Jean-Christophe à Paris. II. Dans la maison. 2
To the Friends of Christophe
Romain Rolland
I have so long had the habit, for years, of conversing mentally with my absent friends, known and unknown, that I feel the need to do it aloud this time. Indeed, I would be ungrateful if I did not thank them for all that I owe them. Since I began to write this long story of Jean-Christophe, it is with them, it is for them that I write. They have encouraged me, followed me with patience, warmed me with their sympathy. If ever I have been able to do some good to certain of them, they have done far more for me. My work is the fruit of our mutual union.
I confess that when I began, I did not dare hope that we would be more than a handful of friends: my ambition did not go beyond the house of Socrates. But, from year to year, I have felt more and more how many brothers we are, loving the same things, suffering from the same things, in the provinces as in Paris, outside France as in France. I had quite recently still further proof of it, on the occasion of my last volume, in which Christophe unburdens his conscience — and mine — of what he thinks of the Fair on the Place. No book of mine has found a more immediate echo. That is because, in truth, it was not merely my voice, but that of my friends. They well know that Christophe belongs to them as much as to me. We have put into him much of our common soul.
Since Christophe belongs to them, I owe those who read me some explanations about him. I fear that the volume I present to them today — and especially this first cahier — may disappoint them. No more than in the Fair on the Place will they find here adventures of a novel; and the hero’s life seems even interrupted. There is less talk of him than of the world that surrounds him.
I must explain the conditions in which I undertook this body of work. I was isolated. I was suffocating, as so many others in France, in a hostile moral world; I wanted to breathe, I wanted to react against an unhealthy civilization, against a way of thinking corrupted by a false elite; I wanted to say to that elite: “You lie, you do not represent France.”
For that, I needed a hero with pure eyes and a pure heart, whose soul was intact enough to have the right to speak, and whose voice was strong enough to make itself heard. I patiently built this hero. Before deciding to write the first line of the work, I carried him within me for years; Christophe did not set out until I had already mapped for him the road to the end; and certain chapters of the Fair on the Place, certain entire volumes from the end of Jean-Christophe, which will not appear until later, were written before Dawn, or at the same time as it. The vision of France, which is reflected in Christophe and in Olivier, had, from the beginning, its appointed place in this book. One should not, therefore, see in it a deviation of the work, but a planned halt along the way, one of those great terraces of life from which one contemplates the country one has just traversed, and the distant horizon toward which one is about to set off again.
It is clear that I never had the pretension of writing a novel, in these last two volumes (The Fair on the Place and In the House), any more than in the rest of the work. What, then, is this work? A poem? — What need have you of a name? When you see a man, do you ask him whether he is a novel or a poem? It is a man I am creating. The life of a man does not confine itself within the framework of a literary form. Its law is within it; and each life has its own law. Its pattern is that of a force of nature. There are human lives that are tranquil lakes, others that are great clear skies where clouds drift, others that are fertile plains, others that are jagged peaks. Jean-Christophe has always appeared to me as a river; I said so from the very first pages. There are zones in the course of rivers where they spread out, seem to sleep, reflecting the countryside around them and the sky; they do not cease for all that to live and to change; and sometimes this apparent stillness conceals a rapid current whose violence will make itself felt farther on, suddenly, at the first obstacle. Such is the case with the last two volumes of Jean-Christophe. Now that he has long been gathering himself, absorbing the thoughts of both banks, he will resume his course toward the sea — where we are all going.
January 1909.