom the German race remained the inviolate refuge against the corrupting influences of Latin and especially French Semitism. He proclaimed the definitive defeat of the impure French spirit. He nonetheless continued, every day, fiercely waging the battle, as though the eternal enemy were still threatening. He recognized only one great man in France: the Count de Gobineau. Kling was a small old man, very small, very polite, and blushing like a young girl. --- The other pillar of the Wagner-Verein, Erich Lauber, had been the director of a chemical factory until the age of forty; then he had thrown it all over to become a conductor. He had achieved this by sheer force of will, and because he was very wealthy. He was a Bayreuth fanatic: it was said that he had walked there from Munich in pilgrim’s sandals. It was a curious thing that this man, who had read widely, traveled widely, practiced various trades, and shown an energetic personality in all of them, should in music have become a sheep of Panurge; all his originality had gone into being a little more stupid than the others. Too uncertain of himself in music to trust his personal judgment, he followed slavishly the interpretations of Wagner given by the Kapellmeister and the performers licensed by Bayreuth. He would have liked to reproduce down to the smallest details of the staging and the multicolored costumes that delighted the childish and barbarous taste of the little court at Wahnfried. He was of the species of that fanatic of Michelangelo who reproduced in his copies even the cracks in the wall and the mold, which, having crept into the sacred work, had thereby themselves become sacred.

Christophe was not much disposed to like these two personages. But they were men of the world, and affable, both of them fairly learned; and Lauber’s conversation was not without interest when one got him onto a subject other than music. He was, moreover, an eccentric; and eccentrics did not displease Christophe too much: they made a change from the numbing banality of reasonable people. He did not yet know that there is nothing more numbing than a man who reasons badly, and that originality is even rarer among those wrongly called “originals” than in the rest of the herd. For these “originals” are mere maniacs, whose thought has been reduced to clockwork movements.

Josias Kling and Lauber, eager to win Christophe over, showed themselves full of consideration for him at first. Kling devoted a laudatory article to him, and Lauber took pains to follow all his indications for the works of his that he conducted at one of the Society’s concerts. Christophe was touched by this. Unfortunately, the effect of these attentions was spoiled for him by the unintelligence of those who offered them. He had no faculty for deceiving himself about people simply because they admired him. He was exacting. He had the pretension that people should not admire him for the opposite of what he was; and he was not far from regarding as enemies those who were his friends by mistake. So he felt no gratitude toward Kling for seeing in him a disciple of Wagner, and for seeking connections between phrases in his Lieder and passages in the Tetralogy that had nothing in common except certain notes of the scale. And he took no pleasure in hearing one of his works embedded — side by side with a worthless pastiche by a Wagnerian scholar — between two enormous blocks of Wagnerian music drama.

It was not long before he began to suffocate in this little chapel. It was another Conservatoire, as narrow as the old Conservatoires, and more intolerant, because it was a newer arrival in the world of art. Christophe began to lose his illusions about the absolute value of any given form of art or thought. Until then, he had believed that great ideas carry their light with them wherever they go. He was now discovering that ideas might change all they liked, men remained the same; and in the end, nothing counted but men: ideas were what men were. If men were born mediocre and servile, even genius was made mediocre in passing through their souls, and the hero’s cry of liberation as he broke his chains became the act of servitude for generations to come. --- Christophe could not refrain from expressing his feelings. He let no opportunity pass to rail against fetishism in art. He declared that there must be no more idols, no more classics of any kind, and that the only true heir to Wagner’s spirit was he who was capable of trampling Wagner underfoot in order to march straight ahead, looking always forward and never back --- he who had the courage to let die what must die, and to keep himself in ardent communion with life. The stupidity of Kling made Christophe aggressive. He would point out the faults or absurdities he found in Wagner. The Wagnerians did not fail to attribute to him a grotesque jealousy of their god. Christophe, for his part, had no doubt that these same people who now exalted Wagner since his death would have been among the first to strangle him when he was alive --- in which he did them an injustice. A Kling and a Lauber had had their hour of illumination too; they had been in the vanguard, some twenty years ago; then, like most people, they had pitched their camp there. Man has so little strength that at the first ascent he stops, winded; very few have breath enough to continue on their way.

Christophe’s attitude promptly alienated his new friends. Their friendship was a transaction: for them to be with him, he had to be with them; and it was all too evident that Christophe would yield nothing of himself: he would not be enrolled. They grew cold toward him. The praises he refused to bestow upon the gods and demigods certified by the clan were refused to him in turn. Less eagerness was shown in welcoming his works: and some began to protest at seeing his name too often on the programs. People mocked him behind his back, and the criticism ran its course; Kling and Lauber, by letting it pass, seemed to associate themselves with it. They would have taken care, however, not to break with Christophe: first because Rhenish minds take pleasure in mixed solutions, in solutions that are no solutions at all, and that have the advantage of indefinitely prolonging an ambiguous situation; and then because they still hoped, despite everything, to eventually make of him what they wanted, if not through persuasion, then at least through weariness.

Christophe gave them no time for that. Whenever he sensed that a man harbored a deep-seated antipathy toward him but refused to admit it, and was trying to deceive himself in order to stay on good terms, Christophe could not rest until he had succeeded in proving to that man that he was his enemy. After an evening at the Wagner-Verein where he had run headlong into a wall of hypocritical hostility, he could stand it no longer and sent Lauber his resignation without a word of explanation. Lauber made nothing of it; and Mannheim came rushing to Christophe’s rooms to try to smooth everything over. At the first words, Christophe burst out:

--- No, no, no, and no! Don’t speak to me about those people anymore. I don’t want to see them again… I can’t, I can’t anymore… I have a monstrous disgust for human beings; it is almost impossible for me to look one of them in the face.

Mannheim laughed with his whole heart. He was far less concerned with calming Christophe’s exaltation than with enjoying the spectacle of it:

--- I know they’re not a pretty sight, he said; but that’s nothing new --- what has happened now?

--- Nothing at all. I’ve simply had enough… Yes, go ahead, laugh at me: I’m a madman, I know. Prudent people act according to the laws of logic and sound reason. I am not like that; I am a man who acts only on his impulses. When a certain charge of electricity has built up in me, it has to discharge itself, cost what it may; and too bad for anyone who gets burned! And too bad for me! I am not made for living in society. From now on, I want to belong to no one but myself.

--- And yet you can’t claim you can do without the whole world, said Mannheim. You can’t perform your music all by yourself. You need singers, a chorus, an orchestra, a conductor, an audience, a claque…

Christophe was shouting:

--- No! No! No!…

But that last word made him leap to his feet:

--- A claque! Aren’t you ashamed?

--- Never mind about paid clappers --- (though in truth they are still the only means anyone has found for revealing the merit of a work to the public.) --- But there’s always got to be a claque: the claque is the author’s little coterie, properly trained by him; every author has his own --- that’s what friends are good for.

--- I don’t want friends!

--- Then you’ll be hissed.

--- I want to be hissed!

Mannheim was in heaven.

--- You won’t even have that pleasure for long. They won’t perform your work.

--- Well then, so be it! Do you really think I’m set on becoming a famous man?… Yes, I was straining with all my might toward that goal… Nonsense! Madness! Imbecility!… As if the satisfaction of the most vulgar pride were any compensation for the sacrifices of every kind --- the annoyances, the sufferings, the infamies, the humiliations, the abasements, the shameful concessions --- that are the price of glory! May ten thousand devils carry me off if such concerns ever trouble my brain again! None of that, none of it! I want nothing more to do with the public and with publicity. Publicity is a vile scoundrel. I want to be a private man, and live for myself and for those I love…

--- Exactly, said Mannheim, with an ironic air. You should take up a trade. Why not cobble shoes as well?

--- Ah, if I were a cobbler like the incomparable Sachs! cried Christophe. How happily my life would arrange itself! A cobbler on weekdays --- a musician on Sundays, and only among intimates, for my own joy and that of a pair of friends! Now that would be a life!… --- Am I not a fool, to sacrifice my time and my pains for the magnificent pleasure of being at the mercy of idiots’ judgments? Is it not far better and finer to be loved and understood by a handful of decent people than to be heard, picked apart, and flattered by thousands of fools?… The devil of pride and of the desire for glory will catch me by the hair no more --- you can count on that!

--- No doubt, said Mannheim.

He was thinking:

--- In an hour he’ll say the opposite.

He concluded calmly:

--- So then --- I’ll arrange things with the Wagner-Verein?

Christophe threw up his arms:

--- That’s really worth all the breath I’ve spent for the past hour shouting the contrary at you!… I tell you I will never set foot there again! I loathe all these Wagner-Vereine, all these Vereine, all these sheep-pens whose occupants need to press together in order to bleat in unison. Go tell those sheep from me: I am a wolf, I have teeth, I am not made for grazing!

--- All right, all right, we’ll tell them, said Mannheim, taking his leave, delighted with his morning. He was thinking:

--- He’s mad, mad, mad as a hatter…

His sister, to whom he hastened to recount the conversation, shrugged her shoulders and said:

--- Mad? He’d very much like people to think so!… He’s stupid, and ridiculously vain…

Meanwhile, Christophe pressed on with his furious campaign in Waldhaus’s review. It was not that he took any pleasure in it: criticism bored him to death, and he was on the verge of sending everything to the devil. But he dug in his heels because people were doing their utmost to silence him --- and he refused to appear to give way.

Waldhaus was beginning to grow uneasy. So long as he had remained unscathed in the midst of the skirmishing, he had watched the fray with the detachment of an Olympian god. But for the past few weeks, the other papers seemed to have forgotten the inviolable status of his person; they had begun attacking him in his authorial vanity with a rare spite, in which Waldhaus might have recognized, had he been more perceptive, the claw-marks of a friend. It was in fact at the sly instigation of Ehrenfeld and Goldenring that these attacks were being made: they saw it as the only means left of persuading him to put an end to Christophe’s polemics. They had read him correctly. Waldhaus at once declared that Christophe was beginning to get on his nerves; and he withdrew his support. The whole review then set about trying to silence him. But go and muzzle a dog in the act of devouring its prey! Everything they said only excited him further. He called them cowards and declared he would say everything --- everything he had a duty to say. If they wanted to throw him out, they were free to do so! The whole city would know they were as craven as the rest; but he would not leave of his own accord.

They looked at one another in dismay, bitterly reproaching Mannheim for the gift he had given them by bringing this madman into their midst. Mannheim, still laughing, undertook to tame Christophe all by himself; and he wagered that by the very next article, Christophe would add some water to his wine. They remained skeptical; but the event proved that Mannheim had not boasted too much. Christophe’s next article, while not exactly a model of courtesy, contained no further remarks that were offensive to anyone. Mannheim’s method was simplicity itself; everyone marveled afterward that they had not thought of it sooner: Christophe never reread what he wrote for the review, and he barely read the proofs of his articles at all --- hurriedly, and very carelessly. Adolf Mai had more than once made waspish remarks on the subject: he said that a printer’s error dishonors a review; and Christophe, who did not regard criticism altogether as an art, replied that whoever he was attacking would always understand well enough. Mannheim seized the opportunity: he said that Christophe was right, that proofreading was a compositor’s work; and he offered to relieve him of it. Christophe was almost effusive in his thanks; but everyone told him with one voice that this arrangement did them a service, since it saved the review a great deal of time. Christophe therefore handed his proofs over to Mannheim, asking him to correct them carefully. Mannheim did not fail to do so: it was child’s play for him. At first he ventured only to soften a few terms, to drop a disagreeably sharp epithet here and there. Emboldened by his success, he pushed his experiments further: he began to recast sentences and to reverse their meaning; he brought a genuine virtuosity to this exercise. The whole art lay in preserving the bulk of the sentence and its characteristic manner while making it say exactly the opposite of what Christophe had intended. Mannheim took more trouble to disfigure Christophe’s articles than he would have needed to write them himself; he had never worked so hard in his life. But he savored the result: certain musicians whom Christophe had until then pursued with his sarcasms were astonished to see him gradually softening and ending by singing their praises. The review was in raptures. Mannheim would read his lucubrations aloud to them. There was uproarious laughter. Ehrenfeld and Goldenring sometimes said to Mannheim:

--- Careful! You’re going too far!

--- There’s no danger, Mannheim would reply.

And he would continue with redoubled gusto.

Christophe noticed nothing. He would come to the review, leave his copy, and think no more about it. Sometimes he would draw Mannheim aside:

--- This time I’ve told those scoundrels what I think of them. Here, read this…

Mannheim read.

--- Well, what do you make of it?

--- Devastating! My dear fellow, there’s nothing left of them!

--- What do you think they’ll say?

--- Oh, there’ll be a splendid uproar!

But there was no uproar at all. On the contrary, faces brightened around Christophe; people he detested greeted him in the street. One day he arrived at the review, uneasy and scowling, and, tossing a calling card onto the table, he demanded:

--- What is the meaning of this?

It was the card of a musician he had just savaged: “With his warmest thanks.”

Mannheim replied, laughing:

--- He’s being ironic.

Christophe was relieved:

--- Phew! he said. I was afraid my article might have pleased him.

--- He’s furious, said Ehrenfeld; but he doesn’t want to show it: he’s playing the superior man, he’s being sarcastic.

--- Sarcastic?… The swine! said Christophe, indignant again. I’m going to write him another article. He who laughs last laughs longest!

--- No, no, said Waldhaus, alarmed. I don’t think he’s mocking at all. It’s humility --- he’s a good Christian: you strike him on one cheek and he turns the other.

--- Better still! said Christophe. Ah, the coward! He’s asking for it, he’ll get his thrashing!

Waldhaus tried to intervene. But the others were laughing.

--- Leave it be… said Mannheim.

--- After all… said Waldhaus, suddenly reassured. --- A little more, a little less!…

Christophe left. The accomplices broke into wild capers and mad laughter. When they had calmed down a little, Waldhaus said to Mannheim:

--- All the same, that was a close call… Do be careful, I beg you. You’re going to get us caught.

--- Bah! said Mannheim. We still have fine days ahead of us… And besides, I’m making him friends.