Jean-Christophe. The New Dawn. 2

They had reached the bend in the road. He got down. The carriage disappeared into the fog. It vanished. He could still hear the rumble of the wheels and the horse’s hooves. Sheets of white mist flowed across the meadows. Through the dense web of it, the shivering trees dripped. Not a breath of wind. The fog gagged the life out of everything. Christophe stopped, suffocating… Nothing remains. Everything has passed…

He breathed in the fog deeply. He set off again on his way. Nothing passes, for one who does not pass away.

PART THREE

Absence adds still more to the power of those we love. The heart retains of them only what is dear to us. The echo of every word that comes across the distance from a faraway friend resonates in the silence with a kind of religious vibration.

The correspondence between Christophe and Grazia had taken on the grave and measured tone of a couple who are no longer at the dangerous test of love, but who, having passed through it, feel sure of their way and walk, hand in hand. Each of them was strong enough to sustain and guide the other, yet weak enough to allow themselves to be guided and sustained in return.

Christophe returned to Paris. He had promised himself never to go back. But what are such promises worth! He knew he would still find Grazia’s shadow there. And circumstances, conspiring with his secret desire against his will, showed him a new duty to be fulfilled in Paris. Colette, who was very well informed about society gossip, had told Christophe that his young friend Jeannin was going off the rails. Jacqueline, who had always been extremely indulgent with her son, no longer tried to restrain him. She herself was going through a peculiar crisis: she was too absorbed in herself to think about him.

Since the unhappy episode that had destroyed her marriage and Olivier’s life, Jacqueline had led an existence that was very dignified and withdrawn. She kept away from Parisian society, which, after having hypocritically subjected her to a sort of quarantine, had made fresh overtures to her, which she had rejected. She felt no shame toward these people for what she had done; she considered that she owed them no account of herself, for they were worth less than she was; what she had done openly, half the women she knew practiced quietly, sheltered beneath the protective cover of the home. Her only suffering came from the harm she had done to her best friend, the only one she had ever truly loved. She could not forgive herself for having lost, in so impoverished a world, an affection like his.

These regrets, this grief, gradually faded. What remained was only a dull ache, a humiliated contempt for herself and others, and her love for her child. This affection, into which all her need to love poured itself, left her defenseless before him; she was incapable of resisting Georges’s whims. To excuse her weakness, she persuaded herself that she was thereby redeeming her wrong toward Olivier. Periods of intense, exalted tenderness alternated with periods of weary indifference; sometimes she exhausted Georges with her demanding and anxious love, and sometimes she seemed to tire of him altogether and let him do as he pleased. She knew she was a poor educator, and it tormented her; but she changed nothing. On the rare occasions when she had tried to shape her principles of conduct on Olivier’s spirit, the results had been disastrous; that moral pessimism suited neither her nor the child. At bottom, she wanted no other authority over her son than that of her affection. And she was not entirely wrong in this: for between these two beings, alike as they were, the only bond was of the heart. Georges Jeannin felt the physical charm of his mother; he loved her voice, her gestures, her movements, her grace, her love. But inwardly he felt himself a stranger to her. She did not notice this until the first breath of adolescence, when he flew away from her. Then she was astonished, then indignant, and she attributed this estrangement to other female influences; and in clumsily trying to fight them, she only drove him further away. In reality, they had always lived side by side, each preoccupied with different concerns and deceiving themselves about what separated them, through a communion of surface sympathies and antipathies that left nothing behind when the man emerged from the child --- that ambiguous creature still so thoroughly steeped in the scent of the woman. And Jacqueline would say to her son, with bitterness:

--- I don’t know whom you take after. You resemble neither your father nor me.

In this way she completed the work of making him feel everything that divided them; and he took a secret pride in it, mixed with a restless, feverish anxiety.

Successive generations always have a keener sense of what divides them than of what unites them; they need to assert their own importance in living, even at the cost of injustice or self-deception. But this feeling is, depending on the era, more or less acute. In classical ages, when the balance of a civilization’s forces is briefly achieved --- those high plateaus bordered by steep slopes --- the difference in level from one generation to the next is less great. But in ages of renaissance or decadence, the young men who climb or descend the vertiginous slope leave far behind those who preceded them. --- Georges, with those of his own age, was climbing the mountain.

He had nothing superior about him, neither in mind nor in character: an even spread of aptitudes, none of which exceeded the level of an elegant mediocrity. And yet, without effort, at the start of his career, he found himself a few steps higher than his father, who had spent in his too-short life an incalculable sum of intelligence and energy.

Barely had the eyes of his reason opened to the daylight than he had perceived all around him that accumulation of shadows pierced by dazzling flashes of light, those piles of knowledge and ignorance, of hostile truths, of contradictory errors, in which his father had wandered in feverish confusion. But he had at the same time become aware of a weapon within his power, one they had never known: his strength…

Where did it come from?… Mystery of those resurrections of a race, which falls asleep exhausted, and wakes up overflowing, like a mountain torrent in spring!… What was he going to do with this strength? Employ it, in his turn, to explore the inextricable thickets of modern thought? They held no attraction for him. He felt the threat of the dangers lurking in ambush there weighing upon him. They had crushed his father. Rather than repeat the experience and re-enter the tragic forest, he would have set it ablaze. He had merely glanced into those books of wisdom or sacred madness on which Olivier had become intoxicated: the nihilistic pity of Tolstoy, the dark destructive pride of Ibsen, the frenzy of Nietzsche, the heroic and sensual pessimism of Wagner. He had turned away from them with a mixture of anger and dread. He hated the lineage of realist writers who, for half a century, had killed the joy of art. He could not, however, entirely erase the shadows of the sad dream on which his childhood had been cradled. He did not want to look behind him; but he knew very well that behind him the shadow lay. Too healthy to seek a relief for his anxiety in the lazy skepticism of the preceding era, he abominated the dilettantism of Renan and Anatole France, that depravity of the free intelligence, the laughter without joy, the irony without grandeur: a shameful device fit only for slaves, who play with their chains, powerless to break them.

Too vigorous to be satisfied by doubt, too weak to create a certainty for himself, he wanted one, he wanted one. He sought it, he implored it, he demanded it. And the eternal chaser of popularity, the false great writers, the false thinkers lying in wait, exploited this magnificent, imperious, and anguished desire, beating the drum and crying up their quack remedies. From the height of their platforms, each of these Hippocrateses cried that his elixir was the only good one, and denounced the others. Their secrets were all worth the same. Not one of these merchants had taken the trouble to find new recipes. They had gone rummaging in the back of their cupboards for stale old flasks. One man’s panacea was the Catholic Church; another’s, the legitimate monarchy; a third’s, the classical tradition. There were droll fellows who pointed to the remedy for all ills in a return to Latin. Others earnestly promoted, in an enormous voice that impressed the gawkers, the dominance of the Mediterranean spirit. (They would just as easily have spoken, at another moment, of an Atlantic spirit.) Against the barbarians of the North and East, they pompously installed themselves as heirs of a new Roman empire… Words, words, and borrowed words. A whole warehouse of books, hawked in the open air. --- Like all his companions, young Jeannin went from one vendor to the next, listened to the pitch, was sometimes tempted, entered the booth, came back out disappointed, a little ashamed of having spent his money and his time to contemplate old clowns in worn-out tights. And yet, such is the power of illusion in youth, such was his certainty of attaining certainty, that at each new promise from a new vendor of hope, he immediately allowed himself to be taken in again. He was thoroughly French: he had a rebellious temperament and an innate love of order. He needed a leader, and was incapable of bearing any of them: his merciless irony saw through every one of them.

While waiting to find one who would give him the key to the riddle… he had no time to wait. He was not the kind of man to content himself, as his father had, with searching all his life for the truth. His impatient young strength wanted to spend itself. With or without reason, he wanted to make a decision. To act, to employ, to use up his energy. Travel, the pleasures of art, and music above all --- on which he had gorged himself --- had at first provided an intermittent and passionate diversion. A handsome boy, precocious, surrendered to temptation, he discovered early the world of love with its enchanting exterior, and he threw himself into it with an abandon of poetic and greedy joy. Then this Chérubin, naive and insatiably impertinent, grew tired of women: he needed action. So he threw himself into sports with a fury. He tried them all, he practiced them all. He attended fencing tournaments and boxing matches; he was the French champion in running and the high jump, captain of a football team. With a handful of young madmen like himself, rich and reckless, he competed in daring during automobile races that were absurd and frenzied, true races toward death. Finally, he abandoned everything for the latest novelty. He shared the crowd’s delirium for flying machines. At the aviation festivals held at Reims, he shouted, he wept for joy, along with three hundred thousand people; he felt himself united with an entire nation in a jubilation of faith; the human birds passing overhead carried them all away in their ascent; for the first time since the dawn of the great Revolution, those massed multitudes raised their eyes to the sky and saw it opening. --- To his mother’s terror, young Jeannin declared that he wanted to join the company of conquerors of the air. Jacqueline begged him to give up this perilous ambition. She ordered him to. He did exactly as he pleased. Christophe, in whom Jacqueline had hoped to find an ally, contented himself with offering the young man a few words of prudent counsel, knowing perfectly well that Georges would not follow them: (for he himself would not have followed them in his place). He did not consider it his right --- even had it been possible --- to hinder the healthy and natural play of young forces that, constrained to inaction, would have turned toward their own destruction.

Jacqueline could not bring herself to accept seeing her son slip away from her. In vain she had sincerely believed herself to have renounced love; she could not do without the illusion of love; all her affections, all her actions were tinted by it. How many mothers pour upon their sons the secret ardor they could not spend in marriage --- and outside of marriage! And when they then see with what ease that son manages without them, when they abruptly understand that they are not necessary to him, they pass through a crisis of the same order as the one into which the betrayal of a lover, the disillusionment of love, had plunged them. --- For Jacqueline it was a fresh collapse. Georges noticed nothing. Young people do not suspect the heart’s tragedies unfolding around them: they have no time to stop and look; and they do not want to look: an instinct of selfishness warns them to walk straight ahead, without turning their heads.

Jacqueline swallowed this new grief alone. She emerged from it only when the grief had worn itself out. Worn out along with her love. She still loved her son, but with a distant, disillusioned affection that knew itself to be useless and lost interest in itself and in him. She dragged through a bleak and wretched year in this way, without his taking any notice. And then this unhappy heart, which could neither die nor live without love, was compelled to invent an object for its love. She fell under the power of a strange passion that visits feminine souls frequently, and above all, one might say, the most noble and inaccessible among them, when maturity comes and the beautiful fruit of life has not been gathered. She met a woman who, from their very first encounter, subjected her to her mysterious power of attraction.

She was a nun, roughly the same age as Jacqueline. She worked in charitable causes. A tall, strong woman, slightly heavyset; dark-haired, with handsome and pronounced features, lively eyes, a wide and delicate mouth that always smiled, an imperious chin. Of remarkable intelligence, by no means sentimental; a peasant’s shrewdness, a precise sense of business affairs, combined with a southern imagination that loved to think on a grand scale, but knew at the same time how to see things at their exact scale when necessary; a savory mixture of high mysticism and the cunning of an old notary. She was accustomed to domination and exercised it naturally. Jacqueline was immediately captivated. She threw herself passionately into the charitable work. She believed so, at any rate. Sœur Angèle knew to whom the passion was addressed; she was accustomed to provoking such passions; without appearing to notice them, she knew how to put them coolly to use in the service of the work and the glory of God. Jacqueline gave her money, her will, her heart. She was charitable; she came to believe, out of love.

It was not long before people noticed the fascination she had fallen under. She was the only one who failed to see it herself. Georges’s guardian grew uneasy. Georges, too generous and too heedless to trouble himself over money matters, noticed on his own the hold that had been established over his mother; and it shocked him. He tried, too late, to reclaim the intimacy they had once shared; he found a curtain had been drawn between them; he blamed the hidden influence, and he conceived against the woman he called an intriguer --- no less than against Jacqueline --- an irritation he made no effort to conceal; he could not accept that an outsider had taken his place in a heart he had always assumed was naturally his. He did not tell himself that if the place had been taken, it was because he had abandoned it. Instead of patiently trying to win it back, he was clumsy and wounding. Between mother and son, both of them impatient and passionate, sharp words were exchanged; the breach widened. Sister Angèle completed her hold over Jacqueline; and Georges drifted away, giving himself free rein. He threw himself into an active and dissipated life. He gambled, he lost considerable sums; he brought a kind of bravado to his extravagances, partly for pleasure, and partly as a retort to his mother’s own extravagances. --- He knew the Stevens-Delestrades. Colette had not failed to notice the handsome young man and to try the effect of her charms on him --- charms that showed no sign of fading. She was aware of Georges’s escapades; she found them amusing. But the solid common sense and genuine kindness hidden beneath her frivolity made her see the danger the young fool was running. And since she knew perfectly well that she was not the one who would be able to shield him from it, she warned Christophe, who returned at once.

Christophe was the only person who had any influence over young Jeannin. A limited and intermittent influence, but all the more remarkable for being difficult to explain. Christophe belonged to the preceding generation, against which Georges and his companions were reacting with violence. He was one of the foremost representatives of that tormented era whose art and thought inspired them with suspicious hostility. He remained inaccessible to the new Gospels and the amulets of the little prophets and the old griots, who offered good young men the infallible recipe for saving the world, Rome, and France. He remained faithful to a free faith --- free of all religions, free of all parties, free of all fatherlands --- that was no longer in fashion, or had not yet come back into fashion. And finally, however detached he was from national questions, he was a foreigner in Paris, at a time when all foreigners seemed, to the natives of every country, to be barbarians.

And yet young Jeannin --- cheerful, lighthearted, instinctively hostile to anything that might sadden or trouble him, passionately in love with pleasure and violent games, easily taken in by the rhetoric of his time, inclined by muscular vigor and mental laziness toward the brutal doctrines of the Action française, nationalist, royalist, imperialist --- (he was not quite sure which) --- respected, at bottom, only one man: Christophe. His precocious experience and the very fine tact he had inherited from his mother had led him to judge (without his good humor being impaired) the little worth of this world he could not do without, and the superiority of Christophe. He intoxicated himself in vain with movement and action; he could not disown his paternal inheritance. From Olivier there came to him, in sudden and brief fits, a vague unease, a need to find and fix a goal for his activity. And from Olivier too, perhaps, came that mysterious instinct that drew him toward the man Olivier had loved.

He would go to see Christophe. Expansive and a little talkative, he loved to confide. He never thought to wonder whether Christophe had time to listen to him. Christophe listened all the same, and showed no sign of impatience. He did sometimes become distracted, when a visit caught him in the middle of his work. It was a matter of a few minutes, during which his mind slipped away to add a touch, a nuance, to the inner work in progress; then it came back to Georges, who had not noticed the absence. He was amused by his little escape, like someone slipping back in on tiptoe, unheard. But Georges noticed it once or twice and said with indignation:

--- But you’re not listening to me!

Then Christophe was ashamed; and dutifully he would set himself again to following his impatient narrator, redoubling his attention to make amends. The narration was not without its humor; and Christophe could not help laughing at the account of some prank, for Georges told everything; he was disarmingly frank.

Christophe did not always laugh. Georges’s conduct often pained him. Christophe was no saint; he did not believe he had the right to moralize to anyone. Georges’s love affairs, the scandalous dissipation of his fortune in foolishness, were not what troubled him most. What he found hardest to forgive was the lightness of spirit Georges brought to his failings: they weighed on him not at all; he found them natural. He had a different conception of morality than Christophe. He was of that breed of young men who willingly see in the relations between the sexes nothing but a free game, stripped of all moral character. A certain frankness and a careless good nature were sufficient baggage for an honest man. He did not encumber himself with Christophe’s scruples. Christophe was indignant. Try as he might to resist imposing his own way of feeling on others, he was not tolerant; his old violence was only half tamed. He would burst out at times. He could not stop himself from calling some of Georges’s intrigues sordid, and he said so bluntly. Georges was no more patient. There were scenes between them, sharp enough. Afterward, they would not see each other for weeks. Christophe recognized that these outbursts were not made to change Georges’s behavior, and that there is some injustice in wanting to submit one era’s morality to the moral measure of another generation. But it was stronger than he was: at the first opportunity, he would begin again. How can one doubt the faith for which one has lived? One might as well give up life itself. What is the point of straining to think differently than one thinks, in order to resemble one’s neighbor, or to spare his feelings? That is to destroy oneself, with no benefit to anyone. The first duty is to be what one is. To dare to say: “This is good, that is wrong.” One does more good to the weak by being strong than by becoming weak oneself. Be indulgent, if you wish, toward weaknesses once committed. But never make any concession to a weakness yet to be committed…

Yes; but Georges took good care not to consult Christophe about what he was going to do --- (did he even know himself?) --- He told him nothing until it was done. --- Well then?… Well, what was left but to look at the young rascal with a silent reproach, shrugging one’s shoulders and smiling, like an old uncle who knows no one will listen to him?

On those days, a silence fell for a few moments. Georges looked into Christophe’s eyes, which seemed to come from very far away. And he felt himself a very small boy before them. He saw himself as he was, in the mirror of that penetrating gaze, where a glimmer of mockery flickered; and he was not very proud of what he saw. Christophe rarely turned Georges’s confidences against him; one would have said he had not heard them. After the silent dialogue of their eyes, he would shake his head with a teasing air; then he would begin telling a story that seemed to have no connection with what had come before: a story from his own life, or from some other life, real or invented. And Georges would see gradually rising up again, in a new light, exposed in an unflattering and comic posture, his own Double (he recognized it), passing through errors similar to his own. It was impossible not to laugh at oneself and at one’s sorry figure. Christophe added no commentary. What made more of an impression even than the story was the narrator’s powerful good nature. He spoke of himself as he did of others, with the same detachment, the same jovial and serene humor. That calm commanded respect from Georges. It was that calm he came looking for. When he had unburdened himself of his garrulous confession, he was like someone stretching out and at ease in the shade of a great tree on a summer afternoon. The feverish dazzle of the burning day fell away. He felt the peace of sheltering wings hovering over him. Near this man who bore with tranquility the weight of a heavy life, he was sheltered from his own agitations. He tasted rest in listening to him. He, too, did not always listen; he let his mind wander; but wherever it strayed, Christophe’s laughter was around him.

And yet his old friend’s ideas remained foreign to him. He wondered how Christophe could manage with his solitude of soul, deprive himself of all attachment to an artistic, political, or religious party, to any human grouping. He asked him: did he never feel the need to shut himself inside a camp?

--- Shut yourself in! said Christophe, laughing. Isn’t it pleasant enough out in the open? And you’re the one talking about walling yourself in --- you, a man of the open air?

--- Ah! it’s not the same thing for the body and for the soul, replied Georges. The mind needs certainty; it needs to think with others, to adhere to principles accepted by all the men of a given time. I envy people of earlier ages, the people of the classical periods. My friends are right, who want to restore the fine order of the past.

--- Coward! said Christophe. Who gave me such a crew of the discouraged?

--- I am not discouraged, protested Georges with indignation. None of us are.

--- You must be, said Christophe, to be afraid of yourselves. What! you need an order, and you cannot make it yourselves? You have to go clutching the skirts of your great-grandmothers! Good God! Walk on your own two feet!

--- One must put down roots, said Georges, quite proud to repeat one of the worn coin-phrases of the day.

--- To put down roots, tell me --- do trees need to be planted in boxes? The earth is here, for all. Drive your roots into it. Find your own laws. Look within yourself.

--- I haven’t the time, said Georges.

--- You’re afraid, Christophe repeated.

Georges rebelled; but he ended by admitting that he had no inclination to look into his own depths; he could not understand what pleasure anyone could find there: leaning over that black pit, one risked falling into it.

--- Give me your hand, said Christophe.

He amused himself by half-opening a trapdoor onto his realistic and tragic vision of life. Georges recoiled. Christophe closed the panel again, laughing:

--- How can you live like that? Georges asked.

--- I live, and I am happy, said Christophe.

--- I would die if I were forced to see that always.

Christophe clapped him on the shoulder:

--- So much for our famous athletes!… Well then, don’t look, if you don’t feel your head is steady enough for it. Nothing forces you to, after all. Press on, my boy. But for that, what do you need a master to brand you on the shoulder, like cattle? What watchword are you waiting for? The signal was given long ago. The cavalry call has sounded; the cavalry is on the march. Attend to your horse. Take your place in the line! And ride!

--- But where am I going? said Georges.

--- Where your squadron is going, to the conquest of the world. Seize the air, subdue the elements, break through nature’s last defenses, push back space, push back death…

“Expertus vacuum Daedalus aera…”

…Champion of Latin, do you know that, tell me? Are you even capable of explaining to me what it means?

“Perrupit Acheronta…”

…There is your generation’s portion. Happy conquistadores!

He showed so clearly the duty of heroic action that had fallen to the new generation that Georges, astonished, said:

--- But if you feel that, why don’t you come with us?

--- Because I have another task. Go on, my boy, do your work. Surpass me, if you can. I stay here and keep watch… Have you read that tale from the Thousand and One Nights, where a genie, as tall as a mountain, is imprisoned in a bottle, sealed with the seal of Solomon?… The genie is here, in the depths of our soul, that soul over which you are afraid to lean. I and those of my generation have spent our lives wrestling with him; we have not defeated him; he has not defeated us. Now he and I are catching our breath; and we look at each other without rancor and without fear, satisfied with the battles we have fought, waiting for the agreed truce to expire. You --- take advantage of the truce to restore your strength and to gather the beauty of the world. Be happy, enjoy the calm. But remember that one day --- you, or those who will be your sons --- returning from your conquests, you will have to come back to this place where I am, and take up the fight again with fresh strength, against the one who is here, and near whom I keep watch. And the fight will go on, broken by truces, until one of the two --- and perhaps both --- has been laid low. May you be stronger and happier than we were!… --- In the meantime, play your sports if you wish; harden your muscles and your heart; and don’t be fool enough to squander your impatient vigor on nonsense: you belong to a time --- rest assured! --- that will find a use for it.

Georges retained little of what Christophe said to him. His mind was open enough that Christophe’s thoughts could enter; but they passed straight through again. He was not at the bottom of the stairs before he had forgotten everything. He was nonetheless left with an impression of well-being that persisted long after the memory of what had produced it had been erased. He felt a veneration for Christophe. He believed in nothing that Christophe believed in. (At bottom, he laughed at everything; he believed in nothing.) But he would have broken the head of anyone who dared to speak ill of his old friend.

Fortunately, no one told him so: otherwise he would have had his hands full.

Christophe had foreseen the coming shift in the wind. The new ideal of the young French music was very different from his own; but instead of this being one more reason for Christophe to feel sympathy toward it, it had none for him. His popularity with the public was hardly calculated to reconcile him with the hungriest of these young men; they had little enough substance in them, and their teeth were all the longer for it, and they bit. Christophe was unmoved by their malice.

--- What heart they put into it! he would say. The little ones are cutting their teeth…

He was not far from preferring them to those other little dogs who fawned on him because he had made his name --- those of whom d’Aubigné speaks, who, “when a mastiff has stuck his head in a pot of butter, come and lick his whiskers in congratulation.”

He had a piece accepted at the Opéra. Barely accepted, it went into rehearsal. One day Christophe learned, through newspaper attacks, that in order to get his work staged, a piece by a young composer --- which was supposed to be performed --- had been pushed back indefinitely. The journalist was outraged by this abuse of power, and held Christophe responsible for it.

Christophe went to see the director and told him:

--- You didn’t warn me. This isn’t done. You’re going to stage the opera you accepted before mine first.

The director threw up his hands, burst out laughing, refused, heaped flattery on Christophe, on his character, his works, his genius, treated the other man’s piece with utter contempt, assured him it was worthless and wouldn’t bring in a sou.

--- Then why did you accept it?

--- One can’t always do as one likes. Now and then you have to give the appearance of satisfying public opinion. In the old days, these young men could shout all they liked; nobody heard them. Now they’ve found ways to whip up against you a nationalist press that howls treason and calls you a bad Frenchman if you have the misfortune not to go into raptures over their young school. The young school! Let’s talk about it!… Do you want to know what I think? I’ve had enough of them! And so has the public. They bore us to death with their Oremus!… Not a drop of blood in their veins; little sacristans singing the mass; when they write love duets, it sounds like a De profundis… If I were fool enough to stage the pieces I’m obliged to accept, I’d ruin my theater. I accept them: that’s all anyone can ask of me. --- Let’s talk about serious matters. You --- you fill the house…

The compliments resumed.

Christophe cut him off sharply, and said with anger:

--- I’m not being taken in. Now that I’m old and an “established” man, you’re using me to crush the young. When I was young, you’d have crushed me just as you crush them. You’ll put on that young man’s piece, or I withdraw mine.

The director threw his arms wide and said:

--- Don’t you see that if we did what you want, we’d look as though we were giving in to the intimidation of their press campaign?

--- What do I care? said Christophe.

--- As you like! You’ll be the first victim.

The young musician’s work was put into preparation, without interrupting rehearsals of Christophe’s work. One was in three acts, the other in two; it was agreed they would be given in the same program. Christophe went to see his protégé; he had wanted to be the first to bring him the news. The other overwhelmed him with promises of eternal gratitude.

Naturally, Christophe could not prevent the director from giving all his attention to his own piece. The casting and staging of the other were somewhat sacrificed. Christophe knew nothing of this. He had asked to attend a few rehearsals of the young man’s work; he had found it quite mediocre, as he had been told; he had ventured two or three suggestions: they had been poorly received; he had left it at that and no longer interfered. Meanwhile, the director had persuaded the newcomer of the necessity of certain cuts, if he wanted his piece to go on without delay. This sacrifice, at first easily consented to, soon began to seem painful to the author.

When the evening of the performance arrived, the debutant’s piece had no success; Christophe’s made a great stir. A few papers tore Christophe to pieces; they spoke of a conspiracy, a plot to crush a young and great French artist; they said his work had been mutilated to please the German master, whom they portrayed as basely jealous of all nascent glories. Christophe shrugged his shoulders, thinking:

--- He’ll respond.

“He” did not respond. Christophe sent him one of the articles, with these words:

--- Have you read this?

The other wrote back:

--- How unfortunate! That journalist has always been so considerate toward me! I am truly sorry. The best thing is to pay no attention.

Christophe laughed and thought:

--- He’s right, the little coward.

And he cast the memory into what he called his “oubliettes.”

But as chance would have it, Georges, who rarely read the papers and read them badly --- except for the sports articles --- happened this time to come across the most violent attacks against Christophe. He knew the journalist. He went to the café where he was sure to find him, found him there indeed, slapped his face, had a duel with him, and gave him a nasty scratch on the shoulder with his sword.

The next day at lunch Christophe learned of the affair through a letter from a friend. He was dumbfounded. He left his meal and ran to Georges’s. Georges himself opened the door. Christophe entered like a hurricane, seized him by both arms, and, shaking him in fury, began to overwhelm him with a torrent of furious reproaches.

--- Idiot! he shouted. You fought a duel for me! Who gave you permission? A boy, a scatterbrain, meddling in my affairs! Am I not capable of looking after them myself, tell me? A lot of good you’ve done! You’ve honored that scoundrel by fighting him. That’s exactly what he wanted. You’ve made a hero of him. Fool! And if chance had had it otherwise… (I’m sure you threw yourself into it headlong, as you always do)… if you had been wounded, killed perhaps! You wretch! I’d never have forgiven you, not in your lifetime!…

Georges, who was laughing like a madman at this last threat, fell into such a fit of hilarity that tears streamed down his face:

--- Ah! old friend, how priceless you are! You’re priceless! Here you are abusing me for having defended you! Next time I’ll attack you. Maybe then you’ll embrace me.

Christophe stopped short; he clasped Georges, kissed him on both cheeks, and then a second time again, and said:

--- My boy!… Forgive me. I’m an old fool… But that news turned my blood upside down. What an idea, to fight a duel! Does one fight duels with people like that? You’ll promise me right now that you’ll never do it again.

--- I promise nothing at all, said Georges. I do as I please.

--- I forbid you, do you hear. If you do it again, I never want to see you, I’ll disavow you in the papers, I’ll…

--- You’ll disinherit me, yes, yes, quite understood.

--- Come now, Georges, I beg you… What good does it do?

--- My dear old man, you’re worth a thousand times more than I am, and you know infinitely more about things; but as for these scoundrels, I know them better than you do. Be calm: it will do some good; they’ll now think seven times before letting that poisoned tongue of theirs loose against you.

--- Oh! what do I care about those geese? I couldn’t care less what they say.

--- But I care. Mind your own business.

From that day on, Christophe lived in dread that some new article would rouse Georges’s susceptibility. There was something comical in seeing him, in the days that followed, settling himself at a café table to devour the papers --- he who never read them --- quite ready, if he happened upon an insulting article, to do anything (even something undignified, if need be) to prevent those lines from falling under Georges’s eyes. After a week he reassured himself. The boy had been right. His gesture had given the yapping pack pause, for the moment. --- And Christophe, while grumbling at the young hothead who had made him lose eight days of work, told himself that after all he had little right to lecture him. He remembered a certain day, not so very long ago, when he himself had fought a duel, on Olivier’s account. And he seemed to hear Olivier saying:

--- Let it go, Christophe, I’m paying back what you lent me!

If Christophe took the attacks against him with easy good humor, another was very far from that ironic detachment. That was Emmanuel.

The evolution of European thought was moving at great speed. It seemed to be accelerating along with the mechanical inventions and new engines. The store of prejudices and hopes that had once been enough to nourish twenty years of humanity was burned through in five. Generations of minds galloped one after another, and often over one another: Time was sounding the charge. --- Emmanuel had been overtaken.

The singer of French energies had never renounced the idealism of his master, Olivier. However passionate his national feeling, it was bound up with his cult of moral greatness. If he proclaimed in his verses, in a ringing voice, the triumph of France, it was because he adored in her, by an act of faith, the highest thought of contemporary Europe, the Athena Nike, the victorious Right that takes its revenge upon Force. --- And now Force had awakened at the very heart of Right; and it was surging up again in its tawny nakedness. The new generation, robust and hardened, aspired to combat and had, before the victory, a conqueror’s mentality. It was proud of its muscles, its broadened chest, its vigorous senses hungry for pleasure, its wings of a bird of prey soaring over the plains; it was impatient to swoop down and try its talons. The exploits of the race, the mad flights across the Alps and seas, the epic rides through African sands, the new crusades --- not much less mystical, not much more self-interested than those of Philip Augustus and Villehardouin --- were turning the nation’s head. These children who had never seen war except in books had no difficulty lending it beauties. They grew aggressive. Weary of peace and ideas, they celebrated “the anvil of battles” upon which action with bloodied fists would one day reforge French power. By reaction against the sickening excess of ideologies, they erected the contempt of the ideal into a profession of faith. They made a point of exalting narrow common sense, violent realism, national self-interest without shame, which tramples underfoot the justice of others and other nationalisms whenever it serves the greatness of the fatherland. They were xenophobic, anti-democratic, and --- even the most unbelieving among them --- preached the return to Catholicism, out of a practical need to “channel the absolute,” to confine the infinite under the watch of a power of order and authority. They were not content merely to disdain --- they treated as public malefactors the gentle drivelers of the day before, the hollow-headed idealists, the humanitarian thinkers. Emmanuel was among that number, in the eyes of these young men. He suffered cruelly from it, and was indignant.

Knowing that Christophe was a victim, like him --- more than he --- of this injustice made him sympathetic toward him. Through his own ill grace, he had discouraged Christophe from visiting. He was too proud to seem to regret it by seeking him out. But he managed to encounter him, as if by chance, and had himself made the first advances. After that, his prickly susceptibility being at rest, he did not conceal the pleasure he took in Christophe’s visits. From then on they often met, sometimes at one’s home, sometimes at the other’s.

Emmanuel confided his bitterness to Christophe. He was infuriated by certain critics; and, finding that Christophe was not sufficiently disturbed by them, he would make him read assessments from the papers written about Christophe himself. He was accused there of not knowing the grammar of his art, of being ignorant of harmony, of having pillaged his colleagues, and of dishonoring music. He was referred to there as: “That restless old agitator”… It was written: “We’ve had enough of these convulsionaries. We are order, reason, classical balance…”

Christophe was amused by it.

--- That’s the law, he would say. The young throw the old into the pit… In my day, it’s true, one waited until a man was sixty to call him an old man. Things move faster now… Wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes… A generation burns itself out more quickly… Poor devils! They haven’t long! Let them hurry up and despise us and preen themselves in the sun!

But Emmanuel did not have that robust good health. Bold in thought, he was at the mercy of his sickly nerves; a burning soul in a stunted body, he needed the fight, and he was not built for fighting. The animosity of certain judgments wounded him to the quick.

--- Ah! he would say, if critics only knew the harm they do to artists with one of those unjust words flung out carelessly, they’d be ashamed of their trade.

--- But they do know, my dear friend. That’s their reason for living. Everyone has to live somehow.

--- They are executioners. One is bled by life, exhausted by the struggle that art demands. Instead of holding out a hand, of speaking of your weaknesses with mercy, of helping you fraternally to repair them, there they are, hands in their pockets, watching you haul your load up the slope, saying: “He won’t make it!…” And when you’ve reached the top, some say: “Yes, but that wasn’t the right way to climb.” While others, obstinate, repeat: “He didn’t make it!…” And you’re lucky when they don’t throw stones under your feet to make you fall!

--- Bah! There are plenty of decent people among them too; and what good they can do! Wicked creatures exist everywhere; it has nothing to do with the profession. Tell me, can you think of anything worse than an artist without kindness --- vain and embittered, for whom the world is a prey he rages at being unable to seize? One must arm oneself with patience. There is no evil that cannot serve some good. Even the harshest critic is useful to us; he is a trainer; he keeps us from loitering on the road. Every time we think we’ve reached the goal, the pack snaps at our heels. Forward! Farther! Higher! They will tire of chasing me before I tire of marching ahead of them. Repeat to yourself that Arabic saying: “Only the sterile trees go untouched. Those alone are pelted with stones whose crowns are laden with golden fruit”… Let us pity the artists whom no one troubles. They will stop halfway, sitting lazily. When they try to rise again, their cramped legs will refuse to carry them. Long live my friends the enemies! They have done me more good in my life than my enemies, the friends!

Emmanuel could not help smiling. Then he said:

--- All the same, don’t you find it hard --- a veteran like you --- to be lectured by raw recruits fighting their first battle?

--- They amuse me, said Christophe. That arrogance is the sign of young and boiling blood that longs to flow. I was the same, once. It is the April squalls on the earth that is being reborn… Let them lecture us! They are right, after all. It is for the old to sit at the feet of the young! They have profited from us; they are ungrateful: that is in the order of things. But rich from our efforts, they go further than we did; they accomplish what we only attempted. If some youth remains in us, let us learn in our turn, and try to renew ourselves. If we cannot, if we are too old, let us rejoice in them. It is beautiful to see the perpetual reflowerings of the human soul that seemed exhausted --- the vigorous optimism of these young people, their joy in adventurous action, these races reborn for the conquest of the world.

--- What would they be without us? That joy has sprung from our tears. That proud strength is the flower of the suffering of an entire generation. Sic vos non vobis…

--- The old saying is wrong. It is for ourselves that we have worked, by creating a race of men who surpass us. We have gathered their savings, we have defended them in a ramshackle shelter where every wind whistled through; we had to brace ourselves against the doors to keep death from entering. It was our arms that cleared the triumphal road along which our sons will march. Our pain has saved the future. We have led the Ark to the threshold of the Promised Land. It will enter there, with them, and through us.

--- Will they ever remember those who crossed the deserts, carrying the sacred fire, the gods of our race --- and these children, who are now men? Our portion was the ordeal and ingratitude.

--- Do you regret it?

--- No. There is an intoxication in feeling the tragic greatness of a powerful era sacrificed, as ours was, to the one it brought into being. The men of today would no longer be capable of savoring the superb joy of renunciation.

--- We were the happiest. We climbed the mountain of Nebo, at whose foot stretch the lands we shall not enter. But we enjoy them more than those who will enter. When you descend into the plain, you lose sight of the immensity of the plain and the distant horizon.

The calming influence that Christophe exerted over Georges and Emmanuel, he drew from his love for Grazia. To that love he owed the feeling of being bound to everything young, of having a sympathy --- never exhausted --- for every new form of life. Whatever the forces that were reanimating the earth, he was with them, even when they were against him; he felt no fear at the coming rise of those democracies that wrung screams of terror from the selfishness of a handful of the privileged; he did not cling desperately to the worn beads of an aging art; he awaited with certainty that from the fabulous visions, the realized dreams of science and action, a more powerful art than the old would spring; he greeted the new dawn of the world, even should the beauty of the old world die with him.

Grazia knew the blessing her love was to Christophe; the awareness of her power lifted her above herself. Through her letters she exercised a kind of guidance over her friend. Not that she had the absurdity of claiming to direct him in art: she had too much tact and knew her limits. But her clear, pure voice was the tuning fork to which he set his soul. It was enough for Christophe to believe he could hear, in advance, that voice repeating his thought, for him to think nothing that was not just, pure, and worthy of being repeated. The sound of a fine instrument is, for the musician, like a beautiful body in which his dream at once takes flesh. Mysterious fusion of two minds that love each other: each ravishes from the other what is best in them; but only to give it back, enriched by their love. Grazia did not shy from telling Christophe that she loved him. The distance made her freer to speak; and also, the certainty that she would never be his. This love, whose devotional fervor had communicated itself to Christophe, was for her a fountain of strength and peace.

From that strength and peace, Grazia gave to others far more than she possessed. Her health was broken, her moral equilibrium gravely compromised. Her son’s condition did not improve. For two years she had lived in perpetual dread, which Lionello’s murderous talent for playing upon it only worsened. He had acquired a virtuosity in the art of keeping alive the anxiety of those who loved him; to revive their interest and torment them, his idle mind was fertile in inventions: it had become a mania with him. And the tragic thing was that while he performed the pantomime of illness, the illness was genuinely advancing; and death appeared. Then what was to be foreseen came to pass: Grazia, who had been tortured for years by her son over an invented affliction, ceased to believe in it when the real affliction arrived. The heart has its limits. She had exhausted her capacity for compassion on lies. She called Lionello a comedian at the very moment when he was telling the truth. And after the truth had revealed itself, the rest of her life was poisoned by remorse.

Lionello’s malice had not relented. Without love for anyone, he could not bear that any of those around him should love someone other than himself; jealousy was his only passion. It was not enough for him to have succeeded in distancing his mother from Christophe; he would have liked to force her to break off the intimacy that persisted between them. He had already used his habitual weapon --- illness --- to make Grazia swear she would not remarry. That promise did not satisfy him. He proceeded to demand that his mother write no more to Christophe. This time she rebelled; and this abuse of power, completing her liberation, was the moment when she said to him things of a cruel severity about his lies --- words she later reproached herself with as a crime, for they threw Lionello into a fit of fury from which he was genuinely ill. He was all the more ill because his mother refused to believe it. Then, in his rage, he wished to die in order to have his revenge. He did not suspect that his wish would be granted.

When the doctor had to let Grazia understand that her son was lost, she stood as if struck by lightning. She had nonetheless to conceal her despair, so as to deceive the child who had so often deceived her. He suspected it was serious this time; but he refused to believe it; and his eyes searched in his mother’s eyes for that reproach of lying which had enraged him when he was the one lying. The hour came when doubt was no longer possible. Then it was terrible for him and for those around him: he did not want to die…

When Grazia saw him at last asleep, she uttered no cry, she made no complaint; she astonished those around her by her silence; she no longer had strength enough left to suffer; she had only one desire: to fall asleep in turn. Yet she continued to perform all the acts of her life with the same outward calm. After a few weeks, her smile reappeared on her lips, more silent than before. No one suspected her distress. Christophe least of all. She had contented herself with writing him the news, saying nothing about herself. To Christophe’s letters, overflowing with anxious affection, she did not reply. He wanted to come: she begged him not to. After two or three months, she resumed with him the grave and serene tone she had maintained before. She would have judged it criminal to unburden herself onto him with the weight of her weakness. She knew how deeply the echo of all her feelings resonated in him, and how much he needed to lean on her. She was not imposing a painful constraint on herself. It was a discipline that saved her. In her weariness of life, only two things kept her living: her love for Christophe, and the fatalism which, in sorrow as in joy, formed the foundation of her Italian nature. This fatalism had nothing intellectual about it: it was the animal instinct that makes the exhausted beast walk on without feeling its fatigue, in a dream with fixed eyes, forgetting the stones of the road and its own body, until it falls. That fatalism sustained her body. Love sustained her heart. Now that her life was worn away, she lived in Christophe. Yet she avoided, with more care than ever, expressing in her letters the love she had for him. Doubtless because that love was greater. But also because she felt weighing upon it the veto of the little dead boy, who made a crime of that affection. So she fell silent; she compelled herself to write no more, for a time.

Christophe did not understand the reasons for these silences. Sometimes, in the even and tranquil tone of a letter, he caught unexpected accents in which a passionate voice seemed to tremble. He was shaken by them; but he dared say nothing; he scarcely dared remark on them; he was like a man holding his breath, afraid to breathe, lest the illusion should cease. He knew that, almost without fail, those accents would be redeemed in the next letter by a deliberate coldness… Then once more, calm… Mecresstille…

Georges and Emmanuel found themselves together at Christophe’s. It was an afternoon. Both were full of their personal troubles: Emmanuel with his literary disappointments, and Georges with a setback in a sporting competition. Christophe listened to them with good humor and teased them affectionately. The bell rang. Georges went to answer it. A servant was bringing a letter on Colette’s behalf. Christophe moved near the window to read it. His two friends had resumed their discussion; they could not see Christophe, who had his back to them. He left the room without their noticing. And when they did notice, they were not surprised. But as his absence went on, Georges knocked at the door of the other room. There was no answer. Georges did not insist, knowing the strange ways of his old friend. A few minutes later, Christophe came back. He looked very calm, very tired, very gentle. He apologized for having left them, resumed the conversation where he had broken it off, spoke to them of their troubles with kindness, and said things that did them good. The tone of his voice moved them, without their knowing why.

They took their leave. On leaving his place, Georges went to Colette’s. He found her in tears. The moment she saw him, she hurried over, asking:

--- And how did he bear the blow, the poor man? It’s dreadful!

Georges did not understand. And Colette told him that she had just sent word to Christophe of Grazia’s death.

She had gone, without having had time to say goodbye to anyone. For some months the roots of her life had been almost torn out; a single breath had been enough to fell her. The day before the relapse of influenza that carried her off, she had received a warm letter from Christophe. It had moved her deeply. She had wanted to call him to her side; she felt that all the rest --- all that separated them --- was false and culpable. Very tired, she put off writing to him until the next day. The next day, she had to stay in bed. She began a letter that she did not finish: she felt dizzy, her head was spinning; besides, she hesitated to speak of her illness, afraid of troubling Christophe. He was absorbed just then in rehearsals for a choral and symphonic work written to a poem by Emmanuel: the subject had moved them both deeply, for it was in some measure the symbol of their own destiny --- La Terre promise. Christophe had often spoken of it to Grazia. The premiere was to take place the following week… He must not be made anxious. In her letter, Grazia made only a passing mention of a simple cold. Then she felt that was already too much. She tore up the letter, and did not have the strength to begin another. She told herself she would write that evening. By evening it was too late. Too late to have him summoned. Too late even to write… How quickly things move! A few hours suffice to destroy what centuries were needed to form… Grazia had barely time to give her daughter the ring she wore on her finger, asking her to pass it on to her friend. She had not been, until then, very intimate with Aurora. Now, on the point of leaving, she gazed passionately at the face of the one who would remain; she clung to the hand that would transmit her embrace; and she thought with joy:

--- I am not leaving altogether.

“Quid? hic, inquam, quis est qui complet aures meas tantus et tam dulcis sonus!…”

(Dream of Scipio).

A surge of sympathy drew Georges back to Christophe after he had left Colette. He had known for some time, through Colette’s indiscretions, what place Grazia held in his old friend’s heart; and he had even --- (youth is hardly respectful) --- sometimes found it amusing. But in that moment he felt with a generous keenness the pain that such a loss must cause Christophe; and he needed to run to him, to embrace him, to offer his condolences. Knowing the violence of Christophe’s passions, the calm he had displayed a little while ago troubled him. He rang the bell. Nothing stirred. He rang again and knocked in the way agreed upon between himself and Christophe. He heard an armchair move, and slow, heavy footsteps approaching. Christophe opened the door. His face was so composed that Georges, who had been ready to throw himself into his arms, stopped short; he no longer knew what to say. Christophe asked gently:

--- Is it you, my boy. Did you forget something?

Georges, flustered, stammered:

--- Yes.

--- Come in.

Christophe went and sat back down in the armchair where he had been before Georges arrived; near the window, his head resting against the back, he was looking at the rooftops opposite and the evening sky glowing red. He paid no attention to Georges. The young man pretended to search on the table, while stealing a glance toward Christophe. His face was motionless; the reflections of the setting sun lit the upper part of his cheeks and a portion of his forehead. Georges, mechanically, passed into the adjoining room --- the bedroom --- as if to continue his search. It was there that Christophe had shut himself away earlier with the letter. It was still there, on the unmade bed, which bore the imprint of a body. On the floor, on the carpet, a book had slid off and lay open to a crumpled page. Georges picked it up and read, in the Gospel, the encounter between Madeleine and the Gardener.

He came back into the first room, moved a few objects here and there to compose himself, and looked again at Christophe, who had not stirred. He would have liked to tell him how much he pitied him. But Christophe was so luminous that Georges felt any word would have been out of place. It was he who would sooner have needed consolation. He said timidly:

--- I’m going.

Christophe, without turning his head, said:

--- Goodbye, my boy.

Georges left, and closed the door without a sound.

Christophe stayed like that for a long time. Night came. He felt no pain, he entertained no thoughts, he saw no distinct image. He was like a weary man who listens to a great, indistinct music without trying to understand it. It was late in the night when he rose, stiff and aching. He threw himself onto his bed and fell into a heavy sleep. The symphony went on murmuring…

And then he saw her, the beloved… She held out her hands to him, and smiled, saying:

--- Now you have passed through the region of fire.

Then his heart melted. An ineffable peace filled the starry spaces, where the music of the spheres spread its great still and deep sheets of sound…

When he woke (the day had returned), the strange happiness persisted, along with the distant glow of the words he had heard. He got out of bed. A silent and sacred enthusiasm lifted him.

… Or vedi, figlio, tra Beatrice e te è questo muro…

Between Béatrice and him, the wall had been crossed.

For a long time already, more than half of his soul had been on the other side. As one lives, as one creates, as one loves and loses those one loves, one escapes further from death. With each new blow that strikes us, with each new work we forge, we escape from ourselves, we save ourselves in the work we have created, in the soul we loved and that has left us. In the end, Rome is no longer in Rome; the best of oneself is outside oneself. Only Grazia still held him, on this side of the wall. And now, at her turn… Now the door was closed upon the world of pain.

He lived through a period of secret exaltation. He no longer felt the weight of any chain. He no longer expected anything from things. He no longer depended on anything. He was free. The struggle was over. Having left the zone of combat and the circle where reigned the God of heroic battles, Dominus Deus Sabaoth, he watched from below, as it faded into the night, the torch of the Burning Bush. How distant it already was! When it had lit his way, he had believed himself almost at the summit. And since then, what a distance he had covered! Yet the peak seemed no closer. He would never reach it, (he saw that now), even if he walked for an eternity. But when one has entered the circle of light and knows that one does not leave the beloved behind, eternity is not too long to travel it in their company.

He bolted his door. No one knocked. Georges had spent all his capacity for compassion in a single moment; once home and reassured, by the next day he had stopped thinking about it. Colette had gone to Rome. Emmanuel knew nothing; and, touchy as ever, he kept an offended silence because Christophe had not returned his visit. Christophe was not disturbed in the mute colloquy he held for days with the one he now carried within his soul, as a woman with child carries her dear burden. A moving exchange that no words could have expressed. Music could barely render it. When his heart was full, full to overflowing, Christophe would sit still, his eyes closed, and listen to it sing. Or for hours, seated at his piano, he would let his fingers speak. During this period, he improvised more than in all the rest of his life. He did not write down his thoughts. What would have been the point?

When, after several weeks, he began again to go out and see other people --- without anyone among his intimates, except Georges, suspecting what had happened --- the demon of improvisation persisted for a while longer. It would visit Christophe at the hours when it was least expected. One evening, at Colette’s, Christophe sat down at the piano and played for nearly an hour, giving himself over entirely, forgetting that the salon was full of indifferent people. They had no desire to laugh. These terrible improvisations subjugated and overwhelmed. Even those who understood nothing of their meaning felt their hearts constrict; and tears had come to Colette’s eyes… When Christophe had finished, he turned abruptly; he saw the emotion of those present, and, shrugging his shoulders --- he laughed.

He had arrived at the point where grief, too, is a force --- a force one masters. Grief no longer held him; he held grief; it could thrash and rattle at the bars: he kept it caged.

From this period date his most harrowing works, and also his most joyful: a scene from the Gospel, which Georges recognized:

« Mulier, quid ploras? » --- « Quia tulerunt Dominum meum, et nescio ubi posuerunt eum. »

Et cum haec dixisset, conversa est retrorsum, et vidit Jesum stantem: et non sciebat quia Jesus est.

--- a series of tragic lieder set to verses from popular Spanish cantares, among them a somber song, both amorous and funereal, like a black flame:

Quisiera ser el sepulcro Donde á ti te han de enterrar, Para tenerte en mis brazos Por toda la eternidad.

(« I would be the sepulcher where they must lay you to rest, so as to hold you in my arms for all eternity. »)

and two symphonies, entitled l’île des Calmes and le Songe de Scipion, in which more intimately than in any other of Jean-Christophe Krafft’s works is realized the union of the finest musical forces of his time: the thoughtful and learned mind of Germany with its shadowed depths, the passionate melody of Italy, and the lively spirit of France, rich in subtle rhythms and nuanced harmonies.

This “enthusiasm born of despair, in the moment of a great loss,” lasted one or two months. After that, Christophe resumed his place in life, with a robust heart and a steady step. The wind of death had blown away the last fogs of pessimism, the gray of the stoic soul, and the phantasmagoria of mystical chiaroscuro. The rainbow had shone upon the clouds as they dissolved. The sky’s gaze, purer, as if washed by tears, smiled through them. It was the quiet evening upon the mountains.

FOURTH PART

The fire smoldering in the forest of Europe was beginning to blaze. They could smother it here; further on, it rekindled; with whirls of smoke and a rain of sparks, it leapt from point to point and burned the dry undergrowth. In the East, skirmishing battles were already preludes to the great war of nations. All of Europe --- Europe still skeptical and apathetic only yesterday, like dead wood --- was the prey of fire. The desire for combat possessed every soul. At any moment war was on the verge of breaking out. They smothered it; it was born again. The most trivial pretext fed it. The world felt itself at the mercy of some chance event that would unleash the fray. It waited. Even the most peaceable felt the weight of inevitability. And ideologues, sheltering in the massive shadow of the cyclops Proudhon, celebrated in war the noblest title to human dignity…

Was it to this, then, that the physical and moral resurrection of the Western races was to lead! Was it to these slaughterhouses that the currents of action and passionate faith were hurling them! Only a Napoleonic genius could have fixed a foreseen and chosen goal to this blind charge. But there was no genius of action anywhere in Europe. One might have thought the world had, in order to govern itself, chosen its most mediocre men. The force of the human spirit was elsewhere. --- Then nothing remained but to surrender to the current that dragged one along. So did governors and governed alike. Europe presented the aspect of a vast vigil of arms.

Christophe recalled a similar vigil, at which he had beside him the anxious face of Olivier. But the threats of war, in those days, had been no more than a passing stormcloud. Now they cast their shadow over all of Europe. And Christophe’s heart, too, had changed. In these national hatreds he could no longer take a part. He found himself in the state of mind of Gœthe in 1813. How to fight without hatred? And how to hate without youth? The zone of hatred was now past. Of all these great rival peoples, which was the one he held least dear? He had learned to know the merits of each of them, and what the world owed to them all. When one has arrived at a certain height of the soul, “one no longer knows nations; one feels the happiness or misfortune of neighboring peoples as one’s own.” The stormclouds are at your feet. Around you there is nothing but sky --- “all the sky, which belongs to the eagle.”

Sometimes, however, Christophe was troubled by the hostility around him. He was made to feel too keenly, in Paris, that he was of the enemy race; even his dear Georges could not resist the pleasure of expressing, in front of him, opinions about Germany that saddened him. Then he would withdraw; he would take as a pretext the desire he had to see Grazia’s daughter again; he would go, for a time, to Rome. But he found no more serene atmosphere there. The great plague of nationalist pride had spread there too. It had transformed the Italian character. These people, whom Christophe had known as indifferent and indolent, now dreamed of nothing but military glory, battles, conquests, Roman eagles soaring over the sands of Libya; they believed themselves returned to the age of the Emperors. What was remarkable was that, in all good faith, the opposition parties --- socialists, clericals, no less than monarchists --- shared in this delirium, without in the least believing themselves unfaithful to their cause. Here one sees how little politics and human reason weigh when great epidemic passions blow over peoples. These passions do not even bother to suppress individual passions; they make use of them: everything converges on the same end. In periods of action, it was always so. The armies of Henri IV, the Councils of Louis XIV, which forged French greatness, counted as many men of reason and faith as of vanity, self-interest, and base epicureanism. Jansenists and libertines, Puritans and verts-galants, in serving their instincts, served the same destiny. In the wars to come, internationalists and pacifists will no doubt take up arms, convinced, like their forebears of the Convention, that it is for the good of peoples and the triumph of peace.

Christophe, smiling with a touch of irony, looked out from the terrace of the Janiculum over the disparate and harmonious city, symbol of the universe it once dominated: scorched ruins, “baroque” facades, modern buildings, cypresses and roses intertwined --- all centuries, all styles, fused into a strong and coherent unity beneath the intelligent light. So must the spirit radiate over the universe in struggle the order and the light that are within it.

Christophe spent little time in Rome. The impression the city made on him was too powerful: he was afraid of it. To truly profit from that harmony, he had to listen to it from a distance; he felt that to stay would be to risk being absorbed by it, as so many others of his race had been. --- From time to time, he made brief visits to Germany. But in the end, and despite the imminence of a Franco-German conflict, it was Paris that always drew him back. There was his Georges, his adopted son, of course. But affection alone did not account for the pull. Other reasons, of an intellectual order, were no less powerful. For an artist accustomed to the full life of the mind, one who mingles generously with all the passions of the great human family, it was difficult to readjust to living in Germany. Artists were not lacking there. What was lacking was air for the artists. They were cut off from the rest of the nation; it had no interest in them; other preoccupations, social or practical, absorbed the public mind. The poets shut themselves away, with irritated contempt, in their scorned art; they made it a point of pride to sever the last ties connecting it to the life of their people; they wrote only for the few: a small aristocracy, talented, refined, barren, itself divided into rival circles of insipid initiates, they suffocated in the narrow space where they were penned; unable to widen it, they persisted in deepening it; they turned the soil over and over until it was exhausted. Then they lost themselves in anarchic dreams, and did not even care to share those dreams with one another. Each one struggled in place, in the fog. No common light. Each expected light from no one but himself.

Over there, on the other side of the Rhine, among the neighbors to the west, the great winds of collective passion blew periodically through art, public storms sweeping through. And, dominating the plain, like the Eiffel Tower above Paris, there shone in the distance the never-extinguished beacon of a classical tradition, won through centuries of labor and glory, passed from hand to hand, which, without enslaving or constraining the spirit, showed it the road that the centuries had traveled, and united an entire people in its light. More than one German mind --- birds lost in the night --- came winging toward that distant lantern. But who in France suspects the force of sympathy that draws so many generous hearts of the neighboring nation toward France! So many loyal outstretched hands, bearing no responsibility for the crimes of politics!… And you do not see us either, brothers of Germany, we who say to you: “Here are our hands. Despite the lies and the hatreds, no one will separate us. We need you, you need us, for the greatness of our spirit and our peoples. We are the two wings of the West. Whoever breaks one, the flight of the other is broken. Let war come! It will not sever the clasp of our hands nor check the soaring of our kindred geniuses.”

So thought Christophe. He felt how deeply the two peoples complement one another, and how their spirit, their art, their action are crippled and lame when deprived of each other’s support. For him, a native of those Rhine countries where the two civilizations mingle in a single current, he had felt from childhood the instinct of their necessary union; throughout his life, the unconscious effort of his genius had been to maintain the balance and the steadiness of those two powerful wings. The richer he was in Germanic dreams, the more he needed the clarity of mind and Latin order. Hence why France was so dear to him. There he had the benefit of knowing himself better and of mastering himself. Only in France was he fully, entirely himself.

He had made his peace with the elements that sought to harm him. He assimilated foreign energies into his own. A vigorous mind, when in good health, absorbs all forces, even those that are hostile; and makes them his own flesh. There even comes a moment when one is more drawn to what least resembles oneself: for there one finds more abundant nourishment.

In fact, Christophe took more pleasure in the works of certain artists presented to him as rivals than in those of his imitators --- for he had imitators, who called themselves his disciples, to his profound despair. They were good fellows, full of veneration for him, industrious, estimable, possessed of every virtue. Christophe would have given a great deal to love their music; but --- (such was his luck!) --- there was no way: he found it worthless. He was a thousand times more captivated by the talent of musicians who were personally antipathetic to him and who represented in art tendencies opposed to his own… Well, what of it? These, at least, were alive! Life is, of itself, so great a virtue that whoever lacks it, however gifted in every other virtue, will never be entirely an honest man, for he is not entirely a man. Christophe used to say, half in jest, that he recognized as disciples only those who fought against him. And when a young artist came to speak to him of his musical vocation, and thought to win his sympathy by flattering him, he would ask:

--- So, my music satisfies you? This is the way you would express your love, or your hatred?

--- Yes, master.

--- Then be silent. You have nothing to say.

This horror of submissive minds, born to obey, this need to breathe in thoughts other than his own, drew him preferentially into circles whose ideas were diametrically opposed to his. He counted among his friends people for whom his art, his idealist faith, his moral convictions were a dead letter; they had different ways of regarding life, love, marriage, family, all social relations --- good people otherwise, but who seemed to belong to a different epoch in moral evolution; the anguish and the scruples that had consumed a portion of Christophe’s life would have been incomprehensible to them. So much the better for them, no doubt! Christophe had no desire to make them comprehend. He did not ask others to think as he did in order to fortify his own thought: of his thought, he was sure. He asked of them other thoughts to know, other souls to love. To love, to know, always more. To see and to learn to see. He had come, not only to admit in others ways of thinking that he had once combated, but to rejoice in them: for they seemed to him to contribute to the fecundity of the universe. He loved Georges all the more for not taking life tragically, as he did. Humanity would be too poor and too drab if it were uniformly clothed in the moral gravity, the heroic constraint, with which Christophe was armored. It had need of joy, of carelessness, of irreverent audacity toward idols --- all idols, even the holiest. Long live “the Gallic salt, which revives the earth”! Skepticism and faith are no less necessary one than the other. The skepticism that erodes yesterday’s faith goes on to prepare the ground for tomorrow’s… How everything grows clear for one who, stepping back from life as from a beautiful painting, sees the divided colors that clashed at close range dissolve into harmonious magic!

Christophe’s eyes had opened to the infinite variety of the material world, as of the moral world. This had been one of his chief conquests since the first journey to Italy. In Paris, he had formed close ties especially with painters and sculptors; he found that the best of French genius resided in them. The triumphant boldness with which they pursued and seized movement, vibrating color, tore away the veils that envelop life, made the heart leap with joy. Inexhaustible riches, for one who knows how to see, in a single drop of light, in a single second of life! What does the vain tumult of disputes and wars count beside these sovereign delights of the spirit?… But those very disputes and wars are part of the marvelous spectacle. One must embrace everything, and boldly, joyfully cast into the blazing crucible of our heart both the forces that negate and those that affirm, enemies and friends alike, all the metal of life. The end of all is the statue taking shape within us, the divine fruit of the spirit; and everything is good that helps render it more beautiful, even at the price of our own sacrifice. What does the one who creates matter? Only what is created is real… You do not touch us, enemies who seek to harm us. We are beyond your reach… You are biting an empty cloak. I have long since been elsewhere.

His musical creation had taken on more serene forms. No longer were they the storms of springtime that had once gathered, broken, and vanished suddenly. They were the white clouds of summer, mountains of snow and gold, great birds of light, hovering slowly and filling the sky… Creating. Harvests ripening, in the calm sun of August…

First, a vague and powerful torpor, the obscure joy of the full cluster of grapes, the swollen ear of grain, the pregnant woman brooding over her ripe fruit. The hum of an organ; the hive where the bees sing, deep within the basket… From this dark and golden music, like a beam of autumn honey, the rhythm that governs it gradually detaches itself; the round of the planets takes shape; it turns…

Then the will appears. It leaps onto the back of the whinnying dream as it passes, and grips it between its knees. The spirit recognizes the laws of the rhythm carrying it forward; it tames the unruly forces and fixes for them the path and the goal toward which it moves. The symphony of reason and instinct organizes itself. The darkness brightens. Along the long ribbon of road unfurling ahead, luminous centers mark themselves out at intervals --- centers that will become in the work being created the nuclei of small planetary worlds bound to the circuit of their solar system…

The great lines of the picture are now fixed. Now its face rises from the uncertain dawn. Everything grows precise: the harmony of colors and the outline of figures. To carry the work to its completion, all the resources of the being are called into service. The casket of memory is opened, and its perfumes exhale. The spirit unleashes the senses; it lets them run wild, and falls silent; but, crouching nearby, it watches them and selects its prey…

All is ready; the crew of workers executes, with the materials seized from the senses, the work conceived by the spirit. The great architect needs good workmen who know their trade and do not spare their strength. The cathedral is finished.

“And God contemplates His work. And He sees that it is not yet good.”

The master’s eye takes in the whole of his creation; and his hand perfects the harmony…

The dream is fulfilled. Te Deum…

The white clouds of summer, great birds of light, hover slowly; and the sky is covered with their outspread wings.

Yet it would be wrong to suppose that his life was reduced entirely to his art. A man of his kind cannot do without love; and not only that equal love which the artist’s spirit spreads over all that exists: no, he must prefer; he must give himself to chosen beings. These are the roots of the tree. Through them the whole blood of his heart is renewed.

The blood of Christophe was far from drying up. A love bathed him, forming the best part of his joy. A double love, for Grazia’s daughter and Olivier’s son. He united them in his thoughts. He was about to unite them in reality.

Georges and Aurora had met at Colette’s. Aurora lived in her cousin’s house. She spent part of the year in Rome, the rest of the time in Paris. She was eighteen years old; Georges was five years older. Tall, upright, elegant, with a small head and a wide face, blonde, with a tanned complexion, a faint shadow of down on her lip, bright eyes whose laughing gaze never exhausted itself with thinking, a slightly full chin, brown hands, beautiful rounded and sturdy arms, and a shapely figure, she had an air that was gay, physical, and proud. Not in the least intellectual, very little given to sentiment, she had inherited from her mother a nonchalant idleness. She slept heavily, eleven hours at a stretch. The rest of the time she drifted about, laughing, half awake. Christophe called her Dornröschen --- Sleeping Beauty. She reminded him of his little Sabine. She sang as she went to bed, she sang as she got up, she laughed for no reason, with a good childlike laugh, swallowing it back like a hiccup. No one could say how she spent her days. All of Colette’s efforts to adorn her with that artificial brilliance so easily applied to the minds of young women, like a coat of lacquer, had been wasted: the varnish would not hold. She learned nothing; she spent months reading a book she found very beautiful, without being able to remember, eight days later, either its title or its subject; she made spelling mistakes without concern and, when speaking of learned matters, committed errors that were downright comical. She was refreshing in her youth, her gaiety, her lack of intellectualism, even in her faults, in her giddiness that sometimes bordered on indifference, in her naïve egoism. So spontaneous, always. This simple and lazy little girl knew how to be coquettish at times, innocently so: she would cast her lines to young men, paint in the open air, play Chopin nocturnes, carry about books of poetry she did not read, engage in idealistic conversations, and wear hats that were no less so.

Christophe watched her and laughed to himself. He felt a paternal tenderness for Aurora, indulgent and teasing. And he also harbored a secret devotion, directed toward the woman he had once loved and who now reappeared, with a new youth, for a love other than his own. No one knew the depth of his affection. The only one who suspected it was Aurora. Since childhood, she had almost always seen Christophe near her; she thought of him as family. In the sorrows of her younger years, less loved than her brother, she instinctively drew closer to Christophe. She sensed in him a kindred pain; he saw her grief; and without confiding in each other, they shared it in silence. Later, she had discovered the feeling that bound her mother and Christophe; she felt herself party to the secret, though they had never drawn her into it. She understood the meaning of the message with which the dying Grazia had entrusted her, and of the ring that now rested on Christophe’s hand. Between them, then, there existed hidden bonds that she did not need to understand clearly in order to feel in all their complexity. She was genuinely attached to her old friend, though she had never been able to make the effort to play or read his works. A reasonably good musician nonetheless, she hadn’t even thought to cut the pages of a score that had been dedicated to her. She loved to come and talk with him informally. --- She came more often once she knew she might find Georges Jeannin there.

And Georges, for his part, had never before found so much interest in Christophe’s company.

Yet the two young people were slow to recognize their true feelings. They had first regarded each other with a mocking eye. They were not much alike. One was quicksilver, the other still water. But it was not long before the quicksilver took pains to appear calmer, and the still water stirred itself awake. Georges criticized Aurora’s dress, her Italian taste --- a slight lack of nuance, a certain preference for bold colors. Aurora liked to tease, she mimicked the way Georges spoke, hurried and a touch precious. And even while mocking each other, both took pleasure in it --- was it the mockery they enjoyed, or simply the having one another to talk about? They discussed each other with Christophe as well, who, far from contradicting them, mischievously passed the small barbs from one to the other. They affected indifference; but they discovered they were far too interested for that, on the contrary; and unable, especially Georges, to hide their pique, they fell, at the first opportunity, into sharp little skirmishes. The stings were light; they were afraid of causing real pain; and the hand that struck them was so dear that they took more pleasure in the blows received than in those they delivered. They watched each other with curious eyes, eyes that searched for the other’s faults and found in them instead something appealing. But neither would admit it. Each, alone with Christophe, protested that the other was unbearable. They made no less use of every occasion Christophe offered them to meet.

One day when Aurora was at her old friend’s and had just announced her visit for the following Sunday morning, --- Georges burst in, as was his habit, and told Christophe he would come on Sunday afternoon. Sunday morning, Christophe waited in vain for Aurora. At the hour Georges had named, she appeared, making excuses for having been prevented from coming earlier; she embroidered a whole little story around it. Christophe, who was amused by her innocent cunning, said to her: --- What a pity. You would have found Georges; he came, we had lunch together; he couldn’t stay this afternoon.

Aurora, crestfallen, was no longer listening to what Christophe said. He went on talking, in good spirits. She answered distractedly; she was not far from resenting him. The doorbell rang. It was Georges. Aurora started. Christophe looked at her, laughing. She understood that he had been playing a trick on her; she laughed and blushed. He wagged a finger at her, with a sly look. Suddenly, with an impulsive rush, she ran to embrace him. He whispered in her ear:

--- Biricchina, ladroncella, furbetta…

And she put her hand over his mouth to make him stop.

Georges understood nothing of this laughter and these embraces. His bewildered expression, and even the slight vexation it showed, only added to the delight of the other two.

Thus Christophe worked to bring the two young people together. And when he had succeeded, he almost reproached himself for it. He loved them both equally: but he judged Georges more severely; he knew his weaknesses, he idealized Aurora; he felt himself more responsible for her happiness than for Georges’s, because it seemed to him that Georges was in some sense his son, was in some sense himself. And he wondered whether he had not been at fault in giving the innocent Aurora a companion who was anything but innocent.

But one day, passing near an arbor where the two young people were sitting --- (it was very shortly after their engagement) --- he heard, with a pang, Aurora laughingly questioning Georges about one of his past adventures, and Georges telling the story without any need to be pressed. Other scraps of conversation, which they made no effort to conceal, showed him that Aurora found herself far more at ease than he was with Georges’s moral outlook. While they were very much in love with each other, one felt that neither regarded themselves as bound forever; they brought to questions of love and marriage a spirit of freedom that doubtless had its beauty, but which cut sharply against the old ethos of mutual devotion usque ad mortem. And Christophe watched with a touch of melancholy… How far they already were from him! How quickly the boat carries our children away!… Patience! One day will come when we will all meet again in port.

In the meantime, the boat was little concerned with which course to follow; it drifted with every wind of the day. --- This spirit of freedom, which was tending to reshape the customs of the time, would have seemed natural if it had also established itself in other domains of thought and action. But nothing of the sort: human nature cares little for consistency. At the very moment when morals were becoming freer, the intellect was becoming less so; it was asking religion to put the bridle back on. And this double movement in opposing directions was taking place, with a magnificent illogic, within the same souls. Georges and Aurora had been swept along by the new Catholic current that was in the process of winning over a portion of fashionable society and the intelligentsia. Nothing was more curious than the way Georges --- a born rebel, impious as naturally as breathing, without ever giving it a second thought, who had never cared a fig for God or the devil --- a true little Gaul who mocks at everything --- had abruptly declared that the truth was to be found there. He needed one; and this one accorded with his need for action, his atavism as a French bourgeois, and his weariness with freedom. The young colt had roamed long enough; he came back, of his own accord, to let himself be harnessed to the plow of his race. The example of a few friends had been enough. Georges, ultra-sensitive to the slightest atmospheric pressures of the surrounding thought, was among the first to be caught. And Aurora followed him, as she would have followed him anywhere. At once, they became certain of themselves and contemptuous of those who did not think as they did. O irony! These two frivolous young people were sincerely devout, while the moral purity, the seriousness, the ardent striving of Grazia and Olivier had never been enough to win them the same faith, despite all their desire for it.

Christophe observed this evolution of souls with curiosity. He made no effort to resist it, as Emmanuel would have wished --- Emmanuel, whose free idealism chafed at this return of the old enemy. One does not fight against a passing wind. One waits for it to pass. Human reason was exhausted. It had just made a gigantic effort. It was yielding to sleep; and, like a child worn out by a long day, before dropping off, it said its prayers. The gates of dreams had swung open again: following upon religion, theosophical, mystical, esoteric, and occultist breezes were drifting through the Western mind. Even philosophy was wavering. Their gods of thought --- Bergson, William James --- were unsteady on their feet. Even in science, signs of reason’s fatigue were making themselves felt. A moment to get through. Let them breathe. Tomorrow the spirit will wake again, more alert and more free… Sleep is good, when one has worked well. Christophe, who had scarcely had time to yield to it himself, was glad, for his children, that they should enjoy it in his place, that they should have the rest of the soul, the security of the law, the absolute, unshakeable confidence in their dreams. He would not have wished, nor could he, to trade places with them. But he told himself that the melancholy of Grazia and the restlessness of Olivier found their peace in their son and daughter, and that this was as it should be.

--- “All that we have suffered, I and my friends and so many others I never knew who lived before us --- all of it was so that these two children might reach joy… That joy, Antoinette, for which you were made, and which was denied you!… Ah, if only the wretched could taste in advance the happiness that will one day flow from their sacrificed lives!”

Why should he seek to argue with this happiness? One must not insist that others be happy in our way, but in their own. At most, he gently asked Georges and Aurora not to feel too much contempt for those who, like himself, did not share their faith.

They did not even take the trouble to argue with him. They seemed to be saying to themselves:

--- He cannot understand…

He belonged, for them, to the past. And, to conceal nothing, they did not attach enormous importance to the past. Between themselves, they would sometimes innocently discuss what they would do later on, when Christophe was “no longer there”… --- Yet they were fond of him… Those terrible young people who push up around you like vines! That force of nature, hurrying, driving you out…

--- “Be off! Be off! Out of the way! My turn now!…”

Christophe, hearing their silent language, felt like saying to them:

--- Don’t be in such a hurry! I am quite comfortable here. Look at me a little longer as someone who is still alive.

He was amused by their naive impertinence.

--- Just say it outright, he said one day, good-naturedly, when they had overwhelmed him with their air of disdain --- just say outright that I’m an old fool.

--- But no, my dear old friend, said Aurora, laughing with her whole heart. You are the best of men; but there are things you do not know.

--- And that you know, little one? What great wisdom!

--- Don’t laugh at me. I don’t know very much. But he, Georges --- he knows.

Christophe smiled:

--- Yes, you’re right, little one. He always knows, the one we love.

What was far more difficult for him than submitting to their intellectual superiority was enduring their music. They put his patience to a severe test. The piano never rested when they came to his house. It seemed that, like birds, love had wakened their song. But they were nothing like as skilled at singing. Aurora had no illusions about her own talent. It was not the same when it came to her fiancé’s; she saw no difference between Georges’s playing and Christophe’s. She may even have preferred Georges’s way of playing. And he, for all his ironic sharpness, was not far from letting himself be won over by his beloved’s faith. Christophe did not contradict them; mischievously, he went along with what the young woman said, (except when he happened to leave the room in exasperation, slamming the doors a little hard behind him.) He listened, with an affectionate and pitying smile, to Georges playing Tristan at the piano. The poor little fellow brought to those tremendous pages a diligent conscientiousness, the agreeable gentleness of a well-meaning young girl full of good feelings. Christophe laughed to himself. He did not want to tell the young man why he was laughing. He embraced him. He loved him just the same, like that. Perhaps he loved him even more this way… Poor little one!… the vanity of art!…

He often talked about “his children” --- (as he called them) --- with Emmanuel. Emmanuel, who was fond of Georges, said jokingly that Christophe should have let him have the boy --- he already had Aurora: it wasn’t fair, he was monopolizing everything.

Their friendship had become almost legendary in Parisian circles, though they lived apart from them. Emmanuel had developed a passion for Christophe. He did not want to show it, out of pride; he hid it behind brusque manners; he was sometimes rough with him. But Christophe was not deceived. He knew how devoted that heart had now become to him, and he knew its worth. They did not let a week pass without seeing each other two or three times. When their poor health kept them from going out, they wrote. Letters that seemed to come from distant regions. External events interested them less than certain advances of the spirit in science and art. They lived in thought, meditating on their art, or discerning, beneath the chaos of events, the small unnoticed gleam that marks a moment in the history of the human mind.

Most often, Christophe came to Emmanuel’s. Although, since a recent illness, he was not much healthier than his friend, they had fallen into the habit of treating Emmanuel’s health as the one more deserving of consideration. Christophe no longer climbed Emmanuel’s six flights without effort; and when he arrived, he needed a good while to catch his breath again. They were equally poor at taking care of themselves. In spite of their ailing lungs and their bouts of breathlessness, they were inveterate smokers. This was one reason why Christophe preferred their meetings to take place at Emmanuel’s rather than at his own: because Aurora waged war on his smoking habit, and he hid it from her. It sometimes happened that both friends were seized by fits of coughing in the middle of their conversation; they would have to stop and look at each other, laughing like guilty schoolboys; and sometimes one of them would lecture the other on his coughing; but when the breath returned, the other would protest energetically that the smoke had nothing to do with it.

On Emmanuel’s table, in a clear space amid his papers, a grey cat lay stretched out, watching the two smokers gravely, with an air of reproach. Christophe said it was their living conscience; to stifle it, he would put his hat over it. It was a scraggly cat, of the most common sort, which Emmanuel had picked up in the street, half stunned; it had never quite recovered from the rough treatment, ate little, barely played, made no noise at all; very gentle, it followed its master with intelligent eyes, unhappy when he was away, content to lie on the table near him, allowing nothing to draw it from its meditation but the hours-long ecstatic contemplation of the cage where inaccessible birds fluttered; it purred politely at the slightest sign of attention, submitted patiently to Emmanuel’s capricious petting and Christophe’s somewhat rougher handling, and always took care never to scratch or bite. It was delicate, one of its eyes wept; it had a little cough; had it been able to speak, it certainly would not have had the effrontery to maintain, as the two friends did, “that the smoke had nothing to do with it”; but from them, it accepted everything; it had the air of thinking:

--- They are men; they know not what they do.

Emmanuel had grown attached to it because he found an analogy between the lot of this ailing creature and his own. Christophe insisted that the resemblance extended even to the expression of its gaze.

--- Why not? said Emmanuel.

Animals reflect their surroundings. Their physiognomy refines itself according to the masters they live with. The cat of a fool has not the same look as the cat of a man of wit. A domestic animal can become good or wicked, frank or sly, subtle or dull, not only through the lessons its master gives it, but through what its master is. There is not even any need for human influence. Places shape animals in their own image. An intelligent landscape illuminates the eyes of animals. --- Emmanuel’s grey cat was in harmony with the cramped garret and the infirm master, lit by the Parisian sky.

Emmanuel had grown more human. He was no longer the same man as in the early days of his acquaintance with Christophe. A domestic tragedy had shaken him profoundly. His companion, to whom he had made too plainly clear, in a moment of exasperation, the weariness caused him by the weight of her affection, had suddenly disappeared. He had searched for her all night, torn with anxiety. He had at last found her at a police station, where she had been held. She had tried to throw herself into the Seine; a passer-by had caught her by her clothes at the moment she was climbing over the parapet of a bridge; she had refused to give her address or name; she wanted to try again. The sight of that grief had overwhelmed Emmanuel; he could not bear the thought that, after having suffered at others’ hands, he was now himself causing suffering. He had brought the desperate woman home, had set himself to bind up the wound he had opened, to restore to the demanding friend her trust in the affection she sought. He had silenced his own rebellions, resigned himself to that consuming love, devoted to it what remained of his life. All the sap of his genius had flowed back into his heart. This apostle of action had come to believe that there was only one action worth doing: to do no harm. His role was finished. It seemed that the Force which raises the great tides of humanity had used him only as an instrument, to unleash action. Once that charge was accomplished, he was nothing more: the action went on without him. He watched it go on, fairly resigned to the injustices that touched him personally, not quite so resigned to those that concerned his faith. For although, as a freethinker, he claimed to be liberated from all religion and jokingly called Christophe a disguised cleric, he had his altar, like every powerful mind that deifies the dreams to which it sacrifices itself. The altar was deserted now; and Emmanuel suffered for it. How could one see without pain the sacred ideas that had cost such effort to bring to victory---ideas for which the best men, for a century, had endured such torment---now trampled underfoot by those who came after! All that magnificent heritage of French idealism---that faith in Liberty which had its saints, its martyrs, its heroes, that love of humanity, that religious aspiration toward the brotherhood of nations and races---with what blind brutality these young men were sacking it! What madness had seized them, to mourn for the monsters we had vanquished, to place themselves again beneath the yoke we had broken, to call loudly for the reign of Force, and to rekindle hatred, the madness of war, in the heart of my France!

--- It is not only in France, it is throughout the whole world, said Christophe, with a laughing air. From Spain to China, the same squall blows. Not a corner left where one can shelter from the wind! Look, it grows comical: even my Switzerland has turned nationalist!

--- You find that consoling?

--- Certainly. One sees thereby that such currents are not due to the ridiculous passions of a few men, but to a hidden God who guides the universe. And before that God, I have learned to bow. If I do not understand him, it is my fault, not his. Try to understand him. But which of you troubles himself to do so? You live from day to day, you see no farther than the next milestone, and you imagine it marks the end of the road; you see the wave that carries you, and you do not see the sea! The wave of today is the wave of yesterday---it is the tide of our souls that opened the way before it. The wave of today will furrow the path of tomorrow’s wave, which will make it forgotten, as ours is forgotten. I neither admire nor fear the nationalism of the present hour. It flows away with the hour; it passes, it has passed. It is one rung on the ladder. Climb to the summit! It is the quartermaster-sergeant of the army yet to come. Already listen to its fifes and drums!…

(Christophe beat a tattoo on the table, at which the cat, startled awake, gave a leap.)

…Every people today feels the imperious need to gather its forces and take stock of them. The reason is that for a century, peoples have been transformed by their mutual penetration and by the immense contribution of all the intelligences of the universe, building a new morality, a new science, a new faith. Each must make its examination of conscience and know exactly who it is and what it possesses, before entering, with the others, into the new century. A new age is coming. Humanity is about to sign a new lease with life. Society will live again under new laws. Tomorrow is Sunday. Each one settles the accounts of the week, each one scrubs his dwelling and wants his house clean, before uniting with the others before the common God, and concluding with him the new covenant.

Emmanuel looked at Christophe; and his eyes reflected the vision that was passing. He was silent for some time after the other had spoken; then he said:

--- You are happy, Christophe! You do not see the night.

--- I see in the night, said Christophe. I have lived in it long enough. I am an old owl.

Around this time, his friends noticed a change in his manner. He was often distracted, as though absent. He did not listen carefully to what was said to him. He had an absorbed and smiling look. When his distraction was pointed out to him, he apologized affectionately. He would sometimes speak of himself in the third person:

--- Krafft will do that for you…

or…

--- Christophe will have a good laugh…

Those who did not know him said:

--- What self-conceit!

And it was quite the opposite. He saw himself from outside, as a stranger. He had reached the hour when one loses interest even in the struggle for beauty, because, having accomplished one’s task, one tends to believe that others will accomplish theirs and that in the end, as Rodin said, “the beautiful will always triumph.” The spitefulness of people and their injustices no longer revolted him. --- He said to himself, laughing, that this was not natural, that life was withdrawing from him.

In fact, he no longer had his former vigor. The slightest physical effort, a long walk, a quick run, tired him. He was winded almost at once; his heart ached. He sometimes thought of his old friend Schulz. He said nothing to others about what he felt. What would be the point? One can only worry them, and one does not get well. Besides, he did not take these ailments seriously. Far more than being ill, he feared being made to take care of himself.

By a secret premonition, he was seized with a desire to see his homeland once more. It was a plan he had been putting off year after year. He said to himself: next year… This time he put it off no longer.

He left in secret, without telling anyone. The journey was brief. Christophe found nothing of what he had come to seek. The transformations that had announced themselves on his last visit were now complete: the little town had become a large industrial city. The old houses had disappeared. Gone, the cemetery. In the place of Sabine’s farmstead, a factory raised its tall chimneys. The river had finished eating away the meadows where Christophe had played as a child. A street --- what a street! --- between hideous buildings, bore his name. Everything was dead from the past, even death itself… So be it! Life went on; perhaps other little Christophes were dreaming, suffering, struggling, in the hovels of that street adorned with his name. --- At a concert in the gigantic Tonhalle, he heard one of his works performed in a spirit contrary to his intention; he barely recognized it… So be it! Misunderstood, it might perhaps stir new energies. We have sown the grain. Do with it as you will; nourish yourselves on us. --- Christophe, walking at dusk through the fields around the town, over which great fogs were floating, thought of the great fogs that would soon envelop his life too, of the beloved beings who had vanished from the earth, sheltered now within his heart, whom the falling night would cover, as it covered him… So be it! So be it! I do not fear you, O night, brooder of suns! For every star that goes out, thousands of others are lit. Like a bowl of boiling milk, the abyss of space brims over with light. You will not extinguish me. The breath of death will make my life blaze up again.

On his way back from Germany, Christophe decided to stop in the town where he had known Anna. Since leaving her, he had heard nothing more. He would not have dared to ask after her. For years, the mere name made him tremble… --- Now he was calm, he feared nothing anymore. But that evening, in his hotel room overlooking the Rhine, the familiar song of the bells ringing for the next day’s feast brought back the images of the past. From the river rose toward him the scent of a distant danger he found hard to comprehend. He spent the whole night turning it over in his mind. He felt liberated from the formidable Master; and it was a sorrowful sweetness. He had not decided what he would do the next day. For a moment he had the idea---the past was so remote!---of paying a visit to the Brauns. But the next day, courage failed him; he did not even venture to ask at the hotel whether the doctor and his wife were still alive. He decided to leave…

At the hour of departure, an irresistible force drew him to the church where Anna used to go; he placed himself behind a pillar, from which he could see the pew where she used to come and kneel. He waited, certain that if she lived, she would still come there.

A woman came, indeed; and he did not recognize her. She resembled any other: stout, full-faced, with a heavy chin, her expression indifferent and hard. Dressed in black. She sat in her pew and remained motionless. She seemed neither to pray nor to listen; she looked straight ahead. Nothing in this woman recalled the one Christophe was waiting for. Once or twice only, a slightly compulsive gesture, as though smoothing the folds of her dress over her knees. Formerly, she had had that gesture… On the way out, she passed close to him, slowly, head erect, her hands with her book crossed above her waist. For a moment, the light of her dark and listless eyes rested upon Christophe’s eyes. And they looked at each other. And they did not recognize each other. She passed, upright and stiff, without turning her head. It was only a moment later that he suddenly recognized her, in a flash of memory, beneath the frozen smile, at a certain fold of the lips, the mouth he had kissed… His breath failed him, and his knees buckled. He thought:

--- Lord, is that the body in which she once dwelt whom I loved? Where is she? Where is she? And where am I myself? Where is the one who loved her? What remains of us and of the cruel love that devoured us? --- The ashes. Where is the fire?

And his God answered him:

--- In me.

Then he raised his eyes, and for the last time he caught a glimpse of her --- in the midst of the crowd --- going out through the door, into the sunlight.

It was shortly after his return to Paris that he made peace with his old enemy Lévy-Cœur. The latter had long attacked him with as much malicious talent as bad faith. Then, having reached the summit of success, sated with honors, replete and pacified, he had had the wit to recognize secretly Christophe’s superiority; and he had made overtures. Attacks and overtures alike, Christophe pretended to notice nothing. Lévy-Cœur had grown weary. They lived in the same neighborhood and met often. They gave no sign of knowing each other. Christophe would let his gaze fall on Lévy-Cœur in passing, as though he did not see him. This quiet way of denying his existence exasperated Lévy-Cœur.

He had a daughter of eighteen or twenty, pretty, fine-featured, elegant, with the profile of a little sheep, a halo of softly curling blond hair, gentle coquettish eyes, and a smile like something from Luini. They walked together; Christophe would cross their path in the allées of the Luxembourg: they seemed very close; the young girl leaned pleasantly on her father’s arm. Christophe, who, for all his distractedness, still noticed a pretty face, had a weakness for this one. He thought of Lévy-Cœur:

--- The man has all the luck!

But he would add proudly:

--- I have a daughter too.

And he compared them. This comparison, in which his partiality gave every advantage to Aurora, had ended by creating in his mind a kind of imaginary friendship between the two young women who had never met---and even, without his realizing it, by drawing him closer to Lévy-Cœur. Returning from Germany, he learned that “the little sheep” had died. His paternal selfishness thought at once:

--- What if it had been mine who was struck!

And he was seized by an immense pity for Lévy-Cœur. At first, he wanted to write to him; he began two letters; he was not satisfied, he felt a shameful hesitation: he did not send them. But a few days later, encountering Lévy-Cœur again---his face ravaged---it was stronger than he was: he went straight to the man, held out both hands. Lévy-Cœur, without pausing to think either, seized them. Christophe said:

--- You have lost her!…

His tone of emotion pierced Lévy-Cœur to the quick. He felt an inexpressible gratitude… They exchanged painful and confused words. When they parted afterward, nothing remained of what had divided them. They had fought each other: that was inevitable, no doubt; let each man fulfill the law of his own nature! But when one sees the end of the tragi-comedy approaching, one sets down the passions that had masked one, and finds oneself face to face---two men who are not worth much more than each other, and who have every right, after playing their parts as best they could, to shake hands.

The wedding of Georges and Aurora had been set for the first days of spring. Christophe’s health was declining rapidly. He had noticed that his children watched him with an anxious air. Once, he overheard them talking in low voices. Georges was saying:

--- How poorly he looks! He’s quite capable of falling ill now.

And Aurora replied:

--- As long as he doesn’t go and delay our wedding!

He had taken the point. Poor children! Of course he would not go and disturb their happiness!

But he was clumsy enough, on the day before the eve of the wedding---he had been absurdly agitated in those last days; one would have thought it was he who was getting married---he was foolish enough to let his old illness take hold of him again, a return of the old pneumonia whose first attack went back to the time of the Foire sur la Place. He was indignant with himself. He called himself an idiot. He swore he would not give in until the marriage was done. He thought of Grazia dying, who had not wanted to warn him of her illness on the eve of a concert, so that he would not be distracted from his work and his pleasure. The thought pleased him---of doing now for his daughter, for her, what she had done for him. He concealed his illness; but he had difficulty holding out to the end. Yet the happiness of the two children made him so happy that he managed to sustain, without faltering, the long ordeal of the religious ceremony. Barely returned to the house, to Colette’s, his strength betrayed him; he just had time to shut himself in a room, and he fainted. A servant found him there. Christophe, coming to, forbade any mention of it to the newlyweds, who were leaving that evening on their journey. They were too absorbed in each other to notice anything else. They left him cheerfully, promising to write tomorrow, the day after tomorrow…

As soon as they had gone, Christophe took to his bed. Fever came upon him, and did not leave. He was alone. Emmanuel, also ill, could not come. Christophe saw no doctor. He did not consider his condition alarming. Besides, he had no servant to fetch a doctor. The charwoman, who came for two hours each morning, took no interest in him; and he contrived to do without her services. He had asked her ten times, when she cleaned the room, not to touch his papers. She was obstinate; she decided the moment had come to have her way, now that he was pinned to his pillow. In the wardrobe mirror he could see from his bed that she was upending everything in the next room. He was so furious---no, decidedly, the old man was not dead in him---that he leaped from his bedclothes to snatch a bundle of papers from her hands and show her the door. His anger earned him a good bout of fever and the departure of the servant who, offended, never returned, not even troubling to notify “that old madman,” as she called him. So he remained, ill, with no one to wait on him. He got up in the morning to take the pot of milk left at his door, and to see whether the concierge had slipped under the threshold the promised letter from the lovers. The letter did not come; they forgot him in their happiness. He bore them no ill will; he told himself that in their place he would have done the same. He thought of their carefree joy, and of how it was he who had given it to them.

He was a little better and beginning to get up, when Aurora’s letter finally arrived. Georges had contented himself with adding his signature. Aurora asked little about Christophe, told him little news; but in return, she charged him with an errand: she begged him to send her a collar that she had left at Colette’s. Though this was hardly important---Aurora had only thought of it at the moment of writing to Christophe, when she was searching for something she might tell him---Christophe, delighted to be useful for something, went out to fetch the object. A spell of April showers. Winter was making an offensive return. Sleet, icy wind. No carriages. Christophe waited in a shipping office. The rudeness of the clerks and their deliberate slowness threw him into a state of irritation that did not advance his business. His sickly condition was partly the cause of these fits of anger, which the calm of his mind disowned; they shook his body as, under the axe, the last shuddering of an oak about to fall. He came back chilled through. The concierge, as he passed, handed him a clipping from a review. He cast his eyes over it. It was a wretched article, an attack against him. They were rare now. There is no pleasure in attacking someone who does not notice your blows. Even the most relentless were being won over, much as it annoyed them, by an esteem they found irritating.

« One believes, Bismarck admitted, as if reluctantly, that nothing is more involuntary than love. Esteem is far more so… »

But the author of the article was one of those strong men who, better armed than Bismarck, escape the assaults of both esteem and love. He spoke of Christophe in outrageous terms, and announced, for the following fortnight, a continuation of his attacks. Christophe began to laugh, and said, as he lay back down:

--- He will be well caught out! He won’t find me at home anymore.

People wanted him to take on a nurse; he refused obstinately. He said he had lived alone long enough, that it was the least he could do to reap the benefit of his solitude in such a moment.

He was not bored. In those last years, he was constantly occupied with dialogues with himself: it was as if his soul were doubled; and for several months, his inner company had greatly multiplied: no longer two souls, but ten dwelling in him. They conversed with each other; more often, they sang. He took part in the conversation, or fell silent to listen to them. He always kept on his bed, on his table, within reach, music paper on which he noted their remarks and his own, laughing at the exchanges. A mechanical habit; the two acts---thinking and writing---had become almost simultaneous; for him, writing was thinking in full clarity. Everything that distracted him from the company of his souls tired him, irritated him. Even, at certain moments, the friends he loved most. He made an effort not to show it too much; but this constraint left him in extreme weariness. He was altogether glad to find himself alone again afterward: for he had lost himself; it was impossible to hear the interior voices amid the babbling of human beings. Divine silence!…

He allowed only the concierge, or one of her children, to come two or three times a day to see what he needed. He also gave them the notes which, until the very last day, he continued to exchange with Emmanuel. The two friends were almost as ill as each other; they harbored no illusions. By different paths, Christophe’s free religious genius and Emmanuel’s free genius without religion had arrived at the same fraternal serenity. In their trembling handwriting, which they had more and more difficulty reading, they spoke not of their illness, but of what had always been the subject of their conversations---their art, the future of their ideas.

Until the day when, with his failing hand, Christophe wrote the words of the King of Sweden, dying in battle:

« Ich habe genug, Bruder; rette dich »!

Like a succession of floors, he surveyed the whole of his life: the immense effort of his youth to take possession of himself, the fierce struggles to win from others the simple right to live, to conquer himself from the demons of his race. Even after victory, the obligation to watch, without respite, over his conquest, in order to defend it against victory itself. The sweetness and the trials of friendship, which reopened to a heart isolated by struggle the great human family. The fullness of art, the zenith of life. Reigning proudly over his conquered spirit. Believing himself master of his destiny. And suddenly, encountering at the turn of the road the horsemen of the Apocalypse---Grief, Passion, Shame---the vanguard of the Master. Thrown down, trampled by the hooves of horses, dragging himself all bleeding to the summits where, amid the clouds, the wild purifying fire blazes. Finding himself face to face with God. Wrestling together, as Jacob with the angel. Coming out of the struggle, broken. Adoring his defeat, understanding his limits, striving to fulfill the will of the Master in the domain assigned to him. So that, when the plowing, the sowing, the harvest---when the hard and beautiful labor was finished---he would have earned the right to rest at the foot of the sunlit mountains and to say to them:

« Blessed be you! I shall not taste your light. But your shadow is sweet to me… »

Then the beloved had appeared to him; she had taken him by the hand; and death, in breaking down the barriers of his body, had, into the soul of the friend, poured the pure soul of the beloved. Together, they had stepped out of the shadow of the days, and they had reached the blessed summits where, like the three Graces in a noble round, the past, the present, the future hold one another by the hand, where the appeased heart watches all at once the birth, the flowering, and the ending of sorrows and joys, where all is Harmony…

He was too hasty; he believed himself already arrived. And the vice that gripped his heaving chest, and the tumultuous delirium of images that struck his burning head, reminded him that the last stage remained---the hardest of all to travel… Forward!…

He was pinned to his bed, motionless. On the floor above, a silly little woman played the piano for hours on end. She knew only one piece; she repeated the same phrases tirelessly; she took such pleasure in it! They were for her a joy and an emotion of every color and every shape. And Christophe understood her happiness; but it grated on him to the point of tears. If only she had not pounded so hard! Noise was as odious to Christophe as vice… He ended by resigning himself. It was hard to learn no longer to hear. Yet there was less pain in it than he would have thought. He was withdrawing from his body. That sick and coarse body. What an indignity to have been locked inside it for so many years! He watched it wearing out, and he thought:

--- It hasn’t much longer.

He asked himself, to take the pulse of his human egoism:

--- « What would you prefer? That the memory of Christophe, of his person and his name, should be eternal, and his work disappear? Or that his work should endure and that no trace remain of your person and your name? »

Without hesitation, he answered:

--- « Let me disappear, and let my work endure! I gain doubly by it: for nothing will remain of me but what is most true---the only true thing. Perish Christophe!… »

But, a little while later, he felt that he was becoming as foreign to his work as to himself. The childish illusion of believing in the lasting power of one’s art! He had a clear vision not only of how little he had done, but of the destruction that lies in wait for all modern music. Faster than any other, the musical language burns itself out; after a century or two, it is understood only by a handful of initiates. For whom do Monteverdi and Lully still exist? Already the moss gnaws at the oaks of the classical forest. Our sonorous constructions, where our passions sing, will be empty temples, crumbling into oblivion. … And Christophe was astonished to contemplate these ruins and feel no distress from them.

--- Do I love life less? he asked himself, astonished.

But he understood at once that he loved it far more… Weep over the ruins of art? They are not worth the trouble. Art is the shadow of man, cast upon nature. Let them vanish together, drunk up by the sun! They keep me from seeing it… The immense treasure of nature slips through our fingers. Human intelligence tries to catch the flowing water in the meshes of a net. Our music is illusion. Our scale of sounds, our gamuts are invention. They correspond to no living sound. They are a compromise of the mind between real sounds, an application of the metric system to the moving infinite. The mind needed this lie in order to comprehend the incomprehensible; and, since it wished to believe in it, it believed. But it is not true. It is not alive. And the pleasure that the mind derives from this order it has created has been purchased only by distorting the direct intuition of what is. From time to time, a genius, in fleeting contact with the earth, suddenly catches sight of the torrent of the real, which overflows the frameworks of art. The dikes crack for a moment. Nature forces its way in through a fissure. But immediately afterward, the crack is sealed. This is necessary for the preservation of human reason. It would perish if its eyes were to meet the eyes of Jehovah. And so it begins again to cement its cell, into which nothing enters from outside that it has not itself elaborated. And perhaps that is beautiful, for those who do not wish to see… But I want to see your face, Jehovah! I want to hear the thunder of your voice, though it should annihilate me. The noise of art disturbs me. Let the mind be still! Silence to man!…

But a few minutes after this fine speech, he groped among the sheets of paper scattered across the bedclothes and tried once more to write a few notes on one of them. When he noticed his own contradiction, he smiled and said:

--- O my old companion, my music, you are better than I am. I am ungrateful --- I dismiss you. But you do not leave me; you refuse to be put off by my moods. Forgive me; you know well these are mere fits of temper. I have never betrayed you, you have never betrayed me --- we are sure of one another. We will go together, my friend. Stay with me until the end.

Bleib bei uns…

He had just awakened from a long torpor heavy with fever and dreams. Strange dreams, with which he was still saturated. And now he looked at himself, touched himself, searched for himself, and could no longer find himself. It seemed to him that he was “another.” Another, dearer than himself… But who?… It seemed to him that in the dream, another had become incarnate in him. Olivier? Grazia?… His heart, his head were so weak! He could no longer distinguish between his beloved ones. What was the use of distinguishing? He loved them all equally.

He lay there motionless, bound in a kind of oppressive beatitude. He had no wish to stir. He knew that pain, lying in ambush, was watching him as a cat watches a mouse. He played dead. Already… No one in the room. Above his head, the piano had fallen silent. Solitude. Silence. Christophe sighed.

--- “How good it is to say to oneself, at the end of one’s life, that one has never been alone, even when one was most alone!… Souls I have met on my road, brothers who gave me your hand for a moment, mysterious spirits born of my thought, the dead and the living --- all living --- O all that I have loved, all that I have created! You surround me with your warm embrace, you watch over me, I hear the music of your voices. Blessed be the destiny that gave you to me as a gift! I am rich, I am rich… My heart is full!…

He was looking at the window… One of those beautiful sunless days which, as old Balzac used to say, resemble a beautiful blind woman… Christophe lost himself in passionate contemplation of a tree branch passing before the panes. The branch was swelling, the damp buds bursting open, the little white flowers unfolding; and there was in those flowers, in those leaves, in all that being which was coming back to life, such an ecstatic surrender to the renewing force that Christophe no longer felt his weariness, his oppression, his miserable body which was dying, and he lived again in the tree branch. The gentle radiance of that life bathed him. It was like a kiss. His heart, too full of love, gave itself to the beautiful tree, which smiled at his final moments. He thought that at this very minute other beings were loving one another, that this hour of agony for him was for others an hour of ecstasy, that it has always been so, that the powerful joy of living never runs dry. And, breathless, in a voice that no longer obeyed his thought --- (perhaps not even a sound was leaving his throat; but he did not notice) --- he intoned a canticle to life.

An invisible orchestra answered him. Christophe said to himself:

--- How do they manage to know? We have not rehearsed. As long as they get through to the end without making a mistake!

He tried to raise himself to a sitting position so that the whole orchestra could see him clearly, beating time with his great arms. But the orchestra did not make mistakes; they were sure of themselves. What marvelous music! Now they were improvising the responses! Christophe was amused:

--- Just wait a little, my fine fellow! I’ll catch you out.

And, giving the tiller a shove, he launched the boat capriciously to the right, to the left, into dangerous channels.

--- How will you get out of this one?… And that one? Catch!… And this other one?

They always got out; they answered boldness with still greater boldness.

--- What will they come up with next? Crafty devils!…

Christophe shouted bravo and burst out laughing:

--- Good Lord! It was getting hard to keep up with them! Am I going to let them get the better of me?… You know, this isn’t fair! I’m exhausted today… Never mind! It shall not be said that they will have the last word…

But the orchestra deployed a fantasy of such abundance, such novelty, that there was no longer anything to do but stay there and listen with one’s mouth open. It took one’s breath away… Christophe took pity on himself:

--- You fool! he said to himself, you’re spent. Be quiet! The instrument has given all it had to give. Enough of this body! I need another.

But the body took its revenge. Violent fits of coughing kept him from listening:

--- Will you be quiet!

He seized himself by the throat, struck himself on the chest with his fists, as if it were an enemy to be vanquished. He saw himself again in the midst of a brawl. A crowd was howling. A man was gripping him around the body. They were rolling together. The other was pressing down on him. He was suffocating.

--- Let me go, I want to listen!… I want to listen! Or I will kill you!

He hammered the other’s head against the wall. The other would not let go…

--- But who is this, now? Whom am I wrestling with, locked together like this? Whose is this body I am holding, that burns me?…

Hallucinated brawls. A chaos of passions. Fury, lust, thirst for murder, the bite of carnal embraces --- all the mire of the pond stirred up, one last time…

--- Ah! Will it not soon be the end? Will I not tear you off, leeches clinging to my flesh?… Then fall with them, my flesh!

With his shoulders, his hips, his knees, Christophe, braced against the invisible enemy, pushed back… He was free!… Over there, the music was still playing, growing distant. Christophe, streaming with sweat, stretched his arms toward it:

--- Wait for me! Wait for me!

He ran to catch up with it. He stumbled. He knocked everything aside… He had run so fast that he could no longer breathe. His heart was beating, his blood rushing in his ears: a train rolling through a tunnel…

--- What an idiot, good God!

He made desperate signs to the orchestra not to continue without him… At last! Out of the tunnel!… Silence returned. He could hear again.

--- How beautiful it is! How beautiful! Again! Courage, my friends!… But whose music can this be?… What’s that? You say this music is by Jean-Christophe Krafft? Come now! What nonsense! I may have known him! He could never have been capable of writing ten measures of it… Who is coughing again? Don’t make so much noise! What is that chord?… And that other one?… Not so fast! Wait!…

Christophe was uttering inarticulate cries; his hand, clutching the sheet, made the gesture of writing; and his exhausted brain mechanically kept trying to determine what elements composed these chords and what they announced. He could not manage it: emotion made him lose his grip. He began again… Ah! This time it was too much…

--- Stop, stop, I can bear no more…

His will relaxed entirely. Gently, Christophe closed his eyes. Tears of happiness flowed from his shut eyelids. The little girl who was watching over him --- without his having noticed --- piously wiped them away. He no longer felt anything of what was happening in the world below. The orchestra had fallen silent, leaving him suspended on a vertiginous harmony whose enigma was unresolved. The brain, obstinate, repeated:

--- But what is that chord? How to escape from it? I would dearly like to find the way out, before the end…

Voices were rising now. A passionate voice. Anna’s tragic eyes… But at the same instant it was no longer Anna. Those eyes full of kindness…

--- Grazia, is it you?… Which of you? Which of you? I can no longer see you clearly… Why is the sun so long in coming?

Three tranquil bells rang. The sparrows at the window were chirping to remind him of the hour when he used to give them the luncheon crumbs… Christophe saw again in his dream his little childhood bedroom… The bells --- here is the dawn! The beautiful sonorous waves flow through the light air. They come from very far away, from the villages over there… The rumble of the river rises behind the house… Christophe found himself again leaning at the staircase window. All his life flowed beneath his eyes like the Rhine. All his life, all his lives --- Louisa, Gottfried, Olivier, Sabine…

--- Mother, lovers, friends… What are their names?… Love, where are you? Where are you, my souls? I know that you are there, and I cannot grasp you.

--- We are with you. Peace, our beloved!

--- I no longer want to lose you. I have searched for you so long!

--- Do not trouble yourself. We will not leave you again.

--- Alas! The current is carrying me away.

--- The river that carries you away carries us with you.

--- Where are we going?

--- To the place where we shall be reunited.

--- Will it be soon?

--- Look.

And Christophe, making a supreme effort to lift his head --- (God! how heavy it was!) --- saw the river overflowing its banks, covering the fields, rolling on majestic, slow, almost motionless. And, like a glint of steel on the edge of the horizon, a line of silver waves seemed to be racing toward him, trembling in the sun. The sound of the Ocean… And his failing heart asked:

--- Is it He?

The voice of his beloved ones answered:

--- It is He.

While the dying brain said to itself:

--- The door opens… There is the chord I was searching for!… But this is not the end? What new spaces!… We will continue tomorrow.

O joy, joy of seeing oneself dissolve in the sovereign peace of the God whom one has striven to serve all one’s life!…

--- Lord, are you not too displeased with your servant? I have done so little! I could not do more… I have struggled, I have suffered, I have wandered, I have created. Let me draw breath in your fatherly arms. One day, I will be born again, for new battles.

And the rumbling of the river and the murmuring sea sang with him:

--- You will be born again. Rest. All is now a single heart. Smile of night and day entwined. Harmony, august couple of love and hate! I will sing the God with the two mighty wings. Hosanna to life! Hosanna to death!

Christofori faciem die quacumque tueris, Illa nempe die non morte mala morieris.

Saint Christophe has crossed the river. All night long he has walked against the current. Like a rock, his body with its athletic limbs rises above the waters. On his left shoulder is the Child, fragile and heavy. Saint Christophe leans on an uprooted pine tree that bends beneath him. His back bends too. Those who watched him set out said he would never arrive; and for a long time their jeers and laughter followed him. Then night fell and they grew weary. Now Christophe is too far away for the cries of those who remain on the bank to reach him. In the noise of the torrent, he hears only the calm voice of the Child, who holds with his small fist a curly lock above the giant’s brow, and who keeps repeating: “Walk!” --- He walks, his back bowed, his eyes fixed straight ahead on the dark shore, whose steep face is beginning to whiten.

Suddenly the angelus rings out and the flock of bells springs awake. Here is the new dawn! Behind the black cliff that stands before him, rises the golden aureole of the invisible sun. Christophe, on the verge of falling, at last reaches the bank. And he says to the Child:

--- Here we are, arrived! How heavy you were! Child, who are you?

And the Child says:

--- I am the day that is about to be born.

1. ↑ When a thing has happened, even fools understand it.
2. ↑ “I’ve had it, brother --- save yourself!”