Jean-Christophe. III. La fin du voyage. I. Les amies. 2

Romain Rolland

After that night, she disappeared, for weeks. As for him, in whom that night had rekindled a sensual ardor that had slept for months, he could not do without her. She had forbidden him to come to her home: he went to see her at the theater. He sat in the cheapest seats, hidden away; and he was scorched with love and emotion; he shivered to the marrow; the tragic fever she put into her roles consumed him along with her. At last he wrote to her:

“My friend, are you angry with me, then? Forgive me, if I have displeased you.”

On receiving this humble note, she hurried to his rooms and threw herself into his arms.

“It would have been better to remain simply good friends. But since that was impossible, it is useless to resist the inevitable. Come what may!”

They joined their lives together. Each of them, however, kept his own apartment and his own freedom. Françoise would have been incapable of submitting to a regular cohabitation with Christophe. Besides, her situation hardly lent itself to it. She would come to Christophe’s, would spend some of her days and nights with him; but every day she would go back to her own place, and there too she would spend nights.

During the vacation months, when the theater was closed, they rented a house together, in the country near Paris, over toward Gif. There they lived happy days, despite a few clouds of sadness. Days of trust and of work. They had a beautiful, bright room, perched high up, with a wide free horizon, above the fields. At night, through the windowpanes, they would see, from their bed, the strange shadows of the clouds passing across a sky of a dull and somber clearness. In each other’s arms, half asleep, they heard the crickets, drunk with joy, singing, the storm-rains falling; the breath of the autumn earth — honeysuckle, clematis, wisteria, mown grass — penetrated the house and their bodies. Silence of the night. Sleep for two. Silence. Very far off, the barking of dogs. Crowing of cocks. The dawn breaks. The thin Angelus rings out from the distant steeple, in the gray and cold early morning, which by contrast makes the warmth of the nest shiver and makes him draw her more lovingly close. The waking of the birds’ voices in the vine clinging to the wall. Christophe opens his eyes, holds his breath, and, his heart melting with tenderness, looks beside him at the dear weary face of his sleeping friend, and her pallor of love…

Their love was no selfish passion. It was a deep friendship, in which the body too wanted its share. They did not constrain each other. Each worked, on his own side. Christophe’s genius, his goodness, his moral temper, were dear to Françoise. She felt herself his elder in certain things, and she took a maternal pleasure in it. She regretted that she understood nothing of what he played; she was closed to music, except at rare moments when she was seized by a savage emotion, which came less from the music than from herself, from the passions which then steeped her, herself and everything around her, the landscape, the people, the colors and the sounds. But she felt nonetheless Christophe’s genius through that mysterious language she did not understand. It was as if she saw a great actor performing, in a foreign tongue. Her own genius was rekindled by it. And Christophe, thanks to love, projected his thoughts, embodied his passions, in the thought of this woman and beneath her beloved form; and he saw them more beautiful than they were in himself — of an antique beauty, and almost eternal. An inestimable richness, the intimacy of such a soul, so feminine, weak and good, and cruel, and a thing of genius by flashes. She taught him much about life and about men — about women, whom he still knew very ill and whom she judged with a keen clear-sightedness. She allowed him to understand the theater better; she opened to him the spirit of that admirable art, the most perfect of arts, the most sober and the most full. She revealed to him the beauty of that magical instrument of human dreaming, for which one must write — for it, not for oneself alone, as his bent led him to write (the bent of too many artists, who, after the example of Beethoven, refuse to write “for a wretched fiddle, when the Spirit speaks to them”). A great dramatic poet does not blush to work for a definite stage, and to adapt his thought to the actors at his disposal; he does not believe he belittles himself thereby; but he knows that a vast hall demands other means of expression than a small one, and that one does not write fanfares for trumpet on a flute. The theater, like the fresco, is art in its place. And for that very reason, the human art par excellence, the living art.

The thoughts that Françoise thus expressed agreed with those of Christophe, who tended, at this moment of his career, toward a collective art, in communion with other men. Françoise’s experience made him grasp the mysterious collaboration that is woven between the public and the actor. Realistic as Françoise was, and of few illusions, she nonetheless perceived the power of reciprocal suggestion, those waves of sympathy which link the actor to the crowd, that great silence of thousands of souls from which the voice of the single interpreter rises. Naturally, she had this feeling only at intermittent, very rare hours, almost never recurring, for the same play, at the same passages. The night before, the emotion; a moment later, the role, the soulless craft, the cold and intelligent mechanism. But the interesting thing was the exception, the minute at whose height one glimpses the abyss, the common soul of the millions of beings whose force expresses itself in you, for one second of eternity.

It was this common soul that the great artist had to express. His ideal had to be that living objectivism, in which the bard assimilates himself to those who sing him, and strips himself of self, in order to clothe the dazzling passions which blow over the world, like a tempest. Françoise felt the need of it all the more in that she was incapable of disinterestedness, and that she always played herself. — The disordered flowering of individual lyricism has, for a century and a half, had something morbid about it. Moral grandeur consists in feeling much and giving much, in making one’s thought modest and chaste, in not parading it, in speaking with a glance, with a deep word, without childish exaggerations, without feminine effusions, for those who can understand at a half-word, like men. Modern music, which speaks so much of itself and mingles its indiscreet confidences into everything, is a want of modesty and a want of taste. It resembles those invalids who think only of their illnesses and who never tire of speaking of them to others, with repugnant and laughable details. This absurdity of art grows ever more marked over the past century. Françoise, who was not a musician, was not far from seeing a sign of decadence in the modern development of music, at the expense of thought, like a polyp that devours it. Christophe protested; but on reflection, he asked himself whether there were not some truth in it. The first lieder written on poems of Goethe were sober and exact; soon Schubert mingles his romanesque sentimentality into them, it deforms them; Schumann, the languors of a little girl; and, down to Hugo Wolf, the movement grows more pronounced toward a music more heavily stressed, indecent analyses, leaving no longer a single nook of one’s soul unrevealed. Every veil is torn away without shame before man, is shrieked out today by shameless girls who show themselves stark naked.

Christophe was a little ashamed of this art, by which he felt himself contaminated; and, without wishing to return to the past (an absurd and unnatural desire), he steeped himself anew in the soul of the true masters of the past who had had the haughty discretion of their thought and the sense of a great collective art: such as Handel, when, disdainful of the tearful pietism of his time and his race, he wrote colossal Anthems and oratorios, heroic epics, songs of the peoples for the peoples. The difficulty was to find subjects of inspiration which could, like the Bible in Handel’s time, awaken common emotions among the peoples of the Europe of today. The Europe of today no longer had a common book: not a poem, not a prayer, not an act of faith, that was the possession of all. O shame which ought to crush all the writers, all the artists, all the thinkers of today! Not one has written, not one has thought for all. Beethoven alone has left a few pages of a new consoling and fraternal Gospel; but only the musicians can read it, and most men will never hear it. Wagner indeed tried to raise upon the hill of Bayreuth a religious art, which should bind all men together. But his great soul was too little simple and too much marked with all the blemishes of the decadent music and thought of his time: upon the sacred hill, it is not the fishermen of Galilee who have come, it is the Pharisees.

Christophe felt clearly what had to be done; but he lacked a poet, he had to suffice unto himself, to restrict himself to music alone. And music, whatever one may say, is not a universal language; one needs the bow of words to drive the arrow of sounds into the heart of all.

Christophe was planning to write a series of symphonies, inspired by everyday life. He conceived, among others, a Domestic Symphony, after his own fashion, which was not quite that of Richard Strauss. He did not concern himself with materializing in it, in a cinematographic picture, the life of a family, by making use of a conventional alphabet, in which musical themes expressed, by the author’s will, various characters whom one then saw evolving together, if one had complaisant ears and eyes. That seemed to him a learned and childish game of a great contrapuntist. He sought to describe neither characters nor actions, but to utter emotions, such as should be known to each, and in which each could find an echo of his own soul, perhaps a comfort. The first movement expressed the grave and naïve happiness of a young couple in love, its tender sensuality, its confidence in the future, its joy and its hopes. The second movement was an elegy on the death of a child. Christophe had taken into disgust all painting of death, all realistic search in the expression of grief; the individual figures disappeared; there was only a great misery — yours, mine, that of every man who suffers a sorrow that may be the deepest. The soul, stricken with mourning, from which Christophe had banished the ordinary effects of weepy melodrama, rose again little by little, by a painful effort, in order to offer up its suffering as a sacrifice to God. It took up its road again courageously, in the following movement which was linked to the second — a deliberate fugue whose intrepid theses and sound rhythm took possession of one’s being, and rose, in the midst of struggles and tears, to a powerful march, full of an indomitable faith. The last movement painted the evening of life. The themes of the beginning reappeared with their touching confidence and their tenderness which could not age, but riper, a little bruised, emerging from the shadows of grief, crowned with light, and thrusting up toward heaven, like a rich flowering, a hymn of religious love to life and to God.

Christophe also sought in the books of the past great subjects, simple and human, speaking to the heart of all, in what it has of best. He chose two of them: Joseph and Niobe. But there, Christophe came up against not only the lack of a poet, but the perilous question, debated for several centuries and never solved, of the union of poetry and music. His conversations with Françoise brought him back to the projects, sketched out long ago with Corinne, of a form of musical drama holding the middle ground between the recitative opera and the spoken drama — the art of free speech united with free music — an art of which almost no artist of today has any inkling, and which the routine criticism, imbued with the Wagnerian tradition, dares no more than it dares any truly new work: for it is not a question here of walking in the footsteps of Beethoven, of Weber, of Schumann, of Bizet, although they practiced melodrama with genius; it is not a question of clapping any spoken voice whatever onto any music whatever and producing, at all costs, with tremolos, gross and crude effects upon gross publics; it is a question of creating a new genre, in which two musical voices follow each other on instruments akin to those voices, and discreetly mingle with their harmonious stanzas the echo of the reveries and the laments of the music. It goes without saying that such a form could be applied only to a very limited range of subjects, to moments of the soul, intimate and recollected, in order to evoke their poetic perfume. No art that need be more discreet and more aristocratic. It is therefore natural that it should have little chance of flowering in an age which, in spite of the pretensions of its artists, smacks of the fundamental vulgarity of upstarts.

Perhaps Christophe was no better made than the others for this art; his very qualities, his plebeian strength, were an obstacle to it. He could only conceive it, and realize a few rough sketches of it with Françoise’s help.

He thus set to music pages of the Bible, almost literally transcribed — such as the immortal scene where Joseph makes himself known to his brothers, and where, after so many trials, no longer able to contain his tenderness, he murmurs very low these words which have wrung tears from old Tolstoy, and from many others:

“I can no longer… Listen, I am Joseph:… is my father still alive?… I am your brother, your brother lost long ago. I am Joseph…”

Friends. — 1.

This beautiful and free union could not last. They had together moments of fullness of life; but they were too different, both of them. And these souls, each as violent as the other, often clashed. These clashes never took on a vulgar character; for Christophe had respect for Françoise. And Françoise, who could be so cruel at times, was good to those who were good to her; for nothing in the world would she have wished to do them harm. Both of them, moreover, had a foundation of joyful humor. She was the first to mock herself. She was none the less consumed by it: for the old passion still held her; she continued to think of the coward she loved; and she could not bear that humiliating state, nor above all that Christophe should suspect it.

Christophe, who saw her silent and tense, absorbing herself for whole days in her melancholy, was astonished that she was not happy. She had attained her goal: she was loved, admired, idolized.

“Yes,” she would say; “if I were one of those famous actresses, who have the ideas of shopkeepers, and who carry on the theater as they would carry on a grocery. Those women are content, when they have ‘achieved’ a fine position, a rich bourgeois marriage, and — ne plus ultra — won the cross of the brave. I, I wanted more. When one is not a fool, does not success seem even emptier than failure? You must know it well!”

“I know it,” said Christophe. “Ah! my God! it was not thus that I pictured glory to myself, when I was a child. With what ardor I desired it, and how luminous it seemed to me! It was for me something religious… Alas!… No matter! There is in success a divine virtue: it is the good it allows one to do.”

“What good? You may be the victor. But what is the use? Nothing is changed. Theaters, concerts, all is always the same. It is only one new fashion succeeding another fashion. They do not understand you, or only in passing; and already they are thinking of something else. — You yourself, do you understand the other artists? In any case, you are not understood by them. How far they are from you, those whom you love best! Remember Tolstoy…”

Christophe had written to him; he had grown enthusiastic over him, he wept reading his books; he wanted to set to music one of his tales of the moujiks, he had asked his authorization for it, he had sent him his lieder. Tolstoy had answered nothing, no more than Goethe had answered Schubert and Berlioz, who sent him their masterpieces. He had Christophe’s music played for him; and it had irritated him; he understood nothing of it. He treated Beethoven as a decadent, and Shakespeare as a charlatan. On the other hand, he was infatuated with mincing little masters, with harpsichord music — the confession of a chambermaid set forth like a Christian book.

“Great men have no need of us,” said Christophe. “It is of the others that one must think.”

“Who? The bourgeois public, those shadows that mask life from us? To play, to write for those people! To lose one’s life for them! What bitterness!”

“Bah!” said Christophe. “I see them as you do; and that does not sadden me. They are not so bad as you say.”

“A fine German optimist!”

“They are men, like me. Why should they not understand me?… — And even if they did not understand me, am I going to grieve over it? Among these thousands of people, there will always be found one or two who will be with me; that is enough for me, a single skylight is enough to breathe the air from outside… Think of those naïve spectators, those adolescents, those old unsatisfied souls, whom your apparition, your voice, the revelation through you of tragic beauty, carry away above their mediocre days. Remember yourself, when you were a child! Is it not good to do for others — even if it were for one alone — the happiness and the good that another once did for you?”

“You believe that there really is one? I have come to doubt it… And besides, how do the best of those who love us love us? How do they see us? They see us ill! They admire you, while humiliating you; they have as much pleasure in seeing any comedy whatever played; they place you in the rank of those one despises. All those who have success are equal, in their eyes.”

“And yet, it is the greatest of all who, in the end, impose themselves on posterity, as the greatest.”

“That is the effect of distance. The mountains rise, as one moves away. One sees their height better; but one is farther from them… And who tells us, besides, that these are the greatest? — Do you know the others, those who have vanished?”

“To the devil!” said Christophe. “Even if no one should feel what I think and what I am, I, I think it and I am it. I have my music, I love it, I believe in it; it is truer than all the rest.”

“You, again, you are free in your art, you can do what you wish. But I, what can I do? I am forced to play what is imposed on me, and to grind it over and over to the point of nausea. We have not quite arrived, in France, at the state of beasts of burden of those American actresses, who play Rip or Robert Macaire ten thousand times, who, for twenty-five years of their life, turn the millstone around one inept role. But we are on the way to it. Our theaters are so poor! The public can endure genius only in infinitesimal doses, drowned in mannerism and in fashionable literature… A ‘fashionable genius’! does that not make one laugh?… What a squandering of forces! See what they have made of a Mounet. What has he had to play, in his life? Two or three roles that are worth the trouble of living: an Œdipus, a Polyeucte. The rest, what foolishness! Is it not enough to disgust one? And to think of all that there would be of great and glorious to be done, for him?… It is no better, outside France. What have they made of a Duse? On what has her life been consumed? On what useless roles?”

“Your true role,” said Christophe, “is to impose upon the world the strong works of art.”

“One exhausts oneself in vain. And it is not worth the trouble. As soon as one of those strong works touches the stage, it loses its great poetry, it becomes a lie. The breath of the public withers it. A public of stifled cities, it no longer knows what the open air is, what nature is, what healthy poetry is: it must have a poetry of the theater, tinseled, painted, and that stinks… — Ah! And then… and then, besides, even if one did succeed at it… No, that does not yet fill life, that does not fill my life…”

“You are always thinking of him.”

“Of whom?”

“You know very well. Of that man.”

“Yes.”

“Even if you had him, that man, and if he loved you, admit it, you would not even then be happy, you would find a way to torment yourself.”

“It is true… Ah! what is the matter with me, then?… You see, I have had too much to struggle, I am too consumed, I can no longer find calm again, I have an uneasiness of the heart, a fever…”

“It must have been in you, even before the trials.”

“It is possible. Yes, already, when I was a little girl, as far back as I can remember… It devoured me.”

“What would you want, then?”

“Do I know? More than I can have.”

“I know that,” said Christophe. “I was so, as an adolescent.”

“Yes, but you have become a man. I, I shall remain an eternal adolescent. I am an incomplete being.”

“No one is complete. Happiness is to know one’s limits and to love them.”

“I can no longer. I have come out of them. Life has driven me out of them, broken, crippled. It seems to me, however, that I might have been a normal and healthy and beautiful woman all the same, without being like the herd.”

“You can still be so. I see you so well, thus!”

“Tell me how you see me.”

He described her, in conditions where she would have developed in a natural and harmonious way, where she would have been happy, loving and loved. And that did her good to hear. But afterward, she said:

“No, it is impossible now.”

“Well,” he said, “one must then tell oneself, as the good old Handel did, when he became blind:

[musical notation]

What e-ver is, is right. (Whatever is, is right.)”

And he went to sing it to her, at the piano. She kissed him, her dear optimist madman. He did her good. But she did him harm: she feared so, at least. She had crises of despair, and she could not hide them from him; love made her weak. At night, when they were in bed, side by side, and she was devouring her anguish in silence, he divined it, he begged the friend so near and so far to share with him the weight that was crushing her; then she could not resist, she gave herself up, weeping, in his arms. Christophe would afterward try for hours to console her, kindly, without growing angry; but this perpetual uneasiness did not fail, in the long run, to wear him down. Françoise trembled lest her fever should end by communicating itself to him. She loved him too much to bear the idea that he should suffer, on her account. An engagement in America was offered to her; she accepted it, in order to force herself to leave. She left him, a little humiliated. She was as much so as he. Not to be able to be happy by means of each other!

“My poor old fellow,” she said to him, smiling sadly, tenderly. “Are we clumsy enough? We shall never find again an occasion as fine, a friendship like this. But there is no way, there is no way. We are too foolish!”

They looked at each other, sheepish and saddened. They laughed so as not to weep, kissed, and parted, with tears in their eyes. Never had they loved each other so much as in parting.

And after she had gone, he returned to art, his old companion… O peace of the starry sky!

Not much time elapsed before Christophe received a letter from Jacqueline. It was only the third time she had written to him; and it was very different from the kind to which she had accustomed him. She told him of her regret at not having seen him for a long time, invited him kindly to come back. She did not wish to grieve those two friends whom he loved. Christophe was delighted, but not too astonished. He thought indeed that Jacqueline’s unjust dispositions toward him would not last forever. He liked to repeat to himself a mocking word of the old grandfather:

“Sooner or later, good moments come to women; one needs only the patience to wait for them.”

He therefore returned to Olivier’s, and was welcomed with joy. Jacqueline showed herself full of attention for him; she avoided the ironic tone that was natural to her, took care to say nothing that might wound Christophe, showed interest in what he was doing, and spoke intelligently of serious subjects. Christophe believed her transformed. She was so only in order to please him. Jacqueline had heard of Christophe’s successes and of the fashionable actress, the account of which had defrayed the Parisian gossip; and Christophe had appeared to her in an entirely new light: she had been seized with curiosity for him. When she saw him again, she found him much more sympathetic. Even his manners did not seem to her without charm. She perceived that Christophe had genius, and that it was worth the trouble to make him love her.

The situation of the young household had not improved; it had even grown worse. Jacqueline was bored, was bored: she was dying of boredom. How alone woman is! Apart from the child, nothing holds her; and the child is not enough to hold her always: for when she is truly a woman, and not only a female, when she has a rich soul and an exacting life, she is made for so many things, which she cannot accomplish alone, if no one comes to her aid!… Man is much less alone, even when he is most so: his monologue can endure, without desert; and when he is alone in a couple, he accommodates himself to it better, for he notices it less, he is always monologuing. And he does not suspect that the sound of that voice which continues imperturbably to speak to itself makes the silence more terrible and the desert more atrocious for her who is beside him, and for whom every word is dead that love does not vivify. He does not notice it; he has not, like the woman, staked his whole life upon love; his life is afterward elsewhere… Who will fill the woman’s life and her immense desert, those millions of ardent and generous forces which, in the forty centuries that humanity has lasted, burn themselves alive, offered up as a holocaust to two sole idols: ephemeral love, and motherhood, that sublime dupery, which falls to but thousands among all the women, and never fills more than a few years of the life of the others?

Jacqueline despaired. She had seconds of dread, which pierced her like swords. She thought:

“Why am I alive? Why was I born?”

And her heart writhed with anguish.

“My God, I am going to die! My God, I am going to die!”

This thought haunted her, pursued her at night. She dreamed that she was saying: “We are in 1889.”

“No,” they answered her. “In 1909.”

And she was distressed at being twenty years older than she believed:

“It is going to be over, and I have not lived! What have I done with these twenty years? What have I done with my life?”

She dreamed that she was four little girls. They were all four lying in the same room, in separate beds. All four had the same height, and the same face; but one was eight years old, another fifteen, another twenty, another thirty. There was an epidemic. Three were already dead. The fourth looked at herself in the glass; and she was seized with terror: she saw herself, the nose pinched, the features drawn… she too was going to die, and then it would be over…

”— What have I done with my life?…”

She would wake up in tears; and the nightmare did not fade away before the day, the nightmare was real: What had she done with her life? Who had stolen it from her?… She came to hate Olivier, innocent accomplice — (innocent! what does it matter, if the harm is the same!) — accomplice of the blind fate that crushed her. She reproached herself for it afterward, for she was good; but she suffered too much; and being there against him, who stifled her life, although he suffered too, she could not keep herself from making him suffer more, in order to avenge herself. Afterward, she was the more overwhelmed, she detested herself; and she felt that if she did not find a way to save herself, she would do still more harm. That way, she sought it, gropingly, around her; she clung to everything, like someone who is drowning; she tried to take an interest in something, some work, some being, that might be in some sort the thing, the work and her being. She tried to take up an intellectual labor again, she learned foreign languages, she began an article, a short story, she set to painting, to composing… In vain: she grew discouraged, from the first day. It was too difficult. And then, “books, works — what is the use? What is it to me? I do not know whether I love them, I do not know whether they exist…” — On certain days, she chatted with animation, she laughed with Olivier, she seemed to grow passionate for what they were saying, for what he was doing, she went out to dizzy herself… In vain: abruptly, the agitation fell, the heart froze, and she was left, without tears, without breath, stricken. — She had succeeded in part in her work upon Olivier. He was becoming skeptical, he was becoming worldly. She was not at all grateful to him for it; she found him weak like herself. Almost every evening, they went out; she carried through the Parisian drawing rooms her anguished boredom, which no one divined beneath the irony of her ever-armed smile. She sought someone who would love her and hold her up above the abyss… In vain, in vain, to her despairing appeal, nothing answered but silence.

She loved Christophe, however; she could not endure his rough manners, his wounding frankness, above all his indifference. She did not love him; but she had the feeling that he, at least, was strong — a rock above death. And she wanted to grip that rock, that swimmer whose head rose above the waves, where she might drown him with her…

And then, it was no longer enough to have separated her husband from his friends: she had to take them from him. The most honest women have at times an instinct which drives them to test how far their power goes, and to go beyond it. In this abuse of power, their weakness proves itself to be strength. And when the woman is selfish and vain, she finds an evil pleasure in stealing from the husband the friendship of his friends. The task is very easy: a few glances suffice for it. There is hardly a man, honest or not, who has not the weakness to bite at the hook. However much a friend he may be, and however loyal, he may indeed avoid the act, but in thought he will almost always betray the friend. And if the other man perceives it, their friendship is finished: they no longer see each other with the same eyes. — The woman who plays this dangerous game stops there, most often, she asks no more of it: she holds them both, disunited, at her mercy.

Christophe noticed Jacqueline’s kindnesses; they did not surprise him at all. When he had affection for someone, he had a naïve tendency to find it natural to be loved in return, simply, without ulterior motive. He responded joyfully to the young woman’s advances; he found her charming; he amused himself with all his heart, with her; and he judged her so favorably that he was not far from believing that Olivier was very clumsy if he did not succeed in being happy and in making her happy.

He accompanied them on a tour of a few days that they made by automobile, and he was their guest at a country house that the Langeais had in Burgundy — an old family house, which was kept for the sake of its memories, but to which they hardly ever went. It was isolated in the midst of the vineyards and the woods, the interior was dilapidated, the windows ill-fitted; one breathed there an odor of mold, of ripe fruit, of cool shade, and of resin-bearing trees heated by the sun. Living with Jacqueline, side by side, for a succession of days, Christophe let himself be little by little caught up by an insinuating and gentle feeling, which did not disquiet him; he experienced an innocent enjoyment, but not at all an immaterial one, in seeing her, in hearing her, in brushing against that pretty body, and in drinking the breath of her mouth. Olivier, somewhat anxious, grew tired. He imposed too long a walk upon himself: a vague uneasiness oppressed him, which he would have blushed to admit; for the least thing, he would leave them alone together, often. Jacqueline read in him, and she was touched:

“Come, do not afflict yourself, my dear. It is still you that I love the best.”

But she did not say it; and the three of them let themselves drift at hazard; Christophe suspecting nothing, Jacqueline not knowing exactly what she wanted, and leaving it to chance to make it known to her, Olivier alone, foreseeing, having presentiments, but out of modesty of self-love and of love, not wishing to think of it. When the will is silent, instinct speaks; in the heart’s absence, the voice of the road speaks.

One evening, after dinner, the night seemed to them so beautiful — a moonless night, starry — that they wished to walk in the garden. Olivier and Christophe went out of the house. Jacqueline went up to her room, to fetch a shawl. She did not come back down. Christophe, fuming against the eternal slownesses of women, went back in to look for her. — (For some time, without his taking heed of it, it was he who played the husband.) — He heard her coming. The room he was in had its shutters closed; and one could see nothing there.

“Come on! Do come along, Madame-who-never-finishes,” cried Christophe gaily. “You will wear out your mirrors, by dint of looking at yourself in them.”

She did not answer. She had stopped. Christophe had the impression that she was in the room; but she did not stir.

“Are you there?” he said.

She did not answer. Christophe fell silent too: he went groping in the darkness; and a trouble seized him. He stopped, his heart beating. He heard quite close to him the light breathing of Jacqueline. He took another step; and stopped again. She was near him, he knew it, but he could no longer advance. A few seconds of silence. Abruptly two hands which seize his and draw him; a mouth pressed itself against his. He embraced her. Without a word, motionless. — Their mouths drew apart, tore themselves from each other. Jacqueline went out of the room. Christophe, trembling, followed her. His legs shook. He remained an instant leaning against the wall, waiting for the beating of his blood to grow calm. At last, he rejoined them. Jacqueline was chatting tranquilly with Olivier. They were walking, a few steps ahead. Christophe followed them, behind. Olivier stopped to wait for him. Christophe did not answer. Olivier, knowing his friend’s humor and the capricious silences in which he sometimes locked himself triple-bolted, did not insist and continued his walk with Jacqueline. And Christophe, mechanically, continued to follow them, ten paces behind, like a dog. When they stopped, he stopped. When they walked, he walked. Thus, they made the round of the garden, and went back in. Christophe went up to his room, and shut himself in. He did not light a lamp. He did not go to bed. He did not think. Toward the middle of the night, sleep took him, seated, his arms and his head leaning on the table. He woke up, an hour later. He lit his candle, feverishly gathered up his papers, his belongings, made his suitcase, then threw himself on his bed, and slept until dawn. Then he went down with his baggage, and departed. They waited for him, all the morning. They looked for him, all day. Jacqueline, hiding under indifference a quiver of anger, affected an insulting irony in counting her silver. Only the following evening did Olivier receive a letter from Christophe:

“My good old fellow, do not be angry with me for having left like a madman. A madman, I am, I know it. What is to be done about it? I am what I am. Thank you for your affectionate hospitality. It was very good. But you see, I am not made for life with others. I do not even know whether I am made for life. I am made to stay in my corner, and to love people — from afar: it is more prudent. When I see them too close, I become a misanthrope. And that is what I do not want to be. I want to love men, I want to love you all. Oh! how I would like to do good to you all! If I could make it so that you were — that you were happy! With what joy I would give in exchange all the happiness that I can have!… But that is forbidden me. One can only show the road to others. One cannot make their road, in their place. Each must save himself. Save yourself! Save yourselves! I love you well.

CHRISTOPHE.

“My respects to Madame Jeannin.”

“Madame Jeannin” read the letter, her lips pressed together, with a smile of scorn, and said dryly:

“Well, follow his advice. Save yourself.”

But at the moment when Olivier stretched out his hand to take back the letter, Jacqueline crumpled the paper, threw it on the floor; and two big tears sprang from her eyes. Olivier seized her hand:

“What is the matter with you?” he asked, moved.

“Leave me!” she cried, in anger.

She went out. On the threshold of the door, she cried:

“Egoists!”

Friends. — 2.

Christophe had ended by making enemies of his protectors of the Grand Journal. This was easy to foresee. Christophe had received from heaven that virtue celebrated by Goethe: “non-gratitude.”

“The repugnance to show oneself grateful,” wrote Goethe ironically, “is rare and is manifested only in remarkable men, who, sprung from the poorest classes, have been at every step forced to accept help almost always poisoned by the coarseness of the benefactor.”

Christophe did not think that he was obliged to debase himself, for a service rendered, nor — what was the same thing for him — to abdicate his freedom. He did not lend out his good turns at so much per cent, he gave them. His benefactors understood it a little differently. They were shocked in the very lofty moral feeling they had of the duties of their debtors, when Christophe refused to set to music a stupid hymn, for an advertisement-festival organized by the journal. They made him feel the impropriety of his conduct. Christophe sent them packing. He finished exasperating them, by the brutal denial which he inflicted, shortly after, upon assertions which the journal had attributed to him.

Then began a campaign against him. They drew out all the weapons. They brought out once more, from the arsenal, the old engine of war, which has served in turn against all the bold spirits, against the true creators, and which has never killed anyone, but whose effect is unfailing upon imbeciles: they charged him with plagiarism. They went to cut out, from his work and from that of obscure colleagues, passages artfully chosen and made up; and they proved that he had stolen his inspirations from others. They accused him of having wished to stifle young artists. If only he had had to deal solely with those whose trade it is to bark, at the head of those critics, those dwarfs who climb upon the shoulders of a great man, and cry:

“I am greater than you!”

But no, the men of talent attack one another: each seeks to make himself unbearable to his confreres; and yet, as the saying goes, the world is wide enough for each to be able to work in peace; and each already has in his own talent an enemy that disquiets him enough.

There were found in Germany jealous artists, to furnish weapons to his enemies, and if need be to invent them. There were found such in France. The nationalists of the musical press — several of whom were foreigners — flung his race in his face like an insult. Christophe’s success had grown much; and, fashion lending a hand in it, one could conceive that it should irritate, by its very exaggerations, the other artists, all the more so the others. Christophe had now, in the concert public, among the young people of the fashionable world and the writers of the young reviews, enthusiastic partisans who, whatever he did, went into ecstasies and readily declared that music had not existed before him. Some expounded his works, and found in them philosophical intentions, at which he was amazed. Others saw in them a musical revolution, the assault delivered against the traditions, which Christophe respected more than anyone. It would have served no purpose for him to protest. They would have demonstrated to him that he did not know what he had written. They admired themselves, in admiring him. And so, the campaign against Christophe met with lively sympathies among his confreres, whom this “ballyhoo” exasperated, of which he was innocent. They had no need of these reasons to dislike his music: most of them felt, with regard to it, the natural irritation of one who has no ideas and expresses it without trouble, according to the formulas learned, against one who has ideas and uses them with some awkwardness, according to the apparent disorder of his creative fancy. How many times the reproach of not knowing how to write had been flung at him by scribblers, for whom style consisted of recipes of the literary clique or of the school, sets of cooking molds, into which thought was thrown! Christophe’s best friends, who sought to understand him, and who, without understanding him because they loved him, found, for the good he did them — these were obscure listeners who had no voice in the matter. The only one who could have vigorously answered, in Christophe’s name — Olivier — was then separated from him and seemed to forget him. Christophe was therefore delivered up to adversaries and to admirers who vied with one another in who would do him the most harm. Disgusted, he did not answer. When he read the verdicts pronounced upon him, from the height of a great journal, by this or that presumptuous critic who governs art, with the insolence given by ignorance and impunity, he shrugged his shoulders, and said:

“Judge me. As for me, I judge. Let us meet again in a hundred years!”

But in the meantime, the slanders ran their course; and the public, following its habit, welcomed open-mouthed the most foolish and the most ignominious accusations.

As if he did not find that the situation was difficult enough, Christophe chose this moment to fall out with his publisher. He had nothing, however, to complain of in Hecht, who published his new works regularly, who was honest in business. It is true that this honesty did not prevent him from concluding contracts disadvantageous to Christophe; but, those contracts, he kept them. He kept them only too well. One day, Christophe had the surprise of seeing a septet of his arranged into a quartet, a suite of pieces for piano for two hands clumsily transcribed for four hands, without his having been notified. He ran to Hecht’s, and putting under his eyes the pieces of the offense, he said:

“Do you know that?”

“Doubtless,” said Hecht.

“And you have dared… you have dared to tamper with my works, without asking my permission?…”

“What permission?” said Hecht calmly. “Your works are mine.”

“Mine too, I suppose!”

“No,” said Hecht gently.

Christophe leaped up.

“My works are not mine?”

“They are no longer yours. You sold them to me.”

“You are mocking me! I sold you the paper. Make money out of it, if you wish, of what is written on it, it is my blood, it is mine.”

“You sold me everything. In exchange for the work in question, I allotted you a sum of three hundred francs, payable up to the said amount, at the rate of thirty centimes per copy sold of the original edition. In consideration of which, you ceded to me, without any restriction or reservation, all your rights over your work.”

“Even that of destroying it?”

Hecht shrugged his shoulders, rang, and said to an employee:

“Bring me Monsieur Krafft’s file.”

He read out calmly to Christophe the text of the contract, which Christophe had signed without reading it — from which it resulted, according to the ordinary rule of the contracts which music publishers then subscribed, in those very ancient times — “that Monsieur Hecht was subrogated to all the rights, ways and actions of the author, and could, to the exclusion of all others, have the right to edit, publish, engrave, print, translate, hire out, sell for his own profit, in whatever form it pleased him, have performed in concerts, café-concerts, balls, theaters, etc., the said work, publish any arrangement of the work for whatever instrument and even, so to speak, pseudonymous, as well as change the title of it…, etc., etc.”

“You see,” he said to him, “that I am very moderate.”

“Evidently,” said Christophe, “I ought to thank you. You could have made of my septet a café-concert song.”

He fell silent, dismayed, his head between his hands.

“I have sold my soul,” he repeated.

“Be assured,” said Hecht ironically, “that I shall not abuse it.”

“And to think,” said Christophe, “that your united Republic sells contracts! You say that man is free. And you sell thought at auction.”

“You have received the price,” said Hecht.

“Thirty pieces of silver, yes,” said Christophe. “Take them back.”

He rummaged in his pockets to give Hecht back the three hundred francs. But he did not have them. Hecht smiled slightly, with a little disdain. That smile enraged Christophe.

“I want my works,” he said, “I buy them back from you.”

“You have no right to them,” said Hecht. “But as I in no way care to retain people, by force, I consent to give them back to you — if you are in a position to reimburse me for the indemnities due.”

“I shall be,” said Christophe, “even if I have to sell myself.”

He accepted, without discussion, the conditions which Hecht submitted to him, a fortnight later. By a mad indignation, he bought back the editions of his works, at prices five times higher than what his works had brought him, although in no way exaggerated: for they were scrupulously calculated according to the chances of sale of the works yielding a profit to Hecht. Christophe was incapable of paying; and Hecht counted well upon it. Hecht did not care to overwhelm Christophe, whom he esteemed as an artist and as a man, in whom he wished to give a lesson: for he did not admit that one should revolt against what was his right. He had not made those regulations, they were those of the time: he therefore found them equitable. He was, besides, sincerely convinced that they were for the good of the author, as of the publisher, who knows better than the author the means of spreading the work, and does not stop, as he does, at scruples of a sentimental order, respectable, but contrary to his true interest. He was resolved to make Christophe succeed; but it was to be in his own fashion, and on condition that Christophe should be delivered up to him, bound hand and foot. He wished to make him feel that one could not so easily release oneself from his services. They made a conditional bargain: if, within a delay of six months, Christophe did not succeed in clearing the debt, the works remained the full property of Hecht. It was easy to foresee that Christophe could not gather a quarter of the sum demanded.

He nonetheless persisted, giving notice to quit his apartment full of memories for him, in order to take another less costly one — selling various objects, none of which, to his great surprise, had any value — running into debt, having recourse to the kindness of Mooch, unfortunately quite destitute then and ill, nailed to his home by rheumatism — looking for another publisher, and everywhere coming up against conditions as exorbitant as those of Hecht, or against a refusal.

It was the time when the attacks against him were liveliest in the musical press. One of the principal Parisian journals was particularly bent upon it; one of its editors, who did not sign with his name, had taken him as a butt; not a week passed without there appearing in the Échos some perfidious note to make him ridiculous. The music critic completed the work of his colleague, with more moderation; any pretext was good to him for expressing in passing his animosity. He was as yet making only the first skirmishes of it: he promised to come back to it at leisure, and to proceed shortly to an execution in due form. He did not hurry, knowing that no precise accusation is worth, for the public, a series of obstinate insinuations repeated. They played with Christophe, as the cat with the mouse. Christophe, to whom the articles were sent, despised them, but did not fail to suffer from them. However, he kept silent; and, instead of replying — (could he have done so, moreover, even if he had wished it?) — he persisted in his struggle of self-love, useless and disproportionate, with his publisher. He engaged in it his time, his strength, his money, and his sole weapons, since out of light-heartedness, he claimed to renounce the publicity that Hecht gave to his music.

Abruptly, everything changed. The article announced in the journal did not appear. The insinuations fell silent. The campaign stopped short. Better still: two or three weeks afterward, the journal’s critic published, incidentally, a few laudatory lines, which seemed to attest that peace had been made. A great publisher of Leipzig wrote to Christophe to offer to publish his works; and the contract was concluded on advantageous terms. A flattering letter, which bore the seal of the Austrian embassy, expressed to Christophe the desire that there was to introduce certain of his compositions into the programs of the gala evenings given at the embassy. Philomèle, whom Christophe patronized, was asked to be heard at one of those evenings; and immediately after, she was everywhere sought after in the aristocratic drawing rooms of the German and Italian colony of Paris. Christophe himself, who did not excuse himself from coming to one of the concerts, found the best of welcomes with the ambassador. However, a few words of conversation showed him that his host, being so little of a musician, knew nothing of his works. Whence then came the sudden interest that was taken in him? An invisible hand seemed to watch over him, to push aside the obstacles, to smooth the road for him. Christophe made inquiries. The ambassador alluded to two friends of Christophe, the Count and the Countess Bérény, who had a great affection for him. Christophe was ignorant even of their name; and the evening that he came to the embassy, he was presented to them there. He did not insist on knowing them. He was going through a period of disgust with men, in which he relied as little on his friends as on his enemies: friends and enemies were equally uncertain, liable to change; one had to learn to make use of them, and to say, like that old man of the seventeenth century:

“God gave me friends; he has taken them from me. They have left me; I leave them, and make no mention of it.”

Since he had left Olivier’s house, Olivier had given no sign of life; everything seemed finished between them. Christophe did not care to make new friendships. He pictured the Count and the Countess Bérény to himself in the image of so many snobs who said they were his friends; and he did nothing to meet them. He would sooner have fled them.

It was the whole of Paris that he would have liked to flee. He had a need to take refuge, for a few weeks, in friendly solitude. He could not do otherwise than steep himself anew, for a few days outside these people, in his native land! Little by little, this thought became a morbid desire. He wanted to see again his river, his sky, the earth of his dead. He had to see it again. He could not, without risking his freedom: he was still under the sentence pronounced against him, at the time of his flight from Germany. But he felt himself ready for any folly in order to return, were it only for a single day.

By good fortune, he spoke of it to one of his new protectors. As a young attaché at the German embassy, met at the evening where his works were given, was telling him that his country was proud of a musician such as he, Christophe answered bitterly:

“It is so proud of me that it would let me die at its door, without opening to me.”

The young diplomat had him explain the situation; and, a few days afterward, he came again to see Christophe, and said to him:

“There is interest taken in you in high places. A very high personage, who alone has the power to suspend the effects of the judgment that weighs upon you, has been informed of your situation; and he deigns to be touched by it. I do not know how your music could have pleased him: for — (between ourselves) — he has hardly very good taste in art; but he is intelligent, and he has a generous heart. Without its being possible to lift, for the moment, the sentence rendered against you, they consent to close their eyes, if you wish to spend forty-eight hours in your town, to see your people again. Here is a passport. You will have it visaed, on arrival and on departure. Be prudent, and do not draw attention to yourself.”

Christophe saw his land once more. He spent the two days that were granted him conversing with it alone and with those who were in it. He saw his mother’s tomb. Grass was growing on it; but flowers had been laid there recently. Side by side slept the father and the grandfather. He sat down at their feet. The tomb backed against the enclosing wall. A chestnut tree which grew on the other side, in the sunken lane, shaded it. Over the top of the wall, one saw the gilded harvests, where the warm wind made soft undulations pass; the sun reigned over the drowsing earth; one heard the cry of the quails in the wheat, and over the tombs the gentle swell of the cypresses. Christophe was alone and dreamed. His heart was calm. His hands clasped around his knee, and his back leaning against the wall, he looked at the sky. His eyes closed, for a moment. How simple everything was! He felt himself at home, among his own. He held himself close to them, as hand in hand. The hours flowed by. Toward evening, footsteps made the sand of the paths creak. The keeper passed, looked at Christophe seated. Christophe asked him who had put the flowers there. The man answered that the farm-woman of Buir came by, once or twice a year.

“Lorchen?” said Christophe.

They chatted.

“Are you the son?” said the man.

“She had three of them,” said Christophe.

“I am speaking of the one from Hamburg. The others turned out badly.”

Christophe, his head a little thrown back, motionless, kept silent. The sun was sinking.

“I am going to close up,” said the keeper.

Christophe rose, and slowly made the round of the cemetery with him. The keeper did the honors of his domain. Christophe stopped to read the names inscribed. How many people he had known he found gathered there together! Old Euler — his son-in-law — farther off, comrades of childhood, little girls with whom he had played — there, a name that stirred his heart: Ada… Peace upon all…

The flames of the sunset girded the tranquil horizon. Christophe went out. He walked a long time still in the fields. The stars were lighting up…

The next day, he came back, and, once more, spent the afternoon in his place of the day before. But the silent feeling of the day before had grown animated. His heart sang a carefree and happy hymn. Seated on the curb of the tomb, he wrote on his knees, in pencil, this song of notes, the song that he heard. The day thus passed. It seemed to him that he was working in his little room of long ago, and that his mother was there, on the other side of the partition. When he had finished and had to depart — he was already a few steps from the tomb — he changed his mind, he came back, and buried the notebook in the grass, under the ivy. A few drops of rain were beginning to fall. Christophe thought:

“It will soon be effaced. So much the better!… For you alone. For no other.”

Friends. — 3.

He saw again too the river, the familiar streets, where so many things were changed. At the gates of the town, on the promenades of the old bastions, a little wood of acacias which he had seen planted had conquered the place, was stifling the old trees. Going along the wall that bordered the De Kerich garden, he recognized the boundary stone on which he used to climb, when he was a little boy, in order to look into the park; and he was astonished to see how the wall, the garden, were as if shrunk. Before the entrance gate, he stopped a moment. He was continuing on his way, when a carriage passed. Mechanically, he raised his eyes; and his eyes met those of a young lady, fresh, plump, cheerful, who was examining him curiously. She uttered an exclamation of surprise. At her gesture, the carriage stopped. She said:

“Monsieur Krafft!”

He stopped.

“Minna…” he said, laughing.

He ran to her, almost as troubled as on the day of the first meeting. She was with a tall gentleman, large, bald, with mustaches turned up with a conquering air, whom she presented as “Herr Reichsgerichtsrat von Brombach” — her husband. She insisted that Christophe come in to the house. He sought to excuse himself. But Minna exclaimed:

“Ah! No, no, he had to come, to come and dine.”

She spoke very loudly and very fast, and, without waiting for questions, was already recounting her life. Christophe, dumbfounded by her volubility and by her noise, heard only half of it, and looked at her. There was his little Minna. She was flourishing, robust, padded out on all sides, a pretty skin, a complexion of roses, but the features broadened, the nose particularly solid and well nourished. The gestures, the manners, the little graces had remained the same; but the volume had changed.

However, she did not cease to speak: she recounted to Christophe the stories of her past, her intimate stories, the way in which she had loved her husband and in which her husband had loved her. Christophe was embarrassed. She had an optimism without criticism, which made her find perfect and superior to all others — (at least when she was in the presence of others) — her town, her house, her family, her husband, her cooking, her four children, and herself. She said of her husband, and in front of him, that he was “the most grandiose man she had ever seen,” that there was in him “a superhuman strength”; and “the most grandiose man” patted Minna’s cheeks, laughing, and declared to Christophe that she “was an eminent woman beyond all understanding.” It seemed that Monsieur the Reichsgerichtsrat was aware of Christophe’s situation, and that he did not know exactly whether he should treat him with regard or without regard, in view of his condemnation on the one hand, and, on the other, “the august protection that covered him”: he took the course of mixing the two manners. As for Minna, she always went on talking. When she had abundantly spoken of herself to Christophe, she spoke of him. She harried him with questions as intimate as those she had been asking him about himself, answering the supposed questions which he had not put to her. She was delighted to see Christophe again; she knew nothing of his music; she knew that he was well known, and it flattered her that he had loved her — (that she had refused him). She reminded him of it, jesting, without much delicacy. She asked him for an autograph for her album. She questioned him insistently about Paris. She showed for that city a great air of curiosity mingled with contempt. She claimed to know it, having seen the Folies-Bergère, the Opera, Montmartre, and Saint-Cloud. According to her, the Parisiennes were all cocottes, bad mothers, who had as few children as possible and did not occupy themselves with them at all, leaving them at home in order to go to the theater or to the places of pleasure. She did not at all admit that she should be contradicted. In the course of the evening, she wanted Christophe to play a piece on the piano. She found it charming. But at bottom, she admired the playing of her husband as much, which she judged superior in everything, as she was herself.

Christophe had had the pleasure of seeing again in the house Minna’s mother, Madame de Kerich. He felt for her a secret tenderness, because she had been good to him. She had lost none of her goodness, and she was more natural than Minna; she always showed Christophe the affectionate irony that used to irritate him long ago. She had even remained the same as when he had left her; she loved the same things; and it did not seem to him otherwise that he pleased her better, or otherwise; she set the Jean-Christophe of long ago against the Jean-Christophe of today; and she preferred the former.

Around her, no one had changed in spirit, save Christophe. The immobility of the little town, the narrowness of its horizon, were painful to him. People spent part of the evening entertaining him with gossip on the account of folk he did not know. They were on the lookout for the absurdities of their neighbors, and they decreed ridiculous everything that differed from them and from their ways. This malevolent curiosity, perpetually occupied with trifles, ended by causing Christophe an unbearable unease. He tried to speak of his life abroad. But at once he felt his impossibility of making them feel that French civilization, by which he had suffered, and which became dear to him, at this moment when it represented for him, in his own country — that free Latin spirit, whose first law is intelligence: to understand as much as possible of life and of thought, at the risk of making light of moral rules. He found again in his hosts, and above all in Minna, that proud spirit which he had once been happy in, but of which he had lost the memory — proud out of weakness as much as out of virtue — that honesty without charity, proud of its virtue, and disdainful of the failings which it could not know, the cult of the comme-il-faut, the scandalized disdain for “irregular” superiorities. Minna had a tranquil and sententious assurance of always being in the right. No shade of nuance in her way of judging others. For the rest, she did not care to understand them, she was occupied only with herself. Her egoism daubed itself over with a vague metaphysical tincture. It was constantly a question of her “self,” of the development of her “self.” She was perhaps a good woman, and capable of loving. But she loved herself too much. Above all, she respected herself too much. She had the air of being perpetually the Pater and the Ave before her “self.” One would have said, indeed, that she would have ceased totally to love, and forever, the man whom she would have loved best, if he had failed for a single instant — (however much he might have regretted it a thousand times, thereafter) — in the respect due to the dignity of her “self”… One always says the “self”! Think a little of the “you”!…

However, Christophe did not see her with severe eyes. He who was so irritable as a rule, he listened to her speak with an almost archangelic patience. He forbade himself to judge her. He surrounded her, as with a halo, with the religious memory of his childhood love; and he persisted in seeking in her the image of the little Minna. It was not impossible to find it again in certain of her gestures; the timbre of her voice had certain sonorities that awakened moving echoes. He absorbed himself in them, keeping silent, not listening to the words she said, having the air of listening, never ceasing to smile at her with a happy and moved air. But he had difficulty in concentrating his mind; she made too much noise, she prevented him from hearing Minna. In the end, he rose, a little weary:

“Poor little Minna! They would like to make me believe that you are there, in that fine fat person, who cries out loud and who bores me. But I know well that you are there no longer. Let us go, Minna. What have we to do with these people?”

He went away, leaving them to believe that he would return the next day. If he had said that he was leaving again, that evening, they would not have let go of him until the hour of the train. From the first steps in the night, he found again the impression of well-being that he had had, before having met the carriage. The memory of the importunate evening was effaced, as with a sponge stroke; nothing of it remained; the voice of the Rhine drowned everything. He went along the bank, toward the house where he had been born. He had no trouble in recognizing it. The shutters were closed; all slept. Christophe stopped in the middle of the road; it seemed to him that if he knocked at the door, familiar phantoms would open to him. He penetrated into the meadow, around the house, near the river, at the spot where he used to go and talk long ago with Gottfried, in the evening, after dinner. He sat down. And the past days lived again. And the dear little girl who had had there with him the dream of the first love had risen again. They lived over again together the young tenderness, and its sweet tears and its infinite hopes. And he said to himself, with a smile of tenderness:

“Life has taught me nothing. For all I know… for all I know… I always have the same illusions.”

How good it is to love and to believe inexhaustibly! All that love touches is saved from death.

“Minna, who are with me — with me, not with the other — Minna, who will never grow old!…”

The moon, veiled, came out of the clouds, and on the back of the river made scales of silver shine. Christophe had the impression that the river did not pass any longer so far off as close to the mound where he was seated. He drew near. Yes, there had been, a short time ago, beyond that pear tree, a tongue of sand, a little grassy slope, where he had played sometimes. The river had gnawed them away; it was advancing, licking the roots of the pear tree. Christophe had a tightening of the heart. He came back toward the spot. On this side, a new quarter — poor houses, building sites under construction, great factory chimneys — was beginning to rise. Christophe thought of the wood of acacias, which he had seen, in the afternoon, and he thought:

“There too, the river gnaws…”

The old town, asleep in the shadow, with all that it enclosed, the living and the dead, was dearer to him still: for he felt it threatened…

Hostis habet muros…

Quick, let us save our own! Death lies in wait for all that we love. Let us hasten to engrave the face that passes, upon the eternal bronze. Let us tear from the flames the treasure of the fatherland, before the fire devours the palace of Priam…

Christophe climbed into the train, which set off, like someone who flees before the flood. But, like those men who saved from the shipwreck of their town the gods of the city, Christophe carried within him the spark of life that had sprung from his land, and the sacred soul of the past.

Jacqueline and Olivier had drawn nearer to each other, for a time. Jacqueline had lost her father. That death had profoundly stirred her. In the presence of true unhappiness, she had felt the wretched foolishness of the other griefs; and the tenderness that Olivier showed her had revived her affection for him. She found herself brought back, by a few years, to the sad days that had followed the death of Aunt Marthe, and which had been sealed by treaties of love. She told herself that she was ungrateful toward life and that one ought to be grateful to it for not taking from you the little it had given you. That little, of which the price was revealed to her, she pressed jealously against herself. A momentary removal from Paris, which the doctor had prescribed to distract her from her mourning, a journey that she made with Olivier, a kind of pilgrimage to the places where they had loved each other during the first year of their marriage, completed the softening of her. In the melancholy of finding again, at the turn of the road, the dear face of love, which one believed had vanished, of seeing it pass, and of knowing that it would vanish again — for how long? forever, perhaps? — they embraced each other with a desperate passion…

“Stay, stay with us!”

But they knew well that they were going to lose it…

When Jacqueline returned to Paris, she felt quivering in her body a little new life, kindled by love. But love was already past. The burden that grew heavy within her did not bind her again to Olivier. She did not feel from it the joy she had expected. She questioned herself with disquiet. Formerly, when she tormented herself, she had thought that the coming of a little child would be salvation for her. The little child was there, salvation had not come. That human plant which drove its roots into her flesh, she felt with dread grow, drink her blood and her life. She would remain whole days, absorbed, listening, the gaze lost, all her being drawn in by the unknown being that had taken possession of her. It was a vague, gentle, drowsy, anguishing humming. She would wake with starts from this torpor — moist with sweat, shivering, with a flash of revolt. She struggled against the law that nature had taken her in. Then she thought that she wanted to be free, and it seemed to her that nature had duped her. Then she was ashamed of these thoughts, she found herself monstrous, she asked herself whether she was then worse, made otherwise than other women. And little by little, she grew calm again, numbed like a tree in the sap and the dream of the living fruit that ripened in her entrails. What was it? What was it going to be?…

When she heard its first cry at the light, when she saw that piteous and touching little body, all her heart melted. She knew, in a minute of dazzlement, that glorious joy of motherhood, the most powerful that there is in the world: to have created out of her suffering a being of her flesh, a living being. And the great wave of love that moves the universe seized her from head to foot, drowned her, lifted her up to the heavens… O God, the woman who creates is fully your equal; and you do not know a joy like hers: for you have not suffered…

Then, the wave fell back; and the soul touched bottom again.

Olivier, trembling with emotion, leaned over the child; and, smiling at Jacqueline, he tried to understand what mysterious bond of life there was between the two of them and this being still miserable and barely human. Tenderly, with a little disgust, he grazed with his lips that little yellow and wrinkled head. Jacqueline watched him: jealously, she pushed him back; she seized the child, and pressed it against her breast, she covered it with kisses. The child cried, she gave it back; and, her head turned against the wall, she wept. Olivier came toward her, kissed her, drank her tears; she kissed him too, and forced herself to smile; but then she asked that she be left to rest, with the child near her… Alas! what is to be done, when love is dead? Man, who delivers up the intelligence to less than half of himself, can never feel a strong sentiment without keeping in his brain a trace of it, an idea. He may love no longer; he cannot forget that he has loved. But the woman who has loved, without reason, wholly, when she ceases to love, without reason, wholly, what can she do about it? Will it? Make illusions for herself? And when she is too weak to will, too true to make illusions for herself?…

Jacqueline, leaning on her bed, looked at the child with a tender pity. What was it? Whatever it was, it was not wholly hers. It was of her other… of “the other,” she no longer loved him. Poor little one! Dear little one! She grew irritated against this being that wanted to bind her again to a dead past; and, bending over it, she kissed it, she kissed it…

The great misfortune of the women of today is that they are too free, and not free enough. More free, they would seek bonds, they would find in them a charm and a security. Less free, they would resign themselves to bonds which they would know they could not break; and they would suffer less. But the worst is to have bonds which do not bind you, and duties from which one can free oneself.

If Jacqueline had had her bond for the whole duration of her life, she would have found it less inconvenient and less narrow, she would have contrived to make it comfortable; she would have ended, as she had begun: by loving it. But she knew that she could come out of it; and she stifled in it. She could revolt: she came to believe that she ought to.

The moralists at present are strange animals. Their whole being has atrophied to the profit of the faculties of observation. They seek no longer anything but to see life: scarcely to understand it, not at all to will it. When they have recognized in human nature what is, their task seems to them accomplished, they say:

“That is.”

They do not try to change it. It seems that, in their eyes, the mere fact of existing is a moral virtue. All the weaknesses have found themselves, at one stroke, invested with a kind of divine right. The world is becoming democratized. Formerly, the king alone was irresponsible. Today, it is all men, and, by preference, the rabble. Admirable counselors! With much trouble and a scrupulous care, they apply themselves to demonstrating to the weak how weak they are, and that, by nature, it has been decreed thus, from all eternity. What is left to the weak, but to fold their arms? Most fortunate, when they do not apply themselves to having it repeated to them. The woman, told that she is a sick child, takes pride in her cowardices, they are made to blossom. Whoever would amuse himself by complacently telling children that there is an age in adolescence, in which the soul that has not yet found its balance is capable of crimes, of suicide, of the worst physical and moral depravities, and, at times, of all that there is of sound in the field — crimes would be born. Man himself, it is enough to repeat to him that he is not free, for him to be so no longer and to deliver himself up to the beast. Tell the woman that she is responsible, mistress of her body and of her will — and she will be so. But cowards that you are, you take good care not to say it: for you have an interest in her not knowing it!…

The sad milieu in which Jacqueline found herself completed her going astray. Since she had detached herself from Olivier, she had gone back into that world which she despised when she was a young girl. Around her and her married friends there had formed a little society of young men and young women, rich, elegant, idle, intelligent and spineless. There reigned there an absolute liberty of thought and of speech, tempered only by one seasoning, wit. Readily they would have taken the device of the Rabelaisian abbey:

Do as thou wilt.

But they boasted a little: for they did not will much; they were the languid ones of Thélème. They professed with complaisance the liberty of the instincts; but those instincts in them were quite faded; and their licentiousness was above all cerebral. The enjoyment of feeling oneself melt in the great insipid and voluptuous pool of civilization, of feeling the bonds dissolve, in which human energies are liquidated, the rude vital powers, the primitive animality and its flowerings of faith, of will, of duties and of passions. In this gelatinous thought, the pretty body of Jacqueline bathed. Olivier could do nothing to prevent her from it. Besides, he too was touched by the malady of the time: he did not believe he had the right to fetter the liberty of another; of her whom he loved, he wished to obtain nothing, except by love. And Jacqueline was not at all grateful to him for it, since her liberty was for her a right.

The danger was that she brought into this enlarged world the entire heart which felt repugnance for all equivocation: when she believed, she gave herself; her little ardent and generous soul, in its very egoism, burned all the vessels; and, from her life in common with Olivier, she had kept a moral intransigence, which would have been ready to apply her theories on immorality to the very end. If they made a show, in theory, of a complete liberty with regard to the prejudices of morality and of society, they arranged matters, in practice, so as to break openly with none that was advantageous to them; they made use of morality and of society, while betraying them, like unfaithful servants who rob their masters. They even robbed one another, out of habit and out of idleness. There was more than one among those husbands, who knew that his wife had lovers. Those women were not ignorant that their husbands had mistresses. They accommodated themselves to it. The scandal begins only when one makes a noise. Those good households rested upon a tacit understanding between associates — between accomplices. But Jacqueline, more frank, played a fair game with fair money. First, she was sincere. And then, to be sincere, and still, and always to be sincere. Sincerity was also one of the virtues that the thought of the time extolled. — (But it is here that one sees that everything is healthy for the healthy, and that everything is corruption for corrupt hearts. How ugly it is at times to be sincere! It is a sin for the mediocre to want to make others see to the bottom of themselves. They read there their mediocrity; and self-love still finds its account in it.)

Jacqueline spent her time studying herself in her mirror; she saw there things which she would have done better never to see: for, after having seen them, she no longer had the strength to detach her eyes from them; and, instead of raising them against herself, she watched them grow larger: they became enormous, they ended by taking possession of all her thought.

The child was not enough to fill her life. She had not been able to nurse it; the little one was wasting away with her. They had had to take a nurse. A great grief, at first… It was soon a relief. The little one was now marvelously well; he grew vigorously, like a wild little man-cub. He spent his time sleeping, and barely cried, at night. The nurse — a robust woman of the Nivernais who was not at her first nursling and who, each time, conceived for it an animal affection, jealous and encumbering — seemed the true mother. When Jacqueline expressed an opinion, the other did only as her own head dictated; and if Jacqueline tried to argue, she ended by perceiving herself that she knew nothing about it. She had never well recovered, since the birth of the child: a beginning of phlebitis had laid her low, frayed her nerves; obliged for weeks to immobility, she gnawed at herself; her thought, already feverish, ground over and over indefinitely the same monotone and hallucinated complaint: “She had not lived, she had not lived,” and now, her life was over… For her imagination was struck: she believed herself crippled forever; and a dull rancor, acrid, unavowed, rose in her against the innocent cause of her ill, against the child. It is a feeling less rare than one believes; but a veil is thrown over it; and even those who feel it are ashamed to admit it, in the secret of their heart. Jacqueline condemned herself; a combat was waged between her egoism and the maternal love. When she saw the child sleep like a blessed one, she was touched; but immediately afterward, she thought with bitterness:

“It has killed me.”

And she could not repress a barren revolt at the indifferent sleep of this being whose happiness she had bought with her suffering. But after she was healed, when the child was bigger, the feeling of hostility persisted obscurely. As she was ashamed of it, she carried it over against Olivier. She continued to believe herself ill; and the perpetual care for her health, her disquiets, which the doctors kept up, by cultivating the idleness which was the source of it — (separation from the child, forced inaction, absolute isolation, weeks of nothingness spent lying stretched out and being stuffed in her bed, like a beast at the fattening) — had completed the concentration of her preoccupations upon herself. Strange modern fashions of neurasthenia, which substitute for one malady of the self another malady, the hypertrophy of the self! Why do you not practice a bleeding upon their egoism, or, by some energetic moral reagent, why do you not bring back their blood, if they have not too much of it, from their head to their heart!

Jacqueline came out of it, physically stronger, fattened, rejuvenated — morally more sick than ever. Her isolation of a few months had broken the last bonds of thought that attached her to Olivier. As long as she had remained near him, she still underwent the ascendancy of that idealistic nature, which, in spite of its weaknesses, remained constant in its faith; she struggled in vain against the slavery in which a spirit firmer than her own held her, against that gaze which penetrated her, which forced her to condemn herself at times, whatever vexation she had of it. But as soon as chance had separated her from this man — once she no longer felt his clear-sighted love weighing upon her — once she was free — at once there succeeded to the friendly confidence that subsisted between them, a rancor at having thus given herself up, a kind of hatred at having borne so long the yoke of an affection which she no longer felt. — Who shall tell the unknown, implacable rancors, which smolder in the heart of a being whom one loves and by whom one believes oneself loved? From one day to the next, everything is changed. She loved, the day before, she seemed to do so, she believed it herself. She loves no longer. He whom she has loved is struck out of her thought. He perceives all at once that he is nothing more to her; and he does not understand: he has seen nothing of the long work that was being done within her; he has not suspected the secret hostility that was amassing against him; he does not want to feel the reasons for this vengeance and for this hatred. Reasons often distant, multiple and obscure — some, buried beneath the veils of the alcove — others, of wounded self-love, secrets of the heart perceived and judged — others…, that does one know, herself? There is such a hidden offense, which was done to her unknowingly, and which she will never pardon. Never will one come to know it, and she herself no longer knows it well; but the offense is inscribed in her flesh: never will her flesh forget it.

Against this frightening current of disaffection, in order to struggle, it would have been necessary to be another man than Olivier — closer to nature, simpler and more supple at the same time, not embarrassing himself with sentimental scruples, rich in instinct, and capable, at need, of acts that his reason would have disavowed. He was conquered in advance, discouraged: too lucid, he had recognized for a long time in Jacqueline a heredity stronger than the will, the soul of the mother that reappeared; he saw her turn, like a stone, toward the depths of her race; and, weak and clumsy, all the efforts that he attempted accelerated the fall of it. He constrained himself to calm. She, by an unconscious calculation, tried to make him come out of it, to make him say violent things, brutal, coarse, in order to give herself reasons to despise him. If he yielded to anger, she despised him. If he was ashamed of it afterward and took on a humiliated air, she despised him still more. And if he did not yield to anger, if he would not yield — then, she hated him. And the worst of all: that silence in which they walled themselves up, for days, face to face with each other. Asphyxiating, crushing, maddening silences, in which the gentlest of beings end by becoming enraged, in which they feel at moments a desire to do harm, to cry out and to make cry out. Silence, black silence, in which love finishes disintegrating, in which the beings, like worlds, each in its orbit, sink into the night… They had come to a point where everything they did, even to draw nearer to each other, was a cause of estrangement. Their life was intolerable. A chance precipitated the events.

For a year, Cécile Fleury had often come to the Jeannins’. Olivier had met her at Christophe’s; then Jacqueline had invited her; and Cécile continued to see them, even after Christophe had separated from them. Jacqueline had been good to her: although she was hardly a musician and although she found Cécile a little common, she relished the charm of her singing and her soothing influence. Cécile had pleasure in making music with her. Little by little, she had become a friend of the house. Her frank spirit inspired confidence; when she came into the Jeannins’ drawing room with her frank eyes, her air of health and of gaiety, her good rather hearty laugh that did one good to hear, it was like a ray of sunshine penetrating into the midst of the fog. The hearts of Olivier and of Jacqueline felt an inexpressible relief from it. When she left, they had a longing to say to her:

“No, stay, stay still longer, I am so cold!”

During Jacqueline’s absence, Olivier had seen Cécile more often; and he had not been able to hide from her a little of his griefs. He did it with the unreflecting abandon of a soul weak and tender that stifles, that has need of confiding, and that gives itself up. Cécile was touched by it; she poured out for him the balm of her maternal words. She pitied both of them; she urged Olivier not to let himself be beaten down. But whether she felt more than he the awkwardness of these confidences, or for some other reason, she found pretexts to come less often. No doubt, it seemed to her that she was not acting loyally toward Jacqueline, that she had no right to know her secrets. At least, Olivier interpreted thus her keeping away; and he approved of it: for he reproached himself with having spoken. But the keeping away of Cécile made it so that Cécile had become dear to him. He was accustomed to share his thoughts with her, his thought relieved him of the grief that oppressed him. He was too expert at reading his own feelings to doubt the one that he recognized in himself for her. He would have said nothing of it to her. But he did not resist the need to write down for himself what he felt. He had returned, of late, to the dangerous habit of conversing on paper with his thought. He had cured himself of it during his years of love, but now that he found himself alone again, the hereditary mania had taken him back; it was a relief, when he suffered, and a necessity of an artist who analyzes himself. Thus, he depicted himself, he wrote down his sorrows, as if he were telling them to Cécile — more freely, since she would never read them.

And chance willed it that those pages should fall under the eyes of Jacqueline. It was a day on which she felt herself closer to Olivier than she had for many years. In tidying her wardrobe, she had come upon the old love letters that he had written to her: she had been moved by them to the point of weeping. Seated in the shadow of the wardrobe, without being able to finish the tidying, she had lived over again all her past; and she had a painful remorse at having destroyed it. She thought of Olivier’s grief: she had never been able to face the thought of it, cold-bloodedly; she thought of forgetting it; but she could not bear the idea that he should suffer because of her. She had her heart torn. She would have liked to throw herself into his arms, to say to him:

“Ah! Olivier, Olivier, what have we done? We are mad, we are mad! Let us not make each other suffer any more!”

If he had come in, at that moment!…

And it was at that moment, precisely, that she found those letters… Everything was finished. — Did she think that Olivier had really betrayed her? Perhaps. But what does it matter? Betrayal for her was not so much in the act, as in the will. She would have pardoned more easily him whom she loved for having a mistress than for having in secret given his heart to another. And she was right.

“A fine to-do!” certain people will say… — (Poor beings, who only suffer from a betrayal of love if it is consummated!)… When the heart remains faithful, the basenesses of the body are a small thing. When the heart has betrayed, the rest is nothing more…

Jacqueline did not think for a minute of reconquering Olivier. Too late! She no longer loved him enough. Or perhaps she loved him too much. No, it was not jealousy that she had. It was all her confidence that was collapsing, all that secretly remained to her of faith and of hope in him. She did not tell herself that she herself had made it so, that she had discouraged him, pushed him to that love, that that love, moreover, was innocent, and that one is not, after all, master to love or not to love. It did not come back to her mind to compare him to Christophe: Christophe, she no longer loved, did not count him at all! In her passionate exaggeration, she thought that Olivier was lying to her, and that she was nothing more to him. The last support failed her, the one toward which she stretched out her hand to seize it… Everything was finished.

She did not know what she had suffered, in that day. But when they saw each other again, he had the impression, he too, that everything was finished.

From that moment, they no longer spoke to each other, save when they were before others. They watched each other, like two hunted beasts, who are very cunning, and who are afraid. Jeremias Gotthelf describes, somewhere, with a pitiless good nature, the sinister situation of a husband and a wife who no longer love each other and who watch each other mutually, each spying on the health of the other, watching for the appearances of illness, in no way thinking of hastening the death of the other, nor even of wishing it, but letting themselves drift into the hope of an accident always possible, and each flattering himself the more robust of the two. There are even minutes in which Jacqueline and Olivier almost imagined that the other had this thought. And neither one nor the other had it. No, it was already too much to lend it to the other, like Jacqueline, who, at night, in her nightmares of hallucinated illness, told herself that the other was the stronger, was wearing her away little by little, and soon all burned up, all devoured. — Monstrous delirium of an imagination and a heart driven wild! — And to think that, from the best of themselves, deep down, they loved each other!…

Olivier, succumbing under the weight, no longer tried to struggle, and, keeping himself apart, he let go the helm of Jacqueline’s soul. Abandoned to herself, without a pilot to guide her, she felt the vertigo of her liberty; she needed a master whom she should serve; if she had none, she had to create one. Then she was the prey of the fixed idea. Until then, whatever she suffered, she had never conceived the thought of leaving Olivier. From that moment, she believed herself released from all bond. She wanted to love, to love at all costs, before it was too late — (for she, so young still, she believed herself already old). — She loved, she knew those passions imaginary and devouring which attach themselves to the first object encountered, to a face glimpsed, to a reputation, sometimes simply to a name, and which, after having gripped it, can no longer let go their hold, which persuade the heart that it can no longer do without the object it has chosen, which ravage it wholly, which make the absolute void in all that filled it of the past: her other affections, her moral ideas, her memories, her pride and her respect for others. And when the fixed idea, having nothing more to feed it, dies in its turn, after having burned everything up, one sees the new nature that springs from the ruins, a nature often without goodness, without pity, without youth, without illusions, which thinks no longer of anything but to live, knows not how the remorse gnaws at it for the moments destroyed!

This time, as usual, the fixed idea attached itself to the being best made to deceive the heart. Poor Jacqueline became enamored of a man of conquests, a Parisian writer, who was neither handsome nor young, who was heavy, ruddy, rumpled, the teeth decayed, of a frightful dryness of heart, and whose principal merit was to be in fashion and to have made a great number of women unhappy. She had not even the excuse of being ignorant of his unworthiness: for he paraded it in his art. He knew well what he was worth: the egoism enchased in art mirrored itself there as in a lark-glass, the torch that fascinates the wild creatures. Around Jacqueline, more than one had let herself be caught: quite lately, a young woman among her friends, newly married, whom he had without great trouble perverted, then left. They did not die of it, because their heart was not in it, only for the joy of the gallery. The one most cruelly stricken was perhaps too anxious about her interest and her various worldly concerns not to keep her disorders within the limits of common sense. They made no scandal. That they should deceive their husband and their friends, that they should be deceived and should suffer, it was in silence. They were the heroines of what-will-people-say.

But Jacqueline was a madwoman; not only was she capable of doing what she said, but of saying what she did. She brought to unreason courage, an absolute disinterestedness. She had that dangerous merit of always being frank with herself and of not drawing back before the consequences of her acts. She was worth more than the others of her world: that is why she did worse. When she loved, when she conceived the idea of adultery, she threw herself into it headlong, with a desperate frankness.

Madame Arnaud was alone, at home, and was knitting with the feverish tranquillity that Penelope must have put into her famous work. Like Penelope, she was waiting for her husband. Monsieur Arnaud spent whole days away from home. He had class, morning and evening. In general, he came back to lunch, although he dragged his leg and although the lycée was at the other end of Paris; he obliged himself to this long course, less out of affection, than out of economy, than out of habit. But on certain days, he was kept by rehearsals, or else he took advantage of his not being in the neighborhood, in order to work in a library. Lucile Arnaud remained alone in the empty apartment. With the exception of the cleaning woman who came, from morning to noon, to do the heavy work, and of the tradesmen who, in the morning, came for and brought the orders, no one rang at the door. In the building, she no longer knew anyone. Christophe had moved, and newcomers had installed themselves in the garden of flowers. Céline Chabran had married Augustin Elsberger. Élie Elsberger had left without haste to make his life in Spain, where he had been charged with the working of a mine. Old Weil had lost his wife, and almost never lived in his Paris apartment. Christophe and his friend Cécile alone had kept up their relations with Lucile Arnaud. But they lived far off, and, taken up the whole day by a fatiguing labor, they remained weeks without coming to see her. She had to count only on herself.

She was not at all bored. It needed little to nourish her interest. The least daily task. A tiny plant, whose frail foliage she cleaned with her maternal care, every morning. Her tranquil gray cat, which had ended by taking on a little of her ways, as do the domestic animals one loves well; it spent the day, as she did, at the corner of the fire, or on her table near the lamp, watching her fingers that worked and sometimes raising toward her its strange pupils that observed her a moment, then went dim, indifferent. Even the furniture kept her company. Each piece of it was a familiar face. She had a childish pleasure in dressing them, in gently wiping off the dust that had attached itself to their flanks, in replacing them with a thousand considerations in their accustomed corner. She held a silent conversation with them. She smiled at the fine old piece of furniture, the only one she possessed, a little Louis XVI cylinder-desk. She felt, every day, the same joy in seeing it. She was no less occupied in reviewing her linen; she spent hours standing on a chair, her head and her arms plunged into the great peasant wardrobe, looking and tidying, while the cat, intrigued, watched her for hours.

But happiness was when, all the business finished, after having lunched alone, God knows how — (she had not a great appetite) — after having done out of doors the indispensable errands, her day ended, she came back toward four o’clock, and installed herself at her window, or near the fire, with her work and her cat. Sometimes, she found a pretext for not going out at all; she was happy when she could remain shut in, above all in winter, when it snowed. She had a horror of the cold, of the wind, of the mud, of the rain, being herself too a very clean little cat, delicate and over-dainty. She would sooner not eat than go out to seek her lunch, when by chance the tradesmen forgot her. In that case, she nibbled a tablet of chocolate, a fruit from the sideboard. She took good care not to tell Arnaud of it. These were her escapades. Then, during those days of half-extinguished light, and sometimes also during fine sunny days — (outside, the blue sky was resplendent, the noise of life hummed around the silent apartment in the shadow: it was like a mirage that enveloped the soul) — installed in her favorite corner, her footstool under her feet, her knitting in her hands, she absorbed herself, motionless, while her fingers worked. She had near her one of her favorite books. Ordinarily, one of those humble volumes with a red cover, a translation of English novels. She read very little, barely a chapter a day; and the volume, on her knees, remained a long time open at the same page, or even did not open at all: she knew it already, she dreamed it. Thus, the long novels of Dickens and of Thackeray were prolonged for weeks, of which her reverie made years. They wrapped her in their tenderness. The people of today who read fast and ill no longer know the marvelous force that is released from the fine books one drinks slowly. Madame Arnaud had no doubt that the life of those beings of novels had all the reality of her own. There were some to whom she would have liked to devote herself: the tender jealous one, Lady Castlewood, the silent lover, with the maternal and virginal heart, was a sister to her; little Dombey and his little friend were her own children; she was Dora, the child-wife, who is going to die; she stretched out her arms toward all those souls of children, who cross the world in a procession of amiable ragamuffins and inoffensive eccentrics, pursuing their chimeras ridiculous and touching — at their head, the affectionate genius of the good Dickens, laughing and weeping at once over his children. At those moments, when she looked out of the window, she recognized among the passers-by this or that silhouette, loved or feared, of that imaginary world. Behind the walls of the houses, she divined beings alike, the same lives. If she did not like to go out, it was because she was afraid of that world, full of moving mysteries. She perceived around her dramas that were being played, comedies that were being played. It was not always an illusion. In her isolation, she had attained to that gift of mystical intuition, which makes one see in the glances that pass many secrets of their life of yesterday and of tomorrow, of which they are often ignorant. She mingled with her veracious visions romanesque memories, which deformed them. She felt herself united to all that immense universe. She had to go back home, to find her footing again.

But what need had she to read or to see others? She had only to look within herself. That existence, pale, extinguished — seen from outside — how it lit up, from within! What an abundant and full life! How many memories, treasures, of which no one suspected… — Existences!… Had they ever had any reality? — Doubtless, they were real, since they were so for her…

O poor lives, which the magic wand of dreaming transfigures!…

Madame Arnaud went back up the course of the years, to her early childhood; each time the slender flowerets of her vanished hopes flowered again in silence… First love of a young girl, whose charm had fascinated her from the instant she had seen her; she loved her, as one can love with love, when one is infinitely pure; she would die of emotion to feel herself touched by her; she would have liked to kiss her feet, to be her little girl, to marry her; the friend had married, had not been happy, had had a child who had died, had died… Another love, toward twelve years of age, for a little girl of her own age who tyrannized over her, the blonde devilish one, laughing, authoritarian, who amused herself by making her cry and who afterward covered her with kisses; they formed together a thousand romanesque projects for the future: that one had become a Carmelite, abruptly, without anyone knowing why; she was said to be happy… Then, a great passion for a man much older. Of that passion, no one had known anything, not even the one who was the object of it. She had spent on it an ardor of devotion, treasures of tenderness… Then, another passion: she was loved, this time. But by a singular timidity, a distrust of self, she had not dared to believe that she was loved, had not wanted to believe that she loved. And happiness had passed by, without her having seized it… Then… But what use is it to recount to others what has meaning only for oneself?… So many little facts, which had taken on a profound significance: an attention from a friend; a kind word of Olivier’s, said as if without his taking heed of it; the good visits of Christophe and the enchanted world that his music evoked; a glance from a stranger; yes, even, this excellent woman, honest and faithful, certain involuntary infidelities of thought that troubled her and at which she blushed, that she pushed aside feebly, and that did her all the same — being so innocent — a little sunshine in the heart… She loved her husband well, although he was not quite the one she would have dreamed of. But he was good; and one day when he had said to her: “My dear wife, you do not know all that I owe you,” she had all her life to be grateful to him for it… (Ah! her heart had melted, and that day, she had felt herself wholly his, wholly, forever, without idea of turning back. Each year had attached them more closely to each other. They had made fine dreams together. Dreams of fine days, of children. What had become of them?… Alas!… But Madame Arnaud dreamed them still. There was a little child, of which she had so often, so profoundly thought, that she knew it almost as if it were there. She had worked at it, for years, embellishing it ceaselessly with what she saw of the most beautiful, with what she loved of the dearest… Silence… Silence…

That was all. They were worlds. How many unknown tragedies, even of the most intimate, at the bottom of the calmest lives, the most mediocre in appearance! And the most tragic perhaps — it is that nothing happens in those lives of hope, which cry out despairingly toward that which is their right, their good promised by nature, and refused — which devour themselves in a passionate anguish — and which show nothing of it outside!

Madame Arnaud, for her happiness, was not occupied only with herself. Her life filled only a part of her reveries. She lived also the life of those whom she knew, or whom she had known, she put herself in their place, she thought of Christophe, of her friend Cécile. She thought of her today. The two women had taken affection for each other. A curious thing, of the two it was the robust Cécile who had the most need to lean on the fragile Madame Arnaud. At bottom, that big joyful and well-doing girl was less strong than she seemed. She was going through a crisis. The most tranquil hearts are not sheltered from storms. Although she had not noticed it, a very tender sentiment had insinuated itself into her; she did not want to recognize it at first; but it had grown until she was forced to see it: — she loved Olivier. The affectionate gentleness of the young man’s manners, the somewhat feminine charm of his person, what he had of the weak and of the surrendered, had at once attracted her: — (a maternal nature is attracted by one who has need of her). — What she had afterward learned of the household’s griefs had inspired in her for Olivier a dangerous pity. Doubtless, these reasons would not have sufficed. Who can say why one being becomes enamored of another? Neither one nor the other is responsible for it, often, but the hour which delivers up by surprise a heart that is not on its guard to the first affection that finds itself then upon its road. — From the moment that she could no longer doubt it, Cécile strove courageously to tear out the hook of a love which she judged culpable and absurd; she suffered from it for a long time, and she did not cure herself of it. No one had suspected what was passing within her. She had the courage to have the air of being happy. Madame Arnaud was alone in knowing what it cost her. Not that Cécile had told her her secret. But she came sometimes to lay her robust head, her nape, on the thin breast of Madame Arnaud. She shed a few tears, in silence, she kissed her, and then she went away, laughing. She had an adoration for that frail friend, in whom she felt a moral energy quite superior to her own. She did not confide. But Madame Arnaud knew how to divine at a half-word. The world seemed to her now melancholy. It is impossible to resolve it. One can only love it, have pity, and… dream.

And when the hive of dreams hummed too much in her, when she could not think further forward, she went to her piano, she played very low, barely grazing the keys, at hazard, in a low voice, in order to envelop with appeased light her image of life…

But the brave little woman did not forget her daily duties; and when Arnaud came back, he found the house lit, the supper ready, and the wan and smiling face of his wife who awaited him. And he did not suspect the universe, in which she had lived.

The difficulty had been to keep together, without clashes, the two lives: the daily life, and the other, the great life of the spirit, with the distant horizons. It was not always easy. Happily, Arnaud lived, he too, a life in part imaginary, books, works of art, whose eternal fire kept up the trembling flame of his soul. But he was more and more, these last years, preoccupied by the petty worries of his profession, the injustices, the favoritisms, the annoyances with his colleagues or with his pupils; he was embittered; he was beginning to talk politics, to rail against the government and against the Jews; he held Dreyfus responsible for his university disappointments. His chagrined humor communicated itself a little to Madame Arnaud. She was approaching forty. She was passing through that age in which her vital force was reached and troubled, sought its balance. There were made in her thought great rents. For a time, they lost, one and the other, all reason for existing: for they no longer had anything to which to attach their spider’s web, which remained stretched in the void. There had to be the support of reality, one is needed for the dream. All support failed them. They no longer found anything to lean on, in each other. Instead of helping each other, they clung to her. And she perceived that she did not suffice to support them: then, she could no longer save her own whole soul. Alone, a miracle could save her. She called for it. It came from the depths of the soul. Madame Arnaud felt well up from her solitary and pious heart the sublime and absurd need to create in spite of everything, in spite of everything to weave her web across space, for the joy of weaving, leaving it to the wind, to the breath of God, to carry it where it ought to go. And the breath of God attached her again to life, found for her invisible supports. Then, the husband and the wife began again, both of them, to spin patiently the magnificent and vain web of their dreams, made of the purest of their sufferings and of their blood.

Madame Arnaud was alone, at home… The evening was coming.

The bell of the door rang out. Madame Arnaud, awakened from her musing before the habitual hour, started. She tidied her work carefully, and went to open. Christophe came in. He was very moved. She took his hands affectionately.

“What is the matter, my friend?” she asked.

“Ah!” he said. “Olivier has come back.”

“Come back?”

“This morning, he arrived, he said to me: ‘Christophe, come to my aid!’ I embraced him. He was weeping. He said to me: ‘I have only you left. She is gone.’”

Madame Arnaud, seized, joined her hands, and said:

“The unhappy ones!”

“She is gone,” repeated Christophe. “Gone with her lover.”

“And her child?” asked Madame Arnaud.

“Husband, child, she has left everything.”

“The unhappy woman!” said Madame Arnaud again.

“He loved her,” said Christophe, “he loved her solely. He will not rise again from this blow. He repeats to me: ‘Christophe, she has betrayed me, my best friend has betrayed me.’ It is in vain that I say to him: ‘Since she has betrayed you, it is that she was not your friend. She is your enemy. Forget her, or kill her!’”

“Oh! Christophe, what are you saying! it is horrible!”

“Yes, I know, that seems to you all a prehistoric barbarity: to kill! One has to hear this pretty Parisian world protest against the brute instincts that drive the male to kill his female who deceives him, and preach indulgent reason! The good apostles! It is fine to see them grow indignant against the return to animality, and a herd of mongrel dogs. After having outraged life, after having taken from it all its price, they heap upon it a religious cult… What! this life without heart, without honor, without signification, a pure physical breath, a beating of blood in a piece of flesh, that is what seems to them worthy of respect! They have not enough regard for that butcher’s meat, it is a crime to touch it. Kill the soul, if you wish, but the body is sacred!”

“The assassins of the soul are the worst assassins.”

“I know it, my friend. You are right. I do not excuse the crime, and you know it well.”

“I know it, my friend. You are right. I would do it, perhaps.”

“No, you slander yourself. You are good.”

“When passion holds me, I am cruel as a tiger. See how I have just let myself be carried away!… But when one sees a friend whom one loves weep, how is one not to hate the one who makes him weep? And will one ever be too severe for a wretched woman who abandons her child to run after a lover?”

“Do not speak thus, Christophe. You do not know.”

“What! you defend her?”

“I pity her, her too.”

“I pity those who suffer. I do not pity those who make others suffer.”

“Eh! do you believe that she has not suffered, she too? Do you believe that it was out of light-heartedness that she abandoned her child, and destroyed her life? For her life too is destroyed. I know her very little, Christophe. I have seen her only twice, and only in passing; she said nothing friendly to me, she had no sympathy for me. And yet, I know her better than you. I am sure that she is not bad. Poor little one! I divine what may have passed within her…”

“You, my friend, whose life is so worthy, so reasonable…”

“I, Christophe. Yes, you do not know, you are good, but you are a man, a hard man, like all men, in spite of your goodness — a man hardly closed to all that is foreign to you. You do not suspect those who live near you. You are, in your way, but you do not disquiet yourselves to understand them. You are so easily satisfied with yourselves! You are persuaded that you know us… Alas! If you knew what a suffering it is at times for us to see, not only that you do not love us, but how you love us, that there is what we are for those who love us. There are moments, Christophe, when we drive our nails into our palms in order not to cry out to you: ‘Oh! do not love us, do not love us! Anything rather than love us thus!’… Do you know that word of a poet: ‘Even in her house, in the midst of her children, the woman surrounded with simulated honors endures a contempt a thousand times more weighty than the worst miseries.’? Think a little of that, Christophe. It makes one tremble.”

“What you say overwhelms me. I do not understand it well. But what I glimpse… Then you yourself…”

“I have known those torments.”

“Is it possible?… No matter! You would not make me believe that you would ever have acted like that woman.”

“I have no child, Christophe. I do not know what I would have done, in her place.”

“No, that cannot be, I have faith in you, I respect you too much, I swear that that cannot be.”

“Do not swear! I have been very near to it like her… I have had the grief, I am destroying the good idea you have of me. But you must learn to know us, if you do not want to be unjust. — Yes, I have been within a hair’s breadth of a like folly. It is only the day on which… you are for something in it. It was two years ago. I was in a period of sadness that was killing me. I told myself that I was good for nothing, that no one cared for me, that no one had need of me, that my husband himself could have done without me, that it was for nothing that I had lived… I was on the point of running away, of doing God knows what! I went up to your rooms… Do you remember?… You did not understand why I came. I came to say my farewells to you… And then, I do not know what happened, I do not know what you said to me, you said nothing of which I now remember exactly… but I know that there are certain words of yours (you did not suspect it, however…) that were for me a light… Perhaps it is not what you said… Perhaps it was only an occasion; the least thing was enough, at that moment, to lose me or to save me… When I came out from your rooms, I went back home, I shut myself in, I wept all day. — And afterward, it was well: the crisis was past.”

“And today,” asked Christophe, “do you regret it?”

“Today?” she said. “Ah! if I had done that folly, I would be at the bottom of the Seine, long since. I would not have borne that shame, and the harm that I would have done to my poor man.”

“Then, you are happy?”

“Yes, as much as one can be happy in this life. It is a thing so rare, to be two who understand each other, who esteem each other, who know that they are sure of each other, not by a simple belief of love which is often an illusion, but by an experience of years passed together, gray years, mediocre, even with — above all with — the memory of those one has surmounted. As one grows old, it becomes better.”

She fell silent, and abruptly blushed.

“My God, how could I have told you?… What you must have thought… No one must know it.”

“Fear nothing,” said Christophe, pressing her hand. “It is a sacred thing.”

Madame Arnaud, unhappy at having spoken, turned away a moment. Then she said:

“I ought not to have told you… But you see, it was to show you that even in the most united households, even with women… whom you esteem, Christophe… there are such hours, which are not only of aberration, as you say, but of real suffering, intolerable, which can lead to follies, and destroy a whole life, ruin two. One must not be too severe. One makes one another suffer well, even when one loves the best.”

“Must one then live alone, each on his own side?”

“It is still worse for us. The life of the woman who must live alone, struggle like the man — is often against the man — is hard in this society which is not made for that idea, and which is, in great part, hostile to it. Yet, it is not our fault: when a woman lives thus, it is not out of caprice, it is that she is forced to it; she has to earn her bread, and to learn to do without the man, since he does not want her when she is poor. She is condemned to solitude, without having any of the benefits of it: for, with us, she cannot, like the man, enjoy her independence, even the most innocently, without awakening scandal: everything is forbidden to her. — I have a little friend, a teacher in a provincial lycée. She would be shut up in an airless jail and she would be no more alone and more stifled. The bourgeoisie closes its doors to those women who strive to live by working; it displays for them a suspicious disdain, malevolence watches their least steps. Their colleagues of the boys’ lycée hold them at a distance, whether because they fear the gossip of the town, or out of secret hostility, or out of savageness — the habit of the café, of unbuttoned conversations, the fatigue after the work of the day, the disgust, from satiety, for intellectual women. They themselves, they can no longer see one another, they can no longer endure one another, above all if they are forced to lodge together. The headmistress is often the least capable of understanding the young affectionate souls who, discouraged in the first years of this arid trade and this inhuman solitude, she leaves to agonize in secret, without seeking to help them; she finds that they have a bad spirit, because they are proud. No one takes interest in them. Their lack of fortune and of connections prevents them from marrying. The quantity of their hours of work prevents them from creating for themselves an intellectual life that attaches and consoles them. When such an existence is not sustained by a religious or moral sentiment that is exceptional — (I will even say, abnormal, morbid: for it is not natural to sacrifice oneself totally) — it is a living death… — For lack of the work of the spirit, does charity offer more resources to women? What disappointments it reserves for those who have a soul too sincere to satisfy themselves with official or worldly charity, with philanthropic parlor-talk, with that odious mixture of frivolity, of beneficence and of bureaucracy, with that way of playing with misery, between two flirtations, while gossiping. When one of them, sickened, has the incredible audacity to risk herself alone in the midst of that misery which she knows only by hearsay, what a vision for her! almost impossible to bear! It is a hell. What can she do for them in aid? She is drowned in that sea of misfortunes. She struggles, however, she strives to save a few of the unfortunate, she exhausts herself for them, she drowns with them. Too happy, if she has succeeded in saving one or two of them! But she, who will save her? Who will worry about saving her? For she suffers, she too, from all the suffering of others and from her own; in proportion as she gives her faith, she has less of it for herself; all those miseries cling desperately to her, she has nothing to which to hold herself. No one holds out a hand to her. And sometimes, the stone is thrown at her… You have known, Christophe, that admirable woman who had given herself to the humblest and most meritorious work of charity: she gathered into her home the prostitutes of the streets who had just given birth, the unhappy girls whom the Public Assistance did not want, or who were afraid of the Public Assistance; she strove to cure them physically and morally, to keep them with their children, to awaken in them the maternal feeling, to make over for them a home, a life of honest work. She had not too much of all her forces for that somber task, full of disappointments and of bitternesses — (one saves so few of them! so few want to be saved!) And all those little children who die! Those innocents, condemned at their birth!…) — That woman who had taken upon herself all the sorrow of others, that innocent who voluntarily expiated the crime of human egoism — how do you believe that she was judged, Christophe? Public malevolence accused her of earning money with her work, and even with her protégées. She had to leave the quarter, to depart, discouraged… — Never will you imagine enough the cruelty of the struggle that independent women have to wage against our society of today, that conservative society without pity, which is dying, and which spends the little energy that remains to it in preventing others from living.”

“My poor friend, it is not the lot only of women. We all know those struggles. I know too the refuge.”

“Which one?”

“Art.”

“Good for you, not for us. And even among men, how many are there, who can profit by it?”

“See our friend Cécile. She is happy.”

“What do you know of it? Ah! how quickly you have judged! Because she is valiant, because she does not linger over what saddens her, because she hides things from others, you say that she is happy! Yes, she is happy to be in good health and to be able to struggle. But you do not know her struggles. Do you believe that she was happy at being so often disappointed in art? Art! When one thinks that there are poor women who aspire to the glory of writing, or of acting, or of singing, as to the summit of happiness! How destitute of everything they must be, that they no longer know to what affection to attach themselves! What have we to do with art, if we have not all the rest, with it? There is only one thing in the world that can make one forget all the rest: it is a dear little child.”

“And when one has it, you see that it does not even suffice.”

“Yes, not always… Women are not very happy. It is difficult to be a woman. Much more so than to be a man. You do not suspect it enough. You, you can absorb yourselves in a passion of the mind, an activity. You mutilate yourselves, but you are happier for it. A healthy woman cannot do so without suffering. It is inhuman to stifle a whole part of oneself. We, when we are happy in one way, we regret the other way. We have several souls, you have only one, more vigorous, often brutal, and even monstrous. I admire you. But do not be too proud. You are much, without suspecting it. You do us much harm, without suspecting it.”

“What is to be done? It is not our fault.”

“No, it is not your fault, my good Christophe. It is neither your fault, nor ours. In the end, you see, it is that life is not at all a simple thing. They say that one has only to live in a natural way! But what is natural?”

“It is true. Nothing is natural in our life. Celibacy is not natural. Marriage is no more so. And free union delivers up the weak to the rapacity of the strong. Our society itself is not a natural thing; we have manufactured it. They say that man is a sociable animal. What foolishness! He has indeed had to become so, in order to live. He made himself sociable, for his usefulness, his defense, his pleasure, his greatness. This necessity has led him to subscribe to certain pacts. But nature kicks back and avenges itself for this constraint. Nature was not made for us. We try to reduce it. It is a struggle: it is not astonishing that we should often be beaten. How to come out of it? — By being strong.”

“By being good.”

“Oh! God! to be good, to tear off one’s corset of egoism, to breathe, to love life, the light, one’s humble task, the little corner of the soil where one drives in one’s roots. What one cannot have in horizons, to strive to have it in depth and in height, like a tree confined that mounts toward the sun!”

“Yes. And first of all to love one another. If man would feel more that he is the brother of woman, and not only her prey, or that she ought to be his! If they would both strip off their pride, and think, each one, a little less of self, and a little more of the other!… We are weak: let us help one another. Let us not say to the one who has fallen: ‘I no longer know you.’ But: ‘Courage, friend. We shall come out of it.’”

They fell silent, seated before the hearth, the little kitten between them, all three motionless, absorbed, and looking at the fire. The flame, near to going out, caressed with its wing-beat the fine face of Madame Arnaud, made rosy in her an inner exaltation that was not customary with her. She was astonished herself at having thus given herself up. Never had she said so much. Never again would she say so much.

She laid her hand on Christophe’s and said:

“What are you doing about the child?”

It was of that that she was thinking, from the beginning. She spoke, she spoke, she was another woman, she was as if intoxicated. But of that alone she was thinking. From the first words of Christophe, she had built up a story in her heart. She thought of the child that its mother had left, of the happiness of bringing it up, of weaving around that little soul her dreams and her love.

“No, it is wrong, I ought not to rejoice over what is the misfortune of others.”

But it was stronger than she. She spoke, she spoke, and her silent heart was bathed in hope.

Christophe said:

“Doubtless, we have thought well about it. The poor little one! Neither Olivier nor I, we are capable of bringing it up. It needs the care of a woman. I had thought that a friend would be quite willing to help us…”

Friends. — 5.

Madame Arnaud was barely breathing.

Christophe said:

“I wanted to speak to you of it. And then, Cécile came, precisely, a little while ago. When she learned of the thing, when she saw the child, she was so moved, she showed so much joy, she said to me: ‘Christophe…’”

The blood of Madame Arnaud stopped; she did not hear the rest; everything blurred before her eyes. She wanted to cry out:

“No, no, give it to me.”

Christophe was speaking. She did not hear what he was saying. But she made an effort upon herself. She thought of Cécile’s confidences. She thought:

“She has more need of it than I. I, I have my dear Arnaud,… and then all my things… And then, I am older…”

And she smiled and said:

“It is well.”

But the flame of the hearth had gone out; and so too the rosiness of her face. And on the dear weary face, there was no more anything but the habitual expression of resigned goodness.

“My friend has betrayed me.”

Under that thought, Olivier was succumbing. In vain Christophe shook him roughly, out of affection.

“What would you have?” he said. “A friend’s betrayal is a daily trial, like illness, poverty, the struggle with fools. One must be armed against it. If one cannot resist it, it is that one is only a poor man.”

“Ah! That is all I am. I take no pride in it… A poor man, yes, who has need of tenderness, and who cannot do without it, if he has it no more.”

“Your life is not finished: there are other beings to love.”

“I no longer believe in any. There are no friends.”

“Olivier!”

“Pardon. I do not doubt you… Although there are moments when I doubt everything,… of myself… But you, you are strong, you have need of no one, you can do without me.”

“She does without me still better.”

“You are cruel, Christophe.”

“My dear little one, I brutalize you; but it is so that you should revolt. What the devil! it is shameful, to sacrifice those who love you, and your life, to someone who mocks you.”

“What do I care for those who love me? It is she that I love.”

“Work. What used to interest you formerly…”

”… interests me no longer. I am weary. It seems to me that I have come out of life. Everything appears to me far off, far off… I see, but I understand no more… To think that there are men who do not tire of beginning again, every day, their clockwork mechanism, their useless task, their newspaper discussions, their poor chase after pleasure, men who grow passionate for or against a ministry, a book, an actress… Ah! how old I feel! I have neither hatred, nor rancor, against anyone whatever: everything bores me. I feel that there is nothing… To write? Why write? Who understands you? I wrote only for one being, who is no more, I was so for him… He is no more. I am tired, Christophe, tired. I would like to sleep.”

“Well, sleep, my little one. I will keep watch over you.”

But that was what Olivier could the least do. Ah! if he who suffers could sleep for months, until his pain were effaced from his renewed being, until he were another! But no one can make him that gift; and he would not want it. The worst suffering for him would be to be deprived of his suffering. Olivier was like a feverish man, who feeds on his fever. A true fever, whose attacks reappeared, at the same hours, in the evening, from the moment when the light falls. And the rest of the time, it left him broken, intoxicated by love, gnawed by memory, grinding over and over the same thought, like an idiot who chews again the same mouthful without being able to swallow it, all the forces of the brain paralyzed, pumped dry by the one fixed idea.

He had not the resource, like Christophe, of cursing his ill, by slandering in good faith her who was the cause of it. More clear-sighted and more just, he knew that there was his share of responsibility, and that he was not the only one to suffer from it: Jacqueline too was a victim — she was his victim. She had confided herself to him: what had he made of it? If he was not strong enough to make her happy, why had he bound her to himself? She was within her right, in breaking those bonds that bruised her.

“It is not her fault,” he thought. “It is mine. I loved her ill. Yet, I loved her well. But I did not know how to love her, since I did not know how to make myself loved.”

Thus, he accused himself; and perhaps he was right. But it does not serve to great purpose to make the trial of the past: that would not prevent one from beginning it again, if it were to be begun again; it prevents one from living. The strong man is he who forgets the harm that has been done to him — and also, alas! that which he has done, from the instant that he has realized that he cannot repair it. But one is not strong by reason, one is so by passion. Love and passion are two distant relations; rarely do they go together. Olivier loved; he was strong against himself. In the state of passivity into which he had fallen, he offered a hold to all ills. Influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia fell upon him. He was ill, part of the summer. Christophe, aided by Madame Arnaud, nursed him with devotion; and the fever calmed, the illness went away. But against the moral ill, they were powerless; and they felt little by little the depressing fatigue of that perpetual sadness and the need to flee it.

Misfortune makes one fall into a strange solitude. Men have an instinctive horror of it. One would say that they are afraid that it is contagious: at the very least, it bores them; one flees from it. How few people there are who pardon you for suffering! It is always the old story of the friends of Job. Eliphaz the Temanite accuses Job of impatience. Bildad the Shuhite maintains that Job’s misfortunes are the penalty of his sins. Zophar the Naamathite charges him with presumption. “And at the last, Elihu son of Barachel the Buzite of the family of Ram, fell into a great anger, and was angry with Job, because Job affirmed that he was just before God.” — Few people truly sad. Those who seem so, few of them are. Olivier was of those. As a misanthrope said, “he seemed to take pleasure in being ill-treated. One gains nothing by playing the part of an unhappy man; one makes oneself detested.”

Olivier could not speak of what he felt to anyone, even to his most intimate friends. He perceived that it bored them. Even his dear Christophe was impatient of this tenacious and impotent pain. He was too clumsy to bring a remedy to it. To tell the truth, Christophe, whose heart was generous and who had made for his friend the trial of suffering, did not succeed in feeling his friend’s suffering. Such is the infirmity of human nature. Be good, compassionate, intelligent, have suffered a thousand deaths: you will not feel the pain of your friend who has a toothache. The illness goes on, one does not even know what is the matter, the sick man exaggerates his complaints. How much more, when the ill is invisible, crouched at the bottom of the soul! He who is not concerned in it finds it irritating that the other should make so much bile over a sentiment that hardly matters to him. And in the end, one says to oneself, to set one’s conscience at rest:

“What can I do about it? All the reasons serve no purpose.”

All the reasons, it is true. One can do good only by loving the one who suffers, by loving him foolishly, without seeking to convince him, without seeking to cure him, by loving him and pitying him. Love is the only balm for the wounds of love. But love is not inexhaustible, even in those who love the best; they have only one, that is a limited fund. When the friends have said and written once all that they have been able to find of words of affection, when in their own eyes they have done their duty, they withdraw prudently, they make the void around the patient, as around a guilty man. And as they are not without a secret shame at helping him so little, they help him less and less; they seek to make themselves forgotten, and to forget themselves. And if the obstinate misfortune persists, they come to judge severely that man without courage, who bears the trial ill. Be sure that if he succumbs, there will be found at the bottom of their desolate pity that disdainful insinuation:

“The poor devil! I had a better opinion of him.”

In this universal egoism, what ineffable good can a simple word of tenderness do, a delicate attention, a glance that has pity and that loves you! One feels then the price of being loved. All the rest is poor, beside it!… It drew Olivier closer to Madame Arnaud, more than to any other, even than to his Christophe. However, Christophe constrained himself to a meritorious patience; he hid from him, out of affection, what he thought of him. But Olivier, with the acuteness of his gaze that suffering refined, perceived the combat that was being waged in his friend, and how much his sadness was at times a burden to him. That was enough to drive him away in his turn from Christophe, and to breathe into him the longing to cry out to him:

“Go away!”

Thus, misfortune often separates the hearts that love each other. As the winnower sorts the grain, it puts on one side what wishes to live, on the other what must die. Terrible law of life, stronger than love! The mother who sees her son die, the friend who sees his friend drown — if they cannot save them, none the less continue to save themselves, they do not die with them. And yet, they love them a thousand times better than their life…

In spite of his great love, Christophe was obliged, at moments, to flee Olivier. He was suffering too strongly, he stifled in that airless pain. How ashamed he was of himself! He had death in his soul at being able to do nothing for him, and as he had need to avenge himself on someone, he bore a grudge against Jacqueline. In spite of the clear-sighted words of Madame Arnaud, he continued to judge her harshly, as was natural to a young soul, violent and whole, which has not yet learned enough of life not to be pitiless toward its weaknesses.

He went to see Cécile and the child that had been confided to him. That refreshed his soul. Cécile was transfigured by her borrowed motherhood; she seemed quite young, happy, refined, softened. Jacqueline’s departure had not given birth in her to a senseless hope of happiness. She knew that the memory of Jacqueline drove Olivier away from her still more than Jacqueline present. Besides, the breath that had troubled her had passed: it was a moment of crisis, which the sight of Jacqueline’s straying had contributed to dissipate; she had gone back into her habitual calm, and she no longer understood very well what she had made herself suffer. The best of her need to love found wherewith to satisfy itself in the love of the child. With the marvelous power of illusion — of intuition — of woman, she found again the one she loved, through that little being; thus, she had him weak and free, all to herself; he belonged to her; and she could love him, passionately love him, with a love as pure as was the heart of that innocent and his limpid blue eyes, droplets of light… Ah! had there not mingled with her tenderness a melancholy regret. Ah! it is never the same thing as a child of our blood!… But it is good, all the same.

Christophe now looked at Cécile with other eyes. He recalled an ironic word of Françoise Oudon:

“How does it come about that you and Philomèle, who would be so well made to be husband and wife, you do not love each other?”

But Françoise, better than Christophe, knew the reason for it: when one is a Christophe, it is rare that one loves who can do you good; and one loves rather who can do you harm. Opposites attract each other; nature seeks its destruction, it goes toward the intense life that burns itself up, in preference to the prudent life that economizes itself. And one is right when one is a Christophe, whose law is not to live as long as possible, but the most strongly.

Christophe however, less penetrating than Françoise, told himself that love is a blind and inhuman force. It puts together those who cannot bear each other. It rejects those who are of the same kind. What it inspires is a small thing, beside what it destroys. Happy, it dissolves the will. Unhappy, it breaks the heart. What good does it ever do?

And as he thus spoke ill of love, he saw its ironic and tender smile, which said to him:

“Ingrate!”

Christophe had not been able to dispense himself from coming once more to one of the evenings of the Austrian embassy. Philomèle sang lieder of Schubert, of Hugo Wolf, and of Christophe. She was happy at her success and at that of her friend, now feted by an elite. Even in the great public, the name of Christophe imposed itself; the Lévy-Cœurs no longer had the right to feign to ignore it; his works were played at the concerts; he had a piece accepted at the Opéra-Comique. Invisible sympathies took interest in him. More than once, Christophe had felt that affectionate hand, which aided him in his démarches: someone watched over him, without seeming to. Christophe had tried to discover it; but it seemed that, vexed that Christophe had not sought sooner to know it, it remained unseizable. Christophe was distracted, moreover, by other preoccupations: he thought of Olivier, of Françoise; the very morning, he had just read in a newspaper that she had fallen gravely ill at San Francisco: he pictured her to himself alone, in a foreign town, in a hotel room, refusing to see anyone, to write to her friends, clenching her teeth, awaiting, alone, death.

Obsessed by these thoughts, he avoided the company; and he had withdrawn into a little drawing room apart. With his back to the wall, in a recess half in the shadow, behind a curtain of green plants and of flowers, he was listening to the beautiful voice of Philomèle, elegiac and warm, which was singing The Linden Tree of Schubert; and the pure music made the melancholy of memories rise up. Facing him, on the wall, a great mirror reflected the lights and the life of the neighboring drawing room. He did not see: he looked within himself; and he had before his eyes a fog of tears… Suddenly, like the old tree of Schubert that shivers, he began to tremble, without reason. He passed a few seconds thus, very pale, without stirring. Then, the veil of his eyes dissipating, he saw before him, in the mirror, “the friend” who was looking at him… The friend? Who was she? He did not see, except that she was the friend, that he knew her; and his eyes fastened to her eyes, leaning against the wall, he continued to tremble. She smiled at him. He saw neither the drawing of her face and of her body, nor the shade of her eyes, nor whether she was tall or short, and how dressed. One single thing he saw: the divine goodness of her compassionate smile.

And that smile suddenly evoked in Christophe a vanished memory of his early childhood… He was six or seven years old, he was at school, he was unhappy, he had just been humiliated and beaten by comrades older and stronger, all mocked him, and the master had unjustly punished him; crouched in a corner, cast aside, while the others played, he was weeping very low. A melancholy little girl who did not play with the others — (he saw her again at this moment, he who had never thought of her, since: she was short of stature, the head big, the hair and the eyelashes of a blond entirely white, the eyes of a very pale and vague blue, the cheeks broad and pale, the lips large, the face a little puffy, and little red hands) — she had come near him, she had stopped; her finger in her mouth, and had watched him weep; then she had laid her little hand on Christophe’s head, and she had said to him, timidly, hurriedly, with the same compassionate smile:

“Do not weep, do not weep!…”

Then, Christophe had been able to hold out no longer, he had burst into sobs, pressing his nose against the pinafore of the little one who repeated, in a trembling and tender voice:

“Do not weep…”

She had died, a short time afterward, a few weeks later; when that scene took place, she must already have been under the hand of death. Why was he thinking of her, at this moment? There was no relation between that little dead one, forgotten, humble child of the people of a distant German town, and the aristocratic young lady who was now looking at him. But there is only one single soul for all; and although the millions of beings seem different among themselves, like all the worlds that roll in the sky, it is the same fluid that passes and fills, with a love that shines forth, at once, in hearts separated by the centuries. Christophe had just found again the gleam that he had seen pass over the colorless lips of the little consoler…

It lasted only a second. A flood of people blocked the door and hid from Christophe the view of the other drawing room. He drew back rapidly into the shadow, out of reach of the mirror; he was afraid that his trouble should be noticed. But when he was calmer, he wanted to see her again. He was afraid that she had already left. He went into the drawing room; and, in the midst of the crowd, he found her again at once, although she was no longer the same as she had appeared to him in the glass. Now, he saw her in profile, seated in a circle of elegant ladies; one elbow on the arm of the chair, the body a little bent, the head leaning on her hand, she listened to the conversations, with an intelligent and distracted smile; she had the air and the features of the young Saint John, listening and seeing, the eyes half closed, before his own thought, in Raphael’s Disputa…

Then, she raised her eyes, saw him, and was not astonished. And he saw that her smile was for him. He bowed to her, moved, and he drew near her.

“You do not recognize me?” she said.

At that instant, he recognized her:

“Grazia!…” he said.

At the same moment, the ambassadress, who was passing, congratulated herself that the meeting, long sought, had at last come about; and she was presenting Christophe to “the Countess Bérény.” But Christophe was so moved that he did not even hear; he did not notice that foreign name. It was always for him his little Grazia.

Grazia was twenty-two years old. She had been married, for a year, to a young embassy attaché of Paris, noble, of great family, belonging to a former minister of the emperor, snobbish, a man of pleasure, elegant, prematurely worn out, with whom she had sincerely fallen in love, and whom she still loved, while judging him. Her old papa was dead. Her husband had been named to the Paris embassy. Through the connections of the Count Bérény, through her charm and her own intelligence, the timid little girl whom a trifle frightened had become of the young women the most in fashion, in Parisian society, without making any effort for it, and without being embarrassed by it. The beautiful flower of life had blossomed: but she had lost nothing of the calm music of her Latin soul, nourished on Italy, and on the musical peace of the Italian earth. Quite naturally, she had acquired a certain influence in the world of Paris; she was not astonished at it, and knew discreetly how to use it for the artistic or charitable works that had recourse to her; of those works she left to others the official patronage: for although she knew how to keep her rank, she had kept from her somewhat wild childhood in the solitary villa in the midst of the fields, a secret independence, which the world wearied even while it amused her, but which knew how to disguise its boredom under the amiable smile of a courteous and good heart.

She had not forgotten her great friend Christophe. The child, who burned in silence a deep and innocent love, no doubt existed no longer. The Grazia of the present was a woman faithful to her affections, but very sensible and in no way romanesque. She had a gentle irony for the exaggerations of her loving youth. She did not, however, fail to be moved by her memories. The thought of Christophe was associated with the purest hours of her life. She did not hear his name without pleasure; and each of his successes rejoiced her, as if she had had a part in it: for she had foreseen them. From her arrival at Paris, she had sought to see him again. She had invited him, adding on the letter of invitation her old maiden name. Christophe had paid no attention to it, and he had thrown the invitation into the wastebasket, without answering. She had not taken offense at it. She had continued to follow, without his knowing it, the works and even a little the life of Christophe. It was she whose beneficent hand had succored him, in the recent campaign carried on against him by certain newspapers. The prim little Grazia had hardly any relations with the world of the press; but when it was a matter of rendering service to a friend, she was capable of cajoling, with an innocent and malicious wile, the people she liked the least. She invited the director of the journal that hounded the pack of barkers; and in less than no time, she turned his head; she knew so well how to flatter his self-love, she so well seduced him, while imposing upon him, that he needed only a few words, negligently dropped, of contemptuous astonishment at the attacks of which Christophe was the object, for the campaign to stop short. The director suppressed the insulting article that was to appear the next day; and when the columnist inquired about the reasons for the suppression, he gave him a dressing-down. He did more: he gave an order to one of his jacks-of-all-trades to fabricate within the fortnight an enthusiastic article on Christophe; the article was fabricated, enthusiastic and stupid, to one’s wish. It was also Grazia who had the idea of organizing at the embassy auditions of works of her friend, and who, knowing that he patronized Cécile, helped her to make herself known. Finally, through her connections in the German diplomatic world, she began very gently, with a tranquil skill, to awaken the interest of the power for Christophe banished from Germany; and little by little, she determined a movement of opinion in order to obtain from the Emperor a decree that should open the doors of his country to a great artist who honored it. If it was premature to expect for the instant that act of grace, she succeeded at least in having them close their eyes upon the journey of a few days that he made in his native town.

And Christophe, who felt hovering over him the presence of the invisible friend, without being able to discover who she was, had just recognized her in the figure of the young Saint John who smiled at him in the mirror.

Friends. — 6.

They were talking of the past. What they said, Christophe hardly knew. No more than one sees her, does one hear her whom one loves. One loves her. And when one loves her well, one does not even think that one loves her. Christophe did not suspect it. She was there: that was enough. The rest existed no longer…

Grazia stopped speaking. A young man, very tall, fairly handsome, elegant, the face shaved, the head half bald, the air bored, disdainful and impassive, was considering Christophe through his monocle, and was already inclining himself with a haughty politeness:

“My husband,” she said.

The noise of the drawing room reappeared. The inner light went out. Christophe, chilled, fell silent, and, answering the salutation, he withdrew at once.

Ridiculous and devouring demands of those souls of artists and of the childish laws that govern their passionate life! That friend, whom he had seen neglected long ago when she loved him, of whom he had not thought for years, scarcely did he find her again than it seemed to him that she was his, that she was his possession, and that if another had taken her, it was that she had been stolen from him: she herself had not the right to give herself to another. Christophe did not account to himself that she could not do without him. But his creative demon accounted for it for him, and gave birth, in those days, to some of his most beautiful songs of sorrowful love.

For a fairly long time he remained without coming back to see her. Olivier’s pain and health obsessed him. One day at last, finding again the address that she had left him, he made up his mind.

In going up the staircase, he heard workmen’s hammers nailing. The anteroom was in disorder, encumbered with crates and trunks. The valet answered that the countess was not visible. But as Christophe, disappointed, was withdrawing after having handed in his card, the servant ran after him, on the staircase, and brought him back in, with apologies. Christophe was introduced into a little drawing room, whose carpets were taken up and rolled. Grazia came to meet him, with her luminous smile, the hand held out in a burst of joy. All the foolish rancors vanished. He seized it with joy, in the same burst of happiness, and he seized her.

“Ah!” she said, “how happy I am that you have come! I so feared to leave, without having seen you again!”

The shadow, once more, fell back upon him.

“To leave! You are going to leave!”

“You see it,” she said, showing the disorder of the room; “at the end of the week, we shall have left Paris.”

“For long?”

She made a gesture:

“Who knows it?”

He made an effort to speak. His throat was contracted.

“Where are you going?”

“To the United States. My husband is named there first secretary of the embassy.”

“And so, so,” he said… (His lips trembled), “it is finished?”

“My friend!” she said, moved at his accent… “No, it is not finished.”

“I have found you again only to lose you!” He had tears in his eyes.

“My friend,” she repeated.

He put his hand over his eyes, and turned away, to hide his emotion.

“Do not be sad,” she said, laying her hand on his hand.

At that moment again, he thought of the little girl of Germany. They fell silent.

“Why did you come so late?” she asked at last. “I sought to see you. You never answered.”

“I did not know, I did not know,” he said… “Tell me, it is you who so many times came to my aid, without my having been able to guess… ? It is to you that I owe my having been able to return to Germany? It is you who were my good angel, who watched over me?”

She said:

“I was happy to be able to do something for you. I owe you so much!”

“What then?” he asked. “I have done nothing for you.”

“You do not know,” she said, “what you have been for me.”

She spoke of the time when, a little girl, she met him at her uncle Stevens’s, when she had had, through him, through his music, the revelation of what there is of beautiful in the world. And little by little, growing animated gently, she recounted to him, by brief allusions transparent and veiled, the emotions of the child, the part she had taken in Christophe’s sorrows, the concert where he had been hissed and where she had wept, and the letter that she wrote to him and to which he never answered: for he had not received it. And Christophe, in listening to her, in good faith projected into the past his present emotion and the tenderness that he felt for the tender face that was bent toward him.

They talked innocently, with an affectionate joy. And Christophe, in speaking, took Grazia’s hand. And abruptly they both stopped: for Grazia perceived that Christophe loved her. And Christophe perceived it too…

Grazia, for a time, had loved Christophe without Christophe’s caring for it. Now Christophe loved Grazia; and Grazia had for him no more than a peaceful friendship: she loved another. As often happens, it had been enough that one of the two clocks of their lives should be ahead of the other, for all their life, for both of them, to be changed.

Grazia withdrew her hand, which Christophe did not retain. And they remained, a moment, disconcerted, without speaking.

And Grazia said:

“Farewell.”

Christophe repeated his lament.

“And so, it is finished?”

“It is better, doubtless, that things should be thus.”

“Shall we not see each other again, before your departure?”

“No,” she said.

“When shall we see each other again?”

She made a gesture of melancholy doubt.

“Then, what is the use,” said Christophe, “what is the use of our having seen each other again?”

But at the reproach of her eyes, he answered at once:

“No, pardon, I am unjust.”

“Alas!” he said, “I cannot even think of you. I know nothing of your life.”

“I shall always think of you,” she said.

Tranquilly, she described to him in a few words her habitual life, and how her days were spent. She spoke of herself and of her husband, with her beautiful affectionate smile.

“Ah!” he said jealously, “you love him?”

“Yes,” she said.

He rose.

“Farewell.”

She rose too. Only then did he notice that she was pregnant. And that made in his heart an inexplicable impression of disgust, of tenderness, of jealousy, of passionate pity. She accompanied him to the entrance of the little drawing room. At the door, he turned around, bent over her hands, and kissed them long. She did not stir, her eyes half closed. At last, he rose again, and, without looking at her, went out rapidly.

… E chi allora m’avesse domandato di cosa alcuna, la mia risponsione sarebbe stata solamente AMORE, con viso vestito d’umiltà…

All Saints’ Day. Gray light and cold wind, outside. Christophe was at Cécile’s. Cécile was near the cradle of the child, over which Madame Arnaud was leaning, who had come, in passing. Christophe was dreaming. He felt that he had missed happiness; but he did not think of complaining: he knew that happiness existed… Sun, I have no need to see you in order to love you! During those long days of winter when I shiver in the shadow, my heart is full of you; my love keeps me warm: I know that you are there…

And Cécile too was dreaming. She was contemplating the child, and ended by believing that it was her child. O blessed power of the dream, imagination creator of life… Life… What is life? It is not what cold reason and what our eyes see it to be. Life is what we dream it. The measure of life is love.

Christophe looked at Cécile, whose rustic face with broad eyes shone with the splendor of the maternal instinct, not of the dream, but of the true mother. He looked at the tender weary face of Madame Arnaud. He read in it, as in a moving book, the sweetnesses and the hidden sufferings of that life of a wife, which, without one’s suspecting anything of it, is as rich at times in sorrows and in joys as the love of Juliet or of Isolde. But with more religious grandeur…

Socia rei humanæ atque divinæ…

And he thought that, no more than faith or the lack of faith, it is not children or the lack of children that make the happiness or the unhappiness of those who marry and of those who do not marry. Happiness is the perfume of the soul, the harmony that sings at the bottom of the heart. And the most beautiful of the musics of the soul is goodness.

Olivier came in. His movements were calm; a new serenity lit him up. He smiled at the child, shook hands with Cécile and with Madame Arnaud, and set to chatting tranquilly. They observed him with an affectionate astonishment. He was no longer the same. In the isolation in which he had shut himself up with his grief, like the caterpillar in the nest it has spun itself, after a hard labor he had succeeded in stripping off his pain like an empty husk. Some day, we shall recount how he had believed he had found a fine cause to which to make the gift of his life, in disinteresting himself from the self in order to sacrifice it; and, as it is the law, from the day on which he had made to his heart an act of renunciation of life, it had been rekindled. They looked at one another. They did not know what had happened, they dared not ask him; but they felt that he had delivered himself, and that there was no longer in him either regret, or bitterness, for whatever it might be, against whomever it might be.

Christophe, rising, went to the piano, and said to Olivier:

“Do you want me to sing you a melody of Brahms?”

“Of Brahms?” said Olivier. “You play now your old enemy?”

“It is All Saints’ Day,” said Christophe. “Day of pardon for all.”

He sang, in a half-voice, so as not to wake the child, a few phrases of an old popular lied of Swabia:

… Für die Zeit, wo du g’liebt mi hast Da dank’ i dir schön, Und i’ wünsch’, dass dir’s anderswo Besser mag geh’n…

(“For the time when you loved me, I thank you kindly, and I wish that elsewhere it may go better for you…”)

“Christophe!” said Olivier.

Christophe pressed him against his breast.

“Come, my little one,” he said to him, “we have the good lot.”

They were all four seated, near the child who was sleeping. They did not speak. And to whoever should have asked them what was their thought — the face clothed with humility, they would have answered only:

“Love.”

[Closing note: the printer’s colophon records that the proof for printing of this eighth cahier was approved, after corrections, on Tuesday, February 8, 1910, for two thousand copies and twelve copies on Whatman paper. Manager: Charles Péguy. The cahier was composed and printed by unionized workers — Julien Cremieu, printer, Suresnes.]