Jean-Christophe. Le buisson ardent. 1
Jean-Christophe: The Burning Bush, Part 1
Romain Rolland
Calm of the heart. The winds suspended. The air motionless…
Christophe was tranquil; peace was in him. He felt some pride in having conquered it. And secretly, he was chagrined by it. He was astonished by the silence. His passions were asleep; he believed, in good faith, that they would never awaken again.
His great strength, somewhat brutal, was growing drowsy, without object, idle. At bottom, a secret void, a hidden “what’s the use,” perhaps the feeling of the happiness he had not known how to seize. He no longer had enough to struggle against, neither against himself nor against others. He no longer had enough trouble, even in working. He had arrived at the end of a stage; he was reaping the sum of his earlier efforts; he was too easily exhausting the musical vein he had opened; and while the public, naturally behind the times, was discovering and admiring his past works, he was beginning to detach himself from them, without yet knowing whether he would go further. He enjoyed, in creation, a uniform happiness. Art was no longer for him, at this moment of his life, anything but a fine instrument on which he played as a virtuoso. He felt, with shame, that he was becoming a dilettante.
“One needs,” said Ibsen, “to persevere in art, something other and more than a natural genius: passions, sorrows that fill life and give it meaning. Otherwise, one does not create, one writes books.”
Christophe was writing books. He was not accustomed to it. These books were beautiful. He would have preferred them less beautiful and more alive. This athlete at rest, who did not know what to do with his muscles, watched, with the yawn of a bored beast, the years, the years of tranquil work that awaited him. And as, with his old fund of Germanic optimism, he willingly persuaded himself that all was for the best, he thought that this was, no doubt, the inevitable end; he flattered himself that he had come through the storm, that he had become his own master. That was not saying much… Well! One reigns over what one has, one is what one can be… He believed he had reached port.
The two friends did not live together. When Jacqueline had left, Christophe had thought that Olivier would come back to live with him. But Olivier could not. Despite his need to be near Christophe, he felt the impossibility of resuming with him the life of former days. After the years spent with Jacqueline, it would have seemed intolerable to him, and even sacrilegious, to introduce another into the intimacy of his life — even if that other loved him a thousand times better and were a thousand times more beloved than Jacqueline. Such things cannot be reasoned about.
Christophe had found it hard to understand. He returned to the charge, he was astonished, he was saddened, he was indignant. Then his instinct, superior to his intelligence, warned him. Abruptly, he fell silent, and decided that Olivier was right.
But they saw each other every day; and never had they been more united, even when they lived under the same roof. Perhaps they did not exchange in their conversations their most intimate thoughts. They had no need of it. The exchange happened of itself, without words, through the grace of loving hearts.
Both talked little, absorbed, the one in his art, the other in his memories. Olivier’s grief was fading; but he did nothing about it, he almost took pleasure in it: for a long time it was his only reason for living. He loved his child; but his child — a wailing baby — could not fill a large place in his life. There are men who are more lovers than fathers. It would be no use to be scandalized by it. Nature is not uniform; and it would be absurd to try to impose the same laws of the heart on everyone. No one has the right to sacrifice his duties to his heart. At least, one must acknowledge the heart’s right not to be happy in doing its duty. What Olivier loved most in his child, perhaps, was the woman whose flesh had formed it.
Until recently, he had paid little attention to the sufferings of others. He was an intellectual, who lives too enclosed in himself. It was not selfishness, it was a sickly habit of dreaming. Jacqueline had further widened the void around him; her love had drawn between Olivier and other men a magic circle that persisted after love was no more. And then, he was by temperament a little aristocrat. Since childhood, despite his tender heart, he had kept apart from the crowd, for reasons of delicacy of body and soul. The smell and the thoughts of these people repelled him.
But everything had changed, following a commonplace news item of which he had just been a witness.
He had rented a very modest apartment in upper Montrouge, not far from Christophe and Cecile. The neighborhood was working-class, and the building was inhabited by petty rentiers, clerks, and a few working-class families. At any other time, he would have suffered from the surroundings, where he was a stranger; but at this moment, he cared little, here or there: he felt like a stranger everywhere. He barely knew who his neighbors were, and he did not want to know. When he came home from work — he had taken a position in a publishing house — he shut himself up with his memories, and left them only to go see his child and Christophe. His lodging was not a home for him: it was the darkroom where the images of the past were fixed; the darker and barer it was, the more clearly the inner images stood out. He scarcely noticed the faces he passed on the staircase. Yet without his knowing it, certain ones imprinted themselves upon him. There is a certain nature of mind that sees things well only after they have passed. But then, nothing escapes them, the smallest details are engraved with a burin. Olivier was like this: he was peopled with shadows of the living. At the shock of an emotion, they would spring up; and Olivier would be astonished, would recognize them without having known them, would sometimes reach out his hands to seize them. Too late.
One day, as he was leaving his apartment, he saw a crowd gathered before the door, around the concierge who was holding forth. He was so incurious that he would have continued on his way without inquiring; but the concierge, eager to recruit one more listener, stopped him to ask if he knew what had happened to those poor Roussels. Olivier did not even know who “those poor Roussels” were; and he lent an ear, with polite indifference. When he learned that a working-class family — father, mother, and five children — had just committed suicide from destitution, in his own building, he stood like the others staring at the walls of the house, listening to the narrator who never tired of beginning the story over again. As she spoke, memories returned to him; he realized he had seen these people; he asked a few questions. Yes, he recognized them: the man — he could hear his wheezing breath on the staircase — a baker, with a pallid complexion, his blood consumed by the heat of the oven, hollow cheeks, badly shaven; he had had pneumonia at the beginning of winter; he had gone back to work, insufficiently recovered; a relapse had occurred; for three weeks, he had been without work and without strength. The woman, dragging through incessant pregnancies, crippled by rheumatism, was exhausting herself doing a few cleaning jobs, spending her days running errands to try to obtain from Public Assistance the meager aid that was in no hurry to arrive. Meanwhile the children kept coming, and they never stopped: eleven, seven, three years old — not counting two others who had been lost along the way; and, to cap it all, twins who had chosen this moment to make their appearance: they had been born the month before.
“The day they were born,” a neighbor recounted, “the eldest of the five, the little girl of eleven, Justine — poor child! — burst into sobs, asking how she would manage to carry both of them.”
Olivier immediately saw again the image of the girl — a large forehead, pale hair pulled back, gray eyes, troubled, prominent, that were infinitely tender. One always met her carrying provisions, or her smaller sister; or else she held by the hand her seven-year-old brother, a boy with a fine, sickly little face, who had lost one eye. When they passed each other on the staircase, Olivier would say, with his distracted courtesy:
“Excuse me, mademoiselle.”
She would say nothing; she would pass, stiff, barely stepping aside; but this illusory courtesy gave her secret pleasure. The evening before, at six o’clock, going downstairs, he had met her for the last time; she was carrying up a pail of charcoal. He had not paid much attention, except that the load seemed very heavy. But that is a natural thing for children of the people. Olivier had greeted her, as usual, without looking. A few steps lower, mechanically raising his head, he had seen, leaning over the landing, the small tense face, watching him go down. She had immediately turned away and had resumed her ascent. Did she know where that ascent was leading her? Olivier did not doubt it, and he was obsessed by the thought of this child carrying back in her too-heavy pail death as a deliverance — the wretched little ones, for whom not to be meant not to suffer! He could not continue his walk. He went back to his room. But there, to feel those dead near him, only a few partitions separating them… To think that he had lived alongside such anguish!
He went to see Christophe. His heart was heavy; he told himself that it was monstrous to absorb oneself, as he had done, in vain regrets of love, when there were near him so many beings who suffered from misfortunes a thousand times more cruel, and whom one might save. His emotion was deep: it had no difficulty in communicating itself. Christophe, easily impressionable, was stirred in turn. At Olivier’s account, he tore up the page he had just written, calling himself an egoist who amuses himself with children’s games. But then, he picked up the torn pieces. He was too absorbed by his music; and his instinct told him that one less work of art would not make one more person happy. This tragedy of poverty was nothing new to him; since childhood, he had been accustomed to walking on the edge of such abysses, and not falling in. He was even severe about suicide, at this moment in his life when he felt himself in full strength and could not conceive that one might, for whatever suffering, renounce the struggle. Suffering and struggle, what is more normal? It is the backbone of the universe.
Olivier too had passed through similar trials; but never had he been able to accept them, neither for himself nor for others. He had a horror of that poverty in which the life of his dear Antoinette had been consumed. After he had married Jacqueline, when he had allowed himself to be softened by wealth and love, he had been eager to push aside the memory of the sad years when he and his sister had exhausted themselves earning, each day, their right to live the next, without knowing if they would succeed. These images reappeared now that he no longer had his youthful selfishness to safeguard. Instead of fleeing the face of suffering, he went in search of it. He had not far to go to find it. In his state of mind, he was bound to see it everywhere. It filled the world. The world, that hospital.
O agonies of pain! Sorrows of wounded flesh, panting, rotting alive. Silent tortures of hearts consumed by grief. Children unloved, poor girls without hope, women seduced or betrayed, men disappointed in their friendships, their loves and their faith, lamentable troop of the unfortunate whom life has bruised and forgotten! The most atrocious thing was not poverty and disease; it was the cruelty of men toward one another. Scarcely had Olivier lifted the trapdoor that closed the human inferno when there rose toward him the clamor of all the oppressed, the poor exploited, the persecuted peoples, Armenia massacred, Finland stifled, Poland dismembered, Russia martyred, Africa thrown as prey to the European vultures, the wretched of all humanity. He was suffocated by it; he heard it everywhere, he could no longer not hear it, he could no longer conceive that there were people who thought of anything else. He spoke of it constantly to Christophe. Christophe, troubled, would say:
“Be quiet! Let me work.”
And as he had difficulty regaining his equilibrium, he would grow irritated and swear: “The devil take it! There’s my day wasted! And what good has it done you?”
Olivier would apologize:
“My friend,” said Christophe, “you must not always look into the abyss. One can’t go on living.”
“One must reach out a hand to those who are in the abyss.”
“No doubt. But how? By throwing ourselves in too? For that’s what you want. You have a propensity to see in life only what is sad. God bless you! This pessimism is charitable, certainly; but it is depressing. Would you create happiness? First, be happy.”
“Happy! How can one have the heart to be happy, when one sees so much suffering? There can be no happiness except in trying to diminish it, by fighting evil.”
“Very well. But it is not by hitting out wildly that I shall help the unfortunate. One more bad soldier, that doesn’t amount to much. But I can console, through my art, spread strength and joy. Do you know how many wretches have been sustained in their sufferings by the beauty of a thought, of a soaring song? To each his trade! You French, generous scatterbrains, you are always the first to protest against every injustice, in Spain or in Russia, without quite knowing what it is about. I love you for that. But do you think you advance things? You throw yourselves in like bunglers, and the result is nil — when by chance it is not worse. And look, never has your art been more sickly than in this time when your artists claim to take part in universal action. Strange that so many little dilettante masters dare to set themselves up as apostles! They would do much better to pour their people a less adulterated wine. My first duty is to do well what I do, and to manufacture for you a healthy music that will renew your blood and put sunshine into you.”
To spread sunshine on others, one must have it in oneself. Olivier lacked it. Like the best of his contemporaries, he was not strong enough to radiate strength all by himself. He could only do it by uniting with others. But with whom? Free of mind and religious of heart, he was rejected by all parties, political and religious. They all rivaled each other in intolerance and narrowness. As soon as they had power, it was to abuse it. Only the weak and the oppressed attracted Olivier. In this at least he shared Christophe’s opinion, that before combating distant injustices, one must combat those close at hand, those that surround you and for which you are more or less responsible. Too many people content themselves with protesting against evil committed by others, without thinking of that which they themselves do.
He took up, first, assistance to the poor. His friend, Madame Arnaud, was part of a charitable organization. Olivier had himself admitted. But in the first days, he had more than one disappointment: the poor whom he had to look after were not all worthy of interest; or else they responded poorly to his sympathy, they distrusted him, they remained closed to him. Besides, an intellectual has difficulty being satisfied with simple charity: it waters so small a province of the land of misery! Its action is almost always fragmented, piecemeal; it seems to go at random, and to dress wounds as it discovers them; it is, in general, too modest and too hurried to venture to the roots of the evil. Now, this was a search that Olivier’s mind could not do without.
He began to study the problem of social misery.
He was not lacking in guides. In those days, the social question had become a society question. It was talked about in salons, in the theater, in novels. Everyone claimed to understand it. A portion of the young generation spent the best of their energies on it.
Every new generation needs a fine folly. Even the most selfish among young people have a surplus of life, a capital of energy that has been advanced to them and that will not remain unproductive; they seek to spend it in action, or — more prudently — in a theory. Aviation or Revolution. The sport of muscles or that of ideas. One needs, when young, to give oneself the illusion that one is participating in a great movement of humanity, that one is renewing the world. Beauty of having senses that vibrate at every breath of the universe! One is so free and so light! One has not yet loaded oneself with the ballast of a family, one has nothing, one risks hardly anything. One is very generous when one can renounce what one does not yet possess. And besides, it is so good to love and to hate, and to believe that one is transforming the earth with dreams and cries! Young people are like dogs on the alert: you see them quiver and bark at the wind. An injustice committed at the other end of the world threw them into delirium.
Barking in the night. From one farm to another, amid the great woods, they answered each other unceasingly. The night was agitated. It was not easy to sleep in those days. The wind carried in the air the echo of so many injustices! Injustice is innumerable; to remedy one, you risk causing others. What is injustice? For one, it is a shameful peace, a dismembered fatherland. For another, it is war. For this one, it is the past destroyed, the prince banished; for that one, it is the Church despoiled; for a third, it is the future stifled, liberty in danger. For the people, it is inequality; and for the elite, it is equality. There are so many different injustices that each epoch chooses its own — the one it combats and the one it favors.
At that moment, the greatest efforts of the world were directed against social injustices — and aimed unconsciously at producing new ones. And certainly, these injustices were great and spread themselves before all eyes, since the working class, growing in number and in power, had become one of the essential gears of the State. But in spite of the declamations of its tribunes and its bards, the situation of this class was not worse, it was better than it had ever been in the past; and the change came not from the fact that it suffered more, but that it was stronger. Stronger, by the very force of the enemy capital, by the fatality of the industrial economic development that had gathered these workers into armies ready for battle and, through mechanization, had put weapons in their hands, had made each foreman a master who commanded light, lightning, movement, the energy of the world. From this enormous mass of elemental forces, which leaders had recently been trying to organize, there emanated a heat of furnace, electric waves that coursed, little by little, through the body of human society.
It was not by its justice, or by the novelty and strength of its ideas, that the cause of this people stirred the intelligent bourgeoisie, although they liked to believe so. It was by its vitality.
Its justice? A thousand other justices were violated in the world, without the world being moved. Its ideas? Scraps of truths, gathered here and there, adjusted to the interests and size of one class, at the expense of other classes. Absurd credos, like all credos — Divine Right of Kings, Infallibility of Popes, Universal Suffrage, Equality of Men — equally absurd, if one considers only their value as reason and not the force that animates them. What did their mediocrity matter? Ideas do not conquer the world as ideas, but as forces. They do not seize men by their intellectual content, but by the vital radiation that, at certain moments in history, emanates from them. It is like a scent that rises: the coarsest nostrils are seized by it. The most sublime idea will remain without effect, until the day when it becomes contagious, not by its own merits, but by those of the human groups that embody it and transfuse it with their blood. Then the dried plant, the rose of Jericho, suddenly blooms, grows, fills the air with its violent fragrance. Such were some of those ideas whose blazing banner led the working masses to the assault of the bourgeois citadel: they had come from the brain of bourgeois dreamers. So long as they had remained in the books of bourgeois, they were dead: museum objects, mummies swathed in glass cases that no one looks at. But as soon as the people had seized upon them, it had made them of the people, it had added to them its feverish reality, which deformed them and animated them, breathing into these abstract reasons its hallucinated hopes, a burning wind of Hegira. They spread from one to another. One was touched by them, without knowing by whom or how they had been brought. Individuals hardly counted. The moral epidemic continued to spread; and it could happen that limited beings communicated it to beings of the elite. Everyone carried it, unknowingly.
These phenomena of intellectual contagion belong to all times and all countries; they make themselves felt even in aristocratic States, where closed castes try to maintain themselves. But nowhere are they more devastating than in democracies, which preserve no sanitary barrier between the elite and the crowd. The former is immediately drowned, whatever it does. In spite of its pride and its intelligence, it cannot resist the contagion: for it is much weaker than it thinks. Intelligence is an islet that the human tides gnaw, crumble, and cover. It emerges again only when the tide withdraws.
One admires the self-abnegation of the privileged French who abdicated their rights on the night of the Fourth of August. What is most admirable, no doubt, is that they could not do otherwise. I imagine that a good number of them, back in their mansions, said to themselves: “What have I done? I was drunk.” Magnificent intoxication! Praised be the good wine and the vine that gives it! The vine whose blood intoxicated the privileged of old France, it was not they who had planted it. The wine was drawn, there was nothing to do but drink it. Whoever drank it was delirious. Even those who did not drink were dizzy, merely from sniffing in passing the aroma of the vintage. Vintages of the Revolution! Of the wine of 89, there remain now, in family cellars, only a few flat bottles; but our grandchildren’s children will still remember that their great-grandparents had their heads turned by it.
It was a harsher wine, but no less potent, that went to the brains of the young bourgeois of Olivier’s generation. They offered up their class as a sacrifice to the new god, Deo ignoto: the people.
Certainly, not all were equally sincere. Many saw in it only an opportunity to distinguish themselves from their class by affecting to despise it. For most, it was an intellectual pastime, an oratorical exercise, which they did not take altogether seriously. There is pleasure in believing that one believes in a cause, that one is fighting for it, or that one will fight — at least, that one could fight. It is not even bad to think that one is risking something. Theater emotions.
They are quite innocent, when one indulges in them naively, without any interested calculation. But others, more shrewd, only played it safe; the popular movement was for them a means of advancement. Like the Norse pirates, they took advantage of the rising sea to launch their barques into the interior of the land; they intended to penetrate to the depths of the great estuaries, and to remain wedged like a nail in the conquered cities, while the sea withdraws. The passage was narrow, and the current capricious: one had to be clever. But two or three generations of demagogy had produced a race of corsairs for whom the trade had no more secrets. They passed boldly through, and did not even glance at those who sank along the way. Such scoundrels belong to all parties; thank God, no party is responsible for them. But the disgust that these adventurers inspired in the sincere and the convinced had led some of the latter to despair of their class. Olivier saw young bourgeois, wealthy and educated, who had the bitter sense of the bourgeoisie’s decadence and their own uselessness. He had only too much inclination to sympathize with them. After having first believed in the renovation of the people by the elite, after having founded Popular Universities and having spent freely much time and money, they had seen their efforts fail; their hopes had been excessive, their discouragement was excessive too. The people had not come at their call, or had run away; when they came, they understood everything backward, they took from bourgeois culture only its vices and absurdities. Finally, more than one black sheep had slipped into the ranks of the bourgeois apostles, and had discredited them, exploiting at one stroke both the people and the bourgeois. Then it seemed to people of good faith that the bourgeoisie was condemned, that it could only infect the people, and that the people must at all costs free itself, make its own way alone. They remained therefore without any possible action other than to predict or to foresee a movement that would take place without them and against them. Some found in it a joy of renunciation, of deep and disinterested human sympathy, that feeds on itself and its sacrifice. To love, to give oneself! Youth is so rich in its own right that it can do without being repaid; it does not fear being left wanting. And it can deprive itself of everything, except loving. Others satisfied there a pleasure of reason, an imperious logic; they sacrificed themselves not to men but to ideas. These were the most intrepid. They felt a proud joy in deducing from their reasonings the fatal end of their class. It would have been more painful for them to see their predictions denied than to be crushed beneath the weight. In their intellectual intoxication, they cried to those outside: “Harder! Strike harder! Let nothing remain of us!” They had made themselves the theorists of violence.
Of the violence of others. For, as usual, these apostles of brutal energy were almost always distinguished and feeble people. More than one was a functionary of that State which he proposed to destroy — an applied, conscientious, and submissive functionary. Their theoretical violence was the revenge of their debility, their grudges, and the compression of their lives. But it was above all the index of the storms that rumbled around them. Theorists are like meteorologists: they say, in scientific terms, not the weather that will come, but the weather that is. They are the weather-vane, which shows where the wind blows. When they turn, they are not far from believing that they make the wind turn.
The wind had turned.
Ideas wear out quickly in a democracy, all the more quickly as they have spread more rapidly. How many republicans in France had, in less than fifty years, grown disgusted with the republic, with universal suffrage, and with so many liberties conquered with passion! After the fetishistic cult of numbers, after the complacent optimism that had believed in holy majorities and expected from them human progress, the spirit of violence was blowing; the incapacity of majorities to govern themselves, their venality, their spinelessness, their base and fearful aversion to all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, aroused revolt; the energetic minorities — all minorities — appealed to force. A baroque and yet fatal rapprochement was taking place between the royalists of the Action Francaise and the syndicalists of the CGT. Balzac speaks, somewhere, of those men of his time, “aristocrats by inclination, who became republicans from spite, solely to find many inferiors among their equals.” Meager pleasure. One must compel these inferiors to acknowledge themselves as such; and for that, no means but an authority that imposes the supremacy of the elite — working-class or bourgeois — over the numbers that oppress it. The young intellectuals, proud petty bourgeois, became royalists or revolutionaries from wounded vanity and hatred of democratic equality. And the disinterested theorists, the philosophers of violence, like good weather-vanes, rose above them, oriflammes of the storm.
And finally there was the band of literary men in search of inspiration — of those who know how to write but do not quite know what to write: like the Greeks at Aulis, becalmed, they can no longer advance and impatiently watch for the fair wind, whatever it may be, that will come to fill their sails. One saw there celebrities, those whom the Dreyfus Affair had unexpectedly torn from their work of style and launched into public meetings. An example too much followed, to the chagrin of the initiators. A crowd of literary men were now occupied with politics, and claimed to govern the affairs of State; everything was a pretext for them to form leagues, brandish manifestos, save the Capitol. After the intellectuals of the vanguard, the intellectuals of the rear: the ones were worth the others. Each of the two parties called the other intellectual, and called itself intelligent. Those who had the luck to possess in their veins a few drops of the blood of the people were proud of it; they dipped their pen in it, they wrote with it. All, bourgeois, malcontents, and seeking to regain the authority that the bourgeoisie had, by its selfishness, irretrievably lost.
It was rare for these apostles to sustain their apostolic zeal for long. At first, the cause had brought them successes, which were probably not due to their oratorical gifts. Their vanity was deliciously flattered by them. Since then, they continued, with less success and some secret fear of being a little ridiculous. In the long run, this latter feeling tended to prevail, doubled by the weariness of a role difficult to play for men of their refined tastes and their skepticism. They were waiting, to beat a retreat, for the wind to permit it, and their escort too. For they were prisoners of both. These Voltaires and Joseph de Maistres of the new times hid beneath their boldness of pen a frightened uncertainty that tested the ground, feared to compromise itself before the young, strove to please them, to be younger than they. Revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries through literature, they resigned themselves to following the literary fashion they had helped to create.
The most curious type that Olivier encountered, in this little bourgeois vanguard of the Revolution, was the revolutionary out of timidity.
The specimen he had before his eyes was called Pierre Canet. Of very wealthy bourgeois stock, and of a conservative family, hermetically sealed against new ideas: magistrates and functionaries who had distinguished themselves by sulking at those in power or by getting themselves dismissed; big bourgeois of the Marais who flirted with the Church and thought little, but well. He had married, out of idleness, a woman with an aristocratic name, who thought no less well, nor any more. This bigoted, narrow, backward world, which perpetually chewed its disdain and its bitterness, had ended by exasperating him — all the more since his wife was ugly and bored him to death. Of average intelligence, of fairly open mind, he had liberal aspirations, without quite knowing what they consisted of: it was not in his milieu that he could have learned what liberty was. All he knew was that it was not there; and he imagined that one had only to leave, to find it. He was incapable of walking alone. From his first steps outside, he was happy to join some college friends, some of whom were infatuated with syndicalist ideas. He found himself even more out of his depth in this world than in the one he came from; but he would not admit it: he had to live somewhere; and people of his shade — that is, without shade — he could not find. God knows, however, that the seed is not rare in France! But they are ashamed of themselves: they hide, or they dye themselves in one of the fashionable political colors, or even in several. Besides, he was under the influence of his friends.
As usual, he had attached himself above all to the one most different from him. This Frenchman, French bourgeois and provincial to the core, had made himself the faithful Achates of a young Jewish doctor, Manousse Heimann, a Russian refugee, who, in the manner of many of his compatriots, had the double gift of settling in immediately among others as if at home, and of finding himself so much at ease in every revolution that one might wonder what interested him more in it: the game, or the cause. His trials and those of others were a diversion for him. Sincerely revolutionary, his scientific habits of mind made him regard revolutionaries and himself as a kind of lunatic. He observed this lunacy while cultivating it. His exalted dilettantism and his extreme inconstancy of mind made him seek out the most opposite circles. He had connections among those in power, and even in the world of the police; he poked about everywhere, with that morbid and dangerous curiosity that gives so many Russian revolutionaries the appearance of playing a double game, and that sometimes makes that appearance a reality. It is not treachery, it is versatility, and disinterested at that. How many men of action, for whom action is a theater, where they bring the aptitudes of good actors, honest but always ready to change roles! To the role of revolutionary, Manousse was faithful, as far as he could be: it was the character that best accorded with his natural anarchy and with the pleasure he took in demolishing the laws of the countries through which he passed. Despite everything, it was only a role. One never knew the share of invention and reality in his remarks; and he himself ended up no longer knowing very well.
Intelligent and mocking, gifted with the psychological fineness of his double race, knowing how to read wonderfully well in the weaknesses of others as in his own, and skillful at exploiting them, he had had no difficulty in dominating Canet. He found it amusing to drag this Sancho Panza into Don Quixotic escapades. He disposed of him without ceremony, of his will, his time, his money — not for himself (he had no needs, one did not know by what or how he lived) — but for the most compromising demonstrations of the cause.
Canet let himself be led; he tried to persuade himself that he thought as Manousse did. He knew very well the contrary: these ideas frightened him; they offended his common sense. And he did not like the people. Moreover, he was not brave. This good fat fellow, tall, broad and corpulent, with his chubby, completely shaven face, short of breath, affable, pompous and childish in speech, who had the pectorals of a Farnese Hercules and was rather handy with boxing and the stick, was the most timid of men. If he gloried in passing among his own for a subversive mind, he trembled in secret before the boldness of his friends. No doubt, this little thrill was not too unpleasant, so long as it was only a game. But the game was becoming dangerous. These creatures were turning aggressive, their demands were growing; they worried Canet in his fundamental selfishness, his deep-rooted sense of property, his bourgeois pusillanimity. He did not dare to ask: “Where are you leading me?” But he grumbled under his breath against the effrontery of these people who like nothing better than to break their own necks, without caring whether they may not at the same time break the necks of others. Who forced him to follow them? Was he not free to abandon them? He lacked the courage. He was afraid of being left alone, like a child abandoned on the road, who cries. He was like so many men: they have no opinion except that they disapprove of all exalted opinions; but to be independent, one would have to be alone, and how many are capable of it? How many, even among the most clear-sighted, will have the temerity to tear themselves free from the slavery of certain prejudices, certain postulates that weigh upon all men of the same generation? That would be to put a wall between oneself and others. On one side, liberty in the desert; on the other, men. They do not hesitate: they prefer men, the flock. It smells bad, but it keeps one warm. Then they pretend to think what they do not think. It is not very difficult for them: they know so little what they think! “Know thyself!” How could they, those who scarcely have a self! In every collective belief, religious or social, those who believe are rare, because those who are men are rare. Faith is a heroic force; its fire has never burned more than a few human torches; they themselves often waver. The apostles, the prophets, Jesus himself, have doubted. The rest are only reflections — save at certain hours of spiritual drought when a few sparks fallen from a great torch set all the plain ablaze; then the fire dies out, and one sees nothing more than embers glowing under the ashes. Scarcely a few hundred Christians truly believe in Christ. The rest believe that they believe, or they want to believe.
So it was with many of these revolutionaries. Good Canet wanted to believe that he was one: so he believed it. And he was appalled at his own boldness.
All these bourgeois claimed to follow different principles: some their hearts, others their reason, others their interest; these linked their way of thinking to the Gospel, those to M. Bergson, those to Karl Marx, to Proudhon, to Joseph de Maistre, to Nietzsche, or to M. Sorel. There were revolutionaries by fashion, by snobbery; there were those by savagery; there were those by hatred, those by love; there were those by a need for action, by a passion for heroism; there were those by servility, by sheepish instinct. But all, without knowing it, were carried by the wind. They were the whirlwinds of dust that you see smoking in the distance, on the great white roads, and that announce the coming of the storm.
Olivier and Christophe watched the wind coming. Both had good eyes. But they did not see in the same way. Olivier, whose lucid gaze penetrated despite himself the ulterior motives of people, was saddened by their mediocrity; but he perceived the hidden force that lifted them; the tragic aspect of things struck him more. Christophe was more sensitive to their comic aspect. Men interested him, ideas not at all. He affected toward them a contemptuous indifference. He mocked social utopias. By a spirit of contradiction and by an instinctive reaction against the morbid humanitarianism that was the order of the day, he showed himself more selfish than he was; the self-made man, the robust parvenu, proud of his muscles and his will, had rather too much of a tendency to call lazy those who did not possess his strength. Poor and alone, he had been able to conquer: let the others do the same! What was all this talk of the social question! What question? Poverty?
“I know all about that,” he said. “My father, my mother, and I, we went through it. You have only to get out of it.”
“Not all can,” said Olivier. “The sick. The unlucky.”
“Help them, that’s simple enough. But the way they are being exalted nowadays, that’s going too far. Not long ago, people alleged the odious right of the strongest. My word, I don’t know if the right of the weakest isn’t more odious still; it enervates the thought of today, it tyrannizes and exploits the strong. You would think it had become a merit to be sickly, poor, unintelligent, defeated — a vice to be strong, healthy, happy in battle, an aristocrat of blood and spirit. And the most ridiculous thing is that the strong are the first to believe it. A fine subject for comedy, my friend Olivier!”
“I would rather be laughed at than make others weep.”
“Good fellow!” said Christophe. “By God! Who says the contrary? When I see a hunchback, I feel the pain in my own back… The comedy is one we play, not one we shall write.”
He did not let himself be taken in by dreams of social justice. His sound popular good sense made him inclined to believe that what had been, would be.
“If one told you that in art, how you would protest!” observed Olivier.
“Perhaps so. In any case, I understand only art. And so do you. I have no confidence in those who talk about what they don’t understand.”
Olivier had no more confidence. The two friends even carried their distrust rather far: they had always kept out of politics. Olivier confessed, not without a little shame, that he did not remember ever having exercised his rights as a voter; for ten years, he had not even picked up his registration card at the town hall.
“Why should I associate,” he said, “with a farce that I know to be futile? Vote? For whom? I have no preference among candidates who are equally unknown to me, and who, I have too much reason to expect, the day after the election will equally betray their profession of faith. Watch them? Recall them to their duty? My life would be spent on it, without fruit. I have neither the time, nor the strength, nor the oratorical means, nor the lack of scruples and the heart armored against the disgusts of action. It is better to abstain. I consent to suffer the evil. At least, not to subscribe to it.”
But despite his excessive clear-sightedness, this man who shrank from regular political action preserved a chimerical hope in a revolution. He knew it was chimerical, but he did not reject it. It was a kind of racial mysticism. One does not belong with impunity to the greatest destructive and constructive people of the West, to the people that destroys to build and builds to destroy — that plays with ideas and with life, and constantly makes a clean sweep to better begin the game again, and for stakes pours out its blood.
Christophe did not carry in him this hereditary Messianism. He was too Germanic to appreciate the idea of a revolution. He thought that one does not change the world. What theories, what words, what useless noise!
“I have no need,” he said, “to make a revolution — or palavers about revolution — to prove my strength. Above all, I have no need, like these worthy young men, to overturn the State in order to set up a king or a committee of public safety to defend me. A strange proof of strength! I can defend myself. I am not an anarchist; I love the necessary order, and I venerate the Laws that govern the universe. But between them and me, I can do without an intermediary. My will knows how to command, and it knows also how to submit. You who have your mouths full of your classics, remember your Corneille: ‘Myself alone, and that is enough.’ Your desire for a master disguises your weakness. Strength is like light: blind is the man who denies it. Be strong quietly, without theories, without violence: like plants toward the light, all the souls of the weak will turn toward you.”
But while protesting that he had no time to waste on political discussions, he was less detached from them than he wished to appear. He suffered, as an artist, from the social malaise. In his temporary dearth of strong passions to absorb him, he happened to look around him and to ask himself for whom he was writing. Then he saw the sad clientele of contemporary art, that tired elite, those dilettante bourgeois, and he thought:
“What interest is there in working for such people?”
Certainly, there was no lack among them of distinguished, educated minds, sensitive to craftsmanship, and not even incapable of appreciating the novelty — or (what amounts to the same) the archaism — of refined sentiments. But they were jaded, too intellectual, too little alive to believe in the reality of art; they interested themselves only in the game — the game of sonorities or the game of ideas; most of them were distracted by other worldly interests, accustomed to scattering themselves among multiple occupations, of which none was “necessary.” It was virtually impossible for them to penetrate beneath the bark of art, to feel its hidden heart; art was not for them flesh and blood: it was literature. Their critics erected into an intolerant theory their inability to rise above dilettantism. When by chance a few of them were vibrant enough to resonate to the voice of art, they had not the strength to bear it; they remained unhinged and neurotic for life. Invalids or dead men. What was art doing in this hospital? And yet it could not, in modern society, do without these cripples: for they had the money and the press; they alone could assure the artist the means of living. One had therefore to lend oneself to this humiliation: an intimate and painful art, a music in which one has put the secret of one’s inner life, offered as entertainment — or rather as a cure for boredom, or as a new boredom — at worldly performances and soirees, to an audience of snobs and tired intellectuals.
Christophe sought the true public, the one that believes in the emotions of art as in those of life, and feels them with a virgin soul. And he was obscurely attracted by the new world that was promised — the people. The memories of his childhood, of Gottfried and of the humble folk who had revealed to him the deep life of art, or who had shared with him the sacred bread of music, inclined him to believe that his true friends were on that side. Like many other generous and naive young men, he cherished grand projects of popular art, of concerts and theaters of the people, which he would have been hard put to define. He expected from a revolution the possibility of an artistic renewal, and claimed that this was for him the only interest of the social movement. But he was deceiving himself: he was too alive not to be attracted, drawn in, by the spectacle of the most living action of the time.
[The text continues with Christophe’s immersion in working-class Paris, his friendships with workers like Joussier, Coquard, and the cobbler La Feuillette and his grandson Emmanuel; Olivier’s bond with the hunchbacked child Emmanuel and the invalid girl Rainette; the approach of May Day and the growing tension; the eruption of street violence during the May Day demonstration; Olivier’s death while trying to save Emmanuel in the melee; Christophe’s flight to Switzerland in Canet’s automobile, orchestrated by Manousse; his devastating grief at the Braun household; and his slow, painful spiritual rebirth through art and through the natural world.]
The social play was double. The one that the intellectuals performed was the play within the play: the people scarcely listened to it. The real play was their own. It was not easy to follow; they themselves could not quite find their way in it. That only made it more unpredictable.
Not that they did not talk a great deal more than they acted. Bourgeois or people, every Frenchman is a great devourer of speech, as much as of bread. But all do not eat the same bread. There is a luxury speech for delicate palates, and a more nourishing one for hungry mouths. If the words are the same, they are not kneaded in the same way; the flavor and the smell, the meaning, is different.
The First of May was approaching. An anxious rumor ran through Paris. The braggarts of the CGT contributed to spreading it. Their newspapers announced the great day arrived, summoned the workers’ militia, and hurled the word of terror that strikes the bourgeois in the most sensitive spot: in the belly. They threatened them with the general strike. The frightened Parisians were leaving for the country, or provisioning themselves as for a siege.
The next day, Christophe came to fetch Olivier for a walk through Paris. Olivier was well again; but he still felt that strange lassitude; he did not want to go out, he had a vague dread, he did not like mingling with the crowd. His heart and his mind were brave, but the flesh was frail. He was afraid of throngs, of brawls, of all brutalities; he knew too well that he was made to be their victim, without being able to defend himself, without even wishing to, for he had as great a horror of causing suffering as of suffering. Sickly bodies tremble more than others before physical pain, because they know it better, because they have less resilience to resist, and because their overexcited imagination makes it seem more immediate and more raw. Olivier blushed at this cowardice of his body, which his will’s stoicism contradicted; and he strove to combat it. But this morning, all contact with men was particularly painful to him; he would have liked to stay shut in, all day. Christophe scolded him, rallied him, insisted at all costs that he go out. Olivier pretended not to hear. Christophe said:
“Very well, I’ll go without you. I’m going to see their First of May. If I’m not back tonight, tell yourself I’ve been locked up.”
He went. On the staircase, Olivier caught up with him. He did not want to let Christophe go alone.
Few people in the streets. Some little working girls, with a sprig of lily of the valley. Workers in their Sunday best strolled about with an idle air. As they advanced, the crowd thickened. Sinister pale faces, villainous mugs, slipped into the current, on the lookout, waiting for the hour and the prey to snatch. The sediment was stirring. At each step, the river grew more turbid. Now it flowed, opaque and heavy. Like air bubbles rising from the bottom to the greasy surface, voices calling, whistles, cries of newspaper vendors, pierced the murmur of the multitude and gave a measure of its amassed layers. At the end of the street, near Aurelie’s restaurant, it was like the sound of sluices. The crowd was breaking against barriers of police and troops. Before the obstacle, it formed a solid mass that heaved, hissed, sang, laughed, with contradictory swells. This multitude was not hostile. It did not know what it wanted. While waiting to find out, it amused itself — in its own way, nervous, brutal, without malice yet — it amused itself by pushing and being pushed, by insulting the police or by insulting itself. But little by little, it was growing edgy.
A wave of blood flowed back, from time to time, to the heart of the thousand-headed monster; looks became hateful, and cries murderous. Individuals hiding in the third or fourth rank began to throw stones. At the windows, families were watching; they thought they were at a show; they egged on the crowd and waited, with a little shudder of anguished impatience, for the troops to charge.
In the midst of these compact masses, with knees and elbows, Christophe was forcing his way like a wedge. Olivier followed. Christophe was exultant. He had completely forgotten that, five minutes before, he had denied the possibility of a popular movement. Scarcely had he set foot in the current when he had been seized: a stranger to this French crowd and its demands, he had suddenly merged with it; it mattered little to him what it wanted: he wanted; it mattered little to him where he was going: he went, breathing this breath of madness.
Olivier followed, carried along, but without joy, lucid, never losing consciousness of himself, a thousand times more foreign than Christophe to the passions of this people that was his own, and yet carried along by them, like wreckage. The illness that had weakened him had loosened his bonds with life. How far he felt from these people! As he was without delirium and his mind was free, the smallest details of things inscribed themselves in him. He gazed with delight at the golden nape of a girl in front of him, her pale, fine neck. And at the same time, the acrid smell fermenting from these packed bodies sickened him.
“Christophe!” he pleaded.
Christophe was not listening.
“Christophe!”
“Eh?”
“Let’s go home.”
“You’re frightened?” said Christophe.
He continued on his way. Olivier, with a sad smile, followed.
At that precise moment, the cuirassiers, tired of being pelted with stones, advanced to clear the entrances to the square; the police brigades marched ahead at a run. At once, the rout began.
Olivier was about to turn the corner of the shop. A few steps more, and he would have been in a side lane that would have taken him away from the crush. The image of his little protege crossed his mind. He turned and looked for him. He saw him, at the precise instant when Emmanuel, who had dropped from his observation post, was rolling on the ground, knocked over by the crowd; the fleeing mob was trampling over him; the police were coming. Olivier did not think: he jumped down the steps and ran to the rescue.
The two bands seized each other by the throat, like dogs. And the women, still at the top of the steps, ululated. Thus the little bourgeois aristocrat triggered the spring of the battle, which no one had wanted less than he.
Christophe, carried along by the workers, had thrown himself into the fray, without knowing who had caused it. He was a hundred leagues from thinking that Olivier was caught up in it. A thrust, not aimed at Olivier, had struck him in the left breast; he had just fallen; the crowd was trampling him. Christophe had been swept by a surge to the other end of the battlefield.
Olivier had been carried to Aurelie’s. He was unconscious. He had been laid in the dark back room, on a bed. At the foot, the little hunchback stood, stricken.
Near the head of the dying man, on the pillow, Aurelie had placed a little bouquet of May Day flowers, a few sprigs of lily of the valley. A badly closed tap dripped in the courtyard, on a pail. Images trembled, for a second, in the depths of thought, like a light about to go out… A provincial house, wisteria on the wall; a garden where a child played: he was lying on a lawn; a jet of water scattered in a stone basin. A little girl was laughing…
They left Paris. They crossed the vast plains buried in fog. It was on an evening like this that Christophe, eight years before, had arrived in Paris. He was a fugitive then, as now. But then, the one who had loved him was alive; and Christophe was fleeing toward him…
“Olivier!” he cried aloud in the letter. “He saw that Olivier was dead.” And he fainted.
They arrived at Laroche. Manousse and Canet did not leave him until they had seen him on the train. The train left. They watched it move away.
“The poor devil!” said Manousse.
They got back in the automobile. They were silent. After a while, Canet said to Manousse:
“I think we have just committed a crime.”
Manousse said nothing at first, then he said:
“Bah! The dead are dead. We must save the living.”
The days passed. Christophe came out of it, as if emptied of his life. Yet he persisted in standing upright; he went out, he walked. Happy are those whom a strong race sustains, in the eclipses of their life! The father’s and the grandfather’s legs carried the body of the son, ready to collapse; the thrust of the sturdy ancestors lifted the broken soul: like the dead horseman whom his horse carries on.
He walked, along a ridge path, between two ravines; he descended the narrow trail of sharp stones, between which the knotted roots of stunted oaks serpentined; not knowing where he was going, and surer of his steps than if a lucid will had guided him. He had not slept; he had scarcely eaten for several days. He had a fog before his eyes. He was descending toward the valley. It was Easter week. A veiled day. The last assault of winter was vanquished. The warm spring was brooding. From the villages below, the bells rose. From one first, nestled like a bird in a hollow, at the foot of the mountain, with its pied thatched roofs, black and golden, covered with thick moss like velvet. Then, from another, invisible, on the other slope of the mountain. Then, from others in the plain, beyond a river. And the great bell, very far, of a city that was lost in the mist. Christophe stopped. His heart was near to fainting. These voices seemed to say to him:
“Come with us. Here is peace. Here, pain is dead. Dead, with thought. We rock the soul so well that it falls asleep in our arms. Come, and rest; you will not wake again.”
How weary he felt! How he wished to sleep! But he shook his head, and said:
“It is not peace I seek, but life.”
He went on again. He covered leagues without noticing. In his state of hallucinated weakness, the simplest sensations reached him with unexpected resonances. His thought projected all around, on the earth and in the air, fantastic gleams.
At the edge of a wood, he found himself near a village. The bells were ringing, the people were going to church. He was thirsty; he entered an inn opposite the church. And there, while he was drinking, through the open door he heard the singing that came from the church, the old songs of the people’s faith, words and melodies of centuries past, the grave voice of an old peasant who droned with naive conviction.
God was suffering. With all those who struggle and for all those who suffer. For he was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, that widens, expands, by which the night is drunk. But the night is boundless, and the divine combat never ceases; and no one can know what will be its outcome. Heroic symphony, in which even the dissonances that clash and mingle form a serene concert! As the beech forest wages furious combats in silence, so Life wars in eternal peace.
These combats, this peace, resounded in Christophe. He was like a seashell in which the Ocean murmurs. Epic cries passed, calls of trumpets, squalls of sound, led by sovereign rhythms. For everything turned into sound in that sonorous soul. It sang the light. It sang the night. And life. And death. It sang for those who were victors in the battle. It sang for himself, vanquished and felled. It sang. All was song. It was nothing more than song.
Its intoxication was such that it did not hear itself singing. Like the rains of spring, the torrents of music poured into this soil cracked by winter. Shames, griefs, bitterness, now revealed their mysterious mission: they had decomposed the earth, and they had fertilized it; the plowshare of sorrow, in tearing open the heart, had opened new springs of life. The moor was flowering again. But these were no longer the flowers of the other spring. Another soul was born.
It was being born, at every instant. For it was not yet ossified and formed, as are only those souls arrived at the end of their growth, the souls that are going to die. It was not the statue. It was the metal in fusion. Each second made of it a new universe. Christophe did not think of fixing its limits. He abandoned himself to this joy of the man who, casting behind him the weight of his past, sets out on a long journey, young in blood, free in heart, and breathes the sea air, and thinks that the voyage will never end. Now that he was visited again by the creative force that animates the world, the richness of the world seized him by the throat, like an ecstasy. He loved; he was his neighbor as himself. And everything was “neighbor” to him, from the grass he trod to the hand he clasped. A beautiful tree, the shadow of a cloud on the mountain, the breath of a meadow carried by the wind, the night, the hive of the sky buzzing with swarms of suns… it was a whirlpool of blood… he had no desire to speak, or to think; he had no more desire but to laugh and to weep and to melt into this living marvel. Write, why write? Can one write the unspeakable? But whether it was possible or not, he had to write. It was his law. Ideas struck him, in lightning flashes, wherever he might be, most often on his walks. Impossible to wait. Then he would write, with anything, on anything; and he would often have been incapable of saying what these sentences meant that sprang from him in an irresistible impulse; and behold, while he was writing, other ideas came to him, and others; and he wrote, he wrote, on his shirtsleeves, on the lining of his hat; however fast he wrote, his thought went faster; he had to resort to a kind of shorthand.
These were only formless notes. The difficulty began when he tried to pour these ideas into the ordinary musical forms; he made the discovery that none of the old molds could suit them; if he wanted to fix his visions faithfully, he had to begin by forgetting all music he had heard, all he had written, to make a clean sweep of all learned formalism, of traditional technique, to reject those crutches of the impotent mind, that ready-made bed for the laziness of those who, fleeing the fatigue of thinking for themselves, lie down in the thought of others.
And then, it stopped. Christophe came out of it, broken,
We gave the press proof after corrections for two thousand copies of this fifth cahier and for fourteen copies on whatman paper on Tuesday, October 31, 1911.
Manager: CHARLES PEGUY
This cahier was composed and printed by union workers.