Jean-Christophe. La nouvelle journée. 1

Jean-Christophe. III. The End of the Journey. The New Day

La Fin du voyage La Nouvelle Journée

LA NOUVELLE JOURNÉE

In finishing this work, I dedicate it:

To free souls, — of every nation, — who suffer, who struggle, and who will conquer.

R. R.

Preface to the last volume of Jean-Christophe

Prologue

First Part

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Second Part

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Third Part

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Fourth Part

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Epilogue

8

During the month of April, he received from Paris the proposal to come and conduct a series of concerts. Without examining it any further, he was going to refuse; but he thought he ought to speak about it first to Grazia. He found a certain sweetness in consulting her on his life; he thereby gave himself the illusion that she shared it.

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

Grazia perhaps was not without regret in giving this advice. But why was Christophe asking her? The more he relied on her to decide for him, the more she judged herself responsible for the actions of her friend. As a result of the exchange that had taken place between their thoughts, she had taken from Christophe a little of his will; he had revealed to her the duty and the beauty of acting. At least, she had recognised this duty for her friend; and she did not want him to fail in it. Better than he, she knew the power of languor concealed in the breath of that Italian soil, which, like the insidious poison of its warm scirocco, slips into the veins and lulls the will to sleep. How often had she felt its malefic charm, without having the energy to resist! All her society was more or less stricken with this malaria of the soul. Stronger men than they, in days gone by, had been victims of it; it had eaten away the bronze of the Roman she-wolf. Rome breathes death: she has too many tombs. It is healthier to pass through there than to live there. One steps out of one’s century too easily there: it is a dangerous taste for forces still young that have a vast career to fulfil. Grazia realised that the world that surrounded her was not a vivifying milieu for an artist. And although she had for Christophe more friendship than for any other… (did she dare confess it to herself?)… at bottom, she was not displeased that he should go away. Alas! He wearied her by all that she loved in him, by that excess of intelligence, by that abundance of life accumulated over the years and now overflowing: her quietude was troubled by it. And he wearied her also, perhaps, because she always felt the menace of that love, beautiful and touching but obsessive, against which one had always to remain on guard; it was more prudent to keep it at a distance. She took good care not to admit this to herself; she believed she had nothing in view but Christophe’s interest.

She was not lacking in good reasons. In the Italy of that day a musician had trouble living: the air was rationed to him. Musical life was compressed, deformed. The factory of the theatre was spreading its greasy ash and its burning smoke over that soil whose flowers of music had once perfumed all Europe. Whoever refused to enrol in the team of vociferators, whoever could not or would not enter the factory, was condemned to exile or to live stifled. Genius was by no means dried up. But it was left to stagnate without profit and to be lost. Christophe had met more than one young musician in whom the soul of the melodious masters of their race revived, along with that instinct of beauty which had pervaded the learned and simple art of the past. But who cared about them? They could neither get themselves played nor get themselves published. No interest in pure symphony. No ears for music that had no greasepaint on its snout!… So they sang to themselves, with a discouraged voice, which ended by dying out. What was the use? Sleep… — Christophe would have asked nothing better than to help them. Granted that he could have, their touchy self-esteem would not lend itself to it. Whatever he did, he was for them a foreigner; and for Italians of old race, despite their affectionate welcome, every foreigner remains, at bottom, a barbarian. They considered that the misery of their art was a question that had to be settled in the family. While lavishing on Christophe marks of friendship, they did not admit him into their family. — What was left for him? He could not, after all, compete with them and dispute with them the meagre place in the sun of which they themselves were not certain!…

And then, 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 recollect itself. But on condition that it come out of it again. Solitude is noble, but mortal for the artist who would no longer have the strength to tear himself from it. One must live the life of one’s time, even noisy and impure as it is; one must incessantly give and receive, and give, and give, and receive again. — Italy, in Christophe’s time, was no longer that great market of art which she had once been, and which she will perhaps become again. The fairs of thought, where the souls of every nation are exchanged, are in the North today. He who wants to live must live there.

Christophe, left to himself, would have shrunk from re-entering the throng. But Grazia felt Christophe’s duty more clearly than he saw it. And she demanded more of him than of herself. No doubt because she esteemed him more. But also because it was more convenient for her. She delegated her energy to him. She kept her tranquillity. — He had not the heart to hold it against her. She was like Mary, she had the better part. To each his role, in life. Christophe’s was to act. For her, it was enough to be. He asked of her nothing more.

Nothing — only to love him, if it were possible, a little less for him and a little more for herself. For he was not very grateful to her for being, in her friendship, so devoid of egoism as to think only of the interest of her friend, — who asked only not to think of it.

He left. He went away from her. He did not leave her. As an old trouvère says, “the friend does not leave his beloved until his soul consents to it.”

1

SECOND PART

His heart ached when he arrived in Paris. It was the first time he was returning there since the death of Olivier. He had never wanted to see that city again. In the cab which carried him from the station to the hotel, he hardly dared look out of the door; he spent the first days in his room, without being able to make up his mind to go out. He felt the anguish of memories, which were lying in wait for him, at the door. But what anguish, precisely? Did he himself quite realise it? Was it, as he wanted to believe, the terror of seeing them surge up again, with their living face? Or, more painful, the terror of finding them dead?… Against this new bereavement, all the half-unconscious ruses of instinct had armed themselves. It was for this reason — (he himself perhaps did not suspect it) — that he had chosen his hotel in a quarter far from the one he had inhabited in former days. And when, for the first time, he walked in the streets, when he had to direct his orchestra rehearsals at the concert hall, when he found himself again in contact with the life of Paris, he continued for a while to shut his eyes, not to want to see what he was seeing, to see obstinately only what he had seen of old. He repeated to himself in advance:

“I know that, I know that…”

In art as in politics, the same intolerant anarchy, always. In the marketplace, the same Fair. Only, the actors had changed roles. The revolutionaries of his day had become bourgeois; the supermen, men of fashion. The independents of yesterday were trying to stifle the independents of today. The young men of twenty years ago were now more conservative than the old men they had once fought; and their critics refused the right to live to the newcomers. In appearance, nothing was different.

And everything had changed…

⁂

“My friend, forgive me. You are good not to have held my silence against me. Your letter did me a great good. I have spent some weeks in terrible disarray. Everything was lacking to me. I had lost you. Here, the dreadful emptiness of those I have lost. All the old friends of whom I have spoken to you, gone. Philomèle — (you remember the voice that sang on that sad and dear evening when, wandering through the crowd of a festival, I saw again in a mirror your eyes looking at me) — Philomèle has realised her reasonable dream; a small inheritance has come to her; she is in Normandy; she has a farm, which she manages. M. Arnaud has retired; he has returned with his wife to their province, a small town in the Angers region. Of the famous men of my day, many are dead or have collapsed; only a few old mannequins, who twenty years ago played the jeunes premiers of art and politics, still play them today, with the same false face. Apart from these masks, I recognised no one. They struck me as grimacing upon a tomb. It was a frightful sentiment. — Moreover, the first days after my arrival, I suffered physically from the ugliness of things, from the grey light of the North, after coming from your golden sun; the heaping-up of pale houses, the vulgarity of line of certain domes, of certain monuments, which had never struck me until then, wounded me cruelly. The moral atmosphere was not more agreeable to me.

“Yet I have no complaint against the Parisians. The welcome I have found scarcely resembles the one I received before. It seems that, during my absence, I have become a kind of celebrity. I shall not speak to you about it, I know what it is worth. All the amiable things these people say or write about me touch me; I am obliged to them. But what shall I tell you? I felt closer to those who used to fight me than to those who praise me today… The fault is in me, I know it. Do not scold me. I had a moment of trouble. It was to be expected. Now, it is over. I have understood. Yes, you were right to send me back among men. I was getting bogged down in my solitude. It is unhealthy to play Zarathustra. The flow of life goes away, goes away from us. There comes a moment when one is no more than a desert. To dig a new channel through the sand to the river, many days of fatigue under the burning sun are needed. — It is done. I no longer have vertigo. I have rejoined the current. I look and I see.

“My friend, what a strange people are these French! Twenty years ago, I thought them finished… They are beginning again. My dear companion Jeannin had indeed predicted it to me. But I suspected him of deluding himself. The means of believing it, then! France was, like their Paris, full of demolitions, of plaster rubble and holes. I would say: ‘They have destroyed everything… What a race of rodents!’ — A race of beavers. The very moment when one believes them bent upon ruins, with those very ruins they lay the foundations of a new city. I see it now that the scaffoldings are rising on every side…

“Wenn ein Ding geschehen,

Selbst die Narren es verstehen…[1]

“To tell the truth, it is always the same French disorder. One must be used to it to recognise, in the throng that collides in every direction, the teams of workmen who each go to their task. They are people, as you know, who can do nothing without shouting from the rooftops what they are doing. They are also people who can do nothing without denigrating what their neighbours do. There is enough to disturb the most solid heads. But when one has lived, as I have, nearly ten years among them, one is no longer the dupe of their uproar. One perceives that this is their way of stirring themselves up to work. While they talk, they act; and each of these worksites building its own house, it turns out that in the end the city is rebuilt. The strongest part of it is that the whole of these constructions is not too discordant. They may uphold opposing theses; they all have heads made the same way. So that beneath their anarchy there are common instincts, there is a logic of race that takes the place of discipline for them, and this discipline is perhaps, in the end, more solid than that of a Prussian regiment.

“It is everywhere the same impulse, the same building-fever: in politics, where socialists and nationalists vie with one another to tighten the slackened gears of power; in art, of which some wish to remake an old aristocratic mansion for the privileged, others a vast hall open to the peoples, where the collective soul sings: reconstructors of the past, constructors of the future. Whatever they do, moreover, these ingenious animals always rebuild the same cells. Their beaver- or bee-instinct makes them, across the centuries, perform the same gestures, find again the same forms. The most revolutionary are perhaps, unbeknownst to themselves, those who are attached to the most ancient traditions. I have found in the syndicates and among the most prominent of the young writers souls of the Middle Ages.

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

“It is not that many things do not displease me here. I have found again my old acquaintances of the Fair in the Marketplace, who once caused me so many holy fits of anger. They have hardly changed. But I, alas! have changed. I no longer dare to be severe. When I feel the urge to judge one of them harshly, 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 existed in vain, and that the vilest have their role in the plan of the tragedy. The depraved dilettantes, the fetid amoralists, have accomplished their task as termites: the rickety hovel had to be demolished before rebuilding. The Jews have obeyed their sacred mission, which is to remain, across the other races, the foreign people, the people that weaves, from one end of the world to the other, the network of human unity. They knock down the intellectual barriers of the 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, at the holy work, at the new life. It is in the same way that the ferocious interest of cosmopolitan bankers, at the cost of how many disasters! is building, whether they will it or not, the future peace of the world, side by side with the revolutionaries who fight them, and far more surely than the silly pacifists.

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

“Tranquil Grace, I speak to you only of myself; and yet, I think only of you. If you knew how my self importunes me! It is oppressive and absorbing. It is a cannonball that God has tied to my neck. How I should like to lay it down at your feet: but what would you have done with it? It is a sad gift… Your feet are made to tread the soft earth and the sand that sings under your steps. I see them, those dear feet, passing nonchalantly over the lawns scattered with anemones… (Have you been back to the Villa Doria?)… Here they already are, weary! I now see you half-stretched out in your favourite retreat, at the back of your salon, leaning on your elbow, holding a book that you are not reading. You listen to me kindly, without paying much attention to what I am saying: for I am tedious, and to be patient, from time to time, you return to your own thoughts; but you are courteous and, careful not to vex me, when a word by chance brings you back from very far away, your distracted eyes hurry to take on an interested air. And I, I am as far as you from what I am saying; I too scarcely hear the sound of my words; and while I am following their reflection on your beautiful face, I listen at the bottom of myself to quite other words, which I do not say to you. Those words, tranquil Grace, all to the contrary of the others, you hear them well; but you pretend not to hear them.

“Farewell. I think you will see me again, before long. I shall not languish here. What should I do here, now that my concerts have been given? — I embrace your children, on their good little cheeks. The stuff of them is yours. One must be content!…

“Christophe.”

⁂

“Tranquil Grace” replied:

“My friend, I received your letter in the little corner of the salon that 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 mock me. It was so that it would last longer. Thus, we spent a whole afternoon. The children asked me what I was reading all the time. I said it was a letter from you. Aurora looked at the paper with commiseration, and she said: ‘How tedious it must be to write so long a letter!’ I tried to make her understand that it was not a penance I had given you, but a conversation we were having together. She listened without a word, then she ran off with her brother, to play in the next room; and, some time later, as Lionello was shouting, I heard Aurora saying: ‘You mustn’t make noise; Mamma is talking with Monsieur Christophe.’

“What you tell me about the French interests me, and does not surprise me. You remember that I often reproached you with being unjust to them. One may not like them. But what an intelligent people! There are mediocre peoples saved by their good heart or by their physical vigour. The French are saved by their intelligence. It washes all their weaknesses. It regenerates them. When one thinks them fallen, beaten down, perverted, they find a new youth in the perpetually springing source of their spirit.

“But I must scold you. You ask me forgiveness for speaking to me only of yourself. You are an ingannatore. You tell me nothing about yourself. Nothing of what you have done. Nothing of what you have seen. It took my cousin Colette — (why don’t you go to see her?) — sending me press clippings about your concerts for me to be informed of your successes. You only mention them in a word, in passing. Are you so detached from everything?… It is not true. Tell me that it gives you pleasure… It must give you pleasure, first because it gives me pleasure. I do not like to see you with a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter was melancholy. It must not be… It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason to crush yourself, as you do, saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would praise you. I tell you that this is wrong. I am not a good Christian. I am a good Italian, who does not like people to torment themselves with the past. The present is quite enough. I do not know exactly all that you may have done in former times. You said a few words about it, and I believe I have guessed the rest. It was not very pretty; but you are no less dear to me for it. Poor Christophe, a woman does not reach my age without knowing that a brave 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 repenting. To repent is to go backward. And in good as in evil, one must always go forward. Sempre avanti, Savoia!… If you think I am going to let you come back to Rome! You have nothing to do here. Stay in Paris, create, act, mix in artistic life. I do not want you to give up. I want you to do beautiful things, I want them to succeed, I want you to be strong, to help the new young Christophes who are beginning the same struggles again and passing through the same trials. Seek them out, help them, be better to your juniors than your elders have been to you. — And finally, I want you to be strong, so that I may know that you are strong: you have no idea of the strength that gives me myself.

“I go almost every day, with the little ones, to the Villa Borghese. The day before yesterday, we went, in a carriage, to Ponte Molle, and we walked round Monte Mario on foot. You slander my poor legs. They are angry with you. — ‘What is this gentleman saying, that we are tired at once, after taking ten steps in the Villa Doria? He doesn’t know us. If we don’t like to give ourselves too much trouble, it is because we are lazy, it is not that we cannot…’ You forget, my friend, that I am a little peasant girl…

“Go and see my cousin Colette. Are you still cross with her? She is a good woman, at bottom. And she swears now only by you. It seems Parisian women are mad about your music. (They were, perhaps, before.) It only depends on my Bernese bear to be a lion of Paris. Have you received letters? Have they made you declarations? You don’t speak to me of any woman. Could you be in love? Tell me. I am not jealous.

“Your friend G.”

⁂

— “If you think I am grateful to you for your last sentence! Would to God, mocking Grace, that you were jealous! But do not count on me to teach you to be. I have no infatuation for these mad Parisiennes, as you call them. Mad? They would much like to be. It is what they are the least. Do not hope that they will turn my head. There would perhaps be more chance of it if they were indifferent to my music. But, it is too true, they love it; and how to keep one’s illusions? When someone tells you that he understands you, that is when you can be sure he 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 had more true sympathy for them than since I no longer look at them with amorous eyes. The great effort they have been making for thirty years to escape from the half-degrading and unhealthy domesticity in which our stupid masculine egoism penned them, to their misfortune and our own, seems to me one of the high deeds of our age. In a city like this one, one learns to admire this new generation of young girls who, despite so many obstacles, throw themselves with candid ardour into the conquest of science and diplomas, — this science and these diplomas which must, they think, emancipate them, open to them the arcana of the unknown world, make them equals of men…

“No doubt this faith is illusory and a little ridiculous. But progress is never realised in the way one had hoped; it is no less realised, by quite other paths. This feminine effort will not be lost. It will make women more complete, more human, as they were in the great centuries. They will no longer disinterest themselves from the living questions of the world: which was a scandal and a monstrosity; for it is not tolerable that a woman, even the most concerned with her domestic duties, should think herself dispensed from thinking about her duties in the modern city. Their great-grandmothers, in the time of Joan of Arc and Catherine Sforza, did not think this way. Woman has wilted. We have refused her air and sunlight. She is taking them back from us, by force. Ah! the brave little ones!… Naturally, of those who struggle today, many will die, many will be deranged. It is an age of crisis. The effort is too violent for forces too softened. When a plant has been long without water, the first rain risks burning it. But well! That is the ransom of all progress. Those who come after will flower from these sufferings. The poor little warrior virgins of today, many of whom will never marry, will be more fecund 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 feminine race of a new classical age.

“It is not in your cousin Colette’s salon that one has a chance of finding these laborious bees. What rage have you to send me to that woman? I had to obey you; but it is not right: you abuse your power. I had refused three of her invitations, left two letters unanswered. She came to hunt me down at one of my orchestra rehearsals — (they were trying out my sixth symphony). — I saw her, during the interval, arrive, nose in the air, sniffing the air, crying: ‘It smells of love! Ah! how I love this music!…’

“She has changed, physically; only her cat’s eyes with their bulging pupil have remained the same, and her fanciful nose that grimaces and always seems in motion. But the face broadened, with solid bones, coloured, strengthened. Sports have transformed her. She gives herself to them headlong. Her husband, as you know, is one of the bigwigs of the Automobile Club and of the Aero Club. Not an aviators’ raid, not an air, land, or water circuit, which the Stevens-Delestrades do not feel obliged to attend. They are always on the road. No conversation possible; their talk is of nothing but Racing, Rowing, Rugby, Derby. It is a new race of society people. The time of Pelléas is past for women. Souls are no longer in fashion. Young girls sport a red, tanned complexion, baked by races in the open air and games in the sun; they look at you with men’s eyes; they laugh, with a slightly coarse laugh. The tone has become more brutal and more crude. Your cousin sometimes says, calmly, enormous things. She is a big eater, she who scarcely used to eat. She continues to complain of her bad stomach, so as not to lose the habit; but she does not lose either a good stroke of the fork. She reads nothing. Nobody reads any more, in that world. Music alone has found favour. It has even profited from the rout of literature. When these people are exhausted, music is for them a Turkish bath, lukewarm steam, massage, narghile. No need to think. It is a transition between sport and love. And it is also a sport. But the most popular sport, among aesthetic diversions, is today dancing. Russian dances, Greek dances, Swiss dances, American dances, they dance everything in Paris: Beethoven’s symphonies, Aeschylus’s tragedies, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the antiques of the Vatican, Orpheus, Tristan, the Passion, and gymnastics. These people have the staggers.

“The curious thing is to see how your cousin reconciles it all together: her aestheticism, her sports and her practical spirit (for she has inherited from her mother her sense of business and her domestic despotism). All this must form an incredible mixture; but she is at ease in it; her wildest eccentricities leave her mind lucid, just as she always keeps her eye and her hand sure in her vertiginous outings by motorcar. She is a masterful woman; her husband, her guests, her servants, she runs them all, with the drum beating. She also occupies herself with politics; she is for ‘Monseigneur’: not that I think her a royalist; but it is for her one more pretext to bestir herself. And although she is incapable of reading more than ten pages of a book, she makes Academy elections. — She has claimed to take me under her protection. You can imagine that this was not to my taste. The most exasperating thing is that, from the fact that I came to her house in order to obey you, she is now convinced of her power over me… I take my revenge by telling her hard truths. She only laughs at them; she is never at a loss to reply. ‘She is a good woman, at bottom…’ Yes, provided she is occupied. She acknowledges it herself: if the machine had nothing more to grind, she would be ready for anything, anything, to furnish it with fodder. — I have been to her house twice. I shall not go again now. That is enough to prove my submission to you. You don’t want my death? I come away from there broken, bruised, aching. The last time I saw her, in the night that followed, I had a frightful nightmare: I dreamt that I was her husband, attached for life to that living whirlwind… A silly dream, and one which surely cannot torment the real husband: for, of all those one sees in the house, he is perhaps the one who remains least with her; and when they are together, they speak only of sport. They get along very well.

“How can these people have made a success of my music? I do not try to understand. I suppose it shakes them up in a new way. They are grateful to it for brutalising them. They love, for the moment, art that has a body. But the soul that is in this body, they do not even suspect it; they will pass from today’s infatuation to tomorrow’s indifference, and from tomorrow’s indifference to the day-after-tomorrow’s denigration, without ever having known it. It is the history of all artists. I have no illusion about my success, it won’t last long; and they will make me pay for it. — Meanwhile, I am present at curious spectacles. The most enthusiastic of my admirers is… (I’ll give you a thousand guesses)… our friend Lévy-Cœur. You remember that fine gentleman, with whom I once had a ridiculous duel? He is now lecturing those who failed to understand me in the past. He does it even very well. Of all those who speak of me, he is the most intelligent. Judge what the others are worth. There is nothing to be proud of, I assure you.

“I do not feel like being so. I am too humiliated when I hear those works of mine that they praise to me. I recognise myself in them, and I do not find myself handsome. What a pitiless mirror a musical work is, for one who knows how to see! Fortunately they are blind and deaf. I have put so much of my troubles and weaknesses into my works that it sometimes seems to me I am committing an evil deed in letting loose these flights of demons into the world. I am calmed when I see the public’s calm: it wears a triple cuirass; nothing could reach it: otherwise, I should be damned… You reproach me with being too severe on myself. It is because you do not know me as I know myself. People see what we are. They do not see what we could have been; and they give us credit for what is far less the effect of our merits than of the events that carry us and of the forces that direct us. Let me tell you a story.

“The other evening, I had gone into one of those cafés where fairly good music is made, though in a strange fashion: with five or six instruments, completed by a piano, they play all the symphonies, the masses, the oratorios. In the same way, in Rome, certain marble-workers sell the Medici chapel as a mantelpiece ornament. It seems this is useful to art. So that it may circulate among men, it must be made into small change. Besides, at these concerts one is not cheated. The programmes are copious, the performers conscientious. I found there a cellist with whom I made friends; his eyes strangely reminded me of those of my father. He told me the story of his life. Grandson of a peasant, son of a minor functionary, a town-hall employee in a village of the North. They wanted to make him a gentleman, a lawyer; he was put into the secondary school of the neighbouring town. The little fellow, robust and rustic, ill-made for that diligent work of a little notary, could not stay in his cage; he leaped over the walls, wandered through the fields, paid court to the girls, spent his great strength in brawls; the rest of the time, he idled, he dreamed of things he would never do. One thing alone attracted him: music. God knows how! No musician among his family, with the exception of a great-uncle, a little cracked, one of those provincial originals whose intelligence and gifts, often remarkable, are spent, in their proud isolation, on maniacs’ trifles. That one had invented a new system of notation — (one more!) — which was to revolutionise music; he even claimed to have found a shorthand that allowed words, melody, and accompaniment to be noted simultaneously; he himself never managed to read it correctly. In the family, they mocked the fellow; but they could not help being proud of him. They thought: ‘He is an old madman. Who knows? Perhaps he has genius…’ — It was no doubt from him that musical mania was transmitted to the great-nephew. What music could he hear, in his town!… But bad music can inspire a love as pure as good music.

“The misfortune was that such a passion seemed inadmissible in that milieu: and the child had not the solid unreasonableness of the great-uncle. He hid to read the lucubrations of the old maniac, which formed the basis of his bizarre musical education. Vain, fearful before his father and before public opinion, he was unwilling to say anything of his ambitions unless he had succeeded. A good fellow, crushed by his family, he did as so many small French bourgeois who, daring not, from weakness or kindness, to face up to the will of their own people, submit to it in appearance and live all their real life in perpetual concealment. Instead of following his bent, he laboured without taste at the work that had been assigned to him: incapable of succeeding at it, as of failing at it spectacularly. As best he could, he managed to pass the necessary examinations. The chief advantage he saw in this was to escape the double provincial and paternal surveillance. The law bored him; he was determined not to make it his career. But as long as his father lived, he did not dare declare his will. Perhaps he was not displeased to have to wait a while longer before taking sides. He was one of those who, all their life, beguile themselves with what they will do later, with what they could do. For the moment, he was doing nothing. Off-balance, intoxicated by his new life in Paris, he gave himself up, with his young peasant brutality, to his two passions: women and music; maddened by concerts no less than by pleasure. He lost years in it, without even profiting from the means he might have had to complete his musical instruction. His touchy pride, an unhappy character, independent and susceptible, prevented him from taking any lessons, from asking advice of anyone.

“When his father died, he sent Themis and Justinian packing. He set to composing, without having had the courage to acquire the necessary technique. Inveterate habits of idle loafing and the taste for pleasure had made him incapable of any serious effort. He felt vividly; but his thought, like his form, escaped him at once; in the end, he expressed only banalities. The worst of it was that there really was, in this mediocre man, something great. I have read two of his old compositions. Here and there, striking ideas, left in the state of sketches, immediately deformed. Will-o’-the-wisps over a peat-bog… And what a strange brain! He wanted to explain Beethoven’s sonatas to me. He sees in them childish, preposterous novels. But what passion, what profound seriousness! Tears come to his eyes when he speaks of them. He would let himself be killed for what he loves. He is touching and burlesque. At the moment when I was about to laugh in his face, I wanted to embrace him… A fundamental honesty. A robust contempt for the charlatanism of Parisian cliques and for false glories, — (although he cannot help, like a small bourgeois, a naïve admiration for people of success)…

“He had a small inheritance. In a few months, he had soon spent it; and, finding himself without resources, he had, like many of his kind, the criminal honesty to marry a girl without resources whom he had seduced; she had a fine voice and made music, without love of music. They had to live on her voice and on the mediocre talent he had acquired in playing the cello. Naturally, they were not long in seeing their common mediocrity and being unable to bear each other. A daughter had come to them. The father transferred to the child his power of illusion; he thought she would be what he had not been able to be. The little girl took after her mother: she was a tinkler with no shadow of talent; she adored her father and applied herself to her task, to please him. For several years, they ran from hotel to hotel in the spa-towns, gathering more insults than coin. The child, frail and overworked, died. The wife, in despair, grew more shrewish every day. And it was bottomless misery, without hope of getting out, sharpened by the sense of an ideal one knows oneself incapable of attaining…

“And I thought, my friend, in seeing this poor devil of a failure, whose life has been but a series of disappointments: ‘Here is what I could have been. There were traits in common between our childhood souls; and certain adventures of our lives resemble each other; I have even found some kinship in our musical ideas; but his stopped on the way. To what is it due that I have not foundered, like him? No doubt to my will. But also to the hazards of life. And even, taking only my will, is it solely to my own merits that I owe it? Is it not rather to my race, to my friends, to God who has helped me?…’ These thoughts make one humble. One feels brotherly toward all those who love art and suffer for it. From the lowest to the highest, the distance is not great…

“On that, I have thought again about what you wrote me. You are right: an artist has no right to keep aloof, so long as he can come to the aid of others. I shall therefore remain, I shall oblige myself to spend a few months a year, either here, or in Vienna or in Berlin, though it is hard for me to get used again 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 will perhaps be useful to myself. And I shall console myself by thinking that you wanted it. And besides,… (I do not want to lie)… I am beginning to find pleasure in it. Farewell, tyrant. You triumph. I have come not only to do what you want me to do, but to love it.

“Christophe.”

⁂

Thus he remained, in part to please her, but also because his artist’s curiosity, awakened, let itself be taken in again by the spectacle of art renewed. All that he saw and did, he offered in thought to Grazia; he wrote it to her. He knew well that he was deceiving himself about the interest she might find in it; he suspected her of a little indifference. But he was grateful to her for not showing it to him too much.

She replied to him regularly, once a fortnight. Affectionate and measured letters, as her gestures were. In recounting her life to him, she did not depart 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 push him to an exaltation she did not want to follow him in. But she was too much a woman to ignore the secret of not discouraging her friend’s love and of dressing at once, with gentle words, the inner disappointment that indifferent words had caused. Christophe was not long in guessing this tactic; and, by a stratagem of love, he in turn forced himself to contain his outbursts, to write more measured letters, so that Grazia’s replies might be less restrained.

As he prolonged his stay in Paris, he grew more and more interested in the new activity that stirred the gigantic ant-heap. He grew the more interested in it as he found among the young ants less sympathy for himself. He had not been mistaken: his success was a Pyrrhic victory. After an absence of ten years, his return had made a sensation in the Parisian world. But by an irony of things, not uncommon, he found himself patronised, this time, by his old enemies the snobs, the people of fashion; the artists were sullenly hostile to him, or distrusted him. He imposed himself by his name which was already of the past, by his considerable work, by his tone of passionate conviction, by the violence of his sincerity. But while one was forced to reckon with him, while he compelled admiration or esteem, he was ill-understood and not loved. He was outside the art of the time. A monster, a living anachronism. He had always been so. His ten years of solitude had accentuated the contrast. During his absence, there had been accomplished in Europe, and especially in Paris, as he had clearly seen, a work of reconstruction. 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 price of lying. Lies of pride, — of every pride: pride of race, pride of caste, pride of religion, pride of culture and of art, — all were good to it, provided they were an armour of iron, provided they furnished it with sword and shield, and that, sheltered by them, it should march to victory. It was therefore disagreeable to it to hear the great tormented voice that recalled to it the existence of grief and of doubts: those gales which had troubled the just-vanished night, which continued, in spite of its denials, to threaten the universe, and which it wanted to forget. Impossible not to hear; one was still too near. So these young men turned away in vexation; and they shouted at the top of their voices, to deafen themselves. But the voice spoke louder. And they bore it a grudge.

On the contrary, Christophe looked on them with friendliness. He hailed the ascent of the world toward happiness. What was deliberately narrow in this thrust did not affect him. When one wants to go straight to the goal, one must look straight ahead. As for him, seated at the turning-point of a world, he enjoyed seeing, behind him, the tragic splendour of the night and, before him, the smile of young hope, the uncertain beauty of fresh and feverish dawn. He was at the still point of the axis of the pendulum, while the pendulum was beginning to rise again. Without following it in its march, he listened with joy to the rhythm of life beating. He associated himself with the hopes of those who disowned his past anguishes. What would be would be, as he had dreamed of it. Ten years before, Olivier, in the night and in pain, — poor little Gallic cock, — had with his frail song announced the distant day. The singer was no more; but his song was being fulfilled. In the garden of France, the birds were awakening. And, dominating the other songs, Christophe suddenly heard, clearer, stronger, happier, the voice of Olivier risen again.

↑ When a thing has come to pass, even the fools understand it.

2

He was reading distractedly, at a bookseller’s display, a book of poems. The name of the author was unknown to him. Certain words struck him; he remained held there. As he continued to read between the uncut pages, it seemed to him he recognised a voice, friendly features… Powerless to define what he felt, and unable to bring himself to part from the book, he bought it. Back at home, he resumed his reading. At once his obsession seized him again. The impetuous breath of the poem evoked, with the precision of a visionary, the immense and age-old souls, — those gigantic trees of which we are the leaves and the fruit, — the Fatherlands. From these pages there rose the superhuman figure of the Mother, — she who was before us, she who will be after us, she who is enthroned, like the Byzantine Madonnas, high as mountains, at whose feet pray the human ants. The poet celebrated the Homeric duel of these great Goddesses, whose lances have clashed since the beginning of the ages: that eternal Iliad, which is to that of Troy what the Alpine chain is to the little Greek hills.

Such an epic of pride and warlike action was far from the thoughts of a European soul like Christophe’s. And yet, by gleams, in the vision of the French soul, — the maiden full of grace, who bears the aegis, the blue-eyed Athena whose eyes shine in the darkness, the worker goddess, the incomparable artist, the sovereign reason, whose dazzling spear strikes down the tumultuously shouting barbarians, — Christophe perceived a look, a smile that he knew, and that he had loved. But at the moment of seizing it, the vision faded. And while he was growing irritated at pursuing it in vain, behold, in turning a page, he heard a story which, a few days before his death, Olivier had told him…

He was upset. He ran to the publisher’s, he asked for the poet’s address. It was refused him, as is customary. He grew angry. In vain. At last, he hit on the idea that he would find the information in a directory. He found it indeed, and at once went to the author’s. When he wanted a thing, he had never known how to wait.

In the Batignolles quarter. On a top floor. Several doors opened onto a common corridor. Christophe knocked on the one indicated. It was the neighbouring door that opened. A young woman, not pretty, very dark, hair on her forehead, with a clouded complexion — a pinched face with lively eyes — asked what he wanted. She had a suspicious air. Christophe explained the object of his visit, and, on a further 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 she went in alone, shutting the door in his face. At last Christophe gained access to the well-guarded lodging. He crossed a half-empty room which served as a dining-room: a few dilapidated pieces of furniture; near the curtainless window, a dozen birds chirped in a cage. In the next room, on a worn divan, a man was lying. He raised himself to receive Christophe. That emaciated face, lit up by the soul, those beautiful velvet eyes in which burned a fever-flame, those long intelligent hands, that ill-shaped body, that sharp voice growing hoarse… Christophe recognised at once… Emmanuel! The little crippled workman, who had been the innocent cause… And Emmanuel, suddenly on his feet, had also recognised Christophe.

They remained without speaking. Both, at that moment, saw Olivier… They could not bring themselves to shake hands. Emmanuel had taken a step back. After ten years gone by, an unconfessed rancour, the old jealousy he had had for Christophe, came back from the obscure 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 held out to him.

Emmanuel asked:

— I knew you were in Paris. But you, how were you able to find me?

Christophe said:

— I read your last book; through it, I heard his voice.

— Did you not? said Emmanuel; you recognised him? All that I am at present, it is to him that I owe it.

(He avoided pronouncing the name.)

After a moment, he continued, darkly:

— He loved you more than me.

Christophe smiled:

— He who loves well knows no more and no less; he gives himself wholly to all those whom he loves.

Emmanuel looked at Christophe: the tragic seriousness of his wilful eyes suddenly lit up with a deep sweetness. He took Christophe’s hand and made him sit down on the divan, beside him.

They told each other their lives. From fourteen to twenty-five, Emmanuel had done many trades: typographer, upholsterer, small street vendor, bookshop clerk, lawyer’s clerk, secretary to a politician, journalist… In all of them, he had found a way 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 misery and his gifts, enriching himself with the worst experiences and managing to come out of them without too much bitterness, leaving in them only the remnant of his sickly health. Singular aptitudes for ancient languages, (less exceptional than one would think, in a race imbued with humanist traditions), had earned him the interest and support of an old Hellenist priest. These studies, which he had not had time to carry very far, were for him a discipline of mind and a school of style. This man, come out of the mud of the people, whose whole instruction had been done by himself, at random, and presented enormous gaps, had acquired a gift of verbal expression, a mastery of thought over form, that ten years of university education are powerless to give to the young bourgeoisie. He attributed the benefit of it to Olivier. Others had nonetheless helped him more effectively. But from Olivier came the spark that had lit, in the night of this soul, the eternal lamp. The others had only poured oil into the lamp.

He said:

— I only began to understand him from the moment he went away. But all he had told me had entered into me. His light has never left me.

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

His poems were indeed the product of that strange race which, through the centuries, has so strongly kept its old Celtic aroma, while putting a bizarre pride in dressing its thought in the cast-offs and laws of the Roman conqueror. One found in them quite pure that Gallic audacity, that spirit of heroic reason, of irony, that mixture of bravado and mad bravery, which went to pull the beard of the senators of Rome, pillaged the temple of Delphi, and laughingly hurled its javelins against the sky. But it had been necessary for this little Parisian cobbler-boy to embody his passions, as his bewigged grandfathers had done, and as his great-great-nephews would no doubt do, in the bodies of the heroes and gods of Greece, dead these two thousand years. A curious instinct of this people, which agrees with their need of the absolute: in placing their thought upon the tracks of the centuries, it seems to them that they impose their thought for the centuries. The constraint of this classical form only printed a more violent impulse on Emmanuel’s passions. Olivier’s calm confidence in the destinies of France had been transformed, in his little protégé, into a burning faith, hungry for action and sure of triumph. He wanted it, he saw it, he proclaimed it. It was by this exalted faith and by this optimism that he had lifted the souls of the French public. His book had been as effective as a battle. It had opened the breach in scepticism and in fear. The whole young generation had rushed after him, toward the new destinies…

He grew animated as he spoke; his eyes burned, his pallid face was mottled with patches of pink, 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 only glimpsed the moving irony of this fate. The bard of energy, the poet who celebrated the generation of intrepid sports, of action, of war, could scarcely walk without panting, was sober, followed a very strict diet, drank water, could not smoke, lived without mistresses, carried all his passions within him, and was reduced by his health to asceticism.

Christophe was observing Emmanuel; and he was feeling a mixture of admiration and brotherly pity. He did not want to show any of this; but no doubt his eyes betrayed something of it; or Emmanuel’s pride, which kept in its flank an ever-open wound, thought it read in Christophe’s eyes the commiseration which was more odious to him than hatred. His flame fell, all at once. He ceased to speak. Christophe tried in vain to bring back his confidence. The soul had closed up again. Christophe saw that he had wounded him.

The hostile silence prolonged itself. Christophe rose. Emmanuel saw him to the door, without a word. His gait betrayed his infirmity; he knew it; he made it his pride to seem indifferent to it; but he thought that Christophe was observing him, and his rancour was aggravated by it.

At the moment when he coldly shook hands with his guest to dismiss him, an elegant young lady rang at the door. She was escorted by a pretentious fop, whom Christophe recognised as having noticed at theatre premieres, smiling, chattering, paw-saluting, kissing the paws of the ladies, and, from his place in the stalls, shooting smiles to the back of the theatre: failing to know his name, he called him “the buck.” — The buck and his companion, at the sight of Emmanuel, threw themselves on the “dear master” with obsequious and familiar effusions. Christophe, who was moving away, heard the dry voice of Emmanuel reply that he could not receive, that he was busy. He admired the gift this man possessed of being unpleasant. He was unaware of his reasons for showing a bad face to the rich snobs who came to gratify him with their indiscreet visits: they were lavish with fine phrases and praises; but they did not concern themselves any more with relieving his misery than the famous friends of César Franck ever sought to relieve him of the piano lessons which, until his last day, he had to give in order to live.

Christophe went back to Emmanuel’s several times. He could no longer succeed in reviving the intimacy of the first visit. Emmanuel showed no pleasure in seeing him, and kept up a suspicious reserve. At moments, the generous need for expansion of his genius carried him away; some word of Christophe’s made him vibrate to the roots; then he would abandon himself to a fit of enthusiastic confidence; and his idealism would cast on his hidden soul splendid flashes of dazzling poetry. Then, abruptly, he would fall back; he would tense up in a surly silence; and Christophe would find the enemy again.

Too many things separated them. Not the least was their difference of age. Christophe was on his way to full consciousness and self-mastery. Emmanuel was still in formation, and more chaotic than Christophe had ever been. The originality of his figure stemmed from the contradictory elements at grips in him: a powerful stoicism, which strove to tame a nature gnawed by atavistic desires, — (the son of an alcoholic and a prostitute); — a frenetic imagination, which reared up beneath the bit of a will of iron; an immense egoism and an immense love of others, of which one never knew which of the two would be victor; a heroic idealism and a morbid avidity for glory which made him uneasy about other men’s superiorities. If Olivier’s thought, if his independence, his disinterestedness, were found again in him, if Emmanuel was superior to his master by his plebeian vitality, which did not know the disgust of action, by his poetic genius and by his rough bark, which defended him against all disgusts, he was far from attaining to the serenity of Antoinette’s brother; his character was vain, restless; and the trouble of other beings was added to his own.

He lived in a stormy union with a young woman who was his neighbour: the one who had received Christophe, the first time he had come. She loved Emmanuel and jealously took care of him, did his housework, copied out his works, wrote them under his dictation. She was not pretty and bore the burden of a passionate soul. Sprung from the people, long a workwoman in a cardboard workshop, then a post-office employee, she had spent a childhood stifled in the ordinary setting of the poor working classes of Paris: souls and bodies packed together, harassing work, perpetual promiscuity, no air, no silence, never solitude, impossibility of recollecting oneself, of defending the sacred retreat of one’s heart. A proud spirit, who brooded a religious fervour for a confused ideal of truth, she had worn out her eyes copying at night, and sometimes without light, by moonlight, Hugo’s Misérables. She had met Emmanuel at a time when he was more unhappy than she, sick and without resources; she had devoted herself to him. This passion was the first, the only love of her life. Therefore she clung to it, with the tenacity of one who is starved. Her affection was terribly heavy for Emmanuel, who shared it less than he submitted to it. He was touched by this devotion; he knew she was the best of friends to him, the only being for whom he was everything, and who could not do without him. But this very feeling crushed him. He needed liberty, he needed isolation; those eyes that avidly begged for a look obsessed him; he spoke to her harshly, he wanted to tell her: “Be off!” He was irritated by her ugliness and her brusqueness. Little as he had glimpsed of high society, and however much contempt he might show it, — (for he suffered at seeing himself there uglier and more ridiculous), — he was sensitive to elegance, he underwent the attraction of women who had for him (he did not doubt it) the sentiment he had for his friend. He tried to show her an affection he did not have, or which was at least constantly obscured by gusts of involuntary hatred. He did not succeed; he carried in his breast a great generous heart, eager to do good, and a demon of violence, capable of doing evil. This inner struggle and the awareness he had of being unable to end it to his own advantage threw him into a sullen irritation, of which Christophe received the outbursts.

Emmanuel could not defend himself, toward Christophe, from a double antipathy: one, sprung from his old jealousy (those childhood passions, whose thrust subsists even when one has forgotten the cause); the other, inspired by a burning nationalism. He embodied in France all the dreams of justice, of pity, of human brotherhood, conceived by the best of the preceding age. He did not set her against the rest of Europe, like an enemy whose fortune grows on the ruins of other nations; he placed her at their head, like the legitimate sovereign who reigns for the good of all, — sword of the ideal, guide of the human race. Rather than see her commit an injustice, he would have preferred her dead. But he did not doubt her. He was exclusively French, by culture and by heart, uniquely nourished on French tradition, of which he found again the profound reasons in his instinct. He misunderstood, with sincerity, foreign thought, for which he had a sort of disdainful condescension, — of irritation, if the foreigner did not accept this humiliated situation.

Christophe saw all this; but, older and more instructed by life, he was not affected by it. If this pride of race was not without being wounding, Christophe was not stricken by it; he made allowance for the illusions of filial love, and he did not think of criticising the exaggerations of a sacred sentiment. Moreover, even humanity finds its profit in the vain belief of peoples in their mission. Of all the reasons he had to feel removed from Emmanuel, only one was painful to him: Emmanuel’s voice, which sometimes rose to overly-shrill intonations. Christophe’s ear suffered cruelly from it. He could not help making grimaces. He tried not to let Emmanuel see them. He applied himself to hearing the music, and not the instrument. Such a beauty of heroism radiated from the crippled poet, when he evoked the victories of the spirit, forerunners of other victories, the conquest of the air, the “flying god” who raised up the crowds and, like the star of Bethlehem, drew them in his wake, ecstatic, toward what distant spaces, or what imminent revenges! The splendour of these visions of energy did not prevent Christophe from feeling their danger, from foreseeing where this charge-pace and the growing clamour of this new Marseillaise were leading. He thought, with a little irony, (without regret for the past nor fear of the future), that the song would have echoes which the singer did not foresee, and that a day would come when men would sigh after the vanished time of the Fair in the Marketplace… How free one was then! The Golden Age of liberty! Never would the like be known again. The world was moving toward an age of strength, of health, of virile action, and perhaps of glory, but of hard authority and of narrow order. How we shall have called for it with all our wishes, the iron age, the classical age! The great classical ages, — Louis XIV or Napoleon, — appear to us, at a distance, the peaks of humanity. And perhaps the nation in them realises most victoriously its ideal of the State. But go ahead and ask the heroes of those times what they thought of them! Your Nicolas Poussin went to live and die in Rome; he stifled at home with you. Your Pascal, your Racine bade farewell to the world. And among the greatest, how many others lived apart, disgraced, oppressed! The very soul of a Molière hid much bitterness. — As for your Napoleon, whom you so regret, your fathers do not seem to have suspected their good fortune; and the master himself was not deceived about it; he knew that when he should disappear, the world would say: “Phew!”… Around the Imperator, what a desert of thought! Over the immensity of sand, the African sun…

Christophe did not say all that he was ruminating. A few allusions had been enough to throw Emmanuel into a fury; he had not repeated them. But although he kept his thoughts to himself, Emmanuel knew that he was thinking them. Much more, he had an obscure consciousness that Christophe saw farther than he did. And he was only the more irritated by it. Young men do not forgive their elders for compelling them to see what they will be in twenty years.

Christophe read in his heart and said to himself:

— He is right. To each his faith. One must believe what one believes. God keep me from troubling his confidence in the future!

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

He grew ever more aloof. He closed his door. He did not answer letters. — Christophe had to give up seeing him.

3

The first days of July had come. Christophe was reckoning up what these few months in Paris had brought him: many new ideas, but few friends. Brilliant and derisory successes: to find one’s image again, the image of one’s work, weakened or caricatured, in mediocre brains, is not a thing to rejoice over. And of those by whom he should have liked to be understood, sympathy failed him; they had not welcomed his advances; he could not join them, however much he desired to associate himself with their hopes, to be an ally to them; one would have said their uneasy self-esteem defended itself against his friendship and found more satisfaction in having him for an enemy. In short, he had let the tide of his generation pass without passing with it; and the tide of the next generation would have nothing of him. He was isolated, and was not astonished at it, all his life having accustomed him to it. But he judged that he had now earned the right, after this new attempt, to return to his Swiss hermitage, while waiting to realise a plan which, lately, was taking on more consistency. As he aged, he was tormented by the desire to come back and settle in his home country. He no longer knew anyone there, he would no doubt find there even less kinship of spirit than in this foreign city; but it is nonetheless one’s country: you do not require those of your blood to think as you do; there exist between them and you a thousand secret bonds; the senses have learned to read in the same book of heaven and earth, the heart speaks the same tongue.

He recounted his disappointments gaily to Grazia, and told her of his intention of returning to Switzerland; he asked, jokingly, for permission to leave Paris and announced his departure for the following week. But at the end of the letter, a post-scriptum said:

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

Christophe had complete confidence in Grazia; he delivered to her the secret of his most intimate thoughts. And yet, there was a compartment of his heart whose key he kept: those memories which did not belong only to himself, but to those he had loved. Thus, he was silent on whatever touched 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, on 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 young boy of fourteen or fifteen asked for Monsieur Krafft. Christophe, gruff, let him in. He was fair, with blue eyes, fine features, not very tall, his figure slender and straight. Standing before Christophe, he remained without speaking, a little intimidated. Very soon he recovered himself, and he raised his limpid eyes, which considered Christophe with curiosity. Christophe smiled, looking at the charming face; and the young boy smiled too.

— Well, said Christophe, what do you want?

— I have come, said the child…

(He grew troubled again, he blushed and was silent.)

— I see clearly you have come, said Christophe laughing. But why have you come? Look at me, are you afraid of me?

The young boy regained his smile, shook his head and said:

— No.

— Bravo! Then tell me first who you are.

— I am, said the child…

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

— Come now! he said. Courage!

The child said:

— I am his son.

Christophe started; he half-rose from his seat, seized the young boy by both arms, and drew him to him; falling back on his chair, he held him tightly clasped; their faces almost touched; and he looked at him, he looked at him, repeating:

— My little one… my poor little one…

Abruptly, he took the head between his hands, and he kissed him on the forehead, on the eyes, on the cheeks, on the nose, on the hair. The young boy, frightened and shocked by the violence of these demonstrations, freed himself from his arms. Christophe let him go. He hid his face in his hands, he pressed his forehead against the wall, and he remained thus for some moments. The little one had backed away to the far end of the room. Christophe raised his head. His face was at peace; he looked at the child, with an affectionate smile:

— I frightened you, he said. Forgive me… You see, it’s because I loved him so.

The little one was silent, still scared.

— How you resemble him! said Christophe… And yet, I would not have recognised you. What is it that has changed?

He asked:

— What is your name?

— Georges.

— That’s right. I remember. Christophe-Olivier-Georges… How old are you?

— Fourteen.

— Fourteen! It is so long ago already?… It seems to me yesterday, — or in the night of ages… How you resemble him! The same features. The same, and yet another. The same colour of eyes, and not the same eyes. The same smile, the same mouth, and not the same voice. You are stronger, you hold yourself straighter. You have a fuller face, but you blush like him. Come, sit down, let us talk. Who sent you to me?

— No one.

— You came of yourself? How do you know me?

— I have been told about you.

— Who?

— My mother.

— Ah! said Christophe. Does she know you have come to me?

— No.

Christophe was silent a moment: then he asked:

— Where do you live?

— Near the Parc Monceau.

— You came on foot? Yes? That’s a good walk. You must be tired.

— I am never tired.

— Well done! Show me your arms.

(He felt them.)

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

— It’s that Papa loved you more than anything.

— Is that what she told you?

(He corrected himself.)

— Is that what your mother told you?

— Yes.

Christophe smiled, pensive. He thought: “She too!… How they all loved him! Why then did they not show it to him?…”

He went on:

— Why have you waited so long to come?

— I wanted to come sooner. But I thought you did not want to see me.

— I!

— Several weeks ago, at the Chevillard concerts, I caught sight of you; I was with my mother, a few seats from you; I greeted you; you looked at me askance, frowning, and you did not reply.

— I, looked at you?… My poor little one, could you think?… I did not see you. I have tired eyes. That is why I frown… So you think me very wicked?

— I think you can be, when you want.

— Really? said Christophe. In that case, if you thought I did not want to see you, how did you dare come?

— Because I wanted to see you.

— And if I had thrown you out?

— I would not have let myself be thrown out.

He said this with a small air, decided, confused and provocative all at once.

Christophe burst out laughing; and Georges did the same.

— You would have thrown me out?… See now! What a daredevil!… No, decidedly, you do not resemble your father.

The mobile face of the young boy clouded over.

— You find I do not resemble him? But you were saying, a moment ago?… So you think he would not have loved me? So you do not love me?

— And what does it matter to you whether I love you or not?

— It matters a great deal.

— Why?

— Because I love you.

In a minute, his eyes, his mouth, all his features coloured with ten various expressions. As on an April day, the shadow of clouds running over the fields, in the breath of spring winds. Christophe felt a delicious joy in seeing him, in hearing him; it seemed to him he was washed of the cares of the past; his sad experiences, his trials, his sufferings, and Olivier’s, all was effaced: he was being reborn, all new, in this young shoot of Olivier’s life.

They talked. Georges knew nothing of Christophe’s music before these last months; but since Christophe had been in Paris, he had not missed a concert at which his works were played. He spoke of them, his face animated, his eyes bright, laughing, and tears very near: like a lover. He confided to Christophe that he adored music, and that he too wanted to make some. But Christophe perceived, from a few questions, that the boy was ignorant of its elements. He inquired about his studies. Young Jeannin was at the lycée; he said, cheerfully, that he was not a brilliant pupil.

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

— It’s about the same everywhere.

— What? What? Could you be a dunce?

He laughed frankly and said:

— I think so.

Then he added confidentially:

— But I know I’m not, all the same.

Christophe could not help laughing:

— Then, why don’t you work? Doesn’t anything interest you?

— On the contrary! Everything interests me.

— Well then?

— Everything is interesting, one doesn’t have time…

— You don’t have time? And what the devil do you do?

He sketched a vague gesture:

— Many things. I make music, I play sports, I go to see exhibitions, I read…

— You would do better to read your school books.

— One never reads anything interesting in class… And then, we travel. Last month, I went to England, to see the match between Oxford and Cambridge.

— That must really advance your studies!

— Bah! one learns more that way than by staying at the lycée.

— And your mother, what does she say of all this?

— My mother is very reasonable. She does everything I want.

— Wicked little fellow!… You’re lucky not to have me for a father.

— It’s you who wouldn’t have been lucky…

Impossible to resist his coaxing air.

— And tell me, great traveller, said Christophe, do you know my country?

— Yes.

— I’m sure you don’t know a word of German.

— I know very well, on the contrary.

— Let’s see a little.

They began conversing in German. The little one jabbered, in an incorrect way, but with droll aplomb; very intelligent, of a quick spirit, he guessed more than he understood; he often guessed wrong; he was the first to laugh at his blunders. He told of his journeys, of his readings, briskly. He had read a great deal, hastily, superficially, skipping half the pages, inventing what he had not read, but always spurred by a quick and fresh curiosity, which sought everywhere for reasons for enthusiasm. He leaped from one subject to another; and his face grew animated, in speaking of spectacles or works that had moved him. His knowledge was without any order. One did not know how he had read a tenth-rate book, and was ignorant of all the most famous works.

— All that is very nice, said Christophe. But you’ll never amount to anything, if you don’t work.

— Oh! I don’t need to. We are rich.

— Devil take it! Then it’s serious. You want to be a man good for nothing, who does nothing?

— On the contrary, I would like to do everything. It’s stupid to shut oneself up, all one’s life, in a trade.

— It’s still the only way that’s been found of doing it well.

— So they say!

— What do you mean, “so they say”? I say so. For forty years I’ve been studying my trade. I’m just beginning to know it.

— Forty years to learn one’s trade! And when can one practise it, then?

Christophe began to laugh.

— Little French reasoner!

— I would like to be a musician, said Georges.

— Well, it’s not too soon for you to set about it. Do you want 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 forbid you ever to lay hands on a piano. If you have aptitude, we’ll try to make something of you… But I warn you: I’ll make you work.

— I’ll work, said Georges, delighted.

They made an appointment for the next day. As he was leaving, Georges remembered that the next day he had other appointments, and the day after as well. Yes, he was not free before the end of the week. They agreed on the day and the hour.

But, the day and hour come, Christophe waited in vain. He was disappointed. He had made himself a childish joy of seeing Georges again. This unexpected visit had lit up his life. He had been so happy and moved that he had not slept on the night that followed. He thought, with tender gratitude, of the young friend who had come to find him, on his friend’s behalf; he smiled, in thought, at this charming face: his naturalness, his grace, his malicious and ingenuous frankness, ravished him; he gave himself up to that mute intoxication, that humming of happiness, which had filled his ears and his heart in the first days of his friendship with Olivier. To this was added a graver and almost religious feeling, which, beyond the living, perceived the smile of the past. — He waited, the next day and the day after. No one. Not a letter of apology. Christophe, saddened, sought himself reasons to excuse the child. He did not know where to write to him, he did not have his address. Had he known it, he would not have dared write to him. An old heart that is smitten with a young being feels a modesty in showing him how much it needs him; it knows well that the one who is young has not the same need: the game is not equal between them; and one fears nothing so much as appearing to impose oneself on someone who does not care about you.

The silence dragged on. Although Christophe suffered from it, he constrained himself to make no move to find the Jeannins again. But, every day, he waited for the one who did not come. He did not leave for Switzerland. He stayed, all summer, in Paris. He judged himself absurd; but he no longer had any taste for travelling. Only in September did he decide to spend a few days at Fontainebleau.

Toward the end of October, Georges Jeannin returned to knock at the door. He apologised quietly, without the slightest confusion at his breach of his word.

— I could not come, he said; and then, we left, we have been in Brittany.

— You could have written, said Christophe.

— Yes, that was what I meant to do. But I never had the time… And then, he said, laughing, I forgot, I forget everything.

— Since when have you been back?

— Since the beginning of October.

— And you took three weeks to make up your mind to come?… Listen, tell me frankly: is it your mother who prevents you?… She doesn’t like you to see me?

— Why no! On the contrary. It is she who told me, today, to come.

— How is that?

— The last time I saw you, before the holidays, I told her everything on returning home. She said I had done well; she inquired about you, asked me many questions. When we came back from Brittany, three weeks ago, she urged me to return to your house. A week ago, she reminded me of it again. And this morning, when she learned that I had not yet come, she was vexed, she wanted me to come at once after lunch, without waiting any more.

— And you aren’t ashamed to tell me this? You have to be forced to come to my house?

— No, no, don’t think… Oh! I’ve vexed you! Forgive me… It’s true, I’m scatterbrained… Scold me, but don’t bear me a grudge. I love you. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t have come. Nobody forced me. I, for one, am never forced to do anything but what I want to do.

— Rascal! said Christophe, laughing in spite of himself. And your musical projects, what have you done with them?

— Oh! I still think of them.

— That hasn’t got you very far.

— I want to set to it, now. These last months, I couldn’t, I had so much, so much to do! But now, you’ll see how I’ll work, if you still want me…

(He had coaxing eyes.)

— You’re a humbug, said Christophe.

— You don’t take me seriously.

— Indeed not.

— That’s disgusting! Nobody takes me seriously. I’m discouraged.

— I’ll take you seriously when I see you at work.

— At once, then!

— I don’t have time. Tomorrow.

— No, tomorrow’s too far off. I can’t bear that you should despise me a whole day.

— You’re a nuisance.

— I beg you!…

Christophe, smiling at his weakness, sat him at the piano and spoke to him about music. He asked him questions; he made him solve little problems of harmony. Georges did not know a great deal; but his musical instinct made up for much ignorance; without knowing their names, he found the chords Christophe was expecting; and his very errors testified, in their awkwardness, to a curiosity of taste and a sensibility singularly sharpened. He did not accept Christophe’s remarks without discussion; and the intelligent questions he posed in turn showed a sincere spirit, who did not accept art as a devotional formula recited from the lips, but who wanted to live it, for his own account. — They did not speak only of music. On the subject of harmonies, Georges evoked pictures, landscapes, souls. It was difficult to hold him in check; one had constantly to bring him back to the middle of the path; and Christophe did not always have the heart to. He was amused at listening to the joyful chatter of this little being, full of spirit and life. What a difference of nature from Olivier!… In the one, life was an interior river that flowed silently; in the other, it was wholly outside: a capricious brook that spent itself in games, in the sun. And yet, the same beautiful pure water, like their eyes. Christophe, with a smile, found again in Georges certain instinctive antipathies, tastes and distastes, that he recognised well, and that naïve intransigence, that generosity of heart which gives itself wholly to what one loves… Only, Georges loved so many things that he had not the leisure to love the same one for long.

He came back, the next day and the days that followed. He had taken a fine youthful passion for Christophe, and he applied himself to his lessons with enthusiasm… — And then, the enthusiasm weakened, the visits grew less frequent. He came less often… And then, he no longer came. He disappeared again, for weeks.

He was light, forgetful, naïvely selfish and sincerely affectionate; he had a good heart and a quick intelligence, which he spent in small change, day by day. He was forgiven everything, because one took pleasure in seeing him: he was happy…

Christophe refused to judge him. He did not complain. He had written to Jacqueline, to thank her for having sent him her son. Jacqueline answered a short letter, of contained emotion; she expressed the wish that Christophe should take an interest in Georges, should guide him in life. She made no allusion to the possibility of meeting Christophe. Out of modesty and pride, she could not bring herself to see him again. And Christophe did not feel it permitted him to come, without her inviting him to. — So they remained separated from each other, occasionally catching sight of one another from a distance at a concert, and connected only by the rare visits of the young boy.

4

Winter passed. Grazia now wrote only rarely. She kept her faithful friendship for Christophe. But, a true Italian, very little sentimental, and attached to the real, she needed to see people, if not to think of them, at least to have pleasure in conversing with them. To keep the memory of her heart alive, she had to refresh from time to time the memory of her eyes. So her letters grew short and far between. She remained sure of Christophe, as Christophe was of her. But this security spread more light than warmth.

Christophe did not suffer too much from these new disappointments. His musical activity sufficed to fill him. Having reached a certain age, a vigorous artist lives in his art far more than in his life; life has become the dream, art the reality. Through contact with Paris, his creative power had awakened. There is no more energetic stimulant in the world than the spectacle of this city of work. The most phlegmatic are touched by its fever. Christophe, rested by years of healthy solitude, brought an enormous sum of forces to spend. Enriched by the new conquests which the intrepid curiosity of the French spirit was constantly making in the field of musical technique, he in turn launched himself into discovery; more violent and more barbaric, he went farther than they all. But nothing, in these new boldnesses, was any longer abandoned to the hazard of instinct. A need of clarity had taken hold of Christophe. All along his life, his genius had obeyed a rhythm of alternating currents; his law was to pass in turn from one pole to the other opposite, and to fill all the space between. After having avidly given 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 sought to wrench himself from their fascination, to throw once more on the face of the sphinx the magic net of the dominating spirit. The imperial breath of Rome had passed over him. Like the Parisian art of the time, of which he underwent a little the contagion, he aspired to order. But not, — like those weary reactionaries who spend their remaining energy in defending their sleep, — to order in Warsaw. Those good people who fall back upon Brahms, — upon the Brahms of every art, the strong-on-theme types, the insipid neoclassicists, from a need of appeasement! As if they were exhausted by passion! You are soon worn out, my friends… No, it is not of your order I speak. Mine is not of the same family. It is order in the harmony of free passions and the will… Christophe was studying to maintain in his art the just balance of the powers of life. Those new chords, those musical demons which he had brought forth from the sonorous abyss, he used to build clear symphonies, vast sunlit architectures, like the Italian domed basilicas.

These plays and combats of the spirit occupied him, all winter. And the winter passed quickly, although sometimes, in the evening, Christophe, ending his day and looking back at the sum of his days, would not have been able to say whether it had been long or short, whether he was still young or whether he was very old.

Then, a new human sunbeam pierced the veils of the dream and, once again, brought back the spring. Christophe received a letter from Grazia, telling him she was coming to Paris, with her two children. She had had the plan for a long time. Her cousin Colette had often invited her. The fear of the effort to be made to break her habits, to tear herself from her nonchalant peace and from the home she loved, to re-enter the Parisian whirlwind she knew, had made her put off her journey, from year to year. A melancholy that took her, that spring, perhaps a secret disappointment — (how many silent novels in a woman’s heart, of which others know nothing, and which she herself often barely confesses!) — inspired her with the desire to go away from Rome. The threats of an epidemic were a pretext for her to hasten the children’s departure. She followed her letter to Christophe by a few days only.

Hardly had he learned she was at Colette’s, when Christophe rushed to see her. He found her still absorbed and distant. He felt grief from this, but he did not show it to her. He had now made an almost complete sacrifice of his egoism; and this gave him clear-sightedness of heart. He understood that she had a sorrow she wanted to hide; and he forbade himself to seek to know it. He tried only to distract her, by recounting his mishaps gaily, by telling her of his works, of his projects, by enveloping her discreetly with his affection. She felt herself penetrated by this great tenderness, which feared to impose itself; she had the intuition that Christophe had guessed her grief; and she was softened by it. Her somewhat downcast heart was at rest in the heart of the friend, who spoke to her of something other than what occupied them both. And little by little, he saw the melancholy shadow fade from his friend’s eyes and their look come closer, still closer. So well that one day, as he was speaking to her, he interrupted himself abruptly and looked at her in silence.

— What is the matter? she asked.

— Today, he said, you have quite come back.

She smiled, and softly she replied:

— Yes.

It was not very easy to converse quietly. They were rarely alone. Colette favoured them with her presence more than they would have wished. She was excellent, despite all her foibles, sincerely attached to Grazia and Christophe; but the idea did not occur to her that she might be wearying them. She had certainly noticed — (her eyes noticed everything) — what she called Christophe’s flirt with Grazia: flirting was her element, she was delighted with it; she asked nothing better than to encourage it. But precisely, that was not asked of her; the hope was that she would not meddle with what was not her concern. It was enough that she should appear, or make to one of the two a discreet (indiscreet) allusion to their friendship, for Christophe and Grazia to take on an icy air and speak of something else. Colette sought all possible reasons for their reserve, except one, the true one. Happily for the friends, she could not keep still. She came and went, entered, went out, supervised everything in the house, conducting ten affairs at once. In the intervals of her apparitions, Christophe and Grazia, alone with the children, took up again the thread of their innocent conversations. They never spoke of the feelings that united them. They confided to each other, without constraint, their small daily adventures. Grazia inquired, with feminine interest, about Christophe’s domestic affairs. All was going badly with him; he had endless squabbles with his charwomen; he was constantly cheated, robbed by those who served him. She laughed at it, heartily, with a maternal compassion for the want of practical sense of this big child. One day when Colette had just left them, after having persecuted them longer than usual, Grazia sighed:

— Poor Colette! I love her dearly… How she wearies me!…

— I love her too, said Christophe, if by that you mean that she wearies us.

Grazia laughed:

— Listen: Will you allow me… (there’s decidedly no way to converse in peace, here)… will you allow me to come to your house once?

He gave a start.

— To my house! You would come!

— Does that vex you?

— Vex me! Ah, my God!

— Well, will Tuesday do?

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

— Tuesday, four o’clock, then. Is that agreed?

— You are good, you are good.

— Wait. It’s on one condition.

— A condition? What’s the use? Anything you want. You know I’ll do it, with or without conditions.

— I prefer one condition.

— It’s promised.

— You don’t know what.

— Doesn’t matter, it’s promised. Whatever you want.

— But listen first, stubborn one!

— Speak.

— It’s that between now and then, you’ll change nothing — nothing, do you hear, — in your flat; everything will stay in the same state, exactly.

Christophe’s face fell. He looked dismayed.

— Ah! that’s no fair.

She laughed:

— You see, that’s what comes of committing oneself too quickly! But you have promised.

— But why do you want?…

— Because I want to see you at your home, as you are, every day, when you don’t expect me.

— At least, you’ll allow me?…

— Not at all. I won’t allow anything.

— At least…

— No, no, no, no. I won’t hear of anything. Or I won’t come, if you prefer it that way…

— You know quite well I would consent to anything, provided you came.

— Then it’s promised?

— Yes.

— I have your word?

— Yes, tyrant.

— Good tyrant?

— There’s no such thing as a good tyrant; there are tyrants one loves and tyrants one detests.

— And I’m of both, am I not?

— Oh no, you are only of the first.

— That’s prettily humiliating.

The day named, she came. Christophe, with his scruples of loyalty, had not dared to tidy the slightest sheet of paper in his disorderly flat: he would have thought himself dishonoured. But he was on the rack. He was ashamed of what his friend would think. He awaited her anxiously. She was punctual, she arrived, four or five minutes scarcely after the hour. She climbed the stairs, with her small firm step. She rang. He was behind the door, and he opened. She was dressed with a simple and supple elegance. Through her veil, he saw her tranquil eyes. They said “Good day” in a low voice, giving each other their hands; she, more silent than usual; he, awkward and moved, falling silent so as not to show his agitation. He let her come in, without saying to her the sentence he had prepared, to excuse the disorder of the room. She sat down on the best chair, and he, beside her.

— Here is my study.

That was all he could find to say to her.

A silence. She looked unhurriedly, with a smile of kindness, she too a little troubled, although she did not admit it. (Later, she told him that as a child she had thought of coming to his house; but she had been afraid, at the moment of going in.) She was struck by the appearance of solitude and sadness of the flat: the narrow and dark anteroom, the absolute lack of comfort, the visible poverty, wrung her heart; she was full of affectionate pity for her old friend, whom so much labour and trouble and some celebrity had not been able to free from the embarrassment of material cares. And at the same time, she was amused at the total indifference to well-being revealed by the bareness of this room, without a carpet, without a picture, without an art object, without an armchair; no other furniture than a table, three hard chairs and a piano; and, mingled with a few books, papers, papers everywhere, on the table, under the table, on the floor, on the piano, on the chairs — (she smiled, seeing with what conscientiousness he had kept his word).

After a few moments, she asked:

— Is it here — (showing his place) — that you work?

— No, he said, it’s there.

He indicated the most obscure recess of the room, and a low chair that had its back to the light. She went and gently sat there, without a word. They were silent a few minutes, and they did not know what to say. He rose and went to the piano. He played, he improvised for half an hour; he felt himself surrounded by his friend, and an immense happiness swelled his heart; with his eyes closed, he played marvellous things. She then understood the beauty of this room, all clothed in divine harmonies; she heard, as if it were beating in her breast, that loving and suffering heart.

When the harmonies had fallen silent, he remained, a moment still, motionless, before the piano; then he turned, hearing the breathing of his friend who was crying. She came to him:

— Thank you, she murmured, taking his hand.

Her mouth trembled a little. She closed her eyes. He did the same. For a few seconds, they remained thus, hand in hand; and time stopped…

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

— Do you want me to see the rest of the flat?

Happy, too, to escape his emotion, he opened the door of the next room; but at once, he was ashamed. There was there a narrow and hard iron bed.

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

— I should think so; she would have had to have great courage.

— Why?

— To sleep in your bed.)

There was also a country chest of drawers, on the wall a plaster cast of Beethoven’s head, and, near the bed, in cheap frames, the photographs of his mother and of Olivier. On the chest, another photograph: she, Grazia, at fifteen. He had found it, in Rome, in an album at her house, and he had stolen it. He confessed it to her, asking her pardon. She looked at the picture, and said:

— Do you recognise me there?

— I recognise you, and I remember.

— Which of the two do you like best?

— You are always the same. I always love you just as much. I recognise you everywhere. Even in your photographs as a very small child. You don’t know what emotion I feel at sensing in this chrysalis your whole soul, already. Nothing makes me know better that you are eternal. I love you from before your birth, and I love you even after…

He fell silent. She remained without answering, lovingly troubled. When she came back into the study, and he showed her, in front of the window, the small tree his friend, where the sparrows chattered, she said to him:

— Now, do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to have tea. I’ve brought tea and cakes, because I thought you didn’t have any of all that. And I’ve brought something else too. Give me your overcoat.

— My overcoat?

— Yes, yes, give it to me.

She drew from her bag needles and thread.

— What, you want?…

— There were two buttons, the other day, whose fate worried me. Where are they today?

— It’s true, I haven’t thought of sewing them back on. It’s so tiresome!

— Poor boy! Give it here.

— I’m ashamed.

— Go and prepare the tea.

He brought the kettle and the spirit lamp into the room, so as not to lose a moment with his friend. She, while sewing, watched out of the corner of her eye mischievously his awkwardnesses. They had tea in chipped cups, which she found hideous, considerately, and which he defended indignantly, because they were souvenirs of life in common with Olivier.

At the moment she was leaving, he asked:

— You’re not vexed with me?

— Why ever?

— By the disorder that’s here?

She laughed.

— I shall set it in order.

When she was on the threshold, and near opening the door, he knelt before her, he kissed her feet.

— What are you doing? she said. Madman, dear madman! Farewell.

5

It was agreed that she would come back, every week, on a fixed day. She had made him promise that there would be no more eccentricities, no more kneelings, no more kissings of feet. Such a sweet calm emanated from her that, even when Christophe was in his days of violence, he was penetrated by it; and although, alone, often, he thought of her with a passionate desire, together they were always like good comrades. Never did a word, a gesture escape him that could disquiet his friend.

For Christophe’s name-day, she dressed her little girl as she herself had been when they had met long ago, for the first time; and she had the child play the piece that Christophe, long ago, had made her repeat.

All this grace, this tenderness, this good friendship, were mingled with contradictory feelings. She was frivolous, she loved society, she had pleasure in being courted, even by fools; she was rather coquettish, except with Christophe, — even with Christophe. When he was very tender with her, she was readily cold and reserved. When he was cold and reserved, she became tender and addressed affectionate teasings to him. She was the most honest of women. But in the most honest and best, there is, at moments, a wanton. She was concerned to spare society, to conform to conventions. Well endowed for music, she understood Christophe’s works; but she was not very much interested in them — (and he knew it well). — For a true Latin woman, art has worth only insofar as it can be brought back to life, and life to love… Love that smoulders at the bottom of the voluptuous body, drowsy… What had she to do with tragic meditations, with tormented symphonies, with the intellectual passions of the North? She needed music in which her hidden desires might bloom, with a minimum of effort, an opera that would be passionate life, without the fatigue of passions, a sentimental, sensual and lazy art.

She was weak and changeable; she could only apply herself to a serious study by fits and starts; she had to be distracted; rarely did she do on the morrow what she had announced the previous day. So many puerilities, disconcerting little caprices! The troubled nature of woman, her morbid and unreasonable character, in periods. She was aware of it and would then try to isolate herself. She knew her weaknesses, she reproached herself with not resisting them better, since they grieved her friend; sometimes she made him real sacrifices, without his knowing it; but in the end, nature was the stronger. Moreover, Grazia could not bear that Christophe should seem to command her; and it happened that once or twice, to assert her independence, she did the contrary of what he asked. Afterward, she regretted it; in the night, she had remorse at not making Christophe more happy; she loved him much more than she showed him; she felt this friendship was the best part of her life. As habitually happens between two very different beings who love each other, they were most 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 thought. Even when Grazia, of old, had loved Christophe the most, would she have married him? She would perhaps have given him her life; but would she have given him to live all her life with him? She knew (she took care not to admit it to Christophe) — she knew that she had loved her husband and that even today, 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 you, as much out of respect for them as out of a complaisant pity for oneself… Christophe was too much of a man to guess them; but it happened to him, by flashes, to glimpse how little she who loved him best, she who truly loved him, by flashes, held to him, — and that one must not count entirely on anyone, on anyone, in life. His love was not altered by it. He did not even feel any bitterness from it. Grazia’s peace spread over him. He accepted. O life, why reproach you with what you cannot give? Are you not very beautiful and very holy, as you are? One must love your smile, Gioconda…

Christophe contemplated at length the beautiful face of his friend; he read in it many things of the past and of the future. During the long years in which he had lived alone, travelling, speaking little but looking much, he had acquired, almost without knowing it, a divining of the human face, that rich and complex language which centuries have formed. A thousand times richer and more complex than spoken language. The race expresses itself in it… Perpetual contrasts between the lines of a face and the words it utters. Such a profile of a young woman, of clear, slightly dry drawing, in the manner of Burne-Jones, tragic, as if eaten by a secret passion, a jealousy, a Shakespearean sorrow… She speaks: she is a little bourgeoise, silly as a basket, mediocrely coquettish and selfish, with no idea of the formidable forces inscribed in her flesh. Yet this passion, this violence are in her. In what form will they be translated, one day? Will it be by a sharpness in money matters, a conjugal jealousy, a fine energy, a morbid wickedness? One does not know. It may even be that she will transmit them to another of her blood, before the hour of the explosion has come. But it is an element with which one must reckon, and which hovers over the race like a fatality.

Grazia too bore the weight of this troubled inheritance, which, of all the patrimony of old families, is what least risks being dissipated on the way. She, at least, knew it. It is a great strength, to know one’s weakness, to make oneself, if not master, then pilot of the soul of the race to which one is bound, which carries you along like a vessel, — to make one’s instrument of fatality, to use it like a sail that one trims or furls, according to the wind. When Grazia closed her eyes, she heard within her more than one disquieting voice, whose timbre was known to her. But in her healthy soul, even dissonances ended by fusing; they formed a deep and velvety music, beneath the hand of her harmonious reason.

6

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

Of Grazia’s two children, the one, the little girl, Aurora, who was eleven, resembled the mother; she was less pretty, of a slightly rustic sap; she limped a little; she was a good little girl, affectionate and cheerful, who had excellent health, much good will, few natural gifts, except that of idleness, the passion for doing nothing. Christophe adored her. He tasted, in seeing her beside Grazia, the charm of a double being, one grasps at two ages of one’s life at once, in two generations… Two flowers issued from the same stem: a Holy Family by Leonardo, the Virgin and Saint Anne, the nuances of the same smile. One embraces in a single glance the entire flowering of a feminine soul; and this is at once beautiful and melancholy: for one sees whence it comes, where it is going. Nothing more natural for a passionate heart than to love with a burning and chaste love the two sisters at once, or the mother and the daughter. The woman whom Christophe loved, he would have wanted to love in all the sequence of her race, just as he loved in her all her past race. Each of her smiles, of her tears, of the folds of her dear face, was it not a being, the remembrance of a life, before her eyes had opened to the light, the herald of a being who later was to come, when her beautiful eyes would be closed?

The little boy, Lionello, was nine. Much prettier than his sister, and of a finer race, too fine, bloodless and worn out, he resembled the father; he was intelligent, rich in bad instincts, caressing and dissembling. He had large blue eyes, long blond girl’s hair, the pale complexion, the delicate chest, a sickly nervousness which he played upon, on occasion, being a born actor, more strangely skilled at finding people’s weak spot. Grazia had a predilection for him, by that natural preference of mothers for the less healthy child, — also by that attraction of 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 repressed). And there is mingled in it too a memory of the husband who made them suffer, and whom they have despised perhaps, but loved. All that strange flora of the soul, which grows in the dark and warm hothouse of the conscience.

Despite Grazia’s attention to share her tenderness equally between her two children, Aurora felt the difference, and she suffered a little from it. Christophe divined her, she divined Christophe; they drew together, by instinct. While between Christophe and Lionello there was an antipathy that the child disguised under an exaggeration of lisping endearments, — which Christophe rejected, like a shameful feeling. He did violence to himself; he strove to cherish this child of another’s, as if it had been the one whom it would have been ineffably sweet to have from his beloved. He did not want to recognise Lionello’s evil nature, all that reminded him of “the other”; he applied himself to finding in him only the soul of Grazia. Grazia, more clear-sighted, had no illusions about her son; and she only loved him the more.

However, the malady, which for years had been smouldering in the child, broke out. Consumption declared itself. Grazia resolved to go and shut herself up with Lionello in a sanatorium in the Alps. Christophe asked to accompany her. To spare opinion, she dissuaded him from it. He was pained by the excessive importance she attached to conventions.

She left. She had left her daughter at Colette’s. She was not long in feeling terribly isolated, among these sick people who spoke only of their malady, in this nature without pity, raising its impassive face above the human wrecks. To flee the depressing spectacle of these unfortunates who, with spittoon in hand, spy on each other and follow in each one the progress of death, she had left the Palace-hospital and rented a chalet where she was alone with her little patient. Instead of improving, the altitude was making Lionello’s condition worse. The fever was stronger. Grazia spent nights of anguish. Christophe felt at a distance the acute intuition of it, although his friend wrote nothing of it: for she stiffened in her pride; she would have wished Christophe to be there; but she had forbidden him to follow her; she could not bring herself to admit now: “I am too weak, I need you…”

One evening when she was standing on the gallery of the chalet, at that twilight hour so cruel for anguished hearts, she saw… she thought she saw on the path that climbed up from the funicular station… A man was walking, with hurried step; he was stopping, hesitating, his back a little stooped. For a moment, he raised his head and looked at the chalet. She threw herself inside, so that he should not see her; she pressed her heart with her hands, and, all moved, she laughed. Although she was scarcely religious, she fell on her knees, she hid her face in her arms: she needed to thank someone… Meanwhile, he was not arriving. She returned to the window, and looked, hidden behind her curtains. He had stopped, leaning against the fence of a field, near the door of the chalet. He did not dare enter. And she, more troubled than he, smiled and said softly:

— Come…

At last he made up his mind, and rang. Already she was at the door. She opened. He had the eyes of a good dog that fears being beaten. He said:

— I came… Forgive me…

She said to him:

— Thank you.

Then, she admitted to him how she had been waiting for him.

Christophe helped her to nurse the little one, whose condition was worsening. He put all his heart into it. The child showed an irritated animosity toward him; he no longer took the trouble to hide it; he found wicked words to say. Christophe attributed everything to the malady. He had a patience that was not customary in him. They spent at the child’s bedside a succession of painful days, and especially a night of crisis, at the end of which Lionello, who had seemed lost, was saved. And then it was for both of them a happiness so pure, — both watching, hand in hand, the little patient asleep, — that abruptly she rose, she took her hooded cloak, she dragged Christophe outside, on the road, in the snow, in the silence and the night, under the cold stars. Leaning on his arm, drinking in with intoxication the icy peace of the world, they scarcely exchanged a few syllables. No allusion to their love. Only, when they came back, on the doorstep, she said to him:

— My dear, dear friend!…

her eyes lit up by the happiness of the child saved.

That was all. But they felt that their bond had become sacred.

7

After the long convalescence back in Paris, settled in a small hotel that she had rented at Passy, she no longer took any care to “spare opinion”; she felt the courage to brave it, for her friend. Their life was henceforth so intimately mingled that she would have judged it cowardly to hide the friendship that united them, at the risk — inevitable — that this friendship would be calumniated. She received Christophe at any hour of the day; she showed herself with him, on walks, at the theatre; she spoke to him familiarly before all. No one doubted that they were lovers. Colette herself thought they were making too much of a show. Grazia stopped allusions with a smile, and passed beyond them, tranquilly.

Yet she had given Christophe no new right 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 insensibly, Christophe came to exercise in the house a sort of familial authority: Grazia listened to him and followed his advice. Since the winter spent in the sanatorium, she was no longer the same; the anxieties and fatigues had gravely tested her health, robust until then. Her soul felt the effect of it. Despite some returns of the old caprices, she had something of greater seriousness, of greater recollection, a more constant desire to be good, to instruct herself and not to cause pain. She was touched by Christophe’s affection, by his disinterestedness, by his purity of heart; and she dreamed of giving him, one day, the great happiness he no longer dared dream of: to become his wife.

He had never spoken of it again, since the refusal she had opposed to him; he did not think it permitted him. But he kept the regret of the impossible hope. Whatever respect he had for his friend’s words, the disillusioned way in which she judged marriage had not convinced him; he persisted in believing that the union of two beings who love each other, with a profound and pious love, is the summit of human happiness. — His regrets were rekindled by the encounter with the old Arnaud couple.

Madame Arnaud was over fifty. Her husband, sixty-five or six. Both seemed much older. He had grown heavier; she, thinner, a little shrivelled; so slight before already, she was now no more than a breath. They had retired to a house in the provinces, after Arnaud had taken his retirement. No tie any longer linked them to the century but the newspaper which came, in the torpor of the little town and of their life going to sleep, to bring them the belated echo of the world’s rumours. Once, they had read Christophe’s name in it. Madame Arnaud had written him a few affectionate lines, a little ceremonious, to tell him the joy they had at his glory. At once, he had taken the train, without announcing himself.

He found them in their garden, dozing under the round canopy of an ash tree, on a hot summer afternoon. They were like the two old spouses of Böcklin, who fall asleep under the arbour, hand in hand. The sun, the sleep, old age overwhelm them; they fall, they are already more than halfway sunk in the eternal dream. And, last gleam of life, their tenderness persists to the end, the contact of their hands, of the warmth of their bodies that is fading… — They had a great joy in Christophe’s visit, for all that he recalled to them of the past. They talked of the old days, which from a distance seemed to them luminous. Arnaud took pleasure in speaking; but he had lost his memory for names. Madame Arnaud whispered them to him. She was willingly silent; she preferred to listen than to speak; but the images of former times had remained fresh, in her silent heart; in flashes, they showed through, like shining pebbles in a brook. There was one whose reflection Christophe saw more than once in the eyes that looked at him, with affectionate compassion; but the name of Olivier was not pronounced. Old Arnaud had for his wife awkward and touching attentions; he was anxious that she should not catch cold, that she should not get too hot; he brooded with a worried love over that dear faded face, whose tired smile strove to reassure him. Christophe observed them, moved, with a little envy… To grow old together. To love in one’s companion to the very wearing of years. To say to oneself: “These little creases, near the eye, on the nose, I know them, I have seen them form, I know when they came. Those poor grey hairs, they have lost their colour, day by day, with me, a little through me, alas! This fine face has swollen and reddened, in the forge of the fatigues and pains that have burned us. My soul, how I love you better still for having suffered and grown old with me! Each of your wrinkles is to me a music of the past.” … Charming old folk, who after the long vigil of life, side by side, are going side by side to fall asleep in the peace of the night! The sight of them was at once beneficial 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 recounting his visit to her. He did not tell her the thoughts this visit had awakened. But she read them in him. He was absorbed, as he spoke. He turned his eyes away; and he was silent, at moments. She looked at him, she smiled, and Christophe’s agitation communicated itself to her.

That evening, when she found herself alone again in her room, she remained dreaming. She went over Christophe’s account; but the image she saw through it was not that of the old spouses asleep beneath the ash tree: it was the timid and ardent dream of her friend. And her heart was full of love for him. In bed, the light out, she thought:

— “Yes, it is an absurd thing, absurd and criminal, to lose the chance of such happiness. What joy in the world is worth that of making happy the one one loves?… What! Do I love him?…”

She fell silent, listening, all moved, to her heart which answered:

— “I love him.”

At that moment, a dry, raucous, precipitated cough broke out in the next room, where the children slept. Grazia pricked up her ear; since the child’s illness, she was always uneasy. She questioned him. He did not answer and continued coughing. She jumped out of bed, she came to him. He was irritated, he whimpered, he said he was not well, and he interrupted himself to cough.

— Where does it hurt?

He did not answer; he moaned that he had pain.

— My treasure, please, tell me where it hurts.

— I don’t know.

— Does it hurt, here?

— Yes. No. I don’t know. I have pain everywhere.

Thereupon, he was seized with a new fit of coughing, violent, exaggerated. Grazia was frightened; she had the feeling he was forcing himself to cough; but she reproached herself for it, in seeing the little one, sweating and panting. She kissed him, she said tender words to him; he seemed to grow calmer; but as soon as she tried to leave him, he began coughing again. She had to remain at his bedside, shivering: for he would not even allow her to go and dress, he wanted her to hold his hand; and he did not let go of it, until sleep took him. Then she lay down again, frozen, anxious, harassed. And it was impossible for her to find her dreams again.

The child had a singular power of reading in his mother’s thought. One finds often enough — but to this degree, rarely, — this instinctive genius in beings of the same blood: they hardly need to look at one another to know what the other thinks; they guess it, from a thousand imperceptible signs. This natural disposition, which life in common strengthens, was further sharpened, in Lionello, by a malice always on the watch. He had the clear-sightedness that the desire to do harm gives. He detested Christophe. Why? Why does a child take a dislike to such or such a one who has done him no harm? Often, it is chance. It is enough for the child to have begun, one day, by persuading himself that he detested someone, to get into the habit of it; and the more one reasons with him, the more he persists; after having played at hatred, he ends by hating in truth. But there are, other times, deeper reasons that exceed the child’s mind; he does not suspect them… From the first days he had seen Christophe, the son of Count Berény had felt animosity against the one whom his mother had loved. One would have said he had had the intuition of the precise instant when Grazia had thought of marrying Christophe. From that moment on, he no longer ceased to watch them. He was always between them, he refused to leave the drawing-room, when Christophe came; or else he arranged to burst suddenly into the room where they were together. Even more, when his mother was alone and was thinking of Christophe, he seemed to divine it. He sat down beside her; and he spied on her. That look embarrassed her, made her almost blush. She would rise, to hide her agitation. — He took pleasure in saying, in front of her, wounding things about Christophe. She begged him to be silent. He insisted. And if she wanted to punish him, he threatened to make himself ill. It was a tactic he had used, with success, since infancy. Quite small, one day when he had been scolded, he had invented, as revenge, undressing himself and lying down naked on the tile floor, in order to catch a heavy cold. — One time when Christophe had just brought a musical work he had composed for Grazia’s name-day, the little one seized the manuscript and made it disappear. The torn shreds of it were found in a wood-box. Grazia lost patience; she scolded the child severely. Then he wept, screamed, stamped his foot, rolled on the floor; and he had a nervous fit. Grazia, terrified, kissed him, supplicated him, promised him all he wanted.

From that day, he was the master: for he knew he was; and, on many occasions, he resorted to the weapon that had succeeded. One never knew to what point his fits were natural, or simulated. He was no longer content to use them by revenge, when he was crossed, but out of pure malice, when his mother and Christophe planned to spend the evening together. He even came to play this dangerous game out of idleness, out of theatricality, and in order to test how far his power extended. He was extremely ingenious at inventing bizarre nervous accidents: now, in the middle of dinner, he was seized with convulsive tremblings, he overturned his glass or broke his plate; now, climbing a staircase, his hand gripped the railing; his fingers stiffened; he claimed he could no longer open them; or else, he had a stabbing pain in his side, and he rolled with cries; or else, he choked. Naturally, he ended by giving himself a real nervous illness. But he had not lost his trouble. Christophe and Grazia were distraught. The peace of their reunions, — those calm conversations, those readings, that music, of which they made themselves a festival, — all this humble happiness was henceforth troubled.

Now and then, however, the little rascal left them some respite, whether he was tired of his role, or that his child’s nature took him over again and he was thinking of something else. (He was sure now of having won the game.)

Then, quickly, quickly, they took advantage of it. Each hour they thus stole was the more precious to them as they were not certain of enjoying it to the end. How near each other they felt! Why could they not always remain thus?… One day, Grazia herself confessed this regret. Christophe seized her hand.

— Yes, why? he asked.

— You know quite 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 the dupe of Lionello’s lies, and yet that she adored him; he knew the blind egoism of those family affections, which make the best spend their reserves of devotion to the profit of bad or mediocre beings of their blood, in such a way that there is nothing left for them to give to those who would be the most worthy of it, to those they love best, but who are not of their blood. And although it angered him, although he had the urge, at moments, to kill the little monster who was destroying their life, he bowed in silence and understood that Grazia could not act otherwise.

Then, they both renounced, without useless recriminations. But if happiness owed to them could be stolen, nothing could prevent their hearts from being united. The very renunciation, the common sacrifice, held them by ties stronger than those of the flesh. Each of them in turn confided his sorrows to his friend, unburdened himself on the other, and took in exchange the sorrows of his friend: so that sorrow itself became joy. Christophe called Grazia “his confessor.” He did not hide from her the weaknesses of which his self-love had to suffer; he accused himself of them with an excessive contrition; and she calmed with a smile the scruples of her big child. He went so far as to confess to her his material straits. However, he had only decided on it after it had been well understood between them that she would offer him nothing, that he would accept nothing from her. Last barrier of pride, which he maintained and she respected. Failing the well-being it was forbidden her to bring into her friend’s life, she contrived to pour into it what had a thousand times more worth for him: her tenderness. He felt its breath around him, at every hour of the day; in the morning, he did not open his eyes, he did not close them at evening, without a mute prayer of amorous adoration. And she, when she awoke, or when, in the night, she remained, as often happened to her, hours without sleeping, thought:

” — My friend is thinking of me.”

And a great calm surrounded them.

8

However, her health had deteriorated. Grazia was constantly bedridden, or had to spend her days stretched out on a chaise longue. Christophe came daily to converse, to read with her, to show her his new compositions. She would then rise from her chaise, she would limp to the piano, on her swollen feet. She would play him the music he had brought. It was the greatest joy she could give him. Of all the pupils he had formed, she was, with Cécile, by far the most gifted. But music, which Cécile felt by instinct, almost without understanding it, was for Grazia a beautiful harmonious language whose meaning she knew. The demoniac in life and in art entirely escaped her; she poured into music the clarity of her intelligent heart. This clarity penetrated Christophe’s genius. His friend’s playing made him understand better the obscure passions he had expressed. With eyes closed, he listened to her, he followed her, holding her by the hand, in the labyrinth of his own thought. By living his music through Grazia’s soul, he espoused that soul and possessed it. From this mysterious coupling were born musical works which were like the fruit of their mingled beings. He told her so, one day, in offering her a collection of his compositions, woven of his substance and his friend’s:

— Our children.

Communion of every instant, when they were together and when they were apart; sweetness of evenings passed in the recollection of the old house, whose frame seemed made for Grazia’s image, and where silent and cordial servants, devoted to her, carried over onto Christophe a little of the respectful attachment they had for their mistress. Joy of listening together to the song of the passing hours, and of seeing the tide of life flow by… Grazia’s faltering health cast on this happiness a shadow of disquiet. But despite her little infirmities, she remained so serene that her hidden sufferings only added to her charm. She was “his dear, his suffering, his moving friend, with the luminous face.” And he wrote to her, certain evenings, on coming away from her house, when his heart was swollen with love and he could not wait for the morrow to tell it to her:

“Liebe liebe liebe liebe liebe Grazia…”

This tranquillity lasted several months. They thought it would last always. The child seemed to have forgotten them; his attention was distracted. But after this respite, he came back to them and would not let them go. The diabolical little fellow had taken it into his head to separate his mother from Christophe. He began his comedies again. He did not bring to them any premeditated plan. He followed, from day to day, the caprices of his malice. He did not suspect the harm he could do; he sought to amuse himself by boring others. He did not rest until he had obtained from Grazia that she leave Paris, that they travel far. Grazia was without strength to resist him. Besides, the doctors advised her a stay in Egypt. She had to avoid a new winter in a Northern climate. Too many things had shaken her: the moral shocks of recent years, the perpetual cares caused by her son’s health, the long uncertainties, the struggle waged within her and of which she showed nothing, the sorrow at the sorrow she was giving her friend. Christophe, so as not to add to the torments he divined in her, hid those he had at seeing the day of separation approach; he did nothing to delay it; and they both affected a calm they did not have, but which they succeeded in communicating to each other.

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

For five days, they had not been able to go out; the rain fell without respite; they had remained almost alone at the hotel; most of the travellers had fled. This last morning, the rain ceased at last; but the mountain remained clothed in clouds. The children left first, with the servants, in a first carriage. In her turn, she set off. He accompanied her as far as the place where the road descended in sharp zigzags onto the plain of Italy. Under the hood of the carriage, the damp penetrated them. They were pressed against one another, and they did not speak; they barely looked at each other. The strange half-day, half-night that enveloped them!… Grazia’s breath dampened her veil with a mist. He pressed the small hand, warm under the icy glove. Their faces came together. Through the moist veil, he kissed the dear mouth.

They had arrived at the turn of the road. He got down. The carriage plunged into the fog. It disappeared. He continued to hear the rolling of the wheels and the hooves of the horse. The sheets of white mist flowed over the meadows. Through the close-meshed net, the chilled trees were dripping. Not a breath. The fog was gagging life. Christophe stopped, suffocating… Nothing is any more. All has passed…

He drew in deeply the fog. He resumed his path. Nothing passes, for him who does not pass himself.

1

THIRD PART

Absence adds still more to the power of those one loves. The heart retains of them only what is dear to us. The echo of each word which, across the spaces, comes from the distant friend, resounds in the silence with religious vibrations.

The correspondence of Christophe and Grazia had taken the grave and contained tone of a couple no longer at the dangerous trial of love, but who, having passed it, feels sure of its road and walks, hand in hand. Each of the two was strong to sustain and to guide the other, weak to let himself be guided and sustained by him.

Christophe returned to Paris. He had promised himself never to come back to it. But what are such promises worth! He knew he would still find there the shadow of Grazia. And circumstances, conspiring with his secret desire against his will, showed him in Paris a new duty to fulfil. Colette, very up to date on society chronicles, had taught Christophe that his young friend Jeannin was in the process of doing follies. Jacqueline, who had always been of a great weakness toward her son, was no longer trying to hold him back. She herself was passing through a singular crisis: she was too occupied with herself, to occupy herself with him.

Since the sad adventure which had broken her marriage and Olivier’s life, Jacqueline had led a very dignified and retiring existence. She kept aloof from Parisian society, which, after having hypocritically imposed on her a kind of quarantine, had again made overtures to her, which she had repulsed. Of her action she felt before these people no shame; she considered she had no account to render them: for they were worth less than she; what she had accomplished frankly, half the women she knew practised without noise, under the protective cover of the hearth. She suffered only from the harm she had done to her best friend, to the only one she had loved. She did not forgive herself for having lost, in a world so poor, an affection like his.

These regrets, this pain, gradually attenuated. There remained only a dull suffering, a humiliated contempt for self and for others, and the love of her child. This affection, into which all her need to love poured itself, disarmed her before him; she was incapable of resisting Georges’s caprices. To excuse her weakness, she persuaded herself that she was thus redeeming her fault toward Olivier. Periods of exalted tenderness alternated with periods of weary indifference; sometimes she wearied Georges with her exacting and uneasy love, sometimes she seemed to weary of him, and let him do whatever he wished. She was aware that she was a bad educator, she tormented herself about it; but she did not change anything. When she had (rarely) tried to model her principles of conduct on the spirit of Olivier, the result had been deplorable; this moral pessimism suited neither her nor the child. At bottom, she did not want to have over her son any authority but that of her affection. And she was not wrong: for between these two beings, however much they resembled each other, there were no other ties than those of the heart. Georges Jeannin underwent the physical charm of his mother; he loved her voice, her gestures, her movements, her grace, her love. But he felt himself, in spirit, foreign to her. She only perceived it at the first breath of adolescence, when he flew off far from her. Then she was astonished, she was indignant, she attributed this distancing to other feminine influences; and in trying clumsily to combat them, she only succeeded in distancing him further. In reality, they had always lived, one beside the other, each preoccupied with different cares and deluding themselves about what separated them, thanks to a communion of skin-deep sympathies and antipathies, of which nothing remained when from the child (that ambiguous being, still all impregnated with the odour of woman) the man freed himself. And Jacqueline said, with bitterness, to her son:

— I don’t know whom you take after. You resemble neither your father nor me.

In so doing she finished making him feel all that separated them; and he felt a secret pride in it, mingled with uneasy fever.

The generations that follow each other always have a livelier sentiment of what disunites them than of what unites them; they need to affirm their importance of living, even at the price of an injustice or a lie with themselves. But this feeling is, according to the epoch, more or less acute. In the classical ages where, for a time, the equilibrium of the forces of a civilisation is achieved, — those high plateaux bordered by steep slopes, — the difference of level is less great, from one generation to another. But in the ages of renaissance or of decadence, the young men who climb or descend the vertiginous slope leave far behind those who preceded them. — Georges, with those of his age, was climbing the mountain.

He had nothing superior, either in mind or in character: an equality of aptitudes, no one of which exceeded the level of an elegant mediocrity. And yet, he found himself, without effort, at the start of his career, several rungs higher than his father, who had spent, in his too short life, an incalculable sum of intelligence and energy.

Hardly had the eyes of his reason opened to the day than he had perceived around him that mass of darkness pierced by dazzling gleams, those heaps of knowledge and unknowingnesses, of hostile truths, of contradictory errors, in which his father had feverishly wandered. But he had at the same time taken consciousness of a weapon that was in his power, and that they had never known: his strength…

Whence did it come to him?… Mystery of those resurrections of a race, which falls asleep exhausted, and awakens overflowing, like a mountain torrent, in spring!… What was he going to do with this strength? Use it, in his turn, to explore the inextricable thickets of modern thought? They did not attract him. He felt weighing on him the menace of the dangers that lay in ambush there. They had crushed his father. Rather than renew the experience and re-enter the tragic forest, he would have set fire to it. He had only half-opened these books of wisdom or of sacred folly with which Olivier had got drunk: Tolstoy’s nihilistic pity, Ibsen’s sombre destructive pride, Nietzsche’s frenzy, Wagner’s heroic and sensual pessimism. He had turned away from them, with a mixture of anger and dread. He hated the lineage of realist writers who, for half a century, had killed the joy of art. He could not however efface entirely the shadows of the sad dream his childhood had been cradled in. He did not want to look behind him; but he knew well that behind him the shadow was. Too healthy to seek a diversion to his disquiet in the lazy scepticism of the preceding epoch, he abominated the dilettantism of the Renans and the Anatole Frances, that depravity of free intelligence, the laughter without gaiety, the irony without grandeur: a shameful means, good for slaves who play with their chains, powerless to break them.

Too vigorous to be satisfied with doubt, too weak to create a certainty for himself, he wanted it, he wanted it. He demanded it, he implored it, he required it. And the eternal poppers-up-of-popularity, the false great writers, the false thinkers on the lookout, exploited this magnificent imperious and anguished desire, beating the drum and doing the spiel for their orvietan. From the top of their stage, each of these Hippocrateses cried that his elixir was the only one that was good, and decried the others. Their secrets were all of equal worth. Not one of these merchants had taken the trouble to find new recipes. They had gone fishing in the bottom of their cupboards for stale flasks. The panacea of one was the Catholic Church; of another, legitimate monarchy; of a third, classical tradition. There were good wags who showed the cure for all ills in a return to Latin. Others seriously, with an enormous verb that imposed itself on the gawkers, sang the praises of the domination of the Mediterranean spirit. (They would have spoken just as well, at another moment, of an Atlantic spirit.) Against the barbarians of the North and of the East, they pompously instituted themselves the heirs of a new Roman Empire… Words, words, and borrowed words. A whole stockpile of library, which they retailed in the open air. — Like all his comrades, young Jeannin went from one vendor to another, listened to the patter, sometimes let himself be tempted, entered the booth, came out disappointed, a little ashamed of having given his money and his time, to gaze at old clowns in worn-out tights. And yet, such is the power of illusion of youth, such was his certainty of attaining certainty, that at each new promise of a new vendor of hope, he let himself be taken in again at once. He was thoroughly French: he had the fronding humour and an innate love of order. He had to have a chief, and he was incapable of bearing any one: his pitiless irony pierced them all.

While he waited for one to be found who would deliver to him the answer to the enigma… he had not the time to wait. He was not a man to content himself, like his father, with seeking truth all his life. His young impatient strength wanted to spend itself. With or without motive, he wanted to decide. To act, to employ, to use up his energy. Journeys, the pleasures of art, music above all on which he had gorged himself, had first been to him an intermittent and passionate diversion. A handsome boy, precocious, exposed to temptations, he had early discovered the world of love with its enchanted exteriors, and he had thrown himself into it, with a transport of poetic and greedy joy. Then, this Cherubino, naïve and insatiable with impertinence, grew disgusted with women: he needed action. So he gave himself up furiously to sports. He tried them all, he practised them all. He was assiduous at fencing tournaments, at boxing matches; he was French champion for the running race and the high jump, captain of a football team. With a few mad youths of his sort, rich and reckless, he vied in temerity in motorcar races, absurd and senseless, real races toward death. Finally, he abandoned everything for the new toy. He shared the delirium of the crowds for flying machines. At the aviation festivals held at Reims, he shouted, he wept with joy, with three hundred thousand men; he felt united with a whole people, in a jubilation of faith; the human birds that passed over them carried them along in their flight; for the first time since the dawn of the great Revolution, these heaped multitudes raised their eyes to the sky and saw it open. — To his mother’s terror, young Jeannin declared that he wanted to join the troop of the conquerors of the air. Jacqueline implored him to renounce this perilous ambition. She ordered him to. He did only as he pleased. Christophe, in whom Jacqueline had thought to find an ally, contented himself with giving the young man a few counsels of prudence, which he was moreover sure that Georges would not follow: (for he himself would not have followed them, in his place). He did not think it permitted him — even had he been able — to hinder the healthy and normal play of young forces which, constrained to inaction, would have turned toward their own destruction.

Jacqueline could not bring herself to accept seeing her son escape her. Vainly had she believed she sincerely renounced love, she could not do without the illusion of love; all her affections, all her acts were tinged with it. How many mothers transfer to their son the secret ardour they have been unable to spend in marriage — and outside marriage! And when they see afterward with what facility this son does without them, when they suddenly understand that they are not necessary to him, they pass through a crisis of the same order as that into which the betrayal of the lover, the disillusion of love, has thrown them. — For Jacqueline it was a new collapse. Georges noticed nothing of it. Young people do not suspect the tragedies of the heart that unfold around them: they have not the time to stop to see; and they do not wish to see: an instinct of egoism warns them to pass straight on, without turning their heads.

Jacqueline devoured this new sorrow alone. She emerged from it only when the sorrow had worn itself out. Worn out with her love. She still loved her son, but with a distant, disillusioned affection, which knew itself useless and lost interest in herself and in him. She dragged on a dreary and miserable year, without his taking notice. And then, this unhappy heart, which could neither die nor live without love, had to invent an object to love. She fell under the power of a strange passion, which frequently visits feminine souls, and especially, so it seems, the noblest, the most inaccessible, when maturity comes and the beautiful fruit of life has not been plucked. She made the acquaintance of a woman who, from their first meeting, subjected her to her mysterious power of attraction.

It was a nun, of about her own age. She was occupied with works of charity. A tall, strong woman, a little corpulent; dark, beautiful pronounced features, lively eyes, a wide and fine mouth that always smiled, an imperious chin. Of remarkable intelligence, in no way sentimental; a peasant malice, a precise sense of business, allied to a Méridional imagination that liked to see big, but knew at the same time how to see to the exact scale, when it was necessary; a savoury blend of high mysticism and old-notary cunning. She had the habit of domination and exercised it naturally. Jacqueline was caught at once. She grew passionate about the work. She believed so, at least. Sister Angèle knew to whom the passion was addressed; she was accustomed to provoke similar ones; without seeming to notice them, she coldly knew how to use them to the service of the work and to the glory of God. Jacqueline gave her money, her will, her heart. She was charitable; she believed, out of love.

People were not long in noticing the fascination she was undergoing. She was the only one not to realise it. Georges’s guardian became uneasy. Georges, too generous and too scatterbrained to bother about questions of money, himself perceived the grip exercised on his mother; and he was shocked by it. He tried, too late, to take up again with her his past intimacy; he saw that a curtain had stretched between them; he accused the occult influence of it, and he conceived against the one he called an intriguer, no less than against Jacqueline, an irritation which he did not disguise; he did not admit that a stranger should have taken his place in a heart which he had believed his natural property. He did not tell himself that if the place was taken, it was because he had left it. Instead of patiently attempting to reconquer it, he was clumsy and wounding. Between the mother and the son, both impatient, passionate, there was an exchange of sharp words; the rift grew more pronounced. Sister Angèle finished establishing her power over Jacqueline; and Georges went away, the bridle on the neck. He threw himself into an active and dissipated life. He gambled, he lost considerable sums; he put a braggadocio into his extravagances, at once out of pleasure, and in order to respond to the extravagances of his mother. — He knew the Stevens-Delestrades. Colette had not failed to notice the handsome boy and to try on him the effect of her charms, which did not disarm. She was au courant with Georges’s escapades; she was amused by them. But the fund of common sense and real goodness, hidden beneath her frivolity, made her see the danger the young madcap was running. And as she well knew that it was not she who would be capable of preserving him from it, she warned Christophe, who returned at once.

Preface to the last volume of Jean-Christophe

PREFACE TO THE LAST VOLUME OF JEAN-CHRISTOPHE

I have written the tragedy of a generation that is about to disappear. I have sought to conceal nothing of its vices and its virtues, of its heavy sadness, of its chaotic pride, of its heroic efforts and its prostrations beneath the crushing burden of a superhuman task: a whole sum of the world, a moral system, an aesthetic, a faith, a new humanity to remake. — That is what we were.

Men of today, young men, your turn now! Make yourselves a stepping-stone of our bodies, and go forward. Be greater and happier than we.

As for myself, I bid farewell to my past soul; I cast it off behind me, like an empty husk. Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, to be reborn.

Romain Rolland.

October 1912.

2

Christophe was the only one who had any influence on young Jeannin. Influence limited and very intermittent, but all the more remarkable as one had trouble explaining it. Christophe belonged to that generation of the day before, against which Georges and his companions reacted with violence. He was one of the highest representatives of that tormented epoch, whose art and thought inspired in them a suspicious hostility. He remained inaccessible to the new Evangels and to the amulets of the little prophets and the old griots who offered to the good young men the infallible recipe for saving the world, Rome, and France. He remained faithful to a free faith, free from all religions, free from all parties, free from all fatherlands, which was no longer in fashion, — or had not yet come back into fashion. Lastly, however disengaged he was from national questions, he was a foreigner in Paris, at a time when all foreigners seemed, to the natives of every country, barbarians.

And yet, little Jeannin, joyful, light, instinctively enemy of what could sadden or trouble him, ardently in love with pleasure, with violent games, easily duped by the rhetoric of his time, inclining by vigour of muscles and laziness of mind to the brutal doctrines of Action française, nationalist, royalist, imperialist, — (he did not really know) — respected at bottom only one man: Christophe. His precocious experience and the very fine tact he had from his mother had made him judge (without his good humour being altered by it) how little this world was worth, of which he could not do without, and the superiority of Christophe. He intoxicated himself in vain with motion and action, he could not deny the paternal heritage. From Olivier came to him, in abrupt and brief fits, a vague disquiet, the need to find, to fix a goal for his action. And from Olivier also, perhaps, came to him that mysterious instinct that drew him toward the one whom Olivier had loved.

He would go to see Christophe. Expansive and a little chatty, he liked to confide. He did not worry whether Christophe had time to listen to him. Christophe nevertheless listened, and showed no sign of impatience. It only happened that he would be distracted, when the visit surprised him in the middle of work. It was the matter of a few minutes, during which the spirit escaped, to add a touch, a nuance, to the interior work; then he came back to Georges, who had not noticed the absence. He amused himself at his escapade, like someone who comes back in on tiptoe, without being heard. But Georges, once or twice, noticed it, and said with indignation:

— But you’re not listening!

Then Christophe was ashamed; and docilely, he set to following his impatient narrator again, redoubling his attention, to make himself forgiven. The narration did not lack drollery; and Christophe could not help laughing, at the account of some prank: for Georges told everything; he was of a disarming frankness.

Christophe did not always laugh. Georges’s conduct was often painful to him. Christophe was not a saint; he did not think himself the right to preach morality to anyone. Georges’s love affairs, the scandalous dissipation of his fortune in foolishness, were not what shocked him most. What he had the most trouble forgiving was the lightness of mind that Georges brought to his faults: certainly, they hardly weighed on him; he found them natural. He had of morality another conception than Christophe. He was of that species of young men who readily see in relations between the sexes only a free game, devoid of any moral character. A certain frankness and a careless goodness were all the baggage sufficient for an honest man. He did not trouble himself with Christophe’s scruples. The latter grew indignant. Try as he might to forbid himself to impose on others his way of feeling, he was not tolerant; his violence of yesteryear was only half tamed. He sometimes burst out. He could not help branding certain of Georges’s intrigues as squalid, and he told him so crudely. Georges was no more patient. There were between them rather lively scenes. Then, they did not see each other for weeks. Christophe realised that these outbursts were not made to change Georges’s conduct, and that there is a certain injustice in wishing to submit the morality of one epoch to the measure of the moral ideas of another generation. But it was stronger than he: at the first occasion, he began again. How doubt the faith for which one has lived? One might as well give up living. What is the use of stiffening oneself to think otherwise than one thinks, to resemble one’s neighbour, or to spare him? It is to destroy oneself, without profit to anyone. The first duty is to be what one is. To dare say: “This is good, that is bad.” One does more good to the weak in being strong, than in becoming weak like them. Be indulgent, if you like, with weaknesses, once committed. But never compromise with any weakness, to be committed…

Yes; but Georges took good care not to consult Christophe on what he was about to do: — (did he know it himself?) — He only spoke to him of it when it was done. — Then?… Then, what remained, but to look at the rascal, with a mute reproach, shrugging the shoulders and smiling, like an old uncle who knows he will not be listened to?

On those days, there was a silence for a few moments. Georges looked at Christophe’s eyes, which seemed to come from very far. And he felt himself a very small boy before them. He saw himself, as he was, in the mirror of that penetrating gaze, in which a gleam of malice was kindled; and he was not very proud of it. Christophe rarely used against Georges the confidences he had just made to him; one would have said he had not heard them. After the silent dialogue of their eyes, he would shake his head mockingly; then, he would set to telling a story which seemed to have no relation to what had preceded: a story of his life, or of some other life, real or fictitious. And Georges would little by little see emerge, under a new light, exposed in awkward and burlesque posture, his Double (he recognised him), passing through errors analogous to his own. Impossible not to laugh at oneself and at one’s pitiful figure. Christophe added no commentary. What had more effect still than the story was the powerful good humour of the narrator. He spoke of himself, as of others, with the same detachment, the same jovial and serene humour. This calm impressed Georges. It was this calm he came to seek. When he had unburdened himself in his garrulous confession, he was like someone who stretches out and lengthens himself, in the shade of a great tree, on a summer afternoon. The feverish dazzlement of the burning day fell. He felt hovering over him the peace of protective wings. Near this man who bore, with tranquillity, the weight of a heavy life, he was sheltered from his own agitations. He tasted a repose, in hearing him speak. He himself did not always listen; he let his mind wander; but, wherever it strayed, Christophe’s laugh was around him.

Yet, his old friend’s ideas remained foreign to him. He wondered how Christophe could accommodate himself to his solitude of soul, deprive himself of any attachment to an artistic, political, religious party, to any human grouping. He asked him: “Did he never feel the need to shut himself up in a camp?”

— Shut oneself up! said Christophe, laughing. Isn’t one well, outside? And it’s you who speak of shutting yourself in, you, a man of the open air?

— Ah! it’s not the same thing for the body and for the soul, replied Georges. The mind needs certainty; it needs to think with others, to adhere to principles admitted by all the men of the same time. I envy the people of former times, those of the classical ages. My friends are right, who want to restore the fine order of the past.

— Wet hen! said Christophe. Who gave me such discouraged fellows?

— I am not discouraged, protested Georges with indignation. None of us is.

— You really must be, said Christophe, to be afraid of yourselves. What! you need an order, and you can’t make it yourselves? You have to go hang onto the skirts of your great-grandmothers! Good Lord! walk by yourselves!

— One must take root, said Georges, all proud to repeat one of the platitudes of the time.

— To take root, do trees need to be in a box, tell me? The earth is there, for all. Sink your roots into it. Find your laws. Seek in yourself.

— I don’t have the time, said Georges.

— You’re afraid, repeated Christophe.

Georges revolted; but he ended by agreeing that he had no taste for looking into the depths of himself; he did not understand the pleasure one could find in it: in leaning over that black hole, one risked falling into it.

— Give me your hand, said Christophe.

He amused himself by half-opening the trapdoor, on his realistic and tragic vision of life. Georges drew back. Christophe closed the leaf again, laughing:

— How can you live like that? asked Georges.

— I live, and I am happy, said Christophe.

— I should die, if I were forced to see that always.

Christophe tapped him on the shoulder:

— There you have our famous athletes!… Well, don’t look at it then, if you don’t feel your head solid enough. Nothing forces you to, after all. Go forward, my little one. But for that, what need have you of a master who marks you on the shoulder, like cattle? What watchword are you waiting for? The signal has been given long ago. Boots and saddles has sounded, the cavalry is on the march. Worry only about your horse. To your rank! And gallop!

— But where am I going? said Georges.

— Where your squadron is going, to the conquest of the world. Seize the air, subdue the elements, force the last entrenchments of nature, push back space, push back death…

“Expertus vacuum Daedalus aera…”

… Champion of Latin, do you know that, tell me? Are you even capable of explaining to me what it means?

“Perrupit Acheronta…”

… Behold your lot. Happy conquistadors!

He showed so clearly the duty of heroic action, fallen to the new generation, that Georges, astonished, said:

— But if you feel this, why don’t you come with us?

— Because I have another task. Go, my little one, do your work. Outdo me, if you can. As for me, I remain here, and I keep watch… You have read the tale of the Thousand and One Nights, where a genie, tall as a mountain, is shut up in a box, under the seal of Solomon?… The genie is here, at the bottom of our soul, that soul over which you are afraid to lean. I and those of my time, we have spent our lives wrestling with him; we have not defeated him; he has not defeated us. At present, we and he are taking breath; and we look at each other, without rancour and without fear, content with the combats we have given each other, and waiting for the agreed truce to expire. You, profit by the truce to remake your strength and to gather the beauty of the world. Be happy, enjoy the lull. But remember that one day, you or those who will be your sons, on returning from your conquests, you will have to come back to this place where I am and take up the combat again, with fresh forces, against the one who is there and near whom I keep watch. And the combat will last, broken by truces, until one of the two (and perhaps both) has been overthrown. To you, to be stronger and happier than we!… — Meanwhile, do sport, if you like; harden your muscles and your heart; and do not be fool enough to dissipate in trifles your impatient vigour: you are of a time (be easy!) that will find the use for it.

3

Georges did not retain much of what Christophe said to him. He was of a mind open enough for Christophe’s thoughts to enter; but they came out again at once. He was not at the bottom of the staircase before he had forgotten everything. He none the less remained under an impression of well-being, which persisted, while the memory of what had produced it was long since effaced. He had for Christophe a veneration. He believed in nothing of what Christophe believed in. (At bottom, he laughed at everything, he believed in nothing.) But he would have broken the head of anyone who had allowed himself to speak ill of his old friend.

Happily, no one did so: otherwise, he would have had a great deal to do.

Christophe had clearly foreseen the imminent shift of wind. The new ideal of young French music was very different from his; but instead of this being one more reason for Christophe to have sympathy for it, it had none for him. His vogue with the public was not designed to reconcile him with the hungriest of these young men; they had not much in their bellies; and their fangs, all the more, were long and bit. Christophe was not moved by their malices.

— What heart they put into it! he said. They are cutting their teeth, the little ones…

He was not far from preferring them to those other little dogs who flattered him, because he had success, — those of whom d’Aubigné speaks, who, “when a mastiff has put his head in a pot of butter, come to lick his chops in congratulation.”

He had a piece accepted at the Opera. Hardly accepted, it was put into rehearsal. One day, Christophe learned, through newspaper attacks, that to make his work pass, they had postponed indefinitely the piece of a young composer, which was to have been played. The journalist was indignant at this abuse of power, for which he held Christophe responsible.

Christophe saw the director, and said to him:

— You did not warn me. This is not done. You will first put on the opera you had accepted before mine.

The director exclaimed, began to laugh, refused, covered Christophe with flatterings, his character, his works, his genius, treated the work of the other with the utmost contempt, declared it was worth nothing and would not make a penny.

— Then why did you accept it?

— One does not do all one wants. One must from time to time give a semblance of satisfaction to opinion. Formerly, these young men could shout; nobody heard them. Now, they find a way to stir up against you a nationalist press, which bawls treason and calls you a bad Frenchman, when you have the misfortune not to go into ecstasies before their young school. The young school! Don’t speak of it!… Do you want me to tell you? I am fed up with it! And the public is too. They are boring us, with their Oremus!… No blood in their veins; little sacristans who chant the mass for you; when they do duets of love, they sound like De profundis… If I were silly enough to put on the pieces I am obliged to accept, I would ruin my theatre. I accept them: that is all one can ask of me. — Let us speak of serious things. You, you fill houses…

The compliments resumed. Christophe cut him off short, and said angrily:

— I am not fooled. Now that I am old and a man who has “arrived,” you make use of me to crush the young. When I was young, you would have crushed me like them. You will play this young man’s piece, or I withdraw mine.

The director raised his arms to heaven, and said:

— Don’t you see that if we did what you want, we would seem to be yielding to the intimidation of their press campaign?

— What do I care? said Christophe.

— As you please! You will be the first victim of it.

The work of the young musician was put into rehearsal, without interrupting the rehearsals of Christophe’s work. One was in three acts, the other in two; they agreed to give them in the same performance. Christophe went to see his protégé; he had wanted to be the first to announce the news to him. The other was profuse in promises of eternal gratitude.

Naturally, Christophe could not prevent the director from giving all his attention to his own piece. The performance and the staging of the other were somewhat sacrificed. Christophe knew nothing of it. He had asked to attend a few rehearsals of the young man’s work; he had found it very mediocre, as he had been told; he had ventured two or three pieces of advice: they were ill received; he had stopped at that, and meddled no more. On the other hand, the director had made the newcomer accept the necessity of a few cuts, if he wanted his piece to pass without delay. This sacrifice, at first easily consented to, soon came to seem painful to the author.

The evening of the performance arrived. The beginner’s piece had no success; Christophe’s made a great stir. Some newspapers tore Christophe apart; they spoke of a put-up job, of a plot to crush a young and great French artist; they said that his work had been mutilated, to please the German master, whom they represented as basely jealous of all nascent glories. Christophe shrugged his shoulders, thinking:

— He will reply.

“He” did not reply. Christophe sent him one of the paragraphs, with these words:

— Have you read it?

The other wrote:

— How regrettable! This journalist has always been so kind to me! Truly, I am sorry. The best thing is to pay no attention.

Christophe laughed, and thought:

— He is right, the little coward.

And he tossed his memory of him into what he called his “oubliettes.”

But chance willed that Georges, who rarely read the papers and read them badly, except for the sports articles, this time came upon the most violent attacks against Christophe. He knew the journalist. He went to the café where he was sure to meet him, found him there in fact, slapped him, fought a duel with him, and roughly scratched his shoulder with his sword.

The next day, while lunching, Christophe learned of the affair through a letter from a friend. He was suffocated by it. He left his lunch and ran to Georges’s place. Georges himself opened the door. Christophe came in, like a hurricane, seized him by both arms, and, shaking him angrily, began to overwhelm him with a flight of furious reproaches.

— Animal! he shouted, you fought for me! Who gave you permission? A boy, a scatterbrain, who meddles in my affairs! Am I not capable of looking after them, tell me? A fine business you’ve made of it! You did this scoundrel the honor of fighting with him. That’s all he wanted. You made a hero of him. Imbecile! And if chance had willed… (I am sure you threw yourself into it harebrained, as you always are)… if you had been wounded, killed perhaps! Wretch! I would never have forgiven you, as long as you lived!…

Georges, who was laughing like a madman, at this last threat, fell into such a fit of hilarity that he wept:

— Ah! old friend, how funny you are! Ah, you are priceless! Here you are abusing me, for having defended you! Next time, I shall attack you. Perhaps you will embrace me.

Christophe broke off; he clasped Georges, kissed him on both cheeks, and then, a second time again, and he said:

— My little one!… Forgive me. I am an old fool… But also, this news has stirred my blood. What an idea, to fight! Does one fight with such people? You are going to promise me at once that you will never do it again.

— I promise nothing at all, said Georges. I do what pleases me.

— I forbid you, do you hear. If you do it again, I will not see you any more, I will disown you in the papers, I will—

— You will disinherit me, agreed.

— Come now, Georges, I beg you… What is the use of it?

— My good old man, you are a thousand times better than I am, and you know infinitely more things; but as for these rascals, I know them better than you. Be easy, it will be of use; they will now turn their poisoned tongue in their mouths more than seven times, before insulting you.

— Eh! what do these gabbling fools matter to me? I make light of what they can say.

— But I do not make light of it. Mind your own business.

Thenceforth, Christophe was in agonies that some new article should awaken Georges’s susceptibility. There was something comic in seeing him, the days that followed, sit down at the café and devour the newspapers, he who never read them, all ready, in case he found an insulting article in them, to do anything (a base thing, if necessary), to prevent those lines from falling under Georges’s eyes. After a week, he was reassured. The boy had been right. His action had given the barkers, for the moment, something to think about. — And Christophe, while grumbling against the young madcap who had made him lose a week of work, told himself that after all he had scarcely the right to give him a lesson. He remembered a certain day, not so long ago, when he himself had fought, on Olivier’s account. And he seemed to hear Olivier, who said:

— Let it be, Christophe, I am giving you back what you lent me!

4

If Christophe took attacks against him easily in his stride, another was very far from this ironic disinterestedness. It was Emmanuel.

The evolution of European thought was going at great speed. One would have said it was accelerating with the mechanical inventions and the new motors. The store of prejudices and hopes, which formerly sufficed to nourish twenty years of humanity, was burned in five years. The generations of minds galloped, one behind another, and often over one another: Time was sounding the charge. — Emmanuel had been passed by.

The poet of French energies had never disavowed the idealism of his master, Olivier. As passionate as his national feeling was, it merged with his worship of moral grandeur. If he proclaimed in his verses, in a ringing voice, the triumph of France, it was because he adored in her, by an act of faith, the loftiest thought of present-day Europe, Athena Niké, victorious Right which takes revenge upon Force. — And here was Force awakened, in the very heart of Right; and it was resurging, in its tawny nudity. The new generation, robust and seasoned, aspired to combat and had, before victory, the mentality of a conqueror. It was proud of its muscles, of its broadened chest, of its vigorous senses hungry for enjoyment, of its bird-of-prey wings hovering over the plains; it was eager to swoop down and try its talons. The exploits of the race, the mad flights over the Alps and the seas, the epic gallops across the African sands, the new crusades, not much less mystical, not much more disinterested than those of Philippe-Auguste and Villehardouin, were finishing the work of turning the nation’s head. These children who had only ever seen war in books had no trouble lending it beauties. They were becoming aggressive. Weary of peace and of ideas, they celebrated “the anvil of battles,” on which action with bloody fists would one day reforge French power. By reaction against the sickening abuse of ideologies, they erected the contempt of the ideal into a profession of faith. They made it a swagger to exalt narrow common sense, violent realism, national egoism, without shame, which tramples underfoot the justice of others and other nationalities, when that is useful to the greatness of the fatherland. They were xenophobes, antidemocrats, and — even the most unbelieving among them — extolled the return to Catholicism, out of a practical need to “canalize the absolute,” to enclose the infinite under the guard of a power of order and authority. They did not content themselves with disdaining — they treated as public malefactors the gentle drivellers of yesterday, the idealist dreamers, the humanitarian thinkers. Emmanuel was among them, in the eyes of these young men. He suffered cruelly from it, and was indignant.

To know that Christophe was a victim, like himself, — more than himself, — of this injustice, made him sympathetic to him. By his ill grace, he had discouraged him from coming to see him. He was too proud to seem to regret it, by going to look for him. But he managed to meet him, as if by chance, and got him to make the first advances. After which, his suspicious touchiness being at rest, he did not hide the pleasure he took in Christophe’s visits. From then on, they met often, either at the one’s or at the other’s.

Emmanuel confided his bitterness to Christophe. He was exasperated by certain criticisms; and, finding that Christophe was not sufficiently moved by them, he made him read newspaper appraisals concerning himself. Christophe was accused there of not knowing the grammar of his art, of being ignorant of harmony, of having plundered his colleagues, and of dishonoring music. He was called: “That old agitator”… It was said: “We have had enough of these convulsionaries. We are order, reason, classical balance…”

Christophe was amused by it.

— It is the law, he said. The young throw the old into the grave… In my time, it is true, one waited for a man to be sixty before treating him as an old man. We go faster, today… Wireless telegraphy, airplanes… A generation is more quickly worn out… Poor devils! they have not long! Let them hasten to despise us and to strut, in the sun!

But Emmanuel did not have this fine health. Intrepid in thought, he was a prey to his sickly nerves; an ardent soul in a rickety body, combat was necessary to him, and he was not made for combat. The animosity of certain judgments wounded him, to the blood.

— Ah! he said, if critics knew the harm they do to artists, by one of those unjust words thrown out at random, they would be ashamed of their craft.

— But they know it, my good friend. It is their reason for living. Everyone must live.

— They are executioners. One is bloodied by life, exhausted by the struggle that must be waged for art. Instead of holding out a hand to you, of speaking of your weaknesses with mercy, of helping you fraternally to repair them, there they are, with their hands in their pockets, watching you hoist your burden up the slope, and saying: “He won’t be able!…” And when one is at the summit, some say: “Yes, but that is not the way one should have gone up.” While the others, obstinate, repeat: “He didn’t manage!…” Lucky, when they don’t throw stones between your legs, to make you fall!

— Bah! there is no lack of decent fellows either, among them; and what good they can do! Wicked beasts, there are everywhere; it does not lie in the profession. Do you know anything worse, tell me, than an artist without kindness, vain and embittered, for whom the world is a prey, which he is furious not to be able to snatch up? One must arm oneself with patience. There is no evil that cannot serve some good. The worst critic is useful to us; he is a trainer; he does not permit us to dawdle on the road. Every time we believe ourselves to be at the goal, the pack bites our heels. On we go! Further! Higher! It will tire of pursuing me sooner than I shall tire of marching ahead of it. Repeat to yourself the Arabic saying: “One does not torment barren trees. Those alone are beaten with stones, whose brow is crowned with golden fruit”… Let us pity the artists who are spared. They will stay halfway, sitting lazily down. When they want to get up again, their stiff legs will refuse to walk. Long live my friends the enemies! They have done me more good, in my life, than my enemies, the friends!

Emmanuel could not help smiling. Then, he said:

— All the same, do you not find it hard, a veteran like you, to see yourself given a lesson by conscripts, who are at their first battle?

— They amuse me, said Christophe. This arrogance is the sign of young, boiling blood that aspires to spread itself. I was so, once. They are the March showers, on the earth that is being reborn… Let them give us a lesson! They are right, after all. To the old, to put themselves to school with the young! They have profited by us, they are ungrateful: it is in the order of things. But, rich with our efforts, they go farther than we, they accomplish what we attempted. If some youth still remains to us, let us learn, in our turn, and try to renew ourselves. If we cannot, if we are too old, let us rejoice in them. It is beautiful to see the perpetual reflowerings of the human soul which seemed exhausted, the vigorous optimism of these young people, their joy in adventurous action, those races which are reborn, for the conquest of the world.

— What would they be without us? This joy has come out of our tears. This proud strength is the flower of the sufferings of an entire generation. Sic vos non vobis…

— The old saying is mistaken. It is for ourselves that we worked, in creating a race of men who surpass us. We amassed their savings, we defended them in a poorly-shut hovel, where all the winds whistled; we had to brace ourselves against the doors to keep death from entering. By our arms was cleared the triumphal way along which our sons are going to march. Our sufferings have saved the future. We have led the Ark, to the threshold of the Promised Land. It will enter therein, with them, and through us.

— Will they ever remember those who crossed the deserts, bearing the sacred fire, the gods of our race, and they, these children, who now are men? We have had, for our share, trial and ingratitude.

— Do you regret it?

— No. There is an intoxication in feeling the tragic grandeur of a powerful epoch sacrificed, like ours, to the one it has brought forth. The men of today would no longer be capable of tasting the superb joy of renunciation.

— We have been the happier. We have climbed the mountain of Nebo, at whose foot stretch the lands we shall not enter. But we enjoy them more than those who will enter. When one descends into the plain, one loses sight of the immensity of the plain and the distant horizon.

5

The soothing action which Christophe exerted upon Georges and upon Emmanuel, he drew the energy for it from the love of Grazia. To this love he owed feeling himself bound to all that was young, having for all the new forms of life a sympathy never tired. Whatever the forces were that were reanimating the earth, he was with them, even when they were against him; he had no fear of the coming advent of these democracies, which made the egoism of a handful of privileged people cry out like banshees; he did not cling desperately to the prayers of an aged art; he awaited, with certainty, the springing forth, from fabulous visions, from realized dreams of science and of action, of an art more powerful than the old one; he saluted the new dawn of the world, even though the beauty of the old world must die with it.

Grazia knew the benefit of her love for Christophe; the consciousness of her power raised her above herself. By her letters, she exercised a guidance over her friend. Not that she had the absurdity of pretending to guide him in art: she had too much tact and knew her limits. But her clear and pure voice was the tuning-fork to which he tuned his soul. It was enough that Christophe should think he heard, in anticipation, that voice repeating his thought, for him to think nothing that was not just, pure, and worthy of being repeated. The sound of a fine instrument is, for the musician, like a beautiful body in which his dream at once becomes incarnate. Mysterious fusion of two minds that love each other: each takes from the other what he has that is best; but it is to give it back, enriched with his love. Grazia did not fear to tell Christophe that she loved him. Distance made her freer to speak; and also, the certainty that she would never be his. This love, whose religious fervor had communicated itself to Christophe, was for him a fountain of strength and of peace.

Of this strength and this peace, Grazia gave to others much more than she had. Her health was broken, her moral balance gravely compromised. Her son’s condition was not improving. For two years, she had lived in perpetual anxieties, aggravated by Lionello’s murderous talent for playing upon them. He had acquired a virtuosity in the art of holding in suspense the anxiety of those who loved him; in order to reawaken interest and torment people, his unoccupied brain was fertile in inventions: it had become a mania with him. And the tragedy was that, while he grimaced the parade of illness, illness was really making its way; and death appeared. Then, what was to be foreseen came to pass: Grazia, whom her son had tortured for years on account of an invented ailment, ceased to believe in it, when the ailment was there. The heart has its limits. She had exhausted her power of compassion upon lies. She treated Lionello as a play-actor, at the moment when he was telling the truth. And after the truth had revealed itself, the rest of her life was poisoned by remorse.

Lionello’s malice had not been disarmed. Without love for anyone whatsoever, he could not endure that one of those around him should have love for any other than him; jealousy was his only passion. It did not suffice him to have succeeded in turning his mother away from Christophe; he would have liked to constrain her to break the intimacy which persisted between them. Already, he had used his customary weapon, — illness, — to make Grazia swear that she would not remarry. He did not content himself with this promise. He claimed to require that his mother should no longer write to Christophe. This time, she rebelled; and this abuse of power finishing the work of delivering her, it was then that she said to him about his lies words of a cruel severity, which she reproached herself for later as for a crime: for they threw Lionello into a fit of rage, from which he was really ill. He was the more so because his mother refused to believe in it. Then, in his rage, he wished to die in order to avenge himself. He did not suspect that his wish would be granted.

When the doctor was obliged to make Grazia understand that her son was lost, she remained as if struck by lightning. She had nonetheless to hide her despair, in order to deceive the child, who had so often deceived her. He suspected that it was serious, this time; but he did not want to believe it; and his eyes sought in his mother’s eyes that reproach of lying which had thrown him into a fury, when he had been the one to lie. There came the hour when it was no longer possible to doubt. Then it was terrible for him and for his people: he did not want to die…

When Grazia at last saw him asleep, she had no cry, she uttered no complaint; she astonished her people by her silence; she had not strength enough left to suffer; she had but one desire: to fall asleep, in her turn. Yet she continued to perform all the acts of her life, with the same calm, in appearance. After some weeks, her smile reappeared even on her mouth, more silent. No one suspected her distress. Christophe, less than anyone. She had contented herself with writing him the news, without saying anything about herself. To Christophe’s letters, overflowing with anxious affection, she did not reply. He wanted to come: she begged him to do nothing of the kind. At the end of two or three months, she resumed with him the grave and serene tone, that she had had, before. She would have judged it criminal to unburden upon him the weight of her weakness. She knew how the echo of all her feelings resonated in him, and how he had need to lean upon her. She did not impose upon herself a painful constraint. It was a discipline that saved her. In her weariness of life, two things alone made her live: love for Christophe, and the fatalism which, in pain as in joy, formed the foundation of her Italian nature. This fatalism had nothing intellectual about it: it was the animal instinct, which makes the harassed beast walk, without feeling its fatigue, in a dream with fixed eyes, forgetting the stones of the path and its body, until it falls. This fatalism sustained her body. Love sustained her heart. Now that her life was used up, she lived in Christophe. Yet she avoided, with more care than ever, expressing in her letters the love she had for him. Without doubt, because this love was greater. But also, because she felt weighing upon it the veto of the little dead one, who made a crime of this affection for her. Then, she would be silent, she would oblige herself not to write, for some time.

Christophe did not understand the reasons for these silences. Sometimes, he would catch, in the even and tranquil tone of a letter, unexpected accents in which a passionate voice seemed to tremble. He was overwhelmed by them; but he dared say nothing; he scarcely dared notice it; he was like a man holding his breath and fearing to breathe, for fear that the illusion might cease. He knew that, almost infallibly, these accents would be redeemed, in the next letter, by a deliberate coldness… Then, again, calm… Mecresstille…

6

Georges and Emmanuel found themselves gathered at Christophe’s. It was an afternoon. Both were full of their personal worries: Emmanuel, of his literary setbacks, and Georges, of a disappointment in a sports competition. Christophe listened to them with good humor and teased them affectionately. There was a ring at the door. Georges went to open it. A servant brought a letter, from Colette. Christophe stood near the window, to read it. His two friends had resumed their discussion; they did not see Christophe, who had his back turned to them. He left the room, without their noticing. And when they did remark it, they were not surprised. But as his absence prolonged itself, Georges went and knocked at the door of the other room. There was no reply. Georges did not insist, knowing the strange ways of his old friend. A few minutes later, Christophe came back. He had the air of being very calm, very weary, very gentle. He apologized for having left them, took up the conversation where he had interrupted it, speaking to them of their troubles with kindness, and saying things to them which did them good. The tone of his voice moved them, without their knowing why.

They left him. On leaving him, Georges went to Colette’s. He found her in tears. As soon as she saw him, she ran up, asking:

— And how did he bear the blow, the poor friend? It is dreadful!

Georges did not understand. And Colette informed him that she had just had carried to Christophe the news of Grazia’s death.

She had gone, without having had time to say good-bye to anyone. For some months, the roots of her life had been almost torn out; it had sufficed for a breath to fell her. The day before the relapse of the influenza which carried her off, she had received a kind letter from Christophe. She had been quite moved by it. She would have wished to call him to her side; she felt that all the rest, all that separated them, was false and culpable. Very weary, she put it off until the next day, to write to him. The next day, she had to stay in bed. She began a letter, which she did not finish: she had vertigo, her head was spinning; besides, she hesitated to speak of her illness, she feared to disturb Christophe. He was occupied at this moment with the rehearsals of a choral and symphonic work, written on a poem by Emmanuel: the subject had impassioned them both, for it was somewhat the symbol of their own destiny: The Promised Land. Christophe had often spoken of it to Grazia. The premiere was to take place, the following week… She must not be alarmed. Grazia made, in her letter, allusion to a mere cold. Then, she found that this was still too much. She tore up the letter, and she had not the strength to begin another. She told herself she would write, in the evening. In the evening, it was too late. Too late to have him called. Too late even to write… How quickly things go! A few hours suffice to destroy what it has taken centuries to form… Grazia had hardly the time to give her daughter the ring she had on her finger, and she begged her to remit it to her friend. She had not been, up till then, very intimate with Aurora. Now that she was leaving, she contemplated passionately the face of the one who was staying; she clung to the hand that would transmit her embrace; and she thought with joy:

— I am not going entirely away.

7

“Quid? hic, inquam, quis est qui complet aures meas tantus et tam dulcis sonus!…” (Dream of Scipio).

A surge of sympathy brought Georges back to Christophe’s, after he had left Colette’s. For a long time he had known, through Colette’s indiscretions, the place that Grazia held in his old friend’s heart; and even — (youth is hardly respectful) — he had sometimes been amused by it. But at this moment, he felt with a generous keenness the pain that such a loss must cause Christophe; and he needed to run to him, to embrace him, to pity him. Knowing the violence of his passions, — the tranquillity Christophe had shown a while ago disquieted him. He rang at the door. Nothing moved. He rang again and knocked, in the manner agreed upon between Christophe and himself. He heard an armchair being stirred, and a slow and heavy step coming. Christophe opened. His face was so calm that Georges, ready to throw himself into his arms, stopped; he no longer knew what to say. Christophe asked gently:

— Is it you, my little one. Have you forgotten something?

Georges, troubled, stammered:

— Yes.

— Come in.

Christophe went and sat down again in the armchair where he had been before Georges’s arrival; near the window, his head leaning against the back, he was looking at the roofs opposite and the evening sky which was glowing red. He was paying no attention to Georges. The young man pretended to search on the table, while throwing a furtive glance at Christophe. The latter’s face was motionless; the reflections of the setting sun illuminated the upper part of his cheeks and a part of his forehead. Georges, mechanically, went into the next room, — the bedroom, — as if to continue his search. It was there that Christophe had shut himself up earlier with the letter. It was still there, on the unmade bed, which bore the imprint of a body. On the floor, on the carpet, a book had slipped. It had remained open, on a crumpled page. Georges picked it up and read, in the Gospel, the meeting of Magdalene with the Gardener.

He returned to the first room, moved a few objects, to right and left, to keep up appearances, looked again at Christophe who had not budged. He would have liked to tell him how he pitied him. But Christophe was so luminous that Georges felt that any word would have been out of place. It was he who would rather have had need of consolations. He said timidly:

— I am going.

Christophe, without turning his head, said:

— Good-bye, my little one.

Georges went away, and closed the door without noise.

Christophe remained a long time thus. Night came. He did not suffer, he did not meditate, he saw no precise image. He was like a tired man, who listens to a great indistinct music, without trying to understand it. The night was far advanced, when he got up, stiff. He threw himself on his bed, and fell asleep, with a heavy sleep. The symphony continued to murmur…

And behold, he saw her, the beloved… She held out her hands to him, and smiled, saying:

— Now, you have passed the region of fire.

Then, his heart melted. An ineffable peace filled the starry spaces, where the music of the spheres spread its great motionless and deep sheets…

When he awoke (day had returned,) the strange happiness persisted, with the distant gleam of the words he had heard. He got out of his bed. A silent and sacred enthusiasm lifted him up.

… Or vedi, figlio,

tra Beatrice e te è questo muro…

Between Beatrice and him, the wall was crossed.

It had been a long time already that more than half of his soul was on the other side. As one lives, as one creates, as one loves and loses those one loves, one escapes death the more. With each new blow that strikes us, with each new work that we strike, one escapes from oneself, one saves oneself in the work one has created, in the soul one loved and which has left us. In the end, Rome is no longer in Rome; the best of oneself is outside of oneself. Grazia alone still held him back, on this side of the wall. And behold, in her turn… Now, the door was closed upon the world of pain.

He lived a period of secret exaltation. He no longer felt the weight of any chain. He no longer expected anything of things. He no longer depended on anything. He was liberated. The struggle was over. Gone out of the zone of combats and from the circle where reigned the God of heroic mêlées, Dominus Deus Sabaoth, he watched at his feet, fading into the night, the torch of the Burning Bush. How far away it was, already! When it had illuminated his road, he had thought himself almost arrived at the summit. And since then, what a road he had traversed! And yet, the peak did not appear any nearer. He would never reach it, (he saw this now), even if he had to walk for eternity. But when one has entered the circle of light and one knows that one is not leaving behind one those one loves, eternity is not too long to make the way with them.

He shut his door. No one knocked at it. Georges had spent at one stroke all his power of compassion; gone home again, reassured, the next day he thought no more of it. Colette had left for Rome. Emmanuel knew nothing; and, susceptible as always, he kept a piqued silence, because Christophe had not returned his visit. Christophe was not disturbed in the mute colloquy that he had for days with her whom he now carried in his soul, as the pregnant woman carries her dear burden. Moving conversation, which no word could have rendered. Music itself could barely express it. When his heart was full, full to overflowing, Christophe, motionless, eyes closed, would listen to it sing. Or, for hours, seated before his piano, he would let his fingers speak. During this period, he improvised more than in all the rest of his life. He did not write down his thoughts. To what end?

When, after several weeks, he began to go out again and to see other men, without any of his intimates, except Georges, having a suspicion of what had happened, the demon of improvisation persisted for some time still. It visited Christophe, at the hours when one expected him least. One evening, at Colette’s, Christophe sat down at the piano and played for nearly an hour, giving himself up entirely, forgetting that the drawing-room was full of indifferent people. They had no desire to laugh. These terrible improvisations subjugated and overwhelmed. Even those who did not understand their meaning had a tightening of the heart; and tears had come to Colette’s eyes… When Christophe had finished, he turned suddenly; he saw the emotion of the people, and, shrugging his shoulders, — he laughed.

He had reached the point where pain, too, is a force, — a force one masters. Pain no longer had him, he had pain; it could stir and shake the bars: he kept it in a cage.

From this period date his most poignant works, and also his happiest: a scene from the Gospel, which Georges recognized:

“Mulier, quid ploras?” — “Quia tulerunt Dominum meum, et nescio ubi posuerunt eum.”

Et cum haec dixisset, conversa est retrorsum, et vidit Jesum stantem: et non sciebat quia Jesus est.

— a series of tragic lieder on the verses of Spanish popular cantares, among others a somber song, amorous and funereal, like a black flame:

Quisiera ser el sepulcro

Donde á ti te han de enterrar,

Para tenerte en mis brazos

Por toda la eternidad.

(“I would wish to be the sepulchre, where you must be buried, in order to hold you in my arms, for all eternity.”)

and two symphonies, entitled The Isle of the Calms, and The Dream of Scipio, in which there is realized more intimately than in any other of the works of Jean-Christophe Krafft the union of the most beautiful musical forces of his time: the affectionate and learned thought of Germany with shadowy folds, the passionate melody of Italy, and the lively spirit of France, rich in fine rhythms and nuanced harmonies.

This “enthusiasm which despair produces, at the moment of a great loss,” lasted a month or two. After which, Christophe took his place again in life, with a robust heart and a sure step. The wind of death had blown away the last mists of pessimism, the grey of the stoic soul, and the phantasmagorias of mystic chiaroscuro. The rainbow had shone upon the clouds, which were fading. The look of the sky, more pure, as if washed by tears, smiled through. It was the tranquil evening upon the mountains.

1

FOURTH PART

The fire smoldering in the forest of Europe was beginning to blaze. It was vainly extinguished, here; farther off, it was rekindled; with whirlwinds of smoke and a rain of sparks, it leapt from one point to another and burned the dry underbrush. In the East, already, advance-guard combats were preluding the great war of nations. The whole of Europe, the Europe yesterday still skeptical and apathetic, like dead wood, was the prey of fire. The desire for combat possessed all souls. At every moment, war was on the point of breaking out. It was stifled, it was reborn. The most futile pretext was food for it. The world felt itself at the mercy of a chance, that would unleash the mêlée. It waited. Upon the most pacific weighed the feeling of necessity. And ideologues, sheltering themselves under the massive shadow of the Cyclops Proudhon, celebrated in war man’s finest title of nobility…

So it was to this that the physical and moral resurrection of the races of the Occident had to lead! It was to these butcheries that the currents of action and impassioned faith were precipitating them! Alone, a Napoleonic genius could have set to this blind race a foreseen and chosen goal. But of the genius of action, there was none, anywhere, in Europe. One would have said the world had, to govern it, made choice of the most mediocre. The force of the human mind was elsewhere. — Then, nothing remained but to give oneself up to the slope which carries you along. Thus did the governors and the governed. Europe offered the aspect of a vast vigil at arms.

Christophe remembered an analogous vigil, when he had had beside him the anxious face of Olivier. But the threats of war had been, in that time, only a stormy cloud that passes. Now, they covered with their shadow all Europe. And Christophe’s heart, too, had changed. In these hatreds of nations, he could no longer take part. He found himself in the state of mind of Goethe, in 1813. How to fight, without hate? And how to hate, without youth? The zone of hatred was henceforth past. Of these great rival peoples, which was least dear to him? He had learned to know the merits of them all, and what the world owed them. When one has reached a certain degree of the soul, “one no longer knows nations, one feels the happiness or the misfortune of neighboring peoples, as one’s own.” The storm-clouds are at your feet. About one, one has only the sky, — “all the sky, which belongs to the eagle.”

Sometimes, however, Christophe was hampered by the ambient hostility. He was made to feel too much, in Paris, that he was of the enemy race; even his dear Georges did not resist the pleasure of expressing before him sentiments about Germany, which saddened him. Then, he would go away; he took as a pretext the desire he had to see Grazia’s daughter again; he went, for some time, to Rome. But he did not find there a more serene milieu. The great plague of nationalist pride had spread there. It had transformed the Italian character. These people, whom Christophe had known indifferent and indolent, dreamed only of military glory, of combats, of conquests, of Roman eagles flying over the sands of Libya; they thought themselves returned to the time of the Emperors. The admirable thing was that, in the best faith in the world, the parties of opposition, socialists, clericals, as well as monarchists, shared this delirium, without believing in the least that they were being unfaithful to their cause. It is there that one sees how little politics and human reason weigh, when the great epidemic passions blow upon peoples. These do not even take the trouble to suppress individual passions; they use them: everything converges to the same end. In the epochs of action, it has always been thus. The armies of Henri IV, the Councils of Louis XIV, which forged French grandeur, counted as many men of reason and faith as of vanity, of self-interest, and of base epicurism. Jansenists and libertines, puritans and gay gallants, in serving their instincts, served the same destiny. In the next wars, internationalists and pacifists will no doubt take their share of the shooting, while being convinced, like their ancestors of the Convention, that it is for the good of the peoples and the triumph of peace.

Christophe, smiling with a touch of irony, looked, from the terrace of the Janiculum, at the disparate and harmonious city, symbol of the universe it once dominated: calcined ruins, “baroque” façades, modern buildings, cypresses and roses entwined, — all the centuries, all the styles, melted into a strong and coherent unity beneath the intelligent light. Thus, the spirit must radiate over the universe in struggle the order and the light that are in it.

Christophe did not remain long in Rome. The impression this city made upon him was too strong: he was afraid of it. To profit fully from this harmony, he had to listen to it from a distance; he felt that to stay would have run the risk of being absorbed by it, like so many others of his race. — From time to time, he made some sojourns in Germany. But, in the end, and despite the imminence of a Franco-German conflict, it was Paris which always drew him. No doubt, his Georges, his adopted son, was there. But the reasons of affection were not the only ones that had hold upon him. Other reasons, of the intellectual order, were not the least strong. For an artist accustomed to the full life of the mind, who mingles generously in all the passions of the great human family, it was difficult to grow re-accustomed to living in Germany. Artists were not lacking there. Air was lacking to artists. They were isolated from the rest of the nation; it was uninterested in them; other preoccupations, social or practical, absorbed the public mind. The poets shut themselves up, with an irritated disdain, in their disdained art; they took pride in cutting the last bonds that attached it to the life of their people; they wrote only for a few: a small aristocracy full of talent, refined, sterile, itself divided into rival circles of insipid initiates, they suffocated in the narrow space where they were penned; incapable of widening it, they doggedly dug into it; they turned over the soil, until it was exhausted. Then, they lost themselves in their anarchic dreams, and they did not even care to put their dreams in common. Each one struggled in place, in the fog. No common light. Each had to expect light only from himself.

Yonder, on the contrary, on the other side of the Rhine, among the neighbors of the West, periodically blew upon art the great winds of collective passions, the public storms. And, dominating the plain, like their Eiffel Tower above Paris, there shone in the distance the never-extinguished beacon of a classical tradition, conquered by centuries of labor and glory, transmitted from hand to hand, and which, without enslaving or constraining the mind, indicated to it the road the centuries had followed, and made a whole people commune in its light. More than one German mind, — birds straying in the night, — would come full-winged toward the distant beacon. But who suspects, in France, the force of sympathy which pushes toward France so many generous hearts of the neighboring nation! So many loyal hands held out, which are not responsible for the crimes of politics!… And neither do you see us, brothers of Germany, who say to you: “Here are our hands. In spite of lies and hatreds, we shall not be separated. We have need of you, you have need of us, for the grandeur of our minds and our races. We are the two wings of the Occident. He who breaks one, the flight of the other is broken. Let war come! It will not break the clasp of our hands and the soaring of our fraternal geniuses.”

Thus Christophe thought. He felt to what point the two peoples complement each other mutually, and how their mind, their art, their action are infirm and lame, deprived of the help of one another. For him, native of those countries of the Rhine, where the two civilizations mingle in one stream, he had had, from his childhood, the instinct of their necessary union; all along his life, the unconscious effort of his genius had been to maintain the balance and steadiness of the two powerful wings. The richer he was in Germanic dreams, the more he had need of the Latin clarity of spirit and order. Hence, that France was so dear to him. He tasted in her the benefit of knowing himself better and of mastering himself. In her alone, he was himself, entirely.

He took in his stride the elements which sought to harm him. He assimilated the energies foreign to his own. A vigorous mind, when it is in good health, absorbs all forces, even those which are enemy to it; and it makes of them its flesh. There comes even a moment when one is more drawn by what resembles you least: for one finds therein a more abundant pasture.

In fact, Christophe had more pleasure in the works of certain artists who were opposed to him as rivals, than in those of his imitators: — for he had imitators, who called themselves his disciples, to his great despair. They were good fellows, full of veneration for him, hard-working, estimable, gifted with all the virtues. Christophe would have given much to love their music; but — (it was just his luck!) — there was no way: he found it null. He was a thousand times more seduced by the talent of musicians who were personally antipathetic to him and who represented in art tendencies hostile to his… Eh! what does it matter? These, at least, were alive! Life is, in itself, such a virtue that whoever is deprived of it, were he gifted with all the other virtues, will never be an honorable man entirely, for he is not entirely a man. Christophe used to say, jestingly, that he recognized as disciples only those who fought him. And when a young artist came to speak to him of his musical vocation, and thought to win his sympathy by flattering him, he would ask him:

— So, my music satisfies you? It is in this manner that you would express your love, or your hatred?

— Yes, master.

— Well then, be silent. You have nothing to say.

This horror of submissive minds, who are born to obey, this need to breathe other thoughts than his own, drew him by preference into circles whose ideas were diametrically opposed to his. He had as friends people for whom his art, his idealistic faith, his moral conceptions were dead letter; they had different ways of envisaging life, love, marriage, the family, all social relations: — good people, moreover, but who seemed to belong to another epoch of moral evolution; the anguishes and scruples which had bound a part of Christophe’s life would have been incomprehensible to them. So much the better for them, no doubt! Christophe did not desire to make them understand them. He did not ask others, by thinking like him, to confirm his thought: of his thought, he was sure. He asked of them other thoughts to know, other souls to love. To love, to know, ever more. To see and to learn to see. He had ended, not only by admitting in others tendencies of mind which he had formerly fought, but by rejoicing in them: for they seemed to him to contribute to the fecundity of the universe. He loved Georges all the better for not taking life tragically, as he himself did. Humanity would be too poor and too grey in color, if it were uniformly clad in the moral seriousness, the heroic constraint, with which Christophe was armed. It had need of joy, of insouciance, of irreverent audacity toward the idols, of all the idols, even the most holy ones. Long live “the Gallic salt, which revives the earth”! Skepticism and faith are no less necessary. Skepticism, which gnaws yesterday’s faith, will prepare the place for tomorrow’s faith… How everything grows clear for him who, drawing away from life, as from a beautiful picture, sees melting into a harmonious magic the divided colors which, up close, were clashing!

Christophe’s eyes had opened to the infinite variety of the material world, as of the moral world. It had been one of his principal conquests, since the first journey to Italy. In Paris, he had associated chiefly with painters and sculptors; he found that the best of the French genius was in them. The triumphant boldness, with which they pursued, they clasped movement, the color that vibrates, they tore away the veils with which life envelops itself, made the heart leap, with elation. Inexhaustible richness, for him who knows how to see, of a drop of light, of a second of life! What count, beside these sovereign delights of the mind, the vain tumult of disputes and of wars?… But these very disputes and these wars are part of the marvelous spectacle. One must embrace all, and valiantly, joyously, throw into the ardent crucible of our heart both the forces that deny and those that affirm, enemies and friends, all the metal of life. The end of all is the statue that is being elaborated within us, the divine fruit of the spirit; and all is good that contributes to making it more beautiful, were it at the price of our sacrifice. What does it matter who creates? Only what is created is real… You do not reach us, enemies who wish to harm us. We are beyond your blows… You bite the empty cloak. It has been long since I was elsewhere.

2

His musical creation had taken on more serene forms. They were no longer the storms of spring, which formerly gathered, broke out, suddenly disappeared. They were the white clouds of summer, mountains of snow and of gold, great birds of light, which hover slowly and fill the sky…

To create. Harvests that ripen, in the calm sun of August…

First, a vague and powerful torpor, the obscure joy of the full bunch of grapes, of the swollen ear of corn, of the pregnant woman brooding over her ripe fruit. A buzzing of organ; the hive where the bees sing, in the bottom of the basket… From this somber and golden music, like a comb of autumn honey, little by little detaches itself the rhythm that leads it; the round of the planets is sketched out; it turns…

Then, the will appears. It leaps onto the rump of the whinnying dream that passes, and grips it between its knees. The mind recognizes the laws of the rhythm that sweeps it along; it tames the disordered forces, and fixes for them the way and the goal toward which it is going. The symphony of reason and instinct organizes itself. The shadow lights up. On the long ribbon of road that unrolls, are marked at intervals luminous hearths, which will be in their turn in the work in creation the nuclei of small planetary worlds chained to the precinct of their solar system…

The great lines of the picture are henceforth fixed. Now its face emerges from the uncertain dawn. Everything becomes precise: the harmony of colors and the outline of figures. To carry the work to its accomplishment, all the resources of the being are requisitioned. The casket of memory is opened, and its perfumes exhale. The mind lets loose the senses; it lets them rave, and is silent; but, crouching beside, it watches them and chooses its prey…

All is ready; the team of workmen executes, with the materials seized from the senses, the work designed by the mind. The great architect needs good workmen who know their trade and do not spare their strength. The cathedral is being completed.

“And God contemplates his work. And He sees that it is not yet good.”

The eye of the master embraces the ensemble of his creation; and his hand perfects the harmony…

The dream is accomplished. Te Deum…

The white clouds of summer, great birds of light, hover slowly; and the sky is covered with their outspread wings.

3

Yet his life was far from being reduced entirely to his art. A man of his kind cannot do without loving; and not only with that equal love, which the spirit of the artist spreads upon all that is: no, he must prefer; he must give himself to beings of his choice. They are the roots of the tree. Through them is renewed all the blood of his heart.

Christophe’s blood was not yet close to being dried up. A love bathed him, which formed the best of his joy. A double love, for Grazia’s daughter and Olivier’s son. He united them in his thought. He was going to unite them, in reality.

Georges and Aurora had met at Colette’s. Aurora lived in her cousin’s house. She spent part of the year in Rome, the rest of the time in Paris. She was eighteen, Georges five years older. Tall, straight, elegant, with a small head and a broad face, blonde, the complexion sunburned, a slight shadow of down on the lip, the clear eyes whose laughing gaze did not tire itself by thinking, the chin a little fleshy, the brown hands, beautiful round and robust arms and a well-formed bosom, she had a gay, material and proud air. Not in the least intellectual, very little sentimental, she had inherited from her mother her nonchalant laziness. She slept with closed fists, eleven hours, all at one stretch. The rest of the time, she idled, laughing, half awake. Christophe called her Dornröschen, — the Sleeping Beauty. She reminded him of his little Sabine. She sang as she went to bed, she sang as she got up, she laughed without reason, with a good childish laugh, swallowing her laugh like a hiccup. One did not know what she spent her days at. All Colette’s efforts to deck her out in that factitious brilliance, which is so easily plastered upon young girls’ minds, like a lacquered varnish, had been lost: the varnish would not hold. She learned nothing; she took months to read a book, which she found very fine, without being able to remember, a week later, either the title or the subject; she made spelling mistakes without a qualm and committed, in speaking of learned things, comical errors. She was refreshing by her youth, her gaiety, her lack of intellectualism, even by her defects, by her thoughtlessness which sometimes bordered on indifference, by her naïve egoism. So spontaneous, always. This little girl, simple and lazy, knew how to be, at her moments, coquettish, innocently: then, she would cast out her lines to little young men, she would paint outdoors, played Chopin’s nocturnes, carried about books of poetry which she did not read, had idealistic conversations and hats which were no less so.

Christophe observed her and laughed up his sleeve. He had for Aurora a fatherly tenderness, indulgent and mocking. And he had also a secret piety, which was addressed to her whom he had once loved and who reappeared, with a new youth, for a love other than his. No one knew the depth of his affection. The only one to suspect it was Aurora. Since her childhood, she had almost always seen Christophe near her; she considered him as one of the family. In her former sorrows, less loved than her brother, she drew instinctively closer to Christophe. She divined in him an analogous sorrow; he saw her chagrin; and without confiding them, they put them in common. Later, she had discovered the sentiment that united her mother and Christophe; it seemed to her that she was in on the secret, though they had never associated her with it. She knew the meaning of the message, with which she had been charged by Grazia dying, and of the ring which was now on Christophe’s hand. Thus, there existed between her and him hidden bonds, which she had no need to understand clearly, to feel in their complexity. She was sincerely attached to her old friend, though she had never been able to make the effort of playing or reading his works. Quite a good musician however, she did not even have the curiosity to cut the pages of a score, that had been dedicated to her. She liked to come and chat familiarly with him. — She came more often, when she knew she could meet at his place Georges Jeannin.

And Georges, on his side, had never until then found so much interest in Christophe’s society.

However, the two young people were slow to suspect their true feelings. They had at first looked at each other, with a mocking eye. They scarcely resembled one another. The one was quicksilver, and the other still water. But not much time passed before the quicksilver strove to appear calmer and the sleeping water awoke. Georges criticized Aurora’s dress, her Italian taste, — a slight lack of nuances, a certain preference for clashing colors. Aurora liked to tease, and amusingly imitated Georges’s way of speaking, hasty and a little precious. And while making fun of each other, both of them took pleasure… in making fun of each other, or in talking of each other? They even talked of each other to Christophe, who, far from contradicting them, mischievously transmitted from one to the other the little arrows. They affected not to care; but they made the discovery that they cared, on the contrary, much too much; and incapable, above all Georges, of hiding their pique, they delivered, at the first meeting, lively skirmishes. The pinpricks were light; they were afraid of hurting each other; and the hand that struck them was so dear to them that they had more pleasure in the blows they received than in those they struck. They observed each other curiously, with eyes that sought the defects of the other and found in them attractions. But they did not admit it. Each one, alone with Christophe, protested that the other was unbearable to him. They nonetheless took advantage of all the occasions Christophe offered them to meet.

One day when Aurora was at her old friend’s and had just announced her visit for the following Sunday, in the morning, — Georges, coming in like a gust of wind, according to his habit, told Christophe he would come Sunday, in the afternoon. Sunday morning, Christophe waited in vain for Aurora. At the hour indicated by Georges, she appeared, apologizing for having been prevented from coming earlier; she embroidered upon this a whole little story. Christophe, who was amused by her innocent cunning, said to her: — That’s a pity. You would have found Georges; he came, we had lunch together; he could not stay, this afternoon.

Aurora, disconcerted, was no longer listening to what Christophe was saying to her. He spoke, good-humoredly. She replied distractedly; she was not far from holding it against him. There was a ring. It was Georges. Aurora was startled. Christophe looked at her, laughing. She understood that he had been mocking her; she laughed and blushed. He shook his finger at her, mischievously. Abruptly, with effusion, she ran to kiss him. He whispered in her ear:

— Biricchina, ladroncella, furbetta…

And she put her hand over his mouth, to oblige him to be silent.

Georges understood nothing of these laughs and these embracings. His astonished, and even a little vexed air, added to the joy of the other two.

Thus, Christophe was working to bring the two children together. And when he had succeeded, he almost reproached himself for it. He loved them both equally: but he judged Georges more severely; he knew his weaknesses, he idealized Aurora; he believed himself responsible for her happiness more than for that of Georges: for it seemed to him that Georges was a little his son, was a little himself. And he wondered whether he was not culpable, in giving to the innocent Aurora a companion, who was scarcely so.

But one day when he was passing near an arbor, where the two young people were sitting, — (it was very shortly after their engagement) — he heard, with a tightening of the heart, Aurora, who was jokingly questioning Georges about one of his past adventures, and Georges who was recounting, without being entreated. Other snippets of conversations, of which they made no secret, showed him that Aurora found herself much more at ease than he himself with Georges’s moral ideas. While being very much enamored of one another, one felt that they did not at all regard themselves as bound forever; they brought, in questions relating to love and to marriage, a spirit of freedom, which must have its beauty, but which contrasted singularly with the old system of mutual devotion usque ad mortem. And Christophe watched, with a touch of melancholy… How far from him they already were! How fast it goes, the bark that carries off our children!… Patience! a day will come, we shall all meet again in port.

In the meantime, the bark was not greatly worried about the route to follow; it floated at all the winds of the day. — This spirit of freedom, which tended to modify the manners of the time, it would have seemed natural that it should establish itself also in the other domains of thought and action. But it was nothing of the sort: human nature cares little for contradiction. In the same time that manners were becoming more free, intelligence was becoming less so; it asked religion to put it back into halter. And this double movement in opposite directions was carried out, with magnificent illogic, in the same souls. Georges and Aurora had let themselves be won by the new Catholic current, which was conquering a part of society people and intellectuals. Nothing was more curious than the way in which Georges, a fronder by nature, irreligious as one breathes, without even paying attention to it, who had never cared about either God or the devil, — a real little Gaul who mocks everything, — had abruptly declared that truth was there. He had to have one; and this one accorded with his need of action, his atavism of French bourgeois and his weariness of liberty. The young colt had wandered enough; he came back, of himself, to be harnessed to the plow of the race. The example of a few friends had sufficed. Georges, ultra-sensitive to the slightest atmospheric pressures of surrounding thought, was one of the first taken. And Aurora followed him, as she would have followed him anywhere. At once, they became sure of themselves and contemptuous of those who did not think as they did. Oh, irony! These two frivolous children were sincerely believers, while the moral purity, the seriousness, the ardent effort of Grazia and of Olivier had never won them the right to be, in spite of all their desire.

Christophe observed curiously this evolution of souls. He did not try to fight it, as Emmanuel would have wished, whose free idealism was irritated by this return of the old enemy. One does not fight the wind that passes. One waits for it to have passed. Human reason was tired. It had just made a gigantic effort. It was giving way to sleep; and, like the child harassed by a long day, before falling asleep, it said its prayers. The door of dreams had reopened: in the wake of religion, theosophical, mystical, esoteric, occultist breaths visited the brain of the Occident. Philosophy itself was wavering. Their gods of thought, Bergson, William James, were tottering. Even science, where the signs of the fatigue of reason were manifesting themselves. A moment to pass. Let them breathe. Tomorrow, the mind will awaken, more alert and more free… Sleep is good, when one has worked well. Christophe, who had scarcely had the time to give way to it, was happy, for his children, that they should enjoy it, in his place, that they should have the rest of the soul, the security of the law, the absolute, imperturbable confidence in their dreams. He would not have wished, nor been able, to make exchange with them. But he told himself that the melancholy of Grazia and the inquietude of Olivier found appeasement in their sons and that it was well so.

— “All that we have suffered, I, my friends, so many others whom I have not known and who lived before us, all has been so that these two children might attain to joy… This joy, Antoinette, for which you were made, and which was refused you!… Ah! if the unhappy could taste, in anticipation, the happiness which will issue, one day, from their sacrificed lives!”

Why should he have sought to dispute this happiness? One must not wish others to be happy in our way, but in theirs. At most, he gently asked Georges and Aurora that they should not have too much contempt for those who, like him, did not share their faith.

They did not even take the trouble to discuss with him. They seemed to say to themselves:

— He cannot understand…

He was, for them, of the past. And, to hide nothing, they did not attach an enormous importance to the past. Between themselves, they happened to talk innocently of what they would do later, when Christophe “would no longer be there”… — Yet they did love him… These terrible children, who grow around you, like lianas! This force of nature, which hastens, which chases you out…

— “Go away! Go away! Get out of there! My turn!…”

Christophe, who heard their mute language, wanted to say to them:

— Do not hurry so! I am quite all right, here. Look upon me still as someone alive.

He was amused by their naïve impertinence.

— Say it straight out, he said good-humoredly, one day when they had overwhelmed him with their disdainful air, say it straight out that I am an old fool.

— But no, my old friend, said Aurora, laughing with all her heart. You are the best; but there are things you do not know.

— And that you know, little girl? Behold the great wisdom!

— Do not mock. I, I do not know much. But, he, Georges, knows.

Christophe smiled:

— Yes, you are right, little one. He always knows, the one one loves.

What was much more difficult for him than to submit to their intellectual superiority, was to endure their music. They put his patience to a rough test. The piano did not stand idle, when they came to his place. It seemed that, like the birds, love awakened their warbling. But they were not, by a long way, as skilled at singing. Aurora had no illusion about her talent. It was not the same for that of her fiancé; she saw no difference between Georges’s playing and Christophe’s. Perhaps she preferred Georges’s way. And he, despite his ironic finesse, was not far from letting himself be convinced by the faith of his sweetheart. Christophe did not contradict it; mischievously, he abounded in the sense of the young girl’s words, (when he did not happen, however, to leave the place, exasperated, slamming the doors a little hard.) He listened, with an affectionate and pitying smile, to Georges, playing Tristan at the piano. This poor little fellow brought, to translating these formidable pages, an applied conscientiousness, a sweet amiable gentleness of a young girl, full of good sentiments. Christophe laughed all to himself. He did not want to tell the young boy why he was laughing. He embraced him. He loved him so. He loved him perhaps the better… Poor little one!… vanity of art!…

4

He often talked of “his children” — (he so named them) — with Emmanuel. Emmanuel, who had affection for Georges, said, joking, that Christophe ought to have ceded him to him, he already had Aurora: it was not fair, he was monopolizing everything.

Their friendship had become almost legendary in the Parisian world, although they lived apart. Emmanuel had conceived a passion for Christophe. He did not want to show it to him, out of pride; he hid it under brusque manners; he was sometimes rough with him. But Christophe was not fooled by it. He knew how devoted this heart was now to him, and he knew its value. They did not pass a week without seeing each other two or three times. When their bad health prevented them from going out, they wrote to each other. Letters which seemed to come from distant regions. External events interested them less than certain progressions of the mind in the sciences and in art. They lived in their thought, meditating on their art, or distinguishing, beneath the chaos of facts, the little unperceived gleam that makes a mark in the history of the human spirit.

Most often, Christophe came to Emmanuel’s. Although, since a recent illness, he was not much better in health than his friend, they had gotten into the habit of finding it natural that Emmanuel’s health should be entitled to more consideration. Christophe no longer climbed without difficulty Emmanuel’s six flights; and when he had arrived, he needed a good moment before catching his breath. They knew as badly how to take care of themselves the one as the other. In spite of their sick bronchi and their fits of oppression, they were enraged smokers. It was one of the reasons why Christophe preferred that their rendezvous should take place at Emmanuel’s, rather than at his own place: for Aurora warred upon him, for his mania for smoking; and he hid from her. It happened that the two friends were seized with fits of coughing, in the middle of their discourse; then, they had to interrupt themselves and looked at one another, laughing, like schoolboys caught at fault; and sometimes one of the two lectured the one who was coughing; but, breath returning, the other protested with energy that the smoke had nothing to do with it.

On Emmanuel’s table, in a free space in the middle of his papers, lay a grey cat, who watched the two smokers, gravely, with a reproachful air. Christophe said that he was their living conscience; to stifle him, he put his hat over him. He was a sickly cat, of the most vulgar species, that Emmanuel had picked up in the street, half stunned; he had never properly recovered from the brutalities, ate little, scarcely played, made no noise; very gentle, following his master with his intelligent eyes, unhappy when he was not there, content to be lying on the table, beside him, letting himself be distracted from his meditation only to contemplate for hours, in ecstasy, the cage where the inaccessible birds fluttered, purring politely at the least mark of attention, lending himself with patience to the capricious caresses of Emmanuel, a little rough of Christophe, and always taking care not to scratch or bite. He was delicate, one of his eyes wept; he coughed a little; if he had been able to speak, he would surely not have had the effrontery to maintain, like the two friends, “that the smoke had nothing to do with it”; but from them, he accepted everything; he seemed to be thinking:

— They are men, they know not what they do.

Emmanuel had grown attached to him, because he found an analogy between the fate of this ailing beast and his own. Christophe claimed that the resemblances extended even to the expression of the gaze.

— Why not? said Emmanuel.

Animals reflect their milieu. Their physiognomy refines itself, according to the masters they frequent. The cat of an imbecile does not have the same gaze as the cat of a man of spirit. A domestic animal can become good or wicked, frank or sly, fine or stupid, not only according to the lessons given it by its master, but according to what its master is. There is not even need of the influence of men. Places shape beasts, in their image. An intelligent landscape illumines the eyes of animals. — Emmanuel’s grey cat was in harmony with the stifled garret and the infirm master, whom the Parisian sky lit.

Emmanuel had become humanized. He was no longer the same as in the first days of his acquaintance with Christophe. A domestic tragedy had profoundly shaken him. His companion, to whom he had made felt too clearly, in an hour of exasperation, the weariness her affection’s weight caused him, had abruptly disappeared. He had sought her, a whole night, overcome with anxieties. He had ended by finding her in a police station, where she had been kept. She had wanted to throw herself into the Seine; a passer-by had held her back by her clothes, at the moment she was stepping over the parapet of a bridge; she had refused to give her address and her name; she wanted to begin again. The spectacle of this sorrow had overwhelmed Emmanuel; he could not bear the thought that, having suffered from others, he was causing suffering, in his turn. He had brought the desperate woman home, he had applied himself to dressing the wound he had opened, to giving back to the exigent friend confidence in the affection she wished to find. He had silenced his revolts, he had resigned himself to this absorbing love, he had devoted to it what remained to him of life. All the sap of his genius had flowed back to his heart. This apostle of action had come to believe that there was but one action that was good: to do no harm. His role was finished. It seemed that the Force which lifts the great human tides had used him only as an instrument, to unleash action. Once the order accomplished, he was no longer anything: action continued without him. He watched it continue, almost resigned to the injustices which touched him personally, not entirely to those which concerned his faith. For although, free-thinker, he claimed himself emancipated from all religion and treated Christophe in jest as a clerical in disguise, he had his altar, like every powerful mind, which deifies the dreams to which it sacrifices itself. The altar was now deserted; and Emmanuel suffered from it. How to see without pain the holy ideas which one has had so much trouble to make victorious, for which the best, for a century, have suffered so many torments, trampled underfoot by those who come after! All this magnificent heritage of French idealism, — this faith in Liberty, which had its saints, its martyrs, its heroes, this love of humanity, this religious aspiration to the fraternity of nations and races, — with what blind brutality these young people sack it! What delirium has seized them to regret the monsters we had vanquished, to put themselves back under the yoke we had broken, to recall with great cries the reign of Force, and to rekindle hatred, the dementia of war in the heart of my France!

— It is not only in France, it is in the whole world, said Christophe, with a laughing air. From Spain to China, the same gust is blowing. Not a corner left where one can shelter against the wind! See, it becomes comic: even my own Switzerland is becoming nationalist!

— You find that consoling?

— Assuredly. One sees thereby that such currents are due not to the ridiculous passions of a few men, but to a hidden God who leads the universe. And before this God, I have learned to bow. If I do not understand him, it is my fault, not his. Try to understand him. But who among you bothers about it? You live from day to day, you see no farther than the next milestone, and you imagine that it marks the end of the road; you see the wave that carries you away, and you do not see the sea! The wave of today is the wave of yesterday, it is the flood of our souls, which opened the road for it. The wave of today will hollow out the furrow of the wave of tomorrow, which will make it forgotten, as ours has been forgotten. I neither admire nor fear the nationalism of the present hour. It flows away with the hour; it passes, it has passed. It is one rung of the ladder. Climb to the summit! It is the quartermaster-sergeant of the army that is to come. Listen already to its fifes and drums sounding!…

(Christophe drummed on the table, where the cat, awakened, gave a start.)

… Each people, today, feels the imperious need of gathering its forces and of taking stock of them. It is that, for a century, the peoples have been transformed by their mutual penetration and by the immense contribution of all the intelligences of the universe, building the new morality, science, faith. Each must make his examination of conscience and know exactly what he is and what is his property, before entering, with the others, into the new century. A new age is coming. Humanity will sign a new lease with life. On new laws, society will live again. It is Sunday, tomorrow. Each settles his accounts for the week, each washes his lodging and wishes his house clean, before uniting himself to the others, before the common God, and concluding with him the new pact of alliance.

Emmanuel watched Christophe; and his eyes reflected the vision that was passing. He was silent, some time after the other had spoken; then, he said:

— You are happy, Christophe! You do not see the night.

— I see in the night, said Christophe. I have lived in it long enough. I am an old owl.

Prologue

Life passes. The body and the soul flow away like a stream. The years inscribe themselves on the flesh of the aging tree. The whole world of forms wears itself out and renews itself. Thou alone dost not pass, immortal music. Thou art the inward sea. Thou art the deep soul. In thy clear pupils, the morose face of life is not mirrored. Far from thee flee, like the flock of the clouds, the procession of days, burning, freezing, feverish, which inquietude chases away and which never endure. Thou alone dost not pass. Thou art outside of the world. Thou art a world, unto thyself alone. Thou hast thy sun, thy laws, thy flux and thy reflux. Thou hast the peace of the stars, which trace in the field of nocturnal spaces their luminous furrow, — silver plows led by the sure hand of the invisible ploughman.

Music, serene music, how sweet thy lunar light is to eyes wearied by the brutal flash of the sun of here below! The soul which has lived and which has turned away from the common watering trough, where men, to drink, stir up the mire with their feet, presses upon thy bosom and sucks from thy breasts the fresh stream of dream. Music, virgin mother, who bearest all the passions in thy immaculate entrails, who enclosest the good and the evil in the lake of thine eyes, the color of rushes, the color of the pale-green water that flows from glaciers, thou art beyond evil, thou art beyond good; whoever takes refuge in thee lives outside the centuries; the sequence of his days will be but a single day; and the death that bites everything will break its teeth.

Music which cradled my aching soul, music which gave it back to me firm, calm and joyous, — my love and my good, — I kiss thy pure mouth, I hide my face in thy hair of honey, I lean my burning eyelids upon the soft palms of thy hands. We are silent, our eyes are closed, and I see the ineffable light of thine eyes, and I drink the smile of thy mute mouth; and nestled upon thy heart, I listen to the beating of eternal life.

5

About this time, his friends noticed a change in his manners. He was often distracted, as if absent. He did not listen well to what was said to him. He had an absorbed and smiling air. When his distractions were remarked to him, he excused himself affectionately. He spoke of himself sometimes, in the third person:

— Krafft will do that for you…

or…

— Christophe will laugh well…

Those who did not know him, said:

— What infatuation with himself!

And it was quite the contrary. He saw himself from outside, like a stranger. He had come to the hour when one ceases to take an interest even in the struggle waged for the beautiful, because, after having accomplished one’s task, one has a tendency to believe that the others will accomplish theirs and that in the end, as Rodin says, “the beautiful will always end by triumphing.” The wickedness of people and the injustices no longer revolted him. — He told himself, laughing, that it was not natural, that life was withdrawing from him.

In fact, he no longer had his old vigor. The least physical effort, a long walk, a rapid run, fatigued him. He was at once out of breath; his heart hurt him. He thought sometimes of his old friend Schulz. He did not speak to others of what he felt. To what end, after all? One can only worry them, and one is not cured. Besides, he did not take these malaises seriously. Much more than to be ill, he feared being obliged to take care of himself.

By a secret presentiment, he was seized with a desire to see his country once more. It was a project that he had been putting off, from year to year. He told himself that, the next year… He did not put it off, this time.

He left in secret, without warning anyone. The trip was short. Christophe found no more of what he had come to look for. The transformations announced at his last passage were now accomplished: the little town had become a great industrial city. The old houses had disappeared. Disappeared, the cemetery. In the place of Sabine’s farm, a factory raised its high chimneys. The river had finished gnawing away the meadows, where Christophe used to play, as a child. A street, (what a street!) between filthy buildings, bore his name. All was dead of the past, even death… So be it! Life continued; perhaps other little Christophes dreamed, suffered, struggled, in the hovels of this street decorated with his name. — At a concert in the gigantic Tonhalle, he heard one of his works performed, contrary to his thought; he barely recognized it… So be it! Ill-understood, it would perhaps stir up new energies. We have sown the grain. Do with it as you please; nourish yourselves on us. — Christophe, walking, at nightfall, in the fields around the city, over which great fogs went floating, thought of the great fogs that were also going to envelop his life, of the loved beings, vanished from the earth, taken refuge in his heart, whom the falling night would cover, like him… So be it! So be it! I do not fear thee, O night, brooder of suns! For one star that goes out, thousands of others light up. Like a bowl of milk that boils, the abyss of space overflows with light. Thou shalt not extinguish me. The breath of death will fan my life back into flame.

On his return from Germany, Christophe wanted to stop in the city where he had known Anna. Since he had left her, he knew nothing more of her. He would not have dared ask news of her. For years, the name alone made him tremble… — Now, he was calm, he feared nothing more. But in the evening, in his hotel room, which gave onto the Rhine, the familiar chant of the bells ringing for the next day’s feast resuscitated the images of the past. From the river rose toward him the smell of the distant danger, which he had trouble understanding. He passed the whole night recalling it to mind. He felt himself emancipated from the dreaded Master; and this was to him a sad sweetness. He was not decided what he would do, the next day. He had, for an instant, the idea — (the past was so far away!) — of paying a visit to the Brauns. But the next day, courage failed him; he did not even venture to ask, at the hotel, whether the doctor and his wife were still living. He decided to leave…

At the hour of departure, an irresistible force drove him to the church where Anna used to go; he placed himself behind a pillar, from where he could see the pew, on which she used to come and kneel. He waited, certain that, if she lived, she would still come there.

A woman came, in fact; and he did not recognize her. She was like others: corpulent, the face full, with a fat chin, the expression indifferent and hard. Dressed in black. She sat down at her pew, and remained motionless. She seemed neither to pray, nor to listen; she looked straight ahead. Nothing, in this woman, recalled the one Christophe was waiting for. Only once or twice, a somewhat maniacal gesture, as if to smooth the folds of her dress on her knees. Long ago, she had that gesture… On the way out, she passed near him, slowly, her head erect, her hands with her book crossed above her belly. For an instant, there came to rest upon Christophe’s eyes the light of her somber and weary eyes. And they looked at each other. And they did not recognize each other. She passed, straight and rigid, without turning her head. It was only an instant later that he suddenly recognized, in a flash of memory, beneath the icy smile, by a certain crease of the lips, the mouth he had kissed… His breath failed, and his knees bent. He thought:

— Lord, is this then the body where she whom I loved dwelt? Where is she? Where is she? And where am I, myself? Where is he who loved her? What remains of us and of the cruel love that devoured us? — The ashes. Where is the fire?

And his God answered him:

— In me.

Then, he raised his eyes, and, for the last time, he saw her, — in the midst of the crowd, — going out by the door, into the sun.

It was shortly after his return to Paris that he made peace with his old enemy Lévy-Cœur. The latter had long attacked him, with as much malicious talent as bad faith. Then, having reached the summit of success, glutted with honors, sated, appeased, he had had the wit to recognize secretly Christophe’s superiority; and he had made advances to him. Attacks and advances, Christophe pretended to remark nothing. Lévy-Cœur had grown weary. They lived in the same quarter, and met often. They had the air of not knowing each other. Christophe let, in passing, his gaze fall on Lévy-Cœur, as if he did not see him. This tranquil way of denying him exasperated Lévy-Cœur.

He had a daughter of eighteen or twenty, pretty, fine, elegant, with a profile of a little lamb, a halo of blonde hair that curled, sweet coquettish eyes, and a smile of Luini. They walked together; Christophe came upon them in the alleys of the Luxembourg: they seemed very intimate; the young girl leaned gently on her father’s arm. Christophe who, distracted though he was, none the less remarked pretty faces, had a weakness for this one. He thought of Lévy-Cœur:

— The fellow is lucky!

But he added proudly:

— I too, have a daughter.

And he compared them. This comparison, in which his partiality gave the whole advantage to Aurora, had ended by creating in his mind a sort of imaginary friendship between the two young girls, who were ignorant of each other, and even, without his perceiving it, by bringing him closer to Lévy-Cœur. On returning from Germany, he learned that “the little lamb” was dead. His paternal egoism thought at once:

— If it had been mine who had been struck!

And he was seized with an immense pity for Lévy-Cœur. On the first impulse, he wanted to write him; he began two letters; he was not satisfied, he had an ugly shame: he did not send them. But, a few days later, meeting Lévy-Cœur again, his face ravaged, it was stronger than him: he went straight to the unhappy man, he held out his hands. Lévy-Cœur, without reasoning either, seized them. Christophe said:

— You have lost her!…

The accent of his emotion penetrated Lévy-Cœur. He felt an ineffable gratitude for it… They exchanged sorrowful and confused words. When they parted afterward, nothing remained of what had divided them. They had fought one another: it was fatal, doubtless; let each accomplish the law of his nature! But when one sees the end of the tragi-comedy coming, one lays down the passions one was masked with, and one finds oneself face to face, — two men who are not worth much more the one than the other, and who have the right, after having played their role as best they can, to give each other their hand.

6

The marriage of Georges and Aurora had been fixed for the first days of spring. Christophe’s health was declining rapidly. He had remarked that his children watched him, with an anxious air. Once, he heard them, who were speaking in a low voice. Georges was saying:

— How bad he looks! He is capable of falling ill, just now.

And Aurora replied:

— Provided he doesn’t go and delay our marriage!

He had taken it to heart. Poor little ones! Surely, he would not go and trouble their happiness!

But he was clumsy enough, the day before the wedding, — (he had ridiculously fussed about, the last days; one would have said it was he who was going to be married), — he was foolish enough to let himself be caught again by his old ailment, a reawakening of the old pneumonia, whose first attack went back to the period of The Fair on the Square. He grew indignant with himself. He called himself an imbecile. He swore he would not yield, until the marriage was made. He thought of Grazia dying, who had not wanted to warn him of her illness, on the eve of a concert, so that he should not be distracted from his task and his pleasure. This thought smiled upon him, of doing now for her daughter, — for her, — what she had done for him. He hid his illness; but he had trouble holding out to the end. Nonetheless, the happiness of the two children made him so happy that he succeeded in sustaining, without weakness, the long trial of the religious ceremony. Hardly returned to the house, at Colette’s, his strength betrayed him; he had just time to shut himself up in a room, and he fainted. A servant found him so. Christophe, having come to, forbade speaking of it to the newlyweds, who were leaving in the evening, on their journey. They were too taken up with themselves, to notice anything else. They left him gaily, promising to write him tomorrow, the day after tomorrow…

As soon as they were gone, Christophe took to his bed. The fever took him, and did not leave him. He was alone. Emmanuel, ill also, could not come. Christophe saw no doctor. He did not judge his state worrying. Besides, he had no servant, to look for a doctor. The cleaning-woman, who came, two hours, in the morning, took no interest in him; and he found a way to deprive himself of her services. He had begged her, ten times, when she was doing the room, not to touch his papers. She was obstinate; she judged the moment come to have her will, now that he had his head nailed to the pillow. In the mirror of the wardrobe, he saw her, from his bed, turning everything upside down, in the room next door. He was so furious — (no, decidedly, the old man was not dead in him) — that he leapt from his sheets, to tear from her hands a packet of papers and put her out the door. His anger earned him a good attack of fever and the departure of the servant who, vexed, did not come back, without even taking the trouble to warn “this old madman,” as she called him. He remained then, ill, with no one to serve him. He got up, in the morning, to take the jug of milk, deposited at his door, and to see whether the concierge had not slipped under the threshold the promised letter from the lovers. The letter did not come; they were forgetting it, in their happiness. He did not hold it against them; he told himself that, in their place, he would have done the same. He thought of their carefree joy, and that it was he who had given it to them.

He was a little better and was beginning to get up, when at last Aurora’s letter arrived. Georges had contented himself with adding his signature. Aurora inquired little about Christophe, gave him little news; but on the other hand, she charged him with a commission: she begged him to send her a tour de cou (a neckpiece), which she had forgotten at Colette’s. Although this was hardly important, — (Aurora had thought of it only at the moment of writing to Christophe, and when she was seeking what she could possibly tell him), — Christophe, all joyful at being good for something, went out to look for the object. A time of squalls. Winter was making an offensive return. Melted snow, icy wind. No carriages. Christophe waited, in a shipping office. The impoliteness of the employees and their deliberate slownesses threw him into an irritation, which did not advance his affairs. His sickly state was the cause, in part, of these fits of anger, which the calm of his spirit disavowed; they shook his body, as, beneath the axe, the last shivers of the oak that is about to fall. He came back, chilled through. The concierge, in passing, handed him a clipping from a review. He cast his eyes upon it. It was a malicious article, an attack against him. They had become rare, now. There is no pleasure in attacking one who does not perceive your blows. The most relentless let themselves be won, while detesting him, by an esteem that irritated them.

“One believes,” Bismarck used to confess, as if reluctantly, “that there is nothing more involuntary than love. Esteem is much more so…”

But the author of the article was one of those strong men who, better armed than Bismarck, escape the encroachments of esteem and of love. He spoke of Christophe, in outrageous terms, and announced, for the following fortnight, a sequel to his attacks. Christophe began to laugh, and said, lying down again:

— He’ll be in for it! He won’t find me at home any more.

They wanted him to take a nurse to care for him; he refused obstinately. He said he had lived alone enough, that it was the least that he should have the benefit of his solitude, in such a moment.

He was not bored. In these last years, he had been constantly occupied with dialogues with himself: it was as if his soul were double; and, for some months, his interior society had greatly increased: no longer two souls, but ten lodged in him. They conversed among themselves; more often, they sang. He took part in the conversation, or was silent to listen to them. He had always on his bed, on his table, within reach of his hand, music paper on which he noted their remarks and his own, laughing at the retorts. Mechanical habit; the two acts: thinking and writing, had become almost simultaneous; with him, to write was to think in full clarity. Everything that distracted him from the company of his souls, tired him, irritated him. Even, at certain moments, the friends he loved best. He made an effort not to show it to them too much; but this constraint put him into an extreme weariness. He was quite happy to find himself again afterward: for he had lost himself; impossible to hear the inner voices, in the midst of human chatter. Divine silence!…

He permitted only that the concierge, or one of her children, should come, two or three times a day, to see what he needed. He gave them also the notes, that, until the last day, he continued to exchange with Emmanuel. The two friends were almost as ill as one another; they had no illusion. By different roads, the free religious genius of Christophe and the free genius without religion of Emmanuel had attained the same fraternal serenity. With their trembling handwriting, which they had more and more difficulty reading, they conversed, not of their illness, but of what had always been the object of their conversations, of their art, of the future of their ideas.

Up until the day when, with his failing hand, Christophe wrote the word of the king of Sweden, dying, in the battle:

“Ich habe genug, Bruder; rette dich”![1].

↑ “I have had enough, brother, save yourself!”

7

Like a succession of stages, he embraced the whole of his life: the immense effort of his youth to take possession of himself, the relentless struggles to conquer from others the simple right to live, to conquer himself from the demons of his race. Even after victory, the obligation to watch, without truce, over his conquest, in order to defend it against victory itself. The sweetness, the trials of friendship, which reopens to the heart isolated by struggle the great human family. The plenitude of art, the zenith of life. To reign proudly over his conquered spirit. To believe himself master of his destiny. And suddenly, to meet, at the turning of the road, the horsemen of the Apocalypse, Bereavement, Passion, Shame, the advance-guard of the Master. Overthrown, trampled by the horses’ hooves, to drag oneself, all bloody, up to the summits where blazes, in the midst of the clouds, the savage fire that purifies. To find oneself face to face with God. To wrestle together, like Jacob with the angel. To come out of the struggle, broken. To adore one’s defeat, to understand one’s limits to strive to accomplish the will of the Master, in the domain he has assigned to us. So that, when the plowings, the sowings, the harvest, when the hard and beautiful labor would be accomplished, to have earned the right to rest at the foot of the sunlit mountains and to say to them:

“Blessed be you! I shall not taste your light. But your shadow is sweet to me…”

Then, the beloved had appeared to him; she had taken him by the hand; and death, in breaking the barriers of his body, had, in the soul of the friend, made flow the pure soul of the beloved. Together, they had come out of the shadow of the days, and they had reached the blessed summits, where, like the three Graces, in a noble round, the past, the present, the future, hold each other by the hand, where the appeased heart watches at once being born, blossoming and ending the sorrows and the joys, where all is Harmony…

He was too much in a hurry, he believed himself already arrived. And the vice which gripped his panting chest, and the tumultuous delirium of images that struck his burning head, reminded him that there remained the last stage, the hardest to make… Onward!…

He was nailed in his bed, motionless. On the floor above, a silly little woman was tinkling at the piano, for hours. She knew but one piece; she repeated tirelessly the same phrases; she took such pleasure in them! They were for her a joy and an emotion of every color and every figure. And Christophe understood her happiness; but he was irritated by it, to the point of tears. If at least she had not banged so hard! Noise was as odious to Christophe as vice… He ended by resigning himself. It was hard to learn to hear no more. Yet there was less pain than he had thought. He was drawing away from his body. This sickly and gross body. What an indignity to have been shut up in it, so many years! He watched it wearing out, and he thought:

— It hasn’t long now.

He asked himself, to feel the pulse of his human egoism:

— “Which would you prefer? that the memory of Christophe, of his person and of his name should be eternalized and that his work should disappear? or that his work should last and that no trace should remain of your person and your name?”

Without hesitating, he replied:

— “Let me disappear, and let my work endure! I gain doubly therein: for there will remain of me only the truest, only the one true. Let Christophe perish!…”

But, a little time afterward, he felt that he was becoming as much a stranger to his work as to himself. The childish illusion of believing in the duration of his art! He had the clear vision not only of the little he had done, but of the destruction that lies in wait for all modern music. Faster than any other, the musical language burns itself out; at the end of a century or two, it is no longer understood except by a few initiates. For whom do Monteverdi and Lully still exist? Already, moss gnaws the oaks of the classical forest. Our sonorous constructions, where our passions sing, will be empty temples, they will crumble into oblivion. … And Christophe was astonished to contemplate these ruins, and to be in no way troubled by them.

— Do I love life less? he asked himself, astonished.

But he understood at once that he loved it much more… To weep over the ruins of art? They are not worth the trouble. Art is the shadow of man, cast upon nature. Let them disappear together, drunk up by the sun! They prevent me from seeing it… The immense treasure of nature passes through our fingers. The human intelligence wants to take the flowing water, in the meshes of a net. Our music is illusion. Our scale of sounds, our gamuts are invention. They correspond to no living sound. It is a compromise of the mind among the real sounds, an application of the metric system to the moving infinite. The mind had need of this lie, to understand the incomprehensible; and, as it wanted to believe in it, it has believed in it. But it is not true. It is not living. And the enjoyment which this order created by itself gives to the mind, has been obtained only by falsifying the direct intuition of what is. From time to time, a genius, in passing contact with the earth, suddenly perceives the torrent of the real, which overflows the frames of art. The dikes crack, a moment. Nature comes back in through a fissure. But immediately afterward, the crack is stopped up. This is necessary to the safeguard of human reason. It would perish, if its eyes met the eyes of Jehovah. Then it begins again to cement its cell, into which nothing enters from outside, that it has not elaborated. And this is beautiful, perhaps, for those who do not want to see… But I, I want to see thy face, Jehovah! I want to hear the thunder of thy voice, though it should annihilate me. The noise of art hinders me. Let the mind be silent! Silence to man!…

But a few minutes after these fine discourses, he sought, fumbling, one of the leaves of paper, scattered upon the sheets, and he tried again to write a few notes on it. When he perceived his contradiction, he smiled, and he said: — Oh my old companion, my music, you are better than I. I am ungrateful, I dismiss you. But you, you do not leave me; you do not let yourself be rebuffed by my whims. Forgive me; you know it well, these are sallies. I have never betrayed you, you have never betrayed me, we are sure of each other. We shall depart together, my friend. Stay with me, until the end.

Bleib bei uns…

8

He had just awakened from a long torpor, heavy with fever and dreams. Strange dreams, with which he was still impregnated. And now, he looked at himself, he touched himself, he sought himself, he no longer found himself. It seemed to him that he was “another.” Another, dearer than himself… Who then?… It seemed to him that in dream, another had become incarnate in him. Olivier? Grazia?… His heart, his head were so weak! He no longer distinguished among his beloved. What use to distinguish? He loved them all as much.

He remained bound, in a kind of overwhelming beatitude. He did not wish to move. He knew that pain, in ambush, watched for him, as the cat the mouse. He played dead. Already… No one in the room. Above his head, the piano had fallen silent. Solitude. Silence. Christophe sighed.

— “How good it is to tell oneself, at the end of one’s life, that one has never been alone, even when one was most so!… Souls I have met on my road, brothers who have, for an instant, given me your hand, mysterious minds hatched out of my thought, dead and living, — all living, — oh all that I have loved, all that I have created! You surround me with your warm embrace, you watch over me, I hear the music of your voices. Blessed be the destiny, that gave me the gift of you! I am rich, I am rich… My heart is filled!…

He looked at the window… One of those beautiful days without sun, which, as old Balzac said, resemble a beautiful blind woman… Christophe was absorbed in the passionate sight of a tree branch which passed before the panes. The branch was swelling, the moist buds were bursting, the little white flowers were opening; and there was, in these flowers, in these leaves, in all this being which was rising again, such an ecstatic abandon to the renascent force that Christophe no longer felt his fatigue, his oppression, his miserable body which was dying, in order to live again in the tree branch. The sweet radiance of this life bathed him. It was like a kiss. His heart too full of love gave itself to the beautiful tree, which smiled at his last moments. He thought that at this minute, beings were loving each other, that this hour of agony for him, was for others an hour of ecstasy, that it is always so, that the powerful joy of living never dries up. And, suffocating, in a voice that no longer obeyed his thought, — (perhaps even no sound came from his throat; but he did not perceive it) — he intoned a canticle to life.

An invisible orchestra answered him. Christophe said to himself:

— How do they manage, to know? We have not rehearsed. Provided they go on to the end, without making a mistake!

He tried to sit up, so as to be well seen by the whole orchestra, marking the beat, with his great arms. But the orchestra was not mistaken; they were sure of themselves. What marvelous music! Behold, they were improvising now the responses! Christophe was amused:

— Wait a little, my lad! I’ll catch you out.

And, giving the helm a stroke, he capriciously launched the boat, to right, to left, into dangerous passes.

— How will you get out of this?… And out of that? Catch!… And again this other?

They always got out of it; they answered audacities with others still more risky.

— What will they invent? Confound the rogues!…

Christophe cried bravo, and laughed aloud:

— The devil! It was getting difficult to follow them! Am I going to let myself be beaten?… You know, this isn’t fair! I am worn out, today… Never mind! It shall not be said that they have the last word…

But the orchestra was deploying a fantasy of such abundance, of such novelty that there was no way to do anything but to stay, listening to it, open-mouthed. One’s breath was taken away… Christophe took pity on himself:

— Animal! he said to himself, you are emptied. Be silent! The instrument has given all it could give. Enough of this body! I need another.

But the body avenged itself. Violent fits of coughing prevented him from listening:

— Will you be silent!

He took himself by the throat, he struck his chest with blows of his fist, like an enemy that had to be vanquished. He saw himself again, in the middle of a mêlée. A crowd was howling. A man was clutching him, body and arms. They rolled together. The other was crushing him. He was suffocating.

— Let me go, I want to hear!… I want to hear! Or I will kill you!

He hammered the other’s head against the wall. The other did not let go…

— But who is it, now? With whom am I struggling, entwined? What is this body that I hold, that burns me?…

Hallucinated mêlées. A chaos of passions. Fury, lust, thirst for murder, the bite of carnal embraces, all the mire of the pond stirred up, one last time…

— Ah! will it not soon be the end? Will I not tear you off, leeches glued to my flesh?… Fall then with them, my flesh!

With his shoulders, his loins, his knees, Christophe, braced, pushed back the invisible enemy… He was free!… Yonder, the music was still playing, growing distant. Christophe, streaming with sweat, held out his arms toward it:

— Wait for me! Wait for me!

He ran, to rejoin it. He stumbled. He pushed everything aside… He had run so fast that he could no longer breathe. His heart was beating, his blood rustled in his ears: a railway train, rolling under a tunnel…

— How stupid, good God!

He made desperate signs to the orchestra, that it should not continue without him… At last! out of the tunnel!… The silence returned. He heard, again.

— How beautiful it is! How beautiful! Again! Hardy, my lads!… But by whom can this be?… You say? You say that this music is by Jean-Christophe Krafft? Come now! What nonsense! I knew him, perhaps! Never would he have been capable of writing ten bars of it… Who is that coughing again? Don’t make such a noise! What is that chord there? … And this other?… Not so fast! Wait!…

Christophe uttered inarticulate cries; his hand, on the sheet that it was clutching, made the gesture of writing; and his exhausted brain, mechanically continued to seek of what elements were made these chords and what they announced. He did not reach it: emotion made him lose his hold. He began again… Ah! this time, it was too much…

— Stop, stop, I can do no more…

His will let go altogether. With sweetness, Christophe closed his eyes. Tears of happiness flowed from his closed eyelids. The little girl who was watching him, without his perceiving it, piously wiped them away. He no longer felt anything of what was happening here below. The orchestra had fallen silent, leaving him on a vertiginous harmony, whose enigma was not resolved. The brain, obstinate, repeated:

— But what is this chord? How to get out of it? Yet I would so like to find the way out, before the end…

Voices were now rising. A passionate voice. The tragic eyes of Anna… But in the same instant, it was no longer Anna. Those eyes full of goodness…

— Grazia, is it you?… Which of you? Which of you? I no longer see you well… Why is the sun so long in coming?

Three tranquil bells rang. The sparrows, at the window, chirped to remind him of the hour when he gave them the crumbs of breakfast… Christophe saw again in dream his little childhood room… The bells, here is the dawn! The lovely sonorous waves flow in the light air. They come from very far, from the villages yonder… The rumbling of the river rises behind the house… Christophe found himself again leaning on his elbows, at the window of the staircase. All his life flowed before his eyes, like the Rhine. All his life, all his lives, Louisa, Gottfried, Olivier, Sabine…

— Mother, lovers, friends… What are their names?… Love, where are you? Where are you, my souls? I know that you are there, and I cannot seize you.

— We are with you. Peace, our beloved!

— I do not wish to lose you any more. I have sought you so long!

— Do not torment yourself. We will not leave you any more.

— Alas! the tide carries me off.

— The river that carries you off, carries us off with you.

— Where are we going?

— To the place where we shall be reunited.

— Will it be soon?

— Look.

And Christophe, making a supreme effort to lift his head, — (God! how heavy it was!) — saw the river overflowing, covering the fields, rolling august, slow, almost motionless. And, like a flash of steel, on the edge of the horizon, there seemed to run toward him a line of silvery waves, which trembled in the sun. The noise of the Ocean… And his fainting heart asked:

— Is it He?

The voice of his beloved answered him:

— It is He.

While the brain, which was dying, said to itself:

— The door is opening… Here is the chord I was seeking!… But is this the end? What new spaces!… We shall continue tomorrow.

Oh joy, joy to see oneself disappearing into the sovereign peace of the God, whom one has striven to serve, all one’s life!…

— Lord, art thou not too discontented with thy servant? I have done so little! I could not do more… I have struggled, I have suffered, I have wandered, I have created. Let me take breath in thy paternal arms. One day, I shall be born again, for new combats.

And the rumbling of the river, and the murmuring sea sang with him:

— Thou shalt be born again. Rest. All is now but a single heart. Smile of the night and the day entwined. Harmony, august couple of love and of hate! I shall sing the God of the two powerful wings. Hosanna to life! Hosanna to death!

9

Christofori faciem die quacumque tueris,

Illa nempe die non morte mala morieris.

Epilogue

Saint Christopher has crossed the river. All night, he has marched against the current. Like a rock, his body with its athletic limbs emerges above the waters. On his left shoulder is the Child, frail and heavy. Saint Christopher leans upon an uprooted pine, which bends. His spine also bends. Those who saw him set out said he would not arrive; and long their gibes and their laughter followed him. Then, night fell, and they grew weary. Now, Christopher is too far for the cries of those who remain on the bank to reach him. In the noise of the torrent, he hears only the tranquil voice of the Child, who holds with his little fist a curly lock on the forehead of the giant, and who repeats: “Walk!” — He walks, his back bent, his eyes, straight before him, fixed upon the dark shore, whose steep slopes begin to whiten.

Suddenly, the angelus rings, and the flock of bells awakens in bounding. Here is the new dawn! Behind the black cliff, which rises up, mounts the golden halo of the invisible sun. Christopher, near to falling, at last reaches the bank. And he says to the Child:

— Here we are arrived! How heavy you were! Child, who then are you?

And the Child says:

— I am the day that is about to be born.

1

FIRST PART

Christophe no longer counts the years that flee away. Drop by drop, life goes away. But his life is elsewhere. It has no more history. Its history is the work that he creates. The incessant song of music welling up fills the soul and renders it insensible to the tumult of the outside.

Christophe has triumphed. His name has imposed itself. Age comes. His hair has turned white. He does not worry about it; his heart is always young; he has abdicated nothing of his strength or his faith. He is again calm; but it is no longer the same as before having passed through the Burning Bush. He keeps at the bottom of himself the trembling of the storm and of what the stirred-up sea has shown him of the abyss. He knows that none should boast of being master of himself save with the permission of the God who reigns in combats. He bears in his soul two souls. One is a high plateau, beaten by winds and clouds. The other, which dominates it, is a snowy summit which bathes in the light. One cannot dwell there; but when one is frozen by the fogs below, one knows the road that climbs toward the sun. In his soul of mist, Christophe is not alone. He feels beside him the presence of the invisible friend, the robust Saint Cecilia, with the wide and calm eyes that listen to the heavens; and, like the apostle Paul, — in Raphael’s picture, — who is silent and dreams, leaning on his sword, he no longer chafes, he no longer thinks of fighting; he dreams and he forges his dream.

He wrote above all, in this period of his life, compositions for keyboard and for chamber music. There one is much freer to dare more; there are fewer intermediaries between thought and its realization: the former has not had time to weaken on the way. Frescobaldi, Couperin, Schubert and Chopin, by their boldnesses of expression and of style, have anticipated by fifty years the revolutionaries of the orchestra. From the sonorous dough that Christophe’s robust hands kneaded came forth unknown harmonic agglomerations, vertiginous successions of chords, issued from the most distant kinships of sounds accessible to today’s sensibility; they exercised upon the spirit a sacred enchantment. — But the public needs time to grow accustomed to the conquests that a great artist brings back from his dives into the bottom of the ocean. Very few followed Christophe in the temerity of his last compositions. His glory was due wholly to his earlier works. The feeling of this incomprehension within success, more painful even than within failure, because it appears without remedy, had aggravated in Christophe, since the death of his only friend, a somewhat morbid tendency to isolate himself from the world.

Meanwhile, the doors of Germany had reopened to him. In France, oblivion had fallen on the tragic skirmish. He was free to go where he wished. But he was afraid of the memories that awaited him, in Paris. And although he had returned for some months to Germany, although he came back from time to time, to direct 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 demanding for one’s country than for another, and one suffers more from its weaknesses. Moreover, it was true that Germany bore the heaviest burden of the sins of Europe. When one has victory, one is responsible for it, one contracts a debt toward those whom one has vanquished; one takes the tacit engagement to march before them, to show them the way. Louis XIV victorious brought to Europe the splendor of French reason. What light has the Germany of Sedan brought to the world? The flash of bayonets? A thought without wings, an action without generosity, a brutal realism, which does not even have the excuse of being that of healthy men; force and self-interest: Mars as a traveling salesman. Forty years, Europe had dragged itself through the night, under fear. The sun was hidden under the helmet of the conqueror. If vanquished too weak to lift the snuffer deserve only a pity mingled with a little contempt, what sentiment does the man with the helmet deserve?

For some little time, day was beginning to return; gaps of light came through the fissures. To be among the first to see the sun rise, Christophe had come out from the shadow of the helmet; he gladly returned to the country of which he had been earlier the forced guest: to Switzerland. Like so many minds of that time, athirst for liberty, who suffocated in the narrow circle of enemy nations, he was seeking a corner of earth where one could breathe above Europe. Long ago, in the time of Goethe, the Rome of free popes was the island where the thoughts of every race came to alight, like birds, sheltered from the tempest. Now, what refuge? The island has been covered by the sea. Rome is no more. The birds have fled the Seven Hills. — The Alps remain. There is maintained, (for how much longer?) in the midst of greedy Europe, the islet of the twenty-four cantons. Certainly, it does not radiate the poetic mirage of the secular City; history has not mingled with the air one breathes the odor of gods and heroes; but a powerful music rises from the wholly naked Earth; the lines of the mountains have heroic rhythms; and more than elsewhere, here, one feels oneself in contact with the elemental forces. Christophe did not come there to seek a romantic pleasure. A field, some trees, a brook, the wide sky, would have sufficed him to live. The calm face of his native land was more fraternal 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 tremor of gratitude and of faith. He was not the only one. How many combatants of life, whom life has bruised, have found on this soil the energy necessary to take up the combat again and to believe in it still!

By living in this country, he had learned to know it. Most of those who pass see only the warts: the leprosy of hotels, which dishonors the most beautiful features of this robust earth, those cities of foreigners, monstrous depots where the fat people of the world come to buy health, those table d’hôte meals, those squanderings of meats thrown into the beasts’ pit, those casino musics whose noise associates itself with that of the little horses, those vile Italian buffoons whose disgusting bellowings make the rich imbeciles who are bored swoon with delight, the silliness of the shop displays: wooden bears, chalets, foolish trinkets, the same ones, repeated, repeated, without any invention, the honest booksellers with scandalous brochures, — all the moral baseness of these milieux into which engulf themselves, each year, without pleasure, the millions of those idlers, incapable of finding amusements, neither more elevated than those of the rabble, nor even simply as lively.

And they know nothing of the life of this people, who is their host. They do not suspect the reserves of moral strength and of civic liberty that have, for centuries, been amassed in him, the coals of the fire of Calvin and Zwingli, that still burn beneath the ashes, the vigorous democratic spirit that the Napoleonic Republic will never know, this simplicity of institutions and this largesse of social works, the example given to the world by these United States of the three principal races of the Occident, miniature of the Europe of the future. They are still more ignorant of the Daphne who hides under this hard bark, the flashing and savage dream of Böcklin, the harsh heroism of Hodler, the serene vision and the green frankness of Gottfried Keller, the living traditions of great popular festivals, and the sap of spring that swells the forest, — all this still young art, which sometimes rasps the tongue, like the stony fruits of wild pear trees, sometimes has the sugared insipidity of black and blue bilberries, but 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, with them, in the same book of life.

Christophe had sympathy for these men who seek less to appear than to be, and who, beneath the recent varnish of an ultra-modern industrialism, preserve some of the most reposeful traits of the old rustic and bourgeois Europe. He had made among them two or three good friends, grave, serious and faithful, who lived isolated and walled-up in their regrets for the past; they were witnessing the slow disappearance of old Switzerland, with a kind of religious fatalism, a Calvinist pessimism: great grey souls. Christophe saw them rarely. His old wounds had cicatrized in appearance; but they had been too deep to heal entirely. He was afraid of renewing bonds with men. He was afraid of taking up again the chain of affections and sorrows. It was somewhat for this that he was content in a country where it was easy to live apart, a stranger among the crowd of strangers. Moreover, it was rare that he stayed long in the same place; he often changed his lodging: an old nomadic bird, who has need of space, and for whom the homeland is in the air… “Mein Reich ist in der Luft…”

2

A summer evening.

He was walking in the mountain, above a village. He went, his hat in his hand, by a winding path that climbed. Arrived at a pass, the road formed a double bend, in the shade, between two slopes; clumps of hazel, fir trees, bordered it. It was like a little closed world. At one bend and the other, the road seemed finished, reared up at the edge of the void. Beyond, the bluish distances, the luminous air. The calm of evening descended, drop by drop, like a thread of water that tinkled beneath the moss.

They appeared both at once, each at one of the opposite bends of the road. She was dressed in black, she stood out against the clarity of the sky; behind her, two children, a little boy and a little girl, six to eight years old, played and gathered flowers. A few steps off, they recognized each other. Their emotion betrayed itself in their eyes: but no loud word, an imperceptible gesture. He, very troubled; she, … her lips trembled a little. They stopped. Almost in a low voice:

— Grazia!

— You here!

They gave each other their hands, and remained without speaking. Grazia, the first, made an effort to break the silence. She said where she was staying, she asked where he was. Mechanical questions and answers, that they scarcely listened to, that they heard afterward, when they were separated: they were absorbed in the sight of one another. The children had rejoined her. She introduced them to him. He felt for them a hostile sentiment. He looked at them without kindness, and said nothing; he was full of her, uniquely occupied in studying her beautiful face a little suffering and aged. She was hampered by his eyes. She said:

— Will you come, this evening?

She said the name of the hotel.

He asked where her husband was. She showed her mourning. He was too moved to continue the conversation. He left her awkwardly. But after taking two steps, he came back to the children, who were picking strawberries, took them brusquely, kissed them, and fled.

In the evening, he came to the hotel. She was under the glazed veranda. They sat down apart. Few people; two or three old persons. Christophe was dully irritated by their presence. Grazia looked at him. He looked at Grazia, repeating her name, very low.

— I have changed greatly, have I not? she said.

His heart was swollen with emotion.

— You have suffered, he said.

— You too, she said with pity, looking at his face ravaged by sorrow and by passion.

They found no more words.

— I beg you, he said after an instant, let us go elsewhere; can we not speak in a place where we may be alone?

— No, my friend, let us stay, let us stay here, we are well; who is paying attention to us?

— I am not free to speak.

— That is better, thus.

He did not understand why. Later, when he went over in his memory this conversation, he thought she had not had confidence in him. But it was that she had an instinctive fear of scenes of emotion; without realizing it, she sought a shelter against the surprises of their hearts; she even loved the constraint of this intimacy in a hotel parlor, which protected the modesty of her secret trouble.

They told each other, in a low voice, with frequent silences, the main lines of their life. Count Berény had been killed in a duel, a few months before; and Christophe understood 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 question Christophe, and she showed, at the recital of his trials, an affectionate compassion.

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

She asked him to return, the day after tomorrow. He was afflicted that she should be so little eager to see him again. In his heart mingled happiness and sorrow.

The next day, on a pretext, she wrote to him to come. This banal word charmed him. She received him, this time, in her private parlor. She was with her two children. He looked at them, with a little trouble still and much tenderness. He found that the little girl, — the elder, — resembled her mother; he did not ask whom the boy resembled. They talked of the country, of the weather, of the books open on the table; — their eyes spoke another language. He counted on succeeding in speaking to her more intimately. But a friend from the hotel came in. He saw the amiable politeness, with which Grazia received this stranger; she did not seem to make any difference between her two visitors. He was afflicted by it; he did not hold it against her. She proposed a walk together, he accepted; the company of this other, although young and agreeable, chilled him; and his day was spoiled.

He did not see Grazia again for two days. During these two days, he lived only for the hour he was going to spend with her. — This time again, he succeeded no better in speaking to her. Although she was good with him, she did not depart from her reserve. Christophe, without knowing it, added to it by some effusions of Germanic sentimentality, which hampered her, and against which, by instinct, she reacted.

He wrote her a letter, which touched her. He said that life was so short! Their life was so far advanced, already! Perhaps they had but little time left to see each other: it was painful, and almost criminal, not to take advantage of it to speak freely to each other.

She replied, by an affectionate note: she apologized for keeping, in spite of herself, a certain mistrust, since life had wounded her; this habit of reserve, she could not lose it; any too vivid manifestation, even of a true feeling, shocked her, frightened her. But she felt the price of the friendship found again; and she was as happy in it as he. She begged him to come and dine, in the evening.

His heart was inundated with gratitude. In his hotel room, lying on his bed, his head in his pillows, he sobbed. It was the relaxation of ten years of solitude. For since Olivier’s death, he had remained alone. This letter brought the word of resurrection for his heart starved of tenderness. Tenderness!… He believed he had renounced it: he had certainly had to learn to do without it! He felt today how much he had missed it, and all that he had accumulated of love…

Sweet and holy evening that they passed together… He could only speak to her of indifferent subjects, despite their intention of hiding nothing. But how many beneficent things he said at the piano, where she invited him with her gaze to speak to her! She was struck to see the humility of heart of this man, whom she had known proud and violent. When he left, the silent clasp of their hands said they had found each other again, that they would not lose each other any more. — It was raining, without a breath of wind. His heart sang.

She was to stay only a few days more in the country; and she did not delay her departure by an hour, though he dared not ask it of her, nor complain. The last day, they walked alone, with the children; at a 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 can say.

They sat down, at the bend of the road where they had met. She looked, smiling still, at the valley at her feet; but it was not the valley that she saw. He contemplated the sweet face where the torments had left their mark; in the thick black hair, white threads were appearing everywhere. He was seized by a pitying and passionate adoration for this flesh which had suffered, which had been impregnated with the sufferings of the soul. The soul was everywhere visible in these wounds of time. — And he asked, in a low and trembling voice, as a precious favor, that she give him… one of her white hairs.

3

She left. He could not understand why she was not disposed for him to accompany her. He did not doubt her friendship; but her reserve disconcerted him. He could not stay two days in the country; he left in another direction. He tried to occupy his mind in travels, in work. He wrote to Grazia. She replied, two or three weeks later, with short letters, in which appeared a tranquil friendship, without impatience, without anxiety. He suffered from them and he loved them. He did not recognize himself the right to reproach her for them; their affection was too recent, too recently renewed! He trembled to lose her. And yet, each letter that came to him from her breathed a loyal calm that should have given him every security. But she was so different from him!…

They had agreed to meet again in Rome, toward the end of autumn. Without the thought of seeing her again, this journey would have had for Christophe little charm. His long isolation had made him domestic; he had no more taste for these useless displacements, in which the feverish idleness of the people of today delights. He was afraid of a change of habits, dangerous for the regular work of the mind. Besides, Italy did not attract him. He knew it only by the infamous music of the verists and by the tenor airs that the land of Virgil periodically inspires in literary travelers. He felt for it the mistrustful hostility of an avant-garde artist, who has too often heard the name of Rome invoked by the worst champions of academic routine. Finally, that old yeast of instinctive antipathy, which broods at the bottom of the hearts of all men of the North for the men of the South, or at least for the legendary type of oratorical boastfulness which represents, in the eyes of the men of the North, the men of the South. Merely to think of it, Christophe made his disdainful lip… No, he had no desire to make fuller acquaintance with the people without music — (how much do the scratchings of their mandolins and the vociferations of their boastful melodramas count, in the music of present-day Europe?) — But to this people Grazia belonged. To find her again, where and by what roads would Christophe not have gone? He would settle for closing his eyes, until he had rejoined her.

To close his eyes, he was used to that. For so many years, his shutters had been closed upon his inner life! In this end of autumn, it was more necessary than ever. Three weeks in a row, it had rained without respite. Since then, a grey skullcap of impenetrable clouds had weighed upon the valleys and upon the cities of Switzerland, shivering and wet. The eyes had lost the memory of the savor of the sun. To find again in oneself the concentrated energy of it, one had to begin by making complete night, and, under closed eyelids, descend to the bottom of the mine, into the underground galleries of the dream. There slept in the coal the sun of dead days. But to pass one’s life, crouching, digging, one came out from there burned, with stiff back and knees, deformed limbs, half petrified, the gaze clouded, with the eyes of a night bird. Many times, Christophe had brought back from the mine the painfully extracted fire, which warms hearts that are chilled. But the dreams of the North smell of the heat of the stove and the closed room. One does not suspect it, when one lives, inside; one loves this heavy warmth, one loves this half-day and the dreams of the soul in the heavy head. One loves what one has. One must indeed be content with it!…

When at the exit of the Alpine barrier, Christophe, drowsing in a corner of his carriage, saw the immaculate sky and the limpid light that flowed on the slopes of the mountains, it seemed to him he was dreaming. On the other side of the wall, he had just left the extinguished sky, the crepuscular daylight. So abrupt was the change that he felt at first more surprise than joy. He needed some time before his numbed soul stretched itself little by little, until the bark that imprisoned it melted, and the heart freed itself from the shadows of the past. But as the day advanced, the mellow light surrounded him with its arms; and, losing the memory of all that had been, he drank avidly the voluptuousness of seeing.

Plains of Milan. Eye of day reflected in the bluish canals, whose network of veins furrows the downy ricefields. Trees of autumn, with thin and supple carcasses, of a twisting design, with tufts of russet down. Mountains of Vinci, snowy Alps with softened brilliance, whose stormy line encircles the horizon, fringed with red, with orange, with green gold and pale azure. Evening falling upon the Apennines. Winding descent along the abrupt little mountains, with serpentine curves, whose rhythm repeats and chains itself, 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 sleep, suspended, flights of little boats, with folded wings…

On the edge of the sea, at a fishing village, the train remained stopped. They explained to the travelers that, after the great rains, a landslide had occurred in a tunnel, on the line from Genoa to Pisa; all the trains were several hours late. Christophe, who had taken a direct ticket for Rome, was delighted by this mishap which raised the protests of his companions. He leapt onto the platform and took advantage of the stop to go toward the sea, whose gaze was drawing him. It drew him so well that one or two hours later, when the whistle of the departing train sounded, Christophe was in a boat and, seeing it pass, called to it: “Bon voyage!” In the luminous night, on the luminous sea, he let himself be cradled, along the fragrant coast, with the headlands bordered with childlike cypresses. He settled in the village, he spent five days there in a perpetual joy. He was like a man coming out of a long fast, who devours. With all his famished senses, he ate the splendid light… Light, blood of the world that flowest in space like a river of life, and through our eyes, our lips, our nostrils, all the pores of our skin, dost infiltrate to the depths of our flesh, light more necessary to life than bread, — he who sees thee stripped of thy veils of the North, pure, burning and naked, asks himself how he ever could have lived without knowing thee, and knows that he will never be able again to live without possessing thee…

Five days, Christophe was plunged in a drunkenness of sunshine. Five days, he forgot — for the first time — that he was a musician. The music of his being had transmuted itself into light. The air, the sea and the earth: dazzling symphony, that the orchestra of the sun plays. And of this orchestra, with what innate art Italy knows how to make use! The other peoples paint after nature; the Italian collaborates with her; he paints with the sun. Music of colors. Everything is music, everything sings. A simple wall on the road, red, cracked with gold; above, two cypresses with crisp fleece; the sky of an avid blue, around. A marble staircase, white, steep, narrow, which moulds itself between rose-colored walls, toward a blue church façade. Such of these multicolored houses, apricot, citron, lemon-green, that gleam among the olive trees, gives the effect of a marvelous and ripe fruit, in the foliage. The Italian vision is a sensuality; the eyes enjoy colors, as the palate and the tongue do a juicy and perfumed fruit. Upon this new feast, Christophe threw himself, with an avid and naïve gluttony; he took his revenge for the asceticism of the grey visions to which he had been condemned till then. His abundant nature, stifled by fate, suddenly took consciousness of the powers of enjoying with which he had done nothing; they took possession of the prey offered them: smells, colors, music of voices, of bells and of the sea, caresses of the air, warm bath of light in which the old and weary soul stretches itself out… Christophe thought of nothing. He was in a voluptuous beatitude. He emerged from it only to share his joy with those he met: his boatman, an old fisherman, with lively, wrinkled eyes, crowned with a red Venetian senator’s cap; — his only fellow-diner, a Milanese, who ate macaroni, while rolling his eyes of Othello, atrocious, black with furious hate, an apathetic, sleepy 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 coquettish glances, who begged on the road, offering to those passing an orange with the green branch. He hailed the carters, sprawled, head down, in the bottoms of their carts, and pushing out, by intermittent fits, the thousand and one couplets of a nasal song, lazy and bawling. He caught himself humming Cavalleria rusticana. The goal of his journey was completely forgotten. Forgotten, his haste to reach the goal, to rejoin Grazia…

Until the day when the loved image awoke. Was it a glance, encountered on the road, was it an inflection of voice, grave and singing, that evoked it? He was not conscious of it. But there came an hour when, from all that surrounded him, from the circle of hills covered with olives, and from the high polished ridges of the Apennine, that thick shadow and ardent sun sculpt, and from the orange woods heavy with flowers and fruit, and from the deep breathing of the sea, radiated the smiling face of the friend. Through the innumerable eyes of the air, her eyes looked at him. She flowered from this beloved earth, like a rose from a rosebush.

Then, he pulled himself together. He took the train again for Rome, without stopping anywhere. Nothing interested him of the Italian memories, of the cities of art of the past. Of Rome he saw nothing, he sought to see nothing; and what he glimpsed of it, in passing, at first, of new quarters without style, of square buildings, did not inspire him with the desire to know more.

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

— By what route did you come? Did you stop at Milan, at Florence?

— No, he said. Why should I?

She laughed.

— Fine answer! And what do you think of Rome?

— Nothing, he said, I have seen nothing.

— But still?

— Nothing. Not a monument. On leaving the hotel, I came to your place. — Ten steps suffice, to see Rome… Look at this wall, opposite… One has only to see its light.

— I see only you, he said.

— You are a barbarian, you see only your idea. And when did you leave Switzerland?

— Eight days ago.

— What have you been doing, then, since?

— I don’t know. I stopped, by chance, in a country near the sea. I scarcely noticed the name. I slept for eight days. Slept, with eyes open. I do not know what I saw, I do not know what I dreamed. I think I dreamed of you. I know that it was very beautiful. But the most beautiful is that I have forgotten everything…

— Thanks, she said.

(He did not listen.)

— … Everything, he resumed, all that was then, all that was before. I am like a new man, who is beginning again to live.

— That is true, she said, looking at him with her laughing eyes. You have changed, since our last meeting.

He looked at her too, and found her no less different from the one he remembered. Not that she had changed, however, in two months. But he saw her with all-new eyes. Yonder, in Switzerland, the image of the old days, the light shadow of the young Grazia interposed itself between his gaze and the present friend. Now, in the sunshine of Italy, the dreams of the North had melted; he saw in the clarity of day the soul and the real body of the beloved. How far she was from the seasonal chamois-girl at Paris, far from the young woman with the smile of Saint John, whom he had met one evening, shortly after her marriage, only to lose her again at once! From the little Umbrian Madonna had flowered a beautiful Roman woman:

Color verus, corpus solidum et succi plenum.

Her forms had taken on a harmonious fullness; her body was bathed in a proud languor. The genius of calm surrounded her. She had this gluttony for the sunlit silence, for motionless contemplation, this voluptuous enjoyment of the peace of living, that the souls of the North will never know well. What she had preserved above all from the past, was her great goodness, which penetrated all her other feelings. But one read new things in her luminous smile: a melancholy indulgence, a touch of weariness, much understanding of souls, a tinge of irony, a peaceable good sense. Age had veiled her with a certain coldness, which sheltered her against the illusions of the heart; she rarely gave herself; and her tenderness kept on its guard, with a clear-sighted smile, against the bursts of passion which Christophe had trouble repressing. With that, weaknesses, moments of abandon to the breath of days, a coquetry that she mocked herself, but did not combat. No revolt against things, nor against herself: a very gentle fatalism, in a nature all good and a little tired.

4

She received much, and without much choosing, — at least in appearance; — but as her intimates belonged, in general, to the same world, breathed the same atmosphere, had been shaped by the same habits, this society formed a fairly homogeneous harmony, very different from those Christophe had heard, in Germany and France. Most were of old Italian stock, vivified here and there by foreign marriages; there reigned among them a surface cosmopolitanism, in which mingled with ease the four principal languages and the intellectual baggage of the four great nations of the Occident. Each people there brought its personal contribution, the Jews their inquietude and the Anglo-Saxons their phlegm; but the whole, at once melted in the Italian crucible. When centuries of great pillaging barons have engraved in a race such a haughty and rapacious profile of bird of prey, the metal may change, the imprint remains the same. Some of these figures which seemed the most Italian, a smile of Luini, a voluptuous and calm look of Titian, flowers of the Adriatic or of the Lombard plains, had blossomed on shrubs of the North transplanted in the old Latin soil. Whatever the colors crushed on the palette of Rome, the color that comes out is always Roman.

Christophe, without being able to analyze his impression, admired the perfume of secular culture, of old civilization, that these souls breathed, often mediocre enough, and, some even, below mediocre. Impalpable perfume, which held to trifles, a courteous grace, a softness of manners that knew how to be affectionate, while keeping its malice and its rank, an elegant finesse of look, of smile, of alert and nonchalant intelligence, skeptical, varied and easy. Nothing stiff and arrogant. Nothing bookish. One had not to fear meeting here one of those psychologists of Parisian salons, lurking behind his eyeglass, or the corporalism of some German doctor. Men, quite simply, and very human men, such as already were the friends of Terence and of Scipio Aemilianus…

Homo sum…

Fine façade. Life was more apparent than real. Beneath, the incurable frivolity, common to the worldly society of all countries. But what gave to this one its racial characters, 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 slumber in the warm shadow, on the tepid pillow of a soft epicurism and of an ironic intelligence, very supple, fairly curious, and prodigiously indifferent, at bottom.

All these men lacked decided opinions. They mingled in politics and in art, with the same dilettantism. One saw there charming natures, those beautiful Italian patrician figures with fine features, intelligent and sweet eyes, tranquil manners, who loved with exquisite taste and an affectionate heart nature, the old painters, flowers, women, books, good cheer, the homeland, music… They loved everything. They preferred nothing. One had the feeling sometimes that they loved nothing. Love nonetheless held a large place in their life; but it was on condition that it should not trouble it. It was indolent and lazy, like them; even in passion, it readily took on a familial character. Their intelligence, well made and harmonious, accommodated itself to an inertia in which the contraries of thought met, without jolts, tranquilly associated, smiling, blunted, rendered inoffensive. They were afraid of entire beliefs, of excessive parties, and found themselves at ease in half-solutions and half-thoughts. They were of conservative-liberal mind. They needed a politics and an art at mid-height: such as those climatic resorts, where one does not risk having one’s breath cut and palpitations. They recognized themselves in the lazy theater of Goldoni, or in the even and diffuse light of Manzoni. Their amiable nonchalance was not disturbed thereby. They would not have said, like their great ancestors: “Primum vivere…,” but rather: “Dapprima, quieto vivere.”

To live tranquil. It was the secret vow, the will of all, even of the most energetic, of those who directed political action. Such a little Machiavelli, master of himself and of others, the heart as cold as the head, the intelligence lucid and bored, knowing, daring to use all means to his ends, ready to sacrifice all his friendships to his ambition, was capable of sacrificing his ambition to one single thing: his quieto vivere. They had need of long periods of annihilation. When they came out of it, just as after a good sleep, they were fresh and disposed; these grave men, these tranquil madonnas; were brusquely seized with a craving for words, for gaiety, for social life: they needed to spend themselves in a volubility of gestures and of words, of paradoxical sallies, of burlesque humor: they played opera buffa. In this gallery of Italian portraits, one would rarely have found the wear of thought, that metallic flash of pupils, those faces withered by the perpetual work of the mind, as one sees, in the North. Yet there was no lack, here as everywhere, of souls who gnawed at themselves and who hid their wounds, of desires, of cares that smoldered beneath the indifference and, voluptuously, wrapped themselves in torpor. Without speaking, in certain ones, of strange escapes, baroque, disconcerting, indices of an obscure disequilibrium, peculiar to very old races, — like the faults that open in the Roman Campagna.

There was much charm in the nonchalant enigma of these souls, of these calm and bantering eyes, where slept a hidden tragic. But Christophe was not in the humor to recognize it. It enraged him to see Grazia surrounded by people of the world, witty and empty. He held it against them, and held it against her. He sulked at her, just as he sulked at Rome. He spaced his visits, he promised himself to leave again.

5

He did not leave again. He was already beginning to feel, unconsciously, the attraction of this Italian world, which irritated him.

For the moment, he isolated himself. He strolled in Rome, and around. The Roman light, the hanging gardens, the Campagna, which the sunlit sea girdles, like a golden scarf, revealed to him little by little the secret of the enchanted earth. He had sworn not to take a step to go and see those dead monuments, which he affected to disdain; he said grumblingly that he would wait for them to come and find him. They came; he met them, at the chance of his walks, in the City with the undulating soil. He saw, without having sought it, the red Forum, at sunset, and the half-crumbled arches of the Palatine, at the bottom of which the deep azure hollows itself out, abyss of blue light. He wandered in the immense Campagna, near the reddish Tiber, fat with mud, like earth that walks, — and along the ruined aqueducts, gigantic vertebrae of antediluvian monsters. Thick masses of black clouds rolled in the blue sky. Peasants on horseback drove, with blows of the goad, across the desert, herds of great pearl-gray oxen with long horns; and, on the ancient way, straight, dusty and bare, goat-footed shepherds, their thighs covered with shaggy skins, plodded in silence, with theories of little asses and little donkey-foals. At the bottom of the horizon, the chain of the Sabine, with Olympian lines, unrolled its hills; and on the other rim of the cup of the sky, the old walls of the city, the façade of Saint John, surmounted by dancing statues, outlined their black silhouettes… Silence… Sun of fire… The wind passed over the plain… On a headless statue, with the arm swaddled, beaten by the waves of grass, a lizard, whose peaceful heart palpitated, was absorbed, motionless, in his meal of light. And Christophe, his head buzzing with sun (and sometimes also with the wine of the Castelli), near the broken marble, seated on the black soil, smiling, drowsy and bathed in forgetfulness, drank the calm and violent strength of Rome. — Until nightfall. — Then, his heart gripped by a sudden anguish, he fled the funereal solitude in which the tragic light was being engulfed… O earth, ardent earth, passionate and mute earth! Beneath thy feverish peace, I still hear the trumpets of the legions sounding. What furies of life rumble in thy breast! What desire of awakening!

Christophe found souls in which burned embers of the secular fire. Beneath the dust of the dead, they had been preserved. One would have thought this fire had gone out, with the eyes of Mazzini. It was living again. The same. Very few wished to see it. It troubled the quietude of those who slept. It was a clear and brutal light. Those who bore it, — young men (the eldest was not thirty-five), an elite come from every point of the horizon, free intellectuals, who differed, among themselves, in temperament, in education, in opinions and in faith — were united in the same cult for this flame of new life. The labels of parties, the systems of thought did not count for them: the great affair was to “think with courage.” To be frank, to be brave, in mind and in deed. They roughly shook the slumber of their race. After the political resurrection of Italy, awakened from death at the call of heroes, after its quite recent economic resurrection, they had undertaken to tear from the tomb the Italian thought. They suffered, as from an insult, from the lazy and fearful atony of the elite, from its cowardice of mind, from its word-worship. Their voice rang out in the fog of rhetoric and moral servitude, accumulated over the centuries on the soul of the fatherland. They blew into it their pitiless realism and their intransigent loyalty. They had the passion of clear intelligence, followed by energetic action. Capable, on occasion, of sacrificing the preferences of their personal reason to the duty of discipline that national life imposes on the individual, they reserved nonetheless their highest altar and their purest ardors to truth. They loved her, with a fiery and pious heart. Insulted by his adversaries, defamed, threatened, one of the chiefs of these young men replied, with calm grandeur:

“Respect the truth. I speak to you, with open heart, free of all rancor. I forget the harm I have received from you and that I may have done to you. Be truthful. There is no conscience, there is no loftiness of life, there is no capacity for sacrifice, there is no nobility, where there does not exist a religious, rigid and rigorous respect for truth. Exercise yourselves in this difficult duty. The false corrupts him who uses it, before vanquishing him against whom it is used. That you should gain immediate success thereby, what does it matter? The roots of your soul will be suspended in the void on the soil eaten away by falsehood. I no longer speak to you as an adversary. We are on a terrain superior to our dissensions, even if in your mouth your passion adorns itself with the name of fatherland. There is something greater than the fatherland, it is the human conscience. There are laws that you must not violate, under pain of being bad Italians. You have before you only a man who seeks the truth; you must hear his cry. You have before you only a man who ardently desires to see you great and pure, and to work with you. For, whether you wish 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 that we cannot foresee) will bear our common mark, if we have acted with truth. The essence of man is there: in his marvelous faculty of seeking the truth, of seeing her, of loving her, and of sacrificing himself to her. — Truth, who pourest upon those who possess thee the magic breath of thy powerful 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 hazards of the struggle of peoples and of ideas might one day throw them, against each other, in the mêlée; but friends or enemies, they were, they would always be of the same human family. They knew it, like him. 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 the works of his friend — (some volumes of verse, essays of criticism), — which were in Paris read only by a small number, had been translated by these Italians and were as familiar to them as 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 uniquely Italian, incapable of an effort to come out of themselves, rooted in the thought of their race. At bottom, they sought, in good faith, in foreign works, only what their national instinct wanted to find there; often, they took from them only what they had put in them, of themselves, without knowing it. Mediocre critics and poor psychologists, they were too whole, full of themselves and of their passions, even when they were the most enamored of truth. Italian idealism does not know how to forget itself; it is not interested in the impersonal dreams of the North; it brings everything back to itself, to its desires, to its racial pride, which it transfigures. Consciously or not, it always works for the terza Roma. One must say that, for centuries, it has not given itself much trouble to realize it. These handsome Italians, well cut out for action, act only by passion, and grow weary quickly of acting; but when passion blows, it lifts them higher than all other peoples: one has seen it by the example of their Risorgimento. — It was one of those great winds that was beginning to pass over Italian youth of all parties: nationalists, socialists, neo-Catholics, free idealists, all irreducible Italians, all, by hope and by will, citizens of imperial Rome, queen of the universe.

At first, Christophe only noticed their generous ardor and the common antipathies that united him with them. They could not fail to be in agreement with him, in contempt of worldly society, against which Christophe still bore a grudge over Grazia’s preferences. They hated more than he this spirit of prudence, this apathy, these compromises and these harlequinades, these half-said things, these amphibian thoughts, this subtle balancing between all possibilities, without deciding for any, these fine phrases, this sweetness. Robust self-taught men, who had made themselves out of whole cloth, and who had had neither the means nor the leisure to give themselves the last stroke of the plane, they readily exaggerated their natural rudeness and their somewhat sharp tone of ill-rough-hewn contadini. They wanted to be heard. They wanted to be combated. Anything, rather than indifference. They would, to awaken the energies of their race, have joyfully consented to being its first victims.

In the meantime, they were not loved and they did nothing to be so. Christophe had little success, when he wished to speak to Grazia of his new friends. They were displeasing to this nature enamored of measure and peace. One had to acknowledge with her that they had a manner of supporting the best causes, which sometimes made one wish to declare oneself their enemy. They were ironic and aggressive, of a harshness of criticism which bordered on insult, even with people they had no wish to wound. They were too sure of themselves, too eager to generalize, to affirm violently. Arrived at public action before having arrived at the maturity of their development, they passed from one infatuation to another, with the same intolerance. Passionately sincere, giving themselves entirely, without sparing anything, 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 burned by it. Nothing fruitful is done save with time and silence. Time and silence had been lacking to them. It is the misfortune of too many Italian talents. Violent and hasty action is an alcohol. The intelligence which has tasted it has much difficulty afterward in unaccustoming itself from it; and its normal growth risks remaining forced and falsified forever.

Christophe appreciated the acid freshness of this green frankness, by contrast with the insipidity of the people of the just middle, of the vie di mezzo, who have an eternal fear of compromising themselves and a subtle talent for saying neither yes nor no. But it happened to him soon to find that these latter, with their calm and courteous intelligence, also had their value. The state of perpetual combat in which his friends lived was wearying. Christophe believed it his duty to go to Grazia’s, in order to defend them. He went there sometimes, 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 is not retraced. At bottom, Christophe well knew that he had said farewell, for his part, to these violences, and that he was making his way toward peace, of which Grazia’s eyes seemed to hold the secret. Why then did he revolt against her?… Ah! it was that he would have wished, by an egoism of love, to be alone in enjoying it. He could not bear that Grazia should dispense its benefits, without counting, to all comers, that she should be prodigal toward all of her charming welcome.

6

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

— You hold it against me to be as I am? You must not idealize me, my friend. I am a woman, I am worth no more than another. I do not seek the world; but I confess that it is agreeable to me, just as I take pleasure in going sometimes to not very good theaters, in reading somewhat insignificant books, that you disdain, but which rest me and amuse me. I can refuse myself nothing.

— How can you endure these imbeciles?

— Life has taught me not to be difficult. One must not ask too much of it. It is already much, I assure you, when one has to do with decent people, not wicked, fairly good… (naturally, on condition of expecting nothing from them; I know well that if I had need of them, I would not find many people any more…) Yet they are attached to me; and when I meet a little real affection, I make light of the rest. You hold it against me, do you not? Forgive me for being mediocre. I know at least how to make the difference between what is best and what is less good in me. And what is with you, is the best.

— I would like everything, he said, in a sulky tone.

He felt, however, that she said true. He was so sure of her affection that after having hesitated for weeks, one day he asked her:

— Will you never wish… ?

— What then?

— To be mine.

He recovered himself:

— … that I should be yours?

She smiled:

— But you are mine, my friend.

— You know well what I mean.

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

— No, my friend, she said with tenderness.

He could not speak. She saw he was afflicted.

— Forgive me, I cause you pain. I knew you would say that to me. We must speak in all truth, like good friends.

— Friends, he said sadly. Nothing more?

— Ungrateful one! What more do you want? To marry me?… Do you remember once, 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 life could have been changed. Now, I think it is better, thus; it is better that we did not expose our friendship to the test of life in common, of that daily life, in which whatever is most pure ends by being debased…

— You say that, because you love me less.

— Oh! no, I love you always as much.

— Ah! it is the first time you have told me so.

— There must no longer be anything hidden between us. You see, I do not much believe in marriage. Mine, I know, is not a sufficient example. But I have reflected and looked around me. They are rare, happy marriages. It is a little against nature. One cannot chain together the wills of two beings save by mutilating one of them, if not both; and these are not even, perhaps, sufferings in which the soul has profit to be tempered.

— Ah! he said, I see in it so beautiful a thing, on the contrary, the union of two sacrifices, two souls mingled into one!

— A beautiful thing, in your dream. In reality, you would suffer more than anyone.

— What! you believe that I shall never be able to have a wife, a family, children?… Do not tell me that! I would love them so! Do you not believe this happiness possible for me?

— I do not know. I do not believe so. Perhaps with a good woman, not very intelligent, not very pretty, who would be devoted to you, and would not understand you.

— How wicked you are!… But you are wrong to mock. It is good, a good woman, even one who has no spirit.

— I should think so! Do you want me to find you one?

— Be silent, I beg you, you pierce my heart. How can you speak so?

— What have I said?

— You do not love me at all then, not at all, to think of marrying me to another?

— But it is on the contrary because I love you, that I would be happy to do what could make you happy.

— Then, if it is true…

— No, no, do not come back to it. I tell you that it would be your misfortune.

— Do not worry about me. I swear to be happy! But tell the truth: do you believe that you, you 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: I believe that nothing could make me wholly unhappy, now. I have seen too many things, I have become a philosopher… But to speak frankly, — (you ask me, do you not? you will not be angry?) — well then, I know my weakness, I would perhaps be silly enough, at the end of a few months, not to be entirely happy with you; and that, I do not wish, just because I have for you the most holy affection; and I do not want anything in the world to be able to tarnish it.

He, sadly:

— Yes, you say so, to sugar the pill for me. I displease you. There are things, in me, which are odious to you.

— But no, I assure you. Do not look so abashed. You are a good and dear man.

— Then, I do not understand any more. Why could we not suit each other?

— Because we are too different, of too marked a character, both of us, too personal.

— It is for that I love you.

— I too. But it is also for that we would find ourselves in conflict.

— But no.

— But yes. Or else, as I know that you are worth more than I, I should reproach myself for hampering you, with my little personality; and then, I would stifle it, I would be silent, and I would suffer.

Tears come to Christophe’s eyes.

— Oh! that, I do not want. Never! I prefer every misfortune, rather than that you should suffer through my fault, for me.

— My friend, do not be affected by it… You know, I say so, I flatter myself perhaps… Perhaps I would not be good enough to sacrifice myself to you.

— So much the better!

— But then, it is you whom I would sacrifice, and it is I who would torment myself, in my turn… You see well, it is insoluble, on the one side as on the other. Let us remain as we are. Is there anything better than our friendship?

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

— Yes, all that, it is that at bottom you do not love enough.

She smiles too, gently, a little melancholy. She says, with a sigh:

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

— Alas! with this old head, these wrinkles, this withered complexion!

— I know well that you have suffered, as much as I, perhaps more. I see it. But you look at me sometimes, with the eyes of an adolescent; and I feel welling up from you a flood of life all fresh. I, I have been extinguished. When I think, alas! of my ardor of former days! As the other says, those were the good times then, I was very unhappy! Now, I have no longer enough strength to be so. I have but a thread of life. I would no longer be bold enough to dare the trial of marriage. Ah! once, once!… If someone whom I know had made me a sign!…

— Well, well, say it…

— No, it is not worthwhile…

— So, formerly, if I had… Oh! my God!

— What! if you had? I have said nothing.

— I have understood. You are cruel.

— Well then, formerly, I was mad, that is all.

— What you say there is still worse.

— Poor Christophe! I cannot say a word that does not hurt him. I will say nothing more, then.

— But yes! Tell me… Say something.

— What?

— Something good.

She laughs.

— Do not laugh.

— And you, do not be sad.

— How do you want me not to be?

— You have no reason for it, I assure you.

— Why?

— Because you have a friend who loves you well.

— Is it true?

— If I tell you so, do you not believe it?

— Say it again!

— You will not be sad any more, then? You will not be insatiable any more? You will know how to content yourself with our dear friendship?

— I must!

— Ungrateful, ungrateful! And you say that you love? At bottom, I believe that I love you more than you love me.

— Ah! if that were possible!

He said this, with such an outburst of amorous egoism that she laughed. He also. He insisted:

— Say it!…

For an instant, she was silent, looked at him, then suddenly brought her head close to Christophe’s, and kissed him. It was so unexpected! He had a shock in the heart. He wanted to clasp her in his arms. Already, she had freed herself. At the door of the little parlor, she looked at him, a finger on her lips, going: “Hush!” — and disappeared.

7

From that moment, he spoke to her no more of his love, and he was less hampered in his relations with her. Upon alternations of stilted silence and ill-compressed violence there succeeded a simple and recollected intimacy. It is the benefit of frankness in friendship. No more innuendos, no more illusions or fears. They knew, each, the bottom of the other’s thought. When Christophe found himself with Grazia in the society of those indifferent people who irritated him, when impatience seized him again to hear his friend exchange with them those somewhat silly things, which are the ordinary of drawing-rooms, she noticed it, looked at him, smiled. That was enough, he knew that they were together; and peace came back down into him.

The presence of what one loves tears from the imagination its envenomed sting; the fever of desire falls; the soul absorbs itself in the chaste possession of the loved presence. — Grazia radiated, moreover, upon those who surrounded her the silent charm of her harmonious nature. Any exaggeration, even involuntary, of a gesture or of an accent, wounded her, like something that was not simple and was not beautiful. By this, she acted in the long run upon Christophe. After having champed at the bit set upon his outbursts, he gained from it little by little a mastery of self, a strength the greater because it no longer spent itself in vain violences.

Their souls mingled. Grazia’s half-sleep, smiling in her abandon to the sweetness of living, awoke at the contact of Christophe’s moral energy. She conceived, for things of the mind, a more direct and less passive interest. She, who scarcely read, who rather re-read indefinitely the same old books with a lazy affection, began to feel curiosity for other thoughts and soon their attraction. The wealth of the world of modern ideas, of which she was not ignorant, but into which she had no taste for venturing alone, no longer intimidated her, now that she had, to guide her into it, a companion. Insensibly, she let herself be brought, while defending herself against it, to understand this young Italy, whose iconoclastic ardors had long displeased her.

But the benefit of this mutual penetration of souls was above all for Christophe. 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 stronger, he must take more. Thus, Christophe had already enriched himself with the spirit of Olivier. But his new mystical marriage was much more fruitful: for Grazia brought him as dowry the rarest treasure, that Olivier had never possessed: joy. Joy of the soul and of the eyes. Light. The smile of that Latin sky, which bathes the ugliness of the humblest things, which flowers the stones of old walls, and communicates to sadness itself its calm radiance.

She had as ally the renascent spring. The dream of new life brooded in the warmth of the numbed air. Young greenery wedded itself to the silver-grey olives. Beneath the dark-red arcades of the ruined aqueducts, white almond trees flowered. In the awakened Campagna undulated the waves of grass and the flames of the triumphant poppies. On the lawns of the villas flowed streams of mauve anemones and sheets of violets. Wisterias climbed around the umbrella pines; and the wind that passed over the city brought the perfume of the roses of the Palatine.

They walked together. When she consented to come out of her Oriental torpor, in which she absorbed herself for hours, she became quite another; she liked to walk: tall, the legs long, the figure robust and supple, she had the silhouette of a Diana by Primaticcio. — Most often, they went to one of those villas, wrecks from the shipwreck in which the splendid Rome of the settecento foundered beneath the waves of Piedmontese barbarism. They had a predilection for the Villa Mattei, that promontory of ancient Rome, at whose foot come to die the last waves of the deserted Campagna. They followed the alley of oaks, whose deep vault frames the blue chain, the sweet Alban chain, which swells gently like a heart that palpitates. Ranged along the way, tombs of Roman spouses showed, through the foliage, their melancholy faces and the faithful clasping of their hands. They sat down at the end of the alley, under a bower of roses, leaning against a white sarcophagus. Before them, the desert. Profound peace. The whispering of a fountain with slow drops, that seemed to expire of languor. They talked in undertones. Grazia’s gaze rested with confidence on her friend’s. Christophe spoke of his life, his struggles, his past pains; they had nothing sad about them any more. Near her, beneath her gaze, all was simple, all was as it ought to be… In her turn, she narrated. He barely heard what she said; but none of her thoughts was lost on him. He espoused her soul. He saw with her eyes. He saw everywhere her eyes, her tranquil eyes in which burned a deep fire; he saw them in the beautiful mutilated faces of the antique statues and in the enigma of their mute gazes; he saw them in the sky of Rome, which laughed amorously around the woolly cypresses and between the fingers of the lecci, black, glossy, riddled by the arrows of the sun.

Through Grazia’s eyes, the meaning of Latin art infiltrated his heart. Up till then, Christophe had remained indifferent to Italian works. The barbarian idealist, the great bear come from the Germanic forest, had not yet learned to taste the voluptuous savor of the beautiful marbles gilded, like a honeycomb. The antiques of the Vatican were frankly hostile to him. He had a disgust for those stupid heads, those effeminate or massive proportions, that banal and rounded modeling, those Gitons and those gladiators. Scarcely did a few statue-portraits find favor with his eyes; and their models were without interest for him. He was not much more tender toward the pale and grimacing Florentines, toward the sickly madonnas, the Pre-Raphaelite Venuses, poor of blood, consumptive, mannered and worn. And the bestial stupidity of the swaggerers and the red and sweating athletes, that the example of the Sistine has loosed upon the world, seemed to him cannon fodder. For Michelangelo alone, he had a secret piety, for his tragic sufferings, for his divine contempt, and for the seriousness of his chaste passions. He loved, with a pure and barbarous love, like the master’s own, the religious nudity of his adolescents, his tawny and fierce virgins, like hunted beasts, the sorrowful Aurora, the Madonna with the savage eyes, whose child bites the breast, and the beautiful Leah, whom he would have wanted for wife. But in the soul of the tormented hero, he found nothing more than the magnified echo of his own.

Grazia opened to him the doors of a new world of art. He entered into the sovereign serenity of Raphael and of Titian. He saw the imperial splendor of the classical genius, which reigns, like a lion, over the universe of forms conquered and mastered. The lightning vision of the great Venetian, which goes straight to the heart and cleaves with its flash the uncertain fogs that veil life, the all-powerful dominating power of those Latin minds, which know how not only to conquer, but to conquer themselves, who impose, victorious, upon themselves the strictest discipline, and, on the battlefield, know how to choose exactly amongst the spoils of the felled enemy and carry off their prey, — the Olympian portraits and the Stanze of Raphael, filled Christophe’s heart with a music richer than that of Wagner. Music of serene lines, of noble architectures, of harmonious groups. Music that radiates from the perfect beauty of the face, of the hands, of the charming feet, of the draperies and of the gestures. Intelligence. Love. Stream of love that wells up from these souls and these bodies of adolescents. Power of the spirit and of voluptuousness. Young tenderness, ironic wisdom, obsessing and warm odor of amorous flesh, luminous smile in which shadows fade away, in which passion falls asleep. Quivering forces of life that rear up and that the master’s calm hand tames, like the horses of the Sun…

And Christophe asked himself:

— “Is it then impossible to unite, as they have done, Roman strength and peace? Today, the best aspire to the one of the two only to the detriment of the other. Of all peoples, the Italians seem to have most lost the sense of this harmony, that Poussin, that Lorrain, that Goethe heard. Must, once more, a foreigner reveal to them its value?… And who will teach it to our musicians? Music has not yet had its Raphael. Mozart is but a child, a little German bourgeois, who has feverish hands and a sentimental soul, and who says too many words and makes too many gestures, and who speaks and weeps and laughs, for nothing. And neither Bach the Gothic, nor the Prometheus of Bonn, who struggles with the vulture, nor his posterity of Titans who pile Pelion on Ossa and rail against the heavens, has ever glimpsed the smile of God…”

Since he had seen it, Christophe blushed at his own music; his vain agitations, his swollen passions, his indiscreet complaints, this display of self, this lack of measure, seemed to him at once pitiful and shameful. A flock without a shepherd, a kingdom without a king. — One must be the king of the tumultuous soul…

During those months, Christophe seemed to have forgotten music. He scarcely wrote any; he did not feel the need of it. His mind, fecundated by Rome, was in gestation. He passed the days in a state of dreaming and of half-intoxication. Nature was, like him, in this first spring, in which there mingles with the languor of the awakening a voluptuous vertigo. She and he, they dreamed, entwined, like lovers who, in sleep, embrace one another. The feverish enigma of the Campagna was no longer hostile and disquieting to him; he had made himself master of its tragic beauty; he held in his arms Demeter sleeping.