Jean-Christophe. I. L'aube
NINTH CAHIER OF THE FIFTH SERIES
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
I. THE DAWN
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE published twenty times per year PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor
Dianzi, nell’alba che precede al giorno, quando l’anima tua dentro dormia… — Purg. XVII
The rumbling of the river rises from behind the house. Rain has been beating against the windowpanes since the beginning of the day. A film of water streams down the cracked corner of the glass. The yellowish daylight fades. It is warm and stale in the room.
The newborn stirs in his cradle. Although the old man left his clogs at the door before entering, his step made the floor creak: the child begins to whimper. The mother leans from her bed to reassure him; and the grandfather lights the lamp, fumbling, so that the little one will not be afraid of the dark when he wakes. The flame illuminates the red face of old Jean-Michel, his rough white beard, his gruff look, and his lively eyes. He comes near the cradle. His coat smells of damp; he drags his big blue felt slippers as he walks. Louisa signals him not to come too close. She is blonde, almost white; her features are drawn; her sweet sheep-like face is marked with freckles; she has pale, thick lips that cannot quite close, and that smile with timidity; she broods over the child with her eyes — very blue, very vague eyes, in which the pupil is a tiny point, but infinitely tender.
The child wakes and cries. His clouded gaze flickers. Alas! What terror! The darkness, the brutal blaze of the lamp, the hallucinations of a brain scarcely free of chaos, the stifling, swarming night that surrounds him, the bottomless shadow from which, like blinding jets of light, sharp sensations, pains, phantoms detach themselves — those enormous faces bending over him, those eyes that pierce him, that sink into him, that he does not understand!… He has not the strength to cry out; terror nails him motionless, eyes and mouth open, panting from the depths of his throat. His great, swollen head puckers in lamentable and grotesque grimaces; the skin of his face and hands is dark, purplish, with yellowish spots.
“Good Lord! How ugly he is!” said the old man in a tone of conviction.
He went to set the lamp back on the table. Louisa made a little pout like a scolded child. Jean-Michel looked at her from the corner of his eye and laughed:
“You wouldn’t want me to tell you he’s beautiful? You wouldn’t believe it. Come now, it’s not your fault. They’re all like that.”
The child emerged from the stupid immobility into which the flame of the lamp and the old man’s gaze had plunged him. He began to cry. Perhaps he sensed by instinct in his mother’s eyes a caress that encouraged him to complain. She held out her arms and said:
“Give him to me.”
The old man began with his usual theories:
“One must not give in to children when they cry. They must be left to cry.”
But he came, took the little one, and grumbled:
“I’ve never seen one so ugly.”
Louisa seized the child with her feverish hands and hid him against her breast. She gazed at him with a confused and delighted smile:
“Oh! My poor little one,” she said, quite ashamed, “how ugly you are, how ugly you are, how I love you!”
Jean-Michel went back to the fire: he set about poking it, in a grumpy manner; but a smile belied the morose solemnity of his face.
“Good girl,” he said. “Come, don’t trouble yourself. He has time to change. And besides, what does it matter? Only one thing is asked of him, and that is to become an honest man.”
The child had calmed at the contact of the warm maternal body. One could hear him suckling with a panting greediness. Jean-Michel leaned back slightly in his chair and repeated with emphasis:
“There is nothing finer than an honest man.”
He paused a moment, pondering whether it would not be fitting to develop this thought; but he found nothing more to say; and after a silence, he resumed in an irritated tone:
“How is it your husband isn’t here?”
“I think he’s at the theater,” said Louisa timidly. “He has a rehearsal.”
“The theater is closed. I just passed in front of it. Another one of his lies.”
“No, don’t always blame him! I must have misunderstood. He must be kept by one of his lessons.”
“He should be home,” said the old man, displeased. He hesitated a moment, then asked more softly, a little ashamed: “Has he… again?…”
“No, Father, no, Father,” said Louisa hastily.
The old man looked at her; she avoided his gaze:
“It isn’t true. You’re lying.”
She wept silently.
“Good Lord!” cried the old man, kicking the fire. The poker fell noisily. Mother and child both jumped.
“Father, I beg you,” said Louisa, “he’ll cry.”
The child hesitated a few seconds as to whether he should cry or continue his meal; but, unable to do both at once, he went back to the latter.
Jean-Michel continued in a lower voice, with outbursts of anger:
“What have I done to the good Lord to have this drunkard for a son? It was worth the trouble of having lived as I’ve lived, of having denied myself everything, all my life! — But you — aren’t you able to stop him? After all, for Heaven’s sake, it’s your duty! If you held him at home!…”
Louisa wept harder.
“Don’t scold me again, I’m already so unhappy! I’ve done everything I could. If you knew how afraid I am when I’m alone! I seem always to hear his step on the stairs. And I wait for the door to open, and I wonder: Good Lord! How will he appear?… It makes me ill to think of it.”
She was shaken by sobs. The old man grew alarmed. He came close to her, pulled the disordered covers back over her trembling shoulders, and stroked her head with his big hand.
“There, there, don’t be afraid, I’m here.”
She calmed herself for the child’s sake, and tried to smile.
“I was wrong to tell you that.”
The old man looked at her, shaking his head:
“My poor girl, it’s not a pretty gift I gave you.”
“It’s my fault,” she said. “He ought not to have married me. He regrets what he did.”
“What should he regret?”
“You know well enough. You yourself were angry that I became his wife.”
“Let’s not speak of that any more. It’s true, I was a little upset. A boy like him — I can say it without offending you — a boy I had brought up with care, a distinguished musician, a true artist — he could have aspired to other matches than you, who had nothing, who were of a lower class, and not even in the profession. A Krafft marrying a woman who was not a musician — that hadn’t been seen in more than a hundred years! — But you know all the same that I’ve not held it against you, and that I’ve had affection for you since I came to know you. And then, when the choice is made, there’s no going back: all that remains is to do one’s duty, honestly.”
He went back to his seat, took a pause, and said with the solemnity he brought to all his aphorisms:
“The first thing in life is to do one’s duty.”
He waited for a challenge, spat into the fire; then, as neither the mother nor the child raised an objection, he wished to continue — and fell silent.
They said no more. Jean-Michel, near the fire, Louisa, sitting up in her bed, both dreamed sadly. The old man, whatever he had said, was thinking of his son’s marriage with bitterness. Louisa was thinking of it too, and she blamed herself, though she had nothing to reproach herself with. She had been a servant when she married, to everyone’s surprise and most of all her own, Melchior Krafft, Jean-Michel’s son. The Kraffts were without fortune but respected in the little Rhenish city where the old man had settled nearly half a century before. They were musicians from father to son, known to the musicians of the whole region, between Cologne and Mannheim. Melchior was a violinist at the Hof-Theater; and Jean-Michel had formerly conducted the concerts of the Grand Duke. The old man had been profoundly humiliated by Melchior’s marriage; he had built great hopes upon his son; he would have liked to make him the eminent man he himself had not been able to become. This impulsive act ruined his ambitions. And so he had stormed at first, heaping curses upon Melchior and Louisa. But, as he was a good man, he had forgiven his daughter-in-law once he came to know her better; and indeed, he had grown paternally fond of her — a fondness that most often expressed itself in rebuffs.
No one could understand what had driven Melchior to this marriage — Melchior least of all. It was certainly not Louisa’s beauty. Nothing in her was made to seduce: she was small, pallid, and frail; and she made a singular contrast with Melchior and Jean-Michel, both tall, broad, colossi with red faces, solid fists, hearty eaters, stiff drinkers, lovers of laughter, and loud of voice. She seemed crushed by them; one scarcely noticed her, and she tried to efface herself still more. If Melchior had been kindhearted, one might have believed he had preferred to every other advantage the simple goodness of Louisa; but he was the vainest of men. It seemed a wager that a fellow of his kind — rather handsome, and knowing it, very vain, not without talent either, able to aspire to some rich match, even capable, perhaps — who knows? — of turning the head of one of his bourgeois pupils, as he boasted — should have brusquely chosen a girl of the people, poor, uneducated, without beauty, who had made no advance to him.
But Melchior was one of those men who always do the opposite of what is expected of them, and of what they expect of themselves. It is not that they are unwarned — a man forewarned is worth two, as they say… They make a profession of being the dupe of nothing, and of steering their course surely toward a precise goal. But they reckon without themselves; for they do not know themselves. In one of those moments of vacuity habitual to them, they let go the helm; and, as is natural, when things are left to themselves, they have a malicious pleasure in thwarting their masters. The boat left to itself heads straight for the reef, and the scheming Melchior married a cook. He was, however, neither drunk nor stupid the day he committed himself for life; and he was not subject to a passionate impulse: far from it. But perhaps there are in us powers other than mind and heart, other even than the senses — mysterious powers that take command in the moments of nothingness when the others slumber; and perhaps it was these that Melchior had encountered in the depths of those pale eyes that looked at him timidly, one evening when he had approached the young woman on the bank of the river and sat down beside her, in the reeds — without knowing why — to give her his hand.
No sooner married, he had shown himself appalled at what he had done; and he did not conceal it from poor Louisa, who, all humble, begged his pardon. He was not unkind, and granted it willingly; but the next moment, his remorse took hold of him again, amid his friends or at the houses of his rich pupils, now disdainful, who no longer trembled at the touch of his hand when he sought to correct the position of their fingers on the keyboard. He would come home then with a dark look, in which Louisa, her heart tight, read at a glance the usual reproaches; or he would linger at stops in the tavern; there he would find self-contentment and indulgence for others. On those evenings he came home with bursts of laughter that seemed sadder to Louisa than the undertones and the muffled rancor of other days. She felt somewhat responsible for the lapses of reason in which, each time, the household’s money and what remained of her husband’s good sense disappeared. Melchior was sinking day by day. At an age when he should have been working without respite to develop his mediocre talent, he was letting himself slide down the slope; and others took his place.
But what did it matter, no doubt, to the unknown force that had drawn him to the flaxen-haired servant? He had fulfilled his role; and the little Jean-Christophe had just set foot on this earth where his destiny pushed him.
Night had fully come. Louisa’s voice roused old Jean-Michel from the torpor into which he had sunk before the fire, thinking of the sadnesses of present and past.
“Father, it must be late,” the young woman said affectionately. “You should go home; you have a long way to go.”
“I’m waiting for Melchior,” answered the old man.
“No, I beg you, I’d rather you didn’t stay.”
“Why?”
The old man raised his head and looked at her attentively.
She did not answer.
He went on:
“You’re afraid — you don’t want me to meet him?”
“Well, yes; it would only make things worse: you would get angry; I don’t want that. Please!”
The old man sighed, rose, and said:
“Let us go.”
He came to her, brushed her forehead with his rough beard; he asked if she needed anything, turned down the lamplight, and left, bumping into the chairs in the darkness of the room. But he was not yet on the stairs before he thought of his son coming home drunk; and he stopped at every step; he imagined a thousand dangers in letting him come home alone.
In the bed, beside the mother, the child stirred again. An unknown suffering was rising from the depths of his being. He stiffened against it. He twisted his body, clenched his fists, knit his brow. The pain grew, tranquil, sure of its strength. He did not know what it was, or how far it would go. It seemed immense to him, and destined never to end. And he began to cry lamentably. His mother stroked him with gentle hands. Already the pain was becoming less acute. But he continued to weep; for he still felt it near, within him. — The man who suffers can diminish his pain by knowing where it comes from; he confines it by thought to a part of his body that can be healed, torn away if need be; he fixes its contours, he separates it from himself. — The child has not this deceptive resource. His first encounter with pain is more tragic and more true. Like his own being, it seems to him without limits; he feels it installed in his breast, seated in his heart, mistress of his flesh. And so it is: it will not depart until it has consumed him.
The mother presses him to her, with little words:
“It’s over, it’s over, let’s not cry, my Jesus, my little golden fish…” He goes on with his broken moaning. One would think that this wretched, unconscious, and shapeless little mass has the presentiment of all the life of suffering that is reserved for it. And nothing can appease it.
The bells of Saint-Martin rang in the night. Their voice was grave and slow. In the rain-soaked air, it made its way like a step on moss. The child fell silent in the middle of a sob. The marvelous music flowed gently into him, like a stream of milk. Night was illuminated, the air grew tender and warm. His pain vanished, his heart began to laugh; and he glided into sleep with a sigh of abandon.
The three tranquil bells continued to ring the festival of the morrow. Louisa dreamed too, listening, of her past miseries and of what the dear little child sleeping beside her would one day become. She had been for hours lying in her bed, weary and aching. Her hands and body burned; the heavy feather eiderdown crushed her; she felt bruised and oppressed by the darkness; but she dared not move. She watched the child, and the darkness did not prevent her from reading in his old-man features. Sleep was overcoming her; feverish images passed through her brain. She thought she heard Melchior open the door, and her heart leaped. Now and then the rumbling of the river mounted louder in the silence, like the bellowing of a beast. The windowpane rang once or twice more under the finger of the rain. The bells, more slowly, sang, and died away; and Louisa fell asleep beside her child.
Meanwhile old Jean-Michel waited before the house, shivering with rain, his beard wet with fog. He waited for his miserable son to come home; for his mind, which was always working, never ceased to tell him tragic stories brought on by drunkenness; and, though he did not believe them, he would not have been able to sleep a minute that night if he had gone away without seeing him return. The song of the bells made him very sad; for he remembered his disappointed hopes. He thought of what he was doing there, at that hour, in the street; and for shame, he wept.
The vast flood of days rolls slowly on. Unchanging, day and night rise and fall, like the ebb and flow of an infinite sea. Weeks and months stream by and begin again. And the chain of days is like a single day.
An immense, taciturn day, marked by the steady rhythm of shadow and light, and the rhythm of the life of the drowsy being who dreams in the depths of his cradle — his imperious needs, painful or joyous, so regular that the day and night which bring them seem brought by them in return.
The pendulum of life moves heavily. The being absorbs itself entirely in its slow pulsation. The rest is only dreams, stumps of dreams, shapeless and swarming — a dust of atoms dancing at random, a dizzying whirlwind that passes and provokes laughter or horror. Clamors, moving shadows, grimacing forms, pains, terrors, laughter, dreams, dreams… All is but dream — and day, and night. — And amid this chaos, the light of friendly eyes that smile at him, the stream of joy that, from the maternal body, from the breast swollen with milk, pours into his body — the force that is in him, the enormous and unconscious force that amasses, the seething ocean that roars within the narrow prison of this little child’s body. Who could read in him would see worlds, half-buried in shadow, nebulae organizing themselves, a universe in formation. His being is without limits. He is all that is.
Months pass. Islands of memory begin to emerge from the river of life. At first they are narrow, scattered islets, rocks that break the surface of the waters. Around them, after them, in the half-light that dawns, the great tranquil sheet continues to extend. Then new islets, gilded by the sun.
Thus from the abyss of the soul certain forms emerge, certain scenes of a strange precision. In the boundless day, beginning again, eternally the same, with its monotonous and mighty swing, the round of days begins to take shape — days holding hands, their profiles some smiling, some sad. But the links of the chain break constantly, and memories rejoin one another over the heads of weeks and months.
The River… The Bells… As far back as he remembers — in the distances of time, at whatever hour of his life — always their deep and familiar voices sing.
Night — half-asleep — a pale glow whitens the window… The river roars. In the silence, its voice rises all-powerful; it reigns over all beings. Sometimes it caresses their sleep, and seems ready to fall asleep itself, in the murmur of its waters. Sometimes it grows angry, it howls like a maddened beast that wants to bite. The shouting subsides: it is now a murmur of infinite gentleness, silvery tones, like clear little bells, like children’s laughter, tender voices singing, music that dances… Great maternal voice, which never sleeps! It lulls the child, as it lulled through centuries, from birth to death, the generations that came before him; it pervades his thought, impregnates his dreams, wraps him in the cloak of its flowing harmonies — which will enfold him still when he lies in the little cemetery that sleeps at the water’s edge, and that the Rhine bathes.
The bells… Here is dawn! They answer one another, doleful, a little sad, friendly, tranquil. In the sound of their slow voices rise swarms of dreams — dreams of the past, desires, hopes, regrets for vanished beings whom the child never knew, and yet whom he was, since he was in them, since they live again in him. Centuries of memories vibrate in this music. So much mourning, so many festivals! — And from the depths of the room, it seems, hearing them, that one sees pass the beautiful sonorous waves that flow in the light air, the free birds, and the warm breath of the wind. A patch of blue sky smiles at the window. A sunbeam steals across the bed through the curtains. The little world familiar to the child’s gaze — all that he sees from his bed each morning as he wakes, all that he is only beginning, with such effort, to recognize and to name, so as to be its master — his kingdom lights up. Here is the table where they eat, the cupboard where he hides to play, the diamond-patterned tiles on which he crawls, the wallpaper whose grimaces tell him burlesque or frightening stories, and the clock that chatters lame words that he alone understands. How many things in this room! He does not know them all. Each day he sets out on an exploration of this universe that is his own — everything is his. Nothing is indifferent; everything is equal: a man or a fly; everything lives equally — the cat, the fire, the table, the grains of dust that dance in a sunbeam. The room is a country; a day is a life. How find one’s way amid these immense spaces? The world is so big: one gets lost in it. And those faces, those gestures, that movement, that noise, which make a perpetual whirlwind around him!… He is tired, his eyes close, he falls asleep. The sweet, profound slumbers that seize him all at once, at any hour, wherever he is, on his mother’s lap, or under the table where he loves to hide!… It feels good. One is well.
Those first days hum in his head like a field of wheat, or a wood stirred by the wind, over which pass the great shadows of the clouds…
The shadows flee, the sun penetrates the forest. Christophe begins to find his way in the maze of the day.
Morning. His parents are sleeping. He lies in his little bed on his back. He watches the luminous stripes that dance on the ceiling. It is an endless amusement. At one moment he laughs aloud, one of those good baby laughs that dilate the hearts of those who hear them. His mother leans from her bed toward him and says: “What’s the matter with you, little fool?” Then he laughs all the harder, and perhaps even forces himself to laugh, because he has an audience. Mama puts on a stern face and places a finger on her lips so he won’t wake his father. But her tired eyes laugh in spite of her. They whisper together… Suddenly, a furious growl from the father. They both start. Mama quickly turns away, like a naughty little girl; she pretends to be asleep. Christophe buries himself in his bed and holds his breath. Dead silence.
After a while, the little face huddled under the covers comes back to the surface. On the roof, the weathercock creaks. The gutter drips. The angelus rings. When the wind blows from the east, from very far away the bells of the villages on the other bank of the river answer. The sparrows, gathered in a band in the ivy-clad wall, make a deafening racket, from which stand out, as in children’s games, three or four voices always the same, shriller than the rest. A pigeon coos at the top of a chimney. The child lets himself be lulled by these sounds. He hums softly, then less softly, then quite loudly, then very loudly, until the father’s exasperated voice shouts: “That ass will never shut up! Just wait, I’ll pull your ears!” Then he dives back into his covers, and he does not know whether to laugh or cry. He is frightened and humiliated; and at the same time, the idea of the donkey to which he is compared makes him snort with laughter. From the depths of the bed he imitates its braying. This time he is spanked. He weeps all the tears in his body. What has he done? He so wants to laugh, to move! And he is forbidden to stir. How can they sleep all the time? When will he be able to get up?
One day he can bear it no longer. He has heard in the street a cat, a dog, something curious. He slips out of bed and, his bare little feet awkwardly patting the tile floor, tries to go down the stairs; but the door is locked. To open it, he climbs on a chair: everything crashes, he hurts himself badly, he howls; and on top of it all he is spanked again. He is always spanked!…
He is at church with grandfather. He is bored. He is not very comfortable. They forbid him to move, and people say words together that he does not understand, then fall silent together. They all have solemn and morose faces. These are not their everyday faces. He looks at them, intimidated. Old Lina the neighbor, sitting beside him, has put on a mean look; at moments he does not even recognize grandfather. He is a little afraid. Then he gets used to it, and looks for ways to amuse himself by every means at his disposal. He swings on his chair, twists his neck to look at the ceiling, makes faces, pulls grandfather by his coat, studies the straw of his chair, tries to make a hole in it with his fingers, listens to the cries of birds, yawns till his jaw might break.
Suddenly — a cataract of sounds: the organ plays. A shiver runs down his spine. He turns around, his chin resting on the back of his chair, and stays very still. He understands nothing of this noise, he does not know what it means: it sparkles, it whirls, nothing can be made out. But it is good. It is as if one were no longer sitting, for the past hour, on a chair that hurts, in a boring old house. One is suspended in the air, like a bird; and when the river of sound rolls from one end of the church to the other, filling the vaults, rebounding from the walls, one is carried with it, one flies on swift wings, this way and that — one has only to let go. One is free, one is happy, the sun shines… He falls asleep.
Grandfather is displeased with him. He behaves badly at Mass.
He is at home, sitting on the floor, his feet in his hands. He has just decided that the doormat is a boat, the tile floor a river. He would believe he was drowning if he stepped off the carpet. He is surprised and a little annoyed that the others pay no attention to it, as they cross the room. He stops his mother by the skirt: “Don’t you see it’s water! You must use the bridge.” The bridge is a line of grooves between the red diamond tiles. His mother passes without even listening. He is vexed, in the manner of a playwright who sees the audience chatting during his play.
The next moment he has forgotten about it. The floor is no longer the sea. He lies upon it stretched out full length, his chin on the stone, humming music of his own composition, and gravely sucking his thumb, drooling. He is plunged in the contemplation of a crack between the tiles. The lines of the diamond shapes grimace like faces. The imperceptible crack grows, it becomes a valley; there are mountains around it. A centipede stirs: it is as big as an elephant. Thunder could fall and the child would not hear it.
No one is paying attention to him, and he has no need of anyone. He can even do without mat-boats and floor-caverns with their fantastic fauna. His body suffices him. What a source of amusement! He spends hours looking at his nails, laughing with delight. They all have different physiognomies, and resemble people he knows. He makes them talk together, and dance, or fight. — And the rest of the body! He continues the inspection of all that belongs to him. What astonishing things! There are some very strange ones. He absorbs himself curiously in looking at them.
He was roughly caught out sometimes, when surprised in this way.
On certain days he takes advantage of his mother’s turned back to slip out of the house. At first they run after him and catch him. Then they get used to letting him go alone, provided he does not go too far. The house is at the edge of the town; the countryside begins almost at once. As long as he is in sight of the windows, he walks without stopping, with a small, measured step, skipping on one foot from time to time. But as soon as he has passed the bend in the road and the bushes hide him from view, he abruptly changes. He begins by stopping, finger in mouth, to decide what story he will tell himself today; for he is full of them. It is true that they all resemble each other and each could fit in three or four lines. He chooses. Usually he picks up the same one, sometimes where he left off the day before, sometimes from the beginning, with variations; but a trifle will suffice — a word overheard by chance — for his thought to race off on a new track.
Chance was fertile in resources. One cannot imagine all the use that could be made of a simple piece of wood, a broken branch, such as one always finds along hedgerows. — When one does not find one, one breaks one. — It was the fairy’s wand. Long and straight, it became a lance, or perhaps a sword; one need only brandish it to summon armies. Christophe was the general; he marched before them, he set the example, he led the assault on embankments. When the branch was flexible, it became a whip. Christophe rode a horse, leaped over precipices. It happened that the mount slipped, and the cavalier found himself at the bottom of the ditch, looking sheepishly at his dirty hands and scraped knees. If the stick was small, Christophe made himself an orchestra conductor: he was the conductor, and he was the orchestra; he led, and he sang; and then he saluted the bushes, whose little green heads the wind stirred.
He was also a magician. He walked with great strides through the fields, looking at the sky and waving his arms. He commanded the clouds. He wanted them to go to the right. But they went to the left. Then he cursed them and reiterated his order. He watched them from the corner of his eye, with a beating heart, to see if there were not at least one little one that would obey him; but they continued to run tranquilly toward the left. Then he stamped his foot, he threatened them with his stick, and ordered them angrily to go to the left; and indeed, this time, they obeyed perfectly. He was happy and proud of his power. He touched the flowers, ordering them to turn into golden carriages, as he had been told they did in fairy tales; and although it never happened, he was persuaded that it could not fail to happen, with a little patience. He looked for a cricket to make into a horse; he gently placed his wand on its back and said a spell. The insect ran away; he blocked its path. After a few moments he was lying flat on the ground near it, watching it. He had forgotten his role as magician and amused himself by turning the poor creature over on its back, laughing with delight at its contortions.
He also invented tying an old string to his magic stick and casting it gravely into the river, waiting for the fish to bite. He knew well that fish do not customarily eat a string without bait or hook; but he thought that for once, and for him, they might make an exception to the rule; and in his inexhaustible confidence, he even came to fish in the street with a whip, through the slit of a sewer grating. He would pull his whip out from time to time, very excited, imagining that the cord was heavier this time, and that he was going to bring up a treasure, as in a story grandfather had told him.
Constantly, in the midst of all these games, he would have moments of strange reverie and complete forgetfulness. Everything around him would vanish; he no longer knew what he was doing, he no longer remembered even himself. This came over him unexpectedly. While walking, while climbing the stairs, a sudden void would open within him. It seemed that he was thinking of nothing. But when he came back to himself, he felt dizzy, finding himself in the same place, on the dark staircase. It was as if he had lived an entire life — in the space of a few steps.
Grandfather often took him along on his evening walks. The little one trotted at his side, holding his hand. They went along paths through the plowed fields, which smelled good and strong. Crickets crackled. Enormous crows, perched crosswise on the road, watched them come from afar and flew off heavily at their approach.
Grandfather would cough slightly. Christophe knew well what that meant. The old man was burning to tell a story; but he wanted the child to seem to ask him for it. Christophe never failed to do so. They understood each other. The old man had an immense affection for his grandson; and it was a great joy for him to find in him a willing audience. He loved to recount episodes of his own life, or the history of great men, ancient and modern. His voice would then become emphatic and moved; it trembled with a childlike joy he tried to suppress. One felt that he was listening to himself with rapture. Unfortunately, the words failed him at the moment of speaking. This was a disappointment he was used to; for it occurred as often as his fits of eloquence. And since he forgot it after each attempt, he never managed to resign himself to it.
He spoke of Regulus, of Arminius, of the Lützow chasseurs, of Koerner and of Friedrich Stabs — the one who wanted to kill the Emperor Napoleon. His face was radiant as he recounted incredible feats of heroism. He declaimed the historic words in so solemn a tone that it became impossible to understand them; and he believed it a great art to keep his listener in suspense at the exciting moments: he would stop, pretend to choke, blow his nose noisily; and his heart exulted when the child asked, in a voice strangled with impatience: “And then, grandfather?”
A day came, when Christophe was older, when he grasped his grandfather’s technique; and he would then mischievously set about putting on an air of indifference to the story’s sequel — which greatly displeased the old man. But we have not yet come to that; for the moment, the two — the little one and the big one — were equally naive, and enjoyed the stories with equal good faith.