Jean-Christophe in Paris. II. The House. 1

I have a friend!… The sweetness of having found a soul in which to take shelter amid the storm, a tender and sure refuge where one can breathe at last, waiting for the pounding of a breathless heart to grow still! To be alone no more, to no longer have to stay always armed, eyes always open and burning from long watching, until exhaustion delivers you to the enemy! To have the dear companion into whose hands one has placed one’s whole being --- who has placed his whole being in yours. To taste rest at last, to sleep while he keeps watch, to keep watch while he sleeps. To know the joy of protecting the one you love, who entrusts himself to you, like a small child. To know the greater joy of abandoning yourself to him, of feeling that he holds all your secrets, that he has the power to dispose of you. Worn, spent, weary of bearing the burden of life for so many years, to be born again young and fresh in the body of the friend, to see the world renewed through his eyes, to embrace beautiful passing things with his senses, to delight with his heart in the splendor of living… Even to suffer with him… Ah! even suffering is joy, so long as we are together!

I have a friend!… Far from me, near me, always within me. I have him, I belong to him. My friend loves me. My friend has me. Love has mingled our souls into one soul.

Christophe’s first thought, on waking the morning after the evening at the Roussins’, was of Olivier Jeannin. He was seized at once by an irresistible desire to see him again. He got up and went out. It was not yet eight o’clock. The morning was mild and a little oppressive. An early April day: a storm haze hung over Paris.

Olivier lived at the foot of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, in a small street near the Jardin des Plantes. The house stood at the narrowest point of the street. The staircase opened at the back of a dark courtyard and exhaled varied and unpleasant odors. The steps, on the sharp turns, slanted toward the wall, which was smudged with pencil inscriptions. On the third floor, a woman with disheveled gray hair and a gaping camisole opened the door when she heard someone coming up, then slammed it shut again when she saw Christophe. There were several lodgings on each landing; and through the ill-fitting doors one could hear children jostling and squealing. It was a swarm of squalid, mediocre lives, piled on top of one another in low-ceilinged floors crowded around a foul-smelling courtyard. Christophe, revolted, wondered what cravings could have drawn all these people here, far from the countryside which at least has air enough for everyone, and what profit they could possibly extract from this Paris where they condemned themselves to live out their entire lives in a tomb.

He had reached Olivier’s floor. A knotted cord served as a doorbell. Christophe pulled it so vigorously that the noise caused several doors to crack open again on the staircase. Olivier opened the door. Christophe was struck by the simple but careful elegance of his dress; and this care, which in any other circumstance would have meant little to him, gave him here an agreeable surprise; amid that soiled atmosphere, it had something smiling and wholesome about it. At once he found again his impression of the previous evening before Olivier’s honest, clear eyes. He held out his hand. Olivier, startled, stammered:

--- You, you here!…

Christophe, absorbed in catching that kindred soul in the nakedness of its fleeting confusion, merely smiled without answering. Pushing Olivier ahead of him, he entered the single room that served as both bedroom and study. A narrow iron bed stood against the wall near the window; Christophe noticed the pile of pillows stacked on the bolster. Three chairs, a table painted black, a small piano, books on the shelves, filled the room. It was cramped, low-ceilinged, poorly lit; and yet it held something like a reflection of the limpidity of the eyes that inhabited it. Everything was clean, neatly arranged, as though a woman’s hand had passed through; and a few roses in a carafe brought a little spring between the four walls, which were adorned with photographs of old Florentine painters.

--- So you came, you came to see me? Olivier repeated with warmth.

--- Well, I had to, said Christophe. You, you would never have come.

--- Do you think so? said Olivier.

Then, almost immediately:

--- Yes, you are right. But not for want of thinking about it.

--- What held you back?

--- I wanted it too much.

--- What a fine reason!

--- Yes indeed, don’t laugh. I was afraid you might not want it as much.

--- A great deal I worried about that! I wanted to see you, so I came. If it bothers you, I’ll find out soon enough.

--- You’ll need sharp eyes for that.

They looked at each other and smiled.

Olivier went on:

--- I was foolish yesterday. I was afraid I had displeased you. My shyness is a real sickness: I can no longer say anything at all.

--- Don’t complain. There are enough people who talk in your country; one is only too glad to meet someone who falls silent from time to time, even if it is out of shyness --- that is, against his will.

Christophe laughed, delighted with his own wit.

--- So it is for my silence that you pay me this visit?

--- Yes, it is for your silence, for the quality of your silence. There are all kinds: I like yours, that is all.

--- How did you manage to feel any sympathy for me? You have barely seen me.

--- That is my affair. I am not long in making up my mind. When I see a face pass through life that pleases me, I decide quickly: I set off in pursuit; I must catch up with it.

--- Does it never happen that you are mistaken in these pursuits?

--- Often.

--- Perhaps you are mistaken again this time.

--- We shall see.

--- Oh! I am lost then! You chill me. It is enough for me to think that you are watching me, and whatever little capacity I have deserts me.

Christophe looked with affectionate curiosity at that impressionable face, which flushed and paled from one moment to the next. Feelings passed across it like clouds on water.

--- What a nervous little creature! he thought. One would say a woman.

He touched his knee gently.

--- Come now, said he, do you think I come armed against you? I have a horror of those who practice psychology at their friends’ expense. All I want is the right for both of us to be free and sincere, to give ourselves over to what we feel, openly, without false shame, without fear of locking ourselves into it forever, without fear of contradiction --- the right to love now, and to love no longer, the next minute. Is that not more manly and more honest?

Olivier looked at him seriously and replied:

--- There is no doubt about it. That is more manly, and you are strong. But I am hardly so.

--- I am quite sure you are, replied Christophe; but in a different way. Besides, I have come precisely to help you be strong, if you wish. For what I have just said allows me to add, with more frankness than I would otherwise have had, that --- without prejudging tomorrow --- I am fond of you.

Olivier blushed to the tips of his ears. Held fast by embarrassment, he found nothing to say.

Christophe cast his gaze around the room. --- You are very badly lodged. Have you no other room?

--- A storage closet.

--- Phew! one cannot breathe. Can you live here?

--- One gets used to it.

--- I never would.

Christophe unbuttoned his waistcoat and drew a deep breath.

Olivier went and opened the window fully.

--- You must always feel ill at ease in a city, monsieur Krafft. As for me, I run no risk of suffering from my strength. I breathe so little that I can find a way to live anywhere. Still, there are summer nights that are hard, even for me. I watch them approaching with dread. Then I sit up on my bed and feel as though I am going to suffocate.

Christophe looked at the pile of pillows on the bed, at Olivier’s tired face; and he saw him struggling in the darkness.

--- Leave this place, he said. Why do you stay? Olivier shrugged and answered in an indifferent tone:

--- Oh! here or anywhere else!…

Heavy shoes walked across the ceiling overhead. On the floor below, shrill voices quarreled. And every few minutes the walls shook from the rumble of the omnibus in the street.

--- And this house! Christophe went on. This house that sweats filth, oppressive heat, ignoble misery --- how can you come back to it every evening? Does it not dishearten you? For me it would be impossible to live here. I would sooner sleep under a bridge.

--- I suffered from it too, at first. I am as revolted as you are. When I was a child and they took me for walks, the mere passing through certain crowded, dirty streets made my heart sink. Strange terrors came over me that I did not dare speak. I would think: “If there were an earthquake at this moment, I would be left dead here, forever”; and that seemed to me the most dreadful misfortune imaginable. I had no idea that one day I would live here of my own free will, and would probably die here. I have had to become less particular. It still repels me; but I try not to think about it anymore. When I climb the stairs, I stop up my eyes, my ears, my nose, all my senses, I wall myself up within myself. And then over there, look, above that rooftop, I can see the tops of an acacia’s branches. I sit in that corner so as to see nothing else; in the evening, when the wind moves them, I have the illusion that I am far from Paris; the surge of great forests has never seemed so sweet to me as at certain moments the silky rustling of those finely cut leaves.

--- Yes, I can well imagine, said Christophe, that you are always daydreaming; but it is a pity to use up in this struggle against life’s petty irritations a power of illusion that ought to serve in creating other lives.

--- Is that not the lot of nearly everyone? You yourself --- do you not spend yourself in anger and conflict?

--- For me, it is not the same. I was born for that. Look at my arms, my hands. Fighting is my health. But you, you have not so much strength to spare; that is plain enough.

Olivier looked with a melancholy air at his thin wrists and said:

--- Yes, I am weak; I have always been so. But what is to be done? One must live.

--- How do you live?

--- I give lessons.

--- Lessons in what?

--- In everything. Tutoring in Latin, Greek, history. I prepare students for the baccalaureate. I also have a class in Morals at a municipal school.

--- A class in what?

--- In Morals.

--- What the devil kind of nonsense is that? They teach morals in your schools?

Olivier smiled:

--- Of course.

--- And is there enough to talk about for more than ten minutes?

--- I have twelve hours of classes a week.

--- So you are teaching them to do evil?

--- Why?

--- One does not need so much talk to know what is good.

--- Or to know nothing about it.

--- Indeed yes: to know nothing about it. And that is not the worst way to do it. Goodness is not a science, it is an action. It takes neurotics to squabble over morality; and the first of all moral laws is not to be neurotic. Damned pedants! They are like cripples who want to teach me how to walk.

--- It is not for your benefit that they speak. You, you know; but there are so many who do not!

--- Well, let them, like children, go on all fours until they have learned by themselves. But on two legs or four, the first thing is that they walk.

He was striding back and forth from one end of the room to the other, which fewer than four steps were enough to measure. He stopped in front of the piano, opened it, leafed through the pieces of music, touched the keys, and said:

--- Play me something.

Olivier gave a start:

--- Me! he exclaimed, what an idea!

--- Mme Roussin told me you were a good musician. Come now, play.

--- In front of you? Oh! he said, it would be the death of me.

That naive cry from the heart made Christophe laugh, and Olivier himself, a little abashed.

--- Well! said Christophe, is that any reason for a Frenchman?

Olivier still resisted:

--- But why? Why do you want this?

--- I will tell you in a moment. Play.

--- What?

--- Whatever you like.

Olivier, with a sigh, came and sat down at the piano, and, obedient to the will of the imperious friend who had chosen him, he began, after a long hesitation, to play the beautiful Adagio in B minor by Mozart. At first his fingers trembled and had not the strength to press down the keys; then, little by little, he grew bolder; and, thinking he was doing no more than repeating Mozart’s words, he unwittingly laid bare his heart. Music is an indiscreet confidante: it betrays the most secret thoughts of those who love it to those who love it. Beneath the divine design of Mozart’s Adagio, Christophe discovered the invisible features, not of Mozart, but of the unknown friend who was playing: the melancholy serenity, the timid and tender smile of this nervous, pure, loving, and blushing creature. But arriving almost at the end of the melody, at the summit where the phrase of painful love rises and breaks, an insurmountable modesty prevented Olivier from going on; his fingers fell silent, and his voice failed him. He lifted his hands from the piano and said:

--- I cannot go on…

Christophe, standing behind him, leaned forward, his two arms encircling him, and finished on the piano the interrupted phrase; then he said:

--- Now I know the sound of your soul.

He held both his hands and looked him full in the face, for a long moment. At last he said:

--- How strange!… I’ve seen you before… I know you so well, and have known you for so long!…

Olivier’s lips trembled; he was on the verge of speaking. But he said nothing.

Christophe gazed at him a moment longer. Then, silently smiling, he left.

He went down the stairs with a radiant heart. He passed two very ugly runny-nosed children on their way up, one carrying a loaf of bread, the other a bottle of oil. He pinched their cheeks in a friendly way. He smiled at the surly concierge. Out in the street, he walked along singing softly to himself. He found himself at the Luxembourg. He stretched out on a bench in the shade and closed his eyes. The air was still and heavy; there were few strollers about. You could hear, very faintly, the uneven sound of a fountain, and now and then the crunch of gravel underfoot. Christophe felt an irresistible laziness come over him; he was growing drowsy like a lizard in the sun; the shade had long since left his face, but he could not bring himself to move. His thoughts turned in circles; he made no effort to fix them; they were all bathed in a happy light. The Luxembourg clock struck; he did not listen; but a moment later it occurred to him that it had struck noon. He leapt to his feet, realized he had been dawdling for two hours, had missed an appointment with Hecht, had wasted his entire morning. He laughed and made his way home, whistling. He composed a Rondo in canon on the cry of a street vendor. Even the melancholy melodies took on a joyful swagger inside him. Passing the laundry on his street, he glanced as usual into the shop, and saw the little red-haired girl, her complexion matte and flushed from the heat, pressing clothes, her thin arms bare almost to the shoulder, her blouse open; she shot him her usual brazen look; for the first time, that glance slid past his without irritating him. He laughed again. Back in his room, none of the worries he had left there awaited him. He tossed his hat, jacket, and waistcoat in every direction and sat down to work with the energy of a man ready to conquer the world. He picked up the musical sketches scattered all around him. His mind was not in them; he read them with his eyes only; after a few minutes, he sank back into the happy torpor of the Luxembourg, his head drunk and dazed. He noticed this two or three times and tried to shake himself free, but in vain. He swore cheerfully, got up, and plunged his head into his basin of cold water. That sobered him slightly. He came back and sat down at his table, quiet, wearing a vague smile. He was thinking:

--- What is the difference between this and love?

Instinctively he had begun to think in a low voice, as though ashamed. He shrugged:

--- There aren’t two ways of loving… Or rather, yes, there are two: the way of those who love with their whole being, and the way of those who give love only a share of their surplus. God preserve me from that miserliness of heart!

He stopped thinking, held back by a kind of modesty from going further. For a long time he sat there smiling at his inward dream. His heart sang in the silence:

--- Du bist mein, und nun ist das Meine meiner als jemals…

(“You are mine, and now I am mine, as I have never been before…”)

He took a sheet of paper and, calmly, wrote down what his heart was singing.

They decided to take an apartment together. Christophe wanted to move in at once, without worrying about losing half a term’s rent. Olivier, more prudent, though no less fond, advised waiting until their leases expired. Christophe could not understand such calculations. Like many people who have no money, he was not troubled by the prospect of losing any. He imagined that Olivier was even more hard up than himself. One day when his friend’s poverty had struck him particularly, he took his leave abruptly and came back two hours later, triumphantly spreading out a few five-franc coins he had got as an advance from Hecht. Olivier blushed and refused. Christophe, displeased, made to throw the money to an Italian playing music in the courtyard. Olivier stopped him. Christophe went off, apparently wounded, but really furious with himself for his clumsiness, to which he attributed Olivier’s refusal. A letter from his friend came to put a balm on his hurt. Olivier wrote what he could not express in words: his happiness at knowing him and his emotion at what Christophe had tried to do for him. Christophe fired back an overflowing, half-mad letter reminiscent of those he had written at fifteen to his friend Otto; it was full of Gemüth and rambling non sequiturs; he made puns in French and German, and even set them to music.

They moved in at last. They had found, in the Montparnasse quarter, near the place Denfert, on the fifth floor of an old building, a flat of three rooms and a kitchen, all quite small, overlooking a tiny garden enclosed by four high walls. From their floor the view stretched, over the opposite wall, which was lower than the others, across one of those great convent gardens that are still so plentiful in Paris, hiding there, unknown. No one was ever to be seen along the deserted paths. The old trees, taller and thicker than those in the Luxembourg, shimmered in the sunlight; bands of birds sang; from dawn it was the fluting of blackbirds, and then the tumultuous, rhythmic choral of sparrows; and in the evenings in summer, the delirious screaming of swifts slicing the luminous air and skating across the sky. And at night, under the moon, like air bubbles rising to the surface of a pond, the pearly notes of toads. You could have forgotten that Paris was there, had the old house not been in constant trembling from the rumble of heavy wagons, as though the earth were seized by a feverish shudder.

One of the rooms was larger and finer than the others. The two friends fell into a dispute over who would not take it. They had to draw lots; and Christophe, who had suggested the idea, managed, with a bad faith and a dexterity he would not have believed himself capable of, to make sure that he did not win.

Then began for them a period of absolute happiness. Happiness was not in any one thing in particular; it was in all things at once; it bathed their every act and their every thought, and it could not be separated from them for a single instant.

During this honeymoon of their friendship, these first days of deep and wordless jubilation known only to “one who can, in all the world, call a single soul his own”…

…Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund…

they barely spoke to each other, barely dared to speak; it was enough to feel the other beside them, to exchange a glance, a word that proved their thoughts, after long silences, were following the same course. Without asking each other any questions, even without looking at each other, they saw each other constantly. One who loves unconsciously models himself on the soul of the one he loves; he desires so earnestly not to wound him, to be all that he is, that by a mysterious and sudden intuition he reads the imperceptible movements at the other’s core. Friend is transparent to friend; they exchange their being. Features imitate features. Soul imitates soul --- until the day when the deep force, the daemon of the race, abruptly breaks free and tears apart the shell of the love that holds it.

Christophe spoke in a low voice, walked softly, was careful not to make noise in the room adjoining that of the silent Olivier; he was transfigured by the friendship; he had an expression of happiness, of trust, of youth, that had never been seen in him before. He adored Olivier. It would have been easy enough for Olivier to take advantage of his power, had he not blushed at it as at a happiness he did not deserve --- for he regarded himself as far inferior to Christophe, who was no less humble. This mutual humility, born of their great love, was a sweetness in itself. It was delicious --- even with the consciousness of not deserving it --- to feel that one held so large a place in the heart of the friend. They felt for each other a moved and grateful tenderness.

Olivier had gathered his books together with Christophe’s; he no longer told them apart. When he spoke of one of them, he did not say “my book.” He said “our book.” There were only a small number of objects he kept aside, without folding them into the common treasury: those that had belonged to his sister, or that were bound up with her memory. Christophe, with the tact that love had given him, was not long in noticing this; but he did not know why. He had never dared to question Olivier about his parents; he knew only that Olivier had lost them; and to the slightly proud reserve of his affection, which avoided prying into his friend’s secrets, was added a fear of stirring in him past griefs. Much as he wanted to, a singular shyness had even prevented him from looking closely at the photographs on Olivier’s table --- photographs showing a gentleman and a lady in ceremonious poses, and a little girl of about twelve with a large spaniel at her feet.

Two or three months after they had moved in, Olivier caught a chill and had to take to his bed. Christophe, who had discovered a maternal soul in himself, watched over him with anxious affection; and the doctor, who on listening to Olivier’s chest had found a slight inflammation at the top of one lung, had asked Christophe to paint the patient’s back with iodine tincture. As Christophe was carrying out the task with great gravity, he noticed around Olivier’s neck a religious medallion. He knew Olivier well enough by now to know that he was even less attached to any religious faith than Christophe himself was. He could not help showing his surprise. Olivier blushed. He said:

--- It’s a keepsake. My poor little Antoinette wore it when she was dying.

Christophe gave a start. The name Antoinette was like a flash of lightning to him.

--- Antoinette? he said.

--- My sister, said Olivier.

Christophe repeated:

--- Antoinette… Antoinette Jeannin… She was your sister?… But, he said, looking at the photograph on the table, she was only a child when you lost her?

Olivier smiled sadly:

--- That is a childhood photograph, he said. Alas, I have no other… She was twenty-five when she left me.

--- Ah! said Christophe, moved. And she had been to Germany, hadn’t she?

Olivier nodded yes.

Christophe took Olivier’s hands:

--- But I knew her! he said.

--- I know, said Olivier.

He threw himself on Christophe’s neck.

--- Poor little one! Poor little one! Christophe kept repeating. They wept, both of them.

Christophe remembered that Olivier was ill. He tried to calm him, made him put his arms back under the covers, drew the sheets up over his shoulders, and, wiping his eyes with maternal tenderness, sat down at his bedside and looked at him.

--- So that is why, he said, I knew you. From that very first evening, I had recognized you.

(It was impossible to tell whether he was speaking to the friend who was there, or to the one who was gone.)

--- But you, he continued after a moment, you knew then?… Why did you never tell me?

Through Olivier’s eyes, Antoinette answered:

--- I could not say it. It was for you to read it.

They were silent for a time; then, in the quiet of the night, Olivier, motionless and stretched out in his bed, told Christophe in a low voice, while Christophe held his hand, the story of Antoinette --- but he did not tell him what he ought not to tell: the secret she had kept, the one Christophe perhaps already knew, without its needing to be said.

From that day on, Antoinette’s soul enveloped them both. When they were together, she was with them. It was not necessary for them to think of her: everything they thought together, they thought within her. Her love was the place where their hearts met.

Olivier evoked her image often. They were disjointed memories, brief anecdotes. They brought back, in a passing gleam, one of her timid and graceful gestures, her young and serious smile, the pensive grace of her vanished being. Christophe listened without speaking, and let the reflections of the invisible friend soak into him. By the law of his nature, which everywhere and always drank more greedily than any other from the well of life, he sometimes heard in Olivier’s words deep resonances that Olivier himself did not hear; and he absorbed, better than Olivier himself, the being of the young woman who was dead.

By instinct he took her place beside Olivier; and it was a touching sight to see the awkward German unconsciously recapture certain of Antoinette’s delicate attentions, her thoughtful kindnesses. He no longer knew, at moments, whether it was Olivier he loved in Antoinette, or Antoinette in Olivier. Moved by a sudden tenderness, he would go, without saying so, to visit Antoinette’s grave and bring flowers. Olivier was a long time before suspecting it. He only found out one day when he discovered fresh flowers on the grave; but it was not without difficulty that he managed to confirm that Christophe had been there. When he tried timidly to mention it, Christophe changed the subject with a gruff brusqueness. He refused to let Olivier know; and he persisted in this until the day they ran into each other at the cemetery of Ivry.

For his part, Olivier wrote to Christophe’s mother without Christophe’s knowledge. He sent Louisa news of her son; he told her how much affection he had for him, and how much he admired him. Louisa wrote back to Olivier in clumsy, humble letters full of effusive thanks; she always spoke of her son as though he were a small boy.

After a period of half-silent tenderness --- “a ravishing calm, delighting without knowing why” --- their tongues were loosed. They spent hours sailing forth in discovery through each other’s soul.

They were very different from each other, but both made of pure metal. They loved each other because they were so different, while being so much the same.

Olivier was weak, frail, incapable of struggling against difficulties. When he ran up against an obstacle, he drew back --- not from fear, but partly from timidity, and largely from disgust at the brutal and coarse means one had to employ to prevail. He earned his living by giving tutoring lessons, by writing books on art that were, as was customary, shamefully underpaid, by contributing articles to reviews --- rare, never free, and on subjects that interested him only moderately: the ones that did interest him were not wanted; no one ever asked him for what he could do best. He was a poet, so they asked him for critical articles; he knew music well, so they wanted him to write about painting; he knew he could say nothing about it but mediocre things --- and that was precisely what pleased; thus he spoke to the mediocre in the language they could understand. He ended by growing disgusted and refusing to write. His only pleasure in working was for little reviews that paid nothing, to which he devoted himself, like so many other young men, because there he was free. There alone could he let come to light all that was in him worth living for.

He was gentle, polite, patient in appearance, but of an excessive sensibility. A word spoken with any sharpness wounded him to the quick; an injustice shook him to the core; he suffered from it on his own behalf and on behalf of others. Certain villainies committed centuries ago still tore at him as if he had been their victim. He turned pale, he trembled, he was wretched to think how wretched the one who had endured them had been, and how many centuries separated him from his sympathy. When he witnessed such an injustice himself, he fell into fits of indignation that made him tremble through his whole body and sometimes made him ill, kept him from sleeping. It was because he knew this weakness that he imposed calm upon himself: for when he lost his temper he knew he overstepped every limit, and said things that were not forgiven. People held it against him more than they did against Christophe, who was always violent, because it seemed that Olivier, in his moments of passion, surrendered the deepest truth of his thought more fully than Christophe did --- and this was true. He judged people without Christophe’s blind exaggerations, but also without his illusions, with lucidity. That is what people forgive least of all. So he kept silent, avoided argument, knowing the futility of it. He had suffered from this restraint. He had suffered still more from his timidity, which sometimes led him to betray his own thought, or not to dare defend it to the end, even going so far as to apologize, as in the argument with Lucien Lévy-Cœur on the subject of Christophe. He had passed through many crises of despair before making his peace with the world and with himself. In his adolescent years, when his nerves had more power over him, periods of exaltation and periods of depression alternated in him perpetually, following one another abruptly and inevitably. At the very moment he felt most calm and even happy, he could be certain that sorrow lay in wait for him. And suddenly, sure enough, he was struck down by it without having seen it coming. Then it was not enough for him to be unhappy; he had to reproach himself for his unhappiness, to put his words and his actions and his honesty on trial, to take the part of others against himself. His heart lurched in his chest, he struggled wretchedly, gasping for air. --- Since Antoinette’s death, and perhaps thanks to her, thanks to the calming light that radiates from certain beloved dead, like the glow of dawn that refreshes the eyes and the soul of the sick, Olivier had managed, if not to free himself from these disturbances, at least to resign himself to them and to master them. Few people suspected these inner battles. He locked within himself their humiliating secret --- that disordered agitation of a frail and tormented body, which a free and serene intelligence contemplated without being able to rule it, yet without being touched by it --- “the central peace that persists at the heart of an endless agitation.”

It struck Christophe. It was that peace he saw in Olivier’s eyes. Olivier had an intuition for souls, and a curiosity of mind that was broad, subtle, open to everything, that denied nothing, hated nothing, and contemplated things with a generous sympathy: that freshness of gaze which is a priceless gift and allows one to savor, with a heart always new, the eternal renewal. In that inner universe where he felt free, vast, sovereign, he forgot his weakness and his physical anxieties. There was even a certain sweetness in contemplating from afar, with an ironic pity, that sickly body, always ready to disappear. That way, one risked no attachment to one’s own life. And one attached oneself all the more passionately to life itself. Olivier poured into love and into thought all the forces he had abdicated in action. He had not enough sap to live from his own substance. He was ivy: he needed something to cling to. He was never so rich as when he gave himself away. His was a feminine soul that always needed to love and to be loved. He was born for Christophe, and Christophe for him. Like those aristocratic and charming friends who form the retinue of great artists, and who seem to have flowered from their powerful souls: Beltraffio, from Leonardo; Cavaliere, from Michelangelo; the gentle Umbrian companions of the young Raphael; Aert van Gelder, remaining faithful beside Rembrandt in his misery and old age. They do not have the greatness of the masters; but it seems that all that is noble and pure in the masters has become, in their friends, yet more spiritualized. They are the ideal companions of genius.

Their friendship was a blessing to them both. Love gives wings to the soul. The presence of a friend lends life its full worth; it is for him that one lives, that one defends against the wear of time the integrity of one’s being.

They enriched one another. Olivier had serenity of mind and a sickly body. Christophe had a powerful strength and a tumultuous soul. They were the blind man and the cripple. Now that they were together, they felt very strong. In Christophe’s shadow, Olivier recovered his taste for the light; Christophe transfused into him something of his abundant vitality, of his physical and moral robustness, which tended toward optimism even in pain, even in injustice and hatred. He took far more in return, according to the law of genius, which, give as it may, always takes in love far more than it gives --- quia nominor leo --- because it is genius, and genius is half a matter of knowing how to absorb all that is great around it and make it greater still. Popular wisdom says that wealth goes to the rich. Strength goes to the strong. Christophe fed on Olivier’s thought; he steeped himself in his intellectual calm, his detachment of mind, that long view of things which comprehended and commanded everything in silence. But transplanted into him, into richer soil, his friend’s virtues grew with a far different energy.

They marveled, both of them, at what they discovered in one another. How much there was to share! Each brought immense riches of which, until then, he had not himself been fully aware: the moral treasure of his people. Olivier brought the vast culture and psychological genius of France; Christophe, the inner music of Germany and its intuition of nature.

Christophe could not understand how Olivier came to be French. His friend resembled so little all the Frenchmen he had known! Before meeting him, he had been not far from taking Lucien Lévy-Cœur --- who was only a caricature of it --- as the type of the modern French mind. And now Olivier’s example showed him that there could be in Paris minds as free, and freer in their thinking, than a Lucien Lévy-Cœur, who yet remained pure and stoic, as much as anyone in Europe. Christophe wanted to persuade Olivier that he and his sister could not be entirely French.

--- My poor friend, Olivier said to him, what do you know of France?

Christophe protested at the pains he had taken to get to know it; he enumerated all the Frenchmen he had seen in the world of the Stevens and the Roussins: Jews, Belgians, Luxembourgers, Americans, Russians, Levantines, and here and there a few authentic Frenchmen.

--- That is exactly what I was saying, Olivier replied. You haven’t seen a single one. A debauched society, a few pleasure-seekers who aren’t even French, idlers, politicians, useless creatures --- all that commotion that passes over the nation without touching it. You’ve seen only the myriads of wasps that fine autumns and abundant orchards attract. You haven’t noticed the laboring hives, the city of work, the fever of study.

--- Pardon me, said Christophe, I’ve seen your intellectual elite as well.

--- What? Two or three dozen men of letters? A fine thing indeed! In an age when science and action have grown so immense, literature has become the most superficial layer of a people’s thought. And even within literature, you have scarcely seen anything but the theater, and the luxury theater at that --- that international cuisine, cooked up for the wealthy clientele of cosmopolitan hotels. The theaters of Paris? Do you think a working man even knows what happens there? Pasteur didn’t go ten times in his life! Like all foreigners, you give an exaggerated importance to our novels, our boulevard scenes, the intrigues of our politicians… I’ll show you, whenever you like, women who never read novels, young Parisian girls who have never set foot in a theater, men who have never involved themselves in politics --- and these among the intellectuals. You have seen neither our scientists nor our poets. You have seen neither the solitary artists who consume themselves in silence, nor the burning blaze of our revolutionaries. You have not seen a single great believer, nor a single great unbeliever. As for the people --- let’s not even speak of them. Apart from the poor woman who nursed you, what do you know of them? Where could you have seen them? How many Parisians have you known who lived above the second or third floor? If you don’t know those people, you don’t know France. You don’t know, in the cramped lodgings, in the garrets of Paris, in the silent provinces, the brave and sincere hearts attached throughout a lifetime of mediocrity to grave thoughts, to daily self-denial --- the little Church, which has always existed in France --- small in number, great in soul, almost unknown, without visible influence, and yet the whole strength of France, the strength that holds its tongue and endures, while what calls itself the elite endlessly rots and renews itself… You are surprised to find a Frenchman who does not live to be happy, happy at any price, but to fulfill or serve his faith? There are thousands of people like me, and more deserving than I am, more devout, more humble, who until the day of their death serve without faltering an ideal, a God, who does not answer them. You don’t know the ordinary people --- thrifty, methodical, industrious, quiet, with a sleeping flame at the bottom of their hearts --- that sacrificed people once defended against the selfishness of the great by my “pays,” old blue-eyed Vauban. You don’t know the people, you don’t know the elite. Have you read a single one of the books that are our faithful friends, the companions who sustain us? Do you even know of the existence of our young reviews, where such a sum of devotion and faith is spent? Do you suspect the moral personalities who are our sun, whose silent radiance frightens the army of hypocrites? They dare not fight them openly; they bow before them, the better to betray them. The hypocrite is a slave, and to say slave is to say master. You know only the slaves, you don’t know the masters… You have watched our struggles, and you called them brutal incoherence, because you did not understand their meaning. You see the shadows and the reflections of the day, you do not see the inner light --- our centuries-old soul. Have you ever tried to know it? Have you ever glimpsed our heroic action, from the Crusades to the Commune? Have you ever penetrated the tragedy of the French mind? Have you ever bent over the abyss of Pascal? How can anyone be permitted to slander a people who, for more than ten centuries, has acted and created, a people who has kneaded the world in its image through Gothic art, through the seventeenth century, and through the Revolution --- a people who, twenty times, has passed through the trial of fire and been retempered there, and who, never dying, has risen again twenty times!… --- You are all the same. All your compatriots who come among us see only the parasites who gnaw at us, the adventurers of letters, politics, and finance, with their suppliers, their clients, and their mistresses; and they judge France by these wretches who devour her. Not one of you thinks of the true oppressed France, of the reserves of life in the French provinces, of all those people who work, indifferent to the racket made by their masters of a day… Yes, it is natural enough that you know nothing of it, I don’t reproach you for it: how could you? It is barely known to the French themselves. The best among us are blockaded, prisoners on our own soil… No one will ever know all that we have suffered, bound to the genius of our race, keeping within us like a sacred deposit the light we had received from it, protecting it desperately against the hostile winds straining to extinguish it --- alone, feeling all around us the poisoned atmosphere of these métèques who have descended upon our thought like a swarm of flies, whose hideous larvae gnaw at our reason and defile our hearts --- betrayed by those whose mission it was to defend us, our leaders, our imbecile or cowardly critics who flatter the enemy in order to be forgiven for being of our race, abandoned by our people, who care nothing for us, who do not even know we exist… What means do we have to be known by them? We cannot reach them… Ah! that is the hardest thing! We know that we are thousands of men in France who think alike, we know that we speak in their name, and we cannot make ourselves heard! The enemy holds everything: newspapers, reviews, theaters… The press flees from thought, or admits it only if it is an instrument of pleasure, or the weapon of a party. The coteries and cliques allow free passage only on condition that one degrades oneself. Poverty and excessive labor crush us. The politicians, fully occupied with enriching themselves, take interest only in the proletariats they can buy. The indifferent, selfish bourgeoisie watches us die. Our people ignore us; even those who struggle as we do, wrapped like us in silence, do not know that we exist, and we do not know that they exist… Baleful Paris! No doubt it has also done good, in grouping all the forces of French thought. But the harm it has done is at least equal to the good; and, in an era like our own, even the good turns to harm. It is enough for a pseudo-elite to seize Paris and sound the formidable trumpet of publicity, for the voice of the rest of France to be smothered. More than that: France deceives itself; it falls silent, dismayed, it pushes its thoughts back timidly within itself… I suffered a great deal from all of this, in years past. But now, Christophe, I am at peace. I have understood my strength, the strength of my people. We need only wait for the flood to pass. It will not wear away the fine granite of France. Beneath the mud it rolls along, I will make you touch it. And already, here and there, high summits are breaking the surface…

Christophe discovered the enormous power of idealism animating the poets, musicians, and scientists of France in his time. While the masters of the day drowned the voice of French thought beneath the din of their coarse sensualism, that thought --- too aristocratic to struggle with violence against the insolent clamor of the rabble --- went on singing its ardent, concentrated song for itself and for its God. It even seemed that, anxious to flee the repugnant noise outside, it had withdrawn into its most secret retreats, deep in the heart of its keep.

The poets --- the only ones who deserved that fine name, so lavishly bestowed by the press and the Academies on chatterboxes hungry for vanity and money --- the poets, disdainful of the shameless rhetoric and the servile realism that gnaw at the bark of things without ever penetrating it, had entrenched themselves at the very center of the soul, in a mystical vision where the universe of forms and thoughts was drawn in, like a torrent falling into a lake, and was colored by the tint of inward life. The intensity of this idealism, which enclosed itself within itself in order to recreate the universe, made it inaccessible to the crowd. Christophe himself did not understand it at first. The transition was too abrupt, after the Foire sur la Place. It was as though, coming out of a furious melee and harsh light, he entered silence and night. His ears were still ringing. He could see nothing. At first, with his ardent love of life, he was jarred by the contrast. Outside, torrents of passion were roaring, convulsing France, stirring humanity. And at first glance, none of it appeared in the art. Christophe asked Olivier:

--- You were lifted up to the stars and cast down into the abyss by your Dreyfus Affair. Where is the poet in whom the storm passed? The most beautiful battle of conscience against the authority of the Church that there has been in centuries is being fought at this very moment in religious souls. Where is the poet in whom this sacred anguish is reflected? The working people are preparing for war, nations are dying, nations are rising again, the Armenians are massacred, Asia awakening from its thousand-year sleep overthrows the Muscovite colossus, keeper of Europe’s keys; Turkey, like Adam, opens its eyes to the day; the air is conquered by man; the old earth cracks beneath our feet and opens; it swallows a whole people… All these prodigies, accomplished in twenty years, enough to fuel twenty Iliads --- where are they, where is their trace of fire in the books of your poets? Are they the only ones who fail to see the poetry of the world?

--- Patience, my friend, patience! Olivier answered him. Be still, don’t speak, listen…

Little by little the grinding of the world’s axle faded away, and the rumble on the cobblestones of the heavy chariot of action, which was losing itself in the distance. And the divine song of silence rose up,

The murmur of bees, the scent of linden… The wind, With its golden lips brushing the soil of the plains… The soft sound of rain with the smell of roses.

One could hear the hammer of the poets ring, sculpting along the flanks of the vessel

The fine majesty of the most artless things,

the grave and joyful life,

With its flutes of gold and its flutes of ebony,

the devout joy, the faith springing up like a fountain from souls

For whom all shadow is bright,…

and the good sorrow, which cradles you and smiles,

From its austere face, from which descends A supernatural clarity,…

and

The serene death with great gentle eyes.

It was a symphony of harmonious and pure voices. Not one had the broad sonority of those trumpets of peoples that Corneille and Hugo once were; but how much deeper and more nuanced was their concert! The richest music of Europe today.

Olivier said to Christophe, who had grown silent:

--- Do you understand now?

Christophe, in his turn, made a sign to him to be quiet. Despite himself, and although he preferred more virile music, he drank in the murmur of the woods and the fountains of the soul that he heard rustling around him. They sang, amid the ephemeral struggles of peoples, the eternal youth of the world, the

Sweet goodness of Beauty.

While humanity,

With howlings of terror and with moans, Turns in circles in a barren, shadowed field,

while millions of beings exhausted themselves tearing bloody shreds of liberty from one another, the springs and woods repeated:

“Free!… Free!… Sanctus, Sanctus…”

They did not, however, fall asleep in a dream of selfish serenity. In the chorus of the poets, tragic voices were not wanting: voices of pride, voices of love, voices of anguish.

It was the drunken hurricane,

With its rude strength or its deep tenderness,

the tumultuous forces, the hallucinated epics of those who sing the fever of crowds, the struggles between human gods, the panting workers,

Faces of ink and gold piercing shadow and mist, Muscular backs stretched out or gathered, suddenly, Around great braziers and enormous anvils…

forging the City to come.

It was, in the blazing and dark light falling on the glaciers of the intellect, the heroic bitterness of solitary souls, gnawing at themselves with a desperate exultation.

Many traits of these idealists seemed to a German more German than French. But all of them loved the “fine speech of France,” and the sap of Greek myths flowed through their poems. The landscapes of France and daily life, by a secret magic, were transformed in their eyes into visions of Attica. One would have said that in these Frenchmen of the twentieth century ancient souls survived, and that they needed to shed their modern trappings in order to find themselves again in their beautiful nakedness.

From the whole of this poetry arose a fragrance of rich civilization ripened over centuries, such as could be found nowhere else in Europe. Once breathed, it could no longer be forgotten. It drew foreign artists from every country in the world. They became French poets, French to the point of intransigence; and classical French art had no more fervent disciples than these Anglo-Saxons, these Flemings, and these Greeks.

Christophe, guided by Olivier, allowed himself to be permeated by the pensive beauty of the Muse of France, while preferring, deep down, to this aristocratic personage --- a little too intellectual for his taste --- a beautiful daughter of the people, simple, healthy, robust, who does not reason so much, but who loves.

The same odor di bellezza rose from all French art, as a scent of ripe strawberries and raspberries rises from autumn woods warmed by the sun. Music was one of those small strawberry plants concealed in the grass, whose breath alone is enough to intoxicate a whole wood. Christophe had at first passed it by without seeing it, accustomed in his own country to thickets of music far more dense, with more brilliant berries. But now the delicate fragrance made him turn back; with Olivier’s help, he discovered amid the stones, the brambles, the dead leaves that had usurped the name of music, the refined and artless art of a handful of musicians. Among the market gardens and factory smoke of democracy, in the heart of the Plaine-Saint-Denis, in a small sacred wood, carefree fauns were dancing. Christophe listened with surprise to their flute song --- ironic and serene, unlike anything he had ever heard:

Beneath the nonchalant grace and apparent dilettantism of those little piano pieces, those songs, that French chamber music which German art had not deigned to glance at, and whose poetic virtuosity Christophe himself had until now neglected, he was beginning to make out a fever of renewal, a restlessness --- unknown on the other side of the Rhine --- with which French musicians were searching the uncultivated soil of their art for the seeds that might fertilize the future. While German musicians stood motionless in the encampments of their fathers, and claimed to halt the world’s evolution at the barrier of their past victories, the world kept moving; and the French, in the lead, threw themselves into discovery; they explored the far reaches of art, the extinguished suns and the suns just kindling, the vanished Greece and the Far East reopening to the light, after centuries of sleep, its wide slanted eyes full of immense dreams. In the music of the West, channeled by the genius of classical order and reason, they lifted the sluices of the ancient modes; they diverted into their Versailles basins all the waters of the universe: popular melodies and rhythms, exotic and antique scales, genres of intervals new or renewed. As, before them, their Impressionist painters had opened a new world to the eye --- Christophers Columbuses of light --- their musicians were bent on conquering the universe of sound; they pressed deeper into the mysterious retreats of Hearing; they discovered new lands in that interior sea. In all likelihood, moreover, they would do nothing with their conquests. Following their habit, they were the world’s advance quartermasters.

Christophe admired the initiative of this music reborn just yesterday, already marching at the avant-garde of art. What valor there was in that elegant, slight little person! He was growing indulgent toward the follies he had once catalogued in it. Only those who do nothing are never mistaken. But the error that strains toward living truth is more fertile and more holy than dead truth.

Whatever the outcome, the effort was astonishing. Olivier showed Christophe the work accomplished over thirty-five years, and the sum of energy expended to raise French music out of the void in which it had slept before 1870: without a symphonic school, without deep culture, without traditions, without masters, without a public; reduced to Berlioz alone, who was dying of suffocation and tedium. And Christophe now felt respect for those who had been the artisans of this national recovery; he no longer thought of quarreling with them over the narrowness of their aesthetic, or even over their lack of genius. They had created far more than a body of work: they had created a musical people. Among all the great laborers who had forged the new French music, one figure was especially dear to him: that of César Franck, who, dying before seeing the victory he had prepared, had, like old Schütz, kept intact within himself, through the darkest years of French art, the treasure of his faith and the genius of his race. A moving apparition: in the midst of pleasure-seeking Paris, this angelic master, this saint of music, preserving through a life of poverty and scorned toil the unalterable serenity of his patient soul, whose resigned smile illumined his music full of goodness.

For Christophe, ignorant of France’s deeper life, this great believing artist, in the midst of an atheist people, was an almost miraculous phenomenon.

But Olivier, gently shrugging his shoulders, asked him in which country of Europe one could find a painter consumed by the breath of the Bible to the equal of the Puritan François Millet; --- a scholar more thoroughly imbued with ardent, humble faith than the lucid Pasteur, prostrated before the idea of the infinite, and when that thought took hold of his mind, “in a harrowing anguish --- as he said himself --- begging mercy of his reason, on the verge of being seized by the sublime madness of Pascal.” A profound Catholicism was no more an obstacle to the heroic realism of the first of these two men than to the passionate reason of the other, who traversed with a sure step, without deviating by a single pace, “the circles of elementary nature, the great night of the infinitely small, the last abysses of being, where life is born.” It was from the provincial people from whom they had come that they had drawn this faith, which still smoldered always in the soil of France, and which the glibness of a few demagogues tried in vain to deny. Olivier knew that faith well: he had carried it in his breast.

He showed Christophe the magnificent movement of Catholic renewal pursued over twenty-five years, the powerful effort of Christian thought in France to embrace reason, freedom, life; those admirable priests who had the courage, as one of them said, “to have themselves baptized as men,” who claimed for Catholicism the right to understand everything and to unite with every loyal thought: for “every loyal thought, even when it errs, is sacred and divine”; those thousands of young Catholics forming the generous vow to build a Christian Republic, free, pure, fraternal, open to all men of good will; and, despite the odious campaigns, the accusations of heresy, the treacheries of right and left --- (especially from the right) --- of which these great Christians were the object, the small intrepid legion advancing through the rough defile that led to the future, their brows serene, resigned to trials, knowing that nothing durable can be built without cementing it with one’s tears and blood.

The same breath of living idealism and passionate liberalism was reviving the other religions in France. A shiver of new life ran through the vast, numbed bodies of Protestantism and Judaism. All were applying themselves, with generous emulation, to creating the religion of a free humanity that would sacrifice nothing --- neither its powers of reason nor its powers of enthusiasm.

This religious exaltation was not the privilege of the religions; it was the soul of the revolutionary movement. There it took on a tragic character. Christophe had until then seen only the low socialism --- that of the politicians, who dangled before the eyes of their hungry clientele the childish and gross dream of Happiness, or, to speak more plainly, of the universal Pleasure which Science, in the hands of Power, would, they said, procure for them. Against this nauseating optimism Christophe saw rising the mystical, frenzied reaction of the elite guiding the workers’ Syndicats in combat. It was a call to “war, which engenders the sublime,” to heroic war, “which alone can restore to a dying world a sense, a purpose, an ideal.” These great Revolutionaries, who vomited “bourgeois, mercantile, pacifist, English-style” socialism, set against it a tragic conception of the universe, “whose law is antagonism,” which lives on sacrifice, perpetual sacrifice, constantly renewed. --- Whether one could doubt that the army these leaders were hurling against the old world truly comprehended this warrior mysticism that applied Kant and Nietzsche simultaneously to violent action, it was nonetheless a striking spectacle: this revolutionary aristocracy, whose intoxicated pessimism, its fury for heroic life, its exalted faith in war and sacrifice, seemed the military and religious ideal of a Teutonic Order or of Japanese Samurai.

Nothing more French, however: it was a French race whose traits had remained immutable for centuries. Through Olivier’s eyes, Christophe rediscovered them in the tribunes and proconsuls of the Convention, in certain of the thinkers, men of action, and reformers of the Ancien Régime. Calvinists, Jansenists, Jacobins, syndicalists --- everywhere the same spirit of pessimistic idealism, struggling with nature, without illusions and without discouragement: --- the iron armature that sustains the nation.

Christophe breathed the breath of these mystical struggles, and he was beginning to understand the grandeur of this fanaticism, in which France brought an intransigent faith and loyalty of which other nations, more familiar with combinazioni, had no idea. Like all foreigners, he had at first allowed himself the pleasure of making easy jokes about the all-too-obvious contradiction between the despotic spirit of the French and the magic formula with which their Republic marked the walls of public buildings. For the first time, he glimpsed the meaning of the belligerent Liberty they adored, which was the formidable sword of Reason. No, for them it was not sonorous rhetoric, a vague ideology, as he had believed. In a people where the needs of reason were the foremost of all, the struggle for reason dominated all others. What did it matter that this struggle seemed absurd to peoples who called themselves practical? Looked at deeply, the struggles for the conquest of the world, for empire, or for money, appear no less vain; and of all of them, in a million years, nothing will remain. But if what gives life its value is the intensity of the struggle, in which all the forces of a being are exalted to the point of its sacrifice to a higher Being, there are few battles that honor life more than the eternal battle waged in France for or against reason. And for those who had tasted its sharp flavor, the apathetic tolerance, so much praised, of the Anglo-Saxons seemed insipid and unmanly. The Anglo-Saxons redeemed it by finding elsewhere the employment of their energy. But their energy was not there. Tolerance is great only when, amid the parties, it is an act of heroism. In the Europe of today, it is more often than not merely indifference, lack of faith, lack of life. The English, adapting a saying of Voltaire to their use, like to boast that “diversity of beliefs has produced more tolerance in England” than did the Revolution in France. --- That is because there is more faith in the France of the Revolution than in the beliefs of England.

From that iron circle of warrior idealism, of the battles of Reason --- as Virgil guided Dante, Olivier led Christophe by the hand to the summit of the mountain, where there stood, silent and serene, the small elite of the truly free French.

No men more free in the world. The serenity of the bird soaring in the motionless sky. At those heights the air was so pure, so rarefied, that Christophe had difficulty breathing. There one saw artists who laid claim to the absolute, unlimited freedom of the dream --- unbridled subjectivists, despising, like Flaubert, “the brutes who believe in the reality of things”; --- thinkers whose undulating and multiple thought, molding itself to the endless flow of moving things, went “flowing and rolling without cease,” settling nowhere, finding nowhere the resistant ground, the rock, and “did not paint being, but painted passage,” as Montaigne said, “the eternal passage, day by day, minute by minute”; --- scientists who knew the void and universal nothingness in which man has fabricated his thought, his God, his art, his science, and who continued to create the world and its laws, that powerful dream of a day. They did not ask science for rest, for happiness, nor even for truth: --- for they doubted of attaining it; --- they loved it for itself, because it was beautiful, alone beautiful, alone real. On the summits of thought, one saw these scientists, passionate Pyrrhonists, indifferent to all suffering, to all disappointment, to almost all reality, listening with closed eyes to the silent concert of souls, the delicate and grandiose harmony of numbers and forms. These great mathematicians, these free philosophers --- the most rigorous and most positive minds in the world --- were at the limit of mystical ecstasy; they hollowed out the void around them, they held themselves suspended over the abyss, they grew drunk on its vertigo; in the boundless night they made the lightning of thought flash, with a sublime elation.

Christophe, leaning beside them, tried to look too; and his head swam. He who believed himself free, because he had freed himself from every law but those of his own conscience, felt, with dismay, how little free he was, beside these Frenchmen emancipated even from every absolute law of the mind, from every categorical imperative, from every reason to live. Why, then, did they live?

--- For the joy of being free, answered Olivier.

But Christophe, losing his footing in that freedom, had come to regret the powerful spirit of discipline, the German authoritarianism; and he said:

--- Your joy is an illusion, the dream of an opium smoker. You intoxicate yourselves with freedom, you forget life. Absolute freedom is madness for the mind, anarchy for the State… Freedom! Who is free, in this world? Who is free in your Republic? --- The scoundrels. You, the best among you, are stifled. You can do nothing now but dream. Soon you will not even be able to dream.

--- No matter! said Olivier. You cannot know, my poor Christophe, the delights of being free. They are well worth paying for with a few risks, a few sufferings, and even death. To be free, to feel that all minds around one are free --- yes, even the scoundrels: it is an inexpressible voluptuousness; it seems as though the soul is swimming in infinite air. She could no longer live elsewhere. What do I care for the security you offer me, the fine order, the impeccable discipline, between the four walls of your imperial barracks? I would die there, asphyxiated. Air! Always more air! Always more freedom!

--- The world needs laws, said Christophe. Sooner or later, the master comes.

But Olivier, mocking, recalled to Christophe the words of old Pierre de l’Estoile:

It lies as little within the power of all terrestrial faculty to prevent the freedom of French speech as to bury the sun in the earth, or to lock it inside a hole.

Christophe was gradually growing accustomed to the air of unbounded freedom. From the summits of French thought, where spirits of pure light stand dreaming, he looked down at his feet along the mountain’s slopes, where the heroic élite that struggles for a living faith --- whatever that faith might be --- strives eternally to reach the peak; --- those who wage the holy war against ignorance, disease, and misery; the fever of invention, the reasoned delirium of the modern Prometheuses and Icaruses who conquer light and blaze pathways through the air; the gigantic struggle of science against the nature it subdues; --- lower down, the small silent company, the men and women of goodwill, the brave and humble hearts, who at the cost of a thousand efforts have made it halfway up and can go no higher, riveted to a difficult and mediocre life, burning themselves in secret through obscure acts of devotion; --- lower still, at the base of the mountain, in the narrow defile between steep slopes, the endless battle, the fanatics of abstract ideas and blind instincts who grapple furiously together without suspecting that anything exists beyond the rocky wall that presses in around them; --- lower still, the marshes and the livestock wallowing in their dung. --- And everywhere, here and there along the mountain’s flanks, the cool flowers of art, the strawberry plants fragrant with music, the song of springs and bird-poets.

And Christophe asked Olivier:

--- Where is your people? I see only élites, good and harmful alike.

Olivier replied:

--- The people? They tend their garden. They don’t concern themselves with us. Every faction of the élite tries to claim them. They care for none of them. Not long ago they still listened, at least out of idle curiosity, to the patter of political showmen. Now they don’t even bother. There are several million who don’t so much as exercise their voting rights. Let the parties batter their heads against each other --- the people couldn’t care less what comes of it, unless in their fighting they trample the fields, in which case it gets angry and thrashes both parties indiscriminately. It doesn’t act, it reacts --- no matter in which direction --- against every excess that disturbs its work and rest. Kings, emperors, republics, priests, freemasons, socialists --- whatever their rulers may be, all it asks of them is protection against the great common dangers: war, disorder, epidemics --- and for the rest, to be left in peace to tend its garden. Deep down, it thinks:

--- Will those creatures never leave me alone?

But those creatures are such fools that they harass the old fellow and won’t rest until he finally takes up his pitchfork and throws them out the door --- as will happen one day with our parliamentarians. In the past, he threw himself into great enterprises. Perhaps it will happen again, though he has long since sown his wild oats; in any case his enthusiasms don’t last long; quickly he returns to his age-old companion: the earth. It is the earth that binds the French to France, far more than the French themselves. So many different peoples have worked side by side for centuries on this good land that it is the earth that unites them --- it is their great love. Through fortune and misfortune they tend it without cease; and everything suits them, even the smallest scraps of soil.

Christophe looked out. As far as the eye could see, along the road, around the marshes, on the rocky slopes, across the battlefields and ruins of action, the mountain, the plain of France --- everything was cultivated and in bloom: it was the great garden of European civilization. Its incomparable charm owed as much to the rich, fertile earth as to the stubborn effort of an untiring people who, for centuries without interruption, had never stopped turning it, seeding it, making it more beautiful.

What a strange people! Everyone calls them fickle; and nothing in them ever changes. Olivier’s trained eye found in Gothic statuary all the types of today’s provinces; just as in the chalk drawings of the Clouets and the Dumoustiers he recognized the weary, ironic faces of society men and intellectuals; or in the Le Nain brothers, the clear spirits and eyes of workers and peasants from the Île-de-France or Picardy. It was also the thought of former times that circulated through the consciences of today. The spirit of Pascal was alive not only among the reasoning religious élite, but in obscure bourgeois households and among revolutionary syndicalists. The art of Corneille and Racine was alive for the people, even more than for the élite, for it was less penetrated by foreign influences; a small Parisian clerk felt himself closer to a tragedy from the reign of King Louis XIV than to a novel by Tolstoy or a play by Ibsen. The songs of the Middle Ages, the old French Tristan, had more kinship with modern Frenchmen than the Tristan of Wagner. The flowers of thought that, since the twelfth century, had never stopped opening in the French parterre --- varied as they were --- were all related to one another, all different from everything that surrounded them.

Christophe knew France too little to grasp fully the constancy of its features. What struck him most in this rich landscape was the extreme parceling of the land. As Olivier had said, everyone had a garden; and each garden, each plot was separated from the others by walls, hedgerows, and enclosures of every kind. Here and there at most were a few common meadows and woods, or the inhabitants of one side of the river found themselves of necessity somewhat closer to each other than to those on the other bank. Each person shut himself up at home; and it seemed that this jealous individualism, rather than weakening after centuries of neighborliness, was stronger than ever. Christophe thought:

--- How alone they are!

Nothing was more characteristic in this regard than the house where Christophe and Olivier lived. It was a small world in miniature, a small honest and hardworking France, with nothing to connect its various elements to one another. A five-story building, an old rickety house that leaned to one side, with its creaking floorboards and worm-eaten ceilings. Rain came in on Christophe and Olivier, who lived under the roof; a decision had finally been made to bring in workmen to patch up the roof as best they could: Christophe could hear them working and talking above his head. There was one in particular who amused and irritated him; the man never stopped talking to himself for a single instant, laughing, singing, chattering nonsense, whistling inanities, carrying on a conversation with himself, all without stopping his work; he couldn’t do anything without announcing what he was doing:

--- I’m going to put in another nail. Where did I put my tool? I’m putting in a nail. Two nails now. One more hammer blow! There we go, old girl, that’s done it…

When Christophe played, the man fell silent for a moment, listened, then went back to whistling louder than ever; at the rousing passages, he marked the beat on the roof with great blows of his hammer. Christophe, exasperated, finally climbed onto a chair and put his head through the skylight of the attic to hurl insults at him. But the moment he caught sight of the man, sitting astride the roof with his good-natured jovial face and his cheek bulging with nails, he burst out laughing, and the man did the same. Christophe, forgetting his grievances, began to chat. It was only at the end that he remembered why he had gone to his window:

--- Ah! by the way, he said, I wanted to ask you: does my piano bother you?

The other assured him it did not; but he begged him to play tunes that weren’t quite so slow, because following the beat was slowing down his work. They parted as good friends. In a quarter of an hour they had exchanged more words than Christophe had managed to say to all the other inhabitants of his building in six months.

There were two apartments per floor, one of three rooms, the other of only two. No servants’ quarters: each household managed on its own, except for the tenants on the ground floor and the first floor, who occupied both apartments joined together.

On the fifth floor, Christophe and Olivier had as their landing neighbor the abbé Corneille, a priest of about forty, highly learned, free in spirit, broad in intelligence, a former professor of exegesis at a grand seminary, and recently censured by Rome for his modernist sympathies. He had accepted his reprimand without truly submitting, but in silence, making no attempt to fight back, refusing the means offered him to publicly expound his doctrines, shunning the limelight, and preferring the ruin of his ideas to any appearance of scandal. Christophe could not manage to understand this type of resigned rebel. He had tried to talk with him; but the priest, very polite, remained cold, spoke of nothing that interested him most, and took his dignity from walling himself in alive.

On the floor below, in the apartment identical to that of the two friends, lived a family named Élie Elsberger: an engineer, his wife, and their two little girls between seven and ten years old --- distinguished, sympathetic people, living enclosed within themselves, mostly out of a false shame about the straitened circumstances they found themselves in. The young woman, who managed her household valiantly, was mortified by it; she would have accepted twice the fatigue if only no one need know --- another sentiment that escaped Christophe entirely. They were of Protestant family, from eastern France. Both had been swept up, some years before, by the hurricane of the Dreyfus affair; they had both thrown themselves into that cause with frenzied passion, like thousands of French people over whom, for seven years, the furious wind of that holy hysteria had blown. They had sacrificed their peace, their position, their social ties; they had broken dear friendships; they had nearly ruined their health. For months they could not sleep, could not eat, they endlessly rehearsed the same arguments with the tenacity of maniacs; they inflamed each other; despite their timidity and their fear of ridicule, they had taken part in demonstrations, spoken at meetings; they came home with their minds haunted, their hearts sick; and they wept together at night. They had spent such a force of enthusiasm and passion in the struggle that when victory came there was not enough left in them to rejoice; they had been left emptied of energy, exhausted for life. So high had the hopes been, so pure the ardor of sacrifice, that the triumph had seemed derisory beside what had been dreamed. For these all-or-nothing souls who had room for only one truth, the transactions of politics, the compromises of their heroes, had been a bitter disappointment. They had watched their companions in struggle --- those people they had believed animated by the same singular passion for justice --- once the enemy was vanquished, rush to the spoils, seize power, grab up honors and positions, and trample justice in their turn. Only a handful of men who remained faithful to their faith --- poor, isolated, rejected by every party and rejecting all of them --- kept to the shadows, apart from one another, gnawed by sadness and neurasthenia, hoping for nothing anymore, worn down by disgust with humanity and the crushing weariness of life. The engineer and his wife were among these defeated.

They made no noise in the building; they had a sickly dread of disturbing their neighbors, all the more since they suffered from being disturbed by them, and took pride in never complaining about it. Christophe felt sorry for the two little girls, whose bursts of gaiety, whose need to shout, jump, and laugh were at every moment suppressed. He adored children, and he lavished a thousand kindnesses on his small neighbors whenever he met them on the staircase. The girls, at first intimidated, had soon grown comfortable with Christophe, who always had some amusing story for them, or some treat; they spoke of him to their parents; and the latter, who had at first viewed these overtures with some suspicion, let themselves be won over by the frank manner of their noisy neighbor, whose piano and devilish racket above their heads they had more than once cursed --- (for Christophe, who suffocated in his room, paced like a bear in a cage.) --- It was no easy matter to get a conversation going. Christophe’s somewhat rough and abrupt manners sometimes gave Élie Elsberger a start. In vain did the engineer try to maintain between the German and himself the wall of reserve behind which he sheltered: it was impossible to resist the impetuous good humor of this man who looked at you with warm, affectionate eyes and no hidden motive. Christophe now and then wrested a few confidences from his neighbor. Elsberger was a curious mind --- courageous and apathetic, discontented and resigned. He had the strength to bear a difficult life with dignity, but not the strength to change it. One might have said he was grateful to it for justifying his pessimism. Just recently, he had been offered a promising position in Brazil, a company to manage; but he had refused it, out of fear of the risks the climate might pose to his family’s health.

--- Well then, leave them, said Christophe. Go on your own and make your fortune for them.

--- Leave them! the engineer had exclaimed. It’s easy to see you have no children.

--- I assure you that if I had, I would think the same way.

--- Never! Never!… And then, leave the country!… No. I’d rather suffer here.

Christophe found it a singular way of loving one’s country and one’s family --- this vegetating together. Olivier understood it:

--- Just think, he said, of the risk of dying over there, on a land that doesn’t know you, far from those you love! Anything is better than that horror. And then, with the few years one has left to live, it isn’t worth making so much effort!…

--- As if one always had to think about dying! said Christophe, shrugging his shoulders. And even if it does happen, isn’t it better to die fighting for the happiness of those you love than to fade out in apathy?

On the same landing, in the small apartment on the fourth floor, lived an electrician named Aubert. --- If this man lived apart from the rest of the house, it was not entirely his own fault. A man who had come up from the working class, he had a passionate desire never to return to it. Small and sickly in appearance, he had a hard brow, a ridge above his eyes whose sharp, direct gaze bored in like an awl; a blond mustache, a mocking mouth, a whistling way of speaking, a muffled voice, a scarf around his neck, a throat always ailing and further irritated by his perpetual habit of smoking, a feverish energy, the constitution of a consumptive. He was a mixture of vanity, irony, and bitterness, all of which covered an enthusiastic, emphatic, naïve spirit, one constantly disappointed by life. The bastard of some bourgeois he had never known, raised by a mother it was impossible to respect, he had seen many sad and sordid things in his early childhood. He had tried all manner of trades, traveled widely through France. With an admirable determination to educate himself, he had shaped himself entirely alone, at the cost of extraordinary effort; he read everything: history, philosophy, the Decadent poets; he was up to date on everything: theater, exhibitions, concerts; he had a touching reverence for art, for literature, for bourgeois thought --- they fascinated him. He was steeped in the vague and burning ideology that had set the bourgeoisie delirious in the early days of the Revolution. He believed with certainty in the infallibility of reason, in unlimited progress --- quo non ascendam? --- in the imminent arrival of happiness on earth, in all-powerful science, in Humanity-as-God, and in France, eldest daughter of Humanity. He had an enthusiastic and credulous anticlericalism that led him to equate religion --- above all Catholicism --- with obscurantism, and to see the priest as the born enemy of the light. Socialism, individualism, chauvinism collided in his head. He was humanitarian in spirit, despotic by temperament, and anarchist in practice. Proud, he was aware of the gaps in his education, and in conversation he was very cautious; he made use of everything said in his presence, but he refused to ask for guidance --- it humiliated him; and yet, whatever his intelligence and skill, they could not entirely substitute for education. He had taken it into his head to write. Like so many people in France who have had no formal schooling, he had a gift for style and a keen eye; but his thinking was muddled. He had shown a few pages of his compositions to an important journalist he admired, who had laughed at him. Deeply humiliated, he had not spoken to anyone since about what he was writing. But he continued to write: it was for him a need to pour himself out and a proud joy. Inwardly, he was very satisfied with his eloquent pages and his philosophical reflections, which were not worth a sou. And he set no store at all by his observations of real life, which were excellent. He had the obsession of believing himself a philosopher and wanting to write social theater, novels of ideas. He resolved insoluble questions without effort and rediscovered America at every turn. When he later found that it had already been discovered, he was disappointed, humiliated, a little bitter; he was not far from blaming injustice and intrigue for it. He burned with a love of glory and an ardor for self-sacrifice that suffered from finding no outlet and no direction. His dream would have been to be a great man of letters, to belong to that scribbling elite which appeared to him clothed in supernatural prestige. Despite his wish to deceive himself, he had too much good sense and irony not to know he had no chance of that. But he would at least have liked to live in that atmosphere of art and bourgeois thought which from a distance seemed to him luminous and free of all mediocrity. This very innocent desire had the unfortunate effect of making the company of those among whom his station obliged him to live feel burdensome. And since bourgeois society, which he tried to approach, kept its door closed to him, it followed that he saw no one. So Christophe had no effort to make in order to get acquainted with him. He had rather, quite quickly, to protect himself from him: otherwise Aubert would have been at Christophe’s place more often than at his own. He was too glad to have found an artist with whom to talk about music, theater, and so on. But Christophe, as one can imagine, found no equal interest in it: with a man from the working class, he would have preferred to talk about the working class. And that was precisely what the other neither wished to do nor knew how to do anymore.

As one descended to the lower floors, relations between Christophe and the other tenants naturally grew more distant. In any case, one would have needed some magic password, a Sesame, open!, to gain entry to the people on the third floor. --- On one side lived two women who had hypnotized themselves into a grief already old: Mme Germain, a woman of thirty-five who had lost her husband and her little daughter, and who lived as a recluse with her mother-in-law, aged and devout. --- On the other side of the landing was installed an enigmatic figure, of indeterminate age, somewhere between fifty and sixty, with a girl of about ten. He was bald, had a fine, well-kept beard, a gentle manner of speaking, distinguished manners, aristocratic hands. He was called M. Watelet. He was said to be an anarchist, a revolutionary, a foreigner --- from what country no one knew quite sure, Russian or Belgian. In reality, he was French, from the north, and was no longer much of a revolutionary; but he lived on his past reputation. He had been caught up in the Commune of ‘71, condemned to death; he had escaped, he himself scarcely knew how; and for about ten years he had lived here and there across Europe. He had witnessed so much villainy during the Parisian upheaval, and afterward, and in exile as well, and after his return, among his old companions who had rallied to power, and also in the ranks of every revolutionary party, that he had withdrawn from all of it, keeping his convictions peacefully to himself, unstained and useless. He read a great deal, wrote a little --- gently incendiary books --- and kept (so it was said) the threads of very distant anarchist movements in India or the Far East, occupied himself with universal revolution, and at the same time with researches no less universal but of a more mild-mannered appearance: a universal language, a new method for the popular teaching of music. He kept to himself entirely in the house; he was content to exchange with those he met on the stairs salutations of excessive politeness. He did, however, consent to say a few words to Christophe about his musical method. It was precisely what could interest Christophe least: the signs of his thought mattered little to him; in whatever language, he would always have managed to express it. But the other would not let it go, and continued explaining his system with a gentle stubbornness; of the rest of his life, Christophe could learn nothing. So he no longer stopped when he crossed his path on the staircase, except to look at the little girl who always accompanied him: a small, pale, fair-haired child, of thin blood, with blue eyes, a profile of somewhat dry outline, a frail body, always neatly dressed, sickly-looking and not very expressive. He believed, as everyone did, that she was Watelet’s daughter. She was a little orphan, a worker’s child, whom Watelet had adopted at the age of four or five, after the death of her parents in an epidemic. He had conceived an almost boundless love for the poor, especially for poor children. It was in him a mystical tenderness, in the manner of Vincent de Paul. As he distrusted all official charity, and knew what to think of philanthropic associations, he insisted on practicing charity alone; he hid it from others: he found in it a secret joy. He had taught himself medicine in order to make himself useful. One day, having entered the home of a worker in the neighborhood, he had found sick people, and had begun to care for them; he had some medical knowledge, and he had undertaken to complete it. He could not see a child suffer: it tore his heart. But then, what exquisite joy when he had managed to snatch one of those poor little beings from illness, when a pale smile reappeared for the first time on a gaunt face! Watelet’s heart melted. Those were moments of paradise. They made him forget the troubles he too often had with those he helped. For it was rare that they showed him much gratitude. Moreover, the concierge was furious at seeing so many individuals with dirty feet climbing her staircase: she complained bitterly. The landlord, alarmed by these gatherings of anarchists, made objections. Watelet was thinking of leaving the apartment; but it pained him to do so: he had his little habits; he was gentle and tenacious, and let people talk.

Christophe gained a little of his trust through the affection he showed children. That was the bond they shared. Christophe could not encounter the little girl without a pang at his heart: for, without being able to say why, through one of those mysterious resemblances of form that instinct perceives immediately, outside of consciousness, the child reminded him of the little daughter of Sabine, his first and distant love, that fleeting shadow whose silent grace had never faded from his heart. So he took an interest in the pale little girl, whom one never saw jumping or running, whose voice one almost never heard, who had no friends her own age, who was always alone, silent, amusing herself quietly with games that barely moved, with a doll or a piece of wood, moving her lips very softly to tell herself something. She was affectionate and a little indifferent; there was something foreign and uncertain about her; but her adoptive father could not see it, he loved her too much. Alas! does not that uncertain quality, that foreignness, always exist, even in the children of our own flesh?… --- Christophe tried to introduce the little solitary to the engineer’s daughters. But from Elsberger just as from Watelet, he met with a refusal, polite but categorical. These people seemed to make a point of honor of burying themselves alive, each in a separate compartment. At a stretch, each would have consented to help the other; but each was afraid the other might think it was he who needed help; and since on both sides the self-regard was the same --- and equally precarious the situation --- there was no hope that either would be the first to extend a hand to the other.

The large apartment on the second floor remained almost always empty. The owner of the building had reserved it for himself, and was never there. He was a former merchant who had abruptly stopped his business the moment he reached a certain figure of fortune he had set for himself. He spent the greater part of the year away from Paris: in winter, at some hotel on the Côte d’Azur; in summer, at some beach in Normandy, living the life of a small investor who gives himself at little expense the illusion of luxury by watching the luxury of others, and leading, like them, a useless life.

The small apartment was rented to a childless couple: M. and Mme Arnaud. The husband, who was between forty and forty-five, was a teacher at a lycée. Overwhelmed with class hours, papers to correct, and tutoring, he had never managed to write his thesis; he had ended by giving it up. The wife, ten years younger, was pleasant, excessively timid. Both were intelligent, educated, fond of each other; they knew no one and never left their home. The husband had no time. The wife had too much time; but she was a good, quiet woman who fought her bouts of melancholy when they came, and above all kept them hidden, occupying herself as best she could, trying to learn, taking notes for her husband, copying her husband’s notes, mending her husband’s clothes, making her own dresses and hats herself. She would have liked to go to the theater from time to time; but Arnaud cared little for it --- he was too tired in the evenings. And she resigned herself.

Their greatest joy was music. They both adored it. He didn’t know how to play, for that matter; and she didn’t dare, though she could; when she played in front of someone, even her husband, she seemed like a child picking out notes. And yet it was enough for them; Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, whom they stumbled through haltingly, were friends to them; they knew the details of these composers’ lives, and their sufferings filled the Arnauds with love and compassion. Fine books too, good books read together, were a happiness. But there are few enough of those in today’s literature: writers don’t concern themselves with people who can bring them neither reputation, nor pleasure, nor money --- people like these humble readers, never seen in society, who write nothing, who know only how to love and keep silent. This quiet light of art, which in those honest and devout hearts took on an almost supernatural quality, along with their shared affection, was enough to keep them living in peace, fairly happy, if a little sad --- (which is no contradiction) --- very much alone, a little bruised. Both of them were far above their station. M. Arnaud was full of ideas; but he had neither the time nor the courage anymore to set them down. Too much effort was required to place articles, to publish books: it wasn’t worth the trouble; empty vanity! It was so little beside the thinkers he loved! He loved great works of art too much to want to make art himself: he would have found such a claim impertinent and absurd. He saw his role as spreading the work of others. So he shared his ideas with his students: they would turn them into books later --- without naming him, of course. --- No one spent as much money as he did on subscriptions to publications. It is always the poor who are most generous: they buy their books; others would feel disgraced if they didn’t manage to get them for free. Arnaud ruined himself on books: it was his weakness --- his vice. He was ashamed of it and hid it from his wife. She never reproached him for it, though she would have done the same. --- And alongside all this, they were always making splendid plans to save money for a trip to Italy --- a trip they would never take, as they well knew; and they were the first to laugh at their inability to hold on to money. Arnaud consoled himself. His dear wife was enough for him, and his life of work and inner joy. Wasn’t that enough for her too? --- She said: yes. She didn’t dare say that it would have pleased her for her husband to have some reputation, a little of which might reflect on her, might brighten her life, might bring some comfort: inner joy is a beautiful thing; but a little light from outside also does a great deal of good, from time to time!… But she said nothing, because she was timid; and besides, she knew that even if he had wanted to seek a reputation, he might not have been able to: too late for that now!… Their greatest regret was having no child. They hid it from each other; and this only made them tenderer toward one another: it was as though these poor souls felt they had something to be forgiven for, one by the other. Mme Arnaud was kind and warm-hearted; she would have been glad to become friends with Mme Elsberger. But she didn’t dare: no advances were made to her. As for Christophe, both husband and wife would have asked nothing better than to know him: they were drawn in by his distant music. But for nothing in the world would they have taken the first step: that would have seemed to them indiscreet.

The entire first floor was occupied by M. and Mme Félix Weil. Wealthy Jews, without children, who spent six months of the year in the country around Paris. Although they had lived in the house for twenty years --- (they stayed on out of habit, though it would have been easy for them to find an apartment more in keeping with their means) --- they always seemed like transients passing through. They had never spoken a word to any of their neighbors, and no one knew any more about them than on the first day. That was no reason to refrain from judging them: on the contrary. They were not liked. And no doubt they did nothing to change that. Yet they deserved to be known a little better: both of them were excellent people, of remarkable intelligence. The husband, around sixty years old, was an Assyriologist, well known for celebrated excavations in Central Asia; open and curious of mind, like most of those of his race, he did not confine himself to his speciality; he took an interest in an infinite variety of things: the fine arts, social questions, every manifestation of contemporary thought. They were not enough to occupy him: for they all amused him, and none consumed him. He was very intelligent --- too intelligent, too free of all attachment, always ready to tear down with one hand what he had built with the other; for he built a great deal: works and theories; he was a hard worker; out of habit, out of mental hygiene, he continued to plow his furrow in science patiently and quite deeply, without believing in the usefulness of what he was doing. He had always had the misfortune of being rich: which meant he had never known the incentive of struggling for a living; and since his campaigns in the East, of which he had tired after a few years, he had accepted no official position. Outside his own work, however, he occupied himself perceptively with current questions, social reforms of a practical and immediate nature, the reorganization of public education in France; he launched ideas, set currents in motion, put great intellectual machines into operation --- and grew disgusted with them almost at once. More than once he had scandalized people whom his arguments had brought round to a cause, by offering the most biting and discouraging critique of that very cause. He didn’t do it on purpose: it was a need of his nature; very nervous and ironic, he had difficulty tolerating the absurdities of things and people, which he saw with a discomfiting clarity. And since there is no fine cause, no good person, which, seen from a certain angle or under a certain magnification, does not present some ridiculous side, there was none that his irony respected for long. This was not well suited to winning him friends. And yet he sincerely wished to do good to people; he did do good; but little credit was given him for it; even those he had helped would not forgive him, in their hearts, for having seen the ridiculous in them. He needed not to see people too closely in order to love them. Not that he was a misanthrope. He was too uncertain of himself for that role. He was timid before the world he mocked; deep down, he was not sure the world was not right and he wrong; he tried to avoid appearing too different from others, and studied to imitate their outward manners and opinions. But do what he would, he could not stop himself from judging them; he had a sharp sensitivity to any exaggeration, to everything that was not simple; and he could not hide his irritation. He was most sensitive to the absurdities of Jews, because he knew them best; and because, despite his freedom of mind which admitted no racial barriers, he often ran up against those that other races erected against him --- and because he himself, in spite of everything, felt out of place in Christian modes of thought --- he withdrew quietly, with dignity, into his ironic labors and into the deep affection he bore his wife.

The worst of it was that she herself was not immune to his irony. She was a good, active woman, eager to make herself useful, always occupied with charitable works. Of a far less complex nature than her husband, she was wrapped up in her moral goodwill, and in the somewhat rigid, intellectual, but very high-minded idea she held of duty. Her whole life --- rather melancholy, without children, without great joy, without great love --- rested on this moral belief, which was above all a determination to believe. Her husband’s irony had not failed to seize on the element of willful self-deception in that faith, and --- (he couldn’t help it) --- to amuse himself at her expense. He was woven of contradictions. He had a sense of duty no less exalted than his wife’s, and at the same time a pitiless need to analyze, to criticize, to see through things, which led him to shred and dismantle his own moral imperative. He did not see that he was pulling the ground out from under his wife’s feet; he discouraged her in a cruel way. When he felt it, he suffered more than she did; but the harm was done. They continued no less faithfully to love each other, to work, and to do good. But the wife’s cold dignity was no better received than the husband’s irony; and since they were too proud to proclaim the good they did, or the desire they had to do it, their reserve was taken for indifference and their solitude for selfishness. And the more they felt that this was how they were regarded, the more carefully they would have kept from doing anything to correct it. In reaction against the gross indiscretion of so many others of their race, they were victims of an excess of reserve in which a great deal of pride took shelter.

As for the ground floor, raised a few steps above the small garden, it was occupied by Commandant Chabran, a retired officer of colonial artillery; this vigorous, still-young man had distinguished himself in campaigns in the Sudan and Madagascar; then, suddenly, he had thrown it all over, buried himself here, wanting no more to do with the army, spending his days turning over his garden beds, struggling without success through flute exercises, grumbling at politics, and snapping at his daughter, whom he adored: a young woman of thirty, not very pretty but pleasant, who devoted herself to him and had never married so as not to leave him. Christophe often saw them from his window; and naturally, he paid more attention to the daughter than to the father. She spent part of her afternoons in the garden, sewing, daydreaming, fussing with the flowers, always in good humor with her grumbling old father. You could hear her calm, clear voice responding with a laugh to the growling voice of the Commandant, whose footsteps dragged endlessly along the gravel paths; then he would go in, and she remained seated on a garden bench, sewing for hours without moving or speaking, smiling vaguely, while inside the house the idle officer battled away at his thin, reedy flute, or, for a change, made a wheezy harmonium squeal clumsily --- to Christophe’s great amusement or irritation, depending on the day.

All these people lived side by side, in the house with the enclosed garden, sheltered from the winds of the world, hermetically sealed even from one another. Christophe alone, with his need to reach outward and his overflowing life, enveloped them all --- without their knowing it --- in his vast sympathy, blind and clear-sighted at once. He did not understand them. He had no means of understanding them. He lacked Olivier’s psychological intelligence. But he loved them. By instinct, he put himself in their place. Slowly there rose in him, through mysterious emanations, the dim awareness of these near and distant lives: the numbing grief of the woman in mourning; the stoic silence of proud thoughts --- of the priest, the Jew, the engineer, the revolutionary; the pale, gentle flame of tenderness and faith that, without a sound, was consuming the two hearts of the Arnauds; the simple man’s naïve aspiration toward the light; the suppressed revolt and futile action that the officer stifled within himself; and the resigned calm of the young woman who dreamed in the shadow of the lilacs. But this silent music of souls, Christophe alone could penetrate it; they did not hear it; each one was absorbed in his own sadness and his own dreams.

All of them worked, moreover: the old skeptical scholar, the pessimistic engineer, the priest, the anarchist, all these proud or despairing souls. And on the roof, the mason was singing.

Around the house, Christophe found in the best of them the same moral solitude --- even when they gathered together.

Olivier had introduced him to a small review where he wrote. It was called Ésope, and had taken as its motto this quotation from Montaigne:

« On mit Æsope en vente avec deux autres esclaves. L’acheteur s’enquit du premier ce qu’il sçavoit faire ; celuy-là, pour se faire valoir, respondit monts et merveilles ; le deuxiesme en respondit autant de soy ou plus. Quand ce fut Æsope, et qu’on lui eut aussi demandé ce qu’il sçavoit faire : --- Rien, fit-il, car ceux-cy ont tout préoccupé ; ils sçavent tout. »

A pure attitude of disdainful reaction against “the impudence,” as Montaigne had already written, “of those who make profession of knowledge, and their unmeasured arrogance!” The supposed skeptics of the review Ésope were, at bottom, among those whose faith was most firmly tempered. But in the public eye, this mask of irony and haughty ignorance naturally had little appeal; it was designed to confound. You win the people to your side only when you bring them words that are simple, clear, vigorous, and certain. They prefer a robust lie to an anemic truth. Skepticism pleases them only when it conceals some good hearty naturalism, or some form of Christian idolatry. The disdainful Pyrrhonism in which Ésope wrapped itself could be understood only by a small number of minds --- alme sdegnose --- who knew their own hidden solidity. That strength was lost to action, to life.

They cared nothing for it. The more France democratized herself, the more her thought, her art, her science seemed to grow aristocratic. Science, sheltered behind its specialized languages, deep within its sanctuary, veiled three times over, with only the initiated able to lift those veils, was less accessible than in the days of Buffon and the Encyclopedists. Art --- that art, at least, which respected itself and worshipped beauty --- was no less hermetic; it held the people in contempt. Even among writers less concerned with beauty than with action, among those who placed moral ideas above aesthetic ones, a strange aristocratic spirit often held sway. They seemed more occupied with preserving the purity of their inner flame than with communicating it to others. One would have said they did not care to see their ideas prevail, only to affirm them.

And yet there were some among them who dabbled in popular art. Among the most sincere, some threw into their works anarchist, destructive ideas --- future truths, still distant, which might perhaps be beneficent in a century, or in twenty, but which, for the present, corroded the soul and burned it; others wrote bitter, ironic plays, without illusions, deeply sad. Christophe found himself completely unstrung for two days after reading them.

--- And this is what you give to the people? he asked, filled with pity for those poor souls who came to forget their troubles for a few hours, and were offered these gloomy entertainments. It’s enough to put them in the ground!

--- Don’t worry, Olivier replied, laughing. The people don’t come.

--- And they’re absolutely right not to! You’re all mad. Do you want to strip them of every will to live?

--- Why not? Shouldn’t they learn, as we have, to see the sadness of things, and yet carry on with their duty without faltering?

--- Without faltering? I doubt it. But certainly without pleasure. And no one gets very far once you’ve killed the pleasure of living in them.

--- What can one do? One has no right to distort the truth.

--- But neither does one have the right to tell all of it to everyone.

--- And it’s you who say this? You who never stop demanding truth, you who claim to love it more than anything in the world!

--- Yes, truth for myself and for those whose backs are strong enough to bear it. But for the others, it is cruelty and stupidity. Yes, I see that now. In my own country, it would never have occurred to me; back there in Germany, they don’t have this sickness of truth the way you do --- they cling too hard to life; they prudently see only what they wish to see. I love you for not being that way: you are brave, you play it straight. But you are inhuman. When you think you’ve unearthed a truth, you release it into the world without troubling yourself over whether, like the foxes in the Bible with their tails on fire, it might set the world ablaze. That you prefer truth to your own happiness --- I esteem you for it. But at the cost of others’ happiness… stop right there! You take too many liberties. One must love truth more than oneself, but one’s neighbor more than truth.

--- Must we then lie to him?

Christophe answered him with the words of Goethe:

--- “We should express, among the highest truths, only those which can serve the good of the world. The others we must keep within ourselves; like the soft glow of a hidden sun, they will shed their light on all our actions.”

But these scruples barely touched them. They never asked whether the bow they held in their hands was launching the idea or death, or both together. They were too intellectual. They lacked love. When a Frenchman has ideas, he wants to impose them on others. When he has none, he wants to all the same. And when he sees that he cannot, he loses interest in others, he loses interest in acting. This was the principal reason why this elite took so little part in politics, except to moan and complain. Each person shut himself up in his own faith, or in his own lack of faith.

Many attempts had been made to combat this individualism and try to form groups among these men; but most of these groups had immediately dissolved into literary chattering or ridiculous factions. The best ones cancelled one another out. There were some excellent men among them, full of strength and conviction, men made to rally and guide the weak-willed. But each had his own flock, and would not consent to merge it with another’s. They were thus a handful of small reviews, unions, associations, which possessed every moral virtue but one: self-abnegation; for none of them would yield to the others; and, thus quarreling over the crumbs of an audience of decent people, few in number and fewer still in means, they vegetated for a time, bloodless, starving; and they fell at last, never to rise again, not under the blows of the enemy, but --- (most lamentable of all!) --- under their own. --- The various professions --- men of letters, playwrights, poets, prose writers, professors, schoolteachers, journalists --- formed a multitude of small castes, which themselves subdivided into yet smaller castes, each closed to the others. No mutual penetration. There was unanimity on nothing in France, except at very rare moments when that unanimity took on an epidemic character, and was, in general, wrong: for it was a sickness. A wild individualism reigned in every order of French activity: as much in scientific work as in commerce, where it prevented merchants from joining together, from organizing employers’ associations. This individualism was not abundant and overflowing, but stubborn, turned inward. To be alone, to owe nothing to others, to keep from mixing with others, for fear of sensing one’s inferiority in their company, not to disturb the tranquillity of one’s proud isolation: this was the secret thought of nearly all these people who founded “alternative” reviews, “alternative” theaters, “alternative” groups; reviews, theaters, groups that most often had no other reason for existing than the desire not to be with others, the inability to unite with others in any common action or thought, distrust of others --- when it was not partisan hostility, which set against each other the very men most worthy of understanding one another.

Even when minds that respected each other found themselves associated in a common task, as Olivier and his comrades on the review Ésope, they always seemed to remain on their guard with one another; they had none of that expansive good-naturedness so common in Germany, where it easily becomes burdensome. In this group of young men, there was one in particular who drew Christophe, because he sensed in him an exceptional force: he was a writer, inflexible in logic and will, passionate about moral ideas, unyielding in his manner of serving them, ready to sacrifice the whole world and himself for their sake; he had founded and nearly single-handedly edited a review to defend them; he had sworn to impose on Europe and on France herself the idea of a France that was pure, heroic, and free; he firmly believed that the world would one day recognize that he was writing one of the most intrepid pages in the history of French thought --- and he was not wrong. Christophe would have liked to know him better and to form a friendship with him. But there was no way. Although Olivier had frequent dealings with him, they saw each other very little and only on business; they said nothing intimate to each other; at most they exchanged a few abstract ideas; or rather --- (to be exact, for there was no exchange, and each kept his own ideas) --- they monologued together, each on his own side. And yet these were companions in struggle, who knew each other’s worth.

This reserve had multiple causes, difficult to discern even in their own eyes. First, an excess of critical intelligence, which sees too clearly the irreducible differences between minds, and an excess of intellectualism which attaches too much importance to those differences; a lack of that powerful and naive sympathy which needs, in order to live, to love, to spend its surplus of love. Perhaps too, the crushing weight of the task, a life too difficult, the fever of thought, which, when evening came, left no strength to enjoy friendly conversation. And finally, that terrible feeling which a Frenchman fears to admit but which too often rumbles within him: that one is not of the same race --- that one belongs to different races, established in different eras on the soil of France, which, while allied, have few thoughts in common and would do well not to dwell on it, in the common interest. And above all, the intoxicating and dangerous passion for liberty, which is such that once one has tasted it, there is nothing one will not sacrifice to it. This free solitude is all the more precious for having been bought through years of trial. The elite has taken refuge there to escape from the enslavement of the mediocre. It is a reaction against the tyranny of religious or political blocs, of the enormous weights that crush the individual in France: the family, opinion, the State, hidden associations, parties, coteries, schools. Imagine a prisoner who, to escape, must leap over twenty walls enclosing him. If he manages it to the end, without breaking his neck, and above all without losing heart, he must be very strong. A harsh school for the free will! But those who have passed through it retain, all their lives, a rigid way of being, a mania for independence, and the impossibility of ever merging with the souls of others.

Alongside the solitude of pride, there was solitude by renunciation. How many decent people in France whose entire goodness, pride, and affection ended in withdrawing from life! A thousand reasons, good and bad, prevented them from acting. In some it was obedience, timidity, the force of habit. In others, self-consciousness, fear of ridicule, fear of being seen, of being submitted to the judgment of the gallery, of meddling in what was not their business, of having disinterested acts attributed to interested motives. This one would take no part in political and social struggle; that one turned away from philanthropic work, because they saw too many people engaged in it without conscience or common sense, and because they feared being lumped together with those charlatans and fools. In nearly all of them, disgust, fatigue, fear of action, of suffering, of ugliness, of stupidity, of risk, of responsibility --- the terrible “What’s the point?” that annihilates the goodwill of so many Frenchmen today. They are too intelligent --- (with an intelligence lacking in broad sweeping strokes) --- they see too clearly all the reasons for and against. Lack of strength. Lack of life. When one is very much alive, one does not ask why one lives; one lives to live --- because living is a magnificent thing!

And finally, in the best of them, there was a combination of sympathetic, middling qualities: a certain philosophy, a moderation of desires, an affectionate attachment to family, to the soil, to moral habits, a discretion, a fear of imposing on others or troubling them, a reticence of feeling, a perpetual reserve. All these lovable and charming traits could very well be reconciled, in certain cases, with serenity, with courage, with inner joy; but they were not without connection to the thinning of the blood, the progressive decline of French vitality.

The graceful garden below, at the foot of the house of Christophe and Olivier, enclosed by its four walls, was the symbol of this small France. It was a patch of greenery, closed to the outside world. Sometimes, only, the great wind from without, which descended in spiraling gusts, brought to the young woman who was dreaming there the breath of distant fields and the wide earth.

Now that Christophe was beginning to catch a glimpse of France’s hidden resources, he felt indignant that she let herself be oppressed by the riffraff. The half-light into which this silent elite was retreating felt suffocating to him. Stoicism is a fine thing for those who have no teeth left. He, for his part, needed the open air, the great public, the sunlight of glory, the love of thousands of souls, to embrace all those he loved, to pulverize his enemies, to struggle and to conquer.

--- You can do it, said Olivier. You are strong, you are made to conquer, by your faults --- (forgive me!) --- as much as by your qualities. You have the good fortune of not belonging to too aristocratic a race or people. Action does not repel you. You would even be capable, if need be, of being a politician. --- And besides, you have the inestimable happiness of writing in music. You are not understood, you can say everything. If people knew the contempt for them that lies in your music, and your faith in what they deny, and that perpetual hymn in honor of what they strain to kill, they would not forgive you, and you would be so thoroughly hampered, pursued, harassed by them that you would lose the best of your strength in fighting them; and when you had gotten the better of them, you would have no breath left to accomplish your work; your life would be over. The great men who triumph benefit from a misunderstanding. They are admired for the opposite of what they are.

--- Bah! said Christophe. You don’t know the cowardice of your masters. At first I thought you were alone, and I excused your inaction. But in reality you are a whole army, all thinking alike. You are a hundred times stronger than those who oppress you, you are worth a thousand times more, and you let yourselves be cowed by their effrontery! I don’t understand you. You have the most beautiful country, you are gifted with the finest intelligence, the most humane sense of things, and you do nothing with any of it, you let yourselves be dominated, outraged, trampled underfoot by a handful of scoundrels. Be yourselves, for heaven’s sake! Don’t wait for heaven to help you, or for a Napoleon! Rise up, unite. Everyone, to work! Sweep your house clean.

But Olivier, shrugging his shoulders with an ironic weariness, said:

--- Come to blows with them? No, that is not our role; we have better things to do. Violence repels me. I know too well what would happen. All the old embittered failures, the young royalist simpletons, the odious apostles of brutality and hatred would seize upon my action and dishonor it. Surely you would not have me take up the old war cry of hate: Fuori Barbari! or: France for the French!

--- Why not? said Christophe.

--- No, those are not French words. People try in vain to spread them among us under the guise of patriotism. That may suit barbarous nations! Ours was not made for hatred. Our genius does not assert itself by negating or destroying others, but by absorbing them. Let the troubled North come to us, and the garrulous South…

--- and the venomous East?

--- and the venomous East: we will absorb it like the rest; we have absorbed far worse! I laugh at the triumphant airs it puts on, and at the pusillanimity of certain people of my own race. It thinks it has conquered us; it struts along our boulevards, in our newspapers, our reviews, on our theater stages, on our political stages. The fool! It is the one being conquered. It will eliminate itself in due course, after having nourished us. Gaul has a strong stomach; in twenty centuries she has digested more than one civilization. We are proof against poison… That fear may be well enough for you Germans! You must be pure, or cease to be. But for us, it is not a question of purity --- it is one of universality. You have an emperor; Great Britain calls itself an empire; but in truth it is our Latin genius that is imperial. We are citizens of the City-Universe. Urbis. Orbis.

--- All that is fine, said Christophe, as long as the nation is healthy and in the fullness of its vigor. But a day comes when its energy fails; and then it risks being submerged by that foreign influx. Between us --- doesn’t it seem to you that day has come?

--- People have been saying so for centuries! And our history has always given the lie to those fears. We have come through far worse trials, since the time of the Maid, when packs of wolves prowled through a deserted Paris. The whole overflow of immorality, the rush toward pleasure, the spinelessness, the anarchy of the present hour --- none of it frightens me. Patience! Whoever would endure must endure. I know very well that a moral reaction will come afterward --- which, moreover, will not be much better, and will probably lead to comparable follies: those who live today on the public corruption will not be the last to trumpet that reaction!… But what does it matter to us? All these movements do not touch the true people of France. A rotten fruit does not rot the tree. It falls. Besides, all those people are so little part of the nation! What do we care whether they live or die? Am I to stir myself to form leagues and revolutions against them? The present evil is not the work of any regime. It is the leprosy of luxury, the parasites of intellectual and material wealth. They will pass.

--- After they have gnawed you down.

--- With such a race, despair is forbidden. There is in it such a hidden virtue, such a force of light and of active idealism, that it communicates itself even to those who exploit and ruin it. Even the greedy politicians attached to their own interests alone fall under its spell. The most mediocre, once in power, are seized by the grandeur of its Destiny; it lifts them above themselves; it passes the torch from hand to hand; one after another, they take up the sacred struggle against the night. The genius of their people sweeps them along; willing or not, they fulfill the law of the God they deny --- Gesta Dei per Francos… Dear country, dear country, I will never doubt you! And even if your trials were mortal, that would be all the more reason for me to keep, to the very end, the pride of our mission in the world. I will not have my France shut herself up fearfully in a sickroom, sealed against every breath of outside air. I have no wish to prolong a sickly existence. When one has been great as we have been, one must die rather than cease to be so. Let the thought of the world pour into ours! I do not fear it. The flood will drain away of itself, after it has enriched my land with its silt.

--- My poor friend, said Christophe, it is not cheerful, in the meantime. And where will you be when your France emerges from the Nile? Would it not be better to struggle? You would risk nothing more than the defeat to which you condemn yourself for your entire life.

--- I would risk far more than defeat, said Olivier. I would risk losing the calm of my mind; and that is what I hold dearer than victory. I do not want to hate. I want to do justice even to my enemies. I want to keep, amid the passions, the lucidity of my gaze --- to understand everything and to love everything.

But Christophe, for whom this love of life detached from life seemed little different from resignation to dying, felt stirring within him, like old Empedocles, a hymn to Hatred and to Love the brother of Hatred --- fecund Love, that plows and sows the earth. He did not share Olivier’s calm fatalism; and, less confident than he in the endurance of a race that did not defend itself, he would have wished to call upon all the healthy forces of the nation, a mass rising of all honest men throughout all of France.

As a single minute of love reveals more about a person than months spent observing them, Christophe had learned more about France in eight days of intimacy with Olivier --- scarcely leaving the house --- than in a year of wandering through Paris and attentively frequenting intellectual and political salons. In the midst of the universal anarchy in which he felt himself losing his footing, a soul like his friend’s had appeared to him truly as “the Île de France” --- the island of reason and serenity, in the middle of the sea. The inner peace that dwelt in Olivier was all the more striking because it had no intellectual support, --- because the circumstances in which he lived were difficult --- (he was poor, alone, and his country in decline) --- because his body was weak, sickly, and at the mercy of his nerves. This serenity did not seem to be the fruit of a willful effort straining to achieve it --- (he had little willpower); --- it came from the depths of his being and his race. In many others around Olivier, Christophe caught the distant gleam of that σωφροσύνη --- “the silent calm of the motionless sea” --- and he, who knew the stormy and troubled depths of his own soul, and that it took all the force of his will to maintain the equilibrium of his powerful nature, admired, more than anyone, that veiled harmony.

The spectacle of hidden France was completing the overthrow of all his ideas about the French character. Instead of a cheerful, sociable, carefree and brilliant people, he saw willful, concentrated spirits, isolated from one another, wrapped in an appearance of optimism as in a luminous haze, yet bathing in a profound and serene pessimism, possessed of fixed ideas and intellectual passions --- souls unshakeable, which it would have been easier to destroy than to change. This was, no doubt, only a French elite; but Christophe wondered where it had drawn this stoicism and this faith. Olivier answered him:

--- From defeat. It is you, my dear Christophe, who reforged us. Ah! it was not without pain. You have no idea of the somber atmosphere in which we grew up, in a humiliated and wounded France that had just looked death in the face, and that always felt the murderous threat of force weighing upon her. Our life, our genius, our French civilization, the greatness of ten centuries --- we felt that it lay in the hands of a brutal conqueror who did not understand it, who hated it at heart, and who at any moment might finish crushing it forever. And we had to live for those destinies! Think of those young French children, born in houses in mourning, in the shadow of defeat, nourished on these discouraged thoughts, raised for a bloody, inevitable, and perhaps futile revenge --- for, small as they were, the first thing of which they had become conscious was that there is no justice, there is no justice in this world: force crushes right! Such discoveries leave a child’s soul degraded or enlarged forever. Many gave up; they said to themselves: “Since it is so, why struggle? Why act? Nothing is anything. Let us not think about it. Let us enjoy ourselves.” --- But those who resisted are proof against fire; no disillusionment can shake their faith: for, from the very first day, they knew that faith’s road had nothing in common with the road to happiness, and that nonetheless one has no choice, one must follow it --- one would suffocate anywhere else. One does not arrive, all at once, at that assurance. One cannot expect it of boys of fifteen. There is much anguish before it, many tears shed. But that is good. It must be so…

“O Faith, maiden of steel… Plow with your lance the trampled heart of the peoples!…”

Christophe pressed Olivier’s hand in silence.

--- Dear Christophe, said Olivier, your Germany has made us suffer greatly.

And Christophe almost apologized, as though he were to blame.

--- Do not be distressed, said Olivier, smiling. The good it has done us, without meaning to, is greater than the harm. It is you who made our idealism blaze up again; it is you who revived in us the ardor of science and of faith; it is you who caused schools to be built across our France; it is you who overstimulated the creative powers of a Pasteur, whose discoveries alone were enough to offset your war indemnity of five billion; it is you who gave new life to our poetry, our painting, our music; it is to you that we owe the awakening of our race’s conscience. One is well rewarded for the effort one had to make in choosing faith over happiness: for one thereby gains the sense of such moral force, amid the apathy of the world, that one ends by no longer doubting even victory. However few we are, you see, my dear Christophe, and however weak we may appear --- a drop of water in the middle of the ocean of German strength --- we believe that it will be that drop of water which colors the whole ocean. The Macedonian phalanx will break through the massed armies of the European plebs.

Christophe looked at the frail Olivier, whose eyes shone with faith:

--- Poor, slight little Frenchmen! You are stronger than we are.

--- O blessed defeat, Olivier repeated. Blessed be the disaster! We will not disown it! We are its children.