Jean-Christophe. IV. Revolt. 2. The Quagmire

La Délivrance/III_La_D%C3%A9livrance “La Révolte (Jean-Christophe)/III La Délivrance”) ►

L’Enlisement

II L’ENLISEMENT

Christophe was at this point in his clumsy experiments at reforming German art when a troupe of French comedians passed through the city. It would be more accurate to say: a herd; for, as was customary, it was a motley collection of poor devils scraped together from no one knew where, along with unknown young actors only too happy to let themselves be exploited as long as they were given parts to play. All of them were harnessed to the wagon of an illustrious and aging actress who was on tour in Germany and, passing through the little capital, had come to give three performances.

At the Waldhaus Review, the event was making a great deal of noise. Mannheim and his friends were familiar with the literary and social life of Paris --- or claimed to be; they repeated its gossip, gleaned from the boulevard papers and more or less well understood, and considered themselves the representatives of the French spirit in Germany. All of which was enough to remove from Christophe any desire to know that spirit better. Mannheim bored him to death with his praise of Paris. He had been there several times; part of his family lived there --- he had family in every country in Europe, and everywhere it had taken on the nationality and complexion of the country. This tribe of Abraham counted among its members an English baronet, a Belgian senator, a French minister, a deputy to the Reichstag, and a papal count; and all of them, though bound together and respectful of the common stock from which they had sprung, were sincerely English, Belgian, French, German, or Papist: for their pride did not doubt for a moment that the country they had adopted was the finest of all. Mannheim was the only one who, by way of paradox, amused himself by preferring all the countries he did not belong to. He spoke often of Paris, and with enthusiasm; but since he said nothing but extravagant things about it, and since, in order to praise the Parisians, he portrayed them as a kind of lunatic, lecherous, blustering people who spent their time carousing and making revolutions without ever taking anything seriously, Christophe felt little attraction toward “the Byzantine and decadent republic beyond the Vosges.” In good faith, he imagined Paris somewhat as it was represented in a naive engraving he had seen at the front of a book recently published in a German art series: in the foreground, the Devil of Notre-Dame, crouching above the city’s rooftops, with the caption:

« Insatiable vampire, eternal Lust Craves the great City as its prey. »

Like a good German, he held the debauched Welches and their literature in contempt --- a literature he knew chiefly through a few ribald farces, l’Aiglon, Madame Sans-Gêne, and café-concert songs. The snobbery of the little town, where people who were most notoriously incapable of any interest in art rushed to sign up noisily at the box office, threw him into an affectation of disdainful indifference toward the great ham actress. He declared he would not lift a finger to go hear her. It was all the easier to keep his word given that the tickets were priced far beyond what he could afford.

The repertoire that the French troupe was bringing to Germany included two or three classical works; but it was composed, for the most part, of those vapid trifles that are above all else the Parisian article for export --- for there is nothing more international than mediocrity. Christophe knew la Tosca, which was to be the actress’s first performance on tour; he had heard it in translation, adorned with all the light graces that a small Rhenish theater company can bestow on a French work; and he congratulated himself with a mocking laugh, watching his friends leave for the theater, on not being forced to hear it again. All the same, he followed with attentive ears, pretending not to listen, the enthusiastic accounts his friends gave of the evening the next day: it enraged him to have deprived himself even of the right to contradict them, having refused to see what everyone was talking about.

The second announced performance was to be a French translation of Hamlet. Christophe had never let slip an opportunity to see a play by Shakespeare. Shakespeare was for him, as much as Beethoven, an inexhaustible source of life. Hamlet had been particularly dear to him during the period of turmoil and tumultuous doubt through which he had just passed. Despite the fear he felt of seeing himself again in that magic mirror, he was fascinated by it; and he would circle the theater’s posters without admitting to himself that he was burning with desire to go buy a ticket. But he had already grown so stubborn that, after what he had said to his friends, he refused to go back on his word; and he would have stayed home that evening as he had the previous one, had chance not placed him face to face with Mannheim at the very moment he was returning home in a melancholy mood.

Mannheim grabbed him by the arm and told him with a furious air, though without ceasing to joke, that some old fool of a relative, a sister of his father’s, had descended on them without warning with her whole clan, and that the family was forced to stay home to receive them. He had tried to slip away, but his father would not hear of trifling with matters of family etiquette and the respect owed to one’s elders; and since he needed to stay on his father’s good side just now, on account of a sum he intended to extract from him, he had been forced to yield and give up the performance.

--- Did you have your tickets? asked Christophe.

--- Of course! An excellent box; and to top it all off, I have to go --- (and I’m going this minute) --- and bring them to that idiot Grünebaum, papa’s associate, so that he can show off with Madame Grünebaum and their turkey of a daughter. Charming!… I’m at least trying to think of something thoroughly unpleasant to say to them. But they won’t care a bit, as long as I bring them tickets --- though they’d like it even better if the tickets were bank notes.

He stopped abruptly, mouth open, staring at Christophe:

--- Oh!… But wait… That’s it!…

He chuckled:

--- Christophe, you’re going to the theater?

--- No.

--- Yes you are. You’re going to the theater. It’s a favor I’m asking you. You can’t refuse.

Christophe didn’t understand.

--- But I don’t have a ticket.

--- Here’s one! said Mannheim, triumphant, forcing the ticket into his hand.

--- You’re mad, said Christophe. And what about your father’s errand?

Mannheim doubled over with laughter:

--- He’ll be furious! he said.

He wiped his eyes and concluded:

--- I’ll hit him up tomorrow morning, the moment he gets out of bed, before he knows a thing.

--- I can’t accept, said Christophe, knowing that it would displease him.

--- You don’t need to know anything, you know nothing, it’s none of your business.

Christophe had unfolded the ticket:

--- And what do you expect me to do with a box for four?

--- Whatever you like. You can sleep in the back, you can dance, if you want. Bring women. Surely you have a few? If need be, I can lend you some.

Christophe held the ticket back out to Mannheim:

--- No, definitely not. Take it back.

--- Not on your life, said Mannheim, stepping back a few paces. I can’t force you to go, if it bores you; but I won’t take it back. You’re free to throw it in the fire, or even, you virtuous man, to bring it to the Grünebaums. That’s no longer my concern. Good night!

He ran off, leaving Christophe standing in the middle of the street, ticket in hand.

Christophe was rather at a loss. He told himself it would be proper to bring the tickets to the Grünebaums; but the idea did not fill him with enthusiasm. He went home undecided; and when he happened to check the time, he saw he had just enough time to dress and get to the theater. It would have been too absurd, all the same, to let the ticket go to waste. He offered to take his mother. But Louisa declared she would much rather go to bed. He left. Deep down, he felt a child’s delight at the prospect of his evening. Only one thing bothered him: having this pleasure alone. He had no remorse regarding old Mannheim or the Grünebaums, whose box he was taking; but he did feel it toward those who might have shared it with him. He thought of how much joy it would have given young people like himself, and it pained him not to give it. He searched his mind and could not think of anyone to whom he might offer the ticket. Besides, it was late, he had to hurry.

As he entered the theater, he passed near the closed ticket window, where a sign announced that not a single seat remained. Among the people turning away, disappointed, he noticed a young woman who could not bring herself to leave and was watching those who went in with a look of longing. She was dressed very simply, in black, not very tall, with a thin face and a delicate air; and at that moment he did not notice whether she was plain or pretty. He had already passed her; he stopped for a moment, turned back, and without pausing to think:

--- You haven’t found a seat, mademoiselle? he asked, point-blank.

She blushed and said, with a foreign accent:

--- No, monsieur.

--- I have a box I don’t know what to do with. Would you like to share it with me?

She blushed more deeply and thanked him, begging to be excused for not being able to accept. Christophe, embarrassed by her refusal, apologized in turn and tried to insist; but he could not persuade her, though it was evident she was dying to accept. He was very perplexed. He decided abruptly.

--- Listen, there’s a way to settle everything, he said: take the ticket. I don’t particularly care about it; I’ve already seen this before. --- (He was boasting.) --- It will give you more pleasure than it would me. Please, with all my heart.

The young woman was so moved by the offer, and by the warmhearted way in which it was made, that tears almost came to her eyes. She stammered her gratitude, saying she could never bring herself to deprive him of it.

--- Well, then come, he said, smiling.

He had such a kind and open look about him that she felt ashamed of having refused; and she said, a little flustered:

--- I’ll come… Thank you.

They went in. The Mannheim box was a center box, wide open: impossible to conceal oneself in it, even if one had wanted to. It goes without saying that their entrance did not pass unnoticed. Christophe seated the young woman in the front row and stayed a little behind, so as not to crowd her. She sat stiff and upright, not daring to turn her head, horribly self-conscious; she would have given a great deal not to have accepted. In order to give her time to compose herself, and in any case not knowing what to talk to her about, Christophe affected to look in another direction. Wherever he looked, it was easy to see that his presence, with this unknown companion, in the midst of the fashionable box crowd, was exciting the curiosity and commentary of the little town. He shot furious glances at those who stared at him; it infuriated him that people would insist on paying attention to him when he paid no attention to them. He did not consider that this indiscreet curiosity was directed at his companion even more than at him, and in a more wounding fashion. To demonstrate his perfect indifference to whatever they might say or think, he leaned toward his neighbor and began to talk. She looked so startled when he spoke to her, and so wretched at having to answer, and with such difficulty did she manage to wring out a yes or a no without daring to look at him, that he took pity on her shyness and retreated into his corner. Fortunately, the performance was beginning.

Christophe had not read the program, and he had not much bothered to find out what role the great actress was playing: he was one of those innocents who come to the theater to see the play, not the actors. He had not asked himself whether the illustrious actress would be Ophelia or the Queen; had he done so, he would have voted for the Queen, given the age of either matron. But what could never have occurred to him was that she might play Hamlet. When he saw it --- when he heard that mechanical-doll voice --- it was some time before he could believe it; he wondered if he were dreaming…

--- But who? But who is that? he murmured to himself. Surely it can’t be…

And when he was forced to admit that it was indeed Hamlet, he let out an oath which, fortunately, his neighbor did not understand, since she was a foreigner --- but which was perfectly understood in the adjacent box, where it promptly drew an indignant command to be quiet. He retreated to the back of the box to fume at his leisure. He could not calm down. Had he been fair, he would have acknowledged the elegance of the disguise and the tour de force of nature and art that allowed this woman in her sixties to appear in the costume of an adolescent --- and even to look beautiful in it, at least to indulgent eyes. But he hated tours de force, and everything that violates and falsifies nature. He liked a woman to be a woman, and a man to be a man. --- (That is no common thing, these days.) --- The childish and slightly ridiculous disguise of Beethoven’s Leonore was already disagreeable enough to him. But this Hamlet surpassed anything one could imagine in the way of absurdity. To make of that robust Dane --- corpulent and pallid, choleric, cunning, argumentative, haunted --- a woman, not even a woman, since a woman playing a man will never be anything but a monster; to make of Hamlet a eunuch, or an ambiguous androgyne --- it took all the spinelessness of the age, all the idiocy of the critics, for this revolting stupidity to have been tolerated a single day without whistles! --- The actress’s voice was the final thing that drove Christophe out of himself. She had that lilting, hammering diction, that monotonous chant which, ever since the Champmeslé and the Hôtel de Bourgogne, has always seemed dear to the least poetic people in the world. Christophe was so exasperated that he felt like going on all fours. He had turned his back to the stage and was making grimaces of rage with his nose against the wall of the box, like a child put in the corner. Fortunately, his companion did not dare look his way; for had she seen him, she would have taken him for a madman.

Suddenly Christophe’s grimaces stopped. He went still and silent. A beautiful musical voice --- a young woman’s voice, low and gentle --- had made itself heard. Christophe pricked up his ears. As she spoke, he turned on his chair, intrigued, to see what bird had such a song. He saw Ophélie. She had nothing, to be sure, of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. She was a beautiful girl, tall, robust and slender, like a young Greek statue --- Electra or Cassandra. She overflowed with life. Despite all her efforts to confine herself to the role, the force of youth and joy within her radiated from her flesh, her movements, her gestures, her brown eyes that laughed in spite of her. Such is the power of a beautiful body that Christophe, who had been merciless a moment before about the interpretation of Hamlet, did not think for a moment to regret that Ophélie bore little resemblance to the image he had formed of her; and he sacrificed his image to her without remorse. With the unconscious dishonesty of passionate people, he even found a deep truth in that youthful ardor burning in the depths of this chaste and troubled virgin heart. But what completed the spell was the magic of the voice --- pure, warm, and velvety: each word rang like a beautiful chord; around the syllables there danced, very closely wrapped, like a scent of thyme or wild mint, the laughing accent of the Midi with its bouncing rhythms. Strange vision of an Ophélie from the land of Arles! She brought with her a little of its golden sun and its wild mistral.

Forgetting his neighbor, Christophe had sat down beside her, in the front of the box, and could not take his eyes off the beautiful actress whose name he did not know. But the audience, which had not come to hear an unknown, paid her no attention; it only decided to applaud when the female Hamlet spoke. Which made Christophe growl and call them “Asses!” --- in a low voice that could be heard ten steps away.

It was only when the curtain fell for the intermission that he remembered the existence of his box companion; and, seeing her still as intimidated as before, he smiled to himself, thinking how he must have alarmed her with his extravagances. --- He was not wrong: this young girl’s soul, which chance had brought near him for a few hours, was of an almost morbid reserve; it had taken an abnormal state of exaltation for her to have dared to accept Christophe’s invitation. Scarcely had she accepted before she would have given anything in the world to be able to withdraw, to find a pretext, to flee. It had been far worse when she found herself the object of general curiosity; and her discomfort had only grown until the end, as she heard behind her back --- (she did not dare turn around) --- the muffled imprecations and growlings of her companion. She expected anything from him; and when he came to sit beside her, she had been frozen with fright: what fresh eccentricity was he going to commit? She would have wished to be a hundred feet underground. She drew back instinctively; she was afraid of brushing against him.

But all her fears fell away when, the intermission having come, she heard him say to her with good-natured ease:

--- I am a most disagreeable neighbor, am I not? I beg your pardon.

Then she looked at him, and saw his kind smile, the same smile that had decided her to come in the first place.

He continued:

--- I cannot hide what I think… But then, it was too much!… That woman, that old woman!…

He made another grimace of disgust.

She smiled, and said softly:

--- Despite everything, it is beautiful.

He noticed her accent, and asked:

--- You are a foreigner?

--- Yes, she said.

He glanced at her modest little dress:

--- A governess? he said.

She blushed, and said:

--- Yes.

--- What country?

She said:

--- I am French.

He made a gesture of surprise:

--- French? I would never have guessed.

--- Why? she asked timidly.

--- You are so… serious! he said.

(She thought that this was not quite a compliment, coming from him.)

--- There are some like that in France as well, she said, quite confused.

He looked at her honest little face --- the broad forehead, the straight small nose, the fine chin, her thin cheeks framed in chestnut hair. He was not really seeing her: he was thinking of the beautiful actress. He repeated:

--- It is curious that you should be French!… Really, you are from the same country as Ophélie? One would never think it.

He added, after a moment’s silence:

--- How beautiful she is!

without noticing that he seemed to be drawing an unflattering comparison between her and his neighbor. She felt it very clearly; but she bore no ill will toward Christophe, for she thought as he did. He tried to get a few details from her about the actress; but she knew nothing --- it was clear she was very little acquainted with theatrical matters.

--- It must give you pleasure to hear French spoken? he asked.

He thought he was making a joke; he had struck home.

--- Ah! she said, with a note of sincerity that struck him, it does me so much good! I am suffocating here.

He looked at her more closely this time: she was clenching her hands slightly and seemed oppressed. But at once she thought of what might be hurtful to him in those words:

--- Oh! forgive me, she said, I don’t know what I’m saying.

He laughed openly:

--- Don’t apologize! You are perfectly right. One doesn’t have to be French to suffocate here. Phew!

He shrugged, drawing in the air.

But she was ashamed of having opened herself like that, and said no more. Besides, she had just noticed that from the neighboring boxes people were watching their conversation; and he noticed it too, with irritation. They broke off; and, while waiting for the intermission to end, he went out into the corridor of the theatre. The young woman’s words were still ringing in his ear; but he was distracted: the image of Ophélie occupied his thoughts. She took complete possession of him in the acts that followed; and when the beautiful actress arrived at the mad scene and the melancholy love songs of death, her voice found accents so touching that he was shaken to the core: he felt he was about to weep like a calf. Furious with himself for what seemed to him a sign of weakness --- (for he did not admit that a true artist should weep) --- and unwilling to make a spectacle of himself, he left the box abruptly. The corridors, the foyer, were empty. In his agitation, he descended the theatre’s stairs and went out without realizing it. He needed to breathe the cold night air, to walk with long strides through the dark and half-deserted streets. He found himself on the bank of a canal, leaning on the parapet, gazing at the silent water where the reflections of street lamps danced in the shadows. His soul was like that: dark and trembling; he could make out nothing in it but a great joy dancing on the surface. The clocks chimed. It would have been impossible for him to return to the theatre and hear the end of the play. To witness Fortinbras’s triumph? No, that held no appeal… A fine triumph! Who thinks to envy the victor, after having been gorged on all the savageries of this ferocious and ridiculous life? The whole work is a formidable indictment of life. And yet such a power of life seethes within it that sadness becomes joy, and bitterness intoxicates…

Christophe went home, giving no further thought to the unknown young woman he had left in his box, whose name he did not even know.

The following morning, he went to see the actress at the modest third-rate hotel where the impresario had lodged her with her colleagues, while the great actress had taken rooms at the city’s finest hotel. He was shown into a small, untidy sitting room where the remains of lunch lay scattered across an open piano alongside hairpins and soiled, torn pages of music. In the adjoining room, Ophélie was singing at the top of her lungs, like a child, for the sheer pleasure of making noise. She interrupted herself for a moment when her visitor was announced, to ask, in a cheerful voice that made no effort to avoid being heard through the wall:

--- What does this monsieur want? What is his name?… Christophe… Christophe what?… Christophe Krafft?… What a name!

(She repeated it two or three times, rolling the r’s tremendously.)

--- It sounds like a swear word…

(She said one.)

--- Is he young or old?… Nice?… --- All right, I’ll come.

She started singing again:

--- Nothing is sweeter than my love…

while rummaging through the room and fuming over a tortoiseshell hairpin that was hiding somewhere in the mess. She grew impatient, began to grumble, raged like a lion. Though he could not see her, Christophe followed in his mind all her gestures behind the wall, and laughed to himself. At last he heard footsteps approaching, the door burst open impetuously, and Ophélie appeared.

She was half dressed, in a dressing gown she held closed around her waist, her arms bare in the wide sleeves, her hair barely combed, with curls falling over her eyes and cheeks. Her beautiful brown eyes were laughing, her mouth was laughing, her cheeks were laughing, a charming dimple was laughing in the middle of her chin. In her beautiful low, musical voice, she barely apologized for receiving him like this. She knew there was nothing to apologize for, and that he could only be very grateful for the sight. She had thought he was a journalist coming to interview her. Far from being disappointed when he told her he had come purely for himself, simply because he admired her, she was delighted. She was a good-natured girl, warm and affectionate, thrilled to please and not trying to hide it: Christophe’s visit and his enthusiasm made her genuinely happy --- (she had not yet been spoiled by compliments). --- She was so natural in all her movements and all her ways, even in her small vanities and in the naive pleasure she took in charming people, that he felt not the slightest moment of awkwardness. They were old friends at once. He stumbled along in halting French, she stumbled along in a few words of German; within an hour, they were telling each other all their secrets. She had no thought of sending him away. This robust, cheerful Southerner --- intelligent, expansive, a woman who would have died of boredom surrounded by her stupid fellow performers and a country whose language she didn’t know, were it not for the natural joy that was in her --- was happy to find someone to talk to. As for Christophe, it was an inexpressible good fortune for him to encounter, in the midst of his pinched and insincere petit-bourgeois world, this free daughter of the Midi, full of popular vitality. He did not yet know the artificiality of such natures, which, unlike his Germans, have nothing more in their minds and hearts than what they show --- and often don’t even have that much. But at least she was young, she was alive, she said frankly and bluntly what she thought; she judged everything freely, with a fresh and unspoiled eye; one breathed in her company a little of her mistral, that sweeper-away of fogs. She was genuinely gifted. Without culture or reflection, she grasped on the spot, and with her whole heart, to the point of being sincerely moved, the things that were beautiful and good; and then, the very next moment, she burst out laughing. Certainly she was coquettish, she played with her eyes; she did not mind showing her bare arms and throat beneath the half-open dressing gown: she would have loved to turn Christophe’s head; but it was pure instinct. No calculation on her part; and she liked even better to laugh, to chat merrily, to be a good sport, a good comrade, easy and unaffected. She told him about the backstage life of the theater, its small miseries, the silly touchiness of her fellow performers, the nagging of Jézabel --- (that was what she called the leading actress) --- who was careful not to let her shine. He confided his grievances about the Germans: she clapped her hands and joined in heartily. She was kind, in truth, and did not mean to speak ill of anyone; but that didn’t stop her from doing so; and while she sincerely reproached herself for her malice whenever she mocked someone, she had a fund of teasing humor and that gift for realistic, comic observation native to people of the Midi: she couldn’t resist it, and she sketched portraits that cut to the quick. She laughed joyfully with her pale lips, which showed her young-dog teeth; and her shadowed eyes shone in her slightly wan face, discolored by stage makeup.

They suddenly realized they had been talking for over an hour. Christophe proposed to Corinne --- (that was her stage name) --- that he come back for her in the afternoon to show her around the town. She was charmed by the idea; and they arranged to meet right after dinner.

At the appointed hour, he was there. Corinne was seated in the small hotel sitting room, holding a notebook from which she was reading aloud. She greeted him with her laughing eyes without pausing in her reading, until she had finished her sentence. Then she motioned for him to sit beside her on the sofa:

--- Sit here and don’t talk, she said. I’m going over my part. I’ll be a quarter of an hour.

She followed the manuscript with her fingernail, reading quickly and at random, like a little girl in a hurry. He offered to hear her recite it. She gave him the notebook and stood up to rehearse. She stumbled along, or went back four times over the end of a sentence before launching into the next. She shook her head as she recited; her hairpins fell all along the room. When a stubborn word refused to enter her memory, she had the impatience of a badly brought-up child: sometimes a droll oath escaped her, or even some rather strong words --- one very strong and very short word that she directed at herself. --- Christophe was struck by her mixture of talent and childishness. She found intonations that were true and moving; but right in the middle of a tirade into which she seemed to pour her whole heart, she would speak words that made no sense at all. She recited her part like a little parrot, without much concern for what it meant: and the result was burlesque non sequiturs. She was not troubled by this; when she caught herself at it, she laughed until she doubled over. At last she said: “Zut!”, snatched the notebook out of his hands, hurled it into a corner of the room, and said:

--- Vacation! The hour has struck!… Let’s go for a walk!

A little anxious about her part, he asked, out of a sense of duty:

--- Do you think you’ll know it?

She answered with assurance:

--- Of course. And what is the prompter there for, then?

She went into her room to put on her hat. Christophe, waiting for her, sat down at the piano and tapped out a few chord sequences. From the other room she called out:

--- Oh! What is that? Play it again! How lovely!

She came running in, pinning her hat to her head. He went on playing. When he finished, she wanted him to go on. She exclaimed in raptures, with those small, dainty little cries that Frenchwomen are accustomed to and lavish just as readily on Tristan as on a cup of chocolate. It made Christophe laugh: it was a change from the enormous, emphatic, and massive exclamations of his Germans; these were two contrary exaggerations --- one tended to turn a trinket into a mountain, the other turned a mountain into a trinket; the latter was no less absurd than the former; but it seemed to him, for the moment, more agreeable, because he liked the mouth from which it came. --- Corinne wanted to know who had composed what he was playing; and when she learned it was his own, she let out a cry. He had told her in their morning conversation that he was a composer; but she had paid no attention to it. She sat down beside him and demanded that he play everything he had composed. The walk was forgotten. It was not mere politeness on her part: she adored music, and she had an admirable instinct that made up for the inadequacy of her training. At first he didn’t take her seriously and played his easiest songs. But when, by chance, having been led to play a piece he cared more deeply about, he saw --- without his having said anything about it --- that it was the one she preferred as well, he felt a joyful surprise. With the naive astonishment of Germans when they meet a Frenchwoman with real musical taste, he said to her:

--- How curious. What good taste you have! I never would have thought…

Corinne laughed in his face.

He amused himself from then on by choosing works of increasing difficulty, to see how far she would follow him. But she did not seem thrown by expressive daring; and after one particularly fresh melody which Christophe had almost given up on because he had never managed to make it go down in Germany, what was his astonishment when Corinne begged him to play it again, then stood up and began to sing the notes from memory, barely missing a one! He turned to her and seized her hands warmly:

--- But you’re a musician! he cried.

She laughed and explained that she had made her debut as a singer in a provincial opera house, but that a touring impresario had recognized her gift for poetic theater and pushed her in that direction. He exclaimed:

--- What a shame!

--- Why? she said. Poetry is a kind of music too.

She had him explain the meaning of his Lieder; he told her the German words, and she repeated them with monkey-like ease, even mimicking the way he shaped his lips and eyes as he pronounced them. When it came to singing them from memory, she made comical errors; and when she no longer knew, she invented words of guttural, barbaric sound that made them both laugh. She never tired of making him play, nor he of playing for her and hearing her pretty voice, which knew nothing of the tricks of the trade and sang a little from the throat, in the manner of a small girl, but which had a quality of fragility and tenderness that touched him. She told him frankly what she thought. Though she could not explain why she liked or disliked a thing, there was always a hidden reason beneath her judgments. Curiously, it was in the most classical pieces, the most admired in Germany, that she was least at ease: she offered a few compliments out of politeness; but it was plain they said nothing to her. Since she had no musical culture, she also lacked that pleasure which the already heard provides unconsciously to amateurs and even to artists, and which so often leads them to reproduce without knowing it, or to love in a new work, forms or formulas they have already loved in old ones. She also lacked the German taste for melodious sentimentality --- (or at least her sentimentality was of another kind: he did not yet know its defects) --- she did not go into raptures over the passages of somewhat soft insipidity that were preferred in Germany; she did not pick out the most mediocre of his Lieder --- a melody he wished he could destroy, because his friends spoke of nothing else, too happy to be able to compliment him on something. Corinne’s dramatic instinct led her to prefer the songs that traced a precise passion with directness: and those were also the ones to which he attached the most value. At the same time, she did not fail to show her slight aversion to certain harmonic harshnesses that seemed quite natural to Christophe: she felt a jolt when she encountered them; she stopped before them and asked “whether it was really like that.” When he said yes, she would then make up her mind to take the difficult step; but afterward she made a little grimace with her mouth that did not escape Christophe. Often she even preferred to skip the measure. He would then play it over at the piano.

--- You don’t like that? he asked.

She wrinkled her nose.

--- It’s wrong, she said.

--- No, he said, laughing, it’s right. Think about what it’s saying. Isn’t it true, here?

(He pointed to his heart.)

But she shook her head:

--- Perhaps; but it’s wrong, there.

(She tugged at her ear.)

She also seemed a little shocked by the great leaps of the German declamation:

--- Why does he speak so loudly? she asked. He’s alone. Aren’t you afraid his neighbors will hear him? He looks… (Forgive me! You won’t be angry?)… he looks like he’s hailing a boat.

He was not angry; he laughed heartily and acknowledged that there was something in that. These observations amused him; no one had ever made them to him before. They agreed that sung declamation most often distorts natural speech, like a magnifying glass. Corinne asked Christophe to write for her the music for a play in which she would speak over the accompaniment of the orchestra, with some sung passages from time to time. He took fire at the idea, despite the difficulties of stage realization, which Corinne’s musical voice seemed to him well suited to overcome; and they made plans for the future.

It was nearly five o’clock when they thought of going out. At that season, night fell early. There was no longer any question of a walk. In the evening, Corinne had a rehearsal at the theater; no one could attend. She made him promise to come back for her the following afternoon and take the planned walk.

The next day, the same scene nearly repeated itself. He found Corinne before her mirror, perched on a high stool with her legs dangling: she was trying on a wig. Her dresser was there, and a local hairdresser, to whom she was giving instructions about a curl she wanted more lifted. While looking at herself in the mirror, she caught sight of Christophe behind her, smiling; she stuck out her tongue at him. The hairdresser left with the wig, and she turned gayly toward Christophe:

--- Good morning, friend! she said.

She held out her cheek for him to kiss. He hadn’t expected such intimacy; but he took care not to miss the opportunity. She didn’t attach much importance to the favor: it was for her just an ordinary greeting.

--- Oh! I’m so happy! she said. It will go well tonight. --- (She was speaking of her wig.) --- I was so miserable! If you had come this morning, you would have found me wretched as a stone.

He asked why.

It was because the Parisian hairdresser had made a mistake in his packing and sent her a wig that didn’t suit the role.

--- Perfectly flat, she said, and falling straight down, stupidly. When I saw that, I cried and cried like a Magdalen. Isn’t that so, Madame Désirée?

--- When I came in, said the dresser, Madame frightened me. Madame was all white. Madame looked as if she were dead.

Christophe laughed. Corinne caught sight of him in the mirror:

--- So that makes you laugh, you heartless thing? she said, indignant.

She began to laugh as well.

He asked her how the previous day’s rehearsal had gone. --- Everything had gone splendidly. She only wished they had cut more from the other performers’ roles, and less from her own. They talked so pleasantly that a good part of the afternoon slipped away. She dressed, at great length; she amused herself by asking Christophe’s opinion on her outfits. Christophe praised her elegance and told her naively, in his Franco-German pidgin, that he had never seen anyone so “luxurious.” --- She stared at him at first, taken aback, then burst into peals of laughter.

--- What did I say? he asked. Is that not the right word?

--- Yes! Yes! she cried, doubled over with laughter. That’s exactly right.

They went out at last. Her flamboyant dress and exuberant manner drew attention. She looked at everything with the mocking eyes of a Frenchwoman, making no effort to conceal her impressions. She burst out laughing in front of the fashion displays, or in front of the shops selling illustrated postcards, where one saw jumbled together sentimental scenes, comic and ribald vignettes, the city’s courtesans, the imperial family, the Emperor in a red coat, the Emperor in a green coat, the Emperor as a man of the sea, gripping the helm of the ship Germania and defying the heavens. She shrieked with laughter at a dinner service decorated with Wagner’s surly face, or at a hairdresser’s window where a wax gentleman’s head held pride of place. She made a thoroughly indecent display of hilarity before the patriotic monument, which showed the old Emperor in a traveling overcoat and spiked helmet, accompanied by Prussia, the German states, and the entirely naked Genius of War. She snatched up in passing anything in people’s faces, their gait, or their manner of speaking that lent itself to mockery. Her victims could not mistake the mischievous glance that gathered up their absurdities. Her mimicking instinct even led her at times, without thinking, to repeat with her lips and nose their expansive or sullen grimaces; she would puff out her cheeks to reproduce fragments of phrases or words she had caught on the fly, whose sonority struck her as comical. He laughed wholeheartedly at all of it, not in the least embarrassed by her impertinences; for he would not have held back himself. Fortunately, her reputation had little left to lose; for such a promenade was enough to sink it forever.

They visited the cathedral. Corinne insisted on climbing to the very top of the spire, despite her high heels and her dress, which was too long and swept the steps, eventually catching on a corner of the staircase; she was unperturbed, tugged boldly at the fabric until it tore, and carried on climbing, hiking up her skirts with gusto. She came very close to ringing the bells. From the top of the towers she declaimed Victor Hugo, of whom he understood nothing, and sang a French folk song. After which, she performed the muezzin’s call. --- Dusk was falling. They came back down into the church, where deep shadow was rising along the gigantic walls, against whose faces the stained-glass windows gleamed like magical eyes. Christophe saw, kneeling in one of the side chapels, the young woman who had shared his box at the performance of Hamlet. She was so absorbed in her prayer that she did not notice him; she had a pained, taut expression that struck him. He would have liked to say a few words to her, to greet her at least; but Corinne swept him along in her whirlwind.

They parted shortly afterward. She had to prepare for the performance, which began early, as was the German custom. He had barely arrived home when there was a knock at his door, and a note from Corinne was delivered:

“Stroke of luck! Jezebel is sick! No performance! Hurrah!… Friend! Come! We’ll have a little supper together!

“Your friend,

“Corinnette.

“P.S. --- Bring lots of music!…”

He had some difficulty deciphering this. Once he had, he was as delighted as Corinne, and went straight to the hotel. He was afraid he would find the whole company gathered at dinner; but he saw no one. Corinne herself had vanished. At last he heard her loud, laughing voice from deep within the building; he went in search of her, and found her at last in the kitchen. She had taken it into her head to prepare a dish of her own invention, one of those southern dishes whose exuberant aroma fills an entire neighborhood and would wake the stones from sleep. She had struck up a fine friendship with the hotel’s stout proprietress, and the two of them were jabbering together in a fearful jargon, a mixture of German, French, and something else entirely, belonging to no known language. They were laughing uproariously, tasting each other’s handiwork. The arrival of Christophe only added to the commotion. They tried to send him away; he held his ground, and managed to taste the famous dish as well. He made something of a face — whereupon she called him a barbarous Teuton and said it was hardly worth taking the trouble for someone like him.

They went back up together to the little sitting room, where the table was laid: there were only two places, hers and Christophe’s. He could not help asking where the others were. Corinne made an indifferent gesture:

--- I have no idea.

--- You don’t dine together?

--- Never! It’s quite enough already to see each other at the theater!… Good heavens! If we had to meet again at the table too!…

It was so different from German habits that he was both astonished and charmed:

--- I always thought, he said, that yours was a sociable people!

--- Well then, she replied, am I not sociable?

--- Sociable means: to live in society. You should see us! Men, women, children — every one of them belongs to clubs and societies from the day they’re born to the day they die. Everything is done in Society: one eats, sings, thinks with the Society. When the Society sneezes, one sneezes with it; you cannot drink a stein of beer without drinking with the Society.

--- That sounds cheerful, she said. Why not from the same glass?

--- Is that not brotherly?

--- To hell with brotherliness! I’m happy to be “brothers” with those I like; I’m not with the others… Ugh! That’s not a society, it’s an anthill!

--- So you can imagine how comfortable I feel here, thinking as you do!

--- Come to us, then!

He asked nothing better. He questioned her about Paris and the French. She offered him information that was not altogether accurate. To her southern bravado was added the instinctive desire to dazzle her listener. --- According to her, in Paris everyone was free; and since everyone in Paris was intelligent, each person exercised that freedom wisely, none abused it; each did as he pleased, thought, believed, loved or did not love as he wished: no one had anything to say against it. It was not there that people meddled in one another’s beliefs, spied on each other’s consciences, or governed each other’s thoughts. It was not there that politicians interfered in the affairs of letters and the arts, distributing decorations, positions, and money to their friends and clients. It was not there that coteries disposed of reputations and success, that journalists were bought and sold, that men of letters swung censers at each other’s heads when they could not smash those heads outright. It was not there that criticism smothered unknown talents while exhausting itself in adulation before established ones. It was not there that success — success at any price — justified every means and commanded public worship. The manners were gentle, affectionate, obliging. No bitterness in relations between people. Never any gossip. Each person helped the others along. Any newcomer of worth could be certain of finding hands extended toward him, the road smoothed beneath his feet. The pure love of beauty filled the souls of these chivalrous and disinterested Frenchmen; and their only failing was their idealism, which, despite their celebrated wit, made them the dupes of every other nation.

Christophe listened with his mouth open; and there was indeed plenty to marvel at. Corinne was marveling at herself as she spoke. She had quite forgotten what she had told Christophe the day before about the hardships of her past life; and he gave it no more thought than she did.

Yet Corinne was not solely concerned with making the Germans love her homeland: she was equally determined to make them love her. An entire evening without flirting would have seemed to her austere and a little absurd. She was not sparing with her provocations toward Christophe; but they were wasted: he did not notice them. Christophe did not know what flirting was. He either loved, or he did not. When he did not love, the thought of love was a thousand miles from his mind. He had a warm friendship for Corinne, he felt the pull of this southern nature, so new to him — her easy grace, her good humor, her quick and open intelligence: these were more than enough reasons, one would think, to fall in love; but “the wind blows where it will”: it was not blowing there; and as for playing at love in love’s absence, such an idea would never have occurred to him.

Corinne was amused by his coolness. Seated beside him at the piano while he played the pieces he had brought, she had slipped her bare arm around Christophe’s neck, and to follow the music she was leaning toward the keyboard, her cheek almost touching his. He felt the brush of her eyelashes and saw, right beside him, the corner of her mocking eye, her lively and appealing little face, and the fine down on her upturned lip, which, smiling, waited. --- She waited. Christophe did not understand the invitation; Corinne was getting in the way of his playing: that was all he was thinking. Instinctively, he freed himself and shifted his chair aside. A moment later, when he turned back toward Corinne to speak to her, he saw that she was dying to laugh; the dimple on her cheek was laughing; she was pressing her lips together and seemed to be holding herself back with all her might from bursting out.

--- What’s the matter? he said, puzzled.

She looked at him, and erupted in a loud burst of laughter.

He made nothing of it:

--- Why are you laughing? he kept asking. Did I say something funny?

The more he pressed her, the harder she laughed. Just as she was nearly done, a single glance at his bewildered expression was enough to set her off again, worse than before. She got up, ran to the sofa at the far end of the room, and buried her face in the cushions to laugh to her heart’s content; her whole body was laughing. It was catching; he came over to her and gave her light pats on the back. When she had laughed her fill, she raised her head, wiped her streaming eyes, and held out both hands to him:

--- What a good fellow you are! she said.

--- No better than the next man.

She was still being shaken by little fits of laughter, holding his hands all the while.

--- Not serious, the Françoise? she said.

(She pronounced it: “Françouése.”)

--- You’re making fun of me, he said, in good humor.

She looked at him with an expression of tenderness, shook his hands vigorously, and said:

--- Friends?

--- Friends! he answered, returning her handshake.

--- He’ll think of Corinnette, when she’s gone? He won’t hold it against the Françoise for not being serious?

--- And she — she won’t hold it against the barbarous Teuton for being so thick?

--- That’s exactly why we love him… Will he come to see her in Paris?

--- That’s a promise… And she — she’ll write to me?

--- That’s a vow… Now you say: I swear it.

--- I swear it.

--- No, not like that. You have to hold out your hand.

She imitated the oath of the Horatii. She made him promise to write something for her — a play, a melodrama, to be translated into French and performed by her in Paris. She was leaving the next day with her company. He pledged to go and meet her, two days later, in Frankfurt, where they were giving a performance. They stayed on a while longer, chatting together. She gave Christophe a photograph of herself, naked almost to the waist, a simple drapery fastened beneath her arms. They parted cheerfully, kissing each other as brother and sister. And indeed, ever since Corinne had seen that Christophe liked her well enough but was decidedly not in love with her, she had begun to like him well enough too, without love, as a good comrade.

Neither of them lost any sleep over it. He was unable to say goodbye to her the next day, for he had a rehearsal at that hour. But the day after, he arranged things, as he had promised, so that he could travel to Frankfurt. It was two or three hours by train. Corinne hardly believed in Christophe’s promise; but he had taken it very seriously, and at the hour of the performance, he was there. When he came, during the intermission, to knock at the dressing room where she was getting ready, she cried out in joyful surprise and threw her arms around his neck with her usual exuberance. She was genuinely grateful to him for having come. Unfortunately for Christophe, she was far more sought after in this city, by rich and cultured Jews who knew how to appreciate her present beauty and her future success. At every moment someone knocked at the dressing room door, and the door would open partway to admit heavy-featured faces with bright eyes, uttering inanities with a sharp accent. Corinne naturally flirted with all of them, and then maintained the same affected and provocative manner when she spoke with Christophe, which irritated him greatly. He felt no pleasure, either, at the calm immodesty with which she went about her toilette in front of him, and the rouge and grease she spread over her arms, her throat, and her face inspired him with deep disgust. He was on the point of leaving without seeing her again, as soon as the performance ended; but when he said his farewell, excusing himself for being unable to attend the supper that was to be offered her after the show, she expressed a disappointment so sweetly affectionate that his resolutions could not hold. She had them bring a railway timetable, to prove to him that he could --- that he must --- stay at least another good hour with her. He asked nothing better than to be convinced, and so he went to supper; he even managed not to show too plainly his boredom at the nonsense talked there, nor his irritation at the coquetries Corinne lavished on the first fop to come along. It was impossible to hold it against her. She was a good-natured girl, without any moral principles, lazy, sensual, pleasure-loving, childishly flirtatious, but at the same time so loyal, so kind, and all her faults so spontaneous and so wholesome, that one could only smile at them, and almost love them. Sitting across from her, watching her as she talked, Christophe studied her animated face, her beautiful radiant eyes, her jaw a little heavy with its Italian smile --- that smile in which there is kindness, subtlety, and a gluttonous heaviness --- and he saw her more clearly than he had until now. Certain features reminded him of Ada: certain gestures, certain glances, certain slightly coarse sensual wiles --- the eternal feminine. But what he loved in her was the nature of the South, that generous nature which does not stint its gifts, which does not amuse itself by manufacturing drawing-room beauties and bookish intelligences, but harmonious beings whose bodies and minds are made to flower in the open air and sunlight. --- When he left, she rose from the table to say her farewells to him, apart from the others. They embraced again and renewed their promises to write and to see each other.

He caught the last train home. At an intermediate station, the train coming in the opposite direction was waiting. Right there in the car stopped across from his --- in a third-class compartment --- Christophe saw the young Frenchwoman who had been with him at the performance of Hamlet. She saw Christophe too, and recognized him. Each of them was as startled as the other. They greeted one another in silence, and sat still, no longer daring to look at each other. Yet he had taken in at a glance that she wore a small traveling hat and had an old valise beside her. It did not occur to him that she might be leaving the country; he assumed she was going away for a few days. He was unsure whether he should speak to her: he hesitated, prepared in his mind what he wanted to say, and was about to lower the window of his car to address a few words to her when the signal for departure was given --- he gave up on speaking. A few seconds passed before the train moved. They looked at each other directly. Alone in their separate compartments, their faces pressed against the glass, through the night that surrounded them, they gazed into each other’s eyes. Two windows separated them. Had they stretched out an arm, their hands might have touched. So near. So far. The cars lurched heavily into motion. She kept looking at him, all timidity gone now that they were parting. They were so absorbed in contemplating each other that they did not even think to wave a last farewell. She receded slowly; he watched her disappear; and the train carrying her plunged into the night. Like two wandering worlds, they had passed, for an instant, near each other in infinite space, and now they were moving apart, perhaps forever.

When she had disappeared, he felt the emptiness that this unknown gaze had just hollowed out in him, and he did not understand why --- but the emptiness was there. His eyelids half-closed, drowsy, leaning against a corner of the car, he felt against his eyes the touch of those eyes, and all his other thoughts fell silent so that he might feel it more fully. The image of Corinne fluttered outside his heart, like an insect beating its wings on the other side of a windowpane, but he did not let it in.

He found her again when he stepped off the train on arrival, when the cool night air and the walk through the sleeping streets of the city had shaken off his torpor. He smiled at the memory of the charming actress, with a mixture of pleasure and irritation, depending on whether he recalled her affectionate ways or her vulgar coquetries.

--- Confounded French! he grumbled to himself, laughing quietly, as he undressed without noise so as not to wake his mother, who was sleeping next door.

A remark he had overheard the other evening in the dressing room came back to him:

--- There are others, too.

From his very first encounter with France, she had set before him the riddle of her double nature. But, like all Germans, he did not trouble himself to solve it, and he repeated calmly, thinking of the young woman in the train car:

--- She doesn’t look French.

As though it were for a German to say what is French and what is not.

French or not, she preoccupied him; for in the middle of the night he woke with a pang in his heart: he had just remembered the valise placed on the seat beside the young woman, and suddenly the thought that the traveler had gone away for good had flashed through his mind. In truth, that thought should have come to him from the very first moment, but he had not thought of it. He felt a dull sadness from it. He shrugged his shoulders in his bed:

--- What can it possibly matter to me? he told himself. It’s none of my concern.

He went back to sleep.

But the next day, the first person he met as he went out was Mannheim, who called him “Blücher” and asked whether he had decided to conquer all of France. From this living gazette, he learned that the story of the dressing room had been a success surpassing everything Mannheim had expected of it:

--- Thanks to you! Thanks to you! Mannheim cried. You’re a great man. I’m nothing compared to you.

--- What did I do? said Christophe.

--- You’re extraordinary! Mannheim went on. I’m jealous of you. To steal the box right out from under the Grünebaums’ noses, and invite their French governess in their place --- no, that takes the prize, I would never have thought of that!

--- She was the Grünebaums’ governess? said Christophe, astonished.

--- Yes, pretend you didn’t know, play the innocent, I recommend it!… The old man is still fuming. The Grünebaums are furious!… It didn’t take long: they threw the girl out.

--- What! cried Christophe. They dismissed her?… Dismissed because of me?

--- You didn’t know? said Mannheim. She didn’t tell you?

Christophe was distraught.

--- Don’t trouble yourself over it, my friend, said Mannheim. It doesn’t matter. And besides, it had to happen sooner or later, once the Grünebaums found out…

--- Found out what? cried Christophe.

--- That she was your mistress, of course!

--- I don’t even know her, I don’t know who she is.

Mannheim gave a smile that said:

--- You think I’m that stupid.

Christophe grew angry, demanding that Mannheim do him the honor of believing what he was telling him. Mannheim said:

--- In that case it’s even funnier.

Christophe grew agitated, talked of going to find the Grünebaums, of telling them what he thought of them, of clearing the young woman’s name. Mannheim dissuaded him:

--- My dear fellow, he said, everything you tell them will only convince them all the more of the opposite. And besides, it’s too late. The girl is far away by now.

Christophe, sick at heart, tried to trace the young Frenchwoman. He wanted to write to her, to beg her forgiveness. But no one knew anything about her. The Grünebaums, to whom he applied, sent him packing; they did not know themselves where she had gone, and were not concerned about it. The thought of the harm he had done while meaning to do good tormented Christophe: it was a continual remorse. To it was joined a mysterious attraction, which radiated silently from those vanished eyes. Attraction and remorse seemed to fade, covered over by the flood of days and new thoughts; but they persisted obscurely at the bottom. Christophe did not forget the one he called his victim. He had sworn to himself that he would see her again. He knew how little chance he had of seeing her again, and he was certain that he would.

As for Corinne, she never replied to the letters he wrote her. But three months later, when he expected nothing more, he received from her a forty-word telegram in which she indulged to her heart’s content in silliness, called him by little pet names, and asked “if one still loved her.” Then, after a fresh silence of nearly a year, came a scrap of a letter scrawled in her enormous childish zigzagging hand, which tried to appear grand --- a few affectionate and droll words. --- And there she let it rest. She had not forgotten him, but she had no time to think of him.

Still under Corinne’s spell, and full of the ideas they had exchanged about art, Christophe dreamed of writing music for a play in which Corinne would act and sing a few airs --- a kind of poetic melodrama. This art form, once so much in favor in Germany, passionately admired by Mozart, practiced by Beethoven, by Weber, by Mendelssohn, by Schumann, by all the great classicists, had fallen into disrepute since the triumph of Wagnerism, which claimed to have achieved the definitive formula for theater and music. The worthy Wagnerian pedants, not content with proscribing any new melodrama, applied themselves to tidying up the old melodramas and operas; they carefully erased every trace of spoken dialogue and composed in their own fashion recitatives for Mozart, Beethoven, or Weber; they were convinced they were thereby serving the glory of the masters and completing their thought, by devoutly depositing their little ordures upon the masterpieces.

Christophe, whose ear had been made more sensitive to the heaviness and, often, the ugliness of Wagnerian declamation by Corinne’s criticisms, had long been wondering whether it was not a contradiction in terms, a work against nature, to couple speech and song in recitative and bind them together in the theater --- it was like trying to harness a horse and a bird to the same chariot. Speech and song each had their own rhythms. One could understand, at a stretch, that an artist might sacrifice one of the two arts in the triumph of the one he preferred. But to seek a compromise between them was to sacrifice both --- to require that speech should be speech no longer, and that song should be song no longer, that the latter should let its broad current be confined between two banks of monotonous canal, and that the former should load its beautiful bare limbs with rich and heavy garments that paralyzed its gestures and its steps. Why not leave both their spontaneity and their free movements? Like a lovely girl walking with a light and supple step along a stream, dreaming as she walks: the gay murmur of the water cradles her reverie, and without her being aware of it, she gradually rhythms her steps and her thoughts to the song of the stream. So, both free, music and poetry would go side by side dreaming, and mingling their dreams. --- Certainly, for this union not all music was suitable, any more than all poetry. The opponents of melodrama had an easy mark in the crudeness of the attempts that had been made at it, and of those who performed them. For a long time Christophe had shared their aversions: the stupidity of the actors who undertook these spoken recitations over an instrumental accompaniment, without troubling themselves about the accompaniment, without seeking to blend their voices into it, but on the contrary trying to ensure that nothing was heard but themselves --- this was enough to revolt any musical ear. But since he had savored the harmonious voice of Corinne --- that liquid and pure voice, which moved through music as a ray of light moves through water, which followed every contour of a melodic phrase, which was like a song more fluid and more free --- he had glimpsed the beauty of a new art.

Perhaps he was right; but he was still far too inexperienced to venture without risk into a genre which --- if one wants it to be beautiful and truly artistic --- is the most difficult of all. Above all, this art demands one essential condition: the perfect harmony of the combined efforts of the poet, the musician, and the performers. --- Christophe gave this no thought at all: he flung himself headlong into an unknown art whose laws only he could sense.

His first idea had been to set to music a Shakespeare fairy-tale, or an act from the Second Faust. But the theaters showed little inclination to attempt the experiment; it would be costly, and the idea seemed absurd. People were willing enough to grant Christophe’s competence in music; but that he should presume to have opinions about poetry and the theater made them smile: no one took him seriously. The world of music and the world of poetry seemed like two foreign countries, secretly hostile to each other. To gain entry into the poetic realm, Christophe was obliged to accept the collaboration of a poet; and he was not permitted to choose that poet himself. He would not have dared to choose for himself in any case: he distrusted his own poetic taste; people had persuaded him that he understood nothing of poetry; and in fact he understood nothing of the poetry admired around him. With his usual honesty and stubbornness, he had sometimes gone to considerable trouble to try to feel the beauty of this or that poem; but he always came away empty-handed and slightly ashamed of himself: no, decidedly, he was no poet. In truth, he passionately loved certain poets of earlier times; and that consoled him a little. But no doubt he did not love them in the right way. Had he not once expressed the outlandish idea that only those poets are truly great who remain great even when translated into prose, even when translated into a foreign prose, and that words have no value beyond the soul they express? His friends had laughed at him. Mannheim had called him a grocer. He had not tried to defend himself. Since he saw daily, in the example of literary men who wrote about music, how ridiculous artists become when they presume to judge an art other than their own, he resigned himself --- though with a certain private skepticism --- to his poetic incompetence; and he accepted, with his eyes closed, the judgments of those he believed better informed on the subject. And so he allowed his friends at the Revue to impose on him one of their own circle, a great man of the decadent cénacle, Stephan von Hellmuth, who brought him an Iphigénie of his own devising. This was the period when German poets --- (like their counterparts in France) --- were busy rewriting all the Greek tragedies. The work of Stephan von Hellmuth was one of those astonishing Greco-German plays, blending Ibsen, Homer, and Oscar Wilde --- without forgetting, of course, a few handbooks of archaeology. Agamemnon was neurasthenic, and Achilles impotent: they lamented at length over their condition; and naturally, their complaints changed nothing. All the energy of the drama was concentrated in the role of Iphigénie --- a neurotic, hysterical, and pedantic Iphigénie, who lectured the heroes, declaimed furiously, expounded her Nietzschean pessimism to the audience, and, drunk with the desire to die, slashed her own throat amid peals of laughter.

Nothing could have been more contrary to Christophe’s spirit than this pretentious literature of the degenerate Ostrogoth costumed in Greek dress. All around him, people cried out that it was a masterpiece. He was a coward; he let himself be persuaded. To tell the truth, he was bursting with music, and he thought far more about his music than about the text. The text was simply a bed into which he could pour the flood of his passions. He was as far as possible from the state of self-effacement and intelligent impersonality that is proper to the musical translator of a poetic work. He thought only of himself, and not at all of the work. He was careful not to admit this. Besides, he deceived himself: he saw in the poem something entirely different from what was there. As when he was a child, he had managed to construct in his head a play entirely different from the one before his eyes.

It was only during the rehearsals that he saw the actual work. One day, while listening to a scene, it struck him as so stupid that he thought the actors were distorting it; and he had the presumption not only to explain it to them, in the poet’s presence, but to explain it to the poet himself, who took his interpreters’ side. The author bristled, and said, in a stung tone, that he thought he knew what he had intended to write. Christophe would not give ground, and maintained that Hellmuth understood nothing of it. The general hilarity warned him that he was making himself ridiculous. He fell silent, conceding that after all it was not he who had written the verses. Then he saw the crushing nullity of the play, and he was overwhelmed by it; he could not understand how he had managed to deceive himself. He called himself an idiot and tore his hair. He tried in vain to reassure himself, repeating: “You understand nothing: it’s none of your business. Concern yourself with your music!” --- but he felt so ashamed of certain bits of foolishness, the pretentious pathos, the glaring falseness of the words, the gestures, the attitudes, that at moments, while conducting the orchestra, he no longer had the strength to raise his baton: he wanted to go hide in the prompter’s box. He was too honest and too poor a politician to conceal what he thought. Everyone noticed: his friends, the actors, and the author. Hellmuth would say to him, with a pinched smile:

--- Does this still not have the good fortune to please you?

Christophe answered bluntly:

--- To tell the truth, no. I don’t understand it.

--- Had you not read it, then, before composing your music?

--- Yes, said Christophe naively, but I was mistaken --- I understood something else.

--- It is a pity, then, that you did not write down what you understood yourself.

--- Ah! if only I had been able to! said Christophe.

The poet, nettled, criticized the music by way of revenge. He complained that it was cumbersome and prevented one from hearing the verse.

If the poet did not understand the musician, nor the musician the poet, the actors understood neither one nor the other, and were not troubled by it in the least. They looked in their roles only for passages, here and there, where they could hang their habitual effects. There was no question of adapting their declamation to the tonality of a passage and the musical rhythm: they went one way and the music went another; one might have said they were constantly singing out of tune. Christophe gnashed his teeth and exhausted himself shouting the notes at them: they let him shout, and continued imperturbably, not even grasping what he wanted of them.

Christophe would have abandoned everything, had the rehearsals not been so far advanced, and had he not been bound by the fear of a lawsuit. Mannheim, to whom he confided his discouragement, laughed at him:

--- What is the matter? he asked. Everything is going perfectly well as it is. You don’t understand each other? Well, what does that matter? Who has ever understood a work outside of its author? He’s lucky if he understands himself!

Christophe was tormented by the stupidity of the poem, which would, he said, bring down his music. Mannheim made no difficulty in acknowledging that the poem made no sense, and that Hellmuth was “a dimwit”; but he had no anxiety on that account: Hellmuth gave good dinners, and he had a pretty wife --- what more could one ask of the critics? --- Christophe shrugged his shoulders, saying he had no time to listen to nonsense.

--- But it’s not nonsense! said Mannheim, laughing. That’s just like the serious-minded! They have no idea what counts in life.

And he advised Christophe not to worry so much about Hellmuth’s affairs, and to think about his own. He urged him to do a little publicity. Christophe refused with indignation. To a reporter who tried to interview him about his life, he replied furiously:

--- That is none of your business!

And when asked for his photograph for a Revue, he leapt with rage, crying that he was not, thank God, an emperor, to display his face to passersby. --- It was impossible to bring him into contact with the influential salons. He did not reply to invitations; and when, by chance, he had been forced to accept one, he forgot to go, or went with such ill grace that he seemed to have made it his mission to be disagreeable to everyone.

But the culmination came when he quarreled with his Revue, two days before the performance.

What had to happen happened. Mannheim had continued his revision of Christophe’s articles; and he no longer bothered to restrain himself from crossing out whole lines of criticism and replacing them with compliments.

One day, in a salon, Christophe came face to face with a virtuoso --- a vain and handsome pianist whom he had savaged in print, who now came to thank him, smiling with all his white teeth. Christophe replied brutally that there was nothing to thank him for. The other insisted, effusively protesting his gratitude. Christophe cut him short by telling him that if he was satisfied with the article, that was his own affair, but that the article had certainly not been written to satisfy him. And he turned his back. The virtuoso took him for a gruff benefactor and went off laughing. But Christophe, who now recalled having received, some time before, a thank-you card from another of his victims, was suddenly pierced by a suspicion. He went out, bought the latest issue of the Revue at a news kiosk, looked for his article, and read… For a moment, he asked himself if he was going mad. Then he understood; and, in a blind fury, he ran to the offices of Dionysos.

Waldhaus and Mannheim were there, deep in conversation with an actress of their acquaintance. They had no need to ask Christophe why he had come. Throwing the issue of the Revue on the table, Christophe, without stopping to draw breath, laid into them with unheard-of violence, shouting, calling them rogues, scoundrels, and forgers, and pounding the floorboards for all he was worth with a chair. Mannheim tried to laugh. Christophe wanted to kick him in the seat of his trousers. Mannheim took refuge behind the table, convulsed with laughter. But Waldhaus assumed an attitude of great hauteur. Dignified and stiff, he labored to make himself heard above the uproar, saying that he would not permit anyone to address him in that tone, that Christophe would hear from him; and he held out his card. Christophe threw it back in his face:

--- Pompous fool!… I don’t need your card to know who you are… You are a scoundrel and a forger!… And you think I’m going to duel with you?… A thrashing is all you deserve!…

His voice could be heard from the street. People stopped to listen. Mannheim closed the windows. The lady visitor, frightened, tried to slip out; but Christophe was blocking the door. Waldhaus, pale and choking, Mannheim stumbling over his words and sniggering, tried to reply. Christophe did not let them speak. He discharged upon them everything he could imagine that was most wounding, and left only when he was out of breath and out of insults. Waldhaus and Mannheim did not recover their voices until he was gone. Mannheim quickly regained his composure: insults rolled off him like water off a duck’s back. But Waldhaus remained embittered: his dignity had been outraged; and what made the affront more mortifying still was that he had had witnesses --- he would never forgive it. His colleagues joined their voices to his. Of the whole Revue, Mannheim alone bore Christophe no grudge: he had had his full amusement from him; he did not think it too high a price to pay, at the cost of a few harsh words, for the hearty laugh he had enjoyed at Christophe’s expense. It had been a good joke: had he himself been its object, he would have been the first to laugh. And so he was ready to shake Christophe’s hand as if nothing had happened. But Christophe was more resentful, and rebuffed every overture. Mannheim was not affected: Christophe had been a toy from which he had extracted all possible amusement; he was already beginning to warm to a new puppet. From one day to the next, everything was finished between them. This did not prevent Mannheim from continuing to say, when Christophe’s name came up in conversation, that they were intimate friends. And perhaps he believed it.

Two days after the quarrel, the premiere of Iphigénie took place. It was a complete fiasco. Waldhaus’s Revue praised the poem and said nothing of the music. The other journals and reviews had a field day. People laughed and hissed. The play was withdrawn after the third performance; but the mockery did not cease so quickly. There was too much pleasure to be had in finding this occasion to heap ridicule on Christophe; and Iphigénie remained, for several weeks, a subject of inexhaustible jokes. People knew that Christophe had no weapon left with which to defend himself; and they took full advantage. The one thing that still restrained them a little was his position at court. Although his relations with the grand duke had grown rather cool --- the duke having made numerous observations to him that he had entirely ignored --- he continued from time to time to present himself at the castle, and to enjoy, in the public mind, a sort of official protection, more illusory than real. --- He took it upon himself to destroy this last support.

He suffered under the criticism. It was directed not only at his music but at his idea of a new artistic form, which no one bothered to understand --- it was far easier to distort it and ridicule it at leisure. Christophe had not yet acquired the wisdom to tell himself that the best response to bad-faith criticism is no response at all, and simply to go on creating. He had fallen, over the past few months, into the bad habit of letting no unjust attack pass without a reply. He wrote an article in which he did not spare certain of his adversaries. The two respectable newspapers he brought it to returned it to him with ironic apologies, explaining that they could not publish it. Christophe dug in his heels. He thought of the city’s socialist paper, which had made some overtures to him. He knew one of the editors; they talked from time to time. Christophe enjoyed finding someone who spoke freely about power, the army, and the oppressive and archaic prejudices of the age. But the conversation could never go very far, because with the socialist it always circled back to Karl Marx, who was a matter of complete indifference to Christophe. Moreover, in those speeches of a free man he kept finding --- beyond a materialism that did not particularly appeal to him --- a pedantic rigidity, a despotism of thought, a secret cult of force, a militarism in reverse, which sounded not very different from what he heard every day in Germany.

Nevertheless, it was to this man and his paper that he turned when he found every other editorial door shut against him. He told himself that the move would cause a scandal --- the paper was violent, full of hatred, constantly condemned --- but since Christophe did not read it, he thought only of the boldness of its ideas, which did not frighten him, and not of the baseness of its tone, which would have disgusted him. Besides, he was so furious at the covert conspiracy among the other papers to silence him that he might well have gone ahead even if he had known better. He wanted to show people that they could not be rid of him so easily. --- He therefore took the article to the socialist editorial office, where he was received with open arms. The next day the article appeared, and the paper announced in emphatic terms that it had secured the collaboration of the young and talented master, citizen Jean-Christophe Krafft, whose ardent sympathies for the demands of the working class were well known.

Christophe read neither the notice nor the article; for that morning, a Sunday, he had set out before dawn for a ramble through the fields. He was in magnificent spirits. Watching the sun rise, he shouted, laughed, yodeled, leapt, and danced. No more Review, no more criticism to produce! It was spring, and the return of the music of heaven and earth, the most beautiful of all. Done with gloomy concert halls, stuffy and rank, with disagreeable neighbors, with insipid virtuosos! You could hear the marvelous song of the murmuring forests rising all around; and across the fields swept, like waves, the intoxicating emanations of Life, bursting through the earth’s crust on every side, rising from the tomb.

He was coming back from his walk, his head buzzing with light and music, when his mother handed him a letter that had been brought from the palace during his absence. The letter, written in an impersonal form, notified monsieur Krafft that he was to present himself at the palace that morning. --- The morning was long past: it was nearly one o’clock. Christophe was not particularly troubled.

--- It’s too late now, he said. It can wait until tomorrow.

But his mother was uneasy:

--- No, no, one could not simply postpone an appointment with His Highness like that; he must go at once. It might be a matter of some importance.

Christophe shrugged:

--- Important? As if those people could ever have anything important to say to you!… He’ll expound his views on music. That’ll be cheerful!… As long as it hasn’t occurred to him to compete with Siegfried Meyer, and he hasn’t also got a Hymn to Ægir to show me! I swear I won’t spare him. I’ll tell him: “Do stick to politics. There you’re the master: you’ll always be right. But in art, watch out! In art, people see you without your plumes, without your helmet, without your uniform, without your money, without your titles, without your ancestors, without your gendarmes;… and really, think about it a little: what will be left of you?”

Good Louisa, who took everything seriously, threw up her hands in horror:

--- You won’t say that!… You’re mad! You’re mad!…

He enjoyed alarming her, playing on her credulity, until the extravagance grew so extreme that Louisa finally understood he was teasing her. She shrugged:

--- You’re too silly, my poor boy!

He kissed her, laughing. He was in magnificent humor: he had found, on his walk, a fine musical theme; and he could feel it romping inside him like a fish in water. He refused to leave for the palace before eating --- he had an appetite like an ogre. Louisa then supervised his dress, because he had started tormenting her again: he insisted he was perfectly fine as he was, in his worn clothes and dusty shoes. That did not prevent him from changing, and from polishing his own boots, whistling like a blackbird and imitating every instrument in the orchestra. When he had finished, his mother reviewed him and solemnly retied his cravat. He was remarkably patient, for once, because he was pleased with himself --- which was also not particularly common. He left, declaring that he was going to carry off Princess Adélaïde --- the grand duke’s daughter, a fairly pretty woman, married to a minor German prince, who had come to spend a few weeks with her parents. She had once shown some fondness for Christophe when he was a child, and he had a soft spot for her. Louisa maintained that he was in love with her; and he pretended to be, for the amusement of it.

He was in no hurry to arrive, loitering before shop windows and stopping in the street to pet a dog, a friend of his who was also loitering, stretched out on his side and yawning in the sun. He vaulted the harmless railings enclosing the palace square --- a large empty quadrangle surrounded by buildings, with two drowsy fountains, two symmetrical, shadeless flowerbeds separated, as if by a part in the hair, by a graveled path raked with care and lined with orange trees in boxes; in the middle, the bronze statue of an unknown grand duke in Louis-Philippe costume, on a pedestal adorned at its four corners by allegorical Virtues. On a bench, a solitary stroller slept over his newspaper. At the palace gate, a post of useless soldiers dozed. Behind the decorative moats of the palace terrace, two sleeping cannons gaped over the sleeping city. Christophe laughed in all their faces.

He entered the palace without troubling to adopt a more official bearing: at most he stopped humming aloud; but inside himself his thoughts kept dancing. He tossed his hat on the vestibule table and hailed the old doorman he had known since childhood in his usual familiar way --- (the old fellow had already been there during Christophe’s first visit to the palace with his grandfather, the evening they had seen Hassler) --- but the old man, who always responded with good humor to Christophe’s somewhat irreverent quips, wore a surly expression this time. Christophe paid it no mind. A little further along, in the antechamber, he ran into a chancellery clerk, usually very talkative and lavish in his demonstrations of friendship; he was surprised at the haste with which this personage swept by, avoiding any conversation. Nonetheless, he did not dwell on these impressions, and, continuing on his way, he asked to be announced.

He entered. Dinner had just ended. His Highness was in one of the drawing rooms. Standing with his back to the fireplace, he was smoking and talking with his guests, among whom Christophe picked out his princess, who was also smoking; lounging negligently in an armchair, she was talking loudly to a group of officers gathered around her. The company was lively. Everyone was in high spirits; and Christophe, as he came in, heard the grand duke’s heavy laughter. But the laughter stopped dead when the prince caught sight of Christophe. He growled and bore straight down on him:

--- Ah! There you are! he shouted. You finally deign to appear? Do you think you’re going to make a fool of me much longer? You are a scoundrel, Monsieur!

Christophe was so stunned by this cannonball to the chest that for a moment he could not find any words. He thought only of his late arrival, which could not possibly justify such violence. He stammered:

--- Highness, what have I done?

His Highness was not listening, and pressed on furiously:

--- Silence! I will not be insulted by a scoundrel.

Christophe, going pale, struggled against his clenched throat, which refused to form words. He made an effort and cried out:

--- Highness, you have no right… you have no right to insult me yourself without telling me what I have done.

The grand duke turned to his secretary, who drew a newspaper from his pocket and handed it to him. He was in a state of exasperation that his naturally choleric temper alone could not account for: the fumes of overly generous wines had played their part as well. He planted himself in front of Christophe and, like a toreador with his cape, furiously waved the unfolded, crumpled newspaper in his face, shouting:

--- Your filth, Monsieur!… You deserve to have your nose rubbed in it!

Christophe recognized the socialist paper:

--- I don’t see what harm there is in it, he said.

--- What! What! yelped the grand duke. You have the insolence!… That rag of scoundrels who insult me daily, who spew the filthiest abuse against me!…

--- Monseigneur, said Christophe, I had not read it.

--- You lie! cried the grand duke.

--- I will not have you say I lie, said Christophe. I had not read it; I concern myself only with music. And in any case, I have the right to write wherever I choose.

--- You have no rights whatsoever, except the right to hold your tongue. I have been too good to you. I have heaped my benefits upon you and your family, despite every reason your conduct and your father’s gave me to be done with you. I forbid you to continue writing in a paper that is my enemy. And furthermore, I forbid you, as a general matter, to write anything at all in the future without my authorization. I have had enough of your musical polemics. I will not tolerate someone who enjoys my protection spending his time attacking everything that is dear to people of taste and feeling, to true Germans. You would do better to write better music, or, if that is beyond you, to work on your scales and exercises. I want no musical Bebel who amuses himself by defaming all our national glories, by sowing confusion in men’s minds. We know what is good, thank God! We did not wait for you to tell us. So --- to your piano, Monsieur, and leave us in peace!

The heavy man stood face to face with Christophe and stared him down with insulting eyes. Christophe, ashen, tried to speak; his lips moved; he stammered:

--- I am not your slave; I will say what I wish, I will write what I wish…

He was choking; he was close to tears of shame and rage; his legs were trembling. With a sudden movement of his elbow he knocked something off the piece of furniture beside him. He was aware that he was making himself ridiculous; and indeed he heard laughter: glancing into the depths of the room, he saw, as if through a fog, the princess following the scene and exchanging remarks of ironic commiseration with those beside her. From that moment he lost clear consciousness of what was happening. The grand duke was shouting. Christophe shouted louder than him, without knowing what he was saying. The prince’s secretary and another official came toward him and tried to make him be quiet: he pushed them away; as he spoke he waved an ashtray he had mechanically seized from the piece of furniture he was leaning against. He could hear the secretary saying to him:

--- Come now, put that down, put that down!…

and he could hear himself shouting disjointed words and striking the edge of the table with the ashtray.

--- Get out! roared the grand duke, beside himself with fury. Get out! Get out! I dismiss you!

The officers had gathered around the prince and were trying to calm him. The grand duke, apoplectic, his eyes bulging from his head, shouted that someone should throw this blackguard out. Christophe saw red: he came within a breath of driving his fist into the grand duke’s face; but he was crushed beneath a chaos of contradictory feelings --- shame, fury, a residue of timidity, of Germanic loyalism, of traditional deference, of habits ground down before the prince. He wanted to speak; he could not speak; he wanted to act; he could not act; he could no longer see, he could no longer hear: he let himself be pushed, and went out.

He passed through the servants --- impassive, having gathered near the door and missed nothing of the quarrel’s noise. The thirty steps he had to take to reach the exit of the antechamber seemed to him to last a lifetime. The gallery stretched longer with every step he took. He would never get out!… The light from outside, which he could see gleaming at the far end through the glass door, was salvation. He stumbled down the staircase; he had forgotten he was bareheaded: the old doorman called him back to take his hat. He had to gather every last scrap of strength to leave the château, cross the courtyard, and make it home. His teeth were chattering. When he opened his front door, his mother was terrified by his appearance and his shaking. He pushed her aside, refused to answer her questions. He went up to his room, locked himself in, and lay down. He was shivering so violently that he could not manage to undress; his breath was cut short and his limbs felt broken… Ah! to stop seeing, stop feeling, to no longer have to sustain this wretched body, to stop struggling against this ignoble life, to fall, fall without breath, without thought, to be nothing, nowhere!… --- His clothes torn off at enormous cost, scattered around him on the floor, he threw himself into bed and burrowed into it up to his eyes. All sound ceased in the room: nothing could be heard but the small iron bed trembling on the tile floor.

Louisa listened at the door; she knocked in vain, called softly: nothing answered; she waited, anxiously watching the silence; then she moved away. Once or twice during the day she came back to listen; and again in the evening, before going to bed. The day passed, the night passed: the house was mute. Christophe trembled with fever; at moments he wept; and in the night he raised himself to shake his fist at the wall. Around two in the morning, in a fit of madness, he climbed out of bed, drenched in sweat and half naked: he wanted to go kill the grand duke. He was consumed by hatred and shame; his body and his heart writhed in flame. --- Of this tempest, nothing was audible outside: not a word, not a sound. Teeth clenched, he kept everything locked inside.

The following morning he came back downstairs as usual. He was a wreck. He said nothing, and his mother did not dare ask him anything: she already knew, from the neighbors’ reports. All day he sat in a chair by the fire, silent, feverish, his back bent, like a little old man; and when he was alone, he wept in silence.

Toward evening, the editor of the socialist newspaper came to see him. Naturally he was already informed, and wanted details. Christophe, touched by his visit, naively took it as an act of sympathy and apology on behalf of those who had compromised him; his pride made him seem to regret nothing, and he let himself speak freely of everything weighing on his heart: it was a relief to talk openly with a man who shared his hatred of oppression. The other man kept urging him to talk: he saw in the incident a windfall for his paper, an opportunity for a scandalous article, for which he counted on Christophe to supply the material --- or better still, to write himself; for he assumed that after this public rupture, the court musician would put his polemical talent --- which was considerable --- and his small cache of private documents about the court --- which was even more so --- at the service of “the cause.” As he did not pride himself on excessive delicacy, he presented the matter plainly, without artifice, in the starkest terms. Christophe recoiled; he declared that he would write nothing, arguing that any attack he made on the grand duke at this moment would be interpreted as an act of personal revenge, and that he was obliged to show more restraint now that he was free than when, not being free, he had taken risks by saying what he thought. The journalist made nothing of these scruples; he judged Christophe to be somewhat obtuse and clerical at heart; above all he thought Christophe was afraid. He said:

--- Well then, leave it to us --- I’ll write it. You won’t have to concern yourself with anything.

Christophe begged him to keep silent; but he had no means of compelling him to do so. Besides, the journalist pointed out that the affair did not concern Christophe alone: the insult had touched the paper as well, which had the right to retaliate. To that there was no reply; all Christophe could do was ask him to promise not to abuse certain confidences made to the friend, not to the journalist. The other gave his word without difficulty. Christophe felt no more reassured for it: he was all too aware, too late, of the recklessness he had shown. --- When he was alone, he went back over everything he had said, and he shuddered. Without a moment’s reflection, he wrote to the journalist, imploring him once more not to repeat what he had confided --- (the wretch was already partly repeating it himself, in his letter.)

The next day, the first thing he read, when he opened the paper with feverish haste, was, on the front page, his story told in full. Everything he had said the day before was there, monstrously amplified, having undergone that particular distortion to which all things are subjected when they pass through the mind of a journalist. The article attacked the grand duke and the court with base invective. Certain details it contained were too personal to Christophe, too obviously known to him alone, for the entire article not to be attributed to him.

This new blow crushed Christophe. As he read, a cold sweat rose to his face. When he had finished, he sat in panic. He wanted to rush to the paper; but his mother stopped him, not without reason fearing his violence. He feared it himself; he felt that if he went there he would do something stupid; and he stayed --- to do something else stupid instead. He sent the journalist an indignant letter, reproaching him in wounding terms for his conduct, disowning the article, and breaking with the party. The disavowal did not appear. Christophe wrote again to the paper, demanding they publish his letter. He was sent a copy of his first letter, written the evening of their conversation, which confirmed everything --- and was asked whether that should be published as well. He felt he was in their hands. At that point, he had the misfortune to run into the indiscreet interviewer in the street; he could not restrain himself from telling the man the contempt he felt for him. The next day, the paper published, without the slightest shame, an insulting little piece in which it spoke of those courtiers who, even after they have been thrown out the door, remain servants still and are no longer capable of being free. A few allusions to the recent incident left no doubt that Christophe was the subject.

Once it was plain to everyone that Christophe had no support whatsoever, he suddenly found himself rich in enemies beyond anything he could have imagined. All those he had offended, directly or indirectly, whether through personal criticism or by fighting their ideas and their taste, immediately took the offensive and took revenge with interest. The broad public, whose apathy Christophe had tried to shake, watched with great satisfaction the drubbing administered to the insolent young man who had presumed to reform opinion and disturb the sleep of respectable people. Christophe was in the water. Each one did his best to hold his head under.

They did not all fall on him at once. One began first, to test the ground. Christophe not responding, he redoubled his blows. Then others followed; and then, the whole pack. Some were in it purely for the sport, like young dogs amusing themselves by depositing their indecencies in a conspicuous place: these were the flying squadron of incompetent journalists who, knowing nothing, try to make it forgotten by heaping flattery on the winners and insults on the losers. Others brought the weight of their principles to bear, thrashing away deaf to everything; where they had passed, nothing remained of anything: this was serious criticism --- the criticism that kills.

Fortunately for Christophe, he did not read the papers. Several devoted friends had taken the trouble to send him the most insulting ones. But he let them pile up on his table without thinking of opening them; it was only at the end that his eye was caught by a large red mark framing an article: he read that his Lieder resembled the grunts of a wild animal, that his symphonies seemed to come out of a madhouse, that it was hysterical art, spasms of harmonies intended to disguise his emotional barrenness and his nullity of thought. The critic, who was well known, concluded thus:

“M. Krafft has formerly given, as a reporter, some astonishing proofs of his style and taste which provoked irresistible hilarity in musical circles. He was then amicably advised to devote himself to composition instead. The latest products of his muse have shown that this well-intentioned advice was bad advice. M. Krafft should definitively return to reporting.”

After this reading, which prevented Christophe from working for the entire morning, he naturally set about hunting for the other hostile papers, to finish demoralizing himself completely. But Louisa, who had a mania for making everything lying around disappear under the pretext of “putting things in order,” had already burned them. He was annoyed at first, then relieved; and, handing his mother the paper that remained, he told her she ought to have done the same with that one.

Other humiliations cut him more deeply. A quartet whose manuscript he had sent to a reputable society in Frankfurt was refused unanimously, without explanation. An overture which an orchestra in Cologne had seemed inclined to perform was returned to him, after months of waiting, as unperformable. The worst ordeal was inflicted on him by an orchestral society in the city. The Kapellmeister H. Euphrat, who directed it, was a reasonably good musician: but, like many conductors, he had no intellectual curiosity; he suffered --- (or rather he was in the finest of health) --- from that special indolence peculiar to his profession, which consists in endlessly rehashing works already known and fleeing like fire from any truly new work. He never tired of organizing Beethoven, Mozart, or Schumann Festivals: in these works he had only to let himself be carried along by the purring of familiar rhythms. Music of his own time, by contrast, was intolerable to him. He did not dare admit it, and told himself he was open to all young talent: truly, when someone brought him a work built on an old pattern --- a sort of tracing of works that had once been new some fifty years earlier --- he received it quite warmly; he even made a show of performing it, of imposing it on the public. It disturbed neither the order of his effects nor the order by which the public was accustomed to being moved. But he felt a mixture of contempt and hatred for anything that threatened to disrupt this fine order and cause him some new exertion. Contempt predominated, if the innovator had no chance of emerging from obscurity. If he threatened to succeed, it was then hatred --- until the moment, naturally, when he had succeeded altogether.

Christophe was far from that point: far indeed. So he was quite surprised when word reached him, through indirect overtures, that Herr H. Euphrat would have been glad to perform something of his. He had all the less reason to expect it given that he knew the Kapellmeister was an intimate friend of Brahms and of several others whom he had treated harshly in his columns. Being a good-natured man, he attributed to his adversaries the generous feelings he himself would have been capable of: he supposed that, seeing him overwhelmed, they wished to prove they were above petty grudges. He was moved. He wrote a warm, effusive note to H. Euphrat, enclosing a symphonic poem. The other had his secretary reply with a cold but polite letter acknowledging receipt and adding that, following the society’s rules, the symphony would soon be distributed to the orchestra and subjected to a full rehearsal before being accepted for public performance. Rules were rules: Christophe had only to comply. In any case, this was a pure formality, used to screen out the sometimes unwieldy efforts of amateurs.

Two or three weeks later, Christophe received notice that his work was to be rehearsed. In principle, everything took place behind closed doors, and even the composer could not attend the rehearsal. But a universally acknowledged tolerance meant that he was always present; he simply did not show himself. Everyone knew it, and everyone pretended not to. On the appointed day, a friend came to fetch Christophe and brought him into the hall, where he took a seat at the back of a box. He was surprised to see that at this closed rehearsal, the hall --- the floor seats at least --- was almost entirely filled: a crowd of dilettantes, idlers, and critics buzzed and chattered. The orchestra was supposed to be unaware of their presence.

They began with the Brahms Rhapsodie for contralto voice, men’s chorus, and orchestra, on a passage from Goethe’s Harzreise im Winter. Christophe, who detested the majestic sentimentality of that work, told himself that this was perhaps the “Brahminists’” courteous way of getting revenge, by forcing him to hear a composition he had criticized irreverently. The thought made him laugh, and his good humor grew when, after the Rhapsodie, came two other pieces by well-known musicians he had also taken to task: the intention seemed to him beyond doubt. And, though he could not quite suppress a few grimaces, he thought it was, all in all, fair play; and, for want of the music, he appreciated the joke. He even amused himself by mixing his ironic applause into that of the public, which gave an enthusiastic demonstration for Brahms and his companions.

At last it was Christophe’s symphony’s turn. A few glances thrown his way from the orchestra and the hall toward his box made it clear that people knew he was there. He hid himself. He waited, with that tightening of the heart every musician feels when the conductor’s baton rises and the full force of the musical current gathers itself in silence, ready to break its dam. He had never yet heard his own work performed by an orchestra. How would the beings he had dreamed into life actually live? What would their voices sound like? He could feel them rumbling inside him; and leaning over the abyss of sound, he waited, trembling, for what was about to emerge.

What emerged was something nameless, a shapeless porridge. Instead of the sturdy columns that were supposed to support the pediment of the edifice, the chords collapsed alongside one another like a building in ruins; nothing could be made out except a cloud of plaster dust. Christophe needed a moment before he could be sure it was really his work being played. He searched for the line, the rhythmic thread of his thought: he no longer recognized it; it lurched along, stumbling and swaying like a drunk clinging to walls; and he was crushed with shame, as if people were seeing him in that very state. He knew perfectly well that this was not what he had written --- yet when a witless interpreter distorts your thought, there is always a moment of doubt, a moment when you ask yourself with consternation whether you might yourself be responsible for the stupidity. The public, for its part, never asks that question: it trusts the interpreters, the singers, the orchestra it is accustomed to hearing, just as it trusts its newspaper --- they cannot be wrong; if they produce absurdities, it is the composer who is absurd. And at this moment the public was all the less inclined to doubt it, since it took pleasure in believing so. --- Christophe tried to convince himself that the Kapellmeister was aware of the shambles, that he would stop the orchestra and start everything over. The instruments were not even playing together. The horn had missed its entrance and come in a beat late; it played on for a few bars, then calmly stopped to empty its instrument. Certain passages in the oboes had vanished entirely. It was impossible for even the most trained ear to recover the thread of the musical thought, or even to imagine that any such thread existed. Touches of orchestration, moments of humorous wit, became grotesque through the sheer coarseness of the playing. It was stupid enough to make you weep --- the work of an idiot, a buffoon, who knew nothing about music. Christophe tore at his hair. He wanted to interrupt; but the friend who was with him held him back, assuring him that Herr Kapellmeister would certainly identify the performance’s flaws on his own and set everything right --- that besides, Christophe ought not to show himself, and that any remark from him would make the worst possible impression. He forced Christophe to draw back to the rear of the box. Christophe let himself be managed; but he was pounding his head with his fists, and each new monstrosity wrung from him a groan of indignation and pain.

--- The wretches! The wretches!…

he groaned; and he bit his hands to keep from crying out.

Now, rising toward him along with the wrong notes came the murmur of the audience, which was beginning to stir. At first it was only a tremor; but soon Christophe had no more doubt: they were laughing. The musicians of the orchestra had given the signal; some made no effort to hide their hilarity. The public, now confident that the work was ridiculous, convulsed with laughter. The delight was universal; it redoubled each time a sharply rhythmic motif returned, which the double basses underscored in a manner that was pure burlesque. The Kapellmeister alone, imperturbable, continued to beat time in the midst of the uproar.

At last they reached the end --- (the best things come to an end). --- The floor belonged to the audience. It exploded. There was an outburst of exhilaration that lasted several minutes. Some whistled, others applauded ironically; the wittiest cried bis! A bass voice from the back of a stage box began to imitate the grotesque motif. Other jokers caught the spirit and imitated it in turn. Someone shouted: “The composer!” --- It had been a long time since these clever people had had such a good time.

After the tumult had died down a little, the Kapellmeister, perfectly impassive, his face turned three-quarters toward the audience yet affecting not to see it --- (the audience was always supposed not to exist) --- gave the orchestra a sign to indicate that he wished to speak. Voices called “Shush!” and everyone fell silent. He waited a moment longer; then --- (his voice was crisp, cold, and cutting): ---

--- Gentlemen, he said, I would certainly not have allowed that thing to be played to the end, had I not wished to put on public display, just this once, the gentleman who dared to write scurrilous things about the master Brahms.

He spoke; and stepping down from his podium, he walked out to the ovations of the hall in delirium. They called for him to return; the acclamations went on for another minute or two. But he did not come back. The orchestra was leaving. The public decided to leave as well. The concert was over.

It had been a fine day.

Christophe had already left. The moment he had seen the miserable conductor quit his stand, he had flung himself out of the box; he was clattering down the stairs from the first floor to catch up with him and strike him in the face. The friend who had brought him ran after him and tried to hold him back; but Christophe shoved him aside and nearly sent him tumbling down the staircase --- (he had reason to believe that the man had been a party to the trap laid for him). --- Fortunately for H. Euphrat and for himself, the door leading to the stage was locked; and his furious pounding could not force it open. Meanwhile the audience was beginning to file out of the hall. Christophe could not remain there. He fled.

He was in an indescribable state. He walked at random, waving his arms, rolling his eyes, talking aloud like a madman; he was forcing back his cries of indignation and rage. The street was nearly deserted. The concert hall had been built the previous year in a new neighborhood, a little outside the city; and Christophe, by instinct, was fleeing toward the countryside, across the waste lots where isolated shacks and a few scaffoldings of houses under construction stood surrounded by wooden fencing. He had murderous thoughts; he would have liked to kill the man who had subjected him to that outrage… Alas! And even if he had killed him, would anything have changed in the animosity of all those people, whose contemptuous laughter still rang in his ear? There were too many of them, he could do nothing against them; they were all in agreement --- those who were divided on so many things --- to insult and crush him. It was more than incomprehension: there was hatred in it. What had he ever done to any of them? He had beautiful things inside him, things that do good and expand the heart; he had wanted to give voice to them, to let others share in them; he had believed they would be made happy by them as he was. Even if they didn’t appreciate them, they ought at least to feel grateful for the intention; they might, at the very worst, have pointed out in a friendly way where he had gone wrong; but from that to the malicious joy with which they had insulted his thoughts, odiously distorted, trampled them underfoot, killed him with ridicule --- how was it possible? In his exaltation he was exaggerating their hatred still further; he attributed to it a seriousness that these mediocre creatures were thoroughly incapable of feeling. He was sobbing: “What have I done to them?” He was suffocating, he felt lost, just as when he was a child and had for the first time made the acquaintance of human wickedness.

And as he looked around him, down at his feet, he suddenly realized he had arrived at the bank of the mill stream, at the very spot where, a few years earlier, his father had drowned. And the thought came to him at once to drown himself as well. Without waiting a moment, he made ready to jump.

But as he leaned over the bank, transfixed by the calm and clear gaze of the water, a tiny bird in a tree nearby broke into song --- into wild, abandoned song. He fell silent to listen. The water murmured. You could hear the trembling of the wheat in flower, rippling beneath the soft caress of the air; the poplars shivered. Behind the hedge along the path, baskets of invisible bees in a garden filled the air with their perfumed music. On the far bank, a cow with beautiful eyes rimmed in agate was dreaming. A fair-haired little girl, sitting on the edge of a wall, a light open-weave basket on her shoulders like a small angel with its wings, was dreaming too, swinging her bare legs and humming a tune that meant nothing at all. In the distance, across the meadow, a white dog was bounding in great wide circles. Christophe, leaning against a tree, listened, watched the springtime earth; he was being drawn back into the peace and joy of all these living things: he forgot, he forgot… Suddenly he threw his arms around the beautiful tree against which he had been resting his cheek. He threw himself to the ground; he buried his face in the grass; he laughed nervously, laughed with happiness. All the beauty, grace, and charm of life enveloped him, soaked into him, penetrated him like a sponge. He thought:

--- Why are you so beautiful, and they --- men --- so ugly?

No matter! He loved it, he loved it, he felt that he would always love it, that nothing could ever tear him from it. He embraced the earth with rapture. He embraced life:

--- I have you! You are mine. They cannot take you from me. Let them do what they will! Let them make me suffer!… to suffer is still to live!

Christophe threw himself back into work with courage. He wanted nothing more to do with the “men of letters” --- well named --- the phrase-mongers, the sterile chatterers, the journalists, the critics, the exploiters and traffickers of art. As for the musicians, he would waste no more time fighting their prejudices and their jealousies. They wanted nothing to do with him? --- So be it! He wanted nothing to do with them. He had his work to do: he would do it. The court was restoring his freedom to him: he thanked it for that. He thanked people for their hostility: he would now be able to work in peace.

Louisa approved of him with all her heart. She had no ambitions; she was not a Krafft: she resembled neither her father nor her grandfather. She did not care in the least about honors or reputation for her son. Certainly she would have rejoiced if he had been rich and famous; but if those advantages were to be purchased at the price of too much unpleasantness, she greatly preferred that nothing of the kind came about. She had been more affected by Christophe’s grief following his break with the court than by the event itself; and at bottom she was delighted that he had fallen out with the people from the reviews and newspapers. She had a peasant’s distrust of printed paper: all of it was good for nothing but wasting your time and bringing you trouble. She had sometimes heard the young men from the Revue, with whom he had collaborated, talking with Christophe: she had been appalled by their viciousness; they tore everything to pieces with relish, said dreadful things about everything; and the more they said, the more pleased with themselves they were. She didn’t like them. They were no doubt very intelligent and very learned; but they were not good: she rejoiced that her Christophe would see them no more. She was entirely of his mind: what need did he have of them?

--- They can say, write, and think of me whatever they like, said Christophe: they cannot stop me from being myself. Their art, their thought --- what do I care? I deny them!

It is very fine to deny the world. But the world does not let itself be denied so easily by a young man’s bravado. Christophe was sincere; but he was deceiving himself, he did not know himself well. He was not a monk; he did not have the temperament for renouncing the world; above all, he did not have the age for it. At first he did not suffer too much: he was deep in composition; and as long as that work lasted, he felt the lack of nothing. But when he entered the period of depression that follows the completion of a work, and that lasts until a new work takes hold of the mind, he looked around him and was chilled by his abandonment. He asked himself why he wrote. While one is writing, the question does not arise: one must write, there is nothing to discuss. Afterward, one finds oneself in the presence of the work that has been born; the powerful instinct that drove it out from within has gone silent: one no longer understands why it was born; one barely recognizes oneself in it, it is almost a stranger, one longs to forget it. And that is impossible as long as it has not been published, or performed, as long as it does not live its own life out in the world. Until then, it is like a newborn child still attached to its mother --- a living thing riveted to living flesh: it must be amputated at any cost, so that one can live. The more Christophe composed, the more the oppression of these beings born from him grew within him --- beings who could neither live nor die. They haunted him. Who would deliver him from them? Some obscure impulse stirred these children of his thought; they aspired desperately to detach themselves from him, to spread into other souls like living, fertile seeds that the wind carries out across the world. Would he remain walled up in his sterility? He would go mad with it.

Since every outlet --- theaters, concerts --- was closed to him, and since nothing in the world would have induced him to humble himself by approaching once more the directors who had already turned him away, he had no recourse but to publish what he had written; yet he could hardly flatter himself that he would find a publisher more easily than an orchestra. The two or three attempts he made, as clumsily as possible, were enough; rather than risk another refusal, or wrangle with one of those music merchants and endure their patronizing airs, he preferred to cover all the costs of publication himself. It was madness: he had a small reserve, drawn from his salary at court and from a few concerts; but that source had dried up, and it would be a long time before he found another; he should have been wise enough to protect this small fund, which was meant to carry him through the difficult period he was now entering. Not only did he fail to do so; but, since the reserve was insufficient to cover the publication expenses, he did not hesitate to go into debt. Louisa dared say nothing; she thought him unreasonable, and could not quite understand why one would spend money to see one’s name in a book; but since it was a way of keeping him patient and keeping him close to her, she was only too glad he was content with it.

Rather than offering the public compositions in some familiar, comfortable genre where they might feel at home, Christophe chose from among his manuscripts a series of works that were distinctly his own and that he cared about greatly. These were pieces for piano, interwoven with Lieder --- some very short and of a folk-like character, others more fully developed and almost dramatic. Taken together, they formed a sequence of joyful or melancholy impressions that flowed into one another naturally, rendered in turn by the piano alone, and by the voice, either alone or accompanied. “For,” said Christophe, “when I am dreaming, I don’t always put into words what I feel: I suffer, I am happy, with no words to say it; but a moment comes when I must say it, and I sing without thinking --- sometimes it is only vague phrases, a few disconnected lines, sometimes whole poems; then I go back to dreaming. So the day passes: and it is indeed a day that I wanted to represent. Why these collections made up only of songs, or only of preludes? Nothing could be more artificial or less harmonious. We must try to render the free play of the soul.” --- He had therefore called the Suite: Une Journée. The various parts of the work bore subtitles indicating briefly the succession of inner reveries. Christophe had written in mysterious dedications, initials, and dates that only he could understand, recalling the memory of poetic hours or beloved faces: the laughing Corinne, the languid Sabine, and the unknown little French girl.

In addition to this work, he chose some thirty of his Lieder --- those he liked best, and which consequently pleased the public least. He had been careful not to take his most “melodious” melodies, but rather the most characteristic. --- (It is well known that good solid citizens always have a great fear of what is “characteristic.” What has no character is far better suited to their taste.)

These Lieder were set to verses by old Silesian poets of the seventeenth century, whom Christophe had come across by chance in a popular anthology and whose plain-spoken sincerity he loved. Two above all were dear to him, like brothers --- two beings of great genius, both dead at thirty: the charming Paul Fleming, the free traveler to the Caucasus and Ispahan, who kept a pure, loving, and serene soul amid the savagery of war, the sorrows of life, and the corruption of his time --- and Jean-Christian Günther, the ungoverned genius who burned himself out in debauchery and despair, flinging his life to every wind. From Günther he had translated the cries of provocation and vengeful irony against the hostile God who crushes him, those furious curses of the felled Titan who hurls the thunderbolt back at heaven. From Fleming he had taken love songs to Anemone and Basilene, sweet and soft as flowers --- and the dance of the stars, the Tanzlied of clear and joyful hearts --- and the heroic and tranquil sonnet To Himself (An Sich), which Christophe recited to himself as a morning prayer.

The smiling optimism of the pious Paul Gerhardt also charmed Christophe. It was a rest for him after his fits of gloom. He loved that innocent vision of nature in God: the fresh meadows where storks walk gravely among tulips and white narcissus at the edge of little streams singing over the sand, the clear air through which swallows with wide wings and flocks of doves pass by, the gaiety of a ray of sunshine tearing through the rain, and the luminous sky laughing between the clouds, and the majestic serenity of evening, the repose of forests, flocks, towns, and fields. He had the impertinence to reset to music several of these sacred hymns, which were still sung in Protestant congregations. And he had been careful not to preserve their chorale character. Far from it: he had a horror of it; he had given them a free and living expression. Old Gerhardt might perhaps have trembled at the diabolical pride that now breathed from certain strophes of his Song of the Christian Traveler, or at the pagan exuberance that sent the peaceful stream of his Summer Song surging like a torrent.

The publication was made, and naturally in defiance of all common sense. The publisher whom Christophe paid to print his Lieder and hold them in stock had no qualification for the job except being his neighbor. He was not equipped for work of this scale; the project dragged on for months; there were blunders, costly corrections. Christophe, who understood nothing of such matters, allowed himself to be charged a third more than was necessary; expenses rose well above what had been anticipated. Then, when it was all over, Christophe found himself with an enormous edition on his hands and no idea what to do with it. The publisher had no clientele; he made not the slightest effort to circulate the work. His apathy was, moreover, well matched by Christophe’s own attitude. When he had asked him, to satisfy his conscience, to write a few lines of publicity copy, Christophe replied “that he wanted no advertising: if his music was good, it would speak for itself.” The other man scrupulously honored his wishes: he locked the edition away in the back of his shop. It was well kept there; for in six months not a single copy was sold.

While waiting for the public to make up its mind to come, Christophe had to find some means of repairing the hole he had made in his small savings; and he could not afford to be choosy: he had to live and pay his debts. Not only were these heavier than he had foreseen; he also discovered that the reserve he had counted on was smaller than he had calculated. Had he spent money without realizing it, or --- which was infinitely more likely --- had he simply done his arithmetic wrong? --- (He had never been able to add up a column of figures correctly.) --- It mattered little in any case why the money was missing: it was missing, that much was certain. Louisa had to bleed herself dry to help her son. It caused him burning remorse, and he set about repaying her as quickly as possible, at any price. He went in search of pupils to teach, however painful it was to put himself forward and sometimes suffer refusals. His reputation had fallen sharply: he had great difficulty finding even a few students. So when he was told of a position at a school, he was only too glad to accept.

It was a semi-religious institution. The director, a subtle man, had seen clearly, without being a musician himself, all the use that could be made of Christophe, and very cheaply, given his current situation. He was affable, and he paid little. When Christophe ventured a timid objection, the director gave him to understand, with a benevolent smile, that Christophe, now holding no official title, could not expect more.

Dismal work! It was less a matter of teaching the pupils music than of giving parents and pupils alike the illusion that they knew it. The great task was to have them ready to sing at the ceremonies to which the public was admitted. The means were of little importance. Christophe found it sickening; he did not even have the consolation of telling himself, as he went about his duties, that he was doing useful work: his conscience reproached him with it as with a kind of hypocrisy. He tried to give the children a more solid grounding, to make them know and love serious music; but the pupils had no interest in it. Christophe could not manage to make himself heard; he lacked authority; and in truth he was not made to teach children. He had no interest in their stumbling efforts; he wanted to explain musical theory to them all at once. When he had a piano lesson to give, he would sit the pupil down at a Beethoven symphony and play it four-handed with him. Naturally, it could not go well; he would explode in anger, chase the pupil from the piano, and play alone in his place, at length. --- He was no different with his private pupils, outside the school. He had not an ounce of patience: he would say, for instance, to a pretty young girl who prided herself on aristocratic distinction, that she played like a cook; or he would even write to her mother that he was giving up, that it would be the death of him if he had to go on any longer with a creature so entirely devoid of talent. --- None of this helped his affairs. His few pupils left him; he could not hold on to one of them for more than two months. His mother reasoned with him; he reasoned with himself. Louisa made him promise that he would not at least quarrel with the institution where he had just taken a position; for if he lost that post, he no longer knew how he would manage to live. So he forced himself, despite his disgust: he was a model of punctuality. But how was he to hide what he thought when some donkey of a pupil mangled a passage for the tenth time, or when he had to hammer into his class, for the upcoming concert, some insipid chorus! --- (For they did not even leave him the choice of his program: his taste was not trusted.) --- One may imagine he brought little zeal to it. He persisted nonetheless, silent, sullen, betraying his inner fury only by an occasional fist on the table that made the pupils jump. But sometimes the pill was too bitter: he could bear it no longer. In the middle of a piece he would interrupt his singers:

--- Enough of that! Enough of that! I’ll play you some Wagner instead.

They were only too pleased. They played cards behind his back. There was always someone to report it to the director; and Christophe would be reminded that he was not there to make his pupils love music, but to make them sing it. He received these reproofs with an inward shudder; but he accepted them: he did not want to break with them. --- Who would have told him, a few years earlier, when his career looked brilliant and assured (and when he had done nothing), that he would be reduced to these humiliations the moment he began to be worth something?

Among the wounds to his pride that his post at the institution caused him, one of the least painful was not the ordeal of the obligatory calls on his colleagues. He paid two such visits at random; and they bored him so thoroughly that he had not the courage to continue. The two fortunate recipients showed no gratitude; but the others considered themselves personally offended. All of them looked on Christophe as their inferior in position and intelligence, and they treated him with an air of condescension. At moments this overwhelmed him: for they seemed so certain of themselves and of the opinion they held of him that he sometimes found himself sharing it; he felt stupid in their company --- what could he possibly have found to say to them? They were full of their trade and saw nothing beyond it. They were not men. If only they had at least been books! But they were footnotes to books, philological commentaries.

Christophe avoided occasions for being in their company. But sometimes they were forced on him. The director received, one afternoon a month, and he expected all his staff to be present. Christophe, who had slipped out of the first invitation without so much as sending his apologies, playing dead in the fallacious hope that his absence would go unnoticed, was the object, the very next day, of a sweetly sour reprimand. The following time, lectured by his mother, he made up his mind to attend; he brought to it all the enthusiasm of a man going to a funeral.

He found himself in a gathering of teachers from the institution and from other schools in the city, with their wives and daughters. Crowded into a drawing room too small for them, they were arranged in hierarchical groups and paid no attention to him whatsoever. The group nearest to him was talking about pedagogy and cooking. All these professors’ wives had culinary recipes, which they expounded with an exuberant and sour-faced pedantry. The men were no less interested in these questions, and scarcely less expert. They were as proud of their wives’ domestic talents as their wives were of their husbands’ learning. Standing near a window, his back against the wall, not knowing what to do with himself, now trying to smile vacuously, now dark and glassy-eyed, his features drawn, Christophe was dying of boredom. A few steps away, seated in the window embrasure, a young woman whom no one was talking to was as bored as he. Both of them looked around the room without looking at each other. It was only after some time that they noticed one another, at the moment when, unable to bear it any longer, they each turned away to yawn. At that exact instant their eyes met. They exchanged a glance of friendly complicity. He took a step toward her. She said to him, in a low voice:

--- Having fun?

He turned his back on the room and, looking toward the window, stuck out his tongue. She burst out laughing, and, suddenly wide awake, she motioned for him to sit beside her. They struck up an acquaintance: she was the wife of Professor Reinhart, who held the chair in natural history at the school and had recently arrived in town, where they knew no one yet. She was far from beautiful --- a broad nose, bad teeth, little freshness of complexion --- but she had lively, rather witty eyes and a good-natured smile. She chattered like a magpie; he played his part with spirit. She had an amusing frankness, a gift for comical sallies; they exchanged impressions with laughter, speaking freely, without caring in the least about those around them. Their neighbors, who had not deigned to notice their existence while it would have been charitable to help them out of their isolation, now shot them indiscreet and displeased glances: it was bad form to enjoy oneself so thoroughly… But what people might think of them was all the same to the two chatterers: they were having their revenge.

At the end of the evening, Madame Reinhart introduced her husband to Christophe. He was extremely ugly --- a pallid, clean-shaven, pockmarked face, slightly macabre in effect --- but with an air of great kindness. He spoke from deep in his throat, articulating his words in a sententious, laboring manner, pausing between syllables.

They had been married a few months, and these two plain creatures were devoted to each other: they had an affectionate way of looking at one another, speaking to one another, taking each other by the hand in the middle of all that company --- which was both comic and touching. What one wanted, the other wanted too. They invited Christophe on the spot to come and sup with them after the reception. Christophe began by resisting, in a joking way; he said that the best thing to do that evening was to go to bed --- they were ground down with boredom, as though they had marched ten leagues. But Madame Reinhart replied that for precisely that reason they must not stop there: it would be dangerous to spend the night with such gloomy thoughts. Christophe let himself be persuaded. In his isolation, he felt glad to have met these good people, not very refined in manner, but simple and gemütlich.

The Reinharts’ little home was gemütlich, like themselves. It was a Gemüt that talked rather a lot, a Gemüt with inscriptions. The furniture, the utensils, the crockery all spoke, repeating tirelessly their joy at welcoming “the dear guest,” inquiring after his health, offering him amiable and virtuous counsel. On the sofa --- which was, it must be said, quite hard --- lay spread a small cushion that murmured in a friendly way:

--- Just a little quarter-hour! (Nur ein Viertelstündchen!)

The cup of coffee offered to Christophe pressed him to take another:

--- Just one more little drop! (Noch ein Schlückchen!).

The plates seasoned the cooking --- which was, moreover, excellent --- with moral instruction. One said:

--- Think of everything: otherwise nothing good will come your way.

Another:

--- Affection and gratitude are pleasing. Ingratitude displeases all.

Although Christophe did not smoke, the ashtray on the mantelpiece could not refrain from presenting itself to him:

--- A little resting place for burning cigars. (Ruheplätzchen für brennende Cigarren.)

He wished to wash his hands. The soap on the washstand said:

--- For our dear guest. (Für unseren lieben Gast.)

And the sententious hand-towel, like a very polite person who has nothing to say but feels obliged to say something all the same, offered him this reflection, full of good sense but not of relevance: that “one must rise early to enjoy the morning.”

--- Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund.

Christophe eventually no longer dared to turn in his chair, for fear of hearing himself hailed by other voices from every corner of the room. He wanted to say to them:

--- Do be quiet, you little monsters! One can’t hear oneself think in here.

And he was seized with an uncontrollable fit of laughter, which he tried to explain to his hosts by recalling the gathering at the school a little while ago. For nothing in the world would he have wished to offend them. Besides, he was not very sensitive to the ridiculous. Very quickly, he grew accustomed to the loquacious cordiality of things and people. What would he not have forgiven them! They were such good souls! And they were not boring, either; if they lacked taste, they did not lack intelligence.

They found themselves somewhat adrift in the town, where they had just arrived. The insufferable touchiness of the small provincial town would not admit that one could simply walk in, like entering a mill, without having first solicited, by the proper channels, the honor of belonging. The Reinharts had not paid sufficient attention to the provincial protocol that governs the duties of newcomers toward those already settled there. Reinhart, left to himself, would have submitted to it mechanically enough. But his wife, whom these tiresome obligations bored to death, and who did not like to put herself out, kept putting them off from day to day. She had chosen from her list of calls the ones that would bore her least, and made those first; the others were indefinitely deferred. The town’s notabilities, who found themselves in this second category, were scandalized by such a lack of consideration. Angelika Reinhart --- (her husband called her Lili in familiar conversation) --- had rather free manners; she could not manage to adopt the official tone. She addressed her social superiors with familiar ease, and they flushed with indignation; she did not shrink, when necessary, from contradicting them flat out. She had a ready tongue and felt a compulsion to say everything that crossed her mind: sometimes these were enormous blunders, laughed at behind her back; sometimes they were sharp thrusts delivered full in the chest, which made her mortal enemies. She would bite her tongue at the very moment she said them, and she would have liked to take them back --- but it was too late. Her husband, the mildest and most respectful of men, would venture timid observations on the subject. She would kiss him, telling him she was a fool and that he was right. But a moment later she would begin again; and it was especially when and where certain things ought least to be said that she immediately said them: she would have burst if she had not said them. --- She was perfectly suited to get along with Christophe.

Among the many absurd things that one ought not to say, and that she consequently said, there recurred at every turn a tactless comparison between what was done in Germany and what was done in France. German herself --- (no one was more so) --- but raised in Alsace and on friendly terms with French Alsatians, she had no doubt been subject to that attraction of Latin civilization which, in the annexed territories, so many Germans resist not at all, including some who seemed least likely to yield to it. Perhaps, to tell the truth, this attraction had grown stronger through a spirit of contradiction, ever since Angelika had married a North German and found herself with him in a purely Germanic milieu.

From their very first evening with Christophe, she launched into her habitual topic. She praised the agreeable freedom of French conversation. Christophe echoed her. France, for him, was Corinne: beautiful luminous eyes, a young laughing mouth, frank and free manners, a well-timbred voice --- he had a great desire to know more of her.

Lili Reinhart clapped her hands with delight at finding herself so perfectly in agreement with Christophe.

--- It’s a pity, she said, that my little French friend is no longer here --- she couldn’t bear it any longer: she left.

The image of Corinne went out at once. As a dying rocket makes the soft and deep glow of the stars appear suddenly in the dark sky, another image, other eyes, appeared.

--- Who? asked Christophe, starting. The little governess?

--- What! said Madame Reinhart --- you knew her too?

They described her: the two portraits were identical.

--- You knew her? Christophe kept saying. Oh! tell me everything you know about her!…

Madame Reinhart began by protesting that they were intimate friends who confided everything to one another. But when she had to go into detail, this everything shrank to very little. They had met first at a social call. Madame Reinhart had made advances to the young woman and, with her usual cordiality, had invited her to come and see her. The young woman had come two or three times and they had talked. But it had not been without difficulty that the curious Lili had managed to learn anything of the little Frenchwoman’s life: the young woman was extremely reserved; one had to wrest her story from her piece by piece. Madame Reinhart knew only that her name was Antoinette Jeannin; that she had no money, and that her only family was a younger brother left in Paris, whom she devoted herself to supporting. She spoke of him without ceasing: it was the only subject on which she showed herself at all expansive; and Lili Reinhart had won her confidence by expressing compassionate sympathy for the young boy, alone in Paris, without parents, without friends, a boarder at a lycée. It was partly to pay for his education that Antoinette had accepted a position abroad. But the two poor children could not live without each other; they wrote every day; and the slightest delay in the arrival of the expected letter threw them both into an anxious, sickly dread. Antoinette never stopped tormenting herself on her brother’s account: the child did not always have the courage to hide from her the sadness of his loneliness; each of his complaints rang in Antoinette’s heart with a tearing intensity; she tortured herself at the thought that he was suffering, and often imagined that he was ill but did not want to say so. The good Madame Reinhart had often had to scold her affectionately for these groundless fears; and she would succeed, for a moment at least, in restoring her confidence. --- As for Antoinette’s family, her circumstances, the depths of her soul, she had been unable to learn anything. At the first question, the young woman would draw back into herself with a fierce shyness. The little she did say showed that she was educated and intelligent; she seemed to possess a precocious experience of life; she appeared at once naive and disillusioned, pious and without illusions. She was not happy there, in a family without tact or kindness. She did not complain of this, but one could see that she suffered from it. --- How she had come to leave, Madame Reinhart did not know precisely. People had claimed that she had been behaving badly. Angelika believed not a word of it; she would have staked her hand on it that these were disgusting slanders, thoroughly worthy of this stupid and malicious little town. But there had been some sort of trouble --- it mattered little which, did it not?

--- Yes, said Christophe, lowering his head.

--- In the end, she left.

--- And what did she say to you, when she left?

--- Ah! said Lili Reinhart, I had no luck. I happened to have gone to Cologne for two days! When I came back… Zu spät! (Too late!)… she broke off, to scold her maid, who was bringing the lemon too late for it to go into her tea.

And she added sententiously, with the natural solemnity that true German souls bring to officiating over the familiar acts of daily life:

--- Too late, as so often in life!

(One could not tell whether it was the lemon or the interrupted story that she had in mind.)

She went on:

--- When I came back, I found a note from her, thanking me for everything I had done, and telling me she was leaving: she was going back to Paris. She left no address.

--- And she never wrote again?

--- Not a word.

Christophe watched the melancholy figure disappear once more into the night --- those eyes that had reappeared to him for a moment, just as he had last seen them, looking at him through the glass of the railway carriage.

The enigma of France presented itself anew, with greater insistence. Christophe never tired of questioning Madame Reinhart about that country which she claimed to know. And Madame Reinhart, who had never been there, was not at a loss to enlighten him. Reinhart, an excellent patriot, full of prejudices against France, which he knew no better than his wife, ventured sometimes a few reservations when her enthusiasm grew too excessive; but she redoubled her assertions with increased energy, and Christophe, knowing nothing, trustingly joined in the chorus.

What was yet more precious to him than Lili Reinhart’s recollections were her books. She had assembled a small library of French volumes: school textbooks, a few novels, a few plays bought at random. To Christophe, eager to educate himself and knowing nothing of France, this seemed a treasure when Reinhart went and fetched them for him, and obligingly put them at his disposal.

He started with collections of selected passages, old school readers that had belonged to Lili Reinhart or her husband when they were pupils. Reinhart had assured him that he must begin there, if he wished to learn to find his way through a literature entirely unknown to him. Christophe, filled with respect for those who knew more than he did, obeyed faithfully; and that very evening he set himself to read. He tried first to form a rough idea of the riches he now possessed.

He became acquainted with French writers who bore names such as: Théodore-Henri Barrau, François Pétis de la Croix, Frédéric Baudry, Émile Delérot, Charles-Auguste-Désiré Filon, Samuel Descombaz, and Prosper Baur. He read poems by the abbé Joseph Reyre, by Pierre Lachambaudie, by the duc de Nivernois, by André van Hasselt, by Andrieux, by madame Colet, by Constance-Marie princesse de Salm-Dyck, by Henriette Hollard, by Gabriel-Jean-Baptiste-Ernest-Wilfrid Legouvé, by Hippolyte Violeau, by Jean Reboul, by Jean Racine, by Jean de Béranger, by Frédéric Béchard, by Gustave Nadaud, by Édouard Plouvier, by Eugène Manuel, by Hugo, by Millevoye, by Chênedollé, by James Lacour Delâtre, by Félix Chavannes, by Francis-Édouard-Joachim known as François Coppée, and by Louis Belmontet. Christophe, lost, drowning, submerged in this poetic deluge, turned to prose. There he found Gustave de Molinari, Fléchier, Ferdinand-Édouard Buisson, Mérimée, Malte-Brun, Voltaire, Lamé-Fleury, Dumas père, J.-J. Rousseau, Mézières, Mirabeau, de Mazade, Claretie, Cortambert, Frédéric II, and monsieur de Vogüé. The French historian most frequently cited was Maximilien Samson-Frédéric Schœll. In this French anthology Christophe came across the Proclamation of the New German Empire; and he read a portrait of the Germans by Frédéric-Constant de Rougemont, from which he learned that “the German was born to live in the world of the soul. He has none of the noisy, frivolous gaiety of the Frenchman. He possesses great depth of soul; his affections are tender and profound. He is untiring in his labors and persevering in his undertakings. There is no people more moral, or among whom the duration of life is as long. Germany counts an extraordinary number of writers. She has a genius for the fine arts. While the inhabitants of other nations take pride in being French, English, Spanish, the German, by contrast, embraces all of humanity in his impartial love. Finally, by virtue of his position at the very center of Europe, the German nation seems to be at once the heart and the superior reason of humanity.”

Christophe, tired and bewildered, closed the book and thought:

--- The French are decent fellows; but they’re not very strong.

He picked up another volume. This one was of a higher caliber; it was aimed at the grandes écoles. Musset occupied three pages in it, and Victor Duruy thirty. Lamartine seven pages, and Thiers nearly forty. Le Cid was given in its entirety --- almost in its entirety: --- (the monologues of don Diègue and Rodrigue had simply been cut, on the grounds that they were too long.) --- Lanfrey extolled Prussia against Napoleon I: accordingly, generous space had been allotted to him; he took up more room, by himself, than all the great classics of the eighteenth century combined. Copious accounts of the French defeats of 1870 had been drawn from Zola’s La Débâcle. There was no sign of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Diderot, Stendhal, Balzac, or Flaubert. Pascal, on the other hand --- absent from the other book --- made an appearance here as a curiosity; and Christophe learned in passing that this convulsionary “belonged to the Fathers of Port-Royal, an institution for young women, near Paris…”

Christophe was on the verge of throwing the whole business aside: his head was spinning; he could no longer see clearly. He told himself: “I’ll never find my way out of this.” He was incapable of forming any judgment. For hours he had been leafing through randomly, without knowing where he was going. He did not read French easily; and when he had gone to considerable trouble to understand a passage, it almost always turned out to be something insignificant and pompous.

Yet from the midst of this chaos, flashes of light sometimes broke through --- sword thrusts, stinging and slashing words, heroic bursts of laughter. Gradually, an impression emerged from this first reading, perhaps due to the tendentious design of the anthologies. The German editors, intentionally or not, had selected above all those French passages most likely to demonstrate --- by the testimony of the French themselves --- the defects of the French and the superiority of the Germans. But they did not suspect that what they were in this way illuminating, in the eyes of an independent mind like Christophe’s, was the astonishing freedom of these French people, who criticized everything about themselves and praised their adversaries. Michelet celebrated Frédéric II, Lanfrey the English at Trafalgar, Charras the Prussia of 1813. No enemy of Napoleon had dared speak of him in such harsh terms. The most revered things were not safe from their spirit of rebellion. Even under the great King, the bewigged poets had their frank say. Molière spared nothing. La Fontaine mocked everything. Boileau himself castigated the nobility. Voltaire insulted war, gave religion a thrashing, ridiculed the fatherland. Moralists, satirists, pamphleteers, comic writers vied with one another in joyful or somber audacity. It was a universal disrespect. The honest German editors were sometimes alarmed by it; they felt the need to set their consciences at rest, seeking to excuse Pascal for lumping together cooks, porters, soldiers, and ruffians in the same bag; they protested, in a footnote, that Pascal would never have spoken in such terms had he known the noble modern armies. Nor did they fail to recall with satisfaction how Lessing had improved upon La Fontaine’s Fables, changing, for instance, on the advice of the Genevan Rousseau, the cheese of Master Crow into a piece of poisoned meat on which the vile fox dies:

“May you never obtain anything but poison, accursed flatterers!”

They blinked before the naked truth; but Christophe rejoiced: he loved the light. Here and there, he too had a slight jolt; he was not accustomed to this unbridled independence, which, in the eyes of even the freest German --- still accustomed, for all that, to order and discipline --- gives the impression of anarchy. He was also thrown off by French irony: he took certain things too seriously; others, which were implacable negations, struck him on the contrary as amusing paradoxes. No matter! Astonished or taken aback, he felt himself drawn in, little by little. He had given up trying to classify his impressions; he moved from one feeling to another: he was alive. The gaiety of the French narratives --- Chamfort, Ségur, Dumas père, Mérimée, heaped together pell-mell --- expanded his spirit; and from time to time, in gusts, there rose from some page the intoxicating and wild scent of Revolutions.

It was nearly morning when Louisa, sleeping in the adjoining room, woke to see light filtering through the cracks of Christophe’s door. She knocked on the wall and asked if he was ill. A chair scraped across the floor; the door opened; and Christophe appeared, pale, in his nightshirt, a candle and a book in hand, making strange gestures that were at once solemn and farcical. Louisa, startled, sat up in bed, thinking he had lost his mind. He burst out laughing, and, waving his candle, he declaimed a scene from Molière. In the middle of a sentence he dissolved into laughter; he sat down at the foot of his mother’s bed to catch his breath; the light trembled in his hand. Louisa, reassured, grumbled at him affectionately:

--- What’s the matter with him? What is going on? Go to bed!… My poor boy, are you going completely out of your mind?

But he started up again with renewed enthusiasm:

--- You have to hear this!

And, settling in beside her, he began reading her the play from the beginning. He thought he could see Corinne; he heard her boastful, biting, resonant voice. Louisa protested:

--- Go away! Go away! You’ll catch cold. You’re driving me mad. Let me sleep!

He went on, relentless. He swelled his voice, he waved his arms, he choked with laughter; and he asked his mother whether it wasn’t magnificent. Louisa had turned her back to him, and, curled up in her blankets, she had stopped her ears and was saying:

--- Leave me in peace!…

But she was laughing quietly to herself at hearing him laugh. Finally she stopped protesting. And when Christophe, having finished the act, appealed in vain to her to attest to the interest of his reading, he leaned over and saw that she was asleep. Then he smiled, kissed her hair gently, and went back to his room without a sound.

He returned to draw from the Reinharts’ library. All the books passed through his hands, one after another, in no particular order. Christophe devoured everything. He had such a desire to love the country of Corinne and the unknown woman, so much enthusiasm to spend, that he found a use for all of it. Even in second-rate works, some page or some phrase would strike him like a breath of free air. He exaggerated it, especially when he spoke of it to madame Reinhart, who never failed to outbid him further. Although she was as ignorant as a carp, she enjoyed setting French culture against German culture and humiliating the latter in favor of the former, to exasperate her husband and to take revenge for the tedium she was made to endure in the small town.

Reinhart was indignant. Beyond his own field of learning, he had never advanced past the notions taught in school. For him, the French were clever people, practically intelligent, agreeable, good at conversation, but light, touchy, boastful, incapable of any real seriousness, any deep feeling, any sincerity --- a people without music, without philosophy, without poetry (apart from l’Art poétique, Béranger, and François Coppée) --- the people of pathos, grand gestures, exaggerated words, and pornography. He never had enough words to brand Latin immorality; and, for want of anything better, he always returned to the word frivolity, which in his mouth, as in that of most of his compatriots, took on a particularly disagreeable meaning. And all of it ended with the customary refrain in honor of the noble German people --- the moral people (“By this, Herder has said, it distinguishes itself from all other peoples”) --- the faithful people (treues Volk… Treu, which says everything: sincere, faithful, loyal, and upright) --- the People par excellence, as Fichte says --- German Strength, symbol of all justice and all truth --- German Thought --- the German Gemüt --- the German language, the only original language, the only one kept pure, like the race itself --- German women, German wine, and German song… “Germany, Germany above all, in all the world!”

Christophe protested. Madame Reinhart burst out laughing. All three of them shouted very loudly. They got along no less well for it: all three knew perfectly well that they were good Germans.

Christophe came often to talk, to dine, to walk with his new friends. Lili Reinhart doted on him, made him sumptuous suppers: she was delighted to find in this a pretext for indulging her own appetite. She showered him with all manner of sentimental and culinary attentions. For Christophe’s birthday she made him a tart on which twenty candles were planted, and in the middle, a small sugar figure dressed in Greek style, which was meant to represent Iphigénie and which held a bouquet. Christophe, profoundly German despite himself, was touched by these somewhat boisterous and not very refined expressions of genuine affection.

The excellent Reinharts knew how to find other, more delicate ways to demonstrate their active friendship. At his wife’s instigation, Reinhart, who could barely read a note of music, had purchased about twenty copies of Christophe’s Lieder --- (the first to have left the publisher’s shop) --- and had distributed them throughout Germany, in various directions, among his university acquaintances; he had also had a certain number sent to booksellers in Leipzig and Berlin with whom he was in contact through his own textbooks. This touching and clumsy initiative, of which Christophe knew nothing, bore no fruit at the time, in any case. The Lieder sent here and there seemed to have fallen on deaf ears: no one spoke of them; and the Reinharts, saddened by this indifference, congratulated themselves on having kept Christophe outside their efforts, for it would have brought him more pain than comfort. --- But in reality, nothing is lost, as one has so many occasions to observe in life; no effort goes entirely in vain. One knows nothing of it for years; then, one day, one realizes that the thought has found its way. Who could say whether Christophe’s Lieder had not gone straight to the hearts of a few good people, scattered in their provinces, too timid or too weary to tell him so?

Only one of them wrote. Two or three months after Reinhart’s dispatches, a letter arrived for Christophe: moved, ceremonious, enthusiastic, in old-fashioned turns of phrase, it came from a small town in Thuringia and was signed “Universitätsmusikdirektor Professor D^r^ Peter Schulz.”

This was a great joy for Christophe, and an even greater one for the Reinharts, when he opened at their home the letter he had forgotten for two days in his pocket. They read it together. Reinhart exchanged knowing glances with his wife, which Christophe did not notice. Christophe seemed radiant, when suddenly Reinhart saw his face darken and he stopped short in the middle of his reading.

--- Well, why have you stopped? he asked.

(They were already on first-name terms.)

Christophe threw the letter on the table in anger.

--- No, this is too much! he said.

--- What is?

--- Read it!

He turned his back to the table and went off to sulk in a corner.

Reinhart read it with his wife and found nothing but expressions of the most rapturous admiration.

--- I don’t see, he said, puzzled.

--- You don’t see? You don’t see?… --- cried Christophe, snatching up the letter and holding it before his eyes. --- Can’t you read? Don’t you see that he’s a “Brahminist” too?

Only then did Reinhart notice that the Universitätsmusikdirektor, in one line of his letter, had compared Christophe’s Lieder to those of Brahms. --- Christophe lamented:

--- A friend! I finally find a friend!… And I’ve barely won him before I’ve already lost him!…

He was suffocated by the comparison. Left to his own devices, he would have fired back at once with a letter full of foolishness. Or, perhaps, on reflection, he would have considered himself very wise and very magnanimous for not replying at all. Fortunately the Reinharts, while they found his ill humor amusing, kept him from committing yet another absurdity. They managed to get him to write a brief note of thanks. But that note, written with great reluctance, was cold and stiff. Peter Schulz’s enthusiasm was not shaken by it: he sent two or three more letters, overflowing with affection. Christophe was not a natural correspondent; and although he had grown somewhat reconciled to the unknown friend by the tone of sincerity and genuine warmth he felt running through every line, he let the correspondence drop. Schulz eventually fell silent. Christophe stopped thinking about him.

He was seeing the Reinharts every day now, and often several times a day. They spent nearly every evening together. After a day spent alone, turned in on himself, he had a physical need to talk, to pour out everything that was on his mind, even if no one understood it, to laugh with or without reason, to spend himself, to unwind.

He would make music for them. Having no other way to express his gratitude, he would sit down at the piano and play for hours. Madame Reinhart was not in the least musical, and she had great difficulty stifling her yawns; but she was fond of Christophe, and feigned interest in what he played. Reinhart, without being much more musical than his wife, was moved in a purely physical way by certain pieces of music, certain passages, certain bars; and at those moments he would be violently stirred, even to the point of tears --- which struck him as idiotic. The rest of the time, nothing: it was just noise to him. As a general rule, moreover, he was never moved except by what was least good in a work --- entirely unremarkable passages. --- They both persuaded themselves that they understood Christophe; and Christophe wanted to persuade himself of the same. Now and then a mischievous urge to make fun of them would come over him: he would lay traps for them, playing things that had no meaning whatsoever, inept potpourris; and he would let them believe it was his own work. Then, when they had admired at length, he would tell them the truth. After that they grew wary; and whenever Christophe put on an air of mystery before playing something, they assumed he was trying to trick them again, and they would criticize it. Christophe let them talk, joined in with them, agreed that this music was not worth a damn --- then suddenly burst out laughing:

--- You little rogues! How right you are!… That’s one of mine!

He was as pleased as a king to have fooled them. Madame Reinhart, slightly vexed, would come and give him a little tap; but he laughed so wholeheartedly that they laughed along with him. They made no pretense to infallibility. And since they no longer knew which foot to dance on, Lili Reinhart had settled on criticizing everything, and her husband on praising everything: that way they could be certain that one of the two would always agree with Christophe.

In any case, it was less the musician that drew them to Christophe than the good-hearted fellow himself, a little touched in the head, very affectionate and very alive. The bad things they had heard said about him had rather disposed them in his favor: like him, they felt oppressed by the atmosphere of the small town; like him, they were frank, they formed their own judgments, and they regarded him as a big child, not very skilled at navigating life, a victim of his own candor.

Christophe had few illusions about his new friends; and it made him a little melancholy to tell himself that they did not understand the deepest part of him, that they never would. But he was so starved of friendship, and needed it so desperately, that he felt infinite gratitude toward them for being willing to care for him a little. The experience of the past year had taught him: he no longer believed he had the right to be particular. Two years earlier he would not have been so patient --- he recalled, with a remorse that was also faintly amused, his severity toward the good and tedious Euler family. Alas, how wise he had become! --- He sighed a little at the thought. A secret voice whispered to him:

--- Yes, but for how long?

That made him smile, and consoled him a little.

What would he not have given to have a friend --- just one --- who understood him and shared his soul! --- But young as he still was, he had enough experience of the world to know that such a wish belonged to those the life most rarely granted, and that he could not hope to be more fortunate than most of the true artists who had come before him. He had begun to learn something of the history of a few of them. Certain books borrowed from Reinhart’s library had shown him the terrible trials endured by German musicians of the seventeenth century, and the quiet steadfastness with which one of those great souls --- the greatest of all: the heroic Schütz --- had proven himself, carrying on unshakeably along his path in the midst of wars, of cities burned, of provinces swallowed by plague, of a fatherland invaded, trampled underfoot by bands from every corner of Europe, and --- worst of all --- broken, exhausted, degraded by misfortune, no longer trying to fight back, indifferent to everything, aspiring only to rest. He thought: “Who would have the right to complain in the face of such an example? They had no public, they had no future; they wrote for themselves alone and for God; what they wrote today, the next day might perhaps annihilate. And yet they went on writing, and they were not sad: nothing made them lose their intrepid and jovial good humor; they satisfied themselves with their song, and they asked of life only to live, to earn just enough for bread, to unburden themselves of what they thought, and to find two or three decent people, simple, genuine, not artists, who most likely did not understand them, but who had faith in them, and in whom they had faith. --- How could he dare to be more demanding than they? There is a minimum of happiness that one may ask for. But no one has a right to more: it is for oneself to supply the surplus of happiness; that is not something others can give.”

These thoughts calmed him; and for that reason he loved his good friends the Reinharts all the more. He did not think that anyone would come to take that last remaining affection from him.

He was reckoning without the malice of small towns. Their grudges are tenacious --- all the more tenacious for having no real aim. A good hatred, one that knows what it wants, is appeased when it has gotten it. But people who do harm out of boredom never disarm, because they are always bored. Christophe was a prey offered up to their idleness. He was beaten, no doubt; but he had the audacity not to appear crushed by it. He no longer alarmed anyone; but he was not alarmed by anyone. He asked for nothing: there was nothing to be done against him. He was happy with his new friends, and indifferent to everything people said or thought of him. This was intolerable. --- Madame Reinhart was even more irritating. The friendship she openly displayed for Christophe, in defiance of the entire town, seemed, like her manner in general, a challenge to public opinion. Good Lili Reinhart was not defying anyone or anything: she gave no thought to provoking others; she did what seemed right to her, without asking anyone else’s opinion. That was the worst provocation of all.

People watched their every move. They were not careful enough. The one extravagant, the other scatterbrained, they lacked prudence when they went out together, or even at home in the evenings when they talked and laughed, leaning on the balcony. They allowed themselves to fall into an innocent familiarity of words and manner that could easily feed calumny.

One morning, Christophe received an anonymous letter. In basely insulting terms, it accused him of being Madame Reinhart’s lover. The blow left him staggered. He had never entertained the slightest thought of love, or even of flirtation, toward her: he was too honorable, he had a puritanical horror of adultery --- the mere idea of that squalid sharing caused him a physical and moral revulsion. Taking the wife of a friend would have seemed to him a crime; and Lili Reinhart would have been the last person in the world with whom he might have been tempted to commit it: the poor woman was not beautiful, and he would not even have had passion as an excuse.

He went back to his friends, ashamed and ill at ease. He found the same unease there. Each of them, separately, had received a similar letter; but they did not dare say so; and all three of them, watching one another and watching themselves, no longer dared to move or speak, and only managed to make fools of themselves. If Lili Reinhart’s natural carelessness gained the upper hand for a moment and she began again to laugh and say outrageous things, a sudden glance from her husband or from Christophe would stop her; the memory of the letter would flash through her mind; she would halt in the middle of a familiar gesture, grow flustered; Christophe and Reinhart grew flustered too. And each of them thought:

--- Do the others already know?

Yet they said nothing of it to one another, and tried to go on living as before.

But the anonymous letters continued, growing more and more insulting, more obscene; they threw the three of them into a state of unbearable agitation and shame. They hid them when they received them, and could not find the strength to burn them unread: they opened them with trembling hands; their hearts failed them as they unfolded the page; and when they read there what they had feared to read, with some fresh variation on the same theme --- ingenious and ignoble inventions of a mind bent on doing harm --- they wept quietly to themselves. They wore themselves out trying to guess who the wretch could be who had set himself to persecute them.

One day, Madame Reinhart, at the end of her strength, confessed to her husband the persecution she had been suffering; and he admitted to her, with tears in his eyes, that he was suffering it too. Should they speak of it to Christophe? They did not dare. And yet they had to warn him, so that he might be cautious. --- From the very first words Madame Reinhart said to him, blushing, she saw with dismay that Christophe was receiving letters as well. This relentless malice drove them out of their minds. Madame Reinhart no longer doubted that the whole town was in on the secret. Instead of bolstering one another, they only finished demoralizing each other. They did not know what to do. Christophe spoke of going to smash someone’s skull. --- But whose? And then, that was precisely when the slanders would have a field day!… Put the police in possession of the letters? --- That would be to make their insinuations public… Pretend to ignore them? It was no longer possible. Their relations of friendship were now poisoned. Reinhart might have absolute faith in the honesty of his wife and of Christophe: he suspected them in spite of himself. He felt the absurdity and the shame of his suspicions; he forced himself to disregard them, and to leave Christophe and his wife alone together. But he suffered; and his wife could see it clearly.

For her, it was even worse. She had never thought of flirting with Christophe, any more than Christophe with her. The slanders insinuated into her mind the ridiculous idea that Christophe, after all, might perhaps have tender feelings for her; and although he was a hundred leagues from showing her anything of the kind, she thought it best to defend herself against it, not by any precise allusion, but by clumsy precautions that Christophe did not understand at first, and that, when he did understand, drove him beside himself. It was enough to make you laugh and cry at once, it was so stupid! Him, in love with this good little bourgeoise, kind but plain and ordinary!… And that she should believe it!… And that he could not defend himself, could not say to her, say to her husband:

--- Come now! Don’t worry! There’s no danger!…

But no, he could not offend these excellent people. And he realized, moreover, that if she was defending herself against being loved by him, it was because she had secretly begun to love him: the anonymous letters had had the fine result of planting in her mind that silly, romantic idea.

The situation had become at once so painful and so idiotic that it could not go on. Besides, Lili Reinhart, who, despite her boastful manner of speaking, had no strength of character, lost her head before the smoldering hostility of the small town. They found shameful pretexts for no longer seeing each other:

“Madame Reinhart was unwell… Reinhart had work to do… They were going away for a few days…”

Clumsy lies, which chance took malicious pleasure in exposing.

More honest, Christophe said:

--- Let us part, my poor friends. We are not equal to this.

The Reinharts wept. --- But it was a relief to them, once the break was made.

The town could triumph. This time Christophe was truly alone. It had stolen from him even the last breath of air --- the affection, however humble, without which no heart can live.

---

1. ↑ A sobriquet by which German pamphleteers customarily refer to one another as H. M. --- (His Majesty): --- the Emperor.

2. ↑ The anthologies of French literature that Jean-Christophe borrows from the library of his friends the Reinharts are:

   I. --- Choix de lectures françaises à l’usage des écoles secondaires, by Hubert H. Wingerath, Doctor of Philosophy, director of the Saint-Jean Realschule in Strasbourg. --- Part Two: middle classes. --- 7th edition, 1902. Dumont-Schauberg.

   II. --- L. Herrig and G. F. Burguy: La France littéraire, revised by F. Tendering, director of the Real-Gymnasium of the Johanneum, Hamburg. --- 1904. Brunswick.