Jean-Christophe. The Journey's End. The Friends. 1

Despite the success that was beginning to take shape outside France, the material situation of the two friends was slow to improve. Difficult periods came around regularly, when they were forced to tighten their belts. They made up for it by eating double portions when they had money. But it was, in the long run, an exhausting way to live.

At the moment, they were in a lean spell. 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 soundly, trying to make up for lost time. Olivier had gone out early: he had a class to teach on the other side of Paris. Around eight o’clock, the concierge, who was bringing up the letters, rang the bell. Usually he didn’t insist, and slipped the papers under the door. But this morning he kept on knocking. Christophe, barely awake, went to open it, grumbling; he paid no attention to what the concierge, smiling and loquacious, was telling him about some newspaper article, he took the letters without looking at them, pushed the door without closing it, went back to bed, and fell asleep again, more soundly than before.

An hour later, he was startled awake again by footsteps in his room; and he was astonished to find, at the foot of his bed, an unfamiliar face, gravely greeting him. A journalist, finding the door open, had walked in without ceremony. Christophe, furious, leaped out of bed:

--- What the hell are you doing in here? --- he shouted.

He had grabbed his pillow to throw at the intruder, who made a move to retreat. They explained themselves. A reporter from la Nation wished to interview monsieur Krafft, regarding the article that had appeared in le Grand Journal.

--- What article?

--- Hadn’t he read it? The reporter offered to read it to him.

Christophe got back into bed. Had he not been dulled by sleep, he would have thrown the man out; but he found it less tiring to let him talk. He sank into the bed, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep. He might eventually have played his role convincingly. But the other man was persistent, and read in a loud voice the opening of the article. From the first few lines, Christophe began to listen. It spoke of monsieur Krafft as the foremost musical genius of the age. Forgetting his pose as a sleeper, Christophe swore in astonishment, and sitting up in bed, he said:

--- They’re mad. What’s come over them?

The reporter took the opportunity to interrupt his reading and put a series of questions, which Christophe answered without thinking. He had taken the article and was staring in stupefaction at his portrait spread across the front page; but he had no time to read it: for a second journalist had just entered the room. This time Christophe grew genuinely angry. He ordered them to clear out: which they did not do until they had quickly noted the arrangement of the furniture in the room, the photographs on the walls, and the appearance of the original himself, 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 decided that he would not be left in peace that day. He had not finished dressing when someone knocked at the door again, with a prearranged signal known only to a few intimates. Christophe opened it, and found himself face to face with a third stranger, whom he was about to expel briskly, when the other, protesting, declared himself to be the author of the article. How could you throw out someone who called you a genius! Christophe, sulky, had to submit to his admirer’s effusions. He was astonished by this sudden notoriety falling on him from nowhere, and he wondered whether he had, without realizing it, had some masterpiece performed the day before. But he had no time to inquire. The journalist had come to carry him off, willingly or not, and bring him then and there to the newspaper’s offices, where the director, the great Arsène Gamache himself, wished to see him: the car was waiting downstairs. Christophe tried to resist; but naive and, in spite of himself, susceptible to protestations of friendship, he ended up letting himself be taken.

Ten minutes later, he was introduced to the potentate before whom everyone trembled. A sturdy fellow, around fifty, short and stocky, a large round head with close-cropped grey hair, a ruddy face, imperious speech, a heavy and emphatic manner, with bursts of rattling volubility. He had imposed himself on Paris through his enormous self-confidence. A man of business and a handler of men, selfish, naive and wily, passionate, full of himself, he conflated his own affairs with those of France, and even of humanity. His interests, the prosperity of his paper, and the salus publica seemed to him to be of the same order and closely linked. He had no doubt that whoever harmed him harmed France; and to crush a personal enemy, he would in good faith have overturned the state. He was not, for all that, incapable of generosity. Idealistic, as one is after dinner, he liked, in the manner of God the Father, to raise up from time to time some poor wretch from the dust, in order that the greatness of his power might be made manifest --- power that made something from nothing, that made ministers, and could, had he wished, have made kings, and unmade them. His competence was universal. He made geniuses too, when it pleased him.

That day, he had just “made” Christophe.

It was Olivier who had, without thinking, set the bell ringing.

Olivier, who never took any steps on his own behalf, who abhorred publicity and fled journalists like the plague, believed himself bound by other duties when it concerned his friend. He was like those tender mothers, honest little bourgeois women, irreproachable wives, who would sell their bodies to obtain special treatment for their rascal of a son.

Writing for reviews, and being in contact with a number of critics and dilettantes, Olivier never missed an opportunity to speak of Christophe; and lately he had been surprised to find that he was being listened to. He sensed around him a stirring of curiosity, a mysterious rumor spreading through literary and fashionable circles. What was its origin? Were there some newspaper echoes following the recent performances of Christophe’s works in England and Germany? There didn’t seem to be any specific cause. It was one of those phenomena well known to alert spirits who breathe in the air of Paris, and who, better than the meteorological observatory on the Tour Saint-Jacques, can sense a day in advance the wind that is building, and what it will bring tomorrow. In this great nervous city, through which electric shivers pass, there are invisible currents of glory, a latent celebrity that precedes the other --- that vague salon murmur, that Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade, which at a given moment bursts forth in a promotional article, the crude trumpet blast that drives into the dullest ears the name of the new idol. It happens besides that this fanfare drives away some of the first and best friends of the man it celebrates. They are responsible for it nonetheless.

So Olivier had his share in the article in le Grand Journal. He had taken advantage of the interest that was manifesting itself in Christophe, and he had taken care to warm it further with adroit pieces of information. He had been careful not to put Christophe directly in contact with the journalists; he feared some outburst. But at the request of le Grand Journal, he had been cunning enough to arrange a meeting, at a café table, between Christophe and a reporter, without the latter suspecting a thing. All these precautions only served to sharpen the curiosity and make Christophe more interesting. Olivier had never yet had dealings with publicity; he had not calculated that he was setting in motion a formidable machine that, once launched, could no longer be directed or restrained.

He was devastated when he read, on his way to class, the article in le Grand Journal. He had not anticipated this hammer blow. Above all, he had not anticipated it coming so quickly. He had assumed the paper would wait, before writing, until it had gathered all the information and knew a little better what it wished to speak of. That was too naive. If a newspaper goes to the trouble of discovering a new glory, it is for itself, of course, and in order to steal from its rivals the honor of the discovery. It must therefore hurry, even at the risk of understanding nothing of what it praises. But it is rare that the author complains: when one is admired, one is always understood well enough.

Le Grand Journal, after relating absurd stories about Christophe’s poverty, representing him as a victim of German despotism, an apostle of freedom forced to flee imperial Germany and seek refuge in France, sanctuary of free souls --- (a fine pretext for chauvinist tirades!) --- launched into a crushing eulogy of his genius, of which it knew nothing --- nothing but a few flat melodies dating from Christophe’s early days in Germany, which Christophe, ashamed, would have liked to destroy. But if the author of the article was ignorant of Christophe’s work, he made up for it with his intentions --- those he attributed to him. Two or three phrases gleaned here and there from the mouths of Christophe or Olivier, or even from some Goujart who claimed to be well informed, had sufficed him to construct the image of a Jean-Christophe, “republican genius --- the great musician of democracy.” He took the opportunity to speak ill of contemporary French musicians, above all the most original and independent among them, who cared very little about democracy. He made exceptions only for one or two composers whose electoral opinions seemed to him excellent. It was unfortunate that their music was considerably less so. But that was a detail. Besides, their praise, and even Christophe’s, mattered less than the criticism of the others. In Paris, when one reads an article praising a man, it is always prudent to ask:

--- Who is being spoken ill of?

Olivier flushed with shame as he went through the paper, saying to himself:

--- A fine piece of work I’ve done!

He had difficulty getting through his class. As soon as he was free, he ran home. How dismayed he was to learn that Christophe had already gone out with journalists! He waited for him at lunch. Christophe did not return. Hour by hour, Olivier, growing more anxious, thought:

--- What foolish things they must be making him say!

Around three o’clock, Christophe came back, quite cheerful. He had lunched with Arsène Gamache, and his head was a little clouded by the champagne he had drunk. He understood nothing of Olivier’s anxiety, as Olivier anxiously asked him what he had said and done.

--- What I did? Had an excellent lunch. It had been a long time since I’d eaten so well.

He began to describe the menu to him.

--- And the wines… I drank every color of the rainbow.

Olivier interrupted him to ask about the other guests.

--- The guests?… I don’t know. There was Gamache, a thoroughly straightforward man, frank as gold; Clodomir, the author of the article, a charming fellow; three or four journalists I don’t know, very lively, all kind and charming to me, the cream of good people.

Olivier did not look convinced. Christophe was surprised by his lack of enthusiasm.

--- Didn’t you read the article?

--- Yes. Exactly. And you --- have you read it carefully?

--- Yes… That is, I glanced at it. I didn’t have time.

--- Well, do read it then.

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

--- Ah! The idiot! he said.

He was doubled over with laughter.

--- Bah! he continued, all critics are 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 anyone should want to make him “a republican musician” was meaningless… Well, let’s pass over that nonsense… But to set his “republican” art against the “sacristy art” of the masters who came before him --- (he who nourished himself on the soul of those great men) --- that was too much…

--- Damn fools! They’re going to make me look like an idiot!…

And then, what reason was there to tear to pieces, on his account, French musicians of talent, whom he liked more or less --- (rather less than more) --- but who knew their craft and did him credit? And --- worst of all --- they were attributing to him, with incredible presumption, feelings about his homeland that were odious!… No, that, that could not be tolerated…

--- I’m going to write to them, said Christophe.

Olivier stepped in:

--- No, no, he said, not now! You’re too worked up. Tomorrow, with a clear head…

Christophe was stubborn. When he had something to say, he could not wait until the next day. He promised Olivier only to show him the letter first. That was not without use. The letter duly revised, in which he concentrated above all on correcting the opinions attributed to him about Germany, Christophe ran to post it.

--- That way, he said on returning, it’s only half bad: 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, you didn’t say anything imprudent at the dinner?

--- Of course not, said Christophe, laughing.

--- Are you sure?

--- Yes, you coward.

Olivier was somewhat reassured. But Christophe was not. He had just recalled how freely he had talked, without any restraint at all. From the moment they sat down, he had made himself entirely at home. Not for an instant had he thought to be on his guard with these people: they had seemed so cordial, so well disposed toward him! And in truth they were. One is always well disposed toward those one has done a favor. And Christophe showed such genuine delight that it spread to those around him. His affectionate ease, his jovial outbursts, his enormous appetite, and the speed with which liquids disappeared down his throat without affecting him in the least were not unwelcome to Arsène Gamache, who was himself a solid man at table --- rough, rustic, and full-blooded, with a thorough contempt for people who were not in good health, for those who dared neither eat nor drink, for the worn-out little Parisians. He judged a man at the table. He appreciated Christophe. On the spot, he proposed staging Christophe’s Gargantua as an opera at the Opéra. --- (The pinnacle of art for these French bourgeois was at that time to mount on stage the Damnation of Faust, or the Nine Symphonies.) --- Christophe, who burst out laughing at this absurd idea, had great difficulty preventing Gamache from telephoning his orders to the management of the Opéra, or to the Ministry of Fine Arts. --- (To hear Gamache tell it, one would think all those people were at his disposal.) --- And this proposal, reminding him of the strange treatment once inflicted on his symphonic poem David, Christophe let himself go and told the story of the performance organized by the deputy Roussin for the debut of his beautiful friend. Gamache, who had no love for Roussin, was delighted; and Christophe, warmed by the generous wines and the sympathy of his audience, launched into other stories, more or less indiscreet, from which those listening did not lose a word. Christophe alone had forgotten them by the time he left the table. And now, at Olivier’s question, they came back to him. He felt a small shiver run down his spine. For he had no illusions; he had enough experience to suspect what was about to happen; now that his intoxication had worn off, he saw it as clearly as if it had already occurred: his indiscretions distorted and published as gossip in some slanderous gazette, his artistic quips turned into weapons of war. As for his letter of retraction, he knew what to expect there, just as well as Olivier did: to answer a journalist is to waste your ink; a journalist always has the last word.

Everything happened exactly as Christophe had foreseen. The indiscretions appeared, and the letter of retraction did not. Gamache contented himself with having Christophe told that he recognized in this his generosity of heart, that such scruples did him honor; but he jealously guarded the secret of those scruples; and the false opinions attributed to Christophe continued to spread, provoking sharp criticism in the Paris papers, and from there in Germany, where people were outraged that a German artist should express himself with so little dignity regarding his own country.

Christophe thought it very clever to take advantage of an interview being conducted by the reporter of another newspaper to protest his love for the Deutsches Reich, where, he said, one was at least as free as in the French Republic. --- He was speaking to the representative of a conservative paper, which immediately attributed to him anti-republican declarations.

--- Better and better! said Christophe. What on earth does my music have to do with politics?

--- It’s the custom here, said Olivier. Look at the battles fought over Beethoven’s back. Some make him a Jacobin, others a bigot, some a firebrand of the people, others a prince’s lackey.

--- Ah! he’d kick them all in the backside!

--- Well then, do the same.

Christophe very much wanted to. But he was too good-natured with those who were amiable toward him. Olivier was never at ease when he left him alone. For journalists always came to interview him; and however much Christophe promised to watch himself, he couldn’t help being expansive and trusting. He said whatever came into his head. Female journalists would arrive, calling themselves his friends and drawing him out about his sentimental adventures. Others used him to speak ill of one person or another. When Olivier came home, he would find Christophe looking thoroughly sheepish.

--- Another foolish thing? he would ask.

--- As always, Christophe would say, crushed.

--- Are you incorrigible, then?

--- I deserve to be locked up… But this time, I swear, it’s the last time.

--- Yes, yes, until the next…

--- No, this time it’s done.

The next day, Christophe told Olivier triumphantly:

--- Another one came. I showed him the door.

--- Don’t go too far, said Olivier. Be careful with them. “This creature is very wicked.” It turns on you when you defend yourself… It’s so easy for them to take revenge! They make use of the slightest words one has said.

Christophe passed his hand across his forehead:

--- Good God!

--- What is it now?

--- The thing is, I said something to him as I shut the door…

--- What exactly?

--- The Emperor’s word.

--- The Emperor’s?

--- Yes, well, if not his, then someone of his household…

--- You wretch! You’ll see it on the front page of the paper!

Christophe shuddered. But what he saw the following day was a description of his apartment --- which the journalist had never entered --- and a conversation he had never had.

The reports grew more embellished as they spread. In the foreign papers, they acquired all manner of absurdities. French articles having reported that Christophe, in his poverty, had transcribed music for guitar, Christophe learned from an English newspaper that he had played the guitar in courtyards.

He did not read only praise. Far from it. It was enough that Christophe had been championed by the Grand Journal for the other papers to attack him at once. It was beneath their dignity to admit that a rival could discover a genius they had overlooked. Some made merry at his expense. Others expressed sympathy for Christophe’s fate. Goujart, piqued at having had the grass cut from under his feet, wrote an article to set things straight, as he put it. He spoke familiarly of his old friend Christophe, whose first steps in Paris he had guided: certainly, he was a gifted musician, but --- (he could say so, since they were friends) --- full of gaps, insufficiently schooled, without originality, of extravagant pride: one could render him no worse service than to flatter that pride in a ridiculous fashion, when what he needed was a wise, learned, judicious, benevolent, and stern Mentor, etc. --- (a perfect portrait of Goujart). --- The musicians laughed sourly. They affected a crushing contempt for an artist who enjoyed the backing of the press; and, playing at disgust with the vulgum pecus, they refused the gifts of Artaxerxes, who was not offering them any. Some vilified Christophe; others crushed him under the weight of their commiseration. Certain ones turned on Olivier --- (they were colleagues of his). --- They were glad to avenge themselves on his intransigence and the way he kept them at arm’s length --- more, to be truthful, from a taste for solitude than from contempt for anyone. But what men forgive least is the ability to get along without them. --- Some were not far from implying that he drew personal profit from the Grand Journal articles. There were those who took Christophe’s side against him; they displayed woeful expressions at Olivier’s recklessness in throwing a delicate, dreamy artist, insufficiently armored against life --- Christophe --- into the clamor of the Fair on the Square, where he would inevitably be lost: for they treated Christophe like a small boy whose head is not strong enough to venture out alone. They were ruining, they said, the future of this man, who, lacking genius, at least deserved better by his goodwill and dogged labor than to be made drunk with inferior incense. It was a great pity. Could he not be left in his obscurity, to work patiently for years?

Olivier would have had an easy answer for them:

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

But that would not have stopped them. They would have replied, with their magnificent serenity:

--- That is a detail. One must suffer. And what does it matter, to suffer?

Naturally, these were people of the world, perfectly comfortable, who professed such stoic theories. As that millionaire said to a naive man who came to ask his help for an artist in poverty:

--- But, monsieur, Mozart died in poverty.

They would have found it in extremely poor taste for Olivier to point out that Mozart would have asked nothing better than to live, and that Christophe was resolved to do so.

Christophe was beginning to be sick of this doorkeeper’s gossip. He wondered if it would go on forever. --- But after a fortnight, it was over. The newspapers spoke of him no more. Only, he was now known. When his name was mentioned, everyone said, not:

--- He’s the author of David or Gargantua,

but:

--- Ah! yes, the man from the Grand Journal!…

That was celebrity.

Olivier noticed it in the number of letters Christophe received, and which reached him as well, by ricochet: offers from librettists, proposals from concert promoters, protestations of friendship from latecomers who had often been enemies from the start, invitations from women. His opinion was also requested for newspaper surveys on an infinite number of subjects: on the depopulation of France, on idealist art, on women’s corsets, on nudity in the theater --- whether he did not think Germany was in decline, that music was finished, and so on. They laughed about it together. But even while mocking it all, what should happen but that Christophe, that Huron, began accepting dinner invitations! Olivier could not believe his eyes.

--- You? he said.

--- Me. Absolutely, replied Christophe with a teasing look. You thought you were the only one who could go see the fine ladies? Not at all, my friend! My turn! I want to have some fun!

--- Have fun? My poor old fellow!

The truth was that Christophe had lived shut in at home for so long that he was suddenly seized by a violent need to get out. And besides, he felt a naive pleasure in savoring his new fame. He was thoroughly bored at these evenings, and found society idiotic. But when he came home, he maliciously told Olivier the opposite. He went to see people; but he did not go back; he found absurd pretexts, of an astonishing impertinence, to dodge their re-invitations. Olivier was scandalized. Christophe roared with laughter. He did not go into salons to cultivate his renown, but to replenish his supply of life, his museum of glances, vocal timbres, human gestures --- all that material of forms, sounds, and colors with which the artist needs periodically to enrich his palette. A musician does not feed on music alone. An inflection of the human voice, the rhythm of a gesture, the harmony of a smile, suggest more music to him than a colleague’s symphony. But it must be said that this music of faces and souls is just as bland and little varied in salons as the music of musicians. Each person has his manner, and is frozen in it. The smile of a pretty woman is just as stereotyped, in its studied grace, as a Parisian melody. The men are even more insipid than the women. Under the debilitating influence of society, energies are blunted, original characters diminish and fade away with frightening speed. Christophe was struck by the number of the dead or dying he encountered among the artists: a young musician here, full of sap and genius, whom success had enervated, numbed, annihilated; he thought of nothing now but sniffing the flattery that was asphyxiating him, enjoying himself, and sleeping. What he would become twenty years later, one could see across the salon in the form of that old pomaded master, rich, celebrated, a member of every Academy, arrived at the pinnacle of his career, and seeming to have nothing more to fear and nothing more to manage --- who groveled before everything and everyone, afraid of opinion, of power, of the press, no longer daring to say what he thought, and in any case no longer thinking, no longer existing, displaying himself like a donkey laden with his own relics.

Behind each of these artists and people of wit who had been great or who might have been, one could be sure there was a woman gnawing away at them. They were all dangerous --- those who were foolish, and those who were not; those who loved, and those who loved only themselves; the best were the worst: for they all the more surely smothered the artist beneath the snuffer of their misguided affection, which in all sincerity applied itself to domesticating genius, to adapting it to their own use, to leveling, pruning, raking, perfuming it, until it was fitted to the measure of their sensibility, their petty vanity, their mediocrity, and that of their world.

Though Christophe only passed through this world briefly, he saw enough to sense the danger. More than one, naturally, sought to draw him into her salon, into 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 disquieting example of the transformations already worked around them by these modern Circes, he would not have escaped unscathed. But he had no desire to swell the flock of these fine turkey-keepers. The risk would have been greater for him had they been less persistent in pursuit. Now that everyone was thoroughly convinced they had a genius among them, following their usual habit, they set about smothering him. Such 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 a tame lackey of him.

Christophe, momentarily unsettled, immediately recovered himself and sent them all packing.

Fate is ironic. It lets the carefree slip through the meshes of its net; but what it takes care never to miss are those who are wary --- the prudent, the forewarned. It was not Christophe who was caught in the Parisian trap, but Olivier.

He had benefited from his friend’s success: Christophe’s fame had reflected back upon him. He was now better known, for having been cited in two or three newspapers as the man who had discovered Christophe, than for everything he had written over the past six years. He received his share of the invitations addressed to Christophe, and accompanied him with the intention of keeping a discreet watch over him. No doubt he was too absorbed in that task to keep watch over himself. Love passed, and took him.

She was a small, slender, charming blonde, with fine hair rippling like little waves around a narrow and clear brow, delicate eyebrows over slightly heavy lids, eyes of a periwinkle blue, a fine nose with quivering nostrils, temples slightly hollowed, a capricious chin, a mobile, witty and voluptuous mouth with corners faintly upturned, the “Parmigianinesque” smile of a very pure little faun. She had a long and slender neck, a pretty figure, a body of elegant thinness, something joyful and careworn in her young face, which was enveloped by the disquieting, poetic enigma of the awakening spring --- Frühlingserwachen. --- Her name was Jacqueline Langeais.

She was not yet twenty. She came from a Catholic family --- wealthy, refined, and free-thinking. Her father was an intelligent, inventive, and resourceful engineer, open to new ideas, who had made his fortune through his work, his political connections, and his marriage. A marriage of love and money --- (the only true love match for people of their kind) --- with a pretty woman, very Parisian, from the world of finance. The money had remained; but the love had departed. A few sparks of it had nevertheless been preserved, for it had burned fiercely on both sides; but they made no pretense of excessive fidelity. Each went about their own business and pleasures, and they got along together as egoistic, unscrupulous, and prudent companions.

Their little daughter was a bond between them, while at the same time the object of a muted rivalry, for they both loved her jealously. Each recognized themselves in her, with their favorite faults idealized by the grace of childhood, and each sought slyly to steal her from the other. The child had not failed to sense this, with the artful candor of those small creatures who have all too great a tendency to believe that the universe revolves around them, and she turned it to her advantage. She provoked between them a perpetual outbidding of affection. There was no whim she did not feel certain of seeing indulged by one if the other refused it, and the other was so vexed at having been outdone that they would immediately offer still more than the first had granted. She had been shamelessly spoiled; and it was fortunate for her that her nature contained nothing truly bad --- apart from the egoism common to nearly all children, which in children too pampered and too wealthy takes on morbid forms bred by the absence of obstacles and the absence of purpose.

While adoring her, Monsieur and Madame Langeais would have been careful not to sacrifice any of their personal convenience on her behalf. They left the child alone for the greater part of the day, amid her thousand and one satisfied whims. She had no lack of time for reflection, and she made full use of it. Precocious and quickly informed by the careless remarks made in her presence --- (for no one stood on ceremony) --- at the age of six she was telling her dolls little love stories whose characters were the husband, the wife, and the lover. It goes without saying that she meant no harm by it. From the day when she glimpsed beneath the words the shadow of an actual feeling, it was over for the dolls: she kept her stories to herself. She had a fund of innocent sensuality that resonated in the distance like invisible bells, far away, far away, on the other side of the horizon. No one knew quite what it was. At moments the wind carried gusts of it; it rose from no one knew where, one was enveloped by it, one felt oneself blush, one’s breath gave out, from fear and from pleasure. One understood nothing of it. And then it vanished as it had come. Nothing was heard anymore. Barely a hum, an imperceptible resonance, dissolved in the blue air. One knew only that it was out there, on the other side of the mountain, and that one must go there, go there as quickly as possible: happiness was there. Ah! If only one could arrive!…

While waiting to get there, one formed strange ideas about what one would find. For the great preoccupation of this little girl’s mind was to guess. She had a friend her own age, Simone Adam, with whom she often talked about these weighty subjects. Each brought her own insights, her experience of twelve years, overheard conversations and readings gathered in secret. Perched on tiptoe and clinging to the stones, the two girls strained to see over the old wall that hid the future from them. But try as they might, and claim as they did that they could see through the cracks, they saw nothing at all. They were a mixture of innocence, poetic mischievousness, and Parisian irony. They said enormous things without realizing it, and made great mysteries out of things perfectly simple. Jacqueline, who poked about everywhere without anyone thinking to object, pushed her little nose into all her father’s books. Fortunately, she was protected against bad encounters by her very innocence and the instinct of a very fastidious little girl: a single scene or word that was even slightly coarse was enough to put her off; she would immediately drop the book and pass through the company of infamous companions like a startled cat picking its way among puddles of dirty water --- without a single splash.

In general, novels did not attract her: they were too precise and too dry. But what made her heart beat with excitement and hope of finding the riddle explained were the books of the poets --- those who spoke of love, naturally. They came closer to her little-girl mentality. They did not see things; they imagined them, through the prism of desire or regret; they seemed, like her, to be looking through the cracks in the old wall. But they knew so many more things, they knew all the things that mattered to know, and they wrapped them in very soft and mysterious words that had to be unwound with infinite care, to find… to find… Ah! one found nothing, and yet one was always on the verge of finding…

The two curious girls were tireless. They repeated to each other, in low voices and with a little shiver, lines by Alfred de Musset or Sully-Prudhomme, in which they imagined abysses of perversity; they copied them out; they questioned each other about the hidden meaning of passages that sometimes had none. These little women of thirteen, innocent and bold, 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 teacher --- a very gentle, very polite old gentleman --- verses like the following, which he caught sight of one day and which left him thunderstruck:

Laissez, oh ! laissez-moi vous tenir enlacées, Boire dans vos baisers des amours insensées, Goutte à goutte et longtemps !…

They attended classes at a fashionable and well-appointed school whose teachers were masters from the University. There they found an outlet for their sentimental aspirations. Nearly all these little girls were in love with their teachers. It was enough for a teacher to be young and reasonably presentable to wreak havoc on their hearts. They worked like angels to make themselves well regarded by their sultan. There were tears when, in examinations, one had been poorly placed by him --- by him, of course: for they cared little when it was by someone else. If he gave praise, one blushed, one went pale, one fired grateful and coquettish glances at him. And if he called you aside to offer advice or a compliment, it was paradise. He did not need to be an eagle to please them. During gymnastics class, when the teacher took Jacqueline in his arms to lift her to the trapeze, she was left with a slight fever. And what furious rivalry! What secret transports of jealousy! What humble and wheedling looks directed at the master, to try to win him back from an insolent rival! In class, when he opened his mouth to speak, pens and pencils rushed forward to follow him. They did not try to understand; the great thing was not to miss a syllable. And while they wrote and wrote, their curious eyes never ceasing to furtively study the face and gestures of their idol, Jacqueline and Simone would murmur to each other:

--- Do you think he’d look nice in a tie with blue polka dots?

Then came an ideal made of fashion prints, romantically worldly books of verse, poetic fashion plates --- infatuations with actors, virtuosos, authors living or dead, Mounet-Sully, Samain, Debussy --- glances exchanged with unknown young men at concerts, at parties, in the street, and tiny passions immediately sketched out in imagination --- a perpetual need to fall in love without cease, to be always filled with a love, a pretext for loving. Jacqueline and Simone confided everything to each other: plain evidence that they felt very little; it was in fact the surest way to never have a deep feeling. In return, this was turning into a state of chronic illness that they were the first to mock but which they cultivated with loving care. They stirred each other up. Simone, more romantic and more cautious, imagined more extravagances. But Jacqueline, more sincere and more ardent, was closer to actually carrying them out. Twenty times she nearly committed the worst follies. --- Yet she did not commit them, as is ordinarily the case with adolescents. There are hours when these poor, frantic little creatures --- (which we have all been) --- are within a hair’s breadth of throwing themselves, the boys into suicide, the girls into the arms of the first man who comes along. Only, thank God, nearly all of them stop there. Jacqueline wrote ten rough drafts of passionate letters to people she scarcely knew by sight; but she sent none of them, except for an enthusiastic letter, which she did not sign, to a critic who was ugly, vulgar, egoistic, dry of heart and narrow of mind. She had fallen for him over three lines in which she had discovered treasures of sensibility. She also became inflamed over 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 said to him? She had nothing, nothing at all to say to him. She did not love him. And she knew it perfectly well. In her follies there was, for one half, deliberate self-deception. And for the other half, it was the eternal and delicious and stupid need to love. Since Jacqueline was of a very intelligent breed, she was unaware of none of this. That did not prevent her from being mad. A madman who knows himself is worth two.

She went out a great deal in society. She was surrounded by young men who fell under her charm and more than one of whom loved her. She loved none of them, and flirted with all. She took no care about the harm she might cause. A pretty girl makes a cruel game of love. It seems entirely natural to her that people should love her, and she feels obligated to no one except the person she herself loves; she would readily believe that whoever loves her is already lucky enough. It must be said in her defense that she has not the faintest idea what love is, though she thinks about it all day long. One readily imagines that a girl of the world, raised in the hothouse atmosphere of a great city, is more precocious than a country girl; and it is just the opposite. Reading and conversation have indeed created in her an obsession with love that, in her idle life, often borders on mania; it even happens sometimes that she has read the play in advance and knows all the lines by heart. And so she feels nothing of 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 runs a great risk of never saying anything at all.

Jacqueline, like most young people, lived therefore in the midst of this dust of feelings lived out by others, which, while keeping her in a state of constant low fever, with burning hands, a dry throat, and irritated eyes, prevented her from seeing things as they were. She believed she knew them. It was not goodwill that she lacked. She read and she listened. She had learned a great deal here and there, in fragments, in conversation and in books. She even tried to read within herself. She was better than the milieu she lived in. She was more sincere.

A woman exercised a beneficial influence on her --- too brief. A sister of her father’s, between forty and fifty, who had never married. Tall, with regular features, but sad and without beauty, Marthe Langeais always dressed in black; she had a constrained distinction in her gestures and movements; she spoke barely at all, in an almost low voice. She would have passed unnoticed, but for the clear gaze of her intelligent gray eyes, and the kind smile of her slightly sad mouth.

She was seen at the Langeais house only on certain days, when they were alone. Langeais regarded her with a respect mingled with tedium. Mme Langeais made no secret to her husband of the little pleasure she took in her visits. Yet they felt obligated, by the duty of propriety, to receive her regularly for dinner, one evening a week; and they took care not to show her too plainly that it was an obligation. Langeais spoke of himself, which always interested him. Mme Langeais thought of other things, and smiled out of habit as she answered, more or less at random. Everything went very smoothly, with a great deal of politeness. There was even no lack of affectionate warmth on the occasions when the aunt --- who was discreet --- took her leave sooner than might have been hoped; and the charming smile of Mme Langeais grew more radiant on days when she had particularly agreeable memories turning over in her mind. Aunt Marthe sensed all of this; few things escaped her gaze; and she saw a great deal in her brother’s household that troubled or saddened her. But she showed nothing of it: what good would it have done? She loved her brother, she had been proud of his intelligence and his successes, as the rest of the family had been --- the family that had not thought it too high a price to pay, at the cost of its own straitened means, for the triumph of the eldest son. She, at least, had kept her own free judgment. As intelligent as he, and better tempered morally, more virile --- (as so many women in France are, so superior to the men) --- she saw him clearly; and when he asked her opinion, she gave it frankly. But it had been a long time since he asked! He found it more prudent not to know, or --- (for he knew just as well as she) --- to close his eyes. She, out of pride, withdrew into herself. No one troubled themselves about her inner 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 make use of her brother’s connections and her own talents: she did not do so. She had written in one of the major Parisian reviews two or three articles --- historical and literary portraits whose sober, precise, striking style had attracted notice. She had stopped there. She might have formed interesting friendships with certain men, certain distinguished women, who had shown interest in her, and whom she herself might perhaps have been pleased to know. She had not responded to their overtures. It happened that having reserved a seat at a performance where beautiful things she loved were being played, she would not go; and being able to take a trip where she knew she would have found pleasure, she would stay home. Her nature was a curious amalgam of stoicism and neurasthenia. The latter in no way touched the integrity of her mind. Her life was affected, but not her spirit. An old sorrow, which she alone knew, had marked her at the heart. And deeper still, more unknown --- unknown even to herself --- was the mark of fate, the inward malady that had already begun to consume her. --- Meanwhile, the Langeais saw in her only her clear gaze, which sometimes disconcerted them.

Jacqueline paid little attention to the aunt when she was carefree and happy --- which was at first her most ordinary state. But when she reached the age at which a troubling labor works silently in the body and soul, delivering the being over to anguish, disgust, terror, desperate sadness --- in those moments of absurd and atrocious vertigo that fortunately do not last, but in which one feels oneself dying --- the child who was drowning and dared not cry out for help found beside her only Aunt Marthe, holding out her hand. Ah, how far away the others were! Strangers, her father and mother, with their affectionate egoism, too satisfied with themselves to think of the small sorrows of a fourteen-year-old doll! But the aunt divined them, and she sympathized. She said nothing. She simply smiled; 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 placed her hand on Jacqueline’s head and stroked it, without speaking.

The girl confided in her. She would go to visit her great friend when her heart was heavy. She knew that at whatever hour she came, she would find the same indulgent eyes, which would pour a little of their tranquillity into her. She seldom spoke to the aunt of her imaginary little passions: she would have been ashamed; she sensed that they were not real. But she told her vague and profound anxieties, more real, the only real things.

--- Aunt, she sometimes sighed, I want so much to be happy!

--- Poor little one! said Marthe, smiling.

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

--- Will I be happy? Aunt, tell me, will I be happy?

--- I don’t know, my dear. It depends a little on you… One can always be happy, when one wishes to be.

Jacqueline was skeptical.

--- Are you happy?

Marthe smiled sadly.

--- Yes.

--- Really? Truly? You are happy?

--- Don’t you believe it?

--- Yes. But…

Jacqueline stopped.

--- What is it?

--- I want to be happy, but not in the same way as you.

--- Poor child! I hope so too, said Marthe.

--- No, continued Jacqueline, shaking her head with decision, I couldn’t, to begin with.

--- Neither did I think I could. Life teaches you to manage many things.

--- Oh, but I don’t want to learn, protested Jacqueline, uneasily. I want to be happy in my own way.

--- You’d be quite at a loss if someone asked you how!

--- I know very well what I want.

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

--- First of all, I want to be loved.

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

--- And what good will that do you, if you do not love?

Jacqueline, taken aback, exclaimed:

--- But, aunt, of course I’m only speaking of what I love! The rest 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. To love is the greatest grace of God. Pray that he grant it to you.

--- And if no one loves me?

--- Even then. You will be happier still.

Jacqueline’s face fell; she took on a sulky look:

--- I don’t want that, she said. It would give me no pleasure at all.

Marthe laughed affectionately, looked at Jacqueline, sighed, then returned to her work.

--- Poor little one! she said again.

--- But why do you always say: poor little one? asked Jacqueline, uneasy. I don’t want to be a poor little one. I want so very much to be happy!

--- That is precisely why I say: poor little one!

Jacqueline sulked a little. But it did not last long. Marthe’s warm laugh disarmed her. She embraced her, pretending to be vexed. At bottom, one cannot help, at that age, being secretly flattered by melancholy predictions for later --- much later. From a distance, misfortune is haloed with poetry; and there is nothing one fears so much as the mediocrity of life.

Jacqueline did not notice that the aunt’s face was growing ever more pale. She did notice that Marthe went out less and less; but she put it down to her homebody ways, which she often teased her about. Once or twice, when she came to visit, she had passed the doctor on his way out. She had asked her aunt:

--- Are you ill?

Marthe answered:

--- It is nothing.

But now she stopped coming even to the weekly dinner at the Langeais house. Jacqueline, indignant, went to her and reproached her bitterly.

--- My dear, said Marthe gently, I am a little tired.

But Jacqueline would hear none of it. All just excuses!

--- A fine effort, coming to us for two hours a week! You don’t love me, she said. You only love the corner of your hearth.

But when she recounted the scene at home, quite proud of herself, Langeais scolded her sharply:

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

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

Jacqueline went through days of terror. She reassured herself a little when she saw her aunt. Marthe, fortunately, was not suffering too greatly. She kept her tranquil smile, which on her translucent face seemed the reflection of an inner lamp. Jacqueline told herself:

--- No, it isn’t possible, they were mistaken, she wouldn’t be so calm…

She resumed the telling of her small confidences, to which Marthe listened with even more interest than before. Only, sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, the aunt would leave the room, giving no sign of suffering; and she would not reappear until the crisis had passed and her features had grown serene again. She did not wish anyone to allude to her condition, she tried to conceal it; perhaps she herself needed not to dwell on it too much: the illness she knew was consuming her filled her with horror, and she turned her mind away from it; her entire effort was to no longer disturb the peace of her final months. The end came more swiftly than expected. Soon she received no one but Jacqueline. Then Jacqueline’s visits had to grow shorter. Then came the day of parting. Marthe, lying in her bed, from which she had not risen for weeks, took leave tenderly of her little friend, with very gentle and consoling words. And then she closed herself away, to die.

Jacqueline passed through months of despair. Marthe’s death coincided with the worst hours of that moral anguish against which Marthe had been the only one to defend her. She found herself in a state of unspeakable abandonment. She would have needed a faith to sustain her. It seemed that this support ought not to have been lacking: she had always been made to practice her religious duties; her mother practiced them exactly as well. But that was precisely it: her mother practiced them; but Aunt Marthe had not. And how could one not make the comparison! A child’s eyes catch many lies that older people no longer think to notice; they note as well many weaknesses and contradictions. Jacqueline observed that her mother and those who claimed to believe were just as afraid of death as if they had believed nothing. No, that was not a sufficient support… Then, on top of that, personal experiences, revolts, repugnances, a clumsy confessor who had wounded her… She continued to practice, but without faith, as one makes visits, because one is well-bred. Religion, like the world, seemed to her a void. Her only recourse was the memory of the dead woman, in which she wrapped herself. She had much to reproach herself with toward the one who, not long ago, her youthful egoism had so often neglected, and whom now it called on in vain. She idealized her image; and the great example that Marthe had left her of a deep and recollected life contributed to making her feel disgust for society life, with its lack of seriousness and truth. She saw in it now only hypocrisies; and those agreeable compromises that at another time might have amused her now revolted her. She was in a state of moral hyperesthesia in which everything caused her pain; her conscience was laid bare. Her eyes were opened to certain facts that until then had escaped her carelessness. One of them wounded her to the quick.

One afternoon she was in her mother’s drawing room. Mme Langeais had a visitor --- a fashionable painter, vain and pretentious, a regular at the house but not very intimate. Jacqueline felt that her presence was inconvenient to the other two; all the more reason to stay. Mme Langeais, slightly on edge, her head dulled by a touch of migraine or by one of those anti-migraine tablets that ladies today crunch like sweets and which complete the emptying of their small brains, was not watching carefully what she said. In the course of the conversation, she addressed the visitor carelessly:

--- My darling…

She noticed it at once. He gave no more sign than she did; and they went on conversing ceremoniously. Jacqueline, who was busy serving the tea, very nearly let a cup slip in her shock. She had the impression that behind her back they were exchanging a smile of understanding. She turned around, and caught their complicit glances, which instantly veiled themselves. --- This discovery shattered her. This young woman, freely brought up, who had often heard talk of and spoken herself laughingly about intrigues of this kind, felt an unbearable suffering when she saw that her mother… Her mother, no, it was not the same thing!… With her habitual tendency to extremes, she swung from one to the other. She had suspected nothing until then. From that moment on, she suspected everything. She set herself doggedly to reinterpreting this or that detail in her mother’s past conduct. And without doubt, the frivolity of Mme Langeais lent itself only too well to these suppositions; but Jacqueline added to them. She wished she could draw closer to her father, who had always been nearer to her, and whose intelligence held great attraction for her. She wished she could love him more, pity him. But Langeais seemed to have no need of pity; and the overexcited mind of the young woman was traversed by a suspicion more dreadful still than the first --- that her father knew everything, but found it more convenient to know nothing, and that so long as he himself acted as he pleased, the rest was a matter of indifference to him.

Then Jacqueline felt herself lost. She could not bring herself to despise them. She loved them. But she could no longer live there. Her friendship with Simone Adam was no help to her. She judged the weaknesses of her old companion harshly. She did not spare herself either; she suffered over what she saw in herself that was ugly and mediocre; she clung desperately to the pure memory of Marthe. But even that memory was fading; she felt that the tide of days, one after another, would cover it over, wash away its trace. And then everything would be finished; she would be like the others, drowned in the mire… Oh! to escape at any cost from this world! Save me! Save me!…

It was in these days of feverish desolation, passionate disgust, and mystical waiting --- when she stretched her hands out toward an unknown Savior --- that she met Olivier.

Mme Langeais had not failed to invite Christophe, who was, that winter, the fashionable musician. Christophe had come, and, following his usual habit, had not put himself out. Mme Langeais had found him charming all the same: --- he could permit himself anything, while he was in fashion; he would always be found charming; it was a matter of a few months. --- Jacqueline, who was, for the moment, outside the current, showed herself less charmed; the mere fact that certain people praised Christophe was enough to put her on her guard. Besides, Christophe’s bluntness, his way of speaking loudly, his cheerfulness, grated on her. In her state of mind, the joy of living seemed to her coarse; she was seeking the melancholy chiaroscuro of the soul, and she imagined she loved it. There was too much daylight in Christophe. But as she was talking with him, he spoke to her of Olivier: he felt the need to draw his friend into everything good that came his way; any new affection would have seemed selfish to him if he had not set aside a share of it for Olivier. He spoke of him so well that Jacqueline, secretly stirred by the vision of a soul in accord with her own thoughts, had him invited too. Olivier did not accept at once: which allowed Christophe and Jacqueline to finish painting an imaginary portrait of him at leisure, one he was obliged to resemble when at last he made up his mind to come.

He came, but said little. He had no need to speak. His intelligent eyes, his smile, the refinement of his manner, the tranquility that wrapped him and that he radiated --- all of this was bound to captivate Jacqueline. Christophe, by contrast, set Olivier off to advantage. She showed nothing of it, out of fear of the feeling that was taking shape; she continued to converse only with Christophe: but the subject was Olivier. Christophe, only too happy to speak of his friend, did not notice the pleasure Jacqueline took in that topic of conversation. He spoke of himself as well, and she listened with apparent goodwill, though it interested her not at all; then, as if by accident, she would steer the conversation back to episodes in his life that involved Olivier.

Jacqueline’s little kindnesses were dangerous for a young man who was not on his guard. Without thinking about it, Christophe was falling in love with her; he found pleasure in coming back; he paid attention to his dress; and a feeling he knew well began once more to weave its tender, smiling languor into everything he thought. Olivier had also fallen in love, and from the very first days; he believed himself overlooked, and suffered in silence. Christophe made his pain worse by cheerfully recounting, on the way home from the Langeais house, his conversations with Jacqueline. It never occurred to Olivier that he might please Jacqueline. Though living alongside Christophe had given him more optimism, he continued to distrust himself; he could not believe he would ever be loved; he saw himself with too clear-eyed a gaze: --- for who would be worthy of being loved, if it were for his merits, and not for those of magic and indulgent love?

One evening when he was invited to the Langeais house, he felt he would be too miserable seeing an indifferent Jacqueline; and, pleading fatigue, he told Christophe to go without him. Christophe, who suspected nothing, went off quite happily. In his naïve selfishness, he thought only of the pleasure of having Jacqueline to himself. He had little cause to rejoice for long. At the news that Olivier would not be coming, Jacqueline immediately assumed an irritable, annoyed, disconcerted air; she no longer felt any desire to please; she did not listen to Christophe, answered at random; and he saw her, with humiliation, stifle a nervous yawn. She felt like crying. Abruptly, she left in the middle of the evening; and she did not reappear.

Christophe went home crestfallen. Along the way, he tried to explain this sudden reversal; glimmers of the truth were beginning to appear to him. At home, he found Olivier waiting for him, who asked in a tone he tried to make casual for news of the evening. Christophe told him of his setback. As he spoke, he watched Olivier’s face light up.

--- And that fatigue? he said. Why didn’t you go to bed?

--- Oh! I’m better, said Olivier, I’m not tired at all anymore.

--- Yes, I believe, said Christophe with a sly smile, that not coming has done you a great deal of good.

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

--- The little minx! he thought. She was making a fool of me! He was fooling me too. How well they hid their game!

From that moment on, he tore from his heart every personal thought concerning Jacqueline; and like a good mother hen jealously brooding over her egg, he brooded over the romance of the two young lovers. Without appearing to know the secret of either of them, and without giving one away to the other, he helped them without their knowing it.

He thought it his duty, with great seriousness, to study Jacqueline’s character, to see whether Olivier could be happy with her. And, being clumsy, he annoyed Jacqueline with the absurd questions he put to her about her tastes, her morals, and so on.

--- What an idiot! What business is it of his? thought Jacqueline, furious, giving him no answer and turning her back on him.

And Olivier blossomed to see that Jacqueline was paying no more attention to Christophe. And Christophe blossomed to see that Olivier was happy. His joy showed itself even more noisily than Olivier’s. And since it was unexplained, Jacqueline, who had no idea that Christophe saw more clearly into their love than she herself did, found him insufferable; she could not understand how Olivier had become so attached to a friend so vulgar and so intrusive. Good Christophe could read her thoughts, and took a malicious pleasure in making her fume; then he would withdraw to his own affairs, pleading work, to refuse the Langeais invitations and leave Jacqueline and Olivier alone together.

He was not without misgivings for the future, however. He felt a large responsibility in the marriage that was taking shape; and he worried: for he saw Jacqueline clearly enough, and he feared many things --- her wealth first of all, her upbringing, her circle, and above all her weakness. He thought back to his old friend Colette. No doubt he recognized that Jacqueline was more genuine, more frank, more passionate; there was in this small being an ardent aspiration toward a courageous life, an almost heroic desire.

--- But wanting is not enough, thought Christophe, who recalled a robust bit of ribaldry from the friend Diderot; one must have a strong back.

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

--- The poor children are happy. Let us not trouble their happiness.

Little by little, his affection for Olivier made him share his friend’s confidence. He reassured himself; he ended by believing that Jacqueline was as Olivier saw her and as she wished to see herself. She was so full of goodwill! She loved Olivier for everything in him that was unlike her and her world: because he was poor, because he was uncompromising in his moral ideas, because he was awkward in society. She loved with so pure and complete a love that she would have wished to be poor like him, and almost, at moments,… yes, almost to become plain, in order to be more certain of being loved for herself, for the love that filled her heart and of which it was hungry… Ah! on certain days, when he was there, she felt herself grow pale, and her hands trembled. She affected to mock her own emotion, pretended to be occupied with something else, to barely glance at him; she spoke with irony. But suddenly she would stop; she would leave the room, flee to her bedroom; and there, with every door closed, the curtain drawn over the window, she would sit, knees pressed together, elbows drawn in against her stomach, arms crossed over her chest, holding back the beating of her heart; she would remain like that, folded in on herself, without a movement, without a breath; she dared not stir, for fear that at the slightest gesture happiness would take flight. She held love in silence against her body.

Now Christophe threw himself passionately into the success of Olivier’s cause. He looked after him maternally, monitored his dress, claimed to give him advice on how to clothe himself, and --- how to describe it! --- tied his cravat for him. Olivier, patient, let it be done, intending to retie his cravat in the stairway once Christophe was no longer there. He smiled inwardly, but he was touched by this great affection. Besides, intimidated by his love, he was uncertain of himself, and willingly asked Christophe’s advice; he told him of his visits. Christophe was as moved as he was; and sometimes, at night, he would spend hours seeking ways to smooth the path for his friend’s love.

It was in the park of the Langeais villa, on the outskirts of Paris, in a small village on the edge of the Forêt de l’Isle-Adam, that Olivier and Jacqueline had the conversation that was to decide their lives.

Christophe had accompanied his friend; but he had found a harmonium in the house and sat down to play, leaving the lovers to walk in peace. --- To tell the truth, they had not wished for it. They were afraid of being alone. Jacqueline was silent and slightly hostile. Already, at the last visit, Olivier had sensed a change in her manner, a sudden coldness, certain glances that seemed distant, hard, almost hostile. It had chilled him to the bone. He did not dare confront her: he feared too much receiving a cruel word from the woman he loved. He trembled to see Christophe move away; it seemed to him that Christophe’s presence alone protected him from the blow that was about to fall.

Jacqueline loved Olivier no less. She loved him a great deal more. That was what made her hostile. This love, with which she had once played, which she had so longed for, it was there before her; she saw it opening before her steps like an abyss, and she recoiled in fright; she no longer understood; she asked herself:

--- But why? why? What does it mean?

Then she would look at Olivier with that gaze that caused him such pain, and she would think:

--- 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 caught all the same; love held her; she was going to lose herself in it, lose herself entirely, her will, her independence, her selfishness, her dreams of the future, all engulfed in this monster. And she stiffened with anger; she felt, at moments, toward Olivier, something almost like hatred.

They walked to the far end of the park, into the kitchen garden, which a screen of tall trees separated from the lawns. They moved slowly along the paths bordered by currant bushes heavy with red and golden clusters, and beds of strawberries whose fragrance filled the air. It was the month of June; but storms had cooled the weather. The sky was gray, the light half extinguished; low clouds moved ponderously all in a mass, driven by the wind. Of that great distant wind, nothing reached the earth: not a leaf stirred; but the air was very cool. A great melancholy wrapped things, and their hearts, which a grave happiness was flooding. And from the far end of the garden, from the invisible villa with its half-open windows, there came to them the sounds of the harmonium, playing the fugue in E-flat minor by Jean-Sébastien Bach. They sat side by side on the coping of a well, very pale, saying nothing. And Olivier saw tears running down Jacqueline’s cheeks.

--- You are crying? he murmured, his lips trembling.

And his own tears fell.

He took her hand. She rested her fair head on Olivier’s shoulder. She no longer tried to struggle: she was defeated; and it was such a relief!… They wept quietly, listening to the music, beneath the moving canopy of heavy clouds whose silent flight seemed to skim the treetops. They thought of all they had suffered --- who knows? perhaps also of what they would suffer later. There are moments when music calls up all the melancholy woven into the fabric of a person’s destiny…

After a moment, Jacqueline dried her eyes and looked at Olivier. And abruptly they embraced. O ineffable happiness! Sacred happiness! So sweet and so deep that it becomes pain!

!

Jacqueline asked:

--- Did your sister resemble you?

Olivier was startled. He said:

--- Why do you speak 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 friend who was gone, of dear Marthe; she said, her heart swelling, how she had wept, wept until she thought she would die of it.

--- Will you help me? she said in a pleading voice, will you help me to live, to be good, to resemble her a little? Poor Marthe --- will you love her too?

--- We will love them both, as they both love each other.

--- I wish they were here!

--- They are here.

They stayed close together; they barely breathed, and they felt each other’s hearts beating. A fine mist of rain fell, fell. Jacqueline shivered.

--- Let us go in, she said.

Beneath the trees it was nearly dark. Olivier kissed Jacqueline’s wet hair; she tilted her face up toward him, and for the first time he felt against his lips those loving lips --- those girl’s lips, feverish, a little chapped. They were on the verge of swooning.

Just short of the house they stopped again:

--- How alone we were before! he said.

He had already forgotten Christophe.

They thought of him at last. The music had fallen silent. They went back inside. Christophe, leaning on the harmonium with his head in his hands, was dreaming too --- of many things from the past. When he heard the door open he roused himself from his reverie and turned toward them with his warm face lit by a grave and tender smile. He read in their eyes what had happened, pressed both their hands, and said:

--- Sit down here. I’ll play you something.

They sat, and he played at the piano everything he had in his heart --- all his love for them. When it was over, the three of them sat without speaking. Then he stood and looked at them. He seemed so kind, and so much older and stronger than they were! For the first time she became aware of what he really was. He drew them both into his arms and said to Jacqueline:

--- You’ll love him well, won’t you? You’ll love each other well?

They were filled with gratitude. But almost immediately he changed the subject, laughed, went to the window, and jumped out into the garden.

In the days that followed, he urged Olivier to ask Jacqueline’s parents for her hand. Olivier dared not, for fear of the refusal he foresaw. Christophe also pressed him to look for a position. Even supposing the Langeais family accepted him, he could not in good conscience take Jacqueline’s fortune if he were not himself capable of earning his bread. Olivier agreed with him on this, without sharing his somewhat injurious and slightly comic distrust of wealthy marriages. It was a fixed idea in Christophe’s head that riches kill the soul. He would gladly have repeated the retort of a penniless sage to a rich young woman who was fretting about the hereafter:

--- Good heavens, madame --- you have millions, and on top of all that you want an immortal soul as well?

--- Beware of women, he told Olivier --- half joking, half in earnest --- beware of women, but twenty times more so of the rich woman. A woman may love art, perhaps, but she stifles the artist. The rich woman poisons both. Wealth is a disease. And a woman endures it even worse than a man. Every rich person is an abnormal creature… You’re laughing? Mocking me? What --- does a rich person have any idea what life is? Does he stay in close communion with harsh reality? Does he feel on his face the rank breath of poverty, the smell of bread that must be earned, of earth that must be turned? Can he understand, can he even see other human beings and things?… When I was a small boy, once or twice I was taken for a drive in the grand duke’s landau. The carriage passed through meadows of which I knew every blade of grass, through woods where I used to roam alone and which I loved. And yet I saw nothing. All those beloved landscapes had become as stiff and starched to me as the imbeciles who were taking me for a drive. It was not only the curtain of those starched souls that had interposed itself between the meadows and my heart. It was enough to have those four boards under my feet, that rolling platform raised above nature. To feel that the earth is my mother, I need my feet sunk in her belly, like a newborn coming out into the light. Wealth severs the bond that binds a man to the earth, and that binds all the earth’s children to one another. And then how could you remain an artist? The artist is the voice of the earth. A rich man cannot be a great artist. He would need a thousand times more genius to achieve it under conditions so unfavorably burdened. Even if he manages it, the result is always a hothouse fruit. For all his greatness, Goethe’s soul has atrophied limbs; it lacks essential organs that wealth has killed. You, who lack Goethe’s vitality, would be devoured by wealth --- above all by a rich woman, whom Goethe at least had the sense to avoid. A man alone can still react against the scourge. He has in him such native brutality, such an accumulated humus of sharp and wholesome instincts binding him to the earth, that he still has a chance of saving himself. But a woman is surrendered to the poison, and she passes it on to others. She delights in the perfumed stench of wealth; she can no longer do without it. A woman who keeps a healthy heart in the midst of fortune is as much a prodigy as a millionaire with genius… And besides, I have no love for monsters. Whoever has more than his share for living is a monster --- a human cancer gnawing at his fellow men.

Olivier laughed:

--- What can I do? he said. I can’t stop loving Jacqueline because she isn’t poor, nor can I force her to be poor for love of me.

--- Well, if you can’t save her, at least save yourself. And that is still the best way of saving her. Stay pure. Work.

Olivier had no need of Christophe to instill those scruples in him. His own soul was even more sensitive than Christophe’s on the point. Not that he took Christophe’s outbursts against money seriously: he had been well-off himself, he had no hatred of wealth, and he found it suited Jacqueline’s pretty face very well. But it was intolerable to him that anyone might mingle with the idea of his love the slightest suspicion of self-interest. He applied to be reinstated in the university. At the moment he could hope for no more than a modest post at a provincial lycée. It was a poor wedding gift to offer Jacqueline. He mentioned it to her timidly. At first Jacqueline had some difficulty accepting his reasoning: she attributed it to an exaggerated pride that Christophe had put in his head, and which she found ridiculous --- is it not natural, when one loves, to accept with the same heart the fortune and misfortune of the one we love? And is it not a petty feeling to refuse to owe him a kindness that would give him such joy?… Nevertheless, she came around to Olivier’s plan: what was austere and unpleasant about it was precisely what decided her; she saw in it an occasion to satisfy her appetite for moral heroism. In the state of proud revolt against her own milieu that her bereavement had provoked, and which her love heightened, she had ended by denying everything in her nature that contradicted this mystical ardor; with complete sincerity, she drew her whole being taut, like a bow, toward an ideal of life that was very pure, very difficult, and radiant with happiness… The obstacles, the mediocrity of the life ahead of her --- all of it was joy to her. How fine and beautiful it would be!…

Mme Langeais was too preoccupied with herself to pay much attention to what was happening around her. For some time now she had thought of nothing but her health; she spent her days nursing imaginary illnesses and trying one doctor after another: each one in turn was the Savior for her; it lasted two weeks; then it was the next one’s turn. She spent months away from home in very expensive sanatoriums, where she devoutly performed the most childish prescriptions. She had forgotten her daughter and her husband.

M. Langeais, less indifferent, was beginning to suspect the affair. His paternal jealousy alerted him. He felt for Jacqueline that troubled yet pure affection which many fathers feel for their daughters but seldom acknowledge --- that indefinable feeling, that mysterious, voluptuous, quasi-sacred curiosity about reliving oneself in beings of one’s own blood who are oneself, and yet women. In those secrets of the heart there is much shadow and much light that it is healthy not to examine too closely. Until then he had taken pleasure in watching his daughter turn the heads of young men: he liked her that way --- coquettish, romantic, yet shrewd --- (as he himself was). But when he saw that the affair threatened to become more serious, he grew uneasy. He began by mocking Olivier in front of Jacqueline, then criticized him with a certain sharpness. Jacqueline laughed it off at first, and said:

--- Don’t speak too badly of him, Papa; it would embarrass you later if I wanted to marry him.

M. Langeais cried out; he called her a fool. An excellent way to make her one entirely. He declared that she would never marry Olivier. She declared that she would. The veil was torn. He realized that he no longer counted for anything with her. His paternal egoism had never suspected as much, and he was outraged by it. He swore that neither Olivier nor Christophe would ever set foot in his house again. Jacqueline was incensed; and one fine morning Olivier, opening his door, found the young woman bursting in, pale and resolute, who said to him:

--- Elope with me! My parents won’t have it. I will. Compromise me.

Olivier, shaken but moved, did not even attempt to argue. Fortunately, Christophe was there. He was usually the least reasonable of them. This time he reasoned with them. He laid out the scandal that would follow, and how they would suffer for it. Jacqueline, biting her lip in anger, said:

--- Very well, we’ll kill ourselves afterward.

Far from frightening Olivier, this was to him a reason to be resolute. Christophe had no small trouble obtaining a little patience from the two madcaps: before resorting to such desperate measures, they ought to try the others first --- Jacqueline should go home; he himself would go and see M. Langeais and plead their cause.

A strange advocate! At his first words, M. Langeais almost threw him out; then the absurdity of the situation struck him, and he was amused by it. Little by little, the seriousness of his visitor, his look of honesty and conviction, began to make an impression; yet he refused to admit it, and went on firing ironic remarks at him. Christophe pretended not to hear; but at certain sharper barbs he would stop, bristle in silence, then resume. At one point he brought his fist down on the table, pounded it, and said:

--- I beg you to believe that this visit is none too pleasant for me; I have to restrain myself from responding to certain of your remarks; but I feel I have a duty to speak with you, and I am doing so. Forget about me, as I am forgetting about myself, and weigh what I say.

M. Langeais listened; and when he heard the talk of suicide, he shrugged and pretended to laugh; but he was shaken. He was too intelligent to dismiss such a threat as bluster; he knew one must reckon with the insanity of girls in love. Years ago, one of his mistresses, a lighthearted and pampered girl whom he had judged incapable of carrying out her boast, had shot herself before his eyes; she had not died on the spot; he still saw that scene… No, one could be sure of nothing with these madwomen. A pang gripped his heart… “She wants it? Well then, so be it, worse for her, the little fool!…” He would have conceded anything rather than push his daughter to the breaking point. Certainly he could have used diplomacy --- pretended to consent, played for time, quietly detached Jacqueline from Olivier. But to do that would have required more effort than he was capable of or willing to make. And besides, he was weak; and the very fact that he had violently said “No!” to Jacqueline now inclined him to say “Yes.” After all, what does anyone know of life? Perhaps the girl was right. The great thing was to love. M. Langeais was well aware that Olivier was a serious young man who perhaps had real talent… He gave his consent.

The evening before the wedding, the two friends kept watch together, part of the night. They wanted to lose none of those last hours of a dear past. --- But it was already the past. Like those sad farewells on a railway platform when the wait drags on before the train departs: one insists on staying, watching, talking. But the heart is no longer there; the friend has already left… Christophe tried to carry on a conversation. He stopped in the middle of a sentence, seeing Olivier’s distracted eyes, and said with a smile:

--- How far away you are already!

Olivier apologized, abashed. He was saddened to find himself drifting away from these last moments of intimacy with his friend. But Christophe pressed his hand and said:

--- Go on, don’t force yourself. I’m happy. Dream, my dear fellow.

They stayed at the window, leaning side by side, looking out at the garden in the night. After a while, Christophe said to Olivier:

--- You’re slipping away from me? You think you can escape me? You’re thinking of your Jacqueline. But I’ll catch you yet. I’m thinking of her too.

--- Poor old thing, said Olivier, and here I was thinking of you! And even…

He stopped.

Christophe finished his sentence with a laugh:

--- …And even making such an effort to do so!…

Christophe had dressed up very smartly, almost elegantly, for the ceremony. There was to be no religious wedding: neither Olivier, who was indifferent to religion, nor Jacqueline, the rebel, had wanted one. Christophe had written a symphonic piece for the civil ceremony; but at the last moment he had given it up, having taken stock of what a civil marriage actually is: he found such ceremonies ridiculous. To believe in them, one would have to be at once very deficient in faith and very deficient in freedom. When a true Catholic goes to the trouble of becoming a freethinker, it is not in order to invest a civil registrar with a religious character. Between God and the free conscience there is no room for a state religion. The state records; it does not unite.

The marriage of Olivier and Jacqueline was hardly designed to make Christophe regret his own resolution. Olivier listened with a detached, faintly ironic air as the mayor delivered his heavy-handed flattery to the young couple, the wealthy family, and the decorated witnesses. Jacqueline wasn’t listening at all; she was covertly sticking out her tongue at Simone Adam, who was watching her; she had bet Simone that getting married would “not affect her in the slightest,” and she was winning the bet: she could barely bring herself to think that it was she who was getting married, and the thought amused her. The others were performing for the gallery, and the gallery was ogling. Monsieur Langeais was parading himself; sincere as his affection for his daughter was, his chief concern was to appraise the guests and wonder whether he had left anyone off the invitation list. Christophe alone was moved; he was, all by himself, the parents, the newlyweds, and the mayor; his eyes followed Olivier, who did not look back at him.

That evening the young couple left for Italy. Christophe and Monsieur Langeais accompanied them to the station. They watched them go — joyful, without regrets, making no effort to hide their eagerness to be gone already. Olivier looked like a boy, and Jacqueline like a little girl… The melancholy, tender charm of such departures! The father is a little sad to see his little girl carried off by a stranger, and for what! — and forever away from him. But they feel nothing but a heady sense of release. Life has no more constraints; nothing holds them back; it seems they have reached the summit: one could die now, one has everything, one fears nothing… Then one sees that it was only a way-station. The road resumes and winds around the mountain; and very few people ever reach the second.

The train carried them off into the night. Christophe and Monsieur Langeais walked back together. Christophe said, with a mischievous naivety:

--- We’re widowers now!

Monsieur Langeais laughed. He had come to know Christophe well and was fond of him. They said goodnight and each went his own way. There was sorrow in both of them. But it was a mingling of sadness and sweetness. Alone in his room, Christophe thought:

--- The best part of my soul is happy.

Nothing in Olivier’s room had been changed. The two friends had agreed that until Olivier returned and settled into his new place, his furniture and his keepsakes would remain with Christophe. It was as though he were still present. Christophe looked at the portrait of Antoinette, set it on his table, and said to it:

--- Little one, are you pleased?

He wrote to Olivier often --- a little too often. He received back few letters, distracted ones, growing more distant in spirit little by little. He was disappointed, but not too deeply troubled. He convinced himself that this was how it had to be; and he had no anxiety about the future of their friendship.

Solitude did not weigh on him. Far from it: there was not enough of it, to his taste. He was beginning to chafe under the protection of the Grand Journal. Arsène Gamache had a tendency to believe he held a kind of property right over the talents he had taken the trouble to discover; it seemed natural to him that these talents should be associated with his own, as Louis XIV had grouped Molière, Le Brun, and Lully around his throne. Christophe found the author of the Hymn to Ægir no more imperial, and no more of an obstacle to art, than his patron at the Grand Journal. For the journalist, who knew no more about art than the emperor did, nevertheless held opinions on the subject just as fixed; what he did not like, he would not tolerate: he decreed it bad and pernicious, and set about ruining it in the public interest. A comic and formidable spectacle --- these half-polished men of affairs, without culture, who presumed to reign not only over politics and money but over the life of the spirit, offering it a kennel with a collar and a meal, or who could, if the spirit refused, unleash upon it the thousands of fools they had trained into their obedient pack! --- Christophe was not a man to be lectured. He took it very badly that a jackass should presume to tell him what he ought and ought not to do in music; and he gave the man to understand that art required rather more preparation than politics. He also declined, without diplomatic niceties, an offer to set to music a witless libretto that its author --- one of the journal’s senior clerks --- was trying to place, and that the patron was recommending. This cast the first chill over his relations with Gamache.

Christophe was not sorry for it. Barely out of obscurity, he was already longing to return to it. He felt himself “exposed to that full daylight where one loses oneself among others.” Too many people were taking an interest in him. He turned over in his mind these words of Goethe:

“When a writer has attracted notice with a work of merit, the public sets about preventing him from producing a second… The talent that would gather itself inward is dragged, against its will, into the tumult of the world, because everyone believes he can appropriate a fragment of it.”

He shut his door to the world outside, and within his own home drew closer to a few old friends. He began seeing the Arnauds again, whom he had somewhat neglected. Madame Arnaud, who spent a part of each day alone, had time to think about other people’s sorrows. She had been thinking about the emptiness Olivier’s departure must have left in Christophe’s life; and she overcame her shyness to invite him to dinner. Had she dared, she might even have offered to come by from time to time and look after his household; but she lacked the courage; and it was perhaps better so, since Christophe did not like anyone to fuss over him. But he accepted the dinner invitation and fell into the habit of coming regularly in the evenings to the Arnauds’.

He found the little household as close-knit as ever, in the same atmosphere of tenderness --- a little sad, a little wounded, greyer still than before. Arnaud was passing through a period of moral depression, worn down by the life of a teacher --- that life of exhausting labor repeated each day, identical to the day before, like a wheel turning in place, never stopping, never moving forward. For all his patience, the good man was in the grip of a discouragement that had grown acute. Certain injustices weighed on him; he felt his devotion was useless. Madame Arnaud encouraged him with kind words; she herself seemed as tranquil as before; but her face was more drawn. In her presence, Christophe would congratulate Arnaud on having such a sensible wife.

--- Yes, Arnaud would say, she’s a good little woman; nothing ever troubles her. She’s fortunate --- and so am I. If she had suffered from this life, I think I would have been lost.

Madame Arnaud blushed, and said nothing. Then, in her composed voice, she spoke of something else. --- Christophe’s visits worked their usual good; they brought light into the house; and he, in turn, was glad to warm himself at those excellent hearts.

Another friend came to him. Or rather, he sought her out: for, though she had wanted to know him, she would not have made the effort to come to him. She was a young woman of a little over twenty-five, a musician, who had won first prize in piano at the Conservatoire; her name was Cécile Fleury. She was short in stature, rather stocky. She had thick eyebrows, fine wide eyes with a moist gaze, a small broad nose with an upturned tip, a little red, like a duck’s bill, large lips that were good and tender, an energetic chin --- solid, fleshy --- and a forehead not high, but wide. Her hair was rolled at the nape of her neck in a thick chignon. She had strong arms and a pianist’s hands --- large, with a splayed thumb and square fingertips. Her whole person gave a general impression of somewhat heavy vitality, of rustic health. She lived with her mother, whom she adored: a good woman with no interest in music whatsoever, but who talked about it constantly from hearing it talked about, and who knew everything that went on in Musicopolis. She led a modest life, gave lessons all day long, and sometimes gave concerts that nobody wrote about. She came home late, on foot or by omnibus, exhausted but in good spirits; and she would then do her scales and her hats with equal energy, talking a great deal, liking to laugh, and often singing, for no reason at all.

Life had not been generous with her. She knew the value of a little comfort earned by one’s own efforts --- the joy of a small pleasure, of an imperceptible small advance in one’s circumstances or one’s playing. Yes, if only she had earned five francs more this month than last, or if she finally managed to get right that passage from Chopin she had been struggling over for weeks --- she was content. Her work, which was not excessive, matched her abilities exactly and satisfied her the way a sensible regimen satisfies: playing, singing, giving lessons gave her the pleasant sense of activity fulfilled, normal and regular, along with a modest sufficiency and a quiet success. She had a robust appetite, ate well, slept well, and was never ill.

Her mind was sound, sensible, modest, perfectly balanced; she worried about nothing, for she lived in the present moment, without concern for what had come before or what would come after. And since she was healthy, and since her life was relatively sheltered from the surprises of fate, she was almost always content. She took pleasure in practicing the piano as in keeping house, or in talking about domestic matters, or in doing nothing at all. She knew how to live --- not day by day (she was thrifty and prudent) but minute by minute. No idealism worked within her; the only kind she had, if one could call it that, was a bourgeois idealism, quietly diffuse in all her acts, distributed across each of her moments; it consisted in peacefully loving what she did, whatever that might be. She went to church on Sundays, but religious feeling occupied almost no place in her life. She admired those who were exalted, like Christophe, people who possess a faith or a genius; but she did not envy them: what would she have done with their restlessness and their genius?

How, then, could she feel their music? She would have found it hard to explain. But what she knew was that she felt it. Her superiority over other virtuosos lay in her robust physical and moral equilibrium; in that abundance of life, unencumbered by personal passions, the passions of others found a rich soil in which to flower. She was not disturbed by them. Those terrible passions that had gnawed at the artist --- she rendered them with all their energy, untouched by their poison; she felt only their force, and the wholesome fatigue that followed. When it was over, she was dripping with sweat and spent; she smiled quietly, 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: there had been few people at the concert, and she was not yet jaded about compliments. Since she had had neither the cleverness to enlist herself in a musical clique, nor the cunning to enlist a following of admirers in her wake; since she sought to set herself apart neither by some technical excess, nor by a fanciful interpretation of hallowed works, nor by claiming exclusive proprietorship of this or that great master --- Johann Sebastian Bach or Beethoven --- since she had no theory about what she played, but simply contented herself with playing plainly what she felt --- no one paid attention to her, and the critics ignored her: for no one had told them she played well, and they would never have found it out for themselves.

Christophe saw a great deal of Cécile after that. This strong, calm girl drew him like a puzzle. She was vigorous and yet apathetic. Indignant on her behalf that she was not better known, he had proposed to have his friends at the Grand Journal write about her. But though she was glad enough to be praised, she asked him to take no steps toward that end. She did not want to struggle, to put herself out, to stir up jealousies; she wanted to stay in peace. No one spoke of her: so much the better! She was free of envy, and the first to marvel at the technique of other virtuosos. No ambition, no desires. She was far too lazy in spirit! When she was not occupied with some immediate and precise object, she did nothing, nothing at all; she did not even daydream; even at night, in bed: she slept, or thought of nothing. She had none of that morbid obsession with marriage that poisons the lives of girls who dread growing old alone. When she was asked whether she wouldn’t like a good husband:

--- Well of course! she would say. Why not fifty thousand livres a year while we’re at it? You take what you have. If it’s offered to you, so much the better! If not, you do without. The fact that there’s no cake is no reason not to find good bread perfectly good. Especially after you’ve spent a long time eating bread that was hard!

--- And then again, said her mother, there are plenty of people who don’t eat every day!

Cécile had her reasons for distrusting men. Her father, who had died a few years back, had been a weak and lazy creature; he had done a great deal of harm to his wife and family. She also had a brother who had gone wrong; no one quite knew what had become of him; every so often he reappeared, to ask for money; they feared him, felt ashamed, lived in dread of what they might learn about him from one day to the next; and yet they loved him. Christophe met him once. He was at Cécile’s: someone rang the doorbell; the mother went to answer. A conversation broke out in the next room, with raised voices. Cécile, who seemed troubled, went out in turn and left Christophe alone. The argument continued, and the stranger’s voice grew threatening; Christophe felt it his duty to intervene: he opened the door. He had barely time to glimpse a young man, slightly misshapen, with his back turned --- before Cécile threw herself toward Christophe and begged him to go back inside. She came back in with him; they sat in silence. In the room next door, the visitor shouted for a few more minutes, then left, slamming the door. Then Cécile sighed, and said to Christophe:

--- Yes… that’s my brother.

Christophe understood:

--- Ah! he said… I know… I have one too…

Cécile took his hand with warm commiseration:

--- You too?

--- Yes, he said… The joys of family.

Cécile laughed; and they changed the subject. No, the joys of family held nothing enchanting for her, and the idea of marriage did not fascinate her in the least: men were not worth much. She found plenty of advantages in her independent life: her mother had sighed after that freedom long enough; she had no desire to lose it. The one waking dream she allowed herself --- if she could someday, later, God only knows when! --- was to give no more lessons and live in the country. But she did not even bother to imagine the details of that life: she found it exhausting to think about something so uncertain; it was better to sleep --- or do one’s work…

While waiting for her castle in Spain, she rented during the summer, in the outskirts of Paris, a small house that she occupied alone with her mother. It was twenty minutes away by train. The house stood well off from the station, isolated, in the middle of waste ground that people called fields; and Cécile often came home late at night. But she had no fear; she did not believe in danger. She did have a revolver; but she always forgot it at home. Besides, she would barely have known how to use it.

During his visits, Christophe had her play. He enjoyed watching her penetration of musical works, especially when he had set her, with a single word, on the path toward the feeling to be expressed. He had noticed that she had an admirable voice: she herself had no idea. He made her practice; he had her sing old German lieder, or his own music; she took pleasure in it and made progress that surprised her as much as it did him. She was marvellously gifted. The musical spark had fallen, by some miracle, on this daughter of petty Parisian bourgeoisie utterly devoid of artistic feeling. Philomèle --- (that was what he called her) --- would sometimes talk with Christophe about music, but always in a practical way, never in a sentimental one; she seemed to take interest only in the technique of singing and piano. More often, when they were together and not making music, they spoke of the most domestic subjects: housekeeping, cooking, home life. And Christophe, who could not have endured those conversations for a minute with any other bourgeoise, held them quite naturally with Philomèle.

They spent evenings like this together, alone, and were sincerely fond of each other with the calmest and almost the coolest affection. One evening when he had come to dinner and lingered in conversation longer than usual, a violent storm broke out. When he tried to leave to catch the last train, the rain and wind were raging; she said to him:

--- But don’t go! You’ll leave tomorrow morning.

He settled into the small sitting room, on an improvised bed. A thin partition separated him from Cécile’s bedroom; the doors did not close properly. Lying in bed he could hear the creaking of the other bed and the quiet breathing of the young woman. Within five minutes she was asleep; and it was not long before he did the same, without the shadow of a troubling thought brushing either of them for even an instant.

During this same period, other unknown friends were beginning to find their way to him, drawn by reading his works. Most of them lived far from Paris, or apart, in their own homes, and would never meet him. Success, even of the crude sort, has something good about it: it makes an artist known to thousands of decent people at a distance whom he could never have reached without the idiotic articles in the newspapers. Christophe entered into correspondence with a few of them. They were isolated young men, leading difficult lives, aspiring with their whole being toward an ideal they were not sure of, who drank greedily from Christophe’s fraternal soul. They were small-town people from the provinces who, having read his lieder, wrote to him as old Schulz had done, feeling themselves bound to him. They were struggling artists --- a composer among others --- who had never arrived, who could not arrive, not only at success, but at expressing themselves, and who were entirely happy that their thought had found realization through Christophe. And perhaps the most cherished of all --- those who wrote to him without giving their name, and who, freer that way to speak, naïvely poured out their touching confidence in the elder brother who came to their aid. Christophe ached at the thought that he would never know these charming souls whom he would have found such joy in loving; and he kissed such letters from unknown hands as the one who had written them kissed Christophe’s lieder; and each of them, on their own side, thought:

--- Dear pages, how much good you do me!

So there formed around him, following the habitual rhythm of the universe, all that small family of genius, gathered about him, feeding on him and feeding him, slowly growing, until it ends by forming one great collective soul of which he is the hearth --- like a luminous world, a moral planet revolving in space, mingling its fraternal choir with the harmony of the spheres.

As mysterious bonds were being woven between Christophe and his invisible friends, a revolution was taking place in his artistic thinking; it was growing broader and more human. He no longer wanted a music that was a monologue, a word spoken to oneself alone, still less a learned construction for specialists only. He wanted it to be a communion with other men. There is no vital art except that which unites itself with others. Jean-Sébastien Bach, in his worst hours of isolation, was connected to others by the religious faith he expressed in his art. Haendel and Mozart, by the force of circumstance, wrote for a public and not for themselves alone. Beethoven himself had to reckon with the crowd. That is a healthy thing. It is good that humanity should remind genius from time to time:

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

Under this constraint, genius gains first of all. Certainly, there are great artists who express no one but themselves. But the greatest of all are those whose hearts beat for everyone. Whoever wishes to see God living, face to face, must seek him not in the empty firmament of his own thought, but in love of human beings.

The artists of today were far from that love. They wrote only for a vain elite, more or less anarchistic, uprooted from social life, who made it their glory not to share the prejudices and passions of the rest of humanity, or who turned them into a game. A fine glory, to amputate yourself from life so as not to resemble others! Let death take them, then! We --- let us go with the living, let us drink at the breasts of the earth, from what is deepest and most sacred in our peoples, from their love of family and soil. In the freest of centuries, among the people who had the most ardent cult of beauty, the young prince of the Italian Renaissance, Raphaël, glorified maternity in his Trastevere Madonnas. Who will give us today, in music, a Madonna of the Chair? Who will give 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 people, you are reduced to copying the music of the great German masters of the past. Everything is to be done, or redone, in your art, from the base to the summit…

Christophe was corresponding with Olivier, now settled in a provincial town. He tried to maintain between them, by letters, the collaboration that had been fruitful during their months of living together. He wanted from him beautiful poetic texts, connected to the thoughts and acts of everyday life, like those that make up the substance of the old German lieder of former times. Short passages from Holy Scripture, Hindu poems, old Greek philosophers, brief religious or moral odes, small pictures of nature, emotions of love or of family, the poetry of mornings and evenings and nights for simple and wholesome hearts. Four or six lines for a lied, that is enough: the simplest expressions, no learned development, no refined harmonies. What do I want with your aesthetic virtuosities? Love my life, help me to love it and to live it. Write me the Hours of France, my Great and Little Hours. And let us seek together the clearest melodic phrase. Let us avoid, like the plague, that artistic language of a caste which is the language of so many writers and above all of so many French musicians today. One must have the courage to speak as a man, not as an “artist.” One must draw from the common store of all, and use, without shame, the everyday formulas that the centuries have marked with their imprint and filled with their soul. Look at what our fathers did. It is from the return to the musical language of all that there arose the art of the German classics of the late eighteenth century. The melodic phrases of Gluck, of the creators of the symphony, of the masters of the lied of that time, are trivial and bourgeois at times, compared to the refined or learned phrases of Jean-Sébastien Bach and Rameau. It is that native soil that gave the great classics their flavor and their immense popularity. They started from the simplest musical forms, from the lied, from the Singspiel; those small flowers of daily life saturated the childhood of a Mozart or a Weber. --- Do the same. Write songs for everyone. On that foundation you can then raise your quartets and symphonies. What use is it to skip stages? One does not begin a pyramid from the top. Your symphonies today are heads without bodies, thoughts without guts. Oh fine minds, take on flesh! What is needed is patient generations of musicians who fraternize joyfully and devoutly with their people. A musical art is not built in a day.

Christophe was not content with applying 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 common in abnormal groups on the margins of the great society of active and healthy men. Since they have put themselves of their own free will outside of life, leave them and go where the men are. To the men of every day, show the life of every day: it is deeper and wider than the sea. The least among us carries the infinite within him. The infinite is in every man who has the simplicity to be a man --- in the lover, in the friend, in the woman who pays with her pain for the radiant glory of the day of giving birth, in the man or woman who sacrifices themselves in obscurity and of whom no one will ever know anything; it is the flood of life, flowing from one to another, from one to another, from another to one… Write the simple life of one of these simple men, write the quiet epic of days and nights that follow one another, all alike and all different, all children of the same mother, since the first day of the world. Write it simply, as it unfolds. Do not trouble yourself about the word, the subtle refinements in which the strength of today’s artists exhausts itself. You are speaking to all: use the language of all. No words are noble or vulgar; no style is pure or impure; there is only language that says or does not say exactly what it has to say. Be wholly present in everything you do: think what you think, and feel what you feel. Let the rhythm of your heart carry your writing! Style is the soul.

Olivier agreed with Christophe; but he replied, with a touch of irony:

--- Such a work could be beautiful; but it would never reach those who could read it. Criticism would smother it along the way.

--- There speaks my little French bourgeois! Christophe retorted. He worries about what the critics will or will not think of his book!… Critics, my boy, are there only to record victory or defeat. Just be victorious… I got along fine without them! Learn to do the same…

But Olivier had learned to do without far more than that! He was doing without art, and without Christophe, and without the rest of the world. At this moment he thought of nothing but Jacqueline, and Jacqueline thought of nothing but him.

Their selfish love had made a void around them; it was burning with reckless improvidence through all its future reserves.

The intoxication of the early days, when two beings intertwined think of nothing but absorbing each other… With every particle of their bodies and souls, they touch, they taste, they seek to merge. They are an entire universe unto themselves, a lawless universe, a chaos in love, where the blended elements do not yet know what distinguishes them from each other, and each strives greedily to devour the other. Everything in the other delights them: the other is still oneself. What have they to do with the world? Like the ancient Androgyne sleeping in a dream of harmonious pleasure, their eyes are closed to the world — the world is entirely within them…

O days, o nights, that form one seamless fabric of dreams, hours that fly past like fair white clouds crossing the sky, of which nothing remains but a luminous wake in the dazzled eye, a warm breath enveloping you in the languor of spring, the golden warmth of bodies, a sun-drenched bower of love, chaste immodesty, embraces, wild laughter, sighs, happy laughter, happy tears — what remains of you, dust of happiness? The heart can barely call you back to mind: for when you were, time did not exist.

Days all alike… A sweet dawn… From the abyss of sleep, the two entwined bodies surface together; smiling heads, their breath mingling, open their eyes at once, look at each other and kiss… The youthful freshness of morning hours, a virginal air where the fever of burning bodies subsides… The voluptuous torpor of endless days, at their depths humming with the pleasure of nights… Summer afternoons, dreaming in the fields, on the velvety meadows, beneath the rustling silks of tall white poplars… Evening reveries, when they return together, arms and hands entwined, under the luminous sky, toward the bed of love. The wind makes the branches of the bushes tremble. In the clear lake of the sky floats the white down of the silver moon. A star falls and dies --- a small jolt to the heart --- a world snuffed out without a sound. On the road, beside them, pass a few shadows, quick and silent. The city’s bells ring out the feast of the coming day. They stop for a moment; she presses herself against him; they stand without speaking… Ah, if only life could stay this way, motionless, like this instant!… She sighs and says:

--- Why do I love you so much?…

After a few weeks of travel in Italy, they had settled in a city in western France, where Olivier had been appointed a professor. They saw almost no one. They took interest in nothing. When they were forced to pay visits, this scandalous indifference showed itself with an ease that wounded some people and made others smile. All words slid off them without touching. They had that impertinent gravity of newlyweds who seem to be saying:

--- The rest of you know nothing…

On Jacqueline’s pretty, absorbed, slightly sulking little face, in Olivier’s happy and distracted eyes, one could read:

--- If you only knew how much you bore us!… When will we be alone?

Even in the company of others, they made no effort to hide it. People caught their glances speaking to each other above the conversation. They did not need to look at each other to see each other; and they smiled: for they knew they were thinking the same things at the same moment. When they found themselves alone again, after some social constraint, they cried out with joy and did a thousand childish foolish things. They seemed to be eight years old. They babbled when they spoke. They called each other ridiculous little names. She called him Olive, Olivet, Olifant, Fanny, Mami, Mime, Minaud, Quinaud, Kaunitz, Cosima, Cobourg, Panot, Nacot, Ponette, Naquet, and Canot. She played the little girl. But she wanted to be everything at once for him, all loves mingled: mother, sister, wife, lover, mistress.

She was not content merely to share his pleasures; as she had promised herself, she shared his work too --- that was also a game. During the early period, she brought to it the amused ardor of a woman for whom work was something new: one might have thought she took pleasure in the most thankless tasks, copying in libraries, translating insipid books --- it was part of her life plan, very pure and very serious, entirely devoted to noble thoughts and shared labors. And it went very well, as long as love illuminated it: for she was thinking only of him, and not of what she was doing. What was strangest was that everything she did in this way was done well. Her mind moved effortlessly through abstract reading that she would have struggled to follow at other moments in her life; her being was as if lifted above the earth by love; she did not notice it: like a sleepwalker making her way across rooftops, she calmly pursued her grave and smiling dream without seeing anything…

And then she began to see the rooftops; and it did not frighten her; but she asked herself what she was doing up there, and she went back inside. The work bored her. She persuaded herself that it was getting in the way of her love. Doubtless because her love was already less keen. But nothing of that showed. They could no longer be apart for even a moment. They walled themselves off from the world, shut their door, accepted no more invitations. They were jealous of others’ affection, of their occupations even, of anything that distracted them from their love. The correspondence with Christophe became infrequent. Jacqueline did not like him: he was a rival to her, he represented an entire part of Olivier’s past in which she had no place; and the greater the place he had held in Olivier’s life, the more she instinctively sought to steal it from him. Without any deliberate calculation on her part, she quietly detached Olivier from his friend; she made ironic remarks about Christophe’s manner, his appearance, his way of writing, his artistic plans; she brought no malice to it, not even any cunning: nature took care of that for her. Olivier was amused by her observations; he saw no ill will in them; he believed he still loved Christophe as much as ever; but it was only the person he loved now --- which counts for little in friendship; he did not notice that little by little he was ceasing to understand him, growing indifferent to his thinking, to that heroic idealism that had once united them… Love is too powerful a sweetness for a young heart; in the face of it, what other faith can hold? The body of the beloved, her soul gathered from that sacred flesh, become all knowledge and all faith. With what a smile of pity one looks upon what others worship, what one once worshipped oneself! Of powerful life and its fierce effort, one sees nothing now but the flower of a single hour, which one believes immortal… Love absorbed Olivier. At first, his happiness still had the strength to express itself in graceful poems. Then even that seemed vain to him: it was time stolen from love. And Jacqueline, like him, was bent on destroying every other reason to live, on killing the tree of life without whose support the ivy of love dies. Thus they annihilated themselves, both of them, in happiness.

Alas! we grow accustomed to happiness so quickly! When selfish happiness is the only aim in life, life soon has no aim. Happiness becomes a habit, an intoxication --- one cannot do without it. And since one must inevitably do without it!… Happiness is one moment in the universal rhythm, one of the poles between which the pendulum of life swings: to stop the pendulum, one would have to break it…

They came to know that tedium of well-being which sends one’s sensibility into extravagance. The sweet hours grew slower, more languid, wan, like flowers without water. The sky was still just as blue; but it was no longer the light air of morning. Everything was motionless; nature fell silent. They were alone, as they had wished. --- And their hearts grew heavy.

An indefinable feeling of emptiness, a vague ennui not without its charm, appeared to them. They did not know what it was; they were obscurely uneasy. They were becoming impressionable in a morbid way. Their nerves, stretched in the listening silence, trembled like leaves at the slightest unexpected shock from life. Jacqueline had tears, without reason to weep; and even though she wished to believe otherwise, it was no longer love alone that caused them to flow. Coming out of the ardent and tormented years that had preceded the marriage, the sudden halt to her efforts now that the goal was reached --- reached and surpassed --- the sudden uselessness of any new action --- and perhaps of all past action as well --- threw her into a disarray that she could not explain and that devastated her. She would not admit it; she attributed it to nervous fatigue, she affected to laugh about it; but her laughter was no less anxious than her tears. Bravely, she tried to set herself back to work. From the very first attempts, she could not even understand how she had been capable of taking interest in such stupid tasks: she pushed them aside in disgust. She made an effort to renew social relations: she succeeded no better; the habit was set, she had lost the knack for people and the mediocre conversation that life demands --- she found them grotesque; and she threw herself back into their isolation for two, trying to persuade herself, through these unhappy trials, that love was decisively the only good thing. And for a time she did indeed seem more in love than ever. But it was because she wanted to be.

Olivier, less passionate and richer in tenderness, was more sheltered from these panics; on his part he felt 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 enjoy. But since he was of fine sensibility, and since every movement taking place in the heart he loved was propagated in his own, Jacqueline’s hidden unease communicated itself to him.

One fine afternoon, they were walking together in the countryside. They had looked forward to the walk. Everything around them was bright. But from the very first steps, a mantle of gloomy, weary sadness fell over them; they felt chilled. It was impossible to speak. They forced themselves nonetheless; but every word they said made the emptiness in which they found themselves ring out. They completed their walk like automatons, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. They returned home, their hearts heavy. It was dusk; the apartment was empty, dark, and cold. They did not turn on the lights at once, so as not to see each other. Jacqueline went into her room, and instead of removing her hat and coat, she sat down, silent, near the window. Olivier, in the next room, also sat down, leaning on the table. The door was open between the two rooms; they were so close to each other they could have heard each other breathe. And in the half-darkness, both of them, bitterly, in silence, wept. They pressed their hands over their mouths so that nothing would be heard. Finally, Olivier, anguished, said:

--- Jacqueline…

Jacqueline, swallowing her tears, said:

--- What?

--- Aren’t you coming?

--- I’m 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 they had been crying. And they could not console each other: for they knew why.

There came a moment when they could no longer hide their distress from each other. And since they did not want to admit the cause of it, they looked for another, and had no difficulty finding one. They blamed the tedium of provincial life and the circle they were in. This was a relief to them. M. Langeais, kept informed by his daughter, was not too surprised that she was beginning to tire of heroism. He called in his political connections and obtained his son-in-law’s appointment to Paris.

When the good news arrived, Jacqueline leapt for joy and recovered all her past happiness. Now that they were about to leave it, the tedious countryside seemed friendly to them; they had sown so many memories of love in it! They spent their last days searching out its traces. A tender melancholy breathed from this pilgrimage. Those calm horizons had seen them happy. An inner voice murmured to them:

--- You know what you are leaving. Do you know what you will find?

Jacqueline wept the evening before their departure. Olivier asked her why. She would not speak. They took a sheet of paper and wrote to each other, as they were in the habit of doing when the sound of words frightened them:

--- My dear little Olivier…

--- My dear little Jacqueline…

--- I’m sorry to be going.

--- Going from where?

--- From where we loved each other.

--- Going to where?

--- Where we will be older.

--- Where we will be together.

--- But never loving each other so much.

--- Always more.

--- Who knows?

--- I know.

--- I want it.

Then they drew two little circles at the bottom of the page, to say that they were kissing each other. And then she wiped her tears, laughed, and dressed him up as a minion of Henri III, draping him in her toque and her white cape with its raised collar, like a ruff.

Back in Paris, they found again those they had left behind. But they did not find them quite as they had left them. At the news of Olivier’s arrival, Christophe had hurried over, full of joy. Olivier felt as much joy as he did at seeing him again. But from the very first looks, they both felt an unexpected awkwardness. Both tried to shake it off. In vain. Olivier was very affectionate; but something in him had changed, and Christophe sensed it. A friend who marries cannot help it: he is no longer the friend of before. Into the male soul a female soul is now always mingled. Christophe caught its scent everywhere in Olivier --- in fleeting glimmers in his gaze, in slight new folds at the corners of his lips that he had never noticed, in new inflections in his voice and his thinking. Olivier was unaware of it; but he was surprised to find Christophe so different from the man he had left behind. He did not go so far as to think that it was Christophe who had changed; he recognized that the change lay in himself: it seemed to him a natural evolution, due to age; and he was surprised not to find the same progress in Christophe; he reproached him for having frozen in place among thoughts that had once been dear to them both, and that now seemed to him naive and out of date. That was because they no longer suited the fashion of the foreign soul that, without his suspecting it, had taken up residence in him. This feeling was sharper when Jacqueline was present at their conversations: then a veil of irony interposed itself between Olivier’s eyes and Christophe. Still, they tried to hide their impressions from each other. Christophe kept coming. Jacqueline innocently shot a few small, sharp, barbed arrows at him. He let her. But when he returned home, he was saddened.

The first months in Paris were a fairly happy time for Jacqueline, and by extension for Olivier. At first, she was absorbed in setting up their home; they had found a pleasant little apartment in an old street in Passy that looked out onto a square of garden. The choosing of furniture and wallpaper was a game that lasted several weeks. Jacqueline poured into it an amount of energy, and almost of passion, that was exaggerated: it seemed as though her eternal happiness depended on a shade of curtain fabric or the profile of some old chest. Then she renewed her acquaintance with her father, her mother, her friends. Since she had forgotten them entirely during her year of love, it was a genuine rediscovery --- all the more so because, while her soul had mingled with Olivier’s, a little of Olivier’s soul had mingled with hers, and she saw her old acquaintances with new eyes. They seemed to her to have gained considerably. Olivier did not lose too much at first, in the comparison. They set each other off well. The moral thoughtfulness, the poetic chiaroscuro of her companion made Jacqueline find more pleasure in those worldly people who think only of enjoying themselves, shining, and pleasing; and the seductive but dangerous faults of that world, which she knew all the better for belonging to it, made her appreciate the steadiness of her friend’s heart. She greatly enjoyed these comparisons, and liked to prolong them in order to justify her choice. --- She prolonged them so well that at certain moments she no longer knew why she had made that choice. These moments did not last, fortunately. Indeed, since she felt remorse over them, she was never more tender with Olivier than in their aftermath. After which, she would start again. When she had made a habit of it, she ceased to enjoy it; and the comparison grew more aggressive: instead of complementing each other, the two opposing worlds went to war. She began to wonder why Olivier did not possess the qualities --- even some of the faults --- she now savored in her Parisian friends. She did not say so to him; but Olivier felt the gaze of his small companion watching him without indulgence: it made him uneasy and mortified.

Nevertheless, he had not yet lost his hold over Jacqueline, that ascendancy love had given him; and the young household would have continued for some time yet in its tender and industrious intimacy, had it not been for the circumstances that came to alter its material conditions and upset its fragile balance.

Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran nemico…

A sister of Mme Langeais died. She was the widow of a wealthy industrialist, and had no children. Her entire estate passed to the Langeais family. Jacqueline’s fortune was more than doubled. When the inheritance arrived, Olivier recalled Christophe’s words about money, and said:

--- We were doing perfectly well without it; perhaps it will prove a misfortune.

Jacqueline laughed at him:

--- Fool! she said. As if that could ever do harm! Besides, we won’t change a thing about our life.

Life did indeed remain the same, in appearance. So thoroughly the same that after a certain time one began to hear Jacqueline complain of not being rich enough --- clear proof that something had changed. And in fact, although their income had doubled and tripled, everything was spent, without their knowing on what. It was enough to make one wonder how they had managed to live before. Money slipped away, absorbed by a thousand new expenses, which at once seemed habitual and indispensable. Jacqueline had made the acquaintance of the great dressmakers; she had dismissed the family seamstress, who used to come by the day and had been known since childhood. Where was the time of the little four-sou hats, fashioned out of almost nothing, and pretty all the same --- of those dresses whose elegance was not impeccable, but that were lit up by her own graceful reflection, that were a little part of herself? The gentle charm of intimacy that had radiated from everything around her was fading day by day. Its poetry had melted away. She was becoming ordinary.

They changed apartments. The one they had taken such trouble and pleasure in furnishing seemed narrow and ugly. Instead of the modest little rooms, all glowing with personality, at whose windows a friendly tree swayed its slender silhouette, they took a large, comfortable, well-appointed apartment that they did not love, could not love, and where they died of boredom. Old familiar objects gave way to furniture and hangings that were alien to them. There was no longer any room anywhere for memory. The first years of life together were swept from their thoughts… What a great misfortune it is for two joined beings to sever the ties that bind them to their past of love! The image of that past is a safeguard against the discouragements and hostilities that inevitably follow the first tenderness… The ease of spending had drawn Jacqueline, in Paris and in travel --- (for now that they were rich, they traveled often) --- into a class of wealthy, idle people, whose company inspired in her a kind of contempt for the rest of humanity, for those who work. With her remarkable gift for adaptation, she assimilated these sterile, corrupted souls on the spot. It was impossible to resist. She would immediately bridle up, irritated, calling it “bourgeois baseness” the mere idea that one could --- that one ought to --- be happy through domestic duty and in the aurea mediocritas. She had lost even the capacity to understand the hours now past, when in love she had given herself generously.

Olivier was not strong enough to fight back. He too had changed. He had given up his teaching post; he no longer had an assigned task. He wrote only; and the equilibrium of his life was altered. Until then, he had suffered from not being able to give himself wholly to art. Now he was wholly given to art, and he felt himself lost in a world of clouds. Art that has no trade to counterbalance it, no sturdy practical life to support it, art that does not feel the goad of daily work in its flesh, art that has no need to earn its bread, loses the best of its strength and its reality. It becomes nothing more than the flower of luxury. It is no longer --- (what it is for the greatest artists, the only truly great ones) --- the sacred fruit of human toil. --- Olivier felt a listlessness, a “What’s the use?” Nothing pressed him any longer: he let his pen drift in reverie, he idled, he was at a loss. He had lost contact with those of his own class, who were patiently, painfully ploughing the furrow of their lives. He had fallen into a different world, in which he was ill at ease, and yet which did not entirely displease him. Weak, amiable, and curious, he observed this world complacently --- with some grace, but with no backbone; and he did not notice that he was gradually being colored by it; his faith was no longer as sure.

To be sure, the transformation was less rapid in him than in Jacqueline. Women have the formidable privilege of being able to change entirely all at once. These instantaneous deaths and rebirths of the self terrify those who love them. And yet it is a natural thing, for a being full of life who is not held in check by willpower, to be no longer tomorrow what she was today. She is a flowing water. Whoever loves her must follow her, or else carry her along in his own current. In either case, he must change. But it is a dangerous trial; one truly knows love only after having put it to that test. And love’s harmony is so delicate in the early years of life together that often the slightest alteration in one or the other of the two beings is enough to destroy everything. How much more, then, a sudden change of fortune or circumstance! One must be very strong --- or very indifferent --- to withstand it.

Jacqueline and Olivier were neither indifferent nor strong. They saw each other in a different light; and the face of the beloved was becoming a stranger’s face. In the moments when they made this sad discovery, they hid it from each other, out of a tender piety for love --- for they still loved each other. Olivier had the refuge of his work, whose regular practice, though less convinced, procured him a measure of calm. Jacqueline had nothing. She did nothing. She remained indefinitely in bed, or at her dressing table, sitting for hours, half undressed, motionless, absorbed; and a dull sadness gathered drop by drop, like icy mist. She was incapable of diverting herself from the fixed idea of love… Love! The most divine of human things, when it is a gift of self, an intoxicated sacrifice. The most foolish and most deceptive, when it is a hunt for happiness… It was impossible for her to conceive of any other purpose to life. In moments of goodwill, she had tried to take an interest in others, in their miseries: she could not manage it. The sufferings of others aroused in her an invincible repulsion; they were intolerable 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 you try to do good, you do harm. It’s better to abstain. I haven’t the calling.

Christophe looked at her: and he thought of one of his chance women friends, a selfish, immoral working-girl, incapable of true affection, but who, the moment she saw someone suffering, felt a mother’s instincts toward a stranger she had ignored the day before or someone she had never met. The most repugnant forms of care did not deter her: she even felt a peculiar pleasure in those that demanded the most self-abnegation. She was not conscious of it: it seemed that in those acts she found an outlet for all her obscure, hereditary, perpetually unexpressed capacity for idealism; her soul, atrophied in the rest of her life, breathed in those rare moments; in easing a little suffering, she felt a well-being, an inward laughter; and her joy then was almost out of place. --- The goodness of this woman who was selfish, the selfishness of Jacqueline who was nonetheless kind: neither vice nor virtue --- a matter of constitution for both. But one was the healthier for it.

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 any of the sources of her joy: her beauty or her youth. That she might not have all the happiness she believed she deserved --- (for she believed in happiness; it was for her a faith, total and absurd, a religious faith) --- that others might have more happiness than she, 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 an infirmity. Her whole life was gradually orienting itself around this principle. Her true character had emerged from the idealistic veils in which, as a girl, she had wrapped herself with a timid modesty. In reaction against that past idealism, she now looked at things with a clear and raw gaze. Things were true only insofar as they accorded with the opinion of the world and with the convenience of life. She now found herself in the same state of mind as her mother: she went to church and practiced religion with a punctual indifference. She no longer troubled herself to know whether it was true, at bottom --- she had other, more concrete troubles; and she thought with ironic pity of her mystical rebellions as a child. --- Yet today’s practical mind was no more real than her former idealism. She was forcing herself. She was neither angel nor beast. She was a poor woman who was bored.

She was bored, bored; she was bored all the more because she could not even excuse herself by claiming that she was not loved, or that she could not bear Olivier. Her life seemed to her blocked, walled in, without a future; she yearned for a new, perpetually renewed happiness --- something childish, and one that her mediocre aptitude for happiness did nothing to justify. She was like so many other women, so many idle households, who have every reason to be happy and who never cease to torment themselves. One sees them all around --- wealthy, with beautiful children, good health, intelligence and the capacity to feel beautiful things, possessing every means to act, to do good, to enrich their lives and the lives of others. And they spend their time lamenting 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 relationships, with their alleged rights to happiness, with their contradictory egoisms, and arguing, arguing, arguing, playing out the comedy of great love, the comedy of great suffering, and ending by believing in it --- suffering… Who will tell them:

--- You are not the least bit interesting. It is indecent to complain when you have so many means of being happy!

Who will strip them of their fortune, their health, all those marvelous gifts of which they are unworthy! Who will put back under the yoke of real misery and real toil these slaves who are incapable of being free, and whom their freedom drives mad! If they had to earn their bread the hard way, they would be content to eat it. And if they looked squarely into the terrible face of suffering, they would no longer dare to perform their revolting comedy of it…

But in the end, they do suffer. They are sick people. How can one not pity them? --- Poor Jacqueline was quite innocent, as innocent of drifting away from Olivier as Olivier was of failing to hold her close. She was what nature had made her. She did not know that marriage is a defiance of nature, and that when one has thrown down the gauntlet to nature, one must expect nature to pick it up, and be prepared to fight valiantly the battle one has provoked. She realized she had made a mistake. It irritated her against herself; and this disappointment turned into hostility toward everything she had loved, toward Olivier’s faith, which had once been hers as well. An intelligent woman has, more than a man at certain moments, an intuition of eternal things; but it is harder for her to remain in them. The man who has conceived such thoughts nourishes them with his life. The woman nourishes her life with them; she absorbs them, she does not create them. Constantly, fresh sustenance must be poured into her mind and heart: they are not sufficient unto themselves. And for want of believing and loving, she must destroy --- unless she possesses calm, that supreme virtue.

Jacqueline had once believed passionately in a union founded on a shared faith, in the happiness of striving and laboring together to build something. But that work, that faith --- she had believed in them only when the sun of love gilded them; as the sun sank, they appeared to her as arid, dark mountains rising against an empty sky; and she felt herself without the strength to continue the road: what was the point of reaching the summit? What lay on the other side? What an immense deception!… Jacqueline could no longer understand how Olivier went on letting himself be deceived by those chimeras that devoured life; and she told herself that he was neither very intelligent nor very alive. She was suffocating in his atmosphere, which she found unbreathable; and the instinct of self-preservation drove her, in self-defense, to attack. She worked to grind into dust the cherished beliefs of the man she still loved; she wielded all her weapons of irony and sensuality; she wound around him the tendrils of her desires and her petty anxieties; she longed to make of him a reflection of herself… of herself, who no longer knew what she wanted or what she was! She felt humiliated that Olivier was not succeeding; and it no longer mattered to her whether rightly or wrongly: for she had come to believe that in the end what distinguishes the failure from the man of talent is success. Olivier felt those doubts weighing on him, and in them he lost the best of his strength. Yet he struggled as best he could, as so many others have struggled and will struggle, most of them in vain, in that unequal contest where the woman’s egotistic instinct, arrayed against the man’s intellectual egoism, draws on his weakness, his disappointments, and his common sense --- that name he gives to the wearing-down of life and his own cowardice. --- At least, Jacqueline and Olivier were superior to most of those who wage that battle. For he would never have betrayed his ideal, as those thousands of men do who allow themselves to be drawn, by the solicitations of their sloth, their vanity, and their love all mingled together, to deny their eternal soul. And had he done so, Jacqueline would have despised him. But in her blindness she kept striving to destroy that strength in Olivier which was also hers, their safeguard both; and by an instinctive strategy she undermined the friendships on which that strength rested.

Since the inheritance, Christophe had felt out of place in the young couple’s company. The affectation of snobbishness and a rather flat practicality that Jacqueline maliciously exaggerated in her conversations with him was achieving its purpose. He sometimes revolted and said hard things that were taken badly. Those things would never, even so, have brought about a quarrel between the two friends: they were too attached to each other. For nothing in the world would Olivier have wanted to sacrifice Christophe. But he could not impose him on Jacqueline; and weak as he was out of love, he was incapable of causing her pain. Christophe, who saw what was happening inside him and how much he suffered, made the choice easier by withdrawing of his own accord. He had understood that he could render Olivier no service by staying: he was doing him harm rather. He was the first to give his friend reasons for distancing himself from him; and Olivier’s weakness accepted those poor reasons, sensing Christophe’s sacrifice and being torn by remorse.

Christophe bore him no ill will. He thought that people were not wrong to say that a woman is half a man. For a married man is no more than half a man.

He tried to reorganize his life without Olivier. But strive as he might and tell himself that the separation would be only temporary, his optimism notwithstanding, he had grim hours. He had lost the habit of being alone. True, he had been alone during Olivier’s stay in the provinces; but then he could maintain the illusion --- he told himself that his friend was far away but would return. Now his friend had returned, and he was farther away than ever. That affection, which had filled his life for several years, was suddenly gone from him: it was as though he had lost the best of his reasons for acting. Since he had loved Olivier, he had formed the habit of thinking alongside him and drawing him into everything he did. Work could not suffice to fill the void, for Christophe had grown accustomed to weaving his friend’s image into his work. And now that the friend had lost interest in him, Christophe was like someone who has lost his balance: he was searching for another affection to restore it.

Those of Mme Arnaud and Philomèle were not lacking to him. But at this moment those tranquil friends could not be enough.

Yet the two women seemed to divine Christophe’s grief, and they sympathized with him in secret. Christophe was quite surprised one evening to see Mme Arnaud come in. Until then she had never ventured to pay him a visit. She appeared agitated. Christophe paid no particular attention to it; he attributed the disturbance to her shyness. She sat down and said nothing. Christophe, to put her at ease, played host in his apartment; they talked of Olivier, whose memories filled the room. Christophe spoke of him cheerfully, naturally, with nothing that betrayed what had passed. But Mme Arnaud, who knew, could not help looking at him with a touch of pity and saying:

--- You hardly see each other anymore?

He supposed she had come to console him; and he felt a flash of impatience, for he disliked people meddling in his affairs. He replied:

--- When it suits us.

She flushed and said:

--- Oh, it was not an indiscreet question!

He regretted his brusqueness and took her hands:

--- Forgive me, he said. I always fear someone is attacking him. Poor dear! He suffers from it as much as I do… No, we no longer see each other.

--- And he does not write to you?

--- No, said Christophe, a little ashamed…

--- How sad life is! said Mme Arnaud, after a moment.

Christophe raised his head.

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

Mme Arnaud went on, with a veiled bitterness:

--- We loved each other, and love each other no more. What has it served?

Christophe answered:

--- We loved each other.

She said again:

--- You sacrificed yourself for him. If only your sacrifice served the one you love! But he is no happier for it!

--- I did not sacrifice myself, said Christophe angrily. And if I sacrifice myself, it is because it pleases me. There is not that much to argue about. One does what one must do. If one didn’t do it, that is when one would truly be unhappy! Nothing so foolish as that word sacrifice! I don’t know what clergymen, with their poverty of heart, mixed into it an idea of Protestant sadness, morose and stiff. It seems that for a sacrifice to be good, it must be disagreeable… To the devil with that! If a sacrifice is a sorrow to you and not a joy, don’t make it --- you are not worthy of it. It isn’t 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, go take a walk! You don’t deserve to live.

Mme Arnaud listened to Christophe without daring to look at him. Suddenly she rose and said:

--- Goodbye.

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

--- Oh, forgive me, I am a selfish man, I speak only of myself. Stay a little longer, will you?

She said:

--- No, I cannot… Thank you…

She left.

They went some time without seeing each other. She gave him no sign of life; and he did not go to her, nor to Philomèle. He was fond of them; but he was afraid of talking with them about those things that saddened him. And besides, their calm, modest existence, their overly rarefied air, did not suit him at the moment. He needed to see new faces; he needed to find his footing again in a new interest, a new affection.

To get out of himself, he began to frequent the theatre, which he had neglected for a long time. The theatre seemed to him, moreover, an interesting school for the musician who wishes to observe and note the accents of the passions.

Not that he had any more sympathy for French plays than at the beginning of his stay in Paris. Beyond the little taste he had for their eternal subjects --- bland and brutal in their psycho-physiology of love --- the theatrical language of the French seemed to him utterly false, especially in poetic drama. Neither their prose nor their verse conformed to the living language of the people, to its genius. The prose was a manufactured language, that of the worldly chronicler at best, of the vulgar serial-writer at worst. The poetry gave weight to Goethe’s quip:

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

It was a prolix and convoluted prose; the profusion of images awkwardly grafted onto it, in imitation of the lyricism of other races, produced on any sincere person an effect of falseness. Christophe set no more store by these poetic dramas than by Italian operas with their howling, syrupy showpiece arias and their plumed vocalises. The actors interested him far more than the plays. And indeed the authors applied themselves to imitating them. “One could not flatter oneself that a play would be performed with any success, if one had not had the attentiveness to model one’s characters on the vices of the players.” The situation had scarcely changed since the time when Diderot wrote those lines. The mimes had become the models of art. As soon as one of them achieved success, he had his theatre, his complaisant tailor-authors, and his plays made to measure.

Among those great mannequins of literary fashion, Françoise Oudon drew Christophe’s attention. Paris had been infatuated with her for barely a year or two. She too, naturally, had her theatre and her suppliers of roles; however, she did not play only works manufactured for her; her rather eclectic repertoire ran from Ibsen to Sardou, from Gabriele d’Annunzio to Dumas fils, from Bernard Shaw to the most recent Parisian fabricators. She even ventured at times into the Versailles-like avenues of the classical hexameter, and onto the torrent of images in Shakespeare. 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 the public’s attention had not fixed itself on her person, her acting had met with no success. From the day when people took an interest in her, everything she played seemed wonderful. And in truth she was well worth the trouble of forgetting, while watching her, the often so wretched works she betrayed by adorning them with her life. The enigma of that woman’s body, shaped by an unknown soul, was for Christophe more moving than the plays she performed.

She had a beautiful profile, clean-cut and rather tragic. None of those accentuated, heavy Roman lines. Delicate lines, on the contrary, Parisian, in the manner of Jean Goujon --- as much those of a young man as of a woman. The nose short, but well made. A beautiful mouth with thin lips, their set slightly bitter. Intelligent cheeks, of a youthful thinness, in which there was something touching, the reflection of an inner suffering. The chin resolute. The complexion pallid. One of those faces accustomed to impassivity yet transparent in spite of themselves, beneath which one feels the soul trembling as though laid bare, where the soul is spread everywhere under the skin. Her hair and eyebrows were very fine, her eyes changeable, grey, amber, capable of taking on all manner of reflections, greenish or golden --- a cat’s eyes. And she had something of the cat in all her nature too, in an apparent torpor, a half-sleep, eyes open and watchful, always wary, with sudden nervous releases, a little cruel. Shorter than she seemed, she was deceptively slender, with beautiful shoulders, harmonious arms, long and fine hands. Very correct in her way of dressing, of wearing her hair, of sober taste, with nothing of the bohemian carelessness or the exaggerated elegance of certain women artists --- in this too very much the cat, aristocratic by instinct, though she had come up from the gutter. And an irreducible wildness at her core.

She must have been a little under thirty. Christophe had heard her spoken of at Gamache’s with a brutal admiration, as a very free woman, intelligent and bold, of iron energy, burning with ambition, but harsh, erratic, unsettling, violent, who had knocked about a great deal before reaching her present glory, and who had been taking her revenge ever since.

One day when Christophe was taking the train to visit Philomèle in Meudon, he opened the door of his compartment and found the actress already seated inside. She seemed to be in a state of agitation and distress, and Christophe’s appearance annoyed her. She turned her back to him and stared stubbornly out the opposite window. But Christophe, struck by how changed her face looked, could not stop watching her with a naive, unsettling compassion. This irritated her, and she shot him a furious glance that he failed to understand. At the next station she got out and moved to another car. Only then did he realize --- a little late --- that he had driven her away, and he felt mortified.

A few days later, at a station on the same line, heading back to Paris, he was waiting for the train and sat down on the only bench on the platform. She appeared and came to sit beside him. He started to get up. She said:

--- Stay.

They were alone. He apologized for having forced her to change compartments the other day; he said that if he had any idea he was bothering her, he would have moved. She replied with an ironic smile:

--- You were insufferable, it’s true, staring at me like that.

He said:

--- Forgive me; I couldn’t help it… You looked as though you were suffering.

--- Well, and what of it? she said.

--- It’s stronger than I am. If you saw someone drowning, wouldn’t you reach out a hand?

--- Me? Not at all, she said. I’d be more likely to push their head under the water, to get it over with faster.

She said this with a blend of bitterness and humor, and as he looked at her with a bewildered expression, she laughed.

The train arrived. Everything was full except the last car. She got in. The attendant was urging them to hurry. Christophe, not wanting to repeat the scene from the other day, tried to find another compartment. She said to him:

--- Get in.

He got in. She said:

--- Today it doesn’t matter to me.

They talked. With great seriousness, Christophe tried to demonstrate to her that one is not permitted to be indifferent toward others, and that people could do each other so much good by helping and consoling one another…

--- Consolations, she said, don’t take hold with me…

And as Christophe pressed the point:

--- Yes, she said again with her impertinent smile, consoler is an advantageous role for the one who plays it.

He took a moment to understand. When he did understand, when he imagined that she suspected him of seeking his own advantage, while he had been thinking only of her, he stood up indignantly, opened the door, and tried to step out --- even though the train was in motion. She stopped him, not without effort. He sat back down furiously and pulled the door shut just as the train entered a tunnel.

--- You see, she said, you could have been killed.

--- I don’t give a damn, he said.

He refused to speak to her anymore.

--- The world is too stupid, he said. We make each other suffer, we suffer ourselves; and when you try to help someone, they suspect you. It’s disgusting. These people are not human.

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

--- What, you know who I am? he said.

--- As if everyone didn’t know everyone in Paris! You’re one of us too. But I was wrong to speak to you the way I did. You’re a good fellow, I can see that. Come now, calm yourself. Here --- let’s make peace!

They shook hands and talked amicably. She said:

--- It isn’t my fault, you see. I’ve had so many experiences with people that it’s made me distrustful.

--- They’ve disappointed me often too, said Christophe. But I always give them the benefit of the doubt.

--- I can see that --- you must have been born a simpleton.

He laughed:

--- Yes, I’ve swallowed quite a few flies in my life; but it doesn’t trouble me. I have a strong stomach. I can swallow bigger creatures too --- the mad cow, misery, and when necessary, the wretches who come after me. I’m none the worse for it.

--- You’re lucky, she said. You’re a man.

--- And you are a woman.

--- That’s not much.

--- It’s a beautiful thing, he said, and it can be so good!

She laughed:

--- That! she said. But what does the world make of that?

--- One must defend oneself.

--- Then it doesn’t last long, that goodness.

--- That’s because there isn’t much of it to begin with.

--- Perhaps. And then, one mustn’t suffer too much. There is a too much that dries out the soul.

He was on the verge of feeling sorry for her. Then he remembered the reception she had given him a little while ago…

--- You’re going to mention the consoler’s advantageous role again…

--- No, she said, I won’t say it anymore. I feel that you are good, that you are sincere. Thank you. Only, don’t say anything to me. You cannot know… I thank you.

They were arriving in Paris. They parted without exchanging addresses or inviting each other to call.

One or two months later, she came of her own accord and rang at Christophe’s door.

--- I’ve come to find you. I need to talk a little with someone. I’ve thought of you a few times since we met.

She settled herself.

--- Just for a moment. I won’t disturb you long.

He was beginning to speak to her. She said:

--- One minute, would you?

They fell silent. Then she said, smiling:

--- I couldn’t go on. Now I feel better.

He wanted to question her.

--- No, she said, not that!

She looked around, observed and appraised various objects, noticed the photograph of Louisa:

--- Is that your mother? she said.

--- Yes.

She picked it up and looked at it with warmth.

--- What a dear old woman! You’re lucky.

--- Alas, she is dead.

--- That doesn’t matter, you had her all the same.

--- And yours?

But she brushed the subject aside with a knitting of her brows. She did not want him asking her about herself.

--- No, tell me about you. Tell me something… Something from your life…

--- What could that mean to you?

--- Go on, all the same…

He did not want to talk; but he could not help answering her questions, for she knew very well how to ask them. And so it happened that he told her certain things that caused him pain --- the story of his friendship, Olivier who had parted from him. She listened with a compassionate, ironic smile… Abruptly, she asked:

--- What time is it? Good God! I’ve been here two hours!… Forgive me… Oh, how rested I feel!…

She added:

--- I would love to be able to come back… Not often… Sometimes… It would do me good. But I wouldn’t want to bore you, to waste your time… Just for a minute, now and then…

--- I’ll come to you, said Christophe.

--- No, no, not to my place. I’d rather come here…

But she did not return for a long while.

One evening he learned by chance that she was gravely ill, that she had not performed in weeks. He went to her place, despite the prohibition. They were not receiving visitors; but when they heard his name, someone called him back on the staircase. She was in bed, she was doing better, she had had pneumonia, she was noticeably changed; but she still had her ironic air and her sharp gaze, which gave no quarter. Even so, she showed genuine pleasure at seeing Christophe. She had him sit beside the bed. She spoke of herself with mocking detachment, and said she had nearly died. He showed he was moved. At that she mocked him. He reproached her for not having sent word to him:

--- Send you word? So you would come? Never in my life!

--- I’ll wager you didn’t even think of me.

--- And you’ve won, she said with her mocking smile, a little sad. I didn’t think of you for a single minute while I was ill. Only today, as it happens. Don’t be sad about it. When I’m sick, I think of no one; I ask only one thing of people, which is that they leave me in peace. I put my nose against the wall and I wait --- I want to be alone, I want to die alone, like a rat.

--- Still, it’s hard to suffer alone.

--- I’m used to it. I’ve been unhappy for years. No one ever came to help me. Now it’s become a habit… And besides, it’s better that way. No one can do anything for you. Noise in the room, unwanted attentions, hypocritical lamentations… No. I’d rather die alone.

--- How resigned you are!

--- Resigned? I don’t even know what that word means. No, I clench my teeth, and I hate the suffering that is hurting me.

He asked if no one came to see her, if no one looked after her. She said her theater colleagues were decent enough people --- fools --- but helpful, compassionate (in a superficial way).

--- But it’s me, I tell you, who doesn’t want to see them. I’m a difficult person to be around.

--- I’d make do with that, he said.

She looked at him with pity:

--- You too! Are you going to say the same things as the others?

He said:

--- Forgive me, forgive me… Good Lord! I’m turning Parisian! I’m ashamed… I swear I didn’t even think about what I was saying…

He hid his face in her bedsheets. She laughed wholeheartedly and gave him a pat on the head:

--- Ah! That expression is not Parisian! That’s more like it! I recognize you. Come now, show your face. Don’t cry in my sheets.

--- Am I forgiven?

--- Forgiven. But don’t do it again.

She chatted with him a little longer, asked what he had been doing, then grew tired and annoyed, and sent him away.

It was agreed that he would come back to see her the following week. But at the moment of departure, he received a telegram from her telling him not to come: she was having one of her bad days. --- Then, the day after next, she summoned him again. He came. He found her convalescing, sitting near the window, half-reclining. It was early spring, the sky was sunny, the young buds on the trees just opening. She was more affectionate and gentle than he had yet seen her. She told him that the other day she could not see anyone --- she would have hated him, as she hated all men.

--- And today?

--- Today I feel utterly young, utterly new, and I feel affection for everything around me that seems young and new --- like you.

--- And yet I’m not so very young and new anymore.

--- You will be until the day you die.

They spoke of what he had been doing since they last saw each other, of the theater where she was about to resume her work; and on that subject she told him what she thought of the theater, which disgusted her but held her fast.

She did not want him to come again; she promised to resume her visits to his place. But she worried about disturbing him. He told her when she would have the best chance of not interrupting his work. They agreed on a signal. She would knock at the door in a particular way; he would open, or not open, depending on whether he felt like it…

She did not abuse the privilege, at first. But one evening when she was on her way to a fashionable gathering where she was to recite verse, at the last moment she found the idea tiresome: en route, she telephoned that she could not come; and she had herself driven to Christophe’s. Her intention was simply to say good evening to him in passing. But it happened, that evening, that she opened up to him, and told him her life from childhood.

A sad childhood! A father she had never known, picked up somewhere along the way. A mother who ran a disreputable inn in the outskirts of a town in northern France; teamsters would come to drink there, sleep with the proprietress, and knock her around. One of them married her because she had a little money; he beat her and drank himself senseless. Françoise had an older sister who worked as a servant in the inn; she wore herself out with the work; the proprietor had made her his mistress, with the full knowledge of the mother; she was consumptive; she died. Françoise had grown up amid blows and degradation. She was a pale, bilious, self-contained child, with a small, ardent, and fierce soul. She watched her mother and her sister weep, suffer, submit, degrade themselves, die. And she had a fierce determination not to submit, to escape from this vile world; she was a rebel by instinct; at certain injustices she would have fits of nerves; she clawed and bit when they struck her. Once she tried to hang herself. She did not manage it: she had barely begun when she no longer wanted to, she was afraid she might succeed too well; and while she was already choking and desperately pulling at the rope with her stiff, clumsy fingers, a furious desire to live convulsed inside her. And since she could not escape through death --- (Christophe smiled sadly, recalling similar trials of his own) --- she swore she would win, would become free and rich, and would trample underfoot all those who oppressed her. She had made herself that oath in her hovel one evening when she heard in the next room the man’s curses, the cries of her mother whom he was beating, and her sister’s weeping. How wretched she felt! And yet the oath had brought her relief. She clenched her teeth and thought:

--- I will crush you all.

In that gloomy childhood, a single point of light:

One day, one of the boys she used to run wild with in the gutter---the son of the theater’s concierge---had sneaked her in, against all rules, to a rehearsal. They slipped deep into the darkened house. She was seized by the mystery of the stage, blazing in that darkness, and by the magnificent, incomprehensible things being spoken there, and by the queenly bearing of the actress---who was in fact playing a queen in a romantic melodrama. She was frozen with emotion; and at the same time her heart was pounding… “There, there---that is what one must be, someday!… Oh! if only she could be like that!…” --- When it was over, she was determined at any cost to see the evening performance. She let her companion leave, pretended to follow him; then turned back and hid inside the theater, crouching beneath a bench, staying there for three hours without moving, suffocating in the dust. And when the performance was about to begin and the audience started filing in, just as she was about to emerge from her hiding place, she had the mortification of being seized, expelled ignominiously, amid laughter and jeers, and escorted home, where she was given a spanking. That night, she would have died---had she not now known what she would do one day: dominate these people and take her revenge on them.

Her plan was made. She took a job as a servant at the Hôtel et Café du Théâtre, where actors stayed. She could barely read or write; she had read nothing, there was nothing to read. She resolved to learn, and threw herself into it with a ferocious energy. She stole books from the guests’ rooms; she read them by moonlight at night, or at dawn, to save on candles. Thanks to the general disorder of the actors, her thefts passed unnoticed; or the owners merely grumbled. Besides, she returned the books after reading them---except one or two that had moved her too deeply for her to let go---but she never returned them intact: she tore out the pages she loved. She was careful, when slipping the volumes back, to slide them under the bed or beneath a piece of furniture, to suggest they had never left the room. She pressed her ear to doors to listen to the actors running through their lines. And alone in the corridor while sweeping, she would imitate their intonations in a low voice and rehearse their gestures. When she was caught doing this, people mocked and insulted her. She fell silent, seething with rage. --- This kind of education might have continued a long time, had she not been imprudent enough, on one occasion, to steal a script from an actor’s room. The actor flew into a rage. No one had entered his room but the servant girl: he accused her. She denied it brazenly; he threatened to have her searched; she threw herself at his feet, confessed everything, and threw in the other thefts as well, and the torn-out pages---the whole secret laid bare. He swore terribly; but he was less mean than he appeared. He asked why she had done it. When she said she wanted to become an actress, he laughed loudly. He questioned her; she recited entire pages she had learned by heart; he was struck by it, and said:

--- Listen, would you like me to give you lessons?

She was overcome with joy; she kissed his hands.

--- Ah! she said to Christophe, how I would have loved him!

But immediately he added:

--- Only, my girl, you understand---nothing for nothing…

She was a virgin; she had always been fiercely chaste in the face of the advances that had been pressed upon her. That wild chastity, that burning need for purity, that revulsion against squalid acts, against ignoble sensuality without love---she had always had these things, since childhood, out of disgust at the sorry spectacles surrounding her in her home; she still had them… Ah! the poor woman! she had been cruelly punished for it!… What a mockery of fate!…

--- So, Christophe asked, you consented?

--- Ah! she said, I would have thrown myself into fire to get out of there. He was threatening to have me arrested as a thief. I had no choice. --- That is how I was initiated into art… and into life.

--- The wretch! said Christophe.

--- Yes, I hated him. But since then I have seen so many that he no longer seems among the worst. At least he kept his word. He taught me what he knew---(not much!)---of the actor’s trade. He got me into the company. At first I was everyone’s servant. I played scraps of roles. Then one evening when the soubrette fell ill, they risked giving me her part. And I went on from there. They found me impossible, burlesque, bizarre. I was ugly then. I stayed ugly until the day they decreed me---if not “divine,” like the Other---supremely, ideally a woman… “the Woman”… Fools! --- As for my acting, it was judged incorrect, extravagant. The public had no taste for me. My fellow actors mocked me. They kept me on because I was useful in spite of everything, and because I was cheap. Not only cheap---I paid. Ah! each step forward, each small advancement, one by one, I paid for with my suffering, with my body. Fellow actors, directors, impresarios, friends of the impresario…

She fell silent, pale, lips pressed shut, her gaze fixed, not weeping; but one felt that her soul was weeping tears of blood. In an instant she was reliving all those past shames and the devouring will to win that had sustained her---devouring all the more fiercely with each new degradation she was forced to endure. She had longed to die; but it would have been too abominable to sink down amid humiliations, to go no further. To kill oneself beforehand, perhaps! Or after the victory. But not having debased oneself, without having reaped the reward…

She was silent. Christophe paced the room in anger; he would have liked to thrash these people who had made this woman suffer, who had defiled her. Then he looked at her with pity; and, standing beside her, he took her head, her temples, her brow between his hands, held them gently, and said:

--- Poor little one!

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

--- Don’t be afraid of me. I care for you.

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

la lunga man d’ogni bellezza piena…

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

Then he sat back down. She had composed herself, and calmly continued the rest of her story.

At last a playwright had launched her. He had discovered in this strange creature a demon, a genius---better still, for his purposes, “a dramatic type, a new woman, representative of an era.” 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 something contrary to love. But he had made her famous; and she had made him famous.

--- And now, said Christophe, the others can no longer do anything to you; it is you who bend them to your will.

--- You believe that? she said bitterly.

Then she told him of this other mockery of fate---the passion she felt for a wretch she despised: a literary man who had exploited her, extracted her most painful secrets, turned them into literature, and then dropped her.

--- I despise him, she said, like the mud on my shoes; and I tremble with fury when I think that I love him, that all it would take is a sign from him and I would run to him, would humble myself before that contemptible man. But what can I do? I have a heart that never loves what my mind wishes. And in turn I must sacrifice and humiliate one or the other. I have a heart. I have a body. And they cry out, they cry out, demanding their share of happiness. And I have no bridle to hold them---I believe in nothing, I am free… Free? A slave to my heart and my body, which want things in spite of me, often, almost always. They carry me away, and I am ashamed. But what can I do?…

She fell silent for a moment, absently stirring the dead ashes with the fire tongs.

--- I have always read, she said, that actors feel nothing. And in truth, those I see are almost all great vain children, tormented by little more than petty questions of vanity. I don’t know whether they are not real actors, or whether it is I who am not. I rather think it is I. In any case, I pay for the rest of them.

She stopped speaking. It was three o’clock in the morning. She rose to go. Christophe told her to wait until morning before going home; he offered his bed for her to lie down. She preferred to remain in the armchair by the dead fire, going on talking quietly in the silence of the house.

--- You’ll be exhausted tomorrow.

--- I’m used to it. But you… What do you have tomorrow?

--- I’m free. A lesson around eleven… And besides, I’m solid.

--- All the more reason to sleep soundly.

--- Yes, I sleep like a stone. No trouble can resist it. I’m angry sometimes at sleeping so well. So many hours wasted!… I’m delighted to take my revenge on sleep for once, to steal a night from it.

They went on talking in low voices, with long silences. And Christophe fell asleep. Françoise smiled, steadied his head so that he wouldn’t fall… She sat daydreaming near the window, watching the dark garden, which slowly brightened. Around seven o’clock she gently woke Christophe and said goodbye.

In the course of that month, she came back at hours when Christophe was out: she found the door locked. Christophe gave her a key to the apartment so that she could come whenever she wished. More than once she did come when he was not there. She would leave on the table a small bunch of violets, or a few words on a sheet of paper, a scrawl, a sketch, a caricature---as a sign of her passing.

And one evening, coming from 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 both felt that neither was in the same benevolent mood as the last time. She tried to leave; but it was too late. Not that Christophe stopped her. It was her own will that no longer permitted it. So they stayed, feeling desire rising between them. And they gave themselves to each other.