Jean-Christophe in Paris. II. The House. 2

Defeat reforges the elites; it sifts the nation; it sets aside all that is pure and strong, making it purer and stronger still. But it hastens the fall of the rest, or breaks their momentum. In this way it separates the mass of the people, who fall asleep or stumble, from the elite who march on. The elite know this, and they suffer for it; even among the most valiant there is a secret melancholy, a sense of their own powerlessness and isolation. And worst of all --- cut off from the body of their people, they are also cut off from one another. Each one fights alone. Those who are strong think only of saving themselves. O man, help thyself!… They do not consider that this virile maxim means: O men, help one another! What all of them lack is confidence, the open flow of sympathy, and the desire for common action that victory gives a people --- the feeling of fullness, of standing at the zenith.

Christophe and Olivier knew something of this. In this Paris teeming with souls made to understand them, in this house full of unknown friends, they were as alone as in an Asian desert.

Their situation was harsh. Their resources were nearly nonexistent. Christophe had just barely the work of copying and transcribing music, commissioned by Hecht. Olivier had rashly resigned from the University during the period of discouragement that followed his sister’s death and that had been deepened further by a painful experience of love in Mme Nathan’s circle: --- (he had never spoken of it to Christophe, for he had a reticence about his sorrows; one of his charms was that he always kept a little of intimate mystery, even with his friend, from whom he otherwise sought to hide nothing). --- In that state of moral collapse where he hungered for silence, his work as a teacher had become intolerable to him. He had never had any taste for that profession, which requires one to put oneself on display, to speak one’s thoughts aloud, to never be alone. Teaching at the lycée level demands, if it is to have any dignity, a vocation for apostleship that Olivier did not possess; and teaching at the university level imposes a perpetual contact with the public that is painful for souls enamored of solitude, as Olivier’s was. Two or three times he had been obliged to speak in public, and each time he had suffered a peculiar humiliation. To begin with, the exhibition of standing on a platform was odious to him. He saw the audience, he felt it, as if with antennae; he knew it was composed, for the most part, of idlers looking only to relieve their boredom; and the role of official entertainer was not to his taste. But above all, speech delivered from a lectern almost inevitably distorts thought; if one is not careful, it risks drawing one little by little into a certain theatricality of gesture, diction, bearing, and manner of presenting ideas --- even into a certain theatricality of mind. The lecture as a form oscillates between two hazards: tedious playacting and worldly pedantry. This kind of monologue delivered at high volume before several hundred unknown and silent persons, this ready-made garment that is supposed to fit everyone and fits no one, is, for the heart of an artist who is a little wild and proud, something intolerably false. Olivier, who felt more and more keenly the need to concentrate himself and to say nothing that was not the complete expression of his thought, therefore left the teaching profession he had struggled so hard to enter; and, no longer having his sister to hold him back from the slope of his reveries, he set about writing. He had the naive belief that, possessing artistic worth, that worth could not fail to be recognized without any effort on his part.

He was quickly disabused of this. Publishing anything proved impossible. He had a jealous love of freedom that inspired in him a horror of everything that encroaches upon it, and that caused him to live apart, like a plant smothered between the blocks of political churches whose rival associations divided the country and the press among themselves. He was no less removed from all the literary coteries, and rejected by them. There was no friend, nor could there be. He was repelled by the harshness, the dryness, the egotism of these intellectual souls --- (apart from the very small number drawn onward by a genuine vocation, or absorbed in passionate scientific inquiry). It is a sorry thing, a man who has atrophied his heart for the benefit of his brain --- when his brain is a small one. No kindness, and an intelligence like a dagger in its sheath: one never knows whether it might not cut your throat one day. One must stay perpetually on guard. The only friendship that is possible is with good people who love beautiful things without seeking profit from them --- those who live outside art. The air of art is unbreathable for most men. Only the very great can live in it without losing love, which is the source of life.

Olivier could count only on himself. It was a precarious support. Every approach cost him something. He was not inclined to humble himself for the sake of his work. He blushed to see the obsequious and degrading courtship that young authors were obliged to perform before this or that well-known theater director, who exploited their docility to treat them in ways he would not have dared to treat his servants. Olivier could not have done it even to save his life. He contented himself with sending his manuscripts by post, or leaving them at the office of a theater or a journal: they would lie there for months unread. Chance did arrange, however, that one day he ran into a former schoolmate, an amiable idler who had retained an admiring gratitude toward him for the willingness and ease with which Olivier had done his school assignments for him; this man knew nothing about literature, but he knew writers, which was worth far more; and he was wealthy and fashionable, and allowed himself, out of snobbishness, to be discreetly exploited by them. He put in a word for Olivier with the secretary of a major journal in which he was a shareholder: at once one of the buried manuscripts was unearthed and read; and after much deliberation --- (for while the work seemed to have some merit, the author’s name had none, being that of an unknown) --- they decided to accept it. When he learned this good news, Olivier thought his troubles were over. They were only beginning.

It is relatively easy to have a work accepted in Paris; but getting it published is another matter altogether. One must wait, wait for months, perhaps a lifetime, if one has not mastered the art of courting people or wearing them down --- of showing up from time to time at the morning levees of these minor monarchs, of reminding them that one exists and that one is resolved to pester them for however long it takes. Olivier knew only how to stay home; and he was exhausted by the waiting. At most he wrote letters, which went unanswered. His nerves were so frayed that he could no longer work. It was absurd; but it was not something one could reason away. He waited from post to post, sitting before his table, his mind drowned in formless suffering; he went out only to cast a glance of hope, quickly disappointed, into his letter box downstairs with the concierge; he walked without seeing anything, his only thought to return and attempt the same trial again; and when the hour of the last delivery had passed, when the silence of his room was broken only by the heavy footsteps of his neighbors overhead, he felt himself suffocating in this indifference. One word in reply, one word! Could it really be that this alms was withheld from him? And yet the one who withheld it had no idea of the harm he was doing. Each person sees the world in his own image. Those whose hearts are without life see the universe as desiccated; and they scarcely think of the trembling hope, expectation, and suffering that swells in young hearts; or, if they do think of it, they judge it coldly, with the weary and heavy irony of a body that is spent and sated.

At last the work appeared. Olivier had waited so long that it gave him no pleasure now: it was a dead thing to him. Still, he hoped it might yet be living for others. There were flashes of poetry and intelligence in it that could not go unnoticed. It fell into absolute silence. --- He made one or two more attempts afterward. Being free of any faction, he encountered always the same silence, or hostility. He could make nothing of it. He had honestly believed that every person’s natural feeling must be one of goodwill toward any new work, even if it was not very good. It always represents so much labor! And one ought to feel grateful to whoever has wished to bring others a little beauty, a little strength, a little joy. Yet he met only indifference or disparagement. He knew, though, that he was not the only one who felt what he had written, that there were other decent people who thought as he did. But he did not know that these decent people did not read him, and that they had no part in literary opinion, or in anything, or in anything at all. If two or three of them, scattered here and there, happened to come across his lines and sympathized with him, they would never tell him so; they remained stiff in their silence, flattened. Just as they did not vote, they abstained from taking sides in art; they did not read the books that shocked them; they did not go to the theater that disgusted them; but they left their enemies to vote, to elect their enemies, to make a scandalous success and a clamorous advertisement of works and ideas that represented in France nothing more than an impudent minority.

Olivier, unable to count on those who shared his kind of mind, since they did not read him, found himself delivered over to the hostile horde: to writers who were, for the most part, hostile to his thought, and to the critics who served at their command.

These first encounters drew blood. He was as sensitive to criticism as old Bruckner, who no longer dared have a work performed, so much had he suffered from the malice of the press. He was not even sustained by his former colleagues, the academics, who, by virtue of their profession, preserved a certain sense of the French intellectual tradition and might have understood him. But these excellent people, in general bent to discipline, absorbed in their work, often a little embittered by an unrewarding métier, did not forgive Olivier for wanting to do things differently from them. As good civil servants, many had a tendency to admit the superiority of talent only when it coincided with hierarchical superiority.

In such a state of affairs, three courses were possible: to break down the resistance by force; to submit to humiliating compromises; or to resign oneself to writing only for oneself. Olivier was incapable of the first course and of the second: he gave himself over to the last. He gave laborious private lessons to survive, and he wrote works that, having no possibility of flowering in the open air, became more and more etiolated, chimerical, unreal.

Christophe broke like a storm into the middle of this twilight life. He was beside himself at the sight of people’s vileness and Olivier’s patience:

--- But have you no blood in you? he said. How can you bear such a life? You who know yourself to be superior to this herd --- you let them crush you without resistance!

--- What do you want? said Olivier. I don’t know how to defend myself; I’m disgusted by the idea of struggling with people I despise; I know they can use every weapon against me, and I cannot do the same. Not only would I be repelled by using their injurious methods, but I would be afraid of hurting them. When I was small, I used to let my schoolmates beat me foolishly. They thought I was a coward, they thought I was afraid of being hit. I was far more afraid of hitting them than of being hit myself. I remember someone saying to me once, when one of my tormentors was after me: “Finish it once and for all --- give him a kick in the stomach!” It horrified me. I preferred to be beaten.

--- You have no blood, Christophe repeated. And those devil’s ideas of yours about Christianity!… Your religious education in France, reduced to catechism; the Gospel castrated, the New Testament watered down, spineless… A teary-eyed humanitarian piety… And the Revolution, Jean-Jacques, Robespierre, ‘48, and the Jews on top of everything!… Take a good thick slice of the old Bible every morning, good and bloody.

Olivier protested. He had a native antipathy toward the Old Testament. This feeling went back to his childhood, when he would leaf through in secret the illustrated Bible that sat in the provincial library, never read by anyone, that children were even forbidden to read. A needless prohibition! Olivier could not keep the book open long. He would close it quickly, irritated, saddened; and it was a relief to him to plunge afterward into the Iliad or the Odyssey, or into the Thousand and One Nights.

--- The gods of the Iliad are beautiful, powerful, vicious men: I understand them, said Olivier, I love them, or I don’t love them; even when I don’t love them, I love them still; I am in love with them. More than once I have kissed, with Patroclus, the beautiful bloody feet of Achilles. But the God of the Bible is an old Jewish man, a monomaniac and a crank, a raving madman who spends his time grumbling, threatening, howling like a rabid wolf, raving alone, shut up in his cloud. I don’t understand him, I don’t love him, his eternal imprecations give me a headache, and his ferocity fills me with horror:

Sentence against Moab… Sentence against Damascus… Sentence against Babylon… Sentence against Egypt… Sentence against the desert of the sea… Sentence against the valley of vision…

He is a madman who fancies himself judge, public accuser, and executioner all in one, pronouncing death sentences in the courtyard of his prison against flowers and pebbles. One is stupefied by the tenacity of hatred that fills this book with its cries of carnage… --- “the cry of ruin,… the cry envelops the land of Moab; its howling reaches as far as Eglaim; its howling reaches as far as Beer…”

From time to time, he rests in the midst of massacres, of small children crushed underfoot, of women violated and disemboweled; and he laughs --- the laugh of a junior officer in Joshua’s army, at table after the sacking of a city:

“And the Lord of hosts makes for his peoples a feast of fat meats, a feast of aged wines, of rich marrow, of well-strained aged wines… The sword of the Lord is full of blood. It is gorged with the fat of the kidneys of rams…”

But the worst of it is the perfidy with which this god sends his prophet to blind men, so that he may have a reason afterward to make them suffer:

“Go, harden the heart of this people, stop their eyes and their ears, lest they understand, lest they be converted and recover their health. --- How long, O Lord? --- Until there are no more inhabitants in the houses, and the land is plunged into desolation…”

No, never in my life have I seen so wicked a man!…

I am not fool enough to fail to recognize the power of the language. But I cannot separate the thought from the form; and if I sometimes admire this Jewish god, it is in the same way that I admire a tiger, or a… (I search in vain for a Shakespearean monster to name; I cannot find one: Shakespeare himself never succeeded in bringing forth such a hero of Hatred --- of holy and virtuous Hatred.) Such a book is frightening. Every madness is contagious. And the danger in this one is all the greater in that its murderous pride lays claim to purification. England makes me tremble when I think that for centuries she has fed on it. I like to feel the ditch of the Channel between her and me. I will never believe a people truly civilized so long as it nourishes itself on the Bible.

--- You would do well, in that case, to be just as afraid of me, said Christophe, for I am drunk on it. It is the pure marrow of lions. The robust hearts are those that feed on it. The Gospel, without the antidote of the Old Testament, is a dull and unhealthy dish. The Bible is the backbone of the peoples who wish to live. One must struggle, one must hate.

--- I have a hatred of hatred, said Olivier.

--- If only you truly had it! said Christophe.

--- You’re right, I don’t even have the strength for that. What can I say? I cannot help but see the reasons my enemies have. I keep repeating Chardin’s word: “Gentleness! Gentleness!…”

--- You devil of a sheep! said Christophe. But do what you will, I’ll make you leap over the ditch that stops you; I’ll march you along at a drumbeat.

And indeed he took up Olivier’s cause and set off on a campaign for him. His early efforts were not very successful. He would flare up at the first word and do his friend harm by defending him; he would realize it afterward and was devastated by his own blunders.

Olivier was no less active. He fought for Christophe. Though he dreaded conflict, though he possessed a lucid and ironic intelligence that mocked extravagant words and deeds, when it came to defending Christophe he surpassed in violence all the others and Christophe himself. He lost his head. In love, one must know how to be unreasonable. Olivier did not stint on it. --- Yet he was more skillful than Christophe. This young man, uncompromising and clumsy on his own behalf, was capable of policy and near-cunning when it came to advancing his friend’s success; he spent admirable energy and ingenuity in winning supporters for him; he succeeded in interesting music critics and patrons in Christophe --- people he would have blushed to solicit on his own account.

Despite everything, they had great difficulty improving their situation. Their love for each other led them into many foolish decisions. Christophe went into debt to secretly publish a volume of Olivier’s poetry, of which not a single copy sold. Olivier persuaded Christophe to give a concert to which almost no one came. Christophe, facing the empty hall, consoled himself bravely with Handel’s words: “Perfect! My music will sound all the better for it…” But this bravado did not restore the money they had spent; and they came home with hearts heavy from the indifference of the world.

Amid all these difficulties, the one person who came to their aid was a Jewish man of about forty, named Taddée Mooch. He ran a shop selling art photographs; but although he was interested in his trade and brought a good deal of taste and skill to it, he was interested in so many other things besides that he neglected his business. When he did attend to it, it was to search for technical improvements, to become infatuated with new reproduction processes that, for all their ingenuity, rarely succeeded and cost a great deal of money. He read enormously and kept watch for every new idea in philosophy, art, science, and politics; he had a surprising instinct for discovering independent and original forces --- as though he were drawn by some hidden magnet. Among Olivier’s friends, isolated like him and each working on his own, he served in a sense as a link. He moved from one to another; and through him there was established between them, without any of them or he himself being conscious of it, a permanent current of ideas.

When Olivier wanted to introduce him to Christophe, Christophe at first refused; he was weary of his experiences with the race of Israel. Olivier, laughing, insisted that he meet Mooch, saying that Christophe knew Jews no better than he knew France. Christophe agreed; but the first time he saw Taddée Mooch, he made a face. Mooch was, in appearance, more Jewish than need be --- the Jew as depicted by those who do not like him: short, bald, ill-made, with a doughy nose, large eyes that squinted behind thick spectacles, a face buried in a poorly grown, coarse, black beard, hairy hands, long arms, short and crooked legs: a small Syrian Baal. But there was in him such an expression of kindness that Christophe was moved by it. Above all, he was very simple and said nothing unnecessary. No exaggerated compliments. Only a discreet word. But a readiness to make himself useful; and, before anything had even been asked of him, a service already rendered. He came back often, too often; and almost always he brought some good news: work to be done for one of the two friends, an art article or a course of lectures for Olivier, music lessons for Christophe. He never stayed long. He made a point of not imposing himself. Perhaps he sensed Christophe’s irritation --- whose first impulse was always one of impatience when he saw appearing at the door the bearded face of the Carthaginian idol --- (he called him: Moloch) --- only to feel, a moment later, his heart filled with gratitude for Mooch’s perfect kindness.

Kindness is not rare among Jews: it is of all the virtues the one they most readily acknowledge, even when they do not practice it. In truth it remains in most of them in a negative or neutral form: indulgence, indifference, a reluctance to do harm, ironic tolerance. In Mooch, it was passionately active. He was always ready to devote himself to someone or something. To his poor coreligionists, to Russian refugees, to the oppressed of all nations, to unhappy artists, to every misfortune, to every generous cause. His purse was always open; and, however thin it was, he always found a way to draw some small coin from it; when it was empty, he drew from the purses of others; he never counted the trouble or the steps, whenever rendering a service was at stake. He did this simply --- with an exaggerated simplicity. He had the fault of saying rather too often that he was simple and sincere: but the most remarkable thing was that he actually was.

Christophe, torn between his irritation and his sympathy for Mooch, said on one occasion something cruelly childlike. One day when he was deeply moved by Mooch’s kindness, he took his hands affectionately and said:

--- What a pity!… What a pity that you are a Jew!

Olivier started and flushed, as if it concerned himself. He was distressed and tried to smooth over the wound his friend had caused.

Mooch smiled, with a sad irony, and replied calmly:

--- It is a far greater misfortune to be a man.

Christophe saw in this only a quip. But the pessimism of those words ran deeper than he imagined; and Olivier, with the keenness of his sensibility, had an intuition of it. Beneath the Mooch everyone knew lay another man entirely different, and even in many things his precise opposite. His apparent nature was the product of a long struggle against his true nature. This man who seemed simple had a tortuous mind: when he let himself go, he always felt the need to complicate simple things and to give his most genuine feelings the character of a mannered irony. This man who seemed modest and sometimes a little too humble had at his core a pride that was self-aware and that punished itself severely. His smiling optimism, his ceaseless activity incessantly occupied with rendering service to others, covered a deep nihilism, a mortal discouragement that was afraid to look at itself. Mooch displayed a great faith in a host of things: in the progress of humanity, in the future of the purified Jewish spirit, in the destinies of France, soldier of the new spirit --- (he readily identified the three causes). --- Olivier, who was not deceived, said to Christophe:

--- At bottom, he believes in nothing.

With all his good sense and his ironic calm, Mooch was a neurasthenic who did not want to look at the void inside him. He had fits of nothingness; he would sometimes wake abruptly in the middle of the night, groaning with terror. He looked everywhere for reasons to act, something to cling to, like buoys in water.

One pays dearly for the privilege of belonging to a race too old. One carries a crushing weight of past, of trials, of exhausted experience, of disappointed intelligence and affection --- an entire vintage of age-old life, at the bottom of which has settled a bitter residue of irony and tedium… The Tedium, the immense Semitic tedium, bearing no resemblance to our Aryan tedium, which makes us suffer greatly as well, but which at least has precise causes and passes with them: for it most often comes from our regret at not having what we desire. But it is the very source of joy and life that is struck, in certain Jews, by a mortal poison. No more desires, no more interest in anything: neither ambition, nor love, nor pleasure. One thing alone persists, not intact, but morbidly hyperesthetized, in these uprooted people of the Orient, exhausted by the expenditure of energy they have had to make for centuries, and aspiring to ataraxia without being able to reach it: thought, endless analysis, which forecloses in advance the possibility of any pleasure and discourages all action. The most energetic among them take on roles, perform them, rather than act on their own account. A curious thing, that in many of them --- and not the least intelligent, nor sometimes the least serious --- this disinterest in real life should taint the vocation, or the unacknowledged desire, to become actors, to play at life --- the only way for them to live it!

Mooch was an actor too, in his own way. He kept in motion in order to dull his senses. But whereas so many people stir themselves for their own egoism, he stirred himself for the happiness of others. His devotion to Christophe was touching and exhausting. Christophe would rebuff him and regret it afterward. Mooch never held it against Christophe. Nothing discouraged him. Not that he had any very keen affection for Christophe. It was devotion itself that he loved, more than the men to whom he devoted himself. They were for him a pretext to do good, to live.

He managed things so well that he persuaded Hecht to publish the David and several other compositions of Christophe. Hecht valued Christophe’s talent; but he was in no hurry to make it known. It was only when he saw Mooch entirely ready to launch the publication at his own expense with another publisher, that he himself, out of pride, took the initiative.

Mooch had another idea as well: at a critical moment when Olivier had fallen ill and money was short, he turned to Félix Weil, the wealthy archaeologist who lived in the same building as the two friends. Mooch and Weil knew each other, but they had little sympathy for one another. They were too different; Mooch, agitated, mystical, revolutionary, with “working-class” manners that he perhaps overstated, provoked the irony of Weil, who was placid and sardonic, refined in his manner and conservative in his thinking. They did share a common bedrock: both were equally devoid of any deep interest in acting; and if they acted, it was not from conviction, but from tenacious and mechanical vitality. But these were things that neither of them liked to become conscious of: they preferred to attend only to the roles they were playing, and those roles had very few points of contact. Mooch therefore met with a rather cool reception from Weil; when he tried to interest him in the artistic projects of Olivier and Christophe, he ran up against a mocking skepticism. Mooch’s perpetual enthusiasms for one utopia or another were a source of amusement to Jewish society, where he was known as a dangerous “tapper.” This time as many times before, he did not lose heart; and while he persisted, speaking of the friendship between Christophe and Olivier, he awoke Weil’s interest. He noticed it and went on.

He had touched a sensitive nerve. This old man, detached from everything, without friends, had a cult of friendship; the great affection of his life had been a friendship that had left him behind along the way: it was his inner treasure; when he thought of it, he felt himself a better person. He had established foundations in his friend’s name. He had dedicated books to his memory. The details Mooch told him of the mutual tenderness between Christophe and Olivier moved him. His own personal history bore some resemblance to theirs. The friend he had lost had been for him a kind of elder brother, a companion of youth, a guide he idolized. He was one of those young Jews, burning with intelligence and generous ardor, who suffer under the harsh environment surrounding them, who have taken it as their task to lift up their people, and through their people, the world, who devour themselves, who burn away on all sides and blaze, like a resin torch, in a matter of hours. His flame had warmed the apathy of young Weil. He had lifted him off the ground. As long as his friend had lived, Weil had walked at his side, in the aureole of luminous and stoic faith --- faith in science, in the power of the spirit, in future happiness --- that radiated from this messianic soul. After it had left him alone, Weil, weak and ironic, had let himself slide down from the heights of that idealism into the sands of Ecclesiastes, which every Jewish intelligence carries within it and which are always ready to absorb it. But he had never forgotten the hours spent with his friend in the light: he kept jealously the nearly faded brightness of those hours. He had never spoken of him to anyone, not even to his wife, whom he loved: it was a sacred thing. And this old man, whom people thought prosaic and dry of heart, arrived at the end of his life, repeated to himself in secret the bitter and tender thought of a Brahmin of ancient India:

« The poisoned tree of the world bears two fruits sweeter than the water of the fountain of life: one is poetry and the other is friendship. »

He took an interest thereafter in Christophe and Olivier. Discreetly, knowing their pride, he had Mooch bring him the volume of Olivier’s poetry that had just been published; and, without the two friends making the slightest overture, without their having even a suspicion of his plans, he arranged to obtain for the work an Académie prize, which arrived at exactly the right moment, in the midst of their financial hardship.

When Christophe learned that this unexpected assistance had come from a man he had been inclined to judge harshly, he felt remorse for what he might have said or thought about him; and, overcoming his aversion to paying visits, he went to thank him. His good intention went unrewarded. The irony of old Weil revived in the presence of Christophe’s youthful enthusiasm, though he made an effort to conceal it from him; and they got along with each other rather poorly.

The day Christophe, grateful and irritated, was climbing back up to his garret after the visit to Weil, he found there, along with good Mooch, who had come to render Olivier some new service, a disparaging review article about his music by Lucien Lévy-Cœur --- not frank criticism, but the kind of insulting benevolence which, through a game of refined mockery, amused itself by placing him in the same rank as third- or fourth-rate musicians whom he detested.

--- Have you noticed, Christophe said to Olivier, after Mooch had left, that we always have to do with Jews, only with Jews? Come now, could we ourselves be Jews? Put my mind at ease. You’d think we attracted them. They’re everywhere in our path, enemies or allies.

--- That’s because they’re more intelligent than the others, said Olivier. Jews are nearly the only people in this country with whom a free man can converse about new things, living things. The others are immobilized in the past, in dead things. Unfortunately, that past does not exist for Jews, or at least it is not the same as ours. With them we can only talk about today; with those of our own people, only about yesterday. Look at Jewish activity, in every domain: commerce, industry, education, science, charitable works, works of art…

--- Let us not speak of art, said Christophe.

--- I am not saying that what they do is always to my taste: it is even odious, often. But at least they are alive and they know how to understand those who are alive. We may criticize, mock, curse the Jews. We cannot do without them.

--- Let us not exaggerate, said Christophe, mockingly. I could do without them.

--- You might manage to live, perhaps. But what good would it do you if your life and your work remained unknown to everyone, as they probably would be without them? Would our fellow Catholics come to our rescue? Catholicism allows the best of its own blood to perish without lifting a finger to defend them. All those who are religious to the depth of their soul, all those who give their lives to the defense of God --- if they have had the audacity to detach themselves from Catholic rule and to free themselves from the authority of Rome --- immediately they become, to the unworthy horde that calls itself Catholic, not merely objects of indifference, but of hostility; it imposes silence on them, it abandons them as prey to common enemies. A free spirit, whatever his greatness --- if, Christian at heart, he is not Christian in obedience --- what does it matter to Catholics that he embodies in himself what is purest in their faith and truly divine? He is not of the flock, of the blind and deaf sect that does not think for itself. He is cast out; people take pleasure in watching him suffer alone, torn by the enemy, calling for help from those who are his brothers and for whose faith he is dying. There is in the Catholicism of today a power of murderous inertia. It would more readily forgive its enemies than those who wish to awaken it and restore it to life… What would we be, my poor Christophe, what would our influence amount to, we who are Catholic by birth and have made ourselves free, without a handful of free Protestants and Jews? Jews are in the Europe of today the most vital agents of all that is both good and bad. They carry the pollen of thought from place to place, at random. Have you not had among them your worst enemies and your friends from the very first?

--- That is true, said Christophe; they encouraged me, supported me, spoke the words that revive a man who is struggling by showing him he is understood. Doubtless, of those friends, very few remained faithful to me; their friendship was nothing but a flash in the pan. No matter! That brief glimmer in the night is worth a great deal. You are right: let us not be ungrateful.

--- Let us above all not be unintelligent, said Olivier. Let us not go about mutilating our already ailing civilization by pretending to prune away some of its most vital branches. If misfortune decreed that the Jews were expelled from Europe, it would be left impoverished of intelligence and energy, to the point of risking complete collapse. In our country in particular, given the present state of French vitality, their expulsion would be a bloodletting more deadly to the nation even than the expulsion of the Protestants in the seventeenth century. --- Certainly, at this moment, they hold a place out of all proportion with their real worth. They take advantage of today’s political and moral anarchy, which they themselves contribute not a little to increasing, by natural inclination, and because they find themselves at ease in it. The best of them, like the excellent Mooch, are at fault for very sincerely identifying France’s destiny with their Jewish dreams, which are often more dangerous than useful to us. But one cannot hold it against them that they wish to remake France in their own image: it is because they love it. If their love is formidable, we have only to defend ourselves and keep them in their proper place, which is, among us, the second. Not that I believe their race inferior to ours --- (all these questions of racial supremacy are foolish and revolting.) --- But it is inadmissible that a foreign race, one that has not yet merged with ours, should presume to know better than we do what suits us. They are comfortable in France: I am very glad of it; but let them not aspire to make it a Judea! An intelligent and strong government, one that knew how to keep the Jews in their place, would make of them one of the most useful instruments of French greatness; and it would render them a service at the same time as ourselves. These hypernervous beings, agitated and uncertain, need a law to hold them in check and a master without weakness, but just, who will keep them in line. Jews are like women: excellent when held in rein; but their domination, in both cases, is execrable; and those who submit to it make a ridiculous spectacle of themselves.

Despite their mutual love, and the intuition it gave them of each other’s soul, there were things that Christophe and Olivier could not quite understand in each other, things that even shocked them. In the early days of their friendship, when each man instinctively makes an effort to show of himself only what most resembles his friend, they did not notice this. It was only gradually that the image of the two races came floating back to the surface, with greater clarity than before: for, by contrasting with each other, they threw each other into sharper relief. They had small clashes that their tenderness did not always succeed in avoiding.

They lost their way in misunderstandings. Olivier’s mind was a mixture of faith, freedom, passion, irony, and universal doubt, whose formula Christophe could not manage to grasp. Olivier, for his part, was shocked by Christophe’s lack of psychological insight; his aristocracy of old intellectual lineage smiled at the clumsiness of this vigorous but heavy and single-minded spirit, which could not analyze itself and was the dupe of others and of itself. Christophe’s sentimentality, his noisy outpourings, his readiness to emotion, also struck Olivier at times as irritating, and even slightly ridiculous. Not to mention a certain cult of force, that German conviction in the moral excellence of the fist, Faustrecht, of which Olivier and his people had good reasons not to be persuaded.

And Christophe could not endure Olivier’s irony, which often irritated him to the point of fury; he could not endure his mania for reasoning, his perpetual analysis, some indefinable intellectual immorality, surprising in a man as devoted as Olivier to moral purity, and which had its source in the very breadth of his intelligence, hostile to all negation --- taking pleasure in the spectacle of opposing thoughts. Olivier regarded things from a viewpoint that was in some sense historical, panoramic; he had such a need to understand everything that he saw both sides of every question; and he defended them in turn, according to which opposing thesis was being argued in front of him; he ended by losing himself in his own contradictions. All the more did he bewilder Christophe. Yet in him it was neither a desire to contradict nor an inclination toward paradox; it was an imperious necessity for justice and good sense; he was offended by the stupidity of any foregone conclusion, and he needed to react against it. The blunt way Christophe judged immoral acts and people, seeing everything larger and more brutal than it was in reality, shocked Olivier, who, though equally moral, was not made of the same inflexible steel, and who let himself be tempted, tinged, touched by external influences. He protested against Christophe’s exaggerations and exaggerated in the opposite direction. Day after day, this quirk of mind led him to argue the cause of his adversaries against his friends. Christophe grew angry. He accused Olivier of sophistries, of indulgence toward hostile people and things. Olivier smiled: he knew very well what an absence of illusions lay beneath his indulgence; he knew very well that Christophe believed in far more things than he did, and that he accepted them with greater ease! But Christophe, looking neither to the right nor to the left, charged straight ahead. He had it in above all for Parisian “kindness.”

--- The great argument they are so proud of for “forgiving” scoundrels, he said, is that scoundrels are already miserable enough as it is, or that they are irresponsible and sick… But to begin with, it is not true that those who do evil are unhappy. That is an idea belonging to morality plays, to insipid melodramas, to the smug and stupid optimism that spreads itself all over Scribe and Capus --- (Scribe and Capus, your great Parisian figures, the artists worthy of your society of pleasure-seeking bourgeois, hypocritical and childish, too cowardly to dare look their own ugliness in the face.) --- A scoundrel can very well be a happy man. He actually has the best chances of being one. And as for his irresponsibility, that too is absurd. Have the courage to acknowledge that Nature being indifferent to good and evil, and therefore malevolent by that very fact, a man can perfectly well be a criminal and in perfect health. Virtue is not something natural. It is the work of man. He must defend it. Human society was built by a handful of beings stronger, greater than the rest. Their duty is not to let the work of so many centuries of terrible struggle be eaten away by the rabble with the hearts of dogs.

These thoughts were not, at bottom, very different from Olivier’s own; but, by some secret instinct of equilibrium, he never felt so much the dilettante as when he heard words of combat.

--- Don’t agitate yourself so, my friend, he would say to Christophe. Let the world take pleasure in its vices. Like the friends in the Decameron, let us breathe in peace the fragrant air of the gardens of thought, while around the hill of cypresses and stone pines, garlanded with roses, Florence is laid waste by the black plague.

He would spend entire days taking apart art, science, thought, searching for their hidden mechanisms; he arrived at a pyrrhonism in which everything that existed was nothing more than a fiction of the mind, a construction in the air, which did not even have the excuse, as geometrical figures do, of being necessary to the mind. Christophe raged at this dismantling of the machine:

--- It was going well; you risk breaking it. A lot of good that will do you! What are you trying to prove? That nothing is anything? Obviously! I know that perfectly well. It’s precisely because nothingness is invading us from all sides that we fight. Nothing exists? But I exist. There is no reason to act? But I act. Let those who love death die if they want! I live, I want to live. My life on one side of the scale, thought on the other… To the devil with thought!

He let himself be swept away by his habitual violence; and in the argument he said wounding things. He had barely said them before he regretted them. He would have liked to take them back; but the damage was done. Olivier was very sensitive; his skin was easily scraped raw; a harsh word, especially from someone he loved, tore at him. He said nothing about it out of pride, withdrawing into himself. He also couldn’t help noticing in his friend those sudden flashes of unconscious egotism that are found in every great artist. He felt that at certain moments, his life wasn’t worth much to Christophe beside a beautiful piece of music --- (Christophe hardly bothered to hide this from him) --- He understood it perfectly, he thought Christophe was right; but it was sad.

And then, there were all sorts of turbulent elements in Christophe’s nature that eluded Olivier and unsettled him. There were sudden gusts of bizarre and formidable humor. Some days he refused to speak; or he fell into fits of diabolical spite, seeking to wound. Or he would vanish: one wouldn’t see him again for the rest of the day and well into the night. Once he was gone for two days running. God knows what he was doing! He barely knew himself… In truth, his powerful nature, compressed into this cramped life and this narrow lodging as if in a chicken cage, was at moments on the verge of exploding. His friend’s tranquility drove him into a rage: at such times he would have liked to hurt him, to hurt someone. He needed to escape, to wear himself out with exhaustion. He would beat the streets of Paris and the outskirts, vaguely in search of some adventure, which he sometimes found; and he wouldn’t have minded a dangerous encounter that would let him spend the overflow of his strength in a brawl… Olivier, with his poor health and physical frailty, had difficulty understanding. Christophe understood it no better himself. He would wake from these wanderings as from an exhausting dream --- a little ashamed and uneasy about what he had done and what he might still do. But when the squall of madness passed, he found himself like a great sky washed clean after the storm, free of all stain, serene, sovereign of his own soul. He became more tender than ever toward Olivier, and he tormented himself over the hurt he had caused him. He could no longer make sense of their little quarrels. The fault wasn’t always entirely on his side; but he didn’t consider himself any less guilty for that; he reproached himself for the passion he put into being right: he thought it better to be wrong alongside one’s friend than to be right against him.

Their misunderstandings were especially painful when they arose in the evening, and the two friends had to spend the night in that discord, which was for both of them a moral disarray. Christophe would get up to write a note, which he slid under Olivier’s door; and the next morning, when he woke, he would ask his forgiveness. Or sometimes in the night he would knock at his door: he could not wait until morning to humble himself. Olivier, as a rule, was no more asleep than he was. He knew perfectly well that Christophe loved him and had not meant to offend him; but he needed to hear it said. Christophe said it: all was forgotten. What delicious calm! How well they slept after!

--- Ah! Olivier sighed, how difficult it is to understand one another!

--- Well, what need is there to always understand? said Christophe. I give up on that. All one needs is to love.

All these small frictions, which they then set themselves to healing with an anxious tenderness, made them almost dearer to each other. In moments of quarrel, Antoinette reappeared through Olivier’s eyes. The two friends showed each other feminine attentions. Christophe never let Olivier’s name-day pass without marking it with a piece dedicated to him, with a few flowers, a cake, a gift, bought God knows how! --- (for money was often scarce in their household.) --- Olivier would ruin his eyes copying out Christophe’s scores in secret, at night.

Misunderstandings between friends are never very serious as long as no third party interposes between them. --- But that was bound to happen: too many people in this world take an interest in others’ affairs in order to muddle them.

Olivier knew the Stevens family, whom Christophe had once frequented; and he too had come under Colette’s spell. If Christophe had not encountered him in the little courtyard of his former friend, it was because at that time Olivier, crushed by his sister’s death, was shut away in his mourning and seeing no one. Colette, for her part, had made no effort to see him: she was fond of Olivier, but she didn’t like unhappy people; she considered herself so sensitive that the sight of grief was intolerable to her: she waited for Olivier’s to pass before remembering him. When she heard that he seemed to have recovered and that there was no longer any danger of contagion, she ventured to send him a sign. Olivier didn’t need to be asked twice. He was at once a recluse and a man of society, easily charmed; and he had a weakness for Colette. When he told Christophe of his intention to return to her house, Christophe, too respectful of his friend’s freedom to express the slightest reproach, simply shrugged and said with a mocking air:

--- Go on then, little one, if it amuses you.

But he took care not to follow him there. He had made up his mind to have nothing more to do with those coquettes, or with their world. Not that he was a misogynist: far from it. He had a tender preference for young women who worked, the little seamstresses, office workers, civil servants, whom one sees hurrying in the morning, always a little late, half awake, toward their workshop or their office. A woman seemed to him to have her full meaning only when she was active, when she was striving to exist in her own right, to earn her bread and her independence. And she seemed to him to have even all her grace only in this way too --- the alert suppleness of her movements, the awakening of all her senses, the integrity of her life and her will. He detested the idle, pleasure-seeking woman: she struck him as a satiated animal, digesting and drowning in unwholesome reveries. Olivier, on the contrary, adored the far niente of women, their flower-like charm, living only to be beautiful and to perfume the air around them. He was more the artist, and Christophe more the human being. In contrast to Colette, Christophe loved others all the more the greater their share in the sufferings of the world. And so he felt bound to them by a fraternal compassion.

Colette was especially eager to see Olivier again since she had learned of his friendship with Christophe: for she was curious to know the details. She still felt a slight grudge against Christophe for the contemptuous manner in which he seemed to have forgotten her; and without any desire to take revenge --- (it wasn’t worth the trouble: for revenge is trouble) --- she would have been quite pleased to play some trick on him. The game of the cat, who nips, so that one pays attention to her. Wheedling, as she knew how to be, she had no difficulty in getting Olivier to talk. No one was more clear-sighted than he, and less taken in by people when he was away from them; no one showed more naive trust when he found himself in the presence of two agreeable eyes. Colette expressed such sincere interest in his friendship with Christophe that he let himself go so far as to tell her its history, and even some of their small friendly misunderstandings, which seemed amusing to him at a distance, and in which he assigned himself all the blame. He also confided to Colette Christophe’s artistic plans and some of his judgments --- which were not all flattering --- on France and the French. Things that had no great importance in themselves, but which Colette hastened to spread about, arranging them in her own fashion, as much to make the telling more piquant as out of a certain hidden malice toward Christophe. And since the first to receive her confidences was naturally her inseparable Lucien Lévy-Cœur, who had no reason to keep them secret, they spread everywhere and grew embellished along the way; they took on a tone of ironic and slightly insulting compassion for Olivier, who was cast as a victim. It seemed the story should have little interest for anyone, the two protagonists being quite unknown; but a Parisian always takes an interest in what is none of his business. So much so that one day Christophe himself heard these secrets from the lips of Mme Roussin. Meeting him at a concert, she asked him whether it was true that he had fallen out with that poor Olivier Jeannin; and she inquired about his work, alluding to things he thought known only to himself and Olivier. And when he asked her where she had obtained these details, she told him it was from Lucien Lévy-Cœur, who had heard them from Olivier himself.

Christophe was staggered by the blow. Violent and uncritical, it never occurred to him to question the implausibility of the news; he saw only one thing: his secrets, confided to Olivier, had been betrayed, betrayed to Lucien Lévy-Cœur. He could not stay for the concert; he left the hall at once. Around him there was emptiness, darkness. In the street he nearly got himself run over. He kept saying to himself: “My friend has betrayed me!…”

Olivier was at Colette’s. Christophe locked the door of his room so that Olivier could not, as he usually did, chat with him for a moment when he came home. He did in fact hear him return a little later, try to open the door, whisper good night through the keyhole: he did not stir. He was sitting on his bed in the darkness, his head in his hands, repeating to himself: “My friend has betrayed me!…”; and he sat like that for part of the night. It was then that he felt how much he loved Olivier; for he did not hold it against him for having betrayed him: he simply suffered. The one we love has every right against us, even the right not to love us anymore. We cannot be angry at them, we can only be angry at ourselves for being so little worthy of love, since they abandon us. And it is a mortal grief, which breaks the will to live.

The next morning, when he saw Olivier, he said nothing to him about it; he found it so repugnant to reproach him --- to reproach him for having abused his trust, for having thrown his secrets as fodder to the enemy --- that he could not utter a single word. But his face spoke for him; it was hostile and cold. Olivier was taken aback; he could make nothing of it. Timidly, he tried to find out what Christophe had against him. Christophe turned away brutally, without answering. Olivier, wounded in his turn, fell silent and swallowed his grief in silence. They did not see each other for the rest of the day.

Had Olivier made him suffer a thousand times more, Christophe would never have done anything to take revenge, hardly even to defend himself: Olivier was sacred to him. But the indignation he felt needed to discharge itself on someone; and since it could not be Olivier, it was Lucien Lévy-Cœur. With his habitual injustice and passion, he immediately attributed to him the responsibility for the fault he was blaming on Olivier; and there was for him an unbearable jealous pain in thinking that a man of that kind had been able to steal his friend’s affection from him, just as he had already edged him out of Colette Stevens’s friendship. To complete his exasperation, that very same day an article by Lucien Lévy-Cœur fell under his eyes, written on the occasion of a production of Fidelio. He spoke of Beethoven in a tone of mockery, and made agreeable fun of the opera’s heroine as a candidate for the prix Montyon. Christophe could see better than anyone the absurdities in the piece, and even certain errors in the music. He had not always himself shown an exaggerated respect for acknowledged masters. But he made no claim to being always consistent with himself or to possessing a French-style logic. He was one of those people who are perfectly willing to point out the faults of those they love, but who do not permit others to do so. Moreover, it was an entirely different matter to criticize a great artist, however harshly, after Christophe’s fashion, out of a passionate faith in art, and even --- (one might say) --- out of an uncompromising love for his glory, which could not tolerate mediocrity in him, --- or to seek in such criticism, as Lucien Lévy-Cœur did, only to flatter the baseness of the public and to make the gallery laugh by displaying one’s wit at a great man’s expense. And then, however free Christophe was in his judgments, there had always been a certain kind of music that he had tacitly set apart, placed out of reach, and which was not to be touched: it was the music that was more and better than music, the music that was pure soul, a great benevolent soul from which one drew consolation, strength, and hope. Beethoven’s music was of that kind. Seeing a scoundrel insult it drove him out of his mind. It was no longer a question of art, it was a question of honor; all that gives life its value --- love, heroism, passionate virtue, the goodness that hungers to give itself to others --- was at stake. It was God Himself! There was nothing more to discuss. One can no more permit an attack on it than if one heard someone insulting the woman one venerates and loves: one must hate and kill… What could be said when the insulter was, of all men, the one Christophe despised most!

And chance would have it that that very evening the two men came face to face.

To avoid being left alone with Olivier, Christophe had gone, against his usual habit, to an evening gathering at Roussin’s. They asked him to play. He did so reluctantly. Yet after a moment he had lost himself in the piece he was playing, when, raising his eyes, he caught sight of Lucien Lévy-Cœur a few steps away in a group, watching him with those ironic eyes. He stopped dead, in the middle of a measure; and rising, he turned his back on the piano. There was a sudden uncomfortable silence. Mme Roussin, taken aback, came over to Christophe with a strained smile; and cautiously --- not being entirely certain the piece had not simply ended --- she asked:

--- You’re not continuing, monsieur Krafft?

--- I’ve finished, he replied curtly.

He had barely spoken when he felt the impropriety of what he’d done; but instead of making him more careful, it only stirred him further. Heedless of the audience’s mocking attention, he went and sat in a corner of the salon, from which he could track Lucien Lévy-Cœur’s movements. His neighbor, an old general with a rosy, drowsy face and pale blue eyes of a childlike expression, felt obliged to offer him compliments on the originality of the piece. Christophe inclined his head, bored, and muttered inarticulate sounds. The other went on talking, excessively polite, with his bland and placid smile; and he would have liked Christophe to explain how he could play so many pages of music from memory. Christophe shifted impatiently, wondering whether he might not shove the old fellow off the sofa with a single push. He wanted to hear what Lucien Lévy-Cœur was saying: he was watching for a pretext to pick a fight with him. For some minutes now he had felt he was about to do something foolish --- nothing in the world could have stopped him. --- Lucien Lévy-Cœur was explaining to a circle of ladies, in his falsetto voice, the intentions of great artists and their secret thoughts. In a moment of silence, Christophe heard him speaking, with salacious insinuations, of the friendship between Wagner and King Ludwig.

--- Enough! he cried, striking the table beside him with his fist.

Everyone turned in astonishment. Lucien Lévy-Cœur, meeting Christophe’s gaze, went slightly pale, and said:

--- Is it to me you’re speaking?

--- To you, you dog! said Christophe.

He sprang to his feet.

--- So you must soil everything great in this world, he went on furiously. Get out, you ham, or I’ll throw you through the window!

He was moving toward him. The ladies scattered with little cries. There was some commotion. Christophe was immediately surrounded. Lucien Lévy-Cœur had half risen from his chair; then he settled back into his negligent pose. Calling in a low voice to a passing servant, he handed him a card; and he resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened; but his eyelids were fluttering nervously, and his blinking eyes darted sideways glances to observe people. Roussin had planted himself in front of Christophe, and, gripping him by the lapels of his coat, was pushing him toward the door. Christophe, furious and ashamed, head down, had before his eyes that broad shirtfront of white linen, whose diamond studs he was counting; and he felt the large man’s breath on his face.

--- Well, my friend, well! said Roussin, what’s gotten into you? What sort of behavior is this? Control yourself, for God’s sake! Do you know where you are? Come now, have you lost your mind?

--- The devil take me if I ever set foot in your house again! said Christophe, pulling free of his hands; and he made for the door.

Prudently, people stepped aside for him. At the cloakroom, a servant held out a tray to him. On it lay Lucien Lévy-Cœur’s card. He took it without understanding, read it aloud; then, abruptly, he fumbled in his pockets, fuming with anger; he drew out, after half a dozen miscellaneous objects, three or four crumpled and soiled cards:

--- Here! Here! --- he said, throwing them onto the tray so violently that one fell to the floor.

He left.

Olivier knew nothing of any of this. Christophe had taken as his seconds the first people who came to mind who were not complete strangers to him: the music critic Théophile Goujart, and a German, Doctor Barth, a Privatdozent at a Swiss university, whom he had met one evening in a brasserie and with whom he had struck up an acquaintance, though he had little sympathy for him --- but they could at least speak together of home. After consulting with Lévy-Cœur’s seconds, the weapon chosen was the pistol. Christophe was equally ignorant of all weapons, and Goujart told him it might be wise to come with him to a shooting range for at least a few lessons; but Christophe refused; and while waiting for the next day, he returned to work.

His mind was distracted. He heard buzzing, as in a troubled sleep, a persistent thought whose outlines were vague… “It was disagreeable, yes, disagreeable… What exactly? --- Ah! this duel, tomorrow… Nonsense! One never actually hits anyone… Although it does happen… Well, and then what?… Then, but precisely, then… One twitch of the finger from that creature who hates me can erase me from life… Come now!… --- Yes, tomorrow, in two days, I may be lying in this nauseating Paris earth… --- Bah! Here or elsewhere!… Good Lord, am I being a coward? --- No, but it would be monstrous to lose in some piece of foolishness all the world of thoughts I feel growing within me… The devil take these modern duels, where they try to equalize both sides’ chances! A fine equality, one that gives a scoundrel’s life as much value as mine! Why not put us face to face with our fists and sticks! That would be a pleasure. But this cold exchange of shots!… And naturally, he knows how to shoot, and I have never held a pistol… They’re right; I must learn… He wants to kill me? I’ll kill him first.”

He went downstairs. There was a shooting range a few steps from his house. Christophe asked for a weapon and had it explained to him how to hold it. On the first shot, he nearly killed the attendant; he tried again two times, three times, and did no better; he grew impatient: it went worse still. Around him, a few young men watched and laughed. He paid no attention. With his German tenacity, he persisted, so indifferent to mockery and so determined to succeed that, as always happens, people soon began to take an interest in this clumsy patience; one of the bystanders offered him advice. He, so habitually violent, listened to everything with a child’s docility; he fought against his nerves, which made his hand tremble; he braced himself, brows contracted; sweat ran down his cheeks; he said not a word; but from time to time a surge of anger seized him; then he went back to shooting. He stayed two hours. After two hours, he was hitting the target. There was nothing more remarkable than this will subduing a clumsy, resistant body. It commanded respect. Of the mockers from the start, some had left, others had gradually fallen silent and could not bring themselves to abandon the spectacle. They saluted Christophe amicably when he left.

Returning home, Christophe found good Mooch waiting for him, anxious. Mooch had heard of the altercation and had come running; he wanted to know the cause of the quarrel. Despite Christophe’s evasions --- he did not want to accuse Olivier --- Mooch eventually guessed. Being level-headed and knowing both friends well, he had no doubt that Olivier was innocent of the small betrayal attributed to him. He set out to investigate, and had no difficulty discovering that all the mischief had come from the gossip of Colette and Lévy-Cœur. He returned in haste to bring Christophe the proof; he imagined he would thus prevent the encounter. But it was quite the opposite: Christophe felt all the more resentment toward Lévy-Cœur when he learned that, thanks to him, he had been able to doubt his friend. To get rid of Mooch, who was imploring him not to fight, he promised everything Mooch wanted. But his mind was made up. He was almost joyful now: it was for Olivier he was going to fight. Not for himself!

A remark by one of the seconds, as the carriage made its way up the wooded lane, abruptly recalled Christophe to full attention. He tried to read what they were thinking, and observed how indifferent to him they were. Professor Barth was calculating at what hour the affair would be over, and whether he could get back in time to finish a piece of work he had begun that day at the manuscript room of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Of Christophe’s three companions, he was the one most interested in the outcome of the fight, out of Germanic pride. Goujart was paying no attention to Christophe, nor to the other German, and was discussing risqué physiological subjects of a prurient kind with Doctor Jullien --- a young physician from Toulouse who had once been Christophe’s neighbor on the same landing, and who sometimes came to borrow his spirit lamp, his umbrella, his coffee cups, returning them invariably broken. In exchange, he offered free consultations, tried remedies out on him, and amused himself at his naivety. Beneath his Castilian hidalgo impassivity there simmered a perpetual sly humor. He was hugely delighted by this adventure, which struck him as burlesque; and he was already relishing in advance Christophe’s blunders. He found it pleasant to take this carriage ride through the woods at good Krafft’s expense. --- That was the clearest view of the trio’s thinking: they saw the whole matter primarily as a pleasure outing that cost them nothing. None of them attached the slightest importance to the duel. They were, besides, prepared with equal composure for any eventuality.

They arrived at the meeting place before the others. A small inn deep in the woods. It was a place of pleasure, more or less seedy, where Parisians came to wash away their honor when the splashes had become too visible. The hedges were in flower with pure wild roses. In the shade of oaks with bronze-colored foliage, small tables had been set out. Three cyclists were seated at one of them: a heavily made-up woman in breeches with black stockings; and two men in flannel, stupefied by the heat, who now and then emitted grunts, as if they had forgotten how to speak.

The arrival of the carriage set off a small stir at the inn. Goujart, who had long known the place and its people, declared that he would see to everything. Barth led Christophe to an arbor and ordered beer. The air was exquisitely mild and full of the humming of bees. Christophe was forgetting why he had come. Barth, emptying his bottle, said after a silence:

--- I see what I’ll do.

He drank, and continued:

--- I’ll still have time: I’ll go to Versailles afterward.

One could hear Goujart haggling sourly with the landlady over the price of the ground for the combat. Jullien had not wasted his time: passing near the cyclists, he had noisily exclaimed over the woman’s bare legs; and there had followed a torrent of filthy remarks, in which Jullien gave as good as he got. Barth said under his breath:

--- The French are repulsive. Brother, I drink to your victory.

He clinked his glass against Christophe’s. Christophe was daydreaming; fragments of music drifted through his mind, mingled with the harmonious drone of the insects. He felt like sleeping.

The wheels of another carriage crunched the gravel of the lane. Christophe caught sight of Lucien Lévy-Cœur’s pale face, smiling as always; and his anger awoke. He rose, and Barth followed.

Lévy-Cœur, his neck enclosed in a high cravat, was dressed with an elegance that made a striking contrast with his adversary’s carelessness. After him stepped down the comte Bloch, a sportsman known for his mistresses, his collection of antique ciboria, and his ultra-royalist opinions, --- Léon Mouey, another man of fashion, a deputy by virtue of literature and a man of letters by political ambition, young, bald, clean-shaven, with a hollow and bilious face, a long nose, round eyes, a bird’s skull, --- and finally Doctor Emmanuel, a very refined Semitic type, benevolent and detached, a member of the Académie de médecine, director of a hospital, famous for his learned writings and for a medical skepticism that led him to listen with ironic compassion to his patients’ complaints, without attempting to cure them.

The newcomers greeted the others courteously. Christophe barely responded, but noticed with irritation the eagerness of his own seconds and the excessive advances they made to Lévy-Cœur’s. Jullien knew Emmanuel, and Goujart knew Mouey; and they drew near, smiling and obsequious. Mouey received them with cold politeness, and Emmanuel with his mocking ease. As for the comte Bloch, who had remained near Lévy-Cœur, with a quick glance he had already inventoried the frock coats and linen of the opposing camp, and was exchanging with his client brief, comical impressions, barely opening his mouth --- both of them calm and correct.

Lucien Lévy-Cœur waited, completely at his ease, for the signal from the comte Bloch, who was directing the combat. He regarded the affair as a mere formality. An excellent shot, and perfectly aware of his adversary’s clumsiness, he would not have dreamed of exploiting his advantages or trying to wound him, in the highly improbable event that the seconds had not seen to it that the encounter would be harmless: he knew there is no greater folly than to give an enemy the appearance of a victim, that it is far more certain to eliminate him quietly. But Christophe, his jacket thrown off, his shirt open at his broad neck and over his powerful wrists, waited with lowered brow, eyes fixed hard on Lévy-Cœur, all his energy gathered within him; the will to kill was implacably written across every line of his face; and the comte Bloch, observing him attentively, thought it fortunate that civilization had done away, as much as possible, with the risks of combat.

After the two shots had been exchanged, each side having fired once and naturally to no effect, the seconds rushed forward, congratulating the adversaries. Honor had been satisfied. --- But not Christophe. He stood there, pistol in hand, unable to believe it was over. He would gladly have insisted, as at the previous day’s shooting practice, that they keep firing until someone actually hit the mark. When he heard Goujart propose that he shake hands with his adversary, who was advancing toward him with chivalrous grace and his eternal smile, this comedy filled him with indignation. He flung his weapon to the ground in fury, shoved Goujart aside, and threw himself at Lucien Lévy-Cœur. The seconds had the greatest difficulty stopping him from continuing the fight with his fists.

The seconds had interposed themselves while Lévy-Cœur withdrew. Christophe broke free of their group and, ignoring their laughter and their protests, strode off into the woods, talking loudly and making furious gestures. He did not even notice that he had left his jacket and hat behind on the dueling ground. He plunged into the forest. He heard his seconds calling after him, laughing; then they grew tired of it and stopped worrying about him. The rumble of departing carriages told him shortly afterward that they had left. He was alone amid the silent trees. His fury had spent itself. He threw himself on the ground and rolled in the grass.

A short while later, Mooch arrived at the inn. He had been in pursuit of Christophe since morning. He was told that his friend was somewhere in the woods. He went looking for him. He beat through every thicket, called his name to the echoes on all sides, and was coming back empty-handed when he heard singing; he followed the voice and at last found him in a small clearing, flat on his back, rolling about like a young calf. When Christophe saw him he called out joyfully, addressed him as “old Moloch,” told him he had riddled his adversary from one side to the other like a sieve, and insisted on playing leapfrog with him --- forced him to jump, then jumped himself, landing tremendous slaps on Mooch’s back as he leapt. Mooch, good-natured as he was, was almost as delighted as Christophe, in spite of his own clumsiness. --- They walked back to the inn arm in arm, and caught the train to Paris from the nearest station.

Olivier knew nothing of what had happened. He was surprised by the warmth of Christophe’s affection and could make no sense of all these reversals. It was only the following day, reading the papers, that he learned Christophe had fought a duel. The thought of the danger Christophe had been in made him almost ill. He wanted to know why. Christophe refused to speak. Pressed relentlessly, he said at last, laughing:

--- For you.

Olivier could get another word out of him. Mooch told the whole story. Olivier, devastated, broke with Colette and begged Christophe to forgive him his recklessness. Christophe, incorrigible, quoted an old French proverb, twisting it maliciously in his own way to torment good Mooch, who stood by, thoroughly happy at the happiness of his two friends:

--- My dear boy, this will teach you to be more careful…

The friendship was restored. The threat of losing it, which had brushed so close, only made it more precious. The small misunderstandings had dissolved; the very differences between the two friends became an added charm. Christophe held within his soul the souls of both their countries, harmoniously joined. He felt his heart rich and full; and this happy abundance expressed itself, as it always did with him, in a stream of music.

Olivier marveled at it. With his excessive critical sense, he was not far from believing that music, which he adored, had said its last word. He was haunted by the unhealthy notion that a certain degree of progress is inevitably followed by decadence; and he trembled that the beautiful art which made life worth loving might suddenly stop, dried up, absorbed into the ground. Christophe laughed at these faint-hearted thoughts. Out of sheer contrariness he insisted that nothing had been done before him and that everything remained to be done. Olivier pointed to the example of French music, which seems to have reached a point of perfection and of finishing civilization, beyond which there appears to be nothing more. Christophe shrugged:

--- French music?… There hasn’t been any yet… And yet you have such beautiful things to do, in this world! You must be very poor musicians indeed, never to have seen it. Ah! if I were French!…

And he listed for him everything a Frenchman could write:

--- You strain after genres that are not made for you, and you do nothing of what suits you. You are the people of elegance, of worldly poetry, of beauty in gesture, in step, in posture, in fashion, in dress --- and you no longer write ballets, you who could have created an inimitable art of poetic dance… --- You are the people of laughter and comedy, and you no longer write opéras-comiques, or you leave the genre to second-rate musicians, grocers of music. Ah! if I were French, I would set Rabelais to music, I would write comic epics… --- You are a nation of novelists, and you do not write novels in music: (for I do not count as such the feuilletons of Gustave Charpentier). You make no use of your gifts for psychological analysis, your penetration of character. Ah! if I were French, I would paint portraits in music for you… (Shall I sketch you the young woman who sits downstairs in the garden beneath the lilac trees?)… I would write you Stendhal for string quartet… --- You are the greatest democracy in Europe, and you have no theater of the people, no music of the people. Ah! if I were French, I would set your Revolution to music: the 14th of July, the 10th of August, Valmy, the Fédération --- I would put the people into music! Not in the false style of Wagnerian declamation. I want symphonies, choruses, dances. No speeches! I am sick of them. Let people not always be talking in a musical drama! Silence to words! Paint in broad strokes, in vast symphonies with choruses, immense musical landscapes, Homeric and Biblical epics, fire, earth, water and luminous sky, the fever swelling in men’s hearts, the surge of instincts, the destiny of a race, the triumph of Rhythm, emperor of the world, who enslaves thousands of men and hurls armies to their deaths… Music everywhere, music in everything! If you were musicians, you would have music for each of your public festivals, for your official ceremonies, for the workers’ guilds, for the student associations, for your family celebrations… But above all, above all, if you were musicians, you would make pure music --- music that means nothing, music that is good for nothing, nothing but to warm, to breathe, to live. Make sunshine! Sat prata… (how do you say that in Latin?)… It has rained enough in your country. I catch cold in your music. One cannot see clearly --- relight your lanterns… You complain today of these Italian porcherie that invade your theaters, conquer your audiences, drive you from your own house? It is your own fault! The public is weary of your twilight art, your harmonic neurasthenias, your contrapuntal pedantry. It goes where life is, however coarse. Why do you withdraw from life? Your Debussy is bad, great artist though he is. He is an accomplice of your torpor. You need someone to wake you roughly.

--- Strauss, then?

--- No more so. That one would finish demolishing you. You need the stomach of my countrymen to bear those excesses of drink. And they cannot even bear them… Strauss’s Salomé!… A masterpiece… I would not wish to have written it… I think of my poor old grandfather and my uncle Gottfried, when they spoke to me --- in what a tone of reverence and tender love --- of the beautiful art of sound!… To command these divine powers, and to put them to such use!… An incendiary meteor! A Jewish-prostituted Isolde. Agonizing and bestial lust. The frenzy of murder, rape, incest, unbridled instincts, rumbling at the heart of German decadence… And, on your side, the spasm of melancholy and voluptuous suicide, rattling in the death-throes of your French decadence… Here, the beast; and there, the prey. Where is the human being?… Your Debussy is the genius of good taste; Strauss, the genius of bad taste. The first is rather insipid. But the second is quite unpleasant. The one, a thin stream of silver stagnant water, losing itself among the reeds and giving off the scent of fever. The other, a powerful and muddy flood… ah! the stench of low Italianism, of neo-Meyerbeerism, the filth of sentiment rolling in that torrent!… A hateful masterpiece!… Salomé, daughter of Isolde… And of whom will Salomé in turn become the mother?

--- Yes, said Olivier, I would like to be fifty years ahead. This race to the abyss must end one way or another: either the horse stops, or it falls. Then we shall breathe. Thank God, the earth will not cease to flower, nor the sky to shine, with or without music. What do we need with such inhuman art!… The West is burning itself up… Soon… Soon… I can already see other lights rising in the depths of the East.

--- Leave me in peace with your East! said Christophe. The West has not said its last word. Do you think I am abdicating? I have centuries left in me. Long live life! Long live joy! Long live the courage that flings us into battle against our destiny! Long live love, which swells our hearts! Long live friendship, which warms our faith --- friendship, sweeter than love! Long live the day! Long live the night! Glory to the sun! Laus Deo, to the God of joy, to the God of dream and action, to the God who created music! Hosannah!…

With that, he sat down at his table and wrote down everything that came into his head, thinking no more about what he had just said.

Christophe was at that time in a state of perfect equilibrium among all the forces of his life. He did not trouble himself with aesthetic debates about the merits of this or that musical form, nor with reasoned efforts to create something new; he did not even need to exert himself to find subjects to translate into music. Everything served. The flood of music poured out without Christophe’s knowing what feeling it expressed. He was happy --- that was all --- happy to overflow, happy to have overflowed, happy to feel within him the pulse of universal life.

This joy and fullness communicated itself to those around him.

The house with the enclosed garden was growing too small for him. There was, to be sure, the opening onto the park of the neighboring convent, with its solitude of long allées and century-old trees; but that was too beautiful to last. Directly opposite Christophe’s window, a six-story building was being constructed, blocking the view and completing the siege around him. He had the additional pleasure of hearing pulleys creaking, stones scraping, and planks being nailed, every day from morning till night. Among the workers he had found again his friend the roofer, with whom he had struck up an acquaintance some time before, on the roof. They exchanged knowing signals from afar. He had even run into him once in the street, taken him to the wine merchant’s, and the two had drunk a glass together, to Olivier’s considerable astonishment and mild scandal. He enjoyed the man’s droll gift for gab and his unshakeable good humor. But he cursed him all the same --- him and his band of industrious, stupid animals --- for raising a wall in front of his house and stealing his air and light. Olivier did not complain much; he was content enough with a walled horizon --- it was like Descartes’s stove, from which compressed thought shoots upward toward the open sky. But Christophe needed more air. Confined in this narrow space, he took his revenge by mingling with the souls of those around him. He drank them in. He set them to music. Olivier told him he looked like a man in love.

--- If I were, Christophe replied, I would see nothing else, love nothing else, nothing would interest me beyond my love.

--- Then what is it you have?

--- I am in good health. I am hungry.

--- Lucky Christophe! Olivier sighed. You really ought to share a little of that appetite with us.

Health is contagious --- like illness. The first to feel the benefit of this strength was naturally Olivier. Strength was what he lacked most. He withdrew from the world because the world’s vulgarity sickened him. With a fine intelligence and exceptional artistic gifts, he was too delicate to become a great artist. Great artists are not squeamish; the first law for any healthy being is to live --- all the more imperative when one is a genius, since one lives so much more intensely. Olivier fled from life; he let himself drift in a world of poetic fictions without body, without flesh, without connection to reality. He was one of that literary elite which, to find beauty, must seek it outside the centuries, in times that are no more, or in times that never were. As though the draught of life were not as intoxicating, and its vintage as opulent, today as it ever was! But exhausted souls recoil from the direct contact of life; they can only bear it through the veil of mirages woven by the distance of the past and the echo that reflects, distorted, the dead words of those who were once alive. --- Christophe’s friendship was drawing Olivier gradually out of those Limbo-lands of art. The sun was filtering into the retreats of his soul, where he had been growing numb.

The engineer Elsberger also felt the contagion of Christophe’s optimism. This did not, however, translate into any change in his habits: they were too deeply ingrained; and there was no counting on his temperament ever becoming enterprising enough to make him leave France and seek his fortune elsewhere. That would have been asking too much. But he was emerging from his torpor; he was regaining his taste for research, reading, and scientific work that he had set aside long ago. It would have greatly astonished him to be told that Christophe had anything to do with this renewed interest in his profession; and the most astonished of all would certainly have been Christophe himself.

Of all the people in the house, those with whom he had formed ties most quickly were the young couple on the second floor. More than once, passing their door, he had stopped to listen to the piano, which the young Mme Arnaud played with feeling when she was alone. On the strength of this, he had sent them tickets to his concert. They had thanked him effusively. Since then, he visited them occasionally in the evenings. He had never managed to hear the young woman play again: she was too shy to perform in front of anyone; even when she was alone, now that she knew she could be heard from the stairwell, she used the soft pedal. But Christophe made music for them; and they talked about it at length. The Arnauds spoke of it with an ardor and a freshness of heart that enchanted him. He would never have thought it possible for French people to love music so deeply.

--- It’s because, said Olivier, you have only seen musicians until now.

--- I know perfectly well, replied Christophe, that musicians are the ones who love music least; but you won’t convince me that people like you are common in France.

--- Several thousand, at the very least.

--- So it’s an epidemic, a very recent fashion?

--- It’s not a matter of fashion, said Arnaud. “Celuy, lequel oyant un doux accord d’instrumens ou la douceur de la voyx naturelle, ne s’en réjouist point, ne s’en esmeut point, et de teste en pied, n’en tressault point, comme doucement ravy, et si ne scay comment dérobé hors de soy, c’est signe qu’il a l’âme tortue, vicieuse, et dépravée, et duquel il se faut donner garde comme de celui qui n’est point heureusement né…”

--- I know that, said Christophe: it’s from my friend Shakespeare.

--- No, said Arnaud gently, it’s from a Frenchman who lived before him, it’s from our Ronsard. You see that if loving music in France is a fashion, it is not a recent one.

That music should be loved in France was less surprising to Christophe than the fact that it was loved there --- more or less --- in the same way as in Germany. In the world of Parisian artists and snobs he had encountered at first, it was considered good form to treat the German masters as distinguished foreigners whom one did not refuse to admire but kept at a distance: people readily mocked the heaviness of a Gluck, the barbarism of a Wagner; they held up French refinement in contrast. And indeed, Christophe had ended by doubting whether a Frenchman could truly understand German works, judging by the way they were performed in France. Very recently he had come away scandalized from a production of Gluck: these clever Parisians had taken it into their heads to tart up the terrible old master; they adorned him, ribboned him, padded his rhythms, dressed his music in impressionistic stage sets, charming little dancers, perverse and lascivious… Poor Gluck! What remained of his eloquence of the heart, his sublimity of heart, his moral purity, his nakedly exposed grief? Was it that a Frenchman could not feel these things? --- And yet Christophe now saw the deep and tender love his new friends had for what is most intimate in the Germanic soul, in the old German lieder, in the German classics. And he asked them whether it was not in fact true that these Germans seemed foreign to them, and whether a Frenchman could truly love only artists of his own race.

--- Not at all! they protested. Our critics presume to speak in our name. Since they always follow fashion, they insist that we must follow it too. But we pay as little attention to them as they pay to us. What charming creatures, trying to teach us what is or is not French! Us --- French of old France!… They come and tell us that our France is in Rameau, --- or in Racine, --- and nowhere else! As if we did not know --- (thousands of us, in the provinces, in Paris) --- how many times Beethoven, Mozart, and Gluck have come and sat by our hearth, kept watch with us at the bedsides of those we loved, shared our sorrows, revived our hopes, become part of our family! If one dared say what one thinks, it would be far more likely that some French artist praised by our Parisian critics was a stranger to us.

--- The truth, said Olivier, is that if there are frontiers in art, they are less barriers of race than barriers of class. I do not know whether there is a French art and a German art; but there is an art of the wealthy, and an art of those who are not. Gluck is a grand bourgeois --- he belongs to our class. Such-and-such a French artist, whom I will refrain from naming, does not: though he was born bourgeois, he is ashamed of us, he disowns us; and we disown him.

Olivier was right. The better Christophe came to know the French, the more he was struck by the resemblances between the decent people of France and those of Germany. The Arnauds reminded him of his dear old Schulz, with his love of art so pure, so disinterested, his self-forgetfulness, his devotion to the beautiful. And he loved them, in memory of Schulz.

At the same time as he was discovering the absurdity of the moral frontiers between decent people of different races, Christophe was becoming aware of the absurdity of the frontiers between the different ways of thinking of decent people within the same race. Thanks to him, and without his having sought it, two men who seemed furthest from understanding each other --- Abbé Corneille and M. Watelet --- had made each other’s acquaintance.

Christophe borrowed books from both of them and, with a casualness that shocked Olivier, lent them from one to the other. Abbé Corneille was not scandalized by this; he had an intuition for souls; and without appearing to, he read in the soul of his young neighbor all that it held of generosity, and even, without Christophe’s knowing it, of the religious. A volume of Kropotkin, borrowed from M. Watelet, which all three of them loved for different reasons, began the rapprochement. By chance they all found themselves together one day at Christophe’s. Christophe feared at first that some cutting remark might pass between his guests. Quite the contrary: they showed each other perfect courtesy. They talked about subjects that were safe: their travels, their experience of people. And they discovered in each other a fullness of gentleness, of evangelical spirit, of improbable hopes, despite so many reasons for despair. They took to each other with a sympathy tinged with a measure of irony. A very discreet sympathy. They never broached the substance of their beliefs together. They saw each other rarely, and did not seek it; but when they met, they were glad to do so.

Of the two, the one whose mind was less constrained was not M. Watelet --- it was Abbé Corneille. Christophe would not have expected this. He was gradually perceiving the grandeur of this religious and free-ranging thought, this powerful and serene mysticism, without fever, which penetrated all the priest’s thoughts, all the acts of his daily life, the whole spectacle of the universe --- which made him live in Christ, as, in his belief, Christ had lived in God.

He denied nothing, no force of life. For him, all the Scriptures, ancient and modern, religious and secular, from Moses to Berthelot, were certain, were divine, were the expression of God. Holy Scripture was merely the richest copy of them, as the Church was the highest élite of the brothers united in God; but neither the one nor the other imprisoned the spirit within an immovable truth. Christianity was the living Christ. The history of the world was nothing but the history of the perpetual enlargement of the idea of God. The fall of the Jewish Temple, the ruin of the pagan world, the failure of the Crusades, the slap given to Boniface VIII, Galileo casting the earth into vertiginous space, the infinitely small proving more powerful than the great, the end of monarchies and of Concordats --- all of this disoriented consciences for a time. Some clung desperately to what was falling; others grabbed a plank at random and drifted. Abbé Corneille asked only: “Where are the people? Where is what makes them live?” For he believed: “Where there is life, there is God.” --- And it was for this reason that he felt sympathy for Christophe.

For his part, Christophe took pleasure in hearing again the beautiful music that is a great religious soul. It awakened in him distant and deep echoes. By that feeling of perpetual reaction which, in vigorous natures, is an instinct of life, the very instinct of self-preservation --- the stroke of the oar that restores a threatened balance and gives the vessel a fresh impetus --- the excess of doubt and the disgust of Parisian sensualism had, over the past two years, little by little resurrected God in Christophe’s heart. Not that he believed in God. He denied him. But he was full of him. Abbé Corneille told him, with a smile, that like the good giant his patron saint, he carried God without knowing it.

--- Why then do I not see him? asked Christophe.

--- You are like thousands of others: you see him every day without suspecting it is he. God reveals himself to all, in different forms --- to some, in their ordinary life, as to Saint Peter in Galilee, --- to others (to your friend M. Watelet), as to Saint Thomas, in wounds and miseries to be healed, --- to you, in the dignity of your ideal: Noli me tangere… One day, you will recognize him.

--- I will never abdicate, said Christophe. I am free. I will remain free.

--- You will only be the more with God by that, replied the priest quietly.

But Christophe would not allow anyone to make a Christian of him against his will. He defended himself with a naïve ardor, as though it could matter in the least what label one attached to his thoughts, or whether it was this one or that. Abbé Corneille listened with a barely perceptible trace of ecclesiastical irony, and a great deal of kindness. He had an unalterable patience rooted in the habit of his faith. The trials of the present-day Church had tempered it; while casting over him a great melancholy, and even having caused him to pass through painful moral crises, those trials did not touch him at the core. It was certainly cruel to find oneself oppressed by one’s superiors, all one’s movements watched by bishops, lurked after by freethinkers who sought to exploit his thoughts, to use him against his faith, equally misunderstood and hounded by his fellow believers and by the enemies of his religion. Impossible to resist: for one must submit. Impossible to submit from the heart: for one knows that the authority is wrong. The anguish of not speaking. The anguish of speaking and being falsely interpreted. Not to mention the other souls for whom one is responsible, all those who wait on you for counsel, for help, and whom one watches suffering… Abbé Corneille suffered for them and for himself, but he resigned himself. He knew how little the days of trial count in the long history of the Church. --- Only, in withdrawing into himself, in his mute resignation, he was slowly growing anemic, developing a timidity, a fear of speaking, that made the slightest action increasingly difficult for him, and was gradually wrapping him in a torpor of silence. He felt himself sinking into it with sadness, but without resistance. His encounter with Christophe was of great help to him. The youthful ardor, the affectionate and guileless interest his neighbor showed him, his sometimes indiscreet questions, did him good. Christophe forced him back into the company of the living.

Aubert, the electrical worker, met him once at Christophe’s. He gave a start when he saw the priest. He had great difficulty concealing his revulsion. Even when that first feeling had been overcome, there remained always a discomfort, a strange awkwardness in being in the presence of this man in a cassock, who was for him an indefinable kind of being. Nevertheless, his sociable instincts and the pleasure he took in talking with cultivated people won out over his anticlericalism. He was surprised by the affable tone that prevailed between M. Watelet and Abbé Corneille; he was no less surprised to find a priest who was a democrat, and a revolutionary who was an aristocrat; this overturned all his received ideas. He searched in vain for the social categories into which he might fit them: for he needed to classify people in order to understand them. It was not easy to find a compartment in which to place the serene freedom of this priest, who had read Anatole France and Renan and spoke of them calmly, fairly, and with precision. In matters of science, Abbé Corneille’s rule was to let himself be guided by those who knew, rather than by those who commanded. He honored authority; but it was not, for him, of the same order as science. Flesh, spirit, charity: the three orders, the three rungs of the divine ladder, the ladder of Jacob. --- Naturally, the good Aubert was far from understanding, or even suspecting, such a frame of mind. Abbé Corneille said quietly to Christophe that Aubert reminded him of some French peasants he had once seen. A young Englishwoman was asking them for directions. She spoke to them in English. They listened gravely, without understanding. Then they spoke French. She did not understand. Whereupon they looked at one another with pity, shook their heads, and said, returning to their work:

--- Isn’t it a pity, all the same! Such a pretty girl!…

As if they had judged her mute, deaf, or simple-minded…

In the early days, Aubert, intimidated by the priest’s learning and M. Watelet’s refined manners, kept quiet, drinking in their conversation. Then, little by little, he joined in, yielding to the naive pleasure he took in hearing himself talk. He laid out his generous and very vague ideology. The other two listened politely, with a small inward smile. Aubert, delighted, did not stop there; he tested, and soon abused, the inexhaustible patience of Abbé Corneille. He read him his lucubrations. The priest always listened, with resignation; and it did not bore him too much, for he was attending less to the words than to the man. And then, as he said to Christophe, who pitied him:

--- Bah! I’ve heard far worse!

Aubert was grateful to M. Watelet and to Abbé Corneille; and all three, without much concern for understanding one another’s ideas, or perhaps even for knowing them, managed to grow fond of each other, without quite knowing why. They were surprised to find themselves so close. They would never have thought it possible. --- Christophe was the bridge between them.

He had innocent allies in the three children --- the two little Elsberger girls and M. Watelet’s adopted daughter. He had become their friend; they adored him. He was saddened by the isolation in which they lived. By talking to each of them at length about the little unknown neighbor, he had given them an irresistible desire to meet. They sent signals to each other through the windows; they exchanged furtive words on the staircase. They managed so well, with Christophe’s help, that they obtained permission to meet sometimes in the Luxembourg gardens. Christophe, pleased with the success of his scheming, went to see them there the first time they were together; he found them awkward, ill at ease, not knowing what to do with such an unfamiliar happiness. He thawed them out in an instant, invented games, races, a chase; he threw himself into it with as much passion as if he had been ten years old; passersby cast an amused and teasing glance at this great fellow running and shouting, circling around the trees with three little girls in pursuit. And since the parents, always suspicious, showed little inclination to let these outings to the Luxembourg happen often --- (for they could not keep close enough watch) --- Christophe found a way to have the children invited to play in the garden of the house itself, by Commandant Chabran, who lived on the ground floor.

Chance had brought him into contact with him --- (chance always knows how to find those who know how to use it). --- Christophe’s work table was near his window. One day, the wind carried off some sheets of music into the garden below. Christophe ran down to retrieve them, bareheaded, disheveled as he was, without even bothering to run a brush through his hair. He expected to deal with a servant. It was the young woman who opened the door. Somewhat taken aback, he explained the purpose of his visit. She smiled and showed him in; they went into the garden. After he had gathered up his papers, he was hurrying to slip away, and she was showing him out, when they ran into the officer. The commandant looked with a surprised eye at this odd guest. The young woman introduced him, laughing.

--- Ah! So you’re the musician? said the officer. Delighted. We’re colleagues.

He shook his hand. They talked, in a tone of friendly irony, about the concerts they gave each other --- Christophe on his piano, the commandant on his flute. Christophe wanted to leave; but the other would not let him go, and had launched into endless elaborations on the subject of music. Abruptly, he stopped and said:

--- Come see my canons.

Christophe followed him, wondering what interest his opinion on French artillery could possibly hold. The other showed him, triumphant, musical canons --- a kind of tour de force --- pieces that could be read starting from the end, or played four-hands, one reading the page right-side up, the other upside down. A former graduate of the École Polytechnique, the commandant had always had a taste for music; but what he loved above all in it was the puzzle; it seemed to him --- (as it is indeed, in part) --- a magnificent game of the mind; and he delighted in posing and solving musical construction riddles, each more extravagant and more useless than the last. Naturally, he had not had much time during his career to cultivate this obsession; but since his retirement he had given himself to it with passion, pouring into it all the energy and ingenuity he had once spent pursuing bands of African kings across the deserts of Africa, or escaping their ambushes. Christophe was amused by these charades, and in turn posed another, more complicated one. The officer was delighted; they competed in skill: from both sides a shower of musical logogriphs. After they had played to their hearts’ content, Christophe went back upstairs. But the very next morning he received from his neighbor a new problem, a genuine brain-teaser over which the commandant had worked for part of the night; he replied in kind; and the contest continued until the day when Christophe, who was beginning to find it a bore, declared himself beaten --- which enchanted the officer. He regarded this victory as a reprisal against Germany. He invited Christophe to lunch. Christophe’s frankness --- he found his musical compositions dreadful, and cried out in protest when Chabran began to massacre a Haydn andante on his harmonium --- finished the conquest. Since then they had fairly frequent conversations. But no longer about music. Christophe found it tedious to listen to his neighbor’s nonsense on that subject; so he preferred to steer the conversation onto military ground. The commandant was only too glad: music was, for this poor man, a forced distraction; underneath, he was eating his heart out.

He let himself be drawn into recounting his African campaigns. Gigantic adventures, worthy of those of Pizarro and Cortés! Christophe watched with astonishment as this marvelous and barbaric epic came back to life --- an epic of which he knew nothing, which the French themselves almost entirely ignore, and in which, for twenty years, the heroism, the ingenious boldness, the superhuman energy of a handful of French conquerors spent themselves, lost in the heart of the black continent, surrounded by black armies, stripped of the most rudimentary means of action, operating constantly against the will of a frightened public opinion and government, and conquering for France, in spite of France, an empire larger than France itself. A scent of powerful joy and blood rose from this action, in which there appeared before Christophe’s eyes figures of modern condottieri, heroic adventurers unexpected in the France of today --- a France that blushes to acknowledge them, over whom she modestly draws a veil. The commandant’s voice rang out boldly in evoking these memories; and he recounted with jovial good humor --- and, (strangely interspersed amid these epic tales) --- with sober descriptions, in precise and dispassionate terms, of the geological terrain, these wide-ranging sorties, these headlong charges, and these human hunts in which he was by turns hunter and quarry, in a merciless game. --- Christophe listened to him, watched him, and felt compassion for this fine human animal, forced into inaction, reduced to devouring himself in ridiculous pastimes. He wondered how he had been able to resign himself to such a fate. He asked him directly. On the subject of his grievances, the commandant seemed at first little inclined to explain himself to a foreigner. But the French have loose tongues, especially when it comes to accusing one another:

--- What do you expect me to do, he said, in their army today? The naval officers write literature. The infantry do sociology. They do everything except make war. They don’t even prepare for it anymore; they prepare to stop making it; they philosophize about war… The philosophy of war! A game for beaten donkeys, meditating on the blows they’ll someday receive!… Arguing, philosophizing --- no, that’s not my line. I might as well go home and make my canons!

He did not say, out of discretion, the worst of his grievances: the suspicion sown among officers by the appeal to informers, the humiliation of obeying the insolent orders of such ignorant and malicious politicians, the army’s anguish at being used for the base work of policing --- church inventories, suppression of labor strikes, service to the interests and grudges of the party in power --- these small-minded radical, anticlerical bourgeois --- against the rest of the country. To say nothing of this old Africa hand’s disgust at the new colonial army, recruited largely from the worst elements of the nation, in order to spare the selfishness and cowardice of the others, who refused to share in the honor and the risks of defending “greater France” --- the France beyond the seas.

Christophe had no business getting mixed up in these French quarrels; it was no concern of his; but he sympathized with the old officer. Whatever he thought of war, he believed that an army exists to produce soldiers, as an apple tree produces apples, and that it is a singular aberration to graft onto it politicians, aesthetes, and sociologists. Yet he did not understand how so vigorous a man could yield the field to others. Not to fight one’s enemies is to be one’s own worst enemy. There was in all these worthwhile Frenchmen a spirit of abdication, a singular renunciation. --- Christophe found it deeper and more touching in the officer’s daughter.

Her name was Céline. She had fine hair drawn back in the Chinese fashion, carefully combed, which left exposed her high, round forehead and slightly pointed ear, her thin cheeks, her graceful chin of a rustic elegance, beautiful dark eyes, intelligent, trusting, very gentle --- the eyes of a nearsighted person --- a nose a little large, a small beauty mark at the corner of her upper lip, a silent smile that made her push forward her lower lip, slightly full, in a charming little pout. She was kind, active, and witty, but with a very deep incuriosity of mind. She read little, knew none of the new books, never went to the theater, never traveled --- (this annoyed her father, who had traveled far too much in his day) --- took no part in any worldly philanthropic work --- (her father criticized such things) --- made no attempt at study --- (he mocked learned women) --- and scarcely stirred from her patch of garden, enclosed by four tall walls, like the bottom of an enormous well. And yet she was not too bored. She occupied herself as best she could, and was resigned with good humor. She and the small domestic world every woman unconsciously creates around herself, wherever she may be, gave off a Chardin-like atmosphere: that warm silence, that calm of figures and attitudes attentive --- (slightly drowsy) --- to their habitual task; the poetry of daily order, of accustomed life, of thoughts and gestures foreseen at the same hour and in the same way, and none the less loved for that, with a penetrating and quiet sweetness; that serene mediocrity of beautiful bourgeois souls --- honesty, conscience, truthfulness, calm, calm work, calm pleasures, and yet poetic. A healthy elegance, a moral and physical cleanliness: it smells of good bread, lavender, uprightness, kindness. The peace of things and people, the peace of old houses and smiling souls…

Christophe, whose affectionate candor drew out candor in others, had grown very close to her; they spoke quite freely together; he had even ended up asking her questions she was surprised to find herself answering; she told him things she had told no one else, not even those more intimate with her.

--- It’s because you don’t frighten me, Christophe told her. There’s no risk of our falling in love --- we’re too good friends for that.

--- How kind you are! she replied, laughing.

Her healthy nature was as averse as Christophe’s to amorous friendship, that form of feeling so dear to ambiguous souls who always hedge about what they feel. They were with each other like good comrades.

One day he asked her what she could possibly be doing on certain afternoons when he saw her in the garden, sitting on a bench, her needlework on her knees, careful not to touch it, motionless for hours at a time. She blushed and protested that it was not for hours --- only a few minutes here and there, a good quarter of an hour at most, “to continue her story.”

--- “What story?”

--- “The story she told herself.”

--- You tell yourself stories? Oh, tell them to me!

She said he was too curious. She confided only that they were stories in which she herself was not the heroine.

He was surprised by this:

--- If you’re going to tell yourself stories anyway, it seems to me it would be more natural to tell your own story, embellished --- to dream yourself into a happier life.

--- I couldn’t, she said. If I did that, it would drive me to despair.

She blushed again at having given away a little of her hidden soul; and she went on:

--- And besides, when I’m in the garden and a gust of wind reaches me, I am happy. The garden seems alive. And when the wind is wild, coming from far away, it says so many things!

Despite her reserve, Christophe could see through to the underlying melancholy concealed beneath her cheerfulness and that busyness which deceived neither him nor her and led nowhere. Why did she not try to escape this condition, to free herself? She was so perfectly suited for an active and useful life! --- But she invoked her attachment to her father, who had no intention of allowing her to leave him. In vain did Christophe protest that the officer, vigorous and energetic as he was, had no need of her, that a man of that temper could manage on his own, that he had no right to sacrifice her. She took her father’s side; with a pious untruth, she insisted that it was not he who forced her to stay, that it was she herself who could not have brought herself to leave him. --- And in a certain measure, she was telling the truth. It seemed settled, from time immemorial, for her, for her father, for everyone around her, that things were as they were and could not be otherwise. She had a married brother who found it perfectly natural that she should devote herself, in his place, to their father. As for himself, he was wholly absorbed in his children. He loved them jealously, allowing them no independence. This love was for him, and above all for his wife, a voluntary chain that weighed upon their whole life, binding every movement; it seemed that once one had children, one’s personal life was finished and one must renounce all personal development forever. This active, intelligent, still young man was counting the years of work remaining before he could retire. --- Christophe felt weighing upon these excellent people the atmosphere of family affection, so deep in France, yet suffocating, draining. All the more oppressive because these French families are reduced to the bare minimum: father, mother, one or two children, scarcely an uncle, an aunt, met with only now and then. A timid love, a fearful love, curled in upon itself like a miser clutching his fistful of gold.

A chance circumstance, by drawing Christophe’s interest more closely to the young woman, came to show him this narrowing of French affections, this fear of living, of giving oneself over, of claiming what is rightfully one’s own.

The engineer Elsberger had a younger brother, ten years his junior, also an engineer. He was a decent fellow, like so many others, from a good bourgeois family, with artistic aspirations: they would very much like to make art; but they would not wish to compromise their bourgeois standing. In truth, this is not a particularly difficult problem; and most of today’s artists have solved it without undue risk. But one must want to; and not all are capable of even that feeble effort of will; they are not sure enough of wanting what they want; and as their bourgeois position becomes more secure, they let themselves slip into it, without revolt and without a sound. One could hardly blame them, if they were good bourgeois instead of mediocre artists. But from their disappointment there too often remains a secret discontent, a qualis artifex pereo, covered over as best it can be with what people have agreed to call philosophy, and which sours their life, until the wearing of days and fresh anxieties have erased the trace of that old bitterness. Such was the case of André Elsberger. He had wanted to write; but his brother, very rigid in his ways of thinking, had insisted that he enter, as he himself had, the scientific career. André was intelligent, passably gifted for the sciences --- or for letters --- equally; he was not certain enough that he was an artist, and he was too certain that he was a bourgeois; he had yielded, provisionally at first --- (one knows what that word means) --- to his brother’s will; he had entered the École Centrale, placed not very high, graduated the same way, and since then had been practicing his profession as an engineer, conscientiously but with no interest whatsoever. Naturally, he had thus lost the small artistic aptitudes he had possessed; and so he now spoke of them only with irony.

--- And besides, he would say --- (Christophe recognized in this reasoning Olivier’s pessimistic turn of mind) --- life was not worth tormenting oneself over a missed career. One more bad poet, more or less!…

The two brothers were fond of each other; they were of the same moral stamp; but they got on poorly together. Both had been Dreyfusards. But André, drawn toward syndicalism, was antimilitarist; and Élie was a patriot.

It happened sometimes that André would call on Christophe without going to see his brother; and Christophe found this puzzling: for there was no great sympathy between him and André. The latter spoke almost exclusively to complain of someone or something --- which grew wearisome; and when Christophe spoke, André did not listen. Christophe therefore no longer made any effort to hide that he found his visits pointless; but the other paid it no mind; he did not seem to notice. At last Christophe hit upon the key to the puzzle, one day when he observed that his visitor had leaned far out the window and was far more occupied with what was happening in the garden below than with what was being said to him. He pointed this out; and André had no difficulty admitting that he did indeed know Mlle Chabran, and that she had more than a little to do with the visits he paid Christophe. And, his tongue loosening, he confessed that he had long felt a deep friendship for the young woman, and perhaps something more: the Elsberger family had been close for a long time with that of the commandant; but after having been very intimate, politics and recent events had driven them apart; and since then they no longer saw each other. Christophe made no secret of finding this idiotic. Could one not think differently and continue to hold one another in esteem? André said yes, and protested his open-mindedness; but he excepted from his tolerance two or three questions on which, in his view, it was not permissible to hold a different opinion from his own; and he named the famous Affair. On that score, he talked nonsense, as is the custom. Christophe knew the custom: he made no attempt to argue; but he asked whether this Affair would not end one day, or whether its curse was to extend to the end of time, upon the children of our grandchildren’s children. André laughed; and, without answering Christophe, launched into a tender tribute to Céline Chabran, reproaching her father’s selfishness in finding it perfectly natural that she should sacrifice herself for him.

--- Why don’t you marry her, said Christophe, if you love her and she loves you?

André lamented that Céline was clericale. Christophe asked what that meant. The other replied that it meant: practicing religion, binding oneself to a God and his monks.

--- And what is that to you?

--- It matters to me that I don’t want my wife to belong to someone else besides me.

--- What! You are jealous even of your wife’s ideas? But you are even more selfish than the commandant!

--- You speak at your ease: would you yourself take a woman who didn’t love music?

--- That has already happened to me!

--- How can one live together if one does not think alike?

--- Never mind your thinking! Ah, my poor friend, all those ideas count for very little when one is in love. What do I care whether the woman I love loves music as I do? She is the music, for me! When one has the good fortune, as you do, to find a dear girl whom one loves and who loves you --- let her believe whatever she likes, and you believe whatever you like! In the end, all your ideas are worth the same; and there is only one truth in the world, only one good God: and that is to love each other.

--- You speak like a poet. You don’t see life as it is. I know too many households that have suffered from this disunity of mind.

--- That is because they did not love enough. One must know what one wants.

--- Will cannot do everything in life. Even if I wanted to marry Mlle Chabran, I could not.

--- I should very much like to know why!

André spoke of his misgivings: his position was not established; he had no fortune; his health was not good. He wondered whether he had the right to marry under such conditions. It was a grave responsibility. Did he not risk making unhappy the woman he loved, and himself as well --- to say nothing of the children who would come?… Better to wait --- or to give up.

Christophe shrugged:

--- A fine way to love! If she loves you, she will be happy to give herself over to it. As for children, you French are ridiculous. You would only release a life into the world if you are sure of making plump little rentiers of them, who will have nothing to suffer, nothing to fear… Good heavens! That is none of your concern; all you have to do is give them life, the love of life, and the courage to defend it. The rest… let them live, let them die… that is the lot of all men. Is it better to give up living than to run the chances of life?

The robust confidence that emanated from Christophe penetrated his interlocutor, but did not move him to a decision. He said:

--- Yes, perhaps, that is true…

But there he stopped. He seemed, like the others, struck with an incapacity to will and to act.

Christophe had taken up the struggle against this inertia, which he found in most of his French friends, strangely coupled with an industrious and very often feverish activity. Nearly all those he saw, across the various bourgeois circles he frequented, were discontented. Nearly all shared the same revulsion toward the masters of the day and their corrupted thought. Nearly all shared the same sorrowful and proud awareness of the betrayed soul of their race. And this was not a matter of personal grievances, the bitterness of men and classes defeated, pushed out of power and active life --- revoked civil servants, energies without employment, the old aristocracy withdrawn to its estates and hiding there to die, like a wounded lion. It was a feeling of moral revolt, muffled, deep, and general: one encountered it everywhere, in varying degrees, in the army, in the magistracy, in the University, in the bureaus, in all the vital gears of the governmental machine. But they did not act. They were discouraged in advance; they repeated:

--- There is nothing to be done;

or:

--- Let us try not to think about it anymore.

They fearfully turned their thoughts and their conversation away from sad things; and they sought refuge in domestic life.

If only they had withdrawn merely from political action! But even within the sphere of their daily work, each of these honest people had lost interest in doing anything. They tolerated degrading associations with scoundrels they despised, but against whom they were careful not to pick a fight, judging it pointless from the start. Why did these artists, for example, and notably these musicians whom Christophe saw at closer range, put up without protest with the effrontery of certain Scaramouches of the press, who laid down the law to them? There were donkeys among them whose ignorance in omni re scibili was proverbial, and who were nonetheless invested with sovereign authority in omni re scibili. They did not even take the trouble to write their own articles or their books; they had secretaries, poor hungry wretches who would have sold their souls, had they possessed any, for bread and women. This was no secret to anyone in Paris. And yet they continued to hold court and to look down upon artists. Christophe cried out with rage when he read certain of their columns.

--- Have they no heart at all! he would say. Oh, the cowards!

--- Who are you after now? asked Olivier. Still after some rogues from the Foire sur la Place?

--- No. After the honest people. The scoundrels are doing their job: they lie, they plunder, they steal, they murder. But the others --- those who let them do it while despising them --- I despise them a thousand times more. If their fellow journalists, if the honest and educated critics, if the artists upon whose backs these Harlequins run riot, did not allow them to carry on, in silence, out of timidity, out of fear of compromising themselves, or out of a shameful calculation of mutual accommodation, a sort of secret pact concluded with the enemy to remain safe from his blows --- if they did not allow these men to adorn themselves with their patronage and friendship, that shameless power would collapse into ridicule. It is the same weakness in every domain. I have met twenty decent men who told me of such and such an individual: “He is a rogue.” And not one of them failed to address him as “dear colleague” and shake his hand. --- “There are too many of them!” they say. --- Too many cowards, yes. Too many honest cowards.

--- Well, what do you want people to do?

--- Police yourselves! What are you waiting for? For heaven to take care of your affairs? Look, right now. The snow fell three days ago. It is blocking your streets, turning your Paris into a cesspool of mud. What are you doing? You cry out against your administration, which leaves you in the filth. But do you do anything to get out of it? God forbid! You fold your arms. Not one of you has the heart to clear so much as the pavement in front of his own door. Nobody does his duty, neither the State nor the individual; each considers himself absolved by accusing the other. You are so thoroughly accustomed by your centuries of monarchical education to doing nothing for yourselves that you always look like men gaping at the sky, waiting for a miracle. The only possible miracle would be for you to make up your minds to act. You see, my dear Olivier, you have intelligence and virtues to spare; but it is blood you lack. You, first of all. It is neither the mind nor the heart that is ailing among you. It is life. You are fading away.

--- What is to be done? We must wait for life to return.

--- You must will it to come back. You must will yourself to get well. You must will it! And for that, first of all, you must let the fresh air back into your house. When you won’t leave your home, at the very least your home must be healthy. You’ve let it be poisoned by the miasmas of the Fair. Your art and your thought are two-thirds adulterated. And your discouragement is such that even about this you don’t think to be indignant, you barely think to be surprised. Some of them --- (and it’s a ridiculous sight) --- some of these worthy people, intimidated, end up convincing themselves that they are the ones who are wrong, and that the charlatans are the ones who are right. Have I not encountered --- even at your journal Ésope, where you profess to be taken in by nothing --- those poor young men who persuade themselves that they love an art and ideas they don’t love at all? They intoxicate themselves with it, joylessly, out of docility; and they die of boredom in that lie!

Christophe moved among the uncertain and the discouraged like a wind shaking trees that have fallen asleep. He made no attempt to impose his own way of thinking; he breathed into them the energy to think for themselves. He said:

--- You are too humble. The great enemy is neurasthenia, doubt. One can, one must be tolerant and humane. But one is forbidden to doubt what one believes good and true. What one thinks, one must believe. And what one believes, one must defend. Whatever our strength, we are not allowed to abdicate. The smallest person in this world has a duty equal to the greatest. And --- (what he doesn’t know well enough) --- he also has power. Don’t believe that your revolt counts for so little! A strong conscience that dares to assert itself is a force. More than once in recent years you have seen the State and public opinion forced to reckon with the judgment of one brave man, whose only weapons were his moral strength, affirmed publicly, with courageous and tenacious constancy…

And if you ask yourself what is the point of taking so much trouble, what is the point of fighting, what is the point?… well, know this: --- Because France is dying, because Europe is dying --- because our civilization, that admirable work built at the cost of so many centuries of effort by our humanity, would be swallowed up if we did not fight. That is no empty word. The Homeland is in danger, our European Homeland --- and above all yours, your little homeland, France. Your apathy is killing it. Your silence is killing it. It dies in each of your energies that dies, in your thoughts that resign themselves, in your sterile goodwill, in each drop of your blood that dries up, useless… Rise up! We must live! Or, if you must die, you must die on your feet.

But the hardest thing was not so much bringing them to act as bringing them to act together. On that score they were intractable. They sulked with one another. The best of them were the most stubborn. Christophe had an example of this in his own house: M. Félix Weil, the engineer Elsberger, and Commandant Chabran lived among themselves on a footing of mute and courteous hostility. And yet, however little Christophe knew them, it was easy for him to see that, under different party or racial labels, they all wanted the same thing.

M. Weil and the commandant would have had, in particular, many reasons to come to an understanding. By one of those contrasts frequent among men of thought, M. Weil, who never left his books and lived entirely by the life of the mind, was passionate about military affairs. “We are all patchwork,” said the half-Jewish Montaigne, applying to all men what is true of certain races of mind, like the one to which M. Weil belonged. This old intellectual had a cult for Napoleon. He surrounded himself with writings and mementos in which the tremendous dream of the imperial epic lived again. Like many Frenchmen of his twilight era, he was dazzled by the distant rays of that sun of glory. He refought the campaigns, he waged the battles, he discussed the operations; he was one of those armchair strategists, proliferating in academies and universities, who explain Austerlitz and correct Waterloo. He was the first to mock this “Napoleonitis”; his irony delighted in it; but he went on just the same intoxicating himself with those beautiful stories, like a child at play; at certain episodes, his eyes would fill with tears: when he noticed this weakness, he would double over with laughter, calling himself an old fool. To tell the truth, it was less patriotism than romantic interest and a platonic love of action that made him a Napoleonist. Yet he was an excellent patriot, more attached to France than many native-born Frenchmen. French anti-Semites do a wicked and foolish thing by discouraging, with their insulting suspicions, the French sentiments of Jews established in France. Apart from the reasons that necessarily cause any family, after one or two generations, to become attached to the soil where it has settled, and that the blood of the earth has become its blood, Jews have special reasons to love the people that represents in the West the most advanced ideas of intellectual and moral freedom. They love it all the more because they have helped to make it so, over the past hundred years, and because that freedom is partly their own work. How then would they not defend it against the threats of every feudal reaction? It plays into the hands of that reaction to try --- as a handful of criminal politicians and a herd of honest fools would like --- to sever the ties that bind these adopted Frenchmen to France.

Commandant Chabran was one of those misguided old Frenchmen whom their newspapers drive to distraction by presenting every immigrant in France as a hidden enemy, and who, with a naturally welcoming and humane spirit, compel themselves to suspect, to hate, to withdraw into themselves, to renounce the generous destinies of a race that is a confluence of races. He therefore felt obliged to ignore the tenant on the first floor, even though he would have been glad to know him. For his part, M. Weil would have enjoyed talking with the officer; but he knew his nationalism, and he gently despised him.

Christophe had far less reason than the commandant to take an interest in M. Weil. But he could not bear to hear anyone spoken ill of unjustly. So he broke lances for M. Weil whenever he was attacked in his presence.

One day when the commandant was ranting, as was his habit, against the state of things, Christophe said to him:

--- It’s your own fault. You all withdraw. When things in France don’t go as you wish, you resign with a great flourish. It is as though you make it a point of honor to declare yourselves defeated. No one has ever seen a cause lost with such enthusiasm. Come now, commandant, you who have fought in a war --- is that any way to fight?

--- There is no question of fighting, replied the commandant; one doesn’t fight against France. In struggles like these, you have to speak, debate, vote, endure unpleasant contact with all manner of scoundrels: that doesn’t suit me.

--- You’re very squeamish! In Africa you’ve seen worse!

--- Upon my word, that disgusted me less. And besides, you could always smash their faces in! And then, to fight, you need soldiers. I had my riflemen over there. Here, I’m all alone.

--- And yet brave men are hardly in short supply.

--- Where are they?

--- All around you.

--- Well then, what are they doing?

--- They’re doing what you do --- nothing; they say there’s nothing to be done.

--- Name me one. Just one.

--- Three, if you like, and in your own house.

Christophe named M. Weil --- (the commandant exclaimed) --- and the Elsbergers --- (he started):

--- That Jew? Those Dreyfusards?

--- Dreyfusards? said Christophe. Well, what of it?

--- They are the ones who have ruined France.

--- They love her as much as you do.

--- Then they’re crackpots, dangerous crackpots.

--- Can one not give one’s adversaries their due?

--- I get along perfectly well with loyal adversaries who fight on equal terms. The proof is that I talk with you, Monsieur l’Allemand. I respect the Germans, while hoping one day to pay them back with interest for the thrashing we received from them. But the others, the enemies within --- that’s a different matter: they use dishonest weapons, sophistry, unhealthy ideologies, poisoned humanitarianism…

--- Yes, you are in the state of mind of the knights of the Middle Ages who found themselves facing gunpowder for the first time. What can you do? War evolves.

--- So be it. But then let us be frank and say that it is war.

--- Suppose a common enemy were threatening European civilization --- would you not ally yourself with the Germans?

--- We did it, in China.

--- Look around you. Is your country, are all our countries of Europe, not currently threatened in the heroic idealism of their races? Are they not all, more or less, in the grip of adventurers of every class? Against that common enemy, should you not extend your hand to those among your adversaries who have some worth and some moral vigor? How can a man like you take so little account of realities? Here are people sustaining against you an ideal different from your own! An ideal is a force --- you cannot deny it; in the struggle you recently waged, it was your adversaries’ ideal that defeated you. Instead of wearing yourself out against it, why not use it alongside your own, side by side, against the enemies of all ideals, against the exploiters of the homeland, of thought, the corrupters of European civilization?

--- For whom? We would first need to agree. To bring about the triumph of our adversaries?

--- When you were in Africa, you didn’t trouble yourself to know whether you were fighting for the King or for the Republic. I imagine many of you gave little thought to the Republic.

--- They didn’t give a damn.

--- Good! And France was the better for it. You were conquering for her, and also for yourselves, for honor, for the joy of it. Well then, why not do the same here! Broaden the struggle. Don’t squabble over petty matters of politics or religion. Those are trifles. Whether your race is the eldest daughter of the Church or the daughter of Reason matters little. But let her live! All is well that exalts life. There is only one enemy: the pleasure-seeking egotism that dries up and pollutes the springs of life. Exalt strength, exalt light, exalt fertile love, the joy of sacrifice, action. And never delegate to others the task of acting in your place. Act, act, unite! Come!…

And he began, laughing, to hammer out on the piano the opening measures of the march in B-flat from the Symphony with Choruses.

--- You know, he said, breaking off, if I were one of your musicians, Charpentier or Bruneau (the Devil take them!), I would put together, in a choral symphony, Aux armes, citoyens!, l’Internationale, Vive Henri IV!, God Save France! --- all the herbs of Midsummer’s Eve --- (something like this, you see…) --- I would give you one of those bouillabaisse stews to blow your head off! It would be terribly bad --- (no worse, in any case, than what they produce) --- but I promise you it would set a fire in your belly, and you’d have no choice but to march!

He laughed with all his heart.

The commandant laughed like him:

--- You’re quite a fellow, Monsieur Krafft. Pity you’re not one of us!

--- But I am one of yours! It’s the same fight, everywhere. Let us close ranks!

The commandant agreed; but things went no further. Then Christophe persisted, bringing the conversation back to M. Weil and the Elsbergers. And the officer, who was no less stubborn, resumed his eternal arguments against the Jews and against the Dreyfusards, without any of what Christophe said appearing to have the slightest effect on him.

Christophe was saddened by it. Olivier said to him:

--- Don’t be troubled. A single man cannot change, all at once, an entire state of mind of an entire society. That would be too much to ask! But you are already doing a great deal without realizing it.

--- What am I doing? said Christophe.

--- You are being Christophe.

--- What good does that do others?

--- A very great good. Be only what you are, my dear Christophe. Don’t trouble yourself about us.

But Christophe would not resign himself to that. He went on arguing with Commandant Chabran, and sometimes heatedly. Céline found it amusing. She attended their conversations, working in silence. She took no part in the discussion; but she seemed more cheerful; her gaze had a wholly different brightness: it seemed as though there were more space, more breathable air around her. She began to read; she went out a little more; she took an interest in more things. And one day when Christophe was battling her father over the Elsbergers, the commandant saw her smile; he asked her what she thought; she answered calmly:

--- I think M. Krafft is right.

The commandant, taken aback, said:

--- That’s a bit much!… Well, right or wrong, we’re quite fine as we are. We have no need to see those people. Don’t you agree, my dear?

--- But yes, Papa, she replied, it would make me happy.

The commandant fell silent and pretended not to have heard. He was himself far less immune to Christophe’s influence than he cared to show. His narrowness of judgment and his violence did not prevent him from possessing a very sound instinct and a generous heart. He liked Christophe; he liked his frankness and his moral health; he often felt a sharp regret that Christophe was a German. No matter how heated he grew in arguments with him, he kept seeking those arguments out; and Christophe’s points never failed to work on him. He would have been the last to admit it. But one day Christophe found him reading attentively a book that he refused to let him see. As she walked Christophe to the door, Céline, alone with him, said:

--- Do you know what he was reading? A book by M. Weil.

Christophe was overjoyed.

--- And what does he say about it?

--- He says: “That scoundrel!…” But he can’t put it down.

Christophe made no allusion to the fact when speaking with the commandant. It was the commandant himself who said to him:

--- Why have you stopped boring me with your Jew?

--- Because there is no longer any need, said Christophe.

--- Why not? asked the commandant, aggressively.

Christophe did not reply and walked away, laughing.

Olivier was right. It is not through words that we act on others. It is through our being. There are people who radiate around them an atmosphere of calm, through their glances, their gestures, the silent contact of their serene souls. Christophe radiated life. It penetrated gently, gently, like the warmth of spring, through old walls and shuttered windows of the drowsy house; it resurrected hearts that pain, weakness, and isolation had been gnawing for years, drying out, leaving for dead. The power of souls over souls! Those who are subject to it and those who exert it are equally unaware of it. And yet the life of the world is made of the ebb and flow governed by this mysterious force of attraction.

Two floors below Christophe and Olivier’s apartment there lived, as we have seen, a young woman of thirty-five, Mme Germain, widowed for two years, who had lost, the previous year, her little girl of seven or eight. She lived with her mother-in-law. They saw no one. Of all the tenants in the house, none had had less contact with Christophe. They had barely crossed paths; and they had never spoken a word to each other.

She was a tall, thin woman, well-made enough, with fine dark brown eyes, opaque, slightly inexpressive, in which there sometimes kindled a bleak and hard flame, set in a face the color of yellow wax, with flat cheeks and a tightly drawn mouth. Old Mme Germain was devout and spent her days at church. The younger woman jealously walled herself up in her grief. She took no interest in anything or anyone. She surrounded herself with relics and images of her little girl; and from staring at them so long, she could no longer see her; the photographs, the dead images, were killing the living image. She could no longer see her; and she persisted; she wanted, she willed, to think of nothing but her; so she had finally reached the point where she could not even think of her: she had completed the work of death. And so she remained there, frozen, her heart turned to stone, tearless, her life run dry. Religion was no comfort to her. She practiced it, but without love, and therefore without living faith; she gave money for masses, but took no active part in any works; her whole religion rested on this single thought: to see her again. The rest---what did it matter to her? God? What did she want with God? To see her again, to see her again… And she was far from certain of that. She wanted to believe it, she wanted it desperately, stubbornly; but she doubted… She could not bear to see other children; she would think:

--- Why have those ones not died?

There was in the neighborhood a little girl who, in height and manner of walking, resembled her own. When she saw her from behind with her little braids, she would tremble. She would begin to follow her; and when the child turned around and she saw it was not her, she felt an impulse to strangle her. She complained that the little Elsberger girls---who were quite quiet, well kept in check by their upbringing---made noise in the apartment above; and the moment the poor children trotted about in their room, she would send her servant up to the neighbors to demand silence. Christophe, who met her once when he was coming home with the little girls, was struck by the hard look she cast at them.

One summer evening, when this living dead woman was hypnotizing herself in her emptiness, seated in the dark near her window, she heard Christophe playing. He had the habit of dreaming at the piano at that hour. The music irritated her, troubling the void in which she was numbing herself. She closed the window angrily. The music pursued her to the far end of the room. Mme Germain felt a kind of hatred for it. She would have liked to prevent Christophe from playing, but she had no right to. Every day now, at the same hour, she would wait, with irritated impatience, for the piano to begin; and when it was late in starting, her irritation only grew fiercer. Against her will, she had to follow the music to its end; and when it was over, she had difficulty finding her way back to her accustomed apathy. --- And one evening, as she was crouched in a corner of her darkened room and through the walls and the closed window came the distant music, the luminous music… she felt herself shiver, and the spring of tears broke in her again. She went to reopen the window; and from then on she listened, weeping. The music was like a rain that penetrated drop by drop her desiccated heart and made it live again. She could see the sky again, the stars, the summer night; she felt stirring, like a very pale glimmer still, an interest in life, a vague and painful sympathy for others. And that night, for the first time in months, the image of her little girl came back to her in a dream. --- For the surest road that brings us close to our dead, the way to see them again, is not to die as they have died---it is to live. They live through our life and die through our death.

She did not seek to meet Christophe. She rather avoided him. But she heard him passing on the staircase with the little girls; and she kept herself hidden behind the door to catch the sound of the childish chatter that stirred her heart.

One day, she was about to go out when she heard the small trotting steps coming down the stairs with a bit more noise than usual, and one of the children’s voices saying to the little sister:

--- Don’t make so much noise, Lucette, you know, Christophe said, because of the lady who is sad.

And the other one began to muffle her steps and to speak in a whisper. Then Mme Germain could hold back no longer: she opened the door, seized the children, and embraced them with violence. They were frightened; one of the little girls began to cry. She let them go and went back inside.

After that, when she met them, she tried to smile at them, with a strained smile---(she had lost the habit of smiling);---she addressed a few abrupt and affectionate words to them, which the intimidated children answered only with oppressed whispers. They continued to be afraid of the lady, more afraid than before; and when they passed her door now, they would run, for fear she might catch them. She, for her part, would hide in order to see them. She would have been ashamed to be seen talking with the children. She was ashamed in her own eyes. It seemed to her that she was stealing from her dead little girl a portion of the love that was entirely the child’s due. She threw herself on her knees and begged her forgiveness. But now that the instinct to live and to love had awakened, she could do nothing against it---it was the stronger force.

One evening---Christophe was coming home---he noticed an unusual commotion in the house. A tradesman he met told him that the tenant on the third floor, M. Watelet, had just died suddenly of angina pectoris. Christophe was filled with compassion, less at the thought of his unfortunate neighbor than at the thought of the child, who was now left alone. No relatives of M. Watelet were known, and there was every reason to believe he was leaving her with almost no resources. Christophe ran up four steps at a time and entered the apartment on the third floor, whose door was standing open. He found the abbé Corneille beside the dead man, and the little girl in tears calling for her papa; the concierge was clumsily trying to console her. Christophe took the child in his arms and spoke tender words to her. The little one clung to him desperately; he could not think of leaving her; he wanted to carry her out of the apartment, but she refused. So he stayed with her. Sitting near the window in the fading light, he kept rocking her in his arms, speaking to her softly. The child gradually grew calmer; she fell asleep in the midst of her sobs. Christophe laid her on her bed and awkwardly tried to undress her, to unlace her little shoes. Night was falling. The apartment door had been left open. A shadow entered with the rustle of skirts. In the last faded light of day, Christophe recognized the feverish eyes of the woman in mourning. He was seized with emotion. Standing at the threshold of the room, she said, her throat tight:

--- I’ve come… Will you… Will you give her to me?

Christophe took her hand. Mme Germain was weeping. Then she sat down at the head of the bed. After a moment, she said:

--- Let me watch over her…

Christophe went back up to his floor with the abbé Corneille. The priest, a little ill at ease, apologized for having come. He hoped, he said with humility, that the dead man would not hold it against him: it was not as a priest that he was there---it was as a friend. Christophe, too moved to speak, left him with a warm press of the hand.

The following morning, when Christophe came back, he found the child with her arms around Mme Germain’s neck, with the naïve trust that surrenders these small beings at once to those who know how to please them. She consented to follow her new friend… Alas! She had very quickly forgotten her adoptive father. She showed the same affection toward her new mamma. It was not very reassuring. Did the possessive love of Mme Germain see it?… Perhaps. But what did it matter? One must love. Happiness is there…

A few weeks after the funeral, Mme Germain took the child to the country, far from Paris. Christophe and Olivier were there for the departure. The young woman wore an expression of peace and secret joy that they had never seen in her before. She paid no attention to them. And yet, at the moment of leaving, she noticed Christophe, held out her hand to him, and said:

--- You saved me.

--- What is the matter with that woman? asked Christophe, astonished, as they climbed the stairs after she had gone.

A few days later, he received by post a photograph of an unknown little girl sitting on a stool, her small hands folded neatly on her knees, looking at him with clear, melancholy eyes. Below it were written these words:

“My little dead girl thanks you.”

So it was that among all these people a breath of new life was passing through. Up above, in the attic room on the fifth floor, there was a hearth of broad and powerful humanity whose rays were slowly penetrating the house.

But Christophe was not aware of it. It was all far too slow for him.

--- Ah! he sighed, if only one could bring all these good people together in fellowship---of every faith, every class---people who simply refuse to know one another! Is there no way?

--- What can you do? said Olivier. It would take a mutual tolerance and a power of sympathy that can only be born of inner joy---the joy of a healthy, normal, harmonious life---the joy of putting one’s energies to good use, the sense that one’s efforts are not wasted, that one is serving something great. For that, one would need a country in good health, a fatherland in a period of greatness, or---(which is still better)---on the road toward greatness. And one would also need---(the two go together)---a power capable of putting all the nation’s energies to work, an intelligent and strong authority that stood above parties. And no power stands above parties except one that draws its strength from itself and not from the multitude, one that does not try to lean on anarchic majorities as today’s does---where it makes itself the lapdog of the mediocre---but that imposes itself on all through services rendered: a victorious general, a Committee of Public Safety dictatorship, the supremacy of intelligence… Who knows? It doesn’t depend on us. The occasion must arise, and so must the men who know how to seize it; luck and genius are both required. Let us wait and hope! The forces are there: forces of faith, of science, of labor, of old France and new France, of greater France… What a surge it would be, if the word were spoken---the magic word that would launch all these united forces! That word, naturally, is one that neither you nor I can say. Who will say it? Victory, glory?… Patience! The essential thing is that all that is strong in the race should gather itself, not destroy itself, not lose heart before the hour. Happiness and genius come only to peoples who have known how to deserve them through centuries of stoic patience, of labor and of faith.

--- Who knows? said Christophe. They often come sooner than one thinks---at the moment when they are least expected. You reckon too much in centuries. Prepare yourselves. Gird your loins. Have always your shoes upon your feet and your staff in your hand… For you do not know whether the Lord may not pass before the door this very night.

He passed very close that night. The tip of his shadow touched the threshold of the house.

In the wake of seemingly insignificant events, relations between France and Germany had suddenly soured; and within two or three days, what had been the ordinary courtesies of bland civility and good-neighborliness had given way to the provocative tone that precedes war. This could only have surprised those living under the illusion that reason governs the world. But they were numerous in France; and for many it was a stupefaction to see, overnight, the Gallophobic violence of the press across the Rhine erupt with its usual near-unanimity. Certain of these newspapers --- those which, in both countries, claim a monopoly on patriotism, speak in the name of the nation, and dictate to the State, sometimes with the State’s secret complicity, the policy it must follow --- were hurling outrageous ultimatums at France. A conflict had arisen between Germany and England; and Germany would not even grant France the right to stay out of it; her insolent newspapers were demanding that France declare herself for Germany, threatening otherwise to make her pay the first costs of the war; they presumed to wrest her alliance through fear, and treated her in advance as a beaten and contented vassal --- to say it plainly, as an Austria. One recognized in this the proud madness of German imperialism, drunk on its victory, and the total incapacity of its statesmen to understand other races, applying to all of them the same common standard that held for themselves: force, the supreme reason. Naturally, upon an old nation rich with centuries of glory and supremacy over Europe that Germany had never known, this brutal summons had produced the opposite effect of what Germany expected. It had roused her slumbering pride; France trembled from base to summit; and even the most indifferent were crying out in anger.

The mass of the German nation had no part in these provocations, which shocked Germany itself: good people everywhere ask only to live in peace; and those of Germany are particularly peaceable, warm-hearted, eager to be on good terms with everyone, and more inclined to admire others and imitate them than to fight them. But no one asks the good people their opinion; and they are not bold enough to give it. Those who have not taken on the virile habit of public action are inevitably condemned to be its playthings. They are the magnificent, unthinking echo that reverberates the snarling shouts of the press and the defiance of leaders, and turns them into La Marseillaise or the Wacht am Rhein.

It was a terrible blow for Christophe and Olivier. They were so accustomed to loving each other that they could no longer conceive why their countries did not do the same. The reasons for this persistent hostility, suddenly rekindled, escaped them both --- above all Christophe, who, as a German, had no cause to resent a people his own people had defeated. Even as he himself was shocked by the insufferable arrogance of some of his compatriots, and shared, to a degree, the French indignation at this Brunswick-style summons, he did not quite understand why France would not, after all, consent to become Germany’s ally. The two countries seemed to him to have so many deep reasons for union, so many thoughts in common, and such great tasks to accomplish together, that he grew angry seeing them persist in these sterile grudges. Like all Germans, he regarded France as the principal culprit in the misunderstanding: for though he was willing to admit that it might be painful for her to remain fixed on the memory of a defeat, he saw in it only a question of pride, which ought to yield before the higher interests of civilization and of France herself. He had never taken the trouble to think through the problem of Alsace-Lorraine. At school he had been taught to regard the annexation of those territories as an act of justice, which had restored, after centuries of foreign subjugation, a German land to the German fatherland. And so he was utterly confounded when he discovered that his friend regarded it as a crime. He had not yet spoken of these things with him, so certain was he that they were in agreement; and now he found Olivier --- whose good faith and intellectual freedom he knew well --- telling him, without passion, without anger, with a deep sadness, that a great people might well renounce vengeance for such a crime, but could not subscribe to it without dishonoring itself.

They had great difficulty understanding each other. The historical arguments Olivier raised in support of France’s right to claim Alsace as a Latin land made no impression on Christophe; there were equally strong arguments for the contrary: history furnishes politics with whatever arguments it needs for whatever cause it pleases. Christophe was far more moved by the aspect of the problem that was not merely French, but human. Whether the Alsatians were or were not German --- that was not the question. They did not wish to be; and that alone counted. Who has the right to say: “This people belongs to me, for they are my brothers”? If his brother disowns him, even if wrongly a thousand times over, all the fault falls on the one who failed to make himself loved, and who has no right to claim to bind them to his fate. After forty years of violence, of brutality open and veiled, and even of genuine services rendered by the precise and intelligent German administration, the Alsatians persisted in not wishing to be German; and even if their weary will had at last given way, nothing could efface the sufferings of the generations forced to go into exile from their native soil, or, more painfully still, unable to leave and compelled to bear a yoke hateful to them --- the theft of their country and the enslavement of their people.

Christophe frankly admitted that he had never considered this aspect of the question; and he could not help being troubled by it. An honest German brings to discussion a good faith that the passionate self-regard of a Latin, however sincere, does not always possess. Christophe did not think to excuse himself by pointing to similar crimes committed in every era of history by every nation. He had too much pride to seek such humiliating excuses; he knew that as humanity rises, its crimes become more odious, because they are surrounded by more light. But he also knew that if France were victorious in turn, she would be no more restrained in victory than Germany had been, and that another link would be added to the chain of crimes. So would the tragic conflict perpetuate itself, in which the best of European civilization threatened to be lost.

As agonizing as the question was for Christophe, it was still more so for Olivier. The sorrow of fratricidal struggle between the two nations best suited to go forward together was not suffering enough. Within France itself, one part of the nation was preparing to fight the other. For years, pacifist and antimilitarist doctrines had been spreading, propagated alike by the noblest and the vilest elements of the nation. The State had long allowed them free rein, with the enervated dilettantism it brought to everything that did not touch the immediate interests of politicians; and it had not occurred to anyone that there would have been no less danger in openly supporting the most dangerous doctrine than in letting it work its way through the nation’s veins and ruin war-readiness while war was being prepared. This doctrine spoke to free intelligences that dreamed of founding a fraternal Europe, uniting its efforts toward a more just and humane world. And it also spoke to the cowardly egotism of the rabble, who wanted to risk their necks for no one and nothing. --- These ideas had reached Olivier and many of his friends. Once or twice Christophe had been present, in his house, at conversations that had left him dumbfounded. Good-natured Mooch, stuffed full of humanitarian illusions, said with shining eyes and great gentleness that war must be prevented, and that the best means to do so was to incite the soldiers to revolt, even if necessary to fire on their officers: he was confident he could manage it. The engineer Élie Elsberger replied, with cold fury, that if war broke out, he and his friends would not leave for the front until they had settled their account with the enemy within. André Elsberger took Mooch’s side. Christophe stumbled one day into a terrible scene between the two brothers. They were threatening to have each other shot. Despite the bantering tone that carried these murderous words, one sensed that neither of them was saying anything he was not resolved to carry out. Christophe regarded with astonishment this absurd nation, which is always ready to kill itself for ideas… Madmen. Logical madmen. Those are the good kind. Each sees only his own idea, and wants to follow it to the end, without deviating a single step. And it serves no purpose: for they annihilate each other. The humanitarians make war on the patriots. The patriots make war on the humanitarians. Meanwhile, the enemy comes and crushes the fatherland and humanity alike.

--- But tell me, Christophe asked André Elsberger, have you come to an understanding with the proletarians of other peoples?

--- Someone has to begin. That someone must be us. We have always been the first. It falls to us to give the signal!

--- And if the others don’t follow?

--- They will follow.

--- Do you have treaties, a plan drawn up in advance?

--- What need is there for treaties? Our strength is greater than all diplomacies.

--- This is not a question of ideology, but of strategy. If you want to kill war, take war’s own methods. Draw up your operational plan for both countries. Agree that on such a date, in France and in Germany, your allied forces will carry out such and such operations. But if you leave it to chance, what good do you expect to come of it? Chance on one side, enormous organized forces on the other --- the result is certain: you will be crushed.

André Elsberger was not listening. He shrugged his shoulders and contented himself with vague threats: a handful of sand thrown in the right place in the gears, he said, was enough to break the whole machine.

But there is a difference between discussing things at leisure, in a theoretical way, and having to put one’s thoughts into practice --- especially when one must take sides on the spot… A gripping hour, when the great swell passes through the depths of human hearts! One believed oneself free, master of one’s own thought! And now one feels swept along, in spite of oneself. An obscure will opposes your will. And one discovers then that what truly exists is not you, but this unknown Force, whose laws govern the entire human ocean…

The firmest minds, the most certain of their faith, watched it dissolve at the breath of reality, wavered, trembled before decisions, and often, to their great surprise, decided in a direction opposite to what they had foreseen. Some of the most ardent opponents of war felt awaken, with unexpected violence, the vigorous pride and passion of the fatherland. Christophe saw socialists, and even revolutionary syndicalists, torn between these warring passions and duties. In the first hours of the conflict, when he did not yet believe the affair was serious, he said to André Elsberger, with German tactlessness, that now was the moment to apply his theories, if he did not want Germany to take France. The other leapt up and answered, angrily:

--- Just you try!… Idiots, who can’t even muzzle your emperor and shake off the yoke, despite your sacred Socialist Party with its four hundred thousand members and three million voters!… We’ll take care of it ourselves! Take us. We’ll take you…

As the waiting dragged on, the fever smoldered in everyone. André was tormented. To know that a faith is true, and to be unable to defend it! And then, to feel oneself struck by this moral epidemic, which propagates through peoples the powerful madness of collective thought --- the breath of war! It worked on all those who surrounded Christophe, and on Christophe himself. They no longer spoke to each other. They kept apart.

But it was impossible to remain long in this state of uncertainty. The wind of action cast the undecided, willing or not, into one camp or the other. And one day, when it seemed they stood on the eve of the ultimatum --- when in both countries every spring of action was wound tight, ready for killing --- Christophe perceived that everyone had chosen, outside the house as within it. All the enemy factions, by instinct, were rallying around that hated or despised power that represented France. Not only the decent people. The aesthetes, the masters of depraved art, interpolated patriotic professions of faith into their risqué stories. The Jews spoke of defending the sacred soil of their ancestors. At the mere name of the flag, Hamilton had tears in his eyes. And all of them were sincere, all were caught by the contagion. André Elsberger and his syndicalist friends as much as the others --- more than the others: crushed by the necessity of things, compelled to a course they detested, they committed themselves to it with a somber fury, a pessimistic rage, that made of them frenzied instruments of action. The worker Aubert, pulled between his learned humanitarianism and his instinctive chauvinism, had nearly lost his mind. After several sleepless nights, he had finally hit upon a formula that settled everything: it was that France was synonymous with humanity. Since then, he no longer spoke with Christophe. Nearly everyone in the house had closed their doors to him. Even the excellent Arnauds no longer invited him. They went on making music, surrounding themselves with art; they tried to forget the common preoccupation. But they thought of it always. Each of them, individually, when they met Christophe, shook his hand warmly but hastily, in hiding. And in the same day, if Christophe saw them together again, they passed without stopping, greeting him, embarrassed. On the other hand, people who had not spoken for years were suddenly drawing close. One evening Olivier beckoned Christophe to the window, and without a word showed him, in the garden below, the Elsbergers talking with Commandant Chabran.

Christophe had no thought of marveling at this revolution in people’s minds. He was too busy with what was happening in his own. A storm was breaking inside him that he could not bring under control. Olivier, who had more reason to be agitated, was calmer than he was. Of everyone Christophe saw around him, Olivier alone seemed to have remained untouched by the contagion. As oppressed as he was by the anticipation of the coming war and by his fear of the internal upheavals he foresaw in spite of everything, he recognized the greatness of the two enemy forces that sooner or later would come to blows; he also knew that it was France’s role to serve as the proving ground for human progress, and that all new ideas need to be watered with her blood in order to flower. For his own part, he refused to take sides in the struggle. In this mutual slaughter of civilization, he would willingly have repeated Antigone’s motto: “I was made for love, not for hate.” --- For love, and for understanding, which is another form of love. His tenderness for Christophe was enough to illuminate his duty. At this hour when millions of human beings were preparing to hate one another, he felt that the duty --- and the happiness --- of two souls like his and Christophe’s was to love each other and to keep their reason intact in the midst of the storm. He thought of Goethe, refusing to join the movement of liberating hatred that in 1813 had hurled Germany against France.

Christophe felt all of this; and yet he was not at peace. He, who had in a sense deserted Germany, who could not return there, who had been nourished on the European thought of the great eighteenth-century Germans so dear to his old friend Schulz, and who detested the spirit of the new Germany, militarist and mercantile --- he heard a squall of passions rising within him, and he did not know which way it would carry him. He said nothing of this to Olivier; but he spent his days in anguish, watching for news. In secret, he gathered his belongings and packed his bag. He was not reasoning. It was stronger than he was. Olivier watched him with unease, sensing the battle being fought inside his friend, yet not daring to question him. They felt the need to draw closer to each other than usual; they loved each other more than ever; but they were afraid to speak. They trembled at the thought of discovering between them some difference of feeling that would divide them again, as they had so recently been divided by a misunderstanding. Often their eyes would meet with an expression of anxious tenderness, as though they stood on the eve of an eternal parting. And they said nothing, heavy with foreboding.

Meanwhile, on the roof of the building going up across the courtyard, through those sad days, in gusts of rain, the workers were hammering the last nails; and Christophe’s friend the talkative roofer would shout across to him, laughing:

--- My house is finished at last!

The storm passed, mercifully, as quickly as it had come. Unofficial notes from the chancelleries announced, like a barometer, the return of fine weather. The snarling dogs of the press were driven back to their kennels. In a matter of hours, people’s spirits relaxed. It was a summer evening. Christophe, breathless, had just brought the good news to Olivier. He was breathing freely again, all happiness. Olivier looked at him, smiling, a little sad. And he did not dare ask the question he carried in his heart. He said:

--- Well --- you saw them united, all those people who couldn’t stand each other?

--- I saw them, said Christophe, in good humor. You’re all jokers! You shout at each other constantly. At bottom, you all agree.

--- It would seem, said Olivier, that you’re glad of it?

--- Why not? Because this union comes at my expense?… Bah! I’m strong enough… And besides, there’s something good about feeling that torrent sweeping you away, those demons waking in your heart…

--- They terrify me, said Olivier. I would rather have eternal solitude than my people’s unity at that price.

They fell silent, and neither one dared approach the subject that troubled them. At last Olivier made an effort and, his throat tight, said:

--- Tell me honestly, Christophe: you were going to leave?

Christophe answered:

--- Yes.

Olivier had been sure of the answer. And yet it struck him like a blow to the heart. He said:

--- What, Christophe, you could have… ?

Christophe passed a hand across his forehead and said:

--- Let’s not speak of it anymore. I don’t want to think about it.

Olivier repeated, in pain:

--- You would have fought against us?

--- I don’t know. I didn’t ask myself.

--- But in your heart, you had taken sides?

Christophe said:

--- Yes.

--- Against me?

--- Never against you. You are mine. Wherever I am, you are with me.

--- But against my country?

--- For mine.

--- It’s a terrible thing, said Olivier. I love my country as you love yours. I love my dear France; but can I murder my soul for her? Can I betray my conscience for her sake? That would be to betray France herself. How could I hate, without hatred, or play the comedy of hate, without lying? The modern state committed an odious crime --- a crime that will crush it --- the day it presumed to bind with its iron law the free Church of the spirit, whose very essence is to understand and to love. Let Caesar be Caesar, but let him not pretend to be God! Let him take our money, our lives: he has no right over our souls; he will not stain them with blood. We came into this world to spread light, not to extinguish it. To each their duty! If Caesar wants war, let Caesar have armies to wage it --- armies as in former times, for whom war was a trade! I am not foolish enough to waste my time in useless lamentation against force. But I am not of the army of force. I am of the army of the spirit; alongside thousands of brothers, I represent France there. Let Caesar conquer the earth if he will! We conquer truth.

--- To conquer, said Christophe, you must win, you must live. Truth is not some rigid dogma secreted by the brain, the way a stalactite is secreted by the walls of a cave. Truth is life. It is not in your head that you must seek it. It is in the hearts of others. Join with them. Think whatever you wish, but take a bath in humanity every day. You must live the life of others, and submit to your destiny, and love it.

--- Our destiny is to be what we are. It does not depend on us whether we think or do not think certain things, even if they are dangerous. We have reached a degree of civilization at which we can no longer go back.

--- Yes, you have reached the outermost edge of civilization’s plateau, that critical point where a people arrives only to be seized by an irresistible desire to throw itself off. Religion and instinct have grown weak in you. You are nothing but intelligence now --- machines for grinding out arguments. Danger ahead! Death is coming.

--- It comes for all peoples: it’s a matter of centuries.

--- Will you dismiss centuries so lightly? All of life is a matter of days and hours. You would have to be the dyed-in-the-wool abstractionists you are to set yourselves in the absolute, instead of seizing the passing moment.

--- What do you want? The flame consumes the torch. One cannot both be and have been, my poor Christophe.

--- One must be.

--- It is a great thing to have been something great.

--- It is only a great thing on condition that there are still men alive and great enough to appreciate it.

--- But wouldn’t you rather have been the Greeks, who are dead, than to be so many peoples who merely vegetate today?

--- I would rather be Christophe, alive.

Olivier stopped arguing. Not that he had nothing left to say. But it no longer interested him. Throughout this whole discussion, he had been thinking only of Christophe. He said, with a sigh:

--- You love me less than I love you.

Christophe took his hand with tenderness:

--- Dear Olivier, he said, I love you more than my own life. But forgive me --- I do not love you more than life itself, more than the sun of our races. I have a horror of the night toward which your false progress draws me. All your words of renunciation conceal the same Buddhist Nirvana. Action alone is living, even when it kills. We have no choice in this world between the devouring flame and the night. Despite the melancholy sweetness of the dreams that precede the dusk, I will not have this peace that is the forerunner of death. The silence of infinite spaces terrifies me. Throw new armfuls of wood onto the fire! More! More! And myself with it, if need be. I will not have the fire go out. If it goes out, we are done for --- everything that is is done for.

--- I know your voice, said Olivier; it comes from the depths of the barbarism of the past.

He took from a shelf a book of Hindu poets and read aloud the sublime apostrophe of the god Krishna:

“Rise up, and fight with a resolute heart. Indifferent to pleasure and to pain, to gain and to loss, to victory and to defeat, fight with all your strength…”

Christophe snatched the book from his hands and read:

--- … I have nothing in the world that constrains me to act: there is nothing that is not mine; and yet I do not desert action. If I did not act, without truce or respite, giving men the example they must follow, all men would perish. If I were to cease acting for a single instant, I would plunge the world into chaos, and I would be the murderer of life.

--- Life, Olivier repeated, what is life?

--- A tragedy, said Christophe. Hurrah!

The swell subsided. Everyone hastened to forget, with a secret dread. No one seemed to remember anymore what had happened. Yet you could tell they were still thinking about it by the eagerness with which they had flung themselves back into life --- good, daily life, whose full value one feels only when it is threatened. As after every danger, people were making up for lost time.

Christophe had thrown himself back into creation with tenfold energy. He drew Olivier along with him. As a reaction against the dark thoughts, they had begun composing together a Rabelaisian epic. It was steeped in that broad materialism which follows periods of moral compression. To the legendary heroes --- Gargantua, Friar John, Panurge --- Olivier had added, under Christophe’s inspiration, a new character: a peasant, Jacques Patience, naive, cunning, crafty, resigned, the plaything of everyone else --- beaten, plundered, accepting it all; his wife fondled by others, his fields ransacked, accepting it all; never tiring of putting his house back in order and tilling his land; forced to follow the others to war, burdened with all the baggage, receiving all the blows, accepting it all --- waiting, amused by his masters’ exploits and by the blows he received, telling himself: “They won’t last forever,” foreseeing their final tumble, watching for it out of the corner of his eye, already laughing in advance with his great silent mouth. One fine day, sure enough, Gargantua and Friar John drowned on a crusade. Patience mourned them honestly, consoled himself cheerfully, rescued the drowning Panurge, and said: “I know well enough that you’ll play tricks on me again --- I’m no fool; but I can’t do without you: you’re good for my spleen, you make me laugh.”

On this poem, Christophe was composing grand symphonic tableaux, with soloists and choruses, heroic-comic battles, uninhibited kermesses, vocal buffooneries, madrigals in the manner of Janequin, of an enormous and childlike joy, a storm at sea, the Ringing Island and its bells, and at the end a pastoral symphony full of meadow air, the serene gladness of flutes and oboes, and folk songs from old France with their clear souls. --- The two friends worked in a continuous jubilation. Thin Olivier with his pale cheeks was taking a health cure in Christophe’s health. Through their garret, gusts of wind swept. An unequaled intoxication! To create with one’s own heart and the heart of one’s friend! The embrace of two lovers is no sweeter or more ardent than this coupling of two kindred souls. They had ended by blending so completely that sometimes they would have the same flash of thought at the same instant. Or Christophe would write the music for a scene, and Olivier would afterward find the words for it. He was swept along in Christophe’s impetuous wake. His spirit covered the other and made it fruitful.

To the joy of creating was added the pleasure of winning. Hecht had just decided to publish the David; and the score, well launched, had made an immediate impression abroad. A great Wagnerian kapellmeister, a friend of Hecht’s, based in England, had grown enthusiastic about the work; he had performed it at several of his concerts, with considerable success, which had reverberated---along with the kapellmeister’s enthusiasm---in Germany, where the David had been performed as well. The kapellmeister had entered into correspondence with Christophe; he had asked him for more works, offered his services, and was waging a fierce campaign on his behalf. In Germany, the Iphigénie was rediscovered---the same work that had once been booed there. They cried genius. Certain circumstances of Christophe’s life, with their romantic quality, played no small part in capturing attention. The Frankfurter Zeitung published, first among them, a resounding article. Others followed. Then, a few people in France noticed that they had a great musician living among them. One of the Paris concert directors asked Christophe for his Rabelaisian epic before it was even finished; and Goujart, sensing the approaching celebrity, began to speak, in mysterious terms, of a genius among his friends, someone he had discovered. He celebrated the admirable David in an article---without even remembering that he had devoted two contemptuous lines to it in a piece from the previous year. And no one around him remembered either, nor thought to wonder at the reversal. How many in Paris have mocked Wagner and Franck, only to celebrate them today, using them as a club to beat down new artists whom they will celebrate tomorrow!

Christophe had not expected such success. He knew he would win, someday; but he had not thought that day would come so soon; and he was wary of a triumph too easily won. He shrugged and said to leave him in peace. He could have understood if people had applauded the David the previous year, when he had written it; but by now he had already moved far beyond it, climbing several rungs higher. He would gladly have said to those who spoke to him of his earlier work:

--- Leave me alone with that rubbish! It disgusts me. And so do you.

And he would plunge back into his new work, with some annoyance at having been pulled from it. All the same, he felt a secret satisfaction. The first rays of glory are sweet indeed. It is good, it is healthy, to win. It is the window thrown open, and the first breath of spring entering the house. --- However much Christophe scorned his earlier works, and Iphigénie in particular, it was still a kind of revenge to see that wretched piece---which had once earned him so many humiliations---praised by German critics and sought after by theaters, as a letter from Dresden now informed him, saying that they would be delighted to mount it for the coming season.

The very day Christophe received this news, which allowed him to glimpse at last, after years of hardship, a calmer horizon and victory in the distance, another letter from Germany arrived.

It was the afternoon. He was washing up, chatting cheerfully with Olivier through the open door between their rooms, when the concierge slid an envelope under the door. His mother’s handwriting… He had been just about to write to her; he was looking forward to telling her of his success, which would give her so much pleasure. He opened the letter. There were only a few lines. How the writing trembled!

« My dear boy, I am not very well. If it were possible, I would so like to see you once more. I send you my love.

Maman. »

Christophe let out a groan. Olivier, who was working in the next room, came running, alarmed. Christophe, unable to speak, pointed to the letter on the table. He kept on groaning, not listening to what Olivier was saying---Olivier had taken in the letter at a glance and was trying to reassure him. He ran to his bed, where he had put his jacket, hurriedly dressed again, and, without fastening his collar---(his fingers were trembling too badly)---he went out. Olivier caught up with him on the stairs: what did he mean to do? Take the first train? There wasn’t one until evening. It was better to wait here than at the station. Did he even have the money he needed? --- They searched their pockets, and, combining everything they had, found barely thirty francs between them. It was September. Hecht, the Arnauds, all their friends, were out of Paris. No one to turn to. Christophe, beside himself, was talking about making part of the journey on foot. Olivier begged him to wait an hour, promising to find the sum they needed. Christophe let him try; he was incapable of forming any idea of his own. Olivier ran to the mont-de-piété: it was his first time there; for his own sake he would have preferred to endure hardship rather than pawn any of those objects, each of which held a dear memory; but this was for Christophe, and there was no time to waste. He left his watch, and received in return an advance well below what he had hoped. He had to go back upstairs, take some of his books, and bring them to a secondhand dealer. It was a painful thing; he barely thought about it in that moment---Christophe’s grief absorbed all his thoughts. He came back and found Christophe where he had left him, sitting at his table in a state of stupor. Together with the thirty francs they already had, the sum Olivier had gathered was more than enough. Christophe was too stunned to wonder how his friend had obtained it, or whether he had left himself enough money to live on in his absence. Olivier gave it no more thought than he did; he had handed over everything he had. He had to look after Christophe like a child, all the way to the departure. He took him to the station and did not leave him until the train began to move.

In the darkness into which he plunged, Christophe stared straight ahead with wide-open eyes, and thought:

--- Will I arrive in time?

He knew well enough that, for his mother to have written asking him to come, she must no longer be able to wait. And his anxiety spurred the pounding rush of the express forward. He reproached himself bitterly for having left Louisa. And at the same time he felt how useless those reproaches were: he was not the master of the course of things.

Yet the monotonous swaying of the wheels and the jolting of the carriage gradually calmed him, mastering his mind the way the surging waves of music are held in check by a powerful rhythm. He saw his whole past unfolding before him, from the hazy dreams of distant childhood: loves, hopes, disappointments, bereavements, and that exultant force, that intoxication of suffering, of joy, and of creation, that exhilaration at drinking in luminous life and its sublime shadows---which was the soul of his soul, the breath of the hidden God. Everything was becoming clear to him now, at this distance. The tumult of his desires, the turmoil of his thoughts, his faults, his errors, his fierce struggles, appeared to him as the eddies and the whirlpools swept along by the great current of life toward its eternal end. He discovered the deep meaning of those years of trial: at each trial, a barrier had cracked under the swelling river, a passage from one narrow valley into a wider one that the river soon filled entirely; each time, the view stretched further, the air grew freer. Between the hills of France and the German plain, the river had forced its way through---not without struggle, overflowing onto the meadows, gnawing at the base of the hills, gathering and absorbing the waters coming from both countries. So it flowed between them, not to divide them, but to unite them; they were wedded within it. And Christophe became conscious, for the first time, of his destiny---which was to carry, like an artery, through enemy peoples, all the forces of life from both banks. --- A strange serenity, a sudden calm and clarity, appeared to him as it sometimes does at the darkest hour… Then the vision dissolved; and, alone, the sorrowful and tender face of the old maman reappeared.

Dawn was barely hinting at itself when he arrived in the small German town. He had to take care not to be recognized; for he was still subject to an arrest warrant. But at the station, no one paid any attention to him: the town was asleep; the houses were shuttered and the streets deserted---it was that gray hour when the lights of night go out and the light of day has not yet come, the hour when sleep is sweetest and when dreams are lit by the paleness of the East. A little servant girl was opening the shutters of a shop, singing an old folk lied. Christophe nearly choked with emotion. O homeland! Beloved!… He wanted to kiss the earth. Listening to that humble song that was melting his heart, he felt how unhappy he had been far from it, and how deeply he loved it… He walked on, holding his breath. When he saw his house, he was obliged to stop and press his hand to his mouth to keep himself from crying out. How would he find the one who was there, the one he had abandoned?… He caught his breath and nearly ran to the door. It was ajar. He pushed it open. No one… The old wooden staircase creaked under his steps. He went up to the floor above. The house seemed empty. The door to his mother’s room was closed.

Christophe, his heart pounding, put his hand on the latch. And he could not find the strength to open it…

Louisa was alone, lying in bed, and she could feel herself dying. Of her other two sons, one---the businessman, Rodolphe---had settled in Hamburg; the other, Ernst, had gone to America, and no one knew what had become of him. No one looked after her, except a neighbor who came twice a day to see what Louisa needed, stayed a few minutes, and went back to her own affairs; she was not always punctual, and often came late. Louisa found it perfectly natural to be forgotten, just as she found it perfectly natural to be in pain. She was of an angelic patience, being accustomed to suffering. She had a weak heart, and attacks of breathlessness during which she thought she was going to die: eyes dilated, hands clenched on her sheets, sweat running down her face. She did not complain. She knew this was how it had to be. She was ready; she had already received the sacraments. She had only one anxiety: that God might not find her worthy of entering His paradise. Everything else she accepted with patience.

In the dark corner of her small room, around her pillow, on the wall of the alcove, she had made a shrine of her memories; she had gathered the likenesses of those dear to her: those of her three children, that of her husband---for whose memory she had always preserved the love of their early days---that of the old grandfather, and of her brother, Gottfried: she kept a touching attachment to all those who had been kind to her, however little. She had pinned to the sheet of her bed, very close to her face, the last photograph Christophe had sent her; and his latest letters were beneath her pillow. She loved order and meticulous cleanliness; and it distressed her that everything in her room was not perfectly tidy. She took an interest in the small noises from outside, which marked for her the different moments of the day. She had been hearing them for so long! Her whole life spent in this narrow space… She thought of her dear Christophe. How immense was her longing to have him there, beside her, at this moment! And yet, even to his not being there she was resigned. She was certain she would see him again in heaven. She had only to close her eyes to see him already. She spent her days half-dozing, deep in the past…

She saw herself again in the old house, on the banks of the Rhine… A holiday… A magnificent summer’s day. The window was open: sunlight blazed on the white road. Birds were singing. Melchior and grandfather were sitting out front, smoking and talking and laughing loudly. Louisa couldn’t see them; but she was glad her husband was home that day, and that grandfather was in such good humor. She was downstairs, preparing dinner: an excellent dinner; she was watching over it like the apple of her eye; there was a surprise: a chestnut cake; she was already savoring the little one’s cries of delight… The little one, where was he? Upstairs: she could hear him, he was practicing his piano. She didn’t understand what he was playing, but it was a joy to hear that familiar small chirping, to know he was there, sitting quietly… What a beautiful day! The cheerful jingling of a carriage passed along the road… Ah, my Lord! The roast! What if it had burned while she stood there looking out the window! She was afraid grandfather, whom she loved so dearly and who always made her a little nervous, would be displeased and scold her… Thank God, nothing had gone wrong. There, everything was ready, and the table was set. She called to Melchior and grandfather. They answered eagerly. And the little one?… He had stopped playing. A moment ago his piano had gone silent, without her noticing… --- “Christophe!”… What was he doing? Not a sound. He always forgot to come down for dinner: his father would scold him again. She hurried up the stairs… --- “Christophe!”… Silence. She opened the door to the room where he worked. No one. The room was empty; the piano was closed… Louisa was seized with dread. What had become of him? The window was open. Lord! What if he had fallen! Louisa is beside herself. She leans out to look… --- “Christophe!”… He’s nowhere. She goes through every room. From below, grandfather calls to her: “Come down, don’t worry, he’ll find us.” She refuses to go down; she knows he’s there: he’s hiding to play a trick on her, he wants to torment her. Ah! the naughty little thing!… Yes, she’s sure of it now, the floorboard just creaked; he’s behind the door. She wants to open the door. But the key isn’t in the lock. The key! She searches frantically in a drawer, among a jumble of other keys. That one, that one,… no, that’s not it… Ah! there it is at last!… Impossible to get it into the lock. Louisa’s hand is trembling. She hurries; she must hurry. Why? She doesn’t know; but she knows she must: if she doesn’t make haste, she’ll run out of time. She can hear Christophe breathing behind the door… Ah! this key!… Finally! The door swings open. A joyful cry. It’s him. He throws himself at her neck… Ah! the naughty, good, dear little one!…

She opened her eyes. He was there, before her.

For a moment he had been looking at her, so changed, her face at once drawn and puffy, a mute suffering made all the more piercing by her resigned smile; and that silence, that solitude all around… His heart was pierced through…

She saw him. She was not surprised. She smiled a smile beyond words. She could neither hold out her arms to him nor speak a single word. He threw himself at her neck, he kissed her, she kissed him; great tears ran down her cheeks. She whispered:

--- Wait…

He saw she was choking.

They made no movement. She stroked his head with her hands; and her tears kept flowing. He kissed her hands, sobbing, his face buried in the bedclothes.

When her anguish had passed, she tried to speak. But she could no longer find her words; she lost track, and he had difficulty understanding her. What did it matter? They loved each other, they were together, they could touch each other: that was what mattered. --- He asked indignantly why she had been left alone. She made excuses for the nurse:

--- She couldn’t be here all the time: she had her work…

In a faint, halting voice that could not quite form all the syllables, she hurriedly made one small request about her grave. She charged Christophe with her tenderness for her two other sons, who had forgotten her. She had a word, too, for Olivier, whose affection for Christophe she knew of. She asked Christophe to tell him she was sending him her blessing --- (she caught herself quickly, timidly, to use a humbler phrase), --- “her respectful affection”…

She began to choke again. He held her sitting up in her bed. Sweat ran down her face. She forced herself to smile. She told herself she had nothing left to ask of the world, now that she had her son’s hand in hers.

And Christophe suddenly felt that hand clench in his. Louisa opened her mouth. She looked at her son, with a tenderness beyond all measure; --- and she passed.

That same evening, Olivier arrived. He had been unable to bear the thought of leaving Christophe alone at such a tragic hour, of which he himself had known only too much. He also feared the dangers his friend was exposing himself to by returning to Germany. He wanted to be there, to watch over him. But he lacked the money to follow him. Coming back from the station where he had seen Christophe off, he decided to sell some jewelry that remained from his family; and since the pawnshop was closed at that hour, and he wanted to catch the first train, he was on his way to a secondhand dealer in the neighborhood when he ran into Mooch on the stairs. Told of his intentions, Mooch expressed genuine distress that Olivier had not come to him; he refused to let Olivier go to the dealer, and he insisted that Olivier accept from him the necessary sum. He could not get over the thought that Olivier had pawned his watch and sold his books to pay for Christophe’s journey, when he would have been so glad to be of help to them. In his eagerness to assist, he even offered to accompany Olivier to Christophe’s side. Olivier had considerable difficulty dissuading him.

Olivier’s arrival was a godsend for Christophe. He had spent the day in prostration, alone with his sleeping mother. The nurse had come, given a little care, and then left and not returned. The hours had passed in a funereal stillness. Christophe was as motionless as the dead woman; he never took his eyes off her; he did not weep, he did not think, he was himself a dead man. --- The miracle of friendship that Olivier had performed brought the tears and life back to him.

Getrost! Es ist der Schmerzen werth dies Leben, So lang… So lang… mit uns ein treues Auge weint.

(“Courage! As long as two faithful eyes weep with us, life is worth its suffering.”)

They embraced for a long time. Then they sat down beside Louisa and spoke in low voices. Night had fallen. Christophe, with his elbow on the foot of the bed, recounted at random memories of childhood, in which the image of his mother always reappeared. He would fall silent for a few minutes, then take up again. Until at last there came a moment when he fell entirely silent, crushed by fatigue, his face buried in his hands; and when Olivier came close to look at him, he saw that he was asleep. Then Olivier kept vigil alone. And sleep took him in turn, his forehead resting on the back of the chair. Louisa smiled gently; and she seemed happy to be watching over her two children.

As morning began to break, they were woken by knocking at the door. Christophe went to open it. It was a neighbor, a carpenter; he had come to warn Christophe that his presence had been reported, and that he must leave if he did not want to be arrested. Christophe refused to flee; he would not leave his mother before he had accompanied her to the place where she would now remain, forever. But Olivier begged him to take the train, he promised to keep faithful watch in his place; he forced him out of the house; and, to be more certain he would not go back on his decision, he walked him to the station. Christophe stubbornly refused to leave without at least seeing the great river again, near which his childhood had passed, and whose resounding echo his soul would carry forever, like a seashell from the sea. Despite the danger of showing himself in the city, they had to yield to his will. They followed the bank of the Rhine, which hastened with a powerful peace between its low shores toward its mysterious death in the sands of the North. An enormous iron bridge plunged, in the middle of the fog, its two arches into the grey water, like the halves of wheels from a colossal cart. In the distance, the boats making their way upstream disappeared into the mist through the winding meadow bends. Christophe lost himself in that dream. Olivier drew him away from it, took his arm, and led him back to the station. Christophe let himself be led; he was like a sleepwalker. Olivier settled him into the train that was about to depart; and they agreed to meet the following day at the first French station, so that Christophe would not return to Paris alone.

The train left, and Olivier went back to the house, where he found, at the entrance, two gendarmes waiting for Christophe’s return. They took Olivier for him. Olivier made no haste to correct a mistake that served Christophe’s flight. Besides, the police showed no great disappointment at the error; their eagerness to pursue the fugitive was fairly tepid; and it even seemed to Olivier that at bottom they were not sorry Christophe had gone.

Olivier remained until the following morning, for Louisa’s burial. Christophe’s brother, Rodolphe, the businessman, attended between trains. This important personage followed the cortège in an entirely correct manner and left immediately afterward, without having addressed a single word to Olivier to ask for news of his brother, or to thank him for what he had done for their mother. Olivier spent a few more hours in that city, where he knew no one alive, but which was peopled for him with so many familiar shades: the little Christophe, those he had loved, those who had made him suffer; --- and dear Antoinette… What remained of all those beings who had lived here, of this Krafft family, now erased? The love that lived from them in the soul of a stranger.

In the afternoon, Olivier found Christophe at the border station where they had agreed to meet. A village in the middle of wooded hills. Rather than wait there for the next train to Paris, they decided to walk part of the way to the nearest town. They needed to be alone. They set off through the silent woods, where the dull thuds of an axe rang out in the distance. They arrived at a clearing on the crest of a hill. Below them, in a narrow valley still in German territory, the red roof of a forester’s cottage, a little meadow like a green lake between the trees. All around, the ocean of dark blue forests wrapped in mist. Fog drifted between the branches of the firs. A transparent veil softened the lines, muted the colors. Everything was still. No sound of footsteps, no voice. A few drops of rain struck the golden copper of the beeches that autumn had ripened. Between the stones, the water of a small stream chimed. Christophe and Olivier had stopped and stood without moving. Each was lost in his grief. Olivier thought:

--- Antoinette, where are you?

And Christophe:

--- What does success matter to me, now that she is gone?

But each heard the consoling voice of his dead:

--- Beloved, do not weep for us. Do not think of us. Think of him…

They looked at each other, and each felt no longer his own pain, but the pain of his friend. They took each other’s hand. A serene melancholy wrapped them both. Softly, without a breath of wind, the veil of mist dissolved; the blue sky bloomed again. The tender sweetness of the earth after rain… So close to us, so gentle!… It takes you in its arms, on its breast, with a lovely, fond smile; and it says to you:

--- Rest. All is well…

Christophe’s heart grew calm. He was like a small child. For two days he had lived entirely in the memory of his dear mother, in the atmosphere of her soul; he relived the humble life, the uniform, solitary days passed in the silence of the house without children, and in the thought of the children who had left her, the poor old woman, infirm and brave, with her quiet faith, her gentle good humor, her smiling resignation, her selflessness… And Christophe thought, too, of all the humble souls he had known. How close he felt to them, at that moment! Emerging from those years of exhausting struggle in the burning heat of Paris, where ideas and people clash in furious confusion, in the wake of that tragic hour when the wind of murderous madness had swept through and hurled against one another those hallucinated peoples, Christophe felt a weariness of that feverish and sterile world, of those battles of egos and ideas, of those human elites, those ambitious men, those thinkers, those artists, who believe themselves to be the reason for the world when they are only its bad dream. And all his love went out to those thousands of simple souls, of every race, who burn in silence, pure flames of goodness, of faith, of sacrifice --- the heart of the world.

--- Yes, I recognize you, I have found you at last, he thought, you are of my blood, you are mine. Like the prodigal son, I left you to follow the shadows that passed along the road. I come back to you now --- welcome me. We are one single being, the living and the dead; wherever I am, you are with me. Now I carry you within me, O mother, you who once carried me. All of you --- Gottfried, Schulz, Sabine, Antoinette --- you are all within me. You are my wealth, my joy. We will travel the road together. I will not leave you again. I will be your voice. With our united strength, we will reach the goal.

A ray of sunlight slipped between the wet branches of the trees, which were slowly dripping. From the little meadow below rose children’s voices, an old German lied, guileless and touching, sung by three little girls dancing a round together around the house; and from far off, the west wind carried, like a fragrance of roses, the voice of the bells of France…

--- O peace, divine harmony, serene music of the liberated soul, in which sorrow and joy dissolve, and death and life, and enemy races, fraternal races --- I love you, I desire you, I will have you…

The veil of night fell. Christophe, waking from his dream, saw once more beside him the faithful face of his friend. He smiled at him and embraced him. Then they set off again, through the forest, in silence; and Christophe cleared the way for Olivier.

Taciti, soli e senza compagnia, n’andavan l’un dinnanzi, e l’altro dopo, come i frati minor vanno per via…