Jean-Christophe. Le buisson ardent. 2

Jean-Christophe: The Burning Bush, Part 2

Romain Rolland

The two friends did not live together. When Jacqueline had gone, Christophe had thought that Olivier would come back to settle in with him. But Olivier could not. Despite the need he had to draw close to Christophe, he felt the impossibility of taking up with him again the life of former days. After the years spent with Jacqueline, it would have seemed to him intolerable, and even sacrilegious, to introduce another into the intimacy of his life — even should that other love him a thousand times better and be a thousand times better loved by him than Jacqueline had been. — Such things are not reasoned out.

Christophe had had difficulty understanding. He kept coming back to it; he was astonished, he was saddened, he was indignant. — Then his instinct, superior to his intelligence, gave him warning. Abruptly, he fell silent, and found that Olivier was right.

But they saw each other every day; and never had they been more united, even when they were living under the same roof. Perhaps they did not exchange in their conversations their most intimate thoughts. They had no need to. The exchange took place of itself, without words, by the grace of loving hearts.

Both talked little, absorbed, the one in his art, the other in his memories. Olivier’s grief was lessening; but he did nothing to bring this about, 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 hold much place in his life. There are men who are more lovers than fathers. It would serve no purpose to be scandalized by it. Nature is not uniform; and it would be absurd to wish to impose on all the same laws of the heart. No one has the right to sacrifice his duties to his heart. At the least, the heart’s right not to be happy while doing its duty must be acknowledged. What Olivier loved most perhaps in his child was the woman of whose flesh it had been formed.

Until these last times, he had paid little attention to the sufferings of others. He was an intellectual, one who lives too shut up within himself. It was not egoism, it was a morbid habit of dreaming. Jacqueline had still further widened the emptiness around him; her love had traced between Olivier and other men a magic circle, which persisted after the love was no more. And then, he was, by temperament, a little aristocrat. Since childhood, in spite of his tender heart, he had held himself aloof from the crowd, for reasons of delicacy of body and of soul. The odor and the thoughts of those people repelled him.

But everything had changed, in the wake of a banal news-item, of which he had just been the witness.

When Braun returned in the morning, he found Anna in the same state of prostration. He saw clearly that something extraordinary had happened; but he could learn nothing from Bäbi, nor from Christophe. All day long, Anna did not stir; she did not open her eyes; her pulse was so faint that one could scarcely feel it; at moments it stopped, and Braun had the anguish of believing, for an instant, that the heart had ceased to beat. His affection made him doubt his science; he ran to a colleague, and brought him back. The two men examined Anna and could not decide whether it was a question of a fever beginning, or of a case of hysterical neurosis: the patient had to be kept under observation. Braun did not leave Anna’s bedside. He refused to eat. Toward evening, Anna’s pulse indicated no fever, but an extreme weakness. Braun tried to introduce into her mouth a few spoonfuls of milk; she brought them up at once. Her body abandoned itself in her husband’s arms, like a broken puppet. Braun passed the night, seated beside her, rising at every instant to listen to her. Bäbi, whom Anna’s illness scarcely troubled, but who was a woman of duty, refused to go to bed, and kept watch with Braun.

On Friday, Anna opened her eyes. Braun spoke to her; she paid no heed to his presence. She remained motionless, her eyes fixed on a point of the wall. Toward noon, Braun saw great tears flowing down her thin cheeks; he wiped them away gently; one by one, the tears continued to flow. Again Braun tried to make her take some nourishment. She let it be done, passively. In the evening, she began to speak: they were words without sequence. It was a question of the Rhine; she wanted to drown herself, but there was not enough water. She persisted in dream in her attempts at suicide, imagining bizarre forms of death; always death slipped away. Sometimes she argued with someone, and her face then took on an expression of anger and of fear; she addressed God, and obstinately strove to prove to him that the fault was his. Or the flame of a desire kindled in her eyes; and she said immodest words, which it did not seem she could have known. At one moment she noticed Bäbi, and gave her, with precision, orders for the next day’s washing. In the night, she dozed off. All at once, she raised herself; Braun hurried to her. She looked at him, in a strange way, stammering impatient and shapeless words. He asked her:

“My dear Anna, what do you want?”

She said, in a harsh voice:

“Go and fetch him.”

“Whom?” he asked.

She looked at him again, with the same expression, abruptly burst out laughing; then she passed her hands over her brow, and moaned:

“Ah! my God! to forget!…”

Sleep took her again. She was calm until daylight. Toward dawn, she made some movement; Braun raised her head, to give her something to drink; she swallowed a few mouthfuls docilely, and, bending toward Braun’s hands, she kissed them. She dozed off again.

On Saturday morning, she awoke toward nine o’clock. Without saying a word, she put her legs out of the bed, and tried to get down. Braun rushed to her and tried to put her back to bed. She persisted. He asked her what she wanted to do. She answered:

“To go to worship.”

He tried to reason with her, to remind her that it was not Sunday, that the church was closed. She kept silent; but, seated on the chair near the bed, she put on her clothes, with her fingers that shivered. The doctor, Braun’s friend, came in. He joined his entreaties to those of Braun; then, seeing that she would not yield, he examined her, and finally consented. He took Braun aside, and told him that his wife’s illness seemed entirely moral, that for the moment they ought to avoid thwarting her, and that he saw no danger in her going out, provided Braun accompanied her. Braun therefore told Anna that he would go with her. She refused and wished to go alone. But at her first steps across the room, she stumbled. Then, without a word, she took Braun’s arm, and they went out. She was very weak and stopped along the way. Several times he asked her if she wished to go back. She set off walking again. Arrived at the church, as he had told her, they found the door closed. Anna sat down on a bench, near the entrance, and remained, shivering, until noon struck. Then she took Braun’s arm again, and they came back in silence. But in the evening, she wished to return to the church. Braun’s supplications were in vain. They had to set out again.

Christophe had passed those two days in isolation. Braun was too anxious to think of him. Only once, on the Saturday morning, trying to turn Anna from her fixed idea of going out, he had asked her if she wished to see Christophe. She had had an expression of terror and of repulsion so strong that he had been struck by it; and Christophe’s name had been spoken no more.

Christophe had shut himself up in his room. Anxiety, love, remorse, a whole chaos of sufferings clashed together within him. He accused himself of everything. He was crushed by disgust with himself. Several times he had risen to confess everything to Braun — at once arrested by the idea that, in accusing himself, he would make one more unhappy man. At the same time, passion did not spare him. He prowled in the corridor, before Anna’s room; and as soon as he heard, within, footsteps approaching the door, he fled to his own room.

When Braun and Anna went out, in the afternoon, he watched for them, hidden behind the curtain of his window. He saw Anna. She, so straight and so proud, had her back bowed, her head bent, her complexion yellow; she was aged, crushed beneath the mantle and the shawl with which her husband had covered her; she was ugly. But Christophe did not see her ugliness, he saw only her wretchedness; and his heart overflowed with pity and with love. He would have liked to run to her, to prostrate himself in the mire, to kiss those feet, that body ravaged by passion, to implore her pardon. And he thought, looking at her:

“My handiwork… Here it is!”

But his gaze, in the mirror, met his own image; he saw in his eyes, on his features, the same devastation; he saw death imprinted in him, as in her, and he thought:

“My handiwork? Not so. The handiwork of the cruel master, who maddens and who kills.”

The house was empty. Bäbi had gone out, to recount to the neighbors the events of the day. Time passed. Five o’clock struck. A terror seized Christophe, at the idea of Anna who was going to come back, and of the night that was coming. He felt that he would not have the strength to remain, that night, under the same roof. He felt his reason cracking beneath the weight of passion. He did not know what he would do, he did not know what he wanted, except that he wanted Anna, at whatever price. He thought of that wretched figure he had seen pass a little while before, beneath his window, and he said to himself:

“To save her from me!…”

A gust of will breathed through him. He gathered up, by handfuls, the bundles of papers that lay strewn on his table, tied them with string, took his hat, his mantle, and went out. In the corridor, near Anna’s door, he quickened his step, seized with fear. Below, he cast a last glance over the deserted garden. He fled like a thief. An icy fog pierced the skin with needles. Christophe hugged the wall of the houses, fearing to meet a familiar face. He went to the station. He got into a train that was leaving for Lucerne. At the first station, he wrote to Braun. He said that an urgent matter called him, for a few days, away from the town, and that he was grieved to leave him at such a moment; he begged him to send him news, at an address that he indicated. At Lucerne, he took the Gotthard train. In the night, he got down at a little station between Altdorf and Göschenen. He did not learn its name, he never learned it. He entered the first inn, near the station. Pools of water cut across the road. It was raining in torrents; it rained all night; it rained all the next day. With a sound of cataract, the water fell from a burst gutter. The sky and the earth were drowned, seemed dissolved, like his thought. He lay down in damp sheets, which smelled of the smoke of the railway. He could not stay lying down. The idea of the dangers Anna ran occupied him too much for him to have, as yet, the time to feel his own suffering. He had to throw public malignity off the scent, to set it on another track. In the fever in which he was, he had a bizarre idea; he hit upon the plan of writing to one of the rare musicians with whom he had been at all closely bound in the town, to Krebs, the confectioner-organist. He gave him to understand that an affair of the heart was drawing him to Italy, that he had been undergoing this passion already when he had come to settle at Braun’s, that he had tried to escape from it, but that it was the stronger. The whole thing, in terms clear enough for Krebs to understand, veiled enough for him to be able to add to them, out of his own stock. Christophe begged Krebs to keep the secret for him. He knew that the good man was of a sickly garrulousness, and he counted — quite rightly — that scarcely would the news be received before Krebs would run to peddle it through the whole town. To complete the diverting of opinion, Christophe ended his letter with a few very cold words, about Braun and about Anna’s illness.

He passed the rest of the night and the following day, embedded in his fixed idea… Anna… Anna… He relived with her the last months, day by day; he saw her no longer as she was, he enveloped her in an impassioned mirage. Always, he had created her in the image of his desire, lending her a moral grandeur, a tragic conscience, which he needed in order to love her the more. These lies of passion redoubled in assurance, now that Anna’s presence no longer controlled them. He saw a healthy and free nature, oppressed, struggling against its chains, aspiring to a frank, broad life, to the open air of the soul, and then, taking fright at it, combating its dreams, setting itself furiously against them, because they could not accord with her destiny and made it the more painful for her. She cried to him: “Help!” He saw again her beautiful body, he clasped it. His memories tortured him; he found a murderous pleasure in redoubling their wounds. As the day advanced, the feeling of all that he had lost became to him so atrocious that he could no longer breathe.

Without knowing what he was doing, he got up, went out, paid the inn, and took the first train that was returning to Anna’s town. He arrived, in the dead of night; he went straight to the house. A wall separated the lane from the garden adjoining Braun’s. Christophe scaled the wall, jumped into the strange garden, passed from there into Braun’s garden. He found himself before the house. All was in darkness, save a glimmer of nightlight that tinged with an ochre reflection one window — Anna’s window. Anna was there. She was suffering there. He had now only one step to take in order to enter. He stretched out his hand toward the handle of the door. Then, he looked at his hand, the door, the garden; he suddenly took conscious account of his act; and, waking from the hallucination that had possessed him for seven or eight hours, he shuddered, he tore himself by a start away from the force of inertia that riveted his feet to the ground; he ran to the wall, climbed back over it, and fled.

In the same night, he left the town, for the second time; and the next day, he went to bury himself in a mountain village, beneath gusts of snow. — To inter his heart, to lull his thought to sleep, to forget, to forget!…

”— E però leva su, vinci l’ambascia

con l’animo che vince ogni battaglia,

se col suo grave corpo non s’accascia.

Leva’mi allor, mostrandomi fornito

meglio di lena ch’io non mi sentia;

e dissi: «Va, ch’io son forte ed ardito.»”

Inf. XXIV.

My God, what have I done to thee? Why dost thou overwhelm me? From childhood, thou hast given me for my lot misery, struggle. I have struggled without complaining. I have loved my misery. I have striven to keep pure this soul that thou hadst given me, to save this fire that thou hadst set in me… Lord, it is thou, it is thou who dost set thyself furiously to destroy what thou hadst created, thou hast quenched this fire, thou hast soiled this soul, thou hast stripped me of all that made me live. I had two sole treasures in the world: my friend and my soul. I have nothing more, thou hast taken everything from me. One single being was mine in the desert of the world, thou hast taken him from me. Our hearts made but one, thou hast torn them apart, thou hast let us know the sweetness of being together only to make us know the better the horror of having lost each other. Thou hast hollowed out the void around me, thou hast hollowed it out within me. I was broken, sick, without will, without weapons, like a child that weeps in the night. Thou hast chosen this hour to strike me. Thou hast come with muffled steps, from behind, like a traitor, and thou hast stabbed me; thou hast loosed upon me thy ferocious hound, passion; I was without strength, thou knewest it, and I could not struggle; it has thrown me down, it has ransacked everything within me, soiled everything, destroyed everything… I have disgust for myself. If I could at least cry out my grief and my shame! or forget them, in the torrent of the force that creates! But my force is broken, my creation withered. I am a dead tree… If I could be dead! O God, deliver me, break this body and this soul, tear me away from the earth, do not leave me to struggle in the pit, do not leave me to agonize without end! I cry mercy… Finish me!

Thus, Christophe’s grief called upon a God in whom his reason did not believe.

He had taken refuge in a farm, isolated, of the Swiss Jura. The house, set against the woods, hid itself in the fold of a high, hummocky plateau. Swellings of the terrain protected it from the winds of the North. In front, meadows sloped down, long wooded slopes; the rock abruptly stopped, fell sheer; contorted firs clung to the edge; beeches with broad arms threw themselves back. An extinguished sky. Vanished life. An abstract expanse with effaced lines. Everything slept beneath the snow. Alone, at night, in the forest, the foxes yelped. It was the end of winter. A belated winter. An interminable winter. When it seemed finished, it always began again.

Yet, for a week now, the old numbed earth felt its heart being reborn. A first deceptive spring insinuated itself into the air and beneath the icy bark. From branches of beech extended like wings that hover, the snow dripped. Through the white mantle that covered the meadows, already a few threads of grass of a tender green were pointing up; around their fine needles, through the rents in the snow, as through little mouths, the moist and black soil breathed. A few hours a day, the voice of the water, numbed in its robe of ice, again murmured. In the skeleton of the woods, a few birds whistled clear, rather shrill songs.

Christophe noticed nothing. Everything was the same to him. He turned endlessly about his room. Or he walked, outside. Impossible to remain at rest. His soul was quartered by inner demons. They tore one another to pieces. Passion, driven back, continued to beat furiously against the walls of the house. The disgust with passion was no less enraged; they bit each other at the throat; and in their struggle, they lacerated the heart. And there were at the same time the memory of Olivier, the despair at his death, the obsession with creating that could not satisfy itself, the pride that reared up before the hole of nothingness. All the devils within him. Not one instant of respite. Or, if a deceitful lull occurred, if the raised waves fell back for a moment, he found himself alone again, and found nothing more of himself: thought, love, will, everything had been killed.

To create! that was the sole recourse. To abandon to the waves the wreck of his life! To save himself by swimming, into the dream of art!… To create! He wished it… He could no longer do it.

Christophe had never had any method of work. When he was strong and healthy, he was rather hampered by his superabundance than anxious to see it grow impoverished; he followed his caprices; he worked, according to his fancy, at the chance of circumstances, without any fixed rule. In reality, he worked in every place, at every moment; his brain never ceased to be occupied. Many a time, Olivier, less rich and more reflective, had warned him:

“Take care. You trust too much in your strength. It is a mountain torrent. Full today, tomorrow perhaps dry. An artist must capture his genius; he does not allow it to scatter itself, at random. Canalize your strength. Constrain yourself to habits, to a hygiene of daily work, at fixed hours. They are as necessary to the artist as the habit of military gestures and steps is to the man who must fight. Let the moments of crisis come — (and they always come) — this iron framework prevents the soul from falling. I know it well, I do. If I am not dead, it is because it saved me.”

But Christophe laughed, and said:

“Good for you, my little one! No danger that I shall ever lose the taste for living. I have too good an appetite.”

Olivier shrugged his shoulders:

“The too much brings on the too little. There are no worse invalids than people too well.”

Olivier’s word now proved true. After the death of the friend, the source of inner life had not at once dried up; but it had become strangely intermittent; it flowed by abrupt gulps, then fell silent, lost itself underground. Christophe paid no heed to it; what did it matter to him? His grief and the nascent passion absorbed his thought. — But after the hurricane had passed, when he sought once more the fountain in order to drink there, he found nothing more. The desert. Not a trickle of water. The soul was dried up. In vain he wished to dig the sand, to make the water gush from the underground sheets, to create at all costs: the machine of the mind refused to obey. He could not summon the aid of habit, the faithful ally, which, when all the reasons for living have fled from us, alone, tenacious and constant, remains at our side, and says not a word, and makes not a gesture, with fixed eyes, with mute lips, but with its very sure hand that never trembles, leads us by the hand across the dangerous defile, until the light of day and the taste for life have come back. Christophe was without aid; and his hand met no hand, in the night. He could no longer come back to the light of day.

It was the supreme ordeal. Then he felt himself at the limits of madness. Now an absurd and demented struggle against his brain, the obsessions of a maniac, a fixation upon numbers: he counted the boards of the floor, the trees in the forest; figures and chords, the choice of which escaped his reason, waged pitched battles in his head. Now a state of prostration, like a dead man.

No one concerned himself with him. He lived in a wing of the house, apart. He did his own room — he did not do it, every day. His food was set down for him, below; he did not see a single human face. His host, an old peasant, taciturn and selfish, took no interest in him. Whether Christophe ate or did not eat, that was his own affair. Scarcely was any heed paid to whether, in the evening, Christophe had come back. Once, he found himself lost in the forest, sunk in the snow up to his thighs; it was a near thing that he could not get back. He tried to kill himself with fatigue, so as not to think. He did not succeed in it. Only, at long intervals, a few hours of harassed sleep.

A single living being seemed to care about his existence: an old Saint Bernard dog, who came to lay his big head with the bloodshot eyes upon Christophe’s knees, when Christophe was seated on the bench before the house. They looked at each other long. Christophe did not push him away. Like the sickly Goethe, those eyes did not disquiet him. He had no wish to cry out to them, as Goethe did:

“Be off!… Try as you may, larva, you shall not snap me up!”

He asked nothing better than to let himself be snapped up by those suppliant and somnolent eyes, to come to their aid; he felt there an imprisoned soul, which implored him.

In this moment when he was steeped through by suffering, torn all living from life, gelded of human egoism, he perceived the victims of man, the field of battle where man triumphs, upon the carnage of the other beings; and his heart was full of pity and of horror. Even in the time when he was happy, he had always loved animals; he could not bear cruelty toward them; he had for hunting an aversion, which he did not dare to express, for fear of ridicule; perhaps he did not even dare to acknowledge it to himself; but this repulsion was the secret cause of the estrangement, inexplicable in appearance, that he felt for certain men: never could he have accepted as friend a man who killed an animal for pleasure. No sentimentality: he knew better than anyone that life rests upon a sum of sufferings and of infinite cruelty; one cannot live without making others suffer. It is not a matter of closing one’s eyes and paying oneself with words. Nor is it a matter of concluding that one must renounce life, and whimper like a child. No. One must kill in order to live, if there is no other means of living, for the moment. But he who kills in order to kill is a wretch. A wretch, unconscious, I know it. A wretch, all the same. The perpetual effort of man must be to diminish the sum of suffering and of cruelty: that is the first human duty.

These thoughts, in ordinary life, remained buried at the bottom of Christophe’s heart. He did not wish to dwell on them. What was the use? What could he do about it? He had to be Christophe, he had to accomplish his work, to live at all costs, to live at the expense of the weaker… It was not he who had made the universe… Let us not think of it, let us not think of it…

But after misfortune had cast him too into the ranks of the vanquished, he could not help thinking of it. Not long before, he had blamed Olivier, who sank into useless remorse and vain compassion for all the unhappiness that men suffer and make others suffer. He went further than he, at present; with the impetuosity of his powerful nature, he penetrated to the very bottom of the tragedy of the universe; he suffered from all the sufferings of the world, he was like a man flayed. He could no longer think of animals without a quiver of anguish. He read in the gaze of beasts, he read a soul like his own, a soul that could not speak; but the eyes cried out for it:

“What have I done to you? Why do you do me harm?”

The most banal spectacle, which he had seen a hundred times — a little calf that bewailed itself, shut up in a slatted crate; its big black bulging eyes, the white of which is bluish, its pink eyelids, its white lashes, its tufts of white curls on the forehead, its violet muzzle, its knock-knees; — a lamb that a peasant was carrying off by the four legs tied together, the head hanging, trying to lift itself up, moaning like a child, and bleating and stretching out its gray tongue; — hens piled up in a basket; — far off, the howls of a pig being bled; — on the kitchen table, a fish being gutted… He could no longer bear it. The nameless tortures that man inflicts upon those innocents gripped his heart. Lend the animal a glimmer of reason, imagine the frightful dream that the world is for it: those men indifferent, blind and deaf, who slit its throat, disembowel it, draw out its entrails, cut it into pieces, cook it alive, sometimes amuse themselves with its contortions of pain. Is there anything more atrocious among the cannibals of Africa? The suffering of animals has something still more intolerable for a free conscience than the suffering of men. For the latter, at least, it is admitted that it is an evil and that what causes it is criminal. But thousands of beasts are massacred uselessly, every day, without the shadow of a remorse. Whoever should make allusion to it would render himself ridiculous. — And that is the irremissible crime. By itself alone, it justifies all that man may ever suffer. It cries vengeance against the human race. If God exists and tolerates it, it cries vengeance against God. If a good God exists, the humblest of living souls ought to be saved. If God is good only for the strongest, if there is no justice for the wretched, for the inferior beings offered in sacrifice to humanity, then there is no goodness, there is no justice…

Alas! The carnages accomplished by man are themselves so little a thing, in the slaughter of the universe! The animals devour one another. The peaceful plants, the mute trees are among themselves ferocious beasts. Serenity of the forests, commonplace of easy rhetoric for the men of letters who know nature only through their books!… In the forest close by, a few steps from the house, frightful struggles were being fought out. The assassin beeches threw themselves upon the firs with the lovely rosy body, entwined their slender waist of antique columns, smothered them. They hurled themselves upon the oaks, they broke them, they forged crutches for themselves out of them. The Briarean beeches with the hundred arms, ten trees in one tree! They dealt death around them. And when, for lack of enemies, they met one another, they mingled with rage, piercing one another, soldering themselves together, twisting themselves, like antediluvian monsters. Lower down, in the forest, the acacias, set out from the edge, had entered the place, attacked the firwood, clasped and clawed the roots of the enemy, poisoned them with their secretions. A struggle to the death, in which the victor seized at once both the place and the spoils of the vanquished. Then the small monsters completed the work of the great. The mushrooms, come up among the roots, sucked the sick tree, which emptied itself little by little. The black ants ground up the wood that was rotting. Millions of invisible insects gnawed, perforated, reduced to dust what had been life… And the silence of those combats!… O peace of nature, tragic mask that covers the sorrowful and cruel face of Life!

Christophe was sinking straight down. But he was not a man to let himself be drowned without a struggle, his arms glued to his body. In vain he wished to die, he did everything he could to live. He was of those, as Mozart said, “who wish to act, until at last there is no longer any means of doing anything.” He felt himself vanishing, and he sought in his fall, beating his arms, to right, to left, a support to cling to. He believed he had found it. He had just remembered Olivier’s little child. On the spot, he carried over onto it all his will to live; he gripped it. Yes, he ought to seek the child out again, to claim it, to bring it up, to love it, to take the place of the father, to make Olivier live again in his son. In his egoistic grief, how had he not thought of it? He wrote to Cécile, who had the care of the child. He awaited the answer feverishly. His whole being strained toward this unique thought. He forced himself to calm; a reason to hope remained to him. He had confidence, he knew Cécile’s goodness.

The answer came. Cécile said that, three months after Olivier’s death, a lady in mourning had presented herself at her house, and had said to her:

“Give me back my child!”

It was the woman who had formerly abandoned her child and Olivier — Jacqueline, but so changed that one had difficulty recognizing her. Her madness of love had not lasted. She had wearied still more quickly of the lover than the lover had wearied of her. She had come back broken, disgusted, aged. The too noisy scandal of her adventure had closed many doors to her. The least scrupulous were not the least severe. Her own mother had shown her a disdain so offensive that Jacqueline had been unable to remain at her house. She had seen to the bottom the hypocrisy of the world. Olivier’s death had completed her undoing. She seemed so sorrowful that Cécile had not believed she had the right to refuse her what she demanded. It was very hard to give back a little being whom one had grown accustomed to regard as one’s own. But how to be harder still toward someone who has more rights than you and who is more unhappy? She would have liked to write to Christophe, to ask his advice. But Christophe had never answered the letters she had written him, she did not know his address, she did not even know whether he was alive or dead… Joy comes, it goes away. What was to be done? Resign oneself. The essential thing was that the child should be happy and loved…

The letter arrived in the evening. A belated return of winter had brought back the snow. All night, it fell. In the forest, where already the new leaves had appeared, the trees beneath the weight cracked and snapped. It was like a battle of artillery. Christophe, alone in his room, without light, in the midst of the phosphorescent shadows, listening to the tragic forest, started at each report; and he was like one of those trees that bend beneath the burden and that crack. He said to himself:

“Now, all is finished.”

The night passed, the day came back; the tree had not snapped. All the new day, and the night that followed, and the days and the nights after, the tree continued to bend and to crack; but it did not snap. Christophe had no longer any reason to live; and he lived. He had no longer any motive to struggle; and he struggled, foot by foot, body to body, with the invisible enemy that was grinding his spine. Like Jacob with the angel. He no longer expected anything from the struggle, he no longer expected anything but the end, the rest; and he struggled still. And he cried out:

“But strike me down, then! Why dost thou not strike me down?”

The days passed. Christophe emerged from it, emptied of his life. Yet he persisted in keeping himself on his feet, he went out, he walked. Happy, those whom a strong race sustains, in the eclipses of their life! The legs of the father and of the grandfather bore up the body of the son all ready to collapse; the thrust of the robust ancestors lifted up the broken soul, like the dead horseman whom his horse carries off.

He walked, by a crest path, between two ravines; he descended the narrow trail with the sharp stones, between which wound the knotted roots of stunted little oaks; without knowing where he was going, and surer of his steps than if a lucid will had been leading 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 the week of Easter. A veiled day. The last assault of winter was vanquished. The warm spring was brooding. From the villages below, the bells rose. From one at first, nestled, like a nest, in a hollow, at the foot of the mountain, with its thatched roofs of mottled colors, black and tawny, clad in thick moss, like velvet. Then, from another, invisible, on the other slope of the mount. Then, from others in the plain, beyond a river. And the great bell, very far off, of a town that was lost in the haze. Christophe stopped. His heart was near to fainting. Those voices seemed to say to him:

“Come with us. Here is peace. Here, grief is dead. Dead, along with thought. We cradle the soul so well that it falls asleep in our arms. Come, and rest, thou shalt awaken no more.”

How weary he felt! How he would have liked to sleep! But he shook his head, and said:

“It is not peace that I am seeking, it is life.”

He set off walking again. He covered leagues, without noticing it. In his state of hallucinated weakness, the simplest sensations reached him with unexpected resonances. His thought projected all around, upon the earth and into the air, fantastic gleams. A shadow that ran before him, without his seeing the cause of it, upon the white and deserted road in the sun, made him shudder.

At the opening of a wood, he found himself near a village. He turned back: the sight of men did him harm. He could not, however, avoid passing near an isolated house, above the hamlet; it was set against the flank of the mountain; it resembled a sanatorium; a large garden, exposed to the sun, surrounded it; a few beings wandered with uncertain steps along the sanded walks. Christophe paid no heed to it; but at a turn of the path, he found himself face to face with a man with pale eyes, a fat and yellow face, who was looking before him, slumped on a bench, at the foot of two poplars. Another man was seated, beside him; they both kept silent. Christophe passed beyond them. But after four steps, he stopped: those eyes were known to him. He turned round. The man had not stirred, he continued to fix, motionless, an object before him. But his companion was looking at Christophe, who made a sign to him. He came.

“Who is it?” asked Christophe.

“He is a boarder of the house of health,” said the man, pointing to the dwelling.

“I think I know him,” said Christophe.

“It is possible,” said the other. “He was a writer very well known in Germany.”

Christophe said a name. — Yes, it was indeed that name. — He had seen him formerly, in the time when he wrote in the review of Mannheim. At that time, they were enemies; Christophe was only beginning, and the other was already famous. He was the strongest man, the surest of himself, the most contemptuous of everything that was not himself, a novelist whose realist and sensual art dominated the mediocrity of current productions. Christophe, who detested him, could not help admiring the perfection of this material art, sincere and limited.

“It took hold of him, a year ago,” said the keeper. “He was treated, he was believed cured, he went back home. And then, it took hold of him again. One evening, he threw himself from his window. In the first times that he was here, he was agitated and he cried out. Now, he is quite quiet. He passes his days, as you see him, seated.”

“What is he looking at?” said Christophe.

He approached the bench. He contemplated with pity the wan face of the vanquished man, the big eyelids that fell back over the eyes; one of them was almost closed. The madman did not seem to know that Christophe was there. Christophe called him by his name, took his hand — the soft and damp hand, which abandoned itself like a dead thing; he had not the courage to keep it in his hands: the man raised, for an instant, toward Christophe his capsized eyes, then began again to look before him, with his besotted smile. Christophe asked:

“What are you looking at?”

The man, motionless, said, in an undertone:

“I am waiting.”

“For what?”

“The Resurrection.”

Christophe gave a start. He set off precipitately. The word had pierced him with a streak of fire.

He plunged into the forest, he climbed back up the slopes, in the direction of his house. In his trouble, he lost the way; he found himself in the midst of the great woods of firs. Shadow and silence. A few patches of sunlight of a russet blond, come no one knew whence, fell into the thicknesses of the shadow. Christophe was hypnotized by those plaques of light. Everything seemed night, around. He went on, over the carpet of needles, stumbling against the roots that jutted out like swollen veins. At the foot of the trees, not a plant, not a moss. In the branches, not a bird’s song. The lower boughs were dead. All the life had taken refuge above, where the sun was. Soon, that life itself was extinguished. Christophe entered a part of the wood that a mysterious malady was gnawing. Sorts of lichens long and fine, like spiders’ webs, enveloped with their nets the branches of the red firs, bound them from head to foot, passed from one tree to another, smothered the forest. One would have said submarine algae with sly tentacles. And it was the silence of the oceanic depths. Above, the sun was paling. Mists, which had insidiously slipped through the dead forest, hemmed Christophe in. Everything disappeared; there was nothing more. For half an hour, Christophe wandered at random, in the network of white mist, which little by little drew closer, blackened, entered his throat; he believed he was walking straight, and he was turning in a circle beneath the gigantic spiders’ webs that hung from the smothered firs; the fog, in passing through them, left attached to them shivering drops. At last, the meshes slackened, a breach opened, and Christophe succeeded in getting out of the submarine forest. He found again the living woods and the silent struggle of the firs and the beeches. But it was always the same immobility. That silence that had been brooding for hours filled him with anguish. Christophe stopped to listen to it…

Suddenly, far off, there was a swell that was coming. A precursor gust of wind was rising from the depths of the forest. Like a horse at the gallop, it arrived upon the crests of the trees, which undulated. Like the God of Michelangelo, who passes in a whirlwind. It passed above Christophe’s head. The forest and Christophe’s heart quivered. It was the herald…

The silence fell again. Christophe, a prey to a sacred terror, hastily went back in, his legs giving way. On the threshold of the house, like a man pursued, he cast an uneasy glance behind him. Nature seemed dead. The forests that covered the slopes of the mountain slept, weighed down beneath a heavy sadness. The motionless air had a magic transparency. No sound. Alone, the funereal music of a torrent — the water that gnaws the rock — tolled the knell of the earth. Christophe lay down, with the fever. In the neighboring stable, the beasts, uneasy like himself, were stirring…

The night. He had dozed off. In the silence, the distant swell again rose. The wind was coming back, in a hurricane this time — the foehn of spring, which warms with its burning breath the chill earth that still sleeps, the foehn that melts the ice and gathers the fecund rains. It rumbled, like the thunder, in the forests on the other side of the ravine. It drew nearer, swelled, climbed the slopes at the charging pace; the whole mountain bellowed. In the stable, a horse whinnied and the cows lowed. Christophe, sat up on his bed, his hair bristling, listened. The squall arrived, hooted, made the shutters bang, made the weathervanes grind, made tiles fly from the roof, made the house tremble. A flowerpot fell and broke. Christophe’s window, badly closed, opened with a crash. And the warm wind entered. Christophe received it full in the face and on his bare breast. He leaped from the bed, his mouth open, suffocated. It was as if into his empty soul the living God were rushing. The Resurrection!… The air entered his throat, the flood of new life penetrated him to the bottom of his entrails. He felt himself bursting, he wished to cry out, to cry out from grief and from joy; and there came from his mouth only inarticulate sounds. He stumbled, he struck the walls with his arms, in the midst of the papers that the hurricane sent flying. He fell down, in the middle of the room, crying out:

“O thou, thou! Thou art come back at last!”

“Thou art come back, thou art come back! O thou, whom I had lost!… Why hast thou forsaken me?”

“To accomplish my task, which thou hast forsaken.”

“What task?”

“To fight.”

“What need hast thou to fight? Art thou not the master of all?”

“I am not the master.”

“Art thou not All that Is?”

“I am not all that is. I am the Life that fights Nothingness. I am not Nothingness. I am the Fire that burns in the Night. I am not the Night. I am the eternal Combat; and no eternal destiny hovers over the combat. I am the free Will, which struggles eternally. Struggle and burn with me.”

“I am vanquished. I am no longer good for anything.”

“Thou art vanquished? Everything seems lost to thee? Others shall be victors. Think not of thyself, think of thine army.”

“I am alone, I have only myself, and I have no army.”

“Thou art not alone, and thou art not thine own. Thou art one of my voices, thou art one of my arms. Speak and strike for me. But if the arm is broken, if the voice is shattered, I, I remain standing; I fight with other voices, other arms than thine. Vanquished, thou art part of the army that is never vanquished. Remember, and thou shalt conquer even unto thy death.”

“Lord, I suffer so much!”

“Dost thou believe that I do not suffer also? For ages, death has hunted me and nothingness has lain in wait for me. It is only by dint of victories that I clear my way. The river of life is red with my blood.”

“To fight, always to fight?”

“One must always fight. God fights, he too. God is a conqueror. He is a lion that devours. Nothingness encircles him, and God strikes it down. And the rhythm of the combat makes the supreme harmony. This harmony is not for thy mortal ears. It is enough that thou knowest that it exists. Do thy duty in peace, and leave the Gods to do the rest.”

“I have no more strength.”

“Sing for those who are strong.”

“My voice is shattered.”

“Pray.”

“My heart is soiled.”

“Tear it out. Take mine.”

“Lord, it is nothing to forget oneself, to cast off one’s dead soul. But can I cast off my dead, can I forget my loved ones?”

“Abandon them, dead, with thy dead soul. Thou shalt find them again, living, with my living soul.”

“O thou who hast left me, wilt thou leave me again?”

“I shall leave thee again. Doubt it not. It is for thee to leave me no more.”

“But if my life is extinguished?”

“Kindle others.”

“If death is in me?”

“Life is elsewhere. Go, open thy doors to it. Senseless one, who shuttest thyself in thy house in ruins! Come out of thyself. There are other dwellings.”

“O life, O life! I see… I sought thee within me, in my empty and closed soul. My soul breaks; through the windows of my wounds, the air flows in; I breathe, I find thee again, O life!…”

“I find thee again… Be silent, and listen.”

And Christophe heard, like a murmur of spring water, the song of life that was coming back into him. Leaning over the edge of his window, he saw the forest, dead yesterday, which in the sun and the wind seethed, lifted up like the Ocean. Over the spine of the trees, like shudders of joy, waves of wind passed; and the bent branches stretched out their arms of ecstasy toward the resplendent sky. And the torrent rang like a laughing bell. The same landscape, yesterday in the tomb, was resuscitated; life had just re-entered it, at the same time as love into Christophe’s heart. Miracle of the soul that grace has touched, which awakens to life! Everything lives again around it. The heart begins to beat again. The eye of the spirit has reopened. The dried-up fountains begin again to flow.

And Christophe re-entered the divine battle… How his own combats, how the human combats lost themselves in the midst of that gigantic mêlée, where suns rain down like flakes of snow that the hurricane sweeps away!… He had stripped off his soul. As in those dreams where one is suspended in space, he felt himself soaring above himself, he saw himself from on high, in the ensemble of things; and the meaning of his efforts, the price of his sufferings, at a single glance, appeared to him. His struggles were part of the great combat of the worlds. His rout was the episode of an instant, at once repaired. As he fought for all, all fought for him. They had a share in his ordeals, he had a share in their glory.

“Companions, enemies, march over me, crush me, let me feel passing over my body the wheels of the cannon that shall conquer! I do not think of the iron that ploughs my flesh, I do not think of the foot that tramples my head, I think of my Avenger, of the Master, of the Chief of the innumerable army. My blood shall be the cement of his future victory…”

God was not for him the impassive Creator, the Nero who contemplates, from the height of his tower of bronze, the burning of the City that he himself kindled. God fought. God suffered. With all those who fight and for all those who suffer. For he was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, which widens, spreads, by which the night is drunk up. But the night is without bounds, and the divine combat never stops; and no one can know what its issue shall be. Heroic symphony, where the very dissonances that clash and mingle form a serene concert! As the forest of beeches that wages furious combats in the silence, so does Life wage war in the eternal peace.

Those combats, that peace, resounded within Christophe. He was like a shell in which the ocean murmurs. Epic cries passed, calls of trumpets, gusts of sounds, which were led by sovereign rhythms. For everything changed into sounds 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 struck down. It sang. Everything was song. It was nothing more than song.

His intoxication was such that it did not hear itself sing. Like the spring rains, the torrents of music engulfed themselves in that soil cracked open by winter. Shames, sorrows, bitternesses, now revealed their mysterious mission: they had decomposed the earth, and they had fertilized it; the ploughshare of grief, in rending the heart, had opened new sources of life. The heath flowered again. But they 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 the souls arrived at the term 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 dream of fixing its limits. He abandoned himself to that joy of the man who, throwing behind him the weight of his past, sets out for a long voyage, his blood young, his heart free, and breathes the sea air, and thinks that the voyage will never have an end. Now that he was taken up again by the creative force that flows through 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 that he trod to the hand that he clasped. A beautiful tree, the shadow of a cloud upon the mountain, the breath of the meadows borne by the wind, the night the hive of the sky humming with the swarms of suns… it was a whirlwind of blood… he had no wish to speak, nor to think, he had no longer any wish but to laugh and to weep, and to melt into that living marvel. To write, why write? Can one write the unutterable?… But whether that were possible or not, he had to write. It was his law. The ideas struck him, by flashes, in whatever place he might be, most often on walks. Impossible to wait. So he wrote, with anything at all, on anything at all; and he would often have been incapable of saying what those phrases meant which gushed from him, in an irresistible impulse; and now, while he was writing, other ideas came to him, and others; and he wrote, he wrote, on his shirt cuffs, on the lining of his hat; however fast he wrote, his thought went faster, he had to use a sort of shorthand.

These were only shapeless notes. The difficulty began when he wished to cast these ideas into the ordinary musical forms; he made the discovery that none of the old molds could suit them; if he wished to fix his visions faithfully, he had to begin by forgetting all music heard, all that he had written, to make a clean sweep of all learned formalism, of traditional technique, to cast off 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. Not long before, when he believed himself arrived at the maturity of his life and of his art — (in fact, he was only at the end of one of his lives and of one of his incarnations in art) — he expressed himself in a language pre-existing his thought; his sentiment submitted without revolt to a logic of development pre-established, which dictated to him in advance a part of his phrases and led him docilely, by the cleared paths, to the agreed term where the public awaited him. At present, no more road, it was for the sentiment to clear it itself; the mind had only to follow. Its role was no longer even to describe passion, or to analyze it; it had to make one body with it, it tried to wed its inner law.

At the same stroke fell the contradictions in which Christophe had been struggling for a long time, without wishing to acknowledge them. For, although he was a pure artist, he had often mingled with his art preoccupations foreign to art; he attributed to it a social mission. And he did not perceive that there were two men within him: the artist who created, without troubling himself with any moral end, and the man of action, the reasoner, who wished that his art should be moral and social. They sometimes put each other into a strange embarrassment. At present, now that every creative idea imposed itself upon him, with its organic law, as a reality superior to all reality, he was torn away from the servitude of practical reason. To be sure, he abdicated nothing of his contempt for the spineless and depraved immoralism of the times; to be sure, he still thought that impure and unhealthy art is the last degree of art, because it is a malady of it, a mushroom that grows on a rotten trunk; but if art for pleasure is the prostitution of art, Christophe did not oppose to it the short-sighted utilitarianism of art for morality, that wingless Pegasus that drags the plough. The highest art, the only one worthy of the name, is above the laws of a day: it is a comet launched across the infinite. It may be that this force is useful, it may be that it seems useless or dangerous, in the order of practical things; but it is the force, it is the movement and the fire; it is the lightning sprung from the sky; and thereby it is sacred, thereby it is beneficent. Its benefits may even be of the practical order; but its true, its divine benefits are, like faith, of the supernatural order. It is like the sun, from which it is issued. The sun is neither moral nor immoral. It is He who Is. It lights the night of the spaces. So, art.

Then Christophe, who was delivered up to it, had the stupefaction of seeing rise up out of him unknown powers, which he would not have suspected: something altogether other than his passions, his sorrows, his conscious soul, but a foreign soul, indifferent to what he had loved and suffered, to his whole life, a soul joyous, fantastical, savage, incomprehensible. It rode him, it ploughed his flanks with strokes of spurs. And, in the rare moments when he could catch his breath, he asked himself, rereading what he had just written:

“How could this, could this have come out of my body?”

He was a prey to that delirium of the mind which every genius knows, to that will independent of the will, “that unutterable enigma of the world and of life,” which Goethe called “the demoniacal,” and against which he remained armed, but which subjugated him.

And Christophe wrote, wrote. For days, for weeks. There are periods in which the mind, fecundated, can nourish itself solely upon itself, and continues to produce, in an almost indefinite manner. The most delicate brushing of things suffices, a pollen borne by the wind, for the inner germs, the myriads of germs to rise and to flower. Christophe had no time to think, he had no time to live. Upon the ruins of life, the creative soul reigned.

And then, it stopped. Christophe emerged from it, broken, burnt, aged by ten years — but saved. He had left Christophe behind, he had emigrated into God.

Tufts of white hair had abruptly appeared in the black head of hair, like those autumn flowers that spring up out of the meadows in one September night. New wrinkles slashed the cheeks. But the eyes had reconquered their calm, and the mouth had grown resigned. He was appeased. He understood, now. He understood the vanity of his pride, the vanity of human pride, beneath the formidable fist of the Force that moves the worlds. No one is master of himself, with certainty. One must keep watch. For if one falls asleep, the Force rushes into us and carries us off… into what abysses? Or the torrent that bears us along withdraws and leaves us in its bed gone dry. It is not even enough to will, in order to struggle. One must humble oneself before the unknown God, who flat ubi vult, who breathes when he will, where he will, love, death, or life. The human will can do nothing without his. A single second suffices him to annihilate years of labor and of efforts. And, if it pleases him, he can make the eternal rise up from the dust and the mire. None, more than the artist who creates, feels himself at his mercy: for, if he is truly great, he says only what the Spirit dictates to him.

And Christophe understood the wisdom of old Haydn, getting down on his knees, every morning, before taking up the pen… Vigila et Ora, Watch and pray. Pray to God, that he may be with you. Remain in loving and pious communion with the Spirit of life.

Toward the end of summer, a Parisian friend who was passing through Switzerland discovered Christophe’s retreat. He came to see him. He was a music critic, who had always shown himself the best judge of his compositions. He was accompanied by a well-known painter, who said he was a music-lover and an admirer, he too, of Christophe. They told him of the considerable success of his works: they were being played everywhere, in Europe. Christophe showed little interest in this news: the past was dead for him, those works counted no more. At the request of his visitor, he showed him what he had written recently. The other understood nothing of it. He thought that Christophe had become mad.

“No melody, no measure, no thematic work; a sort of liquid kernel, of matter in fusion that has not cooled, that takes all forms and that has none; it resembles nothing: gleams in a chaos.”

Christophe smiled:

“That is about it,” he said. “‘The eyes of chaos that gleam through the veil of order…’”

But the other did not understand the saying of Novalis:

(— He is emptied out, he thought.)

Christophe did not seek to make himself understood.

When his guests took their leave, he accompanied them a little way, in order to do them the honors of his mountain. But he did not go very far. Apropos of a meadow, the music critic evoked Parisian theater decors; and the painter noted tones, without indulgence for the clumsiness of their combinations, which he found of a Swiss taste, rhubarb tart, sour and flat, à la Hodler; he displayed, moreover, with regard to nature, an indifference that was not altogether feigned. He pretended to be ignorant of it.

“Nature! what is that? Don’t know it. Light, color, well and good! Nature, I don’t give a damn for it.”

Christophe shook their hands and let them go. All that no longer affected him. They were on the other side of the ravine. It was well. He would say to no one:

“To come up to me, take the same road.”

The creative fire that had burned him for months had died down. But Christophe kept its beneficent warmth in his heart. He knew that the fire would be reborn: if it were not in him, it would be around him. Wherever it might be, he would love it as much: it would always be the same fire. On this end of a September day, he felt it spread through all of nature.

He went back up toward his house. There had been a storm. It was now sunshine. The meadows were steaming. From the apple trees the ripe fruits fell into the moist grass. Stretched on the branches of the firs, spiders’ webs, still shining with rain, were like the archaic wheels of Mycenaean chariots. At the edge of the wet forest, the woodpecker shook out his jerky laugh. And myriads of little wasps, which danced in the rays of sun, filled the vault of the woods with their continuous and deep organ pedal.

Christophe found himself in a clearing, in the hollow of a fold of the mountain, a closed little vale, of a regular oval, which the setting sun flooded with its light: red earth; in the middle, a little golden field, late wheat, and rushes the color of rust. All around, a belt of woods, which autumn was ripening: beeches of red copper, blond chestnut trees, rowans with their clusters of coral, flames of cherry trees with their little tongues of fire, thickets of bilberries with their orange leaves, citron, brown, burnt tinder. Such, a burning bush. And from the center of that flaming cup, a lark, drunk with grain and with sun, rose.

And Christophe’s soul was like the lark. It knew that it would fall back again presently, and many times more. But it knew also that untiringly it would rise back up into the fire, singing its tireli, which speaks to those who are below of the light of the heavens.

He had rented a very modest apartment, in upper Montrouge, not far from Christophe and from Cécile. The quarter was working-class, and the house inhabited by small rentiers, by clerks, and a few working-class households. In any other time, he would have suffered from the milieu in which he found himself a stranger; but at this moment, it mattered little to him, here or there: he found himself a stranger everywhere. He hardly knew who he had for neighbors, and he did not wish to know. When he came back from work — (he had taken a position in a publishing house) — he shut himself up with his memories, and he came out of it only to go and see his child and Christophe. His lodging was not the hearth for him: it was the dark room where the images of the past are fixed; the darker and barer it was, the more clearly the inner images stood out. He scarcely noticed the figures he crossed on the stairs. Without his knowing it, however, certain of them fixed themselves within him. There is a certain nature of minds that see things well only after they are past. But then, nothing escapes them, the slightest details are engraved with the burin. Olivier was thus: he was peopled with shades of the living. At the shock of an emotion, they sprang up; and Olivier was astonished, recognized them without having known them, sometimes stretched out his hands to seize them… Too late.

One day, on coming out of his house, he saw a gathering before the door of the building, around the concierge who was holding forth. He was so little curious that he would have continued on his way without inquiring; but the concierge, desirous of recruiting one more listener, stopped him, to ask him if he knew what had happened to those poor Roussels. Olivier did not even know who “those poor Roussels” were; and he lent his ear, with a polite indifference. When he learned that a family of workers, father, mother and five children had just committed suicide out of destitution, in his house, he remained like the others to gaze at the walls of the building, while listening to the narratress who did not weary of starting the story over again. As she spoke, memories came back to him, he perceived that he had seen those people; he put a few questions… Yes, he recognized them: the man — (he heard his wheezing breath on the stairs) — a baker’s worker, with the wan complexion, the blood drunk up by the heat of the oven, the hollow cheeks, badly shaved; he had had a pneumonia, at the beginning of winter; he had gone back to the task, insufficiently cured; a relapse had supervened; for three weeks, he had been without work and without strength. The woman, dragging through ceaseless pregnancies, crippled with rheumatism, exhausted herself doing a few people’s housework, passed her days in errands, in order to try to obtain from Public Assistance the meager relief that was in no hurry to come. In the meantime, the children came, and did not weary of coming: eleven years, seven years, three years — not to speak of two others who had been lost along the way; — and to crown it all, twins who had chosen this moment to make their appearance; they had been born the month before.

“On the day of their birth,” recounted a neighbor woman, “the eldest of the five, the little one of eleven, Justine — poor kid! — began to sob, asking how she would manage to carry both of them.”

Olivier saw again on the spot the image of the little girl — a voluminous forehead, pale hair drawn back, the troubled gray eyes, prominent. One always met her, carrying the provisions, or the smaller sister; or else she held by the hand the brother of seven, a boy with the fine and puny little face, who had lost an eye. When they crossed each other on the stairs, Olivier said, with his distracted politeness:

“Pardon, mademoiselle.”

She, she said nothing; she passed, stiff, scarcely drawing aside; but this illusory courtesy gave her a secret pleasure. The evening before, at six o’clock, going down, he had met her for the last time; she was carrying up a pail of charcoal. He had paid no heed to it, except that the load seemed very heavy. But that is a natural thing, for the children of the common people. Olivier had bowed, as usual, without looking. A few steps lower down, mechanically raising his head, he had seen, leaning over the landing of the floor, the little tense face, which was watching him go down. She had at once turned away and had taken up her climb again. Did she know where this climb was leading her? — Olivier did not doubt it, and he was obsessed by the thought of that child, who was carrying back in her too heavy pail death, like a deliverance — the unfortunate little ones, for whom to be no more meant to suffer no more! He could not continue his walk. He went back into his room. But there, to feel those dead near him… A few partitions separated him from them… To think that he had lived beside those agonies!

He went to see Christophe. He had his heart wrung; he said to himself that it is monstrous to absorb oneself, as he had done, in vain regrets of love, when so many beings suffered from misfortunes a thousand times more cruel, and when one could save them. His emotion was deep; it had no difficulty in communicating itself. Christophe, easily impressionable, was stirred in his turn. At Olivier’s account, he tore up the page he had just written, treating himself as an egoist who amuses himself with children’s games. But afterward, he picked up the torn pieces. He was too taken up by his music; and his instinct told him that one work of art the less would not make one happy man the more. This tragedy of destitution was nothing new for him; since childhood, he had been accustomed to walk along the edge of such abysses, and not to fall into them. He was even severe toward suicide, at that moment of his life when he felt himself in full strength and could not conceive that one might, for any suffering whatsoever, renounce the struggle. Suffering and struggle, what is there more normal? It is the spine of the universe.

Olivier had also passed through similar ordeals; but never had he been able to make up his mind to it, either for himself or for others. He had the horror of that destitution in which the life of his dear Antoinette had been consumed. After he had married Jacqueline, when he had let himself be softened by wealth and by love, he had been in haste to set aside the memory of the sad years when his sister and he exhausted themselves to earn, every day, their right to live the next day, without knowing whether they would succeed in it. Those images reappeared, now that he no longer had his youthful egoism to safeguard. Instead of fleeing the face of suffering, he set himself to seek it. He had not far to go to find it. In his state of mind, he must see it everywhere. It filled the world. The world, that hospital… O griefs of agonies! Griefs of wounded flesh, panting, that rots alive. Silent tortures of hearts that grief consumes. Children whom no one loves, poor girls without hope, women seduced or betrayed, men deceived in their friendships, their loves and their faith, lamentable troop of the unfortunate whom life has bruised and whom it forgets!… The most atrocious thing was not destitution and illness; it was the cruelty of men, the one toward the other. Scarcely had Olivier lifted the trapdoor that closed the human hell than there rose toward him the clamor of all the oppressed, the poor exploited, the persecuted peoples, Armenia massacred, Finland stifled, Poland quartered, Russia martyred, Africa given over as quarry to the European birds of prey, the wretched of all the human race. 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 something else. He spoke of it ceaselessly to Christophe. Christophe, troubled, said:

“Be quiet! let me work.”

And as he had difficulty recovering his balance, he grew irritated, swore:

“The devil! My day is lost! There you are, much advanced!”

Olivier excused himself.

“My little one,” said Christophe, “one must not always look into the abyss. One can no longer live.”

“One must stretch out a hand to those who are in the abyss.”

“No doubt. But how? By throwing ourselves into it too? For that is what you want. You have a propensity to see in life now nothing but what is sad in it. May the good Lord bless you! This pessimism is charitable, assuredly; but it is depressing. Do you wish to make happiness? First, be happy.”

“Happy! How can one have the heart to be so, when one sees so many sufferings? There can be happiness only in trying to diminish them, in combating evil.”

“Very well. But it is not by going to fight at random that I shall help the unfortunate. One bad soldier more, that is hardly anything. But I can console by 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 winged song? To each his trade! You people of France, generous scatterbrains, you are always the first to demonstrate against all injustices, of Spain or of Russia, without quite knowing what it is about. I love you for it. But do you believe that you advance things? You throw yourselves into it as bunglers, and the result is nil — when by chance it is not worse… And see, never has your art been more etiolated than in this time when your artists claim to mingle in universal action. A strange thing that so many petty-master dilettantes and rakes dare to set themselves up as apostles! They would do much better to pour out for their people a less adulterated wine. — My first duty is to do well what I do, and to manufacture for you a healthy music, which will make you fresh blood and put sunshine into you.”

In order to spread sunshine upon others, one must have it within oneself. Olivier lacked it. Like the best of the men of today, he was not strong enough to radiate strength, all by himself. He could have done so only by uniting himself with others. But with whom unite? Free of mind and religious of heart, he was cast out by all the parties, political and religious. They all rivaled one another in intolerance and in 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 the distant injustices, one ought to combat the near injustices, those that surround you and for which one is more or less responsible. Too many people content themselves, in protesting against the evil committed by others, without thinking of that which they themselves do.

He occupied himself first with assistance to the poor. His friend, Madame Arnaud, was a member of a charitable work. Olivier had himself admitted to it. But in the first times, he had more than one disappointment: the poor whom he had to take charge of were not all worthy of interest; or they responded badly to his sympathy, they distrusted him, they remained closed to him. Besides, an intellectual has difficulty satisfying himself with quite simple charity: it waters so small a province of the country of destitution! Its action is almost always piecemeal, fragmentary; it seems to go at random, and to dress wounds, in proportion as it discovers them; it is, in general, too modest and too hurried to venture as far as the roots of the evil. Now, that is a search of which Olivier’s mind could not do without.

He set himself to study the problem of social misery. He did not lack guides. In this time, the social question had become a question of society. It was spoken of in the salons, at the theater, in novels. Everyone laid claim to knowing it. A part of the youth spent there the best of its forces.

Every new generation needs a fine madness. Even the most egoistic among young people have an overflow of life, a capital of energy that has been advanced to them and that does not wish to remain unproductive; they seek to spend it in an action, or — (more prudently) — in a theory. Aviation or Revolution. The sport of the muscles or that of ideas. One has need, when one is young, of giving oneself the illusion that one participates in a great movement of humanity, that one renews the world. Beauty of having senses that vibrate to all the breaths 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 hold. And then, it is so good to love and to hate, and to believe that one transforms the earth with dreams and with cries! Young people are like dogs on the alert: one sees them quiver and bark at the wind. An injustice committed at the other end of the world made them rave.

Barkings in the night. From one farm to the other, in the midst of the great woods, they answered one another without respite. The night was agitated. It was not easy to sleep, in that time. The wind carried in the air the echo of so many injustices!… Injustice is innumerable; to remedy one of them, one risks causing others. What is injustice? — For one, it is the shameful peace, the dismembered fatherland. For another, it is war. For this one, it is the past destroyed, it is the prince banished; for that one, it is the Church despoiled; for this 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 this moment, the greater part of the world’s efforts were turned against the social injustices — and were aiming, unconsciously, to produce new ones.

And certainly, those injustices were great and spread themselves before the eyes, since the working class, growing in number and in power, had become one of the essential cogs 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 its suffering more, but from its being stronger. Stronger, by the very force of the enemy capital, by the fatality of the economic and industrial development, which had assembled these workers into armies ready for combat and, by machinery, had put weapons into their hands, had made of each foreman a master who commanded the light, the lightning, the movement, the energy of the world. From this enormous mass of elementary forces, which leaders had recently been trying to organize, there issued a heat of furnace, electric waves that ran, from point to point, through the body of human society.

It was not by its justice, or by the novelty and the force of its ideas that the cause of this people stirred the intelligent bourgeoisie, although they wished to believe so. It was by its vitality.

Its justice? A thousand other justices were violated in the world, without the world being moved by it. Its ideas? Shreds of truths, gathered here and there, fitted to the interests and to the size of one class, at the expense of the 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 of 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 take men by their intellectual content, but by the vital radiance which, at certain moments of history, issues from them. One would say it was a savor that rises: the coarsest senses of smell 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 incarnate it and transfuse their blood into it. Then the dried-up plant, the rose of Jericho, suddenly flowers, grows, fills the air with its violent aroma. — Such of these thoughts, whose resplendent banner led the working classes to the assault of the bourgeois citadel, had come out of the brain of bourgeois dreamers. As long as they had remained in the books of the bourgeois, they were as if dead: objects of museum, mummies swaddled in glass cases, that no one looks at. But as soon as the people had seized hold of them, it had made them people, it had added to them its feverish reality, which deformed them, and which animated them, breathing into those abstract reasonings its hallucinated hopes, a burning wind of Hegira. They propagated themselves from one to the other. One was touched by them, without knowing either by whom, or how they had been brought. Persons counted for little. The moral epidemic continued to spread; and it might be that limited beings communicated it to beings of the elite. Each was a bearer of it, unwittingly.

These phenomena of intellectual contagion are of all times and of all countries; they make themselves felt even in the aristocratic States, where closed castes try to maintain themselves apart from one another. But nowhere are they more sudden than in the democracies, which preserve no sanitary barrier between the elite and the crowd. The former is at once contaminated, 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 over. It emerges anew only when the flow withdraws. — One admires the abnegation of the French privileged ones who abdicated their rights, in the night of the 4th of August. What is most admirable, no doubt, is that they could not do otherwise. I imagine that a good number of them, returned to their town houses, said to themselves: “What have I done? I was drunk…” The magnificent intoxication! Praised be the good wine and the vine that gives it! The vine, whose blood intoxicated the privileged ones 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, raved. Even those who did not drink had vertigo, merely from sniffing in passing the odor of the vat. Vintages of the Revolution!… Of the wine of ‘89, there remains now, in the family wine-cellars, only a few flat bottles; but the children of our grandchildren will remember that their great-grandfathers had their heads turned by it.

It was a wine more harsh, but no less strong, that rose to the brain of the young bourgeois of Olivier’s generation. They offered their class in sacrifice to the new god, Deo ignoto: — the people.

To be sure, they were not all equally sincere. Many saw in it only an occasion to distinguish themselves from their class, by affecting to despise it. For the most part, it was an intellectual pastime, an oratorical exercise, which they did not quite take seriously. There is pleasure in believing that one believes in a cause, that one fights for it, or else 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 gives oneself up to them naïvely, without any self-interested calculation being mingled with them. — But others, more shrewd, played only knowingly; the popular movement was for them a means of getting on. Like the Northman pirates, they took advantage of the rising sea to launch their boat into the interior of the lands; they counted on penetrating to the bottom of the great estuaries, and remaining sunk in the conquered towns, while the sea withdraws. The channel was narrow, and the tide capricious: one had to be skillful. But two or three generations of demagogy have formed a race of corsairs, for whom the trade no longer has any secrets. They passed boldly, and did not even have a glance for those who foundered along the way.

That rabble is of all parties; thanks to God, no party is responsible for it. But the disgust that these adventurers inspired in the sincere and the convinced had led some of them to despair of their class. Olivier saw young bourgeois, rich and educated, who had the feeling of the decline of the bourgeoisie and of their own uselessness. He had only too much inclination to sympathize with them. After having at first believed in the renovation of the people by the elite, after having founded Popular Universities and having spent there without counting much time and money, they had recognized the failure of their efforts; their hopes had been excessive, their discouragement was so too. The people had not come at their call, or it had taken to flight. When it came, it understood everything wrong, it took from bourgeois culture only the vices and the absurdities. Finally, more than one mangy sheep had slipped into the ranks of the bourgeois apostles, and had discredited them, exploiting at the same 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 way all alone. They therefore remained with no other possible action 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 human sympathy, deep and disinterested, which sates itself with itself and with its own sacrifice. To love, to give oneself! Youth is so rich with its own stock that it can do without being paid in return; it does not fear to remain destitute. And it can deprive itself of everything, save of 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 enjoyment in deducing from their reasonings the fatal end of their class. It would have been more painful to them to see their predictions belied than to be crushed beneath the weight. In their intellectual intoxication, they cried out to those outside: “Harder! Strike harder! Let nothing more remain of us!” — They had made themselves the theoreticians of violence.

Of the violence of others. For, following the custom, these apostles of brutal energy were almost always distinguished and feeble people. More than one were functionaries of that State which they spoke of destroying, functionaries assiduous, conscientious and submissive. Their theoretical violence was the revenge of their feebleness, of their rancors and of the compression of their life. But it was above all the index of the storms that rumbled around them. The theoreticians are like the meteorologists: they tell, in scientific terms, not the weather it will be, but the weather it is. They are the weathervane, which marks from where the wind is blowing. 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 propagated themselves more promptly. 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 intoxication! After the fetishist cult of number, after the smug optimism that had believed in the holy majorities and that expected from them human progress, the spirit of violence was blowing; the incapacity of the majorities to govern themselves, their venality, their spinelessness, their base and fearful aversion for all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, raised up revolt; the energetic minorities — all the minorities — appealed to force. A baroque rapprochement, and yet fatal, was being made between the royalists of the Action Française and the syndicalists of the C.G.T. Balzac speaks, somewhere, of those men of his time, “aristocrats by inclination, who made themselves republicans out of spite, solely in order to find many inferiors among their equals.” — A meager pleasure. One must constrain those inferiors to recognize themselves as such; and for that, no means but an authority that imposes the supremacy of the elite — working-class or bourgeois — on the number that oppresses it. The young intellectuals, proud petty bourgeois, made themselves royalists, or revolutionaries, out of wounded self-esteem and out of hatred of democratic equality. And the disinterested theoreticians, the philosophers of violence, like good weathervanes, raised themselves above them, oriflammes of the tempest.

And there was finally the band of men of letters in quest of inspiration — of those who know how to write, but do not quite know what to write: like the Greeks at Aulis, blocked by the dead calm, they can no longer advance, and watch impatiently for the good wind, whatever it be, which will come to swell their sails. — One saw there illustrious men, of those whom the Dreyfus Affair had unexpectedly torn from their labors of style and launched into public meetings. An example too much followed, to the taste of the initiators. A crowd of men of letters now occupied themselves with politics, and claimed to regulate the affairs of the State. Everything was for them a pretext to form leagues, launch manifestos, save the Capitol. After the intellectuals of the avant-garde, the intellectuals of the rearguard: the ones were worth the others. Each of the two parties treated the other as intellectual, and treated itself as intelligent. Those who had the good fortune to possess in their veins a few drops of the people’s blood were glorious of it; they dipped their pen in it, they wrote, with it. — All, bourgeois, discontented, and seeking to take back the authority that the bourgeoisie had, by its egoism, irremediably lost. It was rare that these apostles sustained for long their apostolic zeal. At the start, the cause won them successes, which were probably not due to their oratorical gifts. Their self-esteem was deliciously flattered by it. Afterward, they continued, with less success, and some secret fear of being a little ridiculous. In the long run, this last sentiment tended to win out, doubled by the weariness of a role difficult to play, for men of their distinguished tastes and their skepticism. They waited, in order to beat a retreat, for the wind to permit them, and also their escort. For they were prisoners both of the one and of the other. These Voltaires and these Joseph de Maistres of the new times concealed beneath their boldness of speech and of writing a frightened uncertainty, which felt out the ground, feared to compromise itself with the young people, strove to please them, to be younger than they. Revolutionaries, or counter-revolutionaries, out of literature, they resigned themselves to following the literary fashion that they had contributed to found.

The most curious type that Olivier met, in this little bourgeois avant-garde of the Revolution, was the revolutionary out of timidity.

The specimen of it that he had under his eyes was named Pierre Canet. Of rich bourgeoisie, and of a conservative family, hermetically closed to the new ideas: magistrates and functionaries, who had distinguished themselves by sulking against power or by getting themselves dismissed; fat 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 neither better, nor more. This bigoted, narrow and backward world, which perpetually chewed over again its arrogance and its bitterness, had ended by exasperating him — all the more as his wife was ugly and bored him to death. Of average intelligence, of a fairly open mind, he had liberal aspirations, without quite knowing in what they consisted: it was not in his milieu that he could have learned what liberty was. All that he knew was that it was not there; and he imagined that it sufficed to get out of it in order to find it. He was incapable of walking alone. From his first steps outside, he was happy to join some college friends, of whom certain were smitten with syndicalist ideas. He found himself even more out of his element in this world than in the one from which he came; but he did not wish to acknowledge it: he had to live somewhere; and of people of his shade, (that is to say without shade), he could not find any. God knows, however, that the seed of them is not rare in France! But they are ashamed of themselves: they hide, or dye themselves in one of the political colors in fashion, indeed in several. Besides, he underwent the ascendancy of his friends.

Following the custom, he had attached himself above all to the one who was the most different from him. This Frenchman, French bourgeois and provincial in soul, 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 installing himself at once in the homes of others as in his own, and of finding himself so at ease in any revolution that one might ask oneself what interested him the more in it: whether it was the game, or the cause. His own ordeals and those of others were for him a diversion. Sincerely revolutionary, his habits of scientific mind made him regard the revolutionaries and himself as sorts of lunatics. He observed this alienation in others and in himself, while at the same time cultivating it. His exalted dilettantism and his extreme inconstancy of mind made him seek out the most opposed milieus. He had connections among the men in power, and even in the world of the police; he ferreted everywhere, with that morbid and dangerous curiosity that gives to so many Russian revolutionaries the appearance of playing a double game, and that sometimes makes of this appearance a reality. It is not treason, it is versatility, disinterested for the rest. 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 much as he could be: it was the character that accorded best with his natural anarchy and with the pleasure he had in demolishing the laws of the countries through which he passed. In spite of everything, it was only a role. One never knew the share of invention and of reality that there was in his words; and he himself ended by no longer knowing it very well.

Intelligent and mocking, gifted with the psychological finesse of his double race, knowing how to read marvelously in the weaknesses of others, as in his own, and skillful in playing upon them, he had had no difficulty in dominating Canet. He found it amusing to drag this Sancho Panza into escapades à la Don Quixote. He disposed of him without ceremony, of his will, of his time, of his money — not for himself, (he had no needs, one did not know on what, nor how he lived), — but for the most compromising manifestations of the cause. Canet let it be done; he tried to persuade himself that he thought like Manousse. He knew very well the contrary: those ideas frightened him; they shocked his good sense. And he did not love the people. Moreover, he was not brave. This big fellow, tall, broad and corpulent, with the babyish face, completely shaved, the short breath, the speech affable, pompous and childish, who had the pectorals of a Farnese Hercules, and who was of a pretty strength at boxing and at the singlestick, was the most timid of men. If he prided himself on passing among his own people for a subversive mind, he trembled in secret before the boldness of his friends. No doubt, this little shiver was not too disagreeable, as long as it was only a question of a game. But the game was becoming dangerous. Those animals there were becoming aggressive, their pretensions grew; they disquieted Canet in his fundamental egoism, his rooted feeling of property, his bourgeois pusillanimity. He did not dare to ask: “Where are you leading me?” But he railed under his breath against the off-handedness of people who love nothing so much as to break their necks, without troubling themselves to know whether they do not risk breaking at the same time the necks of others. — Who obliged him to follow them? Was he not free to give them the slip? Courage failed him. He was afraid of remaining alone, like a child whom one leaves behind on the road and who weeps. He was like so many men: they have no opinion, except that they disapprove of all the exalted opinions; but in order to be independent, one would have to remain alone, and how many are capable of it! How many, even of the most clear-sighted, will have the temerity to tear themselves away from the slavery of certain prejudices, of certain postulates that weigh upon all the men of a same generation? It would be to put a wall between oneself and others. On one side, liberty in the desert; on the other side, men. They do not hesitate: they prefer men, the flock. It smells bad, but it keeps warm. Then, they make a pretense of thinking 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, they are rare those who believe, because they are rare those who are men. Faith is a heroic force; its fire has never burned but a few human torches; these themselves often flicker. The apostles, the prophets and Jesus doubted. The others are only reflections — save in certain hours of dryness of souls, when a few sparks fallen from a great torch set ablaze the whole plain; then, the conflagration dies out, and one sees gleaming no more than coals beneath the ashes. Scarcely a few hundred Christians really believe in Christ. The others believe that they believe, or else they wish to believe.

It was thus with many of those revolutionaries. The good Canet wished to believe that he was one: he believed it therefore. And he was terrified by his own boldness.

All those bourgeois laid claim to diverse principles: some to their heart, others to their reason, others to their interest; these attached 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 the revolutionaries out of fashion, out of snobbery, there were those out of savagery; there were those out of hatred, there were those out of love; there were those out of a need of action, out of a warmth of heroism; there were those out of servility, out of a sheeplike spirit. But all, without knowing it, were carried away by the wind. They were the whirlwinds of dust that one sees smoking far off, on the great white roads, and that announce that the squall is coming.

Olivier and Christophe watched the wind coming. Both had good eyes. But they did not see in the same fashion. Olivier, whose lucid gaze penetrated in spite of himself the hidden thought of people, was saddened by their mediocrity; but he perceived the hidden force that lifted them up; the tragic aspect of things struck him the more. Christophe was more sensitive to their comic aspect. Men interested him, not at all ideas. He affected toward them a contemptuous indifference. He mocked the 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 egoistic than he was; the man who had made himself, the robust parvenu, proud of his muscles and of his will, had a little too much a tendency to treat as idlers 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? Destitution?

“I know that,” he said. “My father, my mother, and I, we have passed through it. There is nothing to do but get out of it.”

“Not all can do so,” said Olivier. “The sick. The unlucky.”

“Let them be helped, that is quite simple. But from that to exalting them, as is done today, there is a long way. Not long ago, the odious right of the strongest was alleged. Upon my word, I do not know whether the right of the weakest is not still more odious: it enervates the thought of today, it tyrannizes over and exploits the strong. One would say it has become a merit to be sickly, poor, unintelligent, vanquished — a vice to be strong, in good health, happy in the battle, an aristocrat of mind and of blood. And the most ridiculous thing is that the strong are the first to believe it… A fine subject for a comedy, my friend Olivier!”

“I would rather make people laugh at myself than make others weep.”

“Good fellow!” said Christophe. “By Jove! Who says the contrary? When I see a hunchback, I have an ache in my own back… The comedy, it is we who play it, it is not we who shall write it.”

He did not let himself be caught by the dreams of social justice. His big popular good sense made him believe that what had been, would be.

“If you were told that, in art, how you would cry out against it!” observed Olivier.

“Perhaps so. In any case, I know only about art. And so do you. I have no confidence in people who speak of what they do not know.”

Olivier had no more confidence either. The two friends even pushed their distrust a little far: they had always kept themselves outside of politics. Olivier confessed, not without a little shame, that he did not remember ever having used his rights as an elector; for ten years, he had not even withdrawn his registration card at the town hall.

“Why should I associate myself,” he said, “with a comedy that I know to be useless? Vote? For whom vote? I have no preference among candidates who are equally unknown to me, and who, I have too much reason to expect it, the very day after the election, will equally betray their profession of faith. Watch over them? Recall them to their duty? My life would be spent at 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 for me to abstain. I consent to undergo the evil. At least, not to subscribe to it.”

But in spite of his excessive clear-sightedness, this man who had a repugnance for regular political action preserved a chimerical hope in a revolution. He knew it to be chimerical; but he did not set it aside. It was a sort of mysticism of race. One does not belong with impunity to the greatest destroying and constructing people of the West, to the people that destroys in order to construct and constructs in order to destroy — the people that plays with ideas and with life, and constantly makes a clean sweep in order the better to begin the game over again, and for stakes pours out its blood.

Christophe did not bear within him this hereditary Messianism. He was too Germanic to relish well the idea of a revolution. He thought that one does not change the world. So many theories, so many words, what a useless din!

“I have no need,” he said, “to make a revolution — or palavers about the revolution — in order to prove my strength to myself. Above all, I have no need, like those good young people, to overturn the State in order to re-establish a king or a Committee of Public Safety, to defend me. Singular proof of strength! I know how to defend myself, 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 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. Force is like light: blind is he who denies it. Be strong, tranquilly, without theories, without violences: like the plants toward the daylight, all the souls of the weak will turn toward you.”

But all the while protesting that he had no time to lose in political discussions, he was less detached from them than he wished to appear. He suffered, as an artist, from the social malaise. In his momentary dearth of strong passions, 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 fatigued elite, those bourgeois dilettantes; and he thought:

“What interest is there in working for those people?”

To be sure, there did not lack, among them, distinguished minds, instructed, sensitive to craftsmanship, and who were not even incapable of relishing the novelty or — (it is all one) — the archaism of refined sentiments. But they were jaded, too intellectual, too little alive to believe in the reality of art; they took interest only in the game — game of sonorities or game of ideas; most were distracted by other worldly interests, accustomed to scatter themselves among multiple occupations, of which none was “necessary.” It was about 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 a theory, intolerant moreover, their impotence to get out of dilettantism. When by chance a few of them were vibrant enough to resound to the voice of art, they had not the strength to bear it, they remained from it deranged and neurotic for life. Sick people or dead people. What was art coming to do in that hospital? — And yet, it could not, in modern society, do without those 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 art intimate and sorrowful, a music into which one has put the secret of one’s inner life, offered as a diversion — as a relief from boredom rather, or as a new boredom — in worldly performances or evening parties, to a public of snobs and of fatigued intellectuals.

Christophe sought the true public, the one that believes in the emotions of art as in those of life, and that feels them with a virgin soul. And he was obscurely attracted by the new promised world — 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 young men, generous and naïve, he caressed great projects of popular art, of concerts and of theater of the people, which he would have been quite embarrassed to define. He awaited from a revolution the possibility of an artistic renewal, and he claimed that this was for him the sole interest of the social movement. But he deluded himself: he was too alive not to be attracted, drawn in by the spectacle of the most living action that there then was.

What interested him least in the spectacle were the bourgeois theoreticians. The fruits that those trees bear are too often dry fruits; all the sap of life has congealed into ideas. Between those ideas, Christophe did not distinguish. He had no preference even for his own, when he found them again, congealed into systems. With a good-natured contempt, he remained outside the theoreticians of force, as of those of weakness. In every comedy, the thankless role is that of the reasoner. The public prefers to him not only the sympathetic characters, but the antipathetic ones. Christophe was public in this. The reasoners of the social question seemed to him tedious. But he amused himself in observing the others, the naïve ones, the convinced ones, those who believed and those who wished to believe, those who were dupes and those who sought to be so, indeed the good freebooters who make their trade of being birds of prey, and the sheep who are made to be shorn. His sympathy was indulgent to the brave folk a little ridiculous, like the fat Canet. Their mediocrity did not shock him as much as Olivier. He looked at them all, with an affectionate and mocking interest; he believed himself disengaged from the play that they were acting; and he did not perceive that little by little he was letting himself be caught up in it. He thought he was only a spectator, who sees the wind passing. Already the wind had touched him and was dragging him along in its eddy of dust.

The social play was double. The one that the intellectuals played was the comedy within the comedy: the people scarcely listened to it. The true play was the people’s own. It was not easy to follow it; the people itself did not manage very well to find its bearings in it. It had only the more of the unexpected for that.

It was not that there was not much more talking in it than acting. Bourgeois or people, every Frenchman is a great eater of words, as much as of bread. But not all eat the same bread. There is a word of luxury for the delicate palates, and a more nourishing one for the famished maws. If the words are the same, they are not kneaded in the same fashion; the savor and the odor, the meaning, is different.

The first time that Olivier, attending a popular meeting, tasted of that bread, he lacked appetite; the morsels stuck in his throat. He was sickened by the flatness of the thoughts, the colorless and barbarous heaviness of the expression, the vague generalities, the childish logic, that badly beaten mayonnaise of abstractions and of facts without connection. The impropriety and the incorrectness of the language were not compensated by the verve and the freshness of popular speech. It was a vocabulary of newspaper, faded cast-offs, gathered at the secondhand shop of bourgeois rhetoric. Olivier was astonished above all at the lack of simplicity. He forgot that literary simplicity is not a natural thing, but an acquired one: it is the conquest of an elite. The people of the towns cannot be simple; it always goes to seek, by preference, the convoluted expressions. Olivier did not understand the action that those bombastic phrases could have upon the audience. He did not possess the key to them. One calls foreign languages those of another race, and one does not suspect that, within a same race, there are almost as many languages as there are social milieus. It is only for a restricted elite that words have their traditional and age-old meaning; for the others, they represent nothing more than their own experiences and those of their group. Such of those words worn out for the elite and despised by it are like an empty house, where, since its departure, new energies and passions that quiver have installed themselves. If you wish to know the occupant, enter the house.

That is what Christophe did.

He had been put into relations with those workers by a neighbor, a clerk on the State railways. A man of forty-five, small, aged before his time, the skull sadly unfeathered, the eyes sunk in the orbit, the hollow cheeks, the nose prominent, big and curved, the mouth intelligent, the ears deformed with the lobes broken: features of a degenerate. He was named Alcide Gautier. He was not of the people, but of the middle bourgeoisie. Of a good family that had spent on the education of the only son all its little fortune and that had not even been able, for lack of resources, to allow him to pursue it to the end. He had obtained, very young, in an administration of the State, one of those posts that seem to the poor bourgeoisie the haven, and that are death — death living. Once entered there, he had no longer had the possibility of getting out of it. He had committed the fault — (it is one in modern society) — of making a love marriage with a pretty working girl, whose fundamental vulgarity had not been slow to blossom out. She had given him three children. This world had to be made to live. This man, who was intelligent and who aspired, with all his strength, to complete his instruction, found himself bound hand and foot by destitution. He felt within him latent powers, which the difficulties of his life smothered; he could not make up his mind to it. He was never alone. Employed in bookkeeping, he passed his days at mechanical tasks, in a room that was common to him with other colleagues, vulgar and chattering; they spoke of inept things, avenged themselves for the absurdity of their existence by speaking ill of their chiefs, and made fun of him, on account of his intellectual aims, which he had not had the wisdom to hide from them. When he came back home, he found a lodging without grace and ill-smelling, a noisy and common wife, who did not understand him and who treated him as a loafer or a madman. His children resembled him in nothing, resembled the mother. Was it just, all that? Was it just? So many disappointments, of sufferings, the perpetual want, the trade that held him, from morning to evening, the impossibility of ever finding an hour of recollection, an hour of silence, had cast him into a state of exhaustion and of neurasthenic irritation. To forget, he had had recourse, recently, like many others, to drink, which was completing his destruction. — Christophe, who had struck up acquaintance with him, was struck by the tragedy of this destiny: an incomplete nature, without sufficient culture and without artistic taste, but made for great things, and whom ill luck crushed. Gautier had at once clung to Christophe, as do the weak who are drowning, when their hand meets the arm of a good swimmer. He had for Christophe a mixture of sympathy and of envy. He drew him into popular meetings and made him see a few chiefs of the syndicalist party, to which he united himself only out of rancor against society. For he was a failed aristocrat. He suffered bitterly at being mingled with the people.

Christophe, much more of the people than he — all the more so as he was not forced to be — took pleasure in those meetings. The speeches amused him. He did not share Olivier’s repugnances; he was little sensitive to the absurdities of language. For him, one chatterer was worth another. He affected a general contempt of eloquence. But without giving himself the trouble of understanding well this rhetoric, he felt the music of it through the one who was speaking and through those who were listening. The power of the one was multiplied a hundredfold by its resonances in the others. At first Christophe paid heed only to the first; and he had the curiosity to know a few of the speakers.

The one who had the most action upon the crowd was Casimir Joussier — a small man, dark and wan, of thirty to thirty-five years, a Mongol face, thin, sickly, the eyes ardent and cold, the hair sparse, the beard pointed. His power held less to his mimicry, which was poor, jerky, rarely in accord with the speech — it held less to his speech, which was raucous and hissing, with emphatic aspirations — than to his very person, to the violence of certainty and of will that emanated from it. He did not seem to permit that one could think otherwise than he; and as what he thought was what his public desired to think, they had no difficulty in coming to an understanding. He repeated to them three times, four times, ten times, the things that they awaited; he did not weary of striking on the same nail, with an enraged tenacity; and all his public struck, struck, drawn on by the example, struck until the nail was incrusted in the flesh. — To this personal hold was added the confidence that his past inspired, the prestige of multiple convictions, largely deserved by violent articles. He breathed an indomitable energy; but whoever knew how to look unraveled, at the bottom, a great accumulated fatigue, the disgust of so many efforts, and an anger against his destiny. He was of those men who spend, every day, more than their income of life. Since childhood, he had been wearing himself out at work and at destitution. He had done every trade: glassworker, plumber, typographer; his health was ruined; phthisis was undermining him; it made him fall into fits of bitter discouragement, of mute despair, for his cause and for himself; at other times, it exalted him. He was a compound of calculated violence and of morbid violence, of politics and of vehemence. He had instructed himself, after a fashion; he knew very well certain things, of science, of sociology, of his various trades; he knew very badly many others; and he was as sure of the ones as of the others; he had utopias, just ideas, ignorances, a practical mind, prejudices, experience, a suspicious hatred for bourgeois society. That did not prevent him from welcoming Christophe well. His pride was flattered to see himself sought out by a well-known artist. He was of the race of the chiefs, and, whatever he did, curt with the simple workers. Although he wished, in good faith, for perfect equality, he realized it more easily with those who were above him than with those who were below.

Christophe met other chiefs of the working-class movement. There was no great sympathy between them. If the common struggle made — with difficulty — the unity of action, it was far from making the unity of heart. One saw to what reality, altogether external and transitory, the distinction of classes corresponded. The old antagonisms were only adjourned and masked; but they all subsisted. One found there the men of the North and those of the South, with their fundamental disdain the ones for the others. The trades were mutually jealous of one another’s wages, and looked at one another, each with the undisguised feeling that it was superior to the others. But the great difference was — will always be — that of temperaments. The foxes and the wolves and the horned cattle, the beasts with sharp teeth and those with four stomachs, those who are made to eat and those who are made to be eaten, sniffed at one another in passing in the flock that the chance of class and the common interest had grouped; and they recognized one another; and their hair bristled.

Christophe sometimes took his meals in a little restaurant-creamery, kept by a former colleague of Gautier’s, Simon, a railway clerk, dismissed for acts of strike. The house was frequented by the syndicalists. They were five or six, in a back room, which gave onto an inner courtyard, narrow and badly lit, from which rose desperately the inexhaustible song of two canaries in a cage toward the light. Joussier came with his mistress, the beautiful Berthe, a robust and coquettish girl, pale complexion, purple helmet, the eyes wild and laughing. She dragged at her skirts a pretty boy, a fop, intelligent and posing, Léopold Graillot, a mechanic worker: he was the aesthete of the band. While calling himself an anarchist, and one of the most violent against the bourgeoisie, he had the soul of the worst bourgeois. Every morning, for years, he had absorbed the erotic and decadent news of the penny literary papers. These readings had fashioned for him a strange noddle. A cerebral refinement in his imaginations of pleasure amalgamated in him with an absolute lack of physical delicacy, with his indifference to cleanliness, with the relative coarseness of his life. He had taken a taste for that little glass of adulterated alcohol — the intellectual alcohol of luxury, the unhealthy excitements of the unhealthy rich. Not being able to have their enjoyments in his skin, he inoculated them into his brain. It makes the mouth bad, it breaks your legs. But one is the equal of the rich. And one hates them.

Christophe could not abide him. He had more sympathy for Sébastien Coquard, an electrician who was, with Joussier, the most listened-to orator. That one did not encumber himself with theories. He did not always know where he was going. But he went there straight. He was indeed French. A solid fellow, of some forty years, a big colored face, the head round, the hair red, a river of a beard, the neck and the voice of a bull. An excellent worker, like Joussier, but loving to laugh and to drink. The puny Joussier looked at that indiscreet health, with eyes of envy; and although they were friends, an intimate hostility smoldered between them.

The mistress of the creamery, Aurélie, a good woman of forty-five, who must have been beautiful, who still was, despite the wear and tear, sat down beside them, a piece of work in her hand, listened to them talk, with a cordial smile, moving her lips while they spoke; she slipped on occasion her word into the conversation, and scanned the measure of her words with her head, while working. She had a married daughter, and two children of seven to ten years — a little girl and a boy — who did their school homework on the corner of a sticky table, sticking out their tongues and catching in passing scraps of conversations that were not made for them.

Olivier tried to accompany Christophe, two or three times. But he did not feel at ease among those people. When those workers were not held by a strict hour of workshop, by a factory whistle’s persistent call, one could not imagine how much time they had to lose, whether after the work, or between two jobs, whether out of dawdling, or out of unemployment. Christophe, who found himself in one of those periods of idle liberty, when the mind has finished one work and awaits a new one to form, was no more pressed than they; he willingly remained, his elbows on the table, smoking, drinking and chatting. But Olivier was shocked in his bourgeois instincts, in his traditional habits of discipline of mind, of regularity of work, of time scrupulously economized; and he did not like to lose so many hours thus. Besides, he knew neither how to chat, nor how to drink. Finally, the physical discomfort, the secret antipathy that separates the bodies of races of different men, the hostility of their senses that opposes itself to the communion of souls, the flesh that revolts against the heart. When Olivier was alone with Christophe, he spoke to him, much moved, of the duty of fraternizing with the people; but when he found himself in the presence of the people, he was incapable of doing anything about it, in spite of his good will. Whereas Christophe, who mocked his ideas, was, without effort, the brother of the first worker met in the street. Olivier had a real chagrin at feeling himself estranged from those men. He tried to be like them, to think like them, to speak like them. He could not. His voice was muffled, veiled, did not ring like theirs. When he tried to take up certain of their expressions, the words remained in his throat or rang strangely false. He observed himself, he embarrassed himself, he embarrassed them. And he knew it well. He knew that he was for them a stranger and a suspect, that none had any sympathy for him, and that when he went away, everyone said: “Whew!” He surprised, in passing, hard and icy glances, of those enemy glances that the workers embittered by destitution cast at the bourgeois. Christophe had perhaps his share of them; but he saw nothing of them.

Of all the company, the only ones who were disposed to bind themselves with Olivier were Aurélie’s children. Those ones had rather the attraction than the hatred of the bourgeois. The little boy was fascinated by bourgeois thought; he was intelligent enough to love it, not enough to understand it; the little girl, very pretty, whom Olivier had taken once to Madame Arnaud’s, was hypnotized by luxury; she felt a mute ravishment in sitting in beautiful armchairs, in touching beautiful dresses, in being with beautiful ladies; she had the instinct of a little hussy, who aspires to escape from the people toward the paradise of wealth and of bourgeois comfort. Olivier felt no taste at all for cultivating such dispositions; and this naïve homage rendered to his class did not console him for the muffled antipathy of his other companions. He suffered from their malevolence. He had a desire so ardent to understand them! And in truth, he understood them, too well perhaps, he observed them too much, and they were irritated by it. He brought into it no indiscreet curiosity, but his habit of analysis of souls and his need to love.

He was not slow to see the secret drama of Joussier’s life: the evil that was undermining him, and the cruel game of his mistress. She loved him, she was proud of him; but she was too alive; he knew that she was escaping him, that she would escape him; and he was burnt up with jealousy. She made of it an amusement; she teased the men, she enveloped them with her ogling glances, with her lascivious atmosphere: she was a frantic brusher-against. Perhaps she deceived him with Graillot. Perhaps she took pleasure in letting it be believed. In any case, if it was not for today, it would be for tomorrow. Joussier did not dare to forbid her to love whom it pleased her: did he not profess, for the woman, as for the man, the right to be free? She reminded him of it, with a mocking insolence, one day when he was insulting her. A torturing struggle was being fought out within him between his free theories and his violent instincts. By the heart, he was still a man of former days, despotic and jealous; by reason, a man of the future, a man of utopia. She, she was the woman of yesterday and of tomorrow, of always. — And Olivier, who was present at that hidden duel, of which he knew the ferocity by his own experience, was full of pity for Joussier, in seeing his weakness. But Joussier guessed that Olivier was reading within him; and he was far from being grateful to him for it.

Another also followed this game of love and of hatred, with an indulgent gaze. It was the mistress of the house, Aurélie. She saw everything, without seeming to. She knew life. This good woman, healthy, tranquil, settled, had led a rather free youth. She had been a flower-girl; she had had a bourgeois lover; she had had others. Then she had married a worker. She had become a good mother of a family. But she understood everything, all the follies of the heart, the jealousy of Joussier as well as that “youth” that wished to amuse itself. In a few affectionate words, she tried to bring them to an agreement.