Jean-Christophe. The Burning Bush. 2

PART TWO

They left Paris. They crossed the vast plains buried in fog. It was on just such an evening that Christophe, ten years before, had arrived in Paris. He was a fugitive then, as he was today. But then, the one who had loved him was still alive; and Christophe had been fleeing toward him…

During the first hour, Christophe was still caught up in the excitement of the struggle: he talked a great deal and loudly; he recounted, in a halting way, what he had seen and done; he was proud of his exploits, and felt no remorse. Manousse and Canet talked as well, to keep him distracted. Little by little the fever subsided, and Christophe fell silent; his two companions went on talking by themselves. He was a little stunned by the afternoon’s events, but not at all downcast. He recalled the time when he had come to France, already fleeing, always fleeing. It made him laugh. That was no doubt his destiny. Leaving Paris caused him no sorrow: the world was vast; people are the same everywhere. Wherever he might be hardly mattered to him, so long as he was with his friend. He expected to join Olivier the following morning. He had been promised as much.

They reached Laroche. Manousse and Canet did not leave him until they had seen him onto the departing train. Christophe made them repeat the place where he was to get off, and the name of the hotel, and the post office where he would find news. Despite themselves, as they said goodbye, their faces were grim. Christophe shook their hands cheerfully.

--- Come now, he called to them, don’t make those funeral faces. We’ll see each other again, for heaven’s sake! It’s nothing! We’ll write to you tomorrow.

The train departed. They watched it pull away.

--- Poor devil! said Manousse.

They got back into the car. They were quiet. After a while, Canet said to Manousse:

--- I think we’ve just committed a crime.

Manousse said nothing at first, then said:

--- Bah! The dead are dead. We have to save the living.

With the night that had now fallen, Christophe’s excitement died away entirely. Huddled in a corner of his compartment, he sat in somber thought, sobered and cold. Looking at his hands, he saw blood on them that was not his own. A shudder of revulsion passed through him. The scene of the killing came back to him. He remembered that he had killed; and he no longer knew why. He began to retrace the scene of the battle in his mind; but now he saw it through entirely different eyes. He could no longer understand how he had come to be part of it. He went back over the story of the day, from the moment he had left the house with Olivier; he retraced with him the path through Paris, up to the moment when he had been swept up in the whirlwind. At that moment he stopped understanding; the chain of his thoughts broke: how had he been able to shout, to strike, to will the same things as these men whose beliefs he rejected? It was not him, it was not him!… A total eclipse of his will!… He was stupefied and ashamed. So he was not his own master? And who, then, was his master?… He was carried forward by the express train into the night; and the inner night into which he was being swept was no less dark, nor the unknown force any less vertiginous… He tried to shake off his distress; but that only brought a change of worry. The closer he drew to his destination, the more he thought of Olivier; and he began to feel an anxiety, without any reason for it.

As he was about to arrive, he looked out through the window to see if, on the station platform, there was the dear familiar face… No one. He got off, still looking around him. Once or twice he had the illusion… No, that was not “him.” He went to the agreed-upon hotel. Olivier was not there. Christophe had no reason to be surprised: how could Olivier have arrived before him?… But from that moment on, the anguish of waiting began.

It was morning. Christophe went up to his room. He came back down. He had breakfast. He wandered the streets. He affected an air of ease; he looked at the lake, at the shop windows; he joked with the girl at the restaurant, he leafed through illustrated newspapers… He was interested in nothing. The day dragged on, slow and heavy. Around seven in the evening, Christophe, not knowing what else to do, had dined earlier than usual and without appetite, then went back up to his room, asking that the moment his expected friend arrived, he be brought up to him. He sat down at his table, his back to the door. He had nothing to occupy himself with, no luggage, no book; only a newspaper he had just bought; he forced himself to read it; his attention was elsewhere: he was listening for the sound of footsteps in the corridor. All his senses were overwrought from the exhaustion of a day’s waiting and a sleepless night.

Abruptly, he heard the door open. Some indefinable feeling kept him from turning around at first. He felt a hand rest on his shoulder. Then he turned and saw Olivier, who was smiling. He felt no surprise, and said:

--- Ah! There you are at last!

The mirage dissolved.

Christophe leapt to his feet, throwing back the table and his chair, which fell over. His hair stood on end. He stood for a moment, ashen, his teeth chattering.

From that minute on, --- (though he knew nothing, and kept telling himself: “I know nothing”) --- he knew everything; he was certain of what was coming.

He could not stay in his room. He went out into the street, he walked for an hour. When he returned, in the hotel vestibule, the porter handed him a letter. The letter. He had been sure it would be there. His hand was trembling as he took it. He went back up to his room to read it. He opened it, and saw that Olivier was dead. And he fainted.

The letter was from Manousse. It said that in concealing this misfortune from him the evening before, in order to hasten his departure, they had only been following Olivier’s own wish, which was that his friend be saved, --- that it would have served no purpose for Christophe to stay, except to destroy himself as well, --- that he must preserve himself for the memory of his friend, and for his other friends, and for his own glory… etc… etc… Aurélie had added three lines in her large, shaky handwriting, saying that she would take good care of the poor little monsieur…

When Christophe came back to himself, he was seized by a fit of fury. He wanted to kill Manousse. He ran to the station. The hotel vestibule was empty, the streets deserted; in the night, the few late passersby did not notice this wild-eyed, gasping man. He was clamped onto his fixed idea, like a bulldog sinking in its teeth: “Kill Manousse! Kill!…” He wanted to return to Paris. The night express had left an hour before. He would have to wait until the next morning. Impossible to wait. He took the first train heading in the direction of Paris. A train that stopped at every station. Alone in the car, Christophe cried out:

--- It isn’t true! It isn’t true!

At the second station past the French border, the train stopped altogether; it was going no farther. Christophe, trembling with rage, got off, asking about another train, questioning people, colliding with the indifference of half-asleep railway employees. Whatever he did, he would arrive too late. Too late for Olivier. He would not even manage to find Manousse. He would be arrested first. What to do? What to want? Keep going? Turn back? What was the point? What was the point?… He thought about giving himself up to a gendarme who was passing by. Some obscure instinct of self-preservation held him back and counseled him to return to Switzerland. No train was leaving, in either direction, for two or three hours. Christophe sat down in the waiting room, could not stay there, left the station, took a road at random into the night. He found himself in the middle of deserted countryside --- meadows, broken here and there by clusters of fir trees, an advance guard of a forest. He plunged into it. He had taken barely a few steps when he threw himself to the ground and cried out:

--- Olivier!

He lay down across the road, and sobbed.

A long time later, the distant whistle of a train made him get up. He tried to make his way back to the station. He took the wrong road. He walked all through the night. What did it matter, here or there? Walk so as not to think, walk until you can think no more, until you drop dead. Ah! if only one could be dead!…

At dawn, he found himself in a French village, very far from the border. All night he had been moving away from it. He went into an inn, ate ravenously, set out again, walked on. During the day he collapsed in the middle of a meadow, and stayed there until evening, asleep. When he woke, another night was beginning. His fury had gone. Nothing was left but an atrocious, suffocating grief. He dragged himself to a farmhouse, asked for a piece of bread, a bundle of straw to sleep on. The farmer looked him over, cut him a slice of bread, led him into the stable, and locked him in. Lying in the straw, near the cows with their stale smell, Christophe devoured his bread. Tears streamed down his face; his hunger and his sorrow could not be stilled. That night too, sleep delivered him, for a few hours, from his misery. He awoke the next day at the sound of the door opening. He lay there, motionless, not moving. He no longer wanted to live again. The farmer stopped in front of him and looked at him for a long time; he had in his hand a piece of paper at which he kept glancing. At last the man took a step, and held a newspaper up in front of Christophe’s face. His portrait, on the front page.

--- That’s me, said Christophe. Turn me in.

--- Get up, said the farmer.

Christophe got up. The man gestured for him to follow. They passed behind the barn, took a path that wound through the fruit trees. When they reached a crossroads, the farmer pointed out a road to Christophe and said:

--- The border is that way.

Christophe set off again, mechanically. He did not know why he was walking. He was so tired, so broken in body and spirit, that he felt like stopping at every step. But he sensed that if he stopped, he would not be able to start again, would not be able to move from wherever he had fallen. He walked all through that day as well. He had not a sou left to buy bread. Besides, he avoided passing through villages. By some strange feeling that defied reason, this man who wanted to die was afraid of being caught; his body was like a hunted animal in flight. His physical wretchedness, the exhaustion, the hunger, an obscure terror rising from his spent being, were for the moment smothering his moral distress. He longed only to find a refuge where he would be permitted to shut himself away with it and consume himself on it.

He crossed the border. In the distance, he saw a city dominated by towers with slender spires and factory chimneys, whose long plumes of smoke, like black rivers, flowed monotonously, all in the same direction, beneath the rain, through the grey air. He was close to collapse. At that moment, he remembered that he knew in this city a doctor from his homeland, a certain Erich Braun, who had written to him the previous year, after one of his successes, to remind him of his existence. However mediocre Braun might be, and however little he had figured in his life, Christophe, by the instinct of a wounded animal, made one last effort to go and collapse on someone who was not entirely a stranger to him.

Beneath the veil of smoke and rain, he entered the grey and red city. He walked through it, seeing nothing, asking his way, taking wrong turns, retracing his steps, wandering at random. He was at the end of his strength. By one final exertion of his strained will, he had to climb steep lanes and stairways that mounted to the top of a narrow hill, crowded with houses packed close around a dark church. Sixty steps of red stone, arranged in groups of three or six. Between each cluster of steps, a small landing before a house door. At each one, Christophe caught his breath, swaying. Up above, over the tower, ravens were circling.

At last, he read on a door the name he was looking for. He knocked. --- The lane was in darkness. From exhaustion, he closed his eyes. Darkness within him… Ages passed.

The narrow door opened partway. On the threshold stood a woman. Her face was in shadow; but her silhouette stood out against the bright background of a small garden, visible at the far end of the long corridor, in the west. She was tall, stood straight, without speaking, waiting for him to speak. He could not see her eyes; he felt their gaze. He asked for Doctor Erich Braun, and gave his own name. The words came with difficulty from his throat. He was exhausted from weariness, thirst, and hunger. Without a word, the woman went inside; and Christophe followed her into a room with its shutters closed. In the darkness, he stumbled against her; his knees and his body brushed against this silent figure. She went out and closed the door behind her, leaving him alone, without a light. He stood motionless, afraid of knocking something over, leaning against the wall, his forehead pressed against the smooth surface; his ears were ringing; in his eyes, the darkness danced.

On the floor above, a chair scraped, exclamations of surprise, a door slammed. Heavy footsteps descended the staircase.

--- Where is he? asked a familiar voice.

The door of the room opened again.

--- What! They left him here in the dark! Anna! Good God! A light!

Christophe was so weak, he felt so lost, that the sound of this loud but warm voice did him good in his misery. He seized the hands held out to him. The light had come. The two men looked at each other. Braun was short; he had a red face with a black beard, coarse and unevenly grown, kind eyes that laughed behind his glasses, a broad forehead that was lumpy, lined, troubled, and without expressiveness, hair carefully plastered down to his skull and parted by a line that ran all the way to the nape of his neck. He was perfectly ugly; but Christophe felt a sense of comfort in looking at him and in grasping his hands. Braun could not conceal his surprise.

--- Good God! How he’s changed! What a state he’s in!

--- I’ve come from Paris, said Christophe. I got away.

--- I know, I know, we saw it in the paper --- they said you’d been caught. Thank God! We’ve been thinking of you, Anna and I.

He broke off and, gesturing toward the silent figure who had greeted Christophe at the door:

--- My wife.

She had remained at the entrance to the room, a lamp in her hand. A taciturn face, with a strong chin. The light fell on her brown hair with its reddish glints, and on her cheeks, of a matte complexion. She held out her hand to Christophe with a stiff gesture, her elbow pressed close to her body; he took it without looking at her. He was on the verge of fainting.

--- I came… he tried to explain… I thought you might be willing… if I’m not too much of an imposition… to take me in, just for a day…

Braun didn’t let him finish.

--- A day!… Twenty days, fifty, as long as you like. As long as you’re in this country, you’ll stay in our house; and I hope that will be a long time. It is an honor and a happiness for us.

These warm words overwhelmed Christophe. He threw himself into Braun’s arms.

--- My dear Christophe, my dear Christophe, Braun was saying… He’s crying… What on earth is the matter with him?… Anna! Anna!… Quick, he’s fainting…

Christophe had collapsed in his host’s arms. The faint he had felt coming on for the past several hours had struck him down.

When he reopened his eyes, he was lying in a large bed. A smell of damp earth rose through the open window. Braun was leaning over him.

--- Forgive me, Christophe murmured, trying to sit up.

--- But he’s dying of hunger, Braun cried.

The woman went out, came back with a cup, and made him drink. Braun was holding his head. Christophe was coming back to life; but exhaustion was stronger than hunger; barely had his head touched the pillow again before he was asleep. Braun and his wife kept watch over him; then, seeing he needed nothing but rest, they left him.

It was one of those sleeps that seem to last years --- a crushing, leaden sleep, like lead at the bottom of a lake. He was the prey of accumulated fatigue and the monstrous hallucinations that prowl eternally at the gates of the will. He wanted to wake, burning, broken, lost in this unknown night; he heard clocks striking endless half-hours; he could not breathe, nor think, nor move; he was bound and gagged, like a man being drowned, he wanted to struggle and fell back to the bottom again. --- Dawn came at last, the late and grey dawn of a rainy day. The intolerable heat consuming him subsided; but his body lay beneath a mountain. He woke. A terrible awakening.

--- Why open my eyes? Why wake up? To lie here, like my poor boy, who is laid beneath the earth…

Stretched out on his back, he made no movement, even though his position in the bed caused him pain; his arms and legs were heavy as stone. He was in a tomb. A wan light. A few drops of rain struck the windowpanes. A bird in the garden uttered small plaintive cries. Oh, the misery of living! Cruel futility!…

The hours passed. Braun came in. Christophe did not turn his head. Braun, seeing his eyes open, called to him cheerfully; and as Christophe continued to stare at the ceiling with a blank gaze, he set about shaking him out of his melancholy; he sat on the bed and chatted noisily. The noise was unbearable to Christophe. He made an effort that seemed superhuman to him, and said:

--- Please, leave me alone.

The good man changed his tone at once.

--- You want to be alone? But of course! Certainly. Stay perfectly quiet. Rest, don’t talk, we’ll bring your meals up to you, no one will say a word.

But it was impossible for him to be brief. After interminable explanations, he left the room on the tips of his heavy shoes, which made the floorboards creak. Christophe was alone again, sunk in his mortal weariness. His thoughts dissolved in a fog of suffering. He exhausted himself trying to understand… “Why had he known him? Why had he loved him? What purpose had it served for Antoinette to give of herself so completely? What meaning had all those lives, all those generations --- such a sum of trials and hopes --- that had led to this one life and been swallowed up with it into the void?”… Meaninglessness of life. Meaninglessness of death. A human being crossed out, spirited away, an entire lineage vanished without leaving a trace. One cannot tell what is worse, the odious or the grotesque. A bitter laugh rose in him, a laugh of hatred and despair. His impotence in the face of such grief, his grief at such impotence, were killing him. His heart was crushed…

Not a sound in the house, except the doctor’s footsteps as he went out on his rounds. Christophe had lost all sense of time when Anna appeared. She was carrying dinner on a tray. He watched her without making a move, without even parting his lips to thank her; but in his fixed eyes, which seemed to see nothing, the image of the young woman was imprinted with photographic sharpness. Long afterward, when he knew her better, he continued to see her this way; more recent images never succeeded in effacing that first impression. She had thick hair drawn up in a heavy chignon, a domed forehead, wide cheeks, a short and straight nose, eyes that were obstinately lowered, or that, when they met other eyes, slid away with an expression that was neither frank nor kind, lips that were slightly thick, pressed tightly together, her air stubborn, almost hard. She was tall and appeared robust and well-built, but cramped in her clothes and stiff in her movements. She moved without sound or speech, set the tray on the table beside the bed, and left, her arms pressed against her body, her head lowered. Christophe didn’t think to be surprised by this strange and slightly ridiculous apparition; he didn’t touch his dinner and continued to suffer in silence.

The day passed. Evening came again, and with it Anna again, bearing fresh dishes. She found those she had brought in the morning untouched, and carried them away without a word. She offered not one of those affectionate expressions that any woman finds instinctively for addressing a sick person. It was as though Christophe did not exist for her, or as though she herself barely existed. Christophe felt a dull hostility as he watched --- impatiently now --- her awkward, stilted movements. Yet he was grateful to her for not trying to speak. --- He was even more grateful when, after her departure, he had to endure the assault of the doctor, who had just noticed that Christophe had not touched his first meal. Indignant at his wife for not having forced him to eat, he wanted to compel Christophe himself. To have some peace, Christophe had to swallow a few mouthfuls of milk. After which, he turned his back to him.

The second night was calmer. Heavy sleep covered Christophe with its blankness. Not a trace of the hateful life. --- But the awakening was even more suffocating. He was going over all the details of that fatal day, Olivier’s reluctance to leave the house, his insistence on going home, and he told himself in despair:

“It was I who killed him.”…

It was impossible to remain alone, shut in, motionless, under the clutch of the sphinx with its ferocious eyes, which went on blowing the dizziness of its questions into his face, with its breath of a corpse. He got up, feverish; he dragged himself out of the room, he went down the stairs; he had an instinctive and frightened need to press close to other human beings. And the moment he heard another voice, he wanted to flee.

Braun was in the dining room. He welcomed Christophe with his usual demonstrations of friendship. At once, he began to question him about the events in Paris. Christophe seized his arm:

--- No, he said, don’t ask me anything. Later… Don’t hold it against me. I can’t. I’m tired to death, I’m tired…

--- I know, I know, said Braun affectionately. Your nerves are shattered. It’s the strain of the past few days. Don’t talk. Don’t force yourself to do anything. You are free, you are at home here. No one will bother you.

He kept his word. To avoid tiring his guest, he went to the opposite extreme: he no longer dared to converse in front of him even with his wife; people spoke in low voices, walked on tiptoe; the house went silent. Christophe eventually had to ask Braun, irritated by this affectation of whispering silence, to go on living as before.

In the days that followed, no one paid any attention to Christophe. He would sit for hours in the corner of a room, or else wander through the house like a man in a dream. What was he thinking about? He could not have said. He barely had the strength to suffer anymore. He was annihilated. The dryness of his heart horrified him. He had only one desire: to be buried with “him,” and to have it all be finished. --- Once, he found the garden door open and went out. But the sensation of finding himself again in the light was so painful that he hurried back and barricaded himself in his room, shutters closed. Fine weather tortured him. He hated the sun. Nature overwhelmed him with its brutal serenity. At table, he ate in silence whatever Braun served him, and, eyes fixed on the table, he sat without speaking. Braun showed him the piano in the sitting room one day; Christophe recoiled from it in terror. Every noise was odious to him. Silence, silence, and night!… There was nothing left in him but an immense emptiness and the need for emptiness. Gone was his joy in living, gone that powerful bird of joy that had once soared upward in sweeping rushes, singing. For whole days, sitting in his room, he had no other sensation of being alive than the limping pulse of the clock in the next room, which seemed to beat inside his skull. And yet the wild bird of joy was still inside him --- it took sudden flights, battered itself against the bars; and deep within his soul there was a terrible tumult of pain --- “the cry of distress of a being left alone in a vast depopulated expanse…”

The misery of the world is that one almost never has a companion there. Companions, perhaps --- women --- and friends met along the way. One is lavish with that fine word, friend. In reality, one has barely a single friend in a lifetime. And rare are those who have even one. But this happiness is so great that one no longer knows how to live when one no longer has it. It filled life without one’s having noticed. It departs: life is empty. It is not only the beloved one has lost --- it is every reason to love, every reason to have loved. Why did he live? Why did one live?

The blow of this death was all the more terrible for Christophe in that it struck him at a moment when his being was already secretly shaken. There are, in life, ages when a muffled work of transformation operates deep within the organism; then body and soul are more exposed to assaults from without; the spirit feels itself weakened, a vague sadness undermines it, a surfeit of things, a detachment from what one has done, an incapacity to see what else one might do. At the ages when such crises occur, most men are bound by domestic duties: a safeguard for them, which robs them, it is true, of the freedom of mind necessary to judge themselves, find their bearings, rebuild a strong new life. What hidden sorrows, what bitter disgust!… …March! March! You must press on… The obligatory task, the care of a family for which one is responsible, holds a man like a horse that sleeps standing up and goes on moving, exhausted, between its shafts. --- But the man who is entirely free has nothing to sustain him in his hours of nothingness, nothing to force him onward. He goes by habit; he does not know where he is going. His forces are disturbed, his consciousness obscured. Woe to him if, at the moment when he is drowsy, a thunderclap comes to interrupt his sleepwalker’s march! He risks collapse.

A few letters from Paris, which had finally reached him, tore Christophe for a moment out of his despairing apathy. They came from Cécile and from madame Arnaud. They brought him consolations. Poor consolations. Useless consolations. Those who speak of grief are not those who are suffering. They brought him above all an echo of the vanished voice… He didn’t have the courage to reply; and the letters fell silent. In his dejection, he was trying to erase his own trace. To disappear… Grief is unjust: all those he had loved no longer existed for him. Only one being existed: the one who was no longer. For weeks he labored to bring him back to life; he conversed with him; he wrote to him:

--- “My soul, I have not received your letter today. Where are you? Come back, come back, speak to me, write to me!…”

But at night, despite his efforts, he could not manage to see him again in dreams. One rarely dreams of those one has lost, so long as their loss is tearing one apart. They reappear later, when forgetting comes.

Meanwhile, the life outside was seeping little by little into this tomb of the soul. Christophe began by hearing again the various sounds of the house and taking an interest in them without being aware of it. He learned at what hour the door opened and closed, how many times in a day, and in how many different ways, depending on who was calling. He came to know Braun’s footstep; he imagined he could see the doctor, returning from his rounds, stopping in the vestibule and hanging up his hat and coat, always in the same meticulous and fussy way. And when one of the customary sounds failed to occur in the expected order, he found himself involuntarily searching for the reason for the change. At table, he began mechanically listening to the conversation. He noticed that Braun almost always spoke alone. His wife gave him only brief replies. Braun was not troubled by the absence of interlocutors; he recounted, with a chatty good humor, the visits he had just made and the gossip he had gathered. It happened that Christophe looked at him while Braun was speaking; Braun was overjoyed by this and did his best to hold his interest.

Christophe tried to take hold of life again… What exhaustion! He felt so old, old as the world itself!… In the mornings, when he got up, when he saw himself in the mirror, he was weary of his body, of his gestures, of his stupid shape. To get up, to dress --- what for?… He made immense efforts to work: it made him want to retch. What was the point of creating, when everything is destined for nothingness? Music had become impossible for him. One judges art --- (and everything else) --- truly only through suffering. Suffering is the touchstone. Only then does one know which works will cross the centuries, which are stronger than death. Very few survive. One is struck by the mediocrity of certain souls on which one had counted --- (artists one had loved, as well as friends in life). --- Who stays afloat? How hollow the beauty of the world sounds under the finger of grief!

But grief grows weary, and its hand goes numb. Christophe’s nerves were loosening. He slept, slept constantly. It seemed as though he would never manage to satisfy this hunger for sleep.

And one night at last he fell into a sleep so deep that he did not wake until the following afternoon. The house was deserted. Braun and his wife had gone out. The window was open, the luminous air bright with laughter. Christophe felt relieved of a crushing weight. He got up and went down to the garden. A narrow rectangle, enclosed by high walls, with the look of a convent. A few sandy paths between squares of lawn and bourgeois flowers; an arbor wound with a vine and roses. A tiny thread of water dripped from a grotto of rockwork; an acacia leaning against the wall bent its fragrant branches over the neighboring garden. Beyond it rose the old church tower in red sandstone. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The garden was already in shadow. The sun still bathed the crown of the tree and the red steeple. Christophe sat down under the bower, his back to the wall, his head tilted back, gazing at the clear sky through the interlacing vine and roses. It seemed to him that he was waking from a nightmare. An absolute silence reigned. Above his head, a climbing rose hung languidly. Suddenly, the most beautiful of the roses shed its petals and expired; the snow of its petals drifted through the air. It was like a beautiful, innocent life dying. So simply!… In Christophe’s mind, this took on a significance of heartbreaking tenderness. He choked; and, hiding his face in his hands, he sobbed…

The bells of the tower rang out. From one church to another, other voices answered… Christophe had no awareness of the time that passed. When he raised his head, the bells had fallen silent, the sun had disappeared. Christophe was relieved by his tears; his mind felt washed clean. He listened to a thin stream of music rising within him and watched the slender crescent moon glide through the evening sky. The sound of footsteps returning inside roused him. He went back up to his room, locked himself in with the bolt turned twice, and let the fountain of music flow. Braun called him down for dinner, knocked at the door, tried to open it: Christophe did not answer. Braun, anxious, looked through the keyhole, and reassured himself, seeing Christophe half lying across his table, surrounded by papers he was covering in black.

A few hours later, Christophe, exhausted, came downstairs and found in the sitting room below the doctor waiting for him patiently, reading. He embraced him, asked his pardon for the way he had behaved since his arrival, and, without Braun having to question him, began to tell him about the dramatic events of the preceding weeks. It was the only time he ever spoke to him about it; and even then he was not sure Braun had properly understood: for Christophe rambled incoherently, the night was far advanced, and despite his curiosity, Braun was dying of sleep. At last --- (two o’clock was striking) --- Christophe noticed. They said good night to each other.

From that moment on, Christophe’s existence reorganized itself. He did not sustain himself in this state of passing exaltation; he returned to his sadness, but to a normal sadness that did not prevent him from living. He had to live again --- there was no other way! This man who had just lost what he loved most in the world, this man whom his grief was eating away, who carried death within him, had such a force of life, abundant and tyrannical, that it burst through his words of mourning, it radiated from his eyes, his mouth, his gestures. But at the heart of this force, a gnawing worm had lodged itself. Christophe had fits of despair. They came in sudden stabs. He would be calm, trying to read or out for a walk: then abruptly, Olivier’s smile, his tired and tender face… A knife thrust to the heart… He would stagger, pressing his hand to his chest, groaning. Once, he was at the piano, playing a page of Beethoven with his old fierceness… All at once he stopped, threw himself to the floor, and, burying his face in the cushions of an armchair, cried out:

--- My dear one…

The worst of it was the impression of déjà vécu: he had it at every step. Incessantly, he encountered the same gestures, the same words, the perpetual return of the same experiences. Everything was known to him, he had foreseen everything. Such a face that reminded him of an earlier face would say --- (he was sure of it in advance) --- said the same things he had heard that other person say; kindred beings passed through kindred phases, collided with the same obstacles, and wore themselves out against them in the same way. If it is true that “nothing wearies one of life like the recommencement of love,” how much more so this recommencement of everything! It was hallucinatory. --- Christophe tried not to think about it, since it was necessary not to think about it in order to live, and since he wanted to live. A painful hypocrisy that refuses to know itself, out of shame, out of something like piety --- the invincible will to live hiding from itself! Knowing that there is no consolation, it creates consolations for itself. Convinced that life has no reason for being, it forges reasons to live. It persuades itself that it must live, when no one cares about that except itself. If need be, it will invent that the dead person encourages it to live. And it knows that it is lending the dead the very words it wishes them to say. Misery!…

Christophe took up his road again; his step seemed to recover its old assurance; the door of the heart closed over his grief; he never spoke of it to others; he himself avoided being alone with it: he appeared calm.

“True sorrows,” says Balzac, “are apparently tranquil in the deep bed they have made for themselves, where they seem to sleep, but where they go on corroding the soul.”

Anyone who had known Christophe and watched him closely, going and coming, talking, making music, even laughing --- (he laughed now!) --- would have sensed that in this vigorous man, with his eyes burning with life, something had been destroyed, at the very deepest level of his being.

From the moment he was shackled to life, he had to secure the means to live. There was no question of his leaving the city. Switzerland was the safest refuge; and where would he have found a more devoted hospitality? --- But his pride could not accommodate itself to the idea of remaining a burden on a friend. Despite Braun’s protests --- Braun would accept nothing --- he was not at ease until he had a few music pupils who allowed him to pay his hosts a regular board. This was no easy matter. Word of his revolutionary escapade had spread: and bourgeois families were reluctant to introduce into their homes a man who was regarded as dangerous, or in any case as extraordinary, and consequently as not quite “respectable.” Nevertheless, his musical reputation and Braun’s efforts succeeded in opening him access to four or five households that were less timid, or more curious, perhaps eager by way of artistic snobbery to distinguish themselves. These households proved no less vigilant in keeping watch over him and in maintaining a respectable distance between the teacher and the pupils.

Life at the Brauns’ settled into a methodically regulated routine. In the mornings, each went about their own affairs: the doctor to his visits, Christophe to his lessons, Mme Braun to the market and her edifying works. Christophe returned around one o’clock, usually before Braun, who insisted they never wait for him; and he would sit down to table with the young woman. This was not agreeable to him: for he did not find her congenial, and he could find nothing to say to her. She made no effort to counter this impression, which she could not possibly have been unaware of; she put herself to no trouble --- neither in dress nor in conversation; she never spoke to Christophe first. The particular ungainliness of her movements and dress, her awkwardness, her coldness, would have put off any man as sensitive as Christophe to feminine grace. When he recalled the witty elegance of the Parisian women, he could not help thinking, as he looked at Anna:

--- How plain she is!

And yet that was not fair; and he soon noticed the beauty of her hair, her hands, her mouth, her eyes --- in the rare moments when he happened to meet that gaze, which always turned away. But his judgment was not changed. Out of politeness he forced himself to speak to her; he laboriously searched for subjects of conversation; she helped him not at all. Two or three times he tried to ask her about her city, her husband, herself: he could get nothing out of her. She answered in commonplaces; she made an effort to smile; but the effort was disagreeably perceptible; her smile was strained, her voice muffled; she let each word drop; every sentence was followed by a painful silence. Christophe ended up speaking to her as little as possible; and she was grateful to him for it. It was a relief to both of them when the doctor came home. He was always in good humor, noisy, busy, coarse, an excellent man. He ate, drank, talked, and laughed in abundance. With him Anna talked a little; but what they said together concerned little more than the dishes being eaten and the price of each. Sometimes Braun amused himself by teasing her about her pious works and the pastor’s sermons. She would then assume a stiff air and fall silent, offended, until the end of the meal. More often the doctor recounted his visits; he took pleasure in describing certain repugnant cases with a jovial minuteness that drove Christophe out of his mind. The latter would throw his napkin on the table and rise with grimaces of disgust that delighted the narrator. Braun would stop at once and placate his friend, laughing. At the next meal, he would start again. These hospital jokes seemed to have the gift of cheering the impassive Anna. She would emerge from her silence with a sudden, nervous laugh that had something animal in it. Perhaps she felt no less disgust than Christophe at what she was laughing at.

In the afternoon Christophe had few pupils. He ordinarily stayed at home with Anna while the doctor went out. They did not see each other. Each worked separately. At first Braun had asked Christophe to give his wife a few piano lessons; she was, he said, a reasonably good musician. Christophe asked Anna to play something for him. She raised no objection at all, despite the displeasure it caused her; but she brought to it her habitual lack of grace: she played mechanically, with an unimaginable insensitivity; all the notes were equal; no emphasis anywhere; needing to turn the page, she stopped coldly in the middle of a phrase, did not hurry herself, and resumed from the next note. Christophe was so exasperated that he had difficulty not saying something rude to her; he could only restrain himself by leaving before the piece was finished. She was not troubled by this, continued imperturbably to the final note, and showed herself neither mortified nor hurt by this rudeness; she barely seemed to notice it. But between them there was no further talk of music. On the afternoons when Christophe went out, it sometimes happened that on returning unexpectedly he would find Anna practicing at the piano with a glacial, insipid tenacity, repeating the same measure fifty times without tiring, and never coming to life. She never made music when she knew Christophe was in the house. She devoted to housekeeping all the time she did not give to her religious occupations. She sewed, resewed, darned, supervised the maid; she had the manic preoccupation of order and cleanliness. Her husband considered her a good woman, a bit odd --- “like all women,” he said --- but, “like all women,” devoted. On this last point Christophe had his private reservations: this psychology seemed to him too simplistic; but he told himself that after all it was Braun’s affair; and he thought no more about it.

In the evenings they gathered together; after dinner Braun and Christophe would talk. Anna sewed. At Braun’s urging, Christophe had agreed to sit down at the piano again; and he would sometimes play until late in the evening in the large, poorly lit drawing room that looked onto the garden. Braun was in raptures… Who does not know those people who are passionate about works they do not understand, or understand in entirely the wrong way! --- (that is precisely why they love them!) --- Christophe no longer grew angry; he had already met so many fools in his life! But at certain exclamations of absurd enthusiasm, he would stop playing and go back up to his room without a word. Braun eventually understood, and put a mute on his commentary. Besides, his love for music was quickly satisfied; he could not listen with attention for more than a quarter of an hour at a stretch; he would pick up his newspaper, or doze off, leaving Christophe in peace. Anna, seated at the back of the room, said nothing; she had needlework on her lap and seemed to be working; but her eyes were fixed and her hands still. Sometimes she slipped out silently in the middle of a piece, and was not seen again.

And so the days passed. Christophe was recovering his strength. Braun’s heavy but affectionate goodness, the calm of the house, the restful regularity of that domestic life, the singularly abundant Germanic diet — all of it was restoring his robust constitution. His physical health was mending; but the moral machinery was still sick. The returning vigor only sharpened the disarray of a spirit unable to regain its balance, like a badly ballasted boat that lurches at the slightest knock.

His isolation was profound. He could have no intellectual intimacy with Braun. His relations with Anna were reduced to almost nothing beyond the greetings exchanged morning and evening. His dealings with his pupils were rather hostile: for he could not quite conceal from them that the best thing they could have done was to give up music altogether. He knew no one. The fault was not entirely his own — ever since his bereavement he had been burrowing into his corner. But he was also being kept at arm’s length.

He was living in an old city, full of intelligence and strength, but of patrician pride — self-contained and self-satisfied. A bourgeois aristocracy, which had a taste for hard work and high culture, but narrow, pietist, quietly convinced of its own superiority and that of the city, took pleasure in its family isolation. Vast families with vast ramifications. Each family had its day of gathering for its own. For the rest, it barely half-opened its doors. These powerful houses, with their centuries-old fortunes, felt no need to display their wealth. They knew one another: that was enough; the opinion of outsiders did not count. You saw millionaires dressed like petty tradesmen, speaking their rough dialect with its savory expressions, walking conscientiously to their offices every day of their lives, even at an age when even the most industrious grant themselves the right to rest. Their wives prided themselves on their domestic knowledge. No dowry given to daughters. The rich left their children to undergo, in their turn, the same hard apprenticeship they themselves had served. Strict economy for daily life. But a very noble use of those great fortunes in art collections, picture galleries, social works; enormous and continual gifts, almost always anonymous, for charitable foundations, for the enrichment of museums. A mixture of grandeur and absurdity equally out of another age. This world, for which the rest of the world seemed not to exist --- (though it knew the world perfectly well, through business dealings, through its wide connections, through the long and distant study-journeys it required of its sons) --- this world, for which a great reputation or a foreign celebrity counted for nothing until the day it had been welcomed and recognized by them --- exercised over itself the most rigorous of disciplines. They all held together, and they all watched one another. The result was a collective conscience that covered individual differences (more pronounced than elsewhere among these rugged personalities) beneath the veil of religious and moral uniformity. Everyone practiced, everyone believed. Not one had a doubt, or was willing to admit to one. It was impossible to know what was happening in the depths of those souls, which closed themselves all the more hermetically to outside observation because they knew themselves to be surrounded by close surveillance, and because each one assumed the right to peer into another’s conscience. It was said that even those who had left the country and believed themselves free --- the moment they set foot back in it, were recaptured by the traditions, the habits, the atmosphere of the city: the most unbelieving were immediately compelled to practice and to believe. Not to believe would have seemed to them unnatural. Not to believe was the mark of an inferior class with bad manners. It was not permitted that a man of their world should shirk religious duties. Whoever did not practice placed himself outside his class and was no longer received in it.

The weight of this discipline had apparently not yet seemed sufficient. These men did not feel themselves bound enough within their caste. Inside this great Verein, they had formed a multitude of smaller Vereine, in order to bind themselves still more thoroughly. There were several hundred of them; and their number grew each year. There were associations for every purpose: for philanthropy, for pious works, for commercial works, for works that were both pious and commercial at once, for the arts, for the sciences, for singing, for music, for spiritual exercises, for physical exercises, for gathering together simply, for enjoying themselves in company; there were Vereine for neighborhoods, for trade guilds; there were some for those who shared the same profession, the same level of fortune, the same body weight, the same first name. It was said that someone had once wanted to form a Verein of the Vereinlosen (those who belonged to no Verein): they had not been able to find twelve.

Under this triple corset of city, caste, and association, the soul was bound up tight. A hidden constraint compressed the personalities. Most had been made for it since childhood --- since centuries; and they found it healthy; they would have judged it unseemly and unhealthy to do without the corset. Looking at their satisfied smiles, no one would have suspected any discomfort they might feel. But nature took its revenge. From time to time there emerged from it some rebel individual, a vigorous artist or an unbridled thinker, who broke his chains brutally and gave the guardians of the city something to contend with. They were so intelligent that, when the rebel had not been smothered in the egg, when he proved stronger, they never persisted in fighting him --- (the struggle might have risked bringing scandalous explosions): --- they absorbed him. If he was a painter, they put him in the museum; if a thinker, in the libraries. However himself he might shout outrageous things, they affected not to hear him. However much he protested his independence, they incorporated him. So the poison’s effect was neutralized: it was the treatment by homeopathy. --- But such cases were rare; most rebellions never reached daylight. Those peaceful houses sheltered unknown tragedies. It happened that one of their occupants would walk away calmly, without explanation, to throw himself into the river. Or one would shut oneself away for six months, or have one’s wife committed to a sanatorium, in order to recover one’s mind. People spoke of it without embarrassment, as of a natural thing, with that placidity which was one of the city’s fine traits, and which it knew how to maintain in the face of suffering and death.

This solid bourgeoisie, severe with itself because it knew its own worth, was less so with others because it esteemed them less. Toward the foreigners who lived in the city, like Christophe, German professors, political refugees, it showed itself even rather liberal: for they were indifferent to it. And besides, it loved intelligence. Advanced ideas did not trouble it: it knew they would have no influence on its sons. It showed its guests a glacial good nature that kept them at a distance.

Christophe needed no insisting upon. He was in a state of quivering sensitivity, his heart laid bare: he was only too disposed to see egoism and indifference everywhere, and to withdraw into himself.

Moreover, Braun’s clients, the very restricted circle to which his wife belonged, were part of a small Protestant world, particularly rigorist. Christophe was doubly ill-regarded there, as a Catholic by origin and an unbeliever in practice. For his part, he found much in it that struck him the wrong way. However much he no longer believed, he carried in himself the century-old mark of his Catholicism --- more poetic than reasoned, more indulgent toward nature, and one that troubled itself less with explaining or understanding than with loving or not loving; and he also carried the habits of intellectual and moral liberty he had picked up in Paris without knowing it. He was bound to collide with this small pietist world, where the defects of the Calvinist spirit were exaggerated: a religious rationalism that clipped the wings of faith and then left it suspended over the abyss; for it started from an a priori as questionable as any mysticism: it was no longer poetry, it was not prose, it was poetry rendered into prose. An intellectual pride, an absolute and dangerous faith in reason --- in their reason. They might not believe in God, nor in immortality; but they believed in reason as a Catholic believes in the pope, or a fetishist in his idol. It did not even occur to them to question it. However much life might contradict it, they would sooner have denied life. A lack of psychology, an incomprehension of nature, of hidden forces, of the roots of being, of the “Spirit of the Earth.” They fashioned for themselves a childish, simplified, schematic life and cast of characters. Some of them were learned and practical; they had read much, seen much. But they saw and read nothing as it was; they made abstract reductions of everything. They were bloodless; they had high moral qualities; but they were not sufficiently human: and that is the supreme sin. Their purity of heart, often very real, noble and naive, sometimes comical, became unfortunately --- in certain cases --- tragic; it led them to a harshness toward others, a quiet, unangered, self-assured inhumanity, that was frightening. How could they have hesitated? Did they not have truth, right, and virtue on their side? Did they not receive the direct revelation of it from their holy reason? Reason is a hard sun; it illuminates, but it blinds. In that dry light, without vapor and without shadow, souls grow up colorless, the blood of their hearts drunk away.

Now, if anything was at this moment devoid of meaning for Christophe, it was reason. That sun, in his eyes, illuminated only the walls of the abyss, without showing him any way out of it, or even letting him measure its depth.

As for the artistic world, Christophe had little opportunity, and still less desire, to mingle with it. The musicians were generally honest conservatives of the neo-Schumannian and “Brahminic” era, against whom Christophe had once crossed swords. Two were exceptions: the organist Krebs, who kept a well-known confectionery shop --- a good man, a good musician, who would have been an even better one had it not been, to use the words of a compatriot of his, that “he was seated on a Pegasus to whom he gave too much oats” --- and a young Jewish composer, an original talent full of vigorous and turbid sap, who dealt in Swiss novelties: carved wood, chalets and Berne bears. More independent than the others, no doubt because they had not made their art into a trade, they would have been glad to draw closer to Christophe; and at another time in his life, Christophe would have been curious to know them; but at this moment, all artistic and human curiosity was dulled in him; he felt more what separated him from men than what united him to them.

His only friend, the confidant of his thoughts, was the river that ran through the city --- the same powerful and fatherly river that, far to the north, bathed his hometown. Christophe found beside it the memories of his childhood dreams… But in the mourning that enveloped him, they took on, like the Rhine itself, a funereal hue. At the fall of day, leaning on the parapet of a quay, he watched the feverish river, that fused mass, heavy, opaque, and hurrying, always passing, in which nothing could be distinguished but great shifting crepes, thousands of streams, currents, whirlpools, that traced themselves and faded away: like a chaos of images in a haunted mind; eternally they are sketched, and eternally dissolve. Over that crepuscular dream there glided like coffins phantom ferries, without a human form. Night thickened. The river turned to bronze. The lights on the bank made its armor gleam ink-black, throwing off dark flashes. Copper-tinted reflections from the gas lamps, lunar reflections from the electric lanterns, bloody reflections of candles behind windowpanes. The murmur of the river filled the darkness. An eternal rustling, sadder than the sea by its monotony…

For hours Christophe breathed in that song of death and weariness. He could barely tear himself away; then he would make his way back to the house through steep alleys with red stone steps worn down in the middle; his body and soul broken, he clung to the iron railings set into the walls, which gleamed in the light of the street lamp above, on the deserted square before the night-robed church…

He no longer understood why men went on living. When it happened that he recalled the struggles he had witnessed, he bitterly admired that humanity with its faith nailed to the body. Ideas succeeded to opposing ideas, reactions to actions: --- democracy, aristocracy; socialism, individualism; romanticism, classicism; progress, tradition --- and so on, forever. Each new generation, burned up in less than ten years, believed with the same enthusiasm that it alone had reached the summit, and sent its predecessors tumbling down with volleys of stones; it stirred, cried out, awarded itself power and glory, then tumbled in its turn under the stones of the new arrivals, and disappeared. Whose turn next?…

Musical creation was no longer a refuge for Christophe; it had become intermittent, disordered, purposeless. Write? Write for whom? For other people? He was passing through a crisis of acute misanthropy. For himself? He felt too keenly the vanity of art, its incapacity to fill the void left by death. Only his blind force lifted him at moments, on a violent wing, then broke and fell again. He was like a storm cloud rumbling in the darkness. With Olivier gone, nothing remained. He raged against everything that had filled his life, against the feelings he had believed he shared with others, against the thoughts he had imagined holding in common with the rest of humanity. It seemed to him now that he had been the plaything of an illusion: all social life rested on an immense misunderstanding, of which language was the source. One believes that thought can communicate with other thoughts. In reality, there are only relations between words. Words are spoken and words are heard; not a single word carries the same meaning in two different mouths. And that is the least of it: not one word, not a single one, carries its full meaning in lived life. Words overflow lived reality. We speak of love and of hate. There is no love, no hate, no friends, no enemies, no faith, no passion, no good, no evil. There are only cold reflections of those lights falling from extinguished suns, from stars dead for centuries… Friends? There is no shortage of people who claim that name. But what a pale reality their friendship represents! What is friendship, in the ordinary sense of the world? How many minutes of his life does the man who thinks himself a friend give to the dim memory of his friend? What would he sacrifice for him --- not even of what he needs, but of his surplus, his idleness, his boredom? What had Christophe sacrificed for Olivier? --- (For he made no exception of himself; he excepted only Olivier from the nothingness into which he gathered all human beings). --- Art is no truer than love. What place does it actually hold in life? With what love do they love it, those who claim to be its devotees?… The poverty of human feeling is unimaginable. Outside the instinct of the species --- that cosmic force which is the lever of the world --- nothing exists but a dust of emotions. Most men have not enough life in them to give themselves wholly to any passion. They husband themselves with a prudent miserliness. They are a little of everything and entirely nothing. The man who gives without counting the cost, at every moment of his life, in all he does, in all he suffers, in all he loves, in all he hates --- that man is a prodigy, the greatest it is given to encounter on this earth. Passion is like genius: a miracle. Which is to say it does not exist.

So Christophe thought; and life was preparing to inflict a terrible refutation upon him. The miracle is everywhere, like fire in stone: a single blow makes it leap out. We do not suspect the demons sleeping within us…

… Pero non mi destar, deh ! parla basso !…

One evening when Christophe was improvising at the piano, Anna rose and left the room, as she often did when Christophe played. Music seemed to bore her. Christophe no longer paid it any mind: he was indifferent to whatever she might think. He went on playing; then, ideas coming to him that he wished to note down, he broke off and ran to his room to fetch the papers he needed. As he opened the door to the adjoining room and plunged, head down, into the darkness, he collided violently with a body standing motionless at the entrance. Anna… The shock and surprise wrested a cry from the young woman. Christophe, anxious to know whether he had hurt her, took her two hands affectionately. The hands were ice-cold. She seemed to be shivering --- from the shock, no doubt. She murmured a vague explanation of her presence there:

--- I was looking for something in the dining room…

He did not catch what she was looking for; and perhaps she had not said. It struck him as strange that she should be walking about without a light to look for something. But he was so accustomed to Anna’s odd habits that he paid it no further attention.

An hour later he had returned to the small sitting room where he spent the evening with Braun and Anna. He was seated at the table under the lamp, writing. Anna, at the far end of the table to his right, was sewing, bent over her work. Behind them, in a low armchair by the fire, Braun was reading a journal. All three were silent. At intervals one could hear the patter of rain on the garden sand. To isolate himself entirely, Christophe sat at an angle, his back turned to Anna. On the wall facing him, a mirror reflected the table, the lamp, and the two figures bent over their work. It seemed to Christophe that Anna was watching him. At first he paid it no mind; then, as the thought kept nagging at him, he lifted his eyes toward the mirror, and he saw… She was indeed watching him. With what a look! He was struck motionless, holding his breath, observing. She did not know he was watching her. The lamplight fell on her pale face, whose habitual seriousness and silence bore the character of concentrated violence. Her eyes --- those unknown eyes he had never been able to catch --- were fixed on him: dark-blue eyes with wide pupils and a burning, hard gaze; they were fastened to him, probing him, with a mute and obstinate ardor. Her eyes? Could those really be her eyes? He saw them, and could not believe it. Did he truly see them? He turned sharply… The eyes were lowered. He tried to speak to her, to force her to look him in the face. The impassive face replied without raising from its work a gaze sheltered under the impenetrable shadow of bluish eyelids with their short, dense lashes. Had Christophe been less sure of himself, he would have believed he had been the plaything of an illusion. But he knew what he had seen, and he could not manage to explain it.

Yet since his mind was absorbed by his work and Anna interested him little, this strange impression did not occupy him for long.

A week later, Christophe was trying out at the piano a lied he had just composed. Braun, who had a mania --- born of a husband’s self-regard as much as of a taste for teasing --- for tormenting his wife into singing or playing, had been particularly insistent that evening. Ordinarily Anna contented herself with a very dry “no”; after which she no longer troubled herself to answer requests, pleas, or jokes; she pressed her lips together and seemed not to hear. This time, to the great astonishment of Braun and Christophe, she folded her sewing, rose, and came to the piano. She sang the piece she had never read before. It was a kind of miracle --- the miracle. Her voice, of a deep timbre, bore no resemblance to the slightly rough and veiled voice she used in speaking. Firmly placed from the first note, without the slightest shadow of uncertainty, without effort, it gave the musical phrase a moving and pure grandeur; and it rose to a violence of passion that made Christophe tremble, for it seemed to him the voice of his own heart. He stared at her in astonishment while she sang, and he saw her at last, for the first time. He saw her dark eyes lit with a gleam of wildness, her wide passionate mouth with its well-shaped lips, the voluptuous, slightly heavy and cruel smile of her sound white teeth, her beautiful strong hands, one of which rested on the music stand of the piano, and the robust frame of a body constrained by dress, thinned by too narrow and too impoverished a life, but which one sensed to be young, vigorous, and harmonious beneath the gown.

She stopped singing and went to sit back down, her hands resting on her knees. Braun complimented her; but he thought she had sung in a manner lacking in smoothness. Christophe said nothing to her. He was contemplating her. She smiled vaguely, knowing he was looking at her. There was a long silence between them that evening. She was aware that she had just risen above herself, or perhaps that she had been “herself” for the first time. She did not understand why.

From that day on, Christophe began to observe Anna attentively. She had fallen back into her muteness, her cold indifference, and her rage for work, which exasperated even her husband, and in which she lulled the dark thoughts of her troubled nature. However closely Christophe watched her, he found in her nothing but the stiff bourgeoise of the early days. At moments she would sit absorbed, doing nothing, eyes fixed. One would leave her so and find her so a quarter of an hour later: she had not moved. When her husband asked what she was thinking, she would wake from her torpor, smile, and say she was thinking of nothing. And she told the truth.

Nothing was capable of drawing her out of her tranquility. One day while she was getting dressed, her spirit lamp exploded. In an instant Anna was surrounded by flames. The maid fled, screaming for help. Braun lost his head, rushed about, cried out, and nearly fainted. Anna unhooked the clasps of her dressing gown, let her skirt, which had begun to burn, slide from her hips to the floor, and stood on it. When Christophe came running in a panic, stupidly clutching a carafe he had snatched up, he found Anna standing on a chair, in her petticoat with bare arms, calmly smothering the burning curtains with her hands. She burned herself, said nothing of it, and appeared only vexed at having been seen in that state. She blushed, awkwardly hid her shoulders with her arms, and walked off with an air of offended dignity into the next room. Christophe admired her composure; but he could not have said whether that composure proved more her courage or her insensibility. He leaned toward the latter explanation. In truth, this woman seemed to take no interest in anything --- neither in others nor in herself. Christophe doubted she had a heart.

He had no further doubt after an incident he witnessed. Anna had a small black dog with intelligent, gentle eyes that was the pampered darling of the household. Braun adored it. Christophe would take it into his room when he shut himself in to work; and with the door closed, instead of working, he often played with it. When he went out, the dog was there on the threshold, watching for him, following at his heels: for it needed a companion on its walks. It ran ahead of him, its four paws knitting the ground so quickly that they seemed to flutter. Now and then it stopped, proud of being faster; and it looked back at him, chest puffed out and back arched. It put on great airs; it barked furiously at a piece of wood; but the moment it spotted another dog in the distance, it fled at full speed and took refuge, trembling, between Christophe’s legs. Christophe mocked it and loved it. Since distancing himself from people, he felt drawn closer to animals; he found them pitiable and touching. These poor creatures, when one is kind to them, abandon themselves to you with such trust! Man is so completely the master of their life and their death that anyone who harms these weak beings surrendered to him commits an abominable abuse of power.

As loving as the sweet little creature was with everyone, she showed a marked preference for Anna. Anna did nothing to attract her; but she stroked her willingly, let her curl up on her lap, attended to her feeding, and seemed to love her as much as she was capable of loving anything. One day the dog failed to dodge the wheels of an automobile. She was crushed, almost before her owners’ eyes. She was still alive and crying out piteously. Braun ran out of the house bareheaded; he gathered up the bloody bundle and tried at least to ease her suffering. Anna came, looked without bending down, made a face of disgust, and walked away. Braun, with tears in his eyes, kept watch over the little creature’s agony. Christophe paced the garden with long strides, his fists clenched. He heard Anna calmly giving orders to the maid. He could not help saying to her:

--- Does it mean nothing to you, then?

She replied:

--- There is nothing to be done about it, is there? It is better not to think about it.

He felt hatred for her; then the absurdity of the reply struck him, and he laughed. He told himself that Anna ought to give him her recipe for not thinking about sad things, and that life was easy for those fortunate enough to be devoid of a heart. He thought that if Braun were to die, Anna would hardly be disturbed, and he congratulated himself on not being married. His solitude seemed to him less sad than this chain of habits that binds you for life to a being for whom you are an object of hatred, or, which is worse, for whom you are nothing at all. This woman, clearly, loved no one. She barely existed. Pietism had dried her out.

She took Christophe by surprise one day at the end of October. --- They were at table. He was talking with Braun about a crime of passion that had the whole city buzzing. Out in the countryside, two Italian girls, two sisters, had fallen in love with the same man. Since neither could willingly give way to the other, they had drawn lots to decide which of the two would step aside. The loser was simply to throw herself into the Rhine. But when the lots were drawn, the one fate had not favored showed little eagerness to accept the verdict. The other was outraged by such a lack of good faith. From insults they came to blows, and even to knife blows; then, suddenly, the wind shifted; they fell into each other’s arms weeping, swearing they could not live one without the other; and since they could not bring themselves to share the man, they decided he must be killed. So it was done. One night, the two lovers summoned their sweetheart to their room --- that man swollen with pride at his double good fortune; and while one bound him passionately in her arms, the other, no less passionately, drove a knife into his back. By luck, his cries were heard. People came, and pulled him in a rather sorry state from the embrace of his two friends; the women were arrested. They protested that it was no one else’s business, that they alone were concerned in the matter, and that since they were in agreement about disposing of what was theirs, no one had any right to interfere. The victim was not far from approving this reasoning; but the law failed to see it that way. And Braun could not see it that way either.

--- They’re lunatics, he said. They ought to be locked up in an asylum. Ah, the little vixens!… I can understand killing yourself for love. I can even understand killing the person you love who has betrayed you… That is, I don’t excuse it; but I accept it as a remnant of savage atavism; it’s barbaric, but logical --- you kill whoever makes you suffer. But to kill what you love, without grievance, without hatred, simply because others love it --- that’s madness… Do you understand that, Christophe?

--- Pah! said Christophe. I’m used to not understanding. Where there is love, there is unreason.

Anna, who had been silent and appeared not to be listening, raised her head and said, in her calm voice:

--- There is nothing unreasonable in any of that. It is perfectly natural. When you love, you want to destroy what you love, so that no one else can have it.

Braun stared at his wife, dumbfounded; he slapped the table, crossed his arms, and said:

--- Where on earth did she pick that up?… What! You have to put in your word, do you? What the devil do you know about it?

Anna flushed slightly, and said nothing more. Braun went on:

--- When you love, you want to destroy?… What a monstrous piece of nonsense! To destroy what is precious to you is to destroy yourself. --- On the contrary, when you love, the natural feeling is to do good to whoever does good to you, to cherish and protect them, to be kind to them, to be kind to all things. To love is to have paradise on earth.

Anna, her eyes fixed on the shadow, let him talk, and then, shaking her head, said coldly:

--- One is not kind when one loves.

Christophe did not repeat the experiment of hearing Anna sing. He was afraid of… a disillusionment, or something else? He could not have said what. Anna had the same fear. She took care not to be in the sitting room when he began to play.

But one evening in November, when he was reading by the fire, he saw Anna seated, her needlework on her lap, lost in one of her reveries. She was staring into the void, and Christophe thought he glimpsed in her gaze the gleam of that strange ardor from the other evening. He closed his book. She felt herself being watched and went back to her sewing. Under her lowered eyelids she still saw everything. He rose and said:

--- Come.

She fixed on him her eyes, in which a slight disturbance still floated, understood, and followed him.

--- Where are you going? asked Braun.

--- To the piano, replied Christophe.

He played. She sang. At once he found her again as she had appeared to him the first time. She stepped straight into that heroic world as if it were her own. He continued the experiment, taking a second piece, then a third, more headlong, unleashing within her the herd of passions, exalting her, exalting himself; then, at the very peak, he stopped abruptly and asked, looking straight into her eyes:

--- But who are you, really?

Anna replied:

--- I don’t know.

He said bluntly:

--- What is it you carry inside you, to sing like that?

She replied:

--- I have whatever it is you make me sing.

--- Is that so? Well, it is not out of place there. I wonder whether I created it, or whether you did. So you think thoughts like that?

--- I don’t know. I believe one is no longer oneself when one sings.

--- And I believe that is the only moment when you truly are yourself.

They fell silent. Her cheeks were moist with a light film of moisture. Her breast rose and fell, in silence. She stared at the flame of the candles, and absently scraped at the wax that had run down the side of the candlestick. He tapped the keys, watching her. They exchanged a few more strained words, in a curt and rough tone, then tried at some commonplace remarks, and fell altogether silent, afraid to go deeper…

The next day, they barely spoke to each other; they looked at each other furtively, with a kind of fear. But they fell into the habit of making music together in the evenings. They soon began doing so in the afternoons as well; and every day, a little more. Always the same incomprehensible passion seized her from the very first chords, burning her from head to foot, and turning this little bourgeois woman, for the duration of the music, into an imperious Venus, the incarnation of all the furies of the soul.

Braun, surprised by Anna’s sudden infatuation with singing, had not troubled himself to seek an explanation for this female whim; he attended these little concerts, beat time with his head, offered his opinion, and was perfectly happy, though he would have preferred something gentler: this expenditure of energy seemed to him excessive. Christophe sensed danger in the air around him; but his head was spinning --- weakened by the crisis he had just been through, he offered no resistance, and lost awareness of what was passing within him, without penetrating what was passing within Anna. One afternoon, in the middle of a piece, at the height of a torrent of frantic ardor, she stopped and, without a word, left the room. Christophe waited: she did not come back. Half an hour later, passing through the corridor near Anna’s room, he glimpsed through the half-open door, at the far end, her figure absorbed in somber prayers, her face frozen.

Meanwhile, a little --- a very little --- trust was quietly taking root between them. He tried to draw her out about her past; she said only commonplace things; with great difficulty, piece by piece, he managed to extract a few precise details. Thanks to Braun’s good-natured and easily indiscreet openness, he succeeded in glimpsing the secret of her life.

She had been born in the city. Her maiden name was Anna-Maria Senfl. Her father, Martin Senfl, belonged to an old merchant family, centuries-old and wealthy, where caste pride and religious rigorism had run to seed. An adventurous spirit, he had, like many of his compatriots, spent several years abroad --- in the Orient, in South America; he had even undertaken daring explorations in central Asia, driven there by the commercial interests of his firm, a love of science, and his own pleasure. In rolling through the world, he had not merely failed to gather moss --- he had shed whatever had been clinging to him, all his old prejudices. So much so that, on returning home, being of warm temperament and stubborn mind, he married --- to the outraged protests of his family --- the daughter of a farmer from the surrounding countryside, of doubtful reputation, whom he had first taken as a mistress. Marriage had been the only means he could find to keep that beautiful woman for himself, a woman he could no longer do without. The family, after vetoing the match in vain, closed itself entirely to the one who had flouted its sacrosanct authority. The city --- all those who mattered --- showing their usual solidarity in what touched the moral dignity of the community, took sides en masse against the imprudent couple. The explorer learned at his own expense that there is no less danger in crossing the prejudices of people in the land of followers of Christ than among those of the Grand Lama. He was not strong enough to do without the opinion of the world. He had more than eaten into his share of the family fortune; he found employment nowhere: every door was shut to him. He wore himself out in futile rages against the affronts of the pitiless city. His health, undermined by excess and fevers, could not withstand it. He died of a stroke, five months after the marriage. Four months later, his wife --- a decent enough woman, but weak and of limited intelligence, who since her wedding had not passed a single day without weeping --- died in childbirth, casting upon the shore she was leaving the little Anna.

Martin’s mother was still living. She had forgiven nothing, even on their deathbeds --- not her son, nor the woman she had refused to acknowledge as her daughter-in-law. But when that woman was gone, --- divine vengeance having been appeased, --- she took the child and kept her. She was a woman of narrow piety; rich and miserly, she ran a silk goods shop on a dark street in the old part of the city. She treated her son’s daughter less as a granddaughter than as an orphan one takes in out of charity and who owes one in return a kind of half-domestic servitude. She did, however, give her a careful education; but she never relaxed her suspicious severity toward her; it seemed as though she considered the child guilty of her parents’ sin and was relentless in pursuing that sin within her. She allowed her no diversions; she hunted down nature, as a crime, in her gestures, her words, even her thoughts. She killed joy in that young life. Anna was trained early on to be bored at chapel and not to show it; she was surrounded by the terrors of hell; her child’s eyes, with their sly lids, saw them every Sunday at the door of the old Münster, in the form of indecent and contorted statues between whose legs a fire burns and up whose thighs toads and serpents crawl. She grew accustomed to suppressing her instincts, to lying to herself. As soon as she was old enough to help her grandmother, she was put to work from morning to night in the gloomy and dark shop. She took on the habits that prevailed around her: that spirit of order, of joyless economy, of needless self-denial, that bored indifference, that contemptuous and sullen view of life which is the natural consequence of religious belief in those who are not religious by nature. She absorbed herself in devotion to such a degree that she seemed excessive even to the old woman; she overdid fasts and mortifications; for a time, she took to wearing a corset fitted with pins that dug into her flesh with every movement. She was seen to turn pale; but no one knew what ailed her. At last, when she fell faint, a doctor was summoned. She refused to be examined --- (she would sooner have died than undressed before a man) --- but she confessed; and the doctor made such a violent scene that she promised never to do it again. The grandmother, to be safe, thereafter subjected her dress to inspections. Anna did not find in these tortures, as one might have supposed, a mystical pleasure; she had little imagination, and would not have understood the poetry of a Francis of Assisi or a Saint Teresa. Her piety was bleak and material. When she tormented herself, it was not for the rewards she expected in the life to come --- it was out of a cruel boredom that turned back upon herself, finding an almost malicious pleasure in the pain she inflicted. By a singular exception, that hard and cold spirit --- like her grandmother’s --- opened itself to music, without knowing how deep the opening went. She was closed to the other arts; she had perhaps never truly looked at a painting in her life; she seemed to have no sense of plastic beauty, so completely did she lack taste, out of proud and willful indifference; the idea of a beautiful body awakened in her only the idea of nudity --- that is, as with the peasant Tolstoy describes, a feeling of repugnance, all the stronger in Anna because she perceived obscurely, in her relations with people who pleased her greatly, far more the dull spur of desire than the quiet impression of aesthetic judgment. She suspected her own beauty no more than she suspected the force of her repressed instincts; or rather, she did not wish to suspect them; and with her habit of inner deception, she managed to deceive herself.

Braun had met her at a wedding dinner where she found herself by way of exception: for she was seldom invited anywhere, owing to the bad reputation the indecency of her origins continued to bring her. She was twenty-two. He noticed her. Not that she was trying to be noticed. Sitting beside him at table, stiff and badly dressed, she barely opened her mouth to speak. But Braun, who never stopped talking with her --- that is to say, entirely by himself, throughout the meal --- came away full of enthusiasm. With his usual perceptiveness, he had been struck by the air of virginal candor his neighbor wore; he had admired her good sense and her composure; he also appreciated her robust health and the solid domestic qualities she seemed to possess. He paid a call on the grandmother, came back, made his proposal, and was accepted. No dowry: Madame Senfl was leaving the family fortune to the city, for commercial missions.

At no moment had the young woman felt any love for her husband: that was a thought which seemed to her to have no place in an honest life, one to be pushed aside as something guilty. But she knew the value of Braun’s kindness; she was grateful to him, without showing it, for having married her despite her doubtful origins. She also had a strong sense of conjugal honor. In the seven years they had been married, nothing had disturbed their union. They lived side by side, understood each other not at all, and were not troubled by it in the least: in the eyes of the world, they were the model of an ideal couple. They rarely went out. Braun had a fairly large practice, but he had not managed to win his wife any acceptance in it. She did not please people; and the stain of her birth had not yet been entirely erased. Anna, for her part, made no effort to be admitted into society. She harbored a grudge for the slights that had saddened her childhood. Besides, she was ill at ease in company, and did not complain when she was overlooked. She made and received a few indispensable visits that her husband’s interests required. Her callers were small-minded bourgeois women, curious and given to gossip. Their chatter held no interest for Anna; she did not bother to conceal her indifference. That is something that is never forgiven. And so the visits grew more infrequent, and Anna was left alone. That was what she wanted: nothing came any longer to disturb the dream she was forever brooding on, nor the dim hum stirring in her flesh.

For some weeks now, however, Anna had seemed unwell. Her face had grown hollow and pale. She avoided the presence of Christophe and Braun. She spent her days in her room, sinking into her thoughts, not answering when spoken to. Braun was not overly troubled, as a rule, by these feminine moods. He explained them to Christophe. Like nearly all men destined to be duped by women, he prided himself on knowing them very well. And he did know them well enough, in fact --- which is of no use whatsoever. He knew that women often fall into fits of stubborn reverie, of willful and hostile silence; and he believed that at such times one must leave them alone, make no attempt to shed light on things, and above all not try to make them shed light on the dangerous unconscious world in which their minds are steeped. Nevertheless, he was beginning to worry about Anna’s health. He concluded that her wilting came from her way of life --- forever shut indoors, never leaving the city, scarcely even leaving the house. He insisted that she take walks. He could rarely accompany her: on Sundays she was occupied with her religious duties; on other days he had his consultations. As for Christophe, he avoided going out with her. Once or twice they had taken a brief walk together at the edge of town: they had been bored to death. Conversation stalled. Nature seemed not to exist for Anna; she noticed nothing; every landscape was, to her, just grass and stones; her insensibility chilled him. Christophe had tried to make her admire a beautiful view. She looked, smiled coldly, and said, making an effort to please him:

--- Oh! yes, it’s mystical…

In the same way she might have said:

--- There’s a lot of sun.

In irritation, Christophe had dug his nails into the palm of his hand. After that, he asked nothing more of her; and whenever she went out, he found a pretext to stay at home.

In truth, it was not the case that Anna was insensible to nature. She did not care for what are conventionally called beautiful landscapes: she could not distinguish them from any others. But she loved the countryside, whatever it might be --- the earth and the air. Only, she was no more aware of this than of her other strongest feelings; and anyone who lived with her was even less aware of it.

After much insisting, Braun persuaded his wife to take a day trip to the surrounding area. She gave in out of boredom, to have some peace. The outing was arranged for a Sunday. At the last moment, the doctor --- who had been looking forward to it with childlike joy --- was detained by an urgent case. Christophe set out with Anna.

Fine winter weather, no snow: pure cold air, clear sky, bright sun, with a biting north wind. They took a small local railway that connected to one of those ridges of blue hills forming a distant halo around the city. Their compartment was full; they were separated from each other. They did not speak. Anna was somber; the evening before, to Braun’s surprise, she had declared she would not attend the service the next morning. It was the first time in her life she had missed it. Was it an act of rebellion?… Who could have said what battles were being waged within her? She stared fixedly at the seat in front of her; she was pale; she was gnawing at herself.

They got off the train. Their cold hostility did not lift at the start of the walk. They moved side by side; she walked at a brisk pace, paying no attention to anything; her hands were free; her arms swung at her sides; her heels rang on the frozen ground. --- Little by little, her face came alive. The speed of their walking flushed her pale cheeks with pink. Her lips parted to drink in the cool air. At the bend of a path that climbed in switchbacks, she began scaling the hill in a straight line, like a goat; along the edge of a quarry, at the risk of falling, she grabbed hold of shrubs. Christophe followed. She climbed faster, slipping and catching herself again with her hands on clumps of grass. Christophe called out to her to stop. She did not answer and kept climbing, bent forward on all fours. They passed through the mist hanging over the valley like a silver gauze, tearing itself on the bushes; and they emerged into the warm sunlight above. When she reached the summit she turned around; her face had brightened; her mouth was open, breathing hard. She looked at Christophe with ironic eyes as he labored up the slope, pulled off her coat, threw it in his face, and then, without waiting for him to catch his breath, set off running again. Christophe gave chase. They were both warming to the game; the air was going to their heads. She launched herself down a steep slope; stones rolled under her feet; she did not stumble --- she slid, leaped, shot like an arrow. From time to time she glanced back to gauge how far ahead of Christophe she was. He was gaining on her. She plunged into a wood. The dead leaves crackled underfoot; the branches she had pushed aside whipped him in the face. She caught her foot on the root of a tree. He seized her. She struggled, fighting with hands and feet, striking him hard, trying to bring him down; she was crying out and laughing. Her chest heaved against him; for an instant their cheeks brushed; he tasted the sweat that was dampening Anna’s temples; he breathed in the scent of her damp hair. With a powerful shove she broke free and looked at him, without agitation, her eyes defying him. He was astonished by the strength that was in her --- a strength she never used in ordinary life.

They went on to the nearest village, treading lightly over the dry stubble, which sprang back under their feet. Ahead of them, crows that had been searching the fields took to the air. The sun burned, and the wind bit. He held Anna’s arm. She wore a light dress; through the fabric he felt her body warm and moist with heat. He wanted her to put her coat back on; she refused and, in a spirit of bravado, undid the clasp at her collar. They sat down at an inn whose sign bore the image of a “wild man” (Zum wilden Mann). In front of the door grew a small fir tree. The room was decorated with German quatrains, two color prints --- one sentimental: Im Frühling (In Springtime), the other patriotic: The Battle of St. Jakob --- and a crucifix with a skull at the foot of the cross. Anna ate with a voracious appetite Christophe had never seen in her before. They drank cheerfully of a light white wine. After the meal they set off again across the fields like two good companions. No awkward thoughts between them. They thought only of the pleasure of walking, of the blood singing in their veins, of the air stinging their faces. Anna’s tongue had loosened. She was no longer on her guard; she was saying, at random, whatever came to mind.

She spoke of her childhood: her grandmother used to take her to see a friend who lived near the cathedral; while the old ladies talked, she would be sent into the large garden that lay under the shadow of the Münster. She would sit in a corner and stay perfectly still; she listened to the trembling of the leaves, she watched the swarming of the insects; and she felt both pleasure and fear. --- (She omitted to say that she was afraid of devils: her imagination was haunted by them; she had been told that they prowled around churches without daring to enter; and she believed she could see them in the shapes of creatures --- spiders, lizards, ants, all the small misshapen life that swarmed around her under the leaves, on the ground, or in the cracks of the walls.) --- Then she spoke of the house where she had grown up, of her sunless room; she remembered it with pleasure; she had spent nights there without sleeping, telling herself stories…

--- What kinds of stories?

--- Wild ones.

--- Tell me.

She shook her head to say no.

--- Why not?

She blushed, then laughed, and added:

--- And during the day too, while I was working.

She thought about it for a moment, laughed again, and concluded:

--- They were wild stories, wicked stories.

He said, jokingly:

--- Weren’t you afraid, then?

--- Of what?

--- Of being damned?

Her face went cold.

--- One shouldn’t speak of that, she said.

He turned the conversation. He remarked on the strength she had shown a little while ago, in their struggle. She recovered her open expression and told him about her feats as a little girl --- (she said: “as a boy,” for when she was a child she had longed to join in the games and fights of boys). --- Once, with a small companion who was a full head taller than she was, she had suddenly thrown a punch at him, hoping he would hit back. But he had run off, crying that she was beating him. Another time, in the country, she had climbed onto the back of a black cow grazing in a field; the startled animal had thrown her against a tree: Anna had nearly been killed. She had also decided to jump from a first-floor window because she had dared herself to do it: she was lucky to get away with nothing worse than a sprained ankle. She invented strange and dangerous exercises when she was left alone in the house; she subjected her body to ordeals of all sorts.

--- Who would ever believe that of you, he said, seeing how serious you always look?…

--- Oh! she said, if you could see me, on certain days, in my room, when I’m alone!

--- What! even now?

She laughed. She asked him --- jumping from one subject to another --- whether he hunted. He protested that he did not. She said she had once fired a rifle at a blackbird and hit it. He was indignant.

--- Well! she said, what does it matter?

--- Have you no heart?

--- I really don’t know.

--- Don’t you think animals are beings like us?

--- Yes, she said. In fact, I’ve been wanting to ask you: do you believe animals have souls?

--- Yes, I do believe that.

--- The pastor says no. And I think they do… Besides, she added with great seriousness, I believe I was an animal in a previous life.

He started to laugh.

--- There’s nothing to laugh about, she said. (She was laughing too.) It’s one of the stories I used to tell myself as a child. I imagined being a cat, a dog, a bird, a colt, a heifer. I felt their desires. I would have liked to be inside their fur or their feathers for an hour; it seemed to me that I was. Don’t you understand that?

--- You’re a strange creature. But if you feel that kinship with animals, how can you do them harm?

--- One always does harm to someone. Some people do harm to me; I do harm to others. That’s the way it is. I’m not complaining. You mustn’t be so soft-hearted, in life! I even harm myself, by choice!

--- Yourself?

--- Myself. Look. One day, with a hammer, I drove a nail into this hand.

--- Why?

--- For no reason.

(She did not say that she had wanted to crucify herself.)

--- Give me your hand, she said.

--- What do you want with it?

--- Give it here.

He gave her his hand. She took it and squeezed it hard enough to make him cry out. They played at hurting each other as much as possible, like two peasants. They were happy, without a care in the world. Everything else --- the chains of their lives, the sadness of the past, the dread of the future, the storm gathering within them --- all of it had vanished.

They had walked several leagues; they felt no fatigue. Suddenly she stopped, threw herself on the ground, stretched out on the stubble, and said nothing more. Lying on her back with her arms behind her head, she looked up at the sky. What peace! What sweetness!… A few steps away, a hidden spring welled up with an intermittent jet, like a beating artery, now faint, now stronger. The horizon was pearlescent. A haze floated over the violet earth, from which bare black trees rose up. Late-winter sun, pale young fair sun falling asleep. Like bright arrows, birds cleft the air. The gentle voices of country bells called to one another, answering back, from village to village… Sitting near her, Christophe gazed at Anna. She was not thinking of him. A deep joy washed over her. Her beautiful mouth was smiling in silence. He thought:

--- “Is it really you? I no longer recognize you.

--- “Nor do I, nor do I. I think I am someone else. I’m not afraid anymore; I’m not afraid of Him anymore… Ah! How He suffocated me, how He made me suffer! It’s as though I were nailed inside my coffin. …Now I can breathe; this body, this heart is mine. My body. My dear body. My heart, free and loving. So much happiness inside me! And I didn’t know it, I didn’t know myself! What had you made of me?…”

Thus he thought he heard her sigh softly. But she was thinking of nothing, only that she was happy, and that all was well.

Evening was already falling. Beneath curtains of gray and lilac mist, by four o’clock the sun, weary of living, had disappeared. Christophe rose and drew close to Anna. He leaned over her. She turned her gaze toward him, still full of the vertigo of the great sky over which she had been suspended. Several seconds passed before she recognized him. Then her eyes fixed on him with an enigmatic smile that communicated their disturbance to him. To escape it, he closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, she was still looking at him; and it seemed to him that days had passed while they looked at each other this way. It was as though they were reading into each other’s souls. But they did not want to know what they had read.

He held out his hand to her. She took it, without a word. They made their way back to the village, visible down below in the hollow of the valley, its towers capped like the suit of spades; one of them bore on the peak of its mossy-tiled roof, like a cap on a brow, an empty stork’s nest. At the crossroads of two paths, near the entrance to the village, they passed a fountain on which a small Catholic saint, a wooden Madeleine, graceful and slightly precious, stood with arms outstretched. Responding to her gesture, Anna, in an instinctive movement, held out her own arms to her, and climbing onto the rim, she filled the pretty goddess’s hands with branches of holly and clusters of rowan berries still red, spared by the birds’ beaks and the frost.

They crossed paths on the road with groups of peasant men and women in their Sunday best. Women with very dark skin, brightly flushed cheeks, thick chignons coiled like shells, light-colored dresses, flowered hats. They wore white gloves and red wrists. They sang respectable songs with shrill, placid, not quite accurate voices. Inside a stable, a cow was lowing. A child with whooping cough was coughing in a house. From a little farther off came the sounds of a nasal clarinet and a cornet. People were dancing in the village square, between the tavern and the cemetery. Perched on a table, four musicians played. Anna and Christophe sat down in front of the inn and watched the dancers. The couples jostled each other and called out in great noise. The girls shrieked, for the pleasure of shrieking. The drinkers beat time on the tables with their fists. At any other time, this heavy joy would have disgusted Anna; this evening, she reveled in it; she had taken off her hat and was watching with an animated face. Christophe was bursting with laughter at the burlesque gravity of the music and the musicians. He rummaged in his pockets, took out a pencil, and on the back of an inn bill, began to trace bars and notes: he was writing dances. The page was soon filled; he asked for more, which he covered, like the first, with his large impatient and clumsy handwriting. Anna, her cheek near his, read over his shoulder, humming softly; she tried to guess the end of the phrases, and she clapped her hands when she had guessed correctly, or when her expectations were confounded by an unexpected flourish. When he had finished, Christophe brought what he had just written to the musicians. They were good Swabians who knew their trade: they sight-read without flinching. The tunes had a sentimental and burlesque humor, with lurching rhythms, as if punctuated by bursts of laughter. There was no resisting their impetuous buffoonery: your legs danced in spite of themselves. Anna threw herself into the round; she grabbed two hands at random and spun like a madwoman; a tortoiseshell pin flew from her hair; curls came loose and fell over her cheeks. Christophe never took his eyes off her; he admired this beautiful robust creature who had until now been condemned to silence and stillness by a merciless discipline; she appeared to him as no one had ever seen her, as she really was beneath the borrowed mask: a Bacchante, drunk with strength. She called to him. He ran to her and seized her. They danced and danced until they went spinning into a wall. They stopped, dizzy. Night had fully fallen. They rested a moment, then took their leave of the company. Anna, so stiff as a rule with common people, out of awkwardness or contempt, held out her hand warmly to the musicians, the innkeeper, the village boys beside whom she had been dancing in the round.

They found themselves alone under the bright, frozen sky, retracing through the fields the path they had followed that morning. Anna was still all animated. Gradually she spoke less, then fell silent, as if taken by fatigue or by the mysterious emotion of the night. She leaned affectionately on Christophe. As they descended the slope she had climbed so lightly a few hours before, she sighed. They reached the station. Near the first house, he stopped to look at her. She looked at him too, and smiled at him sadly. On the train, the same crowd as on the way out. They could not talk. Seated across from her, he watched her tenderly. She had her eyes lowered; she lifted them toward him, sensing his gaze; then she turned them away, and he could no longer draw them back to his side. She looked outside, into the night. A vague smile floated on her lips, with a touch of fatigue at the corners. Then the smile disappeared. Her expression turned somber. He thought she was absorbed in the rhythm of the train, and he tried to speak to her. She replied coldly, in a single word, without turning her head. He tried to persuade himself that fatigue was the cause of this change; but he knew well that the reason was otherwise. As they drew closer to the city, he saw Anna’s face grow rigid, life extinguish itself, all that beautiful body with its wild grace retreat back into its sheath of stone. She did not lean on the hand he held out to her as they stepped off the train. They came home in silence.

A few days later, around four in the afternoon, they were alone together. Braun had gone out. Since the day before, the city had been wrapped in a pale green fog. The rumble of the invisible river rose up. The flashes of electric trams burst through the mist. The light of day was going out, smothered; it seemed to belong to no particular time: it was one of those hours in which all consciousness of reality is lost, an hour that stands outside the centuries. After the biting breeze of the preceding days, the damp air had suddenly softened, grown too mild and too slack. Snow was swelling the sky, which bent under the weight.

They were alone together in the sitting room, whose cold, cramped taste reflected the mistress of the house. They said nothing. He was reading. She was sewing. He stood up and went to the window; he pressed his broad face against the panes and stood there dreaming; the pallid light reverberating from the dark sky to the livid earth made him dizzy; his thoughts were uneasy; he tried in vain to fix them: they slipped away from him. An anguish crept over him: he felt himself being swallowed up; and in the void of his being, from the depths of accumulated ruin, a burning wind rose in slow spirals. He had his back to Anna; she could not see him, she was absorbed in her work; but a slight shiver passed through her body; she pricked herself several times with her needle and did not feel it. They were both fascinated by the approach of danger.

He tore himself from his numbness and took a few steps across the room. The piano drew him and frightened him. He avoided looking at it. Passing beside it, his hand could not resist; it touched a key. The sound vibrated like a voice. Anna started and let her work fall. Already Christophe had sat down and was playing. He perceived, without seeing her, that Anna had risen, that she was coming, that she was there. Before he was aware of what he was doing, he took up the ardent, religious air she had sung the first time she had revealed herself to him; he improvised on the theme in impassioned variations. Without his having said a word, she began to sing. They lost all sense of what surrounded them. The sacred frenzy of the music caught them up in its talons…

O music, you who open the abysses of the soul! You ruin the habitual equilibrium of the mind. In ordinary life, ordinary souls are closed rooms; within them wither the unemployed forces, the virtues and vices whose use would inconvenience us; wise practical reason, cowardly common sense, hold the keys to the room. They reveal only a few cupboards, neatly arranged in a bourgeois fashion. But music holds the magic bough that makes the locks fall. The doors open. The demons of the heart appear. And the soul sees itself naked, for the first time. --- As long as the siren sings, as long as her bewitching voice vibrates, the tamer holds the wild beasts under his gaze. The powerful reason of a great musician fascinates the passions he unleashes. But when the music has fallen silent, when the tamer is no longer there, the passions he has awakened continue to growl in the shaken cage, and they seek their prey…

The melody ended. Silence… She had, while singing, rested her hand on Christophe’s shoulder. They dared not stir; and they realized they were trembling. Suddenly --- it was a flash of lightning --- she leaned toward him, he turned toward her; their mouths joined; her breath entered into him…

She pushed him away and fled. He remained motionless in the shadow. Braun came in. They sat down to table. Christophe was incapable of thought. Anna seemed absent; she looked “elsewhere.” Shortly after supper, she went to her room. Christophe, who could not have stayed alone with Braun, retired as well.

Around midnight, the doctor, already in bed, was called to a patient. Christophe heard him come down the stairs and go out. It had been snowing since six o’clock. The houses and streets were buried. The air was like wadded cotton. Not a footstep, not a carriage outside. The city seemed dead. Christophe did not sleep. He felt a terror growing with each passing minute. He could not move. Nailed to his bed on his back, his eyes were open. A metallic brightness, rising from the earth and the rooftops clothed in whiteness, rubbed along the walls of the room… An imperceptible sound made him start. Only his feverish ear could have heard it. A very soft rustling on the floor of the corridor. Christophe sat up in his bed. The slight sound drew nearer, stopped; a floorboard creaked. Someone was behind the door; someone was waiting… Complete stillness, for several seconds, perhaps several minutes… Christophe had stopped breathing; he was bathed in sweat. Snowflakes outside grazed the windowpane, like a wing. A hand felt for the door, which opened. On the threshold, a whiteness appeared, moving slowly forward; a few steps from the bed, it paused. Christophe could make out nothing; but he heard it breathing; and he heard his own heart beating. She came close to the bed. She stopped again. Their faces were so near that their breath mingled. Their gazes sought each other, without finding each other, in the shadow… She fell upon him. They embraced in silence, without a word, with fury…

One hour, two hours, a century later. The front door of the house opened. Anna pulled free from the embrace that bound them, slipped out of the bed, and left Christophe without a word, as she had come. He heard her bare feet moving away, brushing the floor with their quick touch. She returned to her room, where Braun found her lying down, appearing to sleep. Thus she remained all night, eyes open, without a breath, motionless, in the narrow bed beside the sleeping Braun. How many nights she had already spent this way!

Christophe did not sleep either. He was in despair. This man brought to matters of love and especially of marriage a tragic seriousness. He hated the frivolity of those writers whose art makes a spice of adultery. Adultery inspired in him a repulsion in which his popular bluntness and his moral pride were combined. He felt at once a religious respect and a physical disgust for the woman who belongs to another man. The promiscuity of dogs in which a certain European elite lives turned his stomach. Adultery consented to by the husband is filth; without the husband’s knowledge, it is the ignoble lie of a vile servant who hides in order to betray and soil his master. How many times had he mercilessly despised those he had seen guilty of this cowardice! He had broken with friends who had so dishonored themselves in his eyes… And now he himself had stained himself with the same ignominy! The circumstances of his crime made it more odious still. He had come to this house, sick and wretched. A friend had taken him in, helped him, consoled him. His kindness had never failed. Nothing had worn it out. He owed him his life. And in return, he had just stolen from this man his honor and his happiness, his humble domestic happiness! He had betrayed him basely, and with whom? With a woman he did not know, did not understand, did not love… Did not love? His whole blood revolted. Love was too weak a word to express the torrent of fire that burned in him whenever he thought of her. It was not love, and it was a thousand times more than love… He spent the night in a tempest. He rose, plunged his face into ice-cold water, suffocated and shivered. The crisis ended in a fit of fever.

When he got up, shattered, he thought how much more she must be overwhelmed with shame than he was. He went to his window. The sun shone on the dazzling snow. In the garden, Anna was hanging laundry on a line. Absorbed in her task, nothing seemed to trouble her. She had a dignity of movement and gesture entirely new to him, one that led her, without thinking, to find the poses of a statue.

At the midday meal, they saw each other again. Braun was away for the entire day. Christophe could never have borne to face him. He wanted to speak with Anna. But they were not alone; the maid kept coming and going; they had to watch themselves. Christophe searched in vain for Anna’s gaze. She looked at no one. No sign of disturbance, and still in her slightest movements that same unwonted assurance and nobility. After dinner, he hoped they might finally talk; but the maid lingered over clearing the table; and when they moved into the adjoining room, she managed to follow them there; she always had something to fetch or return; she prowled about in the corridor, near the half-open door that Anna showed no hurry to close: one might have thought she was watching them. Anna sat down near the window with her eternal needlework. Christophe, sunk in an armchair, his back to the light, had an open book he was not reading. Anna, who could catch a side view of him, glimpsed in a single glance his tormented face staring at the wall; and she smiled, cruelly. From the roof of the house, from the garden tree, the melting snow dripped onto the sand with a faint tinkling. In the distance, the laughter of children chasing each other in the street, hurling snowballs. Anna seemed to be dozing. The silence was torturing Christophe; he could have cried out in pain.

At last the maid went down to the floor below and left the house. Christophe got up, turned toward Anna, and was about to say:

--- Anna! Anna! What have we done?

Anna was looking at him; her eyes, which had been stubbornly lowered, had just reopened; they settled on Christophe with their consuming fire. Christophe received the blow in his eyes and staggered; everything he had meant to say was struck out in a single stroke. They moved toward each other, and once more they seized one another…

The shadow of evening was spreading. Their blood still thundered. She lay stretched on the bed, her dress torn away, her arms spread wide, not even making a gesture to cover her body. He had buried his face in the pillow and was groaning. She raised herself toward him, lifted his head, caressing his eyes and mouth with her fingers; she brought her face close, she plunged her gaze into Christophe’s gaze. Her eyes had the depth of a lake; they smiled, indifferent to suffering. Consciousness faded. He fell silent. Tremors moved through them like great waves…

That night, alone, back in his room, Christophe thought of killing himself.

The following day, barely up, he sought Anna out. Now it was he whose eyes avoided the other’s. The moment he met them, what he had to say fled from his mind. He made the effort nonetheless, and began to speak of the cowardice of their act. She had scarcely understood him when she violently shut his mouth with her hand. She drew back from him, brows contracted, lips pressed tight, with a malevolent expression. He went on. She threw to the floor the needlework she was holding and opened the door, wanting to leave. He seized her hands, shut the door, and said bitterly that she was lucky indeed to be able to wipe from her mind all thought of the wrong they had done. She struggled like a trapped animal, and cried out in anger:

--- Be quiet!… Coward, can’t you see what I’m suffering!… I don’t want you to talk. Leave me!

Her face had grown hollow, her gaze hateful and fearful, like that of an animal that has been hurt; her eyes would have killed him, had they been able. --- He let her go. She ran to the far corner of the room to put herself out of reach. He had no desire to pursue her. His heart was tight with bitterness and dread. Braun came home. They stared at him, dazed. Beyond their own suffering, nothing existed for them.

Christophe went out. Braun and Anna sat down to eat. In the middle of dinner, Braun rose abruptly to open the window: Anna had fainted.

Christophe disappeared from the city for two weeks, giving a journey as his excuse. Anna stayed the whole week shut in her room, except at mealtimes. She was reclaimed by her conscience, her habits, that whole past life from which she had thought herself free, from which one is never free. She tried in vain to close her eyes. Each day, remorse pressed further, went deeper into her heart; in the end it settled there. The following Sunday she again refused to go to church. But the Sunday after, she went back, and never left it again. She was defeated, not subdued. God was the enemy --- an enemy from whom she could not free herself. She went to him with the sullen anger of a slave compelled to obey. Her face, during the service, showed nothing but a hostile coldness; but in the depths of her soul, all her religious life was a ferocious struggle, a mute exasperation, against the Master whose reproach persecuted her. She pretended not to hear. She had to hear; and she argued bitterly with God, jaw clenched, brow furrowed with a stubborn crease, gaze hard. She thought of Christophe with hatred. She could not forgive him for having torn her for a moment from the prison of the soul, and for letting her fall back into it, prey to her tormentors. She no longer slept; she turned the same tormenting thoughts over and over, day and night; she did not complain; she went on, obstinate, continuing to manage everything in the house, to carry out every duty, keeping to the end the intractable and stubborn character of her will in daily life, whose tasks she fulfilled with the regularity of a machine. She grew thin; she seemed eaten away by an inner sickness. Braun questioned her with anxious affection; he wanted to examine her. She pushed him away furiously. The more remorse she felt toward him, the more harshly she spoke to him.

Christophe had resolved not to come back. He was wearing himself to pieces with exhaustion. He took long walks, subjected himself to punishing exercise; he rowed, he walked, he climbed mountains. Nothing managed to put out the fire.

He was more at the mercy of passion than most men. This is a necessity of the nature of genius. Even the most chaste --- Beethoven, Bruckner --- must be constantly in love; all human forces in them are heightened; and since in them those forces are captured by imagination, their minds are prey to perpetual passions. These are most often only passing flames; one destroys another; and all are absorbed by the great conflagration of the creative spirit. But let the ardor of the forge cease to fill the soul, and the soul, defenseless, is surrendered to passions it cannot do without; it desires them, it creates them; they must devour it… --- And then, alongside the keen desire that furrows the flesh, there is the need for tenderness that drives the weary and disillusioned man into the maternal arms of the consoler. A great man is more a child than others; more than others, he needs to confide in a woman, to rest his brow on the soft palms of a friend’s hands, in the hollow of a dress spread between her knees.

But Christophe did not understand this… He did not believe in the fatality of passion --- that romantic foolishness. He believed in the duty and the power to struggle, in the strength of his will… His will! Where was it? Not a trace of it remained. He was possessed. The goad of memory tormented him, day and night. The scent of Anna’s body floated around him. He was like a heavy, disabled vessel, without a rudder, given over to the wind. In vain he tried to flee, wearing himself out in flight: he always found himself brought back to the same place; and he cried out to the wind:

--- Break me, then! What do you want of me?

He questioned himself feverishly. Why, why this woman?… Why did he love her? Not for any qualities of heart or mind. He had known others more intelligent and better. Not for her body. He had had other mistresses his senses preferred. What was it, then? --- “One loves because one loves.” --- Yes, but there is a reason, even if it surpasses ordinary reason. Madness? That says nothing. Why this madness?

Because there is a hidden soul, blind powers, demons, that each person carries imprisoned within. All our effort, since humanity has existed, has been to oppose to this inner sea the dikes of our reason and our religions. But let a storm come (and richer souls are more subject to storms), let the dikes give way, let the demons have free rein, let them encounter other souls roused by similar powers… They hurl themselves upon one another. Hatred, or love? Fury of mutual destruction? --- Passion is the predatory soul.

The sea is unleashed. Who will put it back in its bed? --- Then one must call upon someone more powerful than oneself. Upon Neptune, god of the deep.

After two weeks of futile efforts to flee, Christophe returned to Anna’s house. He could no longer live away from her. He was suffocating.

Yet he continued to struggle. On the evening of his return, they found pretexts not to see each other, not to dine together; at night, they each locked themselves fearfully in their own room. --- But it was stronger than everything. In the middle of the night, she fled barefoot, came to knock at his door; he opened it; she lay down beside him, chilled to the bone. She was weeping quietly. He felt those tears running on his cheek. She tried to calm herself; but her grief overcame her; and she sobbed, her lips pressed against Christophe’s neck. Shaken by that grief, he forgot his own; he tried to calm her, speaking tender, consoling words. She moaned:

--- I am unhappy, I wish I were dead…

Her lament pierced his heart. He tried to embrace her. She pushed him away:

--- I hate you!… Why did you come?

She tore herself from his arms, flung herself to the other side of the bed. The bed was narrow. Despite their efforts to avoid each other, they touched. Anna had her back to Christophe and was trembling with rage and grief. She hated him, to the point of death. Christophe was silent, stricken. In the silence, Anna heard his labored breathing; she turned sharply, put her arms around his neck:

--- Poor Christophe! she said. I am making you suffer…

For the first time, he heard that note of pity in her voice.

--- Forgive me, she said.

He said:

--- Let us forgive each other.

She sat up as if she could no longer breathe. Seated in the bed, bowed over, crushed, she said:

--- I am lost… God has willed it. He has delivered me up… What can I do against Him?

She remained like that a long time, then lay back down and did not move again. A faint glimmer announced the dawn. In the half-light, he saw the anguished face touching his. He murmured:

--- Daylight.

She did not stir.

He said:

--- So be it. What does it matter?

She opened her eyes again, got out of bed, with an expression of mortal exhaustion. Seated on the edge, she stared at the floor. In a colorless voice, she said:

--- I thought of killing him, last night.

He started with terror.

--- Anna! he said.

She was staring at the window, with a somber look.

--- Anna! he repeated. In God’s name!… Not him!… He is the best of men…

She repeated:

--- Not him. Yes.

They looked at each other.

They had known it for a long time. They knew what the only way out was. They could not bear to live in the lie. And never had they even considered the possibility of running away together. They were not unaware that it would solve nothing: for the worst suffering lay not in the external obstacles that separated them, but within themselves, in their different souls. It was equally impossible for them to live together as not to live together. They were cornered.

From that moment on, they no longer touched each other: the shadow of death was upon them; they were sacred to one another.

But they avoided setting a date. They said to themselves: “Tomorrow, tomorrow…” And from that tomorrow they turned their eyes away. Christophe’s powerful soul had bursts of revolt; he would not consent to defeat; he despised suicide, and he could not resign himself to this pitiful and truncated conclusion to a great life. As for Anna, how could she have accepted, without being forced to it, the idea of a death that led to eternal death? But the murderous necessity was hunting them down, and the circle closed slowly around them.

That morning, for the first time since his betrayal, Christophe found himself face to face with Braun. Until then he had managed to avoid him. The encounter was unbearable. He had to invent a pretext for not eating at table beside him: the food caught in his throat. To shake his hand, to eat his bread, the kiss of Judas!… The most odious thing was not the contempt he felt for himself --- it was the anguish of what Braun would suffer if he found out. That thought crucified him. He knew all too well that poor Braun would never take revenge, that he might not even find the strength to hate them; but what a collapse!… With what eyes would he look at him! Christophe felt himself incapable of facing the reproach in those eyes. --- And it was inevitable that sooner or later Braun would be told. Did he not already suspect something? Seeing him again after a fortnight’s absence, Christophe was struck by the change: Braun was no longer the same. His cheerfulness had vanished, or it had something forced about it. At table he stole glances at Anna, who said nothing, who ate nothing, who was consuming herself like a lamp. With timid, touching attentiveness he tried to occupy himself with her; she rebuffed his attentions sharply; then he lowered his eyes to his plate and fell silent. In the middle of the meal Anna, who was suffocating, threw her napkin on the table and left. The two men finished dinner in silence, or pretended to; they did not dare look up. When it was over, Christophe was about to leave when Braun suddenly seized his arm with both hands.

--- Christophe!… he said.

Christophe, shaken, looked at him.

--- Christophe, Braun repeated --- (his voice was trembling) --- do you know what is wrong with her?

Christophe felt himself pierced through; for a moment he could not reply. Braun looked at him timidly; very quickly, he was excusing himself:

--- You see her often, she trusts you…

Christophe was on the verge of seizing Braun’s hands and begging his forgiveness. Braun saw Christophe’s devastated face; and at once, terrified, he chose not to see; imploring him with his eyes, he stammered hurriedly, breathed out the words:

--- No, isn’t that right? you know nothing?

Christophe, overwhelmed, said:

--- No.

Oh, the pain of being unable to accuse oneself, to humble oneself, when to do so would be to tear out the heart of the very person one has wronged! The pain of being unable to speak the truth, when one reads in the eyes of the one who asks it that he does not want --- he does not want to know the truth!…

--- Good, good, thank you, I thank you… said Braun.

He stood there, his hands clinging to Christophe’s sleeve, as though he wished to ask him something more, not daring to, avoiding his eyes. Then he let go, sighed, and went away.

Christophe was crushed by his new lie. He ran to Anna. He told her, stammering with distress, what had happened. Anna listened with a blank look and said:

--- Well then, let him find out! What does it matter?

--- How can you say such a thing? cried Christophe. It’s terrible! At no price, at no price, do I want him to suffer.

Anna flew into a rage.

--- And if he suffers? Am I not suffering too? Let him suffer as well!

They spoke bitter words to each other. He accused her of loving no one but herself. She reproached him for thinking more of her husband than of her.

But a moment later, when he told her he could no longer live this way, that he was going to confess everything to Braun, it was she in turn who called him selfish, crying that she cared little for Christophe’s conscience, but that Braun must know nothing.

Despite her harsh words, she thought of Braun as much as Christophe did. Without having any genuine affection for her husband, she was attached to him. She had a religious respect for social bonds and the duties they impose. She did not perhaps think that a wife had a duty to be kind and to love her husband; but she thought she was obliged to fulfill the obligations of the household scrupulously and to remain faithful. It seemed to her shameful to have failed in that obligation, as she had done.

And even better than Christophe, she knew that Braun was bound to learn everything soon. She had some credit for concealing this from Christophe --- whether because she did not wish to add to his distress, or more likely out of pride.

However closed off Braun’s household might be, however secret the bourgeois tragedy playing itself out within it, something had already leaked to the outside.

In this city, no one can flatter himself that he can hide his life. That is a strange fact. In the streets, no one looks at you; the doors of houses and their shutters are closed. But there are mirrors hung at the corners of windows; and as you pass you hear the dry sound of venetian blinds opening and closing. No one takes any interest in you; it seems you are ignored; but you soon discover that not one of your words, not one of your gestures has been lost: people know what you have done, what you have said, what you have seen, what you have eaten; they know --- or flatter themselves that they know --- even what you have thought. An invisible, universal surveillance envelops you. Servants, shopkeepers, relatives, friends, indifferent acquaintances, unknown passersby --- all collaborate, by tacit consent, in this instinctive spying whose scattered elements are centralized by means no one can explain. It is not only your actions that are observed; your heart is scrutinized. In this city, no one has the right to keep the secret of his own conscience; and everyone has the right to lean over you, to rummage through your most intimate thoughts, and, if they offend public opinion, to call you to account for them. The invisible despotism of the collective soul weighs upon the individual; throughout his whole life he is like a child held in wardship; nothing of him belongs to him: he belongs to the city.

It had been enough for Anna to absent herself from church two Sundays in a row to awaken suspicion. In ordinary times no one seemed to notice her presence at worship; she lived apart, and the city, one would have said, forgot she existed. --- By the evening of the first Sunday she had not come, her absence was known everywhere, recorded in memory. The following Sunday, not one of the pious glances following the sacred words in the Book, or on the pastor’s lips, appeared distracted from its grave attention; not one had failed to note upon entry, to verify upon departure, that Anna’s pew had remained empty. The next day, Anna began receiving visits from people she had not seen for several months; they came on various pretexts, some fearing she might be ill, others taking a new interest in her affairs, her husband, her household; some showed themselves strangely well informed about what was going on in her home; none made any allusion --- (with a clumsy kind of tact) --- to her two Sundays’ absence from worship. Anna said she had been unwell, spoke of her occupations. The visitors listened attentively, approved: Anna knew they did not believe a word of what she said. Their eyes wandered around the room, probing, noting, recording. They maintained their cold affability with its noisy and affected manner; but one could see in their eyes the indiscreet curiosity devouring them. Two or three inquired, with exaggerated indifference, after M. Krafft.

A few days later --- (it was during Christophe’s absence) --- the pastor himself came. A handsome man, good-natured, in flourishing health, affable, with the imperturbable serenity conferred by the conviction of having truth, all truth, on one’s side. He inquired solicitously after his parishioner’s health, listened with polite distraction to the excuses she offered him and which he had not asked for, accepted a cup of tea, chatted pleasantly, apropos of the beverage expressed the opinion that the wine mentioned in the Bible was not an alcoholic drink, made a few citations, told an anecdote, and, just as he was leaving, made an obscure allusion to the danger of bad company, to certain excursions, to the spirit of impiety, to the immorality of dancing, to filthy lusts. He seemed to be addressing the age in general, not Anna. He fell silent for a moment, coughed, rose, charged Anna with his ceremonious compliments for Monsieur Braun, made a little joke in Latin, bowed, and left. --- Anna was left cold by the allusion. Was it an allusion? How could he have known about Christophe and Anna’s excursion? They had met no one there who knew them. But does not everything become known, in this city? The musician with his distinctive face and the young woman in black who had danced at the inn had attracted notice; their description had been given; and as everything repeats itself, word of it had come back to town, where malice, once roused, had not failed to identify Anna. Doubtless it was still only suspicion, but singularly arresting suspicion, to which were added the reports supplied by Anna’s own servant. Public curiosity was now on the alert, watching for them to compromise themselves, spying on them through a thousand invisible eyes. The silent, scheming city was tracking them down like a cat at the hunt.

Despite the danger, Anna might not have yielded; the sense of that cowardly hostility might even have pushed her to provoke it defiantly, had she not carried within her the pharisaical spirit of this very society that was her enemy. Education had enslaved her nature. She might judge the tyranny and foolishness of opinion: she respected it nonetheless; she subscribed to its verdicts, even when they fell upon her; had they conflicted with her conscience, she would have found her conscience at fault. She despised the city; and the city’s contempt would have been impossible for her to bear.

Now the moment was coming when public gossip would find its occasion to pour itself out. Carnival was approaching.

The carnival in this city had preserved until the period in which this story takes place --- (it has changed greatly since) --- a character of archaic license and ferocity. True to its origins, where it served as a release for the licentiousness of the human spirit held in subjection, voluntary or not, to the yoke of reason, nowhere had it been more audacious than in eras and countries where the weight of morals and laws --- guardians of reason --- lay heaviest. So it was that Anna’s city was destined to remain one of its chosen territories. The more moral rigorism paralyzed gestures there, gagged voices, the more daring were gestures and liberated were voices during those few days. Everything that had accumulated in the lower depths of the soul --- jealousies, secret hatreds, immodest curiosity, the instincts of malice inherent in the social animal --- burst all at once with the noise and joy of revenge. Everyone had the right to descend into the street and, prudently masked, to pillory in the public square whoever he detested, to display to passersby everything that a year of patient effort had taught him, all his treasury of scandalous secrets, gathered drop by drop. Some made a parade of it on floats. Some carried transparent lanterns on which were displayed in writing and images the secret history of the city. Some even dared to wear the mask of their enemy, so easily recognizable that street urchins called him by name. Papers full of gossip appeared during those three days. Respectable people mingled slyly in this game of Pasquino. No control was exercised, except over political allusions --- this fierce liberty having been, on several occasions, the cause of disputes between the city’s government and the representatives of foreign states. But nothing protected citizens from other citizens; and this apprehension of public outrage, constantly hanging over them, was not the least of the forces that maintained in the city’s customs that impeccable outward appearance of which it was so proud.

Anna lived under the weight of that fear --- which was, in any case, unjustified. She had very little reason to be afraid. She occupied too little space in the city’s opinion for anyone even to think of attacking her. But in the absolute isolation in which she had walled herself up, in the state of exhaustion and nervous over-excitement that several weeks of sleeplessness and moral suffering had brought on, her imagination was ready to welcome the most unreasonable terrors. She exaggerated the animosity of those who did not like her. She told herself that suspicion was on her trail; a trifle would be enough to destroy her; and who could assure her that it was not already done? Then would come the insult, the merciless stripping bare, the exposure of her heart laid out as prey for passersby: a dishonor so cruel that Anna died of shame at the mere thought. It was said that, a few years before, a young woman subjected to such persecution had been forced to flee the country with her family… And there was nothing one could do, nothing to defend oneself, nothing to prevent it, nothing even to know what was going to happen. Uncertainty was more maddening than certainty. Anna cast around her the eyes of a cornered animal. In her own house, she knew herself to be surrounded.

Anna’s servant was past forty; her name was Bäbi: tall, heavyset, with a face that narrowed and grew gaunt at the temples and forehead, broad and long at the base, swollen below the jaw like a dried pear; she wore a perpetual smile and had piercing eyes like gimlets, sunken and sucked inward, beneath red eyelids with invisible lashes. She never departed from an expression of simpering cheerfulness: always delighted with her employers, always of their opinion, fussing over their health with tender solicitude; smiling when given orders; smiling when reproved. Braun believed her loyalty to be beyond question. Her beatific air contrasted with Anna’s coldness. In many things, however, she resembled her: like her, speaking little, dressed with severe neatness; like her, very devout, accompanying her to worship, punctually fulfilling her religious duties, scrupulous in her household obligations: cleanliness, punctuality, morals and cooking all beyond reproach. She was, in a word, an exemplary servant, and the perfect model of the domestic enemy. Anna, whose feminine instinct seldom erred about the secret thoughts of women, had no illusions about her. They detested each other, each knew it, and neither showed it.

The night following Christophe’s return, when Anna, tormented beyond endurance, went to find him despite her resolution never to see him again, she came furtively, feeling her way along the walls in the darkness; she was nearly at Christophe’s door when she felt beneath her bare feet, instead of the familiar contact of the smooth cold floorboards, a warm powder that yielded softly underfoot. She bent down, touched it with her hands, and understood: a thin layer of fine ash had been spread across the full width of the corridor, over a stretch of two or three meters. It was Bäbi who had, without knowing it, hit upon the old ruse employed in the days of the Breton lais by the dwarf Frocin to catch Tristan making his way to Yseut’s bed — so true it is that a limited number of types, in good as in evil, serve for every age. A powerful argument in favor of the universe’s wise economy! --- Anna did not hesitate; she went on her way all the same, with a kind of contemptuous defiance; she entered Christophe’s room, said nothing to him despite her anxiety; but on the way back, she took the stove brush and carefully swept away the trace of her footsteps in the ash after she had passed. --- When Anna and Bäbi encountered each other the following morning, they met as they always did — one with her cold reserve, the other with her customary smile.

Bäbi sometimes received visits from a relative slightly older than herself; he served as warden at the church, and could be seen at the hour of the Gottesdienst (divine service) standing sentinel at the church door, wearing a white armband with black stripes and a silver tassel, leaning on a cane with a curved handle. By trade, he was a maker of coffins. His name was Sami Witschi. He was very tall and thin, head slightly bowed, with the clean-shaved, grave face of an old peasant. He was pious, and knew better than anyone all the rumors that circulated concerning every soul in his parish. Bäbi and Sami had thoughts of marrying; each appreciated in the other their serious qualities, their solid faith, and their capacity for malice. But they were in no hurry to settle things; they observed each other cautiously. --- In recent weeks, Sami’s visits had grown more frequent. He would come in without anyone noticing. Every time Anna passed near the kitchen, she would glimpse through the glass door Sami seated beside the stove, and Bäbi a few steps away, sewing. However much they might be speaking, not a sound could be heard. One could see Bäbi’s face light up and her lips moving; Sami’s large, severe mouth would wrinkle without opening into a grimacing laugh — nothing issued from his throat; the house seemed utterly still. When Anna entered the kitchen, Sami would rise respectfully and remain standing, without speaking, until she had left. Bäbi, hearing the door open, would break off with affected casualness from some indifferent topic and turn toward Anna with an obsequious smile, awaiting her orders. Anna suspected they were talking about her; but she despised them too much to stoop to eavesdropping.

The day after Anna had foiled the ingenious trap of the ashes, she entered the kitchen and the first thing she saw was in Sami’s hands the small brush she had used in the night to wipe away the print of her bare feet. She had taken it from Christophe’s room; and at that precise moment she suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to put it back — she had left it in her own room, where Bäbi’s sharp eyes had immediately noticed it. The two conspirators had wasted no time in reconstructing the whole story. Anna did not flinch. Bäbi, following her mistress’s glance, smiled with exaggerated brightness and explained:

--- The brush was broken; I gave it to Sami to have it mended.

Anna did not trouble herself to challenge the clumsy lie; she did not even appear to have heard it; she looked over Bäbi’s work, made a few remarks, and went out, impassive. But once the door was closed, she lost all her composure; she could not stop herself from listening, hidden in the corner of the corridor --- (she was humiliated to the very soul at resorting to such means: fear had broken her). --- A brief clucking of laughter. Then a whisper so low that nothing could be made out. But in her agitation Anna believed she could hear; her terror supplied the words she dreaded hearing; she imagined they were talking about the upcoming masquerades and a charivari. No doubt about it: they meant to introduce the episode of the ashes. She was probably wrong; but at the pitch of morbid exaltation she had reached, haunted for the past two weeks by a fixed idea of humiliation, she did not even pause to consider the uncertain as merely possible — she took it as certain.

From that moment, her decision was made.

That same evening --- (it was the Wednesday before Shrovetide), --- Braun was called out for a consultation some twenty kilometers from the city: he was not expected back until the following morning. Anna did not come down to dinner and stayed in her room. She had chosen this night to carry out the tacit pledge she had subscribed to. But she had decided to carry it out alone, without saying anything to Christophe. She despised him. She thought:

--- He made a promise. But he is a man, he is selfish and deceitful, he has his art; he will soon have forgotten.

And then, perhaps there was room in that violent heart that seemed inaccessible to kindness --- perhaps there was room for a feeling of pity toward her husband. But she was too harsh and too passionate to admit it to herself.

Bäbi told Christophe that her mistress asked him to excuse her, that she was feeling slightly unwell and wished to rest. Christophe therefore ate supper alone, under Bäbi’s surveillance; she wearied him with her chatter, trying to draw him into conversation, and defended Anna with such exaggerated zeal that Christophe, despite his natural readiness to believe in people’s good faith, was put on his guard. He had been counting on this evening to have a decisive conversation with Anna. He too could postpone it no longer. He had not forgotten the pledge they had made together at the dawn of that grim day. He was prepared to honor it if Anna demanded it. But he could see the absurdity of this double death that resolved nothing and whose grief and scandal must fall upon Braun. He thought the best course was for them to tear themselves apart, for him to try once more to leave --- if he at least had the strength to stay away: he doubted it, after the futile attempt he had just made; but he told himself that if he could not bear it, he would always have time to resort, alone, without anyone knowing, to the final means.

He hoped that after supper he might slip away for a moment to go up to Anna’s room. But Bäbi would not leave his side. Ordinarily she finished her work early; that evening she went on endlessly washing the kitchen; and when Christophe thought he was finally free of her, she invented the need to sort out a cupboard in the corridor leading to Anna’s room. Christophe found her firmly installed on a step-stool; he understood that she would not budge the whole evening. He felt a furious urge to send her flying off her perch with her stacks of plates; but he contained himself and asked her to go see how her mistress was feeling, and whether he might come to wish her good night. Bäbi went, came back, and said, watching him with malicious pleasure, that Madame was feeling better, that she was sleepy and asked that no one come in. Christophe, irritated and on edge, tried to read, could not, and went up to his room. Bäbi kept watch on his light until it was out, then went up in her turn, resolving to stay awake; she had the precaution of leaving her door ajar so she could hear every sound in the house. Unfortunately for her, she could not get into bed without falling asleep at once, and with such overwhelming force that neither thunder nor even her own curiosity could have roused her before daybreak. This sleep was no secret to anyone. Its echo reached all the way to the floor below.

As soon as Christophe heard that familiar sound, he went to Anna’s room. He had to speak to her. An unease was working on him. He reached the door and turned the handle: the door was locked. He knocked softly: no response. He pressed his mouth to the keyhole, pleaded in a low voice, then more insistently: not a movement, not a sound. He told himself Anna was asleep, but a dread seized him. And as he pressed his cheek against the door, straining to hear, a smell struck him that seemed to be seeping from beneath the threshold; he bent down and recognized it: the smell of gas. His blood ran cold. He shook the door, no longer thinking that he might wake Bäbi: the door did not give… He had understood: Anna had in the bathroom adjoining her room a small gas stove; she had opened it. He had to break down the door; but in his agitation Christophe kept enough presence of mind to remember that Bäbi must not hear at any cost. He pressed his weight against one of the panels in a massive, silent push. The door, solid and well-secured, cracked on its hinges but did not move. Another door led from Anna’s room into Braun’s study. He ran to it. It was locked as well; but here, the lock was on the outside. He set about wrenching it off. It was not easy. He had to remove four large screws set deep in the wood. He had only his knife; and he could see nothing, for he dared not light a candle — he might have blown up the apartment. Feeling blindly, he managed to work his knife into the head of one screw, then another, breaking the blades, cutting himself; the screws seemed to him of a diabolical length, as though he would never finish extracting them; and at the same time, in his feverish haste that soaked his body in an icy sweat, a childhood memory surfaced: he saw himself again at ten years old, shut in the dark closet as a punishment; he had removed the lock and fled the house… The last screw gave way. The lock came out with a grating of wood shavings. Christophe rushed into the room, ran to the window, threw it open. A wave of cold air poured in. Christophe, stumbling over the furniture in the darkness, found the bed, reached out, felt the body of Anna, his trembling hands moving through the sheets over her motionless legs, up to her waist: Anna was sitting up in her bed, shaking. She had not had time to experience the first effects of asphyxiation: the ceiling was high; air had circulated through the gaps in the window and the ill-fitting doors. Christophe took her in his arms. She wrenched herself free in a fury, crying out:

--- Get away from me!… Oh! What have you done?

She raised her arms to strike him; but she was shattered by emotion: she fell back on the pillow; she was sobbing:

--- Oh! Oh! It all has to start again!

Christophe took her hands, embracing her, scolding her, saying things that were both tender and rough:

--- To die! And to die alone, without me!

--- Oh! You, she said bitterly.

Her tone said it plainly:

--- You want to live.

He spoke to her harshly, wanting to force her will.

--- Fool! he said. Don’t you know you could have blown up the whole building?

--- That was what I wanted, she said with fury.

He tried to stir her religious fears: that was the right chord. He had barely touched it when she began to cry out, begging him to stop. He pressed on without mercy, thinking it was the only way to revive in her the will to live. She said nothing more; she had convulsive hiccupping sobs. When he had finished, she said to him in a tone of concentrated hatred:

--- Are you satisfied now? Have you done good work? You have finished me off completely. And now, what am I supposed to do?

--- Live, he said.

--- Live! she cried. But don’t you understand that it’s impossible! You know nothing! You know nothing!

He asked:

--- What is it?

She shrugged her shoulders:

--- Listen.

She told him, in short, broken sentences, everything she had hidden from him until now: Bäbi’s spying, the ashes, the scene with Sami, the carnival, the humiliation that was coming. In telling it, she could no longer distinguish what her fear had invented from what she truly had reason to fear. He listened, dismayed, even less capable than she of sorting the real danger from the imagined in her account. He was a thousand miles from suspecting the hunt being laid against them. He tried to understand; he could say nothing: against such enemies he was unarmed. He felt only a blind fury, the desire to strike. He said:

--- Why didn’t you dismiss Bäbi?

She disdained to answer. Bäbi dismissed would have been more venomous still than Bäbi tolerated; and Christophe grasped the senselessness of his question. His thoughts collided; he searched for a course of action, something immediate to do. He said, his fists clenched:

--- I’ll kill them.

--- Who? she said, contemptuous of these empty words.

His strength failed him. He felt himself lost in this web of shadowy betrayals where nothing could be grasped, where everyone was complicit. He struggled.

--- Cowards! he cried, overwhelmed.

He collapsed to his knees before the bed, his face pressed against Anna’s body. --- They fell silent. She felt a mixture of contempt and pity for this man who knew neither how to defend her nor how to defend himself. He felt against his cheek the legs of Anna trembling with cold. The window had stayed open, and outside it was freezing: in the sky, smooth as a mirror, the icy stars shivered.

When she had savored the bitter satisfaction of seeing him as broken as herself, she said in a tone that was hard and weary:

--- Light a candle.

He lit one. Anna’s teeth were chattering; she was curled in on herself, arms pressed against her chest, knees drawn up to her chin. He closed the window. He sat on the bed. He took Anna’s feet in his hands, cold as ice, and warmed them with his mouth, with his hands. She softened.

--- Christophe! she said.

Her eyes were full of anguish.

--- Anna! he said.

--- What are we going to do?

He looked at her, and said:

--- Die.

She let out a cry of joy:

--- Oh! you’re willing? You want to as well?… I won’t be alone!

She embraced him.

--- Did you really think I was going to leave you?

She answered, in a low voice:

--- Yes.

He felt what she must have suffered.

After a few moments, he questioned her with a glance. She understood:

--- In the study, she said. On the right. The bottom drawer.

He went and searched. At the very back, he saw a revolver. Braun had bought it when he was a student. He had never used it. In a burst box, Christophe found a few cartridges. He brought them back to the bed. Anna looked, then immediately turned her eyes away toward the wall. Christophe waited, then asked:

--- You no longer want to?

Anna turned back sharply:

--- I want to… Quickly!

She was thinking:

--- Nothing can save me now from the eternal abyss. A little more, a little less, it will always be the same.

Christophe clumsily loaded the revolver.

--- Anna, he said in a trembling voice, one of us will have to watch the other die.

She snatched the weapon from his hands, and said with selfishness:

--- Me first.

They looked at each other once more… Alas! even in this very moment when they were about to die for each other, they felt so far from each other!… Each thought, with terror:

--- But what am I doing? What am I doing?

And each could read it in the other’s eyes. The absurdity of the act struck Christophe most of all. His whole life, wasted; his struggles, useless; his sufferings, useless; his hopes, useless; everything ruined, thrown to the wind; a mediocre gesture was about to erase it all… In his normal state, he would have torn the revolver from Anna’s hands, flung it out the window, cried:

--- No! No! I won’t.

But eight months of suffering, doubt, and tormenting grief, and on top of that this gust of demented passion, had wrecked his strength, broken his will; he felt that he could do nothing about it anymore, he was no longer master of himself… Ah! what does it matter, after all?

Anna, certain of eternal death, stretched her whole being toward possession of this last minute of life: Christophe’s anguished face, lit by the flickering candle, the shadows on the wall, a sound of footsteps in the street, the touch of the steel she held in her hand… She clung to these sensations as a shipwrecked man clings to wreckage sinking with him. After, everything was terror. Why not prolong the waiting? But she repeated to herself:

--- It must be done…

She said goodbye to Christophe, without tenderness, with the hurry of a traveler pressed for time who fears missing his train; she opened her nightgown, felt for her heart, and pressed the barrel of the revolver against it. Christophe, kneeling, hid his face in the bedclothes. At the moment of firing, she placed her left hand over Christophe’s hand. The gesture of a child afraid to walk in the dark…

Then several terrible seconds went by… Anna did not fire. Christophe wanted to raise his head, he wanted to seize her arm; and he feared that his very movement might cause her to fire. He could hear nothing anymore, he was losing consciousness… A moan from Anna pierced his heart. He straightened up. He saw Anna, her face contorted with terror. The revolver had fallen onto the bed in front of her. She repeated plaintively:

--- Christophe!… It didn’t go off!…

He took the weapon; the long neglect it had suffered had rusted it; but the mechanism worked. Perhaps the cartridge had been damaged by the air. --- Anna reached her hand toward the revolver.

--- Enough! he pleaded.

She ordered:

--- The cartridges!

He handed them to her. She examined them, took one, loaded the gun without stopping shaking, pressed the weapon against her breast again, and fired. --- The shot misfired again.

Anna threw the revolver across the room.

--- Ah! it’s too much! too much! she cried. He will not let me die!

She writhed in her bedclothes; she was like a madwoman. He tried to approach her; she pushed him away, screaming. At last, she had a fit of nerves. Christophe stayed near her until morning. She finally calmed down; but she was breathless, her eyes closed, the bones of her forehead and her cheekbones straining against her livid skin: she looked like a dead woman.

Christophe remade the disordered bed, picked up the revolver, put back the latch that had been torn away, tidied everything in the room, and left: for it was seven o’clock, and Bäbi was about to come.

When Braun returned in the morning, he found Anna in the same state of prostration. He could see that something extraordinary had happened; but he could find out nothing from Bäbi, nor from Christophe. All that day, Anna did not stir; she did not open her eyes; her pulse was so weak it could barely be felt; at moments it stopped, and Braun suffered the anguish of believing, for an instant, that her heart had ceased to beat. His affection made him doubt his own medical knowledge; he ran to a colleague’s house and brought him back. The two men examined Anna and could not decide whether it was the onset of a fever or a case of hysterical neurosis: the patient would have to be kept under observation. Braun did not leave Anna’s bedside. He refused to eat. Toward evening, Anna’s pulse showed no fever, but extreme weakness. Braun tried to introduce a few spoonfuls of milk into her mouth; she immediately brought them back up. Her body went limp in her husband’s arms like a broken puppet. Braun spent the night sitting beside her, getting up at every moment to check on her. Bäbi, not particularly troubled by Anna’s illness, but being a woman of duty, refused to go to bed and kept watch with Braun.

On Friday, Anna opened her eyes. Braun spoke to her; she paid no attention to his presence. She lay motionless, her eyes fixed on a point on the wall. Toward noon, Braun saw large tears streaming down her thin cheeks; he wiped them away gently; one by one, the tears kept flowing. Again, Braun tried to get her to take some nourishment. She let him, passively. In the evening, she began to speak: her words were incoherent. She was talking about the Rhine; she wanted to drown herself, but there was not enough water. She persisted in her dreams in her attempts at suicide, imagining bizarre forms of death; always death eluded her. Sometimes she argued with someone, and her face took on an expression of anger and fear; she was speaking to God, stubbornly insisting on proving to him that the fault was his. Or a flame of desire lit up in her eyes; and she spoke indecent words, words she did not seem capable of knowing. At one moment, she noticed Bäbi, and gave her precise instructions for the next day’s laundry. In the night, she dozed off. Suddenly she sat up; Braun hurried to her. She looked at him strangely, stammering impatient and formless words. He asked her:

--- My dear Anna, what do you want?

She said, in a harsh voice:

--- Go fetch him.

--- Who? he asked.

She looked at him again, with the same expression, then suddenly burst out laughing; then she passed her hands over her forehead and moaned:

--- Ah! My God! To forget!…

Sleep took her again. She was calm until daybreak. Toward dawn, she stirred a little; Braun lifted her head to give her something to drink; she swallowed a few sips obediently, and, leaning toward Braun’s hands, she kissed them. She dozed off again.

On Saturday morning, she awoke around nine o’clock. Without a word, she swung her legs out of bed and tried to get up. Braun rushed to her and tried to make her lie back down. She persisted. He asked her what she wanted to do. She replied:

--- To go to church.

He tried to reason with her, to remind her that it was not Sunday, that the church was closed. She said nothing; but seated on the chair by the bed, she was putting on her clothes with trembling fingers. The doctor, Braun’s friend, came in. He added his entreaties to Braun’s; then, seeing that she would not give way, he examined her, and finally consented. He took Braun aside and told him that his wife’s illness seemed entirely moral in nature, that for now one should avoid contradicting her, and that he saw no danger in her going out, provided Braun accompanied her. Braun then told Anna he would go with her. She refused and wanted to go alone. But at her very first steps across the room, she stumbled. Then, without a word, she took Braun’s arm, and they went out. She was very weak and stopped along the way. Several times he asked if she wanted to go back. She started walking again. When they arrived at the church, as he had told her, they found the doors closed. Anna sat down on a bench near the entrance and stayed there, shivering, until noon struck. Then she took Braun’s arm again, and they came back in silence. But that evening, she wanted to return to the church. Braun’s pleas were useless. They had to set out again.

Christophe had spent those two days in isolation. Braun was too worried to think of him. Only once, on Saturday morning, trying to dissuade Anna from her fixed idea of going out, he had asked her whether she would like to see Christophe. She had shown such a strong expression of horror and revulsion that he was struck by it; and Christophe’s name was not spoken again.

Christophe had shut himself in his room. Anxiety, love, remorse, a whole chaos of suffering clashing inside him. He accused himself of everything. He was crushed by self-disgust. Several times he had gotten up to confess everything to Braun, --- only to stop immediately at the thought that by accusing himself, he would be making one more person unhappy. At the same time, passion showed him no mercy. He prowled the corridor outside Anna’s room; and whenever he heard footsteps inside approaching the door, he fled back to his room.

When Braun and Anna went out in the afternoon, he watched for them, hidden behind the curtain of his window. He saw Anna. She, so upright and so proud, now had a hunched back, a bowed head, a yellow complexion; she had aged, crushed beneath the coat and shawl with which her husband had wrapped her; she looked worn. But Christophe did not see her wornness, he saw only her misery; and his heart overflowed with pity and love. He would have wanted to run to her, to prostrate himself in the mud, to kiss those feet, that body ravaged by passion, to beg her forgiveness. And he thought, watching her:

--- My work… There it is!

But his gaze, in the mirror, met his own reflection; he saw in his eyes, on his features, the same devastation; he saw death imprinted on himself as on her, and he thought:

--- My work? No. The work of the cruel master, who drives to madness and kills.

The house was empty. Bäbi had gone out to tell the neighbors about the day’s events. Time passed. Five o’clock struck. Terror seized Christophe at the thought of Anna returning, and of the night that was coming. He felt that he would not have the strength to stay, that night, under the same roof. He felt his reason cracking under the weight of passion. He did not know what he would do, he did not know what he wanted, except that he wanted Anna, at whatever cost. He thought of that miserable figure he had just seen passing beneath his window, and said to himself:

--- Save her from me!…

A surge of will rose up. He gathered by the armful the bundles of papers scattered across his table, tied them up, took his hat, his coat, and left. In the corridor, near Anna’s door, he quickened his pace, seized with fear. Below, he cast a last glance at the deserted garden. He fled like a thief. An icy fog pierced the skin like needles. Christophe kept close to the walls of the houses, afraid of meeting a familiar face. He went to the station. He boarded a train departing for Lucerne. At the first station, he wrote to Braun. He said that an urgent matter called him away from the city for a few days, and that he was heartbroken to leave him at such a moment; he asked Braun to send him news at an address he provided. At Lucerne, he took the Gotthard train. In the night, he got off at a small station between Altorf and Goeschenen. He never learned its name, he never did learn it. He entered the first inn near the station. Pools of water cut across the road. It was raining in torrents; it rained all night; it rained all the next day. With a sound like a waterfall, water poured from a burst gutter. The sky and the earth were drowned, seemed dissolved, like his thoughts. He lay down in damp sheets that smelled of railway smoke. He could not stay in bed. The thought of the dangers Anna was running occupied him too much for him to have time to feel his own suffering. He had to throw public malice off the scent, to set it on a different trail. In the fever he was in, a strange idea came to him; he hit upon writing to one of the few musicians with whom he had formed something of a bond in the city, to Krebs, the organist-confectioner. He let him understand that a love affair was drawing him to Italy, that he had been in the grip of this passion even when he had come to live at Braun’s, that he had tried to escape it, but that it was stronger than he was. All of it, in terms clear enough for Krebs to understand, veiled enough for him to add to it from his own imagination. Christophe begged Krebs to keep the secret. He knew that the good man had a pathological love of gossip, and he counted --- quite rightly --- on Krebs running to spread the news all over town the moment he received it. To complete the misdirection of public opinion, Christophe ended his letter with a few very cold words about Braun and about Anna’s illness.

He spent the rest of the night and the following day locked inside his fixed idea… Anna… Anna… He relived with her those last months, day by day; he no longer saw her as she truly was, but wrapped her in a passionate mirage. He had always created her in the image of his desire, lending her a moral grandeur, a tragic consciousness, that he needed in order to love her more. These lies of passion doubled in assurance now that Anna’s presence was no longer there to check them. He saw a sound and free nature, oppressed, struggling against its chains, yearning for a frank, expansive life, for the open air of the soul --- and then growing afraid of it, fighting its own dreams, turning savagely against them, because they could never be reconciled with her destiny and made it all the more painful. She was crying out to him: “Help me!” He saw her beautiful body again, and held it close. His memories tortured him; he took a murderous pleasure in deepening their wounds. As the day wore on, the sense of everything he had lost became so atrocious that he could no longer breathe.

Without knowing what he was doing, he got up, went out, paid the hotel, and boarded the first train back to Anna’s city. He arrived in the dead of night; he went straight to the house. A wall separated the lane from the garden adjoining Braun’s. Christophe scaled the wall, jumped into the neighboring garden, then passed from there into Braun’s garden. He was standing before the house. Everything was dark, except for the faint glow of a night-lamp tinting one window with an ochre hue --- Anna’s window. Anna was there. She was suffering there. He had only one step left to take. He reached his hand toward the door handle. Then he looked at his hand, the door, the garden; he became suddenly aware of what he was doing; and, waking from the hallucination that had possessed him for seven or eight hours, he shuddered, tore himself with a start from the inertia that had rooted his feet to the ground, ran to the wall, climbed back over it, and fled.

That same night, he left the city for the second time; and the next day, he went to bury himself in a mountain village, under gusts of snow. --- To entomb his heart, to put his thoughts to sleep, to forget, forget!…

--- « E però leva su, vinci l’ambascia con l’animo che vince ogni battaglia, se col suo grave corpo non s’accascia. »

Leva’mi allor, mostrandomi fornito meglio di lena ch’io non mi sentia ; e dissi : « Va, ch’io son forte ed ardito. »

Inf. XXIV.

My God, what have I done to you? Why do you crush me? From childhood, you gave me misery and struggle as my lot. I struggled without complaint. I loved my misery. I tried to keep pure this soul you had given me, to preserve this fire you had placed in me… Lord, it is you, you yourself, who are bent on destroying what you created; you have extinguished that fire, you have defiled that soul, you have stripped me of everything that made life worth living. I had only two treasures in the world: my friend and my soul. I have nothing left --- you have taken everything. One single being was mine in the desert of the world, and you took him from me. Our hearts were one, and you tore them apart; you let us know the sweetness of being together only to make us know all the more fully the horror of having lost each other. You have hollowed out emptiness around me, you have hollowed it out within me. I was broken, sick, without will, without weapons, like a child weeping in the night. You chose that hour to strike me. You came on silent feet, from behind, like a traitor, and you stabbed me; you unleashed upon me your fierce dog, passion; I was without strength --- you knew it --- and I could not fight; it has hurled me down, ravaged everything within me, soiled everything, destroyed everything… I am sick with disgust at myself. If I could at least cry out my pain and my shame! Or forget them, in the torrent of creative force! But my force is broken, my power to create has withered. I am a dead tree… If only I could be dead! O God, deliver me, shatter this body and this soul, tear me from the earth, do not leave me struggling in the pit, do not let me agonize without end! I cry for mercy… Finish me!

Thus Christophe’s pain called out to a God in whom his reason did not believe.

He had taken refuge in an isolated farm in the Swiss Jura. The house, backed up against the woods, lay hidden in the fold of a high, uneven plateau. Swells of ground protected it from the north wind. In front, meadows sloped away, long wooded hillsides; then the rock broke off abruptly, falling sheer; contorted firs clung to the edge; broad-armed beeches leaned back against the sky. The sky was dead. Life had disappeared. An abstract expanse with erased contours. Everything slept beneath the snow. Only at night, in the forest, foxes yelped. It was the end of winter. A late winter. An interminable winter. Whenever it seemed finished, it always began again.

Yet for a week now, the old numbed earth had felt its heart reviving. A first, deceptive spring was insinuating itself into the air and beneath the frozen bark. From beech branches spread like hovering wings, snow was dripping. Through the white mantle covering the meadows, a few blades of grass in tender green were already poking through; around their fine needles, in the rifts of the snow, as if through tiny mouths, the damp black soil breathed. For a few hours each day, the voice of the water, locked in its coat of ice, murmured once more. In the skeleton of the woods, a few birds whistled bright, tart little songs.

Christophe noticed nothing. Everything was the same to him. He paced endlessly around his room. Or he walked outside. Impossible to stay still. His soul was being torn apart by inner demons. They tore at one another. Passion, driven back, continued to batter furiously at the walls of the house. The revulsion from passion was no less fierce; they had each other by the throat; and in their struggle they lacerated the heart. And at the same time there was the memory of Olivier, the despair of his death, the haunting need to create that could find no release, the pride that reared up before the void of nothingness. All the devils inside him. Not an instant of respite. Or if a false lull came, if the heaving waves subsided for a moment, he found himself alone, and could find nothing left of himself: thought, love, will --- all had been killed.

To create! That was the only recourse. To surrender the wreckage of his life to the waves! To save himself by swimming toward the dream of art!… To create! He wanted to… He could no longer.

Christophe had never had a method of work. When he was strong and healthy, he was more troubled by his overabundance than worried about seeing it dwindle; he followed his whims; he worked as fancy struck him, at the mercy of circumstance, with no fixed rule. In reality, he worked everywhere, at every moment; his brain never ceased to be occupied. Many times Olivier, less richly endowed and more reflective, had warned him:

--- Be careful. You trust too much in your strength. It is a mountain torrent. Full today, perhaps dry tomorrow. An artist must capture his genius; he cannot let it scatter at random. Channel your force. Compel yourself to habits, to a daily hygiene of work, at fixed hours. They are as necessary to the artist as the habit of military movements and drill to the man who must fight. When the moments of crisis come --- (and they always come) --- that iron framework keeps the soul from falling. I know it well. If I am not dead, it is because that framework saved me.

But Christophe laughed and said:

--- That’s fine for you, my friend! No danger of my ever losing the taste for life. My appetite is too good.

Olivier shrugged his shoulders:

--- Too much leads to too little. The worst invalids are people who have always been too healthy.

Olivier’s words were proving true now. After the friend’s death, the source of inner life had not dried up all at once; but it had become strangely intermittent; it ran in sudden spurts, then fell silent, lost itself underground. Christophe paid no attention; what did it matter to him? His grief and the rising passion absorbed his thoughts. --- But after the hurricane had passed, when he looked again for the spring to drink from, he found nothing. Desert. Not a trickle of water. The soul had dried out. In vain he tried to dig at the sand, to make the water spring up from underground reservoirs, to create at any cost: the machine of the mind refused to obey. He could not invoke the help of habit, that faithful ally which, when all reasons for living have fled, remains alone beside us --- tenacious and constant, saying not a word, making no gesture, eyes fixed, lips mute --- but with its very steady hand that never trembles, leads us by the hand through the dangerous pass, until the light of day and the taste for life return. Christophe was without help; and his hand met no other hand in the night. He could no longer find his way back to the light of day.

This was the supreme trial. Then he felt himself at the edge of madness. At times an absurd, demented struggle with his own brain, the obsessions of a maniac, a haunting of numbers: he counted the planks of the floor, the trees in the forest; figures and chords, whose selection eluded his reason, waged pitched battles in his head. At other times a state of prostration, like a dead man.

No one paid any attention to him. He lived in a wing of the house, apart. He made his own room --- he did not make it every day. His food was left for him downstairs; he never saw a human face. His host, an old peasant, taciturn and selfish, took no interest in him. Whether Christophe ate or did not eat was his own affair. They barely noticed whether, in the evening, Christophe had come home. Once he found himself lost in the forest, sunk in snow up to his thighs; he came very close to not being able to make it back. He was trying to kill himself with fatigue, so as not to think. He did not succeed. Only, now and then, a few hours of exhausted sleep.

One single living creature seemed to care about his existence: an old Saint Bernard dog, who would come and lay his great bloodshot-eyed head on Christophe’s knees when Christophe sat on the bench in front of the house. They would look at each other for a long while. Christophe did not push him away. Unlike the morbid Goethe, those eyes did not disturb him. He had no desire to cry out to them, as Goethe had:

--- Go away!… Do your worst, phantom, you will not seize me!

He only wanted to let himself be seized by those imploring, drowsy eyes, to come to their aid; he sensed there an imprisoned soul that was pleading with him.

In this moment when suffering had soaked him through, when he had been torn from life while still alive, stripped of human egoism, he could see the victims of man, the battlefield where man triumphs over the carnage of other beings; and his heart was full of pity and horror. Even in his happy times, he had always loved animals; he could not bear cruelty toward them; he had an aversion to hunting that he dared not express, for fear of ridicule; perhaps he did not even dare acknowledge it to himself; but this repulsion was the secret cause of the inexplicable distance he felt from certain men: he could never have accepted as a friend a man who killed an animal for pleasure. No sentimentality: he knew better than anyone that life rests on an infinite sum of suffering and cruelty; one cannot live without causing suffering. It is not a matter of shutting one’s eyes and paying oneself with fine words. Nor is it a matter of concluding that one must give up life, and whimpering like a child. No. One must kill in order to live, if there is no other way of living, for now. But whoever kills for the sake of killing is a wretch. An unconscious wretch, I know. A wretch, all the same. The perpetual effort of humanity must be to diminish the sum of suffering and cruelty: that is the first human duty.

These thoughts, in ordinary life, remained buried in the depths of Christophe’s heart. He did not want to dwell on them. What was the use? What could he do about it? He had to be Christophe, he had to accomplish his work, live at any cost, live at the expense of the weakest… It was not he who had made the universe… Don’t think about it, don’t think about it…

But after misfortune had flung him, too, into the ranks of the vanquished, he had no choice but to think about it. Not long ago he had blamed Olivier for sinking into useless remorse and vain compassion for all the suffering that men endure and inflict. He was going further than Olivier now; with the vehemence of his powerful nature, he penetrated to the very depths of the tragedy of the universe; he suffered with all the sufferings of the world, he was like a man flayed alive. He could no longer think of animals without a shudder of anguish. He read in the eyes of beasts --- he read a soul like his own, a soul that could not speak; but the eyes cried out for it:

--- What have I done to you? Why do you hurt me?

The most commonplace sight, one he had seen a hundred times --- a little calf moaning in a slatted crate; its large, protruding black eyes with their bluish whites, its pink eyelids, its white lashes, the white curly tufts on its forehead, its violet muzzle, its knock-kneed legs; --- a lamb that a peasant was carrying off by its four legs tied together, head hanging, trying to right itself, crying like a child, bleating and stretching out its grey tongue; --- hens heaped in a basket; --- from far away, the shrieking of a pig being bled; --- on the kitchen table, a fish being gutted… He could no longer bear it. The nameless tortures that man inflicts on these innocent creatures wrung his heart. Grant the animal even a glimmer of reason, imagine the dreadful dream that the world must be for it: these indifferent, blind, and deaf human beings who slaughter it, gut it, disembowel it, hack it to pieces, cook it alive, sometimes amuse themselves at its contortions of pain. Is there anything more atrocious among the cannibals of Africa? The suffering of animals has something even more intolerable for a free conscience than the suffering of human beings. For the latter, at least, it is acknowledged as an evil, and what causes it is criminal. But thousands of animals are massacred needlessly, every day, without a shadow of remorse. To so much as mention it would make one ridiculous. --- And that is the unpardonable crime. By itself, it justifies all that mankind may ever be made to suffer. It cries out for vengeance against the human race. If God exists and tolerates it, it cries out for vengeance against God. If there is a good God, the most humble of living souls must be saved. If God is good only toward the strongest, if there is no justice for the wretched, for the lesser beings offered up in sacrifice to humanity, then there is no goodness, there is no justice…

Alas! The slaughters carried out by man are so trivial a thing, in themselves, amid the universal carnage. Animals devour one another. The peaceful plants, the silent trees, are savage beasts among themselves. The serenity of forests --- a commonplace of easy rhetoric for men of letters who know nature only through their books!… In the forest just nearby, a few steps from the house, terrifying struggles were taking place. Murderous beeches flung themselves upon the firs with their beautiful rosy trunks, wound their slender forms in columns of ancient stone, throttled them. They hurled themselves upon the oaks, broke them apart, fashioned crutches from their ruins. The Briarean beeches with their hundred arms --- ten trees in one! They spread death around them. And when, for want of enemies, they met among themselves, they intertwined with rage, piercing one another, fusing, twisting like antediluvian monsters. Lower down in the forest, the acacias, pushing in from the edge, had entered the fray, attacking the pine grove, clutching and clawing at the roots of the enemy, poisoning them with their secretions. A war to the death, in which the victor seized both the ground and the spoils of the vanquished. Then the small monsters completed the work of the great ones. The mushrooms that had sprung up among the roots sucked the sickened tree, which gradually hollowed out. The black ants ground up the rotting wood. Millions of invisible insects gnawed, bored, and reduced to dust what had once been life… And the silence of these battles!… O peace of nature, tragic mask covering the painful and cruel face of Life!

Christophe was sinking fast. But he was not the kind of man to let himself drown with his arms pinned to his sides. However much he wished to die, he did everything he could to live. He was one of those, as Mozart had said, “who want to act, until at last there is no longer any way to do anything.” He felt himself vanishing, and in his fall he groped about, striking out right and left, searching for something to clutch. He thought he had found it. He had just remembered Olivier’s little child. At once, he transferred to the child all his will to live; he clung to it. Yes, he must find the boy, claim him, raise him, love him, take the father’s place, make Olivier live again in his son. In his selfish grief, how had he not thought of it? He wrote to Cécile, who had the child in her care. He waited feverishly for the reply. His whole being strained toward this single thought. He forced himself to keep calm; one reason for hope remained. He was confident; he knew Cécile’s goodness.

The reply came. Cécile wrote that, three months after Olivier’s death, a woman in mourning had appeared at her door and said:

--- Give me back my child!

It was the woman who had once abandoned both the child and Olivier --- Jacqueline, but so changed as to be barely recognizable. Her madness of love had not lasted. She had tired of her lover even sooner than he had tired of her. She had come back broken, disgusted, aged. The all-too-conspicuous scandal of her affair had closed many doors to her. Those who were least scrupulous were not the least severe. Even her mother had shown her a disdain so wounding that Jacqueline had been unable to remain in her house. She had seen to the bottom of the world’s hypocrisy. Olivier’s death had finished crushing her. She seemed so grief-stricken that Cécile had not felt she had the right to refuse her what she asked. It was very hard to give up a little being one had grown accustomed to think of as one’s own. But how could one be even harder on someone who had more rights than you and who was more unhappy? She had wanted to write to Christophe, to ask his counsel. But Christophe had never replied to the letters she had sent him, she did not know his address, she did not even know whether he was alive or dead… Joy comes, and goes. What is there to do? One resigns oneself. What mattered most was that the child be happy and loved…

The letter arrived in the evening. A late return of winter had brought back the snow. All night long it fell. In the forest, where the new leaves had already appeared, the trees cracked and broke under the weight. It was like a battery of artillery. Christophe, alone in his room, without a light, in the midst of the phosphorescent darkness, listening to the tragic forest, started at every crack; and he was like one of those trees that bends under the load and cracks. He said to himself:

--- Now, it is all over.

The night passed, the day returned; the tree had not broken. All the new day, and the night that followed, and the days and nights after that, the tree went on bending and cracking; but it did not break. Christophe had no longer any reason to live; and he lived. He had no longer any motive to struggle; and he struggled, inch by inch, body to body, with the invisible enemy who was crushing his spine. Like Jacob with the angel. He expected nothing more from the struggle, nothing more than the end, the rest; and still he struggled. And he cried out:

--- Bring me down then! Why don’t you bring me down?

The days passed. Christophe emerged from it hollowed out of his life. Yet he persisted in keeping upright, he went out, he walked. Happy are those sustained by a strong lineage, in the eclipses of their life! The legs of the father and grandfather bore up the body of the son who was ready to collapse; the thrust of robust ancestors lifted the broken soul, as the dead horseman is borne away by his horse.

He walked along a ridge path, between two ravines; he descended the narrow track with its sharp stones, between which the gnarled roots of small stunted oaks snaked about; not knowing where he was going, and yet surer of his step than if a lucid will had been guiding him. He had not slept; he had scarcely eaten in several days. A fog lay before his eyes. He was descending toward the valley. --- It was Holy Week. A veiled day. The last assault of winter had been overcome. Warm spring was brooding. From the villages below, the bells climbed upward. First from one village, tucked like a nest in a hollow at the foot of the mountain, with its thatched roofs of mingled black and blond, covered in thick moss like velvet. Then from another, invisible, on the far slope of the hill. Then from others in the plain, beyond a river. And the deep drone, very far off, of a town disappearing into the haze. Christophe stopped. His heart was near to failing. These voices seemed to be saying to him:

--- Come with us. Here is peace. Here, pain is dead. Dead, along with thought. We rock the soul so gently that it falls asleep in our arms. Come, and rest --- you will wake no more.

How weary he felt! How he longed to sleep! But he shook his head, and said:

--- It is not peace I seek, it is life.

He set off again. He covered leagues without noticing. In his state of hallucinated weakness, the simplest sensations reached him with unexpected resonances. His thought cast fantastic gleams all around, upon the earth and in the air. A shadow running before him on the white, deserted road in the sunlight --- its cause invisible --- made him start.

At the edge of a wood he found himself near a village. He turned back: the sight of people pained him. He could not avoid passing close to an isolated house, however, above the hamlet; it was built against the hillside; it resembled a sanatorium; a large garden, open to the sun, surrounded it; a few figures wandered along the sandy paths with uncertain steps. Christophe paid no attention; but at a bend in the path he came face to face with a man with pale eyes, a puffy yellow face, staring ahead, slumped on a bench at the foot of two poplars. Another man sat beside him; both were silent. Christophe passed them. But after four paces he stopped: those eyes were familiar to him. He turned around. The man had not moved; he continued to stare fixedly, motionless, at something in front of him. But his companion was watching Christophe, who signaled to him. He came over.

--- Who is that? asked Christophe.

--- He is a resident of the sanatorium, the man said, indicating the building.

--- I believe I know him, said Christophe.

--- It’s possible, said the other. He was a very well-known writer in Germany.

Christophe said a name. --- Yes, that was indeed the name. --- He had seen him once, long ago, in the days when he wrote for the Mannheim review. They had been enemies then; Christophe was just starting out, and the other was already famous. He was the most powerful man, the most self-assured, the most contemptuous of all that was not himself --- a novelist whose realistic and sensual art towered above the mediocrity of current productions. Christophe, who detested him, could not help admiring the perfection of that material, sincere, and limited art.

--- It came over him a year ago, said the attendant. He was treated, thought to be cured, and went back home. Then it came over him again. One evening he threw himself from his window. In the early days he was here, he was agitated and screaming. Now he is quite calm. He spends his days, as you can see, just sitting.

--- What is he looking at? said Christophe.

He approached the bench. He contemplated with pity the pale face of the defeated man, the heavy eyelids drooping over his eyes; one of them was nearly closed. The madman did not seem to know Christophe was there. Christophe called him by his name, took his hand --- the limp and damp hand that yielded like a dead thing; he did not have the heart to hold it in his: the man raised his vacant eyes toward Christophe for a moment, then resumed staring ahead with his stupefied smile. Christophe asked:

--- What are you looking at?

The man, motionless, said in a low voice:

--- I am waiting.

--- For what?

--- The Resurrection.

Christophe gave a start. He left in haste. The words had pierced him like a shaft of fire.

He plunged into the forest, climbed the slopes in the direction of his house. In his agitation he lost the path; he found himself in the middle of the great pine forest. Shadow and silence. A few patches of tawny sunlight, coming from nowhere one could tell, fell through the depths of the shadow. Christophe was hypnotized by these pools of light. Everything around seemed night. He walked over the carpet of needles, stumbling against roots that jutted up like swollen veins. At the foot of the trees, not a plant, not a patch of moss. In the branches, not a birdsong. The lower boughs were dead. All life had taken refuge above, where the sun was. Soon, that life too grew dim. Christophe entered a part of the forest being consumed by a mysterious blight. A kind of long, fine lichen, like cobwebs, wrapped the branches of the red firs in their netting, bound them from foot to head, passed from tree to tree, smothering the forest. It was like deep-sea algae with their stealthy tentacles. And there was the silence of the ocean depths. Above, the sun was fading. Mists that had insidiously crept through the dying forest closed around Christophe. Everything disappeared; there was nothing left. For half an hour Christophe wandered at random in the network of white fog, which little by little tightened, darkened, entered his throat; he thought he was walking straight ahead, but he was turning in circles beneath the gigantic cobwebs hanging from the throttled firs; the fog, passing through them, had left clinging droplets trembling there. At last the mesh loosened, a gap appeared, and Christophe managed to leave the underwater forest. He found once more the living woods and the silent struggle of the firs and beeches. But still the same immobility. This silence that had been brooding for hours grew oppressive. Christophe stopped to hear it…

Suddenly, in the distance, a swell was coming. A forerunning gust of wind rose from the depths of the forest. Like a horse at full gallop, it came over the crests of the trees, which swayed. Like the God of Michelangelo, passing in a whirlwind. It swept above Christophe’s head. The forest and Christophe’s heart trembled. It was the herald…

Silence fell again. Christophe, seized by a sacred terror, hurried back inside, his legs trembling. On the threshold of the house, like a man being pursued, he cast an anxious glance behind him. Nature seemed dead. The forests covering the mountain slopes slept, weighed down by a heavy sorrow. The motionless air had a magical transparency. Not a sound. Only the funereal music of a torrent --- water gnawing at rock --- tolled the earth’s knell. Christophe went to bed, feverish. In the neighboring stable, the animals, restless like him, stirred…

The night. He had dozed off. In the silence, the distant surge rose again. The wind returned, a hurricane this time --- the spring fœhn, warming with its burning breath the chilly earth still sleeping, the fœhn that melts the ice and gathers the fertile rains. It rumbled like thunder in the forests on the other side of the ravine. It drew closer, swelled, charged up the slopes; the whole mountain bellowed. In the stable, a horse whinnied and the cows lowed. Christophe, bolt upright in his bed, hair on end, listened. The squall arrived, howling, rattling the shutters, making the weathervanes screech, sending tiles flying from the roof, shaking the house. A flowerpot fell and shattered. Christophe’s window, poorly latched, burst open with a crash. And the warm wind entered. Christophe received it full in the face and on his bare chest. He leaped from the bed, mouth open, gasping. It was as though the living God were rushing into his empty soul. The Resurrection!… Air poured into his throat, the flood of new life penetrated him to the depths of his being. He felt himself bursting, he wanted to cry out, cry out in pain and joy; and nothing came from his mouth but inarticulate sounds. He stumbled, he struck the walls with his arms, in the midst of papers sent swirling by the hurricane. He fell in the middle of the room, crying out:

--- O you, you! You have come back at last!

--- You have come back, you have come back! O you, whom I had lost!… Why did you abandon me?

--- To accomplish the task that you abandoned.

--- What task?

--- To fight.

--- What need do you have to fight? Are you not master of all?

--- I am not the master.

--- Are you not All that Is?

--- I am not all that is. I am the Life that fights against the Void. I am not the Void. I am the Fire that burns in the Night. I am not the Night. I am the eternal Combat; and no eternal fate hovers over the combat. I am the free Will, fighting eternally. Fight and burn with me.

--- I am defeated. I am no longer good for anything.

--- You are defeated? Everything seems lost to you? Others will be victorious. Do not think of yourself, think of your army.

--- I am alone, I have only myself, and I have no army.

--- You are not alone, and you do not belong to yourself. You are one of my voices, you are one of my arms. Speak and strike for me. But if the arm is broken, if the voice is shattered, I remain standing; I fight with other voices, other arms than yours. Defeated, you are part of the army that is never defeated. Remember this, and you will conquer even in your death.

--- Lord, I suffer so!

--- Do you think I do not suffer as well? For ages, death has hunted me and nothingness lies in wait for me. It is only through victories won blow by blow that I force my way forward. The river of life runs red with my blood.

--- To fight, always to fight?

--- One must always fight. God fights, too. God is a conqueror. He is a lion that devours. Nothingness surrounds him, and God brings it down. And the rhythm of the combat makes the supreme harmony. This harmony is not for your mortal ears. It is enough that you know it exists. Do your duty in peace, and leave the Gods to do theirs.

--- I have no more strength.

--- Sing for those who are strong.

--- My voice is broken.

--- Pray.

--- My heart is defiled.

--- Tear it out. Take mine.

--- Lord, it is nothing to forget oneself, to cast off one’s dead soul. But can I cast off my dead, can I forget those I loved?

--- Abandon them, dead, with your dead soul. You will find them again, alive, with my living soul.

--- O you who left me, will you leave me again?

--- I will leave you again. Have no doubt of it. It is for you not to leave me anymore.

--- But if my life is extinguished?

--- Light others from it.

--- If death is in me?

--- Life is elsewhere. Go, open your doors to it. Madman, who shuts yourself inside your ruined house! Step out of yourself. There are other dwellings.

--- O life, o life! I see… I was seeking you in myself, in my empty and sealed soul. My soul is breaking; through the windows of my wounds, the air floods in; I breathe, I find you again, o life!…

--- I find you again… Be still, and listen.

And Christophe heard, like the murmur of a spring, the song of life returning within him. Leaning over the edge of his window, he saw the forest, dead yesterday, now seething in the sun and wind, heaved up like the Ocean. Over the backs of the trees, like shivers of joy, waves of wind passed; and the bending branches stretched their arms in ecstasy toward the blazing sky. And the torrent rang out like a laughing bell. The same landscape, entombed yesterday, had been resurrected; life had just re-entered it, at the same moment that love re-entered Christophe’s heart. Miracle of the soul that grace has touched, awakening to life! Everything around it revives. The heart starts beating again. The mind’s eye has reopened. The dried-up fountains begin to flow again.

And Christophe re-entered the divine battle… How his own struggles, how human struggles were lost in this gigantic melee, where suns rain down like snowflakes swept by the hurricane!… He had stripped himself of his soul. As in those dreams where one is suspended in space, he felt himself soaring above himself, he saw himself from above, in the context of all things; and the meaning of his efforts, the value of his sufferings, appeared to him at a glance. His struggles were part of the great combat of the worlds. His defeat was an episode of a moment, immediately repaired. As he fought for all, all fought for him. They had a share in his trials, he had a share in their glory.

--- “Comrades, enemies, march over me, crush me, let me feel on my body the wheels of the cannon that will conquer! I do not think of the iron that furrows my flesh, I do not think of the foot that tramples my head, I think of my Avenger, the Master, the Commander of the innumerable army. My blood will be the mortar of his future victory…”

God was not for him the impassive Creator, the Nero who contemplates from the top of his bronze tower the burning of the City that he himself set ablaze. God fought. God suffered. With all who fight and for all who suffer. For he was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading, expanding, through which the night is absorbed. But the night is boundless, and the divine combat never ceases; and no one can know what its outcome will be. Heroic symphony, in which even the dissonances that clash and intermingle form a serene concert! As the beech forest wages furious battles in silence, so does Life make war in the eternal peace.

These combats, this peace, resonated in Christophe. He was like a seashell in which the ocean murmurs. Epic cries passed through him, calls of trumpets, blasts of sound, driven by sovereign rhythms. For everything was transformed into sound in that sonorous soul. It sang the light. It sang the night. And life. And death. It sang for those who were victorious in battle. It sang for himself, defeated and struck down. It sang. Everything was song. It was nothing but song.

His intoxication was such that it did not hear itself singing. Like spring rains, torrents of music poured into that soil cracked open by winter. Shames, sorrows, bitternesses now revealed their mysterious purpose: they had broken down the earth, and they had fertilized it; the ploughshare of pain, in tearing open the heart, had opened new springs of life. The heath bloomed again. But these were no longer the flowers of the earlier spring. Another soul had been born.

It was being born at every moment. For it was not yet ossified and formed, as are souls that have reached the end of their growth, souls that are about to die. It was not the statue. It was the molten metal. Every second made of it a new universe. Christophe did not think of fixing its boundaries. He surrendered to that joy of the man who, casting the weight of his past behind him, sets out on a long journey, his blood young, his heart free, breathing the salt air, thinking that the journey will never end. Now that he was seized again by the creative force flowing through the world, the richness of the world took him by the throat like an ecstasy. He loved, he was his neighbor as himself. And everything was “neighbor” to him, from the grass he trod to the hand he clasped. A beautiful tree, the shadow of a cloud on the mountain, the breath of the meadows carried by the wind, at night the beehive of the sky humming with swarms of suns… it was a whirlwind of blood… he had no wish to speak, nor to think, he had no wish now but to laugh and to weep, and to dissolve into this living wonder. To write, why write? Can one write the unwritable?… But whether it was possible or not, he had to write. It was his law. Ideas struck him in lightning flashes, wherever he happened to be, most often while walking. It was impossible to wait. So he wrote, with whatever was at hand, on whatever was at hand; and he would often have been incapable of saying what those sentences meant that burst from him in an irresistible surge; and while he was writing, other ideas came to him, and others; and he wrote, he wrote, on his shirtsleeves, on the inside of his hat; however fast he wrote, his thought moved faster, he had to use a kind of shorthand.

These were only shapeless notes. The difficulty began when he tried to pour these ideas into ordinary musical forms; he discovered that none of the old molds could suit them; if he wanted to capture his visions faithfully, he had to begin by forgetting all music he had heard, everything he had written, to wipe the slate clean of all learned formalism, of traditional technique, to cast aside those crutches of the impotent mind, that ready-made bed for the laziness of those who, fleeing the effort of thinking for themselves, lie down in the thought of others. Formerly, when he believed he had reached the maturity of his life and art --- (in fact, he was only at the end of one of his lives and one of his incarnations in art) --- he expressed himself in a language pre-existing to his thought; his feeling submitted without resistance to a pre-established logic of development, which dictated in advance some of his phrases and led him docilely, along the beaten paths, to the agreed-upon destination where the public awaited him. Now, no more road --- it was up to the feeling to forge one itself; the mind had only to follow. Its role was no longer even to describe passion, or to analyze it; it had to become one with it, it sought to embrace its inner law.

At the same stroke, the contradictions in which Christophe had long struggled without wanting to admit it fell away. For, though he was a pure artist, he had often mixed into his art concerns alien to art; he attributed to it a social mission. And he did not notice that there were two men in him: the artist who created without caring about any moral purpose, and the man of action, a reasoner, who wanted his art to be moral and social. They sometimes put each other in a strange predicament. Now that every creative idea imposed itself upon him with its organic law, as a reality superior to all reality, he was torn away from the servitude of practical reason. Certainly, he renounced none of his contempt for the spineless and depraved immoralism of the age; certainly, he still thought that impure and unwholesome art is the lowest degree of art, because it is a disease of art, a fungus growing on a rotting trunk; but if art for pleasure’s sake is the prostitution of art, Christophe did not oppose to it the short-sighted utilitarianism of art for morality’s sake, that wingless Pegasus dragging the plough. The highest art, the only one worthy of the name, stands above the laws of any particular day: it is a comet launched through the infinite. This force may be useful, it may seem useless or dangerous in the order of practical things; but it is force, it is movement and fire; it is the lightning bolt from the sky; and by that, it is sacred, by that it is beneficent. Its benefits may even be of the practical order; but its true, its divine benefits are, like faith, of the supernatural order. It is like the sun, from which it springs. The sun is neither moral nor immoral. It is the One Who Is. It illuminates the night of space. Such is art.

Then Christophe, surrendered to it, was astonished to see rising from him unknown powers he had never suspected: something altogether different from his passions, his sorrows, his conscious soul, but a strange soul, indifferent to all he had loved and suffered, to his entire life, a joyful, whimsical, wild, incomprehensible soul. It rode him, it ploughed his sides with its spurs. And in the rare moments when he could catch his breath, he asked himself, rereading what he had just written:

--- How, how could this have come out of my body?

He was in the grip of that delirium of the spirit which every genius knows, that will independent of the will, “this unspeakable enigma of the world and of life,” which Goethe called “the daemonic,” and against which he remained armed, yet to which he was subjected.

And Christophe wrote, and wrote. For days, for weeks. There are periods when the mind, once fertilized, can feed on itself alone and continues to produce in an almost indefinite way. The most delicate brushing of things suffices, a pollen carried on the wind, for the inner germs, the myriads of germs, to rise and flower. Christophe had no time to think, no time to live. Over the ruins of life, the creative soul reigned.

And then it stopped. Christophe emerged from it broken, burnt, aged by ten years---but saved. He had left Christophe behind; he had emigrated into God.

Tufts of white hair had appeared abruptly in his dark hair, like those autumn flowers that spring up from the meadows in a single September night. New wrinkles slashed his cheeks. But his eyes had recovered their calm, and his mouth had made its peace. He was at rest. He understood now. He understood the vanity of his pride, the vanity of human pride, under the formidable fist of the Force that moves the worlds. No one is master of himself with any certainty. One must keep watch. For if one falls asleep, the Force rushes into us and carries us away---into what abysses? Or the torrent that sweeps us along retreats and leaves us dry in its bed. It is not even enough to will, in order to struggle. One must humble oneself before the unknown God, who flat ubi vult, who breathes when he wills, where he wills, love, death, or life. The human will can do nothing without his. A single second suffices him to annihilate years of labor and effort. And, if it please him, he can cause the eternal to spring up from dust and mud. No one, more than the artist who creates, feels himself at his mercy: for if he is truly great, he says only what the Spirit dictates to him.

And Christophe understood the wisdom of old Haydn, kneeling each morning before taking up his pen… Vigila et Ora, Watch and pray. Pray to God, that he may be with you. Remain in loving and devout communion with the Spirit of life.

Toward the end of summer, a Parisian friend who was passing through Switzerland discovered Christophe’s retreat. He came to visit him. He was a music critic who had always shown himself to be the best judge of his compositions. He was accompanied by a well-known painter who called himself a music lover and an admirer of Christophe as well. They told him of the considerable success of his works: they were being performed everywhere, throughout Europe. Christophe showed little interest in this news: the past was dead to him, those works no longer counted. At his visitor’s request, he showed him what he had written recently. The other understood nothing of it. He thought that Christophe had gone mad.

--- No melody, no meter, no thematic development; a kind of liquid core, a molten matter that has not cooled, taking all forms and having none; it resembles nothing: glimmers in a chaos.

Christophe smiled:

--- That’s more or less it, he said. “The eyes of chaos shining through the veil of order…”

But the other did not understand the words of Novalis:

(--- He is emptied out, he thought.)

Christophe made no attempt to be understood.

When his guests took their leave, he walked with them a short way, to do the honors of his mountain. But he did not go far. Apropos of a meadow, the music critic was evoking Parisian stage sets; and the painter was noting colors, showing no indulgence toward the clumsiness of their combinations, which he found to be of Swiss taste, rhubarb tart, sour and flat, in the manner of Hodler; he displayed, moreover, toward nature, an indifference that was not entirely feigned. He affected to ignore it.

--- Nature! What’s that supposed to be? Never heard of it. Light, color, now you’re talking! Nature, I couldn’t care less.

Christophe shook their hands and let them go. None of it affected him any longer. They were on the other side of the ravine. That was fine. He would say to no one:

--- To reach me, take the same road.

The creative fire that had burned within him for months had died down. But Christophe kept its beneficent warmth in his heart. He knew the fire would be reborn: if not in him, then around him. Wherever it might be, he would love it just as much: it would always be the same fire. In this late September afternoon, he felt it spread through all of nature.

He made his way back up toward his house. There had been a storm. Now there was sun. The meadows were steaming. From the apple trees, ripe fruit was falling into the wet grass. Stretched between the branches of the fir trees, spiders’ webs, still brilliant with rain, were like the archaic wheels of Mycenaean chariots. At the edge of the wet forest, the woodpecker shook its staccato laugh. And myriads of small wasps, dancing in the sunbeams, filled the vault of the woods with their deep, continuous organ pedal.

Christophe found himself in a clearing, in the hollow of a fold in the mountain, a closed valley of a regular oval shape, which the setting sun was flooding with its light: red earth; in the middle, a small golden field, late wheat, and rust-colored rushes. All around, a belt of woods that autumn was ripening: beech trees of deep copper red, fair chestnuts, rowan trees with their coral clusters, the flames of cherry trees with their small tongues of fire, thickets of bilberry with orange leaves, citron, brown, charred tinder. Such was a burning bush. And from the center of that blazing cup, a lark, drunk with grain and sunlight, was rising.

And the soul of Christophe was like the lark. It knew that it would fall back soon, and many times again. But it knew too that tirelessly it would rise again into the fire, singing its tireli, which speaks to those below of the light of heaven.