Jean-Christophe. III. La fin du voyage. I. Les amies. 1

Romain Rolland

The End of the Journey. I. The Friends. 1

In spite of the success that was beginning to take shape outside of France, the material situation of the two friends was slow to improve. Periodically there returned difficult moments in which they were obliged to tighten their belts. They made up for it by eating double rations whenever they had money. But in the long run it was an exhausting regime.

For the moment, they were going through one of their lean periods. Christophe had spent half the night finishing a tedious piece of musical transcription for Hecht; he had not gone to bed until dawn, and he was sleeping with clenched fists in order to make up for the lost time. Olivier had gone out early: he had a class to teach at the other end of Paris. Around eight o’clock the concierge, who was bringing up the letters, rang. As a rule he did not persist, but slipped the papers under the door. That morning he kept on knocking. Christophe, half awake, went and opened, grumbling; he did not listen to what the concierge, smiling and prolix, was saying to him about a newspaper article, he took the letters without looking at them, pushed the door without closing it, lay down again, and went back to sleep more soundly than before.

An hour later he was again awakened with a start by footsteps in his room; and he had the astonishment of seeing, at the foot of his bed, a figure who was a stranger to him, and who was bowing to him gravely. A journalist, finding the door open, had walked in without ceremony. Christophe, furious, leapt out of bed:

“What the devil have you come here for?” he shouted at him.

He had seized a pillow to throw at the intruder, who sketched a movement of retreat. They explained themselves. A reporter from the Nation wished to interview Monsieur Krafft regarding the article that had appeared in the Grand Journal.

“What article?”

“Had he not read it?” The reporter offered to acquaint him with it.

Christophe went back to bed. If he had not been numb with sleep, he would have put the man out the door; but he found it less tiring to let him speak. He buried himself in the bed, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep. He would have ended by playing his part to the life. But the other was tenacious, and read in a loud voice the beginning of the article. From the first lines Christophe pricked up his ears. The writer spoke of Monsieur Krafft as the foremost musical genius of the age. Forgetting his role of sleeper, Christophe swore in astonishment, and sitting up he said:

“They are mad. What has come over them?”

The reporter took the opportunity to interrupt his reading and put to him a series of questions, which Christophe answered without reflection. He had taken up the article, and was contemplating with stupefaction his portrait displayed on the front page; but he had no time to read it: for a second journalist had just entered the room. This time Christophe became angry in good earnest. He ordered them to clear out, which they did not do before they had quickly noted the arrangement of the furniture in the room, the photographs on the walls, and the appearance of the original, who, laughing and furious, pushed them by the shoulders and escorted them, in his shirt, to the door, which he bolted behind them.

But it was decreed that he should not be left in peace that day. He had not finished dressing when there came another knock at the door, in the agreed manner that only a few intimates knew. Christophe opened, and found himself in the presence of a third stranger, whom he was preparing to expel summarily, when the other, protesting, claimed the title of author of the article. There was no expelling someone who treated you as a genius! Christophe, sullenly, had to submit to the effusions of his admirer. He was astonished at this sudden notoriety which fell on him out of the blue, and he wondered whether, without suspecting it, he had had some masterpiece performed the evening before.

But he had no time to make inquiries. The journalist had come to carry him off, willing or not, and to conduct him on the spot to the offices of the newspaper, where the director, the great Arsène Gamache himself, wished to see him: the automobile was waiting downstairs. Christophe tried to defend himself; but, naïve and sensitive in spite of himself to protestations of friendship, he ended by letting himself be led.

Ten minutes later he was being presented to the potentate before whom everything trembled. A robust fellow of about fifty, short and thick-set, with a great round head, gray hair cut close like a brush, a swarthy face, an imperious speech, and a heavy, emphatic accent, with fits of gravelly volubility. He had imposed himself on Paris by his enormous self-confidence. A man of business, a manipulator of men, egoistic, naïve and cunning, passionate, full of himself, he identified his affairs with those of France, and even of humanity. His interest, the prosperity of his newspaper, and the salus publica seemed to him of the same order and closely associated. He had no doubt that whoever harmed him harmed France; and to crush a personal adversary he would in good faith have overturned the State. For the rest, he was not incapable of generosity. An idealist, as one is after dinner, he liked, like God the Father, to raise up from the dust some poor wretch from time to time, in order to manifest the greatness of his power, which made something out of nothing, which made ministers, which could, had it so wished, have made kings and unmade them. His competence was universal. He made geniuses too, if it pleased him.

That day he had just “made” Christophe.

It was Olivier who had, without thinking of it, hung the bell on the cat.

Olivier, who would take no step on his own behalf, who had a horror of self-advertisement and fled journalists like the plague, thought himself bound by other duties when it was a question of his friend. He was like those tender mothers, honest little bourgeois women, irreproachable wives, who would sell their bodies to obtain a favor for their rascally sons.

Writing in the reviews, and finding himself in contact with a number of critics and dilettantes, Olivier let slip no opportunity of speaking of Christophe; and for some time he had had the surprise of seeing that he was being listened to. He sensed around him a movement of curiosity, a mysterious rumor that was spreading through the literary and social circles. What was its origin? Were they certain echoes in the newspapers, following the recent performances of Christophe’s works in England and in Germany? It seemed that there was no precise cause. It was one of those phenomena well known to alert minds, which sniff the air of Paris and, better than the meteorological observatory of the Tour Saint-Jacques, know a day in advance the wind that is preparing, and what it will bring on the morrow. In this great nervous city, where electric thrills pass, there are invisible currents of fame, a latent celebrity which precedes the other, that vague rumor of drawing-rooms, that Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade which at a given moment bursts forth in an advertising article, the coarse blast of trumpet which drives into the dullest tympanums the name of the new idol. It happens, moreover, that this fanfare drives away the first and best friends of the man whom it celebrates. They are nonetheless responsible for it.

Thus Olivier had his share in the article in the Grand Journal. He had taken advantage of the interest that was being shown in Christophe, and he had taken care to warm it up by adroit information. He had been careful not to put Christophe directly in touch with the journalists; he feared some outburst. But, at the request of the Grand Journal, he had had the cunning to bring about a meeting, at a café table, between Christophe and a reporter, without Christophe suspecting anything. All these precautions only sharpened curiosity and made Christophe more interesting. Olivier had never before had any dealings with publicity; he had not calculated that he was setting in motion a formidable machine, which once launched could no longer be directed or moderated.

He was thunderstruck when, on his way to his class, he read the article in the Grand Journal. He had not foreseen this hammer-blow. Above all, he had not foreseen it so prompt. He had counted on the newspaper waiting, before writing, until it had gathered all the information and knew a little better what it wanted to talk about. That was too much naïveté. If a newspaper takes the trouble to discover a new glory, it is for itself, of course, and in order to deprive its rivals of the honor of the discovery. It must therefore make haste, even at the cost of understanding nothing of what it praises. But the author rarely complains of it: when one is admired, one is always sufficiently understood.

The Grand Journal, after having retailed absurd stories about Christophe’s poverty, representing him as a victim of German despotism, an apostle of liberty, forced to flee imperial Germany and to take refuge in France, the asylum of free souls — (a fine pretext for chauvinistic tirades!) — proceeded to a crushing eulogy of his genius, of which it knew nothing — nothing but a few flat melodies dating from Christophe’s beginnings in Germany, and which Christophe, ashamed of them, would have liked to annihilate. But if the author of the article was ignorant of Christophe’s work, he made up for it by his intentions — those which he attributed to him. Two or three words gathered here and there from the lips of Christophe or Olivier, or even of some Goujart who claimed to be well informed, had been enough for him to construct the image of a Jean-Christophe, “republican genius — the great musician of democracy.” He took the opportunity to belabor the contemporary French musicians, especially the most original and most independent, who cared very little about democracy. He made exceptions only of one or two composers whose electoral opinions seemed to him excellent. It was a pity that their music was much less so. But that was a detail. After all, their eulogy, and even that of Christophe, was less important than the criticism of the others. In Paris, when one reads an article praising a man, it is always prudent to ask oneself:

“Of whom is ill being spoken?”

Olivier blushed with shame as he ran through the newspaper, and he said to himself:

“I have done good work!”

He had difficulty in giving his class. As soon as he was free, he ran home. What was his consternation when he learned that Christophe had already gone out with the journalists! He waited for him to come to lunch. Christophe did not return. From hour to hour Olivier, more and more anxious, thought:

“What stupidities they must be making him say!”

Toward three o’clock Christophe came in, very jaunty. He had lunched with Arsène Gamache, and his head was a little muddled by the champagne he had drunk. He understood nothing of Olivier’s anxiety, who was asking him anxiously what he had said and done.

“What I have done? A famous lunch. It is a long time since I have eaten so well.”

He set about telling him the menu.

“And the wines… I have absorbed them of every color.”

Olivier interrupted him to speak to him of the guests.

“The guests?… I don’t know. There was Gamache, a quite round fellow, frank as gold; Clodomis, the author of the article, a charming boy; three or four journalists I don’t know, very gay, all good and charming to me, the cream of good fellows.”

Olivier did not look convinced. Christophe was astonished at his lack of enthusiasm.

“Have you not read the article?”

“Yes. Precisely. And you, have you read it carefully?”

“Yes… that is to say, I cast an eye over it. I hadn’t the time.”

“Well, read a little of it now.”

Christophe read. At the first lines he burst out laughing.

“Ah! the imbecile!” said he.

He was doubled up with laughter.

“Bah!” he went on, “all the critics are worth the same. They know nothing.”

But as he read on he began to grow angry: it was too stupid, it made him look ridiculous. That they should want to make him out “a republican musician” — that had no sense at all… Well, let us pass over that piece of nonsense… But that they should oppose his “republican” art to the “sacristy art” of the masters who had come before him — (he, who fed on the souls of those great men) — that was too much.

“Wretched cretins! They are going to make me out an idiot!…”

And then, what reason had they, on his account, to drub French musicians of talent, whom he loved more or less — (and rather less than more) — but who knew their trade and did him honor? And — the worst — they attributed to him, with incredible coolness, hateful sentiments toward his country!… No, that, that could not be borne.

“I am going to write to them,” said Christophe.

But Olivier interposed:

“No, no,” he said, “not now! You are too excited. Tomorrow, with a cool head…”

Christophe was obstinate. When he had something to say, he could not wait until the next day. He only promised Olivier to show him his letter. It was not useless. The letter, duly revised — in which he set himself above all to rectify the opinions attributed to him about Germany — Christophe ran to put in the post.

“This way,” he said as he came back, “tomorrow is all that is needed: the letter will appear tomorrow.”

Olivier gently shook his head, with an air of doubt. Then, still preoccupied, he said to Christophe, looking him straight in the eyes:

“Christophe, did you say nothing imprudent at the dinner?”

“Why no,” said Christophe, laughing.

“Quite sure?”

“Yes, coward.”

Olivier was a little reassured. But Christophe was hardly so. He had just remembered that he had spoken at random. Right away he had made himself at ease. Not for a moment had he thought of distrusting these people: they seemed to him so trusting, so well-disposed toward him! And in truth they were. One is always well-disposed toward those to whom one has done good. And Christophe testified to such a frank joy that it communicated itself to the others. His affectionate informality, his jovial sallies, his enormous appetite, and the speed with which liquids disappeared down his throat without moving him, were not displeasing to Arsène Gamache, solid at table himself, rough, rustic and sanguine, full of contempt for people who did not bear themselves well, for those who did not dare eat or drink, for the little exhausted Parisians. He judged a man at table. He appreciated Christophe. On the spot he proposed to put his Gargantua on the stage as an opera, at the Opera. — (The summit of art, for these French bourgeois, was then to put on the stage the Damnation of Faust or the Nine Symphonies.) — Christophe, whom this burlesque idea set off laughing, had great difficulty in preventing him from telephoning his orders to the director of the Opera, or to the Ministry of Fine Arts. — (To believe Gamache, it seemed that all these people were in his service.) — And this proposal recalling to him the strange disguise that had once been made of his symphonic poem David, he let himself go on to tell the story of the performance organized by the deputy Roussin for the debut of his beautiful friend. Gamache, who did not like Roussin, was delighted; and Christophe, put in the vein by the generous wines and the sympathy of his audience, launched into other stories, more or less indiscreet, of which his listeners lost nothing. Christophe alone had forgotten them when he rose from the table. And now, with Olivier’s question, they came back into his mind. He felt a little shiver run down his spine. For he had no illusion; he had sufficient experience to suspect what was going to happen; now that his elation had fallen, he saw it as clearly as if it were already done: his indiscretions deformed, published in newspaper gossip-columns, his artistic sallies turned into weapons of war. As for his letter of rectification, he knew, as well as Olivier, what to expect of it: to answer a journalist is to waste one’s ink; the journalist always has the last word.

Everything happened, point by point, as Christophe had foreseen. The indiscretions appeared, and the letter of rectification did not appear. Gamache contented himself with letting it be known that he recognized therein Christophe’s generosity of heart, that such scruples did him honor; but he kept jealously the secret of those scruples; and the false opinions attributed to Christophe continued to spread, raising acerbic criticisms in the Parisian newspapers, then from there in Germany, where there was indignation that a German artist should express himself with so little dignity regarding his country.

Christophe was very clever to take advantage of the interview to which the reporter of another newspaper subjected him, to protest his love for the Deutsches Reich, where one was, he said, at least as free as in the French Republic. — He was speaking to the representative of a conservative newspaper, which on the spot attributed to him antirepublican declarations.

“Better and better!” said Christophe. “Ah! see now, what has my music to do with politics?”

“It is the custom with us,” said Olivier. “Look at the battles fought over Beethoven’s back. Some make him a Jacobin, others a sanctimonious churchman, those a Père Duchesne, these a prince’s lackey.”

“Ah! how he would kick them all in the rear!”

“Well, do the same.”

Christophe wanted to. But he was too good a fellow with those who were amiable to him. Olivier was never reassured when he left him alone. For people were always coming to interview him; and Christophe might promise to keep watch on himself: he could not help being expansive and trusting. He said everything that passed through his head. There came female journalists who said they were his friends and made him talk about his sentimental adventures. Others used him to say ill of this man or that. When Olivier came in, he found Christophe quite penitent.

“Some other folly?” he would ask.

“As always,” Christophe would say, thunderstruck.

“Are you really incorrigible?”

“I am fit to be locked up… But this time, I swear it to you, this is the last time.”

“Yes, yes, until the next…”

“No, this time, it is over.”

The next day, Christophe triumphant said to Olivier:

“Another one came. I sent him packing.”

“You must not exaggerate,” said Olivier. “Be prudent with them. ‘That animal is very wicked.’ It attacks you when you defend yourself… It is so easy for them to take revenge! They make capital out of the smallest words you have said.”

Christophe passed his hand over his forehead:

“Ah! good God!”

“What is it again?”

“It is that I said to him, while shutting the door,…”

“Said what?”

“The Emperor’s word.”

“The Emperor’s?”

“Yes, well, if it isn’t his, it is at least somebody’s of his entourage…”

“Wretched man! You will see it on the front page of the newspaper!”

Christophe shuddered. But what he saw, the next day, was a description of his apartment, where the journalist had not been, and a conversation he had not held.

The information was embellished as it spread. In the foreign newspapers it was decked out with absurdities. French articles having recounted that Christophe, in his poverty, was transcribing music for guitar, Christophe learned from an English newspaper that he had played the guitar in courtyards.

He did not read only eulogies. Far from it. It was enough that Christophe should be patronized by the Grand Journal for him to be at once attacked by the other newspapers. It was not in keeping with their dignity to admit that a colleague could discover a genius whom they had ignored. Some made fun of him. Others pitied Christophe’s fate. Goujart, vexed that the grass had been cut under his feet, wrote an article to set things, he said, in their proper place. He spoke familiarly of his old friend Christophe, whose first steps in Paris he had guided: certainly, he was a well-endowed musician, but — (he could well say so, since they were friends) — full of gaps, insufficiently educated, without originality, of an extravagant pride: it was doing him the worst service to flatter that pride in a ridiculous manner, when he had needed a Mentor, wise, learned, judicious, benevolent and severe, etc.: (the whole portrait of Goujart). — The musicians laughed yellow. They affected a crushing contempt for an artist who enjoyed the support of the newspapers; and, playing the disgust of the vulgum pecus, they refused the gifts of Artaxerxes, who did not offer them any. Some stigmatized Christophe; others overwhelmed him under the weight of their commiseration. Certain attacked Olivier — (these were his colleagues). — They were glad to take revenge for his intransigence and the way in which he held them at a distance — more, to tell the truth, from a taste for solitude than from contempt for anyone. But what men forgive least is being able to do without them. — Some were not far from intimating that he found his own profit in the articles of the Grand Journal. There were some who took up the defense of Christophe against himself; they wore woeful faces over the unconsciousness of Olivier, who flung a delicate artist, a dreamer, insufficiently armed against life — Christophe — into the uproar of the Fair on the Square, where he would fatally be lost: for they treated Christophe as a little boy whose head was not strong enough to allow him to walk alone. They were ruining, they said, the future of this man whose good will and obstinate work deserved, if not genius, a better fate, and whom they were intoxicating with incense of bad quality. It was a great pity. Could he not be left in his shadow to work patiently for years? — Olivier would have had a fine answer for them:

“To work, one must eat. Who will give him bread?”

But that would not have nonplussed them. They would have answered with their splendid serenity:

“That is a detail. One must suffer. And what does suffering matter?”

Naturally, those who professed these stoical theories were people of the world, perfectly comfortable. As that millionaire said to a naïf, who was asking him his help for an artist in misery:

“But, sir, Mozart died of poverty.”

They would have found it in very bad taste if Olivier had said to them that Mozart would have asked nothing better than to live, and that Christophe was resolved on it.

Christophe was beginning to be sick of these portresses’ tittle-tattle. He wondered whether it would always last.

But after a fortnight it was over. The newspapers no longer spoke of him. Only, he was known. When his name was pronounced, each said, not:

“He is the author of David or of Gargantua,” but:

“Ah! yes, the man of the Grand Journal!…”

It was celebrity.

Olivier perceived it by the number of letters Christophe was receiving, and which reached him too, by ricochet: offers from librettists, propositions from concert promoters, protestations from friends of the last hour who had often been enemies of the first, invitations from women. They asked him also his opinion, for the inquiries of the newspapers, on an infinity of things: on the depopulation of France, on idealistic art, on the corset of women, on the nude in the theater, — whether he did not believe that Germany was in decadence, that music was finished, etc., etc. They laughed at them together. But, even as they made fun of them, behold Christophe, this Huron, beginning to accept invitations to dinner! Olivier could not believe his eyes.

“You!” said he.

“I. Perfectly,” replied Christophe, mockingly. “Did you think only you could go and see the fine ladies? Not at all, my little one! My turn now! I want to enjoy myself!”

“Enjoy yourself? My poor old fellow!”

The truth was that Christophe, having so long lived shut up in his rooms, was suddenly seized with a violent need to go out. And moreover he felt a naïve joy in inhaling the new glory. He grew, moreover, copiously bored at these evenings, and found society idiotic. But when he came back, slyly he said the opposite to Olivier. He went to the houses of these people; but he did not return; he found preposterous pretexts, of an alarming sans-gêne, for evading their reinvitations. Olivier was scandalized by it. Christophe laughed out loud. He went into society not to cultivate his fame, but to renew his supply of life, his museum of glances, of timbres of voices, of human gestures — all that material of forms, sounds and colors that the artist needs to enrich his palette periodically. A musician does not feed only on music. An inflection of human speech, the rhythm of a gesture, the harmony of a smile, suggest more music to him than the symphony of a colleague. But it must be said that this music of faces and souls is as insipid and as little varied in drawing-rooms as the music of musicians. Each has his manner, and freezes in it. The smile of a pretty woman is as stereotyped, in its studied grace, as a Parisian melody. The men are still more insipid than the women. Under the debilitating influence of society, energies grow blunt, original characters are toned down and effaced with a frightful rapidity. Christophe was struck by the number of dead or dying he met among the artists: such a young musician, full of sap and genius, whom success had enervated, numbed, annulled: he no longer thought of anything but reissuing the flatteries with which they suffocated him, day after day, and of sleeping. What he would become twenty years later, one could see at the other corner of the drawing-room, in the form of that old master with pomade in his hair, rich, celebrated, member of all the Academies, arrived at the summit of his career, and having no longer, it seemed, anything to fear or anything to consider, who was flattening himself before every one and everything, frightened of opinion, of power, of the press, no longer daring to say what he thought, and besides no longer thinking, no longer existing, exhibiting himself, a self-laden mass of his own relics.

Behind each of these artists and men of wit, who had been great, or who could have been so, one could be sure there was a woman who was eating them away. They were all dangerous, those who were silly and those who were not; those who loved and those who loved themselves; the best were the worst: for they trusted the artist all the more surely under the extinguisher of their misjudging affection, who in good faith applied themselves to domesticating the genius, to accommodating him to their own use, to leveling, pruning, raking, perfuming him, until he was on the scale of their sensibility, of their little vanity, of their mediocrity, and of that of their world.

Although Christophe only passed through that world, he saw enough of it to feel the danger. More than one, naturally, sought to monopolize him for her drawing-room, for her service; and Christophe had not been without half swallowing the hook of amiable words and promising smiles. Without his robust common sense and the disturbing example of the transformations already wrought around them by the modern Circes, he would not have escaped unscathed. But he did not care to swell the troop of those fine herders of turkeys. The risk would have been greater for him if there had been fewer to pursue him. Now that all, men and women, were quite convinced that they had a genius among them, after their habit they were exerting themselves to smother him. These people have only one idea, when they see a flower: to put it in a pot — a bird: to put it in a cage — a free man: to make of him a base lackey.

Christophe, troubled for a moment, took hold of himself at once, and sent them all packing.

Destiny is ironic. It lets the careless pass through the meshes of its net; but what it takes good care not to miss are those who are wary, the prudent, the forewarned. It was not Christophe who was caught in the Parisian seine, it was Olivier.

He had profited by his friend’s success: the fame of Christophe had been reflected back upon him. He was better known now, for having been mentioned in two or three newspapers as the man who had discovered Christophe, than for everything he had written in six years. He therefore received his share of the invitations addressed to Christophe; and he accompanied him with the intention of watching over him discreetly. Doubtless he was too absorbed in that task to watch over himself. Love passed, and seized him.

She was a little blond girl, thin and charming, with fine hair undulating like little waves around the narrow, limpid forehead, fine eyebrows over slightly heavy eyelids, eyes of a periwinkle blue, a delicate nose with palpitating nostrils, slightly hollowed temples, a capricious chin, a mobile mouth, witty and voluptuous, with corners slightly raised, the “Parmigianino-esque” smile of a little faun, very pure. She had a long, frail neck, a pretty waist, a body of elegant slenderness, something weary, something happy, something thoughtful, in her young face, which was enveloped in the disturbing and poetic enigma of awakening spring — Frühlingserwachen. — Her name was Jacqueline Langeais.

She was not yet twenty. She was of a Catholic family, rich, distinguished, and of free thought. Her father was an intelligent engineer, inventive and resourceful, open to new ideas, who had made his fortune thanks to his work, his political connections, and his marriage. A marriage of love and money — (the true marriage of love for these people) — with a pretty woman, very Parisian, of the financial world. The money had remained; but the love had gone. Some sparks of it had however been preserved: for it had been very lively, on both sides; but they did not pride themselves on an exaggerated fidelity. Each went about his and her affairs and pleasures; and they got on together like good egoistic comrades, without scruples, and prudent.

Their little girl was between them a bond, while at the same time the object of a deaf rivalry: for they loved her jealously, both of them. Each found himself in her again, with his favorite faults, idealized by the grace of childhood; and each sought sneakingly to filch her from the other. The child had not failed to feel it, with the cunning candor of those small creatures who have only too great a tendency to believe that the universe gravitates around them; and she profited by it. She provoked between them a perpetual outbidding in affection. There was not a whim of hers that she was not certain to see favored by the one if the other refused it; and the other was so vexed at having been outstripped that immediately he offered even more than the first had accorded. She had been indignly spoiled; and it was fortunate for her that her nature had nothing bad in it — apart from that egoism, common to almost all children, but which, in children too pampered and too rich, takes morbid forms which it owes to the absence of obstacles, to the absence of aim.

While adoring her, Monsieur and Madame Langeais would never have sacrificed to her any of their personal conveniences. They left the child alone the greater part of the day, in the midst of her thousand and one satisfied fantasies. She had no lack of time to dream; and she did not deprive herself of it. Precocious and soon enlightened by the imprudent talk held in her presence — (for they hardly bothered themselves) — when she was six she was telling her dolls little love stories, the characters of which were the husband, the wife, and the lover. It goes without saying that she meant no malice by it. From the day when she caught a glimpse of a sentiment under the words, it was over for the dolls: she kept her stories to herself. She had a fund of innocent sensuality, which resounded in the distance like invisible bells, far away, far away, on the other side of the horizon. One did not know what it was. At moments, the wind brought puffs of it; it came from one knew not where, one was enveloped in it, one felt oneself blushing, one’s breath would fail, with fear and pleasure. One understood nothing. And then, it disappeared as it had come. Nothing more was heard. Hardly a humming, an imperceptible resonance, diluted in the blue air. One knew only that it was over there, on the other side of the mountain, and that one must go there, go as quickly as possible: happiness was there. Ah! provided one arrived!…

While waiting to get there, one made strange ideas about what one was going to find. For the great affair, for the intelligence of this little girl, was to guess it. She had a friend of her own age, Simone Adam, with whom she often discussed these grave subjects. Each brought her lights, her experience of twelve years, the conversations overheard and the readings gleaned in secret. Standing on tiptoe, and clinging to the stones, the two little girls strained to see over the old wall that hid the future from them. But they might do as they pleased and claim to see through the cracks: they saw nothing at all. They were a mixture of candor, of poetic mischief, and of Parisian irony. They said enormous things without suspecting it, and made worlds out of the simplest matters. Jacqueline, who poked her nose everywhere without anyone finding it amiss, thrust her little nose into all her father’s books. Fortunately, she was protected against bad encounters by her very innocence and her instinct of a very tidy little girl: it was enough for her to come on a slightly crude scene or word to be disgusted; immediately she dropped the book, and passed amid the most infamous company like a startled little cat among puddles of dirty water — without a splash.

In general, novels did not attract her: they were too precise and too dry. But what made her heart beat with emotion and the hope of finding the enigma explained were the books of the poets — those who spoke of love, of course. They came a little nearer to her mentality of a little girl. They did not see things, they imagined them through the prism of desire or regret; they had the air of looking, as she did, through the cracks in the old wall. But they knew much more, they knew all the things it was a question of knowing, and they wrapped them in words very sweet and mysterious, which had to be unraveled with infinite precautions, in order to find… in order to find… Ah! one found nothing, but one was always on the point of finding…

The two curious ones did not weary of it. They repeated to one another, in undertones, with a little shiver, verses of Alfred de Musset or of Sully-Prudhomme, in which they imagined abysses of perversity; they copied them; they questioned one another on the hidden meaning of passages which sometimes had none; these little women of thirteen, innocent and effrontery, who knew nothing of love, discussed, half laughing, half serious, love and voluptuousness; and they scribbled on their blotters in class, under the paternal eye of the professor — a very gentle, very polite old papa — verses such as the following, which he seized one day and which suffocated him:

Let, oh! let me hold you entwined, Drink in your kisses senseless loves, Drop by drop and long!…

They followed the courses of a fashionable institution, richly attended, whose professors were masters of the University. There they found employment for their sentimental aspirations. Almost all these little girls were in love with their teachers. It was enough for them to be young and not too ill-favored to wreak havoc in the hearts. They worked like angels to be well thought of by their sultan. There were tears when at the compositions one was placed badly by him — by him, of course: for they cared little when it was by another. If he made compliments, one blushed, one paled, one shot him grateful and coquettish glances. And if he called you aside to give advice or to pay compliments, that was paradise. One did not need to be an eagle to please them. At the gymnastics lesson, when the teacher took Jacqueline in his arms to hang her on the trapeze, she felt a little fever. And what frenzied emulation! What secret transports of jealousy! What humble and coaxing glances at the master, to try to take him back from an insolent rival! In class, when he opened his mouth to speak, the pens and pencils rushed to follow him; they did not seek to understand, the great matter was not to lose a syllable. And while they wrote and wrote, without their curious gaze ceasing furtively to take note of the figure and gestures of the idol, Jacqueline and Simone asked each other in low voices:

“Do you think he would look well, with a blue-spotted tie?”

Then it was an ideal of chromos, of romantic and worldly books of verse, of poetical fashion plates — loves for actors, virtuosi, dead or living authors, Mounet-Sully, Samain, Debussy — glances exchanged with unknown young men at a concert, in a drawing-room, in the street, and the little passions immediately sketched out in idea — a perpetual need to be in love incessantly, to be always filled with a love, with a pretext for loving. Jacqueline and Simone confided everything to one another: evident proof that they felt nothing great; it was even the best way never to have a deep feeling. On the other hand, it turned into a state of chronic illness, of which they were the first to make fun, but which they cultivated lovingly. They excited one another. Simone, more romantic and more prudent, imagined more extravagances. But Jacqueline, more sincere and more ardent, was nearer to realizing them. Twenty times she came close to committing the worst follies. — She did not, however, commit them, as is the ordinary case with adolescents. There are hours when those poor little creatures gone mad — (which we have all been) — are within a hair’s breadth of throwing themselves, these into suicide, those into the arms of the first comer. Only, thanks to God, almost all stop there. Jacqueline wrote ten drafts of passionate letters to people scarcely known to her by sight; but she sent none of them, save an enthusiastic letter, which she did not sign, to a critic, ugly, vulgar, egoistic, of dry heart and narrow spirit. She had become infatuated with him for three lines in which she had discovered treasures of sensibility. She also took fire for a great actor: he lived near her; every time she passed his door, she said to herself:

“What if I went in?”

And once, she had the boldness to climb to his floor. But once there, she took flight. What would she have spoken to him about? She had nothing, nothing at all to say to him. She did not love him. And she knew it well. There was, by half, in her follies, voluntary deception. And for the other half it was the eternal and delicious and stupid need to love. As Jacqueline was of a very intelligent race, she was ignorant of nothing in this. That did not prevent her from being mad. A mad person who knows herself is worth two.

She went much into society. She was surrounded by young men who felt her charm and more than one of whom loved her. She loved none of them, and flirted with them all. She did not care about the harm she might do. A pretty girl makes a cruel game of love. It seems quite natural to her that one should love her, and she thinks she owes nothing save to the one she loves; willingly she would believe that whoever loves her is already happy enough. It must be said in her excuse that she suspects nothing of what love is, although she thinks of it all day long. People readily picture that a young society girl, brought up in the hothouse atmosphere of a great city, is more precocious than a country girl; and it is the opposite. Readings and conversations have indeed created in her an obsession with love which, in her unoccupied life, often verges on mania; it even happens that she has read the play in advance and knows all its words by heart. So she does not feel it. In love as in art, one must not read what others have said, one must say what one feels; and whoever hurries to speak before having anything to say risks very much never saying anything.

Jacqueline, like most young people, lived therefore in the midst of this dust of feelings lived by others, which, while maintaining her in a state of little perpetual fever, hands burning, throat dry, and eyes irritated, prevented her from seeing things. She believed she knew them. It was not good will she lacked. She read and she listened. She had learned much, here and there, in bits, in conversation and in books. She tried even to read into herself. She was worth more than the milieu in which she lived. She was more sincere.

A woman had on her a beneficent influence — too brief. A sister of her father, aged from forty to fifty, who had not married. Tall, of regular features, but sad and without beauty, Marthe Langeais was always dressed in black; she had a stiff distinction in her gestures and movements; she scarcely spoke, in a voice almost low. She would have gone unnoticed but for the clear gaze of her intelligent gray eyes, and the good smile of her slightly sad mouth.

She was seen at the Langeais’ only on certain days, when they were alone. Langeais had for her a respect mingled with boredom. Madame Langeais did not hide from her husband the little pleasure she found in her visits. Nevertheless they made it a duty of convenience to receive her regularly at dinner, one evening a week; and they did not show her too much that it was a duty. Langeais spoke of himself, which always interested him. Madame Langeais thought of other things, and smiled out of habit, replying at random. Everything passed off very well, with much politeness. There was even no lack of affectionate effusions when the aunt, who was discreet, took her leave earlier than they would have hoped; and the charming smile of Madame Langeais became more radiant on the days when she had in mind particularly agreeable memories. Aunt Marthe felt all this; few things escaped her gaze; and she saw much, in her brother’s house, that shocked or saddened her. But she showed nothing of it: what would have been the use? She loved her brother, she had been proud of his intelligence and his successes, like the rest of the family, who had not thought they paid too dearly with their privations for the triumph of the elder son. She at least had kept her free judgment. As intelligent as he, and morally better tempered, more virile — (as so many Frenchwomen are, so superior to the men) — she saw clearly into him; and when he asked her opinion, she gave it frankly. But it had been a long time since he had asked it! He found it more prudent not to know, or — (for he knew as much as she) — to close his eyes. She, out of pride, withdrew apart. No one bothered about her interior life. It was also more convenient for the others to ignore it. She lived alone, went out little, and had only a small number of friends, who were not very intimate. It would have been easy for her to take advantage of her brother’s connections and her own talents: she did not do it. She had written for one of the great Parisian Reviews two or three articles, historical and literary portraits, whose sober, just, striking style had been remarked. She had stopped at that. She could have formed interesting friendships with certain men, certain distinguished women who had shown an interest in her, and whom she herself perhaps would have been glad to know. She had not responded to their advances. It happened to her, having booked her seat at a play in which they were performing beautiful things she loved, not to go; and, when she could have taken a journey on which she knew she would have found pleasure, to remain at home. Her nature was a curious amalgam of stoicism and neurasthenia. The latter in no way touched the integrity of her thought. Her life was affected, but not her mind. An old sorrow, which she alone knew, had marked her at the heart. And deeper still, more unknown — unknown to herself — was the mark of destiny, the inner evil that was already beginning to gnaw at her. — However, the Langeais saw of her only her clear gaze, which sometimes embarrassed them.

Jacqueline scarcely paid attention to her aunt when she was carefree and happy — which was at first her most ordinary state. But when she arrived at the age when one secretly does inquieting work in body and soul that delivers the being over to anguishes, to disgusts, to terrors, to bewildered sadnesses, in those moments of absurd and atrocious vertigo, which fortunately do not last, but in which one feels oneself dying — the child who was drowning and who did not dare to cry “Help!” saw alone, beside her, Aunt Marthe holding out her hand. Ah! how far away the others were! Strangers, her father and her mother, with their affectionate egoism, too well satisfied with themselves to think of the little troubles of a doll of fourteen! But the aunt divined them, and she sympathized. She said nothing. She smiled, simply; across the table she exchanged with Jacqueline a glance of kindness. Jacqueline felt that the aunt understood her, and she came to take refuge with her. Marthe would place her hand on Jacqueline’s head, and would caress her, without speaking.

The little girl would confide in her. She would go to visit her great friend when her heart was swollen. She knew that at whatever moment she came, she would find the same indulgent eyes, which would pour into her a little of their tranquillity. She hardly spoke to her aunt of her imaginary little passions: she would have been ashamed of them; she felt that they were not true. But she said her vague and deep anxieties, more real, the only real ones.

“Aunt,” she would sigh sometimes, “I would so much like to be happy!”

“Poor little one!” Marthe would say, smiling.

Jacqueline would lean her head against the aunt’s knees, and kissing the hands that caressed her:

“Shall I be happy? Aunt, say, shall I be happy?”

“I don’t know, my darling. That depends a little on you… One can always be happy when one wishes.”

Jacqueline was incredulous.

“Are you happy, yourself?”

Marthe smiled melancholy.

“Yes.”

“No? Really? You are happy?”

“Do you not believe it?”

“Yes. But…”

Jacqueline stopped.

“What then?”

“As for me, I would like to be happy, but not in the same way as you.”

“Poor little one! I hope so too,” said Marthe.

“No,” continued Jacqueline, shaking her head with decision, “as for me, in the first place, I could not.”

“Neither could I, I should not have thought I could. Life teaches one to be able to do many things.”

“Oh! but I do not want to learn,” protested Jacqueline, uneasy. “I want to be happy as I want, myself.”

“You would be very embarrassed if you were asked how!”

“I know very well what I want.”

She wanted many things. But when it came to saying them, she found only one, which kept returning, like a refrain:

“First, I would like to be loved.”

Marthe sewed, in silence. After a moment, she said:

“And what good would that do you, if you did not love?”

Jacqueline, nonplussed, exclaimed:

“But, aunt, of course I am speaking only of someone I love! The rest, that doesn’t count.”

“And if you loved nothing?”

“What an idea! One always loves, always.”

Marthe shook her head, with an air of doubt.

“One does not love,” she said. “One wants to love. Loving is the greatest grace of God. Pray to him that he grant it to you.”

“And if I am not loved?”

“Even if you are not loved. You will be still happier.”

Jacqueline’s face lengthened; she put on a pouting look:

“I do not want that,” she said. “It would give me no pleasure at all.”

Marthe laughed affectionately, looked at Jacqueline, sighed, then took up her work again.

“Poor little one!” she said again.

“But why do you always say: poor little one?” asked Jacqueline, uneasy. “I do not want to be a poor little one. I want so much, so much to be happy!”

“That is just why I say: Poor little one!”

Jacqueline sulked a little. But it did not last long. Marthe’s good laugh disarmed her. She kissed her, pretending to be vexed. At bottom, at that age, one does not fail to be secretly flattered by melancholy presages for later, much later. Seen from afar, unhappiness wears a halo of poetry; and one fears nothing so much as the mediocrity of life.

Jacqueline did not perceive that the aunt’s face grew always paler. She did notice that Marthe went out less and less; but she attributed it to her stay-at-home habit, of which she often made fun. Once or twice, on coming for a visit, she had passed the doctor on his way out. She had asked her aunt:

“Are you ill?”

Marthe would answer:

“It is nothing.”

But behold, she ceased even to come to the weekly dinner at the Langeais’. Jacqueline, indignant, went to make her bitter reproaches.

“My darling,” said Marthe gently, “I am a little tired.”

But Jacqueline would hear nothing of it. Poor pretexts, all that!

“A fine fatigue, to come to us, two hours a week! You don’t love me,” she said. “You love only your corner by the fire.”

But when, all proud, she recounted her scolding at home, Langeais sharply rebuked her:

“Leave your aunt in peace! Don’t you know that the poor woman is very ill?”

Jacqueline paled; and in a trembling voice she asked what was the matter with her aunt. They did not want to tell her. In the end she succeeded in learning that Marthe was dying of an intestinal cancer; she had only a few months left.

Jacqueline had days of terror. She was a little reassured when she saw her aunt. Marthe, fortunately, did not suffer too much. She kept her tranquil smile, which on her diaphanous face seemed the reflection of an inner lamp. Jacqueline said to herself:

“No, it is not possible, they have made a mistake, she would not be so calm…”

She resumed the recital of her little confidences, to which Marthe lent even more interest than before. Only, sometimes in the middle of a conversation, the aunt would leave the room, without anything betraying that she suffered; and she would reappear only when the crisis was past and her features had returned to serenity. She did not want any allusion to be made to her condition, she tried to hide it; perhaps she herself had need of not thinking too much about it: the evil, by which she knew herself gnawed, horrified her; she turned her mind away from it; all her effort was no longer to disturb the peace of her last months. The denouement was more prompt than was thought. Soon she received no one but Jacqueline. Then Jacqueline’s visits had to become shorter. Then came the day of separation. Marthe, stretched in her bed, from which for weeks she had not risen, took tender leave of her little friend, with very soft and consoling words. And then she shut herself in, to die.

Jacqueline went through months of despair. Marthe’s death coincided with the worst hours of that moral distress, against which Marthe was the only one to defend her. She found herself in a state of indescribable abandonment. She would have needed a faith to sustain her. It seemed that this support should not have been lacking to her: she had always been made to practice exactly her religious duties; her mother practiced them too. But there it was, precisely: her mother practiced them; but Aunt Marthe did not practice them. And how not to make the comparison! The eyes of a child catch many lies which older folk no longer think to notice; they note also many weaknesses and contradictions. Jacqueline observed that her mother and those who said they believed had as much fear of death as if they had not believed. No, that was not a sufficient support… Then, on top of this, personal experiences, revolts, repugnances, a clumsy confessor who had wounded her… She continued to practice, but without faith, as one pays visits because one is well brought up. Religion, like society, seemed to her nothingness. Her only recourse was the memory of the dead one, in which she wrapped herself. She had much to reproach herself for in regard to the one whom, once, her juvenile egoism had often neglected, and whom today it called in vain. She idealized her figure; and the great example that Marthe had left her of a deep and recollected life contributed to making her take a disgust for the life of society, without seriousness and without truth.

She saw in it only hypocrisies; and those amiable compromises which, at other times, would have amused her, revolted her. She found herself in a state of moral hyperesthesia, in which everything made her suffer; her conscience was laid bare. Her eyes opened upon certain facts which until then had escaped her heedlessness. One of them wounded her to the quick.

She was, one afternoon, in her mother’s drawing-room. Madame Langeais was having a visit — a fashionable painter, handsome and pretentious, a familiar of the house, but not very intimate. Jacqueline thought she felt that her presence embarrassed the two others; she stayed all the more. Madame Langeais, slightly nervous, her head numbed by a little migraine, or by one of those tablets against migraine which the ladies of today crunch like sweets and which finish emptying their little brains, did not watch too closely what she said. In the course of the conversation, she absently called the visitor:

“My darling…”

She perceived it at once. He did not flinch any more than she; and they continued to converse ceremoniously. Jacqueline, who was busy serving the tea, almost let slip a cup in her surprise. She had the impression that, behind her back, they exchanged a smile of intelligence. She turned, and caught their complicit glances, which on the spot were veiled.

Her discovery overwhelmed her. This young girl, freely brought up, who had often heard discussed and discussed herself, laughing, intrigues of this kind, experienced an intolerable suffering when she saw that her mother… Her mother — no, that was not the same thing!… With her ordinary exaggeration, she passed from one extreme to the other. She had suspected nothing till then. Thenceforth she suspected everything. She set herself to interpret this and that detail in her mother’s past conduct. And no doubt the lightness of Madame Langeais lent itself only too much to these suppositions; but Jacqueline added to them. She would have wished to draw closer to her father, who had always been nearer to her, and whose intelligence had much attraction for her. She would have wanted to love him more, to pity him. But Langeais seemed to have no need of being pitied; and the over-excited mind of the young girl was crossed by that suspicion, more frightful still than the first — that her father was ignorant of nothing, but that he found it more convenient to know nothing, and that provided he himself acted as he pleased, the rest was indifferent to him.

Then Jacqueline felt herself lost. She did not dare despise them. She loved them. But she could no longer live there. Her friendship with Simone Adam was of no help to her. She judged with severity the weaknesses of her former companion. She did not spare herself either; she suffered from what she saw in herself of ugly and mediocre; she clung desperately to the pure memory of Marthe. But that memory itself was effacing itself; she felt that the flood of days, one after another, would cover it, washing away the imprint. And then all would be over; she would be like the others, drowned in the mire… Oh! to get out at all costs from this world! Save me! Save me!…

It was in those days of feverish forsakenness, of passionate disgust, and of mystical expectation, when she was holding out her hands toward an unknown Savior, that she met Olivier.

Madame Langeais had not failed to invite Christophe, who was, that winter, the fashionable musician. Christophe had come, and, after his custom, had not put himself out. Madame Langeais had not the less found him charming: — he could allow himself anything while he was the fashion, he was always found charming; it was the matter of a few months. — Jacqueline, who was, for the moment, outside the current, showed herself less charmed; the mere fact that Christophe was praised by certain people sufficed to set her on her guard. Moreover, the brusqueness of Christophe, his way of speaking loudly, his gayety, wounded her. In her state of mind, the joy of living seemed coarse to her; she sought the melancholy chiaroscuro of the soul, and imagined that she loved it. There was too much daylight in Christophe. But as she conversed with him, he spoke to her of Olivier: he felt the need of associating his friend with everything happy that came to him; any new affection would have seemed selfish to him if he had not levied a share for Olivier. He spoke so well of him that Jacqueline, secretly troubled by the vision of a soul that accorded with her own thought, had him invited too. Olivier did not accept at once: which allowed Christophe and Jacqueline to complete at leisure an imaginary portrait of him, to which he had to conform when finally he decided to come.

He came, but spoke little. He had no need to speak. His intelligent eyes, his smile, the fineness of his manners, the tranquillity that enveloped him and that he radiated, were bound to seduce Jacqueline. Christophe, by contrast, set Olivier off. She showed nothing of it, out of fear of the feeling that was being born; she continued to converse only with Christophe — but it was of Olivier. Christophe, too happy to speak of his friend, did not perceive the pleasure Jacqueline took in this subject of conversation. He spoke also of himself, and she listened to him with complaisance, although it did not interest her in the least; then, without seeming to, she brought the conversation back to episodes of his life in which Olivier figured.

Jacqueline’s kindnesses were dangerous for a boy who did not suspect anything. Without thinking of it, Christophe was falling in love with her; he found pleasure in coming back; he took care of his toilette; and with a feeling he knew well, he began once more to mingle his tender and laughing languor with everything he thought. Olivier had fallen in love too, and from the first days; he thought himself neglected, and suffered in silence. Christophe increased his pain by joyously recounting to him, on leaving the Langeais’, his conversations with Jacqueline. It did not enter Olivier’s head that he could please Jacqueline. Although by living near Christophe he had acquired more optimism, he continued to distrust himself; he could not believe he would ever be loved, he saw himself with too truthful eyes; — who then would be worthy of being loved, if it were for his merits, and not for those of the magic and indulgent love?

One evening when he was invited to the Langeais’, he felt that he would be too unhappy on seeing the indifferent Jacqueline again; and, on the pretext of fatigue, he told Christophe to go without him. Christophe, suspecting nothing, went off quite joyous. In his naïve egoism, he was thinking only of the pleasure of having Jacqueline all to himself. He had no reason to rejoice over it for long. At the news that Olivier would not come, Jacqueline at once took on a sullen, irritated, bored, disconcerted air; she no longer felt any desire to please; she did not listen to Christophe, replied at random; and he saw, with humiliation, that she was stifling an irritated yawn. She wanted to cry. Brusquely she went out, in the middle of the evening; and she did not reappear.

Christophe went back, crestfallen. Along the road he tried to explain to himself this abrupt reversal; some glimmers of the truth began to appear to him. At home he found Olivier waiting for him, and asking him, in a tone he was trying to make indifferent, for news of the evening. Christophe recounted his discomfiture. As he spoke, he saw Olivier’s face lighten.

“And this fatigue?” he said. “Why did you not go to bed?”

“Oh! I am better,” said Olivier; “I am no longer weary at all.”

“Yes, I think,” said Christophe slyly, “that it did you a great deal of good not to come.”

He looked at him affectionately, mischievously, went off to his room; and there, when he was alone, he began to laugh, to laugh under his breath until tears came:

“The little minx!” he thought. “She was making fun of me! And he too was deceiving me. How they hid their game!”

From that moment, he tore out of his heart every personal thought regarding Jacqueline; and like a brave mother hen jealously brooding over her egg, he brooded over the romance of the two little lovers. Without seeming to know the secret of either of them, and without betraying it from one to the other, he helped them without their knowing it.

He thought it his duty, gravely, to study Jacqueline’s character, in order to see whether Olivier could be happy with her. And as he was awkward, he annoyed Jacqueline by the preposterous questions he put to her about her tastes, her morality, etc.

“There is an imbecile! What is he meddling with?” thought Jacqueline, furious, who did not answer him and turned her back on him.

And Olivier was beaming to see that Jacqueline paid no more attention to Christophe. And Christophe was beaming to see that Olivier was happy. His joy even spread, in a much more boisterous fashion than Olivier’s. And as she could not explain it, Jacqueline, who did not suspect that Christophe saw their love more clearly than she saw it herself, found him insupportable; she could not understand how Olivier had become infatuated with so vulgar and so cumbersome a friend. The good Christophe divined her, and he took a mischievous pleasure in making her cross; then he withdrew aside, pleading work as a pretext for refusing the Langeais’ invitations and leaving Jacqueline and Olivier alone together.

He was not without his anxieties, however, for the future. He attributed to himself a great responsibility in the marriage that was preparing; and he tormented himself: for he saw quite justly into Jacqueline, and he dreaded many things: her wealth first of all, her education, her milieu, and above all her weakness. He recalled his old friend Colette. No doubt, he realized that Jacqueline was truer, more frank, more passionate; there was in this little being an ardent aspiration toward a courageous life, an almost heroic desire.

“But to desire is not enough,” thought Christophe, who remembered a lusty piece of bawdry by friend Diderot; “one must have strong loins.”

He wanted to warn Olivier of the danger. But when he saw Olivier coming back from Jacqueline’s, his eyes bathed in joy, he no longer had the courage to speak. He thought:

“The poor little ones are happy. Let us not trouble their happiness.”

Little by little, his affection for Olivier made him share his friend’s confidence. He was reassured; he ended by believing that Jacqueline was such as Olivier saw her, and as she herself wanted to see herself. She had such good will! She loved Olivier for everything he had different from her and from her world: because he was poor, because he was intransigent in his moral ideas, because he was awkward in society. She loved in so pure and so entire a way that she would have wished to be poor like him, and almost, at moments,… yes, almost to become ugly, in order to be sure of being loved for herself, for the love of which her heart was full and of which it was hungry… Ah! certain days, when he was there, she felt herself growing pale, and her hands trembled. She affected to mock her own emotion, she feigned to be busy with something else, scarcely to look at him; she spoke with irony. But suddenly she would interrupt herself; she would go out, she would flee into her room; and there, with every door closed, the curtain lowered on the window, she remained seated, her knees pressed together, her elbows drawn against her belly, her arms crossed on her breast, pressing back the beating of her heart; she stayed thus, drawn into herself, without a movement, without a breath; she did not dare to stir, for fear lest at the slightest gesture happiness should escape her. She held love in silence to her body.

Now Christophe was passionate for Olivier’s success. He occupied himself with him maternally, supervised his toilette, claimed to give him advice on the way to dress, made — (in what fashion!) — his tie-knots. Olivier, patient, let him do, ready to retie his tie on the stairs, when Christophe was no longer there. He smiled to himself, but he was touched by this great affection. Besides, intimidated by his love, he was not sure of himself, and willingly asked Christophe’s advice; he told him about his visits. Christophe was as moved as he; and sometimes, at night, he spent hours seeking the means of smoothing the path for his friend’s love.

It was in the grounds of the Langeais’ villa, on the outskirts of Paris, in a little hamlet on the edge of the forest of l’Isle-Adam, that Olivier and Jacqueline had the conversation that decided their life.

Christophe had accompanied his friend; but he had found a harmonium in the house, and he set himself to play, leaving the lovers to walk in peace. — To tell the truth, they did not desire it. They feared being alone. Jacqueline was silent and a little hostile. Already, at the last visit, Olivier had felt a change in her manners, a sudden coldness, certain glances that seemed strange, hard, almost hostile. He had been frozen by it. He did not dare to explain himself with her: he feared too much to receive from the one he loved a cruel word. He trembled to see Christophe go off; it seemed to him that his presence alone guaranteed him against the blow that was going to strike him.

Jacqueline did not love Olivier any less. She loved him much more. That was what made her hostile. This love, with which once she had played, which she had so much called for, was there, before her; she saw it open before her steps, like an abyss, and she drew back, frightened; she no longer understood; she asked herself:

“But why? why? What does it mean?”

Then she would look at Olivier, with that glance which made him suffer, and she thought:

“Who is this man?”

And she did not know. He was a stranger.

“Why do I love him?”

She did not know.

“Do I love him?”

She did not know… She did not know; but she knew that she was nonetheless caught; love held her; she was going to lose herself in him, lose herself entirely — her will, her independence, her egoism, her dreams of the future — all engulfed in this monster. And she stiffened herself with anger; at moments she felt, for Olivier, a feeling almost of hatred.

They went to the end of the grounds, into the kitchen garden, which was separated from the lawns by a curtain of great trees. They walked with small steps, in the midst of the alleys, which were bordered with currant bushes with red and golden clusters, and beds of strawberries, whose breath filled the air. It was in the month of June; but storms had cooled the weather. The sky was gray, the light half extinguished; low clouds moved heavily, all in a mass, driven by the wind. From that great distant wind nothing reached the earth; not a leaf stirred; but the air was very fresh. A great melancholy enveloped things, and their hearts, which a grave happiness inundated. And from the depth of the garden, from the invisible villa, with windows half open, there came to them the sounds of the harmonium, which was playing the fugue in E flat minor of Johann Sebastian Bach. They sat down side by side on the edge of a well, both pale, without speaking. And Olivier saw tears flowing down Jacqueline’s cheeks.

“You are weeping?” he murmured, with trembling lips.

And his tears too flowed.

He took her hand. She bent her blond head on Olivier’s shoulder. She no longer tried to struggle: she was vanquished; and it was such a relief to her!…

They wept softly, listening to the music, beneath the moving canopy of heavy clouds, whose silent flight seemed to graze the crest of the trees. They thought of all they had suffered — who knows? perhaps also of what they would suffer later. There are minutes in which music brings forth all the melancholy woven around the destiny of a being…

After a moment, Jacqueline wiped her eyes, and looked at Olivier. And suddenly they kissed. O ineffable happiness! Religious happiness! So sweet and so deep that it is painful!

Jacqueline asked:

“Did your sister look like you?”

Olivier was startled. He said:

“Why do you speak to me of her? You knew her then?”

She said:

“Christophe told me… You suffered greatly?”

Olivier bowed his head, too moved to reply.

“I have suffered greatly too,” she said.

She spoke of the vanished friend, of dear Marthe; she said, her heart swollen, how she had wept, wept to die of it.

“You will help me?” she said, in a supplicating voice; “you will help me to live, to be good, to resemble her a little? The poor Marthe, you will love her too?”

“We will love them both, as the two of them love each other.”

“I would they were here!”

“They are here.”

They remained, pressed against one another; they breathed scarcely, and they felt their hearts beat. A fine little rain was falling, falling. Jacqueline shivered.

“Let us go back,” she said.

Under the trees it was already almost night. Olivier kissed Jacqueline’s wet hair; she raised her head to him, and he felt on his lips, for the first time, the loving lips, those lips of a little girl, feverish, slightly chapped. They were on the point of fainting.

Quite near the house, they stopped again:

“How alone we were, before!” he said.

He had already forgotten Christophe.

They remembered him, at last. The music had ceased. They returned. Christophe, leaning on his elbows on the harmonium, his head between his hands, was dreaming, he too, of many things in the past. When he heard the door open, he awoke from his reverie, and showed them his affectionate face, illumined by a grave and tender smile. He read in their eyes what had happened, pressed the hand of both, and said:

“Sit down there. I am going to play you something.”

They sat down, and he played, at the piano, all that he had in his heart, all his love for them. When it was finished, the three of them remained, without speaking. Then he rose, and he looked at them. He had so kind an air, and so much older and stronger than they! For the first time, she had a sense of what he was. He drew them into his arms, and said to Jacqueline:

“You will love him well, won’t you? You will love each other well?”

They were penetrated with gratitude. But right after, he turned the conversation, laughed, went to the window, and jumped into the garden…

The following days he urged Olivier to make his request to Jacqueline’s parents. Olivier did not dare, for fear of the refusal he foresaw. Christophe also pressed him to look for a position. Supposing that he were accepted by the Langeais, he could not accept Jacqueline’s fortune if he did not find himself in a condition to earn his own bread. Olivier thought as he did, without sharing his injurious, somewhat comic mistrust of rich marriages. It was an idea anchored in Christophe’s head, that wealth kills the soul. He would willingly have repeated this saying of a wise beggar to a rich female bird, who was worrying about the hereafter:

“What, madam, you have millions, and you would still wish, into the bargain, to have an immortal soul?”

“Mistrust woman,” he said to Olivier — half jesting, half serious — “mistrust woman, but twenty times more the rich woman. Woman loves art, perhaps, but she stifles the artist. The rich woman poisons both art and artist. Wealth is a sickness. And woman bears it still worse than man. Every rich person is an abnormal being… You laugh? You make fun of me? What! does a rich man know what life is? Does he remain in close communion with rough reality? Does he feel on his face the wild breath of poverty, the smell of bread to be earned, of the earth to be turned? Can he understand, does he even wish to understand, beings and things?… Long ago, when I was a small boy, I happened once or twice to be taken on a drive in the landau of the grand-duke. The carriage passed through meadows whose every blade of grass I knew, among woods where I had ranged alone and that I adored. Well, I no longer saw anything. All those dear landscapes had become for me as stiff, as starched, as the imbeciles who were taking me out. Between the meadows and my heart, there was interposed not only the curtain of those starchy souls. It was enough merely to have those four planks beneath my feet, that traveling platform above nature. To feel that the earth is my mother, I need to have my feet sunk in her belly, like the newborn coming forth into the light. Wealth cuts the bond that unites man to the earth, and that links to one another all the children of the earth. And then, how would you have me still be an artist? The artist is the voice of the earth. A rich man cannot be a great artist. He would need to be so, a thousand times more genius, in conditions so disgraced by fortune. Even if he attains it, he is always a hothouse fruit. The great Goethe may do what he will: his soul has atrophied limbs, he lacks essential organs which wealth has killed. You, who have not a Goethe’s sap, you would be devoured by wealth, above all by the rich woman, whom Goethe at least avoided. The man alone can still react against the scourge. He has in him such a native brutality, such a humus accumulated of harsh and salutary instincts that bind him to the earth, that, alone, he still has chances of saving himself. But the woman is delivered up to the poison, and she communicates it to others. She delights in the perfumed stench of wealth, she can no longer do without it. A woman who remains sound of heart, in the midst of fortune, is a prodigy, as much as a millionaire with genius… And then, I do not like monsters. Whoever has more than his share to live on is a monster — a human cancer that gnaws away at other men.”

Olivier laughed:

“What would you have?” he said. “I cannot, however, cease to love Jacqueline because she is not poor, nor oblige her to be so, for love of me.”

“Well, if you cannot save her, at least save yourself. And that is still the best way of saving her. Keep yourself pure. Work.”

Olivier had no need that Christophe should communicate his scruples to him. Even more than he, he had a ticklish soul. Not that he took seriously Christophe’s diatribes against money: he had been rich himself, he did not detest wealth, and he found that it became well the dear face of Jacqueline. But it was unbearable to him that any suspicion of interest could be mingled with the idea of his love. He asked to reenter the University. He could no longer hope, for the moment, for anything but a mediocre post in a provincial lycée. It was a sad wedding gift to offer Jacqueline.

He spoke to her of it timidly. Jacqueline had at first some difficulty in admitting his reasons: she attributed them to an exaggerated self-love, which Christophe had put into his head and which she found ridiculous: is it not natural, when one loves, to accept with equal heart the fortune and the misfortune of the one one loves, and is it not a petty feeling to refuse to owe him a benefit which would give him so much joy?… Nevertheless, she rallied to Olivier’s project: what it had of austere and not very pleasant was precisely what decided her; she found in it an occasion to satisfy her appetite for moral heroism. In the state of proud revolt that her grief had provoked against her milieu, and that her love exalted, she had ended by denying everything in her nature which was in contradiction with this mystic ardor; in all sincerity she strained her whole being, like a bow, toward an ideal of life very pure, difficult, and radiant with happiness. The obstacles, the mediocrity of her future condition, everything was joy to her. How good and beautiful that would be!…

Madame Langeais was too occupied with herself to pay great attention to what was happening around her. For some time, she thought only of her health; she filled her time with caring for imaginary illnesses, trying one doctor, then another: each in turn was for her the Savior; he lasted a fortnight; then it was the turn of another. She remained months, away from home, in very costly sanatoriums, where she executed with devotion puerile prescriptions. She had forgotten her daughter and her husband.

Monsieur Langeais, less indifferent, began to suspect the intrigue. His paternal jealousy warned him. He had for Jacqueline that troubled and pure affection many fathers feel for their daughters, but that they hardly confess, that indefinable sentiment, that mysterious, voluptuous, almost sacred curiosity, of living again in beings of one’s own blood, who are oneself, and who are women. There are in these secrets of the heart many shadows and lights, which it is healthy to ignore. Until then, he had been amused to see his daughter make the little young men in love: he liked her thus, coquettish, romantic, and yet shrewd — (as he was himself). — But when he saw that the adventure threatened to become more serious, he grew uneasy. He began by making fun of Olivier in front of Jacqueline, then he criticized him with a certain bitterness. Jacqueline laughed at it at first, and said:

“Don’t speak so ill of him, papa: that would embarrass you later, if I wanted to marry him.”

Monsieur Langeais cried out; he treated her as mad. A good way of making her become so entirely. He declared that she would never marry Olivier. She declared that she would marry him. The veil was rent. He saw that he no longer counted for her. His paternal egoism had never suspected it, and he was indignant. He swore that neither Olivier nor Christophe should set foot in his house again. Jacqueline grew exasperated; and one fine morning, Olivier, going to open his door, saw the young girl come in like a gust of wind, pale and determined, and she said to him:

“Take me away! My parents do not wish it. I, I wish it. Compromise me.”

Olivier, taken aback, but touched, did not even try to argue. Fortunately, Christophe was there. Ordinarily he was the least reasonable. He reasoned with them. He showed them the scandal that would follow, and how they would suffer for it. Jacqueline, biting her lip with anger, said:

“Well, we will kill ourselves afterwards.”

Far from frightening Olivier, this was a reason for him to be resolved. Christophe had no little trouble in obtaining from the two mad ones some patience: before coming to those desperate means, the others must be tried: let Jacqueline go back home; he himself would go and see Monsieur Langeais, and plead their cause.

Singular advocate! At the first words he spoke, Monsieur Langeais nearly turned him out; then the ridiculous nature of the situation struck him, and he was amused by it. Little by little, the seriousness of his interlocutor, his expression of honesty and conviction imposed itself; nevertheless, he did not want to agree, and continued to fire ironic remarks at him. Christophe pretended not to hear; but, at certain more cutting arrows, he stopped, he bristled in silence; then he resumed. At one moment, he set his fist on the table, which he hammered, and said:

“I beg you to believe that the visit I am making is hardly agreeable to me; I have to do violence to myself not to pick up certain of your words; but I judge that I have the duty to speak to you; and I do it. Forget me, as I forget myself, and weigh what I say.”

Monsieur Langeais listened; and when he heard speak of the project of suicide, he shrugged his shoulders and pretended to laugh; but he was shaken. He was too intelligent to treat as a joke such a threat; he knew that one had to reckon with the insanity of girls in love. Once one of his mistresses, a laughing and pampered girl, whom he thought incapable of carrying out her boasting, had fired a revolver shot in front of him; she had not died of it on the spot; he still saw the scene… No, one is sure of nothing with these mad girls. He had a tightening of the heart… “She wishes it? Well, so be it. So much the worse for her, the silly one!…” He would have granted everything, rather than push his daughter to extremes. Certainly, it would have been possible for him to use diplomacy, feign to consent, gain time, gently detach Jacqueline from Olivier. But for that he would have had to give himself more trouble than he could or would. And then, he was weak; and the mere fact that he had violently said “No!” to Jacqueline inclined him now to say “Yes.” After all, what does one know of life? This little one might be right. The great affair is to love. Monsieur Langeais was not ignorant that Olivier was a serious young man, who perhaps had talent… He gave his consent.

The evening before the marriage, the two friends sat up together part of the night. They did not want to lose anything of these last hours of a dear past. — But it was already past, already. Like those sad farewells, on the platform of a station, when the wait drags on before the train departs: one obstinately remains, looks at one another, talks. But the heart is no longer there; the friend has already gone… Christophe tried to converse. He stopped in the middle of a phrase, seeing Olivier’s distracted eyes, and said, with a smile:

“How far away you already are!”

Olivier excused himself, confused. He was saddened to see that he allowed himself to be distracted from these last moments of intimacy with his friend. But Christophe pressed his hand and said:

“Come now, don’t constrain yourself. I am happy. Dream, my little one.”

They remained at the window, leaning on their elbows side by side, looking at the garden in the night. After some time, Christophe said to Olivier:

“You are escaping from me? You think you are going to elude me? You are thinking of your Jacqueline. But I am going to catch you. I too am thinking of her.”

“My poor old fellow,” said Olivier, “and I was thinking of you! And even…”

He stopped.

Christophe finished the phrase for him, laughing:

”… And even who was giving myself so much trouble for it!…”

Christophe had made himself very handsome, almost elegant, for the ceremony. There was no religious marriage: neither indifferent Olivier nor rebel Jacqueline had wished for one. Christophe had written for the mairie a symphonic piece; but, at the last moment, he had renounced it, after realizing what a civil marriage is: he found these ceremonies ridiculous. One must be, to believe in them, very destitute of faith and liberty alike. When a true Catholic takes the trouble of becoming a free-thinker, it is not to attribute a religious character to a functionary of the civil registry. Between God and the free conscience, there is no room for a State religion. The State registers; it does not unite.

The marriage of Olivier and Jacqueline was not made to inspire Christophe with regret for his determination. Olivier listened, with a detached, slightly ironic air, to the mayor flattering heavily the young couple, the rich family, and the decorated witnesses. Jacqueline was not listening; and furtively she was sticking out her tongue at Simone Adam, who was watching her; she had wagered with her that “it would do her nothing at all” to be married, and she was in the process of winning: she scarcely thought that it was she who was getting married; the thought amused her. The others were posing for the gallery; and the gallery was eyeing them. Monsieur Langeais paraded; sincere though his affection for his daughter was, his greatest preoccupation was to note the guests, and to know whether he had not made omissions in his list of announcements. Christophe alone was moved; he was on his own the parents, the newlyweds, and the mayor; he watched Olivier closely with his eyes, who was not looking at him.

In the evening, the young couple left for Italy. Christophe and Monsieur Langeais accompanied them to the station. They saw them joyous, without regrets, not hiding their impatience to be already gone. Olivier looked like an adolescent, and Jacqueline like a little girl… Melancholy and tender charm of these departures! The father is a little sad to see his little one carried off by a stranger, and for what!… and forever far from him. But they feel only a feeling of intoxicated deliverance. Life has no more shackles; nothing stops them anymore; it seems to them they have reached the summit: one can die now, one has everything, one fears nothing… Later, one sees that it was only a stage. The road resumes, and winds around the mountain; and very few people arrive at the second stage…

The train carried them off into the night. Christophe and Monsieur Langeais came back together. Christophe said, with a malicious naïveté:

“Here we are, widowers, now!”

Monsieur Langeais began to laugh. He liked Christophe well, whom he had come to know. They said goodbye, and each went on his way. They had pain. But it was a mixture of sadness and sweetness. Alone, in his room, Christophe thought:

“The best of my soul is happy.”

Nothing had been changed in Olivier’s room. It had been agreed between the two friends that, until Olivier’s return and his new installation, his furniture and his keepsakes should remain at Christophe’s. It was as if he were still present. Christophe looked at the portrait of Antoinette, he placed it on his table, and he said to it:

“Little one, are you content?”

He wrote often — a little too much — to Olivier. He received from him few letters, distracted, and gradually more distant in spirit. He was disappointed by it, but not too much affected. He persuaded himself that it had to be so; and he was not anxious about the future of their friendship.

Solitude did not weigh on him. Far from it: he did not have enough of it for his taste. He was beginning to suffer from the protection of the Grand Journal. Arsène Gamache had a tendency to believe that he possessed a right of property over the glories he had taken the trouble to discover: it seemed natural to him that these glories should be associated with his own, as Louis XIV had grouped around his throne Molière, Le Brun, and Lulli. Christophe found that the author of the Hymn to Aegir was no more imperial, nor more troublesome for art, than his patron of the Grand Journal. For the journalist, who did not know more about it than the emperor, had no less than he fixed opinions on art; what he did not love, he did not tolerate the existence of: he decreed it bad and pernicious; and he ruined it, in the public interest. A comic and formidable spectacle, that of these men of business, badly polished, without culture, who claimed to reign not only over politics and over money, but over the spirit, and offered it a kennel with a collar and food, or could, on its refusal, loose on it the thousands of imbeciles whom they had made into their obedient pack! — Christophe was not a man to let himself be lectured. He found it very bad that a donkey should permit himself to tell him what he should do and what he should not do, in music; and he gave him to understand that art demanded more preparation than politics. He also declined, without oratorical precautions, the offer to set to music an inept libretto, which the author, one of the first clerks of the newspaper, was trying to place, and that the patron recommended. This cast a first chill on his relations with Gamache.

Christophe was not sorry. Hardly emerged from obscurity, he aspired to return into it. He found himself “exposed to that great daylight in which one is lost in others.” Too many people were occupying themselves with him. He meditated these words of Goethe:

“When a writer has made himself remarked by a work of merit, the public seeks to prevent him from producing a second… The talent that recollects itself is in spite of itself dragged into the tumult of the world, because each one believes he can appropriate to himself a parcel of it.”

He shut his door to the world outside, and, in his own house, drew nearer to a few old friends. He saw again the Arnaud couple, whom he had somewhat neglected. Madame Arnaud, who lived alone part of the day, had time to think of the sorrows of others. She thought of the void that must have been left in Christophe’s life by the departure of Olivier; and she overcame her timidity to invite him to dinner. If she had dared, she would even have offered to come from time to time to review his household; but boldness failed her; and it was doubtless better so: for Christophe did not like to have anyone meddling with him. But he accepted the invitation to dinner, and he took the habit of coming regularly in the evening to the Arnauds.

He found the little household as united as ever, in the same atmosphere of tenderness slightly sad, dolorous, grayer still than before. Arnaud was passing through a period of moral depression, caused by the wear of his teacher’s life — that life of tiring labor, repeated each day, identical to the day before, like a wheel that turns in place, without ever stopping, without ever advancing. Despite his patience, the good fellow was going through a crisis of discouragement. He was affected by certain injustices; he found his devotion useless. Madame Arnaud comforted him with kind words; she, seemed always as peaceful as before; but her face was more wilted. Christophe, in front of her, congratulated Arnaud on having so reasonable a wife.

“Yes,” said Arnaud, “she is a good little one; nothing ever disturbs her. She has luck; and I too. If she had suffered from this life, I believe I should have been lost.”

Madame Arnaud blushed, and was silent. Then, in her composed voice, she spoke of something else. — Christophe’s visits produced their usual good effect; they brought light; and he, on his side, found pleasure in warming himself at these excellent hearts.

Another friend came to him. Or rather, he went looking for her: for, while she desired to know him, she would not have made the effort to come and find him. She was a young woman a little over twenty-five, a musician, first prize for piano at the Conservatory: her name was Cécile Fleury. She was short of stature, rather thickset. She had thick eyebrows, beautiful large eyes with a moist gaze, a small thick nose with a turned-up tip, slightly red, like a duck’s bill, large lips, kind and tender, an energetic chin, solid, fleshy, a forehead not high, but broad. Her hair was rolled in an abundant chignon at the nape. She had strong arms, and the hands of a pianist, large, with a spread thumb, with square tips. From her whole person there emanated a general impression of slightly heavy sap, of rustic health. She lived with her mother, whom she cherished: a good woman, who had no interest in music whatever, but who spoke of it from having heard it spoken of so much, and who knew everything that happened in Musicopolis. She had a mediocre life, gave lessons all day, and sometimes concerts of which no one took note. She came home late, on foot or by omnibus, exhausted but in good humor; and she courageously did her scales and her hats, talking a great deal, fond of laughing, and singing often, for nothing.

She had not been spoiled by life. She knew the price of a little well-being earned by one’s own efforts — the joy of a small pleasure, of a small imperceptible progress in one’s situation or one’s talent. Yes, if only she earned five francs more this month than the month before, or if she succeeded in playing well at last that passage of Chopin which she had been striving to play for weeks — she was content. Her work, which was not excessive, answered exactly to her aptitudes, and satisfied her like a reasonable hygiene. To play, to sing, to give lessons gave her an agreeable impression of activity satisfied, normal and regular, at the same time as a moderate competence and a tranquil success. She had a solid appetite, ate well, slept well, and was never ill.

Of mind straight, sensible, modest, perfectly balanced, she tormented herself about nothing: for she lived in the present moment, without bothering with what had been before and what would be after. And as she was in good health, as her life was relatively sheltered from the surprises of fate, she found herself almost always content. She had pleasure in studying her piano, as in doing her housework, or in chatting about domestic things, or in doing nothing. She knew how to live, not day by day — (she was economical and provident) — but minute by minute. No idealism worked in her; the only one she had, if one can say it, was bourgeois, tranquilly diffused in all the acts of her life, distributed over all her moments: it consisted in peacefully loving what she did, whatever she did. She went to church on Sundays, but the religious feeling held almost no place in her life. She admired the exalted, like Christophe, who had a faith or a genius; but she did not envy them: what would she have done with their disquiet and their genius? How then could she feel their music? She would have had difficulty in explaining it. But what she knew was that she felt it. Her superiority over other virtuosi was in her robust physical and moral balance; in that abundance of life, without personal passions, foreign passions found a rich soil in which to flower. She was not troubled by them. Those terrible passions which had gnawed at the artist, she translated them in all their energy, without being touched by their poison; she felt of them only the force and the good fatigue that followed. When it was over, she was all in a sweat, exhausted; she smiled tranquilly, and she was content.

Christophe, who heard her one evening, was struck by her playing. He went to shake her hand, after the concert. She was grateful for it: there were few people at the concert, and she was not blasé about compliments. As she had had neither the cleverness to enroll herself in a musical coterie nor the cunning to enroll in her train a troop of adorers, as she did not seek to single herself out, either by some exaggeration of technique, or by a fanciful interpretation of consecrated works, or by arrogating to herself the exclusive property of this or that great master, of Johann Sebastian Bach or Jean-Philippe Rameau, as she had no theory about what she played, but contented herself with simply playing what she felt — no one paid attention to her, and the critics ignored her: for no one had told them that she played well; and they would not have found it out by themselves.

Christophe saw Cécile often. This strong and calm girl attracted him like an enigma. She was vigorous and apathetic. In his indignation that she was not better known, he had proposed to have his friends at the Grand Journal speak of her. But although she was quite glad to be praised, she had begged him to take no steps to that end. She did not want to struggle, to give herself trouble, to arouse jealousies; she wanted to remain in peace. They did not speak of her: so much the better! She was without envy, and the first to go into ecstasies over the technique of other virtuosi. Neither ambition, nor desires. She was far too lazy of mind! When she was not occupied with an immediate and precise object, she did nothing, nothing; she did not even dream; even at night, in her bed; she slept, or thought of nothing. She had not that obsession with marriage which poisons the life of girls who tremble at remaining old maids. When she was asked if she would not like to have a good husband:

“Come now!” she said, “why not fifty thousand pounds of income? One must take what one has. If it is offered to you, so much the better! If not, one will do without. It is no reason because one has no cake, not to find good bread good. Especially when one has eaten the hard bread for a long time!”

“And besides,” her mother would say, “there are plenty of people who don’t eat it every day!”

Cécile had her reasons for distrusting men. Her father, who had died some years before, was a weak and lazy being; he had done much wrong to his wife and his own. She also had a brother who had gone bad; one did not really know what had become of him; from time to time he reappeared, to ask for money; one feared him, one was ashamed, one was afraid of what one might learn about him, from one day to the next; and yet, one loved him. Christophe met him once. He was at Cécile’s: the bell rang at the door; the mother went to open. A conversation arose in the next room, with bursts of voice. Cécile, who seemed troubled, went out in her turn, and left Christophe alone. The discussion continued, and the foreign voice became threatening; Christophe thought it his duty to intervene: he opened the door. He had scarcely time to glimpse a young man, slightly deformed, who was turning his back: Cécile rushed toward Christophe, and begged him to go back in. She came back in with him; they sat down in silence. In the neighboring room the visitor still shouted for a few minutes, then left, slamming the door. Then Cécile gave a sigh, and she said to Christophe:

“Yes… that is my brother.”

Christophe understood:

“Ah!” he said… “I know… I too, I have one…”

Cécile took his hand, with an affectionate commiseration:

“You too?”

“Yes,” he said… “These are the joys of family.”

Cécile laughed; and they changed the conversation. No, the joys of family had nothing enchanting for her, and the idea of marriage did not fascinate her: men were not worth much. She found many advantages in her independent life: her mother had long enough sighed after this liberty; she had no wish to lose it. The only little daydream she enjoyed amusing herself with was — if she could one day, later, God knows when! — no longer to give lessons and to live in the country. But she did not even take the trouble to imagine the details of that life: she found it tiring to think of something so uncertain; it was better to sleep — or to do her task…

While waiting to have her castle in Spain, she rented during the summer, in the suburbs of Paris, a little house which she occupied alone with her mother. It was twenty minutes by train. The dwelling was rather far from the station, isolated, in the middle of vacant ground which was called fields; and Cécile often came back late, at night. But she was not afraid; she did not believe in danger. She did indeed have a revolver; but she always forgot it at home. Besides, she would hardly have known how to use it.

In the course of his visits, Christophe made her play. He amused himself to see her penetration of musical works, especially when he had set her, with a word, on the path of the feeling to be expressed. He had also perceived that she had an admirable voice; she had not noticed it. He compelled her to exercise it; he made her sing old German lieder, or his own music; she took pleasure in it, and made progress which surprised her as much as him. She was marvelously gifted. The musical spark had fallen, by a prodigy, on this daughter of petty Parisian bourgeois, devoid of artistic feeling. Philomèle — (he called her thus) — sometimes spoke of music with Christophe, but always in a practical way; never in a sentimental way; she seemed interested only in the technique of singing and the piano. Most often, when they were together, and were not making music, they spoke of the most bourgeois subjects: household, cooking, domestic life. And Christophe, who could not have endured for a minute these conversations with a bourgeoise, held them quite naturally with Philomèle.

They spent thus evenings, tête-à-tête, and loved one another sincerely, with the calmest and almost the coldest affection. One evening when he had come to dinner, and when he had lingered to chat, more than usual, a violent storm broke. When he wanted to leave to catch the last train, the rain, the wind were raging; she said to him:

“But don’t go! You will leave tomorrow morning.”

He settled in the little drawing-room, on an improvised bed. A thin partition separated him from Cécile’s bedroom; the doors did not close. He heard, from his bed, the creakings of the other bed and the tranquil breath of the young woman. After five minutes, she was asleep; and he was not long in doing the same, without the shadow of a troubled thought brushing them, for a single instant.

In the same time, other unknown friends came to him, whom the reading of his works was beginning to attract. Most lived far from Paris, or apart, in their houses, and would never meet him. Success, even gross, has something good about it: it makes the artist known to thousands of brave people, distant, whom he would never have reached without the stupid articles of the newspapers. Christophe entered into relations with some of them. They were isolated young men, leading a difficult life, aspiring with their whole being toward an ideal of which they were not certain, and who drank avidly the fraternal soul of Christophe. They were small provincial folk who, after having read his lieder, wrote to him, like old Schulz, feeling themselves united to him. They were poor artists — a composer, among others — who had not arrived, who could not arrive, not only at success, but at expressing themselves, and who were all happy that their thought should be realized through Christophe. And the dearest of all perhaps — those who wrote to him without saying their name, and, more free thus to speak, naïvely poured out their touching confidence in the elder brother, who came to their aid. Christophe had a heavy heart to think that he would never know these charming souls whom he would have had so much joy in loving; and he kissed such of these unknown letters, as the one who had written it kissed Christophe’s lieder; and each, on his side, thought:

“Dear pages, what good you do me!”

Thus there was forming around him, according to the habitual rhythm of the universe, all that little family of genius, grouped around him, who nourishes himself on him and whom he nourishes, who little by little grows larger, and ends by forming a great collective soul of which he is the hearth, like a luminous world, a moral planet that gravitates in space, mingling its fraternal choir with the harmony of the spheres.

As mysterious links wove themselves between Christophe and his invisible friends, a revolution was taking place in his artistic thought; it was becoming larger and more human. He no longer wanted a music that was a monologue, a speech for oneself alone, still less a learned construction for the people of the craft alone. He wanted it to be a communion with other men. There is no vital art save that which unites itself to others. Johann Sebastian Bach, in his worst hours of isolation, was bound to others by the religious faith which he expressed in his art. Handel and Mozart, by force of circumstance, wrote for a public, and not for themselves alone. Beethoven himself had to reckon with the crowd. This is salutary. It is good that humanity from time to time should remind genius:

“What is there for me in your art? If there is nothing, go away!”

By this constraint, genius is the first to gain. Certainly, there are great artists who express only themselves. But the greatest of all are those whose heart beats for all. Whoever would see God living, face to face, must seek him, not in the empty firmament of his own thought, but in the love of men.

The artists of today were far from this love. They wrote only for a vain elite, more or less anarchic, uprooted from social life, who made it their glory not to share the prejudices and passions of the rest of humanity, or who made a game of them. Fine glory, to cut oneself off from life, in order not to resemble the others! Let death take them then! As for us, let us go with the living, let us drink at the breasts of the earth, at what is deepest and most sacred in our races, at their love of family and of the soil. In the freest centuries, in the people which had the most ardent cult of beauty, the young prince of the Italian Renaissance, Raphael, glorified motherhood in his Trastevere Madonnas. Who will make us today, in music, a Madonna of the Chair? Who will make us a music for all the hours of life? You have nothing, you have nothing in France. When you want to give songs to your schools, you are reduced to dressing up the music of the old German masters. Everything is to be done, or to be redone, in your art, from the base to the summit…

Christophe was corresponding with Olivier, now settled in a provincial city. He was trying to maintain between them, by letters, that collaboration which had been fruitful during their months of common life. He would have liked from him beautiful poetic texts, associated with the thoughts and acts of every day, like those which form the substance of the old German lieder of times gone by. Short fragments of the Holy Books, Hindu poems, the old Greek philosophers, religious or moral odelets, small pictures of nature, amorous or familial emotions, the poetry of mornings and evenings and nights, for simple and healthy hearts. Four or six verses for a lied is enough: the simplest expressions, no learned development, no refined harmonies. What have I to do with your aesthete virtuosities? Love my life, help me to love it and to live it. Write me the Hours of France, our Great and Little-Hours. And let us seek together the clearest melodic phrase. Let us avoid, as the plague, that artistic language of a caste, which is that of so many writers, and above all of so many French musicians of today. We must have the courage to speak as a man, not as an “artist.” We must draw from the common fund of all, and use, without blushing, the customary formulas, which the centuries have marked with their imprint and filled with their soul. This is what our fathers did. It is from the return to the musical language of all that the art of the German classics of the end of the eighteenth century emerged. The melodic phrases of Gluck, of the creators of the symphony, of the masters of the lied of that time, are sometimes trivial and bourgeois, compared with the refined or learned phrases of Johann Sebastian Bach and Rameau. It is that fund of soil that made the savor and the immense popularity of the great classics. They started from the simplest musical forms, the lied, the Singspiel; these little flowers of daily life impregnated the anvil of a Mozart or a Weber. — Do the same. Write songs for everybody. After that you will raise quartets and symphonies. Of what use is it to skip stages? You do not begin the pyramid at the summit. Your symphonies of today are heads without a body, thoughts without guts. O fine spirits, incarnate yourselves! Patient generations of musicians are needed, who fraternize joyfully and piously with their people. One does not build a musical art in a day.

Christophe was not content to apply these principles in music; he urged Olivier to put himself at the head of an analogous movement, in literature:

“The writers of today exert themselves,” he said, “to describe human rarities, or cases very frequent in abnormal groups, on the margin of the great society of men acting and healthy. Since they have put themselves out of the door of life, leave them, and go where men are. To the men of every day, show the life of every day: it is deeper and vaster than the sea. The least of us carries in him the infinite. The infinite is in every man who has the simplicity of being a man, in the lover, in the friend, in the woman who pays with her pains for the radiant glory of the day of childbirth, in her or in him who sacrifices himself obscurely and of whom no one will ever know anything; it is the flood of life that flows from one to the other, from one to the other, from the other to the one… Write the simple life of one of those simple men, write the tranquil epic of the days and nights that succeed one another, all similar and diverse, all sons of the same mother, since the first day of the world. Write it simply, just as it unrolls. Do not worry about the verb, the subtle searchings in which the strength of today’s artists exhausts itself. They are not words you must say, they are things. You speak to all: use the language of all. There are no words either noble or vulgar; there is no style either polished or impure; there are only those that say or do not say exactly what they have to say. Be entire in everything you do: think what you think, and feel what you feel. Let the rhythm of your heart carry your writings! Style is the soul.”

Olivier approved of Christophe; but he answered, with some irony:

“Such a work might be beautiful; but it would never reach those who might read it. The critics would smother it on the way.”

“There speaks my little French bourgeois!” replied Christophe. “He worries about what the critics will or will not think of his book!… The critics, my boy, are only there to register victory or defeat. Only be victorious… I have done very well without them! Learn to do without them too…”

But Olivier had learned to do without something very different! He did without art, and without Christophe, and without the rest of the world. At that moment, he thought only of Jacqueline, and Jacqueline thought only of him.

Their love-egoism had made a void around them; it was burning improvidently all its future resources.

Intoxication of the first times, when the beings mingled think uniquely of absorbing one another… From all the particles of their bodies and of their souls, they touch one another, they taste one another, they seek to penetrate one another. They are alone a universe without laws, an amorous chaos, where the confounded elements do not yet know what distinguishes them from one another, and strive greedily to devour one another. Everything ravishes them in the other: the other is still oneself. What have they to do with the world? Like the antique Androgyne, asleep in his dream of harmonious voluptuousness, their eyes are closed to the world; the world is entirely within them…

O days, O nights, that form one same tissue of dream, hours that fled like the beautiful white clouds pass in the sky, and of which nothing remains save, in the dazzled eye, a luminous wake, warm breath that envelops you with a languor of spring, golden warmth of bodies, sunlit trellis of love, chaste impudence, embraces, follies, sighs, happy laughter, happy tears, what remains of you, dust of happiness? The heart can scarcely remember you: for when you were, time did not exist.

Days all alike… Soft dawn… From the abyss of sleep, the two entwined bodies rise at once; the smiling heads, whose breath mingles, open their eyes together, look at each other and kiss… Juvenile freshness of the morning hours, virginal air in which the fever of the burning bodies is appeased… Voluptuous torpor of the interminable days, at the bottom of which murmurs the voluptuousness of the nights… Summer afternoons, reveries in the fields, on the velvety meadows, beneath the cloth-like rustling of the tall white poplars… Reveries of the beautiful evenings, when they come back together, arms and hands entwined, beneath the luminous sky, toward the amorous bed. The wind shivers the branches of the bushes. In the clear lake of the sky floats the white down of the silver moon. A star falls and dies — a small jolt in the heart — a world breathes without sound. On the road, near them, pass rare shadows, swift and mute. The bells of the town ring the feast of the morrow. They stop for an instant, she presses against him, they remain without speaking… Ah! if life stayed thus, motionless, like this instant!… She sighs, and says:

“Why do I love you so much?…”

After some weeks of travel in Italy, they had settled in a city in the west of France, where Olivier had been named professor. They saw almost no one. They were interested in nothing. When they were forced to make visits, this scandalous indifference displayed itself with a sans-gêne that wounded some and made others smile. All words slid over them without reaching them.

They had that impertinent gravity of newlyweds, who have the air of saying to you:

“You others, you know nothing…”

On the pretty absorbed, slightly pouting face of Jacqueline, in the happy and distracted eyes of Olivier, one could read:

“If you knew how we are bored!… When shall we be alone?”

Even in the midst of the others, they did not constrain themselves to be so. One surprised their glances, which spoke to one another above the conversation. They had no need to look at one another to see each other; and they smiled: for they knew they were thinking of the same things at the same time. When they found themselves alone again, after some social constraint, they uttered cries of joy and did a thousand childish follies. They had the air of being eight years old. They babbled in speaking. They called each other by droll little names. She called him Olive, Olivet, Olifant, Fanny, Mami, Mime, Minaud, Quinaud, Kaunitz, Cosima, Coburg, Panot, Nacot, Ponette, Naquet, and Canot. She played the little girl. But she wanted to be everything at once for him, all the loves mingled: mother, sister, wife, sweetheart, mistress.

She was not content to share his pleasures; as she had promised herself, she shared his works: that was a game too. During the first times, she brought to it the amused ardor of a woman for whom work was something new; one would have said she took pleasure in the most ungrateful tasks, copying in libraries, translations of insipid books: that was part of her plan of life, very pure and very serious, entirely consecrated to noble thoughts and labors in common. And that was very well, so long as love illumined them: for she thought only of him, and not of what she was doing. The most curious thing was that everything she did in that way was well done. Her mind moved without effort in abstract readings which she would have had difficulty in following at other moments of her life; her being was as if lifted above the earth by love; she did not perceive it: like a sleepwalker who walks on the roofs, she pursued tranquilly, without seeing anything, her grave and laughing dream…

And then, she began to see the roofs; and that did not worry her; but she asked herself what she was doing on top of them, and she went back home. Work bored her. She persuaded herself that her love was hampered by it. No doubt because her love was already less keen. But nothing of that appeared. They could no longer be without one another for a moment. They walled themselves in from the world, they condemned their door, they no longer accepted any invitation. They were jealous of the affection of others, of their occupations even, of everything that distracted them from their love. The correspondence with Christophe spaced itself out. Jacqueline did not love him: he was a rival for her, he represented a whole part of Olivier’s past, in which she had no part; and the more place he had held in Olivier’s life, the more she sought, by instinct, to steal it from him. Without calculation on her part, she sneakingly detached Olivier from his friend; she made ironic the manners of Christophe, his appearance, his ways of writing, his artistic projects; she put no malice in it, no cunning even: nature took charge of it for her. Olivier was amused by her remarks; he saw no malice in them; he thought he still loved Christophe as much as ever; but it was now only his person that he loved: which is little, in friendship; he did not perceive that little by little he ceased to understand him, he lost interest in his thought, in that heroic idealism, in which they had been united… Love is for a young heart a sweetness too strong: beside it, what other faith can stand? The body of the beloved, her dear soul which one gathers on that sacred flesh, are all science and all faith. With what smile of pity one looks at what others adore, at what one once adored oneself! Of mighty life and its harsh effort, one sees only the flower of an hour, which one believes immortal… Love absorbed Olivier. In the beginning, his happiness still had the strength to express itself in gracious poems. Then, even that seemed vain to him: it was time stolen from love. And Jacqueline, like him, set herself to destroy every other reason for living, to kill the tree of life without the support of which the ivy of love dies. Thus they annihilated themselves both in happiness.

Alas! one grows accustomed so quickly to happiness! When egoistic happiness is the only aim of life, life is soon without aim. It becomes a habit, an intoxication, one can no longer do without it. And yet one must do without it!… Happiness is an instant in the universal rhythm, one of the two poles between which the pendulum of life oscillates: to stop the pendulum, one would have to break it…

There began “that boredom of well-being, which makes, so to speak, sensibility run wild.” The sweet hours slowed down, languished, withered, like flowers without water. The sky was still as blue; but it was no longer the light air of the morning. Everything was motionless; nature was silent. They were alone, as they had so much desired. — And their heart sank.

An indefinable feeling of emptiness, a vague boredom not without charm, appeared to them at moments. They did not know what it was; they were obscurely uneasy. They became impressionable, in a sickly way. Their nerves, taut listening to the silence, quivered like leaves at the slightest unforeseen shock of life. Jacqueline often had tears, without reason to weep; and although she wanted to believe so, it was no longer love alone that made them flow. After the ardent and tormented years which had preceded the marriage, the abrupt halt of her efforts before the goal attained — attained and surpassed — the sudden uselessness of all new action — and perhaps of all past action — threw her into a confusion which she could not explain to herself and which thunderstruck her. She did not admit it; she attributed it to a nervous fatigue, she affected to laugh at it; but her laugh was no less uneasy than her tears. Bravely, she tried to get back to work. From the first attempts, she no longer even understood how she had been capable of being interested in such stupid tasks: she pushed them away with disgust. She made an effort to renew social relations; she succeeded no better. The habit was taken, she had lost the habit of mediocre people and mediocre words to which life obliges: she found them grotesque and odious; and she threw herself back into her isolation for two, seeking to persuade herself, by these unfortunate trials, that there was decidedly nothing good but love. And for some time she did indeed seem more in love than ever. But it was that she wanted to be.

Olivier, less passionate and richer in tenderness, was more sheltered from these throes; he felt, for his part, only a vague and intermittent shiver. Besides, his love was preserved, to a certain extent, by the constraint of his daily occupations, of his profession which he did not love. But as he had a fine sensibility and as all the movements that passed in the heart he loved spread to his own, Jacqueline’s hidden uneasiness communicated itself to him.

One fine afternoon, they went walking together in the countryside. They had rejoiced in advance over this walk. Everything was smiling around them. But from the first steps, a mantle of dreary and weary sadness fell on them; they felt themselves frozen. Impossible to speak. They forced themselves nevertheless; but each word they said made resound more the void in which they found themselves. They finished their walk like automatons, without seeing and without feeling. They came home, their hearts tight. It was twilight; the apartment was empty, dark, and cold. They did not light the lamp at once, in order not to see themselves. Jacqueline entered her room, and, instead of taking off her hat, her coat, she sat down, mute, by the window. Olivier, in the neighboring room, sat down too, leaning on the table. The door was open between the two rooms; they were so near one another that they could have heard their breath. And in the half-darkness, both of them, bitterly, in silence, wept. They pressed their hand on their mouth, that one might hear nothing. At last, Olivier in anguish said:

“Jacqueline…”

Jacqueline, devouring her tears, said:

“What?”

“Are you not coming?”

“I am coming.”

She undressed, went to bathe her eyes. He lit the lamp. After a few minutes, she came back into the room. They did not look at each other. They knew that they had wept. And they could not console themselves: for they knew why.

There came a moment when they could no longer hide their distress from one another. And as they did not want to admit its cause to themselves, they sought another, and had no trouble in finding it. They accused the boredom of provincial life and the milieu in which they were. It was a relief for them. Monsieur Langeais, informed by his daughter, was not too surprised that she was beginning to tire of heroism. He used his political friendships, and obtained the appointment of his son-in-law in Paris.

When the good news arrived, Jacqueline leaped with joy and recovered all her past happiness. Now that they were going to leave it, the tiresome country seemed friendly to them; they had sown there so many memories of love! They occupied the last days in seeking out their traces. A tender melancholy exhaled from this pilgrimage. These calm horizons had seen them happy. An inner voice murmured to them:

“You know what you are leaving. Do you know what you are going to find?”

Jacqueline wept, on the eve of her departure. Olivier asked her why. She did not want to speak. They took a sheet of paper, and wrote to one another, as they were accustomed when the sound of words frightened them:

“My dear little Olivier…”

“My dear little Jacqueline…”

“It troubles me to go away.”

“To go away from where?”

“From where we loved each other.”

“To go away where?”

“Where we shall be older.”

“Where we shall be both together.”

“But never loving each other so much.”

“Always more.”

“Who knows it?”

“I, I know it.”

“I, I want it.”

Then, they drew two circles at the bottom of the paper, to say that they were kissing each other. And then, she dried her tears, laughed, and dressed him as a mignon of Henri III, decking him out in her cap and her white cape, with its turned-up collar, like a ruff.

In Paris they found again those they had left. They no longer found them such as they had left them. At the news of Olivier’s arrival, Christophe had hurried up quite joyous. Olivier had as much joy as he, on seeing him again. But, from the first glances, they felt an unexpected embarrassment. They both tried to react. In vain. Olivier was very affectionate; but there was in him something changed; and Christophe felt it. A friend who marries may do what he will: he is no longer the friend of yesteryear. To the soul of the man there is now mingled the soul of the woman. Christophe sniffed it everywhere in Olivier: in unseizable gleams of his glance, in slight folds of his lips that he had not known, in new inflections of his voice and of his thought. Olivier was not conscious of it; but he was astonished to see Christophe so different from the one he had left. He did not go so far as to think that it was Christophe who had changed; he recognized that the change came from himself; and to him it seemed a normal evolution, due to age; and he was surprised not to find the same progress in Christophe; he secretly reproached him for having immobilized himself in thoughts that had once been dear to him, and that today seemed to him naïve and out of date. It was that they were no longer in the fashion of the foreign soul which, without his suspecting it, had installed itself in him. This feeling was clearer when Jacqueline was present at the conversation: then there was interposed between Olivier’s eyes and Christophe a veil of irony. However, they tried to hide their impressions from one another. Christophe continued to come. Jacqueline innocently shot at him a few small malicious and barbed arrows. He let her do. But when he went home, he was saddened.

The first months passed in Paris were a rather happy time for Jacqueline, and consequently for Olivier. First, she was busy with their installation; they had found in an old street of Passy an agreeable little apartment that gave onto a small garden. The choice of furniture and of papers was a game of some weeks; Jacqueline spent on it a sum of energy, and almost of passion, exaggerated: it seemed that her eternal happiness depended on a shade of curtain or on the profile of some old chest.

Then she got reacquainted with her father, her mother, her friends. As she had totally forgotten them during her year of love, it was a real rediscovery: all the more so as if her soul had mingled itself with Olivier’s, a little of Olivier’s had mingled with hers, and that she saw her old acquaintances with new eyes. They seemed to her to have gained much. Olivier did not lose by it too much, at first. They set each other off mutually. The moral recollection, the poetic chiaroscuro of her companion made Jacqueline find more pleasure in those people of the world who think only of enjoying, shining and pleasing; and the seducing but dangerous defects of that world, which she knew all the better because she belonged to it, made her appreciate the security of the heart of her friend. She amused herself much at these comparisons, and liked to prolong them, to justify her choice. — She prolonged them so well that at certain moments she no longer knew why she had made this choice. These moments did not last, fortunately. Even, as she had remorse over them, she was never so tender with Olivier as afterwards. By which means she began again. When she had taken the habit of it, she ceased to be amused by it; and the comparison became more aggressive: instead of completing one another, the two opposed worlds made war on one another. She asked herself why Olivier did not possess the qualities, indeed even a little of the defects, which she now relished in her Parisian friends. She did not say so to him; but Olivier felt the gaze of his little companion who was observing him without indulgence: he was uneasy and mortified by it.

Nevertheless, he had not yet lost over Jacqueline the ascendancy that love gave him; and the young household would no doubt have continued for a long time its life of tender and laborious intimacy, but for the circumstances which came to modify its material conditions and broke its fragile equilibrium.

Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran nemico…

A sister of Madame Langeais came to die. She was the widow of a rich industrialist, and had no children. All her property passed to the Langeais. Jacqueline’s fortune was thereby more than doubled. When the inheritance arrived, Olivier remembered Christophe’s words about money, and said:

“We were well without that; perhaps it will be an evil.”

Jacqueline made fun of him:

“Big baby!” she said. “As if that could ever do harm! In the first place, we will change nothing of our life.”

Life remained indeed the same, in appearance. So much the same that after a certain time one heard Jacqueline complain of not being rich enough: evident proof that there was something changed.

And in fact, although their revenues had doubled and tripled, everything was spent without their knowing on what. It made one wonder how they had been able to live before. The money slipped away, absorbed by a thousand new expenses, which immediately seemed habitual and indispensable. Jacqueline had made the acquaintance of the great tailors; she had dismissed the family dressmaker, who came by the day and whom they had known since childhood. Where was the time of the little four-sou bonnets, which were made out of nothing, and which were pretty all the same — of those dresses whose elegance was not impeccable, but which were illumined by her gracious reflection, which were a little of herself? The sweet charm of intimacy which radiated from everything around her was effacing itself every day. Its poetry had melted away. She was becoming worldly and banal.

They changed apartments. The one they had had so much trouble and pleasure in setting up seemed narrow and ugly. Instead of the modest little rooms, all radiant with soul, at whose windows a friendly tree balanced its graceful silhouette, they took a large, comfortable apartment, well arranged, that they did not love, that they could not love, where they were dying of boredom. To the old familiar objects they substituted furniture, hangings, that were foreign to you. There was no longer anywhere any place for memory. The first years of common life were swept from thought… Great misfortune for two beings united, to break the bonds that attach them to their past of love! The image of that past is a safeguard against the discouragements and hostilities that fatally succeed the first tendernesses. The facility of expenditure had brought Jacqueline closer, in Paris and in travel — (for now that they were rich, they traveled often) — to a class of rich and useless people, whose society inspired her with a sort of contempt for the rest of mankind — for those who work. With her marvelous power of adaptation, she on the spot assimilated to herself those sterile and gangrened souls. Impossible to react. Immediately she reared up, irritated, treating as “bourgeois baseness” the idea that one could be — happy through domestic duty and in the aurea mediocritas. She had lost even the comprehension of the hours past, when in love she had given herself generously.

Olivier was not strong enough to struggle. He too had changed. He had given up his teaching, he no longer had a compulsory task. He wrote only; and the equilibrium of his life had been modified by it. Until then, he had suffered from being unable to be wholly to art. Now he was wholly to art, and he felt himself lost in the world of fashions. Art which has not for counterweight a trade, for support a strong practical life, art which does not feel in its flesh the goad of the daily task, art which has no need to earn its bread, loses the best of its force and of its reality. It is no more than the flower of luxury. It is no more — (which it is in the greatest of artists, the only great ones) — the sacred fruit of human toil. — Olivier experienced an idleness, a “What’s the use?” Nothing pressed him anymore: he let his pen dream, he loitered, he was idle. He had lost contact with those of his class, who patiently, harshly dug the furrow of their life. He had fallen into a different world, in which he was ill at ease, and which yet did not displease him. Weak, amiable, and curious, he observed complacently this world not without grace, but without consistency; and he did not perceive that he was letting himself be tinted by it little by little; his faith was no longer so sure.

No doubt, the transformation was less rapid in him than in Jacqueline. Woman has the formidable privilege of being able to change all at once entirely. These deaths and these instantaneous renewals of the being terrify those who love her. It is, however, a natural thing, for a being full of life whom the will does not hold in check, to be no longer tomorrow what she was today. She is a water that flows. Whoever loves her must follow her, or else carry her away in his current. In either case, one must change. But it is a dangerous test; one truly knows love only after having put it to that test. And its harmony is so delicate, in the first years of common life, that the slightest alteration in one or the other of the two beings is often enough to destroy everything. How much more so, a brusque change of fortune or of milieu! One must be very strong — or very indifferent — to resist it.

Jacqueline and Olivier were neither indifferent nor strong. They both saw each other in another light; and the face of the friend became foreign to them. At the hours when they made this sad discovery, they hid themselves from one another, out of a piety of love: for they still loved each other. Olivier had the refuge of his work, whose regular exercise, though less convinced, procured him calm. Jacqueline had nothing. She did nothing. She remained indefinitely in bed, or at her toilette, sitting for hours, half undressed, motionless, absorbed; and a deaf sadness drop by drop accumulated in her, like an icy mist. She was incapable of making a diversion to what was tormenting her: the fixed idea of love… Love! The most divine of human things when it is a gift of self, an inebriated sacrifice. The most foolish and most deceptive, when it is a chase after happiness… It was impossible for her to conceive any other aim in life. In moments of good will, she had tried to interest herself in others, in their miseries; she did not succeed. The sufferings of others caused her an invincible repulsion; they were insupportable to her nerves. To quiet her conscience, she had two or three times done something that resembled good: the result had been mediocre.

“You see,” she said to Christophe. “When one wants to do good, one does ill. It is better to abstain. I have not the vocation.”

Christophe looked at her; and he thought of one of his chance friends, a grisette, egoistic, immoral, incapable of true affection, but who, as soon as she saw suffering, felt motherly bowels for the indifferent man of yesterday or for a stranger. The most repugnant cares did not put her off: she even felt a singular pleasure in those that demanded the most abnegation. She did not realize it; it seemed that she found in them the employment of all her force of obscure idealism, hereditary, eternally unexpressed; her soul, atrophied in the rest of her life, breathed in those rare instants; in softening a little of suffering, she felt a well-being, an inner laugh; and her joy then was almost out of place. — The goodness of this woman, who was egoistic, the egoism of Jacqueline, who nevertheless was good: neither vice, nor virtue; hygiene for them both. But the one bore herself better.

Jacqueline was crushed by the idea of suffering. She would have preferred death to physical pain. She would have preferred death to the loss of one of the sources of her joy: her beauty or her youth. That she should not have all the happiness to which she believed she had a right — (for she believed in happiness, it was for her a faith, entire and absurd, a religious faith) — that others should have more happiness than she, that seemed to her the most horrible of injustices. Happiness was not only a faith for her, it was a virtue. To be unhappy seemed to her a sort of infirmity. Her whole life was little by little orienting itself by this principle. Her true character had emerged from the idealistic veils, in which as a virgin she had enveloped herself with timid modesty. By reaction against this past idealism, she looked at things with a clear and crude gaze. They had truth for her only in the measure in which they accorded with the opinion of the world and with the comfort of life. She found herself now in the state of mind of her mother: she went to church, and practiced, with an indifferent punctuality. She no longer tormented herself with knowing whether it was true at bottom: she had other more positive torments; and she thought with an ironic pity of her mystical childhood revolts. — However, her positive spirit of today was no more real than her former idealism. She forced herself. She was neither angel nor beast. She was a poor woman who was bored.

She was bored, was bored; she was bored all the more in that she could not give herself as an excuse that she was not loved, or that she could not endure Olivier. Her life seemed to her blocked, walled in, without future; she aspired to a new happiness, perpetually renewed, which was a childish thing, and which the mediocrity of her aptitude for happiness did not legitimize. She was like so many other women, so many idle households, who have every reason to be happy, and who never cease to torture themselves. One sees them, around oneself, who are rich, who have beautiful children, good health, who are intelligent and capable of feeling beautiful things, who possess every means of acting, of doing good, of enriching their life and that of others. And they spend their time bemoaning that they do not love each other, that they love others, or that they do not love others — perpetually preoccupied with themselves, with their sentimental or sexual relations, with their pretended rights to happiness, with their contradictory egoisms, and discussing, discussing, playing the comedy of great love, the comedy of great suffering, and ending by believing in it — suffering… Who will say to them:

“You are in no way interesting. It is indecent to complain when one has so many means of being happy!”

Who will tear away from them their fortune, their health, all those marvelous gifts, of which they are unworthy! Who will put back under the yoke of poverty and real pain these slaves incapable of being free, whom their liberty maddens! If they had to earn their bread harshly, they would be content to eat it. And if they saw face to face the austere and terrible face of suffering, they would no longer dare to play the revolting comedy of it…

But, in the end, they do suffer. They are sick. How not to pity them? — The poor Jacqueline was very innocent, as innocent of detaching herself from Olivier, as Olivier was of not holding her attached. She was what nature had made her. She did not know that marriage is a defiance to nature, and that, when one has thrown the gauntlet to nature, one must expect her to take it up, and prepare to sustain valiantly the combat one has provoked. She perceived that she had been mistaken. She was irritated against herself; and this disappointment turned into hostility against everything she had loved, against Olivier’s faith, which had been hers too. An intelligent woman has, more than a man, at moments, the intuition of eternal things; but it is more difficult for her to maintain herself in them. The man who has conceived these thoughts, nourishes them with his life. The woman nourishes her life with them; she absorbs them, she does not create them. She must constantly cast into her mind and her heart new aliment: they do not suffice themselves. And failing to believe and to love, she must destroy — unless she possesses calm, supreme virtue.

Jacqueline had passionately believed, once, in a union founded on a common faith, in the happiness of struggling and toiling together to build a work. But that work, that faith, she had only believed in them when the sun of love gilded them; as the sun was setting, they appeared to her like arid, somber mountains, raised against the empty sky; and she felt herself without strength to pursue the road: of what use was it to reach the summit? What was there, on the other side? What immense desert!…

Jacqueline could no longer understand how Olivier continued to let himself be duped by those chimeras which devoured life; and she said to herself that he was neither very intelligent, nor very living. She was suffocating in his atmosphere, unbreathable for her; and the instinct of preservation pushed her, to defend herself, to attack. She labored to reduce to dust the enemy beliefs of the one she still loved; she used all her weapons of irony and voluptuousness; she enlaced him with the lianas of her desires and her small worries; she aspired to make of him a reflection of herself,… of herself who no longer knew what she wanted, or what she was! She found herself humiliated that Olivier did not succeed; and it no longer mattered to her whether it was wrongly or rightly: for she came to believe that, in the final reckoning, what distinguishes the failure from the man of talent is success. Olivier felt these doubts weighing on him, and he lost the best of his strength by them. However, he struggled as best he could, as so many others have struggled and will struggle, vainly for the most part, in that unequal struggle in which the egoistic instinct of woman leans against the intellectual egoism of man on the weakness of man, on his disappointments, and on his common sense, which is the name with which he covers the wear of life and his own cowardice. — At least, Jacqueline and Olivier were superior to most of the combatants. For he would never have betrayed his ideal, like those thousands of men who let themselves be drawn by the solicitations of their laziness, their vanity, and their love mingled, into denying their eternal soul. And if he had done it, Jacqueline would have despised him. But, in her blindness, she persisted in destroying that strength of Olivier, which was also her own, the safeguard of them both; and by an instinctive strategy, she undermined the friendships on which that strength leaned.

Since the inheritance, Christophe had been deposed from the company of the young couple. The affectation of snobbery and rather flat practical mind, which Jacqueline maliciously exaggerated in her conversations with him, succeeded. He revolted sometimes, and said hard things, which were taken badly. They would never, however, have brought about a quarrel between the two friends: they were too attached to one another. For nothing in the world would Olivier have wanted to sacrifice Christophe. But he could not impose him on Jacqueline; and weak from love, he was incapable of giving her pain. Christophe, who saw what was happening in him and how he suffered, facilitated the choice for him by withdrawing of his own accord. He had understood that he could render Olivier no service by remaining: rather, he harmed him. He was the first to give his friend reasons for moving away from him; and the weakness of Olivier accepted those bad reasons, while divining Christophe’s sacrifice, and being torn by remorse.

Christophe did not hold it against him. He thought that one is not wrong to say that woman is the half of man. For a married man is no longer anything but half a man.

He tried to reorganize his life, doing without Olivier. But he might do what he would and persuade himself that the separation would be only momentary: in spite of his optimism, he had sad hours. He had lost the habit of being alone. Certainly he had been alone during Olivier’s stay in the provinces; but then he could deceive himself; he said to himself that the friend was far away, but that he would come back. Now, the friend had come back, and he was farther away than ever. That affection, which had filled his life for several years, was lacking to him all at once: it was as if he had lost the best of his reasons for acting. Since he had loved Olivier, he had taken the habit of thinking with him and of associating him with everything he did. Work could not suffice to fill the void: for Christophe had grown accustomed to mingling with his work the image of his friend. And now that the friend was disinterested of him, Christophe was like one who has lost his balance: he sought another affection to reestablish it. Those of Madame Arnaud and of Philomèle were not lacking to him. But, at the present moment at least, these tranquil friends could not suffice him.

However, the two women seemed to divine Christophe’s grief, and they sympathized in secret with him. Christophe was very surprised, one evening, to see Madame Arnaud come into his rooms. Until then, she had never ventured to pay him a visit. She seemed agitated. Christophe paid no attention to it; he attributed this trouble to her timidity. She sat down, and she said nothing. Christophe, to put her at ease, did the honors of his apartment; they talked of Olivier, whose memories filled the room. Christophe spoke of him gaily, naturally, with nothing that betrayed what had happened. But Madame Arnaud, who served him, could not help looking at him with a little pity, and saying to him:

“You hardly see each other anymore?”

He thought that she had come to console him; and he was impatient about it: for he did not like people to mix in his affairs. He answered:

“When it pleases us.”

She blushed, and said:

“Oh! that was not an indiscreet question!”

He regretted his brusqueness, and took her hands:

“Pardon me,” he said. “I am always afraid that someone is attacking him. Poor little fellow! He suffers from it as much as I do… No, we do not see each other any more.”

“And he does not write to you?”

“No,” said Christophe, a little ashamed…

“How sad life is!” said Madame Arnaud, after a moment.

Christophe raised his head.

“No, life is not sad,” he said. “It has sad hours.”

Madame Arnaud resumed, with a veiled bitterness:

“One has loved, one no longer loves. What has that served?”

Christophe replied:

“One has loved.”

She said again:

“You have sacrificed yourself for him. If at least your sacrifice served the one one loves! But he is no happier for it!”

“I have not sacrificed myself,” said Christophe with anger. “And if I sacrifice myself, it is because it gives me pleasure. There is not so much to discuss. One does what one must do. If one did not do it, that is when one would be unhappy! Nothing is so stupid as that word sacrifice! I do not know what clergymen, with their poverty of heart, have mixed up in it an idea of Protestant sadness, morose and stiff. It seems that for a sacrifice to be good, it must be boring… To the devil! If a sacrifice is a sadness for you, do not make it, you are not worthy of it. It is not for the king of Prussia that one sacrifices oneself, it is for oneself. If you do not feel the happiness there is in giving yourself, then go for a walk! You do not deserve to live.”

Madame Arnaud listened to Christophe, without daring to look at him. Brusquely she rose, and said:

“Goodbye.”

Then he thought that she had come to confide something to him; and he said:

“Oh! pardon me, I am an egoist, I speak only of myself. Stay a little, will you?”

She said:

“No, I cannot… Thank you…”

She left.

They remained some time without seeing each other. She no longer gave him sign of life; and he did not go to her house, nor to Philomèle’s either. He loved them well; but he feared to converse with them of those things that saddened him. And then, their calm, mediocre existence, their over-rarefied air, did not suit him, for the moment. He had need of seeing new faces; he had to get hold of himself in a new affection.

In order to get out of himself, he began to frequent the theater, which he had long neglected. The theater seemed to him besides an interesting school for the musician who wants to observe and note the accents of the passions.

It was not that he had any more sympathy for French plays than at the beginning of his stay in Paris. Apart from the little taste he had for their eternal subjects, insipid and brutal, of amorous psycho-physiology, the theatrical language of the French seemed to him archaic, especially in the poetic drama. Neither their prose nor their verse seemed to him conforming to the living language of the people, to its own genius. The prose was too often a fabricated language, that of a society chronicler in the best, of a vulgar serialist in the worst. The poetry gave reason to Goethe’s witticism:

“Poetry is good for those who have nothing to say.”

It was a prolix and contorted prose; the profusion of images which were awkwardly grafted onto it, in imitation of the lyricism of other races, produced on every sincere being an effect of falsehood. Christophe made no more account of these poetic dramas than of the Italian operas with great howling and saccharine arias, with plumed vocalizations. The actors interested him much more than the plays. The authors, indeed, applied themselves to imitating them. “One could not flatter oneself that a play would be performed with any success unless one had had the attention to model one’s characters on the vices of the comedians.” The situation had hardly changed since the time when Diderot wrote those lines. The mimes had become the models of art. As soon as one of them attained success, he had his theater, his complaisant author-tailors, and his plays made to measure.

Among these great mannequins of literary fashions, Françoise Oudon attracted Christophe. There had been an infatuation with her in Paris, for hardly a year or two. She too, naturally, had her theater and her purveyors of roles; however, she did not play only the works fabricated for her; her rather mixed repertoire ranged from Ibsen to Sardou, from Gabriele d’Annunzio to Dumas fils, from Bernard Shaw to the most recent Parisian craftsmen. Even she sometimes ventured into the Versailles avenues of the classical hexameter, and onto the torrent of Shakespeare’s images. But she was less at ease there, and her public still less. Whatever she played, she played herself, herself alone, always. That was her weakness and her strength. As long as public attention had not occupied itself with her person, her playing had had no success. From the day when people grew interested in her, everything she played seemed marvelous. And in truth, she well deserved that, on seeing her, one should forget the often pitiful works that she betrayed by embellishing them with her life. The enigma of that body of woman, modeled by an unknown soul, was for Christophe more moving than the plays that she played.

She had a fine clear profile, rather tragic. Nothing of the accentuated and heavy lines, à la Roman. Delicate lines, on the contrary, Parisian, à la Jean Goujon — as much of a young boy as of a woman. The short, but well-made nose. A beautiful mouth with thin lips, with a slightly bitter fold. Intelligent cheeks, of a juvenile thinness, in which there was something touching, the reflection of an inner suffering. The voluntary chin. The pallid complexion. One of those faces accustomed to impassivity, but transparent in spite of themselves, beneath which one feels the soul quiver, as if laid bare, where the soul is spread everywhere under the skin. Her hair and her eyebrows were very fine, her eyes changing, gray, amber, capable of taking on all sorts of reflections, greenish or golden — cat’s eyes. And she had something of the cat too in her whole nature, by an apparent torpor, a half-sleep, eyes open, on the watch, ever-fleeing, with brusque nervous relaxations, slightly cruel. Less tall than she seemed, she was a false slim, with fine shoulders, harmonious arms, long and fine hands. Very correct in her way of dressing, of doing her hair, of a sober taste, with nothing of the bohemian laisser-aller nor of the exaggerated elegance of certain artists — in this still very cat-like, aristocratic by instinct — although risen from the gutter. And an irreducible savagery, at bottom.

She must have been a little under thirty. Christophe had heard her spoken of at Gamache’s, with brutal admiration, as a very free girl, intelligent and bold, with an iron energy, burned with ambition, but harsh, fantastic, disconcerting, violent, who had rolled much before arriving at her present glory, and who, since, was taking her revenge.

One day when Christophe was taking the train to go and see Philomèle at Meudon, on opening the door of his compartment he found the actress, already installed. She seemed in a state of agitation and suffering; and Christophe’s appearance was disagreeable to her. She turned her back on him, looking obstinately through the opposite window. But Christophe, struck by the alteration of her features, did not cease to stare at her, with a naïve and embarrassing compassion. She was impatient with it, and shot him a furious glance, which he did not understand. At the next station, she got out, and got into another carriage. Only then did he think — a little late — that he had made her flee; and he was mortified by it.

A few days later, at a station on the same line, returning to Paris, and waiting for the train, he was seated on the single bench of the platform. She appeared, and came to sit beside him. He tried to rise. She said:

“Stay.”

They were alone. He apologized for having forced her to change compartments, the other day; he said that if he could have suspected that he was bothering her, he would have got off. She contented herself with replying, with an ironic smile:

“It is true, you were insupportable, with your insistence in staring at me.”

He said:

“Pardon me; I could not help it… You had the air of suffering.”

“Well, and what then?” she said.

“It is stronger than I. If you saw someone drowning, would you not hold out your hand to him?”

“I? Not at all,” she said. “I would rather push his head under the water, so that it might be over more quickly.”

She said this with a mixture of bitterness and humor; and, as he looked at her with a dumbfounded air, she laughed.

The train arrived. Everything was full, except for the last carriage. She got in. The employee was hurrying them. Christophe, who did not want to begin again the scene of the other day, wanted to look for another compartment. She said to him:

“Get in.”

He got in. She said:

“Today, it is all the same to me.”

They talked. With a great seriousness, Christophe tried to demonstrate to her that one was not allowed to disinterest oneself in others, and that one could do oneself so much mutual good, in helping each other, in consoling one another…

“Consolations,” she said, “they have no effect on me…”

And as Christophe insisted:

“Yes,” she said again with her impertinent smile, “consoler is an advantageous role for whoever plays it.”

It was a moment before he understood. When he understood, when he imagined that she suspected him of seeking his own interest, when he was thinking only of her, he rose indignant, opened the door, and wanted to get out, although the train was in motion. She prevented him, not without difficulty. He sat down again furious, and reclosed the door, just at the moment when the train was passing under a tunnel.

“You see,” she said, “you might have been killed.”

“I don’t care,” he said.

He no longer wanted to speak to her.

“The world is too stupid,” he said. “One makes others suffer, one suffers; and when one wants to come to the aid of someone, he suspects you. It is disgusting. All these people are not human.”

She tried to calm him, laughing. She placed her gloved hand on his hand; she spoke gently to him, calling him by his name.

“What, you know me?” he said.

“As if all the world did not know each other in Paris! You are of the boat too. But I was wrong to speak to you as I did. You are a good fellow, you, I see that. Come, calm yourself. Hands! Let us make peace!”

They shook hands, and conversed amicably. She said:

“It is not my fault, you see. I have made so many experiments with people that it has made me distrustful.”

“They have often disappointed me too,” said Christophe. “But I always give them credit.”

“I see clearly, you must be a gull.”

He began to laugh.

“Yes, I have swallowed a fair few of them, in my life; but it does not bother me. I have a good stomach. I swallow also bigger beasts, the mad cow, poverty, and, if need be, the wretches who attack me. I am the better for it.”

“You are lucky,” she said, “you are a man, you.”

“And you, you are a woman.”

“That is not much.”

“It is very beautiful,” he said, “and that can be so good!”

She laughed:

“That?” she said. “But what does the world do with that?”

“One must defend oneself.”

“Then it does not last long, goodness.”

“It is because one has not much of it.”

“Perhaps. And then, one must not suffer too much. There is a too much that withers the soul.”

He was on the point of pitying her. Then, he remembered the welcome she had given him just before…

“You will again speak of the advantageous role of consoler…”

“No,” she said, “I will say no more. I feel that you are good, that you are sincere. Thank you. Only, say nothing to me. You cannot know… I thank you.”

They were arriving in Paris. They parted, without giving each other their address, nor inviting one another to come.

A month or two later, she came of her own accord to ring at Christophe’s door.

“I have come to find you. I need to chat a little with you. I have thought of you sometimes, since our meeting.”

She settled down.

“Only an instant. I shall not disturb you long.”

He began to speak to her. She said:

“A minute, will you?”

They were silent. Then she said, smiling:

“I could not stand it anymore. Now, it is better.”

He wanted to question her.

“No,” she said. “Not that!”

She looked around her, saw and judged various objects, perceived Louisa’s photograph:

“It is your mother?” she said.

“Yes.”

She took it, and looked at it with sympathy.

“The good old woman!” she said. “You are lucky!”

“Alas! she is dead.”

“That makes no difference, you had her all the same.”

“Well, and you?”

But she put aside this subject, with a frown. She did not want him to question her about herself.

“No, speak to me of yourself. Tell me… Something of your life…”

“What can that matter to you?”

“Go on, all the same…”

He did not want to speak; but he let himself go into answering her questions: for she knew very well how to question him. And he just told her certain things that pained him, the story of his friendship, Olivier who had separated from him. She listened to him with a compassionate and ironic smile… Brusquely, she asked:

“What time is it? Ah! my God! I have been here two hours!… Pardon… Ah! how this has rested me!…”

She added:

“I should like to be able to come back… Not often… Sometimes… It would do me good. But I would not want to bore you, to make you lose your time… Only a minute, from time to time…”

“I will come to you,” said Christophe.

“No, no, not to my house. To yours, I prefer…”

But she did not come again, for a long time.

One evening, he learned by chance that she was gravely ill, that she had not been playing for weeks. He went to her house, despite the prohibition. They were not receiving; but when his name was known, they called him back on the stairs. She was in bed, she was better, she had had pneumonia, she was rather changed; but she still had her ironic air and her sharp gaze, which did not disarm. Yet she showed a real pleasure at seeing Christophe. She made him sit down beside the bed. She spoke of herself, with a mocking detachment, and said that she had nearly died. He showed himself moved. Then, she made fun of him. He reproached her for not having had anything sent to him:

“Have something sent to you? So that you might come? Never in my life!”

“I bet that you did not even think of me.”

“And you have won,” she told him, with her mocking smile, a little sad. “I did not think of it a minute, while I was ill. Only today, precisely. Don’t be sad, come now. When I am ill, I do not think of anyone, I ask only one thing of people, that they leave me in peace. I put my nose against the wall, and I wait, I want to be alone, I want to croak alone, like a rat.”

“It is hard, however, to suffer alone.”

“I am used to it. I was unhappy, for years. No one ever came to my aid. Now, the fold is taken… And then, it is better that way. No one can do anything for you. Noise in the room, importunate attentions, hypocritical jeremiads… No. I prefer to die alone.”

“You are quite resigned?”

“Resigned? I do not even know what that word means. No, I clench my teeth, and I hate the evil that makes me suffer.”

He asked her if no one came to see her, if no one was looking after her. She said that her comrades of the theater were rather good people — imbeciles — but obliging, compassionate, in a superficial way.

”… But it is I, I tell you, who do not want to see them. I am a bad sick-bed.”

“I would content myself with it,” he said.

She looked at him with pity:

“You too! Are you going to speak like the others?”

He said:

“Pardon me, pardon… Good God! Here I am becoming Parisian! I am ashamed… I swear to you that I did not even reflect on what I was saying…”

He hid his face in the sheets. She laughed frankly, and gave him a tap on the head:

“Ah! that word, it is not Parisian! Bravo! I recognize you. Come, show your head. Don’t weep into my sheets.”

“It is pardoned?”

“It is pardoned. But do not do it again.”

She chatted a little more with him, questioned him on what he was doing, then was tired, bored, sent him away.

It was agreed that he would come back to see her, the following week. But at the moment of leaving, he received from her a telegram, telling him not to come: she was in one of her bad days. — Then, the day after the next, she asked for him again. He came. He found her convalescent, seated by the window, half-stretched out. It was the first spring, the sky sunlit, the young shoots of the trees. She was more affectionate and gentler than he had yet seen her. She said that, the other day, she could see no one: she would have hated him, like all other men.

“And today?”

“Today, I feel you all young, all new, and I have affection for everything I feel young and new around me — like you.”

“I am no longer however quite young and quite new.”

“You will be so to your last day.”

They spoke of what he had done since they had seen each other, of the theater where she was going to resume her service soon; and he told her, on this subject, she told him what she thought of the theater, which disgusted her, but which held her.

She did not want him to come again; she promised to resume her visits to him. But she was worried about disturbing him. He told her how she would have the joy of chances not to trouble his work. They agreed on a sign of passage. She would knock at the door in a certain way; he would open, or would not open, according as he wished.

She did not abuse the permission, at least in the beginnings. But once when she was supposed to go to a society evening at which there was a question of saying verses, at the last instant — (she was already in her carriage) — it bored her: on the way, she sent a dispatch to say she could not come; and she had herself driven to Christophe’s. She had simply the intention of saying good evening to him, in passing. But it happened, that evening, that she let herself go to confide in him, to tell him her life, from childhood.

Sad childhood! A father of chance, whom she had not known. A mother, who kept an ill-famed inn, in a faubourg of a city of the North of France; the carters came there to drink, slept with the mistress, and brutalized her. One of them married her, because she had a few pennies; he beat her, got drunk. Françoise had a sister older than herself, who was a servant in the inn; she exhausted herself at her task; the master had made her his mistress, with the knowledge and sight of the mother; she was consumptive; she died. Françoise had grown up in the midst of blows and ignominies. She was a child pale, bilious, concentrated, with a little soul ardent and savage. She saw her mother and her sister weep, suffer, resign themselves, debase themselves, die. And she had the enraged will not to resign herself, to escape certain injustices, she had crises of nerves; she scratched, she bit, when they hit her. Once she tried to hang herself. She did not succeed; scarcely had she begun when she no longer wanted to, she was afraid of succeeding too well; and while she was already suffocating, and while she was struggling to untie the rope with her crisped and awkward fingers, there convulsed in her a furious desire to live. And since she could not escape by death — Christophe smiled sadly, remembering similar tests — she swore to herself to vanquish, to become free, rich, and to trample under her feet all those who oppressed her. She had made this oath in her hovel, one evening when she heard in the room next door the oaths of the man, the cries of the mother whom he was beating, and the weeping of the sister. How miserable she felt! And yet, her oath had relieved her. She clenched her teeth, and thought:

“I will crush you all.”

In that somber childhood, a single luminous point. One day, one of the urchins with whom she ran in the gutter, the son of the doorkeeper of the theater, had made her enter, without anyone knowing, a rehearsal. They slipped to the back of the hall, in the dark. She was seized by the mystery of the stage, resplendent in those shadows, and by the magnificent and incomprehensible things that were being said, and by the queenly air of the actress — who was indeed playing a queen in a romantic melodrama. She was frozen with emotion; and at the same time her heart was beating very strong… “There, there was what one must be, one day!… oh! if she were like that!…” When it was finished, she wanted, at all costs, to see the performance in the evening. She let her comrade leave, she feigned to follow him; and then, she went back to hide in the theater; she crouched under a bench; she remained there three hours, without stirring, suffocating, in the dust; and when the performance was about to begin and the public was arriving, when she was going to come out of her hiding-place, she had had the mortification of being seized, expelled ignominiously, amid laughter, and led back home, where she had been spanked. That night, she would have died, if she had not mentally chewed over what she would do later, to dominate these people and to avenge herself on them.

Her plan was made. She placed herself as servant in the Hotel and Café of the Theater, where the actors stayed. She scarcely knew how to read and write; she had read nothing, she had nothing to read. She wanted to learn, she put a devilish energy into it. She pilfered books in the rooms of the customers; she read them, at night, by moonlight, or at dawn, so as not to spend a candle. Thanks to the disorder of the actors, her little thefts passed unnoticed; or else the owners contented themselves with grumbling. Besides, she returned the books to them, after having read them — except for one or two, which moved her too much for her to be able to part with them; — but she did not return them intact: she tore out the pages that pleased her. She took good care, when she brought back the volumes, to slip them under the bed, into a piece of furniture, so as to make believe they had never left the room. She glued her ear to the doors, to listen to the actors, who were rehearsing their roles. And alone, in the corridor, while sweeping, she imitated their intonations in undertones, and she made gestures. When she was caught thus, she was mocked and insulted. She remained silent, with rage. — (No one could know what she was thinking.) That kind of education lasted a certain time, until she had the imprudence, one time, to steal a part, in the room of an actor. The actor stormed. No one had entered his room but the servant: he accused her. She denied it brazenly; he threatened to have her searched; she threw herself at his feet, she confessed everything to him, and also the other thefts, and the torn pages: the whole pot of roses. He swore in a terrible way; but he was less wicked than he seemed. He asked why she had done that. When she said that she wanted to become an actress, he laughed very loud. He questioned her; she recited to him whole pages that she had learned by heart; he was struck by it. He said:

“Listen, do you want me to give you lessons?”

She was transported, she kissed his hands.

“Ah!” she said to Christophe, “how I would have loved him!” But right away, he added:

“Only, my little one, you know, that is paid for…”

She was a virgin, she had always been of a fierce modesty in the face of the attacks with which she had been pursued. That savage chastity, that ardent need of purity, that disgust of dirty acts, of ignoble sensuality, without love, she had always had them, from childhood, from sickening of the sad spectacles that surrounded her in her house — she had them still… Ah! the unhappy one! she had been well punished!… What a derision of fate!…

“Then,” asked Christophe, “you consented?”

“Yes,” she said. “I hated him. But since, I have seen so many that he no longer seems to me one of the worst. At least he kept his word to me. He taught me what he knew — (not much!) — of his profession as an actor. He had me obtain a role in the troupe. I was at first a stage servant. I played snippets of roles. I remember being a soubrette when the regular soubrette was sick, they took the risk of giving me her role. Then, I went on. I was found besides impossible, burlesque, baroque. I was ugly, then. I remained so until the day when I was decreed — if not ‘divine,’ like the Other one — superiorly, ideally woman,… ‘the Woman’… The imbeciles! — As for the playing, it was judged incorrect, extravagant. The public did not take to me. The comrades made fun of me. I was tolerated, because I rendered services in spite of all, and because I did not cost dear. Not only did I cost them little, but I paid. Ah! each progress, each advancement step by step, I paid for it with my suffering, with my rest. Comrades, director, impresario, friends of the impresario…”

She fell silent, pale, the lips pressed, the gaze fixed, not weeping; but one felt that in her soul there wept tears of blood. In a very avid gesture there relived all those past shames and that devouring will to vanquish which had sustained her, more devouring with each new filth that she had had to endure. She would have wished to die; but it would have been too abominable to succumb amid humiliations, not to go further. To kill oneself before, so be it! Or after victory. But not when one has degraded oneself, without having had the prize for it…

She was silent. Christophe walked with anger in the room; he would have liked to bludgeon those people who had made suffer, who had soiled this woman. Then he looked at her with pity; and, standing near her, he took her head, her temples, her forehead between his hands, pressed them affectionately, and said:

“Poor little one!”

She made a gesture to push him away. He said:

“Have no fear of me. I love you well.”

Then tears flowed on Françoise’s pale cheeks. He knelt down beside her and kissed

la lunga mana d’ogni bellezza piena…

the long beautiful delicate hands, on which two tears had fallen.

Then, he was silent. She had collected herself again, and resumed calmly the continuation of her story:

An actor at last had launched her. He had discovered in this strange creature a demon, a genius — better still for him, “a dramatic type, a new woman, representative of an epoch.” Naturally, he had taken her, after so many others. And she had let herself be taken by him, as by so many others, without love, and even with the contrary of love. But he had made her glory; and from that dated her fortune.

“And now,” said Christophe, “the others can do nothing more against you; it is you who make of them what you will.”

“Do you believe that?” she said bitterly.

Then she told him this other derision of fate, the passion she had for a wretch, whom she despised: a debased and exploiting literary man, who had wrenched from her the most painful secrets, and who had made literature out of them, and then, who had dropped her.

“I despise him,” she said, “like the mud of my shoes; and I tremble with fury when I think that I love him, that it would suffice for him to make me a sign for me to run to him, to humiliate myself before this wretch. But what can I do about it? I have a heart that never loves what my mind wills. And by turns, I must sacrifice, humiliate the one or the other. I have a heart. I have a body. And they cry, they cry, they want their share of happiness. And I have no rein to hold them, I belong to nothing, I am free… Free? Slave of my heart and of my body, which want in spite of me, often, almost always. They carry me away, and I am ashamed. But what can I do?…”

She was silent, for an instant, stirring mechanically the ashes of the fire with the tongs.

“I have always thought,” she said, “that the actors felt nothing. And, in truth, those I see around me are great vainglorious people, who are hardly tormented except by little questions of self-love. I do not know if it is all the actors that are not true comedians, or if it is a matter of our time. I really believe that it is me. In any case, I pay for the others.”

She regretted having spoken. It was three o’clock in the morning. She rose to go. Christophe told her to wait until morning, to go home; he proposed that she go and stretch out on his bed. She preferred to remain in the armchair near the extinguished fire, continuing to chat quietly, in the silence of the house.

“You will be tired tomorrow.”

“I am used to it. But it is you… What are you doing tomorrow?”

“I am free. A lesson around eleven o’clock… And then, I am solid.”

“All the more reason for sleeping solidly.”

“Yes, I sleep like a log. There is no pain that resists it. I am furious sometimes at sleeping so well. So many hours lost!… I am going to take revenge on sleep, for once, by stealing a night from it.”

They continued to chat, in undertones, with long silences. And Christophe fell asleep. Françoise smiled, propped his head, so that it should not fall… She mused, seated near the window, and watching the garden grow light before her. Around seven o’clock, she gently awoke Christophe, and bade him goodbye.

In the course of the month, she came back, at hours when Christophe had gone out: she found the door closed. Christophe gave her a key to the apartment, so that she could come in whenever she wanted. More than once, in fact, she came when Christophe was not there. She left on the table a little bouquet of violets, or a few words on a sheet of paper, a scribble, a sketch, a caricature — as a sign of her passing.

And one evening, on coming out of the theater, she came to Christophe’s, to renew their good conversation. She found him at work; they talked. But from the first words, they felt that neither one nor the other was in the beneficent dispositions of the last time. She wanted to leave; but it was too late. Not that Christophe prevented her, it was her own will that no longer permitted it to her. They remained therefore, feeling the desire that was rising. And they took each other.