Jean-Christophe in Paris. I. The Market-Place. 2

Among the young women of society --- few in number, for that matter --- whom Christophe had as pupils, there was the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer, Colette Stevens. Her father was Belgian, naturalized French, the son of an Anglo-American established in Antwerp and a Dutch woman. Her mother was Italian. It was a very Parisian family. For Christophe --- and for many others --- Colette Stevens was the very type of the young French girl.

She was eighteen years old, with soft velvety dark eyes that she turned tenderly on young men, Spanish eyes that filled their orbits with a moist brilliance, a small nose, slightly long and capricious, which she wrinkled and twitched a little as she spoke, with playful pouts, disordered hair, a crumpled little face, indifferent skin rubbed with powder, heavy features, slightly puffy, the look of a bloated kitten.

Small and dainty in her proportions, very well dressed, seductive, provoking, she had mincing, precious, silly manners; she played the little girl, rocking for two hours in her armchair, letting out small cries, little exclamations:

--- Really? That can’t be!…

at table, clapping her hands when a dish she liked appeared; in the drawing room, burning through cigarettes, affecting, in front of men, an exuberant fondness for her girlfriends, throwing her arms around their necks, stroking their hands, whispering in their ears, saying naïve things, and also saying spiteful things --- admirably, in a soft and fragile voice that knew how, when the occasion called for it, to say very daring things without seeming to mean anything by them, and that knew even better how to make others say them --- with the candid air of a well-behaved little girl, her eyes bright under heavy lids, voluptuous and sly, glancing sideways with a knowing look, catching every piece of gossip, snapping up every indecency in the conversation, and trying here and there to hook some heart on her line.

All these antics, these lapdog performances, this adulterated ingenuousness, pleased Christophe in no way whatsoever. He had other things to do than to lend himself to the schemes of a cunning little girl, or even to observe them with an amused eye. He had his bread to earn, his life and his thoughts to save from death. The sole interest for him in these drawing-room parakeets was the means they provided him. In exchange for their money, he gave them his lessons, conscientiously, with knitted brow and mind intent on the task, so as not to let himself be distracted either by the tedium they caused him or by the coquettish provocations of his pupils, when they were as flirtatious as Colette Stevens. He paid no more attention to her than he did to Colette’s young cousin, a child of twelve, silent and timid, whom the Stevenses had taken in and whom Christophe also taught piano.

But Colette was too shrewd not to sense that with Christophe all her charms were wasted, and too flexible not to adapt herself instantly to his manner of being. She did not even need to apply herself to do so. It was an instinct of her nature. She was woman. She was like a wave without form. Every soul she encountered was like a vessel whose shape, out of curiosity, out of need, she immediately took on. To exist, she always had to be someone else. Her entire personality was that she never remained herself. She changed vessels often.

Christophe attracted her, for many reasons, the first of which was that he was not attracted by her. He attracted her also because he was different from all the young men she knew: she had never yet tried out a vase of this shape and these rough edges. He attracted her finally because she was expert, by breeding, at evaluating at a glance the precise worth of vases and people, and she recognized perfectly well that, for all his lack of elegance, Christophe possessed a solidity that none of her Parisian trinkets could offer her.

She made music, as most idle young women do nowadays. She made much of it and little of it. That is to say, she was always occupied with it, and she knew almost nothing of it. She dabbled at her piano all day long, out of idleness, out of affectation, out of sensuous pleasure. Sometimes she played it as one rides a bicycle. Sometimes she could play well, very well, with taste, with feeling --- (one might almost have said she had some: it was enough for her to put herself in the place of someone who did). --- She was capable of loving Massenet, Grieg, Thomé, before she knew Christophe. But she was equally capable of no longer loving them, since she had come to know Christophe. And now she played Bach and Beethoven quite neatly --- (which, in truth, is not saying much) --- but the most remarkable thing was that she loved them. At bottom, it was neither Beethoven, nor Thomé, nor Bach, nor Grieg that she loved: it was the notes, the sounds, her fingers running over the keys, the vibrations of the strings that scraped her nerves like so many other strings, her skin pleasurably tickled.

In the drawing room of the aristocratic townhouse, decorated with slightly faded tapestries, with a portrait of the robust Madame Stevens by a fashionable painter on an easel in the middle of the room --- who had depicted her languishing, like a flower without water, her eyes dying, her body twisted in a spiral, to express the rarity of her millionaire soul --- in the great drawing room with its glass doors opening onto old trees powdered with snow, Christophe would find Colette always seated before her piano, endlessly rehearsing the same phrases, caressing her own ears with mellow dissonances.

--- Ah! said Christophe, coming in. There’s the cat, purring again!

--- How rude! she said, laughing…

(And she held out her slightly damp hand to him.)

… Listen to this. Isn’t it lovely?

--- Very lovely, he said, in an indifferent tone.

--- You’re not listening!… Will you please listen!

--- I hear it… It’s always the same thing.

--- Ah! you are no musician, she said, with vexation.

--- As if that were what this is about!

--- What do you mean! It isn’t music?… What is it then, if you please?

--- You know perfectly well; and I won’t tell you, because it wouldn’t be proper.

--- All the more reason to say it.

--- You want me to?… So much the worse for you!… Very well, do you know what you’re doing with your piano?… You’re flirting.

--- Well I never!

--- Absolutely. You’re saying to it: “Dear piano, dear piano, say sweet things to me, again, caress me, give me a little kiss!”

--- Oh, do be quiet! said Colette, half laughing, half annoyed. You haven’t the faintest idea of respect.

--- Not the faintest.

--- You are impertinent… And besides, even if it were so, isn’t that the true way to love music?

--- Oh! please, let’s not mix music up in this!

--- But it is music itself! A beautiful chord is a kiss.

--- I didn’t need you to tell me that.

--- Isn’t it true?… Why are you shrugging your shoulders? Why are you making that face?

--- Because it disgusts me.

--- Better and better!

--- It disgusts me to hear music talked about as though it were a kind of libertinism… Oh! it isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of your world. All that vapid society surrounding you regards art as a sort of permitted debauchery… Come, enough of this! Play me your sonata.

--- No, let’s talk a little longer.

--- I am not here to talk, I am here to give you piano lessons… Forward, march!

--- How polite you are! said Colette, offended --- delighted, at bottom, to be handled so roughly.

She played her piece, doing her best; and since she was skilled, she managed it quite adequately, sometimes even rather well. Christophe, who was no fool, laughed inwardly at the cleverness “of that wicked little minx, who played as though she felt what she was playing, though she felt none of it.” He could not help feeling for her an amused sympathy. Colette, for her part, seized every pretext to resume conversation, which interested her far more than the piano lesson. However much Christophe defended himself, claiming he could not say what he thought without risking offense, she always managed to make him say it; and the more offensive it was, the less offended she was: it was an amusement for her. But since the crafty creature sensed that Christophe valued nothing so much as sincerity, she stood her ground boldly and argued stubbornly. They parted the best of friends.

Yet Christophe would never have harbored the slightest illusion about this drawing-room friendship, nor would the slightest intimacy ever have been established between them, had it not been for the confidences that Colette made him one day, as much by surprise as by an instinct of seduction.

The previous evening there had been a reception at her parents’ house. She had laughed, chattered, flirted like mad; but the following morning, when Christophe came to give her her lesson, she was tired, her features drawn, her complexion gray, her head thick. She said barely a few words; she seemed extinguished. She sat down at the piano, played listlessly, missed her passages, tried to redo them, missed them again, broke off abruptly, and said:

--- I can’t… Forgive me… Would you mind, let us wait a moment…

He asked whether she was unwell. She replied that she was not:

“She wasn’t in the right mood… She had moments like this… It was ridiculous, he mustn’t be angry with her.”

He offered to come back another day; but she insisted that he stay:

--- Just a moment… In a little while it may be better, perhaps… How foolish I am, aren’t I?

He sensed clearly that she was not herself; but he did not wish to question her; and, to speak of something else, he said:

--- That’s what comes of being so brilliant last evening! You spent yourself too freely.

She gave a little ironic smile:

--- One can’t say the same of you, she replied.

He laughed openly.

--- I don’t think you said a single word, she continued.

--- Not one.

--- And yet there were interesting people there.

--- Yes, magnificent talkers, clever people. I am lost among your boneless Frenchmen who understand everything, explain everything, excuse everything --- and feel nothing. People who spend hours talking about love and art! Isn’t it sickening?

--- It ought at least to interest you: art, if not love.

--- One doesn’t talk about such things: one does them.

--- But when one cannot do them? said Colette, with a little pout.

Christophe replied, laughing:

--- Then leave them to others. Not everyone is made for art.

--- Nor for love?

--- Nor for love.

--- Good heavens! And what is left for us?

--- Your housekeeping.

--- Thank you! said Colette, stung.

She put her hands back on the piano, tried again, missed her passages again, thumped the keys, and groaned:

--- I can’t!… I am good for nothing, clearly. I think you’re right. Women are good for nothing.

--- That’s already something, to say so, said Christophe, good-naturedly.

She looked at him with the sheepish air of a little girl being scolded, and said:

--- Don’t be so hard!

--- I say nothing against good women, replied Christophe cheerfully. A good woman is paradise on earth. Only, paradise on earth…

--- Yes, no one has ever seen it.

--- I am not so pessimistic. I say: I, myself, have never seen it; but it may very well exist. I am even determined to find it, if it exists. Only, it isn’t easy. A good woman and a man of genius are equally rare, the one as the other.

--- And apart from them, do the rest of men and women not count?

--- On the contrary! Only the rest count… for the world.

--- But for you?

--- For me, they don’t exist.

--- How hard you are! Colette repeated.

--- A little. Someone has to be. If only in the interest of others!… If there weren’t a bit of flint here and there in the world, it would all go to mush.

--- Yes, you’re right, you are fortunate to be strong, said Colette sadly. But don’t be too severe with those --- especially with those women --- who are not… You don’t know how our weakness weighs on us. Because you see us laughing, flirting, playing the fool, you think we have nothing more in our heads, and you despise us. Ah! if you could read everything that goes on in the heads of young women of fifteen to eighteen, who go out into society, and who have the kind of success that their overflowing life affords them --- when they have danced well, said foolish things, paradoxes, bitter things that make people laugh because they laugh, when they have given a little of themselves to imbeciles, and looked deep into each pair of eyes for that light one never finds there --- if you could see them when they go home, in the night, and shut themselves in their silent rooms, and throw themselves on their knees in agonies of solitude!…

--- Is it possible? said Christophe, astonished. What! you suffer, you suffer like this?

Colette did not answer; but tears came to her eyes. She tried to smile, and held out her hand to Christophe: he seized it, moved.

--- Poor little thing! he said. If you suffer, why do you do nothing to get out of this life?

--- What would you have us do? There is nothing to be done. You men can free yourselves, do what you want. But we, we are shut forever within the circle of worldly duties and pleasures: we cannot escape it.

--- Who is stopping you from freeing yourselves as we do, from taking on a task that suits you and gives you, as it gives us, your independence?

--- Like yours? Poor monsieur Krafft! It doesn’t give you much assurance!… Well! At least it pleases you. But us — what task are we made for? There isn’t one that interests us. --- Yes, I know, we involve ourselves in everything now, we pretend to take an interest in heaps of things that have nothing to do with us: we want so badly to be interested in something! I do as the others do. I busy myself with charities, with benevolence committees. I attend lectures at the Sorbonne, talks by Bergson and Jules Lemaître, historical concerts, classical matinees, and I take notes, notes… I don’t even know what I’m writing!… and I try to convince myself that it all fascinates me, or at least that it’s useful. Ah! how well I know the opposite, how indifferent I am to all of it, and how bored I am!… Don’t go back to despising me, because I’m telling you frankly what everyone thinks. I’m not more foolish than anyone else. But what can philosophy, and history, and science possibly mean to me? As for art --- you see --- I tinker at the piano, I daub away, I make those little watercolor trifles; --- but does that fill a life? There is only one purpose to ours: marriage. But do you think it’s cheerful to marry one or another of these individuals, whom I know as well as you do? I see them as they are. I don’t have the luck of being like your German Gretchens, who always manage to delude themselves… Isn’t it terrible? To look around oneself, to see the women who have married, the men they married, and to think that one will have to do the same, distort body and mind, become as ordinary as they are!… It takes real stoicism, I assure you, to accept such a life and its obligations. Not all women are capable of it… And time passes, the years flow by, youth slips away; and yet there were lovely things, good things in us --- which will serve no purpose, which die a little each day, which we will have to resign ourselves to giving over to fools, to beings we despise, and who will despise us in return!… And no one understands you! One would think we are a riddle to people. Never mind the men, who find us insipid and bizarre! But women ought to understand us! They were like us once; they would only need to remember… Not at all. No help from them. Even our mothers are ignorant of us, and make no real effort to know us. They only try to marry us off. For the rest — live, die, manage as you will! Society leaves us in absolute abandonment.

--- Don’t be discouraged, said Christophe. Everyone must, in their own turn, repeat the experiment of living. If you are brave, it will all come right. Look beyond your own world. Surely there are still some honest men in France.

--- There are. I know some. But they are so dull!… And besides, I’ll tell you: the world I live in displeases me; but I don’t believe I could live outside it now. I’ve grown accustomed to it. I need a certain comfort, certain refinements of luxury and society, which money alone is perhaps not enough to provide, but for which it is indispensable. It’s not admirable, I know that. But I know myself — I am weak… Please, don’t draw away from me because I’m telling you my little cowardices. Listen to me kindly. Talking with you does me so much good! I feel that you are strong, that you are healthy: I have complete trust in you. Be a little my friend, will you?

--- I will, said Christophe. But what can I do?

--- Listen to me, advise me, give me courage. I am in such confusion so often! Then I no longer know what to do. I say to myself: “What’s the use of struggling? What’s the use of tormenting myself? This or that — what does it matter? Anyone. Anything.” It’s a dreadful state. I don’t want to fall into it. Help me! Help me!

She looked crushed, aged by ten years; she watched Christophe with soft, submissive, imploring eyes. He promised everything she asked. Then she revived, smiled, became cheerful again.

And that evening she was laughing and flirting, as usual.

From that day on, they had regular intimate conversations. They were alone together: she confided in him whatever she wished; he took great pains to understand her and advise her; she listened to the advice, and when necessary to the rebukes, gravely, attentively, like a well-behaved little girl: it distracted her, interested her, even sustained her; she thanked him with a look that was at once moved and coquettish. --- But nothing in her life had changed: there was simply one more distraction.

Her day was a succession of metamorphoses. She rose excessively late, around noon. She had suffered from insomnia; she rarely fell asleep before dawn. Throughout the whole day she did nothing. She turned over and over endlessly a verse, an idea, a fragment of an idea, the memory of a conversation, a musical phrase, the image of a face that had pleased her. She was not fully awake until four or five in the afternoon. Until then, her eyelids were heavy, her face puffy, her expression sullen and drowsy. She came back to life when a few good friends arrived, as talkative as she was and as curious about Parisian gossip. They discussed love at endless length together. The psychology of love: that was the eternal subject, along with clothes, indiscretions, and slander. She also had her circle of idle young men who needed to spend two or three hours a day in the company of skirts, and who might as well have worn them: for they had the souls and the conversation of women. Christophe had his hour: the confessor’s hour. Colette would instantly compose herself into gravity and recollection. She was like the young Frenchwoman described by Bodley, who in the confessional “developed a theme she had quietly prepared in advance, a model of lucid arrangement and clarity, in which everything that needed to be said was set out in good order and classified into distinct categories.” --- After which she amused herself with greater abandon. As the day advanced she grew younger again. In the evening, they went to the theater; and there was the eternal pleasure of recognizing in the audience the same eternal faces; --- the pleasure, not of the play being performed, but of the actors one knew, and whose familiar failings one noted once more. With those who came to visit in one’s box, one exchanged spiteful remarks about those in the other boxes, or about the actresses. One found that the ingénue had a thin little voice “like a curdled mayonnaise,” or that the great comedienne was dressed “like a lampshade.” --- Or else one went to an evening party; and there the pleasure was to be seen, if one happened to be pretty: --- (that depended on the day: nothing is more capricious than a Parisian prettiness); --- one replenished one’s store of criticisms about people, their clothes, and their physical defects. There was no real conversation. --- One came home late. One had difficulty getting to bed: (it was the hour when one was most wide awake). One wandered around one’s table. One leafed through a book. One laughed to oneself, at the memory of some word or gesture. One was bored. One was very unhappy. One could not sleep. And then at night, suddenly, one had fits of despair.

Christophe, who saw Colette only a few hours at a time, and could witness only some of her transformations, already had considerable difficulty keeping his bearings. He wondered at what moment she was sincere --- or whether she was always sincere --- or whether she was never sincere at all. Colette herself could not have told him. She was like most young women, who are nothing but idle and constrained desire in the dark. She did not know what she was, because she did not know what she wanted, and because she could not know it before she had tried it. So she tried it, in her own way, with as much freedom and as little risk as possible, attempting to model herself on those around her, to take their moral measure. She was in no hurry to choose. She would have liked to keep all her options open, so as to profit from everything.

But with a friend like Christophe, this was not easy. He accepted that she might prefer people he did not esteem, or even despised; but he did not accept being placed on the same level as them. To each his own taste; but at least one had to have one.

He was all the less inclined toward patience because Colette seemed to take pleasure in collecting around her all the young men most likely to exasperate Christophe: nauseating little snobs, mostly wealthy, or at any rate idle, or installed in some sinecure at some ministry --- which amounts to the same thing. All of them wrote --- or claimed to write. It was a kind of neurosis under the Third Republic. It was above all a form of vain idleness --- intellectual work being the hardest of all to verify, and the most susceptible to bluff. They spoke of their great labors only in a few discreet but reverent words. They seemed imbued with the importance of their task, bowed down under its burden. In the early days, Christophe felt some awkwardness at being so entirely ignorant of their works and their names. With timidity he tried to inform himself; he wanted above all to know what one of them had written, a man their conversations elevated to the rank of master of the theater. He was surprised to learn that this great dramatist had produced a single act, which was drawn from a novel, which itself was assembled from a series of short pieces, or rather notations, that he had published in one of their Reviews over the course of the last ten years. The others had no heavier a cargo: a few acts, a few stories, a few verses. Some were celebrated for a single article. Others for a book they “were going to write.” They professed disdain for works of long breath. They seemed to attach extreme importance to the arrangement of words within a sentence. Yet the word “thought” recurred frequently in their talk; but it did not seem to carry the same meaning as in ordinary speech: they applied it to details of style. There were, however, also among them great thinkers and great ironists, who, when they wrote, placed their profound and subtle words in italics, so that no one would miss them.

All of them practiced the cult of the self: it was the only cult they had. They sought to make others share it. The misfortune was that the others were already well supplied. They were constantly preoccupied with an audience in the way they spoke, walked, smoked, read a newspaper, held their head and eyes, greeted one another. --- Posturing is natural to young men, and the more so as they are more insignificant, that is to say, less occupied. It is above all for women that they put on their display: for they covet them, and desire --- even more --- to be coveted by them. But even before the first person who happens by, they spread their feathers: before a passing stranger from whom they can expect nothing more than a stunned glance. Christophe often encountered these little peacocks: painters’ models, virtuosos, young hams, who had given themselves the look of a famous portrait: Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Beethoven, or of a role to play: the good painter, the good musician, the good craftsman, the deep thinker, the jolly fellow, the peasant of the Danube, the man of nature… They cast a sidelong glance in passing, to see if anyone noticed them. Christophe saw them coming, and when they drew near, he would mischievously turn his eyes elsewhere with indifference. But their disappointment never lasted long: two steps further on, they were already prancing for the next passerby. --- Those in Colette’s salon were more refined: it was above all their wit they painted up: they copied two or three models, who were not themselves originals. Or else they played at being an idea: Force, Joy, Pity, Solidarity, Socialism, Anarchism, Faith, Liberty: these were roles for them. They had the talent for turning the most cherished thoughts into a matter of literature, and for reducing the most heroic impulses of the human soul to the rank of drawing-room articles, of fashionable neckties.

But where they were entirely in their element was in love: it belonged to them. The casuistry of pleasure held no secrets for them; in their virtuosity they invented new cases, in order to have the honor of resolving them. It has always been the occupation of those who have no other: for want of loving, they “make love”; and above all, they explain it. The commentary was more abundant than the text, which in their hands was exceedingly thin. Sociology lent spice to the most scabrous ideas: everything was then sheltered under the flag of sociology; whatever pleasure one took in satisfying one’s vices, something would have been lacking if one had not persuaded oneself that in satisfying them, one was laboring for the new age. It was an eminently Parisian variety of socialism: erotic socialism.

Among the problems that then impassioned this little court of love was the question of equality between women and men in marriage, and of their equal rights to love. There had been brave young men, honest, Protestant, a little ridiculous --- Scandinavians or Swiss --- who had called for equality in virtue: men arriving at marriage as virgins, like women. The Parisian casuists were demanding an equality of another kind, an equality in impurity: women arriving at marriage as sullied as men --- the right to lovers. The Parisians had made such lavish use of adultery, in imagination and in practice, that it had begun to seem insipid to them; one sought to substitute, in the world of letters, a more original invention: the prostitution of young girls --- I mean regular, universal, virtuous, decent, domestic, and, into the bargain, social prostitution. --- A book, full of talent, which had just appeared, was laying down the law on the question: it studied in four hundred pages of playful pedantry, “according to all the rules of the Baconian method,” the “best arrangement of pleasure.” It was a course in free love, in which one spoke endlessly of elegance, propriety, good taste, nobility, beauty, truth, modesty, morality --- a Berquin for the young women of society who wished to go astray. --- It was, for the moment, the Gospel in which Colette’s little court took its delight, and which it paraphrased. It goes without saying that, in the habitual manner of disciples, they set aside whatever was just, well-observed, and even fairly humane beneath these paradoxes, retaining only the worst. In that parterre of sugary little flowers, they never failed to pick the most poisonous ones --- aphorisms of this sort: “that a taste for pleasure can only sharpen a taste for work”; --- “that it is monstrous for a virgin to become a mother before she has known enjoyment”; --- “that the possession of a virgin man was for a woman the natural preparation for reflective motherhood”; --- that it was the role of mothers “to organize the freedom of their daughters with that spirit of delicacy and decency they apply to protecting the freedom of their sons”; --- and that the day would come “when young girls would return from a lover’s house as naturally as they now return from a class or from taking tea at a friend’s.”

Colette declared, laughing, that such precepts were quite reasonable.

Christophe had an aversion to these conversations. He exaggerated their importance and the harm they could do. The French have too much wit to apply their literature. These petty Diderots, these small change of the great Denis, are in ordinary life, like the ingenious Panurge of the Encyclopédie, bourgeois as honest --- indeed as timid --- as anyone else. It is precisely because they are so timid in action that they amuse themselves by pushing action (in thought) to the limits of the possible. It is a game in which one risks nothing.

But Christophe was not a French dilettante.

Among all the young men who surrounded Colette, there was one whom she seemed to prefer. Naturally, of all of them he was also the one most insupportable to Christophe.

He was one of those sons of newly wealthy bourgeois who dabble in aristocratic literature and play at being patricians of the Third Republic. His name was Lucien Lévy-Cœur. He had wide-set eyes with a lively gaze, a hooked nose, full lips, a blond beard trimmed to a point in the Van Dyck style, the beginnings of premature baldness which did not ill suit him, a cajoling manner of speech, elegant bearing, fine, soft hands that melted in yours. He always affected great politeness, a refined courtesy, even with those he did not like and whom he sought to throw overboard.

Christophe had already encountered him at the first literary dinner to which Sylvain Kohn had introduced him; and though they had not spoken, it had been enough to hear the sound of his voice to feel toward him an aversion he could not himself explain, and whose deep reasons he would only come to understand later. There are thunderbolts of love. There are also thunderbolts of hatred --- or --- (so as not to shock gentle souls who fear that word, as they fear all passions) --- there is the instinct of the healthy being, who senses the enemy and defends itself.

Set against Christophe, he embodied the spirit of irony and decomposition, which attacked softly, politely, covertly, everything that was great in the old society that was dying: the family, marriage, religion, the fatherland; in art, everything that was virile, pure, healthy, popular; every faith in ideas, in feelings, in great men, in man. At the bottom of all this thought there was nothing but a mechanical pleasure in analysis, analysis to excess, a kind of animal need to gnaw at thought, a worm’s instinct. And alongside this ideal of the intellectual gnawer, a sensuality of a kept woman --- but a bluestocking kept woman: for in him everything was or became literary. Everything was material for literature: his conquests, his vices, and those of his friends. He had written novels and plays in which he narrated with considerable talent the private lives of his parents, their intimate adventures, those of his friends, his own, his liaisons --- one in particular that he had had with the wife of his closest friend: the portraits were drawn with great art; everyone praised their accuracy --- the public, the wife, and the friend. He could not obtain the confidences or the favors of a woman without saying so in a book. --- It might have seemed natural that his indiscretions would put him at odds with his “associates.” But nothing of the sort: they were barely inconvenienced by it; they protested, as a formality; at bottom they were delighted to be displayed to passersby, entirely naked, provided they were left a mask over their faces --- their modesty was at rest. For his part, he brought to these gossipings no spirit of vengeance, nor perhaps even of scandal. He was no worse a son, no worse a lover, than the average man. In the same chapters in which he brazenly revealed his father, his mother, and his mistress, he had pages where he spoke of them with poetic tenderness and charm. In reality, he was extremely family-minded; but in the way of those people who have no need to respect what they love --- quite the contrary; they love better what they can hold in slight contempt; the object of their affection seems to them thereby closer, more human. These are the worldly people least capable of understanding heroism and above all purity. They are not far from regarding these as a lie or a weakness of mind. It goes without saying, besides, that they are convinced they understand the heroes of art better than anyone, and that they judge them with a protective familiarity.

He got on admirably with the corrupted ingénues of wealthy, idle bourgeois society. He was a companion to them, a kind of depraved lady’s maid, freer and more knowing, who instructed them and whom they envied. They felt perfectly at ease with him; and, Psyche’s lamp in hand, they curiously studied the naked androgyne, who let them do as they wished.

Christophe could not understand how a young woman like Colette, who seemed to have a delicate nature and a touching desire to escape the degrading attrition of life, could take pleasure in this company. Christophe was no psychologist. Lucien Lévy-Cœur was a hundred times more so than he. Christophe was Colette’s confidant; but Colette was Lucien Lévy-Cœur’s confidante. A great advantage for the latter. It is sweet to a woman to believe she is dealing with a man weaker than herself. She finds there the means of satisfying, at the same time as what is least good in her, what is best: her maternal instinct. Lucien Lévy-Cœur knew this well: one of the surest ways to touch the hearts of women is to awaken that mysterious chord. Then, Colette felt herself weak, tolerably cowardly, with instincts of which she was not very proud but which she would have taken great care not to repress. It pleased her to let herself be persuaded, by the audaciously calculated confessions of her friend, that others were the same, and that one must take human nature as it was. She thus afforded herself the satisfaction of not combating inclinations that were agreeable to her, and the luxury of telling herself that it must be so, that wisdom lay in not rebelling and in being indulgent toward what one could not --- “alas!” --- prevent. It was a wisdom whose practice had nothing painful about it.

For one who knows how to look upon life with serenity, there is a sharp savor in the perpetual contrast that exists within society between the extreme refinement of apparent civilization and the profound animality beneath. Every salon not filled with fossils and petrified souls presents, like two geological strata, two layers of conversation superimposed upon one another: one --- which everyone hears --- between the intelligences; the other --- of which few people are aware, and which is nonetheless the stronger --- between the instincts, between the beasts. These two conversations are often contradictory. While the minds exchange conventional currency, the bodies say: Desire, Aversion, or, more often: Curiosity, Boredom, Disgust. The beast, though tamed by centuries of civilization and as stupefied as the wretched lions in the tamer’s cage, still dreams of its prey.

But Christophe had not yet arrived at that detachment of spirit which only age and the death of the passions can bring. He had taken his role as Colette’s adviser very seriously. She had asked for his help; and he saw her exposing herself to danger with a lighthearted gaiety. And so he no longer concealed his hostility toward Lucien Lévy-Cœur. The latter had at first maintained, in relation to Christophe, an attitude of irreproachable and ironic politeness. He too sensed the enemy; but he did not consider him dangerous: he ridiculed him without appearing to do so. For the rest, he would have asked nothing better than to be admired by Christophe, so as to remain on good terms with him --- but that was something he could never obtain; and he knew it, for Christophe had no talent for pretending. And so Lucien Lévy-Cœur had imperceptibly passed from an entirely abstract opposition of ideas to a small personal war, carefully veiled, of which Colette was to be the prize.

Between her two friends she kept the scales even. She appreciated the moral superiority and the talent of Christophe; but she also appreciated the amusing immorality and the wit of Lucien Lévy-Cœur; and, at bottom, she found more pleasure in the latter. Christophe did not spare her his reproaches; she listened to them with a touching humility that disarmed him. She was good-natured enough, but without frankness, out of weakness, out of kindness even. She was half-playing a part; she feigned to think as Christophe thought. In truth, she well knew the worth of a friend like him; but she wished to make no sacrifice for a friendship, no sacrifice for anything or anyone; she wanted what was most convenient and most agreeable to her. She therefore concealed from Christophe that she was still receiving Lucien Lévy-Cœur; she lied, with the charming naturalness of young society women, expert from childhood in that exercise necessary to those who must possess the art of keeping all their friends and satisfying all of them. She offered herself the excuse that it was so as not to cause Christophe pain; but in reality it was because she knew he was right, and she nonetheless wished to do what pleased her, without however quarreling with him. Christophe sometimes suspected these ruses; he would grumble then, would put on his gruff voice. She would continue to play the contrite, affectionate, slightly sad little girl; she made her eyes soft for him --- feminæ ultima ratio. --- It truly saddened her to feel she might lose Christophe’s friendship; she would make herself seductive and serious; and she did in fact succeed in disarming him for a time. But sooner or later there had to be an explosion. In Christophe’s irritation, there entered, without his knowing it, a touch of jealousy. And in Colette’s coaxing ruses there entered too a little --- just a little --- of love. The break was sure to be all the sharper for it.

One day when Christophe had caught Colette in flagrant falsehood, he put it plainly to her: choose between Lucien Lévy-Cœur and himself. She tried to evade the question; and finally she asserted her right to have whatever friends she pleased. She was perfectly right; and Christophe recognized that he was being absurd; but he also knew it was not out of selfishness that he showed himself so demanding: he had conceived for Colette a genuine affection; he wanted to save her, even if it meant overriding her will. He insisted, then, clumsily. She refused to answer. He said to her:

--- Colette, do you want us to be friends no longer?

She said:

--- No, please. It would cause me a great deal of pain if you were not.

--- But you would not make the slightest sacrifice for our friendship?

--- Sacrifice! What an absurd word! she said. Why must one always sacrifice one thing for another? Those are stupid Christian ideas. At bottom, you are an old clericalist without knowing it.

--- That may well be, he said. For me, it is all one or all the other. Between good and evil, I find no middle ground, not even the width of a hair.

--- Yes, I know, she said. That is why I love you. I love you dearly, I assure you; but…

--- But you love the other one dearly as well?

She laughed, and said, turning upon him her most coaxing eyes and her sweetest voice:

--- Stay!

He was on the point of giving in once more. But Lucien Lévy-Cœur walked in; and those same coaxing eyes and that same soft voice were put to work to receive him. Christophe watched in silence for a while as Colette ran through her little performances; then he left, resolved to break things off. His heart was heavy. How foolish it was, always getting attached, always letting himself be caught in the trap!

Walking home and mechanically putting his books in order, he opened his Bible out of idleness and read:

…The Lord has said: Because the daughters of Zion go with necks outstretched and wanton eyes, walking with mincing steps, making a tinkling with their feet,

The Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, the Lord will lay bare their nakedness…

He burst out laughing, thinking of Colette’s little maneuvers; and he went to bed in good spirits. Then it occurred to him that he must himself have been quite infected by the corruption of Paris for the Bible to have become comic reading. But this did not stop him from lying in bed and repeating to himself the decree of that great and prankish Avenger; and he tried to picture its effect on the head of his young acquaintance. He fell asleep laughing like a child. He had already forgotten his fresh disappointment. One more, one less… He was beginning to grow used to it.

He did not stop giving piano lessons to Colette; but from that point on he avoided the openings she offered him to continue their friendly conversations. She tried sulking, taking offense, playing all her little tricks: he held firm; they quarreled; she herself eventually found pretexts to space out the lessons; and he found his own reasons for avoiding invitations to the Stevenses’ evenings.

He had had enough of Parisian society; he could no longer bear this emptiness, this idleness, this moral impotence, this neurasthenia, this endless hypercriticism, rootless and purposeless, devouring itself. He wondered how a people could live in this stagnant atmosphere of art for art’s sake and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. And yet this people lived; it had been great; it still cut a decent enough figure in the world --- at least, seen from a distance, it created that impression. Where could it find its reasons to live? It believed in nothing, in nothing but pleasure…

While Christophe was turning these thoughts over in his mind, he ran into a howling crowd of young men and women in the street, who were dragging a carriage in which an old priest sat, bestowing blessings to the right and left. A little farther on, he saw French soldiers smashing in the doors of a church with axes, while some decorated gentlemen greeted them with flying chairs. He realized that the French did believe in something after all --- though he could not quite make out what. Someone explained to him that the State was separating itself from the Church after a century of cohabitation, and that since the Church refused to leave willingly, the State, armed with its rights and its power, was throwing it out. Christophe did not find the procedure particularly gallant; but he was so worn out by the anarchic dilettantism of Parisian artists that he felt a certain pleasure in encountering people who were ready to get their heads broken for a cause, however absurd that cause might be.

He soon recognized that there were a great many such people in France. The political newspapers waged battle like the heroes of Homer; they published daily appeals to civil war. It is true that this took place mostly in words, and that blows were rarely exchanged. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of simpletons to put into practice the morals that others merely wrote. Strange spectacles unfolded: departments claiming to secede from France, regiments deserting, prefectures burned down, tax collectors on horseback at the head of companies of gendarmes, peasants armed with scythes and stoking cauldrons to defend churches that freethinkers were breaking into in the name of liberty, popular Redeemers climbing into trees to harangue the wine-producing provinces, stirred up against the regions of Alcohol. Here and there, these millions of men shaking their fists at one another, red in the face from shouting, ended up coming to genuine blows. The Republic flattered the people; then it had them cut down with sabers. The people, for their part, cracked the heads of a few children of the people --- officers and soldiers. --- And so each side demonstrated to the others the excellence of its cause and its fists. Watching from a distance, through the newspapers, one might have imagined oneself transported back several centuries. Christophe discovered that France --- that skeptical France --- was a fanatical people. But it was impossible for him to tell in which direction. For or against religion? For or against reason? For or against the nation? --- They were all of these things at once. They seemed to be all of them, for the sheer pleasure of it.

He was led one evening to discuss the matter with a socialist deputy whom he sometimes met in the Stevenses’ drawing room. Although he had spoken with him before, he had no idea of the man’s position: until now they had never talked about anything but music. He was very surprised to learn that this man of the world was the leader of a violent party.

Achille Roussin was a handsome man with a blond beard, a burring accent, a ruddy complexion, cordial manners, a certain elegance over a foundation of vulgarity, and coarse gestures that escaped him from time to time: --- a habit of grooming his nails in company, a thoroughly common tendency to be incapable of talking to anyone without grabbing his coat, seizing his arm, squeezing it; --- a big eater, a big drinker, a man of pleasure and good cheer, with the appetites of a man of the people who flings himself at the conquest of power; supple, skilled at adapting his manner to the company and the interlocutor, exuberant in a calculated way, a good listener, instantly absorbing everything he heard; likeable besides, intelligent, interested in everything, by natural inclination, by acquired taste, and by vanity; honest insofar as his interest did not require otherwise, and insofar as it would have been dangerous not to be.

He had a rather pretty wife, tall, well-built, solidly put together, with an elegant figure, a little cramped by luxurious gowns that exaggerated the robust contours of her anatomy; her face framed by curling black hair, large dark thick-lashed eyes, a slightly jutting chin; her face on the heavy side, though with an agreeable enough look, spoiled only by the small grimaces of myopic blinking eyes and a pursed, prissy mouth. She had an affected, jerky way of walking, like certain birds, and a mincing manner of speaking, but a great deal of graciousness and amiability. She came from a wealthy bourgeois merchant family, freethinking and of the virtuous sort, attached to the countless obligations of society as to a religion --- to say nothing of those she imposed on herself, her artistic and social duties: keeping a salon, bringing art to the Universités Populaires, involving herself in philanthropic work or child psychology --- without any great warmth of heart, without any deep interest --- out of a mixture of natural goodness, snobbery, and the innocent pedantry of a well-educated young woman who seems to be perpetually reciting a lesson she has taken pride in knowing thoroughly. She needed to keep busy, but she did not need to be interested in the things she was busy with. It resembled the feverish activity of those women who always have their knitting in hand and ceaselessly ply their needles, as though the salvation of the world depended on the work, for which they have no use in the end. And then there was in her, as in the tricoteuses, the small vanity of the respectable woman who sets an example for other women.

The deputy felt for her an affectionate contempt. He had chosen her very wisely, for his pleasure and his peace of mind. She was beautiful, he enjoyed her, he asked nothing more; and she asked nothing more of him. He loved her, and was unfaithful to her. She accommodated herself to this, provided she had her share. She may even have found in it a certain pleasure. She was calm and sensual. A harem woman’s mentality.

They had two pretty children of four or five years old, of whom she took care, as a good mother, with the same pleasant and detached application she brought to following her husband’s politics and the latest developments in fashion and art. And it all made, in that milieu, the most singular mixture of advanced theories, ultra-decadent art, social agitation, and bourgeois feeling.

They invited Christophe to come and see them. Madame Roussin was a capable musician, playing the piano in a charming manner; she had a delicate and firm touch; with her small head gazing fixedly at the keys and her hands perched above them, bobbing away, she had the look of a hen pecking. Well gifted, and more thoroughly educated in music than most Frenchwomen, she was otherwise as indifferent as a carp to music’s deeper meaning: for her it was a succession of notes, rhythms, and shadings, which she listened to or reproduced with precision; she looked for no soul in it, having no need of one herself. This amiable woman, intelligent, unaffected, always ready to do a kindness, showed Christophe the welcoming graciousness she extended to everyone. Christophe was not particularly grateful; he had little warmth for her: he found her insubstantial. Perhaps without being aware of it, he could not forgive her either for the complaisance with which she accepted sharing her husband with his mistresses, whose affairs were no secret to her. Passivity was, of all the vices, the one he pardoned least.

He became more closely acquainted with Achille Roussin. Roussin loved music, as he loved the other arts, in a coarse but sincere way. When he liked a symphony, he seemed to be going to bed with it. He had a superficial culture, from which he extracted very good use; his wife had not been unhelpful in this regard. He took an interest in Christophe because he recognized in him a vigorous plebeian, as he himself was. He was also curious to observe at close range an original of this kind --- (he had an inexhaustible curiosity for observing men) --- and to learn his impressions of Paris. The frankness and bluntness of Christophe’s remarks amused him. He was sceptical enough to admit their accuracy. That Christophe was German did not trouble him in the least: on the contrary! He prided himself on being above the prejudices of nationality. And on the whole he was sincerely “humane” --- (that was his chief quality); --- he sympathized with everything that was human. But this did not prevent him from holding the firm conviction of the superiority of the Frenchman --- old race, old civilization --- over the German, and from making fun of the German.

Christophe met at Achille Roussin’s other political figures, ministers of yesterday or tomorrow. With each of them individually, he would have been quite happy to converse, had these illustrious personages thought him worthy of it. Contrary to the generally received opinion, he found their company more interesting than that of the other Frenchmen he knew. They had a more lively intelligence, more open to the passions and great concerns of humanity. Brilliant conversationalists, mostly from the south, they were astonishingly dilettantish; taken separately, they were almost as much so as men of letters. Naturally they were quite ignorant of art, and above all of foreign art; but they all claimed, more or less, to know something about it; and often they genuinely loved it. There were Councils of Ministers that resembled the inner circles of little literary reviews. One wrote plays. Another scraped at the violin and was a rabid Wagnerian. Another daubed at painting. And all of them collected impressionist canvases, read decadent books, took a coquettish pleasure in appreciating an ultra-aristocratic art that was almost always the mortal enemy of their ideas. Christophe was uncomfortable seeing these socialist or radical-socialist ministers, these apostles of the wretched and hungry classes, playing the connoisseur of refined pleasures. No doubt it was their right; but it did not seem to him quite honest.

Where this became altogether curious was when these people, who in private conversation were sceptics, sensualists, nihilists, anarchists, turned to action: immediately they became fanatics. The most dilettantish among them, the moment they reached power, turned into little oriental despots; they were seized with the mania of directing everything, leaving nothing free: they had the sceptic’s mind and the tyrant’s temperament. The temptation was too great --- having at their disposal the formidable mechanism of administrative centralization that the greatest of despots had once constructed --- not to abuse it. What followed was a kind of republican imperialism, onto which there had been grafted, in addition, during recent years, an atheist Catholicism.

For a certain time, the politicians had scarcely aspired to anything beyond domination over bodies --- I mean over fortunes --- leaving souls more or less in peace, since souls were not convertible into cash. For their part, souls took no interest in politics; politics passed above or below them; in France, politics was regarded as a branch --- lucrative, but quite undignified --- of commerce and industry; intellectuals despised politicians, politicians despised intellectuals. --- But recently a rapprochement had taken place, followed soon by an alliance, between the politicians and the worst class of intellectuals. A new power had entered the scene, one that had arrogated to itself absolute governance over thought: the Freethinkers. They had made common cause with the other power, which saw in them a refined instrument of political despotism. They were far less intent on destroying the Church than on replacing it; and in fact they formed a church of Free Thought, with its catechisms and ceremonies, its baptisms, its first communions, its marriages, its regional, national, and even ecumenical councils in Rome. It was an indescribable farce --- these thousands of poor creatures who needed to gather in flocks to “think freely.” True, their freedom of thought consisted in forbidding everyone else’s, in the name of Reason: for they believed in Reason as Catholics believe in the Holy Virgin, neither group suspecting that Reason, no more than the Virgin, is nothing in itself, and that the source lies elsewhere. And just as the Catholic Church had its armies of monks and its congregations, which moved silently through the veins of the nation, propagating its virus and annihilating every rival vitality, the anti-Catholic church had its Freemasons, whose mother lodge, the Grand Orient, kept a faithful register of all the secret reports sent to it each day from every corner of France by its pious informers. The republican State covertly encouraged the sacred spying of these mendicant monks and these Jesuits of Reason, who terrorized the army, the universities, all the organs of the State; and it did not perceive that in appearing to serve it, they were gradually aiming to supplant it, and that it was gently drifting toward an atheist theocracy that would have nothing to envy the Jesuit theocracy of Paraguay.

Christophe encountered some of these clerics at Roussin’s home. Each was more fetishistic than the last. At that moment they were exulting over having had the crucifix removed from the courtrooms. They believed they had destroyed religion because they had destroyed a few pieces of wood or ivory. Others were appropriating Joan of Arc and her banner of the Virgin, which they had just wrested from the Catholics. One of the fathers of the new church, a general who made war on the French of the other church, had just delivered an anti-clerical speech in honor of Vercingetorix: he celebrated in the Gallic chieftain --- to whom Free Thought had erected a statue --- a child of the people and the first champion of France against Rome (of the church variety). The ministers of the navy, in order to purify the fleet and bear witness to their horror of war, named their battleships Descartes and Ernest Renan. Other free spirits devoted themselves to purifying art. They expurgated the classics of the seventeenth century and would not permit the name of God to sully La Fontaine’s Fables. They were equally unwilling to admit it in early music; and Christophe heard one of them, an old radical --- ( “To be radical in old age,” says Goethe, “is the height of all folly” ) --- who was outraged that anyone had dared to include Beethoven’s religious lieder in a popular concert. He demanded that other words be substituted.

--- What? asked Christophe, exasperated. The Republic?

Others, even more radical, would accept no such compromises, and insisted on the pure and simple suppression of all religious music and the schools where it was taught. In vain did a Director of Fine Arts --- who in that Boeotia passed for an Athenian --- try to explain that musicians still had to be trained; for, he said, with great elevation of thought, “when you send a soldier to the barracks, you teach him progressively to handle his rifle and to shoot. It is the same with the young composer: his head teems with ideas, but they have not yet been sorted out.” And, a little frightened by his own courage, protesting at every sentence --- “I am an old freethinker… I am an old republican…” --- he boldly proclaimed that “he cared little whether the compositions of Pergolesi were operas or masses; the question was whether they were works of human art.” --- But the implacable logic of his interlocutor replied to the “old freethinker,” the “old republican,” that “there were two kinds of music: that which was sung in churches, and that which was sung elsewhere.” The first was the enemy of Reason and the State; and the Reason of State must suppress it.

All these dunces would have been more ridiculous than dangerous, had there not stood behind them men of genuine stature on whom they leaned --- men who were, like them --- perhaps even more so --- fanatics of Reason. Tolstoy speaks somewhere of those “epidemic influences” that prevail in religion, philosophy, politics, art, and science --- those “mad influences whose madness men perceive only once they are rid of them, but which, as long as they are subject to them, seem so true that they do not even feel the need to question them.” Such were the passion for tulips, belief in witchcraft, the aberrations of literary fashion. --- The religion of Reason was one such madness. It was shared by the most ignorant and the most cultivated alike, by the “sub-veterinarians” of the Chamber and by certain of the most intelligent minds in the University. It was even more dangerous in the latter than in the former; for in the former it accommodated itself to a smug and stupid optimism that sapped its energy, whereas in the latter every spring was taut and every edge honed by a fanatical pessimism that harbored no illusions about the fundamental antagonism of Nature and Reason, and was all the more ferocious in sustaining the combat of abstract Liberty, abstract Justice, abstract Truth against wicked Nature. There was in all this a deep vein of Calvinist, Jansenist, Jacobin idealism, of the old belief in the irremediable perversity of man, which only the implacable pride of the Elect --- in whom Reason breathes, the Spirit of God --- can and must break. It was a distinctly French type: the type of the intelligent Frenchman who is not “humane.” A flint hard as iron: nothing can penetrate it, and it shatters everything it touches.

Christophe was devastated by the conversations he had at Achille Roussin’s with some of these rationalizing madmen. It overturned his ideas about France. He had believed, following received opinion, that the French were a measured, sociable, tolerant people who loved liberty. And he found instead maniacs of abstract ideas, sick with logic, always ready to sacrifice others and themselves to one of their syllogisms. They spoke constantly of liberty, and no one was less fitted to understand or to endure it. Nowhere did one find characters more coldly, more atrociously despotic --- despotic through intellectual passion, or through the passion of always needing to be right.

And this was not peculiar to any one party. All parties were the same. They could not --- they would not --- see anything beyond their political or religious formula, their country, their province, their group, their narrow skull. There were anti-Semites who spent every ounce of their being in a furious and impotent hatred of all the privileged of fortune: for they hated all Jews, and called Jews everyone they hated. There were nationalists who hated --- (when they were at their most charitable, they merely despised) --- all other nations, and within their own nation called foreigners, or renegades, or traitors, all those who did not think as they did. There were anti-Protestants who persuaded themselves that all Protestants were English or German, and who would have liked to banish them all from France. There were the men of the West who refused to admit anything east of the Rhine; and the men of the North who refused to admit anything south of the Loire; and the men of the Midi who called barbarians those north of the Loire; and those who boasted of being of Germanic race; and those who boasted of being of Gallic race; and, the maddest of all, the “Romans,” who took pride in their fathers’ defeat; and the Bretons, and the Lorrains, and the Félibres, and the Albigensians; and those of Carpentras, of Pontoise, and of Quimper-Corentin --- each one admitting only himself, making a title of nobility of being himself, and unable to tolerate that anyone might be otherwise. There is nothing to be done with this sort of man: they listen to no reasoning but their own; they are made to burn the rest of the world, or to be burned themselves.

Christophe thought it fortunate that such a people lived under a Republic: for all these little despots at least annihilated one another. But if one of them had been emperor or king, life would have become unbearable.

He did not know that rationalizing peoples retain one virtue that saves them: --- inconsistency.

The French politicians made ample use of it. Their despotism was tempered by anarchism; they oscillated ceaselessly between one pole and the other. If on the left they leaned on the fanatics of thought, on the right they leaned on the anarchists of thought. Around them one saw an entire rabble of dilettante socialists, petty careerists, who had been careful to take no part in the fight before it was won, but who followed in the wake of the Free Thought army and, after each of its victories, fell upon the spoils of the defeated. It was not for Reason that the champions of reason labored… Sic vos non vobis… It was for these petty cosmopolitan bourgeois, who joyfully trampled the traditions of the country, and who had no intention of destroying one faith in order to install another in its place, but simply to install themselves and be hampered by nothing.

Christophe encountered Lucien Lévy-Cœur there. He was not too surprised to learn that Lucien Lévy-Cœur was a socialist. He simply thought that socialism must be quite sure of succeeding for Lucien Lévy-Cœur to have come over to it. But he did not know that Lucien Lévy-Cœur had managed to make himself equally well regarded in the opposing camp, where he had succeeded in becoming friends with the most anti-liberal, even anti-Semitic, figures in politics and art. He asked Achille Roussin:

--- How can you keep such men with you?

Roussin replied:

--- He has such talent! And besides, he works for us --- he is destroying the old world.

--- I can see that he destroys, said Christophe. He destroys so thoroughly that I don’t know what you’ll have left to rebuild with. Are you sure there will be enough timber remaining for your new house? And indeed, are you sure the woodworm hasn’t already gotten into your construction site?

Lucien Lévy-Cœur was not the only one gnawing away at socialism. The socialist papers were full of these little men of letters --- art for art’s sake, luxury anarchists --- who had seized every avenue that might lead to success. They blocked the road for everyone else and filled the papers that called themselves the voice of the people with their decadent and struggle-for-life dilettantism. They were not content with positions: they needed glory as well. Never had so many statues been hastily erected, so many speeches delivered before plaster geniuses. Most comical of all were the banquets periodically offered to one of the great men of the brotherhood by the habitual glory-spongers --- not on the occasion of some work he had produced, but of some decoration he had received: for that was what touched them most. Aesthetes, supermen, métèques, socialist ministers --- all found themselves in agreement to celebrate a promotion in the Légion d’Honneur, that institution of the Corsican officer.

Roussin was amused by Christophe’s astonishment. He did not think the German’s judgment of his partners was so wrong. He himself, when the two were alone, treated them without any indulgence. He knew their stupidity or their cunning better than anyone; but that did not prevent him from supporting them in order to be supported by them. And if in private he did not scruple to speak of the people in contemptuous terms, at the podium he was a different man. He adopted a head voice --- sharp, nasal, hammering, solemn tones --- with tremolos, with bleating, with great sweeping trembling gestures like the beating of wings: he was playing Mounet-Sully.

Christophe labored to determine the degree to which Roussin actually believed in his own socialism. It was evident he did not believe in it at bottom: he was too skeptical. And yet he believed in it with part of his mind; and even though he knew perfectly well that it was only a part --- (and perhaps not the most important part) --- he had organized his life and conduct around it because it was more convenient for him to do so. His practical interest was not the only thing at stake, but also his vital interest, his reason for being and for acting. His socialist faith served him as a kind of state religion for his own private use. --- The majority of people live no differently. Their lives rest on religious, moral, social, or purely practical beliefs --- (belief in their trade, their work, the usefulness of their role in life) --- in which, at bottom, they do not really believe. But they do not wish to know this: for they need, in order to live, this semblance of faith --- this “state religion” of which each of us is the priest.

Roussin was not among the worst. How many others in the party practiced socialism or radicalism --- one could not even say out of ambition, so short-sighted was that ambition, extending no further than immediate plunder and their own reelection! These men gave the appearance of believing in a new society. Perhaps they had once believed in it; and they continued to perform faith; but in fact they thought of nothing now but living off the spoils of a dying society. A myopic opportunism served this pleasure-seeking nihilism. The great interests of the future were sacrificed to the selfishness of the present hour. The army was being dismembered; the homeland too would have been dismembered, to please the voters. It was not intelligence that was lacking: one understood perfectly well what ought to be done; but it was not done, because it would have cost too much effort, and one was no longer capable of effort. The aim was to arrange one’s own life and the nation’s with the minimum of pain and sacrifice. From top to bottom of the ladder, it was the same morality of the greatest possible pleasure at the least possible cost. This immoral morality was the only guiding thread through the political chaos, where the leaders set an example of anarchy, where one saw an incoherent politics chasing ten hares at once and dropping them all one by one along the way, a bellicose diplomacy side by side with a pacifist war ministry, ministers of war who destroyed the army in order to purify it, ministers of the navy who stirred up the arsenal workers, instructors of warfare who preached the horror of war, dilettante officers, dilettante judges, dilettante revolutionaries, dilettante patriots. A universal political demoralization. Everyone expecting the State to provide them with offices, decorations, pensions, allowances; and the State, indeed, never failing to shower its clientele: the scramble for honors and appointments offered to the sons, nephews, grand-nephews, and lackeys of power; deputies voting themselves salary increases; the frenzied squandering of public finances, positions, titles, and all the forces of the State. --- And, like a sinister echo of the example set from above, sabotage from below: schoolteachers teaching contempt for authority and revolt against the homeland, postal workers burning letters and telegrams, factory workers throwing sand or emery into machine gears, arsenal workers destroying arsenals, ships set ablaze, the monstrous spoilage of work by the workers themselves --- the destruction not of the rich, but of the world’s wealth.

To crown the whole, an intellectual elite amused itself by founding in reason and in right this suicide of a people, in the name of the sacred rights of the human person to happiness. A morbid humanitarianism was eating away at the distinction between good and evil, and pitied the “irresponsible and sacred” person of criminals with an old man’s sentimentality --- capitulating before crime and delivering society into its hands.

Christophe thought:

--- France is drunk on freedom. After raving long enough, she will fall down dead drunk. And when she wakes up, she will be behind bars.

What wounded Christophe most in this demagogy was seeing the worst political violence coldly carried out by men whose uncertain depths he knew. The disproportion was too scandalous between these fluid, shifting creatures and the harsh action they unleashed or authorized. It seemed there were in them two contradictory things: an inconsistent character that believed in nothing, and a rationalizing intellect that cut, mowed, and ravaged life without wishing to look at anything. Christophe wondered how the peaceful bourgeoisie, the Catholics, the officers who were harassed in every possible way did not throw these men out the window. He did not dare say this to Roussin; but since he could hide nothing, Roussin had no difficulty guessing his thoughts. He laughed and said:

--- No doubt, that is what you or I would do, isn’t it? But there is no risk with them. They are poor devils, quite incapable of taking any decisive action; they are fit only for grumbling. A finished aristocracy, senile, stupefied by clubs and sports, prostituted to Americans and Jews, who, to prove its modernity, enjoys the insulting role assigned to it in fashionable plays, and fetes the very people who insult it. An apathetic and querulous bourgeoisie that reads nothing, understands nothing, wants to understand nothing, knows only how to denounce --- denouncing emptily, sourly, to no purpose --- whose only passion is to sleep, to stagnate in its sleep, sitting on its bag of coins, hating those who want to disturb it, or even those who simply refuse to do as it does: because it bothers them that others should work while they are napping!… If you knew those people, you would end up finding us rather likable.

But Christophe felt only a deep disgust for both sides alike: for he did not believe that the baseness of the persecuted was any excuse for that of the persecutors. He had encountered far too often at the Stevenses’ those specimens of the wealthy, sullen bourgeoisie that Roussin had described for him,

… l’anime triste di coloro, Che visser senza infamia e senza lodo…

He saw all too clearly the reasons Roussin and his friends had for being certain not only of their power over these people, but of their right to abuse it. They lacked no instruments of domination. Thousands of officials without will, having abdicated all personality, obeying blindly. Courtier-like customs, a Republic without republicans; socialist newspapers, socialist deputies prostrating themselves before visiting kings; souls of servants, standing at attention before titles, braid, and decorations --- to keep them on a leash, one had only to throw them a bone to gnaw, or the Legion of Honor. If the kings had ennobled every citizen of France, every citizen of France would have been a royalist.

The politicians had an easy game. Of the three Estates of 1789, the first had been annihilated; the second was proscribed, emigrated, or suspect; the third, sated with its victory, slept. And as for the fourth Estate, which had since risen, threatening and envious, it was not very difficult to get the better of it. The decadent Republic treated it as decadent Rome had treated the barbarian hordes it no longer had the strength to expel from its borders: it incorporated them; they soon became its best watchdogs. The bourgeois ministers who called themselves socialists covertly attracted and annexed to the bourgeoisie the most intelligent and vigorous from the workers’ elite; they beheaded the proletarian party of its leaders, infused themselves with their fresh blood, and in return gorged them with indigestible learning and bourgeois ideology.

One of the most curious specimens of these attempts by the bourgeoisie to seize control of the people was the Popular Universities. These were little bazaars of muddled knowledge from every era and every country. They claimed to teach, as one program put it, “all branches of physical, biological, and sociological knowledge: astronomy, cosmology, anthropology, ethnology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, geography, linguistics, aesthetics, logic, etc.” Enough to make the brain of Pico della Mirandola burst.

Certainly, at the outset there had been, and in some of them there still was, a grandeur of idealism, a desire to dispense truth, beauty, and the moral life to all, which was a magnificent thing. Those workers who, after a day of hard labor, came to pack themselves into cramped and stifling lecture halls, whose thirst for knowledge was stronger than their weariness and hunger, offered an admirable and moving spectacle. But how badly the poor people had been abused! For every true apostle, intelligent and humane, for every excellent heart, better intentioned than skilled, how many fools, chatterboxes, and schemers --- writers without readers, orators without audiences, professors, pastors, talkers, pianists, critics, anarchists --- who inundated the people with their output! Each one was trying to sell his wares. The best-patronized were naturally the snake-oil sellers, the philosophical speechifiers who shoveled up sweeping generalities by the spadeful, with a fact here and there, some scientific notions, and cosmological conclusions.

The Popular Universities were also an outlet for ultra-aristocratic works of art: prints, poems, decadent music. The advent of the people was desired in order to rejuvenate thought and regenerate the race. And one began by inoculating them with every refinement of the bourgeoisie. They received it avidly, not because it pleased them, but because it was bourgeois. Christophe, who had been brought to one of these Popular Universities by Mme Roussin, heard Debussy played there for the people, between la Bonne Chanson by Gabriel Fauré and one of the last quartets of Beethoven. He, who had arrived at an understanding of Beethoven’s late works only after many years, by a slow progression of taste and thought, turned to one of his neighbors, full of pity, and asked:

--- But do you understand any of this?

The other drew himself up like an angry rooster and said:

--- Of course. Why should I not understand it as well as you?

And, to prove that he had understood, he demanded an encore of a fugue, looking at Christophe with a provocative air.

Christophe fled, dismayed; he told himself that these creatures had managed to poison even the living springs of the nation: there was no more people.

--- Call yourself “people” if you like! as one worker said to one of those well-meaning souls who tried to found People’s Theaters. I am as much a bourgeois as you!

One fine evening, when the soft sky, like an Oriental carpet in warm, slightly faded tones, lay spread above the darkening city, Christophe was following the quays from Notre-Dame to the Invalides. In the falling night, the towers of the cathedral rose like the arms of Moses lifted high during battle. The golden lance, finely worked, of the Sainte-Chapelle, the sacred thorn in flower, sprang up from the thicket of houses. On the other side of the water, the Louvre unrolled its royal façade, into whose weary eyes the reflections of the setting sun cast a last glimmer of life. At the far end of the plain of the Invalides, behind its moats and haughty walls, in its majestic desert, the dome of somber gold floated like a symphony of distant victories. And the Arc de Triomphe opened upon the hill, like a heroic march, the superhuman stride of the imperial legions.

And Christophe was suddenly seized by the impression of a dead giant, whose immense limbs covered the plain. His heart tight with dread, he stopped, contemplating the gigantic fossils of a fabulous species, vanished from the earth, whose footsteps the whole world had heard resound --- the race helmeted with the dome of the Invalides and girded with the Louvre, which clasped the sky in the thousand arms of its cathedrals, and which braced against the world the two triumphant feet of the Napoleonic Arch, beneath whose heel Lilliput swarmed today.

Without having sought it, Christophe had acquired a small notoriety in the Parisian circles into which Sylvain Kohn and Goujart had introduced him. The originality of his face, which was always to be seen, with one or the other of his two friends, at theater premieres and concerts, his powerful ugliness, even the absurdities of his person, his dress, his brusque and awkward manners, the paradoxical outbursts that escaped him sometimes, his rough but broad and robust intelligence, and the romantic accounts that Sylvain Kohn had spread about his escapades in Germany, his run-ins with the police, and his flight to France, had marked him out for the idle and busy curiosity of that great cosmopolitan hotel salon that the tout-Paris had become. As long as he held himself in reserve --- observing, listening, trying to understand before speaking his mind, as long as his works and the depths of his thought remained unknown --- he was fairly well received. The French were grateful to him for not having been able to remain in Germany. Above all, French musicians felt touched, as by a tribute paid to them, by the injustice of Christophe’s judgments on German music --- (these were, in truth, already old judgments, most of which he would no longer have endorsed today: a few articles published some time ago in a German review, whose paradoxes had been spread and amplified by Sylvain Kohn). --- Christophe was interesting, and he was no one’s rival. It would have been entirely up to him to become a great man of the salon set. He had only to write nothing, or as little as possible, above all to let nothing of his work be heard, and to supply ideas to the Goujarts and their kind --- all that breed which has adopted as its motto a famous saying, with a slight alteration:

“My glass is not large; but I drink… from other people’s.”

A strong personality exerts its influence most of all on young people, more occupied with feeling than with acting. There was no shortage of them around Christophe. They were in general those idle beings, without will, without purpose, without reason for being, who are afraid of the writing table, afraid of finding themselves alone with themselves, who linger indefinitely in an armchair, who wander from a café to a theater, seeking every pretext not to go home, not to come face to face with themselves. They came, settled in, dragged on for hours in those insipid conversations from which one emerges with a bloated feeling, nauseated, saturated, and yet still hungry, with the need and the disgust simultaneously of going on. They gathered around Christophe like Goethe’s poodle, like “larvae lying in wait,” watching for a soul to seize upon and cling to for life.

A vain fool would have taken pleasure in such a court of parasites. But Christophe had no taste for playing the idol. He was moreover infuriated by the idiotic subtlety of his admirers, who discovered in what he wrote outlandish intentions --- Renanesque, Nietzschean, hermaphroditic. He showed them the door. He was not made for a passive role. Everything in him had action as its aim. He observed in order to understand; and he wanted to understand in order to act. Free of academic constraint and prejudice, he informed himself about everything, read everything, studied in his art all the forms of thought and all the expressive resources of other countries and other times. Each one that seemed to him effective and true became his prey. Unlike those French artists he studied --- ingenious inventors of new forms who exhaust themselves in endless invention and leave their inventions half-finished along the road --- he sought far less to innovate in the musical language than to speak it with greater energy; his concern was not to be rare but to be strong. This passionate force stood in opposition to the French genius for refinement and measure. It had contempt for style for style’s sake and art for art’s sake. The finest French artists struck him as luxury craftsmen. One of the most accomplished Parisian poets had amused himself by drawing up “the workers’ list of contemporary French poetry, each with his commodity, his product, or his end-of-season stock”; and he enumerated “the crystal chandeliers, the Oriental fabrics, the gold and bronze medals, the guipure lace for dowagers, the polychrome sculptures, the floral faïence” that came out of this or that colleague’s workshop. The poet represented himself, “in a corner of the vast atelier of letters, darning old tapestries, or polishing halberds long out of use.” --- This conception of the artist as a good craftsman, attentive solely to the perfection of his trade, was not without a certain grandeur. But it did not satisfy Christophe; and while he acknowledged in it a professional dignity, he felt contempt for the poverty of life it usually concealed. He could not conceive of writing for the sake of writing, of speaking for the sake of speaking. He did not utter words --- he said, or meant to say --- things.

Ei dice cose, e voi dite parole…

After a period of rest during which he had been occupied only with absorbing a new world, Christophe’s mind was suddenly seized by a need to create. The antagonism he felt between Paris and himself multiplied his strength a hundredfold by sharpening his sense of who he was. It was an overflow of passions demanding imperiously to be expressed. They were of every kind; by all of them he was solicited with equal ardor. He had to forge works in which to discharge the love that swelled his heart --- and the hatred too; the will, and also the renunciation, and all the demons that clashed within him and each had an equal right to live. Hardly had he relieved himself of one passion in a single work --- sometimes he did not even have the patience to carry the work to its end --- than he threw himself into a contrary passion. But the contradiction was only apparent: if he was always changing, he always remained the same. All his works were different roads leading to the same destination; his soul was a mountain, and he took every path up it; some lingered in the shade through their soft windings; others climbed harshly, arid, into the sun; all led to God, who reigned at the summit. Love, hatred, will, renunciation --- all human forces, carried to their paroxysm, touch eternity and already partake of it. Each person carries it within: the religious man and the atheist, the one who sees life everywhere and the one who denies it everywhere, and the one who doubts everything --- life and its negation alike --- and Christophe, whose soul embraced all these contraries at once. All contraries dissolve into the eternal Force. What mattered to Christophe was to awaken this Force in himself and in others, to throw armfuls of wood onto the blaze, to set Eternity alight. A great flame had risen in his heart in the midst of the voluptuous night of Paris. He believed himself free of all faith, and he was entirely nothing but a torch of faith.

Nothing could more readily lay itself open to French irony. Faith is one of the feelings that a highly refined society is least able to forgive: for it has lost faith itself, and it does not want others to possess it. In the mute or mocking hostility that most people feel toward the dreams of the young, there is a large admixture of the bitter thought that they themselves were once that way, that they once had those ambitions and never realized them. All those who have betrayed their own souls, all those who had a work within them and did not accomplish it --- choosing instead the security of an easy and respectable life --- think:

--- Since I could not do what I had dreamed of doing, why should they be able to? I do not want them to do it.

How many Hedda Gablers among men! What a silent struggle to annihilate fresh and free energies, what art in killing them through silence, through irony, through attrition, through discouragement --- and through some perfidious seduction, at just the right moment!…

The type is found in every country. Christophe knew it, having encountered it in Germany. Against this kind of person he was armored. His system of defense was simple: he attacked first; at the first overtures, he declared war; he compelled these dangerous friends to become his enemies. But if this straightforward policy was most effective at safeguarding his personality, it was far less so in easing his career as an artist. Christophe was beginning his old mistakes all over again, as in Germany. It was stronger than he was. Only one thing had changed: his mood, which was decidedly cheerful.

He expressed freely to anyone who would listen his unmeasured criticisms of French artists, drawing much ill will upon himself in the process. He did not even take the sensible precaution of securing the support of some small clique. He would have had no difficulty finding artists around him quite ready to admire him, provided he admired them in return. There were even some who admired him in advance, on condition of reciprocation. They regarded the person they praised as a debtor from whom they could always, when the moment came, demand repayment. It was money well invested. --- It was money very badly invested, where Christophe was concerned. He repaid nothing. Worse still, he had the effrontery to find mediocre the works of those who found his work good. They nursed a deep and silent grudge, and promised themselves that at the first opportunity they would repay him in exactly the same coin.

Among all the blunders he committed, Christophe had that of going to war against Lucien Lévy-Cœur. He found him everywhere in his path, and he could not conceal an exaggerated antipathy toward this mild, polished being who did no apparent harm, who seemed indeed to possess more kindness than he did, and who in any case had far more restraint. He provoked him into arguments; and however trivial the subject of the argument, it always took on, through Christophe’s doing, a sudden acrimony that surprised those present. It seemed that Christophe sought every pretext to charge headlong at Lucien Lévy-Cœur; yet he could never land a blow. His adversary always had the supreme skill, even when most clearly in the wrong, of casting himself in the better light; he defended himself with a courtesy that threw Christophe’s lack of polish into sharp relief. Christophe, who besides spoke French very badly --- lacing it with slang, even with rather coarse expressions he had picked up immediately and used inappropriately, as many foreigners do --- was incapable of outwitting Lévy-Cœur’s tactics, and he struggled furiously against that ironic gentleness. Everyone took sides against him: for no one could see what Christophe sensed obscurely --- the hypocrisy of that gentleness, which, when it encountered a force it could not erode, sought to smother it without a scene, in silence. Lévy-Cœur was in no hurry, being one of those who, like Christophe, counted on time; but his purpose was destruction, where Christophe’s was construction. He had no difficulty in drawing Sylvain Kohn and Goujart away from Christophe, just as he had gradually edged him out of the Stevenses’ salon. He made a desert around him.

Christophe was doing that himself, on his own. He satisfied no one, belonging to no party, or rather, being against all parties. He did not like Jews; but he liked antisemites even less. The cowardice of the masses rising against a powerful minority --- not because it was evil but because it was powerful --- this appeal to the base instincts of jealousy and hatred, disgusted him. He was seen by Jews as an antisemite, by antisemites as a Jew. As for the artists, they sensed in him an enemy. Instinctively, Christophe made himself out, in art, to be more German than he actually was. In opposition to the voluptuous ataraxia of a certain Parisian music, he celebrated violent will, a virile and healthy pessimism. When joy appeared in his work, it came with a bad taste, a plebeian exuberance, well suited to revolt even the aristocratic patrons of popular art. A learned and rough form. He even went so far as to affect, by way of reaction, a studied negligence of style and an indifference to outward originality, which must have been keenly felt by French musicians. And so those among them to whom he communicated some of his works lumped him, without looking more closely, in with the contempt they held for the belated Wagnerism of the contemporary German school. Christophe cared very little; he laughed inwardly, repeating to himself these lines from a charming musician of the French Renaissance --- adapted to his own use:

… Go, go, be not dismayed by those who say: This Christophe lacks the counterpoint of such a one. He has not such a one’s harmony, they say. I have something too that others have not won.

But when he tried to have his works performed in concerts, he found the door shut. There was already more than enough to do in playing --- or not playing --- the works of young French musicians, without troubling about those of an unknown German.

Christophe did not persist in making overtures. He shut himself in and went back to writing. He cared little whether the people of Paris heard him or not. He wrote for his own pleasure, not for success. The true artist does not concern himself with the future of his work. He is like those Renaissance painters who joyfully painted the facades of houses, knowing that in ten years nothing would remain of them. Christophe worked in peace, with good-natured resignation, waiting for better times --- when help came to him from an unexpected quarter.

Christophe was then drawn toward the dramatic form. He did not yet dare give himself freely over to the flood of his inner lyricism. He needed to channel it into specific subjects. And it is no doubt good for a young genius who has not yet mastered himself, who does not yet even know exactly who he is, to create voluntary boundaries in which to enclose a soul that slips from his own grasp. These are the necessary sluices and dikes that make it possible to direct the course of thought. --- Unfortunately, what Christophe lacked was a poet; he was forced to cut his own subjects from legend or from history.

Among the visions that had been floating within him for several months were images from the Bible. --- The Bible, which his mother had given him as a companion in exile, had been for him a source of dreams. Although he did not read it in a religious spirit, the moral --- or rather, the vital --- energy of that Hebrew Iliad was a wellspring for him, in which each evening he bathed his naked soul, soiled by the smoke and mud of Paris. He did not trouble himself with the sacred meaning of the book; but it was nonetheless sacred to him, for the breath of wild nature and primitive individuality he inhaled there. He drank in those hymns of earth consumed by faith, of palpitating mountains, exultant heavens, and human lions.

One figure in the book for whom he felt a special tenderness was that of David as a young man. He did not lend him the ironic smile of a Florentine street boy, nor the tragic tension that Verrocchio and Michelangelo had given to their sublime works --- he did not know them. He saw his David as a small poetic shepherd, with a virgin heart in which heroism lay sleeping, a Siegfried of the South, of a more refined race, more beautiful, more harmonious in body and mind. --- For all his rebellion against the Latin spirit, that spirit had begun, unknown to him, to infiltrate his soul. It is not only art that influences art, not only thought --- it is everything that surrounds you: people, things, gestures, movements, lines, the light of each city. The atmosphere of Paris is powerful: it shapes even the most resistant souls. And no soul is less capable of resistance than a Germanic one; it wraps itself in vain in national pride, for it is, of all European souls, the quickest to lose its national character. Christophe’s soul had already begun, without his suspecting it, to draw from Latin art a clarity, a sobriety, an intelligence of feeling, and even, to a certain degree, a plastic beauty it could never have possessed without that influence. His David was the proof.

He had wanted to trace several episodes from that adolescence: the encounter with Saul, the combat with Goliath; and he had first written the opening scene. He had conceived it as a symphonic tableau for two characters.

On a deserted plateau, in the middle of a heath of flowering heather, the little shepherd boy lay stretched out, dreaming in the sun. The serene light, the hum of living things, the soft shivering of grasses swaying in the breeze, the silver tinkling of the grazing flocks, the strength of the earth---all of it cradled the reverie of a child unconscious of his divine destiny. Lazily, he wove his voice and the sounds of a flute into the harmonious silence; and this song was of so calm and limpid a joy that those who heard it no longer thought of joy or of sorrow, but felt simply that it was so, that it could not be otherwise. --- Suddenly, great shadows spread across the heath; the air fell still; life seemed to withdraw into the veins of the earth. Tranquil, the flute song continued alone. Saul passed by, wild-eyed. The maddened king, consumed by emptiness, thrashed like a raging flame devouring itself, twisted by the hurricane. He implored, he reviled, he defied the void that surrounded him and that he carried within himself. And when, breathless at last, he fell upon the heath, there reappeared in the silence the peaceful smile of the little shepherd’s song, which had never ceased. Then Saul, stilling the tumultuous beating of his heart, came silently to the side of the child lying there; in silence he gazed at him; he sat down beside him and laid his fevered hand upon the shepherd’s head. David, untroubled, turned with a smile and looked at the king. He rested his head upon Saul’s knees and took up his music again. The shadow of evening fell; David drifted into sleep, still singing, and Saul wept. And in the starlit night there rose once more the hymn of serene joy from a nature restored to life, and the song of thanksgiving from a convalescent soul.

Christophe, in writing this scene, had thought only of his own joy; he had given no thought to the means of performance, and above all it would never have occurred to him that it might be staged. He intended it for the concert halls, for the day when the concert halls might deign to receive it.

One evening, speaking of it to Achille Roussin, and having at his request tried to give him some idea of it at the piano, he was quite astonished to see Roussin catch fire for the work and declare that it absolutely had to be performed on a Parisian stage, and that he would make it his personal affair. He was still more astonished when, a few days later, he saw that Roussin was taking the matter seriously; and his astonishment bordered on stupefaction when he learned that Sylvain Kohn, Goujart, and Lucien Lévy-Cœur himself were taking an interest in it. He had to admit that the personal grudges of these people yielded to their love of art --- which genuinely surprised him. The least eager to have his work performed was Christophe himself. It had not been written for the theatre in any sense; staging it there was a nonsense, almost an affront. But Roussin was so insistent, Sylvain Kohn so persuasive, and Goujart so emphatic that Christophe allowed himself to be tempted. He was weak. He so desperately wanted to hear his music!

Everything was easy for Roussin. Directors and artists fell over themselves to please him. As it happened, a newspaper was organizing a gala matinée for the benefit of a charity. It was agreed that David would be performed there. A good orchestra was assembled. As for the singers, Roussin claimed to have found the ideal interpreter for the role of David.

Rehearsals began. The orchestra got through the first reading reasonably well, though it was poorly disciplined, in the French manner. The Saul had a somewhat tired voice, but a respectable one, and he knew his craft. As for the David, she was a handsome woman---tall, full-figured, well-made---but with a sentimental and vulgar voice that sprawled about heavily with melodramatic tremolos and music-hall affectations. Christophe winced. From the first measures she sang, it was clear to him that she could not keep the role. At the first break in the orchestra, he went to find the impresario, who had taken charge of the practical organization of the concert and who, with Sylvain Kohn, was attending the rehearsal. The impresario, seeing him approach, said with a beaming face:

--- Well, are you pleased?

--- Yes, said Christophe, I think it will come together. There is only one thing that isn’t working: the singer. You’ll need to replace her. Tell her gently --- you know how to manage these things. It won’t be difficult for you to find me another.

The impresario looked astonished; he stared at Christophe as if unsure whether he was serious, and said:

--- But that isn’t possible!

--- Why not? asked Christophe.

The impresario exchanged a knowing glance with Sylvain Kohn and replied:

--- But she has such talent!

--- She has none whatsoever, said Christophe.

--- What! Such a beautiful voice!

--- She has none whatsoever.

--- And then, such a beautiful woman!

--- I don’t give a damn.

--- It doesn’t hurt, all the same, said Sylvain Kohn, laughing.

--- I need a David, and a David who can sing; I don’t need the Belle Hélène, said Christophe.

The impresario rubbed his nose awkwardly:

--- This is very awkward, very awkward indeed, he said. She really is an excellent artist… I assure you! She may not be at her best today. You really ought to give her another try.

--- Very well, said Christophe; but it’s a waste of time.

He resumed the rehearsal. It went even worse. He had difficulty seeing it through to the end; he was growing irritable; his remarks to the singer, at first cool but polite, became sharp and cutting, despite the obvious effort she was making to satisfy him and the glances she kept shooting at him to win his good graces. The impresario prudently broke off the rehearsal at the moment when things threatened to turn ugly. To smooth over the bad impression of Christophe’s remarks, he hurried to the singer’s side and lavished clumsy gallantries upon her, when Christophe, who had been watching this performance with undisguised impatience, beckoned him over imperiously and said:

--- There is nothing to discuss. I don’t want this person. It’s unpleasant, I know, but I’m not the one who chose her. Make whatever arrangements you like.

The impresario bowed with an air of annoyance and said, indifferently:

--- There is nothing I can do. Speak to Monsieur Roussin.

--- What does this have to do with Monsieur Roussin? asked Christophe. I don’t want to trouble him with these matters.

--- It won’t trouble him, said Sylvain Kohn, with an ironic smile.

And he pointed out Roussin, who was just then entering.

Christophe went to meet him. Roussin, in excellent humor, exclaimed:

--- What! Already finished? I was hoping to hear a little more. Well, my dear maître, what do you say? Are you satisfied?

--- Everything is going very well, said Christophe. I can’t thank you enough…

--- Not at all! Not at all!

--- There is only one thing that cannot work.

--- Tell me, tell me. We’ll sort it out. I’m determined that you should be happy.

--- Well, it’s the singer. Between us, she’s dreadful.

The broad smile on Roussin’s face froze instantly. He said, with a severe air:

--- You astonish me, my dear fellow.

--- She’s worthless, absolutely worthless, Christophe continued. She has no voice, no taste, no craft, not the shadow of talent. You’re lucky you didn’t hear her just now!…

Roussin, growing more and more stiff, cut Christophe short and said in a clipped tone:

--- I know Mlle de Sainte-Ygraine. She is an artist of great talent. I have the highest admiration for her. Every person of taste in Paris thinks as I do.

And he turned his back on Christophe. Christophe watched him offer his arm to the actress and leave with her. As he stood there dumbfounded, Sylvain Kohn, who had followed the scene with delight, took his arm and said to him with a laugh, as they went down the theatre staircase together:

--- But don’t you know she’s his mistress?

Christophe understood. So it was for her, not for him, that the piece was being mounted! He could now explain Roussin’s enthusiasm, his expenditure, the eagerness of his associates. He listened as Sylvain Kohn told him the story of the Sainte-Ygraine: a music-hall divette who, after exhibiting herself with some success in various small theatres of that sort, had been seized by the ambition, common to many of her kind, to be heard on a stage more worthy of her talent. She was counting on Roussin to get her engaged at the Opéra, or the Opéra-Comique; and Roussin, who asked nothing better, had seen in the performance of David an opportunity to reveal, without risk, the lyrical gifts of the new tragedienne to the Parisian public, in a role that required almost no dramatic action and that showed off her elegant figure to full advantage.

Christophe listened to the story to the end; then he freed himself from Sylvain Kohn’s arm and burst out laughing. He laughed and laughed, at length. When he had finished laughing, he said:

--- You disgust me. You all disgust me. Art counts for nothing with you. It’s always a matter of women. A work is mounted for a dancer, for a singer, for the mistress of so-and-so, or of such-and-such. You think of nothing but your filth. I don’t hold it against you, mind you --- that’s the way you are, stay that way if you like, and wallow in your trough. But let us part ways: we are not made to live together. Good evening.

He left him; and once back home, he wrote to Roussin withdrawing his piece, not concealing the reasons that led him to take it back.

That was the break with Roussin and with his entire circle. The consequences were felt immediately. The newspapers had made a certain noise about the planned performance, and the story of the falling-out between the composer and his interpreter did not fail to set tongues wagging. A concert director, out of curiosity, gave the work at one of his Sunday matinées. This stroke of luck proved a disaster for Christophe. The work was performed---and booed. All the singer’s friends had given the word to administer a lesson to the insolent musician; and the rest of the public, which the symphonic poem had bored, readily joined in the verdict of the qualified judges. To make matters worse, Christophe had been imprudent enough, in order to show off his virtuosic ability, to agree to perform himself at the same concert, in a Fantasy for piano and orchestra. The hostile mood of the audience, held in check to some degree during the performance of David by the desire not to offend the other performers, was given free rein when it found itself face to face with the author in person---whose playing was not, moreover, entirely faultless. Christophe, rattled by the noise in the hall, broke off abruptly in the middle of the piece; and, looking out at the audience, which had fallen suddenly silent, with a mocking expression, he played: “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre!”---and said insolently:

--- That’s what you want.

Thereupon he rose and left.

There was a fine uproar. People cried that he had insulted the audience and that he owed the house an apology. The newspapers the next day executed in concert the grotesque German upon whom Parisian good taste had passed judgment.

And then came the void again, complete, absolute. Christophe found himself alone once more, more alone than ever, in the great foreign and hostile city. He was no longer distressed by it. He was beginning to believe that it was his destiny, and that he would remain so all his life.

He did not know that a great soul is never truly alone, that however bereft of friends fortune may leave it, it always ends by creating them, that it radiates around itself the love with which it is full, and that at that very hour, when he believed himself isolated forever, he was richer in love than the most fortunate people in the world.

At the Stevens household there was a young girl of thirteen or fourteen to whom Christophe had given lessons at the same time as to Colette. She was Colette’s first cousin, and her name was Grazia Buontempi. She was a girl with a golden complexion, delicately flushed at the cheekbones, full-cheeked with a healthy country bloom, a slightly upturned nose, a wide, well-cut mouth always faintly parted, a round chin very white, calm and gently smiling eyes, a round forehead framed by a profusion of long silky hair that fell without curls along her cheeks in light, quiet waves. A little Madonna by Andrea del Sarto, broad-faced, with a beautiful and silent gaze.

She was Italian. Her parents lived almost the whole year in the country, on a large estate in the north of Italy: plains, meadows, small canals. From the rooftop terrace one looked out over waves of golden vines, from which the black spindles of cypresses emerged here and there. Beyond lay the fields, the fields. Silence. One could hear the lowing of the oxen turning the soil, and the sharp cries of the peasants at the plough:

--- Ihi!… Fat innanz’!…

The cicadas sang in the trees, and the frogs along the water. And at night came the infinite silence under the moon’s floods of silver. In the distance, from time to time, the guards of the crops, who dozed in huts of branches, fired their guns to warn any thieves that they were awake. For those who heard them, half asleep, the sound had no more meaning than the ticking of a peaceful clock, marking the hours of the night from afar. And the silence closed again, like a soft mantle with vast folds, over the soul.

Around little Grazia, life seemed to be sleeping. No one paid her very much attention. She grew up quietly in the lovely calm that bathed her. No fever, no hurry. She was lazy; she liked to wander and sleep long hours. She would lie stretched out in the garden for hours at a time. She let herself drift on the silence like a fly on a summer brook. And then, suddenly, she would break into a run for no reason at all. She ran like a small animal, her head and shoulders tilted slightly to the right, supple, without any stiffness. A real little kid, scrambling and sliding among the stones for the sheer joy of leaping. She talked with the dogs, with the frogs, with the grasses and the trees, with the peasants and the farmyard animals. She adored all the small creatures around her, and the large ones too — though with those she held something back. She saw almost no one. The property was far from town, isolated. Very rarely did the dragging step of some grave peasant pass along the dusty road, or a handsome country woman with luminous eyes in a tanned face, walking with a swaying rhythm, head high, chest forward. Grazia would spend entire days alone in the silent park; she saw no one; she was never bored; she was afraid of nothing.

Once, a vagabond came in to steal a hen from the empty farmyard. He stopped short, disconcerted, before the little girl lying in the grass, eating a long slice of bread and butter and humming a song. She looked at him calmly and asked what he wanted. He said:

--- Give me something, or I’ll turn nasty.

She held out her bread and butter to him, and said, with her smiling eyes:

--- You mustn’t turn nasty.

Then he went away.

Her mother died. Her father, very kind, very weak, was an old Italian of good stock — robust, jovial, affectionate, but a little childlike and entirely incapable of directing the little girl’s upbringing. The old Buontempi’s sister, Mme Stevens, who had come for the funeral and had been struck by the child’s isolation, decided, to distract her from her grief, to take her away to Paris for a while. Grazia wept, and the old papa too; but when Mme Stevens had made up her mind about something, there was nothing left to do but resign oneself: no one could resist her. She was the strong head of the family; and, in her Paris house, she directed everything, she dominated everything: her husband, her daughter, and her lovers --- for she had not stinted herself of those; she kept her duties and her pleasures running in tandem: she was a practical and passionate woman --- and, moreover, very social and very restless.

Transplanted to Paris, the calm Grazia fell into adoration of her beautiful cousin Colette, who found it amusing. The gentle little savage was taken out into society, brought to the theater. People continued to treat her as a child, and she thought of herself as a child, even when she no longer was one. She had feelings she concealed, feelings that frightened her: immense surges of tenderness toward an object or a person. She was secretly in love with Colette: she would steal a ribbon from her, a handkerchief; often, in her presence, she could not utter a single word; and when she was waiting for her, when she knew she was about to see her, she trembled with impatience and happiness. At the theater, when she saw her pretty cousin, in a low-cut gown, enter the box where she was sitting and draw every gaze, she had a warm smile, humble, affectionate, overflowing with love; and her heart melted when Colette spoke to her. In a white dress, her beautiful black hair loose and billowing over her brown shoulders, gnawing at the tips of her long white cotton gloves, poking her finger into their opening out of idleness --- at every moment during the performance she would turn back toward Colette, to seek a friendly glance, to share the pleasure she felt, to say with her brown, limpid eyes:

--- I love you dearly.

Out walking, in the woods, on the outskirts of Paris, she walked in Colette’s shadow, sat at her feet, ran ahead of her steps, pulled aside branches that might have brushed her, laid stones across the mud. And one evening when Colette, feeling cold in the garden, asked her for her shawl, she let out a roar of pleasure --- of which she was ashamed afterward --- at the happiness of having the beloved wrap herself in a little piece of herself, and then return it to her, all saturated with the fragrance of her body.

There were also books --- certain pages of poets, read in secret --- (for people kept on giving her children’s books) --- that caused her delicious turmoil. And even more, certain pieces of music, though people told her she could not possibly understand them; and she convinced herself that she understood nothing --- but she was entirely pale and moist with emotion. No one knew what was happening inside her at those moments.

Apart from all that, she was still a docile little girl, scatterbrained, lazy, rather greedy, blushing at the slightest thing, sometimes silent for hours, sometimes talking volubly, laughing and crying easily, given to sudden sobs and a child’s laughter. She loved to laugh and was amused by small nothings. She never tried to play the grown-up lady. She stayed a child. Above all, she was good; she could not bear to cause pain, and she was hurt by the slightest cross word directed at her. Very modest, always self-effacing, wholly ready to love and admire everything she believed she saw to be beautiful and good, she attributed to others qualities they did not possess.

Her education, which had fallen far behind, was attended to. It was in this way that she began piano lessons with Christophe.

She saw him for the first time at an evening party at her aunt’s, where there was a large gathering. Christophe, incapable of adapting himself to any audience, played an interminable adagio that had everyone yawning: whenever it seemed to be ending, it began again; people wondered whether it would ever stop. Mme Stevens was boiling with impatience. Colette was vastly amused: she savored every bit of the ridiculousness of the thing, and she bore Christophe no ill will for being so completely oblivious to it; she sensed that he was a force, and that was something she liked; but it was comical too; and she would have taken great care not to come to his defense. Only little Grazia was moved to tears by that music. She had hidden herself in a corner of the drawing room. At the end, she slipped away so that her agitation would not be noticed, and also because she was pained to see that people were mocking Christophe.

A few days later, at dinner, Mme Stevens spoke in front of her of having Christophe give Grazia piano lessons. Grazia was so flustered that she dropped her spoon back into her soup bowl and splashed herself and her cousin. Colette said that she was clearly in need of lessons in how to sit properly at table first. Mme Stevens added that in that case it was not Christophe one ought to consult. Grazia was happy to be scolded alongside Christophe.

Christophe began the lessons. She was completely stiff and frozen, her arms pressed to her sides; she could not move; and when Christophe laid his hand on her little hand to correct the position of her fingers and spread them over the keys, she felt herself about to faint. She trembled at the thought of playing badly in front of him; but however much she practiced until she made herself ill and until her cousin cried out in impatience, she always played badly when Christophe was there; her breath failed her, her fingers were stiff as pieces of wood or limp as cotton; she would clip the wrong notes and accent the wrong beats; Christophe would scold her and leave in a temper: and then she wanted to die.

He paid no attention to her whatsoever; he had eyes only for Colette. Grazia envied her cousin’s intimacy with Christophe; but, though it pained her, her kind little heart rejoiced in it for Colette’s sake and for Christophe’s. She thought Colette so far above herself that it seemed natural to her that she should absorb all the homage. --- It was only when she had to choose between her cousin and Christophe that she felt her heart take sides against the former. With the intuition of a young woman, she saw clearly that Christophe was suffering from Colette’s flirtatiousness and from the assiduous courtship Lévy-Cœur paid her. Already, by instinct, she disliked Lévy-Cœur, and she detested him the moment she knew that Christophe detested him. She could not understand how Colette could amuse herself by setting him in rivalry with Christophe. She began to judge Colette severely in secret; she surprised her in certain small lies, and she suddenly changed her manner with her. Colette noticed it, without being able to guess the reason; she affected to attribute it to the caprice of a little girl. But the fact was that she had lost her hold over Grazia: a trivial incident showed her this. One evening when the two of them were walking in the garden together and Colette, with a coquettish tenderness, wanted to shelter Grazia under the folds of her cloak against a light shower that had begun to fall, Grazia --- for whom it would, a few weeks before, have been an inexpressible happiness to nestle against the breast of her dear cousin --- drew coldly away and stood a few steps off in silence. And when Colette said she found a piece of music that Grazia was playing to be ugly, it did not stop Grazia from playing it, and from loving it.

Now she was attentive only to Christophe. She had the divination of tenderness, and she perceived what he was suffering without his saying a word. She greatly exaggerated it, to be sure, in her anxious and childlike attention. She believed that Christophe was in love with Colette, when he felt for her only a demanding friendship. She thought he was unhappy, and she was unhappy for him. Poor little thing, she was scarcely rewarded for her solicitude: she paid for Colette when Colette had driven Christophe to distraction; he would be in a bad humor and take it out on his little pupil, impatiently pointing out the faults in her playing. One morning when Colette had exasperated him more than usual, he sat down at the piano with such abruptness that Grazia lost the little composure she had left: she floundered; he reproached her for her wrong notes angrily; and then she went completely to pieces; he lost his temper, shook her hands, shouted that she would never make anything decent of herself, that she should occupy herself with cooking, sewing, whatever she liked, but, in heaven’s name, play no more music! It was not worth martyrizing people by making them listen to her wrong notes. With that he walked out on her in the middle of the lesson and left, furious. And poor Grazia wept until she had no tears left --- less from the grief those humiliating words caused her than from the grief of being unable to give Christophe pleasure, despite all her desire to, and of actually adding, by her foolishness, to the suffering of the one she loved.

She suffered far more when Christophe stopped coming to the Stevens household. She would have liked to go back to her own country. This child, so healthy even in her daydreaming, who kept within herself a bedrock of rustic serenity, felt ill at ease in that city, surrounded by neurasthenic and agitated Parisians. Without daring to say so, she had ended by judging the people around her with fair accuracy. But she was timid, weak, like her father --- from goodness, from modesty, from self-distrust. She let herself be dominated by her authoritarian aunt and by her cousin who was used to tyrannizing over everything. She did not dare write to her old papa, to whom she regularly sent long affectionate letters:

--- Please, take me back!

And the old papa did not dare take her back, for all his desire to; for Mme Stevens had answered his timid overtures by saying that Grazia was well off where she was, much better off than she would be with him, and that for the sake of her education she must remain.

But there came a moment when the exile grew too painful to that little southern soul, and when she had to take wing again toward the light. --- It was after Christophe’s concert. She had gone with the Stevenses; and it was a tearing grief to her to witness that hideous spectacle of a crowd amusing itself by insulting an artist… An artist? The one who, in Grazia’s eyes, was the very image of art, the personification of all that was divine in life. She wanted to weep, to flee. She had to endure to the end the uproar, the whistles, the jeering, and, on returning to her aunt’s, the unkind remarks, Colette’s pretty laughter, Colette exchanging commiserating remarks with Lucien Lévy-Cœur. Retreating to her room, to her bed, she sobbed for much of the night: she spoke to Christophe, she consoled him, she would have liked to give her life for him, she was in despair at being able to do nothing to make him happy. It was impossible for her to stay in Paris any longer. She begged her father to bring her home. She said:

--- I can’t go on living here, I can’t, I’ll die if you leave me here any longer.

Her father came at once; and as painful as it was for both of them to stand up to the formidable aunt, they found the strength to do it in a last desperate act of will.

Grazia returned to the great sleeping park. She found again with joy the beloved nature and the beings she loved. She had carried away with her, and kept for some time still in her aching heart, which grew calmer each day, a little of the melancholy of the North, like a veil of mist that the sun was little by little dissolving. She thought at moments of Christophe in his unhappiness. Lying on the lawn, listening to the familiar frogs and cicadas, or seated at the piano, with whom she conversed more often than before, she dreamed of the friend she had chosen for herself; she talked with him, very softly, for hours at a time, and it would not have seemed impossible to her that he might one day open the door and walk in. She wrote to him, and, after hesitating for a very long time, she sent him a letter, unsigned, which she went one morning, in secret, her heart beating, to drop in the village post box three kilometers away, on the other side of the great plowed fields --- a kind letter, touching, telling him that he was not alone, that he must not lose heart, that someone was thinking of him, that someone loved him, that someone prayed to God for him --- a poor letter, which went foolishly astray along the way, and which he never received.

Then the uniform and serene days unfolded in the life of the distant friend. And the Italian peace, the genius of calm, of quiet happiness, of mute contemplation, re-entered that chaste and silent heart, at the depths of which the memory of Christophe continued to burn, like a small steady flame.

But Christophe knew nothing of the artless affection that watched over him from afar, and that was later to hold such a large place in his life. And he knew nothing either of the fact that at that same concert where he had been insulted, there was present the one who was to become his friend, his dear companion, who was to walk beside him, side by side, and hand in hand.

He was alone. He believed himself alone. And in any case he was not in the least crushed by it. He no longer felt that bitter sadness which had tormented him in Germany. He was stronger, more mature: he knew that this was how it had to be. His illusions about Paris had fallen away: men were the same everywhere; one had to accept that and stop persisting in a childish struggle against the world; one had to be oneself, with tranquillity. As Beethoven had said, “if we surrender to life the forces of our life, what will be left to us for the nobler thing, for the best?” He had vigorously come to know his own nature and his own race, which he had once judged so harshly. The more he was oppressed by the Parisian atmosphere, the more he felt the need to take refuge in his homeland, in the arms of its poets and musicians, where the best of it had gathered itself together. As soon as he opened their books, his room filled with the murmur of the sun-lit Rhine and the affectionate smile of old friends left behind.

How ungrateful he had been toward them! How had he not felt sooner the treasure of their candid goodness? He recalled with shame all the unjust and insulting things he had said about them when he was in Germany. Then, he had seen only their faults, their awkward and ceremonious manners, their tearful idealism, their small deceptions of thought, their small cowardices. Ah! those were so little compared to their great virtues! How could he have been so cruel about weaknesses that now made them seem almost more touching in his eyes: for they were more human for them! By reaction, he was drawn more strongly to those among them toward whom he had been most unjust. What hadn’t he said against Schubert and against Bach! And now he felt himself very close to them. Now these great souls, whose absurdities he had impatiently catalogued, leaned toward him, now that he was exiled far from his own people, and said to him with a kind smile:

--- Brother, we are here. Courage! We too had more than our share of miseries… Bah! one gets through them…

He heard the roaring Ocean of Jean-Sébastien Bach’s soul: the hurricanes, the blowing winds, the clouds of life fleeing away --- the peoples drunk with joy, with grief, with fury, and Christ, full of gentleness, the Prince of Peace, soaring above them --- the cities awakened by the cries of watchmen, rushing forward with shouts of joy to meet the divine Bridegroom whose steps shake the world --- the prodigious reservoir of thoughts, of passions, of musical forms, of heroic life, of Shakespearean hallucinations, of Savonarolan prophecies, of pastoral, epic, and apocalyptic visions, all enclosed in the cramped body of the little Thuringian cantor, with his double chin and small bright eyes beneath their creased lids and arched brows… --- he saw him so clearly! somber, jovial, a little ridiculous, his brain stuffed with allegories and symbols, Gothic and Rococo, wrathful, stubborn, serene, with a passion for life and a longing for death… --- he saw him in his school, a genius of a pedant, surrounded by his pupils, dirty, rough, beggars, scab-ridden, with cracked voices, those rascals with whom he bickered, with whom he sometimes fought like a docker, and one of whom had beaten him black and blue… --- he saw him in his family, surrounded by his twenty-one children, thirteen of whom died before him, one of whom was an idiot; the others, good musicians, gave him little concerts… Sicknesses, funerals, bitter quarrels, poverty, his genius unrecognized; --- and above all that, his music, his faith, deliverance and light, Joy glimpsed, sensed, willed, seized --- God, the breath of God burning in his bones, raising the hair on his flesh, striking through his mouth… O Force! Force! The blessed Thunder of Force!…

Christophe drank in this force in long draughts. He felt the blessing of that power of music which streams from German souls. Often mediocre, even coarse --- what did it matter? The essential thing was that it existed, that it flowed to the brim. In France, music is gathered drop by drop, through Pasteur filters into carefully stoppered carafes. And these drinkers of flat water turn up their noses at the rivers of German music! They pick apart the faults of German geniuses!

--- Poor little things! --- thought Christophe, forgetting that he himself had not long ago been equally absurd, --- they find faults in Wagner and in Beethoven! They would need geniuses who had no faults!… As if a tempest, when it blows, takes the trouble to leave everything in its proper place!…

He walked through Paris, exhilarated by his strength. So much the better if he was misunderstood! He would be all the freer for it. To create, as is the role of genius, a world from nothing, organically constituted according to its own inner laws, one must live entirely within it. An artist is never too alone. What is dangerous is to see one’s thought reflected in a mirror that distorts and diminishes it. One must say nothing to others about what one is doing before it is done: otherwise one would no longer have the courage to go to the end; for it would no longer be one’s own idea, but the wretched idea others have of it, that one would see in oneself.

Now that nothing came any more to distract him from his dreams, they sprang up like fountains from every corner of his soul and every stone of his path. He lived in the state of a visionary. Everything he saw and heard evoked in him beings, things different from what he actually saw and heard. He had only to let himself live to find everywhere around him the life of his characters. Their sensations came to seek him out on their own. The eyes of passersby, the sound of a voice carried on the wind, the light on a lawn, the birds singing in the trees of the Luxembourg, a convent bell ringing far off, the pale sky, the small corner of sky seen from the depths of his room, the sounds and shades of the different hours of the day --- he did not perceive these in himself, but in the beings he was dreaming. --- Christophe was happy.

And yet his situation was more difficult than ever. He had lost the few piano lessons that were his only resource. It was September; Parisian society was on holiday; and it was hard to find new pupils. The only one he had was an engineer, intelligent and erratic, who had taken it into his head, at forty, to become a great violinist. Christophe did not play the violin very well; but he always knew more than his pupil; and for a while he gave him three hours of lessons a week at two francs an hour. But after a month and a half the engineer grew tired of it, suddenly discovering that his true vocation was painting. --- The day he shared this discovery with Christophe, Christophe laughed a great deal: but when he had laughed enough, he counted his finances and found he had just twelve francs in his pocket, which his pupil had just paid him for his last lessons. This did not trouble him; he simply said to himself that he would decidedly have to look for other means of support: start again making the rounds of the publishers. It was not exactly cheerful… Pff!… There was no use tormenting himself about it in advance. Today the weather was fine. He went off to Meudon.

He had a hunger for walking. Walking brought up in him harvests of music. He was full of it, like a hive full of honey; and he laughed at the golden buzzing of his bees. It was, as a rule, music that modulated a great deal. And rhythms bounding, insistent, hallucinatory… Go and create rhythms when you are numbed in your room! That is the time for assembling subtle, motionless harmonies, like those Parisians!

When he was tired of walking, he lay down in the woods. The trees were half stripped of their leaves, the sky periwinkle blue. Christophe sank into a reverie that soon took on the tint of the soft light falling from the October clouds. His blood beat. He listened to the hurrying floods of his thoughts flowing by. They came from every point of the horizon: young worlds and old, at war with one another, tatters of past souls, old tenants, parasites, living in him like the people of a city. The old words of Gottfried before Melchior’s grave came back to him: he was a living tomb, full of the dead who stirred --- his whole unknown race. He listened to this multitude of lives, he took pleasure in sounding the great organ of that age-old forest, full of monsters like Dante’s forest. He no longer feared them, as in the days of his adolescence. For the master was there: his will. He took a fierce joy in cracking his whip so that the beasts howled, so that he felt more keenly the richness of his inner menagerie. He was not alone. There was no danger of his ever being alone. He was a whole army unto himself, centuries of joyful, healthy Krafft. Against a hostile Paris, against a people, a whole people --- the struggle was equal.

He had given up the modest room --- too expensive --- that he had been occupying, and taken in the Montrouge quarter an attic room that, if it lacked other advantages, was very well ventilated. A perpetual draft. But he needed to breathe. From his window he had an extended view over the chimneys of Paris, and over Montmartre in the distance. The move had not taken long: a handcart had been enough; Christophe had pushed it himself. Of all his furniture, the object most precious to him was, along with his old trunk, one of those casts that have been so widely reproduced in recent times, of Beethoven’s death mask. He had packed it with as much care as if it had been a work of art of the highest value. He never parted with it. It was his island in the middle of Paris. It was also for him a moral barometer. The mask showed him, more clearly than his own consciousness, the temperature of his soul, his most secret thoughts: now a sky heavy with storm clouds, now the sudden gust of the passions, now the powerful calm.

He had had to cut back considerably on his food. He ate once a day, at one in the afternoon. He had bought a large sausage, which he hung outside his window; with a good thick slice, a solid chunk of bread, and a cup of coffee he made himself, he had a meal fit for a king. But he could easily have eaten two. He was annoyed at having such a good appetite. He scolded himself severely; he called himself a glutton who thought of nothing but his belly. Of belly he had very little; he was more gaunt than a starving dog. But otherwise solid, a frame of iron, and his head always clear.

He did not worry too much about the next day, though he had good reason to. As long as he had money in hand for the day, he didn’t trouble himself. The day he had nothing left, he finally resolved to make the rounds of the publishers. He found work nowhere. He was heading home empty-handed when, passing near the music shop where Sylvain Kohn had once introduced him to Daniel Hecht, he walked in, not remembering that he had already been there under unpleasant circumstances. The first person he saw was Hecht. He was on the point of turning back; but it was too late: Hecht had seen him. Christophe did not want to appear to be retreating; he moved toward Hecht, not knowing what he was going to say, and ready to hold his ground with as much arrogance as would be needed: for he was convinced that Hecht would spare him no insolence. Nothing of the sort happened. Hecht, coolly, extended his hand: with a bland polite formula, he inquired after his health, and, without even waiting for Christophe to make any request, he indicated the door of his office and stepped aside to let him pass. He was secretly pleased by this visit, which his pride had foreseen but no longer expected. Without making it apparent, he had followed Christophe very closely; he had missed no opportunity to acquaint himself with his music; he had been at the famous concert of the David; and the hostile reception from the audience had surprised him all the less, in his contempt for audiences, since he had perfectly felt all the beauty of the work. There were perhaps not two people in Paris more capable than Hecht of appreciating the artistic originality of Christophe. But he would have taken good care not to say a word of it, not only because he was stung by Christophe’s attitude toward him, but because it was impossible for him to be agreeable: that was a particular defect of his nature. He was sincerely disposed to help Christophe; but he would not have taken a step toward it: he waited for Christophe to come and ask. And now that Christophe had come --- instead of generously seizing the occasion to erase the memory of their misunderstanding by sparing his visitor any humiliating formalities, he gave himself the satisfaction of making him lay out his request at length; and he insisted on imposing on him, at least once, the work Christophe had once refused. He gave him, for the next day, fifty pages of music to transpose for mandolin and guitar. After that, satisfied at having made him yield, he found him less disagreeable work, but always with such an absence of good grace that it was impossible to feel grateful; Christophe would have had to be hard pressed by need to turn to him again. In any case, he still preferred to earn his money by this work, irritating as it was, than to receive it as a gift from Hecht, as Hecht offered once: --- and it was genuinely well-meant; but Christophe had sensed Hecht’s intention to humiliate him first; forced to accept his conditions, he at least refused to accept his charity; he was willing to work for him --- give and take, they were quits --- but he wanted to owe him nothing. He was not like Wagner, that shameless beggar for his art; he did not place his art above himself; bread he had not earned himself would have choked him. --- One day when he had just returned the task he had spent the night completing, he found Hecht at table. Hecht, noticing his pallor and the glances he involuntarily cast at the dishes, was quite certain he had not eaten all day, and invited him to lunch. The intention was good; but Hecht made it so plainly felt that he had seen Christophe’s destitution that his invitation resembled an act of charity: Christophe would have died of hunger rather than accept. He could not refuse to sit at the table --- (Hecht said he had something to discuss with him) --- but he touched nothing: he claimed he had just eaten. His stomach was knotted with hunger.

Christophe would have wished to do without Hecht; but the other publishers were even worse. --- There were also the wealthy dilettantes, who gave birth to a scrap of a musical phrase and were not even capable of writing it down. They would summon Christophe and sing him their effusion:

--- Well! Isn’t it beautiful!

They gave it to him to develop --- (to write out in full) --- and it appeared under their names with a major publisher. Afterward they were convinced the piece was their own. Christophe came to know one of them, a gentleman of good standing, a tall, agitated figure who immediately addressed him as “dear friend,” seized him by the arm, showering him with demonstrations of stormy enthusiasm, sniggering in his ear, babbling non-sequiturs and incongruities mixed with cries of ecstasy: Beethoven, Verlaine, Fauré, Yvette Guilbert… He would put him to work and then neglect to pay him. He settled the account with luncheon invitations and handshakes. In the end, he sent Christophe twenty francs, which Christophe gave himself the stupid luxury of returning. That day he had not twenty sous in his pocket; and he had needed to buy a twenty-five-centime stamp to write to his mother. It was old Louisa’s feast day; and for nothing in the world would Christophe have let it pass: the good woman counted too much on her boy’s letter, she could not have done without it. She had been writing to him a little more often these past few weeks, despite the effort writing cost her. She was suffering from her solitude. But she could not bring herself to come and join Christophe in Paris: she was too timid, too attached to her small town, to her church, to her house; she was afraid of traveling. And besides, even if she had wished to come, Christophe had no money for her; he did not always have it for himself.

One package that had given him genuine pleasure, once, was from Lorchen, the young peasant girl on whose account he had come to blows with Prussian soldiers: she had written to tell him she was getting married; she gave him news of his mother, and sent along a basket of apples and a piece of cake, to eat in her honor. It had come at just the right moment. That evening at Christophe’s it was a fast day, Ember Day, and Lent combined: of the sausage hanging on a nail by the window, nothing remained but the string. Christophe compared himself to the holy anchorites whom a raven comes to feed on their rock. But the raven had much to do, no doubt, feeding all the anchorites, for it did not come back.

Despite all these troubles, Christophe kept his spirits up. He did the laundry in his washbasin and polished his shoes, whistling like a blackbird. He consoled himself with Berlioz’s words: “Let us rise above the miseries of life, and sing with a light voice that well-known cheerful refrain: Dies iræ…” --- He would sometimes sing it, to the scandal of his neighbors, who were stupefied to hear him break off in the middle with bursts of laughter.

He led a rigorously chaste life. As someone else put it, “the career of a lover is the career of an idler and a rich man.” Christophe’s poverty, his daily hunt for bread, his excessive frugality, and his fever of creation left him neither the time nor the inclination to think of pleasure. He was not merely indifferent to it; by way of reaction against Paris, he had flung himself into a kind of moral asceticism. He had a passionate need for purity, a horror of all defilement. It was not that he was beyond passion. At other moments, he had been in its grip. But these passions remained chaste, even when he yielded to them: for he sought in them not pleasure, but the absolute gift of self and the fullness of being. And when he saw that he had been mistaken, he cast them off with fury. Lust was not for him a sin like the others. It was the great Sin, the one that defiles the wellsprings of life. All those in whom the old Christian foundation has not been entirely buried under foreign alluvium, all those who today still feel themselves to be the sons of vigorous races who, at the cost of a heroic discipline, built the civilization of the West, have no difficulty understanding this. Christophe despised the cosmopolitan society for which pleasure was the sole aim, the credo. --- To be sure, it is good to seek happiness, to want it for others, to combat the depressing pessimistic beliefs heaped upon humanity by twenty centuries of Gothic Christianity. But only on the condition that it is a generous faith, one that wants what is good for others. Instead, what is actually at stake? The most pitiable egotism. A handful of pleasure-seekers trying to wring the maximum of pleasure from their senses with the minimum of risk, perfectly content for others to suffer for it. --- Yes, no doubt, one knows their drawing-room socialism!… But do they not know themselves that their voluptuous doctrines are only valid for the people of the “well-fed,” for a fattening “elite” like their own, and that for the poor, they are a poison?…

“The career of pleasure is a career for the rich.”

Christophe was not rich, and not made to become so. When he had just earned some money, he hastened to spend it at once on music; he went without food in order to go to concerts. He took the cheapest seats, all the way at the top of the Théâtre du Châtelet; and he plunged into the music: it served him as supper and mistress alike. He brought to it such a hunger for happiness and such a capacity for enjoyment that the imperfections of the orchestra could not disturb him; for two or three hours he remained sunk in a state of bliss, without false notes or lapses of taste provoking anything in him beyond an indulgent smile: he had left his critical faculty at the door; he had come to love, not to judge. Around him, the audience gave itself over as he did, motionless, eyes half-closed, to the current of the great torrent of dreams. Christophe had the vision of a people crouching in the darkness, gathered into itself, like an enormous cat, brooding over hallucinations of voluptuousness and carnage. In the thick, golden half-darkness, certain faces took on mysterious form, whose unknown charm and mute ecstasy drew Christophe’s eyes and heart; he fastened on them; he listened through them; he ended by assimilating himself, body and soul, with them. It would happen that one of them became aware of this, and that there was woven between her and Christophe, for the duration of the concert, one of those obscure sympathies which go all the way to the depths of being, without any precise word translating any of it to our own consciousness, and of which nothing remains once the concert is over and the current that joined the souls has been broken. It is a state well known to those who love music, especially when they are young and give themselves most fully: the essence of music is so entirely love that one only savors it completely by savoring it in another, and at a concert one instinctively searches the crowd with one’s eyes for a friend with whom to share a joy too great for oneself alone.

Among these friends of an hour whom Christophe sometimes chose in order to savor more fully the sweetness of the music, one figure attracted him, one he saw again at every concert. She was a little grisette who must have adored music without understanding any of it. She had the profile of a small creature --- a little straight nose barely projecting beyond the line of a slightly advanced mouth and a delicate chin, fine arched brows, clear eyes: one of those carefree faces beneath whose surface one senses joy and laughter, wrapped in an indifferent calm. It is these wayward little girls, these working-class girls, who perhaps reflect most of the vanished serenity of ancient statues and the figures of Raphael. It lasts but a moment in their lives, the first awakening of pleasure; the blight is near. But they have at least lived one lovely hour.

Christophe took delight in watching her: a pretty face did his heart good; he knew how to enjoy it without desiring it; he drew from it joy, strength, peace --- yes, almost virtue. She, needless to say, had quickly noticed that he was watching her; and without either of them thinking about it, a magnetic current had been established between them. And as they met again at nearly the same seats at almost every concert, they had soon come to know each other’s tastes. At certain passages they exchanged a knowing glance; when she particularly loved a phrase, she would lightly stick out the tip of her tongue, as if licking her lips; or, to show she did not care for something, she would thrust forward her pretty little nose with disdain. Mixed into these small expressions was a touch of that innocent playacting from which almost no one can free themselves when they know they are being watched. She would sometimes try, during the serious pieces, to put on a grave expression; and, turning in profile, with an air of absorption and a smiling cheek, she would watch from the corner of her eye whether he was watching her. They had become very good friends, without ever having exchanged a word, and without ever having tried --- (Christophe at least) --- to meet at the exit.

Chance finally arranged things so that at an evening concert they found themselves seated side by side. After a moment’s smiling hesitation, they fell into friendly conversation. She had a charming voice, and said a great many foolish things about music — for she knew nothing about it, yet wanted to appear knowledgeable; but she loved it passionately. She loved the worst and the best of it, Massenet and Wagner; it was only the mediocre that bored her. Music was a voluptuous pleasure for her; she drank it in through every pore of her body, like Danaë the golden rain. The prelude to Tristan gave her a kind of little death; and she delighted in feeling herself swept away, like prey in battle, by the Eroica Symphony. She informed Christophe that Beethoven was deaf-mute, and that, despite this, had she known him, she would have loved him dearly, even though he was rather ugly. Christophe protested that Beethoven was not so ugly; and so they fell to debating beauty and ugliness; and she conceded that it all depended on one’s taste; what was beautiful to one was not beautiful to another: “one wasn’t a gold louis, one couldn’t please everyone.” --- He would rather she had not spoken at all: he heard her far better that way. During the Death of Isolde, she extended her hand to him; her hand was quite moist; he held it in his until the piece ended; and through their interlaced fingers they felt the same current of life flowing between them.

They left together; it was nearly midnight. They walked back up toward the Latin Quarter, talking as they went; she had taken his arm, and he accompanied her almost to her door; but when they arrived at the entrance, just as she was preparing to show him the way in, he took his leave, paying no heed to her smile and her inviting eyes. In that moment she was stupefied, then furious; then she doubled over with laughter at the thought of his foolishness; then, back in her room and undressing, mid-toilette, she was vexed again, and finally wept in silence. When she saw him again at the concert, she wanted to seem offended, indifferent, a little cutting. But he was such a good-natured soul that her resolution did not hold. They began talking again; only now she kept a certain reserve with him. He spoke to her cordially but with great politeness, about serious things, beautiful things — the music they were hearing and what it meant to him. She listened attentively and tried to think as he did. The meaning of his words often escaped her; yet she believed in them all the same. She held for Christophe a grateful respect that she barely let him see. By tacit agreement, they only spoke at concerts. He encountered her once in the midst of a group of students. They greeted each other gravely. She spoke of him to no one. Deep in her soul there was a small sacred province — something beautiful, pure, consoling.

In this way, Christophe had begun to exercise, through his mere presence, through the simple fact of his existence, a calming and strengthening influence. Everywhere he passed, he left unconsciously a trace of his inner light. He was the last person to suspect it. Near him, in his building, were people he had never seen, who, without knowing it themselves, were gradually coming under the beneficent radiance he gave off.

For several weeks Christophe had had no money to go to concerts, even by going without; and in his room under the eaves, now that winter was coming, he felt thoroughly chilled; he could not sit still at his table. So he went downstairs and walked through Paris to warm himself. He had the faculty of forgetting at moments the teeming city around him and escaping into the open spaces and the infinite of time. It was enough for him to see above the tumultuous street the dead and icy moon hanging in the abyss of sky, or the disk of the sun rolling through white fog, for the noise of the street to recede, for Paris to sink into the boundless void, for all that life to appear to him as nothing more than the phantom of a life that had been, long ago, long ago… centuries ago… The least small sign — imperceptible to common people — of the great wild life of nature, which civilization’s livery barely covers, was enough to make it surge up wholly before his eyes. The grass pushing between the cobblestones, the renewal of a tree strangled in its iron collar, without air or soil, on an arid boulevard; a dog, a bird passing by — last vestiges of the fauna that once filled the primitive universe, and which man has destroyed; a cloud of gnats; the invisible epidemic devouring a neighborhood: --- these were enough, in the asphyxia of this human hothouse, for the breath of the Spirit of the Earth to strike him full in the face and whip his energy awake.

On these long walks, often fasting, and having spoken to no one for days on end, he dreamed without cease. Deprivation and silence intensified this morbid disposition. At night he had troubled sleep, exhausting dreams: again and again he saw the old house, the room where he had lived as a child; he was pursued by musical obsessions. By day he conversed endlessly with the inner beings he carried within him and with those he loved — the absent and the dead.

One damp December afternoon, when frost covered the stiffened lawns and the rooftops and gray domes dissolved into the fog, and the trees, with their bare, spindly, contorted branches, seemed in the vapor that drowned them like marine vegetation on the floor of the Ocean --- Christophe, who since the day before had felt himself shivering and could not get warm, went into the Louvre, which he barely knew.

Until then, he had not been greatly moved by painting. He was too absorbed in his interior universe to grasp clearly the world of colors and forms. They acted on him only through their musical resonances, which brought him only a distorted echo of them. Doubtless his instinct obscurely perceived the identical laws that govern the harmony of visual forms as of sonic forms, and the deep strata of the soul from which flow the two rivers of color and sound that bathe the two opposing slopes of life. But he knew only one of the two slopes, and he was lost in the kingdom of the eye, which was not his kingdom. And so the secret of the most exquisite, perhaps the most natural, charm of France with its clear gaze — queen in the world of light — escaped him.

Even had he been more curious about painting, Christophe was too German to adapt easily to a vision of things so different from his own. He was not one of those fashionable Germans who repudiate the Germanic way of feeling, and who persuade themselves that they are mad about Impressionism or eighteenth-century French art --- when, by chance, they do not have the firm conviction that they understand it better than the French. Christophe was a barbarian, perhaps; but he was one frankly. The little pink bottoms of Boucher, the plump chins of Watteau, the bored shepherds and well-rounded shepherdesses laced into their corsets, the whipped-cream souls, the virtuous sidelong glances of Greuze, the lifted chemises of Fragonard, all that poetic trouser-dropping inspired in him no more interest than an elegant and risqué gazette. He did not hear the rich and brilliant harmony in it; the voluptuous dreams, sometimes melancholy, of that ancient civilization, the most refined in Europe, were foreign to him. As for seventeenth-century French art, he cared no more for its ceremonious piety and its formal portraits; the somewhat cold reserve of the gravest among those masters, a certain grayness of soul spread over the haughty work of Nicolas Poussin and over the pale figures of Philippe de Champaigne, kept Christophe at a distance from the old French art. And of the new he knew nothing. Had he known it, he would have misjudged it. The only modern painter by whom he had been fascinated in Germany — Boecklin of Basel — had not prepared him to see Latin art. Christophe still carried within him the shock of that brutal genius who smelled of earth and the wild reek of the heroic bestiary he had drawn from it. His eyes, burned by crude light, accustomed to the frantic riot of colors of that drunken savage, had difficulty adjusting to the half-tones and broken, supple harmonies of French art.

But one does not live with impunity in a foreign world. Its imprint enters one without one’s knowledge. However much one walls oneself in: one discovers one day that something has changed.

Something had changed in Christophe, that evening when he was wandering through the rooms of the Louvre. He was weary, he was cold, he was hungry, he was alone. Around him, shadow was descending over the deserted galleries; the sleeping forms were stirring to life. Christophe passed, silent and frozen, amid the sphinxes of Egypt, the Assyrian monsters, the bulls of Persepolis, the glistening serpents of Palissy. He felt himself in an atmosphere of fairy tales; and a mysterious emotion rose in his heart. The dream of humanity enveloped him --- the strange flowers of the soul…

In the midst of the golden dust of the painting galleries, the gardens of brilliant and ripe colors, the meadows of canvases where the air runs out, Christophe — feverish, on the threshold of illness — was struck by a thunderbolt. --- He walked on, barely seeing, dizzy from want, from the warmth of the rooms, from this orgy of images: his head was spinning. Arriving at the far end of the gallery along the riverside, before Rembrandt’s The Good Samaritan, he pressed both hands against the iron railing surrounding the paintings to keep from falling; he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again on the work before him, close to his face, he was transfixed…

The daylight was fading. Daylight was already distant, already dead. The invisible sun was collapsing into the night. It was the magical hour when hallucinations are on the verge of emerging from the soul, aching from the labors of the day, motionless, numb. Everything falls silent; one hears only the beating of one’s arteries. One no longer has the strength to move, barely to breathe; one is sad and surrendered; one has only an immense need to abandon oneself in a friend’s arms; one implores the miracle, one feels it is about to come… Here it is! A flood of gold blazes in the dusk, bursts upon the wall of the hovel, upon the shoulder of the man carrying the dying one, bathes these humble objects and these unremarkable beings, and everything takes on a sweetness, a divine glory. It is God Himself, who clasps in His terrible and tender arms these wretched ones — weak, ugly, poor, dirty, the lousy manservant with stockings fallen at his heels, those misshapen and frightened faces pressing heavily at the window, those apathetic beings who stand in silence, gripped by anguished terror --- all that pitiful humanity of Rembrandt, that flock of obscure and fettered souls who know nothing, who can do nothing, but wait, tremble, weep, pray. --- But the Master is there. He is coming, one knows He is coming. He Himself is not seen; but one sees His aureole and the shadow of light He casts upon men…

Christophe left the Louvre with unsteady steps. His head ached. He could see nothing. Out in the street, in the rain, he barely noticed the puddles between the cobblestones or the water running into his shoes. The yellowish sky above the Seine was kindled, as day fell, with an interior flame --- the light of a lamp. Christophe carried in his eyes the fascination of a gaze. It seemed to him that nothing existed: no, the carriages were not rattling the cobblestones with their merciless noise; the passersby were not jostling him with their wet umbrellas; he was not walking in the street; perhaps he was sitting at home and dreaming; perhaps he no longer existed… And suddenly --- (he was so weak!) --- a dizziness seized him, he felt himself falling headlong, face forward… It lasted only an instant: he clenched his fists, braced his legs, and recovered his balance.

At that precise moment, in the second when his consciousness emerged from the abyss, his gaze collided, on the other side of the street, with a gaze he knew well — one that seemed to be calling to him. He stopped, confused, trying to recall where he had seen it before. It was only after a moment that he recognized those sad, gentle eyes: it was the little French governess whom he had unwittingly caused to be dismissed from her post in Germany, and whom he had sought so long since, to beg her pardon. She too had stopped, in the midst of the crowd of passersby, and was looking at him. Suddenly he saw her try to push back against the current of the crowd and step down into the roadway to come to him. He rushed toward her; but an inextricable tangle of carriages separated them; he glimpsed her still for a moment, struggling on the other side of that living wall; he tried to cross regardless, was knocked by a horse, slipped, fell on the slick asphalt, nearly crushed. When he got up again, covered in mud, and managed to reach the other side, she had vanished.

He tried to go after her. But his dizziness redoubled: he had to give it up. He could feel the illness coming, but he refused to admit it. He stubbornly refused to go straight home, taking the longest route. Useless torture: he was forced to acknowledge defeat; his legs had given out under him, he was dragging himself along, and he barely managed to make it back. On the staircase he nearly suffocated, and had to sit down on the steps. Back in his freezing room, he stubbornly refused to lie down; he sat in his chair, soaked with rain, his head heavy and his chest heaving, sinking into music that was as weary and aching as he was. He heard phrases from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony drifting through his mind. Poor little Schubert! When he wrote that, he too was alone, feverish and drowsy, in that state of half-torpor that comes before the great sleep; he was dreaming by the fireside; numb strands of music floated around him like slightly stagnant water; he lingered in them, like a child half-asleep who delights in the story he is telling himself, repeating a passage twenty times; sleep comes: death comes… --- And Christophe also heard that other music passing through him, with burning hands, with closed eyes, smiling a weary smile, the heart swollen with sighs, dreaming of the death that sets one free: --- the opening chorus of the Cantata by J. S. Bach: “Dear God, when shall I die?”… How good it felt to sink into those soft, unfolding phrases with their slow undulations, the murmur of distant, muffled bells… To die, to dissolve into the peace of the earth!… Und dann selher Erde werden… “And then oneself to become earth…”

Christophe shook off these morbid thoughts, the murderous smile of the siren that lies in wait for weakened souls. He stood and tried to walk about his room; but he could not keep upright. He was shivering with fever. He had to take to his bed. He could feel that this time it was serious; but he did not relent; he was not one of those who, when they fall ill, surrender to the illness; he fought, he refused to be sick, and above all he was perfectly determined not to die. He had his poor mama waiting for him back home. And he had his work to do: he would not let himself be killed. He clenched his chattering teeth, he strained his will, which kept slipping away from him --- like a strong swimmer who keeps fighting in the midst of waves that are washing over him. At every moment he was going under: there were delirious wanderings, disconnected images, memories of home or of Parisian drawing rooms; and there were obsessive rhythms and phrases turning, turning endlessly, like horses on a carousel; the sudden flash of the golden light of the Good Samaritan; figures of terror in the shadows; and then abysses, nights. Then he would surface again, tearing through the grimacing clouds, clenching his fists and his jaw. He held on to everyone he loved, in the present and the past --- the friendly face he had just glimpsed, his dear mama, and also his indestructible being, which he felt like a rock: “death cannot bite it”… --- But the rock was covered again by the sea; a crash of waves made the soul lose its grip; it was swept away, tumbled by the foam. And Christophe thrashed about in his delirium, uttering senseless words, conducting and playing an imaginary orchestra: trombones, trumpets, cymbals, kettledrums, bassoons, and double basses… he scraped, blew, and hammered with frenzy. The poor man was boiling over with pent-up music. For weeks he had been unable to hear any or play any; he was like a boiler under pressure, on the verge of exploding. Certain obstinate phrases drilled into his brain like augers, perforating his eardrums, making him cry out in pain. After these crises he would collapse back onto his pillow, dead with fatigue, soaked, battered, gasping, suffocating. He had set his water pitcher beside the bed and drank from it in gulps. The sounds from the neighboring rooms, the attic doors slammed shut, made him start. He felt a hallucinatory revulsion at all these beings piled up around him. But his will kept fighting, blowing warlike fanfares, the battle against the devils… “Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär, und wollten uns verschlingen, so fürchtenwir uns nicht so sehr…” (“And even if the world were full of devils, and they wanted to swallow us up, we would not be afraid…”)

And over the ocean of burning darkness that was rolling through his being, there came suddenly a lull, rifts of light, a quieted murmur of violins and violas, calm and glorious calls from trumpets and horns, while, almost motionless, like a great wall, there rose from the ailing soul an unshakeable song, like a chorale by J. S. Bach.

While he struggled against the phantoms of fever and against the suffocation that was spreading through his chest, he became vaguely aware that the door of his room had opened, and that a woman had entered, candle in hand. He thought it was another hallucination. He tried to speak. But he could not, and fell back. When, at long intervals, a wave of consciousness brought him up from the depths to the surface, he sensed that his pillow had been raised, that a blanket had been placed over his feet, that something burning was on his back; or he would see, seated at the foot of the bed, this woman, whose face was not entirely unknown to him. Then another figure appeared, a doctor, who examined him. Christophe could not hear what was being said; but he guessed they were talking about sending him to the hospital. He tried to protest, to cry out that he did not want that, that he wanted to die here, all alone; but only incomprehensible sounds came from his mouth. The woman understood him nonetheless: for she took his side, and she calmed him. He wore himself out trying to remember who she was. As soon as he was able, at the cost of extraordinary effort, to string together a coherent sentence, he asked her. She replied that she was his neighbor in the attic rooms, that she had heard him moaning through the wall, and had taken the liberty of entering, thinking he needed help. She respectfully asked him not to tire himself by speaking. He obeyed. Besides, he was broken by the effort he had made; he lay still and said nothing; but his mind kept working, laboriously gathering his scattered memories. Where had he seen her?… He finally remembered: yes, he had passed her in the attic corridor; she was a servant, her name was Sidonie.

With his eyes half closed, he watched her without her seeing him. She was small, with a serious face, a domed forehead, hair drawn up, the upper cheeks and temples bare, pale, and strongly boned, a short nose, clear blue eyes with a gentle and determined gaze, full and firmly set lips, an anemic complexion, a humble, inward, slightly stiffened air. She attended to Christophe with an active and silent devotion, without familiarity, never departing from the reserve of a servant who does not forget the difference of class.

Gradually, however, as he improved and was able to talk with her, Christophe’s warm-hearted friendliness drew Sidonie to speak a little more freely; but she always kept watch over herself; there were certain things that one could see she was not saying. She had a mixture of humility and pride. Christophe learned that she was from Brittany. She had left her father behind in the country, and spoke of him with great discretion; but Christophe had no difficulty guessing that he did nothing but drink, enjoy himself, and exploit his daughter; she let herself be exploited, without saying a word, out of pride; and she never failed to send him a portion of her monthly wages; but she was not deceived. She also had a younger sister who was preparing for a teacher’s examination, and of whom she was very proud. She paid for nearly all of her education. She worked relentlessly, with stubborn determination.

--- “Did she have a good position?” --- Christophe asked her.

--- “Yes; but she was thinking of leaving it.”

--- “Why? Did she have reason to complain of her employers?”

--- “Oh! no. They were very good to her.”

--- “Didn’t she earn enough?”

--- “She did…”

He did not quite understand; he tried to understand, he encouraged her to speak. But she had nothing to tell him but her monotonous life, the difficulty of earning a living; she did not dwell on it: work did not frighten her, it was a necessity for her, almost a pleasure. She did not speak of what weighed on her most heavily: boredom. He could sense it. Little by little he read it in her, with the intuition of deep sympathy that illness had sharpened, and that the memory of trials endured in a similar life by his dear mama made still more penetrating. He could see, as though he had lived it himself, that bleak, unhealthy, unnatural existence --- the ordinary existence that bourgeois society imposes on servants: --- employers not unkind, but indifferent, who sometimes went several days without saying a word to her, except about the work. The hours, the hours, in the stifling kitchen whose one small window, cluttered by a larder, looked out onto a dirty white wall. Her great joys, when she was told offhandedly that the sauce was good, or the roast properly cooked. A walled-in life, without air, without a future, without a glimmer of desire or hope, without interest in anything. --- The worst time for her was when her employers went to the country. They did not take her with them, for economy’s sake; they paid her monthly wages, but not her travel to go back home; they left her free to go at her own expense. She would not and could not do it. So she stayed alone in the nearly abandoned house. She had no desire to go out, she did not even talk with the other servants, whom she looked down on a little for their coarseness and immorality. She did not go out to enjoy herself: she was serious by nature, thrifty, and she feared unpleasant encounters. She would sit in her kitchen, or in her room, from which above the chimney tops she could see the top of a tree in a hospital garden. She did not read, she tried to work, she grew numb, she grew bored, she wept from boredom; she had a singular capacity to weep, endlessly: it was her pleasure. But when she was too bored, she could not even weep anymore, she was as if frozen, her heart dead. Then she would rouse herself; or life would return of its own accord. She thought of her sister, she listened to a barrel organ in the distance, she daydreamed, she counted at length how many more days it would take to finish such-and-such a piece of work, to earn such-and-such a sum; she made mistakes in her calculations; she started counting again; she fell asleep. The days passed…

Alternating with these bouts of depression were outbursts of childlike and mocking gaiety. She poked fun at others and at herself. She was not without observing and judging her employers, the anxieties their idleness created for them, Madame’s vapors and her melancholies, the so-called occupations of this so-called elite, the interest they took in a painting, a piece of music, a book of verse. With her slightly blunt common sense, equally removed from the snobbery of the very Parisian servant and the thick stupidity of the very provincial servant who only admires what he does not understand, she had a respectful contempt for all that piano-playing, all that insipid chatter, all those intellectual things --- perfectly useless, and boring on top of it --- that take up so much room in these hollow lives. She could not help silently comparing real life, with which she was locked in struggle, to the imaginary pleasures and pains of this life of luxury, where everything seems manufactured by boredom. But she was not revolted by it. That was how it was: that was how it was. She accepted everything, the wicked people and the fools. She would say:

--- It takes all sorts to make a world.

Christophe imagined she was sustained by religious faith; but one day she said, speaking of others who were richer and happier:

--- In the end, we’ll all be the same, later on.

--- When will that be? he asked. After the social revolution?

--- The revolution? she said. Oh! well, a lot of water will pass under the bridge before that. I don’t believe in that nonsense. Everything will always be the same.

--- So when will we all be equal?

--- After death, of course! Nothing remains of anyone.

He was quite astonished by this calm materialism. He did not dare say to her:

--- Isn’t it terrible, in that case, if one has only one life, that it should be like yours, while other people are happy?

But she seemed to have guessed what he was thinking; she went on, with a resigned and slightly ironic composure:

--- One has to make the best of it. Not everyone can draw the winning ticket. You get a bad draw: too bad!

She did not even think of looking outside France --- as she had once been offered in America --- for a better-paying position. The idea of leaving the country could not enter her head. She would say:

--- Stones are hard everywhere.

There was in her a bedrock of skeptical and mocking fatalism. She was truly of that race that has little or no faith, few intellectual reasons to live, and yet an enormous vitality --- of that people of the French countryside, laborious and apathetic, irreverent and submissive, who do not love life much, but who cling to it, and who need no artificial encouragements to keep their courage.

Christophe, who did not yet know her, was surprised to find in this simple girl a complete detachment from all belief; he admired her attachment to life, without pleasure and without purpose, and, more than anything, her robust moral sense, which rested on nothing. Until now he had seen the French working class only through naturalist novels and the theories of the minor literary men of his day, who, contrary to those of the age of pastoral idylls and the Revolution, liked to picture natural man as a vicious animal, in order to justify their own vices… He was discovering with astonishment the uncompromising honesty of Sidonie. It was not a matter of morality; it was a matter of instinct and pride. She had her aristocratic dignity. For it is foolishness to think that “the people” means “the common.” The people have their aristocrats, just as the bourgeoisie has its plebeian souls. Aristocrats --- that is, beings who have instincts, perhaps a blood, purer than others, and who know it, who are conscious of what they are, and proud not to fall short of it. They are a minority; but even when kept apart, everyone knows they are the first; and their mere presence is a restraint on the rest. The rest are forced to model themselves on them, or to pretend to. Every province, every village, every human community is, to a certain degree, what its aristocrats are; and, depending on what they are, opinion in one place is extremely severe, while in another it is lax. The anarchic overflow of majorities, in the present age, will change nothing of this immanent authority of silent minorities. More dangerous for them is their uprooting from native soil, and their scattering far off into great cities. But even so, lost in alien surroundings, isolated from one another, individuals of good stock persist, without merging with what surrounds them. --- Of all that Christophe had seen in Paris, Sidonie knew almost nothing, and sought to know nothing. The sentimental and sordid literature of the newspapers touched her no more than the political news. She did not even know that Popular Universities existed; and, had she known, it was likely she would have concerned herself with them no more than with going to a sermon. She did her work, and thought her thoughts; she did not trouble herself to think the thoughts of others. Christophe paid her his compliments on this.

--- What is there to be surprised about? she said. I am like everyone else. Have you never met a French person before?

--- I have been living among them for a year, said Christophe; and I have not met a single one who seemed to think of anything but amusing themselves, or imitating those who do.

--- Well, yes, said Sidonie. You have only seen the rich. The rich are the same everywhere. You have seen nothing yet.

--- Oh, but I have, said Christophe. I am beginning to.

He was catching a glimpse, for the first time, of that people of France who give the impression of eternal endurance, who are one with their land, who have watched pass over them, as it has, so many conquering races, so many masters of a day --- and who do not pass.

He was better now and beginning to get up.

The first thing he worried about was repaying Sidonie for the expenses she had incurred on his behalf while he was ill. Since he was in no position to go about Paris looking for work, he had to resign himself to writing to Hecht: he asked that an advance might be made to him against his next work. With his extraordinary mixture of indifference and generosity, Hecht made him wait more than two weeks for a reply --- two weeks during which Christophe tormented himself, refusing to touch almost all the food Sidonie brought him, accepting only a little milk and bread that she forced upon him, and which he then reproached himself for, because he had not earned it: --- after which he received from Hecht, without a word, the sum he had asked for; and not once, during the months that Christophe’s illness lasted, did Hecht seek to know how he was getting on. He had a gift for making himself unloved, even when doing good. The fact was that, in doing good, he did not love.

Sidonie came each day, for a while in the afternoon, and again in the evening. She prepared Christophe’s dinner. She made no noise; she quietly went about her business; and, having noticed the sorry state of his linen, without saying a word, she would carry it home to mend. Imperceptibly, something more tender had crept into their relations. Christophe spoke at length of his old mother. Sidonie was moved; she put herself in Louisa’s place, alone back there; and she felt toward Christophe a maternal affection. He himself, in talking with her, tried to ease his need for family warmth --- that need which weighs on one so much more when one is weak and ill. He felt closer to Louisa with Sidonie than with anyone else. He would sometimes confide some of his troubles as an artist. She would console him gently, with a touch of irony for those intellectual sorrows. That too reminded him of his mother, and did him good.

He tried to draw out her confidences; but she opened herself far less than he did. He asked her in a joking way whether she would not someday marry. She replied, in her usual tone of mocking resignation, that “it was not allowed, when one is in service: it complicated things too much. And besides, one had to make the right choice, and that was not easy. Men were notorious scoundrels. They came courting you when you had money; they spent your money, and then afterwards they left you stranded. She had seen too many examples of this around her: she had no wish to do the same.” --- She did not mention that she had had a failed engagement: her “intended” had dropped her when he saw that she was giving everything she earned to her family. --- Christophe would watch her playing maternally in the courtyard with the children of a family that lived in the house. When she met them alone on the staircase, she would sometimes embrace them with passion. Christophe imagined her in the place of one of the ladies of his acquaintance: she was no fool, she was no plainer than the rest; he told himself that in their place, she would have been finer than they. Such reserves of vitality buried away, with no one caring! And, by contrast, all those living dead who encumber the earth, taking the place and the happiness of others, in the sun!…

Christophe was not on his guard. He was very affectionate, too affectionate with her; he let himself be coddled like a big child.

Sidonie, on certain days, seemed downcast; but he put it down to her workload. Once, in the middle of a conversation, she suddenly stood up and left Christophe, making some work her excuse. Then, after a day on which Christophe had shown her even more trust than usual, she stopped her visits for a time; and when she came back, she spoke to him only with constraint. He wondered in what way he had offended her. He even asked her. She replied sharply that he had offended her in no way at all; but she went on keeping her distance. A few days later, she told him she was leaving: she had given up her position and was quitting the house. In cold and stilted terms, she thanked him for the kindness he had shown her, expressed the wishes she held for his health and for his mother’s, and said her farewells. He was so astonished by this sudden departure that he did not know what to say; he tried to learn the reasons that had determined her: she answered evasively. He asked where she was going to find a new position: she avoided answering; and, to cut short his questions, she left. On the threshold, he held out his hand; she pressed it rather firmly; but her face did not change; and to the very end, she kept her stiff and frozen manner. She was gone.

He never understood why.

Winter dragged on endlessly. A damp, foggy, muddy winter. Weeks without sun. Although Christophe was better, he was not cured. He still had a painful spot in his right lung, a lesion that was healing slowly, and fits of nervous coughing that kept him awake at night. The doctor had forbidden him to go out. He might just as well have ordered him off to the Côte d’Azur, or to the Canaries. He had to go out! If he did not go to fetch his dinner, his dinner was not going to come and fetch him. --- He was also prescribed medicines he had no means of paying for. He had therefore given up consulting doctors: it was money wasted; and besides, he always felt ill at ease with them; he and they could not understand each other: they were two opposing worlds. They had an ironic and slightly contemptuous compassion for this poor wretch of an artist, who claimed to be a world unto himself, and who was swept along like a straw by the river of life. He was humiliated at being examined, handled, poked about by these men. He was ashamed of his sick body. He thought:

--- How glad I will be when it dies!

Despite the solitude, the illness, the poverty, so many reasons to suffer, Christophe bore his lot patiently. He had never been so patient. He was surprised at himself. Illness is often a blessing. In breaking the body, it frees the soul; it purifies it: in the nights and days of forced inaction, thoughts arise which are afraid of too harsh a light, and which are burned by the sun of good health. Whoever has never been ill has never fully known himself.

Illness had brought a singular peace to Christophe. It had stripped away what was coarsest in his being. He felt, through more subtle organs, the world of mysterious forces that exist within each of us, and which the noise of life prevents us from hearing. Since the visit to the Louvre, in those hours of fever whose smallest memories had been engraved in him, he had been living in an atmosphere akin to that of the Rembrandt painting --- warm, deep, and gentle. He felt, he too, within his heart, the magical reflections of an invisible sun. And though he no longer believed, he knew that he was not alone: a God held him by the hand, leading him where he was meant to go. He surrendered to him like a small child.

For the first time in years, he was compelled to rest. Even the fatigue of convalescence was a rest to him, after the extraordinary intellectual tension that had preceded the illness and still left him aching. Christophe, who for several months had been bracing himself in a state of perpetual alertness, felt the fixed intensity of his gaze gradually ease. He was no less strong for it; he was more human. The powerful but somewhat monstrous life of genius had receded into the background; he found himself again a man like others, stripped of all his intellectual fanaticisms, and of all that action has of hardness and ruthlessness. He no longer hated anything; he no longer thought about irritating things, or only with a shrug; he thought less of his own sorrows, and more of those of others. Since Sidonie had reminded him of the silent suffering of humble souls struggling without complaint at every point of the earth, he lost himself in thinking of them. He who was not usually sentimental now had fits of that mystical tenderness which is the flower of weakness and of illness. In the evenings, leaning on his windowsill above the courtyard, listening to the mysterious sounds of the night,… a voice singing in a neighboring house, which distance made seem moving, a little girl naively picking out Mozart on the piano,… he thought:

--- All of you whom I love, and do not know! You whom life has not withered, who dream of great things you know to be impossible, and who struggle against a hostile world --- I want you to have happiness --- it is so good to be happy!… Oh my friends, I know you are there, and I stretch out my arms to you… There is a wall between us. Stone by stone, I wear it away; but I wear away too, at the same time. Will we ever meet? Will I reach you before another wall rises up: death?… --- No matter! Let me be alone my whole life, so long as I work for you, do you some good, and you love me a little, later, after my death!…

So it was that Christophe the convalescent drank the milk of the two good nurses: “Liebe und Noth” (Love and Misery).

In this loosening of his will, he felt the need to draw closer to others. And, though he was still very weak, and it was hardly prudent, he went out in the early morning, at the hour when the flood of working people poured down the crowded streets toward distant labor, or in the evening, when it flowed back. He wanted to plunge into the refreshing bath of human sympathy. Not that he spoke to anyone. He didn’t seek that out. It was enough for him to watch people pass, to sense them, and to love them. He observed, with an affectionate pity, these workers who hurried along, all of them carrying, as if in advance, the exhaustion of the day --- those faces of young men, of young women, with their sallow complexions, their sharp expressions, their strange smiles --- those transparent and mobile faces, through which you could watch the shifting currents of desire, worry, and irony flow past --- that people so intelligent, too intelligent, slightly morbid, of the great cities. They all walked quickly, the men reading newspapers, the women nibbling a croissant. Christophe would gladly have given a month of his life so that the disheveled blonde, her features puffy with sleep, who had just passed near him with a small nervous and dry goat-step, could sleep one or two hours more. Oh! she would not have said no, if it had been offered! He wanted to spirit away from their hermetically sealed apartments, at that hour, all the idle wealthy women who were ennuyedly enjoying their comfort, and to put in their place, in their beds, in their restful lives, these small ardent and tired bodies, these souls not yet jaded, not overflowing, but lively and hungry for life. He felt full of indulgence toward them now; and he smiled at those alert and worn little faces, where there was both craftiness and ingenuousness, a brazen and naive desire for pleasure, and, at bottom, a brave little soul, honest and hardworking. And he did not take offense when some of them laughed in his face, or nudged each other, pointing out this tall young man with his burning eyes.

He also lingered along the quays, dreaming. That was his favorite walk. It calmed his nostalgia a little for the great river that had cradled his childhood. Ah! it was no longer, to be sure, the Vater Rhein! None of its all-powerful force. None of the wide horizons, the vast plains, where the spirit soars and loses itself. A river with gray eyes, in a pale-green dress, with fine and precise features, a river of grace, with supple movements, stretching out with a spiritual nonchalance in the sumptuous and sober adornment of its city, the bracelets of its bridges, the necklaces of its monuments, and smiling at its own prettiness, like a beautiful stroller… The delicious light of Paris! That was the first thing Christophe had loved in this city; it penetrated him, gently, gently; little by little it transformed his heart without his noticing. It was for him the most beautiful of musics, the only Parisian music. He spent hours in the evening along the quays, or in the gardens of old France, savoring the harmonies of the day over the great trees bathed in violet mist, over the gray statues and urns, over the patinated stone of the royal monuments, which had drunk the light of centuries --- that subtle atmosphere, made of fine sunlight and milky vapor, where the laughing spirit of the race floats in a dust of silver.

One evening, he was leaning on his elbows near the pont Saint-Michel, and, while watching the water, he was idly leafing through the books of a secondhand bookseller spread out on the parapet. He opened at random a stray volume of Michelet. He had already read a few pages of this historian, who had not particularly pleased him with his French boastfulness, his power of intoxicating himself with words, and his trembling delivery. But that evening, from the very first lines, he was seized: it was the end of the trial of Joan of Arc. He knew the Maid of Orléans from Schiller; but until now she had been for him only a romantic heroine, to whom a great poet had lent an imaginary life. Suddenly, reality appeared to him, and it gripped him. He read, he read, his heart crushed by the tragic horror of the sublime narrative; and when he reached the moment where Joan learns that she is to die that very evening and where she faints with terror, his hands began to tremble, tears came upon him, and he had to stop. The illness had weakened him: he had become ridiculously sensitive, which exasperated even himself. --- When he wished to finish his reading, it was late, and the bookseller was closing his boxes. He resolved to buy the book; he searched his pockets: he had six sous left. It was not rare for him to be so destitute: he did not worry about it; he had just bought his dinner, and he expected to collect a little money from Hecht the next day, for a music copying job. But to wait until the next day was hard! Why had he just spent on his dinner the little that remained to him? Ah! if he could have offered the bookseller the bread and sausage he had in his pocket as payment!

The next morning, very early, he went to Hecht’s to collect the money; but in passing near the bridge that bears the name of the archangel of battles --- “the brother of paradise” of Joan --- he did not have the courage not to stop. He found the precious book again in the bookseller’s boxes; he read it all the way through; he spent nearly two hours reading it; he missed the appointment at Hecht’s; and in order to catch him afterward, he had to lose almost the whole day. At last, he managed to get his new assignment and to be paid. At once, he ran to buy the book, even though he had already read it entirely. He was afraid another buyer might have taken it. No doubt the harm would not have been great: it was easy to obtain other copies; but Christophe did not know whether the book was rare or not; and besides, it was that particular volume he wanted, and no other. Those who love books are willingly fetishists. The leaves, even soiled and stained, from which the source of dreams has sprung, are sacred things for them.

Christophe reread at home, in the silence of the night, the Gospel of the Passion of Joan; and no human regard obliged him any longer to contain his emotion. A tenderness, a pity, an infinite grief filled him for the poor little wagtail, in her heavy red peasant clothes, tall, timid, her voice gentle, dreaming of the sound of bells --- (she loved them as he did) --- with her beautiful smile, full of fineness and goodness, her tears always ready to flow --- tears of love, tears of pity, tears of weakness: for she was at once so virile and so womanly, the pure and valiant girl who tamed the savage wills of an army of brigands, and calmly, with her intrepid good sense, her woman’s subtlety, and her gentle stubbornness, foiled for months, alone and betrayed by all, the threats and hypocritical ruses of a pack of churchmen and lawyers --- wolves and foxes, their eyes and fangs bloody --- forming a circle around her.

What penetrated Christophe most deeply was her goodness, her tenderness of heart --- weeping after victories, weeping over dead enemies, over those who had insulted her, consoling them when they were wounded, helping them to die, without bitterness against those who had delivered her up, and, on the very pyre, as the flames rose, not thinking of herself, thinking only of the monk who was exhorting her, and forcing him to leave. She was “gentle in the harshest struggle, good among the wicked, peaceful even in war. War, that triumph of the devil, she brought into it the spirit of God.”

And Christophe, turning his thoughts back on himself, thought:

--- I have not brought enough of the spirit of God into it.

He reread the beautiful words of the evangelist of Joan:

“To be good, to remain good, amid the injustices of men and the severities of fate… To keep gentleness and benevolence amid so many bitter disputes, to pass through experience without allowing it to touch that interior treasure…”

And he repeated to himself:

--- I have sinned. I have not been good. I have lacked benevolence. I have been too severe. --- Forgive me. Do not think I am your enemy, you whom I fight! I would like to do good to you as well… But I must still prevent you from doing harm…

And since he was not a saint, it was enough for him to think of them for his hatred to reawaken. What he forgave them least was that in seeing them, in seeing France through them, it was impossible to imagine that such a flower of purity and heroic poetry could ever have grown from this soil. And yet, it had. Who could say it would not spring from it a second time? The France of today could not be worse than that of Charles VII, the prostituted nation from which the Maid had emerged. The temple was empty now, defiled, half in ruins. No matter! God had spoken there.

Christophe sought a Frenchman to love, for the love of France.

It was toward the end of March. For months, Christophe had spoken with no one, and received no letter, except now and then a few words from the old mother, who did not know he had been ill, who did not tell him that she was ill. All his relations with the world were reduced to his trips to the music shop, to pick up or return work. He went at hours when he knew Hecht would not be there --- in order to avoid talking with him. A needless precaution: for the one time he had encountered Hecht, the latter had barely addressed a few indifferent words to him about his health.

He was thus blockaded in a prison of silence, when one morning there arrived an invitation from Mme Roussin to a musical evening: a celebrated quartet was to be heard there. The letter was very gracious, and Roussin had added a few cordial lines. He was not especially proud of his quarrel with Christophe. He was all the less so because, since then, he had quarreled with his singer and judged her without mercy. He was a good-natured fellow; he never held a grudge against those he had wronged. It would have seemed ridiculous to him that his victims should have more sensitivity than he did. So, when he had occasion to see them again, he did not hesitate to extend his hand.

Christophe’s first impulse was to shrug and swear he would not go. But as the day of the concert approached, he was less decided. He was suffocating from no longer hearing a human word, nor above all a note of music. He told himself again and again that he would never set foot in that house. But when the evening came, he went, thoroughly ashamed of his weakness.

He was poorly rewarded for it. No sooner had he found himself back in that milieu of politicians and snobs than he was seized again by an aversion for them more violent even than before: for in his months of solitude he had grown unaccustomed to this menagerie. It was impossible to hear music here: it would be a profanation. Christophe decided to leave as soon as the first piece was over.

He let his eyes travel around that circle of antipathetic faces and bodies. He encountered, at the far end of the drawing room, a pair of eyes that were looking at him and immediately turned away. There was in them something --- I know not what kind of candor --- that struck him, among all those jaded looks. They were timid eyes, but clear and precise, eyes in the French manner, which, once they fixed upon you, looked at you with absolute honesty, which concealed nothing of themselves, and to which perhaps nothing of you was hidden. He recognized those eyes. And yet he did not know the face they illuminated. It was that of a young man of twenty to twenty-five years, short in stature, slightly stooped, with a frail look, a beardless and unhealthy face, with chestnut hair, irregular and fine features, a certain asymmetry giving to his expression something, not troubled, but somewhat unsettled, which was not without charm, and seemed to contradict the tranquility of his eyes. He was standing in the embrasure of a doorway; and no one was paying any attention to him. Again Christophe looked at him; and each time, he encountered those eyes, which turned away timidly, with an amiable awkwardness; and each time, he “recognized” them: he had the impression of having seen them before in another face.

Incapable of concealing what he felt, following his habit, Christophe made his way toward the young man; but, as he approached, he wondered what he could say to him; and he lingered, undecided, looking to right and left, as if he were wandering at random. The other was not fooled by this, and understood that Christophe was coming toward him; he was so intimidated at the thought of speaking to him that he considered slipping into the next room; but he was nailed to the spot by his own awkwardness. They found themselves face to face. Several moments passed before either of them managed to find an opening. As the situation prolonged itself, each of them felt ridiculous in the other’s eyes. At last, Christophe looked the young man in the face, and, without further preamble, said to him with a smile, in a gruff tone:

--- You’re not Parisian?

At this unexpected question, the young man smiled despite his discomfort, and answered that he was not. His weak voice, with its veiled sonority, was like a fragile instrument.

--- I thought as much, said Christophe.

And, seeing him a little confused by this singular remark, he added:

--- That isn’t a reproach.

But the other’s discomfort only increased.

There was another silence. The young man was making efforts to speak; his lips trembled; one could sense he had a phrase ready to say, but could not bring himself to pronounce it. Christophe studied with curiosity this mobile face, where one could watch small tremors pass beneath the transparent skin; he did not seem to be made of the same substance as those surrounding him in the drawing room, the massive faces, of heavy matter, which were nothing but a prolongation of the neck, a piece of the body. Here, the soul surfaced; there was a moral life in every particle of flesh.

He still could not manage to speak. Christophe, good-naturedly, continued:

--- What are you doing here, among all these people?

He spoke aloud, with that strange freedom of his that made people despise him. The young man, embarrassed, could not help glancing around to see if anyone had heard; and that small movement displeased Christophe. Then, instead of answering, the young man asked with an awkward and gentle smile:

--- And you?

Christophe began to laugh, with his somewhat heavy laugh:

--- Yes. And me? he said, in good humor.

The young man made up his mind all at once:

--- How I love your music! he said, in a strangled voice.

Then he stopped, making fresh and useless efforts to overcome his shyness. He was blushing; he could feel it; and his blush deepened, spreading to his temples and his ears. Christophe watched him with a smile, and felt an urge to embrace him. The young man raised discouraged eyes toward him.

--- No, I truly can’t, he said; I can’t… I can’t speak of that… not here…

Christophe took his hand, with a silent laugh from his broad closed mouth. He felt the unknown man’s thin fingers tremble slightly against his palm and close around it with an involuntary tenderness; and the young man felt Christophe’s strong hand crushing his affectionately. The noise of the salon faded away around them. They were alone together, and they understood that they were friends.

It lasted only a second, after which Mme Roussin, touching Christophe’s arm lightly with her fan, said to him:

--- I see you’ve gotten acquainted, and that introductions are unnecessary. This tall young man came this evening on your account.

At that, they drew slightly apart from each other, a little awkwardly.

Christophe asked Mme Roussin:

--- Who is he?

--- What! she said. You don’t know him? He’s a young poet who writes charmingly. One of your admirers. He’s a good musician and plays the piano well. You’d better not be criticized in his presence: he’s in love with you. The other day he nearly came to blows over you with Lucien Lévy-Cœur.

--- Ah! What a fine fellow! said Christophe.

--- Yes, I know, you’re unfair to poor Lucien. All the same, he admires you too.

--- Oh, don’t tell me that! I’d hate myself.

--- I assure you.

--- Never! Never! I forbid him to.

--- That’s exactly what your admirer said. You’re both just as mad as each other. Lucien was in the middle of explaining one of your works to us. This shy young man you just saw stood up, trembling with rage, and told him he had no right to speak of you. Can you imagine the nerve!… Fortunately I was there. I laughed it off; Lucien followed my lead; and the other fell silent, utterly mortified; and he ended up apologizing.

--- Poor dear, said Christophe.

He was moved.

--- Where has he gone? he went on, without listening to Mme Roussin, who was speaking to him about something else.

He went to look for him. But the unknown friend had vanished. Christophe went back to Mme Roussin:

--- Tell me his name.

--- Whose? she asked.

--- The one you told me about.

--- Your little poet? she said. His name is Olivier Jeannin.

The echo of that name rang in Christophe’s ears like a familiar melody. A young girl’s silhouette floated for a moment before his eyes. But the new image, the image of the friend, erased it at once.

Christophe was making his way home. He walked through the streets of Paris, amid the crowd. He saw nothing, heard nothing; his senses were closed to everything around him. He was like a lake, cut off from the rest of the world by a ring of mountains. No breath, no noise, no disturbance. Peace. He kept saying to himself:

--- I have a friend.

1. ↑ See Jean-Christophe, II. Le Matin “Le Matin (Jean-Christophe)”).
2. ↑ See Jean-Christophe, IV. La Révolte “La Révolte (Jean-Christophe)”).
3. ↑ See Jean-Christophe, IV, La Révolte “La Révolte (Jean-Christophe)”).