Jean-Christophe. The Journey's End. The Friends. 2

In the wake of that night, she vanished for weeks. In him that night had rekindled a sensual ardor that had been dormant for months, and he found he could not do without her. She had forbidden him to come to her apartment; so he went to see her at the theater. He sat in the cheap seats, hidden away, burning with love and emotion, trembling to the bone; the tragic fever she poured into her roles consumed him along with her. At last he wrote to her:

--- “My friend, are you angry with me then? Forgive me if I have displeased you.”

When she received that humble note, she hurried to his apartment and threw herself into his arms.

--- It would have been better to remain simply good friends. But since that was impossible, there was no use resisting the inevitable. Whatever comes, comes!

They wove their lives together. Each of them kept their own apartment and their independence, all the same. Françoise would have been incapable of submitting to any regular domestic arrangement with Christophe. Her situation, moreover, hardly lent itself to one. She came to Christophe’s place and spent part of her days and nights with him; but each day she returned to her own home and spent nights there as well.

During the vacation months, when the theater was closed, they rented a house together on the outskirts of Paris, near Gif. They spent happy days there, in spite of a few veils of sadness. Days of trust and work. They had a fine, bright room, set high up, with a broad, open horizon above the fields. At night, through the windowpanes, they could see from their bed the strange shadows of clouds passing across a sky of matte and somber brightness. Lying in each other’s arms, half asleep, they heard the crickets singing drunk with joy, the storm rains falling; the breath of the autumn earth --- honeysuckle, clematis, wisteria, freshly cut grass --- seeped into the house and into their bodies. The silence of the night. Sleep together. Silence. Far away, the barking of dogs. The cries of cocks. Dawn breaks. A thin angelus rings from the distant steeple, in the cold gray early light that makes their bodies shiver in the warmth of the nest and draws them to press closer together in tenderness. The awakening of birdsong in the vine clinging to the wall. Christophe opens his eyes, holds his breath, and, his heart softened, looks beside him at the dear, weary face of the sleeping woman he loves, and her pallor of love…

Their love was no selfish passion. It was a deep friendship, in which the body also claimed its share. They did not get in each other’s way. Each worked on their own. Christophe’s genius, his goodness, his moral fiber, were dear to Françoise. She felt herself his elder in certain things, and took a maternal pleasure in this. She regretted that she understood nothing of what he played: she was closed to music, except in rare moments when she was seized by a wild emotion that owed less to the music itself than to herself --- to the passions that then permeated her and everything around her, the landscape, the people, the colors and sounds. Yet she felt Christophe’s genius nonetheless through this mysterious language she did not understand. It was as though she were watching a great actor perform in a foreign tongue. Her own genius was quickened by it. And Christophe, through love, projected his thoughts, embodied his passions, into the mind of this woman and under her beloved form; and he saw them more beautiful than they were within him --- with an ancient, almost eternal beauty. What an incalculable richness it was, the intimacy of such a soul, so deeply feminine, weak and kind and cruel, and gifted with flashes of genius. She taught him a great deal about life and people --- about women, whom he still knew rather poorly and whom she judged with piercing clarity. Above all, he owed to her a deeper understanding of the theater; she led him into the spirit of that admirable art, the most perfect of arts, the most spare and the most full. She revealed to him the beauty of that magical instrument of human dreaming --- and that one must write for it, not for oneself alone, as had been his tendency --- (the tendency of too many artists, who, following the example of Beethoven, refuse to write “for a damned violin, when the Spirit speaks to them”). --- A great dramatic poet is not ashamed to work for a specific stage, and to adapt his thought to the actors at his disposal; he does not think this diminishes him; but he knows that a large hall requires different means of expression than a small one, and that one does not write fanfares for trumpet on a flute. The theater, like the fresco, is art in its proper place. And for that reason it is the human art par excellence, the living art.

The thoughts Françoise expressed in this way accorded with Christophe’s own, for at this point in his career he was moving toward a collective art, in communion with other human beings. Françoise’s experience helped him grasp the mysterious collaboration that weaves itself between the audience and the performer. Realist that she was, with few illusions, she nonetheless perceived this power of reciprocal suggestion, these waves of sympathy linking the actor to the crowd, this great silence of thousands of souls from which the voice of the unique interpreter rises. Of course, she had this feeling only in intermittent flashes, very rare, almost never recurring in the same play at the same moments. The rest of the time it was soulless craft, intelligent and cold machinery. But the interesting thing is the exception --- the flash of lightning by whose light one glimpses the abyss, the shared soul of millions of beings whose force is expressed through you, for one second of eternity.

It was this shared soul that the great artist must express. His ideal ought to be a living objectivism, in which the bard assimilates himself to those for whom he sings, strips himself of himself, to clothe the collective passions that blow across the world like a tempest. Françoise felt the need of this all the more keenly because she was incapable of such selflessness and always played herself. --- The disorderly flowering of individual lyricism has had something sickly about it for the past century and a half. Moral greatness consists in feeling much and mastering much, in being sparing of words and chaste with one’s thought, in not parading it, in speaking with a glance, with a single deep word, without childish exaggerations, without feminine effusions, for those who know how to understand at half a word --- for men. Modern music, which talks so much about itself and intrudes its indiscreet confidences at every turn, is a failure of modesty and a failure of taste. It resembles those invalids who think of nothing but their ailments and never tire of describing them to others in revolting and ridiculous detail. This absurdity of art has grown more pronounced with every passing century. Françoise, who was no musician, was not far from seeing in the very development of music at the expense of poetry a sign of decadence --- like a polyp devouring it. Christophe protested; but, on reflection, he wondered whether there was not something true in it. The first lieder written on Goethe’s poems were spare and exact; soon Schubert mingles his Romantic sentimentality with them, distorting them; Schumann adds his girlish languor; and, all the way to Hugo Wolf, the movement intensifies toward more labored declamation, indecent analysis, a pretension to leave no corner of the soul in shadow. Every veil is torn from the mysteries of the heart. What was once said with restraint by a man is howled today by shameless girls showing themselves naked.

Christophe felt a measure of shame at this art, from which he himself was not untouched; and, without wishing to return to the past --- (an absurd and unnatural desire) --- he steeped himself again in the spirit of those masters of the past who had possessed the haughty discretion of thought and a sense of great collective art: Handel, for instance, when, disdainful of the lachrymose pietism of his time and his people, he wrote his colossal Anthems and his oratorios --- heroic epics, songs of peoples for peoples. The difficulty was to find subjects of inspiration that could, as the Bible did in Handel’s day, awaken shared emotions in the peoples of today’s Europe. Today’s Europe no longer had a book in common: not a poem, not a prayer, not an act of faith that was the possession of all. O shame that should crush every writer, every artist, every thinker of today! Not one has written, not one has thought for all. Beethoven alone left a few pages of a new consoling and fraternal Gospel; but only musicians can read it, and most human beings will never hear it. Wagner did indeed attempt to raise on the hill at Bayreuth a religious art that would bind all people together. But his great soul was too little simple and too deeply marked by all the flaws of the decadent music and thought of his time: on the sacred hill, it was not the fishermen of Galilee who came, but the Pharisees.

Christophe clearly sensed what needed to be done; but he lacked a poet, and he had to be sufficient unto himself, to confine himself to music alone. And music, whatever one may say, is not a universal language: one needs the bow of words to drive the arrow of sound into every heart.

Christophe was planning to write a series of symphonies inspired by everyday life. He was conceiving, among others, a Domestic Symphony, in his own way, which was not quite that of Richard Strauss. He had no interest in materializing, in a cinematographic tableau, family life through the use of a conventional alphabet, in which musical themes expressed, by the composer’s decree, various characters whom one then watched interact --- if one had obliging ears and eyes. That seemed to him a learned and childish game for a great contrapuntist. He sought to describe neither characters nor actions, but to express emotions that would be familiar to every person, in which every person might find an echo of their own soul, perhaps some comfort. The first movement expressed the grave and artless happiness of a young couple in love, their tender sensuality, their confidence in the future, their joy and their hopes. The second movement was an elegy on the death of a child. Christophe had fled with disgust from any depiction of death, any realistic probing in the expression of grief; individual figures disappeared; there was only a great misery --- yours, mine, that of every person, in the face of a misfortune that is or that may be the lot of all. The soul laid low by this bereavement, from which Christophe had banished the ordinary effects of tearful melodrama, slowly gathered itself up, through painful effort, to offer its suffering as a sacrifice to God. It took up its path again with courage, in the movement that followed and linked itself to the second --- a determined fugue whose bold design and obstinate rhythm gradually took possession of the whole being, and led, amid struggles and tears, to a powerful march full of indomitable faith. The final movement depicted the evening of life. The themes from the opening reappeared with their touching confidence and their tenderness that could not grow old, but more mature now, a little bruised, emerging from the shadows of grief, crowned with light, and thrusting toward the sky, like a rich blossoming, a hymn of devout love to life and to God.

Christophe also searched the books of the past for great, simple human subjects, speaking to the heart of all, to what is best in it. He chose two: Joseph and Niobe. But here Christophe ran up against not only the absence of a poet, but against the perilous question, debated for several centuries and never resolved, of the union of poetry and music. His conversations with Françoise brought him back to the projects sketched out long ago with Corinne: a form of musical drama that would hold a middle ground between recitative opera and spoken drama --- the art of free speech united with free music --- an art of which almost no artist today has any inkling, and which routine criticism, steeped in the Wagnerian tradition, denies, as it denies every truly new work: for what is at stake here is not to walk in the footsteps of Beethoven, Weber, Schumann, or Bizet, though they practiced melodrama with genius; it is not a matter of laying a random spoken voice over random music and producing, at any cost, crude effects on crude audiences by means of tremolo strings; it is a matter of creating a new genre, in which musical voices blend with instruments kindred to those voices, and discreetly weave into their harmonic stanzas the echo of the reveries and plaints of music. It goes without saying that such a form could only apply to a limited order of subjects, to intimate and contemplative moments of the soul, in order to evoke their poetic fragrance. No art calls for greater discretion and greater aristocratic refinement. It is therefore natural that it should have little chance of flourishing in an era that, despite the pretensions of its artists, reeks of the essential vulgarity of the parvenu.

Perhaps Christophe was no better suited than others for this art; his very qualities, his plebeian force, were an obstacle to it. He could only conceive of it, and realize a few sketches with Françoise’s help.

He set to music passages from the Bible, transcribed almost literally --- such as the immortal scene in which Joseph makes himself known to his brothers, and where, after so many trials, overwhelmed by emotion and tenderness, he murmurs in a low voice those words that drew tears from old Tolstoy, and from many others:

“I can bear it no longer… Listen, I am Joseph; does my father still live? I am your brother, your brother lost so long ago. I am Joseph…”

This beautiful and free union could not last. They had moments together of fullness of life; but they were too different. And both of them, equally violent, they often clashed. These clashes never took on a vulgar character: for Christophe respected Françoise. And Françoise, who could be so cruel at times, was kind to those who were kind to her; she would not have wanted to hurt them for anything in the world. Each of them had, moreover, a vein of cheerful humor. She was the first to laugh at herself. She gnawed at herself no less: for the old passion still held her; she kept thinking of the coward she loved; and she could not bear this humiliating condition, nor above all that Christophe might suspect it.

Christophe, seeing her silent and tense, absorbed for whole days in her melancholy, was amazed that she was not happy. She had reached her goal: she was a great artist, admired, adored…

--- Yes, she said; if only I were one of those famous actresses with shopkeeper’s souls, who do theater the way others do business. Those women are content when they’ve “secured” a comfortable position, a wealthy bourgeois marriage, and --- the nec plus ultra --- landed the croix des braves. I wanted more. When you’re not a fool, doesn’t success seem even emptier than failure? You must know that very well!

--- I do know it, said Christophe. Ah! My God! This wasn’t how I imagined glory when I was a child. How ardently I desired it, and how luminous it seemed to me! It was something religious for me… No matter! There is a divine virtue in success: it is the good it allows you to do.

--- What good? You win. But to what end? Nothing has changed. Theaters, concerts, everything is always the same. It’s only a new fashion succeeding another fashion. They don’t understand you, or only in passing; and already they’re thinking of something else… Do you yourself understand other artists? In any case, they don’t understand you. How far they are from you, those you love best! Remember your Tolstoy…

Christophe had written to him; he had been filled with enthusiasm for him, he wept reading his books; he wanted to set one of his tales for the moujiks to music, he had asked his permission, he had sent him his lieder. Tolstoy had not replied, any more than Goethe had replied to Schubert and Berlioz, who sent him their masterworks. He had had Christophe’s music played for him; and it had irritated him: he understood nothing of it. He called Beethoven decadent, and Shakespeare a charlatan. On the other hand, he had taken a fancy to minor masters of pretty mannerisms, harpsichord music that would have charmed the Wig-King; and he regarded La Confession d’une femme de chambre as a Christian book…

--- Great men have no need of us, said Christophe. It’s the others we must think of.

--- Who? The bourgeois public, those shadows who block our view of life? Playing, writing for those people! Wasting one’s life on them! What bitterness!

--- Bah! said Christophe. I see them as you do; and it doesn’t sadden me. They aren’t as bad as you say.

--- Good German optimist!

--- They are men, like me. Why wouldn’t they understand me?… --- And if they didn’t understand me, should I despair over it? Among those thousands of people, there will always be one or two who are with me: that’s enough for me, a single skylight is enough to breathe the outside air… Think of those naive spectators, those adolescents, those old candid souls, whom your appearance, your voice, your revelation of tragic beauty carry up above their ordinary days. Remember yourself, when you were a child! Is it not good to give others --- even if only to one --- the happiness and goodness that someone once gave to you?

--- Do you really think there’s even one? I’ve come to doubt it… And then, how do even the best of those who love us love us? How do they see us? They see so poorly! They admire you while humiliating you; they take just as much pleasure watching any third-rate actress perform; they rank you alongside fools one holds in contempt. All those who have success are equal in their eyes.

--- And yet, in the end, it is the greatest of all who impose themselves on posterity as the greatest.

--- That’s the effect of distance. Mountains grow taller as you move farther away. Their height becomes clearer; but you are farther from them… And who tells us, besides, that they are the greatest? Do you know the others, those who have vanished?

--- To the devil! said Christophe. Even if no one felt what I think and what I am, I still think it and I still am it. I have my music, I love it, I believe in it; it is truer than anything.

--- You, at least, are free in your art, you can do what you want. But what can I do? I am forced to play what is imposed on me, and to repeat it until I’m sick of it. We haven’t quite reached the condition of pack animals that those American actors have, who play Rip or Robert-Macaire ten thousand times, who spend twenty-five years of their lives turning the millstone around some inane role. But we’re on our way there. Our theaters are so poor! The public tolerates genius only in infinitesimal doses, sprinkled with mannerism and fashionable literature… “A fashionable genius!” --- doesn’t that make you laugh?… What a waste of powers! Look at what they did with a Mounet. What did he have to play, in his lifetime? Two or three roles worth living for: an Oedipus, a Polyeucte. The rest --- what nonsense! Isn’t it enough to disgust you? And to think of everything great and glorious there was to do, for him?… It’s no better outside France. What did they do with a Duse? To what did her life burn away? To what useless roles?

--- Your true role, said Christophe, is to impose the great works of art on the world.

--- You wear yourself out in vain. And it isn’t worth the trouble. The moment one of these great works touches the stage, it loses its great poetry, it becomes false. The breath of the audience withers it. An audience of stifled cities, they no longer know what open air is, what nature is, what wholesome poetry is: they need a theater poetry, glittering, painted, and reeking. --- Ah! and then… and then, besides, even if one succeeded… No, this still doesn’t fill a life, it doesn’t fill my life…

--- You’re still thinking of him.

--- Of whom?

--- You know well. That man.

--- Yes.

--- Even if you had that man, and if he loved you, admit it, you still wouldn’t be happy, you’d find a way to torment yourself.

--- That’s true… Ah! what is wrong with me?… You see, I’ve had too much to struggle with, I’ve gnawed at myself too much, I can no longer find peace, there’s an unease in me, a fever…

--- It must have been in you, even before your trials.

--- Perhaps. Yes, even when I was a little girl, as far back as I can remember… It devoured me.

--- What would you want, then?

--- Do I know? More than I can have.

--- I know that feeling, said Christophe. I was like that, as a young man.

--- Yes, but you became a man. I will remain an eternal adolescent. I am an incomplete being.

--- No one is complete. Happiness is in knowing one’s limits and loving them.

--- I can no longer do that. I’ve gone beyond them. Life has forced me to, worn me out, crippled me. And yet it seems to me that I could have been a normal woman, healthy and beautiful all the same, without being like the herd.

--- You can still be that. I can see you so clearly, that way!

--- Tell me how you see me.

He described her as she might have been under conditions in which she would have developed naturally and harmoniously, in which she would have been happy, loving and loved. And it did her good to hear. But afterward, she said:

--- No, it’s impossible now.

--- Well, he said, one must tell oneself then, as good old Handel did when he went blind:

And he went and played it for her on the piano. She embraced him, her dear optimistic fool. He did her good. But she did him harm --- she feared as much, at least. She had crises of despair, and she could not hide them from him; love made her weak. At night, when they lay in bed side by side and she was silently devouring her anguish, he would sense it, and he would beg his friend, so near and yet so far, to share with him the weight that was crushing her; then she could not resist, she gave way, weeping, in his arms; and he would then spend hours consoling her, steadily, without anger; but this perpetual anxiety wore him down in the end, all the same. Françoise dreaded that her fever might eventually infect him. She loved him too much to bear the thought that he might suffer because of her. She was offered an engagement in America; she accepted, to force herself to leave. She left him, slightly humiliated. She was as humiliated as he was. To be unable to make each other happy!

--- My poor dear, she said to him, smiling sadly, tenderly. Aren’t we quite hopeless? We’ll never find again so fine an occasion, so rare a friendship. But there’s no way, there’s no way. We are too foolish!

They looked at each other, abashed and sorrowful. They laughed so as not to cry, embraced, and parted, tears in their eyes. They had never loved each other so much as in the moment of parting.

And after she had gone, he returned to art, his old companion… O peace of the starry sky?

Not much time had passed before Christophe received a letter from Jacqueline. It was only the third time she had written to him; and the tone was very different from what she had accustomed him to. She expressed her regret at not seeing him for so long, and gently invited him to come back, if he did not want to grieve two friends who cared for him. Christophe was delighted, but not overly surprised. He had thought that Jacqueline’s unfair attitude toward him could not last forever. He liked to repeat to himself a mocking saying of the old grandfather:

“Sooner or later, good moments come to women; one only needs the patience to wait for them.”

He returned therefore to Olivier’s home, and was received with joy. Jacqueline was full of attentiveness toward him; she avoided the ironic tone that was natural to her, took care not to say anything that might wound Christophe, showed interest in what he was doing, and spoke with intelligence about serious subjects. Christophe believed her transformed. She was only that way to please him. Jacqueline had heard talk of Christophe’s romance with the fashionable actress, the story of which had provided fodder for Parisian gossip; and Christophe had appeared to her in an entirely new light: she had grown curious about him. When she saw him again, she found him much more likable. Even his faults did not seem to her without appeal. She realized that Christophe had genius, and that it was worth the effort to make him care for her.

The situation of the young married couple had not improved; it had even worsened. Jacqueline was bored, bored: she was dying of boredom… How alone a woman is! Aside from the child, nothing holds her; and the child is not always enough to hold her: for when she is truly a woman, and not merely a female, when she has a rich soul and a demanding life, she is made for so many things that she cannot accomplish alone, if no one comes to her aid!… A man is much less alone, even when he is most alone: his monologue is enough to populate his desert; and when he is alone with another, he accommodates himself to it better, for he notices it less --- he is still monologuing. And he does not suspect that the sound of this voice, which continues imperturbably talking to itself in the desert, makes the silence more terrible and the desert more atrocious for the one beside him, for whom every word is dead that love does not animate. He does not notice; he has not staked his entire life on love, as a woman has: his life is occupied elsewhere… What will occupy the life of a woman and her immense desire, those millions of ardent and generous forces which for the forty centuries that humanity has endured burn uselessly, offered as a holocaust to only two idols: ephemeral love, and motherhood --- that sublime deception, which is denied to thousands of women, and fills only a few years of the lives of the rest?

Jacqueline despaired. She had moments of terror that pierced her like swords. She thought:

--- “Why do I live? Why was I born?”

And her heart twisted with anguish.

--- “My God, I am going to die! My God, I am going to die!”

This thought haunted her, pursued her at night. She dreamed that she was saying:

--- “We are in 1889.”

--- “No,” someone answered her. “In 1909.”

She was devastated to find herself twenty years older than she had thought.

--- “It will soon be over, and I haven’t lived! What have I done with those twenty years? What have I done with my life?”

She dreamed that she was four little girls. All four of them were lying in the same room, in separate beds. All four were the same height and had the same face; but one was eight years old, another fifteen, another twenty, another thirty. There was an epidemic. Three were already dead. The fourth looked at herself in the mirror; and she was seized with terror; she saw herself, nose pinched, features drawn… she was going to die too --- and then it would be over…

--- ”… What have I done with my life?…”

She woke in tears; and the nightmare did not fade with the day --- the nightmare was real. What had she done with her life? Who had stolen it from her?… She found herself hating Olivier, innocent accomplice --- (innocent! what does it matter, if the harm is the same!) --- accomplice to the blind law that crushed her. She reproached herself for it afterward, for she was good-hearted; but she suffered too much; and this being bound against her, who smothered her life, though he suffered too, she could not stop herself from making him suffer more, in order to avenge herself. Then she felt more wretched than ever; she despised herself; and she sensed that if she did not find some way to save herself, she would do still greater harm. She searched for that way, groping about her; she clutched at everything, like someone drowning; she tried to take an interest in something, some work, some person, that might be in some sense her own thing, her own work, her own person. She tried to take up intellectual work again, she learned foreign languages, she began an article, a short story, she took up painting, composing… All in vain: she lost heart on the very first day. It was too difficult. And besides, “books, works of art! What are they? I don’t know whether I love them, I don’t know whether they exist…” --- On certain days she talked with animation, she laughed with Olivier, she seemed to catch fire over what they were saying, what he was doing, she tried to distract herself… All in vain: suddenly the agitation would collapse, her heart would go cold, she would hide away, without tears, without breath, crushed. --- She had partly succeeded in her work on Olivier. He was becoming skeptical, he was growing worldly. She felt no gratitude for this; she found him weak, as she was. Almost every evening they went out; she carried her anguished boredom through the drawing rooms of Paris, where no one could guess it beneath the irony of her ever-armed smile. She looked for someone who would love her and hold her above the abyss… In vain, in vain, in vain. To her desperate cry, nothing answered but silence.

She did not love Christophe; she could not bear his rough manners, his wounding frankness, above all his indifference. She did not love him; but she had the sense that he, at least, was strong --- a rock above death. And she wanted to cling to that rock, to that swimmer whose head rose above the waves, or to drown him with her…

And then, it was no longer enough to have separated her husband from his friends: she had to take them from him. The most virtuous women sometimes have an instinct that drives them to test how far their power extends, and to go beyond. In this abuse of power, their weakness proves its strength. And when a woman is selfish and vain, she takes a wicked pleasure in stealing from her husband the friendship of his friends. The task is easy enough: a few glances suffice. There are few men, honest or not, who lack the weakness to rise to the bait. However good a friend the man may be, and however loyal, he may well manage to stop short of action, but in thought he will almost always betray his friend. And if the other man notices, it is the end of their friendship: they no longer see each other with the same eyes. --- The woman who plays this dangerous game usually stops there; she asks no more: she holds them both, divided, at her mercy.

Christophe noticed Jacqueline’s kindnesses to him; they did not surprise him. When he had affection for someone, he had a naïve tendency to find it natural to be loved in return, without ulterior motive. He responded cheerfully to the young woman’s overtures; he found her charming; he enjoyed himself with her wholeheartedly; and he thought so well of her that he was not far from believing that Olivier must be very clumsy indeed if he failed to be happy and to make her happy.

He accompanied them on a short motor tour they made lasting several days; and he was their guest at a country house the Langeais family owned in Burgundy --- an old family home, kept for the sake of its memories, but rarely visited. It stood isolated amid vineyards and woods; the interior was run-down, the window frames ill-fitting; one breathed an odor of mildew, of ripe fruit, of cool shadows and resinous trees warmed by the sun. Living alongside Jacqueline day after day, Christophe gradually let himself be invaded by an insinuating, gentle feeling that caused him no alarm; he felt an innocent pleasure --- though by no means an immaterial one --- in seeing her, hearing her, brushing against that pretty body, and breathing the warmth of her breath. Olivier, a little preoccupied, said little. He did not suspect anything; but a vague unease weighed on him, which he would have blushed to admit to himself; to punish himself for it, he often left them alone together. Jacqueline read him clearly, and she was moved; she felt the urge to say to him:

--- Go on, don’t be troubled, my love. You are still the one I love best.

But she said nothing; and all three of them drifted where chance led: Christophe suspecting nothing, Jacqueline not knowing quite what she wanted, leaving it to chance to let her know, Olivier alone foreseeing, sensing, but out of a pride in self-respect and in love unwilling to think about it. When the will falls silent, instinct speaks; in the soul’s absence, the body goes its own way.

One evening after dinner, the night seemed so beautiful to them --- a moonless, starlit night --- that they wanted to walk in the garden. Olivier and Christophe went out of the house. Jacqueline went up to her room to fetch a shawl. She did not come back down. Christophe, fuming at the eternal delays of women, went back in to find her. --- (For some time now, without noticing it, it had been he who was playing the husband.) --- He heard her coming. The room he was in had its shutters closed; one could see nothing.

--- Come along now! Get a move on, Madame-who-never-finishes, Christophe called out gaily. You’ll wear out the mirrors, staring at yourself in them.

She did not answer. She had stopped. Christophe had the impression that she was in the room; but she did not move.

--- Where are you? he said.

She did not answer. Christophe fell silent too: he was moving through the darkness by touch; and a confusion came over him. He stopped, heart beating. He heard Jacqueline’s light breathing very close by. He took one more step and stopped again. She was near him, he knew it, but he could no longer go forward. A few seconds of silence. Then suddenly, two hands seizing his and drawing him forward, a mouth on his mouth. He held her close. Without a word, motionless. --- Their mouths released, tore themselves from each other. Jacqueline left the room. Christophe, trembling, followed. His legs were shaking. He stood for a moment leaning against the wall, waiting for his pulse to calm. At last he rejoined them. Jacqueline was talking quietly with Olivier. They walked a few steps ahead. Christophe followed them, crushed. Olivier stopped to wait for him. Christophe stopped too. Olivier called to him in a friendly way. Christophe did not answer. Olivier, knowing his friend’s moods and the capricious silences into which he sometimes locked himself triple-fast, did not press the matter and continued walking with Jacqueline. And Christophe, mechanically, kept following them, ten paces behind, like a dog. When they stopped, he stopped. When they walked, he walked. So they made the circuit of the garden and went in. Christophe went up to his room and locked himself in. He did not light a candle. He did not go to bed. He did not think. Toward the middle of the night sleep took him, sitting up, his arms and head resting on the table. He woke an hour later. He lit his candle, feverishly gathered his papers and belongings, packed his bag, then threw himself on his bed and slept until dawn. Then he came downstairs with his luggage and left. They waited for him all morning. They searched for him all day. Jacqueline, concealing beneath indifference a tremor of anger, affected with insulting irony to count her silverware. Only the following evening did Olivier receive a letter from Christophe:

“My dear old friend, don’t hold it against me for leaving like a madman. A madman I am, you know that. What can be done about it? I am what I am. Thank you for your warm hospitality. It was very good. But you see, I am not made for life with others. For life itself, I am not quite sure I am made for that either. I am made to stay in my corner, and to love people --- from a distance: that is more prudent. When I see them too closely, I turn misanthropic. And that is what I do not want to be. I want to love men, I want to love you all. Oh, how I wish I could do you all some good! If I could make you --- make you happy! With what joy I would give in exchange all the happiness I might have!… But that is forbidden me. One can only show others the way. One cannot walk their path for them. Each person must save himself. Save yourself! Save yourselves! I love you well.

Christophe.

“My respects to madame Jeannin.”

“Madame Jeannin” read the letter with tight lips, a smile of contempt, and said curtly:

--- Well then, follow his advice. Save yourself.

But at the moment when Olivier reached out his hand to take the letter back, Jacqueline crumpled the paper, threw it to the floor; and two large tears sprang from her eyes. Olivier seized her hand:

--- What is it? he asked, moved.

--- Leave me alone! she cried, angrily.

She left the room. On the threshold she called out:

--- Egoists!

Christophe had ended by making enemies of his patrons at the Grand Journal. This was easy to foresee. Christophe had received from heaven that virtue celebrated by Goethe: “ingratitude.”

“The reluctance to show gratitude,” Goethe wrote ironically, “is rare and manifests itself only in remarkable men who, having risen from the poorest classes, have been compelled at every step to accept assistance almost always poisoned by the benefactor’s crudeness…”

Christophe did not think he was obliged to debase himself for a service rendered, nor --- which for him came to the same thing --- to abdicate his freedom. He did not lend out his benefits at compound interest; he gave them. His benefactors understood this somewhat differently. They were shocked in their lofty moral sense of what their debtors owed them when Christophe refused to write the music for a stupid hymn, for a publicity event organized by the paper. They let him feel the impropriety of his conduct. Christophe told them to go to the devil. He finished exasperating them by the blunt denial he issued, shortly afterward, of statements that the paper had attributed to him.

Then a campaign against him began. Every weapon was used. Once again they pulled out of the arsenal of chicanes the old war machine that has been deployed in turn by all the impotent against all the creators, and that has never killed anyone, but whose effect on imbeciles is infallible: they charged him with plagiarism. They went and cut from his work and from that of obscure colleagues artificially chosen and doctored passages; and they proved that he had stolen his inspiration from others. They accused him of having tried to stifle young artists. If only he had had to deal only with those whose trade is to bark --- with certain of those critics, those dwarfs who climb onto a great man’s shoulders and cry:

--- I am taller than you!

But no: men of talent attack one another; each tries to make himself unbearable to his colleagues; and yet, as someone once said, the world is wide enough for each person to work in peace; and each person already has in his own talent an enemy that troubles him enough.

In Germany there were jealous artists ready to furnish weapons to his enemies, or to invent them if need be. There were such people in France as well. The nationalists of the musical press --- several of whom were themselves foreigners --- flung his race at him like an insult. Christophe’s success had grown considerably; and, with fashion taking a hand, one could understand how, in its exaggerations, it irritated even people without any particular bias --- and all the more, the others. Christophe now had, among concert audiences, among society people and the writers for the little reviews, enthusiastic partisans who, whatever he did, went into raptures and declared freely that music had not existed before him. Some explained his works, and found in them philosophical intentions that left him astonished. Others saw in them a musical revolution, an assault on traditions that Christophe respected more than anyone. It would have done him no good to protest. They would have demonstrated to him that he didn’t know what he had written. They were admiring themselves, in admiring him. So the campaign against Christophe met with lively sympathy among his colleagues, who were exasperated by the “hype” for which he was entirely innocent. They had no need of these reasons to dislike his music: most of them felt, toward him, the natural irritation of someone who has no ideas and expresses them effortlessly according to learned formulas, against someone who is full of ideas and deploys them with a certain awkwardness, following the apparent disorder of his creative imagination. How many times had he been accused of not knowing how to write, by scribblers for whom style consisted in clique recipes and school formulas, kitchen molds into which thought was poured! Christophe’s truest friends, who did not try to understand him, and who alone understood him because they loved him --- simply, for the good he did them --- were obscure listeners who had no voice in the matter. The one person who might have responded vigorously on Christophe’s behalf --- Olivier --- was at that point estranged from him and seemed to have forgotten him. Christophe was thus left to adversaries and admirers who competed to see who could do him the most harm. Disgusted, he did not reply. When he read the verdicts pronounced upon him, from the heights of some major newspaper, by one of those presumptuous critics who hold dominion over art with the insolence that comes from ignorance and impunity, he would shrug and say:

--- Judge me. I judge you in return. We’ll settle it in a hundred years!

But in the meantime, the slander ran its course; and the public, as usual, received with gaping mouths the most foolish and ignominious accusations.

As though he did not find the situation difficult enough already, Christophe chose this moment to quarrel with his publisher. He had no real cause to complain of Hecht, who published his new works regularly and was honest in business matters. It was true that this honesty did not prevent him from concluding contracts unfavorable to Christophe; but he held to those contracts. He held to them only too well. One day, Christophe was surprised to find a septet of his arranged as a quartet, and a suite of piano pieces for two hands clumsily transcribed for four, without his having been notified. He rushed to Hecht’s office and, pushing the offending items under his nose, said:

--- Do you know about this?

--- Of course, said Hecht.

--- And you dared… you dared to tamper with my works without asking my permission!…

--- What permission? said Hecht calmly. Your works belong to me.

--- To me as well, I would suppose!

--- No, said Hecht gently.

Christophe leapt up.

--- My works don’t belong to me?

--- They no longer belong to you. You sold them to me.

--- You’re making fun of me! I sold you the paper. Do what you like with it, make money from it. But what is written on it --- that is my blood, that belongs to me.

--- You sold me everything. In exchange for the work in question, I paid you a sum of three hundred francs, payable up to that amount at a rate of thirty centimes per copy sold of the original edition. In consideration of which, you assigned to me, without restriction or reservation, all your rights to your work.

--- Even the right to destroy it?

Hecht shrugged, rang the bell, and said to a clerk:

--- Bring me the Krafft file.

He read Christophe the text of the contract calmly --- a contract that Christophe had signed without reading --- from which it followed, according to the standard terms of contracts that music publishers concluded in those very distant times, “that M. Hecht was subrogated to all the rights, means, and actions of the author, and had, to the exclusion of all others, the right to edit, publish, engrave, print, translate, rent, sell for his own profit, in whatever form he saw fit, to have performed in concerts, café-concerts, dances, theaters, etc., the said work, to publish any arrangement of the work for any instrument and even with words, as well as to change the title… etc., etc.”

--- You see, he said, that I am being quite restrained.

--- Evidently, said Christophe. I should thank you. You might have turned my septet into a café-concert song.

He fell silent, dismayed, his head in his hands.

--- I have sold my soul, he kept repeating.

--- You may be sure, said Hecht ironically, that I won’t abuse the bargain.

--- And to think, said Christophe, that your Republic authorizes such traffic! You say that man is free. And you sell thought at auction.

--- You received the price, said Hecht.

--- Thirty pieces of silver, yes, said Christophe. Take them back.

He was searching his pockets to return the three hundred francs to Hecht. But he didn’t have them. Hecht smiled slightly, with a touch of disdain. That smile enraged Christophe.

--- I want my works back, he said. I’ll buy them back from you.

--- You have no right to do so, said Hecht. But since I have no desire to hold anyone by force, I consent to return them to you --- if you are in a position to reimburse me for the compensation owed.

--- I will be, said Christophe, even if I have to sell myself.

He accepted, without negotiating, the conditions Hecht laid out for him a fortnight later. In an act of remarkable folly, he was buying back the editions of his works at prices five times higher than what those works had earned him, though not at all exaggerated: for they had been scrupulously calculated according to the actual profits the works were bringing to Hecht. Christophe was incapable of paying; and Hecht counted on it. Hecht had no desire to crush Christophe, whom he esteemed as an artist and as a man more than any other of the young musicians; but he wanted to teach him a lesson: for he could not accept that anyone should rebel against what was his right. He had not made these rules; they were those of the time, and he found them equitable. He was moreover sincerely convinced that they were in the author’s best interest as well as the publisher’s, since the publisher knows better than the author the means of spreading a work, and does not stop, as the author does, at scruples of a sentimental nature --- respectable, but contrary to his real interest. He was resolved to make Christophe succeed; but it would be his way, and on condition that Christophe was delivered to him, bound hand and foot. He intended to make him feel that one could not so easily shake free of his services. They made a conditional agreement: if, within six months, Christophe did not manage to settle his debt, the works would remain the full property of Hecht. It was easy to foresee that Christophe could not raise even a quarter of the sum demanded.

He persisted nonetheless, giving notice on his apartment full of memories for him in order to take a cheaper one --- selling various objects, none of which, to his great surprise, had any value --- going into debt, calling on the goodwill of Mooch, who was unfortunately very short of money himself just then and ill, confined to his home by rheumatism --- seeking another publisher, and everywhere running up against terms as onerous as Hecht’s, or against outright refusal.

This was the period when the attacks against him in the musical press were most fierce. One of the leading Parisian newspapers was particularly relentless; one of its contributors, who did not sign his real name, had taken to using him as a whipping boy: not a week passed without some perfidious note appearing in the Échos to hold him up to ridicule. The music critic completed the work of his masked colleague: the slightest pretext was enough for him to express his animosity in passing. These were still only the opening skirmishes; he promised to return to the matter at leisure and shortly to carry out a systematic execution. They took their time, knowing that no precise accusation is worth, in the eyes of the public, a series of insinuations stubbornly repeated. They played with Christophe as a cat plays with a mouse. Christophe, to whom the articles were sent, despised them but could not help suffering from them. Nevertheless, he kept silent; and instead of responding --- (could he even have done so, even had he wished?) --- he persisted in his futile and disproportionate contest of pride with his publisher. He was losing his time, his strength, his money, and his only weapons in the process, since in a fit of self-righteousness he was claiming to renounce the publicity that Hecht was giving his music.

Then, abruptly, everything changed. The promised article in the newspaper did not appear. The insinuations fell silent. The campaign stopped dead. More than that: two or three weeks later, the newspaper’s critic published, in passing, a few laudatory lines that seemed to confirm that peace had been made. A major Leipzig publisher wrote to Christophe offering to publish his works; and the contract was concluded on advantageous terms. A flattering letter bearing the seal of the Austrian embassy expressed to Christophe the desire to include certain of his works in the programs of the gala evenings held at the embassy. Philomèle, whom Christophe patronized, was invited to perform at one of these evenings; and immediately afterward, she was sought everywhere in the aristocratic salons of the German and Italian colony in Paris. Christophe himself, who could not avoid attending one of the concerts, found the most cordial reception from the ambassador. Yet a few words of conversation showed him that his host, not much of a musician, knew nothing of his works. Where did this sudden interest come from? An invisible hand seemed to be watching over him, clearing away obstacles, smoothing his path. Christophe made inquiries. The ambassador alluded to two friends of Christophe’s, the Count and Countess Berény, who had a great affection for him. Christophe had not known even their names; and on the evening he came to the embassy, he had no opportunity to be introduced to them. He did not press to meet them. He was passing through a period of disgust with people, in which he placed as little trust in his friends as in his enemies: friends and enemies were equally uncertain; a breath of wind could change them; one had to learn to do without them, and say, like that old man of the seventeenth century:

“God gave me friends; he has taken them from me. They have left me. I leave them, and make no mention of them.”

Since he had left Olivier’s house, Olivier had given him no sign of life; everything seemed finished between them. Christophe had no desire to form new friendships. He imagined the Count and Countess Berény in the image of so many snobs who called themselves his friends; and he did nothing to encounter them. He would rather have avoided them.

It was all of Paris he would have liked to flee. He felt a need to take refuge, for a few weeks, in some friendly solitude. If only he could steep himself again, for a few days --- a very few days --- in his native land! Little by little this thought was becoming a morbid craving. He wanted to see his river again, his sky, the earth of his dead. He had to see them. He could not do so without risking his freedom: he was still subject to the warrant issued against him at the time of his flight from Germany. But he felt ready for any recklessness if it would let him return, even for a single day.

Fortunately, he mentioned this to one of his new protectors. When a young attaché at the German embassy, whom he met at the evening where his works were performed, told him that his country was proud of having a musician such as himself, Christophe answered bitterly:

--- It is so proud of me that it will let me die at its door without opening it.

The young diplomat asked him to explain his situation; and a few days later he came back to see Christophe and said:

--- There is interest in you at the highest level. A very great personage, who alone has the power to suspend the effects of the judgment weighing upon you, has been made aware of your situation; and he deigns to be moved by it. I do not know how your music could have come to please him: for --- (between us) --- his taste is not very good; but he is intelligent, and he has a generous heart. Without it being possible for the moment to lift the judgment against you, there is willingness to look the other way if you wish to spend forty-eight hours in your city to see your people again. Here is a passport. Have it stamped on arrival and on departure. Be prudent, and do not draw attention to yourself.

Christophe saw his homeland once more. He spent the two days allotted to him in conversation with it alone, and with those who lay within it. He visited his mother’s grave. Grass had grown over it, but flowers had been placed there recently. Father and grandfather slept side by side. He sat at their feet. The grave was backed against the enclosure wall. A chestnut tree growing on the other side, in the sunken lane, cast its shade over it. Over the low wall one could see the golden harvests, across which a warm wind sent slow, rippling waves; the sun reigned over the drowsing land; one heard the cry of quails in the wheat, and over the graves the gentle swelling of the cypresses. Christophe was alone and dreaming. His heart was calm. Sitting with his hands clasped around his knee and his back resting against the wall, he gazed at the sky. His eyes closed for a moment. How simple everything was! He felt at home, among his own. He remained beside them as though hand in hand. The hours passed. Toward evening, footsteps crunched on the gravel paths. The caretaker passed and looked at Christophe sitting there. Christophe asked him who had put the flowers. The man replied that the farmwoman from Buir came by once or twice a year.

--- Lorchen? said Christophe.

They talked.

--- You are the son? said the man.

--- She had three, said Christophe.

--- I’m speaking of the one from Hamburg. The others turned out badly.

Christophe, his head tilted slightly back, motionless, said nothing. The sun was going down.

--- I’m going to lock up, said the caretaker.

Christophe rose and walked slowly with him around the cemetery. The caretaker showed him about as if hosting him in his own home. Christophe stopped to read the names inscribed on the stones. How many people he knew were gathered here! Old Euler --- his son-in-law --- further on, childhood companions, little girls he had played with --- and there, a name that stirred his heart: Ada… Peace upon them all…

The flames of the sunset encircled the tranquil horizon. Christophe left. He walked a long while longer in the fields. The stars were coming out…

The next day he came back and, again, spent the afternoon in his place from the evening before. But the beautiful silent calm of the previous day had grown animated. His heart sang a carefree, joyful hymn. Seated on the edge of the grave, he wrote in pencil on his knees, in a notebook, the song he heard within him. The day passed thus. It seemed to him that he was working in his old little room, and that his mother was there, on the other side of the wall. When he had finished and it was time to leave --- he was already a few steps from the grave --- he changed his mind, turned back, and buried the notebook in the grass beneath the ivy. A few drops of rain were beginning to fall. Christophe thought:

--- It will be erased quickly. All the better!… For you alone. For no one else.

He saw the river again too, the familiar streets where so many things had changed. At the edge of town, on the promenades of the old ramparts, a small stand of acacias that he had watched being planted had taken over the space, smothering the old trees. Walking along the wall that bordered the De Kerich garden, he recognized the stone post he used to climb as a boy to peer into the park; and he was struck by how small the street, the wall, and the garden had all become. He stopped for a moment in front of the entrance gate. He was continuing on his way when a carriage passed. He looked up instinctively, and his eyes met those of a young woman, fresh-faced, plump, and cheerful, who was studying him with curiosity. She let out an exclamation of surprise. At her gesture, the carriage stopped. She said:

--- Monsieur Krafft!

He stopped.

She said, laughing:

--- Minna…

He ran to her, almost as agitated as on the day of their first meeting. She was with a gentleman, tall, stout, bald, with a mustache turned up in a conquering air, whom she introduced: “Herr Reichsgerichtsrat von Brombach” --- her husband. She insisted that Christophe come inside. He tried to excuse himself. But Minna exclaimed:

--- “No, no, he had to come, come to dinner.”

She spoke very loudly and very quickly, and without waiting for questions she was already recounting her life. Christophe, overwhelmed by her volubility and her noise, heard only half of it, and he looked at her. So this was his little Minna. She was flourishing, sturdy, padded out in every direction, a pretty skin, a rosy complexion, but the features grown broader, the nose particularly solid and well-nourished. The gestures, the manners, the little pleasantries had remained the same; but the volume had changed.

Yet she never stopped talking: she recounted to Christophe the stories of her past, her intimate stories, the manner in which she had loved her husband and her husband had loved her. Christophe was uncomfortable. She had an uncritical optimism that led her to find perfect and superior to all others --- (at least when in the presence of others) --- her town, her house, her family, her husband, her cooking, her four children, and herself. She said of her husband, and before him, that he was “the most grandiose man she had ever seen,” that there was in him “a superhuman force.” The “most grandiose man” patted Minna’s cheeks with a laugh and declared to Christophe that she “was a highly eminent woman.” It seemed that the Reichsgerichtsrat was aware of Christophe’s situation, and that he did not quite know whether to treat him with respect or without it, given his conviction on the one hand, and, on the other, the august protection that covered him: he settled on mixing the two approaches. As for Minna, she was still talking. When she had talked at length about herself to Christophe, she talked about him; she pelted him with questions as intimate as had been her answers to the supposed questions he had never put to her. She was delighted to see Christophe again; she knew nothing of his music; but she knew he was famous; she was flattered that he had loved her --- (and that she had refused him). --- She reminded him of this, joking, without much delicacy. She asked him for an autograph for her album. She questioned him persistently about Paris. She showed for that city as much curiosity as contempt. She claimed to know it, having seen the Folies-Bergère, the Opéra, Montmartre, and Saint-Cloud. According to her, Parisian women were all kept women, bad mothers, who had as few children as possible and paid them no attention, leaving them at home to go to the theater or to places of pleasure. She would not allow herself to be contradicted. During the course of the evening, she insisted that Christophe play a piece on the piano. She found it charming. But at heart, she admired her husband’s playing just as much, judging him superior in all things, as she was herself.

Christophe had had the pleasure of seeing again at the house Minna’s mother, Madame de Kerich. He had kept for her a secret tenderness, because she had been kind to him. She had lost none of her kindness, and she was more natural than Minna; but she still showed Christophe that same fond little irony that had irritated him long ago. She had remained at exactly the point where he had left her; she loved the same things; and it did not seem admissible to her that one might do better, or differently; she set the Jean-Christophe of former days against the Jean-Christophe of today; and she preferred the first.

Around her, no one had changed in spirit except Christophe. The immobility of the small town, its narrowness of horizon, weighed on him. His hosts spent part of the evening entertaining him with gossip about people he did not know. They were on the lookout for the absurdities of their neighbors, and they decreed absurd anything that differed from them and their ways. This malevolent curiosity, perpetually occupied with trifles, ended by causing Christophe an unbearable unease. He tried to speak of his life abroad. But at once he felt how impossible it was to make them feel that French civilization, which he had suffered from, and which was growing dear to him now that he represented it in his own country --- that free Latin spirit whose first law is intelligence: to understand as much as possible of life and thought, at the risk of treating moral rules lightly. He found in his hosts, and above all in Minna, that proud spirit against which he had once collided, and whose memory he had lost --- proud through weakness as much as through virtue --- that charity-less honesty, proud of its virtue and contemptuous of the failings it could not know, the worship of propriety, the scandalized disdain for “irregular” forms of superiority. Minna had a calm, sententious assurance of always being right. No nuance in her way of judging others. Besides, she was not concerned with understanding them; she was occupied only with herself. Her egoism was varnished over with a vague metaphysical tint. It was constantly a question of her “self,” of the development of her “self.” She was perhaps a good woman, and capable of love. But she loved herself too much. Above all, she respected herself too much. She seemed perpetually to be reciting the Pater and the Ave before her “self.” One had the feeling that she would have ceased entirely to love, and forever, the man she had loved most, had he failed for a single instant --- (though he might have regretted it a thousand times afterward) --- in the respect owed to the dignity of her “self”… The devil take the “self”! Think a little of the “you”!…

Yet Christophe did not see her with severe eyes. He who was ordinarily so irritable listened to her talk with an archangelic patience. He refused to judge her. He surrounded her, as with a halo, with the reverent memory of his childhood love; and he persisted in searching in her for the image of little Minna. It was not impossible to find her again in certain of her gestures; the timbre of her voice had certain resonances that awakened moving echoes. He absorbed himself in them, saying nothing, not listening to the words she spoke, appearing to listen, never ceasing to show her an affectionate respect. But it was hard for him to concentrate his mind: she made too much noise; she prevented him from hearing Minna. At last he rose, a little weary:

--- Poor little Minna! They would have me believe that you are there, in this fine large person who cries out so loudly and bores me. But I know well that you are not. Let us go, Minna. What do we have to do with these people?

He took his leave, letting them believe he would return the next day. Had he said he was leaving that evening, they would not have released him until the hour of the train. With his first steps into the night, he recovered the sense of well-being he had had before meeting the carriage. The memory of the tiresome evening faded, as if with a stroke of the sponge: nothing of it remained; the voice of the Rhine drowned everything. He walked along the bank, toward the house where he had been born. He had no trouble recognizing it. The shutters were closed; everything slept. Christophe stopped in the middle of the road; it seemed to him that if he knocked at the door, familiar ghosts would open it. He entered the meadow around the house, near the river, at the spot where he used to talk in the evenings long ago with Gottfried. He sat down. And the days gone by lived again. And the dear little girl who had shared with him the dream of first love was resurrected. They relived together the young tenderness, and its soft tears and its infinite hopes. And he said to himself, with a good-natured smile:

--- Life has taught me nothing. Much as I know… much as I know… I still have the same illusions.

How good it is to love and to believe without end! Everything that love touches is saved from death.

--- Minna, who is with me --- with me, not with the other --- Minna, who will never grow old!…

The moon, veiled, emerged from the clouds, and made silver scales glitter on the back of the river. Christophe had the impression that the river had not passed so close to the rise of ground where he was sitting in the old days. He went nearer. Yes, there had been, not long ago, just beyond that pear tree, a tongue of sand, a small grassy slope where he had played many times. The river had gnawed them away; it was advancing, licking at the roots of the pear tree. Christophe felt a pang in his heart. He turned back toward the station. On that side, a new neighborhood --- poor houses, construction yards, tall factory chimneys --- was beginning to rise. Christophe thought of the stand of acacias he had seen that afternoon, and he thought:

--- There too, the river gnaws…

The old town, asleep in the shadows, with all it held within it, the living and the dead, was all the dearer to him now: for he felt it threatened…

Hostis habet muros…

Quickly, let us save our own! Death watches over all we love. Let us hasten to engrave the passing face in eternal bronze. Let us snatch the treasure of the homeland from the flames, before the fire devours the palace of Priam…

Christophe boarded the train, which departed like a man fleeing before a flood. But like those men who rescued the gods of their city from its shipwreck, Christophe carried within him the spark of life that had sprung from his soil, and the sacred soul of the past.

Jacqueline and Olivier had drawn closer together, for a time. Jacqueline had lost her father. His death had shaken her deeply. Confronted with genuine grief, she had felt the wretched triviality of all her other sorrows; and the tenderness Olivier showed her had rekindled her affection for him. She found herself carried back several years, to the sad days that had followed the death of Aunt Marthe, and that had in turn been followed by the blessed days of love. She told herself she had been ungrateful toward life, and that she ought to be thankful it had not taken from her the little it had given. That little, whose worth had now been revealed to her, she pressed jealously to herself. A brief absence from Paris, which the doctor had prescribed to distract her from her mourning, a journey she made with Olivier --- a kind of pilgrimage to the places where they had loved each other during the first year of their marriage --- completed the softening of her heart. In the melancholy of finding, around a bend in the road, the dear face of a love one had thought gone, and of watching it pass, and of knowing it would vanish again --- for how long? forever, perhaps? --- they clasped it with desperate passion…

--- Stay, stay with us!

But they knew perfectly well they were going to lose it…

When Jacqueline returned to Paris, she felt a small new life stirring within her body, kindled by love. But love had already passed. The burden that grew heavier inside her did not bind her to Olivier. She did not feel the joy she had expected. She questioned herself with unease. In earlier times, when she tormented herself, she had often thought that the arrival of a child would be her salvation. The child was there; the salvation had not come. This human plant sending its roots into her flesh --- she felt it with dread as it grew, drinking her blood and her life. She would spend entire days absorbed, listening, her gaze unfocused, her whole being drawn in by the unknown being that had taken possession of her. It was a vague, soft, drowsy, anguishing hum. She would startle awake from this torpor --- damp with sweat, shivering, with a flash of revolt. She struggled against the net in which nature had caught her. She wanted to live, she wanted to be free; it seemed to her that nature had deceived her. Then shame would come over her at these thoughts; she found herself monstrous; she wondered whether she was worse than other women, or simply made differently. And gradually she would calm again, numbed like a tree in the sap and the dream of the living fruit ripening within her. What was it? What would it become?…

When she heard its first cry in the light of the world, when she saw that small, pitiful and touching body, her whole heart melted. She knew, in a single dazzling moment, the glorious joy of motherhood, the most powerful joy in the world: to have created from one’s own suffering a being of one’s flesh, a human being. And the great wave of love that moves the universe seized her from head to foot, rolled her, drowned her, lifted her to the heavens… O God, the woman who creates is your equal; and you do not know a joy like hers: for you have not suffered…

Then the wave fell back; and her soul touched bottom again.

Olivier, trembling with emotion, bent over the child; and, smiling at Jacqueline, he tried to grasp what mysterious bond of life existed between the two of them and this wretched creature barely yet human. Tenderly, with a slight revulsion, he brushed his lips against the small yellow, wrinkled head. Jacqueline watched him: jealously, she pushed him away; she seized the child and pressed it to her breast, smothering it with kisses. The child cried; she handed it back; and, her face turned to the wall, she wept. Olivier came to her, embraced her, drank her tears; she embraced him in return and forced herself to smile; then she asked to be left to rest, with the child beside her… Alas! what can one do, when love is dead? A man, who surrenders more than half of himself to the intellect, never loses a strong feeling without preserving in his mind some trace of it, some idea. He may no longer love; he cannot forget that he loved. But a woman who has loved without reason, wholly, and who ceases to love without reason, wholly --- what can she do? Will herself? Deceive herself with illusions? And when she is too weak to will, too honest to deceive herself?…

Jacqueline, leaning on her elbow in bed, looked at the child with tender pity. What was he? Whatever he might be, he was not entirely hers. He was also “the other’s.” And “the other” --- she no longer loved him. Poor little one! Dear little one! She felt irritated at this being who would bind her to a dead past; and, bending over him, she kissed him, she kissed him…

The great misfortune of women today is that they are too free, and not free enough. If they were more free, they would seek bonds and find in them a certain charm and security. If they were less free, they would resign themselves to bonds they knew they could not break; and they would suffer less. But the worst of it is to have bonds that do not bind, and duties from which one can free oneself.

If Jacqueline had believed that her little home had been assigned to her for the whole of her life, she would have found it less inconvenient and less confining; she would have set about making it comfortable; she would have ended, as she had begun, by loving it. But she knew she could leave; and she was suffocating in it. She could rebel: she came to believe that she must.

The moralists of today are strange creatures. Their entire being has atrophied in favor of the faculties of observation. They seek only to see life --- barely to understand it, and not at all to shape it by an act of will. Once they have identified and recorded what exists in human nature, their task seems to them accomplished; they say:

--- That is how things are.

They make no effort to change them. It seems to them that the mere fact of existing is a kind of moral virtue. All weaknesses have thus been invested, at a stroke, with a sort of divine right. The world is becoming democratic. Once, only the king was beyond responsibility. Today, it is all men --- and common riff-raff above all. What splendid counselors! With great effort and scrupulous care, they apply themselves to demonstrating to the weak just how weak they are, and that nature has decreed it so from all eternity. What is left to the weak but to fold their arms? Lucky enough, when they do not actually admire themselves for it! Through constant repetition that she is a sick child, woman comes to take pride in it. Her cowardices are cultivated, coaxed into bloom. Anyone who sat down to recount with complacency to adolescents that there is a stage in youth when the soul, not yet in balance, is capable of crimes, of suicide, of the worst physical and moral depravities --- and who excused them for it --- would find those crimes appearing at once. Even a man: it suffices to keep telling him he is not free for him to cease to be so and surrender himself to the beast. Tell a woman she is responsible, mistress of her body and her will --- and she will be. But you cowards, you are careful not to say it: because you have an interest in her not knowing it!…

The dreary milieu in which Jacqueline found herself completed her undoing. Since she had drawn away from Olivier, she had drifted back into the social world she had despised as a young woman. Around her and her married friends there had formed a small society of young men and young women --- rich, elegant, idle, intelligent, and spineless. Among them reigned an absolute freedom of thought and conversation, tempered only --- and seasoned --- by wit. They would gladly have taken as their motto the device of the Rabelaisian abbey:

Fay ce que Vouldras.

But they were flattering themselves a little: for they did not want very much; they were the exhausted inhabitants of Thélème. They professed with satisfaction the freedom of the instincts; but their instincts were, in truth, greatly faded; and their licentiousness was above all cerebral. They took pleasure in feeling themselves dissolve into the great, tepid, voluptuous swimming pool of civilization --- that lukewarm mud-bath in which human energies dissolve, along with the rough vital powers, the primitive animality with its flowering of faith, will, duty, and passion. In that gelatinous thought, Jacqueline’s lovely body lay soaking. Olivier could do nothing to prevent it. Besides, he too was touched by the sickness of the times: he did not believe he had the right to impede another person’s freedom; from the woman he loved, he would accept nothing that was not freely given through love. And Jacqueline felt no gratitude toward him for this, since her freedom was, in her view, simply her right.

The worst of it was that she brought into this amphibious world a wholehearted nature that could not abide equivocation: when she believed, she gave herself; her small ardent and generous soul, even in its selfishness, burned all its bridges; and from her shared life with Olivier she had retained a moral intransigence she was ready to apply even within immorality.

Her new friends were far too prudent to show themselves to others as they really were. While they professed, in theory, complete freedom from the prejudices of morality and society, they managed in practice to avoid any open break with anyone who might be useful to them; they used morality and society while betraying them, like unfaithful servants who steal from their masters. They even stole from one another, out of habit and boredom. More than one of those husbands knew that his wife had lovers. Those wives were well aware that their husbands had mistresses. They accommodated themselves to it. Scandal begins only when a fuss is made. These well-arranged households rested on a tacit understanding between associates --- between accomplices. But Jacqueline, more straightforward, played it straight. Above all, be sincere. And then, be sincere. And again, and always, be sincere. Sincerity was also one of the virtues praised by the thinking of the day. But here one sees that everything is wholesome to the wholesome, and that everything becomes corruption for the corrupt at heart. How ugly it can sometimes be, to be sincere! It is a sin for mediocre people to want to read what lies within themselves. They read their own mediocrity; and vanity still manages to find its account there.

Jacqueline spent her time studying herself in the mirror; she saw things there she would have done far better never to see: for once she had seen them, she no longer had the strength to look away; and instead of fighting them, she watched them grow --- they became enormous, they ended by taking over her eyes and her thoughts.

The child was not enough to fill her life. She had not been able to nurse him; the little one was fading away with her. A wet nurse had had to be engaged. Great grief, at first… It soon became a relief. The little one was thriving now; he was growing vigorously, like a sturdy little fellow who gave no trouble, spent his time sleeping, and barely cried at night. The wet nurse --- a robust woman from the Nièvre, not on her first nursling, who each time fell into an animal, jealous, and encroaching affection for the child --- seemed to be the real mother. When Jacqueline expressed an opinion, the woman simply did as she pleased; and if Jacqueline tried to argue, she would end up realizing herself that she knew nothing about it. She had never quite recovered since the child’s birth: an early case of phlebitis had laid her low and worn her nerves thin; obliged for weeks to lie still, she was consumed by herself; her thoughts, already feverish, rehashed the same monotonous, haunted complaint endlessly: “She had not lived, she had not lived; and now her life was over…” For her imagination had been struck: she believed herself crippled forever; and a dull, acrid, unspoken resentment was rising within her against the innocent cause of her affliction, against the child. This is a feeling less rare than one might think; but a veil is drawn over it; and even those who experience it are ashamed to acknowledge it, in the secret of their own hearts. Jacqueline judged herself harshly; a struggle was being waged between her selfishness and her maternal love. When she saw the child sleeping like one of the blessed, she was moved; but the very next moment, she thought bitterly:

--- He has killed me.

And she could not suppress an irritated revolt against the indifferent sleep of this being whose happiness she had purchased with her suffering. Even after she recovered, when the child was older, this feeling of hostility persisted obscurely. Since she was ashamed of it, she transferred it onto Olivier. She continued to believe herself ill; and the perpetual anxiety about her health, her worries stoked by the doctors who cultivated the idleness that was their source --- (separation from the child, forced inaction, complete isolation, weeks of nothingness spent lying stretched out and force-fed in her bed like an animal being fattened) --- had ended by concentrating all her preoccupations on herself. Strange modern cures for neurasthenia, that substitute for one illness of the self another illness: the hypertrophy of the self! Why do you not perform a bloodletting on their egotism, or, by some vigorous moral reagent, bring their blood --- if they have not too much of it --- back from their head to their heart!

Jacqueline emerged from it physically stronger, filled out, looking younger --- and morally more unwell than ever. Those few months of isolation had severed the last threads of thought that still bound her to Olivier. As long as she had stayed near him, she had still been subject to the ascendancy of that idealistic nature which, for all its weaknesses, remained constant in its faith; she had struggled in vain against the bondage in which a mind stronger than her own held her, against that gaze that pierced through her, that sometimes forced her to condemn herself, however much she resented it. But the moment chance had separated her from this man --- the moment she no longer felt the weight of his clear-sighted love upon her --- the moment she was free --- the friendly confidence that had persisted between them was instantly replaced by a resentment at having yielded herself so completely, a kind of hatred at having borne so long the yoke of an affection she no longer felt. --- Who can speak of the hidden, implacable grudges that smolder in the heart of someone you love and whom you believe loves you? From one day to the next, everything changes. She loved him yesterday, or seemed to, or believed she did. She loves him no longer. The one she loved is erased from her mind. He suddenly perceives that he is nothing to her; and he does not understand: he saw nothing of the long labor that had been taking place within her; he had no inkling of the secret hostility that had been building against him; he cannot bring himself to acknowledge the reasons for this vengeance and this hatred. Reasons often distant, manifold, and obscure --- some buried beneath the veils of the alcove --- others rooted in wounded pride, in secrets of the heart glimpsed and judged --- still others… what does she herself know? There is some hidden offense that was done to her without anyone knowing, and that she will never forgive. No one will ever manage to know it, and she herself no longer knows it clearly; but the offense is inscribed in her flesh: her flesh will never forget.

Against this frightening current of estrangement, it would have required a different man than Olivier to hold firm --- one closer to nature, simpler and more supple at the same time, unencumbered by sentimental scruples, rich in instinct, and capable, when necessary, of acts his reason would have disowned. He was defeated before the fight began, already discouraged: too lucid, he had long recognized in Jacqueline an inheritance stronger than the will, the mother’s soul reasserting itself; he watched her falling, like a stone, to the bottom of her lineage; and, weak and clumsy, every effort he made only hastened the fall. He forced himself toward calm. She, by some unconscious calculation, tried to draw him out of it, to provoke him into saying violent, brutal, coarse things, so as to give herself reasons to despise him. If he gave in to anger, she despised him. If he was afterward ashamed and put on a humiliated air, she despised him even more. And if he did not give in to anger, if he refused to give in --- then she hated him. And worst of all: that silence into which they would wall themselves, for days, face to face with each other. A suffocating, crushing, maddening silence, in which even the gentlest souls end by turning savage, in which they feel at moments a desire to cause pain, to cry out and make the other cry out. Silence, black silence, in which love finishes its disintegration, in which two beings, like worlds each following its own orbit, sink into the night… They had reached a point where everything they did, even in the attempt to draw closer, only pushed them further apart. Their life was intolerable. A chance event precipitated things.

For a year, Cécile Fleury had been coming often to the Jeannin household. Olivier had met her at Christophe’s; then Jacqueline had invited her; and Cécile had gone on seeing them, even after Christophe had parted ways with them. Jacqueline had been kind to her: although she was hardly musical and found Cécile a little common, she appreciated the charm of her singing and her calming influence. Olivier took pleasure in making music with her. Little by little, she had become a friend of the house. She inspired confidence: when she entered the Jeannin salon with her frank eyes, her air of health and good spirits, her hearty laugh that was a little loud but good to hear, it was like a ray of sunlight breaking through the fog. Olivier’s and Jacqueline’s hearts felt an inexpressible relief in it. When she left, they wanted to say to her:

--- No, stay, stay a little longer, I am cold!

During Jacqueline’s absence, Olivier had seen Cécile more often; and he had not been able to hide a portion of his sorrow from her. He did it with the unthinking openness of a gentle and tender soul that is suffocating, that needs to confide in someone, and gives itself away. Cécile was moved by it; she poured the balm of her motherly words over him. She pitied them both; she urged Olivier not to let himself be crushed. But whether she felt more strongly than he did the awkwardness of these confidences, or for some other reason, she found pretexts to come less often. No doubt it seemed to her that she was not behaving loyally toward Jacqueline, that she had no right to know these secrets. At least, that was how Olivier interpreted her withdrawal; and he approved of it, for he reproached himself for having spoken. But the withdrawal made him feel what Cécile had become to him. He had grown accustomed to sharing his thoughts with her; she alone delivered him from the grief that weighed on him. He was too practiced at reading his own feelings to doubt the name he ought to give to this one. He would have said nothing of it to Cécile. But he could not resist the need to write down for himself what he felt. He had recently returned to the dangerous habit of conversing with his own thoughts on paper. He had been cured of it during his years of love; but now that he found himself alone again, the hereditary compulsion had taken hold of him once more: it was a relief when he suffered, and a necessity of the artist who analyzes himself. And so he described himself, he wrote down his sorrows, as if he were telling them to Cécile --- more freely, since she would never read them.

And chance would have it that these pages fell under Jacqueline’s eyes. It was a day when she felt herself closer to Olivier than she had been in years. While sorting through her wardrobe, she had reread the old love letters he had sent her: they had moved her to tears. Seated in the shadow of the wardrobe, unable to finish the sorting, she had relived her entire past; and she was filled with a painful remorse at having destroyed it. She thought of Olivier’s grief: she had never before been able to contemplate that idea in cold blood; she could forget it; but she could not bear the thought that he was suffering on her account. Her heart was torn. She had wanted to throw herself into his arms, to say to him:

--- Ah! Olivier, Olivier, what have we done? We are mad, we are mad! Let us not make each other suffer any longer!

If only he had come home at that very moment!

And it was at that very moment that she found these letters… Everything was finished. --- Did she believe that Olivier had truly betrayed her? Perhaps. But what did it matter? The betrayal for her lay not so much in the act as in the intention. She would have forgiven the man she loved more easily for having a mistress than for having secretly given his heart to another. And she was right.

--- A fine fuss to make about nothing! some will say… --- (Poor souls, who can only suffer from a betrayal in love once it has been consummated!… When the heart remains faithful, the baseness of the body is of little consequence. When the heart has betrayed, everything else counts for nothing.)…

Jacqueline did not think for a single moment of winning Olivier back. Too late! She no longer loved him enough. Or perhaps she loved him too much. No, it was not jealousy she felt. It was her entire confidence collapsing, everything that still remained secretly of faith and hope in him. She did not tell herself that she herself had spurned it, that she had discouraged him, pushed him toward this love, that this love moreover was innocent, and that one is not, after all, the master of loving or not loving. It did not occur to her to compare this sentimental attachment with her own flirt with Christophe: Christophe, she had never loved him, he counted for nothing! In her passionate exaggeration, she believed that Olivier had lied to her, and that she was nothing to him anymore. The last support gave way beneath her, at the very moment she was reaching out her hand to grasp it… Everything was finished.

Olivier never knew what she had suffered on that day. But when he saw her again, he too had the sense that everything was finished.

From that moment on, they no longer spoke to each other, except when they were in the presence of others. They watched each other like two cornered animals, on their guard and afraid. Jeremias Gotthelf describes somewhere, with pitiless good humor, the sinister situation of a husband and wife who no longer love each other and keep each other under surveillance, each watching the other’s health, scanning for signs of illness, not in the least thinking of hastening the other’s death, nor even of wishing for it, but allowing themselves to drift toward the hope of some unforeseen accident, each flattering themselves that they are the more robust of the two. There were moments when Jacqueline and Olivier almost imagined that the other was harboring precisely this thought. And neither of them had it; but it was already too much to attribute it to the other, as Jacqueline did, who at night, in seconds of haunted sleeplessness, told herself that the other was the stronger, was wearing her down little by little, and would soon triumph… The monstrous delirium of a mind and heart gone wild! --- And to think that, in the best part of themselves, deep down, they still loved each other!…

Olivier, buckling under the weight, no longer tried to fight, and, withdrawing into himself, he relinquished the helm of Jacqueline’s soul. Left to herself, with no pilot to guide her, she was seized with vertigo at her freedom; she needed a master to rebel against: if she had none, she would have to create one. And so she became the prey of a fixed idea. Until now, whatever she had suffered, she had never conceived the thought of leaving Olivier. From this moment on, she believed herself released from every bond. She wanted to love, before it was too late --- (for she, still so young, already believed herself old). --- She loved; she came to know those devouring, imaginary passions that fasten themselves to the first object encountered, to a face glimpsed in passing, to a reputation, sometimes simply to a name, and which, once they have seized hold of it, can no longer let go, which persuade the heart that it cannot live without the object it has chosen, which ravage it entirely, which create an absolute void in everything that had once filled it --- other affections, moral ideas, memories, self-esteem, and respect for others. And when the fixed idea, having nothing left to feed on, dies in its turn after having burned everything to the ground, who can speak of the new nature that rises from the ruins, a nature often without kindness, without pity, without youth, without illusions, which thinks only of gnawing at life as grass gnaws at crumbling monuments!

This time, as usual, the fixed idea fastened itself to the being least suited to satisfy the heart. Poor Jacqueline fell in love with a man of many conquests, a Parisian writer, who was neither handsome nor young, who was heavy, ruddy, and worn, with bad teeth, of a frightful dryness of heart, and whose chief merit was to be fashionable and to have made a great many women unhappy. She did not even have the excuse of ignorance about his selfishness: for he paraded it in his art. He knew perfectly what he was about: selfishness enshrined in art is the decoy mirror, the flame that fascinates the weak. Among Jacqueline’s circle, more than one woman had been taken in: quite recently, a young friend of hers, newly married, whom he had without much effort seduced and then abandoned. They did not die of it, even though their wounded pride was awkward at concealing itself, to the delight of onlookers. The most cruelly affected was far too mindful of her own interests and social obligations not to keep her disorders within the bounds of common sense. They made no scene. Whether they were deceiving their husbands and their friends, or whether they were being deceived and suffering, it was all done in silence. They were the heroines of what-will-people-say.

But Jacqueline was reckless: not only was she capable of doing what she said, but of saying what she did. She brought to her follies a complete absence of calculation, an absolute disinterestedness. She had the dangerous merit of always being honest with herself and of not drawing back from the consequences of her acts. She was better than the others of her world: which is why she behaved worse. When she loved, when she conceived the idea of adultery, she threw herself into it headlong, with a desperate candor.

Mme Arnaud was alone at home, knitting with the feverish tranquility that Penelope must have brought to her famous work. Like Penelope, she was waiting for her husband. M. Arnaud spent entire days away from home. He had classes in the morning and in the evening. As a rule, he came back for lunch, though the lycée was at the other end of Paris and the walk tired him: he imposed this long journey on himself less out of affection, or out of economy, than out of habit. But on certain days he was kept back by extra sessions; or he took advantage of being in that part of the city to work in a library. Lucile Arnaud remained alone in the empty apartment. Apart from the cleaning woman who came from eight to ten o’clock to do the heavy work, and the tradespeople who came in the morning to fetch and deliver orders, no one rang at the door. In the building, she no longer knew anyone. Christophe had moved away, and new tenants had settled in the garden with the lilac trees. Céline Chabran had married Augustin Elsberger. Élie Elsberger had gone with his family to Spain, where he had been put in charge of operating a mine. Old Weil had lost his wife, and almost never stayed in his Paris apartment. Only Christophe and his friend Cécile had kept up their relations with Lucile Arnaud; but they lived far away, and, occupied all day by exhausting work, they might go for weeks without coming to see her. She could count only on herself.

She was never bored. Very little was enough to sustain her interest. The smallest daily task. A tiny plant whose frail plumage she tended with maternal care each morning. Her quiet gray cat, who had gradually taken on some of her ways, as domesticated animals do when they are well loved: he spent his days, as she did, by the fireside, or on her table beside the lamp, watching her fingers as they worked, and sometimes lifting toward her his strange pupils that observed her a moment, then went dim with indifference. Even the furniture kept her company. Each piece was a familiar face. She took a childlike pleasure in cleaning them, gently wiping the dust that had settled on their sides, replacing them with a thousand careful attentions in their usual corners. She carried on a silent conversation with them. She smiled at the fine antique piece, the only one she owned, an elegant Louis XVI cylinder desk. Each day she felt the same joy at seeing it. She was no less absorbed in going through her linens: she would spend hours standing on a chair, her head and arms plunged into the great country wardrobe, sorting and arranging, while the cat, intrigued, watched her for hours at a stretch.

But her happiness came when, all her tasks finished, after having lunched alone, God knows how --- (she had little appetite), --- after having run the necessary errands outside, her day complete, she returned around four o’clock and settled herself at her window, or near the fire, with her needlework and her kitten. Sometimes she found a pretext for not going out at all; she was happy when she could stay shut in, especially in winter, when it snowed. She had a horror of cold, wind, mud, and rain, being herself a very clean, delicate, and cozy little cat. She would sooner have gone without eating than gone out to fetch her lunch when the suppliers happened to forget her. In that case, she would nibble on a bar of chocolate, or a piece of fruit from the sideboard. She was careful never to mention it to Arnaud. These were her escapades. Then, during those days of half-extinguished light, and sometimes too during bright sunny days --- (outside, the blue sky blazed, the noise of the street hummed around the silent and shadowed apartment: it was like a mirage enveloping the soul), --- settled in her favorite corner, her footstool under her feet, her knitting in her hands, she would sink into absorption, motionless, while her fingers moved on. She kept one of her favorite books near at hand. Usually one of those humble volumes with red covers, a translation of an English novel. She read very little, barely a chapter a day; and the volume, lying on her knees, would remain open for a long time at the same page, or sometimes would not open at all: she already knew it, she dreamed it. Thus the long novels of Dickens and Thackeray stretched on for weeks, which her reverie turned into years. They wrapped her in their tenderness. People today who read quickly and carelessly no longer know the marvelous power that radiates from beautiful books drunk slowly. Mme Arnaud had no doubt that the lives of these fictional beings were just as real as her own. There were those among them to whom she would have wished to devote herself: the tenderly jealous Lady Castlewood, the silent woman in love, with her maternal and virginal heart, was a sister to her; little Dombey was her dear small child; she was Dora, the child-wife on the verge of death; she stretched her arms toward all those childlike souls who cross the world with brave and innocent eyes; and around her passed a procession of amiable scoundrels and harmless eccentrics, pursuing their ridiculous and touching chimeras --- and at their head, the affectionate genius of the good Dickens, laughing and weeping at once over his own dreams. At such moments, when she looked out the window, she recognized among the passersby some beloved or dreaded silhouette from that imaginary world. Behind the walls of the houses, she sensed lives like those, the same lives. If she did not like going out, it was because she feared this world, so full of moving mysteries. She glimpsed around her dramas that conceal themselves, comedies playing out in secret. This was not always an illusion. In her isolation, she had arrived at that gift of mystical intuition which allows one to read in passing glances many secrets of their past and future lives, secrets those people often do not know themselves. She mingled with these truthful visions certain novelistic memories that distorted them. She felt herself drowning in this immense universe. She had to go home, to find solid ground again.

But why did she need to read, or to observe others? She had only to look within herself. This pale, dim existence --- seen from without --- how it shone from within! What an abundant and full life! What memories, what treasures, unsuspected by anyone!… Had they ever had any reality? --- Without doubt they were real, since they were real to her… O poor lives, transfigured by the magic wand of dream!

Mme Arnaud traveled back along the stream of years, all the way to her early childhood; each of the frail little flowers of her vanished hopes bloomed again in silence… A first childlike love for a young woman whose charm had captivated her from the moment she saw her; she loved her as one can love with a passion when one is infinitely pure; she was overcome with emotion at the other’s touch; she would have wished to kiss her feet, to be her little girl, to marry her; the friend had married, had not been happy, had had a child who died, and had herself died… Another love, around age twelve, for a girl her own age who tyrannized her, a mischievous little blonde, laughing and imperious, who amused herself by making her cry and then covered her with kisses; together they wove a thousand romantic plans for the future: that one had become a Carmelite, suddenly, without anyone knowing why; she was said to be happy… Then a great passion for a man much older than herself. Of this passion, no one had known anything, not even its object. She had spent in it an ardor of devotion, treasures of tenderness… Then another passion: she was loved, this time. But through a singular timidity, a distrust of herself, she had not dared believe that she was loved, had not dared let it be seen that she loved. And happiness had passed without her seizing it… Then… But what is the use of telling others what has meaning only for oneself? So many small events that had taken on deep significance: an attentive gesture from a friend; a kind word from Olivier, spoken without his even noticing; the good visits from Christophe and the enchanted world his music conjured; a glance from a stranger; yes, even --- in this excellent woman, honest and pure --- certain involuntary wanderings of thought that troubled her and made her blush, which she weakly pushed aside, and which nonetheless, being so innocent, gave her a little warmth in her heart… She was fond of her husband, though he was not quite the man she had dreamed of. But he was good; and one day when he had said to her:

--- My dear wife, you don’t know what you are to me. You are my whole life.

Her heart had melted; and that day she had felt herself united to him, entirely and forever, with no thought of turning back. Each year had bound them more closely to one another. They had made beautiful dreams together. Dreams of work, of travel, of children. What had become of them?… Alas!… Mme Arnaud still dreamed them. There was a small child she had thought of so often and so deeply that she knew him almost as if he were there. She had worked on him for years, embellishing him constantly with the most beautiful things she saw, with what she held most dear… Silence!…

That was all. Those were worlds. How many unknown tragedies, even from those most intimate, in the depths of the calmest lives, the most outwardly mediocre! And the most tragic of all, perhaps: --- that nothing happens in these lives of hope that cry out desperately for what is their right, their inheritance promised by nature and refused them --- that devour themselves in a passionate anguish --- and show nothing of it to the world!

Mme Arnaud, fortunately, was not occupied only with herself. Her own life filled only a part of her reveries. She also lived the lives of those she knew, or had once known; she put herself in their place, she thought of Christophe, of her friend Cécile. She was thinking of them today. The two women had grown fond of one another. Strangely, it was the robust Cécile who had the greater need to lean upon the fragile Mme Arnaud. At heart, this large, joyful, healthy young woman was less strong than she appeared. She was going through a crisis. Even the most tranquil hearts are not immune from surprises. Without her having noticed it, a very tender feeling had crept into her; at first she refused to acknowledge it; but it had grown until she was forced to see it: --- she loved Olivier. The affectionate gentleness of the young man’s manner, the slightly feminine charm of his person, his quality of weakness and of surrender, had drawn her from the first: --- (a maternal nature is drawn to those who need her). --- What she had since learned of the sorrows of his marriage had inspired in her a dangerous pity for Olivier. No doubt these reasons would not have been sufficient on their own. Who can say why one person falls for another? Often neither is responsible, but rather the moment that, by surprise, delivers an unguarded heart to the first affection that happens to cross its path. --- From the moment she could no longer doubt it, Cécile struggled bravely to pull out the hook of a love she judged both guilty and absurd; she made herself suffer for a long time, and she could not cure herself. No one would have suspected what was passing within her: she brought all her courage to bearing a happy appearance. Mme Arnaud alone knew what it cost her. Not that Cécile had told her the secret. But she would sometimes come and rest her head with its strong nape on Mme Arnaud’s narrow chest. She would shed a few tears, in silence, embrace her, and then go away laughing. She had an adoration for this fragile friend, in whom she sensed a moral energy and a faith superior to her own. She did not confide in her. But Mme Arnaud knew how to understand with only half a word. The world seemed to her a melancholy misunderstanding. It is impossible to resolve it. One can only love it, have pity, and dream.

And when the hive of dreams buzzed too loudly within her, when she could think no further, she would go to her piano and let her hands brush over the keys at random, softly, to wrap the mirage of life in the soothing light of sound…

But the good little woman never forgot the hour of her daily duties; and when Arnaud came home, he found the lamp lit, supper ready, and the pale, smiling face of his wife waiting for him. And he had no inkling of the universe in which she had lived.

The difficulty had been in holding together, without collision, the two lives: daily life, and the other one, the great life of the spirit, with its distant horizons. It was not always easy. Fortunately, Arnaud too lived a life that was partly imaginary, in books, in works of art, whose eternal fire sustained the trembling flame of his soul. But in recent years he had grown increasingly preoccupied with the petty irritations of his profession, injustices, favoritism, troubles with colleagues or with students; he had grown bitter; he had begun to talk politics, to rail against the government and against the Jews; he held Dreyfus responsible for his professional disappointments. His unhappy disposition communicated itself somewhat to Mme Arnaud. She was nearing forty. She was passing through an age in which her vital strength was touched and troubled, seeking its equilibrium. Great rifts formed in her thinking. For a time, both of them lost all reason to exist: for they no longer had anything to which to attach their spiderweb, which hung stretched out in the void. However frail the support of reality, a dream requires one. All support failed them. They could no longer find a foothold in one another. Instead of helping her, he clung to her. And she came to understand that she was not enough to sustain him: and then she could no longer sustain herself. Only a miracle could save her. She called for it. It came from the depths of the soul. Mme Arnaud felt rising from her solitary and devout heart the sublime and absurd need to create nonetheless, nonetheless to weave her web across empty space, for the joy of weaving, trusting to the wind, to the breath of God, to carry it wherever it must go. And the breath of God bound her back to life, found invisible supports for her. Then husband and wife both began again patiently to spin the magnificent and vain web of their dreams, woven from the purest of their suffering and their blood.

Mme Arnaud was alone at home… Evening was coming on.

The doorbell rang. Mme Arnaud, woken from her reverie before her usual hour, gave a start. She carefully set aside her work and went to open the door. Christophe came in. He was deeply moved. She took his hands affectionately.

--- What is it, my friend? she asked.

--- Ah! he said. Olivier has come back.

--- Come back?

--- He arrived this morning, he said to me: “Christophe, come to my aid!” I embraced him. He was weeping. He said to me: “You are all I have left. She is gone.”

Mme Arnaud, stricken, clasped her hands and said:

--- The poor souls!

--- She is gone, Christophe repeated. Gone with her lover.

--- And the child? asked Mme Arnaud.

--- Husband, child, she left everything behind.

--- The poor woman! said Mme Arnaud again.

--- He loved her, said Christophe, he loved her with all he had. He will not recover from this blow. He keeps saying: “Christophe, she betrayed me… my best friend betrayed me.” However much I tell him: “Since she betrayed you, she was never your friend. She is your enemy. Forget her, or kill her!”

--- Oh! Christophe, what are you saying! It’s horrible!

--- Yes, I know, it strikes all of you as some prehistoric barbarism: killing! You should hear this charming Parisian world protest against the brutish instincts that drive a man to kill the woman who has deceived him, and preach indulgent reason! Fine apostles, indeed! It’s quite a sight to see this mongrel herd rear up in indignation against a return to animality. After outraging life, after stripping it of all its worth, they surround it with religious devotion… What! This life without heart, without honor, without meaning---a mere physical breath, a pulse of blood in a scrap of flesh---that is what they deem worthy of respect! They cannot show enough reverence for this butcher’s meat; to touch it is a crime. Kill the soul if you like, but the body is sacred…

--- Those who murder the soul are the worst murderers; but one crime does not excuse another, and you know that perfectly well.

--- I know it, my friend. You are right. I don’t really mean what I’m saying… Who knows? Perhaps I would do it.

--- No, you slander yourself. You are good.

--- When passion takes hold of me, I am as cruel as anyone. See how I just flew into a rage!… But when you see a friend you love in tears, how can you not hate the one who made him weep? And can one ever be too hard on a wretched woman who abandons her child to run after a lover?

--- Don’t speak like that, Christophe. You don’t know.

--- What! You defend her?

--- I pity her too.

--- I pity those who suffer. I don’t pity those who cause suffering.

--- And do you think she hasn’t suffered as well? Do you think it was with a light heart that she abandoned her child and destroyed her life? Because her life is destroyed too. I know her very little, Christophe. I’ve only seen her twice, and only in passing; she said nothing kind to me, she had no sympathy for me. And yet I know her better than you do. I’m certain she is not wicked. Poor thing! I can imagine what may have passed through her…

--- You, my friend, whose life is so dignified, so reasonable!…

--- Me, Christophe. Yes, you don’t know---you are good, but you are a man, a hard man, like all men, for all your goodness---a man firmly closed off to everything that is not yourself. You have no idea about the women who live alongside you. You love them, in your way; but you don’t trouble yourself to understand them. You are so easily satisfied with yourselves! You are convinced you know us… Ah! If you only knew what a suffering it sometimes is for us to see---not that you don’t love us---but how you love us, and to realize that this is what we are to those who love us best! There are moments, Christophe, when we dig our nails into our palms so as not to cry out: “Oh! Don’t love us, don’t love us! Anything rather than to be loved like this!”… Do you know those words of a poet: “Even in her own home, surrounded by her children, the woman wrapped in simulated honor endures a contempt a thousand times heavier than the worst misery”? Think on that, Christophe. It makes one tremble.

--- What you say shakes me to the core. I don’t fully understand. But what I can glimpse… Then even you yourself…

--- I have known such torments.

--- Is it possible?… No matter! You will never make me believe you would ever have acted as that woman did.

--- I have no child, Christophe. I don’t know what I would have done in her place.

--- No, it cannot be, I have faith in you, I respect you too much, I swear it cannot be.

--- Don’t swear! I came very close to doing as she did… It pains me to shatter the good opinion you have of me. But you must learn a little to know us, if you don’t want to be unjust. --- Yes, I was within a hair’s breadth of the same madness. And if I did not commit it, you had something to do with that. It was two years ago. I was going through a period of sadness that was eating me alive. I told myself I was of no use to anyone, that no one cared for me, that no one needed me, that even my husband could have done without me, that I had lived for nothing… I was on the point of running away, of doing God knows what! I went up to your rooms… Do you remember?… You didn’t understand why I had come. I had come to say goodbye to you… And then, I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what you said to me, I can’t recall exactly… but I know there were certain words of yours… (you had no idea, mind you…)… they were a light to me… Perhaps it wasn’t what you actually said… Perhaps it was only an occasion; the slightest thing would have been enough at that moment to destroy me or save me… When I left your rooms, I went home, I locked myself in, I wept all day… And afterward, it was well: the crisis had passed.

--- And today, Christophe asked, do you regret it?

--- Today? she said. Ah! If I had committed that madness, I would have been at the bottom of the Seine long since. I could never have borne the shame, nor the harm I would have done to my poor husband.

--- So you are happy?

--- Yes, as happy as one can be, in this life. It is such a rare thing, to be two people who understand each other, who esteem each other, who know they can count on each other---not through a simple belief in love, which is often an illusion, but through the experience of years spent together, gray, ordinary years, even with---especially with the memory of those dangers one has overcome. As one grows older, it only becomes better.

She fell silent, and suddenly blushed.

--- Good Lord, how could I have told all that?… What have I done?… Forget it, Christophe, I beg you. No one must know.

--- Have no fear, said Christophe, pressing her hand. It is a sacred thing.

Mme Arnaud, distressed at having spoken, turned away for a moment. Then she said:

--- I should not have told you… But you see, it was to show you that even in the most united households, even among women… whom you esteem, Christophe…, there are such hours---not merely of aberration, as you say, but of real, unbearable suffering that can lead to madness and destroy a whole life, even two lives. One must not be too severe. We cause each other great suffering, even when we love each other best.

--- Must we then live alone, each on our own?

--- That is even worse for us. The life of a woman who must live alone, struggle as a man does (and often against men) is something dreadful, in a society that is not accustomed to the idea and is, in large part, hostile to it…

She sat in silence, her body leaning slightly forward, her eyes fixed on the fireplace flame; then she went on softly, in her slightly veiled voice that hesitated at moments, stopped, then continued on its way:

--- Yet it is not our fault: when a woman lives like that, it is not out of caprice, it is because she is forced to; she must earn her bread and learn to do without men, since men don’t want her when she is poor. She is condemned to solitude without any of its benefits: because for us, unlike a man, she cannot enjoy her independence in the most innocent way without arousing scandal---everything is forbidden to her. --- I have a young friend, a teacher in a provincial lycée. She would not be more alone or more stifled if she were shut in an airless prison cell. The bourgeoisie closes its doors to these women who struggle to live by working; it displays a suspicious contempt for them; malice lies in wait for their every move. Their male colleagues from the boys’ lycée keep their distance, either because they fear the town’s gossip, or out of hidden hostility, or out of roughness---the café habit, slovenly conversations, the exhaustion after a day’s work, the weariness, through surfeit, with intellectual women. The women themselves can no longer stand one another, especially if they are forced to live together in the school. The headmistress is often the least capable of understanding the young, affectionate souls whom the first years of this arid profession and inhuman solitude discourage; she lets them suffer in secret without seeking to help them; she thinks they are proud. No one takes any interest in them. Their lack of fortune and connections prevents them from marrying. The number of their working hours prevents them from building an intellectual life that might sustain and console them. When such an existence is not supported by an exceptional---I would even say abnormal, unhealthy---religious or moral conviction (for it is not natural to sacrifice oneself completely), it is a living death… --- In the absence of intellectual work, does charity offer more resources to women? What disappointments it holds for those whose soul is too sincere to be satisfied by official or fashionable charity, by philanthropic chatter, by that odious mixture of frivolity, benevolence, and bureaucracy, that way of toying with misery between two flirtations, while gossiping! When one of them, sick at heart, has the incredible audacity to venture alone into the midst of this misery she knows only by hearsay---what a vision awaits her! Almost impossible to endure! It is a hell. What can she do to help? She is drowned in this sea of misfortune. She struggles nonetheless, she strives to save a few of those wretches, she exhausts herself for them, she drowns with them. Lucky if she has managed to save one or two! But who will save her? Who will think to save her? For she too suffers from all the suffering of others and her own; as she gives her faith away, she has less left for herself; all these miseries cling desperately to her; and she has nothing to hold on to. No one stretches out a hand to her. And sometimes, stones are thrown at her… You knew, Christophe, that admirable woman who had given herself to the most humble and most meritorious work of charity: she took in off the streets the prostitutes who had just given birth---the wretched girls whom public assistance would not have, or who were afraid of public assistance; she strove to heal them physically and morally, to keep them with their children, to awaken in them the maternal feeling, to rebuild for them a home and a life of honest work. All her strength was barely enough for this grim task, full of disappointments and bitterness---(so few are saved, so few want to be saved! And all those little children who die! Those innocents, condemned at birth!…)---This woman who had taken all the pain of others upon herself, this innocent who voluntarily atoned for the crime of human selfishness---how do you think she was judged, Christophe? Public malice accused her of making money from her work, and even from her protégées. She had to leave the neighborhood, go away, discouraged… --- You will never adequately imagine the cruelty of the struggle that independent women must wage against today’s society---that conservative and heartless society which is dying, and which spends what little energy it has left on preventing others from living.

--- My poor friend, that is not the lot of women alone. We all know those struggles. I know the refuge too.

--- Which one?

--- Art.

--- Good for you, not for us. And even among men, how many are there who can truly profit from it?

--- Look at our friend Cécile. She is happy.

--- What do you know about it? Ah! How quickly you judge! Because she is brave, because she does not dwell on what saddens her, because she hides it from others, you say she is happy! Yes, she is happy to be healthy and able to fight. But you don’t know what her struggles are. Do you think she was made for this disappointing life of art? Art! When you think that there are poor women who aspire to the glory of writing, or playing, or singing, as to the pinnacle of happiness! They must be so utterly destitute of everything, so ignorant of what affection to cling to! Art! What have we to do with art, if we don’t have everything else as well? There is only one thing in the world that can make one forget all the rest, all the rest: a dear little child.

--- And when one has one, as you see, it isn’t even enough.

--- Yes, not always… Women are not very happy. It is difficult to be a woman. Far more difficult than to be a man. You don’t realize this nearly enough. You can absorb yourselves in a passion of the mind, in an activity. You mutilate yourselves, but you are happier for it. A healthy woman cannot do so without suffering. It is inhuman to stifle a part of yourself. We, when we are happy in one way, regret the other way. We have several souls. You have only one, more vigorous, often brutal, even monstrous. I admire you. But don’t be too selfish. You are very selfish, without realizing it. You do us great harm, without realizing it.

--- What can be done? It isn’t our fault.

--- No, it isn’t your fault, my good Christophe. It is neither your fault nor ours. When all is said and done, you see, it is simply that life is not at all a simple thing. They say one need only live naturally. But what is natural?

--- That’s true. Nothing in our lives is natural. Celibacy is not natural. Neither is marriage. And free unions leave the weak at the mercy of the strong. Society itself is not a natural thing; we manufactured it. They say man is a social animal. What nonsense! He had no choice but to become one, in order to survive. He made himself social for his own utility, his defense, his pleasure, his greatness. That necessity led him to subscribe to certain pacts. But nature balks and takes its revenge for this constraint. Nature was not made for us. We try to subdue it. It is a struggle: no wonder we are often beaten. How do we get out of it? --- By being strong.

--- By being good.

--- Oh! God! To be good, to tear off the corset of selfishness, to breathe, to love life, the light, one’s humble task, the small patch of earth where one sinks one’s roots. What one cannot have in breadth, to strive for in depth and height, like a tree hemmed in, reaching toward the sun!

--- Yes. And first of all, to love one another. If only men would feel more keenly that they are the brothers of women, and not merely their prey, or that women must be theirs! If only both would strip away their pride and think, each of them, a little less about themselves, and a little more about the other!… We are weak: let us help one another. Let us not say to the one who has fallen: “I no longer know you.” But rather: “Courage, friend. We will find our way out of this.”

They fell silent, seated before the hearth, the little cat between them, all three motionless, absorbed, watching the fire. The flame, near to dying, caressed with its flickering wing the fine face of Mme Arnaud, which was flushed by an inner exaltation uncharacteristic of her. She was surprised at herself for having opened up so freely. She had never said so much. She would never say as much again.

She laid her hand on Christophe’s and said:

--- What are you going to do with the child?

That was what she had been thinking about from the very beginning. She talked and talked, she was a different woman, she felt almost giddy. But that alone was what she was thinking about. From Christophe’s very first words, she had built a novel in her heart. She was thinking of the child its mother had left behind, of the happiness of raising it, of weaving her dreams and her love around that small soul. And she told herself:

--- No, it is wrong, I must not rejoice in what is the misfortune of others.

But it was stronger than she was. She talked and talked, and her silent heart was bathed in hope.

Christophe said:

--- Yes, of course, we’ve thought hard about it. Poor little thing! Neither Olivier nor I am capable of raising a child. It needs a woman’s care. I had been thinking that a friend might be willing to help us…

Mme Arnaud could scarcely breathe.

Christophe said:

--- I had wanted to speak to you about it. And then Cécile came, just a little while ago. When she heard about it, when she saw the child, she was so moved, she showed such joy, she said to me: “Christophe…”

The blood stopped in Mme Arnaud’s veins; she did not hear the rest; everything blurred before her eyes. She wanted to cry out:

--- No, no, give him to me…

Christophe was speaking. She could not hear what he was saying. But she forced herself. She thought of what Cécile had confided in her. She thought:

--- She needs it more than I do. I have my dear Arnaud… and then all my things… And besides, I am older…

And she smiled and said:

--- That is well.

But the flame in the hearth had gone out; and so had the color in her face. And on that dear, weary face, there was nothing left but the habitual expression of resigned kindness.

--- My friend has betrayed me.

Beneath that thought, Olivier was succumbing. In vain Christophe shook him roughly, out of affection.

--- What do you expect? he said. A friend’s betrayal is an everyday trial, like illness, poverty, the struggle against fools. One must be armed against it. If you can’t withstand it, you are nothing but a poor specimen of a man.

--- Ah! That is all I am. I take no pride in saying it… A poor man, yes, who needs tenderness, and who dies without it.

--- Your life is not over: there are other people to love.

--- I no longer believe in any of them. There are no friends.

--- Olivier!

--- Forgive me. I don’t doubt you. Though there are moments when I doubt everything… myself… But you, you are strong, you need no one, you can do without me.

--- She does even better without you.

--- You are cruel, Christophe.

--- My dear boy, I am rough with you; but it’s so you’ll fight back. Good God! it’s shameful, to sacrifice those who love you, and your own life, to someone who couldn’t care less about you.

--- What do those who love me matter to me? It’s her I love.

--- Work. What used to interest you…

--- … no longer interests me. I am exhausted. It feels as though I have stepped out of life. Everything seems far away, so far away… I see, but I no longer understand… To think that there are men who never tire of winding up their clockwork day after day, their tasteless routine, their newspaper debates, their poor little hunt for pleasure, men who get passionate for or against a ministry, a book, some actress… Ah! how old I feel! I bear no hatred, no rancor, toward anyone: everything bores me. I feel that there is nothing… Write? Why write? Who understands you? I wrote only for one person; everything I was, I was for them… There is nothing. I am tired, Christophe, tired. I want to sleep.

--- Then sleep, my boy. I will keep watch over you.

But that was precisely what Olivier was least able to do. Ah! if the one who suffers could sleep for months, until his grief fades from his renewed being, until he is a different person! But no one can give him that gift; and he would not want it. The worst torment would be to be robbed of his suffering. Olivier was like a fever patient who feeds on his own fever. A genuine fever, whose attacks returned at the same hours, above all in the evenings, from the moment the light begins to fail. And the rest of the time, it left him broken, intoxicated by love, gnawed by memory, turning the same thought over and over, like an idiot who keeps chewing the same mouthful without being able to swallow it, all the powers of the mind paralyzed, drained by a single fixed idea.

He did not have recourse, as Christophe did, to cursing his affliction by honestly slandering the one who had caused it. More clear-sighted and more just, he knew that he bore some of the responsibility, and that he was not the only one suffering: Jacqueline was a victim too --- she was his victim. She had entrusted herself to him: what had he done with that trust? If he was not strong enough to make her happy, why had he bound her to him? She was within her rights in breaking the bonds that were bruising her.

--- It is not her fault, he thought. It is mine. I loved her badly. And yet I did love her. But I did not know how to love her, since I did not know how to make her love me.

Thus he accused himself; and perhaps he was right. But it serves little purpose to put the past on trial: it would not prevent one from repeating it, if one had it to do over; and it prevents one from living. The strong man is the one who forgets the harm done to him --- and also, alas! the harm he has done, the moment he has recognized that he cannot repair it. But one is not strong through reason; one is strong through passion. Love and passion are distant relatives; they rarely go together. Olivier loved; he was strong only against himself. In the state of passivity into which he had fallen, he was exposed to every assault. Influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia descended on him. He was ill for much of the summer. Christophe, helped by Mme Arnaud, nursed him with devotion; and they managed to check the illness. But against the moral affliction, they were powerless; and they gradually felt the draining fatigue of that perpetual sadness, and the need to escape it.

Misfortune plunges one into a strange solitude. Men have an instinctive horror of it. One would think they fear it might be contagious: at the very least, it bores them; they flee from it. How few people forgive you for suffering! It is always the old story of Job’s friends. Eliphaz the Temanite accuses Job of impatience. Bildad the Shuhite maintains that Job’s misfortunes are the punishment for his sins. Zophar the Naamathite charges him with presumption. “And at last, Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, burned with anger, and was angry with Job, because Job justified himself before God.” --- Few people are truly sad. Many are called, few are chosen. Olivier was among the latter. As a misanthrope once remarked, “he seemed to take pleasure in being ill-used. There is nothing to be gained by playing the unhappy man: you only make yourself hated.”

Olivier could not speak of what he felt to anyone, even his closest friends. He noticed that it oppressed them. Even his dear Christophe was irritated by this tenacious, intrusive grief. He knew himself too clumsy at finding a remedy for it. To tell the truth, this man whose heart was generous, and who had himself been tested by suffering, could not manage to feel his friend’s suffering. Such is the infirmity of human nature. Be kind, compassionate, intelligent, have suffered a thousand deaths: you will not feel the pain of your friend who has a toothache. If the illness drags on, one is tempted to think the patient is exaggerating his complaints. How much more so when the ailment is invisible, lurking in the depths of the soul! The person not involved finds it irritating that the other should make himself so miserable over a feeling that matters little to him. And at last one says to oneself, to put one’s conscience at rest:

--- What can I do? All the reasons in the world are useless.

All the reasons --- that is true. One can only do good by loving the one who suffers, by loving him simply, without trying to convince him, without trying to cure him, by loving him and by pitying him. Love is the only balm for the wounds of love. But love is not inexhaustible, even in those who love best; they have only a limited supply. When friends have once said or written everything they could find in the way of affectionate words, when in their own eyes they have done their duty, they withdraw cautiously, they create a void around the patient, as though around a guilty man. And since they are not without a secret shame at helping him so little, they help him less and less; they try to make themselves forgotten, and to forget themselves. And if the importunate misfortune persists, if an indiscreet echo reaches them in their retreat, they come to judge harshly this man without courage who bears his trial so poorly. You may be sure that if he succumbs, at the bottom of their sincere pity there will be this disdainful undertone:

--- Poor devil! I had a better opinion of him.

In this universal egoism, what ineffable good a simple word of tenderness can do, a delicate attention, a look that feels pity and loves you! One then feels the worth of kindness. And how poor everything else seems beside it!… It drew Olivier closer to Mme Arnaud than to anyone else, even closer than to his Christophe. Yet Christophe was making a commendable effort at patience; out of affection, he hid from Olivier what he thought of him. But Olivier, with the keenness of vision that suffering sharpened, could see the struggle going on within his friend, and how much his sadness weighed on him. That was enough to push him away from Christophe in turn, and breathe into him the urge to cry out:

--- Go away!

Thus, misfortune often separates hearts that love each other. Like the winnower sorting grain, it places on one side what wants to live, and on the other what wants to die. A terrible law of life, stronger than love! The mother who watches her son die, the friend who watches his friend drown --- if they cannot save them, they go on saving themselves nonetheless, they do not die with them. And yet they love them a thousand times better than their own lives…

Despite his great love, Christophe was forced, at times, to flee from Olivier. He was too strong, too healthy; he suffocated in that airless grief. How ashamed of himself he was! He was sick at heart at being able to do nothing for his friend; and since he needed to take out his frustration on someone, he resented Jacqueline. Despite Mme Arnaud’s clear-sighted words, he continued to judge her harshly, as befits a young, violent, and uncompromising soul that has not yet learned enough of life to be anything but pitiless toward its weaknesses.

He went to visit Cécile and the child who had been entrusted to him. It refreshed his spirit. Cécile had been transfigured by her borrowed motherhood; she seemed altogether younger, happy, more refined, more tender. The departure of Jacqueline had not awakened in her any unspoken hope of happiness. She knew that the memory of Jacqueline kept Olivier further from her than Jacqueline’s actual presence had. In any case, the breath of feeling that had troubled her had passed: it had been a moment of crisis, one that the sight of Jacqueline’s waywardness had helped dispel; she had returned to her habitual calm, and could no longer quite understand what had drawn her out of it. The best of her need for love found satisfaction in her love for the child. With the marvelous power of illusion --- of intuition --- that women possess, she found, through this small being, the one she loved; here she had him weak and surrendered, wholly hers: he belonged to her; and she could love him, love him passionately, with a love as pure as the heart of that innocent child and his clear blue eyes, droplets of light… Not that her tenderness was unmixed with a melancholy regret. Ah! it is never quite the same as a child of one’s own blood!… But it is still good, all the same.

Christophe now looked at Cécile with different eyes. He recalled an ironic remark of Françoise Oudon’s:

--- How is it that you and Philomèle, who are so perfectly suited to be husband and wife, do not love each other?

But Françoise, better than Christophe, knew the reason: when one is a Christophe, it is rare that one loves the person who can do one good; one loves far rather the person who can do one harm. Opposites attract; nature seeks its own destruction, it moves toward the intense life that burns itself out, in preference to the prudent life that conserves itself. And one is right, when one is a Christophe, whose law is not to live as long as possible, but as intensely as possible.

Christophe, however, less perceptive than Françoise, told himself that love is a blind and inhuman force. It throws together those who cannot bear each other. It casts aside those who are alike. What it inspires is a small thing compared to what it destroys. When it is happy, it dissolves the will. When it is unhappy, it breaks the heart. What good does it ever do?

And even as he was thus speaking ill of love, he saw its ironic, tender smile, saying to him:

--- Ungrateful!

Christophe had been unable to avoid attending yet another evening at the Austrian embassy. Philomèle was singing lieder by Schubert, Hugo Wolf, and Christophe. She was happy in her success and in that of her friend, now celebrated by an elite audience. Even among the general public, Christophe’s name was making itself felt day by day; the Lévy-Cœurs no longer had any right to pretend not to know it. His works were being performed at concerts; he had a piece accepted at the Opéra-Comique. Invisible sympathies were taking an interest in him. The mysterious friend who had more than once worked on his behalf continued to second his desires. More than once, Christophe had felt that affectionate hand assisting him in his endeavors: someone was watching over him, and hiding jealously. Christophe had tried to discover who it was; but it seemed that the friend had taken offense because Christophe had not sought to know him sooner, and he remained elusive. Christophe was distracted in any case by other preoccupations: he was thinking of Olivier, he was thinking of Françoise; that very morning, he had read in a newspaper that she had fallen gravely ill in San Francisco --- he pictured her alone in a foreign city, in a hotel room, refusing to see anyone, refusing to write to her friends, gritting her teeth, waiting, alone, for death.

Preoccupied by these thoughts, he was avoiding the crowd; and he had withdrawn into a small side drawing room. Leaning against the wall, tucked into a recess half in shadow, behind a curtain of green plants and flowers, he was listening to Philomèle’s beautiful voice, elegiac and warm, singing Schubert’s Der Lindenbaum; and the pure music was drawing up the melancholy of memories. Across from him, on the wall, a large mirror reflected the lights and the life of the adjoining room. He did not see it: he was looking inward; and before his eyes was a mist of tears… Suddenly, like Schubert’s old linden tree trembling in the wind, he began to shake, for no reason. He remained thus for a few seconds, very pale, motionless. Then, the veil before his eyes clearing, he saw in the mirror before him “the friend” who was looking at him… The friend? Who was she? He knew nothing more than that she was the friend, and that he knew her; and with his eyes fixed on hers, leaning against the wall, he continued to tremble. She was smiling. He could not make out the features of her face and figure, nor the color of her eyes, nor whether she was tall or short, nor how she was dressed. One thing only he saw: the divine goodness of her compassionate smile.

And that smile suddenly evoked in Christophe a vanished memory from early childhood… He had been six or seven years old, he was at school, he was unhappy, he had just been humiliated and beaten by older, stronger classmates, they were all mocking him, and the teacher had unjustly punished him; crouched in a corner, forsaken, while the others played, he wept quietly. A melancholy little girl who was not playing with the others --- (he was seeing her again now, he who had never thought of her since: she was short in stature, large-headed, with hair and lashes of an utterly white blond, eyes of a very pale blue, broad and pallid cheeks, full lips, a slightly puffy face, and small red hands) --- she had come near him, had stopped, her thumb in her mouth, and had watched him cry; then she had placed her little hand on Christophe’s head, and had said to him, timidly, hastily, with that same compassionate smile:

--- Don’t cry, don’t cry!…

At that, Christophe had been unable to hold back any longer; he had burst into sobs, pressing his nose against the little girl’s apron while she repeated, in a trembling, tender voice:

--- Don’t cry…

She had died a short time afterward, a few weeks perhaps; when this scene took place, she must already have been under the hand of death… Why was he thinking of her at this moment? There was no connection between this forgotten little dead girl, a humble child of the people from a distant German town, and the aristocratic young woman who was looking at him now. But there is only one soul for all; and though millions of beings seem different from one another, like the worlds rolling through the heavens, it is the same flash of thought or love that blazes at once in hearts separated by centuries. Christophe had just found again the gleam he had once seen pass across the colorless lips of the little consoler…

It lasted only a second. A surge of people blocked the doorway and hid from Christophe the view of the other room. He drew back quickly into the shadow, out of reach of the mirror; he was afraid his agitation might be noticed. But when he was calmer, he wished to see her again. He feared she might have left. He entered the drawing room; and, amid the crowd, he found her at once, though she appeared different now from how she had seemed to him in the mirror. Now he saw her in profile, seated in a circle of elegantly dressed women; an elbow on the arm of her chair, her body slightly inclined, her head resting on her hand, she was listening to the conversation with an intelligent, distracted smile; she had the air and the features of the young Saint John, listening and seeing, eyes half-closed, smiling at his own thought, in Raphael’s Disputa…

Then she raised her eyes, saw him, and was not surprised. And he saw that her smile was for him. He greeted her, moved, and approached.

--- You don’t recognize me? she said.

At that instant, he recognized her:

--- Grazia… he said.

At the same moment, the ambassadress, passing by, congratulated herself that the encounter, long sought, had finally come about; and she was presenting Christophe to “the Countess Berény.” But Christophe was so moved that he did not even hear; and he did not notice the unfamiliar name. She was still, always, his little Grazia.

Grazia was twenty-two years old. She had been married, for a year, to a young Austrian embassy attaché, of noble birth and great family, related to one of the Emperor’s prime ministers, a snob, a man of pleasure, elegant, prematurely worn out, of whom she had been sincerely enamored, and whom she still loved, even as she judged him. Her old papa was dead. Her husband had been posted to the Paris embassy. Through the connections of Count Berény, through her own charm and intelligence, the timid little girl who was frightened by the smallest thing had become one of the most prominent young women in Parisian society, without making any effort toward that end, and without being troubled by it. It is a great power to be young and pretty, and to please, and to know that one pleases. And it is an equally great power to have a tranquil heart, very healthy and very serene, that finds its happiness in the harmonious accord of its desires and its destiny. The beautiful flower of life had blossomed; but she had lost nothing of the calm music of her Latin soul, nourished by the light and the powerful peace of the Italian earth. Quite naturally she had acquired a certain influence in Parisian society: she was not surprised by it, and knew how to use it discreetly in the service of artistic or charitable works that turned to her; the official patronage of these works she left to others: for though she knew how to hold her own rank, she had preserved from her somewhat wild childhood in the solitary villa amid the fields a secret independence, one that found the social world tiring even while it amused her, but that knew how to disguise its tedium beneath the pleasant smile of a courteous and kind heart.

She had not forgotten her great friend Christophe. The child who had burned in silence with an innocent love no doubt no longer existed. The Grazia of the present was a very sensible woman and not at all romantic. She had a gentle irony for the exaggerations of her childhood affection. She was not without being moved by these memories, all the same. The thought of Christophe was associated with the purest hours of her life. She could not hear his name without pleasure: and each of his successes delighted her, as if she had had a share in them --- for she had foreseen them. From the moment of her arrival in Paris, she had sought to see him again. She had invited him, adding on the invitation letter her former maiden name. Christophe had paid it no attention, and had thrown the invitation in the wastebasket without replying. She had not taken offense. She had continued, without his knowing it, to follow his work and even something of his life. It was she whose beneficent hand had come to his aid in the recent campaign mounted against him by the newspapers. The proper Grazia had few connections with the world of the press; but when it was a matter of doing a service to a friend, she was capable of winning over, with a mischievous cunning, the very people she liked least. She invited the director of the newspaper that was leading the pack of baying hounds; and in no time at all, she turned his head; she knew how to flatter his vanity; she seduced him so completely, while at the same time impressing him, that she needed only a few words, negligently dropped, of contemptuous astonishment at the attacks Christophe was being subjected to, for the campaign to stop dead. The director suppressed the insulting article that was to appear the following day; and when the columnist inquired about the reasons for the suppression, he gave him a dressing-down. He did more: he ordered one of his general factotums to put together within a fortnight an enthusiastic article about Christophe; the article was duly put together, enthusiastic and stupid, just as required. It was also Grazia who had the idea of organizing at the embassy performances of her friend’s works, and who, knowing that he was supporting Cécile, helped her to become known. Finally, through her connections with the German diplomatic world, she began very gently, with a quiet skill, to awaken the interest of those in power on behalf of Christophe who had been banished from Germany; and little by little, she set in motion a movement of opinion in order to obtain from the Emperor a decree that would reopen the doors of his country to a great artist who was bringing it honor. If it was premature to hope for such an act of grace at present, she succeeded at least in having the authorities turn a blind eye to the few days’ journey he made to his hometown.

And Christophe, who felt hovering over him the presence of the invisible friend, without being able to discover who she was, had just recognized her in the figure of the young Saint John who had smiled at him in the mirror.

They were talking of the past. What they said, Christophe hardly knew. No more than one sees her does one hear the one one loves. One loves her. And when one loves her well, one does not even think that one loves her. Christophe did not suspect it. She was there: that was enough. The rest no longer existed…

Grazia stopped speaking. A very tall young man, fairly handsome, elegant, clean-shaven, his head half-bald, looking bored and contemptuous, was examining Christophe through his monocle, and was already bowing with a haughty politeness:

--- My husband, she said.

The noise of the room returned. The inner light went out. Christophe, chilled, fell silent, and responding to the greeting, withdrew at once.

Ridiculous and devouring demands of these artistic souls and the childlike laws that govern their passionate lives! This friend, whom he had once neglected when she loved him, and of whom he had not thought for years, he had scarcely found her again before it seemed to him that she was his, that she was his possession, and that if another had taken her, it was because she had been stolen from him: she herself had no right to give herself to another. Christophe was not aware of what was happening within him. But his creative demon was aware of it on his behalf, and in those days gave birth to some of his most beautiful songs of sorrowful love.

For quite some time he remained without seeing her again. Olivier’s pain and health obsessed him. One day at last, coming across the address she had left him, he made up his mind.

As he climbed the stairs, he heard the hammering of workmen driving nails. The anteroom was in disorder, cluttered with crates and trunks. The manservant replied that the countess was not receiving. But as Christophe turned to leave in disappointment, having handed over his card, the servant ran after him and brought him back with apologies. Christophe was shown into a small sitting room whose carpets had been rolled up and removed. Grazia came toward him with her luminous smile, her hand extended in a burst of joy. All his foolish grievances dissolved. He took that hand with the same surge of happiness and kissed it.

--- Ah! she said. I am so glad you came! I was so afraid of leaving without seeing you again!

--- Leaving --- you are leaving!

The shadow fell over him again.

--- As you can see, she said, gesturing at the disorder around them; by the end of the week we will have left Paris.

--- For long?

She made a gesture:

--- Who knows?

He made an effort to speak. His throat was tight.

--- Where are you going?

--- To the United States. My husband has been appointed first secretary of the embassy.

--- And so, so, he said… (His lips were trembling)… it is over?

--- My friend! she said, moved by the sound of his voice… No, it is not over.

--- I found you again only to lose you!

His eyes were full of tears.

--- My friend, she repeated.

He put his hand over his eyes and turned away to hide his emotion.

--- Don’t be sad, she said, placing her hand on his.

At that moment he thought again of the little girl in Germany. They were silent.

--- Why did you come so late? she asked at last. I tried to see you. You never answered.

--- I didn’t know, I didn’t know, he said… Tell me --- was it you who helped me so many times, without my ever being able to guess?… Is it to you that I owe my being able to return to Germany? Was it you who were my guardian angel, watching over me?

She said:

--- I was happy to be able to do something for you. I owe you so much!

--- What do you mean? he asked. I have done nothing for you.

--- You don’t know, she said, what you have been to me.

She spoke of the time when, as a young girl, she had met him at her uncle Stevens’s house, and how through him, through his music, she had come to know the revelation of all that is beautiful in the world. And little by little, growing gently animated, she told him, in brief allusions both transparent and veiled, of her childhood feelings, of the part she had taken in Christophe’s sorrows, the concert where he had been hissed and where she had wept, and the letter she had written him to which he had never replied --- for he had never received it. And Christophe, listening to her, in all sincerity projected his present emotion back into the past, together with the tenderness that filled him as he looked at the gentle face leaning toward him.

They talked innocently, with affectionate joy. And as he spoke, Christophe took Grazia’s hand. And suddenly they both fell silent: for Grazia realized that Christophe loved her. And Christophe realized it too…

Grazia had for a time loved Christophe without his caring. Now Christophe loved Grazia; and Grazia felt for him only a quiet friendship: she loved someone else. As so often happens, it had taken nothing more than one of the two clocks of their lives running ahead of the other to change the whole course of both their lives…

Grazia withdrew her hand, which Christophe did not try to hold. And they remained for a moment at a loss, without speaking.

And Grazia said:

--- Adieu.

Christophe repeated his lament.

--- And so, it is over?

--- It is better, no doubt, that things are as they are.

--- Will we not see each other again before you leave?

--- No, she said.

--- When will we see each other again?

She made a gesture of melancholy uncertainty.

--- Then what was the point, said Christophe, what was the point of our seeing each other again?

But at the reproach in her eyes, he answered at once:

--- No, forgive me, I am being unfair.

--- I will always think of you, she said.

--- Alas! he said, I cannot even think of you. I know nothing of your life.

Calmly, she described her daily life to him in a few words, and how her days passed. She spoke of herself and her husband with her lovely, affectionate smile.

--- Ah! he said jealously, you love him?

--- Yes, she said.

He stood up.

--- Adieu.

She rose as well. Only then did he notice that she was pregnant. And this left in his heart an inexpressible mingling of disgust, tenderness, jealousy, and passionate pity. She walked with him to the entrance of the small sitting room. At the door, he turned back, bent over her hands, and kissed them for a long time. She did not move, her eyes half closed. At last he straightened up, and without looking at her, he walked out quickly.

… E chi allora m’avesse domandato di cosa alcuna, la mia risponsione sarebbe stata solamente AMORE con viso vestito d’umiltà…

All Saints’ Day. Grey light and cold wind outside. Christophe was at Cécile’s. Cécile was near the child’s cradle, over which Mme Arnaud was leaning --- she had stopped in on her way past. Christophe was dreaming. He felt that he had missed happiness; but he had no thought of complaint: he knew that happiness existed… Sun, I have no need to see you to love you! Through these long winter days when I shiver in the dark, my heart is full of you; my love keeps me warm: I know that you are there…

And Cécile was dreaming too. She gazed at the child and had come to believe that it was her own child. O blessed power of dreams, imagination that creates life! Life… What is life? It is not what cold reason and our eyes show it to be. Life is what we dream it. The measure of life is love.

Christophe looked at Cécile, whose broad-eyed, plain face shone with the splendor of maternal instinct --- more a mother than the true mother. And he looked at the tender, weary face of Mme Arnaud. There he read, as in a moving book, the hidden sweetness and hidden suffering of that life of a wife which, without anyone suspecting it, is sometimes as rich in pain and joy as the love of Juliet or Isolde. But with a deeper religious grandeur…

Socia rei humanæ atque divinæ…

And he thought that no more than faith or its absence does it come down to children or the lack of them to make happy or unhappy those who marry and those who do not. Happiness is the fragrance of the soul, the harmony that sings at the heart’s depths. And the finest music of the soul is goodness.

Olivier came in. His movements were calm; a new serenity illuminated him. He smiled at the child, shook hands with Cécile and Mme Arnaud, and began to talk quietly. They watched him with affectionate wonder. He was no longer the same. In the isolation in which he had shut himself with his grief, like a caterpillar in the cocoon it has spun, after hard work he had succeeded in shedding his sorrow like an empty shell. Some day we will tell how he had believed he had found a fine cause to which to give the gift of his life, which no longer interested him except to be sacrificed; and, as the law requires, from the day when he had made in his heart an act of renunciation toward life, it had rekindled. His friends watched him. They did not know what had happened, and they dared not ask him; but they felt that he had freed himself, and that there was no longer in him either regret or bitterness, for anything or toward anyone.

Christophe, rising, went to the piano and said to Olivier:

--- Would you like me to sing you a melody by Brahms?

--- Brahms? said Olivier. You play your old enemy now?

--- It is All Saints’ Day, said Christophe. A day of pardon for all.

He sang, softly, so as not to wake the child, a few phrases from an old Swabian folk lied:

… Für die Zeit, wo du g’liebt mi hast Da dank’i dir schön, Und i wünsch’, dass dir’s anderswo Besser mag geh’n…

(« For the time when you loved me, I thank you; I hope that elsewhere things may go better for you… »)

--- Christophe! said Olivier.

Christophe pressed him to his chest.

--- Come, my friend, he said to him, we have the good lot.

They sat, all four of them, beside the sleeping child. They did not speak. And to whoever might have asked what their thoughts were --- the face clothed in humility, they would have answered only:

--- Love.

1. ↑ See Jean-Christophe: II. Le Matin/III_Minna “Le Matin (Jean-Christophe)/III Minna”).
2. ↑ See Jean-Christophe à Paris. I. La Foire sur la Place.