Jean-Christophe in Paris. I. The Market-Place. 1

Disorder within order. Railroad employees slovenly and familiar. Travelers protesting the regulations even as they obeyed them. --- Christophe was in France.

After satisfying the curiosities of customs, he boarded the train for Paris. Night lay over the fields, soaked with rain. The harsh lights of the stations threw into sharper relief the melancholy of the interminable plain buried in shadow. The trains they passed, growing more and more frequent, tore the air with their whistles, jolting the torpor of drowsing passengers. Paris was drawing near.

An hour before arrival, Christophe was ready to get off: he had jammed his hat down on his head; he had buttoned himself up to the neck, for fear of thieves, of whom he had been told Paris was full; he had stood up and sat back down twenty times; he had shifted his suitcase twenty times, from the rack to the seat and from the seat back to the rack, to the irritation of his neighbors, whom he managed to knock against each time with his usual clumsiness.

Just as the train was entering the station, it stopped abruptly in the middle of the night. Christophe pressed his face against the window and tried in vain to see. He turned toward his traveling companions, seeking a glance that would let him start a conversation, to ask where they were. But they were dozing, or pretending to, looking sullen and bored; not one of them made any move to explain the delay. Christophe was surprised by this inertia: these surly, numbed creatures resembled so little the French people he had imagined! He finally sat down, discouraged, on his suitcase, toppling with every lurch of the train, and he was beginning to doze himself when he was woken by the sound of doors being thrown open… Paris!… His neighbors were already getting off.

Jostling and being jostled, he made his way toward the exit, waving off the porters who offered to carry his luggage. Suspicious as a peasant, he thought everyone wanted to rob him. He had hoisted his precious suitcase onto his shoulder and went on his way, paying no attention to the remarks of the people he shoved through. At last he found himself on the slick pavement of Paris.

He was too preoccupied with his load, with the lodging he was going to find, and with the tangle of carriages in which he found himself caught, to think of looking at anything. The first order of business was to find a room. Hotels were not in short supply: they crowded around the station on every side; their names blazed in letters of gaslight. Christophe looked for the least brilliant of them: none seemed humble enough for his purse. At last, in a side street, he spotted a filthy inn with a cheap eating-house on the ground floor. It called itself the Hôtel de la Civilisation. A stout man in his shirtsleeves was smoking a pipe at a table; he hurried over when he saw Christophe come in. He understood nothing of his jargon; but he sized up at a glance the awkward, childlike German who refused to let anyone take his bundle and was straining to make him a speech in some improbable language. He led him up a foul-smelling staircase to an airless room that gave onto an inner courtyard. He did not fail to praise the quietness of a place that no noise from outside could reach; and he charged a good price for it. Christophe, understanding little, ignorant of the cost of living in Paris, his shoulder broken by his load, agreed to everything: he was eager to be alone. But no sooner was he alone than the squalor of the place seized him; and to keep himself from giving in to the sadness rising inside him, he hurried back out, after plunging his head into the dusty water in the basin, which felt greasy to the touch. He forced himself not to see and not to smell, so as to escape the disgust.

He went down into the street. The October fog was thick and sharp; it had that flat smell of Paris, where the fumes from the suburban factories mingle with the city’s heavy breath. You could not see ten paces ahead. The glow of the gas lamps trembled like a candle about to go out. In the half-darkness, a crowd of people surged in opposing streams. Carriages crossed and collided, blocking the way, damming the flow of traffic like a weir. Horses slipped on the frozen mud. The curses of coachmen, the horns and bells of trams made a deafening uproar. This noise, this swarming, this smell struck Christophe in the head and in the heart. He stopped for a moment, was immediately shoved by those walking behind him, and swept along by the current. He went down the Boulevard de Strasbourg, seeing nothing, lurching awkwardly into passersby. He had not eaten since morning. The cafés he encountered at every step intimidated and repelled him, because of the crowds packed inside. He spoke to a policeman. But he was so slow in finding his words that the man did not even bother to hear him out, and turned his back in the middle of the sentence, shrugging his shoulders. Christophe kept walking mechanically. People had stopped in front of a shop window. He stopped mechanically with them. It was a stall selling photographs and postcards: they showed girls in their underclothes, or without; illustrated papers displayed obscene jokes. Children, young women looked on calmly. A thin girl with red hair, seeing Christophe absorbed in contemplation, made him an offer. He looked at her without understanding. She took his arm with a vacant smile. He shook off her grip and walked away, flushed with anger. Music halls followed one after another; at their doors, posters of grotesque performers strutted. The crowd grew ever denser; Christophe was struck by the number of depraved faces, shady prowlers, degraded vagrants, painted women reeking of sickening perfume. He felt chilled through. Fatigue, weakness, and the horrible disgust that gripped him more and more tightly made his head swim. He clenched his teeth and walked faster. The fog thickened as he drew nearer to the Seine. The tangle of carriages became inextricable. A horse slipped and fell on its side; the coachman beat it furiously to make it get up; the wretched animal, strangled by its harness, thrashed about and fell back pitifully, motionless, as if dead. This commonplace sight was for Christophe the drop that makes the soul overflow. The convulsions of that miserable creature amid the indifferent stares made him feel with such anguish his own nothingness among those thousands of beings --- the revulsion he had been straining for an hour to stifle toward this human herd, this fouled atmosphere, this hostile moral world, broke through with such violence that he choked. He burst into sobs. Passersby stared, astonished, at this tall young man with his face contorted by grief. He walked on with great strides, tears streaming down his cheeks, making no effort to wipe them away. People stopped to watch him for a moment; and had he been capable of reading the soul of that crowd which seemed hostile to him, he might perhaps have seen in some of them --- mixed, no doubt, with a little Parisian irony at the absurdity of any naïve grief that displays itself --- a fraternal compassion. But he could see nothing: his tears blinded him.

He found himself in a square, near a large fountain. He bathed his hands in it, he plunged his face into it. A small newspaper vendor watched him with a curious look and some mocking remarks, but without malice; and he picked up Christophe’s hat, which Christophe had let fall. The icy cold of the water revived him. He pulled himself together. He retraced his steps, avoiding looking around; he no longer even thought of eating: it would have been impossible for him to speak to anyone; the slightest thing would have sufficed to reopen the flood of tears. He was exhausted. He took the wrong road, wandered at random, found himself back in front of his building at the moment when he believed himself definitively lost: --- he had even forgotten the name of the street where he lived.

He went back into his wretched lodging. Fasting, his eyes burning, his heart and body aching all over, he sank onto a chair in the corner of his room and stayed there for two hours, unable to move. At last he tore himself from that apathy and lay down. He fell into a feverish torpor, from which he woke every minute with the illusion that he had slept for hours. The room was stifling; he burned from head to foot; he had a terrible thirst; he was prey to stupid nightmares that clung to him even when his eyes were open; sharp pangs pierced him like knife thrusts. In the middle of the night he woke in a despair so atrocious that he could have howled; he stuffed the sheets into his mouth so that no one would hear: he felt himself going mad. He sat up in bed and lit the lamp. He was drenched in sweat. He got up, opened his suitcase to look for a handkerchief. His hand fell on an old Bible that his mother had hidden among his linen. Christophe had never read this book very much; but it was an inexpressible comfort to find it in that moment. This Bible had belonged to his grandfather, and to his grandfather’s father. The heads of the family had written on a blank page at the end their names and the important dates of their lives: births, marriages, deaths. His grandfather had marked in pencil, in his large handwriting, the dates of the days when he had read and reread each chapter; the book was filled with scraps of yellowed paper where the old man had jotted down his simple reflections. This Bible had stood on a shelf above his bed; he had often taken it down during his long sleepless nights, conversing with it rather than reading it. It had kept him company until the hour of his death, as it had kept company with his father before him. A century of the family’s griefs and joys breathed from that book. Christophe felt less alone with it.

He opened it at its darkest pages:

The life of man upon earth is a continual warfare, and his Days are like the Days of a hired servant…

If I lie down, I say: When shall I rise? And being risen, I wait impatiently for evening, and am filled with pain until the night…

When I say: My bed shall comfort me, rest shall ease my complaint, --- then thou dost frighten me with dreams, and trouble me with visions…

How long wilt thou not spare me? Wilt thou not give me some respite, that I may breathe? --- Have I sinned? What have I done to thee, O keeper of men?…

All comes to the same: God afflicts the righteous as well as the wicked…

Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him…

Ordinary hearts cannot understand what benefit it is to a suffering man to encounter this boundless grief. All greatness is good, and the extremity of pain reaches liberation. What breaks the soul, what crushes it, what destroys it beyond repair, is the mediocrity of pain and joy, the selfish and petty suffering that lacks the strength to detach itself from a lost pleasure and stands secretly ready for any degradation in exchange for a new one. Christophe was revived by the bitter breath rising from the old book: the breath of Sinai, of vast solitudes and the mighty sea, swept away the miasma. Christophe’s fever subsided. He lay back down, calmer, and slept without waking until the next day. When he opened his eyes, daylight had come. He saw more clearly still the ignominy of his room; he felt his poverty and his isolation; but he looked them in the face. The despondency was gone; all that remained was a virile melancholy. He repeated the words of Job:

Though God should slay me, I will not cease to hope in him…

He got up, and began the struggle, with tranquility.

He decided, that very morning, to take the first steps. He knew only two people in Paris, two young men from his country: his old friend Otto Diener, who was in partnership with an uncle, a cloth merchant in the quartier du Mail; and a little Jew from Mayence, Sylvain Kohn, who was supposed to be employed at a large publishing house whose address he did not have.

He had been very close to Diener around the age of fourteen or fifteen. He had felt for him one of those childhood friendships that anticipate love, and that are already love. Diener had loved him too. That stout, timid, stiff young man had been captivated by Christophe’s impetuous independence; he had gone to ridiculous lengths to imitate him --- which irritated Christophe even as it flattered him. In those days they had made plans that would have turned the world upside down. Then Diener had traveled for his commercial education, and they had not seen each other since; but Christophe occasionally had news of him from people back home, with whom Diener had stayed in regular contact.

As for Sylvain Kohn, his dealings with Christophe had been of a different character. They had known each other as small boys at school, where the little monkey had played several tricks on Christophe, who thrashed him in return when he spotted the trap he had fallen into. Kohn never defended himself; he let himself be rolled about and rubbed face-first in the dust, whimpering; but he would start again immediately after, with untiring mischief --- until the day he took fright, Christophe having seriously threatened to kill him.

Christophe went out early. He stopped along the way to have breakfast at a café. Despite his pride, he forced himself not to miss any occasion to speak French. Since he had to live in Paris, perhaps for years, he needed to adapt as quickly as possible to the conditions of life there, and to overcome his aversions. He therefore insisted on paying no attention --- though it cost him dearly --- to the mocking look of the waiter listening to his gibberish; and without becoming discouraged, he laboriously constructed shapeless sentences, which he repeated stubbornly until he was understood.

He set out to find Diener. True to his habit, when he had an idea fixed in his mind, he saw nothing around him. Paris made only one impression on him during that first walk: an old city, poorly kept. Christophe was accustomed to the towns of the new German Empire --- at once very old and very young, where you feel the pride of a new force rising --- and he was disagreeably surprised by the gutted streets, the muddy pavements, the jostling crowds, the chaos of vehicles --- carriages of every sort and every shape: venerable horse-drawn omnibuses, steam and electric tramways of every system --- stalls on the sidewalks, merry-go-rounds of wooden horses (or rather of monsters, of gargoyles) on squares cluttered with statues in frock coats: a kind of squalor belonging to some medieval town that had been initiated into the blessings of universal suffrage but could not shed its old rascally character. The previous day’s fog had turned into a fine, penetrating rain. In many shops the gas was already lit, though it was past ten o’clock.

Christophe arrived --- not without having wandered through the labyrinth of streets near the place des Victoires --- at the shop he was looking for, on the rue de la Banque. On entering, he thought he caught sight, at the back of the long, dim store, of Diener busy arranging bales of goods among a cluster of employees. But he was a little nearsighted and distrusted his eyes, even though their instinct rarely misled him. There was a stir among the people at the back when Christophe gave his name to the clerk who received him; and after a whispered consultation, a young man detached himself from the group and said in German:

--- Monsieur Diener has stepped out.

--- Stepped out? For long?

--- I believe so. He just left.

Christophe thought for a moment, then said:

--- Very well. I’ll wait.

The employee, taken aback, hastened to add:

--- It’s just that he may not be back for two or three hours.

--- Oh, that doesn’t matter, replied Christophe placidly. I have nothing to do in Paris. I can wait all day, if need be.

The young man stared at him in bewilderment, thinking he was joking. But Christophe had already stopped thinking about him. He had settled himself quietly in a corner, his back to the street, and seemed prepared to camp there indefinitely.

The clerk returned to the back of the shop and whispered with his colleagues; they were searching, with comical consternation, for some way to rid themselves of this unwelcome visitor.

After a few minutes of uncertainty, the office door opened. Monsieur Diener appeared. He had a broad red face, scarred across the cheek and chin by a purple cicatrice, a blond mustache, hair plastered flat with a side parting, a gold pince-nez, gold studs on his shirt front, and rings on his thick fingers. He was holding his hat and umbrella. He came toward Christophe with an easy air. Christophe, who had been daydreaming in his chair, started in surprise. He seized Diener’s hands and broke into loud, cordial exclamations that made the employees snicker and brought a flush to Diener’s face. The imposing personage had his reasons for not wishing to resume his old relations with Christophe; he had resolved, from the very first moment, to hold him at a distance with his commanding manner. But scarcely had he met Christophe’s gaze than he felt himself once again a small boy in his presence; it filled him with fury and shame. He stammered hastily:

--- In my office… We’ll be more comfortable for talking.

Christophe recognized in this his habitual caution.

But in the office, whose door was carefully shut, Diener made no move to offer him a chair. He remained standing, explaining with heavy awkwardness:

--- Very glad… I was just going out… They thought I had gone out… But I must go out… I have only a minute… An urgent appointment…

Christophe understood that the employee had lied to him a moment before, and that the lie had been arranged with Diener in order to send him away. The blood rose to his head; but he controlled himself, and said curtly:

--- There’s no hurry.

Diener flinched. He was outraged by such presumption.

--- What do you mean, no hurry! he said. An engagement…

Christophe looked him in the face:

--- No.

The stout fellow dropped his eyes. He hated Christophe for making him feel so cowardly in his presence. He muttered resentfully. Christophe interrupted him:

--- Here it is, he said. You know…

(This use of tu stung Diener, who had vainly attempted, from the very first words, to erect between Christophe and himself the barrier of vous.)

--- … You know why I’m here?

--- Yes, I know, said Diener.

(He had been informed by his correspondents of Christophe’s altercation and of the proceedings brought against him.)

--- Then, Christophe went on, you know I’m not here by choice. I had to flee. I have nothing. I need to live.

Diener had been waiting for the request. He received it with a mixture of satisfaction --- (since it allowed him to reclaim his superiority over Christophe) --- and unease --- (since he dared not make that superiority felt in the way he would have liked).

--- Ah! he said with self-importance, that is very unfortunate, very unfortunate indeed. Life is hard here. Everything is expensive. We have enormous expenses. And all these employees…

Christophe cut him off with contempt:

--- I’m not asking you for money.

Diener was thrown off balance. Christophe continued:

--- Business is good? You have a fine clientele?

--- Yes, yes, not bad, thank God… said Diener cautiously. (He was on his guard.)

Christophe shot him a furious look, and went on:

--- You know a great many people in the German colony?

--- Yes.

--- Well then, put in a word for me. They must be musical people. They have children. I’ll give lessons.

Diener assumed an embarrassed air.

--- What is it now? said Christophe. Do you happen to doubt that I know enough for that sort of work?

He was asking a favor as though he were the one granting it. Diener, who would never have done anything for Christophe except for the pleasure of having him feel obligated, was firmly resolved not to lift a finger on his behalf.

--- You know a thousand times more than is needed… Only…

--- Well?

--- Well, it’s difficult --- very difficult, you see --- because of your situation.

--- My situation?

--- Yes… In short, this affair, this lawsuit… If it were to become known… It’s difficult for me. It could do me a great deal of harm.

He stopped, seeing Christophe’s face contort with rage; and he hastened to add:

--- It’s not for my own sake… I’m not afraid… Ah, if I were on my own!… It’s my uncle… You know, the firm belongs to him, I can do nothing without him…

Growing more and more frightened by Christophe’s expression and by the explosion that was building, he said rapidly --- (he was not bad at heart; avarice and vanity were at war within him: he would have liked to help Christophe, but at no cost to himself):

--- Would you like fifty francs?

Christophe went crimson. He advanced on Diener in such a way that Diener backed hastily to the door and opened it, ready to call for help. But Christophe merely brought his flushed face close to his:

--- Swine! --- he said, in a ringing voice. He pushed him out of the way and walked out through the middle of the employees. On the threshold, he spat in disgust.

He strode down the street at a rapid pace. He was drunk with rage. The rain sobered him. Where was he going? He didn’t know. He knew no one. He stopped to think in front of a bookshop, staring unseeingly at the books in the window. On one cover, a publisher’s name caught his eye. He wondered why. After a moment he recalled that it was the name of the firm where Sylvain Kohn worked. He noted the address… What did it matter? He certainly wouldn’t go… Why wouldn’t he go?… If that wretch Diener, who had once been his friend, received him this way, what could he expect from a scoundrel he had treated without the least consideration and who must hate him? Useless humiliations? His blood rebelled. --- But a fund of native pessimism, which perhaps came from his Christian upbringing, drove him to test to the very end the vileness of people.

--- I have no right to stand on ceremony. One must have tried everything before giving up.

A voice added within him:

--- And I will not give up.

He confirmed the address once more and went to Kohn’s. He had made up his mind to smash his face at the first impertinence.

The publishing house was in the Madeleine quarter. Christophe went up to a reception room on the first floor and asked for Sylvain Kohn. A liveried employee replied that he didn’t know the name. Christophe, surprised, thought he had mispronounced it, and repeated his question; but the employee, after listening carefully, maintained that there was no one by that name in the firm. Quite bewildered, Christophe was apologizing and about to leave when, at the far end of a corridor, a door opened; and he saw Kohn himself, showing a lady out. Still smarting from the affront he had just suffered at Diener’s, he was in a mood to believe that everyone was making a fool of him. His first thought was therefore that Kohn had seen him coming and had ordered the attendant to say he was not in. Such impudence took his breath away. He was leaving, indignant, when he heard himself called. Kohn, with his sharp eyes, had recognized him from a distance; and he was running toward him, smiling, with both hands outstretched, with every sign of exaggerated delight.

Sylvain Kohn was short and stocky, his face entirely clean-shaven in the American fashion, complexion too red, hair too black, a wide, massive face with fleshy features, small eyes, creased and ferreting, a slightly crooked mouth, a heavy and sly smile. He was dressed with an elegance that sought to conceal the defects of his figure --- his high shoulders and the breadth of his hips. This was the one thing that wounded his self-esteem; he would gladly have suffered a few kicks in order to gain two or three inches in height and a trimmer waist. As for the rest, he was thoroughly satisfied with himself; he believed himself irresistible. And the strangest thing was that he was. This small German Jew, this lout, had made himself the chronicler and arbiter of Parisian elegance. He wrote vapid society columns of elaborate refinement. He was the champion of beautiful French style, French elegance, French gallantry, French wit --- Regency, red heels, Lauzun. People laughed at him; but that did not prevent him from succeeding. Those who say that ridicule is fatal in Paris do not know Paris: far from killing anyone there, some people actually live off it; in Paris, ridicule leads to everything, even to glory, even to romantic conquests. Sylvain Kohn had long since lost count of the declarations that his Frankfurt-style marivaudages earned him every day.

He spoke with a heavy accent and a falsetto voice.

--- What a surprise! he cried gaily, shaking Christophe’s hand in his sausage-like hands, with their short fingers that seemed crammed into skin too tight for them. He could not bring himself to let Christophe go. One would have said he was greeting his closest friend. Christophe, taken aback, wondered whether Kohn was mocking him. But Kohn was not mocking him. Or if he was, it was no more than usual. Kohn bore no grudges: he was too intelligent for that. He had long since forgotten Christophe’s rough treatment of him; and even had he remembered it, he would scarcely have cared. He was delighted by this opportunity to show a former acquaintance the importance of his new position and the elegance of his Parisian manners. He was not lying when he expressed his surprise: the last thing in the world he would have expected was a visit from Christophe; and though he was shrewd enough to know in advance that it had an interested motive, he was entirely well-disposed to receive it, for the sole reason that it was a tribute paid to his power.

--- And you’ve come from home? How is your mother? he asked, with a familiarity that at other times would have grated on Christophe, but which now did him good, here in this foreign city.

--- But how is it, Christophe asked, still a little suspicious, that someone told me a moment ago that Monsieur Kohn was not here?

--- Monsieur Kohn is not here, said Sylvain Kohn, laughing. I no longer go by Kohn. My name is Hamilton.

He broke off.

--- Pardon me, he said.

He went to shake hands with a lady who was passing and put on a few smiles. Then he came back. He explained that she was a woman of letters, famous for novels of scorching sensuality. The modern Sappho wore a violet decoration on her bodice, had an ample figure, and ardent blonde hair above a cheerful, heavily powdered face; she said pretentious things in a masculine voice that carried a Franc-Comtois accent.

Kohn resumed questioning Christophe. He inquired after everyone from back home, asking what had become of this person and that, making a show of remembering them all. Christophe had forgotten his antipathy; he answered with grateful cordiality, giving a flood of details that were entirely indifferent to Kohn, who interrupted him again.

--- Pardon me, he said once more.

And he went to greet another visitor.

--- I say, Christophe asked, are there really only women who write in France?

Kohn burst out laughing and said with self-satisfaction:

--- France is a woman, my dear fellow. If you want to get ahead, make the most of it.

Christophe paid no attention to the explanation and went on with his own. Kohn, to put an end to it, asked:

--- But how on earth did you come to be here?

--- There it is, thought Christophe. He didn’t know. That’s why he was so agreeable. Everything will change when he finds out.

He made a point of honor of recounting everything most likely to compromise him: the brawl with the soldiers, the proceedings against him, his flight from the country.

Kohn doubled over with laughter:

--- Bravo! he cried, bravo! What a splendid story!

He shook his hand warmly. He was delighted by any thumb of the nose at authority; and this one amused him all the more because he knew the principals in the story --- the whole comic side of it was plain to him.

--- Listen, he went on. It’s past noon. Do me the honor… Have lunch with me.

Christophe accepted gratefully. He thought:

--- He’s a decent man, after all. I was wrong about him.

They went out together. On the way, Christophe ventured his request:

--- You see now what my situation is. I came here looking for work, music lessons, while I wait to make a name for myself. Could you put in a word for me?

--- But of course! said Kohn. With anyone you like. I know everyone here. Entirely at your service.

He was pleased to show off his influence.

Christophe was profuse in his thanks. He felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his heart.

At table, he ate with the appetite of a man who had not had a proper meal in two days. He had knotted his napkin around his neck and was eating with his knife. Kohn-Hamilton was horribly put off by his voracity and his peasant manners. He was no less offended by the little attention his guest paid to his boasting. He wanted to dazzle him with accounts of his fine connections and his conquests; but it was wasted effort: Christophe wasn’t listening, he kept interrupting without ceremony. His tongue was loosening; he was becoming familiar. His heart brimmed with gratitude, and he wore Kohn down by confiding naively all his plans for the future. Above all, he exasperated him by an insistent habit of reaching across the table to seize his hand and press it effusively. And he topped it all off, toward the end, by wanting to clink glasses in the German fashion and drink, with sentimental words, to those far away and to the Vater Rhein. Kohn watched with horror as the moment approached when Christophe was going to break into song. The neighboring diners were watching them with ironic expressions. Kohn pleaded urgent business and rose from his chair. Christophe clung to him; he wanted to know when he could have a letter of introduction, call on someone, begin his lessons.

--- I’ll look into it. Today. This very evening, Kohn promised. I’ll speak about it shortly. You can rest easy.

Christophe pressed him.

--- When will I know?

--- Tomorrow… Tomorrow… or the day after.

--- Very well. I’ll come back tomorrow.

--- No, no, Kohn hastened to say. I’ll let you know. Don’t trouble yourself.

--- Oh! it’s no trouble. On the contrary! After all, I’ve nothing else to do in Paris, in the meantime.

--- The devil! thought Kohn… No, he resumed aloud, I’d rather write to you. You wouldn’t find me these next few days. Give me your address.

Christophe dictated it to him.

--- Perfect. I’ll write to you tomorrow.

--- Tomorrow?

--- Tomorrow. You can count on it.

He extricated himself from Christophe’s handshake and made his escape.

--- Phew! he thought. What a bore!

On his way back in, he told the office boy that he would be out when “the German” came to call. --- Ten minutes later, he had forgotten him entirely.

Christophe returned to his lodgings. He was deeply moved.

--- What a good fellow! What a good fellow! he thought. How wrong I was about him. And he holds no grudge!

This remorse weighed on him; he was on the point of writing to Kohn to say how sorry he was for having misjudged him in the past, and to ask forgiveness for the wrong he had done him. His eyes were wet at the thought. But writing a letter came less easily to him than writing a score; and after fuming ten times over the ink and pen at the hotel, which were indeed abominable, after smearing, crossing out, and tearing up four or five sheets of paper, he lost patience and threw the whole thing over.

The rest of the day dragged; but Christophe was so worn out by his sleepless night and his morning errands that he finally dozed off in his chair. He roused himself from his torpor only toward evening, just long enough to go to bed; and he slept twelve hours straight, without stopping.

The next day, from eight o’clock onward, he began waiting for the promised reply. He had no doubt about Kohn’s punctuality. He did not stir from his room, telling himself that Kohn might stop by the hotel before going to his office. So as not to go out at all, toward noon he had lunch brought up from the eating house downstairs. Then he waited again, certain that Kohn would come by after leaving the restaurant. He paced his room, sat down, started pacing again, opening his door whenever he heard footsteps on the stairs. He had no desire to go walking through Paris to pass the time. He lay down on his bed. His thoughts kept returning to his old mother, who at this very moment was thinking of him too --- who was the only one thinking of him. He felt for her an infinite tenderness and a pang of remorse for having left her. But he did not write to her. He was waiting until he could tell her what kind of situation he had found. Despite their deep love, it would not have occurred to either of them to write simply to say they loved each other: a letter was meant to convey definite news. --- Lying on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head, he drifted in and out of reverie. Though his room was far from the street, the roar of Paris filled the silence; the whole building trembled. --- Night came again, without bringing any letter.

Another day began, identical to the one before.

On the third day, Christophe, whom this self-imposed confinement was beginning to drive mad, made up his mind to go out. But Paris had inspired in him, from the very first evening, an instinctive repulsion. He had no desire to see anything: no curiosity whatsoever; he was too preoccupied with his own life to take any pleasure in watching that of others; and the relics of the past, the monuments of a city, had always left him cold. So, barely out of doors, he grew so bored that, though he had resolved not to go back to Kohn’s for a week, he went straight there all the same.

The errand boy, who had his instructions, said that Monsieur Hamilton had gone out of town on business. It was a blow to Christophe. He asked haltingly when Monsieur Hamilton was expected back. The clerk answered at random:

--- In about ten days.

Christophe went away, crestfallen, and buried himself in his room for the days that followed. It was impossible for him to get back to work. He realized with dismay that his small savings --- the little money his mother had sent him, carefully folded in a handkerchief at the bottom of his suitcase --- were dwindling fast. He put himself on a strict regimen. He went downstairs only toward evening to dine at the tavern below, where he had quickly become known to the regulars as “the Prussian,” or “Sauerkraut.” --- He wrote, at the cost of painful effort, two or three letters to French musicians whose names he vaguely knew. One of them had been dead for ten years. He asked them to be good enough to grant him an audience. The spelling was extravagant, and the style was adorned with those long inversions and ceremonious formulas that are customary in German. He addressed one letter: “To the Palace of the Académie de France.” --- The only one who read it made it a source of great amusement for his friends.

After a week, Christophe went back to the bookshop. Luck was with him this time. On the threshold he ran into Sylvain Kohn, who was just leaving. Kohn made a face when he saw himself caught; but Christophe was so happy that he did not notice. He had already seized him by both hands in his irritating way, and was asking cheerfully:

--- You were traveling? Did you have a good trip?

Kohn nodded, but his expression did not thaw. Christophe went on:

--- I came by, you know… They told you, didn’t they?… Well, what’s new? Have you spoken about me? What did they say?

Kohn grew more and more sullen. Christophe was surprised by his stiff manner: he was no longer the same man.

--- I did speak about you, said Kohn; but I don’t know anything yet; I haven’t had the time. I’ve been terribly busy since I saw you. Business over my head. I don’t know how I’ll get through it all. It’s crushing. I’ll end up falling ill.

--- Are you not feeling well? asked Christophe, with a tone of anxious concern.

Kohn shot him a sardonic look and replied:

--- Not well at all. I don’t know what’s wrong with me these past few days. I feel very unwell.

--- Good Lord! said Christophe, taking his arm. Take good care of yourself, above all! You must rest. How sorry I am to have given you yet another burden! You should have told me. What exactly do you feel?

He took the other man’s excuses so seriously that Kohn, overcome by a gentle hilarity he did his best to conceal, was disarmed by this comical candor. Irony is a pleasure so dear to the Jews --- (and many Christians in Paris are Jews in this respect) --- that they have a special indulgence for bores and even enemies who give them occasion to exercise it at their own expense. Besides, Kohn was not unmoved by the interest Christophe took in his person. He felt inclined to do him a service.

--- An idea occurs to me, he said. While you’re waiting for lessons, would you be willing to do some work for a music publisher?

Christophe accepted eagerly.

--- I have just the thing for you, said Kohn. I know one of the directors of a major music publishing house intimately --- Daniel Hecht. I’ll introduce you; you’ll see what there is to be done. I myself, as you know, understand nothing about it. But he is a true musician. You’ll have no trouble coming to an agreement.

They arranged to meet the following day. Kohn was not displeased to rid himself of Christophe while doing him a favor.

The next day, Christophe came to fetch Kohn at his office. On Kohn’s advice, he had brought along some compositions to show to Hecht. They found him at his music shop near the Opéra. Hecht did not stir when they came in; he extended two cold fingers to Kohn’s handshake, did not respond to Christophe’s ceremonious bow, and, at Kohn’s request, passed with them into an adjoining room. He did not offer them a seat. He remained leaning against the cold fireplace, his eyes fixed on the wall.

Daniel Hecht was a man of about forty, tall, cold, immaculately dressed, a very pronounced Phoenician type, with an intelligent and disagreeable air, a frowning face, and dark hair --- a beard like an Assyrian king’s, long and square-cut. He almost never looked anyone in the face, and he had a glacial and brutal way of speaking that landed like an insult, even when he said good morning. This insolence was more apparent than real. No doubt it reflected something contemptuous in his character; but it owed still more to what was automatic and rigid in him. Jews of this type are not rare; and public opinion is not kind to them: it taxes as arrogance that snapping stiffness which is often the mark of an incurable awkwardness of body and soul.

Sylvain Kohn was presenting his protégé in a tone of pretentious banter, with exaggerated praise. Christophe, thrown off by the reception, rocked back and forth, his hat and manuscripts in hand. When Kohn had finished, Hecht, who until that moment had not seemed to be aware that Christophe was there, turned his head disdainfully toward him and, without looking at him, said:

--- Krafft… Christophe Krafft… I have never heard that name.

Christophe received these words like a punch squarely in the chest. The color rose to his face. He answered angrily:

--- You will hear it later.

Hecht did not flinch, and went on imperturbably, as if Christophe did not exist:

--- Krafft… No. I don’t know it.

He was one of those men for whom it is already a black mark not to be known to them.

He continued, in German:

--- And you are from the Rhein-Land?… It is astonishing how many people there are down that way who meddle with music! I believe there is not one of them who does not claim to be a musician.

He meant it as a joke, not an insult; but Christophe took it differently. He would have replied, had Kohn not spoken first.

--- Ah! but I beg your pardon, he said to Hecht, you’ll grant me this much --- I myself know nothing about it.

--- That speaks well of you, replied Hecht.

--- If one must know nothing about music to please you, said Christophe drily, I’m sorry to say I don’t qualify.

Hecht, his head still turned to one side, resumed with the same indifference:

--- Have you already written music? What have you written? Songs --- lieder --- naturally?

--- Lieder, two symphonies, symphonic poems, quartets, suites for piano, incidental music, said Christophe, seething.

--- One writes a great deal in Germany, said Hecht, with a contemptuous politeness.

He was all the more suspicious of the newcomer precisely because this man had written so many works, and he, Daniel Hecht, knew nothing of them.

--- Well then, he said, I might be able to give you something to do, since you come recommended by my friend Hamilton. We are currently putting together a collection, a Bibliothèque de la jeunesse, in which we publish easy piano pieces. Could you “simplify” Schumann’s Carnaval for us, and arrange it for six and eight hands?

Christophe gave a start:

--- And that is what you offer me --- me, of all people?…

That naive “me” delighted Kohn; but Hecht assumed an offended air:

--- I don’t see what can surprise you, he said. It is not such easy work! If it seems too simple to you, so much the better! We’ll see after that. You tell me you are a good musician. I must take your word for it. But after all, I don’t know you.

He thought to himself:

--- If one believed all these fellows, they’d give Johannes Brahms himself a run for his money.

Christophe, without replying --- (for he had promised himself to hold his outbursts in check) --- jammed his hat on his head and started toward the door. Kohn stopped him, laughing:

--- Wait, wait now! he said.

And, turning toward Hecht:

--- He’s brought along a few of his pieces, in fact, so you can get an idea.

--- Ah! said Hecht, with a look of annoyance. Very well, let’s see them.

Christophe, without a word, held out the manuscripts. Hecht glanced at them, carelessly.

--- What’s this? A Suite for piano… (Reading:) A Day… Ah! Always program music!…

Despite his apparent indifference, he was reading with close attention. He was an excellent musician, thoroughly master of his craft --- though he saw nothing beyond it; from the very first bars, he felt perfectly well who he was dealing with. He said nothing, leafing through the work with a disdainful air; he was deeply struck by the talent it revealed; but his natural arrogance and the wounded vanity Christophe’s manner had caused him would not permit him to show it. He read to the end in silence, not missing a single note:

--- Yes, he said at last, in a patronizing tone, it’s fairly well written.

A harsh criticism would have wounded Christophe less.

--- I don’t need anyone to tell me that, he said, exasperated.

--- I rather imagine, said Hecht, that if you’re showing me this piece, it’s so that I may tell you what I think of it.

--- Not at all.

--- Then, said Hecht, stung, I don’t see what you’ve come to ask me.

--- I’m asking you for work, nothing else.

--- I have nothing else to offer you at the moment beyond what I’ve already said. And even of that I’m not certain. I said it might be possible.

--- And you have no other way to employ a musician like me?

--- A musician like you? said Hecht, in a woundingly ironic tone. Musicians at least as good as you have not considered this occupation beneath their dignity. Certain ones, whom I could name, and who are now quite well known in Paris, were grateful to me for it.

--- That’s because they’re worthless cowards, Christophe burst out. --- (He already knew certain refinements of the French language.) --- You’re mistaken if you think you’re dealing with someone of their sort. Do you imagine you can overawe me with your manner of not looking me in the face and speaking to me through clenched teeth? You didn’t even deign to return my greeting when I walked in… But what are you, exactly, to treat me this way? Are you even a musician? Have you ever written anything?… And you presume to teach me how to write --- me, for whom writing is my very life!… And after reading my music, the best you can offer me is to castrate great composers and make a mess of their works so that little girls can dance to them!… Apply to your Parisians if they’re servile enough to let themselves be lectured by you! As for me, I’d sooner starve!

There was no stopping the torrent.

Hecht said, icily:

--- You are free to go.

Christophe walked out, slamming the doors behind him. Hecht shrugged his shoulders and said to Sylvain Kohn, who was laughing:

--- He’ll come around, like the rest.

At bottom, he respected him. He was intelligent enough to sense the worth not only of the works but of the man. Beneath Christophe’s furious insults he had discerned a force, whose rarity he well knew --- in the artistic world more than anywhere. But his pride had dug in: at no price would he consent to acknowledge he was in the wrong. He had the honest need to do Christophe justice, and he was incapable of doing so unless Christophe humbled himself before him. He waited for Christophe to come back; his dreary skepticism and his knowledge of people had taught him how inevitably misery breaks down the strongest wills.

Christophe went home. Anger had given way to dejection. He felt lost. The slender support he had counted on had collapsed. He had no doubt that he had made a mortal enemy not only of Hecht but of Kohn, who had introduced him. It was absolute solitude in a hostile city. Apart from Diener and Kohn, he knew no one. His friend Corinne, the beautiful actress with whom he had become close in Germany, was not in Paris; she was still on tour abroad, in America, and this time on her own account: for she had become famous; the papers were full of clamorous dispatches about her travels. As for the young French schoolteacher whom he had, without meaning to, caused to lose her position, and whose memory had long weighed on him like a remorse --- how many times had he promised himself he would find her when he reached Paris! But now that he was in Paris, he realized there was one thing he had forgotten: her name. He could not recall it. He remembered only her first name: Antoinette. And even if his memory had served him, how was he to find a poor little schoolteacher in this human anthill!

He had to secure the means of living as quickly as possible. He had five francs left. Overcoming his reluctance, he brought himself to ask his landlord --- a fat tavern keeper --- whether he knew anyone in the neighborhood who might want piano lessons. The man, who already thought poorly of a lodger who ate only once a day and spoke German, lost whatever respect he had left when he learned the fellow was merely a musician. He was a Frenchman of the old breed, for whom music is the trade of an idler. He sneered:

--- Piano!… Don’t know about that. You play the piano? My compliments!… Funny thing, to be in that line by choice! Me, all music does for me is like rain coming down… Still, maybe you could teach me. What do you say, you lot? he called, turning to some workmen who were drinking.

They laughed loudly.

--- Nice trade, said one. Not dirty work. And the ladies love it.

Christophe understood French imperfectly, and mockery even less; he groped for words; he was not sure whether he should take offense. The landlord’s wife took pity on him:

--- Come, come, Philippe, you’re not being serious, she said to her husband. --- All the same, she went on, turning to Christophe, there might just be someone who would suit your purpose.

--- Who? the husband asked.

--- The little Grasset girl. You know, they’ve bought her a piano.

--- Ah! Those show-offs! So they have.

Christophe learned that the matter concerned the butcher’s daughter: her parents wanted to make a young lady of her; they might well agree to her taking lessons, if only to give people something to talk about. The landlady promised to look into it.

The following day she told Christophe that the butcher’s wife wanted to see him. He went. He found her at her counter, surrounded by animal carcasses. She was an attractive woman, rosy-cheeked, with a sugary smile, who assumed a dignified air when she learned why he had come. She moved at once to the question of price, hastening to add that she did not wish to spend much, since piano is a pleasant thing but not a necessity: she offered him fifty centimes an hour. She would not go beyond four francs a week. After that, she asked Christophe with a suspicious look whether he at least knew his music properly. She seemed reassured and became more amiable when he told her that not only did he know it but that he composed it: that flattered her vanity; she resolved to spread the word through the neighborhood that her daughter was taking lessons from a composer.

When Christophe found himself the following day seated beside the piano --- a dreadful instrument, bought secondhand, that rang like a guitar --- with the little butcher’s daughter, whose short, thick fingers stumbled over the keys, who was incapable of distinguishing one note from another, who wriggled with boredom, who yawned in his face from the very first minutes --- when he had to endure the mother’s supervision and conversation, her views on music and musical education --- he felt so wretched, so wretchedly humiliated, that he no longer even had the strength to be indignant. He went home in a state of prostration; some evenings he could not eat dinner. If this was where he had sunk after only a few weeks, how much further might he fall in time to come? What had it availed him to revolt against Hecht’s offer? What he had consented to was more degrading still.

One evening, in his room, tears came over him; he flung himself desperately to his knees before his bed and prayed… To whom did he pray? Who was there to pray to? He did not believe in God, he believed there was no God… But he had to pray, he had to pray to himself. Only mediocre souls never pray. They do not know the necessity that drives strong souls to withdraw at times into their sanctuary. Coming out of the day’s humiliations, Christophe felt, in the murmuring silence of his heart, the presence of his eternal Being, his God. The waves of miserable life churned below without reaching Him: what had that life to do with Him? All the sorrows of the world, bent on destruction, came and broke against His rock. Christophe heard the beating of his arteries like an inner sea, and a voice that repeated:

--- Eternal… I am… I am…

He knew it well: as far back as he could remember, he had always heard that voice. He sometimes forgot it; for months at a time he would cease to be conscious of its powerful, monotonous rhythm; but he knew it was there, that it never ceased, like the ocean that roars in the night. In that music he found again the calm and energy he drew from it each time he steeped himself in it anew. He rose, at peace. No, the hard life he was living held nothing, at least, of which he need be ashamed; he could eat his bread without a blush; it was those who made him buy it at such a price who should blush. Patience! Patience! The time would come…

But the next day patience began to fail him again; and despite all his efforts, he finally exploded with rage one day during the lesson, against the stupid little fool --- impertinent into the bargain --- who mocked his accent and with monkey-like malice did the exact opposite of whatever he said. His angry shouts were answered by the girl’s howls, frightened and furious that a man she was paying should dare to disrespect her. She cried that he had beaten her --- (Christophe had shaken her arm rather roughly.) --- The mother rushed in like a fury, smothered her daughter in kisses and covered Christophe in abuse. The butcher appeared in turn and declared he would not have a Prussian beggar laying hands on his daughter. Christophe, white with rage, shamed, not certain he would not strangle the man, the woman, and the girl, fled into the downpour outside. His landlords, who saw him come in looking shattered, had no difficulty getting the story out of him; and their ill will toward the neighbors was gratified. But by evening, the whole neighborhood was saying the German was a brute who beat children.

Christophe made fresh inquiries at music shops; they came to nothing. He found the French unwelcoming; and their disorderly agitation bewildered him. He had the impression of an anarchic society governed by an arrogant and despotic bureaucracy.

One evening when he was wandering along the boulevards, discouraged by the fruitlessness of his efforts, he caught sight of Sylvain Kohn coming from the opposite direction. Convinced they were on bad terms, he looked away and tried to pass unnoticed. But Kohn called out to him:

--- Where on earth have you been since that famous day? he asked, laughing. I wanted to come and see you, but I’ve lost your address… Good God, my dear fellow, I didn’t know you had it in you. You were magnificent.

Christophe looked at him, surprised and a little abashed:

--- You’re not angry with me?

--- Angry with you? What an idea!

Far from being angry, he had been delighted by the way Christophe had given Hecht a thrashing: he had thoroughly enjoyed himself. It mattered nothing to him whether Hecht or Christophe was in the right; he regarded people solely in terms of the amusement they might afford him; and he had glimpsed in Christophe a source of high comedy from which he fully intended to profit.

--- You should have come to see me, he went on. I was expecting you. What are you doing this evening? You’ll come to dinner. I’m not letting you go. We’ll be among ourselves: a few artists who meet once a fortnight. You must get to know this world. Come. I’ll introduce you.

Christophe pleaded his appearance in vain. Sylvain Kohn carried him off.

They entered a restaurant on the boulevards and went up to the first floor. Christophe found himself in the midst of some thirty young men, aged between twenty and thirty-five, who were arguing with great animation. Kohn introduced him as someone who had just escaped from the prisons of Germany. They paid him no attention whatsoever and did not even interrupt their passionate discussion, into which Kohn, barely arrived, plunged headlong.

Christophe, intimidated by this select company, kept silent, and was all ears. He could not manage to understand --- struggling to follow the volubility of French speech --- what great artistic interests were under debate. Listen as he might, he could make out only words like “trust,” “monopoly,” “falling prices,” “box-office receipts,” mixed with talk of “the dignity of art” and “the rights of the writer.” He gradually realized it was all a matter of commerce. A number of authors, belonging apparently to some financial association, were outraged at attempts being made to set up a rival association disputing their monopoly. The defection of some of their associates, who had found it advantageous to go over, bag and baggage, to the rival firm, threw them into transports of fury. They spoke of nothing less than cutting off heads. ”… Disgrace… Betrayal… Infamy… Sellouts…”

Others directed their grievances not at the living but at the dead, whose free-of-charge reproductions were clogging up the market. It seemed that Musset’s work had just fallen into the public domain and was being purchased far too widely. They therefore called upon the State for vigorous protection --- heavy taxes on the masterpieces of the past, to obstruct their sale at reduced prices, which they bitterly denounced as unfair competition against the merchandise of living artists.

They interrupted one another to listen to the box-office receipts from some play or other the previous evening. Everyone marveled at the luck of a veteran of the dramatic arts, famous in two hemispheres --- whom they despised, but envied even more. --- From authors’ royalties they moved on to critics’ fees. They discussed what a certain well-known colleague was allegedly paid --- (pure slander, no doubt), --- for every opening night at a boulevard theatre, in exchange for a favorable review. He was an honest man: once the deal was struck, he honored it faithfully; but his great art, so they claimed, was to praise a play in such a way as to make it close as quickly as possible, so that opening nights would come around more often. The tale --- (or the tally) --- drew laughter but surprised no one.

Through all of this they dropped grand words; they spoke of “poetry,” of “art for art’s sake.” In that clatter of small coins, it rang out as “art for money’s sake”; and those horse-trader manners, newly imported into French literature, scandalized Christophe. Since he could make nothing of the financial arguments, he had given up following the discussion --- when at last they began to talk about literature, or at least about literary figures. Christophe pricked up his ears at the sound of Victor Hugo’s name.

The question was whether he had been cuckolded. They debated at length the love affair between Sainte-Beuve and Madame Hugo. After that, they moved on to George Sand’s lovers and their respective merits. This was the great occupation of literary criticism at the time: having explored every corner of a great man’s house, examined every cupboard, rummaged through every drawer, emptied every wardrobe, it now rifled through the bedroom. The posture of Monsieur de Lauzun, lying flat on his belly under the king’s bed with La Montespan, was one that criticism particularly favored in its devotion to history and truth --- (everyone of that era had, as is well known, a devotion to truth). --- Christophe’s fellow diners showed themselves thoroughly possessed by it: no detail wearied them in this pursuit of the real. They extended it to the art of the present day as readily as to the art of the past; and they analyzed the private lives of several of the most notorious living figures with the same passion for exactitude. It was a curious thing that they knew the most intimate details of scenes that ordinarily take place without any witness whatsoever. One was almost tempted to believe that the parties concerned had been the first to supply the public with precise information, out of devotion to truth.

Christophe, growing more and more uncomfortable, tried to steer the conversation elsewhere with his neighbors. But no one paid him any attention. They had indeed begun by asking him a few vague questions about Germany --- questions that had revealed to him, to his great astonishment, the near-total ignorance in which these distinguished and apparently educated people lived regarding even the most elementary matters of their own trade --- literature and art --- outside of Paris. They had barely heard of a handful of great names: Hauptmann, Sudermann, Liebermann, Strauss (David, Johann, and Richard), among whom they ventured cautiously, for fear of making some embarrassing confusion. In any case, they had questioned Christophe out of politeness, not curiosity: they had none; they had scarcely noticed what he answered; they had hurried back at once to the Parisian affairs that delighted the rest of the table.

Christophe timidly attempted to speak about music. None of these literary men was musical. At bottom, they regarded music as an inferior art. But its growing success over the past few years caused them a secret irritation; and since it was in fashion, they pretended to take an interest in it. They made a great fuss above all about a new opera, which they were not far from treating as the origin of music itself, or at least of a new musical era. Their ignorance and their snobbery were quite content with this idea, which spared them from knowing anything else. The composer of this opera, a Parisian whose name Christophe was hearing for the first time, had, according to some, made a clean sweep of everything that came before him, renewed music from top to bottom, re-created it entirely. Christophe started. He was more than willing to believe in genius. But a genius of this caliber, who with one stroke could annihilate the past!… Good God! There was a fellow for you; how on earth had he managed it? --- He asked for an explanation. The others, who would have been hard pressed to give him one and whom Christophe was boring to tears, directed him to the musician of the group, the great music critic Théophile Goujart, who promptly began speaking to him of sevenths and ninths. Christophe followed him onto that ground. Goujart knew music more or less as Sganarelle knew Latin…

--- … You don’t understand Latin?

--- No.

--- (With enthusiasm) Cabricias, arci thuram, catalamus, singulariter,… bonus, bona, bonum…

Finding himself in the presence of a man who “understood Latin,” Goujart prudently retreated at once into the thicket of aesthetics. From that impregnable refuge he began to fire upon Beethoven, Wagner, and classical art, none of which was at issue --- (but in France, one cannot praise an artist without offering up all those who differ from him as burnt offerings). He proclaimed the advent of a new art that trampled the conventions of the past underfoot. He spoke of a musical language that had just been discovered by the Christopher Columbus of Parisian music and that totally superseded the language of the classics, reducing it to a dead tongue.

Christophe, while reserving judgment on this innovative genius until he had seen the works and could say something about them, felt himself, in spite of everything, instinctively distrustful of this musical Baal to whom the whole of music was being sacrificed. He was scandalized to hear the masters spoken of in such a way; and he forgot that not long ago, back in Germany, he himself had said far worse. He who had considered himself a revolutionary in art over there, he who had scandalized others with his boldness of judgment and his blunt candor --- from his very first words in France, he felt that he had become a conservative at heart. He wanted to argue, and he had the poor taste to do so --- not in the manner of a well-bred man, who advances arguments without demonstrating them, but in the manner of a professional, who goes in search of precise facts and overwhelms you with them. He did not shrink from entering into technical explanations; and his voice, as he argued, rose to a pitch well suited to grating on the ears of polite society, where both his arguments and the heat with which he pressed them seemed equally absurd. The critic quickly put an end to the tiresome discussion with a witticism, and it was at that moment that Christophe noticed with stupefaction that his interlocutor knew nothing whatsoever about the subject under discussion. Opinion about the pedantic and outmoded German was now settled; and his music, though no one knew it, was pronounced detestable. But the attention of those thirty-odd young men, with their mocking eyes and their quick instinct for the ridiculous, had been drawn back to this strange figure, who waved his long thin arms with their enormous hands in clumsy, violent gestures, darted furious glances, and cried out in a shrill voice. Sylvain Kohn set about entertaining his friends at his expense.

The conversation had definitively moved away from literature and fastened upon women. --- In truth, these were two faces of the same subject: for in their literature there was scarcely any talk but of women, and in their women scarcely anything but literature, so thoroughly were those women steeped in literary things and literary people.

They were speaking of a respectable lady, well known in Parisian society, who had, it was said, just married her daughter off to her own lover, the better to keep him to herself. Christophe shifted in his chair and, without noticing it, made a grimace of disgust. Kohn saw it; and, nudging his neighbor, he pointed out that the subject seemed to fascinate the German, who was no doubt burning to meet the lady. Christophe reddened, stammered, and finally said angrily that women of that sort deserved a flogging. A thunderous burst of laughter greeted his proposal; and Sylvain Kohn, in a fluting voice, protested that one should not touch a woman, not even with a flower… etc… etc… (In Paris he was the champion of Love.) --- Christophe replied that a woman of that stripe was neither more nor less than a bitch, and that with vicious dogs there was only one remedy: the whip. There was a great outcry. Christophe said that their gallantry was hypocrisy, that it was always those who respected women least who talked most about respecting them; and he raged against their scandalous stories. They countered that there was nothing scandalous about it, nothing but the most natural thing in the world; and they were all agreed that the heroine of the tale was not only a charming woman but the Woman, par excellence. The German exclaimed in protest. Sylvain Kohn asked him slyly what Woman was like, then --- as he imagined her. Christophe sensed a trap being laid; but he walked straight into it, carried away by his vehemence and his conviction. He began to explain to those jeering Parisians his ideas about love. He could not find his words; he groped for them laboriously, finally dredging up from his memory improbable expressions, blurting out things so outlandish that they delighted his audience, all the while maintaining admirable seriousness and a touching indifference to the ridiculous --- for he could hardly fail to see that they were brazenly mocking him. In the end he got tangled up in a sentence, could not work his way out of it, banged his fist on the table, and fell silent.

They tried to draw him back into the discussion; but he knitted his brows and did not budge, elbows on the table, ashamed and angry. He did not open his mouth again until the end of dinner, except to eat and drink. He drank enormously, unlike these Frenchmen who barely touched their wine. His neighbor was maliciously encouraging him, refilling his glass, which he emptied without thinking. But, although he was unaccustomed to such excess at table, especially after the weeks of privation he had just endured, he held his ground and did not provide the ridiculous spectacle the others had been hoping for. He merely sat absorbed; no one paid him any attention now: they assumed he had been dulled by the wine. Beyond the fatigue of following a conversation in French, he was weary of hearing nothing but talk about literature --- actors, authors, publishers, backstage gossip and bedroom gossip of a literary kind: --- that seemed to be the sum total of the world. In the midst of all these unfamiliar faces and this torrent of words, he could fix in his mind neither a single face nor a single thought. His nearsighted eyes, vague and absorbed, traveled slowly around the table, resting on people without seeming to see them. Yet he saw them better than anyone; he simply was not aware of it himself. His gaze was nothing like that of those Frenchmen and Jews, whose eyes snatched up tiny fragments of things, tiny, tiny, tiny, and dissected them in an instant. He soaked up people slowly, in silence, like a sponge; and he carried them away with him. He felt he had seen nothing and remembered nothing. It was only much later --- hours, often days, afterward --- when he was alone and looked inward, that he realized he had taken in everything.

But for the moment he appeared to be nothing more than a lumpish German gorging himself, intent only on not missing a mouthful. And he could make out nothing at all, except that, listening to his fellow diners address one another by name, he wondered, with a drunkard’s stubborn insistence, why so many of these Frenchmen bore foreign names --- Flemish, German, Jewish, Levantine, Anglo- or Hispanic-American…

He did not notice when people began to rise from the table. He sat alone; and he was dreaming of the Rhine hillsides, the great forests, the plowed fields, the meadows along the river, the old mother at home. A few guests were still talking, standing at the far end of the room. Most had already left. At last he made up his mind, rose in his turn, and, looking at no one, went to retrieve his coat and hat from the rack at the entrance. Having put them on, he was leaving without saying goodnight when, through a half-open door, he caught sight of something in an adjoining room that transfixed him: a piano. It had been several weeks since he had touched a musical instrument. He went in, caressed the keys tenderly, sat down, and --- his hat still on his head, his coat still on his back --- began to play. He had completely forgotten where he was. He did not notice two people slipping into the room to listen. One was Sylvain Kohn, who was passionate about music --- God knows why, for he understood nothing of it and liked bad music as well as good. --- The other was the music critic Théophile Goujart. He --- (it was simpler that way) --- neither understood nor loved music; but that in no way hindered him from speaking about it. On the contrary: there are no freer minds than those who do not know what they are talking about, for it is all the same to them whether they say one thing or another.

Théophile Goujart was a heavyset man, stocky and muscular; a black beard, heavy locks curling over his forehead, a brow creased with thick, expressionless wrinkles, a face roughly hewn as if coarsely carved from wood, short arms, short legs, a broad chest: a kind of timber merchant, or an Auvergnat porter. His manners were coarse and his speech arrogant. He had entered the world of music through politics, which, in those days in France, was the only road to success. He had attached himself to the fortunes of a minister from his home province, with whom he had vaguely discovered some family connection or alliance --- something like the son “of the bastard of his apothecary’s.” --- Ministers are not eternal. When his patron had appeared on the verge of going under, Théophile Goujart had abandoned ship, having first carried off everything he could take --- most notably, decorations; for he loved glory. Weary of politics, where for some time he had begun to receive, on behalf of his patron and even on his own account, a fair number of harsh blows, he had sought shelter from the storms, looking for a position of utter ease where he could bore others without ever being bored himself. Criticism was the obvious choice. As it happened, a post as music critic had just fallen vacant at one of the great Parisian dailies. The previous holder, a young composer of talent, had been dismissed because he persisted in saying what he thought about works and their authors. Goujart had never concerned himself with music and knew nothing about it: he was chosen without hesitation. People had had enough of competent individuals; with Goujart, at least, there was nothing to fear; he attached no ridiculous importance to his own opinions; always at the management’s disposal, and ready to relay its demolitions and its puff pieces. That he was not a musician was a secondary consideration. Music, as everyone knows, is something every Frenchman understands well enough. Goujart had quickly acquired the indispensable expertise. The method was simple: it consisted, at concerts, of positioning himself next to some competent musician --- preferably a composer --- and getting him to say what he thought of the works being performed. After a few months of this apprenticeship, one knew the trade: the gosling could fly. In truth, it was no eagle’s flight; and God knows what nonsense Goujart deposited in his column, with all the authority in the world. He listened and read haphazardly, jumbled everything up in his ponderous brain, and arrogantly lectured everyone else; he wrote in a pretentious style, shot through with puns and larded with aggressive pedantries; his was the mentality of a schoolroom monitor. From time to time, at wide intervals, his cruelest attacks had drawn cruel rejoinders: in those cases, he played dead and took great care not to reply. He was at once a sly schemer and a coarse individual, insolent or servile as circumstances required. He fawned on the great masters who held official positions or official glory --- (that was the only reliable method he had of gauging musical merit) --- while treating all others with contempt, and exploiting the hungry. He was no fool.

Despite his acquired authority and his reputation, in his heart he knew that he knew nothing about music; and he was well aware that Christophe knew a great deal. He would never have admitted it; but it imposed on him. --- And now he listened to Christophe playing, straining to appear absorbed and profound while thinking of nothing; he could make nothing out of that fog of notes, and he nodded his head like a connoisseur, calibrating his signs of approval to the eye-signals of Sylvain Kohn, who was having great difficulty keeping still.

At last, Christophe, whose awareness was gradually surfacing from the fumes of wine and music, became vaguely conscious of the pantomime taking place behind his back; and, turning around, he caught sight of the two admirers. They threw themselves upon him at once and pumped his hands with great energy --- Sylvain Kohn yelping that he had played like a god, Goujart declaring in a magisterial tone that he had the left hand of Rubinstein and the right hand of Paderewski --- (or perhaps the reverse.) --- They were united in declaring that such a talent must not be hidden under a bushel, and they pledged to bring it to the light. For a start, both intended to extract from it all the honor and profit they possibly could.

The very next day, Sylvain Kohn invited Christophe to come to his apartment, placing at his disposal, with gracious friendliness, the excellent piano he owned and never used. Christophe, who was dying of suppressed music, accepted without needing to be pressed; and he took up the invitation for some time.

The first evenings, all went well. Christophe was wholly absorbed in the joy of playing; and Sylvain Kohn showed a certain discretion in leaving him to enjoy it in peace. He himself enjoyed it sincerely. By one of those strange phenomena anyone may observe, this man who was not a musician, not an artist, who had the driest heart, utterly devoid of poetry or any deep kindness, was seized sensuously by this music, which he did not understand, but from which a force of pleasure was released for him. Unfortunately, he could not keep quiet. He had to talk, aloud, while Christophe played. He punctuated the music with emphatic exclamations, like a snob at a concert, or else made absurd remarks. Then Christophe would bang on the piano and declare he could not go on like this. Kohn would make every effort to be silent; but it was stronger than he was: he would immediately start again --- snickering, groaning, whistling under his breath, tapping, humming, imitating the instruments. And when a piece was finished, he would have burst if he had not shared his inane reflections with Christophe.

He was a curious mixture of Germanic sentimentality, Parisian mockery, and insufferable vanity. Sometimes it was studied and precious judgments, sometimes extravagant comparisons, sometimes indecencies, obscenities, absurdities, utter nonsense. To praise Beethoven, he found ribaldry in him, a lubricious sensuality. He discovered an elegant playfulness in somber thoughts. The quartet in C-sharp minor struck him as charmingly bold. The sublime adagio of the Ninth Symphony made him think of Chérubin. After the three opening blows of the Symphony in C minor, he cried: “Don’t come in! Someone’s in here.” He admired the battle in Heldenleben because he claimed to recognize in it the sound of an automobile. And everywhere, images to explain the pieces --- puerile, incongruous images. One wondered how he could love music. Yet there was no doubt: he did love it; at certain of these pages, which he understood in the most comical way, tears would almost come to his eyes. But after being moved by a scene from Wagner, he would tap out an Offenbach galop on the piano, or hum a café-concert ditty after the Ode to Joy. Then Christophe would leap up and howl with rage. --- But the worst was not when Sylvain Kohn was absurd; it was when he wanted to say something deep and refined, when he wanted to pose in Christophe’s eyes, when it was Hamilton rather than Sylvain Kohn who was speaking. At those moments, Christophe would fix him with a stare laden with hatred and crush him with coldly insulting words that wounded Hamilton’s self-regard: the piano sessions frequently ended in quarrels. But the next day Kohn had forgotten; and Christophe, who felt remorse for his violence, compelled himself to return.

All of this would still have amounted to nothing, had Kohn been able to stop himself from inviting people to hear Christophe play. But he needed to show off his musician. --- The first time Christophe arrived at Kohn’s to find three or four young Jews waiting, along with Kohn’s mistress --- a tall, flour-dusted girl, stupid as a basket, who repeated mindless puns and talked about what she had eaten, but who considered herself musical because she displayed her thighs each evening in a Revue des Variétés --- Christophe was unenthused. The second time, he told Sylvain Kohn plainly that he would no longer play at his apartment. Sylvain Kohn swore up and down that he would invite no one else. But he continued in secret, installing his guests in an adjoining room. Naturally, Christophe eventually noticed; he left in a fury and, this time, did not return.

Nevertheless, he had to stay on good terms with Kohn, who introduced him in cosmopolitan households and found him pupils.

For his part, Théophile Goujart came, a few days later, to collect Christophe from his hovel. He showed no offense at finding him so poorly housed. On the contrary: he was charming. He said:

--- I thought it might perhaps please you to hear a little music, from time to time; and since I have entrée everywhere, I came to call on you.

Christophe was delighted. He found the gesture thoughtful, and thanked him warmly. Goujart was utterly different from the man he had seen that first evening. Alone with Christophe, he was without haughtiness, good-natured, almost timid, eager to learn. It was only in the presence of others that he instantly resumed his superior air and his peremptory tone. In any case, his desire to learn always had a practical character. He was not curious about anything that was not immediately relevant. At the moment, he wanted to know what Christophe thought of a score he had received and would have been hard pressed to write about, since he could barely read the notes.

They went together to a symphonic concert. The entrance was shared with a music hall. Through a winding corridor one reached a room with no proper exits: the atmosphere was stifling; the seats too narrow, crammed together; part of the audience stood blocking all the exits --- the French standard of comfort. A man who appeared to be gnawed by incurable boredom was galloping through a Beethoven symphony as though in a hurry for it to be over. The strains of a belly-dance number drifted in from the café-concert next door and mingled with the funeral march from the Eroica. The audience kept arriving, settling in, eyeing one another. When they had finished arriving, they began to leave. Christophe strained every faculty of his mind to follow the thread of the work through this fairground racket; and by dint of determined effort he was managing to take some pleasure in it --- (for the orchestra was skillful, and Christophe had been starved of symphonic music for a long time) --- when Goujart took him by the arm and said, in the middle of the concert:

--- Now we leave. We are going to another concert.

Christophe frowned but said nothing, and followed his guide. They crossed half of Paris. They arrived at another hall that smelled of a stable and where, at other hours, pantomimes and popular plays were performed --- (music, in Paris, is like those poor workers who share a lodging between two: when one gets out of bed, the other gets into the still-warm sheets.) --- No air, naturally: since King Louis XIV, the French have considered it unhealthy; and the hygiene of theaters, as once that of Versailles, is that one does not breathe in them. A distinguished elderly man, with the gestures of a lion-tamer, was unleashing an act of Wagner: the unhappy beast --- the act --- resembled those circus lions, bewildered at facing the footlights, that must be whipped into remembering they are lions after all. Fat Pharisees and empty-headed women attended this exhibition with smiles on their lips. After the lion had performed, the tamer had bowed, and both had been rewarded with the audience’s din, Goujart had the temerity to drag Christophe off to yet a third concert. But this time Christophe gripped the arms of his seat and announced that he would not budge: he had had enough of rushing from concert to concert, catching here a crumb of symphony, there a scrap of concerto. In vain did Goujart try to explain to him that music criticism in Paris was a trade in which it was more essential to be seen than to listen. Christophe protested that music was not made to be heard at a gallop, and that it called for more quietude. This mixing of concerts turned his stomach: one at a time was enough for him.

He was genuinely surprised by this multiplicity of concerts. He had believed, like most Germans, that music held a subordinate place in France; and he had expected it to be served to him in small portions, but carefully prepared. He was offered, to begin with, fifteen concerts in seven days. There was one for every evening of the week, and often two or three on the same evening, at the same hour, in different parts of the city. For Sunday, there were always four, always at the same hour. Christophe marveled at this appetite for music. He was no less struck by the abundance of the programs. Until now he had thought his compatriots had the monopoly on those gorging sessions of sound that had more than once disgusted him in Germany. He found that the Parisians could have given them points at table. They were served generous helpings: two symphonies, a concerto, one or two overtures, an act of lyric drama. And from every quarter --- German, Russian, Scandinavian, French --- beer, champagne, barley water and wine --- they swallowed it all, without flinching. Christophe marveled that these little French sparrows had such capacious stomachs. It did not trouble them in the least. The cask of the Danaids. Nothing remained at the bottom.

It did not take Christophe long to notice that this abundance of music amounted, in the end, to very little. At every concert he found the same faces and the same pieces. These generous programs never ventured outside the same narrow circle. Almost nothing before Beethoven. Almost nothing after Wagner. And in between, how many gaps! It seemed as though music had been reduced to five or six celebrated names in Germany, three or four in France, and, since the Franco-Russian alliance, to a half-dozen Muscovite pieces. --- Nothing of the old French composers. Nothing of the great Italians. Nothing of the German colossi of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nothing of contemporary German music, except for Richard Strauss alone, who, more astute than the rest, came himself each year to impose his new works upon the Parisian public. Nothing of Belgian music. Nothing of Czech music. But most astonishing of all: almost nothing of contemporary French music. --- Yet everyone spoke of it, in mysterious terms, as something that was revolutionizing the world. Christophe was on the lookout for every opportunity to hear it; his curiosity was wide open, without prejudice of any kind: he burned with desire to discover something new, to admire works of genius. But despite all his efforts, he could not manage to hear any of it — for he did not count three or four short pieces, finely enough written but cold and wisely complicated, to which he had paid little attention.

While waiting to form his own opinion, Christophe sought to inform himself through music criticism.

That was not easy. It resembled the court of King Petaud. Not only did the various musical journals contradict one another with gleeful abandon; each one contradicted itself from article to article, almost from page to page. It would have been enough to make a man lose his mind, had he read everything. Fortunately, each contributor read only his own articles, and the public read none of them. But Christophe, who wished to form a precise idea of French musicians, persisted in letting nothing slip past him; and he marveled at the cheerful composure of this people, who moved through contradiction the way a fish moves through water.

Among all these divergent opinions, one thing struck him: the professorial air of most of the critics. Who was it that had said the French were amiable fantasists who believed in nothing? Those Christophe saw were harnessed with more musical learning --- even when they knew nothing at all --- than the entire critical establishment across the Rhine.

In those days, the French music critics had made up their minds to learn music. A few of them had even succeeded: these were originals, who had taken the trouble to think about their art and to form their own opinions. Naturally, they were not very well known; they remained confined to their small reviews; with one or two exceptions, the major newspapers had no place for them. Decent men, intelligent, interesting, whose isolation inclined them at times toward paradox, and their habit of talking to themselves toward an intolerance of judgment and a tendency to chatter. --- The others had hastily acquired the rudiments of harmony, and stood amazed before their recent learning. Like Monsieur Jourdain, having just mastered the rules of grammar, they marveled at their own knowledge:

--- D, a, Da. F, a, Fa. R, a, Ra… Ah! how beautiful that is!… Ah! what a fine thing it is to know something!…

They spoke of nothing but subject and countersubject, of harmonics and resultant tones, of chains of ninths and successions of major thirds. When they had named the sequences of harmonies unfolding across a page, they mopped their brows with pride: they believed they had explained the piece; they nearly believed they had written it. In truth, they had done nothing but repeat it in scholastic terms, like a schoolboy parsing a page of Cicero for grammar. But it was so difficult for even the best among them to conceive of music as a natural language of the soul, that when they did not make it a branch of painting, they lodged it in the suburbs of science and reduced it to problems of harmonic construction. Men of such learning had naturally to set the musicians of the past straight. They found faults in Beethoven, rapped Wagner across the knuckles. As for Berlioz and Gluck, they made a hearty joke of them. Nothing existed for them at that moment of fashion except Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Debussy. The former, indeed, of whom much use had been made in recent years, was beginning to seem pedantic, old-fashioned, and, to put it plainly, a bit of a bore. The truly distinguished people spoke mysteriously in praise of Rameau, and of Couperin called the Great.

Among these learned men, epic battles erupted. They were all musicians; but since they were not all musicians in the same way, each claimed that his way alone was the right one, and cried raca! upon the ways of his colleagues. They called one another false littérateurs and false scholars; they hurled at each other the words idealism and materialism, symbolism and verism, subjectivism and objectivism. Christophe told himself it had not been worth coming from Germany to find German quarrels in Paris. Instead of being grateful that good music offered them all so many diverse ways of enjoying it, they tolerated no way but their own; and a new Lutrin, a bitter war, now divided musicians into two armies: that of counterpoint and that of harmony. Like the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians, some argued heatedly that music should be read horizontally, and others that it should be read vertically. The latter would hear nothing of savory chords, melting progressions, succulent harmonies: they spoke of music as though it were a pastry shop. The former would not allow that anyone concern himself with the ear, that rag: for them music was a discourse, a parliamentary assembly in which the orators all spoke at once without paying any attention to their neighbors, until they had finished; too bad if no one could hear them --- one could always read their speeches the next day in the Journal officiel: music was made to be read, not to be heard. When Christophe first heard tell of this quarrel between the Horizontalists and the Verticalists, he thought they were all mad. Summoned to take sides between the army of Succession and the army of Superposition, he answered with his usual motto, which was not quite that of Sosia:

--- Gentlemen, the enemy of everyone!

And as they pressed him, asking:

--- Of harmony and counterpoint, which matters most in music?

He replied:

--- Music. Show me yours, then.

On the subject of their music, they were all in agreement. These intrepid brawlers, who pummeled one another as hard as they could whenever they were not pummeling some illustrious old corpse whose celebrity had lasted too long, found themselves reconciled in a common passion: the ardor of their musical patriotism. France was for them the great musical nation. They proclaimed on every register the decline of Germany. --- Christophe was not offended. He had himself so thoroughly decreed it that he could not in good conscience contradict the verdict. But the supremacy of French music surprised him somewhat: in truth, he could see little trace of it in the past. The French musicians maintained, however, that their art had been admirable in very ancient times. The better to glorify French music, they began, moreover, by ridiculing all the French glories of the last century, save that of one very fine, very pure master --- who was Belgian. Having dispatched these, one was more at ease to admire archaic masters, all of whom had been forgotten, and some of whom had remained until that day completely unknown. Contrary to the lay schools of France, which date the world from the French Revolution, the musicians regarded that event as a range of massive mountains one had to climb in order to contemplate, on the other side, the golden age of music, the Eldorado of art. After a long eclipse, the golden age was about to be reborn: the hard wall was crumbling; a magician of sound was causing a wonderful spring to flower again; the old tree of music was putting on a tender young plumage; in the parterre of harmonies, a thousand flowers were opening their laughing eyes to the new dawn; one could hear the silver-toned springs murmuring, the fresh song of streams --- it was an idyll.

Christophe was enchanted. But when he looked at the playbills of the Parisian theaters, he always saw the names of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Massenet, even of Mascagni and Leoncavallo, whom he knew far too well; and he asked his friends whether this shameless music, these girlish swoonings, these artificial flowers, this perfumer’s shop, were the gardens of Armide they had promised him. They protested, with an offended air: these were, by their account, the last vestiges of a dying age; no one thought of them anymore. --- In truth, Cavalleria Rusticana held court at the Opéra-Comique, and Pagliacci at the Opéra; Massenet and Gounod were doing brisk business; and the musical trinity of Mignon, Les Huguenots, and Faust had merrily passed the thousandth performance. --- But these were accidents of no importance; one had only to refuse to see them. When an impertinent fact disturbs a theory, nothing is simpler than to deny it. The French critics denied these brazen works, denied the public that applauded them; and it would not have taken much to make them deny the musical theater altogether. The musical theater was for them a literary genre, therefore impure. (Since they were all men of letters, they all disavowed being so.) Any music that was expressive, descriptive, suggestive --- any music that meant something --- was taxed as impure. --- In every Frenchman, there is a Robespierre. He must always behead someone or something in order to render it pure. --- The great French critics admitted only pure music, and left the rest to the rabble.

Christophe felt mortified, reflecting on how plebeian his own taste was. What consoled him a little was to notice that all these musicians who despised the theater were writing for the theater: there was not one of them who was not composing an opera. --- But that, no doubt, was yet another accident of no importance. They had to be judged, as they wished to be judged, by their pure music. Christophe went in search of their pure music.

Théophile Goujart took him to concerts given by a Society devoted to national art. There, the new glories were carefully elaborated and long incubated. It was a great cenacle, a little church with several chapels. Each chapel had its saint, each saint had his devotees, who were quite willing to speak ill of the saint in the neighboring chapel. Among all these saints, Christophe at first made little distinction. As was natural, given his habits formed on a completely different kind of art, he understood nothing of this new music, and understood it all the less in proportion as he believed he understood it.

Everything seemed to him bathed in a perpetual half-light. It was a gray wash in which the lines blurred, receded, surfaced for a moment, then faded away again. Among these lines there were stiff, rough, and dry drawings traced as if with a square, folding back on themselves with sharp angles like the elbow of a thin woman. There were undulating ones that writhed like cigarette smoke. But all were gray. Had the sun then ceased to shine in France? Christophe, who since his arrival in Paris had known nothing but rain and fog, was fairly inclined to believe it; but the artist’s task is to create the sun when there is none. These composers did light their little lantern; only it was like a glowworm’s --- it warmed nothing and barely gave light. The titles of the works changed: spring appeared at times, or noon, or love, or the joy of living, or a run across the fields; the music itself did not change; it was uniformly soft, pale, numbed, anemic, etiolated. --- It was then the fashion in France, among the refined, to speak in a low voice in music. And they were quite right: for whenever they raised their voices, it was to shout --- there was no middle ground. One had only the choice between a distinguished drowsiness and melodrama declamations.

Christophe, shaking off the torpor that was beginning to overtake him, looked at his program; and he was quite surprised to see that these small wisps of fog drifting across the gray sky had the pretension of representing very precise subjects. For in spite of all the theories, this pure music was almost always program music, or at the very least music with subjects. They might rail against literature all they liked: they still needed a literary crutch to lean on. Strange crutches, as a rule! Christophe noted the bizarre childishness of the subjects they imposed on themselves to paint. There were orchards, kitchen gardens, henhouses, musical menageries, real Jardins des Plantes. Some transposed into orchestral or piano pieces the paintings of the Louvre or the frescoes of the Opéra; they set to music Cuyp, Baudry, and Paul Potter; explanatory notes helped one recognize, here the apple of Paris, there the Dutch tavern, or the rump of a white horse. All this seemed to Christophe like the games of elderly children who cared only for pictures, and who, not knowing how to draw, scribbled their notebooks with whatever came into their heads, inscribing naively underneath, in large letters, that this was the portrait of a house or a tree.

Alongside these blind image-makers, who saw with their ears, there were also philosophers: they treated metaphysical problems in music; their symphonies were the struggle of abstract principles, the exposition of a symbol or a religion. These were the same men who, in their operas, took up the study of the legal and social questions of their time: the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, elaborated by the metaphysicians of the Butte and the Palais-Bourbon. There was hope yet of putting on the drawing board the question of divorce, the search for paternity, and the separation of Church and State. Among them were secular symbolists and clerical symbolists. They set philosophers who were ragpickers to singing, sociologist grisettes, prophetic bakers, apostolic fishermen. Goethe had already spoken of the artists of his own era “who reproduced Kant’s ideas in allegorical paintings.” Those of Christophe’s time put sociology into sixteenth notes. Zola, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Barrès, Jaurès, Mendès, the Gospel and the Moulin Rouge — all fed the cistern from which the composers of operas and symphonies came to draw their thoughts. A good many of them, intoxicated by Wagner’s example, had cried out: “And I too am a poet!” --- and they confidently set out beneath their musical lines verses that rhymed, or didn’t, in the style of a primary school exercise or a decadent serial novel.

All these thinkers and poets were partisans of pure music. But they preferred to talk about it rather than write it. --- They did sometimes write it, however. When they did, it was music that meant nothing. The misfortune was that it often succeeded at this: it said nothing whatsoever --- at least to Christophe. --- One should add that he did not have the key to it.

To understand a foreign music, one must take the trouble to learn its language, and not assume one already knows it. Christophe assumed this, like any good German. He could be forgiven. Many French people themselves understood it no better than he did. Like those Germans in the time of King Louis XIV who strained to speak French and ended by forgetting their own language, French musicians of the nineteenth century had spent so long unlearning theirs that their music had become a foreign patois. It was only recently that a movement had begun to speak French in France. Not all of them were succeeding: the old habit was too strong; and apart from a few, their French was Belgian, or retained a Germanic flavor. It was therefore natural that a German might be deceived by it and declare, with his customary assurance, that this was very bad German and meant nothing, since he himself understood nothing of it.

Christophe made no effort to resist this judgment. French symphonies struck him as an abstract dialectic, in which musical themes opposed or were superimposed upon one another after the fashion of arithmetical operations: to express their combinations, one might just as well have replaced them with numbers, or letters of the alphabet. One composer built a work around the progressive flowering of a sonic formula, which, appearing in complete form only on the last page of the last movement, remained in larval form for nine-tenths of the piece. Another scaffolded variations on a theme that revealed itself only at the end, descending step by step from the complex to the simple. These were very learned toys. One had to be at once very old and very childlike to take any pleasure in them. They had cost their inventors inconceivable efforts. They spent years writing a fantasia. They gave themselves white hairs searching for new combinations of chords --- in order to express…? No matter! New expressions. Just as the organ is said to create the need, so expression always ends by creating thought: the essential thing is that it be new. Novelty, at any cost! They had a morbid terror of the “already said.” The best of them were paralyzed by it. One sensed that they were constantly occupied in watching themselves anxiously, erasing what they had written, asking themselves: “Good God! Where have I already read that?” … There are musicians --- especially in Germany --- who spend their time pasting together other people’s phrases end to end. Those of France checked, for each of their own phrases, whether it might appear in their lists of melodies already used by others, and kept scraping, scraping, changing the shape of its nose, until it no longer resembled any known nose, nor even any nose at all.

For all that, they did not fool Christophe: however much they might disguise themselves in a complicated language and mime superhuman transports, orchestral convulsions, or cultivate inorganic harmonies, obsessive monotonies, Sarah-Bernhardt-style declamations that always pitched slightly off-key and went on for hours, walking like half-dozing mules along the edge of a slippery slope --- Christophe found beneath the mask small, cold, insipid souls, outrageously perfumed after the fashion of Gounod and Massenet, but with less naturalness. And he repeated to himself Gluck’s unjust remark about the French:

--- Leave them be: they will always return to their street songs.

Only, they applied themselves to making those songs very learned. They took folk songs as themes for doctoral symphonies, like Sorbonne theses. That was the great game of the day. Folk songs from every land took their turn passing through it. --- And from these they made Ninth Symphonies and Franck Quartets, but far more difficult. A composer would think of a small, perfectly clear phrase. He would quickly hasten to insert a second phrase in the middle of it, one that meant nothing but grated cruelly against the first. --- And one sensed that all these people were so calm, so perfectly well-balanced!…

To conduct these works, a young conductor --- correct and wild-eyed --- would flail and thunder, making Michelangelo-like gestures, as though he were lifting armies of Beethoven or Wagner. The audience, composed of fashionable people who were dying of boredom but would not for anything in the world have surrendered the honor of paying dearly for a glorious boredom, and of little apprentices, delighted to demonstrate their schoolroom expertise by disentangling the tricks of the trade as they went, poured out a frenzied enthusiasm that matched the gestures of the conductor and the clamors of the music…

--- You don’t say!… said Christophe.

(For he had become an accomplished Parisian.)

But it is easier to penetrate the slang of Paris than its music. Christophe judged with the passion he brought to everything, and with the native incapacity of Germans to understand French art. At least he was in good faith and asked only to acknowledge his errors if someone proved he had been mistaken. He therefore did not consider himself bound by his judgment, and left the door wide open to any new impressions that might change it.

Even now, he could not help recognizing in this music a great deal of talent, interesting material, curious discoveries in rhythm and harmony, an assortment of fine, supple, and brilliant fabrics, a shimmer of colors, a constant expenditure of invention and wit. Christophe enjoyed it, and made use of it. All these minor masters had infinitely more freedom of mind than the musicians of Germany; they bravely left the main road and struck off through the woods. They sought to lose themselves. But they were such sensible little children that they never quite managed it. Some, after twenty paces, fell back onto the highway. Others grew tired immediately and stopped wherever they happened to be. There were some who had almost arrived at new paths; but instead of pressing on, they sat down at the edge of the wood and idled under a tree. What they lacked most was will, strength; they had every gift --- except one: the powerful life. Above all, it seemed that this quantity of effort was being used in a confused way and was being lost along the road. It was rare for these artists to arrive at a clear awareness of their own nature and to coordinate their forces steadily toward a given end. This was the ordinary effect of French anarchy, which expends enormous resources of talent and goodwill only to annihilate them through its own uncertainties and contradictions. It was almost without example that one of their great musicians --- a Berlioz, a Saint-Saëns, to say nothing of more recent ones --- had not become mired in himself, grimly set on his own destruction, repudiating himself, for want of energy, for want of faith, and above all for want of an inner compass.

Christophe, with the insolent disdain of Germans of the present day, thought:

--- The French know only how to squander themselves on inventions they do nothing with. They always need a master of another race, a Gluck or a Napoleon, to come and make use of their Revolutions.

And he smiled at the thought of an Eighteenth Brumaire.

Meanwhile, amidst the anarchy, a group was striving to restore order and discipline to the minds of artists and public alike. To begin with, it had taken a Latin name evoking the memory of a clerical institution that had flourished some thirteen or fourteen hundred years ago, in the time of the great Invasion of the Goths and Vandals. Christophe was somewhat surprised that they should reach back so far. Certainly, it was good to rise above one’s time. But there was reason to fear that a tower fourteen centuries high might prove a rather inconvenient observatory, from which one would more easily follow the movements of the stars than those of the men of today. Christophe quickly reassured himself, seeing that the sons of Saint Gregory rarely remained on their tower; they climbed it only to ring the bells. All the rest of the time they spent in the church below. Christophe, who attended a few of their services, took some time before realizing they were of the Catholic rite; he was at first convinced they belonged to the ritual of some minor Protestant sect. A prostrated audience; pious, intolerant, readily aggressive disciples; at their head, a very pure, very cold, willful and slightly childlike man, upholding the integrity of religious, moral, and artistic doctrine, explaining in abstract terms the Gospel of music to the small congregation of the Elect, and calmly damning Pride and Heresy. He attributed all the faults of art and the vices of humanity to them: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the current influence of Judaism, which he lumped together in the same sack. The Jews of music were burned in effigy, having first been dressed in shameful costumes. The colossal Händel received a flogging. Only Johann Sebastian Bach was allowed to be saved, by the grace of the Lord, who recognized in him a Protestant by mistake.

The temple on the rue Saint-Jacques carried out an apostolate: souls and music were saved there. The rules of genius were methodically taught. Diligent pupils applied these recipes with great effort and absolute certainty. One might have thought they wished to redeem by their pious toil the culpable frivolity of their grandfathers: the Aubers, the Adams, and that arch-damned, that diabolical ass, Berlioz, the devil in person, diabolus in musica. With praiseworthy ardor and sincere piety, the cult of the recognized masters was spread. In a dozen years, the work accomplished was considerable; French music had been transformed by it. It was not only the French critics, but the musicians themselves who had learned music. One now saw composers, and even virtuosos, who knew Bach’s work. That had not been so common, even in Germany! --- Above all, a great effort had been made to combat the stay-at-home spirit of the French. These people seal themselves in; they struggle to get out. As a result, their music lacks air: it is music of a closed room, of the chaise longue, music that does not walk. The very opposite of a Beethoven, composing across open fields, tumbling down slopes, striding along under sun and rain, and frightening the flocks with his gestures and his cries! There was no danger of the musicians of Paris disturbing their neighbors with the thunderclap of their inspiration, as the bear of Bonn had done. When composing, they put a mute on their thought; and draperies prevented the sounds of the outside world from reaching them.

The Schola had tried to renew the air; it had opened the windows onto the past. Onto the past only. That was opening them onto the courtyard, not onto the street. It did not serve much purpose. Scarcely had the window been opened than they pushed it shut again, like elderly ladies who are afraid of catching cold. A few gusts blew in from the Middle Ages, from Bach, from Palestrina, from folk songs. But what did it amount to? The room continued just the same to smell of stuffiness. In truth, they were comfortable there; they were wary of the great modern currents. And if they knew more things than others, they also denied more things in art. Music took on a doctrinal character in this milieu; it was not a recreation: concerts were history lessons, or examples of edification. Advanced ideas were being academicized. The great Bach, torrential, was received and tamed in the bosom of the Church. His music underwent in the scholastic brain a transformation analogous to that of the furious and sensual Bible in the brains of Englishmen. As for new music, the doctrine they promoted was a very aristocratic eclecticism that strove to unite the distinguishing characteristics of three or four great musical eras, from the sixth to the twentieth century. Had it been possible to realize it, the result in music would have been the equivalent of those hybrid constructions raised by some viceroy of India, on returning from his travels, with precious materials gathered from every corner of the globe. But French good sense saved them from the excesses of this erudite barbarism; they were careful not to apply their theories; they dealt with them as Molière dealt with his doctors: they took the prescription, and did not follow it. The strongest went their own way. The rest of the flock kept in practice to very hard learned exercises in counterpoint: these were called sonatas, quartets, and symphonies… --- “Sonata, what do you want of me?” --- It wanted nothing at all, except to be a sonata. The thought in it was abstract and anonymous, applied and joyless. It was an art for the perfect notary. Christophe, who had at first been grateful to the French for not loving Brahms, now told himself that there were a great many little Brahmses in France. All these good craftsmen, hardworking and conscientious, were full of virtues. Christophe left their company extremely edified, but penetrated with boredom. It was very fine, very fine…

How beautiful it was, outside!

And yet there were in Paris, among the musicians, a few independents, free of any school. They were the only ones who interested Christophe. They alone can give the measure of an art’s vitality. Schools and coteries express nothing but a superficial fashion or manufactured theories. But the independents, who withdraw into themselves, have a better chance of finding there the true thought of their time and their race. It is true that, for that very reason, they are even harder for a foreigner to understand than the others.

That was what happened when Christophe heard for the first time that celebrated work, about which the French said a thousand extravagant things, and which some proclaimed the greatest musical revolution accomplished in ten centuries. --- (Centuries cost them little: they rarely left their own.)

Théophile Goujart and Sylvain Kohn took Christophe to the Opéra-Comique to hear Pelléas et Mélisande. They were immensely proud to show him this work; one would have thought they had written it themselves. They gave Christophe to understand that he was about to find his road to Damascus. The performance had already begun when they were still talking. Christophe silenced them and listened with all his ears. After the first act, he leaned toward Sylvain Kohn, who asked him with shining eyes:

--- Well, old boy, what do you say?

And he said:

--- Is it like this the whole time?

--- Yes.

--- But there’s nothing there.

Kohn protested and called him a philistine.

--- Nothing at all, Christophe went on. No music. No development. It doesn’t follow. It doesn’t hold together. Very delicate harmonies. Some nice little orchestral effects, in very good taste. But it’s nothing, nothing at all…

He went back to listening. Little by little, the lantern brightened; he began to make out something in the half-light. Yes, he understood well enough that there was a deliberate sobriety here, a reaction against the Wagnerian ideal, which drowned the drama in floods of music; but he wondered, with some irony, whether that ideal of sacrifice did not come from sacrificing what one did not possess. He sensed in the work a fear of effort, a pursuit of effect produced with the minimum of exertion, a renunciation by indolence of the hard labor demanded by Wagner’s powerful constructions. He was not without being struck by the even, simple, modest, subdued declamation, though it seemed monotonous to him, and as a German he did not find it true: --- (he even found that the more it strove to be true, the more it made one feel how ill the French language suited music: too logical, too clearly drawn, with contours too well defined, a world perfect in itself but hermetically sealed.) --- Nevertheless, the experiment was curious, and Christophe readily approved its spirit of revolutionary reaction against the emphatic violence of Wagnerian art. The French composer seemed to have applied himself, with an ironic discretion, to having all passionate feelings murmured at half-voice. Love, death without cries. Only by an imperceptible tremor in the melodic line, a shudder in the orchestra like a twitch at the corner of the lips, did one become aware of the drama playing out in the souls. It was as if the artist trembled to give himself away. He had the genius of taste, --- except at certain moments when the Massenet who slumbers in every French heart woke up to indulge in lyricism. Then one found the hair too blond, the lips too red, --- the bourgeoise of the Third Republic playing the great lover. But these moments were exceptional: they were a relaxation of the constraint the author imposed on himself; in the rest of the work reigned a refined simplicity, a simplicity that was not so simple, that was the product of will, the subtle flower of an old society. The young Barbarian that Christophe was could only half appreciate it. Above all, the drama as a whole, the poem, irritated him. He seemed to see an aging Parisienne playing at being a child and having fairy tales told to her. It was no longer Wagnerian silliness, sentimental and clumsy, like a big girl from the Rhine. But the Franco-Belgian silliness was no better, with its simpers and its drawing-room inanities: --- “the hair,” “little father,” the “doves,” --- and all that mystery laid on for society women. Parisian souls gazed at themselves in this piece, which sent back to them, like a flattering portrait, the image of their languid fatalism, their boudoir nirvana, their cushioned melancholy. Of will, not a trace. No one knew what he wanted. No one knew what he was doing.

--- It is not my fault! It is not my fault!… these great children moaned. All through five acts unfolding in a perpetual twilight --- forests, caverns, underground passages, a death chamber --- small birds from distant islands fluttered, barely. Poor little birds! pretty, warm, and delicate… How they feared the too-bright light, the brutality of gestures, of words, of passions, of life! Life is not refined. Life cannot be handled with kid gloves…

Christophe could hear the rumble of the cannons that were coming to crush this exhausted civilization, this dying little Greece.

Was it this sentiment of melancholy and proud pity that, despite everything, inspired in him some sympathy for the work? In any case it interested him more than he was willing to admit. Though he persisted in answering Sylvain Kohn, coming out of the theater, that “it was very subtle, very subtle, but that it lacked Schwung (drive), and that there was not enough music in it for him,” he was careful not to confuse Pelléas with the other French musical works. He was drawn by this lamp burning in the middle of the fog. He could make out other lights, vivid and wayward, flickering around it. These will-o’-the-wisps intrigued him: he would have liked to draw near them to discover how they burned; but they were not easy to catch. These free musicians, whom Christophe did not understand, and whom he was all the more curious to observe, were not easy to approach. They seemed to lack that great need for sympathy which possessed Christophe. With one or two exceptions, they appeared to read little, to know little, to desire to know little. Almost all lived apart, some outside Paris, others in Paris but isolated, in fact and by choice, enclosed in a narrow circle, --- from pride, from wildness, from disgust, from apathy. Few as they were, they were divided into small rival groups that could not live together. They were extremely touchy, and could not bear their enemies, nor their rivals, nor even their friends, when these dared to admire another musician besides themselves, or when they permitted themselves to admire them in a manner either too cold, or too exalted, or too commonplace, or too eccentric. It became exceedingly difficult to satisfy them. Each of them had ended by accrediting a licensed critic, duly patented, who kept jealous watch at the foot of the statue. It was not to be touched. --- For being understood only by themselves, they were not better understood for that. Adulated, deformed by the opinion that their partisans held of them and that they held of themselves, they lost their footing in the awareness they had of their art and their genius. Amiable fantasists believed themselves reformers. Alexandrian artists posed as rivals to Wagner. Almost all were victims of one-upmanship. Each day they had to jump higher than they had jumped the day before, and above all higher than their rivals had jumped. These acrobatic feats did not always succeed; and they had appeal only for a few professionals. They had no concern for the public, and the public had no concern for them. Their art was an art without a people, a music that fed only on music, on craft. Now Christophe had the impression, right or wrong, that no music more than French music would have needed to seek support outside itself. This supple, climbing plant could not do without a stake: it could not do without literature. It did not find within itself enough reasons for living. It had a short breath, little blood, no will. It was like a languid woman waiting for a man to take her. But this Empress of Byzantium, with her slight, bloodless body heavy with jewels, was surrounded by eunuchs: snobs, aesthetes, and critics. The nation was not musical; and all this infatuation, loudly proclaimed for twenty years, with Wagner, Beethoven, or Bach, or Debussy, hardly extended beyond one caste. This multiplication of concerts, this invading tide of music at any price, answered nothing real in the development of public taste. It was an overexertion of fashion, which touched only the elite and unhinged it. Music was truly loved only by a handful of people; and they were not always the ones who occupied themselves with it most: composers and critics. There are so few musicians in France who truly love music!

So Christophe thought; and he did not tell himself that it is the same everywhere, that even in Germany there are not many more true musicians, and that what counts in art is not the thousands who understand nothing of it, but the handful of people who love it and serve it with proud humility. Had he even seen them, in France? Creators and critics, --- the best worked in silence, far from the noise, as Franck had done, as the most gifted of the composers of the present day did, and so many artists who would spend their whole lives in obscurity, to furnish some journalist one day with the glory of discovering them and calling himself their friend, --- and that little army of obscure and laborious scholars who, without ambition, heedless of themselves, were rebuilding stone by stone the greatness of France’s past, or who, having devoted themselves to the musical education of the country, were preparing the greatness of France to come. How many minds were there, whose richness, freedom, and universal curiosity would have drawn Christophe to them, had he been able to know them! But he had barely glimpsed, in passing, two or three of them; he knew them only through caricatures of their thought. He saw only their faults, copied and exaggerated by the usual apes of art and the traveling salesmen of the press.

What disgusted him most of all in this musical rabble was its formalism. Among these people there was never any talk of anything but form. Of feeling, of character, of life, not a word! Not one of them suspected that every true musician lives in a sonic universe, as other men live in a visible one, and that his days unfold within him like a stream of music. Music is the air he breathes, the sky that envelops him. Nature is reflected in his soul as music. His soul itself is music; music, everything it loves, hates, suffers, fears, hopes. A musical soul, when it loves a beautiful body, sees it in the form of music. The dear eyes that charm it are not blue, nor gray, nor brown: they are music; seeing them, it experiences the sensation of a caress of notes, of a delicious chord. This interior music is a thousand times richer than the music that expresses it, and the keyboard is inferior to the one who plays it. Genius is measured by the power of life, and by the power of evoking it through the medium of art, that imperfect instrument. --- But how many people in France suspect as much? For this nation of chemists, music seems to be nothing but the art of combining sounds. They take the alphabet for the book. Christophe shrugged when he heard them say with smug authority that, to understand art, one must abstract the human element from it. They brought to this paradox a great satisfaction: for they believed they were thereby proving their own musicality to themselves. Even Goujart, that fool who had never been able to understand how one could manage to memorize a page of music by heart --- (he had tried to get Christophe to explain this mystery to him) --- and who wanted to prove to him that Beethoven’s greatness of soul and Wagner’s sensuality had no more part in their music than a painter’s model has in his portraits.

--- That proves, Christophe finally answered, losing patience, that a beautiful body has no more artistic value for you than a great passion. Poor man!… Do you not suspect all that the beauty of a perfect face adds to the beauty of the painting that depicts it, as the beauty of a great soul adds to the beauty of the music that reflects it?… Poor man!… Only the craft interests you? As long as the work is well made, it matters nothing to you what the work means?… Poor man!… You are like those people who do not listen to what an orator says, but listen to the sound of his voice, who watch without understanding his gesticulations, and who find that he speaks devilishly well?… Poor man!… Poor man!… You blithering idiot!

But it was not merely this or that theory that irritated Christophe, it was all theories. He was fed up with these endless squabbles, these Byzantine disputes, these conversations among musicians eternally about music, solely about music. It was enough to disgust the best musician from music forever. Christophe thought, as Moussorgski had, that musicians would do well to leave their counterpoint and their harmonies from time to time for the reading of great books and the experience of life. Music is not enough for a musician of today: it is not thus that he will come to dominate his century and to raise himself above nothingness… Life! All of life! To see everything, know everything, feel everything. To love, to seek, to embrace truth, --- that beautiful Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, who bites the one who kisses her!

Enough of musical chatter, enough of workshops for manufacturing chords! It was not all those bits of gossip about harmonic cookery that would ever teach him to find a new harmony that was not a monster, but a living being.

He turned his back on those Wagner doctors brooding over their alembics to hatch some Homunculus in a bottle; and, escaping from French music, he set out to know the literary world and Parisian society.

It was through the daily newspapers that Christophe first made his acquaintance --- as millions of people in France have done --- with the French literature of his time. Eager to attune himself as quickly as possible to the pitch of Parisian thought, while also improving his command of the language, he made a point of reading with great diligence the papers he was told were the most Parisian. On the first day, amidst horrifying news items whose accounts and snapshots filled several pages, he read a short story about a father who was sleeping with his fifteen-year-old daughter: the thing was presented as perfectly natural, even rather touching. On the second day, he read in the same paper a story about a father and his twelve-year-old son, who were sleeping with the same girl. On the third day, he read a story about a brother sleeping with his sister. On the fourth, about two sisters sleeping together. On the fifth… On the fifth, he threw the paper down with a surge of revulsion, and said to Sylvain Kohn:

--- What on earth is the matter with you people? Are you ill?

Sylvain Kohn burst out laughing and said:

--- It’s art.

Christophe shrugged:

--- You’re making fun of me.

Kohn laughed all the more:

--- Not in the least. See for yourself.

He showed Christophe a recent survey on Art and Morality, from which it emerged that “Love sanctified everything,” that “Sensuality was the leaven of Art,” that “Art could not be immoral,” that “morality was a convention born of Jesuit education,” and that the only thing that counted was “the enormity of Desire.” --- A string of literary endorsements in the newspapers attested to the artistic purity of a novel depicting the customs of pimps. Some of the respondents bore the greatest names in contemporary literature, or were austere critics. A family poet, a bourgeois and a Catholic, covered with his artistic blessing a very carefully drawn portrait of Greek sexual vices. Lyrical advertisements extolled novels in which Debauchery was laboriously paraded across the ages: Rome, Alexandria, Byzantium, the Italian and French Renaissance, the Grand Siècle… it was a complete course of study. Another cycle of works encompassed the various countries of the globe: conscientious writers had devoted themselves, with the patience of Benedictines, to the study of the houses of ill repute in the five parts of the world. No one was surprised to find, among these geographers and historians of pleasure, distinguished poets and perfect writers. They were set apart from the others only by their erudition. They recounted archaic obscenities in impeccable prose.

What was most dismaying was to see decent men and true artists --- men who enjoyed a well-deserved reputation in French letters --- straining themselves in a trade for which they had no gift. Some exhausted themselves writing filth like everyone else, served out by the morning papers in installments. They produced it regularly, on fixed dates, once or twice a week; and this had gone on for years. They kept producing, producing without end, having nothing left to say, racking their brains to squeeze out something new, more absurd, more incongruous: for the public, gorged to satiety, tired of every dish, and soon found even the most uninhibited fantasies of pleasure insipid --- there had to be constant outbidding, eternal outbidding, --- outbidding one another, outbidding themselves; --- and they laid their blood, they laid their very entrails: it was a pitiful and grotesque spectacle.

Christophe, who did not know all the seamy workings of that sorry trade, and who, had he known them, would not have been more lenient: for nothing in the world, in his eyes, excused an artist from selling art for thirty pieces of silver…

--- (Not even to ensure the well-being of those he loves?

--- Not even that.

--- That’s not human.

--- It’s not a question of being human, it’s a question of being a man… Human!… God bless your pale-livered humanitarianism, without a drop of blood in it!… One cannot love twenty things at once, one cannot serve several gods!…)

… Christophe, who in his working life had scarcely ventured beyond the horizon of his small German town, could not have suspected that this artistic depravity, displayed so crudely in Paris, was common to almost every great city; and the hereditary prejudices of chaste Germany against Latin immorality stirred awake in him. Yet Sylvain Kohn could easily have countered him with what was happening on the banks of the Spree, and the frightful rottenness of a segment of imperial Germany’s elite, whose brutality made the ignominy even more repellent. But Sylvain Kohn never thought to press the advantage; he was no more shocked by it than by Parisian manners. He thought ironically: “Each people has its customs,” and he found those of the world in which he lived so natural that Christophe could easily believe they were the very nature of the race. And so he did not hesitate, like his compatriots, to see in the ulcer devouring the intellectual aristocracies of Europe the peculiar vice of French art, the bankruptcy of the Latin races.

This first contact of Christophe with French literature was painful to him, and it took him time to get past it afterward. There was no shortage of works that were not exclusively preoccupied with what one of these writers nobly called “the taste for fundamental diversions.” But of the finest and best among them, nothing reached him. They were not the kind that sought the approval of a Sylvain Kohn and his circle; they did not trouble themselves with such people, and such people did not trouble themselves with them: they were mutually invisible. Sylvain Kohn would never have mentioned them to Christophe. In all sincerity, he was convinced that his friends and he embodied French art, and that beyond those whom their opinion and the boulevard press had anointed as great men, there was no talent, no art, no France. Of the poets who were the glory of contemporary French letters, the crown of France, Christophe knew nothing. Of the novelists, only a few books by Barrès and Anatole France reached him, emerging above the tide of mediocrity. But he was still too little acquainted with the language to fully savor the universal dilettantism and erudite irony of the one, or the uneven yet sometimes superior art of the other. He lingered for a while to look curiously at the small orange trees in tubs growing in the hothouse of Anatole France, and the slender, perfect flowers rising over the graveyard of a soul that was Barrès. He paused for a few moments, too, before the genius --- somewhat sublime, somewhat naïve --- of Maeterlinck: from it emanated a worldly mysticism, monotonous, numbing like a vague ache. --- He shook himself free, fell into the torrent of thick force, the muddy romanticism of Zola, which he already knew, and emerged from it only to drown entirely in a flood of literature.

From those submerged plains there rose an odor di femina. The literature of the day swarmed with feminine men and women. --- It is well that women write, if they have the honesty to paint what no man has ever quite managed to see: the depths of the female soul. But only a small number dared to do so; most of the others wrote only to attract men: they were as false in their books as in their drawing rooms; they prettified themselves insipidly and flirted with the reader. Since they were no longer pious and no longer had a confessor to whom to recount their little improprieties, they recounted them to the public. It was a downpour of novels, almost always risqué, always mannered, written in a language that seemed to lisp, a language that smelled of flowers, of fine perfumes --- too many fine perfumes --- and also of mediocre ones --- and the eternal, obsessive smell, warm and sugary and faintly stale. It was everywhere in that literature. Christophe thought, as Goethe had: “Let women write as many poems and pieces as they like; but let men not write like women! That is what displeases me.” He could not see without disgust those simperings, that dubious coquetry, that sentimentality lavished preferably on the least deserving of beings, that style kneaded from ideology, affectation, and sensuality, that mixture of refinement and brutality, those carter-psychologists.

But Christophe recognized that he could not judge fairly. He was deafened by the noise of the fair of words. It was impossible to hear the pretty little flute airs that were lost in the midst of it. For even among these works of pleasure, there was no shortage of those at the bottom of which smiled the limpid sky and the harmonious lines of the Attic hills --- so much talent, so much grace, a sweetness of living, a charm of style, a thought like the lovely voluptuaries or the languid adolescents of Perugino and the young Raphael, who smile at their amorous dream with eyes half closed. Christophe could see none of it. Nothing could reveal to him the dominant tendencies, the currents of the public mind. A Frenchman would himself have had great difficulty finding his way. And the only observation he was in a position to make, for the moment, was of this overflow of writing, which had the look of a public calamity. It seemed that everyone wrote: men, women, children, officers, comedians, society people, convicts. It was an epidemic.

Christophe gave it up, for the time being. He felt that a guide like Sylvain Kohn could only lead him completely astray. His experience in Germany of a literary coterie put him rightly on guard against the milieu in which he found himself; he was skeptical about books and reviews: one never knew whether they represented simply the opinion of a hundred idlers, or even, in certain cases, whether the author was not himself the entire reading public. The theater gave a more accurate picture of society. It held in Paris, in daily life, an exorbitant place. It was an enormous kitchen, a Pantagruelian restaurant, still insufficient to satisfy the appetite of those two million souls. Thirty large theaters, not counting the neighborhood theaters, the cafés-concerts, the various shows --- a hundred halls playing each evening, and each evening nearly all of them full. A whole people of actors and employees. Colossal sums swallowed by that maw. The four subsidized theaters alone employing nearly three thousand people and spending ten million. All of Paris filled with the glory of ham actors. At every turn, countless photographs, drawings, caricatures repeated their grimaces and their fashions; gramophones their nasal twanging; the newspapers their pronouncements on art and politics. They had their own specialized press. They published their heroic and familiar Memoirs. Among the other Parisians --- those great idle children who spent their time mimicking one another --- these perfect mimics held the scepter; and the playwrights were their prime ministers. Christophe asked Sylvain Kohn to introduce him to the kingdom of reflections and shadows.

But Sylvain Kohn was no more reliable a guide in that country than in the country of books, and the first impression Christophe gained, through him, of the Parisian theaters was no less repellent than that of his first reading. It seemed that everywhere the same spirit of cerebral prostitution prevailed.

There were two schools among the merchants of pleasure. One was the good old way, the national way --- coarse pleasure without ceremony, good honest filth, the joy of ugliness, of copious digestion, of physical deformity, men in their undershirts, barrack-room jokes, stories of spice and red pepper and high-hung meat and private dining rooms --- “that virile frankness,” as these people called it, which claims to reconcile bawdiness and morality because after four acts of sordidness it restores order and the triumph of the Code by tossing, through the accident of some imbroglio, the lawful wife into the bed of the husband she meant to deceive --- (so long as the law is saved, virtue is too) --- that crapulous respectability which defends marriage by giving it the manner of debauchery: the Gallic genre.

The other school was modern-style. It was far more refined, and far more sickening. The Parisianized Jews and the Judaized Christians who swarmed in the theater had introduced there the habitual jumble of feelings that is the distinguishing mark of a degenerate cosmopolitanism. These sons who blushed for their fathers made it their business to disown the conscience of their race; and they succeeded only too well. Having stripped away their ancient soul, they were left with no other personality than that of scrambling the intellectual and moral values of other peoples together; they made a macédoine of it, an olla podrida: that was their way of savoring it. Those who were then masters of the Parisian stage excelled at beating filth and sentiment together, at giving virtue a tinge of vice and vice a tinge of virtue, at inverting every relation of age, sex, family, and affection. Their art thus had a sui generis odor, at once pleasant and unpleasant --- that is to say, very unpleasant: they called it “amoralism.”

One of their favorite heroes at that time was the amorous old man. Their theater offered a rich gallery of portraits of this type. In painting him they found the occasion to display a thousand delicacies. Sometimes the sexagenarian hero had his daughter as his confidante; he spoke to her of his mistress; she spoke to him of her lovers; they counseled each other fraternally; the good father assisted his daughter in her adulteries; the good daughter acted as go-between with the faithless mistress, implored her to return, and brought her back to the fold. Sometimes the worthy old man made himself the confidant of his mistress; he chatted with her about the lovers she had, contented himself, for lack of better, with the account of her libertinages, and even ended by finding pleasure in it. One also saw lovers --- accomplished gentlemen --- who entered as stewards into the households of their former mistresses, overseeing their commerce and their couplings. Society women stole. Men were procurers, girls lesbians. All of this in the best circles: the wealthy world --- the only one that mattered. For it allowed one to offer clients, under the cover of the seductions of luxury, a spoiled commodity. Done up that way, it sold on the open market; young women and elderly gentlemen made it their delight. From all of this there rose a smell of corpse and of seraglio pastilles.

Their style was no less mixed than their feelings. They had fashioned for themselves a composite argot, drawing on expressions from every class and every country --- pedantic, Chat Noir-esque, classical, lyrical, precious, sticky, and coarse --- a mixture of non sequiturs, affectations, vulgarity, and wit that seemed to carry a foreign accent. Ironic, and gifted with a somewhat clownish humor, they had little natural esprit; but, dexterous as they were, they manufactured it skillfully enough, in the Parisian manner. If the stone was not always of the finest water, and if the setting was almost always in baroque and overloaded taste, at least it glittered in the lamplight, and that was all that was required. Intelligent, moreover, good observers --- but nearsighted observers, their eyes warped by centuries of the shopkeeper’s life, examining feelings under a magnifying glass, swelling small things and missing large ones, with a marked taste for tinsel --- they were incapable of painting anything other than what their parvenu snobbery regarded as the ideal of elegant society: a handful of jaded pleasure-seekers and adventurers squabbling over the enjoyment of some stolen money and a few women of no virtue.

Yet sometimes the true nature of these Jewish writers would suddenly awaken, rising from the depths of their being in response to some mysterious echo struck by the shock of a word, a sensation. Then came a strange amalgam of centuries and races, a breath of the Desert that, across the seas, carried into these Parisian boudoirs the smell of Turkish bazaars, the dazzle of the sands, oriental hallucinations, a drunken sensuality, a power of invective, a furious neurosis on the very edge of convulsions, a frenzy of destruction --- Samson, who suddenly --- seated for centuries in shadow --- rises like a lion and shakes with rage the columns of the Temple, which crumble upon him and upon the enemy race.

Christophe held his nose and said to Sylvain Kohn:

--- There’s power in that; but it stinks. Enough! Let’s go see something else.

--- What? asked Sylvain Kohn.

--- France.

--- Here it is! said Kohn.

--- That’s not possible, said Christophe. France is not like that.

--- France, same as Germany.

--- I don’t believe it. A people who were truly like that wouldn’t last twenty years: they already smell of rot. There’s something else.

--- There’s nothing better.

--- There’s something else, Christophe insisted.

--- Oh! we have beautiful souls too, naturally, said Sylvain Kohn, and theaters for beautiful souls. Is that what you want? We can provide them.

He took Christophe to the Théâtre-Français.

That evening they were performing a modern prose comedy dealing with a legal question.

From the very first words, Christophe could no longer tell what world it was set in. The actors’ voices were immeasurably ample, grave, slow, measured; they articulated every syllable as though giving diction lessons, and seemed perpetually to be scanning alexandrines, with tragic hiccups. The gestures were solemn, almost hieratic. The heroine, draped in her dressing gown like a Greek peplos, one arm raised, head bowed, was always playing Antigone, and smiled the smile of eternal sacrifice while modulating the deepest notes of her beautiful contralto. The noble father walked with a fencing master’s gait, with automatic gestures, a funereal dignity, a romanticism in black evening dress. The young lead coldly contracted his throat and chest to wring tears from them. The play was written in the style of tragedy-feuilleton: abstract words, bureaucratic epithets, academic periphrases. Not a single unpremeditated movement, not a single spontaneous cry. From beginning to end, clockwork mechanism, a problem stated, a dramatic schema, the skeleton of a play, and over it, no flesh --- only phrases from a book. Timid ideas at the core of discussions that sought to appear bold: the soul of a stiff little bourgeois.

The heroine had divorced an unworthy husband, by whom she had a child, and had remarried an honest man whom she loved. The task was to prove that even in this case, divorce was condemned by nature as much as by prejudice. For that, nothing could be easier: the author contrived to have the first husband take the woman once, by surprise. And afterward, instead of straightforward nature, which would have demanded remorse, perhaps a deep shame --- but all the greater desire to love and honor the second, the honest man --- the play presented a heroic case of conscience, contrary to nature. It costs so little to be virtuous outside of nature! French writers seem unfamiliar with virtue: they always overplay it when they speak of it; there’s no longer any way to believe in it. One would think they are always dealing with Corneille’s heroes, with kings of tragedy. --- And are they not indeed kings, these millionaire heroes, these heroines who could not be interesting unless they had, at the very least, a townhouse in Paris and two or three châteaux in the provinces? Wealth, for this breed of writers and audience, is a beauty --- almost a virtue.

The audience was even more astonishing than the play. All the implausibilities, repeated endlessly, never wore them out. They laughed at the right moments, when the actor delivered the line that ought to provoke laughter, announcing it in advance so that there was time to prepare for it. They blew their noses and coughed, deeply moved, at the instants when the tragic mannequins hiccupped, roared, or swooned according to consecrated rites.

--- And they say the French are light-minded! Christophe exclaimed as they left the performance.

--- Everything in its season, said Sylvain Kohn, mockingly. You wanted virtue? You can see there’s still some in France.

--- But that’s not virtue, Christophe protested, it’s eloquence!

--- With us, said Sylvain Kohn, virtue on the stage is always eloquent.

--- Courtroom virtue, said Christophe --- the prize goes to the most verbose. I detest lawyers. Haven’t you any poets in France?

Sylvain Kohn took him to poetic theaters.

There were poets in France. There were even great poets. But the theater was not for them. It was for versifiers. The theater bears the same relation to poetry as the opera does to music. As Berlioz put it: Sicut amori lupanar.

Christophe saw courtesans who were princesses by virtue --- women who made their honor consist in self-prostitution and were compared to Christ climbing Calvary; --- friends who betrayed their friend out of devotion to him; --- glorified ménages à trois; --- heroic cuckolds: (the type had become, like the saintly prostitute, a European commodity; the example of King Mark had turned their heads: like Saint Hubert’s stag, they now appeared only with a halo). --- Christophe also saw loose women torn between passion and duty; the passion was to follow a new lover; the duty was to stay with the old one, an elderly man who gave them money and whom they were betraying besides. In the end, heroically, they chose duty. --- Christophe found that this duty differed very little from sordid self-interest; but the audience was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them; they had no attachment to the thing itself: the flag covered the merchandise.

The pinnacle of the art, and what pleased most, was when sexual immorality and Cornelian heroism could be reconciled in the most paradoxical fashion. Thus everything was satisfied in this Parisian audience: its wit, its senses, and its rhetoric. --- Besides, justice had to be done to it: it was even more talkative than licentious. Eloquence was its delight. It would have submitted to a flogging for a fine speech. Virtue or vice, absurd heroism or base villainy, there was no pill it couldn’t be made to swallow, gilded with sonorous rhymes and redundant words. Everything was material for couplets, antitheses, arguments: love, suffering, death. And when they had done that, they believed they had felt and represented love, suffering, death. Everything was phrases. Everything was a game. When Hugo made his thunder heard, quickly --- as one of his apostles put it --- he muted it, so as not to frighten even a small child. --- (The apostle was persuaded he was paying a compliment.) --- Never, in their art, did one feel a force of nature. They domesticated everything. As in music --- and far more than in music, which was a younger art in France, and relatively more naive --- they had a terror of the “already said.” The most gifted applied themselves coldly to taking the opposite position. The method was of childlike simplicity: one chose a fine legend or a children’s tale and made it say exactly the opposite of what it intended to say. Thus one had Bluebeard beaten by his wives, or Polyphemus gouging out his own eye, out of goodness, to sacrifice himself for the happiness of Acis and Galatea. In all of this, nothing serious but the form. And even that seemed to Christophe --- though he was a poor judge of the matter --- to be the work of petty masters and pasticheurs rather than great writers, creators of their own style, painting on a broad canvas.

They played at being artists. They played at being poets. Nowhere did the poetic lie spread itself with more insolence than in the heroic drama. They had formed for themselves a burlesque conception of the hero:

What matters is to have a magnificent soul, An eagle’s eye, a brow as wide and lofty as a portico, A bearing powerful and grave, moving, radiant, A heart full of shivers, and eyes full of dreams

Such verses were taken seriously. Beneath the trappings of these grand words, these plumes, these theatrical parades with tin swords and cardboard helmets, one always found the incurable frivolity of a Sardou, the intrepid vaudevillist, playing Punch and Judy with history. What in reality could correspond to the heroism of a Cyrano? These people stirred heaven and earth; they brought forth from their tombs the Emperor and his legions, the bands of the League, the condottieri of the Renaissance, all the human cyclones that devastated the universe: --- and it was only to show some puppet, impassive amid the massacres, surrounded by armies of mercenaries and serais of captives, who was consumed by a romantically foolish love for a woman he had glimpsed ten or fifteen years before --- or King Henri IV, going to his assassination because his mistress did not love him.

This was how these good people played at kings and condottieri from their armchairs, and how they represented heroic passion. Worthy descendants of those illustrious simpletons from the age of Le Grand Cyrus --- those Gascons of the ideal, Scudéry, La Calprenède --- that eternal breed, singers of false heroism, of impossible heroism, which is the enemy of the true. --- Christophe noted with astonishment that the French, said to be so discerning, had no sense of the ridiculous.

Lucky those times when it was not religion that was in fashion! Then, during Lent, actors at the Gaîté would read the sermons of Bossuet to organ accompaniment. Jewish authors wrote tragedies about Saint Teresa for Jewish actresses. The Stations of the Cross was performed at the Bodinière, l’Enfant Jésus at the Ambigu, la Passion at the Porte-Saint-Martin, Jésus at the Odéon, orchestral suites on le Christ at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Some brilliant conversationalist --- a poet of voluptuous love --- gave a lecture at the Châtelet on la Rédemption. Naturally, of all the Gospels, what these society people remembered best was Pilate and the Magdalene: --- “What is Truth?” and the holy foolish virgin. --- And their boulevard Christs were appalling babblers, thoroughly up to date on the latest tricks of worldly casuistry.

Christophe said:

--- That is the worst of all. It is the lie made flesh. I’m suffocating. Let’s get out of here.

And yet there was a great classical art that survived amid these modern industries, like the ruins of noble ancient temples among the pretentious constructions of present-day Rome. But outside of Molière, Christophe was not yet able to appreciate it. He lacked the intimate feeling for the language, and therefore for the genius of the race. Nothing escaped him so completely as seventeenth-century tragedy --- one of the least accessible provinces of French art to foreigners, precisely because it lies at the very heart of France. He found it crushingly dull, cold, dry, nauseating in its affectations and pedantry. A thin or forced action, characters as abstract as the premises of a rhetorical argument, or as insipid as a drawing-room conversation among society women. A caricature of classical subjects and heroes. A parade of reason, reasoning, sophistry, psychology, outmoded archaeology. Speeches, speeches, speeches: the eternal French babble. Whether it was beautiful or not, Christophe ironically refused to decide: nothing in it interested him; whatever theses were successively defended by the orators of Cinna, it was perfectly indifferent to him which of these rhetorical machines prevailed in the end.

He observed, moreover, that the French public did not share his opinion, and that it applauded these plays which bored him. This did nothing to dispel the misunderstanding: he saw this theater through its audience; and he recognized in the modern French certain traits --- distorted --- of the classicists. As when a too-lucid gaze rediscovers in the withered face of an old coquette the fine pure features of her daughter: --- (the spectacle is not well suited to producing amorous illusion). --- Like members of the same family who are accustomed to seeing one another, the French did not notice the resemblance. But Christophe was struck by it, and exaggerated it: he could see nothing else. The art that surrounded him seemed to offer antiquated caricatures of the great ancestors; and the great ancestors, in turn, appeared to him as caricatures. He could no longer distinguish Corneille from his lineage of poetic rhetoricians, obsessively inserting sublime and absurd cases of conscience everywhere. And Racine merged with his train of petty Parisian psychologists, bending pretentiously over their own hearts.

None of these people ever strayed from their classics. The critics went on endlessly debating Tartuffe and Phèdre. They never tired of seeing the same plays. They savored the same words, and, as old men, laughed at the same jokes that had delighted them as children. It would be so until the end of the race. No country in the world held so deep-rooted a cult of its great-grandfathers. The rest of the universe held no interest for them. How many minds, among the most intelligent, had read nothing and wished to read nothing beyond what had been written in France under the Sun King! Their theaters staged neither Goethe, nor Schiller, nor Kleist, nor Grillparzer, nor Hebbel, nor any of the great men of any other nation, apart from ancient Greece, whose heirs they claimed to be --- (as do all the peoples of Europe). Every now and then they felt the need to conscript Shakespeare to their cause. That was the touchstone. Among them there were two schools of interpretation: some performed King Lear with a bourgeois realism, as though it were a comedy by Émile Augier; others turned Hamlet into an opera, full of show-pieces and vocal flourishes in the manner of Victor Hugo. It never occurred to them that reality might be poetic, or that poetry might be a spontaneous language for hearts overflowing with life. Shakespeare seemed false. They always came back to Rostand.

Yet for twenty years a considerable effort had been made to renew the theater; the narrow circle of subjects in Parisian literature had widened; it touched on everything, with an appearance of daring. Even two or three times the turmoil from outside, from public life, had burst through the curtain of conventions with a vigorous push. But they hastened to stitch up the tears. They were soft-hearted fathers, afraid to see things as they are. A social spirit, a classical tradition, a routine of mind and form, a lack of deep seriousness, prevented them from following their audacities to the end. The most urgent problems became ingenious games; and everything always came back to questions of women --- of little women. What a sorry spectacle the great men made as phantoms on their stages: Ibsen’s heroic Anarchy, Tolstoy’s Gospel, Nietzsche’s Superman!…

The writers of Paris worked very hard to seem to be thinking new things. At bottom, they were all conservatives. There was no literature in Europe where the past, the old, the “eternal yesterday,” reigned more generally and more unconsciously: in the great Reviews, in the great newspapers, in the subsidized theaters, in the Academies. Paris was in literature what London was in politics: the moderating brake on the European spirit. The Académie française was a House of Lords. A certain number of institutions of the Ancien Régime persisted in imposing their old spirit on the new society. Revolutionary elements were quickly rejected or assimilated. They asked for nothing better. In vain did the government affect socialist leanings in politics. In art, it took its lead from the Academies and the Academic Schools. Against the Academies, one could only fight with coteries; and the fight went badly. For as soon as one member of a coterie could manage it, he would step across into an Academy and become more academic than the rest. Moreover, whether a writer was at the vanguard or in the rearguard of the army, he was almost always a prisoner of his group and his group’s ideas. Some sealed themselves inside their academic Credo, others inside their revolutionary Credo; and in the end it always came to the same thing.

To rouse Christophe, whom academic art was putting to sleep, Sylvain Kohn proposed to take him to theaters of a special kind --- the last word in refinement. --- There one saw murders, rapes, madness, torture, torn-out eyes, disemboweled bodies --- everything that could shake the nerves and satisfy the hidden barbarism of an overly civilized elite. It exercised a pull on an audience of lovely women and society men --- the same who spent their afternoons shut inside the stifling rooms of the Palais de Justice to follow scandalous trials, chatting, laughing, and crunching bonbons. --- But Christophe refused with indignation. The further he advanced into this art, the more clearly he could make out the smell that had seized him insidiously from the very first steps, then grown tenacious, suffocating: the smell of death.

Death: it was everywhere, beneath this luxury and this noise. Christophe now understood the revulsion he had felt from the very start toward certain of these works. It was not their immorality that shocked him. Morality, immorality, amorality --- all these words mean nothing. Christophe had never built moral theories for himself; he loved in the past many very great poets and very great musicians who were not minor saints; when he had the good fortune to encounter a great artist, he did not ask for his confession ticket; he asked rather:

--- Are you healthy?

To be healthy --- that was everything. “If the poet is sick, let him begin by curing himself, as Goethe says. When he is cured, he will write.”

The Parisian writers were sick; or, when one of them was healthy, it was rare that he did not feel ashamed of it; he concealed it, he tried to give himself a respectable illness. Their sickness was not revealed by this or that trait of their art --- by the love of pleasure, by the extreme licence of thought, by universal criticism that called into question all the givens of the mind. All these traits could be --- were, depending on the case --- healthy or unhealthy; there was no germ of death in them as such. If death was present, it did not come from these forces; it came from the use these people made of them, it was in these people themselves. --- And Christophe too loved pleasure. And he too loved freedom. He had roused the opinion of his small German town against him by his frankness in defending many things he now found praised by these Parisians --- and which, praised by them, now disgusted him. They were the same things, nonetheless. But nothing of it rang the same when these Parisians said it and when he did. When Christophe, impatient, shook off the yoke of the great masters of the past, when he went to war against Pharisaic aesthetics and morality, it was no game for him, as it was for these fine wits; he was serious, terribly serious; and his revolt had life as its aim, the fecund life teeming with centuries to come. In these people, everything tended toward sterile enjoyment. Sterile. Sterile. That was the word that solved the riddle. An infertile debauch of thought and the senses. A brilliant art, full of wit and skill --- a beautiful form, certainly, a tradition of beauty that held itself indestructible in spite of foreign alluvium --- a theater that was theater, a style that was style, authors who knew their craft, writers who knew how to write, the rather handsome skeleton of an art, a thought, that had once been powerful. But a skeleton. Words that tinkle, phrases that ring, the metallic rustling of ideas colliding in the void, games of the mind, brains haunted by sensuality, and reasoning senses. None of it served any purpose, any purpose but egotistical enjoyment. It was moving toward death. It was a phenomenon analogous to France’s alarming depopulation, which Europe observed --- and quietly factored into its calculations. So much wit, intelligence, such refined senses, squandered in a kind of shameful onanism! They suspected nothing of it, they wished to suspect nothing. They laughed. That was even the one thing that somewhat reassured Christophe: these people still knew how to laugh well; all was not lost. He liked them much less when they wished to take themselves seriously; and nothing wounded him more than to see writers who sought in art only an instrument of pleasure presenting themselves as the priests of a disinterested religion:

--- We are artists, Sylvain Kohn repeated with complacency. We make art for art’s sake. Art is always pure; there is nothing in it but chastity. We explore life as tourists whom everything amuses. We are connoisseurs of rare sensations, lovers of beauty.

--- You are hypocrites, Christophe finally retorted bluntly. Forgive me for saying so. I had believed until now that only my country was. In Germany, we have the hypocrisy of always speaking of idealism while always pursuing our own interest, and even of believing ourselves idealists while thinking only of our egotism. But you are far worse: you cover your national lust with the name of Art and Beauty (with a capital letter) --- when you do not shelter your moral Pilatism under the name of Truth, Science, Intellectual Duty, which washes its hands of the possible consequences of its lofty researches. Art for art’s sake!… A magnificent faith! But a faith only for the strong. Art! To seize life as the eagle seizes its prey, and carry it upward into the air, to rise with it into the serene heights!… For that, one needs talons, vast wings, and a powerful heart. But you are nothing but sparrows, who, when they have found some scrap of carrion, tear at it on the spot and quarrel over it with squawking… Art for art’s sake!… Poor wretches! Art is not a vile fodder, thrown out to all vile passers-by. A pleasure, certainly, and the most intoxicating of all. But a pleasure that is only the reward of fierce struggle, the laurel that crowns the victory of strength. Art is life tamed. Art is the emperor of life. To be Caesar, one must have Caesar’s soul. But you are nothing but theatrical kings: it is a role you play, you do not even believe in it yourselves. And, like those actors who take pride in their deformities, you make literature out of your own and out of those of the public. You lovingly cultivate the diseases of your people, its fear of effort, its love of pleasure, of sensual ideologies, of chimerical humanitarianism, of everything that voluptuously numbs the will, of everything that can strip it of every reason for acting. You lead it straight to the opium dens. And you know it well; but you do not say it: death is at the end. --- Well then, I say: Where death is, art is not. Art is what makes life live. But the most honest among your writers are so cowardly that even when the blindfold has fallen from their eyes, they affect not to see; they have the brazenness to say:

--- It is dangerous, I admit; there is poison in it; but it is so full of talent!

As if a judge in criminal court were to say of a thug:

--- He is a scoundrel, true; but he has such talent!…

Christophe wondered what French criticism was for. And yet it was not critics that were lacking; they swarmed over French art. One could no longer see the works themselves: they disappeared beneath them.

Christophe was not gentle toward criticism in general. He already had difficulty accepting the usefulness of that multitude of artists who formed something like a fourth or fifth Estate in modern society: he saw in it the sign of a tired epoch, one that entrusted others with the task of looking at life --- that felt by proxy. All the more, then, did he find it somewhat shameful that society was no longer even capable of seeing with its own eyes these reflections of life, that it needed yet more intermediaries, reflections of reflections --- in a word, critics. At the very least, these reflections ought to have been faithful. But they reflected nothing but the uncertainty of the crowd that stood around them in a circle. Like those museum mirrors where, along with a painted ceiling, one sees reflected the faces of the onlookers straining to catch themselves in the glass.

There had been a time when these critics had enjoyed immense authority in France. The public bowed before their verdicts; and was not far from regarding them as superior to the artists, as intelligent artists --- (the two words did not seem made to go together). --- Then they had multiplied with excessive speed; there were too many augurs: that ruins the trade. When there are so many people, each asserting that he alone possesses the one truth, one can no longer believe them; and they end by no longer believing themselves. Discouragement came: overnight, following the French habit, they had swung from one extreme to the other. After professing to know everything, they now professed to know nothing. They made a point of honor and a vanity of it. Renan had taught these softened generations that it is not elegant to affirm anything without immediately denying it, or at least calling it into doubt. He was one of those of whom Saint Paul speaks, “in whom there is always yes, yes, and then no, no.” All of the French elite had grown enthusiastic over this amphibious Credo. Mental laziness and weakness of character found their account in it. One no longer said of a work that it was good or bad, true or false, intelligent or foolish. One said:

--- It may be… There’s no impossibility… I really couldn’t say… I wash my hands of it.

If a piece of filth were staged, they did not say:

--- That is filth.

They said:

--- My lord Sganarelle, kindly change that manner of speaking. Our philosophy commands that we speak of all things with uncertainty; and for that reason you must not say: “That is filth,” but rather: “It seems to me… It appears to me that that is filth… But it cannot be certain. It might be a masterpiece. And who knows whether it is not one?”

There was no longer any danger of being accused of tyrannizing the arts. In the old days, Schiller had lectured them, reminding the little tyrants of the press of his time of what he bluntly called:

The Duty of Servants.

“Above all, let the house be clean where the Queen is to appear. Look sharp, then! Sweep the chambers. That, gentlemen, is why you are here.

“But the moment She appears, quickly to the door, servants! The maidservant must not make herself at home in the lady’s armchair!”

Justice had to be done to the men of today. They no longer sat in the lady’s armchair. They were meant to be servants: and servants they were. --- But bad servants; they swept nothing; the room was a hovel. Rather than restore order and cleanliness, they folded their arms and left the task to the master, to the divinity of the day: --- Universal Suffrage.

In truth, a movement of reaction had been taking shape for some time in the bourgeois conscience. A few decent people had undertaken a campaign --- still very feeble --- for public decency; but Christophe saw nothing of it in the circles where he moved. Besides, no one listened to them, or they were mocked. When it happened, once in a long while, that an honest man raised his voice against indecent art, the authors replied with superb confidence that they were right, since the public was satisfied. That was enough to close off all objections. The public had spoken: the supreme law of art! It occurred to no one that one might reject the testimony of a debauched public in favor of those who debauched it, nor that the artist was made to command the public, and not the public the artist. The religion of Number --- of the number of spectators and the size of the receipts --- dominated the artistic thought of this commercialized democracy. Following the lead of the authors, the critics docilely decreed that the essential office of the work of art is to please. Success is the law; and when success endures, there is nothing to do but bow. They applied themselves, therefore, to anticipating the fluctuations of the Stock Exchange of pleasure, to reading in the eyes of the public what it thought of works. The amusing thing was that the public strove in turn to read in the eyes of the critics what it ought to think of works. And so both gazed at each other; and in each other’s eyes they saw nothing but their own indecision.

Never, however, had fearless criticism been more necessary. In an anarchic Republic, fashion, which is all-powerful in art, rarely recoils, as it does in a conservative state; it moves ever forward; and it is a perpetual bidding-up of false intellectual freedom, which almost no one dares resist. The crowd is incapable of forming a judgment; it is shocked, at bottom; but no one dares say what everyone secretly feels. If the critics were strong, if they dared to be strong, what power they would have! A vigorous critic could, in a few years, make himself the Napoleon of public taste, and sweep the sick men of art away to Bicêtre. But there is no Napoleon anymore. --- For one thing, all the critics live in this vitiated atmosphere: they no longer notice it. Then, too, they dare not speak. They all know one another; they form a small company in which everyone is more or less connected, and must maintain consideration for the others: there is no independent man. To be one, you would have to renounce social life, almost friendship itself. Who would have the courage, in an enfeebled age, when even the best doubt whether the rightness of a critique is worth the unpleasantness it can cause to the one who delivers it and the one who receives it? Who would condemn himself, out of duty, to making his life a hell: daring to stand up to opinion, to fight against public imbecility, to lay bare the mediocrity of the day’s triumphant men, to defend the unknown artist, alone and thrown to the beasts, to impose sovereign minds upon minds made to obey? --- It happened to Christophe to hear critics say to each other, at a premiere, in the corridors of the theater:

--- Well! Isn’t that bad enough! What a disaster!

And the next day, in their columns, they spoke of a masterpiece, of Shakespeare, and of the wing of genius, whose wind had passed over their heads.

--- It is not so much talent that your art lacks, said Christophe to Sylvain Kohn, as character. What you need more than anything is a great critic, a Lessing, a…

--- A Boileau? said Sylvain Kohn, mocking.

--- A Boileau, perhaps indeed, more than ten artists of genius.

--- If we had a Boileau, said Sylvain Kohn, no one would listen to him.

--- If no one listened to him, it would be because he was not a Boileau, Christophe replied. I give you my word that the day I decided to tell you your truths straight out, clumsy as I am, you would hear them; and you would have to swallow them.

--- My poor old friend! sneered Sylvain Kohn.

That was his entire reply.

He looked so certain and so satisfied with the general spinelessness that Christophe suddenly had the impression, watching him, that this man was a hundred times more a stranger in France than he himself; and his heart tightened.

--- It’s not possible, he said again, as on the evening when he had come out sickened from a boulevard theater. There is something else.

--- What more do you want? asked Kohn.

Christophe repeated stubbornly:

--- France.

--- France is us, said Sylvain Kohn, bursting into laughter.

Christophe looked at him steadily for a moment, then shook his head and took up his refrain:

--- There is something else.

--- Well then, old friend, go find it, said Sylvain Kohn, laughing all the more.

Christophe could go and look. They had hidden it well enough.

FIN DE LA PREMIÈRE PARTIE

A stronger impression imposed itself on Christophe, as he saw more clearly into the vat of ideas in which Parisian art was fermenting: the supremacy of woman over this cosmopolitan society. She held an absurd, disproportionate place in it. It was no longer enough for her to be man’s companion. It was not even enough for her to become his equal. Her pleasure had to be the first law for her and for man alike. And man lent himself to this. When a people grows old, it abdicates its will, its faith, all its reasons for living, into the hands of the dispenser of pleasure. --- Men make the works; but women make the men, --- (when they do not also undertake to make the works, as was the case in the France of that time); --- and what they make, it would be more accurate to say they unmake. The eternal feminine has no doubt always exerted an exalting force upon the best of men; but for the common run of men and for weary epochs, there is, as someone has said, another feminine, quite as eternal, which draws them downward. That one was the master of Parisian thought, the king of the Republic.

Christophe observed the Parisiennes with curiosity, in the drawing rooms where Sylvain Kohn’s introductions and his gifts as a virtuoso had gained him a welcome. Like most foreigners, he generalized to all Frenchwomen his unindulgent observations based on two or three types he had encountered: young women, not very tall, without much freshness, with supple figures, dyed hair, a large hat on their agreeable heads, which were a little large for their bodies; clear features, the flesh slightly puffed; a small nose fairly well made, often vulgar, never with character; eyes always alert, without any deep life in them, straining to make themselves as brilliant and as large as possible; a well-drawn mouth, very much mistress of itself; a full chin; the whole lower face betraying the material character of these elegant persons, who, however occupied they might be with amorous intrigues, never lost sight of their concern for the world and for their households. Pretty, but without breeding. In nearly all these society women, one sensed the bourgeoise gone to seed, or who would have liked to, carrying within her all the traditions of her class: prudence, economy, coldness, practical sense, selfishness. A meager inner life. A desire for pleasure that proceeded much more from cerebral curiosity than from any need of the senses. A will of mediocre quality, but resolute. They were superbly dressed and had small automatic gestures. Patting their hair and their combs with the back or the hollow of their hands, in little delicate taps. And always seated in such a way as to be able to see themselves --- and to watch others --- in a mirror, nearby or distant, not counting, at dinner or at tea, the spoons, the knives, the silver coffeepots, polished and gleaming, in which they never failed to catch in passing the reflection of their own faces, which interested them more than any person or any thing. They observed at table a strict hygiene: drinking water, and depriving themselves of all dishes that might impair their ideal of powdered whiteness.

The proportion of Jewish women was fairly high in the circles Christophe frequented; and he was always drawn to them, though since his encounter with Judith Mannheim he had few illusions about them. Sylvain Kohn had introduced him into several Israelite salons, where he had been received with the habitual intelligence of that race, which loves intelligence. Christophe met there at dinner financiers, engineers, newspaper magnates, international brokers, a kind of Algerian slave-traders, --- the businessmen of the Republic. They were lucid and energetic, indifferent to others, smiling, expansive, and closed. Christophe sometimes had the feeling that there were crimes beneath those hard brows, in the past and in the future of these men assembled around the sumptuous table laden with meats, flowers, and wines. Nearly all of them were ugly. But the herd of women, taken as a whole and seen from a distance, was fairly brilliant. One had to be careful not to look at them too closely; most had a want of fineness in their coloring. But there was brilliance, an appearance of fairly strong material vitality, beautiful shoulders that blossomed forth proudly beneath admiring gazes, and a genius for making of their beauty, and even of their ugliness, a trap to catch a man. An artist might have recognized in certain of them the ancient Roman type, the women of the time from Nero to Hadrian. One saw also faces in the manner of Palma, of carnal expression, with a heavy chin firmly set in the neck, not without a bestial beauty. Others had abundant, curly hair, burning, bold eyes: one sensed them to be shrewd, incisive, ready for anything, more virile than other women, and yet more womanly. In the midst of the herd, there stood out here and there a more spiritualized profile. Its pure features, beyond Rome, traced back to the Orient, to the land of Laban: one felt in them a poetry of silence, of the Desert. But when Christophe drew near and listened to the remarks that Rebecca was exchanging with Faustina the Roman, or Saint Barbara the Venetian, he found a Parisian Jewess like the others, more Parisian than a Parisienne, more artificial and more adulterated, who said quiet cruel things while undressing the souls and bodies of people with her Madonna eyes.

Christophe drifted from group to group, unable to mix with any of them. The men spoke of hunting with ferocity, of love with brutality, of money alone with a sure, cold, mocking precision. Business notes were being taken in the smoking room. Christophe heard it said of a fop who was making his way among the ladies’ armchairs, a rosette in his buttonhole, rolling out heavy pleasantries in a thick accent:

--- What! So he’s at large?

In a corner of the drawing room, two ladies were conversing about the love affair of a young actress and a society woman. Sometimes there was a concert. Christophe was asked to play. Poetesses, breathless and streaming with sweat, declaimed in an apocalyptic tone verses by Sully-Prudhomme and Auguste Dorchain. A celebrated ham came to solemnly recite a Ballade mystique, with celestial organ accompaniment. The music and verse were so idiotic that Christophe felt ill. But the Roman women were charmed, and laughed heartily, displaying their magnificent teeth. Ibsen was also performed. The epilogue to a great man’s struggle against the Pillars of Society --- ending in their entertainment!

Then everyone felt naturally obliged to discourse on art. It was a nauseating thing. The women above all would begin talking of Ibsen, of Wagner, of Tolstoy --- out of flirtation, out of politeness, out of boredom, out of stupidity. Once the conversation had found that ground, there was no stopping it. The disease was contagious. One had to listen to the thoughts of bankers, stockbrokers, and slave-traders on the subject of art. However Christophe tried to avoid answering, to steer the conversation elsewhere, people would insist on talking to him about music, about high poetry. As Berlioz once said, “these people use such terms with the greatest composure; you would think they were talking about wine, women, or other filth.” A psychiatrist recognized in an Ibsen heroine one of his own patients, but far stupider. An engineer declared in all good faith that in A Doll’s House the sympathetic character was the husband. The famous ham actor --- a celebrated comedian --- brayed with vibrant conviction his profound thoughts on Nietzsche and Carlyle; he told Christophe that he could not look at a painting by Velasquez --- (the god of the hour) --- “without great tears running down his cheeks.” Yet he confided --- again to Christophe --- that, high as he placed art, he placed still higher art in life, action, and that if he had been free to choose the role he would play, he would have chosen that of Bismarck. Now and then one of those men called witty would be present. The conversation was not noticeably improved by it. Christophe kept count of what they were supposed to say and what they actually said. Most often they said nothing; they confined themselves to affected brusqueries or enigmatic smiles; they lived off their reputations and took no pains at all. Apart from a few great talkers, generally from the South. Those spoke about everything. No sense of values; everything was on the same level. This one was a Shakespeare. That one was a Molière. Another a Pascal, or even a Jesus Christ. They compared Ibsen to Dumas fils, or Tolstoy to George Sand; and naturally, always to show that France had invented everything. Ordinarily they knew no foreign language. But this did not trouble them in the least. It mattered so little to their audience whether they told the truth! What mattered was that they say amusing things, and, as far as possible, flattering to national self-love. Foreigners made a convenient target --- apart from the idol of the moment, for there always had to be one for the sake of fashion: whether Grieg, or Wagner, or Nietzsche, or Gorki, or d’Annunzio. It never lasted long, and the idol was sure to pass, one morning, into the rubbish bin.

For the moment, the idol was Beethoven. Beethoven --- who would have thought it? --- was a man in fashion. Among society people and literary men, at least: for the musicians had immediately detached themselves from him, following the see-saw system that is one of the laws of artistic taste in France. To know what he thinks, a Frenchman needs to know what his neighbor thinks, so that he may think the same or think the opposite. Thus it was that, seeing Beethoven grow popular, the more distinguished among the musicians had begun to find him no longer distinguished enough for them; they claimed to be always ahead of opinion, never to follow it; rather than find themselves in agreement with it, they would have turned their backs on it. They had therefore taken to treating Beethoven as an old deaf man who shouted in a harsh voice; and certain of them maintained that he was perhaps a respectable moralist, but an overrated musician. --- These poor jokes were not to Christophe’s taste. The enthusiasm of society people satisfied him no more. Had Beethoven come to Paris at that moment, he would have been the lion of the day: it was unfortunate for him that he had been dead for a century. His music counted for less in this vogue than the more or less romantic circumstances of his life, made popular by sentimental and virtuous biographies. His violent mask, with its lion’s muzzle, had become a face from a romance. Ladies pitied him; they let it be understood that had they known him, he would not have been so unhappy; and their great hearts were all the more disposed to offer themselves in that there was no risk of Beethoven taking them at their word: the old fellow had no need of anything anymore. --- That is why the virtuosos, the conductors, the impresarii were discovering in themselves treasures of piety for him; and, in their capacity as representatives of Beethoven, they gathered in the tributes intended for him. Sumptuous festivals, at very high prices, gave society people the opportunity to demonstrate their generosity --- and sometimes also to discover Beethoven’s symphonies. Committees of actors, of fashionable people, of demimondaines, and of politicians charged by the Republic with presiding over the destinies of art, made it known to the world that they were going to erect a monument to Beethoven: on the list one could see, alongside a few decent men who served as passports for the others, all that riffraff, who would have trampled Beethoven underfoot had he been alive, or whom Beethoven would have crushed.

Christophe watched and listened. He clenched his teeth to keep from saying something outrageous. The whole evening he remained tense and on edge. He could neither speak nor stay silent. To speak --- not out of pleasure or necessity, but out of politeness, because one must speak --- seemed to him humiliating and shameful. To say what he truly thought was not permitted him. To say commonplace things was not possible for him. And he did not even have the talent to be polite when he said nothing. If he looked at his neighbor, it was in a way too fixed and too intense: he was studying the man in spite of himself, and the man was offended by it. If he spoke, he believed too much in what he was saying: that was shocking to everyone, himself included. He was well aware that he did not belong; and since he was intelligent enough to have a sense of the harmony of the world around him, in which his presence sounded a wrong note, he was as disturbed by his own behavior as his hosts were. He resented himself, and he resented them.

When at last he found himself alone again in the street, in the middle of the night, he was so crushed by tedium that he lacked the strength to walk home; he felt like lying down on the pavement, right there in the street, as he had been, twenty times, on the verge of doing, when, as a child virtuoso, he came back from playing at the grand duke’s château. Sometimes, with only five or six francs left to last him the rest of the week, he would spend two of them on a cab. He would throw himself into it hastily, to flee more quickly; and while it carried him away, he would moan with agitation. At home he would go on moaning, in his bed, in the midst of sleep… And then, suddenly, he would burst out laughing at the memory of some absurd remark. He would catch himself repeating it, mimicking the gestures. The next day, and for several days afterward, it would still happen, as he walked alone, that he would suddenly growl like a beast… Why did he go to see these people? Why did he go back to see them? Why force himself to make the gestures and grimaces others made, to pretend to take an interest in what did not interest him? --- Was it really true that it did not interest him? --- A year ago, he could never have endured that society. Now it amused him at bottom, even as it irritated him. Was it some of the Parisian indifference seeping into him? He sometimes asked himself with unease whether he had grown less strong. But it was the opposite: he had grown stronger. He was freer in spirit in a foreign milieu. His eyes were opening in spite of themselves to the great Comedy of the world.

Besides, whether he liked it or not, he had to keep up this life if he wanted his art to be known to Parisian society, which takes an interest in works only insofar as it knows the artists. And he had to seek to be known, if he wanted to find lessons to give among those Philistines, on whom he depended for his living.

And then, one has a heart; and in spite of oneself the heart grows attached; it finds something to attach itself to, in whatever milieu it finds itself; if it did not attach itself, it could not live.