Jean-Christophe. The New Dawn. 1

R. R.

PREFACE TO THE FINAL VOLUME OF JEAN-CHRISTOPHE

I have written the tragedy of a generation that is passing away. I have sought to conceal nothing of its vices and its virtues, its heavy sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic efforts and its collapses beneath the crushing burden of a superhuman task: an entire summa of the world, a morality, an aesthetic, a faith, a new humanity to be remade. --- That is what we were.

Men of today, young men, your turn has come! Make of our bodies a stepping stone, and press forward. Be greater and happier than we.

I myself say farewell to my past soul; I cast it behind me, like an empty shell. Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, so that we may be reborn.

Romain Rolland.

October 1912.

Life passes. Body and soul flow away like a stream. The years inscribe themselves on the flesh of the aging tree. The entire world of forms wears away and renews itself. You alone do not pass, immortal music. You are the inner sea. You are the deep soul. In your clear eyes, the sullen face of life does not mirror itself. Far from you, like a flock of clouds, the procession of days flees --- burning, frozen, feverish days that restlessness drives on and that never last. You alone do not pass. You exist outside the world. You are a world unto yourself. You have your sun, your laws, your ebb and flow. You have the peace of the stars that trace their luminous furrow across the field of nocturnal spaces --- silver ploughs guided by the sure hand of the invisible ploughman.

Music, serene music, how gentle is your moonlight to eyes wearied by the brutal glare of the sun down here! The soul that has lived and turned away from the common watering-trough, where men, drinking, churn up the mud with their feet, presses itself to your breast and draws from your nipples the cool stream of dreams. Music, virgin mother, who carries all the passions within your immaculate womb, who encloses good and evil in the lake of your eyes --- the color of rushes, the color of the pale-green water that runs off glaciers --- you stand beyond evil, beyond good; whoever takes refuge in you lives outside the ages; the whole succession of their days will be but a single day; and death, which gnaws at everything, will break its teeth.

Music that cradled my aching soul, music that gave it back to me firm, calm, and joyful --- my love and my treasure --- I kiss your pure mouth, I hide my face in your honey-colored hair, I press my burning eyelids against the soft palm of your hands. We are silent, our eyes are closed, and I see the ineffable light of your eyes, and I drink the smile from your mute lips; and nestled against your heart, I listen to the beating of eternal life.

PART ONE

Christophe no longer counts the years as they flee. Drop by drop, life ebbs away. But his life is elsewhere. It no longer has a story. His story is the work he creates. The ceaseless song of music welling up fills the soul and renders it insensible to the tumult of the outside world.

Christophe has triumphed. His name has made itself known. Age is coming on. His hair has turned white. He pays it no mind; his heart is still young; he has surrendered none of his strength or his faith. He has found calm again; but it is not the same calm as before he passed through the Burning Bush. He carries deep within himself the trembling of the storm and of what the sea, when it surged, had shown him of the abyss. He knows that no one ought to boast of being master of himself except by leave of the God who reigns in battle. He bears within his soul two souls. One is a high plateau, beaten by winds and clouds. The other, which rises above it, is a snowy summit bathed in light. One cannot linger there; but when one is frozen by the mists below, one knows the path that climbs toward the sun. In his soul of mist, Christophe is not alone. He feels beside him the presence of the invisible companion, the strong saint Cecilia, with her wide, calm eyes that listen to heaven; and, like the apostle Paul --- in Raphael’s painting --- who is silent and pensive, leaning on his sword, he no longer grows angry, no longer thinks of fighting; he dreams and forges his dream.

During this period of his life, he wrote chiefly compositions for keyboard and chamber music. One is far freer there to dare more; there are fewer intermediaries between thought and its realization: the thought has not had time to weaken along the way. Frescobaldi, Couperin, Schubert, and Chopin, through their boldness of expression and style, anticipated by fifty years the revolutionaries of the orchestra. From the sonorous material kneaded by Christophe’s powerful hands emerged unknown harmonic formations, vertiginous chord progressions issuing from the most distant harmonic relationships accessible to the contemporary ear; they exerted a sacred enchantment over the mind. --- But the public needs time to grow accustomed to the conquests that a great artist brings back from his dives to the bottom of the ocean. Very few followed Christophe in the audacity of his latest compositions. His fame rested entirely on his earlier works. The awareness of this incomprehension within success --- more painful still than incomprehension within failure, because it seems without remedy --- had deepened in Christophe, since the death of his one true friend, a somewhat morbid tendency to withdraw from the world.

And yet, the doors of Germany had reopened to him. In France, oblivion had fallen over the tragic scrape. He was free to go wherever he pleased. But he was afraid of the memories waiting for him in Paris. And although he had returned for several months to Germany, although he went back from time to time to conduct performances of his works, he had not settled there. Too many things wounded him there. They were not peculiar to Germany; he found them elsewhere. But one is more exacting toward one’s own country than toward another, and one suffers more from its weaknesses. In any case, it was true that Germany bore the heaviest burden of Europe’s sins. When one has victory, one is responsible for it, one incurs a debt toward those one has vanquished; one takes on the tacit obligation to march ahead of them, to show them the way. Louis XIV in victory brought to Europe the splendor of French reason. What light did the Germany of Sedan bring to the world? The flash of bayonets? A thought without wings, an action without generosity, a brutal realism that does not even have the excuse of belonging to healthy men; force and self-interest: Mars as traveling salesman. For forty years, Europe had dragged itself through the darkness, under the shadow of fear. The sun was hidden beneath the victor’s helmet. If those who were vanquished and too weak to lift the extinguisher deserve only a pity mixed with a little contempt, what feeling does the man in the helmet deserve?

Recently, day had begun to dawn again; shafts of light were breaking through the cracks. To be among the first to see the sun rise, Christophe had stepped out of the helmet’s shadow; he was glad to return to the country where he had once been a reluctant guest: Switzerland. Like so many spirits of that time, thirsting for freedom, suffocating within the narrow circle of hostile nations, he sought a corner of the earth where one could breathe above Europe. Long ago, in Goethe’s day, the Rome of the free popes had been the island where thoughts of every kind came to alight, like birds sheltering from the storm. Now, what refuge? The island has been swallowed by the sea. Rome is no more. The birds have fled from the Seven Hills. --- The Alps remain to them. There, in the midst of a covetous Europe, the little island of the twenty-four cantons holds on --- for how much longer? It does not radiate the poetic mirage of the eternal City; history has not blended into the air one breathes the scent of gods and heroes; but a powerful music rises from the naked Earth; the lines of the mountains have heroic rhythms; and more than anywhere else, one feels here in contact with elemental forces. Christophe did not come seeking romantic pleasure. A field, a few trees, a stream, the vast sky, would have been enough for him to live. The calm face of his native land was more brotherly to him than the Alpine Gigantomachy. But he could not forget that here he had recovered his strength; here, God had appeared to him in the Burning Bush; he never returned without a shiver of gratitude and faith. He was not alone in this. How many fighters in the battle of life, bruised by life itself, have found on this soil the energy they needed to take up the struggle again and to believe in it still!

By living in this country, he had come to know it. Most of those who pass through see nothing but its warts: the leprosy of hotels that dishonors the finest features of this vigorous land, those cities of foreigners, monstrous depots where the world’s well-fed come to purchase their health, those table d’hôte meals, those manglings of meat tossed into the pit of beasts, those casino orchestras whose noise mingles with the sound of roulette wheels, those vile Italian buffoons whose nauseating bellowing sends the rich imbeciles who are bored into raptures, the inanity of shop displays: wooden bears, chalets, silly trinkets, all the same, repeated and repeated without any invention, the respectable booksellers with their scandalous pamphlets --- all the moral baseness of those settings where, each year, joylessly, the millions of these idle people pour in, incapable of finding amusements either more elevated than those of the rabble or simply as lively.

And they know nothing of the life of the people who are their hosts. They have no inkling of the reserves of moral force and civic freedom that have accumulated over centuries in that people, from the embers of the fire of Calvin and Zwingli that still glow beneath the ash, of the vigorous democratic spirit that the Napoleonic Republic will never understand, of that simplicity of institutions and that breadth of social endeavor, of the example given to the world by these United States of the three main races of the West, a miniature of the Europe of the future. They know even less of the Daphne that hides beneath this rough bark, the blazing and savage dream of Böcklin, the harsh heroism of Hodler, the serene vision and the green candor of Gottfried Keller, the living traditions of the great popular festivals, and the spring sap swelling in the forest --- all that art still young, which at times scrapes the tongue like the stony fruit of wild pear trees, at times has the sugary blandness of blue-black bilberries, but which at least smells of the earth, is the work of self-taught men whom an archaic culture does not separate from their people and who read, alongside them, in the same book of life.

Christophe had sympathy for these men who care less about appearing than about being, and who, beneath the recent veneer of an ultra-modern industrialism, retain certain of the most restful traits of the old rural and bourgeois Europe. He had made among them two or three good friends, grave, serious, and loyal, who lived isolated and walled up in their regrets for the past; they witnessed the slow disappearance of old Switzerland with a kind of religious fatalism, a Calvinist pessimism: great gray souls. Christophe saw them rarely. His old wounds had healed on the surface; but they had been too deep to heal entirely. He was afraid of forming new ties with people. He was afraid of being caught again in the chain of affections and of sorrows. It was partly for this reason that he found himself at ease in a country where it was easy to live apart, a stranger among the crowd of strangers. Moreover, he rarely stayed long in any one place; he changed his lodgings often: an old nomadic bird who needs space, and for whom home is the open air… “Mein Reich ist in der Luft…”

A summer evening.

He was walking in the mountains above a village. He went, hat in hand, along a winding path that climbed upward. Where it reached a pass, the road made a double bend, in the shade, between two slopes; hazel thickets and fir trees bordered it. It was like a small enclosed world. At each turn of the bend, the road seemed to end, rearing up at the edge of emptiness. Beyond, the bluish distances, the luminous air. The calm of evening descended, drop by drop, like a trickle of water tinkling beneath the moss.

They appeared at the same moment, each at one of the opposite bends in the road. She was dressed in black and stood out against the brightness of the sky; behind her, two children, a small boy and a small girl of six to eight years, were playing and picking flowers. A few steps away, they recognized each other. Their emotion betrayed itself in their eyes: but no strong words, an imperceptible gesture. He, very shaken; she, … her lips trembled slightly. They stopped. Almost in a whisper:

--- Grazia!

--- You, here!

They shook hands and remained without speaking. Grazia was the first to make an effort to break the silence. She said where she was staying, she asked where he was. Mechanical questions and answers, which they barely listened to, which they heard afterward, when they were apart: they were absorbed in the sight of each other. The children had rejoined her. She introduced them to him. He felt toward them a hostile sentiment. He looked at them without kindness and said nothing; he was full of her, wholly occupied with studying her beautiful face, a little worn and aged. She was made uneasy by his eyes. She said:

--- Will you come this evening?

She gave the name of the hotel.

He asked where her husband was. She indicated her mourning dress. He was too moved to continue the conversation. He took his leave of her awkwardly. But after taking two steps, he turned back toward the children, who were picking strawberries; he took them up abruptly, embraced them, and hurried away.

That evening, he came to the hotel. She was sitting under the glass-enclosed veranda. They sat down apart from the others. Few people; two or three elderly persons. Christophe was dimly irritated by their presence. Grazia looked at him. He looked at Grazia, repeating her name, very softly.

--- I have changed quite a bit, haven’t I? she said.

His heart was swollen with emotion.

--- You have suffered, he said.

--- So have you, she answered with compassion, looking at his face ravaged by grief and passion.

They could find no more words.

--- Please, he said after a moment, let us go somewhere else; can’t we talk somewhere we’d be alone?

--- No, my friend, let us stay, stay here, we are fine; who is paying any attention to us?

--- I am not free to speak here.

--- That is better, this way.

He did not understand why. Later, when he turned that conversation over in his memory, he thought that she did not trust him. But the truth was that she had an instinctive fear of emotional scenes; without quite knowing it, she was seeking shelter against the surprises their hearts might spring; she even welcomed the awkwardness of this intimacy in a hotel salon, which protected the modesty of her secret disturbance.

They told each other, in low voices, with long silences between, the broad outlines of their lives. Count Berény had been killed in a duel several months before; and Christophe understood that she had not been very happy with him. She had also lost a child, her firstborn. She avoided all complaint. She turned the conversation away from herself to ask Christophe questions, and showed, as he recounted his trials, a warm and tender compassion.

The bells were ringing. It was a Sunday evening. Life was suspended.

She asked him to come back the day after next. He was grieved that she was in so little hurry to see him again. In his heart joy and sorrow were mingled.

The next day, on a pretext, she wrote asking him to come. That ordinary little note delighted him. This time she received him in her private sitting room. She was with her two children. He looked at them with some lingering unease and a great deal of tenderness. He thought that the little girl --- the elder --- resembled her mother; he did not ask whom the boy resembled. They talked about the countryside, the weather, the books lying open on the table --- while their eyes spoke an entirely different language. He hoped to find a way to talk to her more intimately. But a friend from the hotel walked in. He watched the pleasant courtesy with which Grazia received this stranger; she seemed to make no distinction between her two visitors. It grieved him; he did not hold it against her. She proposed a walk together, he accepted; the other woman’s company, agreeable as she was, chilled him; and his day was ruined.

He did not see Grazia again until two days later. During those two days he lived only for the hour he was about to spend with her. --- This time again he was no more successful in talking to her. For all her kindness toward him, she did not abandon her reserve. Christophe, without realizing it, only added to it with certain outpourings of Germanic sentimentality, which made her uncomfortable and against which she instinctively recoiled.

He wrote her a letter that moved her. He said that life was so short! Their lives were already so far along! Perhaps they had only a little time left to see each other: it was painful, almost criminal, not to use it to speak freely.

She replied with an affectionate note: she apologized for keeping, despite herself, a certain wariness, since life had wounded her; this habit of reserve she could not shake off; any manifestation too intense, even of a genuine feeling, shocked and frightened her. But she felt the value of this recovered friendship; and she was as glad of it as he was. She asked him to come to dinner that evening.

His heart overflowed with gratitude. In his hotel room, lying on his bed with his face buried in the pillows, he wept. It was the release of ten years of solitude. For since Olivier’s death he had been alone. This letter brought the word of resurrection for his heart, starved of tenderness. Tenderness!… He had thought he had given it up: he had been forced to learn to do without it! He felt now how much he had missed it, and all the love he had been accumulating within himself…

A sweet and sacred evening they spent together… He was unable to speak to her about anything but indifferent topics, despite their intention to hide nothing from each other. But how much that was healing he said at the piano, where she invited him with a glance to speak to her! She was struck to see the humility of heart in this man whom she had known as proud and violent. When he left, the silent clasp of their hands said that they had found each other again, that they would not lose each other anymore. --- It was raining, without a breath of wind. His heart was singing.

She was to remain only a few more days in the country; and she did not delay her departure by a single hour, nor did he dare ask her to, nor complain of it. On the last day, they walked alone together with the children; at one moment he was so full of love and happiness that he wanted to tell her so; but with a very gentle gesture she stopped him, smiling:

--- Hush! I feel everything you might say.

They sat down at the bend in the road where they had met. She gazed, still smiling, at the valley below; but it was not the valley she was seeing. He contemplated the gentle face on which suffering had left its mark; in the thick black hair, white threads showed everywhere. He was seized by a pitying and passionate adoration for this flesh that had endured, that had been steeped in the soul’s suffering. The soul was visible everywhere in these wounds of time. --- And he asked, in a low and trembling voice, as though begging a precious gift, that she give him… one of her white hairs.

She left. He could not understand why she was not inclined to let him accompany her. He did not doubt her friendship; but her reserve disconcerted him. He could not stay two days in that place; he left in another direction. He tried to occupy his mind with travel, with work. He wrote to Grazia. She replied, two or three weeks later, with short letters in which a calm friendship showed through, without impatience, without anxiety. He suffered from them and he loved them. He did not feel he had the right to reproach her for them; their affection was too recent, too newly renewed! He trembled at the thought of losing her. And yet every letter that came from her breathed a quiet sincerity that should have given him every reassurance. But she was so different from him!…

They had arranged to meet in Rome toward the end of autumn. Without the thought of seeing her again, that journey would have held little charm for Christophe. His long isolation had made him a homebody; he no longer had any taste for the pointless displacements in which the restless idleness of people today takes such pleasure. He dreaded any change of habits, which was dangerous for the regular work of the mind. Moreover, Italy held no attraction for him. He knew it only through the execrable music of the veristi and through the tenor arias that Virgil’s land periodically inspires in traveling men of letters. He felt toward it the suspicious hostility of an avant-garde artist who has too often heard the name of Rome invoked by the worst champions of academic routine. And finally, that old leaven of instinctive antipathy that smolders at the bottom of every northerner’s heart toward the men of the south --- or at least toward the legendary type of oratorical boastfulness that, in the northern eye, stands for the men of the south. The mere thought of it made Christophe curl his lip in disdain… No, he had no desire whatsoever to make better acquaintance with this people without music --- (what do their mandolin strumming and their blustering melodrama yowling count for in the music of present-day Europe?) --- But to that people, all the same, Grazia belonged. To find her again, how far and by what roads would Christophe not have gone? He would simply close his eyes until he had reached her.

Close his eyes --- he was used to that. For so many years, the shutters had been drawn on his inner life! In this late autumn, it was more necessary than ever. For three weeks straight it had rained without respite. Since then, an impenetrable grey dome of cloud had weighed down on the valleys and cities of Switzerland, shivering and sodden. The eyes had lost all memory of the taste of sunlight. To rediscover within oneself its concentrated energy, one had first to make complete darkness and, behind closed eyelids, descend to the bottom of the mine, into the underground galleries of dream. There, sleeping in the coal, lay the sun of dead days. But spending one’s life crouching there, digging, one came out of it scorched, spine and knees stiff, limbs misshapen, half petrified, vision clouded, with the eyes of a night bird. Many a time Christophe had brought up from the mine the fire painfully extracted that warms frozen hearts. But the dreams of the North smell of the heated stove and the closed room. One doesn’t notice it when one lives inside them; one loves that heavy warmth, one loves that half-light and the soul’s reveries in the heavy head. One loves what one has. One must be satisfied with it!…

When, emerging from the alpine barrier, Christophe, dozing in the corner of his railway carriage, caught sight of the immaculate sky and the limpid light flowing over the mountain slopes, it seemed to him he was dreaming. On the other side of the wall, he had just left the extinguished sky, the twilight day. So abrupt was the change that he felt at first more surprise than joy. It took him some time before his numbed soul slowly unwound, before the shell imprisoning it melted away, and before his heart freed itself from the shadows of the past. But as the day advanced, the soft light enfolded him in its arms; and, losing all memory of everything that had been, he drank greedily the pleasure of seeing.

The plains of the Milanese. The eye of day reflected in the bluish canals whose network of veins cross the downy rice paddies. Autumn trees, their spare and supple skeletons, twisting in line, with tufts of russet down. Mountains of Leonardo, snowy Alps with softened brilliance, their stormy line encircling the horizon, fringed with red, orange, yellow-green and pale blue. Evening falling over the Apennines. Sinuous descent along the small steep hills, with their serpentine curves, whose rhythm repeats and links itself together like a farandole. --- And suddenly, at the bottom of the slope, like a kiss, the breath of the sea and the scent of orange trees. The sea, the Latin sea and its opal light, where flocks of small boats lie sleeping, suspended, with folded wings…

On the seashore, at a fishing village, the train had stopped. Travelers were being told that following the heavy rains a landslide had occurred in a tunnel on the Genoa-to-Pisa line; all trains were running several hours late. Christophe, who had taken a direct ticket to Rome, was delighted by this misfortune that was drawing protests from his fellow passengers. He jumped onto the platform and took advantage of the halt to go toward the sea, whose gaze was drawing him in. It drew him so well that an hour or two later, when the whistle of the departing train sounded, Christophe was in a boat and, watching it pass, called out: “Bon voyage!” In the luminous night, on the luminous sea, he let himself be cradled along the fragrant coast with its promontories edged by young cypresses. He settled into the village, spending five days there in unbroken joy. He was like a man emerging from a long fast who devours everything in sight. With all his famished senses he feasted on the splendid light… Light, blood of the world flowing through space like a river of life, seeping through our eyes, our lips, our nostrils, all the pores of our skin into the very depths of our flesh, light more necessary to life than bread --- whoever sees you stripped of your northern veils, pure, burning and bare, wonders how he could ever have lived without knowing you, and knows he will never be able to live again without possessing you…

For five days, Christophe was submerged in a drunkenness of sunlight. For five days, he forgot --- for the first time --- that he was a musician. The music of his being had transformed itself into light. The air, the sea, and the earth: a blazing symphony, played by the orchestra of the sun. And of that orchestra, with what innate art Italy knows how to make use! Other peoples paint from nature; the Italian collaborates with it; he paints with the sun. Music of colors. Everything is music, everything sings. A simple roadside wall, red, cracked with gold; above it, two cypresses with their tightly curled fleece; the sky an avid blue, all around. A marble staircase, white, steep, narrow, winding between pink walls toward a blue church facade. One of those multicolored houses --- apricot, lemon, citron --- that gleam among the olive trees has the effect of a marvelous ripe fruit in the foliage. The Italian vision is a sensuality; the eyes take pleasure in colors as the palate and tongue take pleasure in a juicy, fragrant fruit. Christophe threw himself upon this new feast with an eager and artless greediness; he was taking his revenge for the asceticism of gray visions to which he had until now been condemned. His abundant nature, stifled by fate, was suddenly becoming aware of the powers of enjoyment he had never used; they seized upon the prey now offered to them --- scents, colors, the music of voices, bells, and the sea, the caresses of the air, the warm bath of light in which the aged and weary soul relaxes… Christophe was thinking of nothing. He was in a voluptuous beatitude. He emerged from it only to share his joy with those he encountered: his boatman, an old fisherman with sharp, crinkled eyes, wearing a red Venetian senator’s cap; --- his sole dining companion, a Milanese man who ate macaroni while rolling the atrocious eyes of an Othello, black with furious hatred, yet an apathetic, drowsy man; --- the restaurant waiter, who, to carry a tray, bent his neck, twisted his arms and torso like a Bernini angel; --- the little Saint John, with his flirtatious glances, who begged along the road, offering an orange with a green branch to those who passed. He hailed the coachmen, sprawled with their heads hanging down inside their carriages, intermittently bursting into the thousand and one verses of a nasal, lazy, bellowing song. He caught himself humming Cavalleria rusticana. The purpose of his journey was entirely forgotten. Forgotten, his eagerness to reach his destination, to find Grazia again…

Until the day when the beloved image awakened. Was it a glance encountered on the road, was it an inflection of voice, grave and melodious, that evoked her? He was not aware of it. But an hour came when, from everything that surrounded him --- from the circle of hills covered in olive trees, and from the high, polished ridges of the Apennines sculpted by thick shadow and ardent sun, and from the orange groves heavy with flowers and fruit, and from the deep breathing of the sea --- there radiated the smiling face of his friend. Through the countless eyes of the air, her eyes were watching him. She blossomed from this beloved earth like a rose from a rosebush.

Then he pulled himself together. He boarded the train for Rome without stopping anywhere. Nothing of Italy’s monuments interested him, none of the art cities of the past. Of Rome he saw nothing and sought to see nothing; and what he did catch a glimpse of in passing --- first the new quarters without style, the square buildings --- inspired in him no desire to know more.

As soon as he arrived, he went to Grazia’s home. She asked him:

--- Which way did you come? Did you stop in Milan, in Florence?

--- No, he said. Why would I?

She laughed.

--- What an answer! And what do you think of Rome?

--- Nothing, he said; I haven’t seen anything.

--- But even so?

--- Nothing. Not a single monument. After leaving the hotel, I came straight to you.

--- Ten steps are enough to see Rome… Look at that wall across the way… One has only to see its light.

--- I see only you, he said.

--- You’re a barbarian; you see only your own idea. And when did you leave Switzerland?

--- Eight days ago.

--- What have you been doing since then?

--- I don’t know. I stopped, by chance, in a place near the sea. I barely noticed the name. I slept for eight days. Slept with my eyes open. I don’t know what I saw, I don’t know what I dreamed. I think I dreamed of you. I know it was very beautiful. But the most beautiful thing is that I’ve forgotten everything…

--- Thank you, she said.

(He did not hear.)

--- …Everything, he went on, everything that existed then, everything that came before. I’m like a new man, beginning life over.

--- It’s true, she said, looking at him with her laughing eyes. You’ve changed since our last meeting.

He was looking at her too, and found her no less different from the woman he remembered. Not that she had really changed, though, in two months. But he was seeing her with entirely new eyes. Back there in Switzerland, the image from former days, the light shadow of young Grazia, had interposed itself between his gaze and the friend before him. Now, under the Italian sun, the dreams of the North had melted away; he saw in the clarity of day the real soul and body of the woman he loved. How far she was from the seasonal kid-goat in Paris, far from the young woman with the Saint John smile whom he had found one evening, shortly after her marriage, only to lose her again at once! From the little Umbrian Madonna had blossomed a fine Roman woman:

Color verus, corpus solidum et succi plenum.

Her figure had taken on a harmonious fullness; her body was bathed in a proud languor. The spirit of calm surrounded her. She had that relish for sunlit silence, for motionless contemplation, that voluptuous enjoyment of the peace of living, which Northern souls will never truly know. What she had kept above all from the past was her great goodness, which permeated all her other feelings. But new things could be read in her luminous smile: a melancholy indulgence, a touch of weariness, a deep understanding of souls, a hint of irony, a serene good sense. Age had veiled her with a certain coolness that sheltered her against the heart’s illusions; she rarely gave herself; and her tenderness kept itself on guard, with a clear-eyed smile, against the outbursts of passion that Christophe had difficulty restraining. Along with that, there were weaknesses, moments of surrender to the breath of the passing days, a coquetry she mocked in herself but did not fight. No revolt against things, nor against herself: a very gentle fatalism, in a nature wholly good and a little tired.

She received many visitors, and without much discrimination --- or so it seemed; --- but since her intimates generally belonged to the same world, breathed the same atmosphere, and had been shaped by the same habits, this society formed a fairly homogeneous harmony, very different from those Christophe had known in Germany and in France. Most were of old Italian stock, here and there enlivened by foreign marriages; among them reigned a surface cosmopolitanism in which the four principal languages and the intellectual baggage of the four great Western nations mingled with ease. Each people contributed its personal element, the Jews their restlessness and the Anglo-Saxons their phlegm; but the whole was immediately fused in the Italian crucible. When centuries of great pillaging barons have engraved in a race that haughty and rapacious profile of a bird of prey, the metal may change, but the stamp remains the same. Certain of these faces that seemed most Italian --- a Luini smile, a voluptuous and calm Titian gaze, flowers of the Adriatic or the Lombard plains --- had blossomed on Northern shrubs transplanted into the old Latin soil. Whatever colors are ground on Rome’s palette, the color that emerges is always the Roman.

Christophe, without being able to analyze his impression, admired the perfume of centuries-old culture, of ancient civilization, that breathed from these souls --- often quite mediocre, and some even below mediocre. An impalpable perfume, dependent on trifles: a courteous grace, a gentleness of manner that knew how to be affectionate while preserving its malice and its rank; a refined elegance of glance, of smile, of intelligence that was alert and nonchalant, skeptical, varied, and easy. Nothing rigid or arrogant. Nothing bookish. One had no fear of encountering here one of those salon psychologists of Paris, lying in wait behind his lorgnette, or the militarism of some German doctor. Simply men --- and very human men, such as were already the friends of Terence and Scipio Aemilianus…

Homo sum…

A fine facade. Life was more apparent than real. Beneath it, the incurable frivolity common to fashionable society in every country. But what gave this society its racial character was its indolence. French frivolity is accompanied by a nervous fever --- a perpetual movement of the brain, even when it moves in a void. The Italian brain knows how to rest. It knows it only too well. It is sweet to doze in the warm shade, on the soft pillow of a gentle epicureanism and an ironic intelligence, very supple, curious enough, and in the end prodigiously indifferent.

All these men lacked firm opinions. They involved themselves in politics and in art with the same dilettantism. One saw among them charming natures, those beautiful Italian patrician faces with fine features, intelligent and gentle eyes, and quiet manners, who loved with exquisite taste and an affectionate heart the countryside, the old painters, flowers, women, books, good food, their country, music… They loved everything. They preferred nothing. One sometimes had the feeling that they loved nothing. Love nonetheless held a large place in their lives; but only on the condition that it not disturb them. It was indolent and lazy like themselves; even in passion it tended to take on a domestic character. Their intelligence, well-formed and harmonious, accommodated itself to an inertia in which the contraries of thought met without collision, tranquilly associated, smiling, blunted, rendered harmless. They feared whole beliefs, excessive positions, and felt comfortable in half-solutions and half-thoughts. They were liberal-conservative in spirit. They required politics and art at a moderate altitude --- like those mountain resorts where one risks neither breathlessness nor palpitations. They recognized themselves in the lazy theater of Goldoni, or in the even, diffuse light of Manzoni. Their amiable nonchalance was untroubled by any of it. They would not have said, as their great ancestors had: “Primum vivere…” but rather: “Dapprima, quieto vivere.”

To live quietly. That was the secret wish, the will of all of them, even the most energetic, even those who directed political action. A certain small Machiavelli, master of himself and others, with a heart as cold as his head, his intelligence lucid and bored, knowing and daring to use every means for his ends, ready to sacrifice all his friendships to his ambition, was capable of sacrificing his ambition to one thing alone: his quieto vivere. They needed long periods of annihilation. When they emerged from these --- as after a good sleep --- they were fresh and vigorous; these grave men, these tranquil madonnas, were seized suddenly by a craving for talk, for gaiety, for social life: they needed to spend themselves in a volubility of gestures and words, of paradoxical sallies, of burlesque humor --- they were performing the opera buffa. In this gallery of Italian portraits, one would rarely have found the wear of thought, that metallic glitter of the eyes, those faces withered by the perpetual labor of the mind that one sees in the North. And yet there was no lack here, as everywhere, of souls who gnawed at themselves and hid their wounds, of desires and anxieties smoldering beneath the indifference, voluptuously wrapping themselves in torpor. Not to mention, in certain individuals, strange outbursts --- baroque, disconcerting, signs of an obscure imbalance peculiar to very ancient races --- like the fissures that open in the Roman Campagna.

There was much charm in the nonchalant enigma of these souls, these calm and mocking eyes in which a hidden tragedy lay sleeping. But Christophe was in no mood to recognize it. He raged to see Grazia surrounded by society people who were witty and empty. He resented them, and he resented her. He sulked at her, just as he sulked at Rome. He spaced out his visits and resolved to leave.

He did not leave. He was already beginning to feel, without knowing it, the pull of this Italian world that irritated him.

For the moment, he withdrew into himself. He wandered through Rome and its surroundings. The Roman light, the hanging gardens, the Campagna encircled like a golden sash by the sunlit sea, gradually revealed to him the secret of that enchanted land. He had sworn not to take a single step to visit those dead monuments he affected to disdain; he grumbled that he would wait for them to come to him. They came; he encountered them, by chance on his walks, in the city whose ground rolls and undulates. Without having sought it, he saw the Forum in red sunset light, and the half-crumbled arches of the Palatine, through which the deep azure hollows itself out — a chasm of blue light. He wandered across the vast Campagna, near the reddish Tiber, heavy with mud, like earth itself in motion --- and along the ruined aqueducts, gigantic vertebrae of antediluvian monsters. Thick masses of black cloud rolled through the blue sky. Peasants on horseback drove great herds of long-horned grey oxen across the wasteland with blows of a pole; and on the ancient road, straight, dusty and bare, goat-footed shepherds with thighs wrapped in hairy hides made their way in silence, trailing processions of small donkeys and foals. On the floor of the horizon, the Sabine range with its Olympian lines unrolled its hills; and on the other rim of the sky’s bowl, the old city walls, the façade of Saint John’s crowned with dancing statues, traced their black silhouettes… Silence… Fiery sun… The wind passed over the plain… On a headless statue, its arm swathed in wrappings, battered by waves of grass, a lizard whose peaceful heart pulsed sat motionless, absorbed in its meal of light. And Christophe, his head buzzing with sun (and sometimes also with the wine of the Castelli), seated on the dark earth near the broken marble, smiling, drowsy, and steeped in oblivion, drank in the calm and violent strength of Rome. --- Until nightfall. --- Then, his heart seized by a sudden anguish, he fled the funereal solitude into which the tragic light was swallowed… O earth, burning earth, earth passionate and mute! Beneath your feverish peace, I still hear the trumpets of the legions sounding. What furies of life rumble in your breast! What longing for awakening!

Christophe found souls in which the embers of the age-old fire still burned. Beneath the dust of the dead they had been preserved. One might have thought the fire had gone out with the eyes of Mazzini. It lived again. The same fire. Very few wished to see it. It disturbed the quiet of those who slept. It was a clear and brutal light. Those who carried it --- young men (the eldest was not yet thirty-five), an elite drawn from every point of the horizon, free intellectuals who differed among themselves in temperament, education, opinions, and faith --- were united in the same devotion to this flame of new life. Party labels and systems of thought meant nothing to them: the great business was to “think with courage.” To be frank, to be brave, in mind and in deed. They shook the slumber of their race with rough hands. After the political resurrection of Italy, awakened from death by the call of heroes, after her most recent economic resurrection, they had undertaken to drag Italian thought out of the tomb. They suffered, as from an affront, over the lazy and fearful torpor of the elite, its cowardice of mind, its worship of words. Their voices rang out through the fog of rhetoric and moral servitude that had accumulated for centuries over the soul of their homeland. Into it they blew their pitiless realism and their uncompromising loyalty. They had a passion for clear intelligence followed by energetic action. Capable, when the occasion demanded, of sacrificing the preferences of their personal reason to the duty of discipline that national life imposes on the individual, they nonetheless reserved their highest altar and their purest ardor for the truth. They loved it with a fervent and pious heart. Insulted by his adversaries, defamed, threatened, one of the leaders of these young men replied with a calm greatness:

« Respect the truth. I speak to you with an open heart, free of all rancor. I forget the harm I have received from you and whatever harm I may have done you. Be truthful. There is no conscience, no height of life, no capacity for sacrifice, no nobility, where there does not exist a religious, rigid, and rigorous respect for truth. Practice this difficult duty. Falsehood corrupts the one who uses it before it defeats the one against whom it is used. What does it matter if you gain immediate success by it? The roots of your soul will hang in the void over ground eaten away by lies. I no longer speak to you as an adversary. We stand on ground that surpasses our disagreements, even if in your mouth your passion adorns itself with the name of homeland. There is something greater than the homeland: it is the human conscience. There are laws you must not violate, on pain of being bad Italians. You have before you now only a man who seeks the truth; you must hear his cry. You have before you now only a man who ardently desires to see you great and pure, and to work alongside you. For, whether you will it or not, we all work in common with all those in the world who work with truth. What will come out of us (and what we cannot foresee) will bear our common mark, if we have acted with truth. The essence of man lies there: in his marvelous faculty for seeking the truth, seeing it, loving it, and sacrificing himself to it. --- Truth, who breathes over those who possess you the magic breath of your mighty health!… »

The first time Christophe heard these words, they seemed to him the echo of his own voice; and he felt that these men and he were brothers. The accidents of the struggle between peoples and ideas might one day throw them against one another in the fray; but friends or enemies, they were, they would always be, of the same human family. They knew it, as he did. They knew it before him. He was known to them before he knew them. For they were already the friends of Olivier. Christophe discovered that his friend’s works --- (a few volumes of verse, some critical essays) --- which were read in Paris only by a small number, had been translated by these Italians and were as familiar to them as they were to himself.

Later, he was to discover the unbridgeable distances that separated these souls from Olivier’s. In their way of judging others, they remained purely Italian, incapable of an effort to step outside themselves, rooted in the thought of their race. At bottom, they sought in good faith from foreign works only what their national instinct wished to find there; often they took from them only what they had themselves put in, without knowing it. Mediocre critics and poor psychologists, they were too absolute, too full of themselves and their passions, even when most in love with truth. Italian idealism does not know how to forget itself; it takes no interest in the impersonal dreams of the North; it draws everything back to itself, to its desires, to its racial pride, which it transfigures. Consciously or not, it always works for the terza Roma. It must be said that for centuries it had not put itself to much trouble to realize it. These handsome Italians, well built for action, act only through passion and quickly grow weary of acting; but when the passion blows, it lifts them higher than all other peoples: the example of their Risorgimento has made this plain. --- It was one of those great winds that was beginning to pass over the Italian youth of every party: nationalists, socialists, neo-Catholics, free idealists, all irreducibly Italian, all, in hope and will, citizens of imperial Rome, queen of the universe.

At first, Christophe noticed only their generous ardor and the common antipathies that bound him to them. They could not fail to understand one another with him in their contempt for fashionable society, toward which Christophe nursed a grievance on account of Grazia’s preferences. They hated more than he did that spirit of caution, that apathy, those compromises and harlequinades, those half-spoken things, those amphibious thoughts, that subtle balancing among all possibilities without committing to any, those fine phrases, that sweetness. Robust autodidacts who had made themselves entirely from scratch and who had lacked the means or leisure to put on the finishing touches, they willingly exaggerated their natural roughness and their slightly harsh tone of half-polished contadini. They wanted to be heard. They wanted to be challenged. Anything rather than indifference. They would have joyfully consented to be the first victims of the process if it might awaken the energies of their race.

In the meantime, they were not loved and did nothing to make themselves so. Christophe had little success when he tried to speak to Grazia of his new friends. They were disagreeable to that nature so in love with measure and peace. He had to admit, along with her, that they had a way of championing the best causes that sometimes made one feel like declaring oneself their enemy. They were ironic and aggressive, their criticism harsh enough to border on insult, even with people they had no wish to wound. They were too sure of themselves, too quick to generalize and to assert violently. Having arrived at public action before having arrived at the maturity of their development, they passed from one enthusiasm to another with the same intolerance. Passionately sincere, giving themselves wholly without holding anything back, they were consumed by their excess of intellectualism, by their precocious and frenzied labor. It is not healthy for young thoughts, barely out of the husk, to expose themselves to the raw sun. The soul remains scorched by it. Nothing fertile is accomplished except with time and silence. Time and silence had been denied them. That is the misfortune of too many Italian talents. Violent and hasty action is an alcohol. The intelligence that has tasted it has a very hard time afterward breaking the habit; and its normal growth risks being forced and distorted by it forever.

Christophe appreciated the sharp freshness of this green frankness, in contrast to the insipidity of the men of the happy medium, the vie di mezzo, who live in eternal fear of compromising themselves and have a subtle talent for saying neither yes nor no. But he soon found that these latter men, with their calm and courteous intelligence, also had their worth. The state of perpetual combat in which his friends lived was exhausting. Christophe felt it his duty to go to Grazia’s in order to defend them. He sometimes went there in order to forget them. No doubt they resembled him. They resembled him too much. They were today what he had been at twenty. And the course of life cannot be reversed. At bottom, Christophe knew perfectly well that he had said farewell, for his own part, to those violences, and that he was making his way toward the peace of which Grazia’s eyes seemed to hold the secret. Why then did he revolt against her?… Ah! it was because he would have wished, out of a selfishness of love, to be the sole one to enjoy it. He could not bear that Grazia should dispense its benefits without counting, to all comers, that she should be lavish toward everyone with her charming welcome.

She read him; and with her amiable frankness, she said to him one day:

--- You hold it against me for being as I am? You must not idealize me, my friend. I am a woman; I am no better than any other. I do not seek out society; but I confess that it is agreeable to me, just as I take pleasure in going sometimes to theaters that are not very good, in reading books that are rather slight, which you disdain but which rest me and amuse me. I cannot deny myself anything.

--- How can you bear those fools?

--- Life has taught me not to be too particular. One must not ask too much of it. It is already a great deal, I assure you, when one has to do with decent people, not wicked, fairly good… (naturally, on condition that one expects nothing from them; I know very well that if I needed them, I would find very few left…) Still, they are attached to me; and when I encounter a little real affection, I make light of the rest. You hold it against me, don’t you? Forgive me for being mediocre. At least I know how to tell the difference between what is best and what is less good in me. And what is with you is the best.

--- I want it all, he said, in a sulking tone.

He felt clearly, nonetheless, that she was telling the truth. He was so certain of her affection that after hesitating for weeks, one day he asked her:

--- Would you never want…?

--- What, then?

--- To be mine.

He caught himself:

--- … for me to be yours?

She smiled:

--- But you are mine, my friend.

--- You know very well what I mean.

She was a little unsettled; but she took his hands and looked at him frankly:

--- No, my friend, she said with tenderness.

He could not speak. She saw that he was grieved.

--- Forgive me, I am causing you pain. I knew you would say this to me. We must speak to each other in complete truth, as good friends.

--- Friends, he said sadly. Nothing more?

--- Ungrateful! What more do you want? To marry me?… Do you remember long ago, when you had eyes only for my beautiful cousin? I was sad then that you did not understand what I felt for you. Our whole lives might have been changed. Now I think it is better this way; it is better that we did not expose our friendship to the trial of life in common, of that daily life where what is purest ends by being degraded…

--- You say that because you love me less.

--- Oh! no, I love you just as much as ever.

--- Ah! that is the first time you have said it to me.

--- There must no longer be anything hidden between us. You see, I do not believe very much in marriage. My own, I know, is not a sufficient example. But I have thought and looked about me. Happy marriages are rare. It is somewhat against nature. One cannot chain together the wills of two beings without mutilating one of them, if not both; and those are not even, perhaps, sufferings from which the soul profits by being tempered.

--- Ah! he said, I see something so beautiful in it, on the contrary --- the union of two sacrifices, two souls blended into one!

--- Something beautiful, in your dream. In reality, you would suffer more than anyone.

--- What! You believe I can never have a wife, a family, children?… Don’t say that to me! I would love them so much! You don’t think that happiness is possible for me?

--- I don’t know. I don’t think so. Perhaps with a good woman, not very intelligent, not very beautiful, who would be devoted to you and would not understand you.

--- How unkind you are!… But you are wrong to mock. A good woman is a fine thing, even one without wit.

--- I quite believe it! Would you like me to find you one?

--- Please be quiet, you are piercing my heart. How can you speak like that?

--- What did I say?

--- You don’t love me at all, then, not at all, to think of marrying me off to someone else?

--- But it is precisely because I love you that I would be glad to do whatever might make you happy.

--- Then, if that is true…

--- No, no, don’t go back to that. I tell you it would be your misfortune.

--- Don’t worry about me. I swear I will be happy! But tell me the truth: do you believe that you yourself would be unhappy with me?

--- Oh! Unhappy? My friend, no. I esteem and admire you too much ever to be unhappy with you… And then, I will tell you something: I believe that nothing could make me truly unhappy now. I have seen too many things, I have become a philosopher… But speaking frankly --- (you did ask me, didn’t you? You won’t be angry?) --- well, I know my own weakness, and after a few months I might be foolish enough to not be entirely happy with you; and that I do not want, precisely because I have for you the most sacred affection; and I do not want anything in the world to be able to tarnish it.

He said, sadly:

--- Yes, you say this to soften the blow for me. I displease you. There are things about me that are odious to you.

--- Not at all, I assure you. Don’t look so crestfallen. You are a good, dear man.

--- Then I no longer understand. Why could we not suit each other?

--- Because we are too different, both of us too strongly marked in character, too individual.

--- That is why I love you.

--- So do I. But it is also why we would find ourselves in conflict.

--- No, we wouldn’t.

--- Yes, we would. Or else, knowing as I do that you are worth more than I am, I would reproach myself for hampering you with my little personality; and then I would smother it, I would fall silent, and I would suffer.

Tears came to Christophe’s eyes.

--- Oh, that I will not have. Never! I would rather suffer every misfortune than have you suffer through my fault, for my sake.

--- My friend, don’t let it distress you… You know, I say all this, but perhaps I am flattering myself… Perhaps I would not be good enough to sacrifice myself for you.

--- So much the better!

--- But then, it would be you I would sacrifice, and I would be the one tormenting myself in turn… You see, it is insoluble, one way or the other. Let us remain as we are. Is there anything better than our friendship?

He shook his head, smiling with a touch of bitterness.

--- Yes, all of this simply means that deep down you don’t love enough.

She smiled too, gently, a little melancholic. She said, with a sigh:

--- Perhaps. You are right. I am no longer very young, my friend. I am weary. Life wears one down, when one is not very strong, as you are… Oh! you --- there are moments when I look at you and you have the air of an eighteen-year-old.

--- Alas! With this old head, these wrinkles, this faded complexion!

--- I know very well that you have suffered, as much as I have, perhaps more. I can see it. But sometimes you look at me with the eyes of an adolescent; and I feel a flood of perfectly fresh life welling up from you. I have burned out. When I think, alas, of my old ardor! As the saying goes, those were the good times --- I was very unhappy then! Now I no longer have enough strength for that. I have only a trickle of life left. I would no longer be reckless enough to dare the ordeal of marriage. Ah! in the past, in the past!… If someone I know had given me a sign!…

--- Well, well, tell me…

--- No, it’s not worth it…

--- So, in the past, if I had… Oh, my God!

--- What! If you had? I said nothing.

--- I understood. You are cruel.

--- Well, in the past I was a fool, that’s all.

--- What you say now is even worse.

--- Poor Christophe! I cannot say a word that doesn’t hurt him. I won’t say another thing then.

--- But yes! Tell me… Say something.

--- What?

--- Something kind.

She laughed.

--- Don’t laugh.

--- And you, don’t be sad.

--- How can you expect me not to be?

--- You have no reason to be, I assure you.

--- Why?

--- Because you have a friend who loves you dearly.

--- Is that true?

--- If I tell you so, don’t you believe it?

--- Say it again!

--- You won’t be sad anymore, then? You won’t be insatiable anymore? You will know how to be content with our dear friendship?

--- I have no choice!

--- Ungrateful, ungrateful! And you say you love? Deep down, I believe I love you more than you love me.

--- Ah! If only that were possible!

He said this with such a surge of amorous self-absorption that she laughed. So did he. He insisted:

--- Say so!…

For a moment she was silent, looked at him, then suddenly brought her face close to Christophe’s and kissed him. It was so unexpected! His heart lurched. He tried to take her in his arms. She had already drawn back. At the door of the small salon, she looked at him, a finger on her lips, saying: “Hush!” --- and disappeared.

From that moment on, he never spoke to her again of his love, and he was less constrained in his relations with her. The alternations of stiff silence and barely suppressed outbursts gave way to a simple, collected intimacy. Such is the gift of frankness in friendship. No more hidden meanings, no more illusions or fears. Each of them knew the depths of the other’s thought. When Christophe found himself with Grazia in the company of those indifferent people who irritated him, when impatience seized him again at hearing his friend exchange with them those slightly foolish things that make up the ordinary commerce of drawing rooms, she would notice, look at him, and smile. That was enough; he knew they were together; and peace descended in him once more.

The presence of what one loves draws out the sting from the imagination; the fever of desire subsides; the soul absorbs itself in the chaste possession of the beloved presence. --- Grazia shed over those around her the silent charm of her harmonious nature. Any exaggeration, even involuntary, of a gesture or a tone, wounded her, as something that was neither simple nor beautiful. Through this, she acted on Christophe over time. After chafing against the bridle placed on his outbursts, he gradually gained from it a mastery of self, a strength all the greater for no longer being squandered in futile violence.

Their souls intermingled. Grazia’s half-sleep, smiling in her surrender to the sweetness of life, awoke at contact with Christophe’s moral energy. She began to take a more direct and less passive interest in matters of the mind. She, who read little, who tended rather to reread the same old books endlessly with a languid affection, began to feel the curiosity of other ideas and soon their attraction. The richness of the modern world of ideas, which she did not ignore but into which she had no taste for venturing alone, no longer intimidated her, now that she had a companion to guide her through it. Imperceptibly, while still resisting, she allowed herself to be led toward understanding that young Italy whose iconoclastic ardors had long displeased her.

But the gift of this mutual penetration of souls was above all Christophe’s. It has often been observed that in love, the weaker of the two is the one who gives the most: not that the other loves less; but being stronger, that one must take more. Thus Christophe had already been enriched by Olivier’s spirit. But his new mystical marriage was far more fruitful: for Grazia brought him as her dowry the rarest treasure Olivier had never possessed --- joy. The joy of the soul and of the eyes. Light. The smile of that Latin sky which bathes the ugliness of the humblest things, which makes flowers bloom on the stones of old walls, and which communicates even to sadness its calm radiance.

She had an ally in the reborn spring. The dream of new life brooded in the warmth of the drowsy air. The young greenery mingled with the silver-grey olive trees. Beneath the dark-red arcades of ruined aqueducts, white almond trees were in bloom. Across the awakened Campagna rolled waves of grass and the flames of triumphant poppies. Over the lawns of the villas flowed streams of mauve anemones and sheets of violets. Wisteria climbed around stone pines; and the wind passing over the city carried the fragrance of the roses of the Palatine.

They walked together. When she consented to emerge from her Oriental torpor, in which she could be absorbed for hours at a time, she became entirely different; she loved to walk: tall, long-legged, with a robust and supple waist, she had the silhouette of a Diana by Primaticcio. --- Most often they went to one of those villas, the flotsam from the shipwreck in which the splendid Rome of the settecento sank beneath the waves of Piedmontese barbarism. They had a particular fondness for the Villa Mattei, that promontory of ancient Rome at whose foot the last waves of the empty Campagna came to die. They followed the oak-lined avenue, whose deep vault framed the blue chain, the sweet Alban chain, swelling gently like a heart that pulses. Lined along the path, the tombs of Roman couples showed through the foliage their melancholic faces and the faithful clasp of their hands. They sat at the end of the avenue, under an arbor of roses, leaning against a white sarcophagus. Before them, the desert. Profound peace. The murmur of a fountain with slow drops, which seemed to be expiring of languor. They spoke in low voices. Grazia’s gaze rested with trust on that of her friend. Christophe spoke of his life, his struggles, his past sorrows; they no longer held anything sad. Near her, beneath her gaze, everything was simple, everything was as it had to be… In her turn, she told her stories. He barely heard what she said; but none of her thoughts was lost to him. He espoused her soul. He saw with her eyes. He saw her eyes everywhere, her tranquil eyes in which a deep fire burned; he saw them in the beautiful mutilated faces of ancient statues and in the enigma of their silent gaze; he saw them in the sky of Rome, which laughed amorously around the woolly cypresses and between the fingers of the lecci, black, gleaming, riddled with the arrows of the sun.

Through Grazia’s eyes, the sense of Latin art seeped into his heart. Until then, Christophe had remained indifferent to Italian works. The barbarian idealist, the great bear come from the Germanic forest, had not yet learned to savor the voluptuous flavor of beautiful golden marbles, like a beam of honey. The antiquities at the Vatican were frankly hostile to him. He had a revulsion for those stupid heads, those effeminate or massive proportions, that banal and rounded modeling, those Gitons and gladiators. Barely a few portrait statues found favor in his eyes; and their subjects held no interest for him. He was not much more tender toward the pale, grimacing Florentines, toward the sickly madonnas, the Pre-Raphaelite Venuses, bloodless, consumptive, mannered and hollow. And the bestial stupidity of the blustering heroes and sweating red-limbed athletes that the example of the Sistine had unleashed upon the world struck him as so much cannon fodder. For Michelangelo alone he had a secret devotion --- for his tragic sufferings, his divine contempt, and the seriousness of his chaste passions. He loved with a pure and barbaric love, as the master’s own had been, the religious nudity of his adolescents, his wild and fierce virgins like hunted animals, the dolorous Aurora, the Madonna with savage eyes whose child bites her breast, and the beautiful Leah, whom he would have wished for a wife. But in the tormented hero’s soul he found nothing more than the magnified echo of his own.

Grazia opened for him the doors of a new world of art. He entered into the sovereign serenity of Raphael and Titian. He saw the imperial splendor of classic genius, which reigns, like a lion, over the universe of forms conquered and mastered. The thundering vision of the great Venetian, which goes straight to the heart and cleaves with its lightning the uncertain mists in which life veils itself, the all-dominating power of those Latin spirits who know not only how to conquer but how to conquer themselves, who impose upon themselves, as victors, the strictest discipline, and who, on the field of battle, know how to choose exactly among the spoils of the fallen enemy and carry off their prize --- the Olympian portraits and the Stanze of Raphael filled Christophe’s heart with a music richer than Wagner’s. Music of serene lines, of noble architectures, of harmonious groups. Music radiating from the perfect beauty of the face, of the hands, of the charming feet, of the draperies and the gestures. Intelligence. Love. A stream of love welling from those souls and those adolescent bodies. Power of the spirit and of voluptuousness. Young tenderness, ironic wisdom, the obsessive warm fragrance of amorous flesh, a luminous smile in which shadows dissolve, in which passion falls asleep. The trembling forces of life rearing up and tamed, like the horses of the Sun, by the calm hand of the master…

And Christophe wondered:

--- “Is it truly impossible to unite, as they once did, Roman strength and Roman peace? Today, the best of men pursue one only at the expense of the other. Of all peoples, the Italians seem to have lost most completely the sense of that harmony which Poussin, Lorrain, and Goethe understood. Must a foreigner once again reveal to them its worth?… And who will teach it to our musicians? Music has not yet had its Raphael. Mozart is only a child, a petty German bourgeois, with feverish hands and a sentimental soul, who says too many words and makes too many gestures, who talks and weeps and laughs at nothing. And neither Bach the Gothic, nor the Prometheus of Bonn who wrestles with the vulture, nor his posterity of Titans who pile Pelion upon Ossa and rail against heaven, have ever glimpsed the smile of God…”

Ever since he had seen it, Christophe blushed at his own music; his empty agitations, his puffed-up passions, his indiscreet lamentations, this parade of self, this want of measure, seemed to him at once pitiable and shameful. A flock without a shepherd, a kingdom without a king. --- One must be king of the tumultuous soul…

During those months, Christophe seemed to have forgotten music. He scarcely wrote a note; he felt no need of it. His mind, made fertile by Rome, was in gestation. He passed his days in a state of dreaming and half-intoxication. Nature was, like him, in that first spring where the languor of awakening mingles with a voluptuous vertigo. She and he dreamed together, intertwined, like lovers who embrace in sleep. The feverish enigma of the Campagna was no longer hostile or unsettling to him; he had made himself master of its tragic beauty; he held sleeping Demeter in his arms.

In the course of April, he received from Paris a proposal to come and conduct a series of concerts. Without further consideration, he was about to refuse; but he thought he ought first to speak of it to Grazia. He felt a quiet pleasure in consulting her about his life; it gave him the illusion that she shared it.

This time, she caused him deep disappointment. She had the matter explained to her quite calmly; then she advised him to accept. He was saddened by this; he saw in it proof of her indifference.

Grazia was perhaps not without regrets in giving that counsel. But why had Christophe asked her for it? The more he left decisions about his life to her, the more she felt herself responsible for her friend’s actions. Through the exchange that had taken place between their minds, she had taken from Christophe something of his will; he had revealed to her the duty and beauty of action. At least, she had recognized that duty on behalf of her friend; and she did not want him to fall short of it. Better than he, she knew the power of languor that the breath of this Italian earth conceals, and which, like the insidious poison of its warm scirocco, steals into the veins, lulling the will to sleep. How often she had felt its malefic charm, without having the energy to resist! All her circle of acquaintances was more or less afflicted with that malaria of the soul. Stronger men than they, in earlier times, had been its victims; it had gnawed at the bronze of the she-wolf of Rome. Rome breathes death: she has too many tombs. It is healthier to pass through than to live there. One leaves the present age there too easily --- a dangerous taste for forces still young that have a vast career ahead of them. Grazia understood that the world surrounding her was not a life-giving environment for an artist. And though she felt for Christophe more affection than for anyone else… (did she dare admit it to herself?)… she was not, at bottom, displeased that he should go away. Alas! He exhausted her, through all that she loved in him, through that overabundance of intelligence, through that accumulation of life stored up over years and now overflowing: her tranquility was troubled by it. And he exhausted her too, perhaps, because she always felt the threat of that love --- beautiful and touching, but obsessive --- against which she had always to remain on guard; it was more prudent to keep it at a distance. She took care not to admit this to herself; she believed she had only Christophe’s interest in view.

She was not short of good reasons. In the Italy of that time, a musician struggled to survive: the air was rationed for him. Musical life was compressed and distorted. The theater-factory spread its greasy ashes and scalding fumes over soil whose flowers of music had once perfumed all of Europe. Whoever refused to enlist in the company of shouters, whoever could not or would not enter the factory, was condemned to exile or to live suffocated. The genius was not in the least exhausted. But it was left to stagnate unprofitably and go to waste. Christophe had met more than one young musician in whom the soul of the melodious masters of their race lived on, and that instinct for beauty that had penetrated the learned yet simple art of the past. But who cared about them? They could neither get their work performed nor published. No interest in pure symphony. No ears for music that has not smeared its snout with greasepaint!… So they sang for themselves, in a discouraged voice that eventually fell silent. What was the use? Sleep… --- Christophe would have asked nothing better than to help them. Even supposing he could have, their prickly self-regard did not lend itself to it. Whatever he did, he was an outsider to them; and for Italians of the old stock, despite their warm reception, every outsider remains, at bottom, a barbarian. They felt that the misery of their art was a question to be settled within the family. While lavishing on Christophe every mark of friendship, they did not admit him into their family. --- What remained for him? He could hardly rival them and dispute with them the meager place in the sun that was not even secure for themselves!…

And besides, genius cannot do without nourishment. The musician needs music --- music to hear, music to make heard. A temporary retreat has its value for the mind, which it forces to gather itself. But only on condition that the mind emerges from it. Solitude is noble, but fatal to the artist who no longer has the strength to tear himself free of it. One must live the life of one’s own time, even noisy and impure; one must ceaselessly give and receive, and give, and give, and receive again. --- Italy, in Christophe’s day, was no longer the great market of art it had once been, and may perhaps become again. The fairs of thought, where the souls of all nations are exchanged, are in the North today. Whoever would live must live there.

Left to himself, Christophe would have been reluctant to re-enter the throng. But Grazia saw his duty more clearly than he did. And she demanded more of him than of herself. No doubt because she held him in higher esteem. But also because it suited her better. She delegated her energy to him. She kept her tranquility. --- He could not bring himself to hold it against her. She was like Mary; she had chosen the better part. To each his role in life. Christophe’s was to act. For her, it was enough to be. He asked nothing more of her.

Nothing, except to love him, if possible, a little less for his sake and a little more for her own. For he did not feel especially grateful toward her for being, in her friendship, so free of selfishness as to think only of her friend’s interest --- a friend who asked for nothing so much as to be excused from thinking of it himself.

He left. He withdrew from her. He did not leave her. As an old trouvère says, “a lover parts from his beloved only when his soul consents to it.”

SECOND PART

His heart was aching when he arrived in Paris. It was the first time he had returned there since Olivier’s death. He had never wanted to see the city again. In the cab that carried him from the station to the hotel, he hardly dared look out the window; he spent the first days in his room, unable to bring himself to go out. He dreaded the memories lying in wait for him at every door. But what dread, exactly? Did he fully understand it himself? Was it, as he preferred to believe, the terror of seeing them resurface with their living faces? Or the more painful terror of finding them dead?… Against this new mourning, all the half-unconscious ruses of instinct had armed themselves. It was for that reason --- (he perhaps did not suspect it) --- that he had chosen his hotel in a neighborhood far from the one he had lived in before. And when, for the first time, he walked in the streets, when he had to lead orchestra rehearsals at the concert hall, when he found himself once again in contact with the life of Paris, he continued for a time to close his eyes, refusing to see what he saw, obstinately seeing only what he had once seen. He repeated to himself in advance:

“I know all this, I know all this…”

In art as in politics, the same intolerant anarchy, always. In the public square, the same Fair. Only the actors had changed roles. The revolutionaries of his day had become bourgeois; the overmen, men of fashion. The former independents were trying to smother today’s independents. The young men of twenty years ago were now more conservative than the old ones they had once fought; and their critics refused the right to exist to the newcomers. On the surface, nothing was different.

And everything had changed…

⁂

“My friend, forgive me --- you are kind not to have held my silence against me. Your letter did me great good. I passed several weeks in terrible disarray. Everything was missing. I had lost you. Here, the dreadful void left by those I have lost. All the old friends I have told you about, gone. Philomèle --- (you remember the voice that was singing on that sad and dear evening when, wandering through a party crowd, I saw in a mirror your eyes looking at me) --- Philomèle has realized her sensible dream; a small inheritance came to her; she is in Normandy; she has a farm, which she manages. Monsieur Arnaud has retired; he has returned with his wife to their province, a small town near Angers. Of the celebrated men of my time, many are dead or have collapsed; only a few old puppets who twenty years ago were playing the jeunes premiers of art and politics are still playing them today, with the same false faces. Apart from these masks, I recognized no one. They gave me the impression of grimacing over a tomb. It was a dreadful feeling. --- Moreover, in the first days after my arrival, I suffered physically from the ugliness of things, from the grey light of the North, coming out of your golden sun; the piling up of pallid houses, the vulgarity of line in certain domes, certain monuments that had never struck me before, wounded me cruelly. The moral atmosphere was no more agreeable.

“Yet I have no cause to complain of the Parisians. The reception I found here bears little resemblance to the one I received before. It appears that during my absence I have become something of a celebrity. I say nothing more about it; I know what it is worth. All the kind things these people say or write about me touch me; I am grateful to them for it. But what can I say? I felt closer to those who once fought me than to those who praise me today… The fault is mine, I know. Do not scold me. I had a moment of disturbance. It was to be expected. Now it is over. I have understood. Yes, you were right to send me back among men. I was bogging down in my solitude. It is unhealthy to play the Zarathustra. The tide of life ebbs and ebbs away from us. A moment comes when one is nothing but a desert. To dig a new channel through the sand down to the river takes many days of toil under a burning sun. --- It is done. I no longer feel the vertigo. I have rejoined the current. I look and I see.

“My friend, what a strange people these French are! Twenty years ago, I believed them finished… They are beginning again. My dear companion Jeannin had told me as much. But I suspected him of deceiving himself. How was one to believe it then! France was, like their Paris, full of demolitions, of rubble and holes. I said: ‘They have destroyed everything… What a race of gnawers!’ --- A race of beavers. At the very moment you think them bent on ruins, with those same ruins they are laying the foundations of a new city. I see it now that scaffolding is rising on all sides…

“Wenn ein Ding geschehen, Selbst die Narren es verstehen…

“In truth, it is the same old French disorder as always. One must be used to it to recognize, in the crowd jostling in every direction, the gangs of workers each heading to their task. These are people who, as you know, cannot do anything without shouting from the rooftops what they are doing. They are also people who cannot do anything without disparaging what their neighbors are doing. It is enough to unsettle the most solid heads. But when one has lived, as I have, nearly ten years among them, one is no longer taken in by their uproar. One realizes that it is their way of spurring themselves to work. Even as they talk, they act; and with each worksite building its own house, it turns out that in the end the city is rebuilt. The most remarkable thing is that the whole of the construction is not too discordant. No matter that they maintain opposing theses, they all have heads made the same way. So that beneath their anarchy there are shared instincts, there is a logic of race that serves them in place of discipline, and that discipline is perhaps, when all is said and done, more solid than that of a Prussian regiment.

“It is everywhere the same impulse, the same fever for building: in politics, where socialists and nationalists compete to tighten the loosened gears of power; in art, where some want to restore an old aristocratic mansion for the privileged few, and others want a vast hall open to the people, where the collective soul sings --- reconstructors of the past, builders of the future. Whatever they do, these clever animals always rebuild the same cells. Their instinct, like beavers or bees, drives them across the centuries to repeat the same gestures, to rediscover the same forms. The most revolutionary are perhaps, without knowing it, those who reach back to the oldest traditions. In the trade unions and among the most prominent young writers I have found souls from the Middle Ages.

“Now that I have reaccustomed myself to their tumultuous ways, I watch them work with pleasure. Let me be frank: I am too old a bear ever to feel at ease in any of their houses; I need open air. But what fine workers they are! That is their highest virtue. It redeems the most mediocre and the most corrupt. And in their artists, what a sense of beauty! I noticed it less before. You have taught me to see. My eyes opened in the light of Rome. Your men of the Renaissance have helped me understand these ones. A page of Debussy, a torso by Rodin, a sentence by Suarès --- they come from the same lineage as your cinquecentisti.

“Not that many things here do not displease me. I have found my old acquaintances from the Fair on the Square, who caused me so many righteous rages in the past. They have scarcely changed. But I, alas, have changed. I no longer dare to be harsh. When I feel the urge to judge one of them severely, I tell myself: ‘You have no right to. You have done worse than these men, you who thought yourself strong.’ I have also learned to see that nothing exists uselessly, and that even the vilest have their role in the plan of the tragedy. The depraved dilettantes, the fetid amoralists, have accomplished their work as termites: the tottering hovel had to be demolished before it could be rebuilt. The Jews have obeyed their sacred mission, which is to remain, across all other races, the foreign people, the people who weave, from one end of the world to the other, the network of human unity. They break down the intellectual barriers between nations to clear the field for divine Reason. The worst corruptors, the ironic destroyers who ruin our beliefs of the past, who kill our beloved dead, are working, without knowing it, toward the holy work, toward the new life. It is in the same way that the ferocious self-interest of cosmopolitan bankers, at the cost of how many disasters, builds --- whether they wish it or not --- the future peace of the world, side by side with the revolutionaries who fight them, and far more surely than the simpleminded pacifists.

“You see. I am growing old. I no longer bite. My teeth are worn down. When I go to the theater, I am no longer one of those naïve spectators who harangue the actors and insult the villain.

“Tranquil Grace, I speak to you of nothing but myself; and yet I think of nothing but you. If you only knew how much my self wearies me! It is oppressive and consuming. It is a millstone God has hung about my neck. How I would have wished to lay it at your feet --- but what would you have done with it? It is a sorry gift… Your feet are made to tread soft earth and sand that sings beneath one’s step. I see them, those dear feet, moving languidly across the lawns scattered with anemones… (Have you gone back to the Villa Doria?)… And now I see you already tired! I see you now half-reclining in your favorite retreat, at the back of your salon, resting on your elbow, holding a book you are not reading. You listen to me with kindness, without paying much attention to what I say --- for I am tedious, and to keep your patience, you return now and then to your own thoughts; but you are courteous, and taking care not to contradict me, whenever a word by chance draws you back from very far away, your distracted eyes hasten to put on an interested look. And I am as far as you are from what I am saying; I too can barely hear the sound of my own words; and while I follow their reflection in your lovely face, I listen within myself to quite other words, which I do not say to you. Those words, tranquil Grace, unlike the others, you hear perfectly well --- but you pretend not to hear them.

“Farewell. I believe you will see me again before long. I will not linger here. What would I do, now that my concerts are given? --- I embrace your children on their good little cheeks. The material of them is yours. One must be content!…

“Christophe.”

⁂

“Tranquil Grace” replied:

“My friend, I received your letter in that little corner of the salon you remember so well; and I read you, as I know how to read, letting your letter rest from time to time, and doing as it does. Do not laugh. It was so that it would last longer. And so we spent an entire afternoon. The children asked me what I kept reading. I told them it was a letter from you. Aurora looked at the paper with commiseration, and said: ‘How tedious it must be to write such a long letter!’ I tried to make her understand that it was not a punishment I had given you, but a conversation we were having together. She listened without a word, then ran off with her brother to play in the next room; and a little while later, when Lionello was crying out, I heard Aurora saying: ‘You must not make noise; maman is talking with monsieur Christophe.’

“What you tell me about the French interests me, and does not surprise me. You will remember that I have often reproached you for being unjust toward them. One may not love them. But what an intelligent people! There are mediocre peoples, saved by their good hearts or their physical vigor. The French are saved by their intelligence. It washes away all their weaknesses. It regenerates them. When one believes them fallen, beaten down, perverted, they find a new youth in the perpetually welling spring of their spirit.

“But I must scold you. You ask my pardon for speaking to me of nothing but yourself. You are an ingannatore. You tell me nothing of yourself. Nothing of what you have done. Nothing of what you have seen. It took my cousin Colette --- (why do you not go to see her?) --- sending me clippings about your concerts to inform me of your successes. You mention them to me in a single word, in passing. Are you so detached from everything?… That is not true. Tell me it gives you pleasure… It must give you pleasure, if only because it gives me pleasure. I do not like to see you with that disillusioned air. The tone of your letter was melancholy. You must not… It is well that you should be more just toward others. But that is no reason to burden yourself as you do, saying you are worse than the worst among them. A good Christian would praise you. I tell you it is wrong. I am not a good Christian. I am a good Italian woman, who does not like to see people torment themselves over the past. The present is quite enough. I do not know exactly everything you may have done in former times. You said a few words to me about it, and I think I guessed the rest. It was not very fine; but you are no less dear to me for it. Poor Christophe, a woman does not reach my age without knowing that a good man is often very weak. If one did not know his weakness, one would not love him as much. Think no more of what you have done. Think of what you will do. There is no use in repenting. To repent is to go backward. And for good as for ill, one must always go forward. Sempre avanti, Savoia!… As if I am going to let you come back to Rome! You have nothing to do here. Stay in Paris, create, act, throw yourself into the life of art. I do not want you to renounce anything. I want you to make beautiful things, I want them to succeed, I want you to be strong, so that you can help the young new Christophes who are taking up the same struggles and passing through the same trials. Seek them out, help them, be kinder to your juniors than your elders were to you. --- And finally, I want you to be strong, so that I may know you are strong: you have no idea what strength that gives to me in turn.

“I go almost every day with the little ones to the Villa Borghese. The day before yesterday we drove to Ponte Molle and walked around the Monte Mario. You slander my poor legs. They are cross with you. --- ‘What does that gentleman mean, saying we tire out at once after ten steps at the Villa Doria? He does not know us. If we don’t much like to exert ourselves, it is because we are lazy --- not because we cannot…’ You forget, my friend, that I am a country girl…

“Go and see my cousin Colette. Are you still holding a grudge against her? She is a good woman, at bottom. And she swears by no one but you now. It seems the Parisian women are wild about your music. (They may have been, before.) My Bern bear has only to choose to become a Paris lion. Have you received letters? Have you had declarations made to you? You mention no woman to me at all. Can you be in love? Tell me. I am not jealous.

“Your friend G.”

⁂

--- “As if I owe you any gratitude for that last phrase! Would to God, mocking Grace, that you were jealous! But do not count on me to teach you how to be. I have no fancy for these mad Parisian women, as you call them. Mad? They would very much like to be. That is what they are least of all. Do not hope they will turn my head. There might perhaps be more chance of that if they were indifferent to my music. But it is only too true that they love it; and how does one keep one’s illusions? When someone tells you they understand you, that is precisely when you can be sure they will never understand you…

“Do not take my outbursts too seriously. The feelings I have for you do not make me unjust toward other women. I have never felt more genuine sympathy for them than since I stopped looking at them with a lover’s eyes. The great effort they have been making for thirty years to escape the degrading and unwholesome semi-domesticity in which our stupid masculine selfishness had penned them, to their misfortune and to ours, seems to me one of the great deeds of our age. In a city like this one, one learns to admire this new generation of young women who, despite so many obstacles, fling themselves with candid ardor into the conquest of science and degrees --- that science and those degrees which will, they believe, set them free, open to them the mysteries of the unknown world, make them the equals of men…

“Doubtless this faith is illusory and a little ridiculous. But progress is never realized in the way one hoped; it is none the less realized, by entirely different paths. This feminine effort will not be wasted. It will make women more complete, more fully human, as they were in the great centuries. They will no longer be indifferent to the living questions of the world --- which was a scandal and a monstrosity; for it is not tolerable that a woman, even the most scrupulous about her domestic duties, should think herself exempt from reflecting on her duties in the modern city. Their great-grandmothers, in the age of Joan of Arc and Catherine Sforza, did not think so. Woman has grown stunted. We denied her air and sunlight. She is taking them back by force. Ah, the brave little things!… Naturally, of those who are fighting today, many will die, many will be broken. It is an age of crisis. The effort is too violent for faculties too long enfeebled. When a plant has long gone without water, the first rain risks scorching it. But what of it! That is the ransom of all progress. Those who come after will flower from these sufferings. The poor little warrior virgins of the present, many of whom will never marry, will be more fruitful for the future than the generations of matrons who gave birth before them: for from them will come, at the price of their sacrifices, the female race of a new classical age.

“It is not in your cousin Colette’s salon that one has any chance of finding these industrious bees. What a passion you have for sending me to that woman! I had to obey you; but it was not right --- you abuse your power. I had refused three of her invitations, left two letters unanswered. She came and hunted me down at one of my orchestra rehearsals --- (we were trying out my sixth symphony). --- I saw her arrive during the intermission, nose in the air, sniffing about, crying out: ‘It smells of love! Oh, how I adore this music!…’

“She has changed, physically; only her cat’s eyes with their rounded pupils remain the same, along with her whimsical nose that seems to be always grimacing, always in motion. But her face is broader now, with solid bones, flushed and hardened. Sport has transformed her. She gives herself to it body and soul. Her husband, as you know, is one of the big names at the Automobile-Club and the Aéro-Club. Not a single aviator’s race, not a single circuit --- air, land, or water --- at which the Stevens-Delestrades don’t feel obliged to be present. They’re always on the road. Conversation is impossible; their talk is nothing but Racing, Rowing, Rugby, Derby. They are a new breed of society people. The era of Pelléas is over for women. Souls are no longer fashionable. Young girls now sport a red, tanned complexion, baked by open-air racing and games in the sun; they look at you with a man’s eyes; they laugh a slightly coarse laugh. The tone has become more brutal and more raw. Your cousin sometimes says, quite calmly, the most outrageous things. She eats enormously --- she who barely used to eat at all. She continues to complain of her weak stomach, so as not to lose the habit; but she doesn’t lose her hearty appetite either. She reads nothing. No one reads anymore, in that world. Music alone has found favor. It has even profited from the rout of literature. When these people are exhausted, music is a Turkish bath to them --- warm steam, a massage, a hookah. No need to think. It is a transition between sport and love. And it is also a sport. But the most fashionable sport, among aesthetic diversions, is today the dance. Russian dances, Greek dances, Swiss dances, American dances --- everything is danced in Paris: Beethoven’s symphonies, Aeschylus’s tragedies, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the antiquities of the Vatican, Orphée, Tristan, the Passion, and gymnastics. These people are dizzy with it all.

“What is curious is to see how your cousin manages to reconcile everything at once: her aestheticism, her sports, and her practical mind (for she has inherited from her mother the business sense and the domestic despotism). All of this must form an incredible mixture; but she is perfectly at ease in it; her wildest eccentricities leave her mind lucid, just as she always keeps a steady eye and hand during her vertiginous automobile excursions. She is a commanding woman; her husband, her guests, her servants --- she runs everything with a drumbeat. She is involved in politics as well; she is for ‘Monseigneur’ --- not that I believe her to be a royalist; but it gives her one more pretext for bustling about. And although she is incapable of reading more than ten pages of a book, she manages Academic elections. --- She claimed to take me under her protection. You can imagine that did not sit well with me. The most exasperating thing is that, because I came to her home in order to obey you, she is now convinced she has power over me… I take my revenge by telling her hard truths. She only laughs at them; she is never at a loss for an answer. ‘She’s a good woman, at bottom…’ Yes, as long as she has something to do. She admits it herself: if the machine had nothing left to grind, she would be ready for anything, anything at all, to feed it. --- I have been to her house twice. I will not go again now. That is enough to prove my submission to you. You don’t want my death, do you? I come away from there broken, ground down, aching all over. The last time I saw her, I had, the following night, a dreadful nightmare: I dreamed I was her husband, bound my whole life to that living whirlwind… A foolish dream, and one that certainly doesn’t torment the real husband: for of all those one sees in the house, he is perhaps the one who spends the least time with her; and when they are together, they talk of nothing but sport. They get along very well.

“How did those people manage to make a success of my music? I don’t try to understand. I suppose it shakes them in a new way. They are grateful to it for brutalizing them. They love, for the moment, art that has a body. But the soul inside that body --- they have not the faintest suspicion of it; they will pass from today’s infatuation to tomorrow’s indifference, and from tomorrow’s indifference to the day after tomorrow’s disparagement, without ever having known it. It is the story of all artists. I have no illusions about my success --- it won’t last long; and they will make me pay for it. --- In the meantime, I witness curious spectacles. The most enthusiastic of my admirers is… (I give you a thousand guesses)… our friend Lévy-Cœur. You remember that pleasant gentleman, with whom I once had a ridiculous duel? Today he lectures those who failed to understand me in earlier days. He does it rather well, too. Of all those who speak of me, he is the most intelligent. Judge from that what the others are worth. There is nothing to be proud of, I assure you.

“I have no desire to be. I am too humiliated when I hear these works for which I am praised. I recognize myself in them, and I do not find myself beautiful. What a merciless mirror a musical work is, for one who knows how to look! Fortunately they are blind and deaf. I have put so much of my troubles and weaknesses into my works that it sometimes feels as though I am committing a wicked act by releasing these flights of demons into the world. I grow calmer when I see the public’s composure: they wear triple armor; nothing could touch them --- otherwise I should be damned… You reproach me for being too harsh on myself. That is because you do not know me as I know myself. One sees what we are. One does not see what we might have been; and we are given credit for what is far less the effect of our own merits than of the events that carry us and the forces that guide us. Let me tell you a story.

“The other evening, I had stepped into one of those cafés where they play rather good music, though in a strange fashion: with five or six instruments, augmented by a piano, they play all the symphonies, the masses, the oratorios. In the same way, at certain marble-cutters’ shops in Rome, one can buy the Medici Chapel as a fireplace ornament. It seems this is useful to art. For art to circulate among people, it must be made into small change. Besides, at these concerts, no one deceives you as to the account. The programs are copious, the performers conscientious. There I found a cellist with whom I struck up an acquaintance; his eyes strangely recalled those of my father. He told me the story of his life. Grandson of a peasant, son of a minor civil servant, a municipal clerk in a village in the North. They wanted to make a gentleman of him, a lawyer; he was sent to the college in the nearby town. The boy, robust and rough-hewn, ill-suited to that careful work of a petty notary, could not bear to be caged; he would leap over walls, wander through the fields, court girls, spend his great strength in brawls; the rest of the time, he idled and daydreamed of things he would never do. Only one thing drew him: music. God knows how! Not a single musician among his family, except for a great-uncle, a slightly crackbrained fellow, one of those provincial originals whose intelligence and gifts --- often remarkable --- are spent, in their proud isolation, on the trifles of maniacs. This one had invented a new system of notation --- (one more!) --- that was supposed to revolutionize music; he even claimed to have found a shorthand that allowed one to write down words, melody, and accompaniment simultaneously; he himself had never managed to read it back correctly. In the family, people laughed at the old fellow; but they were not without a certain pride in him. They thought: ‘He’s an old fool. Who knows? Perhaps he has genius…’ --- It was no doubt from him that the musical mania was transmitted to the great-nephew. What music could he possibly have heard in that town!… But bad music can inspire a love as pure as good.

“The trouble was that such a passion did not seem admissible in that milieu: and the boy lacked the solid unreasonableness of the great-uncle. He hid himself to read the old maniac’s lucubrations, which formed the foundation of his bizarre musical education. Vain, fearful before his father and before public opinion, he would say nothing of his ambitions unless he had already succeeded. A good-hearted boy, crushed by the family, he did as so many young French bourgeois do --- not daring, through weakness or kindness, to stand up against the will of those around them, they submit in appearance and live their entire real life in perpetual concealment. Instead of following his inclination, he strained without enthusiasm at the work assigned to him: incapable of succeeding at it, yet equally incapable of failing at it spectacularly. As best he could, he managed to pass the necessary examinations. The chief advantage he saw in this was escaping the double surveillance of province and father. Law bored him to death; he had decided not to make a career of it. But as long as his father lived, he did not dare declare his will. Perhaps he was not displeased to have to wait a little longer before making a choice. He was one of those who, all their lives, delude themselves with what they will do later, what they could do. For the moment, he did nothing. Unmoored, intoxicated by his new life in Paris, he threw himself, with the brutality of a young peasant, into his two passions: women and music; maddened by concerts no less than by pleasure. He wasted years there, without even making use of the means he had to complete his musical education. His touchy pride, an independence of character both difficult and easily wounded, prevented him from attending any lesson, from asking advice of anyone.

“When his father died, he sent Themis and Justinian packing. He set about composing without having had the courage to acquire the necessary technique. Deep-rooted habits of lazy idling and a taste for pleasure had made him incapable of any serious effort. He felt keenly; but his thoughts, like his form, escaped him at once; in the end, he expressed only banalities. The worst of it was that there was genuinely something great in this mediocre man. I read two of his earlier compositions. Here and there, striking ideas, left in the state of sketches, immediately distorted. Will-o’-the-wisps over a peat bog… And what a strange mind! He wanted to explain Beethoven’s sonatas to me. He finds in them childish, preposterous little novels. But what passion, what profound seriousness! Tears come to his eyes when he speaks of it. He would get himself killed for what he loves. He is touching and burlesque. At the very moment I was about to laugh in his face, I felt an urge to embrace him… A fundamental honesty. A robust contempt for the charlatanism of Parisian coteries and for false glories --- (while being quite unable to resist a naïve petit-bourgeois admiration for people who have succeeded)…

“He had a small inheritance. In a few months, he had made short work of eating through it; and, finding himself without resources, he had, like many in his position, the criminal decency to marry a penniless girl he had seduced; she had a fine voice and made music, but without any love of music. They had to live on her voice and the modest talent he had acquired playing the cello. Naturally, they were not long in seeing their shared mediocrity and in being unable to bear one another. A daughter had come to them. The father transferred onto the child his capacity for illusions; he thought she would become what he had been unable to be. The little girl took after her mother: she was a piano-plunker with not a shadow of talent; she adored her father and applied herself to her work to please him. For several years they toured the hotels of spa towns, collecting more humiliations than money. The child, frail and overworked, died. The wife, in despair, grew more shrewish each day. And it was bottomless misery, without hope of escape, sharpened by the sense of an ideal one knows oneself incapable of reaching…

“And I thought, my friend, looking at that poor wretch of a failure, whose life has been nothing but a string of disappointments: ‘There is what I might have been. There were common traits between our childhood souls; and certain events in our lives resemble one another; I even found a kinship in our musical ideas; but his stopped halfway. What was it that prevented me from foundering as he did? No doubt, my will. But also the accidents of life. And even, taking only my will into account --- is it solely to my own merits that I owe it? Is it not rather to my race, to my friends, to God who helped me?…’ Such thoughts make one humble. One feels a brotherly bond with all those who love art and who suffer for it. From the lowest to the highest, the distance is not great…

“On the strength of that, I thought about what you wrote me. You are right: an artist has no right to hold himself apart, as long as he can be of help to others. I will therefore remain; I will oblige myself to spend a few months each year either here, or in Vienna or in Berlin, though I have some difficulty readapting to these cities. But one must not abdicate. If I do not succeed in being of great use, as I have reason to fear, this stay may perhaps be useful to me. And I will console myself by thinking that you wished it. And then,… (I do not want to lie)… I am beginning to take pleasure in it. Farewell, tyrant. You have triumphed. I have come not only to do what you wish me to do, but to love doing it.

“Christophe.”

⁂

And so he stayed, partly to please her, but also because his artist’s curiosity, reawakened, was letting itself be drawn back into the spectacle of art renewed. Everything he saw and did, he offered in thought to Grazia; he wrote it all to her. He knew well enough that he was deceiving himself about the interest she might find in it; he suspected her of a certain indifference. But he was grateful to her for not making it too plain.

She replied to him regularly, once a fortnight. Affectionate, measured letters, much like her gestures. In recounting her life, she never departed from a tender and proud reserve. She knew with what violence her words reverberated in Christophe’s heart. She preferred to seem cold to him rather than drive him toward an exaltation she had no wish to share. But she was too much a woman not to know the secret of never quite discouraging her friend’s love, and of soothing at once, with gentle words, the private disappointment that indifferent words had caused. Christophe was not long in divining this tactic; and, by a ruse of love, he in turn forced himself to hold back his impulses, to write more measured letters, so that Grazia’s replies might have less occasion to apply themselves to him.

As his stay in Paris lengthened, he took a growing interest in the new activity stirring within the gigantic anthill. He was all the more interested because among the young ants he found little sympathy for himself. He had not been wrong: his success was a Pyrrhic victory. After an absence of ten years, his return had caused a sensation in Parisian circles. But by one of those ironies of circumstance that are far from rare, he found himself patronized this time by his old enemies, the snobs, the fashionable set; the artists were quietly hostile, or regarded him with suspicion. He imposed himself through his name, which already belonged to the past, through his considerable body of work, through the accent of passionate conviction, through the violence of his sincerity. But if they were compelled to reckon with him, if he forced admiration or esteem, he was poorly understood and not loved. He stood outside the art of his time. A monster, a living anachronism. He had always been. His ten years of solitude had deepened the contrast. During his absence, a work of reconstruction had been accomplished in Europe, and above all in Paris, as he had seen clearly --- a new order was being born. A generation was rising, eager to act more than to understand, hungry for happiness more than for truth. It wanted to live, it wanted to seize life, even at the cost of illusion. Illusions of pride --- of every kind of pride: racial pride, caste pride, religious pride, the pride of culture and art --- all were welcome to it, provided they formed an iron armature, provided they furnished sword and shield, and that sheltered behind them, it could march toward victory. And so it found it disagreeable to hear that great tormented voice, which reminded it of the existence of pain and doubt: those gusts that had troubled the night just past, that continued, in spite of all denials, to threaten the world, and that it wanted to forget. Impossible not to hear them; they were still too near. And so these young people turned away with irritation; and they shouted at the top of their voices in order to deafen themselves. But the voice spoke louder. And they resented it.

Christophe, on the contrary, watched them with goodwill. He hailed the world’s ascent toward happiness. What was wilfully narrow in this surge did not trouble him. When one wants to go straight to the goal, one must look straight ahead. For his part, seated at the turning of a world, he took pleasure in seeing behind him the tragic splendor of the night, and ahead, the smile of young hope, the uncertain beauty of the fresh and feverish dawn. He stood at the still point of the pendulum’s axis, while the pendulum began its upswing again. Without following it in its motion, he listened with joy to the beat of life’s rhythm. He joined his hopes to those who were repudiating his past anguish. What would be, would be, as he had dreamed. Ten years before, Olivier, in the night and the suffering --- poor little Gallic cock --- had announced with his frail song the distant day. The singer was gone; but his song was fulfilling itself. In the garden of France, the birds were waking. And, rising above the other notes, Christophe suddenly heard, clearer, stronger, happier, the voice of Olivier resurrected.

He was idly reading, at a bookshop stall, a volume of poetry. The author’s name was unknown to him. Certain words struck him; he stayed fixed. As he went on reading between the uncut pages, he seemed to recognize a voice, familiar features… Unable to define what he felt, and unable to bring himself to part from the book, he bought it. Back at his lodgings, he took it up again. At once his obsession returned. The poem’s impetuous breath evoked, with a visionary’s precision, those immense and age-old souls --- those gigantic trees of which we are the leaves and the fruits --- the Fatherlands. From these pages rose the superhuman figure of the Mother --- she who was before us, she who will be after us, she who is enthroned, like Byzantine Madonnas, high as mountains, at whose feet the human ants pray. The poet celebrated the Homeric duel of these great Goddesses, whose lances have clashed since the beginning of ages: that eternal Iliad, which stands to the Iliad of Troy as the Alpine chain stands to the small Greek hills.

Such an epic of pride and martial action was far from the thoughts of a European soul like Christophe’s. And yet, by flashes, in the vision of the French soul --- the grace-filled virgin who bears the aegis, Athena of the blue eyes shining in the darkness, the working goddess, the incomparable artist, the sovereign reason, whose gleaming lance strikes down the barbarians with their tumultuous cries --- Christophe glimpsed a gaze, a smile he knew and had loved. But just as he was about to grasp it, the vision faded. And while he chafed at pursuing it in vain, turning a page, he heard a story that, a few days before his death, Olivier had told him…

He was overwhelmed. He ran to the publisher and asked for the poet’s address. It was refused, as is customary. He grew angry. Uselessly. At last he thought to look the information up in a directory. He found it there, and went at once to the author’s home. When he wanted something, he had never known how to wait.

In the Batignolles quarter. On the top floor. Several doors opened onto a shared corridor. Christophe knocked at the one he had been directed to. It was the neighboring door that opened. A young woman, not pretty, very dark, with hair over her forehead, a muddy complexion --- a tense face with quick eyes --- asked what was wanted. She had a suspicious air. Christophe explained the purpose of his visit, and, in answer to another question, gave his name. She came out of her room and opened the other door with a key she had on her. But she did not let Christophe in at once. She told him to wait in the corridor, and went inside alone, shutting the door in his face. At last Christophe gained access to the well-guarded lodgings. He crossed a half-empty room that served as a dining room: a few dilapidated pieces of furniture; near the curtainless window, a dozen birds were chirping in a cage. In the next room, on a worn divan, a man lay stretched out. He raised himself to receive Christophe. That emaciated face, illuminated by the soul within, those beautiful velvet eyes where a feverish flame burned, those long intelligent hands, that ill-made body, that sharp voice which kept going hoarse… Christophe recognized him at once… Emmanuel! The small, crippled workman who had been the innocent cause… And Emmanuel, abruptly on his feet, had also recognized Christophe.

They stood without speaking. Both of them, at that moment, were seeing Olivier… They could not bring themselves to offer each other their hands. Emmanuel had made a movement of recoil. After ten years, an unacknowledged resentment, the old jealousy he had felt toward Christophe, rose up from the dark depths of instinct. He remained there, defiant and hostile. --- But when he saw Christophe’s emotion, when he read on his lips the name they were both thinking: “Olivier!…” it was stronger than he: he threw himself into the arms extended toward him.

Emmanuel asked:

--- I knew you were in Paris. But you --- how did you find me?

Christophe said:

--- I read your latest book; through it, I heard his voice.

--- Didn’t you? said Emmanuel, you recognized him? Everything I am now, I owe to him.

(He avoided pronouncing the name.)

After a moment, he went on, growing somber:

--- He loved you more than me.

Christophe smiled:

--- One who loves truly knows neither more nor less; he gives himself entirely to all those he loves.

Emmanuel looked at Christophe: the tragic seriousness of his resolute eyes was suddenly lit by a deep tenderness. He took Christophe’s hand and drew him down to sit on the divan beside him.

They spoke of their lives. From fourteen to twenty-five, Emmanuel had worked at many trades: typesetter, upholsterer, small street vendor, bookshop clerk, solicitor’s clerk, secretary to a politician, journalist… In all of them he had found ways to learn feverishly, here and there meeting the support of good people struck by the little man’s energy, more often falling into the hands of people who exploited his poverty and his gifts, enriching himself on the worst of experiences and managing to emerge from them without too much bitterness, leaving behind in them only what remained of his frail health. Singular aptitude for the ancient languages --- less exceptional than one might think, in a race steeped in humanist traditions --- had earned him the interest and support of an old Hellenist priest. These studies, which he had not had the time to pursue very far, gave him a discipline of mind and a school of style. This man risen from the mud of the people, whose entire education had been self-made, haphazard, and full of enormous gaps, had acquired a gift for verbal expression, a mastery of thought over form, that ten years of university training is powerless to give to the young bourgeoisie. He attributed this benefit to Olivier. Others had helped him more effectively. But from Olivier had come the spark that had lit, in the night of that soul, the eternal lamp. The others had done no more than pour oil into it.

He said:

--- I only began to understand him from the moment he was gone. But everything he had said to me had entered into me. His light has never left me.

He spoke of his work, of the task that had been bequeathed to him, as he claimed, by Olivier: of the awakening of French energies, of that blaze of heroic idealism of which Olivier had been the herald; he wanted to become the resounding voice that soars above the fray and sounds the coming victory; he was singing the epic of his resurrected race.

His poems were indeed the product of that strange race which, across the centuries, has preserved so strongly its old Celtic aroma, while taking a peculiar pride in clothing its thought in the cast-offs and laws of the Roman conqueror. One found there, in all their purity, that Gaulish audacity, that spirit of heroic reason, of irony, that mixture of braggadocio and reckless bravado which had tugged the beards of Rome’s senators, pillaged the temple of Delphi, and laughingly hurled its javelins against the sky. But this little Parisian cobbler’s apprentice had had to incarnate his passions, as his great bewigged grandfathers had done, and as no doubt his great-grandnephews would do, in the bodies of the heroes and gods of Greece, dead these two thousand years. A curious instinct of this people, which accords with its need for the absolute: by setting its thought in the footprints of the centuries, it seems to itself to be stamping its thought upon the centuries. The constraint of this classical form only impressed a more violent momentum upon Emmanuel’s passions. Olivier’s calm confidence in the destinies of France had been transformed, in his small protégé, into a burning faith, hungry for action and certain of triumph. He willed it, he saw it, he proclaimed it. It was through this exalted faith and this optimism that he had stirred the souls of the French public. His book had been as effective as a battle. It had opened a breach in scepticism and in fear. The entire younger generation had rushed through behind him, toward new destinies…

He grew animated as he spoke; his eyes burned, his pale face became mottled with pink patches, and his voice was shrill. Christophe could not help noticing the contrast between this devouring fire and the wretched body that served as its pyre. He caught only a glimpse of the moving irony of this fate. The bard of energy, the poet who celebrated the generation of bold sport, of action, of war, could barely walk without gasping for breath, was abstemious, followed a very strict regimen, drank water, could not smoke, lived without mistresses, carried all his passions within him, and was reduced by his health to asceticism.

Christophe observed Emmanuel; and he felt a mixture of admiration and brotherly pity. He wanted to show nothing of it; but no doubt his eyes betrayed something; or Emmanuel’s pride, which harbored in its flank a wound always open, believed it read in Christophe’s eyes the commiseration that was more odious to him than hatred. His flame went out at a stroke. He stopped talking. Christophe tried in vain to restore the confidence between them. The soul had closed again. Christophe saw that he had wounded him.

The hostile silence stretched on. Christophe rose. Emmanuel walked him back, without a word, to the door. His gait revealed his infirmity; he knew it; he took pride in appearing indifferent to it; but he thought Christophe was watching him, and his resentment deepened on that account.

Just as he was coldly shaking his host’s hand to bid him goodbye, an elegantly dressed young woman rang at the door. She was escorted by a pretentious dandy whom Christophe recognized from having noticed him at theatrical premieres --- smiling, chattering, bowing with a wave of his paw, kissing the ladies’ hands, and from his seat in the stalls, sending smiles all the way to the back of the house: for want of knowing his name, he called him “the buck.” The buck and his companion, catching sight of Emmanuel, threw themselves upon the “dear master” with obsequious and familiar effusions. Christophe, who was making his way out, heard Emmanuel’s dry voice reply that he could not receive visitors, that he was occupied. He admired the gift this man possessed for being disagreeable. He did not know his reasons for putting a bad face on the wealthy snobs who came to gratify him with their indiscreet calls: they were lavish with fine phrases and praise, but they took no more trouble to lighten his poverty than the famous friends of César Franck ever sought to relieve him of the piano lessons he was forced to give for his living until his very last day.

Christophe returned to see Emmanuel several times. He never again managed to revive the intimacy of that first visit. Emmanuel showed no pleasure in seeing him and held himself in suspicious reserve. At moments, the generous urge toward expansion that was part of his genius would take over; some word from Christophe would make him vibrate to his very roots; and then he would surrender to a surge of enthusiastic confidence, and his idealism would cast over his hidden soul splendid flashes of blazing poetry. Then, abruptly, he would sink back; he would tighten into a surly silence, and Christophe would find the enemy again.

Too many things separated them. Not the least was the difference in their ages. Christophe was moving toward full self-awareness and self-mastery. Emmanuel was still being formed, and more chaotic than Christophe had ever been. The originality of his character lay in the contradictory elements locked in struggle within him: a powerful stoicism, straining to subdue a nature corroded by atavistic desires --- (the son of an alcoholic and a prostitute) --- ; a frenzied imagination, rearing against the bit of a will of steel; an immense egoism and an immense love of others, and one never knew which of the two would prevail; a heroic idealism and a morbid hunger for glory that made him uneasy in the face of any other superiority. If the thought of Olivier, his independence, his disinterestedness could be found in him, and if Emmanuel surpassed his master in plebeian vitality that did not know the nausea of action, in poetic genius, and in the rough hide that defended him against all disgust, he was far from attaining the serenity of Antoinette’s brother; his character was vain and restless, and the troubles of other souls were added to his own.

He lived in a stormy union with a young woman who was his neighbor: the one who had received Christophe the first time he came. She loved Emmanuel and attended to him jealously, kept his household, copied out his works, and wrote them down at his dictation. She was not beautiful and bore the burden of a passionate soul. Born of the working class, long employed in a box-making workshop, then a postal clerk, she had spent a stifled childhood in the ordinary setting of the poor workers of Paris: souls and bodies crowded together, exhausting labor, perpetual promiscuity, no air, no silence, never any solitude, no possibility of gathering oneself, of defending the sacred retreat of one’s heart. A proud spirit, nursing a religious fervor for a vague ideal of truth, she had worn out her eyes copying at night, and sometimes without a lamp, by moonlight, Hugo’s Les Misérables. She had met Emmanuel at a moment when he was more wretched than she --- sick and without resources --- and she had given herself over to him. This passion was the first and only love of her life. She clung to it, therefore, with the tenacity of someone who has long gone hungry. Her affection was terribly oppressive for Emmanuel, who shared it less than he endured it. He was touched by such devotion; he knew that she was the best of friends to him, the only being for whom he was everything, who could not do without him. But this very feeling crushed him. He needed freedom, he needed solitude; those eyes that begged greedily for a glance obsessed him; he spoke to her harshly, he wanted to say: “Go away!” He was irritated by her plainness and her abruptness. However little he had glimpsed fashionable society and however much contempt he showed for it --- (for he suffered from finding himself uglier and more ridiculous there) --- he was sensitive to elegance, he was susceptible to the attraction of women who had for him (he had no doubt of it) the same feeling he had for his companion. He tried to show her an affection he did not feel, or at least that was never ceasing to be darkened by storms of involuntary hatred. He could not manage it; he carried in his chest a great generous heart, avid to do good, and a demon of violence, capable of doing harm. This inner struggle and the awareness that he could not end it to his advantage threw him into a muted irritation, and Christophe received the brunt of its outbursts.

Emmanuel could not help feeling a double antipathy toward Christophe: one born of his old jealousy (those childhood passions whose momentum persists even after one has forgotten the cause); the other inspired by a burning nationalism. He embodied in France all the dreams of justice, pity, and human brotherhood conceived by the best minds of the preceding generation. He did not set her against the rest of Europe as an enemy whose fortune grows on the ruins of other nations; he placed her at their head, as the legitimate sovereign reigning for the good of all --- sword of the ideal, guide of humankind. He would have preferred to see her dead rather than guilty of an injustice. But he did not doubt her for a moment. He was exclusively French in culture and in heart, nourished solely by the French tradition, whose deep reasons he rediscovered in his own instinct. He was sincerely unaware of foreign thought, for which he had a kind of disdainful condescension --- irritation, if the foreigner refused to accept this humiliated position.

Christophe saw all of this; but older and more schooled by life, he was not wounded by it. If this racial pride was not without its sting, Christophe was not reached by it; he made allowances for the illusions of filial love and had no thought of criticizing the exaggerations of a sacred feeling. Besides, humanity itself finds profit in a people’s vain belief in its mission. Of all the reasons he had for feeling distant from Emmanuel, only one was painful to him: Emmanuel’s voice, which sometimes rose to shrill, high-pitched intonations. Christophe’s ear suffered cruelly from it. He could not help making faces. He tried to ensure that Emmanuel did not see them. He applied himself to hearing the music and not the instrument. What beauty of heroism radiated from the infirm poet when he evoked the victories of the spirit, harbingers of other victories --- the conquest of the air, the “flying god” that lifted crowds and, like the star of Bethlehem, drew them spellbound in its wake toward what distant spaces or what near revenge! The splendor of these visions of energy did not prevent Christophe from sensing their danger, from foreseeing where this charge-step and the swelling clamor of this new Marseillaise were leading. He thought, with a touch of irony (without regret for the past or fear of the future), that the song would have echoes the singer did not foresee, and that a day would come when men would sigh after the vanished time of the Fair on the Square… How free one was then! The golden age of liberty! They would never know its like again. The world was moving toward an age of force, health, virile action, and perhaps of glory, but of harsh authority and narrow order. How fervently we called for it, the iron age, the classical age! The great classical ages --- Louis XIV or Napoleon --- seem to us, from a distance, the summits of humanity. And perhaps the nation does then realize most triumphantly its ideal of the State. But go and ask the heroes of those times what they thought of it! Your Nicolas Poussin went away to live and die in Rome; he was suffocating in your midst. Your Pascal, your Racine said farewell to the world. And among the greatest, how many others lived apart, disgraced, oppressed! Even a Molière’s soul concealed many bitternesses. --- As for your Napoleon, whom you miss so much, your fathers do not seem to have suspected their good fortune; and the master himself was not deceived; he knew that when he disappeared, the world would say: “Good riddance!”… Around the Imperator, what a desert of thought! Over the immensity of sand, the African sun…

Christophe did not say aloud everything he was turning over in his mind. A few allusions had been enough to send Emmanuel into a fury; he had not repeated them. But however much he kept his thoughts to himself, Emmanuel knew he was thinking them. More than that, he was obscurely aware that Christophe saw further than he did. And he was all the more irritated for it. Young people do not forgive their elders who compel them to see what they themselves will be in twenty years.

Christophe read his heart and said to himself:

--- He is right. To each his own faith. He must believe what he believes. God keep me from troubling his confidence in the future!

But his mere presence was a cause of disturbance. Of two personalities that are together, whatever effort both make to efface themselves, one always crushes the other, and the other harbors within a humiliated resentment. Emmanuel’s pride suffered from Christophe’s superiority of experience and character. And perhaps he was defending himself against the love he felt growing in him for Christophe…

He became increasingly withdrawn. He closed his door. He did not answer letters. --- Christophe was forced to give up seeing him.

They had reached the first days of July. Christophe was taking stock of what these few months in Paris had brought him: many new ideas, but few friends. Brilliant and derisory successes: to find one’s image, the image of one’s work, weakened or caricatured in mediocre minds --- there is nothing rejoicing in that. And from those whose understanding he would have cherished, sympathy had been withheld; they had not welcomed his overtures; he could not attach himself to them, however much he wished to join himself to their hopes and be an ally to them; it was as if their anxious self-regard defended itself against his friendship and found more satisfaction in having him for an enemy. In short, he had let the wave of his own generation pass without passing with it, and the wave of the next generation did not want him. He was isolated, and was not surprised by it, his whole life having accustomed him to it. But he judged that now he had earned the right, after this new attempt, to return to his Swiss hermitage, while waiting to carry out a plan that had lately been gaining in substance. As he grew older, he was tormented by the desire to go back and settle in his own country. He no longer knew anyone there; he would doubtless find even less kinship of spirit than in this foreign city; but it is one’s country nonetheless: you do not ask those of your blood to think as you do; a thousand secret bonds exist between you and them; the senses have learned to read in the same book of sky and earth, the heart speaks the same language.

He recounted his disappointments cheerfully to Grazia, said he intended to return to Switzerland, asked in a joking way permission to leave Paris, and announced his departure for the following week. But at the end of the letter, a postscript read:

“I have changed my mind. My departure is postponed.”

Christophe had complete trust in Grazia; he gave her the secret of his most intimate thoughts. And yet there was one compartment of his heart of which he kept the key: the memories that did not belong to him alone, but to those he had loved. And so he was silent about whatever touched on Olivier. His reserve was not deliberate. The words could not come out when he was about to speak of Olivier to Grazia. She had not known him…

Now, that morning, while he was writing to his friend, there was a knock at the door. He went to open it, grumbling at being disturbed. A boy of fourteen or fifteen asked for monsieur Krafft. Christophe, gruff, showed him in. He was fair-haired, blue-eyed, fine-featured, not very tall, slender and straight in bearing. Standing before Christophe, he stayed without speaking, a little intimidated. Very quickly he recovered, and he raised his clear eyes, which regarded Christophe with curiosity. Christophe smiled, looking at the charming face, and the boy smiled too.

--- Well, Christophe said to him, what do you want?

--- I have come, the child said…

(He grew flustered again, blushed, and fell silent.)

--- I can see that you have come, said Christophe, laughing. But why have you come? Look at me --- are you afraid of me?

The boy found his smile again, shook his head, and said:

--- No.

--- Good! Then first tell me who you are.

--- I am, said the child…

He stopped again. His eyes, which were curiously making a tour of the room, had just discovered on Christophe’s mantelpiece a photograph of Olivier. Christophe followed the direction of his gaze mechanically.

--- Come now! he said. Courage!

The child said:

--- I am his son.

Christophe started; he raised himself from his seat, seized the boy by both arms and drew him close; back in his chair, he held him tightly; their faces were almost touching, and he looked at him, looked at him, repeating:

--- My little one… my poor little one…

Abruptly, he took the boy’s head between his hands and kissed him on the forehead, on the eyes, on the cheeks, on the nose, on his hair. The young boy, frightened and shocked by the violence of these demonstrations, pulled himself free from his arms. Christophe let him go. He hid his face in his hands, pressed his forehead against the wall, and stood there for a few moments. The child had retreated to the far end of the room. Christophe raised his head. His face had grown calm; he looked at the boy with an affectionate smile:

--- I frightened you, he said. Forgive me… You see, it’s that I loved him so much.

The child said nothing, still startled.

--- How you resemble him! said Christophe… And yet, I wouldn’t have recognized you. What has changed?

He asked:

--- What’s your name?

--- Georges.

--- Yes, of course. I remember. Christophe-Olivier-Georges… How old are you?

--- Fourteen.

--- Fourteen! Has it really been so long?… It feels like yesterday---or like the distant past… How you resemble him! The same features. The same, and yet another. The same color of eyes, and not the same eyes. The same smile, the same mouth, and not the same tone of voice. You are stronger, you hold yourself straighter. Your face is fuller, but you blush like he did. Come, sit down, let’s talk. Who sent you to me?

--- No one.

--- You came on your own? How do you know who I am?

--- People spoke to me about you.

--- Who?

--- My mother.

--- Ah! said Christophe. Does she know you came to see me?

--- No.

Christophe was silent for a moment; then he asked:

--- Where do you live?

--- Near the parc Monceau.

--- You walked? Yes? That’s quite a distance. You must be tired.

--- I’m never tired.

--- Good for you! Show me your arms.

(He felt them.)

--- You’re a sturdy little fellow… And what gave you the idea of coming to see me?

--- Because Papa loved you more than anything.

--- Did she tell you that?

(He corrected himself.)

--- Did your mother tell you that?

--- Yes.

Christophe smiled, pensive. He was thinking: “She too!… How they loved him, all of them! Why then did they never show him?…”

He continued:

--- Why did you wait so long to come?

--- I wanted to come sooner. But I thought you didn’t want to see me.

--- Me!

--- A few weeks ago, at the Chevillard concerts, I noticed you; I was with my mother, a few rows from you; I greeted you; you looked at me sideways, frowning, and didn’t respond.

--- Me, I looked at you?… My poor child, how could you think?… I didn’t see you. My eyes are tired. That’s why I frown… Do you think me so wicked then?

--- I think you can be that way too, when you choose.

--- Really? said Christophe. In that case, if you thought I didn’t want to see you, how did you dare come?

--- Because I wanted to see you.

--- And if I’d thrown you out?

--- I wouldn’t have let you.

He said this with a small air of resolve, embarrassed and challenging all at once.

Christophe burst out laughing; and Georges did the same.

--- You would have thrown me out?… Just look at that! What a character!… No, you really don’t resemble your father.

The boy’s mobile face darkened.

--- You think I don’t resemble him? But you said so just a moment ago?… So you think he wouldn’t have loved me? So you don’t love me?

--- And what does it matter to you whether I love you?

--- It matters a great deal.

--- Because?

--- Because I love you.

In a single minute, his eyes, his mouth, every feature colored with ten different expressions. Like an April day, the shadow of clouds racing across the fields in the breath of spring winds. Christophe felt a delicious joy in watching him, in listening to him; it seemed to him he was being washed clean of past troubles; his sad experiences, his trials, his sufferings, and those of Olivier, all of it was wiped away: he was born again, wholly new, in this young shoot of Olivier’s life.

They talked. Georges had known nothing of Christophe’s music until these last few months; but since Christophe had returned to Paris, he had missed not a single concert where his works were performed. He spoke of them with an animated face, eyes bright, laughing, and tears close by: like a lover. He confided to Christophe that he adored music, and that he too wanted to make it. But Christophe realized, from a few questions, that the boy knew none of its fundamentals. He inquired about his studies. Young Jeannin was at the lycée; he said cheerfully that he was not a remarkable student.

--- Where are you strongest? In letters or in sciences?

--- It’s about the same everywhere.

--- What? What? Are you a dunce?

He laughed openly and said:

--- I think so, yes.

Then he added confidentially:

--- But I do know that I’m not, really.

Christophe couldn’t help laughing:

--- Then why don’t you work? Does nothing interest you?

--- On the contrary! Everything interests me.

--- Well, then?

--- Everything is interesting, there just isn’t time…

--- You haven’t time? And what the devil do you do?

He made a vague gesture:

--- Many things. I do music, I do sport, I go to exhibitions, I read…

--- You’d do better to read your schoolbooks.

--- You never read anything interesting at school… And besides, we travel. Last month, I went to England to watch the match between Oxford and Cambridge.

--- That must do wonders for your studies!

--- Bah! you learn more that way than by staying at the lycée.

--- And your mother, what does she say about all this?

--- My mother is very sensible. She does everything I want.

--- You little devil!… You’re lucky I’m not your father.

--- You’re the one who wouldn’t have had the luck…

It was impossible to resist his wheedling manner.

--- And tell me, great traveler, said Christophe, do you know my country?

--- Yes.

--- I’m certain you don’t know a word of German.

--- On the contrary, I know it very well.

--- Let’s see then.

They began to talk in German. The boy stumbled along, incorrectly, but with a comical self-assurance; very intelligent, quick-witted, he guessed at more than he understood; he often guessed wrong; he was the first to laugh at his blunders. He told stories of his travels and his reading with enthusiasm. He had read a great deal, hastily, superficially, skipping half the pages, inventing what he hadn’t read, but always driven by a keen and fresh curiosity that searched everywhere for reasons to be enthusiastic. He jumped from one subject to another; and his face lit up when he spoke of performances or works that had moved him. His knowledge had no order whatsoever. You couldn’t tell how he had read a tenth-rate book while remaining entirely ignorant of the most celebrated works.

--- All of that is very charming, said Christophe. But you’ll get nowhere if you don’t work.

--- Oh! I don’t need to. We’re rich.

--- Good heavens! That’s serious, then. Do you want to be a man who’s good for nothing, who does nothing?

--- On the contrary, I’d like to do everything. It’s stupid to shut yourself up, your whole life, in one trade.

--- That’s still the only way anyone has found to do it well.

--- That’s what they say!

--- What do you mean, “that’s what they say”?… I say that. I’ve been studying my craft for forty years. I’m barely beginning to know it.

--- Forty years to learn your craft! And when does one get to actually do it?

Christophe began to laugh.

--- Little French rationalist!

--- I’d like to be a musician, said Georges.

--- Well, it’s not too soon to start. Would you like me to teach you?

--- Oh! I would be so happy!

--- Come tomorrow. I’ll see what you’re worth. If you’re worth nothing, I’ll forbid you ever to lay your hands on a piano again. If you have talent, we’ll try to make something of you… But I warn you: I’ll make you work.

--- I will work, said Georges, delighted.

They set a time for the next day. As he was about to leave, Georges remembered that the following day he had other appointments, and the day after as well. Yes, he was not free until the end of the week. They agreed on a day and an hour.

But when the day and hour arrived, Christophe waited in vain. He was disappointed. He had been so childishly looking forward to seeing Georges again. That unexpected visit had lit up his life. He had been so happy and moved by it that he hadn’t slept the night after. He thought, with a tender gratitude, of the young friend who had come to find him, sent by the friend; he smiled inwardly at that charming face: the boy’s naturalness, his grace, his mischievous and artless frankness, enchanted him; he gave himself over to that mute intoxication, that buzzing of happiness which had filled his ears and his heart in the first days of his friendship with Olivier. To this was joined a graver and almost religious feeling which, reaching beyond the living, glimpsed the smile of the past. --- He waited the next day and the day after. No one. Not a letter of apology. Christophe, saddened, sought out reasons himself to excuse the boy. He did not know where to write him; he had no address. Had he known it, he would not have dared write. An old heart that becomes attached to a young person feels a shyness about showing the need it has of him; it knows well that the young person does not have the same need: they are not evenly matched; and one fears nothing so much as appearing to impose oneself on one who has no particular use for you.

The silence grew longer. Though Christophe suffered from it, he forced himself to make no move to find the Jeannins. But each day he waited for the one who did not come. He did not leave for Switzerland. He stayed all summer in Paris. He thought himself absurd; but he no longer had any taste for travel. Only in September did he make up his mind to spend a few days at Fontainebleau.

Toward the end of October, Georges Jeannin came knocking at the door again. He apologized calmly, without the slightest embarrassment over his broken word.

--- I couldn’t come, he said; and then we went away, we went to Brittany.

--- You could have written to me, said Christophe.

--- Yes, that’s what I meant to do. But I never had time… And besides, he said with a laugh, I forgot---I forget everything.

--- How long have you been back?

--- Since the beginning of October.

--- And it took you three weeks to make up your mind to come?… Listen, tell me honestly: is it your mother who stops you?… She doesn’t like you seeing me?

--- Not at all! Quite the opposite. It was she who told me to come today.

--- How so?

--- The last time I saw you, before the holidays, I told her everything when I got home. She said I had done the right thing; she asked about you, she had many questions. When we came back from Brittany three weeks ago, she encouraged me to go back to see you. A week ago, she reminded me again. And this morning, when she found out I still hadn’t come, she was annoyed and insisted I come right away after lunch, without waiting any longer.

--- And you’re not ashamed to tell me this? You have to be forced to come and see me?

--- No, no, don’t think that… Oh! I’ve made you angry! Forgive me… It’s true, I’m scatterbrained… Scold me, but don’t hold it against me. I do care for you. If I didn’t care for you, I wouldn’t have come. No one forced me. Besides, you can’t force me to do anything I don’t want to do.

--- You little rascal! said Christophe, laughing despite himself. And your musical ambitions---what have you done with those?

--- Oh! I still think about them.

--- That doesn’t get you very far.

--- I want to start now. These past months, I couldn’t---I had so, so much to do! But now, you’ll see how I’m going to work, if you’ll still have me…

(His eyes were winning and soft.)

--- You’re a joker, said Christophe.

--- You don’t take me seriously.

--- Frankly, no.

--- That’s disgusting! No one takes me seriously. I’m discouraged.

--- I’ll take you seriously when I’ve seen you at work.

--- Right now, then!

--- I don’t have time. Tomorrow.

--- No, tomorrow is too far. I can’t bear you despising me for a whole day.

--- You’re a nuisance.

--- Please!…

Christophe, smiling at his own weakness, sat the boy down at the piano and spoke to him about music. He asked him questions; he had him work through small problems in harmony. Georges did not know very much; but his musical instinct made up for a great deal of ignorance. Without knowing their names, he found the chords Christophe was waiting for; and even his errors showed, in their awkwardness, a curiosity of taste and a singularly keen sensitivity. He did not accept Christophe’s remarks without discussion; and the intelligent questions he posed in turn revealed a sincere mind, one that did not receive art as a formulary of devotion to be recited with the lips, but that wanted to live it, on his own terms. --- They did not speak only of music. Starting from harmonies, Georges would conjure up paintings, landscapes, souls. He was difficult to keep on the path; he had to be constantly drawn back to the middle of the road; and Christophe did not always have the heart to do it. He enjoyed listening to the cheerful chatter of this small creature, full of wit and life. What a difference of nature from Olivier!… In one, life was an inner river that flowed in silence; in the other, it was all on the surface: a capricious stream that spent itself in play, in the sunlight. And yet the same beautiful, pure water --- as in their eyes. Christophe, with a smile, found in Georges certain instinctive antipathies, certain likes and dislikes that he recognized well, and that naive intransigence, that generosity of heart which gives itself wholly to what it loves… Only, Georges loved so many things that he had no leisure to love the same one for long.

He came back the next day and the days that followed. He had been seized by a fine youthful passion for Christophe, and he threw himself into his lessons with enthusiasm… --- And then the enthusiasm waned, the visits grew less frequent. He came less often… And then he stopped coming at all. He disappeared again, for weeks on end.

He was lighthearted, forgetful, naively selfish and sincerely affectionate; he had a kind heart and a quick intelligence, which he spent in small change, day by day. Everything was forgiven him, because it was a pleasure to see him: he was happy…

Christophe refused to judge him. He did not complain. He had written to Jacqueline to thank her for sending her son to him. Jacqueline replied with a short letter, its emotion held in check; she expressed the wish that Christophe would take an interest in Georges, would guide him in life. She made no mention of any possibility of meeting Christophe. Out of modesty and pride, she could not bring herself to see him again. And Christophe did not feel at liberty to come without being invited. --- And so they remained separated from one another, sometimes catching a glimpse of each other from a distance at a concert, connected only by the boy’s rare visits.

Winter passed. Grazia was writing less and less frequently. She kept for Christophe her faithful friendship. But, as a true Italian, not at all sentimental and firmly attached to reality, she needed to see people --- if not in order to think of them, at least to have the pleasure of conversation with them. To keep the memory alive in her heart, she needed to refresh from time to time the memory in her eyes. Her letters grew brief and distant. She remained certain of Christophe, as he was of her. But that certainty shed more light than warmth.

Christophe did not suffer too much from his new disappointments. His musical activity was enough to fill him. Having reached a certain age, a vigorous artist lives far more in his art than in his life; life has become the dream, and art the reality. In contact with Paris, his creative power had reawakened. There is no more energetic stimulant in the world than the spectacle of that city of work. Even the most phlegmatic are touched by its fever. Christophe, rested by years of wholesome solitude, brought with him an enormous store of forces to expend. Enriched by the new conquests that the intrepid curiosity of the French spirit never ceased to make in the field of musical technique, he launched himself in turn into discovery; more violent and more barbarous, he went further than any of them. But nothing, in these new audacities, was any longer left to the hazard of instinct. A need for clarity had taken hold of Christophe. Throughout his life, his genius had obeyed a rhythm of alternating currents; his law was to pass in turn from one pole to the opposite, filling all the space between. After having eagerly surrendered himself, in the preceding period, to “the eyes of chaos that gleam through the veil of order” --- to the point of tearing the veil to see them better --- he now sought to break free from their fascination, to cast once more over the face of the sphinx the magic net of the dominating mind. The imperial breath of Rome had passed over him. Like the Parisian art of that moment, whose contagion he partly felt, he aspired to order. But not --- like those weary reactionaries who spend what remains of their energy defending their sleep --- to order in Warsaw. Those good people who return to Brahms, --- to the Brahms of all the arts, to the strong-themed, to the insipid neo-classicists, out of a need for appeasement! One might think they were exhausted by passion! You are soon spent, my friends… No, it is not of your order that I speak. Mine is not of the same family. It is order in the harmony of free passions and the will… Christophe applied himself to maintaining in his art the just equilibrium of life’s powers. Those new chords, those musical demons he had summoned from the sonorous abyss, he now employed to build luminous symphonies, vast sunlit architectures, like the Italian basilicas with their domes.

These contests and combats of the spirit occupied him throughout the winter. And the winter passed quickly, though sometimes in the evening, Christophe, finishing his day and looking back at the sum of his days, could not have said whether it was long or short, or whether he was still young or very old.

Then a new ray of human sunlight broke through the veils of the dream and, once again, brought the spring. Christophe received a letter from Grazia, telling him that she was coming to Paris with her two children. She had been planning it for a long time. Her cousin Colette had often invited her. The fear of the effort required to break her habits, to pull herself free from her nonchalant peace and the home she loved, to re-enter the Parisian whirl she already knew, had caused her to put off the trip, year after year. A melancholy that overtook her that spring --- perhaps a secret disappointment (how many silent novels in a woman’s heart, unknown to others, and how often she does not confess it even to herself!) --- inspired in her the desire to leave Rome. The threat of an epidemic gave her a pretext to hasten the children’s departure. She followed her letter to Christophe by only a few days.

Scarcely had he learned she was at Colette’s before Christophe hurried to see her. He found her still absorbed and distant. It pained him, but he did not show it. He had now more or less made the sacrifice of his egoism; and this gave him a clear-sightedness of the heart. He understood that she had a sorrow she wished to conceal; and he forbade himself from trying to learn what it was. He strove only to distract her --- telling her gaily of his misadventures, sharing his work and his plans, wrapping her discreetly in his affection. She felt herself pervaded by this great tenderness that was afraid to impose itself; she had the intuition that Christophe had guessed her grief; and this moved her. Her somewhat aching heart rested in the heart of the friend who spoke to her of other things than what occupied them both. And little by little, he saw the melancholy shadow fade from his friend’s eyes, and their gaze draw closer, ever closer. So much so that one day, in mid-conversation, he broke off abruptly and looked at her in silence.

--- What is it? she asked him.

--- Today, he said, you have come back entirely.

She smiled, and in a low voice she answered:

--- Yes.

It was not very easy to speak in peace. They were rarely alone. Colette graced them with her presence more than they would have wished. She was excellent, for all her faults, sincerely attached to Grazia and to Christophe; but it never occurred to her that she might be in the way. She had noticed --- (her eyes noticed everything) --- what she called the flirt between Christophe and Grazia: flirting was her element and she was delighted by it; she asked for nothing more than to encourage it. But precisely, no one asked her to; they wished she would not meddle in what did not concern her. The moment she appeared, or made to one of them a discreet (indiscreet) allusion to their friendship, Christophe and Grazia would assume a glacial air and speak of something else. Colette sought every possible reason for their reserve, except the one true reason. Fortunately for the friends, she could not stay still. She came and went, entered and exited, supervised everything in the house, managing ten affairs at once. In the intervals between her appearances, Christophe and Grazia, alone with the children, would pick up the thread of their innocent conversations. They never spoke of the feelings that united them. They confided without constraint their small daily adventures to one another. Grazia inquired, with a feminine interest, into Christophe’s domestic affairs. Everything was going badly for him; he had endless disputes with his cleaning women; he was constantly deceived, robbed by those who served him. She laughed heartily at it, with a maternal compassion for the poor practical sense of this great child. One day, when Colette had just left them, having persecuted them longer than usual, Grazia sighed:

--- Poor Colette! I do love her… How she bores me!…

--- I love her too, said Christophe, if you mean by that she bores us.

Grazia laughed:

--- Listen: Will you allow me… (there is truly no way to speak in peace here)… will you allow me to come to your home one day?

He started.

--- To my place! You would come!

--- Does that put you out?

--- Put me out! Good Lord!

--- Well then, would Tuesday suit you?

--- Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, any day you like.

--- Tuesday at four, then. Agreed?

--- You are good, you are so good.

--- Wait. There is one condition.

--- A condition? What need is there? Whatever you wish. You know perfectly well that I’ll do it, with or without conditions.

--- I prefer a condition.

--- It’s promised.

--- You don’t know what it is yet.

--- That doesn’t matter, it’s promised. Whatever you wish.

--- But listen first, you stubborn man!

--- Say it.

--- Between now and then you will change nothing --- nothing, do you hear --- in your apartment; everything will remain exactly as it is.

Christophe’s face falls. He takes on an expression of dismay.

--- Ah! That isn’t fair.

She laughed:

--- You see, that’s what comes of committing yourself too quickly! But you promised.

--- But why would you want…?

--- Because I want to see you in your home, as you are, every day, when you are not expecting me.

--- At least you’ll allow me…?

--- Nothing at all. I will allow nothing.

--- At least…

--- No, no, no, no. I won’t hear a word of it. Or I won’t come, if you prefer…

--- You know very well I would consent to anything, as long as you come.

--- Then it’s promised?

--- Yes.

--- I have your word?

--- Yes, tyrant.

--- A good tyrant?

--- There are no good tyrants; there are tyrants one loves and tyrants one detests.

--- And I am both, aren’t I?

--- Oh no, you are only the first kind.

--- That is rather humiliating.

On the appointed day, she came. Christophe, with his scruples of loyalty, had not dared to so much as tidy a single sheet of paper in his disordered apartment: he would have felt dishonored. But he was in agony. He was ashamed of what his friend would think. He waited for her anxiously. She was punctual; she arrived barely four or five minutes past the hour. She came up the stairs with her small, firm step. She rang. He was behind the door and opened it. She was dressed with a simple, supple elegance. Through her veil he saw her tranquil eyes. They said “Bonjour” to each other in low voices, shaking hands; she, quieter than usual; he, awkward and moved, saying nothing so as not to reveal his emotion. He showed her in, without uttering the phrase he had prepared to excuse the disorder of the room. She sat down on the best chair, and he sat beside her.

--- Here is my study.

That was all he found to say to her.

A silence. She looked around without haste, with a kind smile --- she, too, slightly ill at ease, though she would not admit it. (Later, she told him that as a child she had once thought of coming to see him; but at the moment of entering, she had lost her nerve.) She was struck by the look of solitude and sadness in the apartment: the narrow, dark anteroom, the complete absence of comfort, the visible poverty --- it wrung her heart; she was full of fond pity for her old friend, whom so much labor and hardship and a measure of fame had not been able to free from the strain of material worries. And at the same time, she was amused by the total indifference to comfort revealed by the bareness of this room --- no carpet, no painting, no object of art, no armchair; no furniture other than a table, three hard chairs, and a piano; and, mixed in among them, books, and papers, papers everywhere, on the table, under the table, on the floor, on the piano, on the chairs --- (she smiled, seeing how conscientiously he had kept his word).

After a few moments, she asked him:

--- Is it here --- (indicating his chair) --- that you work?

--- No, he said, it is there.

He pointed to the darkest corner of the room, and a low chair with its back to the light. She went and settled into it gently, without a word. They fell silent for a few minutes, at a loss for what to say. He got up and went to the piano. He played, he improvised for half an hour; he felt his friend surrounding him, and an immense happiness swelled his heart; eyes closed, he played wonderful things. She understood then the beauty of that room, wholly clothed in divine harmonies; she heard, as though it beat within her own chest, that loving and suffering heart.

When the harmonies had faded, he remained for a moment motionless before the piano; then he turned, hearing the breath of his friend weeping. She came to him:

--- Thank you, she murmured, taking his hand.

Her lips trembled slightly. She closed her eyes. He did the same. For a few seconds they remained like that, hand in hand; and time stood still…

She opened her eyes again and, to free herself from her agitation, she asked:

--- Would you like to show me the rest of the apartment?

Happy himself to escape his emotion, he opened the door to the adjoining room; but at once he felt ashamed. There stood a narrow iron bed, hard and spare.

(Later, when he confided to Grazia that he had never brought a mistress into his home, she said to him, mockingly:

--- I rather suspected as much; it would have taken great courage on her part.

--- Why?

--- To sleep in your bed.)

There was also a plain country dresser, a plaster cast of Beethoven’s head on the wall, and beside the bed, in cheap frames, photographs of his mother and of Olivier. On the dresser, another photograph: her, Grazia, at fifteen. He had found it in Rome, in an album at her home, and had stolen it. He confessed as much, asking her forgiveness. She looked at the image and said:

--- Do you recognize me there?

--- I recognize you, and I remember.

--- Which of the two do you love more?

--- You are always the same. I love you just as much as I always have. I recognize you everywhere. Even in your photographs from earliest childhood. You cannot know what emotion I feel sensing your whole soul already there, in that chrysalis. Nothing makes me more certain that you are eternal. I love you from before your birth, and I love you on past the time when…

He fell silent. She remained without answering, troubled with love. When she had come back into the study and he had shown her, by the window, the little tree his friend, where sparrows chattered, she said to him:

--- Now, do you know what we are going to do? We are going to have tea. I brought tea and cakes, because I was quite sure you had none of that sort of thing. And I brought something else as well. Give me your overcoat.

--- My overcoat?

--- Yes, yes, give it here.

She drew needles and thread from her bag.

--- What, you want to---?

--- There were two buttons, the other day, whose fate was worrying me. How are they today?

--- It’s true, I still haven’t thought to sew them back on. It’s such a nuisance!

--- Poor boy! Give it here.

--- I’m ashamed.

--- Go and make the tea.

He brought the kettle and the spirit lamp into the room so as not to lose a single moment of his friend’s company. She, all the while sewing, watched his clumsiness out of the corner of her eye with a mischievous air. They drank their tea from chipped cups, which she found dreadful---politely---and which he defended with indignation, because they were keepsakes from his life shared with Olivier.

As she was leaving, he asked:

--- You’re not cross with me?

--- About what?

--- The disorder here?

She laughed.

--- I’ll set things in order.

When she stood at the threshold, about to open the door, he knelt before her and kissed her feet.

--- What are you doing? she said. Madman, dear madman! Goodbye.

It was agreed that she would return every week, on a fixed day. She had made him promise there would be no more eccentricities, no more kneeling, no more kissing of feet. Such a gentle calm emanated from her that even when Christophe was in his violent moods, it penetrated him; and though, alone, he often thought of her with passionate desire, when they were together they were always like good companions. Not a word, not a gesture ever escaped him that might trouble his friend.

For Christophe’s nameday, she dressed her little girl as she herself had been dressed when they had first met, long ago; and she had the child play the piece that Christophe had once made her practice again and again.

All this grace, this tenderness, this good friendship, was mingled with contradictory feelings. She was frivolous, she loved society, she took pleasure in being courted, even by fools; she was rather vain---except with Christophe---and even with Christophe. When he was very tender with her, she was willingly cool and reserved. When he was cool and reserved, she became tender and offered him affectionate little provocations. She was the most honest of women. But in the most honest and the best of women, there is, at moments, a flirtatious creature. She took care to preserve appearances, to conform to conventions. Well gifted for music, she understood Christophe’s works; but she did not take much interest in them---(and he knew it well).---For a true Latin woman, art has value only insofar as it leads back to life, and life to love… The love that smolders in the depths of the voluptuous, drowsing body… What has she to do with tragic meditations, tormented symphonies, the intellectual passions of the North? She needs a music in which her hidden desires can unfold with a minimum of effort, an opera that is passionate life without the fatigue of the passions, a sentimental, sensual, and indolent art.

She was weak and changeable; she could apply herself to serious study only in fits and starts; she needed distraction; rarely did she do the next day what she had announced the day before. Such puerilities, such small and disconcerting whims! The murky nature of woman, her sickly and unreasonable character, in certain periods. She was aware of this and tried then to withdraw into herself. She knew her weaknesses, she reproached herself for not resisting them better, since they grieved her friend; sometimes, without his knowing it, she made him real sacrifices; but in the end, nature was the stronger. Besides, Grazia could not bear it when Christophe seemed to give her orders; and it happened once or twice that, to assert her independence, she did the opposite of what he asked. Afterward she regretted it; at night she was tormented by remorse for not making Christophe happier; she loved him far more than she let him see; she felt that this friendship was the best part of her life. As usually happens between two very different beings who love each other, they were most closely united when they were not together. In truth, if a misunderstanding had separated their destinies, the fault was not entirely Christophe’s, as he simply believed. Even when Grazia, in earlier days, had loved Christophe most, would she have married him? She might perhaps have given him her life; but would she have given him the right to live all his life with her? She knew---she was careful not to admit it to Christophe---she knew that she had loved her husband and that even now, after all the harm he had done her, she loved him as she had never loved Christophe… Secrets of the heart, secrets of the body, of which one is not very proud, and which one hides from those who are dear to us, as much out of respect for them as out of a complacent pity for oneself… Christophe was too much a man to guess them; but it happened, in flashes, that he glimpsed how little the woman who loved him best, who truly loved him---in flashes---held to him, and that one cannot count entirely on anyone, on anyone, in this life. His love was not diminished by it. He felt no bitterness from it. Grazia’s peace spread over him. He accepted. O life, why reproach you for what you cannot give? Are you not very beautiful and very holy, as you are? One must love your smile, Joconde…

Christophe gazed long at the lovely face of his friend; he read there many things of the past and the future. During the long years when he had lived alone, traveling, speaking little but observing much, he had acquired, almost without realizing it, a gift for reading the human face, that rich and complex language shaped by centuries. A thousand times richer and more complex than spoken language. Race expresses itself there… Perpetual contrasts between the lines of a face and the words it speaks. A young woman’s profile, with a clean, slightly austere line, in the manner of Burne-Jones, tragic, as though eaten away by a secret passion, a jealousy, a Shakespearean sorrow… She speaks: she is a petty bourgeoise, as foolish as a basket, coquettish and selfishly mediocre, with no idea of the formidable forces inscribed in her flesh. Yet that passion, that violence, are within her. In what form will they one day find expression? Will it be through a lust for gain, a conjugal jealousy, a fine energy, a morbid malice? One cannot know. It is even possible that she will transmit them to another of her blood before the hour of explosion has come. But it is an element that must be reckoned with, one that hovers over the race like a fatality.

Grazia too bore the weight of that troubled inheritance, which, of all the patrimony of old families, is what is least likely to dissipate along the way. She, at least, knew it. It is a great strength to know one’s weakness, to become, if not master, then pilot of the soul of the race to which one is bound, which carries one along like a vessel---to make an instrument of fatality, to use it like a sail, which one spreads or furls according to the wind. When Grazia closed her eyes, she heard within herself more than one unsettling voice, whose timbre she recognized. But in her sound soul, even the dissonances finally melted together; they formed a deep and velvety music beneath the hand of her harmonious reason.

Unfortunately, it does not depend on us to transmit to those of our blood the best of our blood.

Of Grazia’s two children, one, the little girl, Aurora, who was eleven, resembled her mother; she was less pretty, with something a little rustic in her vitality; she walked with a slight limp; she was a good little creature, affectionate and cheerful, in excellent health, with a great deal of goodwill, few natural gifts except for idleness, and a passion for doing nothing. Christophe adored her. He savored, in seeing her beside Grazia, the charm of a double being caught at two ages of its life at once, across two generations… Two flowers from the same stem: a Leonardo Holy Family, the Virgin and Saint Anne, the nuances of the same smile. One takes in at a glance the full flowering of a feminine soul; and it is at once beautiful and melancholy, for one sees where it comes from and where it is going. Nothing more natural for a passionate heart than to love, with a burning and chaste love, two sisters at once, or a mother and daughter. The woman Christophe loved, he would have wished to love through all the succession of her race, just as he loved in her all her past race. Was not each of her smiles, each of her tears, each fold of her dear face a being, the memory of a life lived before her eyes had opened to the light, the harbinger of a being who would come later, when those lovely eyes would be closed?

The little boy, Lionello, was nine. Far prettier than his sister, and of a finer race---too fine, bloodless and exhausted---he resembled his father; he was intelligent, rich in bad instincts, cajoling and secretive. He had large blue eyes, long fair hair like a girl’s, a pallid complexion, a delicate chest, a sickly nervousness which he could play upon at will, being a born actor and, more strangely, remarkably adept at finding people’s weak points. Grazia had a predilection for him, from that natural preference of mothers for the less healthy child---also from that attraction felt by good and honest women for sons who are neither one nor the other (for in them is relieved a whole part of their life that they have suppressed). And mixed in with it is a memory of the husband who made them suffer, whom they may have despised but loved. All that strange flora of the soul, growing in the warm dark greenhouse of consciousness.

Despite Grazia’s care to share her tenderness equally between her two children, Aurora sensed the difference and suffered slightly from it. Christophe divined this, she divined Christophe; they drew close to each other by instinct. Whereas between Christophe and Lionello there was an antipathy, which the child disguised beneath an exaggeration of lisping sweetnesses---and which Christophe pushed away, as a shameful feeling. He did violence to himself; he strove to cherish this other man’s child as though it were the child he would have found it ineffably sweet to have with the woman he loved. He refused to acknowledge Lionello’s bad nature, all that reminded him of “the other one”; he applied himself to finding in the boy only Grazia’s soul. Grazia, more clear-sighted, had no illusions about her son; and she loved him all the more for it.

Then the illness that had been smoldering in the child for years broke out. Tuberculosis declared itself. Grazia made the decision to shut herself away with Lionello in a sanatorium in the Alps. Christophe asked to accompany her. To spare appearances, she dissuaded him. He was hurt by the excessive importance she placed on conventions.

She left. She had entrusted her daughter to Colette. It did not take long for her to feel terribly isolated, among patients who spoke of nothing but their illness, in that pitiless landscape which turned its impassive face upon all these human wrecks. To escape the depressing spectacle of those wretched souls who, sputum cup in hand, kept watch on one another and tracked the progress of death in each, she had left the Palace hotel and rented a chalet where she was alone with her little patient. Rather than improving, the altitude made Lionello’s condition worse. The fever ran higher. Grazia passed nights of anguish. Christophe sensed this at a distance with sharp intuition, even though his friend wrote him nothing: for she stiffened in her pride; she would have wished for Christophe to be there; but she had forbidden him to follow her; she could not bring herself to admit it now: “I am too weak, I need you…”

One evening, as she stood on the chalet’s balcony at that twilight hour so cruel to anguished hearts, she saw… she thought she saw on the path rising from the funicular station… A man was walking with quick, hurried steps; he stopped, hesitating, his back slightly stooped. For a moment he raised his head and looked at the chalet. She threw herself back inside so that he would not see her; she pressed her heart with both hands, and, deeply moved, she laughed. Though she was not especially religious, she fell to her knees, she hid her face in her arms: she needed to thank someone… Yet he did not come. She returned to the window and looked out, concealed behind the curtains. He had stopped, leaning against a field fence near the chalet gate. He did not dare to enter. And she, more agitated than he was, smiled and said softly:

--- Come…

At last he made up his mind and rang. She was already at the door. She opened it. He had the eyes of a good dog that fears it is about to be beaten. He said:

--- I came… Forgive me…

She said to him:

--- Thank you.

Then she told him how much she had been waiting for him.

Christophe helped her care for the child, whose condition was worsening. He put his whole heart into it. The child showed him an irritated hostility; he no longer bothered to conceal it; he found ways to say spiteful things. Christophe attributed it all to the illness. He had a patience quite uncharacteristic of him. They spent a succession of painful days at the child’s bedside, and especially one night of crisis, after which Lionello, who had seemed lost, was saved. And then there was for both of them a happiness so pure --- both keeping vigil, hand in hand, the little sick boy sleeping --- that she suddenly rose, took her hooded coat, and drew Christophe outside onto the road, into the snow, the silence and the night, beneath the cold stars. Leaning on his arm, breathing in with intoxication the icy peace of the world, they exchanged scarcely a few syllables. No allusion to their love. Only, when they came back in, on the threshold of the door, she said to him:

--- My dear, dear friend!…

her eyes alight with the joy of the child who had been saved.

That was all. But they felt that the bond between them had become sacred.

Back in Paris after the long convalescence, settled in a small hotel she had rented in Passy, she no longer took any care to “manage appearances”; she felt the courage to defy them, for the sake of her friend. Their lives were now so intimately intertwined that she would have judged it cowardly to conceal the friendship that united them, at the risk --- inevitable --- that this friendship would be slandered. She received Christophe at any hour of the day; she appeared with him in public, on walks, at the theater; she spoke to him familiarly before everyone. No one doubted that they were lovers. Colette herself felt they were being too conspicuous. Grazia stopped the allusions with a smile and went on her way, calmly.

Yet she had given Christophe no new rights over her. They were nothing but friends; he always spoke to her with the same affectionate respect. But between them nothing was hidden; they consulted each other on everything; and imperceptibly, Christophe came to exercise a kind of familial authority in the household: Grazia listened to him and followed his advice. Since the winter spent at the sanatorium, she was no longer the same; anxiety and fatigue had seriously impaired her health, which until then had been robust. Her spirit had felt it too. Despite occasional relapses into the caprices of old, there was in her something more serious, more inward, a more constant desire to be kind, to learn, and not to cause pain. She was moved by Christophe’s affection, his disinterestedness, his purity of heart; and she thought of giving him, one day, the great happiness he no longer dared to dream: to become his wife.

He had never spoken of it again since the refusal she had given him; he did not feel it was permitted to him. But he kept the regret of an impossible hope. Whatever respect he had for his friend’s words, the disenchanted way she judged marriage had not convinced him; he persisted in believing that the union of two beings who love each other, with a deep and reverent love, is the summit of human happiness. --- His regrets were revived by his encounter with the old Arnaud couple.

Madame Arnaud was over fifty. Her husband, sixty-five or six. Both appeared to be much older. He had grown stout; she, altogether thin, a little shrunken; so slender even in former times, she was now barely a breath. They had retired to a house in the provinces after Arnaud had taken his pension. No tie bound them to the world any longer except the newspaper that came, in the torpor of the small town and their drowsing life, to bring them the belated echo of the world’s murmurs. Once, they had read Christophe’s name in it. Madame Arnaud had written him a few affectionate, slightly formal lines to tell him the joy his glory gave them. At once, he had taken the train, without warning.

He found them in their garden, dozing beneath the rounded canopy of an ash tree on a warm summer afternoon. They were like the two old spouses in Böcklin, asleep in the arbor, hand in hand. The sun, sleep, and old age weighed down on them; they were sinking, already more than half submerged in the eternal dream. And, last glimmer of life, their tenderness persisted to the end, the contact of their hands, the warmth of their bodies slowly fading… --- They were overjoyed at Christophe’s visit, for all it recalled of the past. They spoke of former days, which from a distance seemed luminous to them. Arnaud took pleasure in talking; but he had lost his memory for names. Madame Arnaud supplied them in a low voice. She was happy to be quiet; she preferred listening to speaking; but the images of the old days had stayed fresh in her silent heart; by glimpses they shone through, like bright pebbles in a stream. There was one image whose reflection Christophe more than once saw in the eyes watching him with tender compassion; but the name of Olivier was not spoken. Old Arnaud had clumsy and touching attentions for his wife; he was anxious that she should not take cold, should not get too warm; he watched over that dear faded face with a worried love, while its tired smile tried to reassure him. Christophe observed them, moved, with a touch of envy… To grow old together. To love in one’s companion even the wearing away of the years. To say: “These little creases near the eye, beside the nose, I know them, I watched them form, I know when they came. This poor gray hair grew pale, day by day, along with me, partly because of me, alas! This fine face has swelled and reddened, at the forge of the fatigues and sorrows that have burned us. My soul, how much more I love you for having suffered and grown old with me! Each of your wrinkles is a music from the past.” … Charming old people, who after the long vigil of life, side by side, go side by side to sleep in the peace of the night! Their sight was at once comforting and painful for Christophe. Oh! how beautiful life, how beautiful death would have been, like that!…

When he saw Grazia again, he could not help telling her of his visit. He did not tell her the thoughts the visit had stirred in him. But she read them in him. He was absorbed as he spoke. He looked away; and he fell silent at times. She watched him, she smiled, and Christophe’s unease communicated itself to her.

That evening, when she found herself alone in her room, she remained lost in reverie. She went over Christophe’s account to herself; but the image she saw through it was not that of the old couple sleeping under the ash tree: it was the timid, ardent dream of her friend. And her heart was full of love for him. Lying down, the light extinguished, she thought:

--- “Yes, it is an absurd thing, absurd and criminal, to let the opportunity of such happiness slip away. What joy in the world is worth that of making happy the one you love?… What! Do I love him?…”

She fell silent, listening, deeply moved, to her heart as it answered:

--- “I love him.”

At that moment, a dry, rasping, rapid cough broke out in the next room, where the children slept. Grazia sat up; ever since the child’s illness, she was always anxious. She called to him. He did not answer and went on coughing. She leapt out of bed and went to him. He was irritated, whimpering, saying he was unwell, interrupting himself to cough.

--- Where does it hurt?

He did not answer; he moaned that he was in pain.

--- My darling, please, tell me where it hurts.

--- I don’t know.

--- Does it hurt here?

--- Yes. No. I don’t know. It hurts everywhere.

With that, he was seized by another fit of coughing, violent, exaggerated. Grazia was frightened; she had the feeling that he was forcing himself to cough; but she reproached herself for it as she watched the child, sweating and gasping. She kissed him and spoke tender words to him; he seemed to grow calm; but as soon as she tried to leave, he started coughing again. She had to stay at his bedside, shivering: for he would not even allow her to move away to dress herself; he wanted her to hold his hand; and he did not let go of it until sleep took him. Then she went back to bed, frozen, anxious, exhausted. And she found it impossible to recapture her dreams.

The child had a singular power to read his mother’s thoughts. One finds often enough --- but at this degree, rarely --- that instinctive gift in beings of the same blood: they hardly need to look at each other to know what the other is thinking; they sense it through a thousand imperceptible signs. This natural disposition, strengthened by life together, was further sharpened in Lionello by a malice always on the alert. He had the clairvoyance that the desire to do harm bestows. He detested Christophe. Why? Why does a child take an aversion to this or that person who has done nothing to him? Often it is chance. It is enough for the child to have begun, one day, by persuading himself that he hated someone, to make a habit of it; and the more one reasons with him, the more he digs in; having played at hatred, he ends by truly hating. But there are, at other times, deeper reasons that surpass the child’s understanding; he does not suspect them… From the first days he had seen Christophe, the son of Count Berény had felt animosity toward the man his mother had loved. One might have said that he had had an intuition of the precise moment when Grazia had thought of marrying Christophe. From that moment on, he never ceased watching them. He was always between them, he refused to leave the salon when Christophe came; or he contrived to burst suddenly into the room where they were together. More than that, when his mother was alone and thinking of Christophe, it seemed as if he could divine it. He would sit beside her and spy on her. That gaze made her uneasy, made her almost blush. She would get up to hide her agitation. --- He took pleasure in saying hurtful things about Christophe in her presence. She would ask him to be quiet. He insisted. And if she tried to punish him, he threatened to make himself ill. It was a tactic he had used, with success, since childhood. When he was very small, one day when he had been scolded, he had invented, as revenge, stripping off his clothes and lying down stark naked on the cold floor tiles in order to catch a serious cold. --- Once, when Christophe had just brought a musical work he had composed for Grazia’s name day, the child seized the manuscript and made it disappear. Its torn shreds were found later in a wood box. Grazia lost patience; she scolded the child severely. Then he wept, screamed, stamped his feet, rolled on the floor; and he had a nervous fit. Grazia, terrified, kissed him, pleaded with him, promised him everything he wanted.

From that day on, he was master: for he knew it; and more than once he had recourse to the weapon that had served him so well. One never knew how far his crises were genuine and how far they were feigned. He was no longer satisfied with wielding them out of revenge, when he was crossed, but out of pure spite, whenever his mother and Christophe had planned to spend an evening together. He even came to play this dangerous game out of idleness, out of showmanship, and in order to test how far his power extended. He was extraordinarily inventive in contriving bizarre nervous episodes: sometimes, in the middle of dinner, he would be seized by convulsive trembling, upsetting his glass or smashing his plate; sometimes, climbing a staircase, his hand would grip the banister; his fingers would clench; he would insist that he could not open them again; or he would feel a stabbing pain in his side and roll about screaming; or he would choke. Naturally, he ended by giving himself a genuine nervous disorder. But it had not been wasted effort. Christophe and Grazia were frantic. The peace of their evenings together --- those quiet conversations, those readings, that music, which they had looked forward to as a celebration --- all that humble happiness was henceforth disturbed.

Now and then, however, the little rascal would grant them some respite, either because he was tired of his role, or because his child’s nature reasserted itself and he turned his attention elsewhere. (He was certain by now that he had won.)

Then, quickly, quickly, they made the most of it. Every hour they stole in this way was all the more precious to them because they could not be sure of enjoying it to the end. How close they felt to each other! Why could they not always remain like this?… One day, Grazia herself confessed that regret. Christophe seized her hand.

--- Yes, why? he asked.

--- You know very well, my friend, she said, with a sorrowful smile.

Christophe knew. He knew that she was sacrificing their happiness to her son; he knew that she was not deceived by Lionello’s lies, and yet that she adored him; he knew the blind selfishness of those family attachments which cause even the best people to spend their reserves of devotion on bad or mediocre members of their blood, so that nothing remains for those who would be most worthy of it, for those they love best, but who are not of their blood. And though it infuriated him, though he sometimes felt like killing the little monster who was destroying their lives, he bowed in silence and understood that Grazia could not act otherwise.

So they both renounced, without useless recriminations. But if their rightful happiness could be stolen from them, nothing could prevent their hearts from being joined. Renunciation itself, their shared sacrifice, bound them by ties stronger than those of the flesh. Each of them in turn confided their sorrows to the other, unburdened themselves, and took on the other’s sorrows in exchange: and so even grief became joy. Christophe called Grazia “his confessor.” He did not hide from her the weaknesses that wounded his self-esteem; he accused himself of them with excessive contrition; and she calmed the scruples of her old child with a smile. He even went so far as to confess his financial difficulties to her. He had not brought himself to this, however, until it was firmly understood between them that she would offer him nothing, and that he would accept nothing from her. A last barrier of pride, which he maintained and which she respected. Since she was forbidden to bring ease into her friend’s life, she set herself to spread through it something of a thousand times greater worth to him: her tenderness. He felt its breath around him at every hour of the day; in the morning, he could not open his eyes, nor in the evening close them, without a silent prayer of loving adoration. And she, when she woke, or when, as often happened, she lay awake for hours during the night, would think:

”--- My friend is thinking of me.”

And a great calm surrounded them.

In the meantime, her health had declined. Grazia was constantly confined to bed, or had to spend days lying on a chaise longue. Christophe came daily to talk with her, to read with her, to show her his new compositions. She would then rise from her chair and go limping to the piano on her swollen feet. She would play for him the music he had brought. That was the greatest joy she could give him. Of all the pupils he had formed, she was, along with Cécile, by far the most gifted. But the music that Cécile felt by instinct, without quite understanding it, was for Grazia a beautiful, harmonious language whose meaning she knew. The demonic element in life and in art escaped her entirely; what she poured into it was the clarity of her intelligent heart. That clarity penetrated Christophe’s genius. His friend’s playing helped him better understand the obscure passions he had expressed. His eyes closed, he listened to her, followed her, holding her by the hand, through the labyrinth of his own thought. In living his music through Grazia’s soul, he wedded that soul and possessed it. From this mysterious union were born musical works that were like the fruit of their mingled beings. He told her so one day, as he offered her a collection of his compositions, woven from his own substance and that of his friend:

--- Our children.

A communion at every moment, whether they were together or apart; the sweetness of evenings spent in the gathered quiet of the old house, whose setting seemed made for Grazia’s image, and where silent, cordial servants, devoted to her, reflected onto Christophe something of the respectful affection they bore their mistress. The joy of listening together to the song of the passing hours, and watching the flood of life flow by… Grazia’s failing health cast a shadow of anxiety over this happiness. But in spite of her small infirmities, she remained so serene that her hidden suffering only added to her charm. She was “his dear, suffering, touching friend, with the luminous face.” And he would write to her on certain evenings, on leaving her house, when his heart was full of love and he could not wait until the next day to tell her:

“Liebe liebe liebe liebe liebe Grazia…”

This tranquility lasted several months. They thought it would last forever. The child seemed to have forgotten them; his attention had wandered elsewhere. But after this respite he returned to them and would not let them go. The diabolical little creature had got it into his head to separate his mother from Christophe. He resumed his performances. He went about it without any premeditated plan. He followed the caprices of his malice from day to day. He had no idea of the harm he could do; he was looking to amuse himself by tormenting others. He gave them no peace until he had persuaded Grazia to leave Paris, to travel far away. Grazia had no strength to resist him. Besides, the doctors were advising her to spend time in Egypt. She was to avoid another winter in a northern climate. Too many things had shaken her: the moral shocks of recent years, the perpetual anxieties caused by her son’s health, the long uncertainties, the struggle she had waged within herself and of which she showed nothing, the grief of the grief she was causing her friend. Christophe, so as not to add to the torments he could sense, concealed his own anguish at seeing the day of separation draw near; he did nothing to delay it; and they both affected a calm they did not possess, yet managed to communicate to each other.

The day came. A morning in September. They had left Paris together in mid-July, and spent the last remaining weeks in Switzerland, in a mountain hotel, near the place where they had found each other again, six years earlier now.

For five days they had been unable to go out; the rain fell without cease; they had been left almost alone at the hotel; most of the other travelers had fled. On that last morning, the rain finally stopped; but the mountain remained wrapped in clouds. The children left first, with the servants, in a first carriage. Then came her turn; she departed. He accompanied her to the place where the road wound down in sharp bends to the Italian plain. Under the hood of the carriage, the damp penetrated them. They were pressed close together and said nothing; they scarcely looked at each other. What a strange half-light, half-darkness enveloped them!… Grazia’s breath misted her veil. He pressed her small hand, warm beneath the cold glove. Their faces touched. Through the damp veil, he kissed the dear mouth.