Jean-Christophe in Paris. I. The Fair on the Square. 2

Romain Rolland

First Book (Continued and End)

A stronger impression imposed itself on Christophe, the more clearly he saw into the seething vat of ideas where Parisian art was fermenting: the supremacy of woman over that cosmopolitan society. She held there an absurd, disproportionate place. It was no longer enough for her to be man’s companion. It was not even enough for her to become his equal. Her pleasure had to be the first law, both for her and for man. And man lent himself to it. When a people grows old, it abdicates its will, its faith, all its reasons for living, into the hands of the dispenser of pleasure. — Men make works; but women make men — (when they do not also meddle with making the works, as was then the case in France); — and what they make, it would be more just to say that they unmake it. The Eternal Feminine has no doubt always exercised an exalting force upon the best; but for the common run of men and for weary epochs, there is, as someone has said, another feminine, no less eternal, that draws them downward. That one was the master of Parisian thought, the king of the Republic.

Christophe observed curiously, in the salons where the presentation of his talent as a virtuoso had been arranged for him by Sylvain Kohn, the women. Like most foreigners, he generalized his remarks, with no indulgence, from two or three types he had encountered: women not very tall, with little freshness, supple of figure, dyed hair, a great hat upon their amiable heads, a little too large for the body; clean-cut features, the flesh somewhat puffy; a small nose, fairly well made, often vulgar, always without character; eyes always on the alert, with no deep life, that strove to make themselves as brilliant and as large as possible; the mouth well drawn, well mistress of itself; the chin fleshy; the whole lower part of the face betraying the material character of these elegant persons who, however occupied they might be with amorous intrigues, never lost sight of the worldly concern, and of their household. Pretty, but not of pedigree. In almost all these society women, one felt the bourgeoise gone bad, or who would have wished to be so, with the traditions of her class: prudence, economy, coldness, practical sense, egoism. A poor life. A desire for pleasure that proceeded much more from a cerebral curiosity than from a need of the senses. A will of mediocre quality, but decided. They were superbly dressed, and had little automatic gestures. Patting their hair and their combs, with the back or the hollow of their hands, in small delicate strokes. And always seated so as to be able to look at themselves — and to watch the others — in a mirror, near or distant, without counting at dinner or at tea the spoons, the knives, the coffee-pots well polished and gleaming, in which they never failed to catch in passing the reflection of their faces, which interested them more than anything or anyone else. They observed at table a severe hygiene: drinking water, and depriving themselves of all the dishes that might have damaged their ideal of floury whiteness.

The proportion of Jewesses was rather large in the circles Christophe frequented; and he was always drawn to them, although, since his meeting with Judith Mannheim, he had hardly any illusions about them. Sylvain Kohn had introduced him into a few Israelite salons, where he had been received with the habitual intelligence of that race that loves intelligence. Christophe met there at dinner with financiers, engineers, journal-mongers, international brokers, kinds of Algerian slave-traders — the men of affairs of the Republic. They were lucid and energetic, indifferent to others, smiling, expansive, and closed. Christophe sometimes had the feeling that there were crimes beneath these hard brows, in the past and in the future of these men assembled around the sumptuous table, laden with flesh, with flowers and wines. Almost all were ugly. But the herd of women, in the mass and at a distance, was rather brilliant. One had to be careful not to look at them too closely: most lacked finesse in their coloring. But they had brilliance, an appearance of life rather strong, fine shoulders that they bared proudly to the bystander, and certain of them in whom an artist would have rediscovered the ancient Roman type — the women of Nero’s time, of Hadrian’s. One saw also figures resembling the Alma-Tadema, of carnal expression in the chin, strongly attached at the neck, not without something bestial. Others had abundant, thick hair, burning, bold eyes: one guessed them to be cunning, idle, ready for anything, more virile than the other women, and yet more woman. In the middle of the herd, here and there stood out a more spiritualized profile. Their pure features, beyond Rome, went back to the Orient, to the land of Laban: one felt there a poetry of silence, of the Desert. But when Christophe drew near and listened to the talk that Rebecca exchanged with Faustine the Roman, or Saint Barbara the Venetian, he found a Parisian Jewess, like the others, more Parisian than a Parisienne, more artificial and more adulterated, who uttered tranquil maliciousnesses, undressing the souls and bodies of people with her Madonna’s eyes.

Christophe wandered, from group to group, without being able to join any. The men spoke of hunting with ferocity, of love with brutality, of money alone with a sure justness, cold and bantering. They called themselves nationalists. They disposed, moreover, of their capital to back German or English industrial enterprises. They took notes about business in the smoking-room. Christophe heard said of a handsome fellow, who paced between the ladies’ armchairs, a rosette in his buttonhole, drawling out heavy gallantries:

— What! He is at large?

In a corner of the salon, two ladies were conversing of plays. Breathless poetesses ushered Sully Prudhomme and Auguste Dorchain forth in the apocalyptic tone of verse. An illustrious ham of the stage solemnly declaimed Jean Marcau, Musique et Vers, with the accompaniment of celestial organ. Christophe was ill of it. But the Romans were charmed, and laughed heartily, showing their magnificent teeth. They also played Ibsen. The Pillars of Society. — Epilogue of the struggle of a great man against Society, ending in providing them with diversion! Then, they considered themselves bound, naturally, to discourse on art. It was a sickening thing. The women above all set about speaking of Ibsen, of Wagner, of Tolstoy, out of flirtation, out of politeness, out of boredom, out of stupidity. Once the conversation was on that ground, there was no further means of stopping it. The disease was contagious. One had to listen to the thoughts of bankers, brokers, and slave-traders on art. Christophe vainly avoided answering, turned the talk aside: they were bent on speaking to him of music, of art, of high poetry. As Berlioz said, “those people employ these terms with the greatest sang-froid; one would think they were talking of wine, of women, or of other filth.” An alienist doctor recognized in Ibsen’s heroine one of his clientele, but much sillier. An engineer maintained, in good faith, that in A Doll’s House, the sympathetic character was the husband. The illustrious ham of the stage, a famous comic, droned out, vibrating with profound Thoughts on Nietzsche and on Carlyle; he related to Christophe that he could not see a painting by Velasquez (Velasquez was the god of the day), without great tears coursing down his cheeks. Christophe, always, observed that the higher these people placed art, the lower they themselves still stood. Christophe took account of what they passed off as said, and of what they really said. Most often, they said nothing. They kept to affected brusqueries, or enigmatic smiles: they lived on their reputation and gave themselves no trouble. Save for a few discoursers, generally from the Midi. Those ones spoke of everything. No sense of values. Everything was on the same plane. Such a one was a Shakespeare. Such a one was a Molière. Such a one, a Pascal, or even a Jesus Christ. They compared Ibsen to Dumas fils, or Tolstoy to George Sand; and naturally, it was to show that France had invented everything. Ordinarily, they knew no foreign language. But that did not embarrass them. It mattered so little to their public that they should tell the truth! What mattered was that they should say amusing things, and, as far as possible, flattering to national self-love. The foreigners had broad backs — apart from the idol of the day: for one was always needed for the fashion. Whether it were Grieg, or Wagner, or Nietzsche, or Gorky, or d’Annunzio. It did not last long, and the idol was sure to pass, one morning, into the dustbin.

For the moment, the idol was Beethoven. Beethoven — who would have said it? — was a man of fashion. At least among society people and men of letters: for the musicians had at once detached themselves from him, following the system of see-saw which is one of the laws of art in France. To know what to think, a Frenchman has need of knowing what his neighbor thinks, in order thereupon to think the contrary. As Beethoven was becoming popular, the musicians felt him no longer distinguished enough for them; they pretended to outstrip opinion, and never to follow it; rather than find themselves in agreement with it, they would have turned their backs on it. They had therefore taken to treating Beethoven as a drunken deaf man, who cried out in a harsh voice; and certain ones affirmed that he was perhaps an estimable moralist, but an overrated musician. — These nasty jokes were not to Christophe’s taste. The enthusiasm of society people satisfied him no more. If Beethoven had come to Paris at that moment, he would have been the lion of the day: it was unfortunate for him that he had been dead for a century. His music, moreover, counted for less in this vogue than the more or less romantic circumstances of his life, popularized by sentimental and virtuous biographies. His violent mask, with its lion’s muzzle, had become a figure of romance. The ladies pitied him: they let it be understood that, if they had known him, he would not have been so unhappy; and their great hearts were the more disposed to offer themselves since there was no risk that Beethoven would take them at their word: the old fellow no longer needed anything. — That is why the virtuosos, the orchestra conductors, the impresarios discovered treasures of piety for him; and, in their quality of Beethoven’s representatives, they gathered up the homages that were destined for him. Sumptuous festivals, at high prices, gave society people the occasion to display their generosity — and at times even to discover Beethoven’s symphonies. Actors, society men, demi-mondaines, dignitaries charged by the Republic with presiding over the destinies of art, made it known to the world that they were going to raise a monument to Beethoven: on the subscription list one saw, along with a few decent folk who served as passport for the others, all that rabble that would have trampled Beethoven underfoot while he was living, or whom Beethoven would have crushed.

Christophe watched, listened. He clenched his teeth, so as not to say something outrageous. The whole evening, he remained tense and contracted. He could neither speak nor be silent. To speak, not for pleasure or from necessity, but out of politeness, because one must speak, seemed to him humiliating and shameful. To say the bottom of his thought was not permitted him. To say banalities was not possible for him. And he had not even the talent of being polite, when he said nothing. If he looked at his neighbor, it was in too fixed and too intense a fashion: in spite of himself, he studied him, and the other was offended. If he spoke, he believed too much in what he said: that was shocking to everyone, and even to himself. He was well aware that he was not in his place; and as he was intelligent enough to have the sense of the harmony of the milieu, in which his presence jarred, he was as shocked by his own ways as his hosts themselves. He was angry with himself, and he was angry with them.

When he found himself alone at last in the street, in the middle of the night, he was so crushed with boredom that he had not the strength to walk home; he had a mind to lie down on the ground, in the open street, as he had been on the point of doing, when, on coming out of a concert where he had just played, having no more than five or six francs in his pocket, he absurdly spent them in fleeing more quickly, and took a carriage. He groaned with exasperation. Once at home, he groaned still more, in his bed, in the middle of his sleep. And then, brusquely, he would burst out laughing, recalling some burlesque remark. He surprised himself repeating it, miming the gestures. The next day, and several days after, it still happened to him, walking alone, to scold himself suddenly, like a beast… Why was he going to see these people? Why did he go back to them? Why oblige himself to make gestures and grimaces, like the others, to pretend to take an interest in what did not interest him? — Was it indeed true that it did not interest him? A year ago, he would never have been able to bear this society. Now, it amused him, at bottom, even while irritating him. Was it a little of the Parisian indifference creeping into him? He asked himself sometimes with anxiety whether he had then become less strong. But on the contrary it was that he was more so. He was freer in mind in a foreign milieu. The spectacle of the world was beginning to interest him, outside of himself.

Among the young women of society — few in number, moreover — whom Christophe had as pupils, was the daughter of a rich automobile manufacturer, Colette Stevens. Her father was Belgian, naturalized French, son of an Anglo-American settled at Antwerp and of a Dutchwoman. Her mother was Italian. It was a thoroughly Parisian family. For Christophe — for many others — Colette Stevens was the type of the young French girl.

She was eighteen, with velvety black eyes which she made soft for the young men, Spanish pupils that filled the whole orbit with their humid sparkle, a little nose somewhat long and whimsical, which she wrinkled and twitched slightly in speaking, with saucy pouts, disordered hair, a crumpled little face, mediocre skin rubbed with powder, large, slightly puffed features, the air of a chubby little kitten. Of altogether slender proportions, very well dressed, seductive, irritating, she had mincing, precious, simpering manners; she played the little girl, swinging two hours in her rocking-chair, uttering little cries, little:

— No? It’s not possible?…

at table, clapping her hands when there was a dish she liked; in the salon, smoking cigarettes, affecting, in front of the men, an exuberant affection for her women friends, throwing herself on their necks, caressing their hands, whispering in their ear, saying ingenuous things, saying also malicious things, admirably, in a sweet and frail voice, which knew even, on occasion, how to say very risqué things, without seeming to touch them, which knew still better how to make others say them — the candid air of a very well-behaved little girl, eyes shining, with heavy lids, voluptuous and sly, looking sideways, slyly, on the lookout for all the gossip, snatching up all the indecencies of the conversation, and trying to hook here and there some heart on a line.

All these monkey-tricks, these parades of a little dog, this adulterated ingenuousness, did not please Christophe in any way. He had something else to do than lend himself to the manoeuvres of a sly little girl, or even than consider them with an amused eye. He had to earn his bread, to save from death his life and his thoughts. The sole interest for him of these salon parrots was to furnish him the means of doing so. In exchange for their money, he gave them his lessons, conscientiously, his brow furrowed, his mind bent on the task, in order not to let himself be distracted either by the boredom which it caused him or by the coquetries of his pupils, when they were as flirtatious as Colette Stevens. He gave hardly more attention to her than to Colette’s little cousin, a child of twelve, silent and timid, whom the Stevenses had taken in, and to whom Christophe also taught the piano.

But Colette was too clever not to feel that with Christophe all her graces were lost, and too supple not to adapt herself instantly to his ways. She did not even need to apply herself for that. It was an instinct of her nature. She was woman. She was like a wave without form. All the souls she met were for her like vases, whose forms, out of curiosity, out of need, at once, she espoused. To be, she always had to be another. Her whole personality lay in not remaining herself. She changed vases often.

Christophe attracted her, for many reasons. The first was that he was not attracted by her. He attracted her further, because he was different from all the young men she knew: she had never yet tried a vase of this sort and of these asperities. He attracted her finally, because, expert, of pedigree, at evaluating at first glance the exact price of vases and of people, she realized perfectly that, in default of elegance, Christophe had a solidity that none of her Parisian knick-knacks could offer her.

She made music, like most idle young girls of the present day. She made much of it and little. That is to say, that she was always occupied with it, and that she knew almost nothing of it. She fiddled at her piano all day long, out of idleness, out of pose, out of voluptuousness. Sometimes she made of it as one makes of bicycling. Sometimes she could play well, very well, with taste, with soul — or, almost in the same breath, play vilely. It was enough for that, that she should put herself in the place of someone who had a soul. She was capable of loving Massenet, Grieg, Thomé, before she knew Christophe. But she was also capable of no longer loving them, after she knew Christophe. And now, she played Bach and Beethoven very properly — (which, in truth, is not saying much); — but the strongest 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 tickled epidermis.

In the salon of the aristocratic mansion, decorated with somewhat pale tapestries, with, on an easel, in the middle of the room, the portrait of the robust Madame Stevens by a fashionable painter, who had represented her languishing, like a flower without water, the eyes dying, the body twisted in a spiral, to express the rarity of her millionaire soul — in the great salon with bay windows, looking out on old trees that the snow powdered, Christophe always found Colette seated at her piano, indefinitely repeating the same phrases, caressing her ears with mellow dissonances.

— Ah! said Christophe on entering. There is the kitten, purring again!

— Rude man! she said, laughing…

(And she held out her slightly moist hand.)

… Listen to this. Isn’t it pretty?

— Very pretty, said he, in an indifferent tone.

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

— I hear… It’s always the same thing.

— Ah! you are not a musician, said she with vexation.

— As if it were music that was in question!

— What! it is not music?… And what, if you please?

— You know it very well; and I shall not tell you, because it would not be proper.

— All the more reason to say it.

— You want it?… So much the worse for you!… Well, do you know what you are doing with your piano?… You are flirting.

— What an idea!

— Perfectly. You are saying to it: “Dear piano, dear piano, tell me sweet words, more, caress me, give me a little kiss!”

— But will you be silent! said Colette, half laughing, half angry. You have not the slightest idea of respect.

— Not the slightest.

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

— Oh! I beg you, let us not mix up music with that!

— But it is music itself! A fine chord is a kiss.

— I did not make you say it.

— Isn’t it true?… Why do you shrug your shoulders? Why do you make a face?

— Because it disgusts me.

— Better and better!

— It disgusts me to hear music spoken of as of a libertinism… Oh! it is not your fault. It is the fault of your world. All this mad society that surrounds you regards art as a sort of permitted debauchery… Come, enough on that! Play me your sonata.

— But no, let us talk a little more.

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

— You are polite! said Colette, vexed — delighted, at bottom, at being thus bullied.

She played her piece, applying herself as best she could; and, as she was clever, she succeeded very tolerably, sometimes even rather well. Christophe, who was not deceived, laughed in himself at the cleverness “of that confounded little vixen, who played as if she felt what she played, although she felt nothing of it.” He did not fail to feel for her an amused sympathy. Colette, on her side, seized every pretext to resume the conversation, which interested her much more than the piano lesson. Christophe in vain defended himself against it, alleging that he could not say what he thought without risking wounding her: she always succeeded in making him say it; and the more wounding it was, the less she was wounded by it: it was an amusement for her. But as the sharp little creature felt that Christophe loved nothing so much as sincerity, she stood up to him boldly, and disputed mordicus. They parted very good friends.

Yet Christophe would never have had the slightest illusion about this salon friendship, that the slightest intimacy was not established between them, but for the confidences Colette made to him, one day, as much by surprise as by instinct of seduction.

The day before, there had been a reception at her parents’. She had laughed, chattered, flirted like a mad creature; but, the following morning, when Christophe came to give her her lesson, she was weary, her features drawn, her complexion gray, her head as heavy as a fist. She said hardly a few words; she had an extinguished air. She sat down at the piano, played limply, missed her passages, tried to redo them, missed them again, interrupted herself brusquely, and said:

— I cannot… I beg your pardon… Will you, let us wait a little…

He asked her if she was unwell. She replied:

“She was not ill-disposed… She had moments like that… It was ridiculous. He must not hold it against her.”

He proposed coming back another day; but she insisted that he stay:

— Just an instant… In a moment, it will be better, perhaps… How stupid I am, am I not?

He felt clearly that she was not in her normal state; but he did not wish to question her; and, to speak of something else, he said:

— That is what comes of having been so brilliant last evening! You spent yourself too much.

She had a little ironic smile:

— One cannot say as much of you, she answered.

He laughed frankly.

— I believe you did not say a word, she resumed.

— Not one.

— There were however interesting people there.

— Yes, famous chatterers, witty people, society people. I am lost in the midst of your boneless Frenchmen, who understand everything, explain everything, excuse everything — who feel nothing. People who talk, for hours on end, of love and of art! Is it not sickening?

— That ought, however, to interest you: art — if not love.

— One does not speak of those things: one does them.

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

Christophe replied, laughing:

— Then leave that to others. Not everyone is made for art.

— Nor for love?

— Nor for love.

— Mercy! And what is left to us?

— Take care of your household.

— Thank you! said Colette, piqued.

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

— I can’t!… I am good for nothing, decidedly. I believe you are right. Women are good for nothing.

— It is already something to say so, said Christophe good-humoredly.

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

— Don’t be so hard!

— I do not speak ill of good women, replied Christophe gaily. 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, I have never seen it; but it may very well exist. I am even resolved to find it, if it exists. Only, it is not easy. A good woman and a man of genius are both as rare the one as the other.

— And besides them, the rest of men and women do not count?

— On the contrary! There is only the rest that counts — for the world.

— But for you?

— For me, that does not exist.

— How hard you are! repeated Colette.

— Bah! it is of no great importance. Were it only in the interest of others!… If there were not a bit more pebble-bread in the world, it would all go to mush.

— Yes, you are right, you are happy to be strong, said Colette sadly. But do not be too severe with those — above all with those who are not… You do not know how heavily our weakness weighs upon us. Because you see us laughing, flirting, playing the monkey, you think we have nothing more in our heads, and you despise us. Ah! if you read all that goes on in the heads of the little women of fifteen to eighteen who go into society, and who have the kind of success their overflowing life entails — when they have well danced, said silly things, paradoxes, bitter things at which one laughs because they laugh, when they have given up a little of themselves to imbeciles, and sought in the depths of each one’s eyes that light one never finds there — if you saw them, when they return home, in the night, and shut themselves up in their silent room, and throw themselves on their knees in agonies of solitude!…

— Is it possible? said Christophe, stupefied. What! you suffer, you suffer thus?

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

— Poor little one! said he. If you suffer, why don’t you do something to get out of this life?

— What do you want us to do? There is nothing to do. You, men, you can free yourselves, do what you wish. But we are shut up forever in the circle of worldly duties and pleasures: we cannot escape from it.

— Who hinders you from emancipating yourselves like us, from taking a task that pleases you, and assures you, as it does us, independence?

— Like you? Poor Monsieur Krafft! It does not assure it to you too much!… After all! It pleases you, at least. But we — for what task are we made? There is none that interests us. — Yes, I know well, we meddle in everything nowadays, we pretend to interest ourselves in heaps of things that do not concern us: we would so much like to interest ourselves in something! I am like the others. I occupy myself with patronages, with charity committees. I attend the courses at the Sorbonne, the lectures of Bergson and Jules Lemaître, historical concerts, classical matinées, and I take notes, notes… I don’t know what I am writing!… and I try to persuade myself that this passions me, or at least that it is useful. Ah! how well I know the contrary, how indifferent all that is to me, how I am bored!… Do not begin again to despise me, because I tell you frankly what everyone thinks. I am perhaps a bigger goose than another. But what can philosophy, and history, and science possibly mean to me? As for art — you see — I strum, I daub, little stupid watercolors: that’s all. And after that? does that fill a life? I mean: a life; it is not marriage. But do you believe it is cheerful to marry one of those individuals whom I know as well as you? I see them as they are. I have not the luck to be like our German Gretchens, who always know how to deceive themselves… Isn’t it terrible? To look around oneself, to see those who have married, those whom they have married, and to think that one will have to do as they do, be as they are, deform oneself in body and in mind, become banal as they are!… It needs stoicism, I assure you, to accept such a life and its duties. Not all women are capable of it… And the time passes, the years flow, youth goes away; and many were the pretty things, the good things in us, that will serve for nothing, that die every day, that we shall have to resign ourselves to giving to fools, to people whom we despise, and who despise them!… And no one understands you! They find you unjust, they make of you an enigma for people. Let it pass for the men, who find us insipid and baroque! But women ought to understand us! They have been as we are; they would only need to remember… Nothing. No help from them. Even our mothers do not understand us, do not really seek to know us. They ask only to see us married. For the rest, live, die, manage as you will! Society leaves us to its unhealthy abandonment.

— Do not be discouraged, said Christophe. Each one in turn must make the experience of life. If you are brave, all will go well. Look outside of your world. There must still be a few honest men in France.

— There are. I know some. But they are so boring! …And then, I will tell you: the world in which I live displeases me; but I do not believe I could live outside it. It is so, I am used to it. I need luxury, certain comfort, certain refinements of luxury and of society, which money serves me to have without doubt to give, but for which it is indispensable. It is not brilliant, I know. But I know myself, I am weak… I beg you, do not make fun of me, because I tell you my little cowardices. Listen to me with kindness. It does me so much good to talk with you! I feel that you are strong, that you are sound: I have full confidence in you. Be a little my friend, will you?

— I am willing, said Christophe. But what shall I be able to do?

— Listen to me, advise me, give me courage. I am in such disarray, often! Then I no longer know what to do. I say to myself: “What good is it to struggle? What good is it to torment myself? This or that, what matter? Anyone! Anything!” It is a horrible state. I would not wish to fall into it. Help me! Help me!

She looked overwhelmed, aged by ten years; she looked at Christophe with good submissive and supplicating eyes. He promised all she wished. Then she revived, smiled, became gay again.

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

From that day on, they had regularly intimate conversations. They were alone together. She confided to him what she wished. He took much pains to understand her and to advise her. She listened to the counsels, the remonstrances if need be, gravely, attentively, like a very well-behaved little girl: it amused her, interested her, sustained her even; she thanked him with a moved and coquettish glance. — But nothing in her life was changed: it was only one distraction more.

Her day was a succession of metamorphoses. She rose excessively late, toward noon. She had had insomnia; she scarcely fell asleep till dawn. For the whole day, she did nothing. She turned over indefinitely a verse, an idea, a shred of an idea, a memory of conversation, a musical phrase, the image of a face that had pleased her. She was not entirely awake till about four or five in the evening. Until then, she had heavy lids, a swollen face, a sulky, sleepy air. She revived when there came a few good women friends, gossipy as she was, and as she was curious of Parisian tittle-tattle. They discussed together at endless length on love. The psychology of love: that was the eternal subject, with dress, indiscretions, slanders. She had also her circle of idle young men, who needed to spend two or three hours a day in the midst of skirts, and who might just as well have worn them: for they had the souls and conversations of girls. Christophe had his hour: the hour of the confessor. Colette, instantly, became grave and recollected. She was like the young Frenchwoman, of whom Bodley speaks, who, at the confessional, “developed a calmly prepared theme, a model of luminous ordering and of clarity, where all that had to be said was arranged in good order, and classified in distinct categories.” As the day advanced, she became younger again. In the evening, they went to the theatre; and it was the eternal pleasure of recognizing in the hall the same eternal figures — the pleasure, not so much of the play that was being performed, as of the actors whom one knew, of remarking, once more, their well-known foibles. One exchanged with those who came to see you in your box maliciousnesses about those who were in the other boxes, or about the actresses. One found that the ingénue had a thread of voice “like a curdled mayonnaise,” or that the great actress was dressed “like a lampshade.” — Or one went out in the evening; and there, the pleasure was to show oneself, if one were pretty — (that depended on the days; nothing more capricious than a pretty woman of Paris); — or one renewed one’s stock of criticisms on people, their dress and their physical defects. One was bored, no less.

One came home late. One had trouble going to bed: it was the hour when one was most awake. One pulled around one’s table. One leafed through a book. One laughed all alone, at the memory of a word or a gesture. One was bored. One was often very unhappy. One had crises of despair.

Christophe, who saw Colette only a few hours, from time to time, could not witness all these transformations, already had much trouble recognizing her. He wondered at what moment she was sincere — or whether she was always sincere — or whether she was sincere ever. Colette herself could not have told him. She was like most young girls, who are only idle and constrained desire, in the night. She did not know what she was, because she did not know what she wanted, and because she could not know it, before having tried it. So she tried it, in the way, with the most freedom and the least risks possible, in trying to model herself on those who surrounded her, to take their moral measure. She was not in a hurry to choose. She would have wished to spare everything, in order to profit from everything.

But with a soul like Christophe’s, it was not convenient. He admitted that one might prefer to him beings he did not esteem as much, that one might despise him; but he did not admit that one should equate him with them. To each his taste; but at least one had to have one.

He was the less disposed to patience because Colette seemed to take pleasure in collecting around her all the little young men who had the gift of exasperating Christophe: sickening little snobs, rich at least.

All wrote — pretended to write. It was a neurosis, under the Third Republic. It was above all a form of vain idleness — intellectual work being the most difficult to verify, and the one that lends itself most to bluff. They said of their great labors only a few discreet but respectful words. They seemed penetrated with the importance of their task, crushed under the burden. In the first times, Christophe felt some pain at being so absolutely ignorant of their works and their names. With timidity, he tried to inform himself; he wished above all to know what had been written by one of them, of whom their discourse made a master of the theatre. He was surprised to learn that this great dramatist had produced a single act, which was extracted from a novel, which itself was drawn from a series of notations he had, later on, expanded; and published in one of their Reviews, over the course of the last ten years. The others did not have a heavier baggage: a few acts, a few stories, a few verses. Some were famous for an article. Many for a book “that they were going to do.” They professed such a disdain for prose in the Latin tongue. They seemed to attach an extreme importance to the arrangement of words in a sentence. Meanwhile, the word expressed came up frequently in their talk; but it did not appear to have the same sense as in current language; they applied it to details of style. There were however also among them great thinkers and great ironists, who, when they wrote, put their profound and fine words in italics, so that one might not be mistaken about it. All had the cult of self: it was the only cult they had. They sought to make others share it. The misfortune was that the others were already provided: each one had his own. They had the constant preoccupation of a public in the eyes: of speaking, walking, eating, smoking, carrying the head and the eyes, reading a newspaper, greeting one another. Buffoonery is natural to the young man, and all the more so as the young man is more intelligent, that is, less occupied. Naturally, it is above all for woman that they put themselves out: for they covet her, or desire — still more — to be coveted by her. But even for the first comer, they show off: — for an astonished passer-by. Christophe often met one of these little signboards: daubers, virtuosos, little hams, who make themselves up like a known portrait: Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Beethoven, have a role to play: they are the good musician, the good workman, the profound thinker, the joyous wag, the peasant of the Danube, the man of nature… They cast a sidelong glance, in passing, to see if they were noticed. Christophe saw them come, and, when they were near him, mischievously, he turned his eyes another way. But their little discomfiture hardly lasted: two steps further, they posed for the next passer-by. — Those of Colette’s salon were more refined: it was above all their wit they made up: they copied two or three models, who themselves were not originals. Or else, they mimed an idea: Force, Joy, Suffering, Solidarity, Socialism, Anarchism, Faith, Liberty: these were roles for them. They had the talent of making of the dearest thoughts an affair of literature, and of reducing the most heroic transports of the human soul to the role of salon articles, of fashionable ties.

But where they were quite in their element was in love: it belonged to them. The casuistry of pleasure had no secrets for them; in their virtuosity, they were of those new ones, in order to have the honor of resolving it. It has always been the occupation of those who have no other: instead of loving, they “make love”; and above all, they explain it. The commentaries were more abundant than the text, which, with them, was very thin. Sociology gave a relish to the most scabrous thoughts: everything was then covered with the flag of sociology; whatever pleasure one had in satisfying one’s vices, something would have been lacking, if one had not persuaded oneself that, in satisfying them, one was working for the new times. It was a kind of socialism eminently Parisian: erotic socialism.

Among the problems that then passioned this little court of love, modern style, was the equality of women and men in marriage and of their rights to love. There had been brave young men, honest, Protestant, a little ridiculous — Scandinavians or Swiss — who had demanded equality in virtue: men coming to marriage, virgins like women. The Parisian casuists demanded an equality of another sort, equality in dirtiness: women coming to marriage, soiled like men. — After what their lovers had had. The Parisians had made such a consumption of adultery, in imagination and in practice, that it began to seem to them insipid; one sought to substitute for it, in the world of letters, a more original invention: the prostitution of young girls. — I mean regular prostitution, universal, virtuous, decent, familial, and, into the bargain, social. — A book, full of talent, that had just appeared, made a stir on the question: it studied in four hundred pages of a Bantu pedantry the best “management of pleasure.” It was a course in free love, where one spoke ceaselessly of elegance, of decorum, of good taste, of nobility, of beauty, of truth, of modesty, of morality — a Berquin for the young girls of society who wished to go wrong. It was, for the moment, the Gospel in which Colette’s little court took its delights, and which it paraphrased. It goes without saying that, in the customary fashion of disciples, they left aside all that there might be, under these paradoxes, of just, of well observed and even of fairly human, to retain only the worst. In this parterre of sugary little flowers, they never failed to gather the most venomous — aphorisms of this sort: “that the taste for voluptuousness can only sharpen the taste for work”; — “that it is monstrous for a virgin to become a mother before having enjoyed”; — “that the possession of a virgin man was for a woman the natural preparation for reflective maternity”; — that it was the role of mothers “to organize the liberty of their daughters with that spirit of delicacy and decency which they apply to protecting the liberty of their sons”; — and that the time would come “when young girls would return from their lover’s with as much naturalness as they now come back from a course or from taking tea at a friend’s.”

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

Christophe had a horror of these remarks. He exaggerated to himself their importance and the harm they could do. The French have too much wit to apply their literature. These petty Diderots, this small change of the great Denis, are, in ordinary life, like the genial Panurge of the Encyclopédie, bourgeois as honest, even as timorous as the others. It is precisely because they are so timid in action that they amuse themselves with pushing action, in thought, to the limits of the possible. It is a game where one risks nothing.

But Christophe was not a French dilettante.

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

He was one of those sons of enriched bourgeois who do aristocratic literature, and play the patricians of the Third Republic. He was named Lucien Lévy-Cœur. He had wide-set eyes, a lively glance, a hooked nose, full lips, the beard cut in a point, and he had the air of a Van Dyck, with the beginning of a precocious baldness, which did not become him ill, a wheedling skin, elegant manners, fine and soft hands, which melted in one’s hand. He affected always a very great politeness, a refined courtesy, even with those whom he did not like, and whom he sought to throw overboard.

Christophe had already met him, at the first dinner of men of letters where Sylvain Kohn had introduced him; and although they had not spoken to each other, it had been enough for him to hear the sound of his voice to feel toward him an aversion he could not explain to himself, and the deep reasons for which he was to understand only later. There are thunderbolts of hatred, as there are also of love — or — not to shock gentle souls who are afraid of the word, as of all the passions — it is the instinct of the healthy being who senses the enemy and defends himself.

In face of Christophe, he represented the spirit of irony, of decomposition, which attacked gently, politely, deafly, all that there was of great in the old society that was dying: family, marriage, fatherland, religion; in art, all that there was of virile, of pure, of sound, of popular; all faith in ideas, in feelings, in great men, in man. At the bottom of all this thought, there was only a mechanical pleasure of analysis, of analysis to excess, a kind of animal need to gnaw at thought, the instinct of a worm. And alongside this ideal of intellectual rodent, a sensuality of a courtesan, but of a bluestocking courtesan: for with him, everything was, or was becoming, literary. Everything was matter for literature: his good fortunes, his vices and those of his friends. He had written novels and plays, where he narrated with much talent the private life of his parents, their intimate adventures, those of his friends, his own, his liaisons, one among others which he had had with the wife of his best friend: the portraits were made with great art; everyone praised the exactness of them: the public, the woman, and the friend. He could not obtain the confidences or the favors of a woman without speaking of it in a book. — It would have seemed natural that his indiscretions should put him on cold terms with his “associates.” But there was nothing of the sort: they were scarcely a little embarrassed by them; they protested for form’s sake: at bottom, they were ravished to be shown to passers-by, all naked; provided one left them a mask on their face, their modesty was at rest. On his side, he brought to these chronicles no spirit of vengeance, and perhaps not even of scandal. He was no worse a son, nor a worse lover than the average of people. In the same chapters where he shamelessly unveiled his father, his mother and his mistress, he had pages where he spoke of them with a tenderness and a poetic charm. In reality, he was extremely family-minded; but he was of those people who cannot do without respecting and esteeming what they love: quite the contrary; they love better what they can a little despise; the object of their affection seems to them then nearer to them, more human. They are the people in the world least capable of understanding heroism and above all purity. They are so by their intelligence, by a weakness of mind. They have no illusions about themselves, and have no sympathy nor convictions to respect for anyone the heroes of art, and they judge them with a protective familiarity.

He understood himself admirably with the perverted ingénues of bourgeois society, rich and idle. He was a companion for them, a sort of depraved servant, freer and more knowing, who instructed them, and whom they envied. They did not put themselves out before him; and, with the lamp of Psyche in hand, they curiously studied the male androgyne, who let them do as they pleased.

Christophe could not understand how a young girl, like Colette, who seemed to have a delicate nature and the touching desire to escape from the degrading atmosphere of life, had taken to this psychological taste. Lucien Lévy-Cœur was a hundred times worse than herself. Christophe was the confidant of Colette; but Colette was the confidant of Lucien Lévy-Cœur. Great superiority for the latter. It is sweet to a woman to believe that she is dealing with a man weaker than herself. She finds satisfied there, at the same time as what there is of least good in her, what there is of best: her maternal instinct. Lucien Lévy-Cœur knew it well: one of the surest means of touching the heart of women is to awaken this mysterious chord. Then, Colette felt herself weak, fairly cowardly, with instincts of which she was not very proud, but which she would have taken good care not to repulse. It pleased her to let herself be persuaded by the audaciously calculated confessions of her friend that the others were as she was, and that one must take human nature as it was. She thus gave herself the satisfaction of not combating inclinations that were agreeable to her, and the luxury of telling herself that it was thus that things ought to be, “alas!” — that wisdom was not to rebel and to be indulgent for what one could not prevent. Here was a wisdom whose practical application had nothing painful about it.

For whoever knows how to look at life with serenity, it is a sufficiently powerful spectacle, this perpetual contrast that exists in society between the extreme refinement of apparent civilization and the deep animality. In every salon that is not filled with fossils and petrified souls, there are always, like two layers of ground, two layers of superimposed conversations, the one upon the other: the one, that everyone hears, between intelligences; the other, of which few people are aware, and which is yet the stronger — between instincts, between beasts. — These two conversations are often contradictory. While minds exchange conventional coin, bodies say: Desire, Aversion — or, more often: Curiosity, Boredom, Disgust. The beast, although tamed by centuries of civilization, and stunned only as the miserable lions in the tamer’s cage, dreams always of its prey.

But Christophe had not yet arrived at that disinterestedness of mind which alone age and the death of the passions bring. He had taken very seriously his role of counselor to Colette. She had asked his aid; and he saw her expose herself with a light heart to danger. So he did not conceal his hostility to Lucien Lévy-Cœur. The latter had at first kept, vis-à-vis Christophe, the attitude of an irreproachable and ironic politeness. He too scented the enemy; but he did not judge him formidable; he ridiculed him, without seeming to. Besides, he asked only to be admired by Christophe in order to remain on good terms with him; but it was what he could never obtain; and he felt it well: for Christophe had not the art of dissimulating. Then, Lucien Lévy-Cœur had passed insensibly from a wholly abstract opposition of thoughts to a small personal war, carefully polite, of which Colette was to be judge.

Between her two friends she kept the balance equal. She enjoyed the moral superiority and the talent of Christophe; but she enjoyed also 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 remonstrances: she listened to them with a touching humility that disarmed him. She was rather good, but without frankness, by weakness, by goodness even. She would have been desolated to give pain to Christophe. In fact, she well knew the price of a friend like him; but she would not make any sacrifice to a friendship; she would not make any sacrifice to anything, or to anyone; she wanted above all what was most convenient and most agreeable to her. So she hid from Christophe that she still received Lucien Lévy-Cœur; she lied, with the charming naturalness of young women of society, accustomed from childhood to this exercise necessary for one who must possess the art of receiving and keeping all her friends. She gave as her excuse that it was so as not to give Christophe pain; but in reality, it was because she knew that he was right, and that she wanted nonetheless to do what pleased her, without however falling out with him. Christophe sometimes suspected these ruses; he then scolded, he assumed a thunderous voice. She continued to play the contrite little girl, affectionate, a little sad; she made sweet eyes at him — feminae ultima ratio. — It really saddened her to feel that she might lose Christophe’s friendship; she made herself seductive and serious; and she succeeded indeed in disarming Christophe for some time. But it had always to end in an outburst. Into Christophe’s irritation there entered, without his knowing, a little bit of jealousy. And into Colette’s coaxing ruses, there entered perhaps also a little, a little bit of love. The rupture was therefore only the sharper.

One day when Christophe had caught Colette in flagrant lie, he put it to her: choose between Lucien Lévy-Cœur and him. She tried to elude the question; and finally, she claimed her right to have all the friends she pleased. She was perfectly right; and Christophe realized that he was ridiculous; but he knew also that it was not from egoism that he was being demanding: he had taken a sincere affection for Colette; he wished to save her, were it by doing violence to her will. So he insisted, awkwardly. She refused to reply. He said to her:

— Colette, do you wish then that we should no longer be friends?

She said:

— No, I beg you. It would give me much pain if you no longer were.

— But would you not prefer to our friendship the slightest sacrifice?

— Sacrifice! What an absurd word! she said. Why must one always sacrifice one thing to another? Those are foolish Christian ideas. At bottom, you are an old clerical without knowing it.

— That may well be, he said. For me, it is all or all the other. Between good and evil, I find no middle ground, I want one to take the thickness of a hair.

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

— But you also love the other?

She laughed, and said, making at him the most coaxing eyes and her softest voice:

— Stay!

He was on the point of yielding again. But Lucien Lévy-Cœur entered; and the same coaxing eyes and the same sweet voice served to receive him. Christophe watched Colette for some time, in silence, perform her little comedies; then he went away, decided to break. He had a sad heart. It was so stupid always to attach oneself, to let oneself be taken in the snare!

On returning home, and mechanically putting his books in order, he opened the Bible at random and read:

… The Lord hath said: Because the daughters of Zion have walked with stretched-out necks, have wantoned with their eyes, and walked with mincing steps, making the rings of their feet to tinkle,

The Lord shall make bald the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, the Lord shall discover their nakedness…

He burst out laughing, thinking of Colette’s manoeuvres; and he went to bed in good humor. Then he thought that he must indeed be well affected, he too, by the corruption of Paris, for the Bible to have become for him comic reading. But he continued nonetheless, in his bed, to repeat to himself the sentence of the great farcical Justiciar; and he sought to imagine the effect on the head of his young friend. He fell asleep, laughing like a child. He no longer thought of his new sorrow. One more, one less… He was beginning to get accustomed.

He did not cease to give piano lessons to Colette; but he henceforth avoided the occasions she offered him to continue their friendly conversations. She had vainly grieved, taken offense, played all her little wiles; he persisted; as she sulked, of her own accord, she ended by finding pretexts to space out the lessons; and he too found some for shirking the invitations to the Stevenses’ evenings.

He had had enough of Parisian society; he could no longer suffer this emptiness, this neurasthenia, this hypercriticism, without reason and without aim, which devours itself. He wondered how a people could live in this stagnant atmosphere, anarchic for art and pleasure for pleasure. Nevertheless, this people lived, it had been great, it still cut a fair enough figure in the world; at least, when one saw it from a distance, it gave the illusion of so doing. Whence could it draw its reasons for living? It believed in nothing, in nothing but pleasure.

As Christophe was at this point in his reflections, he ran in the street into a howling crowd of young men and women, dragging a carriage in which an old priest was seated, blessing right and left. A little further, he saw French soldiers, who were knocking in the doors of a church with axes, and whom decorated gentlemen were greeting with blows of chairs. He perceived that the French believed however in something — though he did not understand in what. It was explained to him that it was the State separating itself from the Church, after a century of common life, and that, as she did not want to leave of her own good will, strong in her right and her force, it was putting her out. Christophe did not find the procedure very gallant; but he was so fed up with the anarchic dilettantism of the Parisian artists that he took some pleasure in meeting people who were ready to have their heads broken for some reason, whatever it might be.

He was not long in recognizing that there were many of these people in France. The political newspapers gave one another battles, like the heroes of Homer; they daily published appeals to horse, to civil war. It is true that this took place in words, and that it rarely came to blows. Nevertheless, there was no lack of naïve persons to put into action the moral that the others were writing. One then assisted at curious spectacles: one saw departments that claimed to separate themselves from France, regiments that deserted, prefectures burned, tax collectors on horseback, at the head of companies of gendarmes, peasants armed with scythes, boiling cauldrons, to defend the churches, free-thinking demolishers, in the name of liberty, popular Redeemers who climbed into the trees to speak to the provinces of Wine, risen against the provinces of Alcohol. Here and there, these millions of men who showed one another the fist, all red from having shouted, ended by really coming to blows. The Republic flattered the people; and then she had it sabered. The people, on its side, broke the heads of a few children of the people — officers and soldiers. — Thus, each one proved to the others the excellence of his cause and of his fists. When one looked at this from afar, through the newspapers, one thought oneself back several centuries. Christophe discovered that France — this skeptical France — was a fanatical people. But it was impossible for him to know in what sense. For or against religion? For or against reason? For or against the fatherland? — They were so in every sense. They had the air of being so, for the pleasure of being so.

He was led to talk of this, one evening, with a socialist deputy whom he sometimes met in the salon of the Stevenses. Although he had already spoken to him several times, he had no suspicion of his interlocutor’s quality: hitherto, they had never conversed of anything but music. He was very astonished 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, drawling speech, ruddy complexion, cordial manners, a certain elegance with a fund of vulgarity, gestures of a rustic, that escaped him from time to time: — a way of doing his nails in society, an entirely popular habit of being unable to speak to anyone without seizing his coat, grabbing him, palpating his arms; — he was a great eater, a great drinker, a high liver, a laugher, with the appetites of a man of the people who rushes to the conquest of power; supple, skillful at changing manners, according to the milieu and the interlocutor, exuberant in a calculated fashion, knowing how to listen, assimilating on the spot all he heard; sympathetic moreover, intelligent, interested in everything, by natural taste, by acquired taste, and by vanity; honest, to the extent that his interest did not command him to the contrary, and where it would have been dangerous not to be so.

He had a fairly pretty wife, tall, well made, solidly built, the figure elegant, a little cramped in luxurious dresses, which accentuated with exaggeration the robust roundnesses of her anatomy; the face framed with curly black hair, the eyes large, black and thick; the chin set in a galosh; the face large, of fairly pretty aspect however, but spoiled by the little grimaces of the myopic, blinking eyes, and of the puckered mouth. She had an artificial, jerky gait, like that of certain birds, a mincing way of speaking, but much good grace and amiability. She was of that bourgeois and merchant family, of free spirit and virtuous species, attached to religious and social duties, as to a religion, not to mention those she imposed on herself, her artistic and social duties: to have a salon, to spread art in the Popular Universities, to occupy herself with philanthropic works and with the psychology of childhood — without great warmth of heart, without deep interest — by a mixture of natural goodness, of snobbery, and of bourgeois pedantry of the educated young woman, who seems to be perpetually reciting a lesson, and with a self-love of having it well known. She had need of occupying herself, but she had no need of being interested in what she occupied herself with. It resembled the feverish and mechanical work of women who always have knitting between their fingers, and who move the needles without respite, as if the salvation of the world were tied to the work for which they have no use. And then, there was in her — as in so many others — a little of the vanity of the honest woman, who, by her example, gives the lesson to other women.

The deputy had for her an affectionate contempt. He had chosen her very well, for his pleasure and for his tranquility. She was beautiful, he enjoyed her, he asked nothing more of her; and she asked nothing more of him. He loved her, and deceived her. She accommodated herself to it, provided she had her share. Perhaps she even found a certain pleasure in it. She was calm and sensual. The mentality of a woman of the harem.

They had two pretty children of four to five years old, with whom she occupied herself, as a good mother of a family, with the same amiable and cold application that she brought to following the politics of her husband and the latest manifestations of fashion and of art. And that made, in this milieu, the most singular mixture of advanced theories, of ultra-decadent art, of worldly agitation, and of bourgeois sentiment.

They invited Christophe to come and see them. Madame Roussin was a good musician, played the piano in a charming fashion; she had a delicate and firm touch; with her little head, which stared fixedly at the keys, and her hands perched above them, that hopped, she had the air of a hen pecking. Well endowed, and more instructed in music than most Frenchwomen, she was moreover as indifferent as a carp to the deep sense of music: music was for her a series of notes, of rhythms and of nuances, which she listened to or recited with exactness; she sought no soul there, having no need of it for herself. This amiable woman, intelligent, simple, always disposed to render service, dispensed to Christophe the welcoming good grace which she had for all. Christophe was little grateful to her for it; he had no great sympathy for her: he found her too non-existent. Perhaps too he did not pardon her, without realizing it, the complaisance she put in accepting the sharing with her husband’s mistresses, whose adventures she did not ignore. Passivity was, of all vices, the one he excused least.

He became more intimately linked with Achille Roussin. Roussin loved music, like the other arts, in a coarse but sincere fashion. When he loved a symphony, he had the air of sleeping with it. He had a superficial culture, and got very good use of it; his wife had not been useless to him in that. He took an interest in Christophe, because he saw in him a vigorous plebeian, as he himself was. He was moreover curious to observe at close hand an original of this kind — (he was of an untiring curiosity to observe men) — and to know his impressions of Paris. The frankness and the rudeness of Christophe’s remarks amused him. He was skeptical enough to admit the exactness of them. That Christophe was German did not embarrass him: on the contrary! He boasted of being above prejudices of fatherland. And, in sum, he was sincerely “human” — (it was his principal quality); — he sympathized with all that was man. But that did not prevent him from having the firm conviction of the superiority of the Frenchman — old race, old civilization — over the German, and of poking fun at the German.

Christophe saw at Achille Roussin’s other politicians, ministers of yesterday or of tomorrow. With each of them, individually, he would have had pleasure enough to talk, if these illustrious personages had judged him worthy of it. Contrary to the generally widespread opinion, he found their society more interesting than that of the other Frenchmen he knew. They had a more lively intelligence, more open to the passions and the great interests of humanity. Brilliant talkers, Meridionals for the most part, they were astonishingly dilettante; taken apart, they were almost as much so as the men of letters. To be sure, they were extremely ignorant of art, above all of foreign art; but they all pretended more or less to know about it; and often, they really loved it. There were Councils of ministers that resembled the little cenacles of little Reviews. One wrote plays. Another scraped the violin, and was a frenzied Wagnerian. Another daubed at painting. And all collected impressionist paintings, read decadent books, put a coquetry into appreciating an ultra-aristocratic art, which was almost always the mortal enemy of their ideas. Christophe was embarrassed to see these socialist or radical-socialist ministers, these apostles of the miserable and starving classes, play the connoisseurs in refined enjoyments. No doubt, that was their right; but it did not seem to him very loyal.

Where it became really curious was when these people, in private conversation, were skeptical, sensualists, nihilists, anarchists, touched action: at once, they became fanatics. The most dilettante of them, hardly arrived at power, made themselves into little oriental despots; they were seized with the mania to direct everything, to leave nothing free; they had a skeptical mind and a tyrannical temperament. It was for them too strong a temptation to be able to make use of the formidable mechanism of administrative centralization, which had been built in former times by the greatest of despots, and not to abuse it. There followed a sort of dilettante imperialism, on which had come to graft itself, into the bargain, in these last years, an atheist Catholicism.

For a certain time, the politicians had hardly aspired to anything but the domination of bodies. They had to say of fortunes; they left souls more or less in peace, souls not being negotiable. On their side, souls did not occupy themselves with politics; they passed above or below it; politics, in France, was considered as a branch — lucrative, but very little elevated — of commerce or of industry; the intellectuals despised the politicians; the politicians despised the intellectuals. — But for some time a rapprochement had taken place, soon an alliance, between the politicians and the small class of intellectuals. A new power had entered upon the scene, which had arrogated to itself the absolute government of thoughts: it was the Churches. There was the party with the other power, which laid claim to political government. They tended much less to destroy the Church than to replace her; in fact, they were forming a Church of Free Thought, which had its catechisms and its ceremonies, its baptisms, its first communions, its marriages, its regional, national, even need to gather in flocks in order to “think freely.” It is true that their freedom of thought consisted in forbidding that of others, in the name of Reason: for they believed in Reason, as the Catholics in the Holy Virgin, without suspecting, the ones and the others, that Reason any more than the Virgin is nothing by herself, and that the source is elsewhere. And just as the Catholic Church had its armies of monks and its congregations, which solemnly made their way through the veins of the nation, propagated her virus, and annihilated all rival vitality, the anti-Catholic Church had its Freemasons, whose mother house, the Grand-Orient, kept a faithful register of all the secret reports that were addressed to it, every day, from all points of France, by its pious informers. The Republican State encouraged the sacred espionages of these mendicant monks and Jesuits of Reason, who terrorized the University, all the bodies of the State; and it did not perceive that, in seeming to serve it, they were quietly working their way toward an atheist theocracy, which would have nothing to envy in that of the Jesuits of Paraguay.

Christophe saw at Roussin’s a few of these clericals of free thought. They were all as fetishists as one another. For the moment, they were exulting at having driven the Christ from the tribunals. They believed they had laid religion low, because they had destroyed a few pieces of wood or ivory. Others were laying hold of Joan of Arc and her banner of the Virgin, which they had just snatched from the Catholics. One of the fathers of the new Church, a general who was waging war on the French of the other church, had just pronounced an anti-clerical discourse in honor of Vercingetorix: he celebrated in the Gallic Brenn, to whom Free Thought had raised a statue, a son of the people and the first champion of France against Rome (the Church of). The ministers of the navy, to purify the fleet, and to testify their horror of ancient war, named their ironclads, Descartes and Ernest Renan. Other free spirits applied themselves to purifying art. They expurgated the classics of the seventeenth century, and did not even pardon the good God who soiled the Fables of La Fontaine; they admitted Him no more in ancient music; and Christophe heard one of them, an old radical — (“To be radical in one’s old age,” says Goethe, “is the height of all folly”) — who was indignant that one had dared to give in a popular concert the religious Lieder of Beethoven. He demanded that other words be put in their place.

— What? asked Christophe, exasperated. The Republic?

Others, more radical still, did not accept these compromises, and wanted that one purely and simply suppress all religious music; and the schools where one learned it. In vain, a director of Beaux-Arts, who in this Boeotia passed for an Athenian, tried to explain that one must teach music to musicians: for, said he, with a great elevation of thought, “when you send a soldier to the barracks, you teach him progressively to use his rifle to shoot. It is the same with the young composer: the head swarms with ideas; but their classification has not yet been effected.” And, a little frightened of his courage, protesting at each sentence: “I am an old free-thinker… I am an old republican…” he audaciously proclaimed that “it mattered little to him to know if the compositions of Pergolese were operas or masses; it was a matter of knowing whether they were works of human art.” — But the implacable logic of his interlocutor replied to the “old free-thinker,” to the “old republican,” that “there were two musics: that which was sung in the Churches, and that which was sung elsewhere.” The first was the enemy of Reason and of the State; and Reason of State must suppress it.

All these fools would have been more ridiculous than dangerous, if there had not been behind them men of real worth, on whom they leaned, and who were like them — more so perhaps — fanatics of Reason. Tolstoy speaks somewhere of those “epidemic influences,” which reign in religion, in philosophy, in politics, in art, in science, of “those senseless influences, whose folly men see only when they are rid of them, but which, so long as they are subject to them, appear to them so true that they do not even believe it necessary to discuss them.” Thus, the passion for tulips, the belief in sorcerers, the aberrations of literary fashions. — The religion of Reason was one of these follies. It was common to the most foolish and to the most cultivated, to the “sub-veterinarians” of the Chamber and to certain of the most intelligent minds of the University. It was more dangerous still in the latter than in the former; for in the former, it accommodated itself to a beatific and stupid optimism, which slackened its energy; whereas in the others, all its springs were taut and the edge sharpened by a fanatical pessimism, which made no illusion about the fundamental antagonism of Nature and Reason, and which was only the more relentless in sustaining the combat of abstract Liberty, of abstract Justice, of abstract Truth, against evil Nature. There was there a foundation of proud idealism, Jansenist, Jacobin, of vast belief in the irremediable perversity of man, which only the implacable pride of the Elect, in whom Reason breathes, can and must break — “the Spirit of God.” It was a thoroughly French type, the type of the intelligent Frenchman who is not “human” — that is, into whom no man can penetrate; and he breaks everything he touches.

Christophe was appalled by the conversations he had at Achille Roussin’s with some of these mad reasoners. It upset his ideas about France. He believed, according to current opinion, that the French were a balanced people, sociable, tolerant, loving liberty. And he found fanatics 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 made to understand it and bear it. Nowhere were there characters more coldly, more atrociously despotic, by intellectual passion, or by passion of wishing to be in the right.

And this was not the case of one party. All the parties were alike. They could not — they would not — see anything on this side, beyond their political or religious formulary, of their fatherland, of their province, of their group, of their narrow brain. There were anti-Semites who spent all the forces of their being in a raging and impotent hatred against all the privileged of fortune: for they hated all the Jews, and they called Jews all those they hated. There were nationalists who hated — (when they were very good, they were content to despise) — all the other nations, and, in their own nation, called foreigners, or renegades, or traitors, those who did not think like them. There were anti-Protestants who persuaded themselves that all the Protestants were English or German, and who would have wished to banish them all from France. There were the people of the West, who wanted to admit nothing East of the line of the Rhine; and the people of the North, who wanted to admit nothing South of the line of the Loire; and the people of the Midi, who called Barbarians those north of the line of the Loire; and those who gloried in being of Germanic race; and those who gloried in being of Gallic race; and, the maddest of all, the “Romans,” who took pride in the defeat of their fathers; 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 it a virtue and a title of nobility to be himself, and not tolerating that one could be otherwise. Nothing to do against this species of men: they listen to no reasoning but their own; they are made to burn the rest of the world, or to be burned.

Christophe thought that, all things considered, it was happy that such a people were in a Republic; for all these little despots, who clashed with one another, at least annihilated one another. But if one of them had been emperor or king, it would have been a thing to give up living.

He did not know that, as someone has said, there remains to reasoning peoples a virtue that saves them: — inconsistency.

The French politicians did not lack for it. Their despotism tempered itself with anarchism; they oscillated ceaselessly from the one to the other pole. If they leaned to the left on the fanatics of thought, to the right they leaned on the anarchists of thought. One saw there a whole rabble of dilettante socialists, of little arrivistes, who had been careful not to take part in the combat, before it was won, but who followed at the heels of the army of Free Thought, and, after each of its victories, swooped down on the spoils of the vanquished. It was not for reason that the champions of reason were working… Sic vos non vobis… It was for these little cosmopolitan bourgeois, who joyously trampled all the traditions of the country, and who did not mean to destroy one faith in order to install another in its place, but to install themselves, and not be hampered by anything.

Christophe found there Lucien Lévy-Cœur again. He was not too astonished to learn that Lucien Lévy-Cœur was a socialist. He thought simply that socialism must indeed be sure of succeeding for Lucien Lévy-Cœur to come to it. But he did not know that Lucien Lévy-Cœur had found means of being just as well seen in the opposite camp, where he had succeeded in making himself the friend of the most antiliberal personalities, even antisemitic, of art and of politics. He asked Achille Roussin:

— How can you keep such men with you?

Achille Roussin replied:

— He has so much talent! And then, he works for us, he destroys the old world.

— I see indeed that he destroys, said Christophe. He destroys so well that I do not know with what you will rebuild. Are you sure that there will be enough framework left for your new house? And even, are you sure that the worms have not already gotten into your construction site?

Lucien Lévy-Cœur was not the only one to gnaw at socialism. The socialist papers were full of these little men of letters, art for art’s sake, anarchists of luxury, who had seized all the avenues that could lead to success. They blocked all the outlets, barred the way to others, and filled the newspapers, which called themselves organs of the people, with their decadent dilettantism and their struggle for life. They were not content with the places: they wanted glory as well. In no time had one seen so many statues hastily raised, so many discourses before plaster geniuses. The most comic thing was the banquets, periodically offered to one of the great men of the brotherhood by the habitual freeloaders of glory, not on the occasion of one of his works, but of one of his decorations: for that was what touched them most. Aesthetes, supermen, métèques, socialist ministers, all found themselves in agreement to celebrate a promotion in the Legion of Honor, instituted by a Corsican officer.

Roussin was amused at Christophe’s astonishments. He did not find that the German judged his partners so badly. He himself, when they were alone together, treated them without quarter. He knew their stupidity or their wiles better than anyone; but that did not prevent him from supporting them, in order to be supported by them. And if, in intimacy, he did not put himself out from speaking of the people in contemptuous terms, on the tribune he was another man.

Christophe heard him at the Chamber, in one of those sessions where those sad ill-mannered bourgeois all talk at once, above the serene School of Athens. This childish crowd, whose mind had trouble following a serious discussion, and flew zigzag, like a fly, on the lookout for all distractions, had one passion, like all French crowds: it was the theatre, and that goes without saying, eloquent theatre. The dear ones gave themselves a comedy — (when they had any) — that they made everyone silent when one of their great comedians mounted the stage; they delighted in his tirades. They resumed their uproar after he had finished. Their essential theatre was the old Italian Operas, where one came to listen only to the great arias, and where one talked, supped, or made faces the rest of the time. — Roussin was one of the most fashionable singers at the Théâtre-Bourbon. He took a head voice, sharp, nasal, hammered, solemn tones, tremolos, bleatings, great vast and floating gestures, like beatings of wings: he played by turns Coquelin and Mounet-Sully.

Christophe exerted himself to make out to what extent Roussin believed in his socialism. It was evident that he did not believe in it, at bottom: he was too skeptical. He believed in it however, with a certain part of his intelligence, of his heart, of his being; — and although he knew that this was only a part of his being — (and perhaps not the most important), — he had organized his life and his conduct according to it, because it was more convenient for him, thus. His practical interest was not alone in question, but also his vital interest, his reason for being and for acting. His socialist faith was for him a sort of religion of State. — The majority of people do not live otherwise. Their lives rest on religious beliefs, or moral, or social, or purely practical — (belief in their trade, in their work, in the usefulness of their role in life) — in which they know well that they do not believe, at bottom. But they do not wish to know it: for they have need, in order to live, of this semblance of faith — of this “religion of State,” of which each one is the priest.

Roussin was not one of the worst. How many others, in the party, made socialism or radicalism — one could not even say from ambition, so short-sighted was this ambition, going no further than the immediate pillage and their re-election! These people had the air of believing in a new society. Perhaps they had believed in it formerly; and they continued to play the faith; but in themselves, they thought now only of living on the spoils of the society that was dying. A myopic opportunism was at the service of this hedonistic nihilism. The great interests of the future were sacrificed to the egoism of the present hour. They dismembered the army, they disarmed the fatherland to satisfy their electors. It was not intelligence that was lacking: one realized clearly what must be done; but one did not do it, because it would have cost too much effort, and one was no longer capable of efforts. One wanted to arrange one’s life and that of the nation with the minimum of trouble and of sacrifice. From the top to the bottom of the ladder, it was the same morality of the most possible pleasure with the least possible effort. This immoral morality was the only guiding thread in the midst of the political mess, where the leaders gave the example of anarchy, where one saw an undecided policy pursuing ten hares at once, and letting them all go one after another along the way, a bellicose diplomacy side by side with a diplomacy of war, who illuminated pacifist, ministers at the bottom of the ladder, ministers of the navy, who stirred up the workers of the arsenals, instructors of the army in order to purify it, ministers of war, who preached the horror of war, dilettante officers, dilettante judges, dilettante revolutionaries, dilettante patriots. A universal political demoralization. Each one expecting from the State that it provide him with functions, decorations, pensions, indemnities; and the State indeed never failed to sprinkle its clientele with them: the curée of honors and of offices offered to the sons, to the nephews, to the great-nephews, to the valets of power; the deputies voting themselves salary increases; the unbridled squandering of finances, of places, of titles, of all the forces of the State. — And, like a sinister echo of the example come from above, the sabotage from below: schoolmasters teaching contempt for authority and revolt against the fatherland, postal employees burning letters and dispatches, factory workers throwing sand or emery into the gears of machines, arsenal workers destroying arsenals, ships burned, the monstrous wasting of work by the workers — the destruction not of the rich, but of the wealth of the world.

To crown the work, an intellectual elite amused itself with 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 gnawed at the distinction between good and evil, and pitied the “irresponsible and sacred” person of criminals, with a senile sentimentality — capitulating before crime and delivering society to it.

Christophe thought:

— France is drunk on liberty. After having delirium, she will fall down dead drunk. And when she wakes, she will be in the lockup.

What wounded Christophe most in this demagogy was to see the worst political violences coldly accomplished by men of whose uncertain depths he was aware. The disproportion was too scandalous between these undulating beings and the harsh action they unleashed, or which they authorized. It seemed they had within them two contradictory things: an inconsistent character, that believed in nothing, and a reasoning reason, that cut, mowed, ravaged life, without wishing to look at anything. Christophe wondered how the peaceful bourgeoisie, the Catholics, the officers who were harassed in every fashion, did not throw them out of the window. He dared to say it to Roussin; but as he could hide nothing, Roussin had no trouble guessing his thought. He smiled, 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 wretches, nerveless; they are not capable of taking the least energetic part; they are good only for recriminating. A finished aristocracy, brutalized by clubs and by sports, prostituted to the Americans and to the Jews, and which, to show its modernism, amuses itself with the insulting role given it to play in fashionable plays, and fêtes the insulters. An apathetic and grumbling bourgeoisie, which reads nothing, will see nothing, which understands nothing, which wants to understand nothing, which knows only how to denigrate, denigrate emptily, sourly, with no usefulness — which has but one passion: to sleep, to stagnate in its sleep, on its sack of big coppers, with hatred for those who wish to disturb it, or even for those who do not wish to do as it does: for it disturbs it that others should work, while it snoozes!… If you knew these people, you would end by finding us sympathetic.

But Christophe felt only a great disgust for the ones and for the others: for he did not think that the baseness of the persecuted was an excuse for that of the persecutors. He had only too often met at the Stevenses’ types of this rich and sullen bourgeoisie that Roussin depicted to him,

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

He saw only too well the reasons Roussin and his friends had to be sure not only of their force over these people, but of their right to abuse it. The tools of domination were not lacking to them. Thousands of functionaries without will, having abdicated all personality, obeying blindly, perinde ac cadaver, true automatons, exact cogs of the Napoleonic mechanism. Courtier-like manners, a Republic without republicans; socialist newspapers, socialist elected officials prostrate before visiting kings. Servile souls, drawn up before titles, galloons, decorations: to hold them on a leash, one had only to throw them as pasture some bone to gnaw, or the Legion of Honor. If the kings had ennobled all the citizens of France, all the citizens of France would have been royalists.

The politicians had a good game. Of the three Estates of ‘89, the first was annihilated; the second was proscribed, emigrated or suspect; the third, sated with its victory, was sleeping. And as for the fourth Estate, which had since arisen, menacing and jealous, it was not very difficult to deal with it. The decadent Republic treated it, as decadent Rome treated the barbarian hordes whom she no longer had the force to expel from her frontiers: she incorporated them; they soon became her best watchdogs. The bourgeois ministers, who called themselves socialists, slyly attracted, annexed to the bourgeoisie the most intelligent and the most vigorous of the working-class elite; they decapitated of their leaders the party of the proletarians, infused themselves with their new blood, and, in return, gorged them with indigestible science and bourgeois ideology.

One of the most curious specimens of these attempts at takeover by the bourgeoisie over the people was the Popular Universities. They were little bazaars of confused knowledge of all times and all countries. One claimed to teach there, as one program said, “all the branches of physical, biological, sociological knowledge: astronomy, cosmology, anthropology, ethnology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, geography, linguistics, aesthetics, logic, etc.” It was enough to make Pico della Mirandola’s brain crack.

To be sure, there had been at the origin, there still was in some of them, a grandeur of idealism, a need to dispense truth, beauty, the moral life to all, which was a magnificent thing. These workers who, after a day of hard work, came to pack themselves into the narrow and stifling lecture-rooms, and whose thirst for knowing was stronger than fatigue and hunger, offered an admirable and touching spectacle. But how the poor folk were abused! For a few true apostles, intelligent and human, for a few excellent hearts, better intentioned than skillful, how many fools, chatterers, intriguers, writers without readers, orators without audiences, professors, pastors, talkers, pianists, critics, anarchists, who inundated the people with their products! Each one sought to place his merchandise. The most patronized were naturally the sellers of orvietan, the philosophical discoursers who shoveled general ideas with the spade, with here and there a few facts, scientific notions, cosmological conclusions. The Popular Universities were also an outlet for ultra-aristocratic works of art: engravings, poetry, or decadent music. One wanted the advent of the people to rejuvenate thought and to regenerate the race. And one began by inoculating it with all the refinements of the bourgeoisie. It took them with avidity, not because they pleased it, but because they were bourgeois. Christophe, who had been brought to a P. U. by Madame Roussin, heard her play Debussy to the people, between the Bonne Chanson of Gabriel Fauré and the last quartets of Beethoven. He, who had arrived at the understanding of Beethoven’s last works only after many years, by a slow advance of his taste and his thought, remained petrified, and said to one of his neighbors:

— But do you understand that?

The other stood up on his spurs, like an angry cock, and said:

— Surely. Why should I not understand as well as you?

And, to prove that he had understood, he had a fugue encored, looking at Christophe with a provocative air.

— “People” yourself! as one of them said to one of those good folk who tried to found Popular Theatres. I am as much bourgeois as you!

One fine evening, when the soft sky, like an Oriental carpet of warm, slightly faded tones, stretched above the darkened 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, raised during the battle. The chiseled golden lance of the Sainte-Chapelle, the flowering sacred thorn, sprang from the thicket of houses. On the other side of the water, the Louvre unrolled its royal façade, in whose weary eyes the reflections of the setting sun put a last gleam of life. At the end of the plain of the Invalides, behind its moats and its haughty walls, in its majestic desert, the dark gold dome hovered, like a symphony of distant victories. And the Arc de Triomphe opened on the hill, like a heroic march, the superhuman stride of the imperial legions.

And Christophe had suddenly the impression of a dead giant, whose immense limbs covered the plain. His heart gripped with terror, he stopped, contemplating the gigantic fossils of a fabulous species, vanished from the earth, and whose footsteps the whole earth had heard ring — the race, helmeted with the dome of the Invalides, and belted with the Louvre, which embraced the sky with the thousand arms of its cathedrals, and which braced upon the world the two triumphant feet of the Napoleonic Arch, beneath whose heel today swarmed Lilliput.

Without having sought it, Christophe had acquired a small notoriety in the Parisian circles where Sylvain Kohn and Goujart had introduced him. The originality of his figure, which one always glimpsed, with one or the other of his two friends, at theatre premières and at concerts, his powerful ugliness, the very absurdities of his person, of his bearing, of his abrupt and clumsy manners, the paradoxical sallies that sometimes escaped him, his ill-shapen but broad and robust intelligence, and the romantic tales that Sylvain Kohn had spread about his escapades in Germany, about his quarrels with the police and about his flight to France, had designated him to the idle and busy curiosity of that great cosmopolitan hotel salon which Tout-Paris has become. So long as he kept himself in reserve, observing, listening, trying to understand, before pronouncing, so long as one was ignorant of his works and of the depth of his thought, he was rather well regarded. The French gave him credit for not having been able to remain in Germany. Above all, the French musicians were touched, as by a homage paid them, by the injustice of Christophe’s judgments on German music: — (these were, in truth, already old judgments, to most of which he would no longer have subscribed today, but which were vaguely known from a few articles in a German Review, where he had written formerly, and whose paradoxes had been spread and amplified by Sylvain Kohn.) — Christophe was interesting, and he did not hamper; he took no one’s place. He had only to be a great man of a cenacle. He had only not to write anything, or as little as possible, above all to let nothing of his be heard, and to feed with ideas the Goujarts and their like, all this scum, which has taken for its device a famous saying — by arranging it a little:

“My glass is not big; but I drink… from that of others.”

A strong personality exercises its radiance above all on young men, more occupied with feeling than with acting. There was no lack of them around Christophe. They were in general those idle beings, without will, without aim, without reason for being, who are afraid of the work-table, afraid of finding themselves alone with themselves, who linger eternally in an armchair, who wander from a café to a theatre, seeking every pretext not to go home, not to see themselves face to face. They came, lingered, dragged about the room for hours, in those insipid conversations from which one comes away with a dilation of stomach, sickened, saturated, and yet hungry, with the need of disgust at once surrounding Christophe, like Goethe’s poodle, “the larvae on the watch,” who watch for a soul to snap up, in order to cling again to life.

A vain fool, who had taken pleasure in this court of parasites. But Christophe did not love the species of the idol. He was moreover bristled by the idiotic sublimity of his admirers, who found in what he was doing far-fetched intentions, Renanian, Nietzschean, hermaphroditic. He put them out the door. He was not made for a passive role. Everything in him had action for its end. He observed, in order to understand; and he wanted to fight, in order to act. Free from the constraint of school and prejudices, he informed himself of everything, read everything, studied in his art all the forms of thought and the resources of expression of other countries and other times. Each of those that appeared to him efficacious and true, he made his prey. Unlike those French artists he studied, ingenious inventors of new forms, who exhaust themselves inventing endlessly, and leave their inventions in the middle of the road, he sought much less to innovate in the musical language than to speak it with more energy; he had no concern to be rare, but to be strong. This passionate force opposed itself to the French genius of finesse and of measure. It had the disdain for style for style’s sake and for art for art’s sake. The best French artists made on him the effect of luxury workmen. One of the most perfect Parisian poets had himself amused himself with drawing up “the workman’s list of contemporary French poetry, each one with his ware, his product or his sales”; and he enumerated “the crystal chandeliers, the Oriental stuffs, the gold and bronze medals, the guipures for dowagers, the polychrome sculptures, the flowered earthenware” that came out of the workshop of such and such of his confrères. He himself was represented, “in a corner of the vast workshop of letters, mending old tapestries, or scraping the rust off disused partisans.” — This conception of the artist as a good workman, attentive only to the perfection of the craft, was not without grandeur. But it did not satisfy Christophe; and, while recognizing in it a professional dignity, he had a little contempt for the poverty of life that it ordinarily concealed. He did not conceive that one should write to write, that one should speak to speak. He did not say words, he said — or wished to say — things.

Ei dice cose, e voi dite parole…

After a period of repose in which he had only been occupied in absorbing a world of new thoughts, Christophe’s mind was suddenly seized with a need to create. The antagonism he felt between Paris and himself centupled his force, in accentuating his personality. It was an overflow of passions, which imperiously demanded to express themselves. They were distinct from one another, and often they seemed to contradict one another; he was solicited by the same ardor of the most opposite subjects. He had to say everything, where to discharge himself of the love that swelled his heart, and also of the will; and of hatred, and of renunciation, and of all those demons that clashed within him, and that had equal right to live. Scarcely had he relieved himself of one, he had not even the patience to go to the end of the work; another, of a contrary passion. But the contradiction was only apparent: it was always a question of, it remained always the same. All the works were different roads that led to the same goal; he took all the roads at once; — to the mountain; he followed all its mellow detours; some lingered in shadow, in mellow detours; others mounted harshly, arid, in the sun; all led to God, ended on the summit. Love, hate, will, renunciation, all the human forces, carried to their paroxysm, touch eternity, and already participate in it. Each one carries it in himself: the religious and the atheist, the one who sees life everywhere, and the one who denies it everywhere, and the one who doubts of everything both of life and of negation — and Christophe, whose soul embraced all these contraries at once. All the contraries fuse in the eternal Force. The important thing for Christophe was to awaken this Force in himself and in others, to throw armfuls of wood on the brazier, to make Eternity flame. A great flame had risen in his heart, in the middle of the voluptuous night of Paris. He believed himself free of all faith, and he was wholly nothing but a torch of faith.

Nothing could more lend the flank to French irony. Faith is one of the feelings that a very refined society pardons least: for it has lost it, and it does not wish others to possess it. In the muffled or mocking hostility of most people for the dreams of young men — (dreams often burlesque, but big with future) — there enters for much the bitter thought that they themselves were thus in former times, that they had these ambitions and did not realize them. All those who had within them a work, and have not accomplished it, in order to accept the security of an easy and honorable life, all those who have denied their soul for thirty pieces of silver, think:

— Since I could not do what I dreamed, why should they, they? I do not wish that they should do it.

Who has not known the types of these wretched men of thirty to fifty, who have always lived a purely literary life, shut up in the horizon of cafés, of cenacles, of wings, of editorial offices, and who have burned all their fire in aesthetes’ discussions and easy loves! They have not succeeded; their youthful ardor has fallen; no ideal sustains them; no reason to continue to write, since there is neither imperious vocation, nor hope of success. No reason, save that it is too late, and that they can no longer do anything else. Embittered most often by domestic sorrows: liaisons that have made a vacuum around them, and that have been brusquely broken, leaving them alone in the middle of the path of life — be it abandonment, be it death. No friends. Of the companions of the cenacles, the old, the masters around whom one gathered, are dead. Of the young, some are also dead; others have plunged into the swamp of mediocrity; the small handful have succeeded: those, one no longer sees; they have risen into other regions. There remain together only a few discouraged ones, whose critical intelligence has survived the ruin of their illusions, has even allied itself with, one might say envenomed itself, as a consequence of this ruin, and inspires in them disgust for those who are like them, and secret hatred for those who are not like them. All these sorrowful and ironic shadows can bear neither believers nor the living. The least sign of heroism, of idealism, of faith, sets them ill at ease. They must avenge themselves on those who remain worthy of the generative faith of their twenty years, and they must turn them to derision, or better, take compassion on them, insultingly. How many Heddas Gabler among men! What muffled struggle to annihilate the new and free forces, what science for killing them by silence, by irony, by wear, by discouragement — and by some perfidious seduction, at the right moment!… They suffer, they suffer so much!… — No doubt. But that is yet no reason for making others suffer — and the most innocent of all. It is that hideous reasoning:

— I am unhappy. You must be as much so as I…

Poor devils! To be unhappy, and to find nothing better to relieve one’s ill than to do ill!…

The type is of every country. Christophe knew it, for having met it in Germany. Against this species of people he was armored. His system of defense was simple: he attacked first; at their first overtures, he declared war upon them; he constrained these dangerous friends to make themselves his enemies. But if this frank policy was the most efficacious for safeguarding his personality, it was much less so for facilitating his career as an artist. Christophe was beginning again his wanderings of Germany. It was stronger than he. There was but one thing changed: his humor, which was very gay.

He expressed gaily to whoever wanted to hear them his ill-measured criticisms of French artists: he thus drew on himself many enmities. He did not even take the precaution of arranging for himself, as sensible people do, the support of a little coterie. He would have had no trouble finding around him artists, quite ready to admire him, provided he admired them. There were even some who admired him in advance, in expectation of return. They regarded the one they were praising as a debtor, of whom they could always, when the moment came, demand the reimbursement of their debt. It was money well invested. — It was money very badly invested, with Christophe. He reimbursed nothing. Worse still, he had the effrontery to find mediocre the works of those who found his good. They kept of it, without saying so, a profound resentment, and promised themselves, at the next occasion, to return him exactly the same coin.

Among all the blunders committed, Christophe had that of starting up on his own against Lucien Lévy-Cœur. He found him everywhere on his way, and could not conceal an exaggerated antipathy for this gentle, polite being, who did no apparent wrong, who seemed even to have more goodness than he, and who in any case had much more measure. He provoked him into discussions, and, becoming roused upon the subject of the discussion, it always pleased her, in the tone of the mêlée. Christophe, with a sudden roughness that surprised the audience. It seemed that Christophe sought pretexts to fall, head down, on Lucien Lévy-Cœur; but never could he reach him. His enemy always had the supple skill, even when his wrong was most certain, of giving himself the fine role; he defended himself with a courtesy that made the lack of manners in Christophe stand out. The latter, who moreover spoke French very badly, with slang words — even with rather coarse words, which he had picked up at once, and which he employed inopportunely, like many foreigners, was incapable of foiling Lucien Lévy-Cœur’s tactics, who debated furiously against this ironic gentleness. Everyone gave him the wrong: for one did not see what Christophe felt obscurely: the hypocrisy of that gentleness, which, when it ran up against a force that it did not succeed in penetrating, sought to kill it, but without éclat, by smothering in silence. He was not in a hurry, being of those who, like Christophe, counted on time; but it was to destroy, whereas Christophe, it was to build. He had no trouble in detaching from Christophe Sylvain Kohn and Goujart, as he had little by little ousted him from the Stevenses’ salon. He made the void around him.

Christophe charged himself with it, himself. He pleased no one, being of no party, or better, being against all parties. He did not love the Jews; but he loved still less the antisemites. This cowardice of the masses risen up against a powerful minority, not because it is bad, but because it is powerful, this appeal to the base instincts of jealousy and hatred, repelled him. He was regarded by the Jews as an antisemite, by the antisemites as a Jew. As for the artists, they felt in him the enemy. Since he had been in Paris, Christophe was making himself even more German in art than he was. In opposition to the voluptuous ataraxy of certain Parisian music, he celebrated violent will, a virile and sound pessimism. When joy appeared, it was a want of taste, a plebeian fervor, well made to revolt even the aristocratic patrons of popular art. A learned and rough form. He was not even far from affecting, by reaction, an apparent negligence in style and a heedlessness of outward originality, which had to be very perceptible to French musicians. So those of them, to whom he communicated some of his works, included him, without looking closer, in the contempt they had for the belated Wagnerism of the contemporary German school. Christophe cared little; he laughed inwardly, repeating to himself these verses of a charming musician of the French Renaissance — adapted to his use:

……………………………… Go, go, do not be amazed at those who shall say: This Christopher has not the counterpoint of so-and-so, He has not the harmony of such a one, I have something too that the others have not.

But when he tried to have some of his works played in concerts, he found doors closed everywhere. There was already quite enough to do playing — or not playing — the works of young French musicians, not to worry about those of an unknown German.

Christophe did not persist in making approaches. He shut himself up at home, and set himself to writing again. It mattered little to him whether the people of Paris heard him or not. He wrote for his pleasure, and not to succeed. The true artist does not concern himself with the future of his work. He is like those painters of the Renaissance who painted joyously the façades of houses, knowing that in ten years nothing would remain of it. Christophe worked therefore in peace, resigned with good humor to await better times, when help came to him from an unexpected quarter.

Christophe was then drawn by the dramatic form. He did not yet dare to abandon himself freely to the flow of his inner lyricism. He needed to channel it in precise subjects, to fix his passions in characters independent of himself. And no doubt, it is good for a young genius, who is not yet master of himself, who does not yet even know exactly who he is, to create for himself voluntary limits in which to enclose his soul that slips away from itself. They are the necessary locks and dikes that allow one to direct the course of thought. — Unfortunately, Christophe lacked a poet; he was obliged to cut out his subjects himself in legend or in history: for he read much, above all since he had been in Paris; and, in the state of creative obsession in which he lived, all he read overexcited his dreams; everything became for him the subject of a musical work; he found himself again in this or that hero, under one of the diverse faces of his multiple soul.

Among the images that floated within him for some months were images of the Bible. — The Bible, which his mother had given him as a companion of exile, had been for him a source of dreams. Although he did not read it in a religious spirit, the moral energy, or, to put it better, vital energy, of this Hebrew Iliad was for him a fountain in which, in the evening, he washed his bruised soul, soiled by the smoke and the mud of Paris. He did not concern himself with the sacred meaning of the book; but he found in it no less, for himself, a sacred book — through the breath of wild nature and of primitive individualities that he breathed there. He drank these hymns of the earth devoured by faith, of the palpitating mountains, of the rolling heavens, and of the human lions.

One of the figures in the book, for whom he had a special tenderness, was that of the adolescent David. He did not lend him the ironical urchin’s smile of Florence, 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, poetical shepherd-boy, with a virgin heart in which heroism slept — a Siegfried of the South, of a more refined stock, more beautiful, more harmonious in body and in thought. In vain did he rebel against the Latin spirit: without his knowing it, that spirit had begun to seep into him. It is not only by the subjects of art, nor only by thought — it is everything that surrounds you: the people, the things, the habits, the gestures, the words, the movements, the lines, the light of each city. Every city has its own atmosphere, to which the artist is more sensitive than anyone else, and which, in the musician, transforms itself into music. The atmosphere of Paris is very strong: it shapes even the Germanic souls best able to resist it; in vain do they drape themselves in their national pride — it is, of all European souls, the quickest to denationalize itself. Christophe’s had already begun, without his suspecting it, to take from Latin art a clarity, a sobriety, an intelligence of the feelings, and even, in a certain measure, a plastic beauty which it would never have possessed without that. His David was the proof.

He had had the desire to retrace several episodes of this adolescence: the meeting with Saul, the combat with Goliath; and he had begun by writing the first of these scenes. He had conceived it as a symphonic tableau, with two characters.

On a deserted plateau, in the midst of a heath of flowering heather, the little shepherd-boy lay stretched, and dreamed in the sun. The serene light, the humming of living things, the soft trembling of the swaying grasses, the silvery bells of the grazing flocks, the strength of the earth, cradled the reverie of the child unconscious of his divine destinies. Indolently, he mingled his voice, or the sounds of a flute, with the harmonious silence; and this song was of a joy so calm, so limpid, that one could not even know, in hearing it, whether it was joy or sorrow, but it seemed that it had to be thus, that one could not dream otherwise. Suddenly, great shadows stretched over the heath; the air fell silent; life seemed to withdraw into the veins of the earth. Indifferent and tranquil, the song of the flute went on alone. Saul, hallucinated, passed by. The mad king, gnawed by the void, writhed like a furious flame that devours, that the hurricane twists. He implored, insulted, defied the emptiness that surrounded him and that he bore within himself. Worn out from his fear, breathless, he fell upon the heath, and in the silence the peaceful smile of the little shepherd’s song reappeared — the song that had not been interrupted. Then Saul, crushing the tumultuous beating of his heart, came in silence, near the recumbent child; in silence, he contemplated him; he sat down by him, and laid his feverish hand on the shepherd’s head. David, untroubled, turned smiling, and looked at the king. He leaned his head on Saul’s knees, and took up his music again. The shadow of evening fell; David fell asleep singing, and Saul wept. And in the starry night, there rose from the child the hymn of serene joy of nature resurrected — and the chant of thanksgiving of the convalescent soul.

Christophe, in writing this scene, had concerned himself only with his own joy; he had amused himself with the means of execution; and above all, it had never come into his head that it might be performed. He did not even think of the day when the concerts would deign to welcome him.

One evening, when he was speaking of it to Achille Roussin, and when he had tried out the idea at the piano, he was much astonished to see Roussin take fire and flame for the work, and declare that at all costs it must be played without delay. Christophe, astonished, made it his concern. He was more astonished still when, a few days later, he saw that Roussin was taking the matter seriously; and his astonishment touched on stupor when he saw Sylvain Kohn, Goujart, and Lucien Lévy-Cœur himself interesting themselves in it. He had to admit that the personal grudges of these people and their petty interests yielded to the love of art: that did indeed surprise him. The least eager to give his opinion, Sylvain Kohn was silent. The work was in no way made for the theatre; it was a bad turn to do him, and almost an insulting thing. But Roussin was so insistent, Sylvain Kohn so persuasive, and Goujart so affirmative, that Christophe let himself be tempted. He was weak. He had such a great desire to hear his music!

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

The rehearsals began. The orchestra acquitted itself rather well in the first reading, although it was little disciplined, in the French fashion. The Saul had a somewhat tired voice, but a respectable one; and he knew his trade. As for the David, it was a fine person, tall, stout, well-formed, but a sentimental and vulgar voice that spread itself heavily with melodramatic tremolos and the airs of a café-concert. Christophe pulled a face. From the first bars she sang, it was evident to him that she could not keep the role. At the first pause of the orchestra, he went to find the impresario, who had taken charge of the material organization of the concert, and who, with Sylvain Kohn, was attending the rehearsal. The impresario, seeing him come, said, his face beaming:

— Well, are you content?

— Yes, said Christophe, I think it will work out. There is only one thing that is not going: it is the singer. That must be changed. Tell her gently; you have the habit… It will be quite easy for you to find me another.

The impresario looked stupefied; he looked at Christophe, as if he did not know whether Christophe was speaking seriously; and he said:

— But that is not possible!

— Why is it not possible? asked Christophe.

The impresario exchanged a mocking glance with Sylvain Kohn, and resumed:

— But she has so much talent!

— She has none, said Christophe.

— What!… Such a fine voice!

— She has none.

— And then, such a fine person!

— I don’t give a damn.

— That doesn’t let her off the hook, said Sylvain Kohn, laughing.

— I need a David, and a David who can sing; I have no need of fair Helen, said Christophe.

The impresario rubbed his nose with embarrassment:

— It is very awkward, very awkward… he said. And yet she is an excellent artist… I assure you! Perhaps she has not all her means today. You should try again.

— Very well, said Christophe; but it is time lost.

He resumed the rehearsal. It was worse still. He had to give up going to the end: he was becoming nervous; his remarks to the singer, at first cold but polite, became dry and cutting, in spite of the evident pains she gave herself to satisfy him, and the glances she darted at him to win his good graces. The impresario, prudently, interrupted the rehearsal at the moment when she was about to perceive what was being plotted. To soften the bad effect of Christophe’s remarks, he hastened to her and lavished heavy gallantries upon her, when Christophe, who was watching this manoeuvre with undisguised impatience, signalled imperiously for him to come, and said:

— There is no discussion. I do not want this person. It is disagreeable, I know; but it is not I who chose her. Arrange it as you wish.

The impresario bowed, with an annoyed air, and said with indifference:

— I can do nothing. Address yourself to Monsieur Roussin.

— What has Monsieur Roussin to do with it? asked Christophe. I don’t wish to bother him with these matters.

— It will not bother him, said Sylvain Kohn, ironically.

And he showed him Roussin, who, precisely, was entering.

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

— Well, what! Already finished? I was hoping to hear another part. Well, my dear master, what do you say to it? Are you satisfied?

— Everything is going very well, said Christophe. I cannot thank you enough…

— Not at all! Not at all!

— There is only one single thing that cannot work.

— Speak, speak. We shall arrange that. I am set on your being content.

— Well, it is the singer. Between us, she is execrable.

Roussin’s beaming face suddenly froze over. He said, with a severe air:

— You astonish me, my dear fellow.

— She is worth nothing, nothing at all, continued Christophe. She has neither voice, nor taste, nor craft, not the shadow of talent. You are fortunate not to have heard her just now!…

Roussin, more and more pinched, cut Christophe’s speech short, and said in an imperious tone:

— I know Mademoiselle de Sainte-Ygraine. She is an artist of great talent. I have the most lively admiration for her. All the people of taste, in Paris, think as I do.

And he turned his back on Christophe. Christophe saw him offer his arm to the actress and leave with her. As he stood stupefied, Sylvain Kohn, who had followed the scene with delight, took him by the arm, and said to him, laughing, while they descended the theatre staircase together:

— But don’t you know that she is his mistress?

Christophe understood. So it was for her, and not for him, that the piece was being mounted! He explained to himself Roussin’s enthusiasm, his expenditures, the eagerness of his acolytes. He listened to Sylvain Kohn, who told him the story of the Sainte-Ygraine: a music-hall divette who, after having exhibited herself successfully in various little theatres of genre, had conceived, out of ambition, like many of her sort, the idea of being heard on a stage more worthy of her talent. She was counting on Roussin to have her engaged at the Opéra, or at the Opéra-Comique; and Roussin, who asked for nothing better, had found in the risks that the Parisian public ran of discovering the lyrical gifts of the new tragedienne, in a role that required almost no dramatic action, and that displayed in their full value the elegance of her forms.

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

— You disgust me. You all disgust me. Art does not count for you. It is always questions of women. An opera is mounted for a dancer, for a singer, for the mistress of Monsieur So-and-so, or of Madame Such-and-such. You think only of your filth. See here, I bear you no grudge: you are like that, stay like that, if it pleases you, and wallow in your trough. But let us separate: we are not made to live together. Goodnight.

He left him; and when he reached home, he wrote to Roussin that he was withdrawing his piece, without hiding from him the reasons that made him take it back.

This was the rupture with Roussin and with all his clan. The consequences made themselves felt at once. As the papers had made a certain noise around the projected performance, and as the story of the composer’s quarrel with his interpreter had not failed to set tongues wagging, a concert director had the curiosity to give the work in one of his Sunday matinées. This good fortune was a disaster for Christophe. The work was played — and hissed. All the friends of the singer had given each other the word to administer a lesson to the insolent musician; and the rest of the public, whom the symphonic poem had bored, joined or attached themselves obligingly to the verdict of the competent ones. To crown his misfortune, Christophe had had the imprudence, in order to display his virtuoso’s talent, to consent to be heard, at the same concert, in a Fantasia for piano and orchestra. The malevolent dispositions of the public, held back in a certain measure during the performance of David by the desire to spare the interpreters, had free play when they found themselves in the presence of the author in person — whose playing, moreover, was not too correct. Christophe, irritated by the noise of the hall, suddenly broke off in the middle of the piece, and, looking with a mocking air at the public, which had fallen silent on the instant, he played: “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre!”

— and said insolently:

— There is what you need.

Whereupon he rose and left.

There was a fine tumult. They cried that he had insulted the public. The papers, the next day, executed in concert the grotesque German, on whom the good public had done justice.

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

He did not know that a great soul is never alone, and that, lacking friends by good fortune, it always ends by creating them, that it radiates around it the love with which it is full, and that at the very hour when he believed himself isolated forever, he was richer in love than the happiest people in the world.

At the Stevenses’ there was a little girl of thirteen or fourteen, to whom Christophe had given lessons at the same time as Colette. She was Colette’s first cousin, and her name was Grazia Buontempi. She was a little girl with a golden complexion, delicately pink at the cheekbones, with full cheeks, of a country health, a small, slightly turned-up nose, a large, well-cut mouth always half-open, a round, very white chin, calm eyes softly smiling, a round forehead framed by a profusion of long, silky hair which descended without curls along the cheeks, with light and calm undulations; the figure supple and straight. A little Virgin of Andrea del Sarto, with a broad face and a beautiful, silent gaze.

She was Italian. Her parents lived almost all the year in the country, in a great property in northern Italy: plains, meadows, canals, vines and olives. From the terrace on the roof, one had at one’s feet a sea of silvery olives and golden vines, from which there emerged here and there the black spindles of the cypresses. The clusters of ripe grapes wound around the green olives. Beyond, were the fields, the fields. The silence. One heard the oxen lowing as they turned the soil, and the sharp cries of the peasants at the plough:

— Ihi !… Fat innanz’ !…

In the evening, the cicadas sang in the trees, and the frogs along the little canals. And at night, it was the infinity of silence, beneath the moon with its waves of silver. Far off, from time to time, the keepers of the olive groves, who dozed in their huts of branches, fired rifle-shots to warn thieves that they were awake. But one barely heard them, half-asleep, and this noise had no other meaning than the chiming of a peaceful clock, marking from afar the hours of the night. And the silence closed itself again, like a soft mantle of vast folds, over the soul.

Around little Grazia, life seemed asleep. People did not occupy themselves much with her. She grew up tranquilly in the beautiful calm that bathed her. No fever, no haste. She was lazy, she loved to stroll and to sleep long. She would remain stretched out, for hours, in the garden. She let herself glide upon the silence, like a fly upon a summer stream. And sometimes, abruptly, she would set to running, for no reason. She ran like a little animal, the head and bust slightly inclined to the right, supplely, without stiffness. A real little goat, who climbed and slipped among the stones for the joy of leaping. She talked with the dogs, with the frogs, with the grasses and the trees, with the peasants and the beasts of the farmyard. She adored all the little beings that surrounded her, and also the great: but with these she gave herself less. She saw very few people. The house was far from the town, isolated. Very rarely did the dragging step of some grave peasant pass along the dusty road, or of a fine country girl with eyes luminous in the tanned face, walking with a balanced rhythm, head high, breast forward. Grazia lived, for whole days, alone in the silent park; she saw no one; she was never bored. She was afraid of nothing.

Once, a vagabond entered, to steal a few fruits or a hen from the deserted farm. He stopped, taken aback, before the little girl, lying in the grass, who was eating a long slice of bread and butter, humming a song. She looked at him tranquilly, and asked him what he wanted. He said:

— Give me something, or I shall turn nasty.

She held out her slice 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 childish, and altogether incapable of directing the education of the little girl. The sister of old Buontempi, Madame Stevens, who had come for the funeral, and who had been struck by the child’s isolation, decided, to distract her from her mourning, to take her for some time to Paris. Grazia wept, and the old papa too; but when Madame Stevens had decided something, there was nothing for it but to resign oneself: no one could resist her. She was the strong head of the family; and, in her Paris house, she directed everything, dominated everything: her husband, her daughter, and her lovers — for she had not denied herself any; she carried her duties and her pleasures abreast: she was a practical and passionate woman — and besides, very restless and very worldly.

Transplanted to Paris, the calm Grazia took to adoring her beautiful cousin Colette, who was amused by it. They led the sweet little savage into society, took her to the theatre. They continued to treat her as a child, and she herself looked upon herself as a child, when already she was no longer one. She felt within her feelings that she hid, and of which she was a little afraid: immense surges of tenderness for an object, or for a being. She was secretly in love with Colette: often, when she saw her, she felt herself pale at a single word; and when she awaited her, when she knew she was going to see her, she trembled with impatience and happiness; she would steal from her a ribbon, a handkerchief. At the theatre, when she saw her pretty cousin, low-cut, enter the box where she was and draw all eyes, she had a good smile, humble, affectionate, overflowing with love; and her heart tightened deliciously when Colette addressed a word to her. In a white dress, her beautiful black hair undone and puffed out over her brown shoulders, nibbling the ends of her long white thread gloves, into the opening of which she would slip her finger to loosen them — at every instant, during the performance, she turned toward Colette to beg a friendly look, to share the pleasure she was feeling, to tell her with her brown, limpid eyes:

— I love you very much.

On walks, in the woods around Paris, she walked in Colette’s shadow, sat at her feet, ran ahead of her, tore away branches that might have hindered her, set stones in the middle of the mud. And one evening, when Colette, chilly in the garden, asked her for her scarf, she gave a cry of pleasure — of which she was ashamed: it was happiness that the beloved should wrap herself in a little of her, and then give it back to her, all impregnated with the perfume of her body.

There were also certain books, certain pages of poets, read in secret (for they continued to give her children’s books) — which caused her delicious troubles. And, still more, certain music, although she was told that she could understand nothing of it; and she persuaded herself that she understood nothing of it — but she was all pale and moist with emotion. No one knew what was happening in her, at those moments.

Apart from that, she was always a very good little girl, docile, scatterbrained, lazy, rather greedy, blushing at nothing, sometimes silent for hours, sometimes speaking with volubility, laughing and weeping easily, with sudden sobs and a child’s laughter. She loved to laugh, and was amused by little trifles. She never tried to play the lady. She remained a child. Above all, she was good, she could not bear to give pain, and she suffered at the least slightly cross word against her. Very modest, always effacing herself, all ready to love and admire everything she saw or thought she saw of the beautiful and the good, she lent to others qualities they did not have.

They occupied themselves with her education, which was very much behind. It was thus that she took piano lessons with Christophe.

She saw him, for the first time, at one of her aunt’s soirées, where there was a numerous company. Christophe, incapable of adapting himself to any audience, played an interminable adagio that made everyone yawn: when it seemed to be finished, it would begin again; one wondered whether it would ever end. Madame Stevens was boiling with impatience. Colette was wildly amused: she savored all the ridiculousness of the thing, and she did not hold it against Christophe to be, to that point, insensible to it; she felt that he was a force, and that was sympathetic to her; but it was comic, too; and she took good care not to take his defense. Alone, little Grazia was penetrated to tears by this music. She concealed herself in a corner of the drawing room. At the end, she ran away, so that no one should notice her trouble, and also because she was suffering to see them mock Christophe. When they sought her, she hid, so as not to have to answer.

A few days later, at dinner, Madame Stevens spoke, in front of her, of having her given piano lessons by Christophe. Grazia was so troubled that she let her spoon drop back into her soup plate, and she spattered herself, as well as her cousin, who began to ask her loudly, first of all, for lessons in how to hold herself properly at table. Madame Stevens added that in that case, it was not Christophe to whom they should apply. Grazia was happy to be scolded along with Christophe.

Christophe began his lessons. She was all stiff and frozen; her arms were glued to her body; she could not stir; and when Christophe put his hand on her little hand to rectify the position of the fingers and spread them over the keys, she felt herself swooning. She trembled to play badly before him; she might study herself almost sick, but it always failed: her trouble paralyzed her; her fingers were stiff as pieces of wood, or limp as cotton; she stumbled over the notes, accented them backward; when Christophe scolded her, she was not at ease, so that she stopped with a desire to weep.

He paid no attention to her; he was occupied only with Colette. Grazia suffered from her cousin’s intimacy with Christophe; but however much she suffered from it, her little heart rejoiced in it for Colette and for Christophe. She found Colette so superior to 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 her little woman’s intuition, she saw well that Christophe was suffering from Colette’s coquetries and from the assiduous court paid to her by those little young men, that Lucien Lévy-Cœur whom already, by instinct, she did not love, and whom she detested from the moment she knew that Christophe detested them. She could not understand how Colette amused herself by setting them in rivalry with Christophe. She began to judge her severely, in secret; she caught certain of her little lies, and she abruptly changed her manners with her. Colette perceived it, without guessing the cause; she affected to attribute it to the caprices of a little girl. But the certain thing was that she had lost her power over Grazia: an insignificant fact showed it. One evening when, walking together in the garden, Colette wanted, with a coquettish tenderness, to shelter Grazia under the folds of her cloak against a little shower that had begun to fall, Grazia, for whom it would have been, a few weeks before, an ineffable happiness to nestle against the breast of her dear cousin, withdrew coldly, and held herself a few paces away, in silence. And when Colette said she found ugly a piece of music that Grazia was playing, that did not prevent Grazia from playing it, and from loving it.

She was now attentive only to Christophe. She had the divination of tenderness, and perceived what he suffered, without his needing to say it. She exaggerated it much, it is true, in her anxious and childish attention. She believed that Christophe was in love with Colette, when he had for her only a demanding friendship. She thought he was unhappy, that he was wretched, on her account. The poor child was scarcely rewarded for her solicitude. One day, on a word said by Colette, when Colette had irritated Christophe, he was in a bad humor, and avenged himself on little Grazia by mercilessly noting the faults of her playing; and as Colette had exasperated him still more than usual, he sat down at the piano with her, and his brusqueness made Grazia lose the little means she had: she floundered; he reproached her with her wrong notes in anger; then, she began to weep; he cried out, shook her hands, cried that she would never do anything decent, that she should occupy herself with cooking, with sewing, with whatever she wanted, but, in the name of heaven! that she should make no more music! It was not worth the trouble of martyring people by making them hear her wrong notes. Whereupon, he left her there, in the middle of her lesson, and the child departed.

Poor Grazia swallowed back all the tears of her body, less from the chagrin caused her by these humiliating words than from the chagrin of not being able to please Christophe, in spite of all her desire, and even of adding by her stupidity to the trouble of this cold lesson.

She suffered far more when Christophe ceased to come to the Stevenses’. She suddenly wanted to return to her country. This child, so healthy even in her reveries, and who kept within her a depth of rustic serenity, felt ill at ease in this city, in the midst of neurasthenic and agitated Parisian women. Without daring to say it, she had ended up judging rather exactly the people who surrounded her. But she was timid, weak, like her father, out of kindness, out of modesty, out of self-distrust. She let herself be dominated by her authoritarian aunt and by her cousin accustomed to tyrannize over everything. She did not dare to write to her old papa, to whom she sent long, affectionate letters regularly:

— I beg you, take me back!

And the old papa did not dare to take her back, despite all his desire; for Madame Stevens had answered his timid overtures that Grazia was well where she was, far better than she would be with him, and that, for her education, she had to remain.

But there came a moment when exile became too painful to the little Southern soul, and when she had to take her flight again toward the light. — It was after Christophe’s concert. She had come to it with the Stevenses; and it was a heartrending thing for her to be present at 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 hear to the end the uproar, the hissings, the hootings, even her aunt’s disobliging reflections, the pretty laughter of Colette, who was exchanging with Lucien Lévy-Cœur pitying remarks. Taken refuge in her bedroom, she sobbed, for part of the night: she spoke to Christophe, she consoled him, she would have wanted to give her life for him, she despaired of being able to do anything to make him happy. It became impossible for her henceforth to remain in Paris. She entreated her father to bring her back. She said:

— I can live here no longer, I can no longer, I shall die if you leave me any longer.

Her father came at once; and however painful it was to them both to stand up to the terrible aunt, they drew the energy for it from an effort of desperate will.

Grazia returned among her olives. She rediscovered with joy dear nature and the beings she loved. She had carried with her, and kept for some time still in her aching heart, which tightened a little each day, a melancholy of the North, like a veil of fogs, that the sun gradually melted away. She thought at moments of unhappy Christophe. Stretched out on the lawn, listening to the cicadas and the familiar frogs, or seated at the piano, with joy she conversed more often than before, she dreamed of him: ah! how she had chosen him for her own; she conversed with him, in a low voice, for hours; and it would not have seemed impossible to her that he might open the door, one day, and enter. She wrote to him, and, after having hesitated very long, she sent him a letter, unsigned, that she went one morning, in secret, three kilometers away, on the other side of the great ploughed fields, to post — a good letter, touching, that told him he was not alone, that he must not be discouraged, that someone was thinking of him, that someone loved him, that someone prayed God for him — a poor letter, which stupidly went astray on the road, and that he never received.

Then, the uniform and serene days unrolled in the life of the distant friend. And the great Italian peace, the genius of calm, of tranquil happiness, of mute contemplation, took softly hold of this chaste and silent heart, in the depths of which there continued to burn, like a little motionless flame, the memory of Christophe.

But Christophe was unaware of the naïve affection that from afar watched over him, and that was to take so great a place later in his life. And he was unaware also that at this same concert, where he had been insulted, was present the one who was to become his friend, the dear companion who was to walk beside him, side by side, and hand in hand.

He was alone. He believed himself alone. Besides, he was in no way crushed by it. He no longer felt that bitter sadness which had agonized him formerly, in Germany. He was stronger, more mature: he knew it had to be so. His illusions about Paris had fallen: men were everywhere the same; he must reconcile himself to it, and not persist in a childish struggle against the world; he must be himself, with tranquility. As Beethoven said, “if we surrender the forces of our life to life, what will remain to us for what is noblest, for what is best?” He had taken vigorous consciousness of his nature and of his stock, which he had once judged so severely. As he was more oppressed by the Parisian atmosphere, he felt the need to take refuge near his fatherland, in the arms of the poets and musicians, where the best of itself was gathered. As soon as he opened their books, his room filled with the rustling of the sunlit Rhine and the affectionate smile of old, forsaken friends.

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 outrageous things he had said of them, when he was in Germany. Then he saw only their defects, their graceless and ceremonious naïvetés, their tearful idealism, their little adroit lies, their little cowardices. Ah! that was little compared to their great virtues! How had he been able to be so cruel to weaknesses that now made them almost more touching in his eyes: for they were thereby more human! By reaction, he had drawn much tenderness for those to whom he had been most unjust. What faults he had been within an inch of committing against Schubert, and even against Bach! And now he felt himself quite close to them. Now those great souls, whom he had judged with impatience for their ridiculousness, leaned over him affectionately, now that he was exiled far from his own, and said to him, with a smile:

— Brother, we are here. Courage! We too have had more than our share of miseries… Bah! one comes through it…

He heard the Ocean of the soul of Johann Sebastian Bach: the hurricanes, the whistling winds, the clouds of life that flee, the peoples drunken with joy, with sorrow, with anger, and Christ, full of meekness, the Prince of Peace, hovering above them; the towns awakened by the cries of the watchmen, rushing forth, with clamors of jubilation, to meet the divine Bridegroom, whose steps shake the world — the prodigious reserve of thoughts, of poetries, of musical forms, of heroic life, of Shakespearean hallucinations, of Savonarola-like prophecies, of pastoral visions, epic, apocalyptic — packed into the cramped body of the little Thuringian cantor with the double chin, the little eyes shining beneath the wrinkled eyelids and the raised brows… — he saw him so well! sombre, jovial, a little ridiculous, the brain stuffed with allegories and symbols, Gothic and rococo, choleric, stubborn, serene, having the passion of life and the nostalgia of death… — he saw him in his school, pedant of genius, in the midst of his students, dirty, gross, beggarly, scabby, with cracked voices, those rascals with whom he quarreled, with whom he sometimes fought like a porter, and one of whom belabored him with blows… — he saw him in his family, in the midst of his twenty-one children, of whom thirteen died before him, of whom one was an idiot; the others, good musicians, gave him little concerts… Illnesses, burials, sharp disputes, want, his genius misunderstood; — and above all that, his music, his faith, deliverance and light, Joy glimpsed, presaged, willed, seized — God, the breath of God burning his bones, raising the hairs of his flesh, thundering through his mouth… O Force! Force! Blessed thunder of Force!…

Christophe drank in long draughts of this force. He felt the benefit of this power of music, which streams out from German souls. Often mediocre, even gross, what does it matter? The essential is that it should be, that it should flow brim-full. In France, music is gathered, drop by drop, by Pasteur filters into carefully corked carafes. And these drinkers of insipid water turn up their noses before the rivers of German music! They pick out the faults of the German geniuses!

— Poor little things! — thought Christophe, without remembering that he himself, not long ago, had been just as ridiculous — they find defects in Wagner and in Beethoven! They would need geniuses without defects!… As if, when the tempest blows, it were going to take care to disturb nothing of the fine order of things! They want hurricanes that should be, as that other one of Debussy’s Sea says, salon conversations. Those muscled tempests, held on a leash, that one walks in the alleys of the Luxembourg!…

He walked through Paris, all joyous in his strength. So much the better if he was misunderstood! He would be the freer for it. To create as one ought, one must live, or, what comes to the same thing, organically constituted following one’s interior laws, one must live entirely. An artist is never too much alone. What is to be feared is to see one’s thought reflected in a mirror that deforms it and diminishes it. One must have no eye to what others say of what one does, before having done it. One must know, otherwise one would no longer have the courage to go to the end; soon it would no longer be one’s idea, but the miserable idea of others, that one would see within oneself.

Now that nothing came any more to distract him from his dreams, they gushed forth like fountains from all the corners of his soul. They were like the stones of his road. He lived a visionary’s life. All that he saw and heard evoked in him beings, things, different from what he saw and heard. He had only to let himself live to find everywhere around him the life of his heroes. Their sensations came of themselves to seek him out. All that he saw came to him through a voice that the wind bore, the light on a road, the steps, the birds that sang in the trees of the Luxembourg, a convent bell that rang in the distance, the pale sky, the little corner of the sky seen from the depth of his room, the noises and the nuances of the various hours of the day: he did not perceive them in himself, but in the beings of whom he dreamed. For a slightly rich heart, every minute is strange with a thousand events, strange with a thousand centuries. Millions of beings have tasted, and will taste after us, the days that caress us with the same freshness. A little love is enough to recover, through the water that passes, the millions of those who are no more and those who shall be. — Christophe was happy.

Meanwhile, his situation was more difficult than it had ever been. He had lost the few piano lessons that were his principal resource. It was September; Parisian society was on holiday; and it was impossible to find other pupils. The only one he had was an engineer, intelligent and unhinged, who had taken it into his head, at forty, to become a great violinist. Christophe played certain airs of the violin very well; but he always knew more than his pupil. The latter, for some time, gave him three hours of lessons a week, at two francs an hour. But, at the end of a month and a half, the engineer grew tired, discovering all at once that his principal vocation was painting. — On the day that he announced this discovery to Christophe, Christophe laughed a great deal; but when he had finished, he made the count of his finances, and found that he had just exactly what was needed to make a pledge of the twelve francs his pupil had just paid him for his last lessons. This did not move him; he merely said to himself that he should decidedly have to set about looking for other means of existence: begin once more the rounds to the publishers. That was not a cheering prospect… Pff!… It was useless to torment himself in advance about it. Today, the weather was fine. He went off to Meudon. He had a fierce appetite for walking. Walking made harvests of music rise within him. He was full, like a hive of honey; and he was at the golden buzzing of his bees. It was, ordinarily, a music that modulated much. And bounding, insistent, hallucinating rhythms… Just try then to create rhythms, when you are numbed in your room! Good then for amalgamating subtle and motionless harmonies, like those Parisians!

When he was tired of walking, he lay down in the woods. The trees were half-stripped of leaves, the sky periwinkle-blue. Christophe numbed himself in a reverie, which soon took on the tint of the fluid thought that was stirring within him. It was, in the ordinary way, a fluid music that was stirring within him — his whole life, his thoughts. It came from all points of the horizon: worlds young and old, that gave themselves battle, shreds of souls past, ancient guests, parasites, that lived in him, on him, like the populace of a city. The old saying of Gottfried before Melchior’s tomb came back to his thought: he was like a living people, full of living ones that were stirring within him — a whole unknown race. He listened to this multitude of lives of which he was an episode, he took pleasure in making the organ of this age-old forest sound, full of monsters, like the forest of Dante. The master was there: his will. He had a strong joy in cracking his whip, so that the beasts should howl, and that he should feel better the wealth of his interior menagerie. He was not alone. There was no risk that he should ever be alone. He was a whole army to himself alone, centuries of Kraffts joyous and sad. Against hostile Paris, against a people, a whole people: the struggle was equal.

He had given up the modest room — too expensive — that he had occupied, to take in the quarter of Montrouge a garret which, for want of other advantages, was very airy. A perpetual draft. But he had to breathe. From his window, he had an extended view over the chimneys of Paris, and over Montmartre in the background. The move had not been long: a handcart had sufficed; Christophe had pushed it himself. Of all his furniture, the most precious object to him was, with his old trunk, one of those casts, which have been so vulgarized in recent times, of the mask of Beethoven. He had wrapped it up with as much care as if it had been a work of art of the highest price. He never parted from it. It was his island, in the middle of Paris. It was for him also a moral barometer. The mask marked for him, more clearly than his own conscience, the temperature of his soul, its most secret thoughts: now the sky charged with clouds, now the gust of passions, now the powerful calm.

He had had to cut down much on his food. He ate once a day, at one o’clock in the afternoon. He had bought a big sausage, which he had hung at his window; with a good slice, a solid hunk of bread, and a cup of coffee that he made himself, he made a meal of the gods. But he would gladly have made two. He was vexed at having so good an appetite. He apostrophized himself severely; he treated himself as a glutton who thinks only of his belly. For all that, he scarcely suffered from it; he was not as gaunt as a thin dog. Moreover, sound, an iron frame, and the head always clear.

He did not worry himself too much about the morrow, though he would have had good reasons for doing so. As long as he had the day’s money before him, he did not take pains. The day he had nothing left, he decided at last to begin his rounds at the publishers’. He found no work anywhere. He was returning home, empty-handed, when, passing by chance near the music agency where he had been introduced once by Sylvain Kohn to Daniel Hecht, he entered, without recalling that he had already come there in not very agreeable 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. Hecht did not want to appear to retreat; he approached Hecht, not knowing what he was going to say to him, and ready to stand up to him with as much arrogance as might be needed: for he was convinced that Hecht would not spare him his insolences. Nothing of the sort. Hecht, coldly, held out his hand to him; with a banal formula of politeness, he inquired about his health, and, without even waiting for Christophe to make his request, he indicated to him with his hand the door of his cabinet, stepped aside to let him pass. He was happy, secretly, at this visit, which his pride had foreseen, but which he no longer expected. Without his having said so, he had followed Christophe very attentively; he had missed no occasion to know his music; he was at the famous concert of David; and the hostile reception of the public had astonished him all the less, in his contempt for the public, that he had perfectly felt all the beauty of the work. There were perhaps not two persons in Paris more capable than Hecht of appreciating the artistic originality of Christophe. But he took good care to say nothing of it to him, not only because he was piqued by Christophe’s attitude toward him, but because it was impossible for him to be amiable: it was a special disgrace of his nature. He was sincerely disposed to help Christophe; but he would not have taken a step for it: he waited for Christophe to come and ask him. And now that Christophe had come, — instead of generously seizing the occasion to efface the memory of their misunderstanding, by sparing his visitor any humiliating step, he gave himself the satisfaction of letting Christophe expound his request at length; and, although he could have found him more elevated work, he insisted on imposing, at least for once, the kind that Christophe had once refused. He gave him, for the next day, a hundred pages to copy, transposing them, of music for mandolin and guitar. After which, satisfied at having made him bend, he found him less repellent occupations, but always with such a total absence of good grace that it was impossible to be grateful to him for it, and that Christophe had to be spurred on by want to have recourse to him again. In any case, he still preferred to earn his money by these tasks, irritating as they were, than to receive it as a gift from Hecht, as the latter offered it to him, once — and certainly with a good heart; but Christophe had felt the intention that Hecht had had to humiliate him first; constrained to accept his conditions, he refused at least to accept his benefactions; he was willing enough to work for him, but if he was dependent on him, he was quits; — but he wanted to owe him nothing. He was not like Wagner, without impudent scruple about his luxury, putting his art above himself. The bread that he had not earned himself would have choked him. — One day when he had just brought back the task he had spent the night doing, he found Hecht at table. Hecht, noticing his pallor and the looks he involuntarily cast on the dishes, was certain that he had not eaten all day, and invited him to lunch with him. The intention was good; but Hecht let him feel so heavily that he saw there Christophe’s destitution, that his invitation resembled an alms: Christophe was even more tempted to refuse than to accept. He could not refuse to sit at table — (Hecht said he had things to tell him) — but he touched nothing: he claimed that he had just lunched. His stomach contracted with need.

Christophe would have wished to do without Hecht; but the other publishers were worse still. — There were, no doubt, the wealthy dilettantes, who labored out a scrap of a musical phrase, and who let themselves be persuaded to set it down. They sent for Christophe, and sang him their lucubrations:

— Eh! is it not fine!

They gave it him to develop, to conclude — (to write out in full) — and it would appear under their name at a great publisher’s. Afterward, they were persuaded that the piece was theirs. Christophe knew one of them, a gentleman of good birth, a tall, agitated body who at once rang out his “dear friend!”, seized him by the arm, lavished on him demonstrations of tempestuous enthusiasm, sniggered into his ear, stammered out coq-à-l’âne and musical incongruities and cries of ecstasy: Beethoven, Verlaine, Fauré, Yvette Guilbert… He made him work, and then neglected to pay him. He settled with invitations to lunch and handshakes. In the end of ends, he sent Christophe twenty francs, which Christophe gave himself the luxury — stupid — of returning to him. That day, he did not have twenty-five centimes to write to his mother, whose name-day it was, old Louisa’s; and for nothing in the world would Christophe have wanted to miss it. The good woman counted too much on her boy’s letter; she could not have lived, not seeing it come. She had been writing to him a little more often, for some weeks, despite the pain it cost her to write, in her solitude. But she could not have brought herself to come and join Christophe in Paris: she was too timorous, too attached to her little town, to her church, to her house, she was afraid of journeys. And besides, when she would have wanted to come, Christophe had no money for her; he had none every day for himself.

A package which had given him much pleasure, once, had been from Lorchen, the young peasant girl with whom he had had a brawl with Prussian soldiers: she had written to him that she was getting married; she gave him news of the house, and she sent him a basket of apples, a little cake to eat in her honor. It had fallen prettily to the purpose. That evening at Christophe’s, it was fast, ember-days, and lent: of the sausage hung on the nail near the window, there remained only the string. Christophe compared himself to the holy anchorites, whom a raven comes to feed upon their rock. But the raven had much to do, no doubt, feeding the other anchorites: for it did not come back.

In spite of all his troubles, Christophe kept his cold blood. He did his laundry in his basin and shined his shoes, whistling like a blackbird. He consoled himself with Berlioz’s words: “Let us raise ourselves above the miseries of life, and sing in a light voice the gay refrain so well known: Dies iræ…” He sang sometimes, to the scandal of his neighbors, stupefied to hear him break off in the middle with bursts of laughter.

He led a rigorously chaste life. As that other man says, “the career of a lover is a career of the idle and the rich.” Christophe’s wretchedness, his hunt for daily bread, his excessive sobriety, and his fever of creation left him neither the time nor the taste to dream of pleasure. He was not only indifferent to it; by reaction against Paris, he was caught in his furious asceticism. He had a passionate need of purity, the horror of all defilement. It was not that he was sheltered from the passions. At other moments, he would have surrendered himself to them. But these passions remained chaste, even when he yielded himself entirely to them: for he sought in them not pleasure, but the absolute gift of self and the plenitude of being. And when he saw that he had only that, he rejected them with fury. Lust was not for him the sin against nature. It was indeed the great Sin, the one that defiles the sources of life. All those in whom the old Christian foundation has not been totally buried under foreign alluvia, all those who feel themselves still today the sons of the vigorous stocks who, at the price of a heroic discipline, built up the civilization of the West, have no difficulty in understanding it. Christophe despised the cosmopolitan society whose pleasure was the unique aim, the credo. — Certainly, it is well to seek happiness, to will it for men, to combat the depressing pessimistic beliefs amassed upon humanity by twenty centuries of Gothic Christianity. But it is on condition that this be a generous faith, that wills the good of others. Instead of that, what is it? The most pitiful egoism. A handful of pleasure-seekers, who seek to extract from their senses the maximum of pleasures with the minimum of risks, accommodating themselves quite well to others’ suffering for it. — Yes, no doubt, one knows their drawing-room socialism!… But do they not themselves know that their voluptuous doctrines are good only for the people of the “fat”, for an “elite” being fattened, like theirs, and that for the poor, it is a poison?

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

Christophe was not rich, nor made to become so. When he had just earned some money, he hastened to spend it immediately on music; he deprived himself of food to go to the concert. He took the cheapest seats, at the very top of the Châtelet theatre, and he plunged himself into the music: that took the place for him of supper and mistress. He brought to it such a hunger for happiness and such an aptitude for enjoying it that the imperfections of the orchestra did not succeed in troubling him; he remained, two or three hours, numbed in a state of beatitude, without the lapses of taste and the wrong notes provoking in him anything else than an indulgent smile: he had left his criticism at the door; he had come to love, and not to judge. Around him, the public abandoned itself like him, motionless, eyes half-closed, to the current of the great torrent of dreams. Christophe had the vision of a people crouched in the shadow, gathered upon itself, like an enormous cat, brooding over hallucinations of voluptuousness and carnage. In the thick and golden half-darkness, certain figures mysteriously took shape, whose unknown charm and mute ecstasy reached Christophe’s eyes and heart; he attached himself to them; he sought them out; he ended by assimilating himself, body and soul, with them. It happened that one of them would perceive it, and that there was woven, between her and Christophe, during the duration of the concert, one of those obscure sympathies which go down to the deepest of being, without any precise word translating anything of it to our own consciousness, and of which nothing remains, once the concert is finished and the current is broken that united the souls. It is a state well known to those who love music, especially when they are young and give themselves the most: the essence of music is so completely love that one tastes it only fully if one tastes it in another, and that at the concert one instinctively looks with one’s eyes in the midst of the crowd for a friend with whom to share a joy too great for oneself alone.

Among these friends of an hour, whom Christophe sometimes chose, the better to savor the sweetness of the music, one figure attracted him, that he saw again at every concert. It was a little grisette, who must have adored music, without understanding any of it. She had the profile of a little animal, a small straight nose, scarcely passing the line of the slightly forward mouth and the delicate chin, fine, raised eyebrows, clear eyes: one of those carefree little faces, under whose veil one feels joy and laughter, wrapped in an indifferent and vaguely happy peace. They are these vicious little girls, these gamine working-women, who reflect perhaps most of the vanished serenity, that of antique statues and of figures by Raphael. It is only an instant in their lives, the first awakening of pleasure; the blight is near. But they have lived at least one pretty hour.

Christophe took delight in looking at her: a pretty face did his heart good; he knew how to enjoy it without desiring it; he drew from it joy, strength, appeasement — yes, almost virtue. She — that goes without saying — had quickly noticed that he was looking at her; and there had been established between them, without thinking of it, a magnetic current. And since they found themselves, in roughly the same seats, at almost all the concerts, they had not been long in knowing their tastes. At certain passages, they exchanged a glance of intelligence; when she particularly liked a phrase, she stuck out her tongue slightly, as if to lick her lips; or, to show that she did not find it good, she dismissively thrust forward her pretty muzzle. Mingled with these little airs was a touch of innocent showing-off, against which almost no being can defend itself when it knows itself watched. She knew how to assume sometimes, during serious pieces, a dreamy expression, and, turned in profile, to wear the absorbed air, and the smiling cheek, while from the corner of her eye she would look at him to see if he was looking at her. They had become very good friends, without ever having spoken a word — without having even tried — (Christophe at least) — to meet at the exit.

Chance brought it about that, at an evening concert, they found themselves seated next to each other. After an instant of smiling hesitation, they began to chat amicably. She had a charming voice, and said many foolish things about music: for she knew nothing of it, and wanted to appear to know it; but she loved it passionately. She loved the worst and the best, Massenet and Wagner, and had not the slightest antipathy. Music was a voluptuousness for her; she drank it through all the pores of her body, like Danaë the shower of gold. The prelude of Tristan gave her her little death; and she enjoyed feeling herself swept away, like a prey in battle, by the Heroic Symphony.

She informed Christophe that Beethoven was deaf and dumb, and that, despite that, if she had known him, she would have loved him well, although he was prettily ugly. Christophe protested that Beethoven was not so ugly; then, they discussed beauty and ugliness; and she agreed that all depended on tastes; what was beautiful for one was not for the other: “one was not a louis d’or: one could not please everyone.” — He preferred that she not speak: he heard her much better. During the Death of Isolde, she held out her hand; her hand was all moist; he kept it in his until the end of the piece; they felt, through their interlaced fingers, the same flood of life flow.

They came out together; it was near midnight. They went back up, chatting, into the Latin Quarter; she had taken his arm, and he accompanied her almost to her door; but, arrived at the door, as she was getting ready to show him the way, he left her, paying no heed to her smile and her inviting eyes. For the moment, she was stupefied, then furious; then, she was doubled over with laughter, thinking of her folly; then, back in her room and undressing, in the middle of her toilet, she was again annoyed, and finally wept in silence. When she saw him again at the concert, she wanted to show herself piqued, indifferent, a little cutting. But he was so good-natured that her resolution did not hold. They resumed chatting, in good friendship; only, she now kept with him a certain reserve. He spoke to her cordially, but with great politeness, and of serious things, of beautiful things, of the music they were hearing and of what it meant for him. She listened to him attentively, and tried to think as he did. The sense of his words often escaped her; but she believed in them all the same. She had for Christophe a grateful respect, which she scarcely showed him. By a tacit accord, they spoke to each other only at the concert. He met her once in the middle of some students. They greeted each other gravely. She spoke of him to no one. There was at the bottom of her soul a little sacred province, something beautiful, pure, consoling.

Thus Christophe was beginning to exercise, by his sole presence, by the sole fact that he existed, an appeasing and fortifying influence. Everywhere he passed, he left unconsciously a trace of his interior light. He was the last to suspect it. There were near him, in his house, people whom he had never seen, and who, without suspecting it themselves, gradually felt his beneficent radiation.

For several weeks, Christophe had no longer any money to go to the concert, even by fasting; and, in his garret under the roofs, now that winter was coming, he felt himself all chilled through; he could not remain motionless at his table. Then he would go down, and walk through Paris, to warm himself. He had the faculty of forgetting at moments the swarming city that surrounded him, and of escaping into the spaces and the infinity of time. It was enough for him to see above the tumultuous street the dead and frozen moon, suspended in the gulf of the sky — or the disc of the sun, rolling in the white fog, like a host — for the noise of the street to be effaced, for Paris to plunge into the boundless void, for all this life to appear to him no longer than as the phantom of a life that had been, long, long ago,… centuries ago… The least little sign, imperceptible to common men, of the great wild life of nature, that the livery of civilization recovers as best it may, was enough to make it spring forth whole before his eyes. The grass that pushed up between the paving-stones, the renewal of a stunted tree, strangled in its iron collar, without air and without earth, on an arid boulevard; a dog, a bird that passed, last vestiges of the fauna that filled the primitive universe, and that man has destroyed; a swarm of midges; the invisible epidemic that was devouring a quarter: — that was enough so that, in the asphyxia of this human hothouse, the breath of the Spirit of the Earth should come to strike him in the face and whip up his energy.

On his long walks, often on an empty stomach, having not spoken, for several days, with anyone at all, he dreamed unceasingly. The privations and the silence overexcited this morbid disposition. At night, he had painful sleeps, tiring dreams; ceaselessly, he saw again the old house, the room where he had lived as a child; he was pursued by musical obsessions. By day, he conversed unceasingly with his inner beings and with those he loved, the absent and the dead.

One damp December afternoon, when the hoarfrost covered the stiffened lawns, when the roofs of houses and the gray domes diluted themselves in the fog, when the trees, with their bare branches, frozen and tormented in the vapor that drowned them, seemed marine vegetations at the bottom of the Ocean — Christophe, who, since the day before, felt himself shivering and could not succeed in warming himself, entered the Louvre, which he scarcely knew.

He had not been until then very moved by painting. He was too absorbed by the inner universe to be able to seize the world of colors and forms. They acted on him by their musical resonances, which brought him only a deformed echo of them. No doubt, his instinct obscurely perceived the identical laws that preside over the harmony of visual forms as of sonorous forms, and the deep ranks of the soul, whence well up the two opposite rivers 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.

Thus there escaped him the secret of the most exquisite charm, the most natural perhaps, of France of the clear gaze, queen in the world of light.

Had he been moreover more curious of painting, Christophe was too German to adapt himself easily to a vision of things so different. He was not of those last-cry Germans who deny the Germanic way of feeling, and who persuade themselves that they go mad for impressionism or for the French eighteenth century — when by chance they have not the firm assurance that they understand it better than the French. Christophe was a barbarian, perhaps; but he was so frankly. The little rosy buttocks of Boucher, the fat shepherds of Watteau, the bored shepherdesses and the chubby shepherdesses, laced up in their bodices, the souls of whipped cream, the virtuous oglings of Greuze, the tucked-up chemises of Fragonard, all this poetic disrobing inspired in him no more interest than an elegant newspaper easy to read. He heard well the rich and brilliant harmony painted there; the voluptuous, sometimes melancholy dreams of this old civilization, of a refinement of Europe, were foreign to him. As for the French seventeenth century, he relished no more its ceremonious devotion and its parchments of state; the somewhat cold reserve of the gravest of these masters, a certain moon-grey spread over the haughty work of Nicolas Poussin and over the pale figures of Philippe de Champaigne, kept Christophe at a distance from the ancient French art. And of the modern, he knew nothing. If he had known it, he would have misunderstood it. The only modern painter under whose fascination he had fallen in Germany, Böcklin of Basel, had in no way prepared him to see Latin art. Christophe retained within him the shock of that brutal genius, who smelled of the earth and the wild scents of the heroic bestiary he had drawn forth from it. His eyes, burned by the explosion of crude color, accustomed to the frenzied variegation of this drunken savage, had difficulty in growing used to the half-tints, to the broken and mellow harmonies of French art.

But it is not with impunity that one lives in a foreign world. One undergoes, without knowing it, its imprint. One may wall oneself up in oneself: one notices one day that something has changed.

There was something changed in Christophe, that evening when he came out of the Louvre. He was tired, he was cold, he was hungry, he was alone. Around him, the shadow descended in the deserted galleries; the sleeping forms came to life. Christophe passed, silent and frozen, in the midst of the Egyptian sphinxes, the Assyrian monsters, the bulls of Persepolis, the glaucous serpents of Palissy. It was an atmosphere of fairy tales. He felt rising in his heart a mysterious emotion. The Dream of humanity enveloped him — the strange flowers of the soul…

In the midst of the golden dust of the painting galleries, of the gardens of brilliant and ripe colors, of the prairies of colors, where the air was lacking, Christophe, feverish, on the threshold of sickness, had a sudden lightning-stroke. — He went, almost without seeing, dazed by need, by the warmth of the rooms, and this orgy of images: his head was turning. Arrived at the end of the gallery by the waterside, before the Good Samaritan of Rembrandt, he leaned with both hands, so as not to fall, against the iron rail that surrounds the pictures, and he closed his eyes, for an instant. When he reopened them on the work that was facing him, very close to his face, he was fascinated…

The day was dying. The day was already distant, already dead. The invisible sun collapsed in the night. The heavy shadows gathered upon the earth and upon the soul. It was the magical hour when hallucinations are about to come forth from the soul wearied by the labors of the day, motionless, numbed. All is silent. One hears only the noise of the arteries. One no longer has the strength to stir, hardly to breathe. One is sad and abandoned, one has only an immense need to give oneself up into the arms of a friend. One implores the miracle. One feels that it is going to come… Here it is! A flood of gold blazes in the twilight, leaps out upon the wall of the hovel, upon the shoulder of the man who carries the dying one, bathes these humble objects and these mediocre beings, and all takes on a sweetness, a divine glory. It is God himself, who embraces in his terrible and tender arms these miserable, weak — (even the Samaritan, … what weakness!) — ugly, poor, dirty creatures, this lousy serving-man, with his stockings at his heels, these deformed and frightened faces that crowd heavily at the window, these apathetic beings who are silent, racked with terror — all this pitiful humanity of Rembrandt, this herd of obscure and bound souls, who know nothing, who can do nothing, but wait, tremble, weep, pray. — But the Master is there, very near. He is going to come. They know that he is going to come. They do not see Him himself; but they see his halo and the shadow of light he projects upon men…

Christophe came out of the Louvre with an unsteady step. His head was paining him. He saw no more anything. In the street, under the rain, he scarcely noticed the puddles between the paving-stones and the water streaming from his shoes. Yonder, on the Seine, was kindling, at the fall of day, with an inner flame — a lamplight. Christophe carried in his eyes the fascination of a gaze. It seemed to him that nothing existed: no, the carriages were not shaking the paving-stones with a pitiless noise; the passers-by were not jostling him with their wet umbrellas; he was not walking in the street; perhaps he was seated at home and dreaming; perhaps he no longer existed… And suddenly — (he was so weak!) — a dizziness took him, he felt himself fall like a mass, there, in the street, forward… It was but a flash: he set his jaws, and braced himself on his hams, he recovered his balance.

At that precise moment, in the second when his consciousness emerged from the gulf, his gaze struck, on the other side of the street, a gaze he knew well, that seemed to call him. He stopped, taken aback, seeking where he had already seen it. It was only at the end of a moment that he recognized the sad and gentle eyes: it was the little French governess whom he had, in the corridor, caused to be driven from her place, in Germany, and whom he had so sought since, to ask her pardon. She had stopped also, in the middle of the crowd of passers-by, and she was looking at him. Suddenly, he saw her try to go back against the current of the crowd, and to come down onto the roadway, to come to him. He threw himself toward her; but an inextricable jam of carriages separated them; he glimpsed her again for an instant, wanted to cross over to the other side of this living death; he wanted to dart forward all the same, was bumped by a horse, slipped, fell on the sticky asphalt, was nearly crushed. When he picked himself up, covered with mud, and managed to pass to the other side, she had disappeared.

He wanted to set off in pursuit of her. But his dizziness redoubled: he had to give it up. The sickness was coming: he felt it, but he would not admit it. He stubbornly refused to go straight home; he took the longest way. Useless torture: he had to recognize himself beaten; his legs were broken, he dragged himself, he had difficulty in getting home. On the stairs, he choked, he had to sit down on the steps. Back in his frozen room, he stubbornly refused to lie down; he stayed on his chair, soaked with rain, his head heavy and his chest panting, numbing himself in musics aching, like himself. He heard passing phrases of the Unfinished Symphony of Schubert. Poor little Schubert! When he wrote that, he was alone, feverish and drowsy, he too, in the state of half-torpor that precedes the great sleep; he was dreaming by the fire; numbed musics floated around him, like waters a little stagnant; he lingered there, as a half-sleeping child takes pleasure in the story he tells himself, repeating a passage twenty times; sleep comes: death comes… — And Christophe heard also passing this other music with the burning hands, the closed eyes, smiling with a weary smile, the heart swollen with sighs, dreaming of the death that delivers: — the first chorus of the Cantata of J. S. Bach: “Dear God, when shall I die?”… It was good to sink into the mellow phrases that unroll with slow undulations, the humming of bells distant and veiled, in the serene light!… To die, to melt into the peace of the earth!… Und dann selber Erde werden… (“And then oneself to become earth…”)

Christophe shook off these sickly thoughts, the murderous smile of the siren that lies in wait for weakened souls. He rose, and tried to walk in his room; but he could not stand up. He was shivering with fever. He had to take to his bed. He felt that this time it was serious; but he did not lay down arms; he was not of those who, when they are sick, abandon themselves to sickness: he struggled, he did not want to be ill, and above all, he was perfectly determined not to die. He had his poor mama who was waiting for him over there. And he had his work that he would not let be torn from him. He clenched his chattering teeth, he tightened his will that was escaping him; like a good swimmer who continues to struggle, in the midst of the waves that cover him over. At every instant, he plunged; there were ramblings, images without sequence, memories from the country of his parents; they were brought on by obsessions of rhythms and phrases, that turned, turned indefinitely like circus horses; the sudden shock of the golden light falling upon the shoulder of the serving-man of the Good Samaritan; the figures of dread in the shadow; abysses, ruins. Then, he came up to the surface again, he tore the grimacing clouds, which fell stubbornly back upon him. He clenched his fists, and his jaw. He clung to all those he loved from the present and in the past, to the young friend whom he had glimpsed just now, to his dear mama, and assured her of something indestructible, that he felt like a rock: “a mort n’y mord” (“death cannot bite into it”)… — But the rock was again covered by the floods, and the waves made the soul let go; it was again carried off, rolled by the foam. And Christophe struggled in his delirium, saying senseless words, conducting and playing an imaginary orchestra: trombones, trumpets, cymbals, kettledrums, bassoons, and double-basses,… he scraped, blew, banged, with frenzy. The unfortunate man was boiling over with music pent up. After weeks of being unable to hear or play any, he was like a boiler under pressure, near to bursting. Certain obstinate phrases sank into his brain like gimlets, perforated his eardrum, made him suffer enough to make him howl. Coming out of these crises, he fell back on his pillow, dead with weariness, soaked, ground, panting, suffocating. He had set his water-jug next to his bed, from which he drank in gulps. The noises of the neighboring rooms, the doors of the garrets brusquely shut, made him start up again. He had a hallucinated disgust for these beings piled around him. But his will struggled still. It blew warlike fanfares, the combat against the devils… “Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär, und wollten uns verschlingen, so fürchten wir uns nicht so sehr…” (“And though the world were full of devils, and they wanted to swallow us up, that would not frighten us…”) — And on the ocean of burning shadows that rolled his being, there suddenly came a calm, breaks of light, a murmur of violins and violas, calm fanfares of glory from the horns and the kettledrums, while, almost motionless, like a great wall, rose from the sick soul an unshakable song, like a chorale of J. S. Bach.

While he was struggling against the phantoms of the fever and against the suffocation that was gaining his chest, he had vaguely the consciousness that someone was opening the door of his room, and that a young woman was entering, with a candle in her hand. He thought it was still a hallucination. He tried to speak. But he could not, and fell back. When, from time to time, a wave of consciousness brought him back from the depth to the surface, he felt that someone had lifted his pillow, that she had put a blanket on his feet, that he had seen the back of something that was burning him; and he saw, seated at the foot of his bed, this woman, whose face was not entirely unknown to him. Then there came another face, a doctor, who auscultated him. Christophe did not hear what was said to him; but he guessed that they were speaking of carrying him to the hospital. He tried to protest, to cry that he did not wish it, that he wished to die here, all alone; but only incomprehensible sounds came out of his mouth. The woman understood him, however: for she took his defense, and she calmed him. He exhausted himself trying to know who she was. As soon as he could formulate a connected phrase, at the price of unheard-of efforts, he asked her. She answered that she was his garret neighbor, that she had heard him moaning on the other side of the wall, and that she had taken the liberty of entering, thinking he had need of help. She respectfully begged him not to tire himself by speaking. Moreover, he was broken by the effort he had made; he held himself therefore motionless, and was silent; but his brain continued to work, to gather painfully his scattered memories. Where then had he seen her?… He ended by recalling: yes, he had met her in the corridor of the garrets; she was a domestic; she was named Sidonie. With his eyes half-closed, he looked at her, without her seeing him. She was small, the face serious, the forehead bulging, the hair drawn back, the upper part of the cheeks and the temples uncovered, pale, and of strong bone-structure, the nose short, the eyes well-pale, with a gentle and obstinate gaze, the lips thick and pressed together, the complexion anemic, the air honest, concentrated, a little stiffened. She occupied herself with Christophe with an active and silent devotion, without familiarity, without ever departing from the reserve of a domestic, who does not forget the difference of classes.

Little by little, however, when he was better and could chat with her, Christophe’s affectionate good-nature led Sidonie to speak to him a little more freely; but she always watched herself. There were certain things, that one saw she did not say. She had a mixture of humility and pride. Christophe learned that she was a Breton. She had left in her country her father, of whom she spoke with much discretion; but Christophe had no difficulty in understanding that he did nothing but drink, give himself a good time, and exploit his daughter; she let herself be exploited, without saying a word, and never failed to send him a part of the money of her month; but she was not duped. She had also a young sister, whom she was preparing for an examination to be a schoolmistress, and of whom she was very proud. She paid almost all the costs of her education. She labored stubbornly at her work.

— “Did she have a good place?” Christophe asked her.

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

— “Why?”

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

— “Was she not earning enough?”

— “Yes…”

He did not well understand, he tried to understand, he encouraged her to speak. But she was not skillful at recounting her monotonous life, the trouble one had in earning one’s living. She did not insist on it: work did not frighten her, and was for her a need, almost a pleasure. She did not speak of what was most heavy for her: the boredom. He guessed it however: he read in her, with the intuition of a great sympathy, that the sickness had sharpened, and that this had been the habit of the memory of trials borne in an analogous life of the dear mama. It seemed to him, as it did to her, that the ordinary, dreary, unhealthy, unnatural existence imposed on domestics by bourgeois society, the service of these wicked or indifferent people, who would sometimes leave her several days, without saying a word to her, except for service. The hours, the hours, in the suffocating kitchen, whose skylight, encumbered by a meat-safe, gave onto a dirty white wall. All her thoughts, when they would tell her negligently that the sauce was good, or the roast well cooked. A walled-up life, without future, without a glimmer of desire or hope, without interest in anything.

The worst moment for her was when her masters went off to the country, on a journey. They did not take her with them, out of economy; they paid her her month, but did not pay her her journey, to go back to her country; they left her free to go at her own expense. She did not wish to, she could not do it. So she stayed alone in the house, more or less abandoned. She had no desire to go out: she knew no one; she did not even mingle with the other domestics, whom she despised somewhat, because of their grossness and their immorality. She did not go out to enjoy herself: she was serious by nature, thrifty, and she had the fear of bad encounters. She remained seated, in her kitchen, or in her room, from which, by the chimneys, she perceived the top of a tree, in the garden of a hospital. She did not read, she tried to knit, she grew numb, she was bored, she wept from boredom; she found in herself a singular power of weeping, indefinitely: it was her pleasure. But when she was bored too much, she could not even weep any longer, she was as if frozen, the heart dead. Then she would shake herself; her life came back of itself. She thought of her sister, she listened to a barrel-organ in the distance, she day-dreamed, she counted at length how many days she would need to have finished such a work, to have earned such a sum; she would make mistakes in her calculations; she would begin to count again; she would sleep. The days passed.

With these fits of depression alternated awakenings of a childish and bantering gaiety. She made fun of others and of herself. She did not deny herself judging her masters, the cares that 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 picture, in a piece of music, in a book of verses. With her good sense, somewhat coarse, equally distant from the snobbery of very Parisian domestics and from the thick stupidity of very provincial domestics, who admire only what they do not understand, she had a respectful contempt for these pianoings, these insipid chatterings, all these intellectual things, perfectly useless, and tedious in the bargain, that take up so great a place in these mendacious existences. She could not help silently comparing real, hard life, which they were like, with the imaginary pleasures and pains of this life of luxury, of which seems fabricated by boredom. Besides, she was not revolted by it. It was so: it was so. She admitted everything, the wicked people and the foolish. She said:

— You need everything to make a world.

Christophe imagined that she was supported by her religious faith; but one day she said to him, apropos of the others, richer and happier:

— In the end, we shall all be alike, later.

— When then? he asked. After the social revolution?

— The revolution? she said. Oh! a great deal of water will pass under the bridge before that. I do not believe in those silly things. Everything will always be the same.

— Then when shall we all be alike?

— After death, she said! Nothing remains of anyone.

He was much astonished by this tranquil materialism. He did not dare to say to her:

— Is it not frightful, in that case, since one has only one life, to have a life like yours, while there are others who are happy?

But she seemed to have guessed what he was thinking, and she continued, with her resigned and slightly ironical phlegm:

— You have to come to terms with it. Everyone cannot draw the big lot. One would be too unhappy.

She did not even think any longer of seeking outside France, as he had offered her in America, or in Spain, what would have brought her in more. The idea of leaving the country could not enter her head. She said:

— It is everywhere that stones are hard.

There was in her a foundation of skeptical and bantering fatalism. She was very much of that stock which has little or no faith, few intellectual reasons for living, and yet an enormous vitality — of that people of the French countrysides, laborious and apathetic, fault-finding and reasoning, which holds on, which holds itself together, and which has no need of artificial encouragements to keep its courage.

Christophe, who did not yet know it, was astonished to find in this simple girl a disinterestedness from all faith; he admired her attachment to life, without pleasure and without faith, and, more than all, her robust moral sense, which leaned on nothing. He thought of these ideas of this French people only through the naturalist novels and the theories of the petty contemporary men of letters, who, contrary to those of the century of pastorals and of the Revolution, liked to represent the man of nature as a vicious animal, in order to legitimize their own vices… He discovered with surprise the intransigent honesty of Sidonie. It was not an affair of morality; it was an affair of instinct and of pride. She had her aristocratic pride. It is a folly to believe that the people is only what is called: popular. The people has its aristocrats, just as the bourgeoisie has its dukes and its plebs. Aristocrats, that is to say, people who have by instinct, or by blood perhaps, [something] higher than others, and who know it, who have the consciousness of what they are, and the pride not to fall away. They are a minority; but, even kept aside, it is well known that they are the first; and their mere presence is a brake for the others. The others are constrained to model themselves on them, or to pretend to it. Each province, each village, each grouping of men is, in a certain measure, what its aristocrats are; and, depending on what they are, opinion is, here, extremely severe; and there, it is loose. The anarchic overflowing of majorities, at the present hour, will change nothing of this immanent authority of mute minorities. More dangerous for them is their uprooting from the native soil, and their scattering far off, in the great towns. But even thus, lost in foreign environments, isolated from one another, the individualities of good stock persist, without mingling with what surrounds them.

— Of all that Christophe had seen in Paris, Sidonie knew almost nothing, and did not seek to know anything. The sentimental literature and the gossip of the newspapers reached her no more than the political news. She did not even know that there were Popular Universities; and, had she known it, it was probable that she would have troubled herself about it no more than about a sermon. She had her trade, and thought her thoughts; she did not worry herself about thinking those of others. Christophe complimented her on it.

— What is there astonishing about that? she said. I am like everyone else. Have you not then seen any French people?

— It is a year that I have been living in their midst, said Christophe; and I have not met a single one who seemed to be thinking of anything other than amusing himself, or aping those who amuse themselves.

— Why yes, said Sidonie. You have only seen rich people. The rich, that is not much. You have not yet seen anything.

— Yes I have, said Christophe. I am beginning.

He glimpsed, for the first time, this people of France, which gives the impression of an eternal duration, which makes one body with its earth, which has seen passing, like it, so many conquering races, so many masters of a day, and which does not pass.

He was better now and beginning to get up. The first thing he worried about was reimbursing Sidonie the expenses she had made for him while he was ill. In the impossibility he found himself, of running about Paris to look for work, he had to resolve to write to Hecht: he asked that he would be so good as to make him an advance of money on his next work. With his astonishing mixture of indifference and benevolence, Hecht made him wait, more than a fortnight for the reply — a fortnight during which Christophe tortured himself, refusing almost to touch the food that Sidonie brought him, accepting only a little milk and bread that she forced him to take, and that he reproached himself afterward, because he had not earned it: — after which he received from Hecht, without a word, the sum asked for; and not once, during the months that Christophe’s illness lasted, did Hecht try to find out how he was. He had the genius for not making himself loved, even in doing good. It was, moreover, that in doing good, he did not love.

Sidonie came each day, a moment in the afternoon, and in the evening. She prepared Christophe’s dinner. She made no noise; she occupied herself discreetly with his affairs; and, having seen the dilapidation of his linen, without saying so, she carried it away to her room, to mend it. Imperceptibly, there had slipped into their relations something more affectionate. Christophe spoke long of his old mama. Sidonie was moved; she put herself in Louisa’s place, alone, over there; and she had for Christophe a maternal feeling. He himself, in conversing with her, sought to cheat his need of family affection, from which one suffers all the more, when one is weak and ill. He felt himself closer to Louisa with Sidonie than with anyone else. He sometimes confided to her some of the sorrows of his childhood. She pitied him gently, but avoiding intellectual sadnesses. That too reminded him of his mother, and did him good.

He tried to provoke her confidences; but she yielded much less than he. He asked her, jokingly, if she would not marry. She answered, in her habitual tone of ironical resignation, that “it was not permitted, when one is a domestic: it complicates things too much. And then, one must indeed fall well on one’s choice, and that is not convenient. Men are fine rascals. They come to court you, then with one’s money; they eat what you have; and then afterward, they plant you there. She had seen too many examples of it around her: she was not tempted to do the same.” — She did not say that she had had a marriage that fell through: a future husband, who had left her, when he saw that she gave all she earned to her family. — Christophe saw her perhaps naturally in the courtyard with the children of a family that lived in the house. When she met them on the stairs, she happened to embrace them passionately. Christophe imagined her in the place of one of the ladies who, while she was not stupid, was no uglier than any other; and he said to himself that life: she would have been better than they. So many powers of life buried, without anyone caring! And, in compensation, all these living dead, who encumber the earth, and take the place and the happiness of others, in the sun!…

Christophe was not on his guard. He was very affectionate, too affectionate toward her; he caressed her, like a great child.

Sidonie, on certain days, seemed downcast; but he attributed it to her task. Once, in the middle of a conversation, she rose suddenly, and left Christophe, on the pretext of work. At last, one day when Christophe had shown her even more confidence than usual, she interrupted her visits for several days, and, when she came back, she spoke to him with more constraint. He wondered how he could have offended her. He even asked her. She replied with vivacity that he had in no way offended her; but she continued to draw away from him. A few days later, she announced to him that she was leaving: she had given notice in her place, and was leaving the house. In cold and stiff terms, she thanked him for the kindnesses he had shown her, expressed the wishes she formed for his health and for that of his kin, and bade him farewell. He was so astonished by this abrupt departure and the way in which she informed him of it, that he did not know what to say. He tried to learn the motives that were determining her to it: she replied evasively. He asked her where she was going to place herself: she avoided answering; and, as he pressed his questions, she left. On the threshold of the door, she held out her hand to him; and she squeezed his a little vivaciously; but her face did not give way; and, to the end, she kept her stiff and frozen air. She went away.

He never understood why.

The winter dragged on. A damp, foggy, muddy winter. Weeks without sun. Although Christophe was getting better, he was not cured. He still had a painful spot in the right lung, a lesion that was slowly cicatrizing, and fits of violent coughing that prevented him from sleeping at night. The doctor had forbidden him to go out. He would have needed to go off to the Engadine, or to the Midi, or to the Canaries. He certainly had to go out! If he did not go to find his doctor, it was not his doctor who would come to find him. — He was prescribed also drugs that he had no means to pay for. So he had given up asking for advice and doctors: it was money lost; and then, he always felt ill at ease with them; they and he could not understand each other: they were two opposite worlds. They had an ironic and slightly contemptuous compassion for this poor devil of an artist, who claimed to be a world unto himself, and who was swept like a straw by the river of life. He was humiliated to be looked at, palpated, fingered by these men. He was ashamed to feel himself sick. He thought:

— How happy I shall be when he dies!

In spite of solitude, sickness, want, so many motives for suffering, Christophe bore it patiently. Never had he been so patient. He was astonished at it himself. Sickness is often beneficent. In breaking the body, it frees the soul; it purifies it: in the nights and days of forced inaction, there rise thoughts that have fear of light too crude, and that the sun of health burns. He who has never been sick has never known himself entirely.

The illness had set in Christophe a singular appeasement. It had stripped him of what there was of grossest in his being. He felt, with more subtle organs, the world of mysterious forces that are in each of us, and that the tumult of life prevents us from hearing. Since the visit to the Louvre, during these hours of fever, the slightest memories of which had engraved themselves in him, he had lived in an atmosphere analogous to that of Rembrandt’s picture, warm, deep and gentle. He felt, he too, in his heart, the magic 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, led him where he had to come. He confided himself to him like a little child.

For the first time in years, he was constrained to rest. The very lassitude of convalescence was a rest for him, after the extraordinary intellectual tension that had preceded the illness, and that still ached in him. Christophe, who, for several months, had stiffened himself in a state of perpetual alert, felt the fixity of his gaze gradually relax. He was no less strong, but he was more human. The powerful, but somewhat monstrous, life of genius had passed into the background; he found himself again a man like others, stripped of all his fanaticisms of mind, and of all that action has of hard and pitiless. He hated nothing more; he no longer thought of irritating things, or only with a shrug of the shoulders; he thought less of his own sorrows, and more of those of others. Since Sidonie had reminded him of the silent sufferings of humble souls, who struggled without complaint, on every point of the earth, he forgot himself in them. He who was not sentimental in the ordinary way, he had now fits of that mystical tenderness which is the flower of weakness and of sickness. In the evening, leaning on his window, above the courtyard, listening to the mysterious noises of the night — a voice that sang in a neighboring house, and that distance made appear moving, a little girl who naïvely played Mozart on the piano — he thought:

— All you whom I love, and whom I do not know! You whom life has not yet withered, who dream of great things which you know to be impossible, and who struggle against the enemy world — I should wish that you might have happiness… It is so good to be happy!

— O my friends, I know that you are there, and I hold out my arms to you… There is a wall between us. Stone by stone, I wear it away; but it springs up, at the same time. Shall we ever rejoin one another? Shall I reach you, before there is set up another wall: death?… No matter! Let me be alone, all my life, provided that I work for you, that I do you good, and that you love me a little, later, after my death!…

Thus, Christophe convalescent drank the milk of the two good nurses: « Liebe und Noth » (Love and Want).

In this relaxing of his will, he felt the need to come closer to others. And, though he was still very weak, and though it was scarcely prudent, he went out, in the early morning, at the hour when the flood of the people poured down from the populous streets toward the distant work, or in the evening, when they were coming back. He wanted to plunge into the refreshing bath of human sympathy. Not that he spoke to anyone. He did not even seek it. It was enough for him to watch people pass, to divine them, and to love them. He observed, with an affectionate pity, those workers who hurried along, having all, as if in advance, the weariness of the day — those faces of young men, of young girls, with the etiolated complexion, the sharp expressions, the strange smiles — those transparent and mobile faces, beneath which one saw passing waves of desires, of cares, of changing ironies — this people so intelligent, too intelligent, somewhat morbid, of the great cities. They walked fast, all of them, the men reading the newspapers, the women nibbling a croissant. Christophe would gladly have given a month of his life so that the disheveled blonde, with features puffy with sleep, who had just passed near him, with the little goat-step, nervous and dry, might sleep one or two hours more. Oh! she would not have said no, if it had been offered to her! He would have wanted to remove from their apartments, hermetically closed at that hour, all the rich idle women, who were enjoying so tediously their well-being, and put in their place, in their beds, in their restful lives, these little broken bodies, these unjaded souls, not abundant, but lively and greedy of life. He felt himself full of indulgence for them, now; and he smiled at these awake and worn little faces, in which there was guile and ingenuousness, an impudent and naïve desire for pleasure, and, at bottom, a brave little soul, honest and laborious. And he was not angry when some of them laughed in his face, or jostled each other with the elbow, pointing out the tall fellow, with ardent eyes.

He lingered also on the quays, dreaming. It was his favorite walk. It soothed a little his nostalgia for the great river that had cradled his childhood. Ah! it was no doubt not the Vater Rhein! Nothing of his all-powerful strength. Nothing of the wide horizons, of the vast plains, where the mind soars and loses itself. A river with grey eyes, with a pale-green robe, with fine and precise features, a girl of grace, with supple movements, stretching herself with a spiritual nonchalance in the sumptuous and sober finery of her city, in the bracelets of her bridges, in the necklaces of her monuments, and smiling at her prettiness, like a beautiful idler… The delicious light of Paris! It 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. It was for him the most beautiful of musics, the only Parisian music. He passed hours, in the evening, along the quays, in the gardens of the ancient France, savoring the harmonies of the day on the great trees bathed in violet mist, on the statues and the grey vases, on the patinated stone of the royal monuments, which had something of the light of the centuries — that subtle atmosphere, made of fine sun and milky vapor, where there floats, in a dust of silver, the eternal spirit of the race.

One evening, he was leaning on the Pont Saint-Michel, and, while watching the water, he was leafing distractedly through the books of a bookseller, laid 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 pleased him too much with his French bluster, his power of intoxicating himself with words, and his agitated delivery. But, that evening, from the first lines, he was seized: it was the end of the trial of Joan of Arc. He knew through Schiller the Maid of Orleans; but until then she was for him only a romantic heroine, to whom a great poet had lent his own imaginary life. Abruptly, the reality appeared to him, and it seized him. He read, he read, his heart crushed by the tragic horror of the sublime account; and suddenly, having come to the moment when Joan suddenly learns that she is to die that evening, and when she swoons with fright, without even trembling, the tears took him, and he had to break off. The sickness had weakened him; he had become of a ridiculous sensibility, that exasperated himself. — When he wanted to finish his reading, he saw that the bookseller was closing his boxes. He resolved to buy the book; he searched in his pockets: he had six sous left. It was not the first time that he was as denuded: he did not worry about it; he had just bought his dinner, and was counting, the next day, to receive a little money at Hecht’s, for a copy of music. But to wait until the next day, that was hard! Why had he come precisely to spend on his dinner the little that remained to him?! Ah! if he had been able to offer in payment to the bookseller the bread and the sausage that he had in his pocket!

The next morning, very early, he went to Hecht’s, to look for the money; but in passing near the bridge, which bears the name of the archangel of battles — “the brother of Joan’s paradise” — he had not the courage not to stop. He found the precious book again in the bookseller’s boxes; he read it entirely; he spent nearly two hours reading it. He missed his appointment with Hecht; and to meet him afterward, he had to lose almost all his day. At last, he managed to get his new commission and to be paid. At once, he ran to buy the book, fearing that it might be gone. He was afraid, for an instant, that someone might have bought it. No doubt, the harm was not so great: it was easy enough to procure other copies; but Christophe did not know whether the book was rare or not; and besides, it was that volume he wanted, and not another. Those who love books are willingly fetishists. The pages, even soiled and stained, from which the source of dreams has gushed, are for them a sacred thing.

Christophe reread at home, in the silence of night, the Gospel of the Passion of Joan, and no human respect compelled him any longer to contain his emotion. A tenderness, a pity, an infinite sorrow filled him for the poor little shepherdess, in her thick red peasant clothes, tall, timid, the voice gentle, gentle as the bells — (she loved them as he did) — with her good smile, full of fineness and goodness, and the 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 bandits, and tranquilly, with her intrepid good sense, her woman’s subtlety, and her gentle stubbornness, foiled for months, alone, and betrayed by all, the threats and the hypocritical wiles of a pack of church-men and law-men — wolves and foxes, the eyes and the fangs bloody — who made a circle around her.

What penetrated Christophe most was her goodness, her tenderness of heart — weeping after victories, weeping over the dead enemies, over those who had insulted her, consoling them when they were wounded, helping them to die, without bitterness against those who handed her over, and, on the pyre itself, when the flames were rising already, 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 in war itself. War, that triumph of the devil, she brought into it the spirit of God.”

And Christophe, looking back upon 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, between the injustices of men and the severities of fate… To keep gentleness and benevolence among so many sharp disputes, to pass through experience without letting it touch this inner treasure…”

And he repeated to himself:

— I have sinned. I have not been good. I have lacked benevolence. I have been too severe. — Pardon. Do not believe that I am your enemy, you whom I combat! I would wish to do you good, to you also… But I must still prevent you from doing evil…

And as he was not a saint, it sufficed him to think of them for his hatred to wake. What he forgave them least was that, seeing them, seeing France through them, it was impossible to imagine that such a flower of purity and of heroic poetry could ever have sprung from this soil. And yet that was so. Who could say that it would not spring forth from it once again, a second time? The France of today could not be worse than that of Charles VII, the prostituted nation from which came the Maid. The temple was empty at present, soiled, half-ruined. 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 not chatted with anyone, nor received any letter, except now and then a few words from the old mama, who did not know that he was ill, and who did not tell him that she was ill. All his relations with the world reduced themselves to his trips to the music store, to take or bring back work. He went there at hours when he knew Hecht was not there — in order to avoid talking with him. Superfluous precaution: for the only time he had met Hecht, the latter had scarcely addressed a few indifferent words to him on the subject of his health.

He was therefore shut up in a prison of silence, when, one morning, there arrived an invitation from Madame Roussin to a musical soirée: a famous quartet was to be heard there. The letter was very kind, and Roussin had added a few cordial lines. He was not very proud of his quarrel with Christophe. He was all the less so since, in the meantime, he had quarreled with his singer and was judging her without indulgence. He was a good fellow; he never bore a grudge against those whom he had wronged. It would have seemed ridiculous to him that his victims should have more susceptibility than he. So, when he had the pleasure of seeing them again, he did not hesitate to hold out his hand to them.

Christophe’s first movement was to shrug his shoulders and to swear that he would not go. But as the day of the concert approached, he was less decided. He was choking from no longer hearing a human word, and above all a note of music. He repeated to himself, however, that he would never again set foot at these people’s house. But, when the evening came, he went, all ashamed of his cowardice.

He was ill rewarded for it. Scarcely had he found himself again in this milieu of politicians and snobs than he was seized by an aversion for them more violent still than before: for, in his months of solitude, he had lost the habit of this menagerie. Impossible to hear music here: it was a profanation. Christophe decided to leave, as soon as the first piece was over.

He ran his eyes over the whole circle of antipathetic faces and bodies. He encountered, at the other end of the salon, eyes that were looking at him and turned away at once. There was in them a great candor which struck him, among these jaded gazes. They were timid, but clear, precise eyes — French eyes, which, once they fixed themselves upon you, looked at you with an absolute truthfulness, that hid nothing of themselves, and from which perhaps nothing was hidden of you. He knew these eyes. Yet he did not know the face they lit up. It was that of a young man of twenty to twenty-five, of small stature, a little stooped, of a sickly air, the face beardless and ailing, with chestnut hair, irregular and fine features, a certain asymmetry, giving to the expression something, not troubled, but a little disturbed, which was not without charm, and seemed to contradict the tranquillity of the eyes. He was standing in the recess of a door; and no one was paying attention to him. Again, Christophe looked at him, and each time, he met the eyes, which turned away timidly, with an amiable awkwardness; and each time, he “recognized” them: he had the impression of having seen them already in another face.

Incapable of hiding what he felt, following his habit, Christophe made his way toward the young man; but, while approaching, he wondered what he could say to him; and he lingered, undecided, looking right and left, as if he were going at random. The other was not duped, and understood that Christophe was coming toward him; he was so intimidated, at the thought of speaking to him, that he thought of passing into the neighboring room; but he was nailed to the spot by his very awkwardness. They found themselves face to face. Some moments passed before they succeeded in finding a way to begin. As the situation prolonged itself, each of them believed himself ridiculous in the eyes of the other. 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 are not Parisian?

At this unexpected question, the young man smiled, despite his discomfort, and answered that no. His weak voice, of a veiled sonority, was like a fragile instrument.

— I suspected so, said Christophe.

And, as he saw him a little confused at this singular remark, he added:

— It is not a reproach.

But the other’s discomfort only increased by it.

There was a new silence. The young man was making efforts to speak; his lips trembled; one felt he had a sentence all ready to say, but that he could not bring himself to pronounce it. Christophe studied with curiosity this mobile face, where one saw little tremblings pass under the transparent skin; he did not seem of the same essence as those who surrounded him in this salon, those massive faces, of heavy matter, which were only a prolongation of the neck, a piece of the body. Here, the soul welled to the surface; there was a moral life in each parcel of flesh.

He did not succeed in speaking. Christophe, good-naturedly, continued:

— What are you doing here, in the midst of these beings?

He spoke out loud, with that strange freedom which made him hated. The young man, embarrassed, could not help looking around them, to see if they were being heard; and this movement displeased Christophe. Then, instead of answering, he asked, with an awkward and pleasing smile:

— And you?

Christophe began to laugh, with his slightly heavy laugh:

— Yes. And I? he said, in good humor.

The young man decided abruptly:

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

Then, he stopped, making new and useless efforts to overcome his timidity. He blushed; he felt himself, and his blush in increasing, reached the temples and the ears. Christophe was looking at him, smiling, and he had the desire to embrace him. The young man raised discouraged eyes toward him.

— No, decidedly, he said; I cannot… I cannot speak of this… afterward here…

Christophe took his hand, with a silent laugh of his wide, closed mouth. He felt the thin fingers of the stranger trembling slightly against his palm, and gripping it with an involuntary tenderness; and the young man felt the robust hand of Christophe affectionately crushing his hand. The noise of the salon disappeared around them. They were alone together, and they understood that they were friends.

It was but a second, after which Madame Roussin, lightly touching Christophe’s arm with her fan, said to him:

— I see you have made acquaintance, and that it is useless to introduce you. This tall fellow came for you, this evening.

Then, they drew apart, with a little embarrassment.

Christophe asked Madame Roussin:

— Who is he?

— What! she said, you do not know him? He is a little poet, who writes prettily. One of your admirers. He is a good musician, and plays the piano well. It is not good to discuss you in front of him: he is in love with you. The other day, he almost had an altercation, on your account, with Lucien Lévy-Cœur.

— Ah! the brave fellow! said Christophe.

— Yes, I know, you are unjust to that poor Lucien. Nevertheless, he loves you too.

— Ah! do not tell me that! I should hate myself.

— I assure you.

— Never! Never! I forbid him.

— Just what your admirer did. You are as mad the one as the other. Lucien was in the act of explaining to us one of your works. That little timid fellow you have just seen rose, trembling with anger, and forbade him to speak of you. Do you see such pretension!… Happily I was there. I took the part of laughter; Lucien did the same; and the other fell silent, all confused; and he ended by making excuses.

— Poor little thing! said Christophe.

He was quite moved.

— Where has he gone? he continued, without listening to Madame Roussin, who was speaking to him of something else.

He set off to find him. But the unknown friend had disappeared. Christophe came back toward Madame Roussin:

— Tell me what his name is.

— Whose? she asked.

— The one you spoke to me of.

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

The echo of this name rang in Christophe’s ears like a known music. A silhouette of a young girl floated, for a second, at the bottom of his eyes. But the new image, the image of the friend, effaced it at once.

Christophe was returning home. He walked in the streets of Paris, in the midst of the crowd. He saw, he heard nothing, he had his senses closed to all that surrounded him. He was like a lake, separated from the rest of the world by a ring of mountains. No breath, no noise, no trouble. Peace. He repeated to himself:

— I have a friend.

Twelve copies have been drawn from this cahier on whatman*, distributed as follows:*

first stub copy, the manager’s copy;

second stub copy, the administrator’s copy;

third stub copy, the printer’s copy;

nine subscription copies, numbered from 1 to 9 subscription copies.

All our copies on whatman are numbered at the press and printed in the name of the subscriber; our printings of copies on whatman are rigorously limited to the number of subscriptions taken out at each moment; we do not sell any copies on whatman outside the subscription; the subscription on whatman to this ninth series is one hundred francs for all countries.

Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine are composed by hand, in fine eighteenth-century characters (Didot) from the Mayeur foundry (Allainguillaume and company successors), 21, rue du Montparnasse, in Paris, sixth arrondissement.