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Title: Jean-Christophe Journey's End

Author: Romain Rolland

Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7967]
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JEAN-CHRISTOPHE
JOURNEY'S END

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
THE BURNING BUSH
THE NEW DAWN

BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND

Translated by
GILBERT CANNAN

WITH PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR




CONTENTS


LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

THE BURNING BUSH

THE NEW DAWN




LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

I


In spite of the success which was beginning to materialize outside
France, the two friends found their financial position very slow in
mending. Every now and then there recurred moments of penury when they
were obliged to go without food. They made up for it by eating twice as
much as they needed when they had money. But, on the whole, it was a
trying existence.

For the time being they were in the period of the lean kine. Christophe
had stayed up half the night to finish a dull piece of musical
transcription for Hecht: he did not get to bed until dawn, and slept
like a log to make up for lost time. Olivier had gone out early: he had
a lecture to give at the other end of Paris. About eight o'clock the
porter came with the letters, and rang the bell. As a rule he did not
wait for them to come, but just slipped the letters under the door. This
morning he went on knocking. Only half awake, Christophe went to the
door growling: he paid no attention to what the smiling, loquacious
porter was saying about an article in the paper, but just took the
letters without looking at them, pushed the door to without closing it,
went to bed, and was soon fast asleep once more.

An hour later he woke up with a start on hearing some one in his room:
and he was amazed to see a strange face at the foot of his bed, a
complete stranger bowing gravely to him. It was a journalist, who,
finding the door open, had entered without ceremony. Christophe was
furious, and jumped out of bed:

"What the devil are you doing here?" he shouted.

He grabbed his pillow to hurl it at the intruder, who skipped back. He
explained himself. A reporter of the Nation wished to interview M.
Krafft about the article which had appeared in the _Grand Journal_.

"What article?"

"Haven't you read it?"

The reporter began to tell him what it was about.

Christophe went to bed again. If he had not been so sleepy he would have
kicked the fellow out: but it was less trouble to let him talk. He
curled himself up in the bed, closed his eyes, and pretended to be
asleep. And very soon he would really have been off, but the reporter
stuck to his guns, and in a loud voice read the beginning of the
article. At the very first words Christophe pricked up his ears. M.
Krafft was referred to as the greatest musical genius of the age.
Christophe forgot that he was pretending to be asleep, swore in
astonishment, sat up in bed, and said:

"They are mad! Who has been pulling their legs?"

The reporter seized the opportunity, and stopped reading to ply
Christophe with a series of questions, which he answered unthinkingly.
He had picked up the paper, and was gazing in utter amazement at his own
portrait, which was printed as large as life on the front page: but he
had no time to read the article, for another journalist entered the
room. This time Christophe was really angry. He told them to get out:
but they did not comply until they had made hurried notes of the
furniture in the room, and the photographs on the wall, and the features
of the strange being who, between laughter and anger, thrust them out of
the room, and, in his nightgown, took them to the door and bolted it
after them.

But it was ordained that he should not be left in peace that day. He had
not finished dressing when there came another knock at the door, a
prearranged knock which was only known to a few of their friends.
Christophe opened the door, and found himself face to face with yet
another stranger, whom he was just about to dismiss in a summary
fashion, when the man protested that he was the author of the
article.... How are you to get rid of a man who regards you as a genius!
Christophe had grumpily to submit to his admirer's effusions. He was
amazed at the sudden notoriety which had come like a bolt from the blue,
and he wondered if, without knowing it, he had had a masterpiece
produced the evening before. But he had no time to find out. The
journalist had come to drag him, whether he liked it or not, there and
then, to the offices of the paper where the editor, the great Arsene
Gamache himself, wished to see him: the car was waiting downstairs.
Christophe tried to get out of it: but, in spite of himself, he was so
naively responsive to the journalist's friendly protestations that in
the end he gave way.

Ten minutes later he was introduced to a potentate in whose presence all
men trembled. He was a sturdy little man, about fifty, short and stout,
with a big round head, gray hair brushed up, a red face, a masterful way
of speaking, a thick, affected accent, and every now and then he would
break out into a choppy sort of volubility. He had forced himself on
Paris by his enormous self-confidence. A business man, with a knowledge
of men, naive and deep, passionate, full of himself, he identified his
business with the business of France, and even with the affairs of
humanity. His own interests, the prosperity of his paper, and the
_salus publica_, all seemed to him to be of equal importance and to
be narrowly associated. He had no doubt that any man who wronged him,
wronged France also: and to crush an adversary, he would in perfectly
good faith have overthrown the Government. However, he was by no means
incapable of generosity. He was an idealist of the after-dinner order,
and loved to be a sort of God Almighty, and to lift some poor devil or
other out of the mire, by way of demonstrating the greatness of his
power, whereby he could make something out of nothing, make and unmake
Ministers, and, if he had cared to, make and unmake Kings. His sphere
was the universe. He would make men of genius, too, if it so pleased
him.

That day he had just "made" Christophe.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was Olivier who in all innocence had belled the cat.

Olivier, who could do nothing to advance his own interests, and had a
horror of notoriety, and avoided journalists like the plague, took quite
another view of these things where his friend was in question. He was
like those loving mothers, the right-living women of the middle-class,
those irreproachable wives, who would sell themselves to procure any
advantage for their rascally young sons.

Writing for the reviews, and finding himself in touch with a number of
critics and dilettanti, Olivier never let slip an opportunity of talking
about Christophe: and for some time past he had been surprised to find
that they listened to him. He could feel a sort of current of curiosity,
a mysterious rumor flying about literary and polite circles. What was
its origin? Were there echoes of newspaper opinion, following on the
recent performances of Christophe's work in England and Germany? It
seemed impossible to trace it to any definite source. It was one of
those frequent phenomena of those men who sniff the air of Paris, and
can tell the day before, more exactly than the meteorological
observatory of the tower of Saint-Jacques, what wind is blowing up for
the morrow, and what it will bring with it. In that great city of
nerves, through which electric vibrations pass, there are invisible
currents of fame, a latent celebrity which precedes the actuality, the
vague gossip of the drawing-rooms, the _nescio quid majus nascitur
Iliade_, which, at a given moment, bursts out in a puffing article,
the blare of the trumpet which drives the name of the new idol into the
thickest heads. Sometimes that trumpet-blast alienates the first and
best friends of the man whose glory it proclaims. And yet they are
responsible for it.

So Olivier had a share in the article in the _Grand Journal_. He
had taken advantage of the interest displayed in Christophe, and had
carefully stoked it up with adroitly worded information. He had been
careful not to bring Christophe directly into touch with the
journalists, for he was afraid of an outburst. But at the request of the
_Grand Journal_ he had slyly introduced Christophe to a reporter in
a cafe without his having any suspicion. All these precautions only
pricked curiosity, and made Christophe more interesting. Olivier had
never had anything to do with publicity before: he had not stopped to
consider that he was setting in motion a machine which, once it got
going, it was impossible to direct or control.

He was in despair when, on his way to his lecture, he read the article
in the _Grand Journal_. He had not foreseen such a calamity. Above
all, he had not expected it to come so soon. He had reckoned on the
paper waiting to make sure and verify its facts before it published
anything. He was too naive. If a newspaper takes the trouble to discover
a new celebrity, it is, of course, for its own sake, so that its rivals
may not have the honor of the discovery. It must lose no time, even if
it means knowing nothing whatever about the person in question. But an
author very rarely complains: if he is admired, he has quite as much
understanding as he wants.

The _Grand Journal_, after setting out a few ridiculous stories
about Christophe's struggles, representing him as a victim of German
despotism, an apostle of liberty, forced to fly from Imperial Germany
and take refuge in France, the home and shelter of free men,--(a fine
pretext for a Chauvinesque tirade!)--plunged into lumbering praise of
his genius, of which it knew nothing,--nothing except a few tame
melodies, dating from Christophe's early days in Germany, which
Christophe, who was ashamed of them, would have liked to have seen
destroyed. But if the author of the article knew nothing at all about
Christophe's work, he made up for it in his knowledge of his plans--or
rather such plans as he invented for him. A few words let fall by
Christophe or Olivier, or even by Goujart, who pretended to be
well-informed, had been enough for him to construct a fanciful
Jean-Christophe, "a Republican genius,--the great musician of
democracy." He seized the opportunity to decry various contemporary
French musicians, especially the most original and independent among
them, who set very little store by democracy. He only excepted one or
two composers, whose electoral opinions were excellent in his eyes. It
was annoying that their music was not better. But that was a detail. And
besides, his eulogy of these men, and even his praise of Christophe, was
of not nearly so much account as his criticism of the rest. In Paris,
when you read an article eulogizing a man's work, it is always as well
to ask yourself:

"Whom is he decrying?"

Olivier went hot with shame as he read the paper, and said to himself:

"A fine thing I've done!"

He could hardly get through his lecture. As soon as he had finished he
hurried home. What was his consternation to find that Christophe had
already gone out with the journalists! He delayed lunch for him.
Christophe did not return. Hours passed, and Olivier grew more and more
anxious and thought:

"What a lot of foolish things they will make him say!"

About three o'clock Christophe came home quite lively. He had had lunch
with Arsene Gamache, and his head was a little muzzy with the champagne
he had drunk. He could not understand Olivier's anxiety, who asked him
in fear and trembling what he had said and done.

"What have I been doing? I've had a splendid lunch. I haven't had such a
good feed for a long time."

He began to recount the menu.

"And wine.... I had wine of every color."

Olivier interrupted him to ask who was there.

"Who was there?... I don't know. There was Gamache, a little round man,
true as gold: Clodomir, the writer of the article, a charming fellow:
three or four journalists whom I didn't know, very jolly, all very nice
and charming to me--the cream of good fellows."

Olivier did not seem to be convinced. Christophe was astonished at his
small enthusiasm.

"Haven't you read the article?"

"Yes. I have. Have you read it?"

"Yes.... That is to say, I just glanced at it. I haven't had time."

"Well: read it."

Christophe took it up. At the first words he spluttered.

"Oh! The idiot!" he said.

He roared with laughter.

"Bah!" he went on. "These critics are all alike. They know nothing at
all about it."

But as he read farther he began to lose his temper: it was too stupid,
it made him look ridiculous. What did they mean by calling him "a
Republican musician"; it did not mean anything.... Well, let the fib
pass.... But when they set his "Republican" art against the "sacristy
art" of the masters who had preceded him,--(he whose soul was nourished
by the souls of those great men),--it was too much....

"The swine! They're trying to make me out an idiot!..."

And then, what was the sense of using him as a cudgel to thwack talented
French musicians, whom he loved more or less,--(though rather less than
more),--though they knew their trade, and honored it? And--worst of
all--with an incredible want of tact he was credited with odious
sentiments about his country!... No, that, that was beyond
endurance....

"I shall write and tell them so," said Christophe.

Olivier intervened.

"No, no," he said, "not now! You are too excited. Tomorrow, when you are
cooler...."

Christophe stuck to it. When he had anything to say he could not wait
until the morrow. He promised Olivier to show him his letter. The
precaution was useful. The letter was duly revised, so as to be confined
practically to the rectification of the opinions about Germany with
which he had been credited, and then Christophe ran and posted it.

"Well," he said, when he returned, "that will save half the harm being
done: the letter will appear to-morrow."

Olivier shook his head doubtfully. He was still thoughtful, and he
looked Christophe straight in the face, and said:

"Christophe, did you say anything imprudent at lunch?"

"Oh no," said Christophe with a laugh.

"Sure?"

"Yes, you coward."

Olivier was somewhat reassured. But Christophe was not. He had just
remembered that he had talked volubly and unguardedly. He had been quite
at his ease at once. It had never for a moment occurred to him to
distrust any of them: they seemed so cordial, so well-disposed towards
him! As, in fact, they were. We are always well-disposed to people when
we have done them a good turn, and Christophe was so frankly delighted
with it all that his joy infected them. His affectionate easy manners,
his jovial sallies, his enormous appetite, and the celerity with which
the various liquors vanished down his throat without making him turn a
hair, were by no means displeasing to Arsene Gamache, who was himself a
sturdy trencherman, coarse, boorish, and sanguine, and very contemptuous
of people who had ill-health, and those who dared not eat and drink, and
all the sickly Parisians. He judged a man by his prowess at table. He
appreciated Christophe. There and then he proposed to produce his
_Gargantua_ as an opera at the Opera.--(The very summit of art was reached
for these bourgeois French people in the production on the stage
of the _Damnation of Faust_, or the _Nine Symphonies_.)--Christophe, who
burst out laughing at the grotesqueness of the idea, had great difficulty
in preventing him from telephoning his orders to the directors of the
Opera, or the Minister of Fine Arts.--(If Gamache were to be believed, all
these important people were apparently at his beck and call.)--And, the
proposal reminding him of the strange transmutation which had taken place
in his symphonic poem, _David_, he went so far as to tell the story of the
performance organized by Deputy Roussin to introduce his mistress to the
public. Gamache, who did not like Roussin, was delighted: and Christophe,
spurred on by the generous wines and the sympathy of his hearers, plunged
into other stories, more or less indiscreet, the point of which was not
lost on those present. Christophe was the only one to forget them when the
party broke up. And now, on Olivier's question, they rushed back to his
memory. He felt a little shiver run down his spine. For he did not deceive
himself: he had enough experience to know what would happen: now that he
was sober again he saw it as clearly as though it had actually happened:
his indiscretions would be twisted and distorted, and scattered broadcast
as malicious blabbing, his artistic sallies would be turned into weapons
of war. As for his letter correcting the article, he knew as well as
Olivier how much that would avail him: it is a waste of ink to answer a
journalist, for he always has the last word.

Everything happened exactly to the letter as Christophe had foreseen it
would. His indiscretions were published, his letter was not. Gamache
only went so far as to write to him that he recognized the generosity of
his feelings, and that his scruples were an honor to him: but he kept
his scruples dark: and the falsified opinions attributed to Christophe
went on being circulated, provoking biting criticism in the Parisian
papers, and later in Germany, where much indignation was felt that a
German artist should express himself with so little dignity about his
country.

Christophe thought he would be clever, and take advantage of an
interview by the reporter of another paper to protest his love for the
_Deutsches Reich_, where, he said, people were at least as free as
in the French Republic.--He was speaking to the representative of a
Conservative paper, who at once credited him with anti-Republican views.

"Better and better!" said Christophe. "But what on earth has my music to
do with politics?"

"It is usual with us," said Olivier. "Look at the battles that have
taken place over Beethoven. Some people will have it that he was a
Jacobin, others a mountebank, others still a Pere Duchesne, and others a
prince's lackey."

"He'd knock their heads together."

"Well, do the same."

Christophe only wished he could. But he was too amiable with people who
were friendly towards him. Olivier never felt happy when he left him
alone. For they were always coming to interview him: and it was no use
Christophe promising to be guarded: he could not help being confidential
and unreserved. He said everything that came into his head. Women
journalists would come and make a fuss of him, and get him to talk about
his sentimental adventures. Others would make use of him to speak ill of
such-an-one, or so-and-so. When Olivier came in he would find Christophe
utterly downcast.

"Another howler?" he would ask.

"Of course," Christophe would reply in despair.

"You are incorrigible!"

"I ought to be locked up.... But I swear that it is the last time."

"Yes, I know. Until the next...."

"No. This really is the last."

Next day Christophe said triumphantly to Olivier:

"Another one came to-day. I shut the door in his face."

"Don't go too far," said Olivier. "Be careful with them. 'This animal is
dangerous.' He will attack you if you defend yourself.... It is so easy
for them to avenge themselves! They can twist the least little thing you
may have said to their uses."

Christophe drew his hand across his forehead:

"Oh! Good Lord!"

"What's the matter?"

"When I shut the door in his face I told...."

"What?"

"The Emperor's joke."

"The Emperor's?"

"Yes. His or one of his people's...."

"How awful! You'll see it to-morrow on the front page!"

Christophe shuddered. But, next day, what he saw was a description of
his room, which the journalist had not seen, and a report of a
conversation which he had not had with him.

The facts were more and more embellished the farther they spread. In the
foreign papers they were garnished out of all recognition. Certain
French articles having told how in his poverty he had transposed music
for the guitar, Christophe learned from an English newspaper that he had
played the guitar in the streets. He did not only read eulogies. Far
from it. It was enough for Christophe to have been taken up by the
_Grand Journal_, for him to be taken to task by the other papers.
They could not as a matter of dignity allow the possibility of a rival's
discovering a genius whom they had ignored. Some of them were rabid
about it. Others commiserated Christophe on his ill-luck. Goujart,
annoyed at having the ground cut away from under his feet, wrote an
article, as he said, to set people right on certain points. He wrote
familiarly of his old friend Christophe, to whom, when he first came to
Paris, he had been guide and comforter: he was certainly a highly gifted
musician, but--(he was at liberty to say so, since they were
friends)--very deficient in many ways, ill-educated, unoriginal, and
inordinately vain; so absurdly to flatter his vanity, as had been done,
was to serve him but ill at a time when he stood in need of a mentor who
should be wise, learned, judicious, benevolent, and severe, etc.--(a
fancy portrait of Goujart).--The musicians made bitter fun of it all.
They affected a lofty contempt for an artist who had the newspapers at
his back: and, pretending to be disgusted with the _vulgum pecus_,
they refused the presents of Artaxerxes, which were not offered them.
Some of them abused Christophe: others overwhelmed him with their
commiseration. Some of them--(his colleagues)--laid the blame on
Olivier.--They were only too glad to pay him out for his intolerance and
his way of holding aloof from them,--rather, if the truth were known,
from a desire for solitude than from scorn of any of them. But men are
least apt to pardon those who show that they can do without them.--Some
of them almost went so far as to hint that he had made money by the
articles in the _Grand Journal_. There were others who took upon
themselves to defend Christophe against him: they appeared to be
broken-hearted at Olivier's callousness in dragging a sensitive artist,
a dreamer, ill-equipped for the battle of life,--Christophe,--into the
turmoil of the market-place, where he could not but be ruined: for they
regarded Christophe as a little boy not strong enough in the head to be
allowed to go out alone. The future of this man, they said, was being
ruined, for, even if he were not a genius, such good intentions and such
tremendous industry deserved a better fate, and he was being intoxicated
with incense of an inferior brand. It was a great pity. Why could they
not leave him in his obscurity to go on working patiently for years?

Olivier might have had the answer pat:

"A man must eat to work. Who will give him his bread?"

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

"That is a detail. An artist must suffer. And what does a little
suffering matter?"

Of course, they were men of the world, quite well off, who professed
these Stoic theories. As the millionaire once said to the simple person
who came and asked him to help a poverty-stricken artist:

"But, sir, Mozart died of poverty."

They would have thought it very bad taste on Olivier's part if he had
told them that Mozart would have asked nothing better than to go on
living, and that Christophe was determined to do so.

       *       *       *       *       *

Christophe was getting heartily sick of the vulgar tittle-tattle. He
began to wonder if it were going on forever.--But it was all over in a
fortnight. The newspapers gave up talking about him. However, he had
become known. When his name was mentioned, people said, not:

"The author of _David_ or _Gargantua_," but:

"Oh yes! The _Grand Journal_ man!..."

He was famous.

Olivier knew it by the number of letters that came for Christophe, and
even for himself, in his reflected glory: offers from librettists,
proposals from concert-agents, declarations of friendship from men who
had formerly been his enemies, invitations from women. His opinion was
asked, for newspaper inquiries, about anything and everything: the
depopulation of France, idealist art, women's corsets, the nude on the
stage,--and did he believe that Germany was decadent, or that music had
reached its end, etc., etc. They used to laugh at them all. But, though
he laughed, lo and behold! Christophe, that Huron, steadily accepted the
invitations to dinner! Olivier could not believe his eyes.

"You?" he said.

"I! Certainly," replied Christophe jeeringly. "You thought you were the
only man who could go and see the beautiful ladies? Not at all, my boy!
It's my turn now. I want to amuse myself!"

"You? Amuse yourself? My dear old man!"

The truth was that Christophe had for so long lived shut up in his own
room that he felt a sudden longing to get away from it. Besides, he took
a naive delight in tasting his new fame. He was terribly bored at
parties, and thought the people idiotic. But when he came home he used
to take a malicious pleasure in telling Olivier how much he had enjoyed
himself. He would go to people's houses once, but never again: he would
invent the wildest excuses, with a frightful want of tact, to get out of
their renewed invitations. Olivier would be scandalized, and Christophe
would shout with laughter. He did not go to their houses to spread his
fame, but to replenish his store of life, his collection of expressions
and tones of voice--all the material of form, and sound, and color, with
which an artist has periodically to enrich his palette. A musician does
not feed only on music. An inflection of the human voice, the rhythm of
a gesture, the harmony of a smile, contain more suggestion of music for
him that another man's symphony. But it must be said that the music of
faces and human souls is as stale and lacking in variety in polite
society as the music of polite musicians. Each has a manner and becomes
set in it. The smile of a pretty woman is as stereotyped in its studied
grace as a Parisian melody. The men are even more insipid than the
women. Under the debilitating influence of society, their energy is
blunted, their original characters rot away and finally disappear with a
frightful rapidity. Christophe was struck by the number of dead and
dying men he met among the artists: there was one young musician, full
of life and genius, whom success had dulled, stupefied, and wiped out of
existence: he thought of nothing but swallowing down the flattery in
which he was smothered, enjoying himself, and sleeping. What he would be
like twenty years later was shown in another corner of the room, in the
person of an old pomaded _maestro_, who was rich, famous, a member
of all the Academies, at the very height of his career, and, though
apparently he had nothing to fear and no more wires to pull, groveled
before everything and everybody, and was fearful of opinion, power, and
the Press, dared not say what he thought, and thought nothing at all--a
man who had ceased to exist, showing himself off, an ass saddled with
the relics of his own past life.

Behind all these artists and men of intellect who had been great, or
might have been great, there was certain to be some woman preying upon
them. They were all dangerous, both the fools and those who were by no
means fools: both those who loved and those who loved themselves: the
best of them were the worst: for they were all the more certain to snuff
out the artist with their immoderate affection, which made them in all
good faith try to domesticate genius, turn it to their own uses, drag it
down, prune it, pare it down, scent it, until they had brought it into
line with their sensibility, their petty vanity, their mediocrity, and
the mediocrity of the world they lived in.

Although Christophe only passed through that section of society, he saw
enough of it to feel its danger. More than one woman, of course, tried
to take possession of him for her circle, to press him into her service:
and, of course, Christophe nibbled at the hook baited with friendly
words and alluring smiles. But for his sturdy common sense and the
disquieting spectacle of the transformations already effected in the men
about them by these modern Circes, he would not have escaped
uncontaminated. But he had no mind to swell the herd of these lovely
goose-girls. The danger would have been greater for him if there had not
been so many of them angling for him. Now that everybody, men and women,
were properly convinced that they had a genius in their midst, as usual,
they set to work to stifle him. Such people, when they see a flower,
have only one idea: to put it in a pot,--a bird: to put it in a cage,--
a free man: to turn him into a smooth lackey.

Christophe was shaken for a moment, pulled himself together, and sent
them all packing.

Fate is ironical. Those who do not care slip through the meshes of the
net: but those who are suspicious, those who are prudent, and
forewarned, are never suffered to escape. It was not Christophe who was
caught in the net of Paris, but Olivier.

He had benefited by his friend's success: Christophe's fame had given
him a reflected glory. He was better known now, for having been
mentioned in a few papers as the man who had discovered Christophe, than
for anything he had written during the last six years. He was included
in many of the invitations that came for Christophe: and he went with
him, meaning carefully and discreetly to look after him. No doubt he was
too much absorbed in doing so to look after himself. Love passed by and
caught him.

She was a little fair girl, charmingly slender, with soft hair waving in
little ripples about her pure narrow forehead: she had fine eyebrows and
rather heavy eyelids, eyes of a periwinkle blue, a delicately carved
nose with sensitive nostrils; her temples were slightly hollowed: she
had a capricious chin, and a mobile, witty, and rather sensual mouth,
turning up at the corners, and the _Parmigianninesque_ smile of a
pure faun. She had a long, delicate throat, a pretty waist, a slender,
elegant figure, and a happy, pensive expression in her girlish face, in
every line of which there was the disturbing poetic mystery of the
waking spring,--_Fruhlingserwachen_. Her name was Jacqueline Langeais.

She was not twenty. She came of a rich Catholic family, of great
distinction and broad-mindedness. Her father was a clever engineer, a
man of some invention, clear-headed and open to new ideas, who had made
a fortune, thanks to his own hard work, his political connections, and
his marriage. He had married both for love and money--(the proper
marriage for love for such people)--a pretty woman, very Parisian, who
was bred in the world of finance. The money had stayed: but love had
gone. However, he had managed to preserve a few sparks of it, for it had
been very ardent on both sides: but they did not stickle for any
exaggerated notion of fidelity. They went their ways and had their
pleasures: and they got on very well together, as friends, selfishly,
unscrupulously, warily.

Their daughter was a bond between them, though she was the object of an
unspoken rivalry between them: for they both loved her jealously. They
both saw themselves in her with their pet faults idealized by the grace
of childhood: and each strove cunningly to steal her from the other. And
the child had in due course become conscious of it, with the artful
candor of such little creatures, who are only too ready to believe that
the universe gravitates round themselves: and she turned it to good
account. She had them perpetually outbidding each other for her
affection. She never had a whim but she was sure that one of them would
indulge it if the other refused: and the other would be so vexed at
being outdone that she would at once be offered an even greater
indulgence than the first. She had been dreadfully spoiled: and it was
very fortunate for her that there was no evil in her nature,--outside
the egoism common to almost all children, though in children who are too
rich and too much pampered it assumes various morbid shapes, due to the
absence of difficulties and the want of any goal to aim at.

Though they adored her, neither M. nor Madame Langeais ever thought of
sacrificing their own personal convenience to her. They used to leave
the child alone, for the greater part of the day, to gratify her
thousand and one fancies. She had plenty of time for dreaming, and she
wasted none of it. She was precocious and quick to grasp at incautious
remarks let fall in her presence--(for her parents were never very
guarded in what they said),--and when she was six years old she used to
tell her dolls love-stories, the characters in which were husband, wife,
and lover. It goes without saying that she saw no harm in it. Directly
she began to perceive a shade of feeling underlying the words it was all
over for the dolls: she kept her stories to herself. There was in her a
strain of innocent sensuality, which rang out in the distance like the
sound of invisible bells, over there, over there, on the other side of
the horizon. She did not know what it was. Sometimes it would come
wafted on the wind: it came she did not know from whence, and wrapped
her round and made the blood mount to her cheeks, and she would lose her
breath in the fear and pleasure of it. She could not understand it. And
then it would disappear as strangely as it had come. There was never
another sound. Hardly more than a faint buzzing, an imperceptible
resonance, fainter and fainter, in the blue air. Only she knew that it
was yonder, on the other side of the mountain, and thither she must go,
go as soon as possible: for there lay happiness. Ah! If only she could
reach it!...

In the meanwhile, until she should reach that land of happiness, she
wove strange dreams of what she would find there. For the chief
occupation of the child's mind was guessing at its nature. She had a
friend of her own age, Simone Adam, with whom she used often to discuss
these great subjects. Each brought to bear on them the light of her
twelve years' experience, conversations overheard and stolen reading. On
tip-toe, clinging to the crannies in the stones, the two little girls
strained to peer over the old wall which hid the future from them. But
it was all in vain, and it was idle for them to pretend that they could
see through the chinks: they could see nothing at all. They were both a
mixture of innocence, poetic salaciousness, and Parisian irony. They
used to say the most outrageous things without knowing it, and they were
always making mountains out of molehills. Jacqueline, who was always
prying, without anybody to find fault with her, used to burrow in all
her father's books. Fortunately, she was protected from coming to any
harm by her very innocence and her own young, healthy instincts: an
unduly described scene or a coarse word disgusted her at once: she would
drop the book at once, and she passed through the most infamous company,
like a frightened cat through puddles of dirty water,--without so much
as a splash.

As a rule, novels did not attract her: they were too precise, too dry.
But books of poetry used to make her heart flutter with emotion and hope
of finding the key to the riddle,--love-poems, of course. They coincided
to a certain extent with her childish outlook on things. The poets did
not see things as they were, they imagined them through the prism of
desire or regret: they seemed, like herself, to be peering through the
chinks of the old wall. But they knew much more, they knew all the
things which she was longing to know, and clothed them with sweet,
mysterious words, which she had to unravel with infinite care to find
... to find ... Ah! She could find nothing, but she was always sure that
she was on the very brink of finding it....

Their curiosity was indomitable. They would thrill as they whispered
verses of Alfred de Musset and Sully Prudhomme, into which they read
abyss on abyss of perversity: they used to copy them out, and ask each
other about the hidden meanings of passages, which generally contained
none. These little women of thirteen, who knew nothing of love, used, in
their innocent effrontery, to discuss, half in jest, half in earnest,
love and the sweets of love: and, in school, under the fatherly eye of
the master--a very polite and mild old gentleman--verses like the
following, which he confiscated one day, when they made him gasp:

  "Let, oh! let me clasp you in my arms,
   And in your kisses drink insensate love
   Drop by drop in one long draught...."

They attended lectures at a fashionable and very prosperous school, the
teachers of which were Masters of Art of the University. There they
found material for their sentimental aspirations. Almost all the girls
were in love with their masters. If they were young and not too ugly,
that was quite enough for them to make havoc of their pupils'
hearts--who would work like angels to please their sultan. And they
would weep when he gave them bad marks in their examinations: though
they did not care when anybody else did the same. If he praised them,
they would blush and go pale by turns, and gaze at him coquettishly in
gratitude. And if he called them aside to give them advice or pay them a
compliment, they were in Paradise. There was no need for him to be an
eagle to win their favor. When the gymnastic instructor took Jacqueline
in his arms to lift her up to the trapeze, she would be in ecstasies.
And what furious emulation there was between them! How coaxingly and
with what humility they would make eyes at the master to attract his
attention from a presumptuous rival! At lectures, when he opened his
lips to speak, pens and pencils would be hastily produced to take down
what he said. They made no attempt to understand: the chief thing was
not to lose a syllable. And while they went on writing and writing
without ceasing, with stealthy glances to take in their idol's play of
expression and gestures, Jacqueline and Simone would whisper to each
other:

"Do you think he would look nice in a tie with blue spots?"

Then they had a chromo-lithographic ideal, based on romantic and
fashionable books of verses, and poetic fashion-plates,--they fell in
love with actors, virtuosi, authors, dead and alive--Mounet-Sully,
Samain, Debussy,--they would exchange glances with young men at concerts,
or in a drawing-room, or in the street, and at once begin to weave
fanciful and passionate love-affairs,--they could not help always
wanting to fall in love, to have their lives filled with a love-affair,
to find some excuse for being in love. Jacqueline and Simone used to
confide everything to each other: proof positive that they did not feel
anything much: it was the best sort of preventive to keep them from ever
having any deep feeling. On the other hand, it became a sort of chronic
illness with them: they were the first to laugh at it, but they used
lovingly to cultivate it. They excited each other. Simone was more
romantic and more cautious, and used to invent wilder stories. But
Jacqueline, being more sincere and more ardent, came nearer to realizing
them. She was twenty times on the brink of the most hopeless
folly.--However, she did not commit herself, as is the way with young
people. There are times when these poor little crazy creatures--(such as
we have all been)--are within an ace, some of suicide, others of
flinging themselves into the arms of the first man who comes along.
Only, thank God, almost all of them stop short at that. Jacqueline wrote
countless rough drafts of passionate letters to men whom she hardly knew
by sight: but she never sent any of them, except one enthusiastic
letter, unsigned, to an ugly, vulgar, selfish critic, who was as
cold-hearted as he was narrow-minded. She fell in love with him over a
few lines in which she had discovered a rare wealth of sensibility. She
was fired also by a great actor, who lived near her: whenever she passed
his door she used to say to herself:

"Shall I go in?"
And once she made so bold as to go up to the door of his flat. When she
found herself there, she turned and fled. What could she have talked to
him about? She had nothing, nothing at all to say to him. She did not
love him. And she knew it. In the greater part of her folly she was
deceiving herself. And for the rest it was the old, old, delicious,
stupid need of being in love. As Jacqueline was naturally intelligent,
she knew that quite well, and it kept her from making a fool of herself.
A fool who knows his folly is worth two who don't.

She went out a good deal. There were many young men who felt her charm,
and more than one of them was in love with her. She did not care what
harm she did. A pretty girl makes a cruel game of love. It seems to her
quite natural that she should be loved, and never considers that she
owes anything to those who love her: she is apt to believe that her
lover is happy enough in loving her. It must be said, by way of excuse,
that she has no idea of what love is, although she thinks of nothing
else all day long. One is inclined to think that a young girl in
society, brought up in the hot-house atmosphere of a great town, would
be more precocious than a country girl: but the opposite is the case.
Her reading and conversation have made her obsessed by love, so obsessed
that in her idle life it often borders on mania: and sometimes it
happens that she has read the play beforehand, and knows it word for
word by heart. But she never feels it. In love, as in art, it is useless
to read what others have said: we can but say what we feel: and those
who make haste to speak before they have anything to say are as likely
as not to say nothing.

Jacqueline, like most young people, lived in an atmosphere clouded by
the dust of the feelings of others, which, while it kept her in a
perpetual fever, with her hands burning, and her throat dry, and her
eyes sore, prevented her seeing anything. She thought she knew
everything. It was not that she lacked the wish to know. She read and
listened. She had picked up a deal of information, here and there, in
scraps, from conversation and books. She even tried to read what was
written in herself. She was much better than the world in which she
lived, for she was more sincere.

There was one woman who had a good influence--only too brief--over her.
This was a sister of her father's, a woman of between forty and fifty,
who had never married. Tall, with regular features, though sad and
lacking in beauty, Marthe Langeais was always dressed in black: she had
a sort of stiff distinction of feature and movement: she spoke very
little, and she had a deep voice, almost like a man's. But for the clear
light in her intelligent gray eyes and the kind smile on her sad lips
she would have passed unnoticed.

She only appeared at the Langeais' on certain days, when they were
alone. Langeais had a great respect for her, though she bored him.
Madame Langeais made no attempt to disguise from her husband how little
pleasure his sister's visits gave her. However, they faced their duty,
and had her to dinner once a week, and they did not let it appear too
glaringly that they regarded it as a duty. Langeais used to talk about
himself, which she always found interesting. Madame Langeais would think
of something else, and, as a matter of habit, smile affably when she was
spoken to. The dinner always went off very well, and she was invariably
polite. Sometimes, even, she would be effusively affectionate when her
tactful sister-in-law went away earlier than she had hoped: and Madame
Langeais's charming smile would be most radiant when she had any
particularly pleasant memories to think of. Marthe saw through it all:
very little escaped her eyes: and she saw many things in her brother's
house which shocked and distressed her. But she never let it appear:
what was the good? She loved her brother, and had been proud of his
cleverness and success, like the rest of the family, who had not thought
the triumph of the eldest son too dear a price to pay for their poverty.
She, at least, had preserved her independence of opinion. She was as
clever as he was, and of a finer moral fiber, more virile--(as the women
of France so often are; they are much superior to the men),--and she knew
him through and through: and when he asked her advice she used to give
it frankly. But for a long time he had not asked it of her! He found it
more prudent not to know, or--(for he knew the truth as much as she
did),--to shut his eyes. She was proud, and drew aside. Nobody ever
troubled to look into her inward life, and it suited the others to
ignore her. She lived alone, went out very little, and had only a few
not very intimate friends. It would have been very easy to her to turn
her brother's influence and her own talents to account: but she did not
do so. She had written a few articles for the leading reviews in Paris,
historical and literary portraits, which had attracted some attention by
their sober, just, and striking style. But she had gone no farther. She
might have formed interesting friendships with certain distinguished men
and women, who had shown a desire to know her, whom also she would,
perhaps, have been glad to know. She did not respond to their advances.
Though she had a reserved seat for a theater when the program contained
music that she loved, she did not go: and though she had the opportunity
of traveling to a place where she knew that she would find much
pleasure, she preferred to stay at home. Her nature was a curious
compound of stoicism and neurasthenia, which, however, in no wise
impaired the integrity of her ideas. Her life was impaired, but not her
mind. An old sorrow, known only to herself, had left its mark on her
heart. And even more profound, even less suspected--unknown to herself,
was the secret illness which had begun to prey upon her. However, the
Langeais saw only the clear expression of her eyes, which sometimes made
them feel embarrassed.

Jacqueline used to take hardly any notice of her aunt in the days when
she was careless and gay--which was her usual condition when she was a
child. But when she reached the age at which there occurs a mysterious
change and growth in body and soul, which bring agony, disgust, terror,
and fearful moments of depression in their train, and moments of absurd,
horrible dizziness, which, happily, do not last, though they make their
victim feel at the point of death,--the child, sinking and not daring to
cry for help, found only her Aunt Marthe standing by her side and
holding out her hand. Ah! the others were so far away! Her father and
mother were as strangers to her, with their selfish affection, too
satisfied with themselves to think of the small troubles of a doll of
fourteen! But her aunt guessed them, and comforted her. She did not say
anything. She only smiled: across the table she exchanged a kindly
glance with Jacqueline, who felt that her aunt understood her, and she
took refuge by her side. Marthe stroked Jacqueline's head and kissed
her, and spoke no word.

The little girl trusted her. When her heart was heavy she would go and
see her friend, who would know and understand as soon as she arrived;
she would be met always with the same indulgent eyes, which would infect
her with a little of their own tranquillity. She told her aunt hardly
anything about her imaginary love-affairs: she was ashamed of them, and
felt that there was no truth in them. But she confessed all the vague,
profound uneasiness that was in her, and was more real, her only real
trouble.

"Aunt," she would sigh sometimes, "I do so long to be happy!"

"Poor child!" Marthe would say, with a smile.

Jacqueline would lay her head in her aunt's lap, and kiss her hands as
they caressed her face:

"Do you think I shall be happy? Aunt, tell me; do you think I shall be
happy?"

"I don't know, my dear. It rather depends on yourself.... People can
always be happy if they want to be."

Jacqueline was incredulous.

"Are you happy?"

Marthe smiled sadly: "Yes."

"No? Really? Are you happy?"

"Don't you believe it?"

"Yes. But...."

Jacqueline stopped short.

"What is it?"

"I want to be happy, but not like you."

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

"No." Jacqueline went on shaking her head decisively. "But I couldn't
be."

"I should not have thought it possible, either. Life teaches one to be
able to do many things."

"Oh! But I don't want to learn," protested Jacqueline anxiously. "I want
to be happy in the way I want."

"You would find it very hard to say how!"

"I know quite well what I want."

She wanted many things. But when it came to saying what they were, she
could only mention one, which recurred again and again, like a refrain:

"First of all, I want some one to love me."
Marthe went on sewing without a word. After a moment she said:

"What good will it be to you if you do not love?"

Jacqueline was taken aback, and exclaimed:

"But, aunt, of course I only mean some one I loved! All the rest don't
count."

"And suppose you did not love anybody?"

"The idea! One loves always, always."

Marthe shook her head doubtfully.

"No," she said. "We don't love. We want to love. Love is the greatest
gift of God. Pray to Him that He may grant it you."

"But suppose my love is not returned?"

"Even if your love is not returned, you will be all the happier."

Jacqueline's face fell: she pouted a little:

"I don't want that," she said. "It wouldn't give me any pleasure."

Marthe laughed indulgently, looked at Jacqueline, sighed, and then went
on with her work.

"Poor child!" she said once more.

"Why do you keep on saying: 'Poor child'?" asked Jacqueline uneasily. "I
don't want to be a poor child. I want--I want so much to be happy!"

"That is why I say: 'Poor child!'"

Jacqueline sulked for a little. But it did not last long. Marthe laughed
at her so kindly that she was disarmed. She kissed her, pretending to be
angry. But in their hearts children of that age are secretly flattered
by predictions of suffering in later life, which is so far away. When it
is afar off there is a halo of poetry round sorrow, and we dread nothing
so much as a dull, even life.

Jacqueline did not notice that her aunt's face was growing paler and
paler. She observed that Marthe was going out less and less, but she
attributed it to her stay-at-home disposition, about which she used
often to tease her. Once or twice, when she called, she had met the
doctor coming out. She had asked her aunt:

"Are you ill?"

Marthe replied:

"It's nothing."

But now she had even given up her weekly dinner at the Langeais'.
Jacqueline was hurt, and went and reproached her bitterly.

"My dear," said Marthe gently, "I am rather tired."

But Jacqueline would not listen to anything. That was a poor sort of
excuse!

"It can't be very exhausting for you to come to our house for a couple
of hours a week! You don't love me," she would say. "You love nothing
but your own fireside."

But when at home she proudly told them how she had scolded her aunt,
Langeais cut her short with:

"Let your aunt be! Don't you know that the poor creature is very ill!"

Jacqueline grew pale: and in a trembling voice she asked what was the
matter with her aunt. They tried not to tell her. Finally, she found out
that Marthe was dying of cancer: she had had it for some months.

For some days Jacqueline lived in a state of terror. She was comforted a
little when she saw her aunt. Marthe was mercifully not suffering any
great pain. She still had her tranquil smile, which in her thin
transparent face seemed to shine like the light of an inward lamp.
Jacqueline said to herself:

"No. It is impossible. They must be mistaken. She would not be so
calm...."

She went on with the tale of her little confidences, to which Marthe
listened with more interest than heretofore. Only, sometimes, in the
middle of a conversation, her aunt would leave the room, without giving
any sign to show that she was in pain: and she would not return until
the attack was over, and her face had regained its serenity. She did not
like anybody to refer to her condition, and tried to hide it: she had a
horror of the disease that held her in its grip, and would not think of
it: all her efforts were directed towards preserving the peace of her
last months. The end came sooner than it was expected. Very soon she saw
nobody but Jacqueline. Then Jacqueline's visits had to be curtailed.
Then came the day of parting. Marthe was lying in her bed, which she had
not left for some weeks, when she took a tender farewell of her little
friend with a few gentle, comforting words. And then she shut herself
up, to die.

Jacqueline passed through months of despair. Marthe's death came at the
same time as the very worst hours of her moral distress, against which
Marthe had been the only person who could help her. She was horribly
deserted and alone. She needed the support of a religion. There was
apparently no reason why she should have lacked that support: she had
always been made to practise the duties of religion: her mother
practised them regularly. But that was just the difficulty: her mother
practised them, but her Aunt Marthe did not. And how was she to avoid
comparison? The eyes of a child are susceptible to many untruths, to
which her elders never give a thought, and children notice many
weaknesses and contradictions. Jacqueline noticed that her mother and
those who said that they believed had as much fear of death as though
there had been no faith in them. No: religion was not a strong enough
support.... And in addition there were certain personal experiences,
feelings of revolt and disgust, a tactless confessor who had hurt
her.... She went on practising, but without faith, just as she paid
calls, because she had been well brought up. Religion, like the world,
seemed to her to be utterly empty. Her only stay was the memory of the
dead woman, in which she was wrapped up. She had many grounds for
self-reproach in her treatment of her aunt, whom in her childish
selfishness she had often neglected, while now she called to her in
vain. She idealized her image: and the great example which Marthe had
left upon her mind of a profound life of meditation helped to fill her
with distaste for the life of the world, in which there was no truth or
serious purpose. She saw nothing but its hypocrisy, and those amiable
compromises, which at any other time would have amused her, now revolted
her. She was in a condition of moral hypersensitiveness, and everything
hurt her: her conscience was raw. Her eyes were opened to certain facts
which hitherto had escaped her in her heedlessness.

One afternoon she was in the drawing-room with her mother. Madame
Langeais was receiving a caller,--a fashionable painter, a good-looking,
pompous man, who was often at the house, but not on terms of intimacy.
Jacqueline had a feeling that she was in the way, but that only made her
more determined to stay. Madame Langeais was not very well; she had a
headache, which made her a little dull, or perhaps it was one of those
headache preventives which the ladies of to-day eat like sweets, so that
they have the result of completely emptying their pretty heads, and she
was not very guarded in what she said. In the course of the conversation
she thoughtlessly called her visitor:

"My dear...."

She noticed the slip at once. He did not flinch any more than she, and
they went on talking politely. Jacqueline, who was pouring out tea, was
so amazed that she almost dropped a cup. She had a feeling that they
were exchanging a meaning smile behind her back. She turned and
intercepted their privy looks, which were immediately disguised.--The
discovery upset her completely. Though she had been brought up with the
utmost freedom, and had often heard and herself laughed and talked about
such intrigues, it hurt her so that she could hardly bear it when she
saw that her mother.... Her mother: no, it was not the same thing!...
With her habitual exaggeration she rushed from one extreme to the
other. Till then she had suspected nothing. Thereafter she suspected
everything. Implacably she read new meanings into this and that detail
of her mother's behavior in the past. And no doubt Madame Langeais's
frivolity furnished only too many grounds for her suppositions: but
Jacqueline added to them. She longed to be more intimate with her
father, who had always been nearer to her, his quality of mind having a
great attraction for her. She longed to love him more, and to pity him.
But Langeais did not seem to stand in much need of pity: and a
suspicion, more dreadful even than the first, crossed the girl's heated
imagination,--that her father knew nothing, but that it suited him to
know nothing, and that, so long as he were allowed to go his own way, he
did not care.

Then Jacqueline felt that she was lost. She dared not despise them. She
loved them. But she could not go on living in their house. Her
friendship with Simone Adam was no help at all. She judged severely the
foibles of her former boon companion. She did not spare herself:
everything that was ugly and mediocre in herself made her suffer
terribly: she clung desperately to the pure memory of Marthe. But that
memory was fading: she felt that the stream of time, one day following
another, would cover it up and wash away all trace of it. And then there
would be an end of everything: she would be like the rest, sunk deep in
the mire.... Oh! if she could only escape from, such a world, at any
cost! Save me! Save me!...

It was just when she was in this fever of despair, feeling her utter
destitution, filled with passionate disgust and mystic expectancy,
holding out her arms to an unknown saviour, that she met Olivier.

Madame Langeais, of course, invited Christophe, who, that winter, was
the musician of the hour. Christophe accepted, and, as usual, did not
take any trouble to make himself pleasant. However, Madame Langeais
thought him charming;--he could do anything he liked, as long as he was
the fashion: everybody would go on thinking him charming, while the
fashion ran its allotted course of a few months.--Jacqueline, who, for
the time being, was outside the current, was not so charmed with him:
the mere fact that Christophe was belauded by certain people was enough
to make her diffident about him. Besides, Christophe's bluntness, and
his loud way of speaking, and his noisy gaiety, offended her. In her
then state of mind the joy of living seemed a coarse thing to her: her
eyes were fixed on the twilight melancholy of the soul, and she fancied
that she loved it. There was too much sunlight in Christophe.

But when she talked to him he told her about Olivier: he always had to
bring his friend into every pleasant thing that happened to him: it
would have seemed to him a selfish use of a new friendship if he had not
set aside a part of it for Olivier. He told Jacqueline so much about
him, that she felt a secret emotion in thus catching a glimpse of a soul
so much in accordance with her ideas, and made her mother invite him
too. Olivier did not accept at first, so that Christophe and Jacqueline
were left to complete their imaginary portrait of him at their leisure,
and, of course, he was found to be very like it when at last he made up
his mind to go.

He went, but hardly spoke a word. He did not need to speak. His
intelligent eyes, his smile, his refined manners, the tranquillity that
was in and inundated by his personality, could not but attract
Jacqueline. Christophe, by contrast, stood as a foil to Olivier's
shining qualities. She did not show anything, for she was fearful of the
feeling stirring in her: she confined herself to talking to Christophe,
but it was always about Olivier. Christophe was only too happy to talk
about his friend, and did not notice Jacqueline's pleasure in the
subject of their conversation. He used to talk about himself, and she
would listen agreeably enough, though she was not in the least
interested: then, without seeming to do so, she would bring the
conversation round to those episodes in his life which included Olivier.

Jacqueline's pretty ways were dangerous for a man who was not on his
guard. Without knowing it Christophe fell in love with her: it gave him
pleasure to go to the house again: he took pains with his dress: and a
feeling, which he well knew, began to tinge all his ideas with its
tender smiling languor. Olivier was in love with her too, and had been
from their first meeting: he thought she had no regard for him, and
suffered in silence. Christophe made his state even worse by telling him
joyously, as they left the Langeais' house, what he had said to
Jacqueline and what she had said to him. The idea never occurred to
Olivier that Jacqueline should like him. Although, by dint of living
with Christophe, he had become more optimistic, he still distrusted
himself: he could not believe that any woman would ever love him, for he
saw himself too clearly, and with eyes that saw too truthfully:--what
man is there would be worthy to be loved; if it were for his merits, and
not by the magic and indulgence of love?

One evening when he had been invited to the Langeais', he felt that it
would make him too unhappy to feel Jacqueline's indifference: he said
that he was too tired and told Christophe to go without him. Christophe
suspected nothing, and went off in high delight. In his naive egoism he
thought only of the pleasure of having Jacqueline all to himself. He was
not suffered to rejoice for long. When she heard that Olivier was not
coming, Jacqueline at once became peevish, irritable, bored, and
dispirited: she lost all desire to please: she did not listen to
Christophe, and answered him at random: and he had the humiliation of
seeing her stifle a weary yawn. She was near tears. Suddenly she went
away in the middle of the evening, and did not appear again.

Christophe went home discomfited. All the way home he tried to explain
this sudden change of front: and the truth began dimly to dawn on him.
When he reached his rooms he found Olivier waiting for him, and then,
with a would-be indifferent air, Olivier asked him about the party.
Christophe told him of his discomfiture, and he saw Olivier's face
brighten as he went on.

"Still tired?" he asked. "Why didn't you go to bed?"

"Oh! I'm much better," said Olivier. "I'm not the least tired now."

"Yes," said Christophe slyly, "I fancy it has done you a lot of good not
going."

He looked at him affectionately and roguishly, and went away into his
own room: and then, when he was alone, he began to laugh quietly, and
laughed until he cried:

"Little minx!" he thought. "She was making a game of me! And he was
deceiving me, too. What a secret they made of it!"

From that moment he plucked out every personal thought of Jacqueline
from his heart: and, like a broody hen hatching her eggs, he hatched the
romance of the young lovers. Without seeming to know their secret, and
without betraying either to the other, he helped them, though they never
knew it.

He thought it his solemn duty to study Jacqueline's character to see if
Olivier could be happy with her. And, being very tactless, he horrified
Jacqueline with the ridiculous questions he put to her about her tastes,
her morality, etc., etc.

"Idiot! What does he mean?" Jacqueline would think angrily, and refuse
to answer him, and turn her back on him.

And Olivier would be delighted to see Jacqueline paying no more
attention to Christophe. And Christophe would be overjoyed at seeing
Olivier's happiness. His joy was patent, and revealed itself much more
obstreperously than Olivier's. And as Jacqueline could not explain it,
and never dreamed that Christophe had a much clearer knowledge of their
love than she had herself, she thought him unbearable: she could not
understand how Olivier could be so infatuated with such a vulgar,
cumbersome friend. Christophe divined her thoughts, and took a malicious
delight in infuriating her: then he would step aside, and say that he
was too busy to accept the Langeais' invitations, so as to leave
Jacqueline and Olivier alone together.

However, he was not altogether without anxiety concerning the future. He
regarded himself as responsible in a large measure for the marriage that
was in the making, and he worried over it, for he had a fair insight
into Jacqueline's character, and he was afraid of many things: her
wealth first of all, her up-bringing, her surroundings, and, above all,
her weakness. He remembered his old friend Colette, though, no doubt, he
admitted that Jacqueline was truer, more frank, more passionate: there
was in the girl an ardent aspiration towards a life of courage, an
almost heroic desire for it.

"But desiring isn't everything," thought Christophe, remembering a jest
of Diderot's: "the chief thing is a straight backbone."

He would have liked to warn Olivier of the danger. But when he saw him
come back from being with Jacqueline, with his eyes lit with joy, he had
not the heart to speak, and he thought:

"The poor things are happy. I won't disturb their happiness."

Gradually his affection for Olivier made him share his friend's
confidence. He took heart of grace, and at last began to believe that
Jacqueline was just as Olivier saw her and as she wished to appear in
her own eyes. She meant so well! She loved Olivier for all the qualities
which made him different from herself and the world she lived in:
because he was poor, because he was uncompromising in his moral ideas,
because he was awkward and shy in society. Her love was so pure and so
whole that she longed to be poor too, and, sometimes, almost ... yes,
almost to be ugly, so that she might be sure that he loved her for
herself, and for the love with which her heart was so full, the love for
which her heart was so hungry.... Ah! Sometimes, when he was not with
her, she would go pale and her hands would tremble. She would seem to
scoff at her emotion, and pretend to be thinking of something else, and
to take no notice of it. She would talk mockingly of things. But
suddenly she would break off, and rush away and shut herself up in her
room: and then, with the doors locked, and the curtains drawn over the
window, she would sit there, with her knees tight together, and her
elbows close against her sides, and her arms folded across her breast,
while she tried to repress the beating of her heart: she would sit there
huddled together, never stirring, hardly breathing: she dared not move
for fear lest her happiness should escape if she so much as lifted a
finger. She would sit holding her love close, close to her body in
silence.

And now Christophe was absolutely determined that Olivier should succeed
in his wooing. He fussed round him like a mother, supervised his
dressing, presumed to give him advice as to what he should wear, and
even--(think of it!)--tied his tie for him. Olivier bore with him
patiently at the cost of having to retie his tie on the stairs when
Christophe was no longer present. He smiled inwardly, but he was touched
by such great affection. Besides, his love had made him timid, and he
was not sure of himself, and was glad of Christophe's advice. He used to
tell him everything that happened when he was with Jacqueline, and
Christophe would be just as moved by it as himself, and sometimes at
night he would lie awake for hours trying to find the means of making
the path of love smoother for his friend.

It was in the garden of the Langeais' villa, near Paris, on the
outskirts of the forest of Isle-Adam, that Olivier and Jacqueline had
the interview which was the turning-point in their lives.

Christophe had gone down with his friend, but he had found a harmonium
in the house, and sat playing so as to leave the lovers to walk about
the garden in peace.--Truth to tell, they did not wish it. They were
afraid to be left alone. Jacqueline was silent and rather hostile. On
his last visit Olivier had been conscious of a change in her manner, a
sudden coldness, an expression in her eyes which was strange, hard, and
almost inimical. It froze him. He dared not ask her for an explanation,
for he was fearful of hearing cruel words on the lips of the girl he
loved. He trembled whenever he saw Christophe leave them, for it seemed
to him that his presence was his only safeguard against the blow which
threatened to fall upon him.

It was not that Jacqueline loved Olivier less. Rather she was more in
love with him, and it was that that made her hostile. Love, with which
till then she had only played, love, to which she had so often called,
was there, before her eyes: she saw it gaping before her like an abyss,
and she flung back in terror: she could not understand it, and wondered:

"Why? Why? What does it mean?"

Then she would look at Olivier with the expression which so hurt him,
and think:

"Who is this man?"

And she could not tell. He was a stranger.

"Why do I love him?"

She could not tell.

"Do I love him?"

She could not tell.... She did not know: and yet she knew that she was
caught: she was in the toils of love: she was on the point of losing
herself in love, losing herself utterly; her will, her independence, her
egoism, her dreams of the future, all were to be swallowed up by the
monster. And she would harden herself in anger, and sometimes she would
feel that she almost hated Olivier.

They went to the very end of the garden, into the kitchen-garden, which
was cut off from the lawns by a hedge of tall trees. They sauntered down
the paths bordered on either side with gooseberry bushes, with their
clusters of red and golden fruit, and beds of strawberries, the
fragrance of which scented the air. It was June: but there had been
storms, and the weather was cold. The sky was gray and the light dim:
the low-hanging clouds moved in a heavy mass, drifting with the wind,
which blew only in the higher air, and never touched the earth; no leaf
stirred: but the air was very fresh. Everything was shrouded in
melancholy, even their hearts, swelling with the grave happiness that
was in them. And from the other end of the garden, through the open
windows of the villa, out of sight, there came the sound of the
harmonium, grinding out the Fugue in E Flat Minor of Johann Sebastian
Bach. They sat down on the coping of a well, both pale and silent. And
Olivier saw tears trickling down Jacqueline's cheeks.

"You are crying?" he murmured, with trembling lips.

And the tears came to his own eyes.

He took her hand. She laid her head on Olivier's shoulder. She gave up
the struggle: she was vanquished, and it was such sweet comfort to her!
... They wept silently as they sat listening to the music under the
moving canopy of the heavy clouds, which in their noiseless flight
seemed to skim the tops of the trees. They thought of all that they had
suffered, and perhaps--who knows?--of all that they were to suffer in
the future. There are moments when music summons forth all the sadness
woven into the woof of a human being's destiny....

After a moment or two Jacqueline dried her eyes and looked at Olivier.
And suddenly they kissed. O boundless happiness! Religious happiness!
So sweet and so profound that it is almost sorrow!

[Illustration: Musical notation]

Jacqueline asked:

"Was your sister like you?"

Olivier felt a sudden pang. He said:

"Why do you ask me about her? Did you know her?"

She replied:

"Christophe told me.... You have suffered?"

Olivier nodded: he was too much moved to speak.

"I have suffered too," she said.

She told him of the friend who had been taken from her, her beloved
Marthe and with her heart big with emotion she told him how she had
wept, wept until she thought she was going to die.

"You will help me?" she said, in a beseeching tone. "You will help me
to live, and be good, and to be a little like her? Poor Marthe, you will
love her too?"

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

"I wish they were here."

"They are here."

They sat there locked in each other's arms: they hardly breathed, and
could feel heart beating to heart. A gentle drizzle was falling,
falling. Jacqueline shivered.

"Let us go in," she said.

Under the trees it was almost dark. Olivier kissed Jacqueline's wet
hair: she turned her face up to him, and, for the first time, he felt
loving lips against his, a girl's lips, warm and parted a little. They
were nigh swooning.

Near the house they stopped once more:

"How utterly alone we were!" he said.

He had already forgotten Christophe.

They remembered him at length. The music had stopped. They went in.
Christophe was sitting at the harmonium with his head in his hands,
dreaming, he too, of many things in the past. When he heard the door
open, he started from his dream, and turned to them affectionately with
a solemn, tender smile lighting up his face. He saw in their eyes what
had happened, pressed their hands warmly, and said:

"Sit down, and I'll play you something."

They sat down, and he played the piano, telling in music all that was in
his heart, and the great love he had for them. When he had done they all
three sat in silence. Then he got up and looked at them. He looked so
kind, and so much older, so much stronger than they! For the first time
she began to appreciate what he was. He hugged them both, and said to
Jacqueline:

"You will love him dearly, won't you? You will love him dearly?"

They were filled with gratitude towards him. But at once he turned the
conversation, laughed, went to the window, and sprang out into the
garden.

       *       *       *       *       *

During the days following he kept urging Olivier to go and propose his
suit to Jacqueline's parents. Olivier dared not, dreading the refusal
which he anticipated. Christophe also insisted on his setting about
finding work, for even supposing the Langeais accepted him, he could not
take Jacqueline's fortune unless he were himself in a position to earn
his living. Olivier was of the same opinion, though he did not share his
violent and rather comic distrust of wealthy marriages. It was a rooted
idea in Christophe's mind that riches are death to the soul. It was on
the tip of his tongue to quote the saying of a wise beggar to a rich
lady who was worried in her mind about the next life:

"What, madame, you have millions, and you want to have an immortal soul
into the bargain?"

"Beware of women," he would say to Olivier--half in jest, half in
earnest--"beware of women, but be twenty times more wary of rich women.
Women love art, perhaps, but they strangle the artist. Rich women poison
both art and artists. Wealth is a disease. And women are more
susceptible to it than men. Every rich man is an abnormal being.... You
laugh? You don't take me seriously? Look you: does a rich man know what
life is? Does he keep himself in touch with the raw realities of life?
Does he feel on his face the stinging breath of poverty, the smell of
the bread that he must earn, of the earth that he must dig? Can he
understand, does he even see people and things as they are?... When I
was a little boy I was once or twice taken for a drive in the Grand
Duke's landau. We drove through fields in which I knew every blade of
grass, through woods that I adored, where I used to run wild all by
myself. Well: I saw nothing at all. The whole country had become as
stiff and starched as the idiots with whom I was driving. Between the
fields and my heart there was not only the curtain of the souls of those
formal people. The wooden planks beneath my feet, the moving platform
being rolled over the face of Nature, were quite enough. To feel that
the earth is my mother, I must have my feet firmly planted on her womb,
like a newborn child issuing to the light. Wealth severs the tie which
binds men to the earth, and holds the sons of the earth together. And
then how can you expect to be an artist? The artist is the voice of the
earth. A rich man cannot be a great artist. He would need a thousand
times more genius to be so under such unfavorable conditions. Even if he
succeeds his art must be a hot-house fruit. The great Goethe struggled
in vain: parts of his soul were atrophied, he lacked certain of the
vital organs, which were killed by his wealth. You have nothing like the
vitality of a Goethe, and you would be destroyed by wealth, especially
by a rich woman, a fate which Goethe did at least avoid. Only the man
can withstand the scourge. He has in him such native brutality, such a
rich deposit of rude, healthy instincts binding him to the earth, that
he alone has any chance of escape. But the woman is tainted by the
poison, and she communicates the taint to others. She acquires a taste
for the reeking scent of wealth, and cannot do without it. A woman who
can be rich and yet remain sound in heart is a prodigy as rare as a
millionaire who has genius.... And I don't like monsters. Any one who
has more than enough to live on is a monster--a human cancer preying
upon the lives of the rest of humanity."

Olivier laughed:

"What do you want?" he said. "I can't stop loving Jacqueline because she
is not poor, or force her to become poor for love of me."

"Well, if you can't save her, at least save yourself. That's the best
way of saving her. Keep yourself pure. Work."

Olivier did not need to go to Christophe for scruples. He was even more
nicely sensitive than he in such matters. Not that he took Christophe's
diatribes against money seriously: he had been rich himself, and did not
loathe riches, and thought them a very good setting for Jacqueline's
pretty face. But it was intolerable to think that his love might in any
way be contaminated with an imputation of interest. He applied to have
his name restored to the University list. For the time being he could
not hope for anything better than a moderate post in a provincial
school. It was a poor wedding-present to give to Jacqueline. He told her
about it timidly. Jacqueline found it difficult at first to see his
point of view: she attributed it to an excessive pride, put into his
head by Christophe, and she thought it ridiculous: was it not more
natural between lovers to set no store by riches or poverty, and was it
not rather shabby to refuse to be indebted to her when it would give her
such great joy?... However, she threw herself in with Olivier's plans:
their austerity and discomfort were the very things that brought her
round, for she found in them an opportunity of gratifying her desire for
moral heroism. In her condition of proud revolt against her surroundings
which had been induced by the death of her aunt, and was exalted by her
love, she had gone so far as to deny every element in her nature which
was in contradiction to her mystic ardor: in all sincerity her whole
being was strained, like a bow, after an ideal of a pure and difficult
life, radiant with happiness.... The obstacles, the very smallness and
dullness of her future condition in life, were a joy to her. How good
and beautiful it would all be!...

Madame Langeais was too much taken up with herself to pay much attention
to what was going on about her. For some time past she had been thinking
of little outside her health: she spent her whole time in treating
imaginary illnesses, and trying one doctor after another: each of them
in turn was her saviour, and went on enjoying that position for a
fortnight: then it was another's turn. She would stay away from home for
months in expensive sanatoria, where she religiously carried out all
sorts of preposterous prescriptions to the letter. She had forgotten her
husband and daughter.

M. Langeais was not so indifferent, and had begun to suspect the existence
of the affair. His paternal jealousy made him feel it. He had
for Jacqueline that strange pure affection which many fathers feel for
their daughters, an elusive, indefinable feeling, a mysterious,
voluptuous, and almost sacred curiosity, in living once more in the
lives of fellow-creatures who are of their blood, who are themselves,
and are women. In such secrets of the heart there are many lights and
shadows which it is healthier to ignore. Hitherto it had amused him to
see his daughter making calfish young men fall in love with her: he
loved her so, romantic, coquettish, and discreet--(just as he was
himself).--But when he saw that this affair threatened to become more
serious, he grew anxious. He began by making fun of Olivier to
Jacqueline, and then he criticised him with a certain amount of
bitterness. Jacqueline laughed at first, and said:

"Don't say such hard things, father: you would find it awkward later on,
supposing I wanted to marry him."

M. Langeais protested loudly, and said she was mad: with the result that
she lost her head completely. He declared that he would never let her
marry Olivier. She vowed that she would marry him. The veil was rent. He
saw that he was nothing to her. In his fatherly egoism it had never
occurred to him, and he was angry. He swore that neither Olivier nor
Christophe should ever set foot inside his house again. Jacqueline lost
her temper, and one fine morning Olivier opened the door to admit a
young woman, pale and determined looking, who rushed in like a
whirlwind, and said:

"Take me away with you! My father and mother won't hear of it. I _will_
marry you. You must compromise me."

Olivier was alarmed though touched by it, and did not even try to argue
with her. Fortunately Christophe was there. Ordinarily he was the least
reasonable of men, but now he reasoned with them. He pointed out what a
scandal there would be, and how they would suffer for it. Jacqueline bit
her lip angrily, and said:

"Very well. We will kill ourselves."

So far from frightening Olivier, her threat only helped to make up his
mind to side with her. Christophe had no small difficulty in making the
crazy pair have a little patience: before taking such desperate measures
they might as well try others: let Jacqueline go home, and he would go
and see M. Langeais and plead their cause.

A queer advocate! M. Langeais nearly kicked him out on the first words
he said: but then the absurdity of the situation struck him, and it
amused him. Little by little the gravity of his visitor and his
expression of honesty and absolute sincerity began to make an
impression: however, he would not fall in with his contentions, and went
on firing ironical remarks at him. Christophe pretended not to hear:
but every now and then as a more than usually biting shaft struck home he
would stop and draw himself up in silence; then he would go on again.
Once he brought his fist down on the table with a thud, and said:

"I beg of you to believe that it has given me no pleasure to call on
you: I have to control myself to keep from retaliating on you for
certain things you have said: but I think it my duty to speak to you,
and I am doing so. Forget me, as I forget myself, and weigh well what I
am telling you."

M. Langeais listened: and when he heard of the project of suicide, he
shrugged his shoulders and pretended to laugh: but he was shaken. He was
too clever to take such a threat as a joke: he knew that he had to deal
with the insanity of a girl in love. One of his mistresses, a gay,
gentle creature, whom he had thought incapable of putting her boastful
threat into practice, had shot herself with a revolver before his eyes:
she did not kill herself at once, but the scene lived in his memory....
No, one can never be sure with women. He felt a pang at his heart....
"She wishes it? Very well: so be it, and so much the worse for her,
little fool!..." He would have granted anything rather than drive his
daughter to extremes. In truth he might have used diplomacy, and
pretended to give his consent to gain time, gently to wean Jacqueline
from Olivier. But doing so meant giving himself more trouble than he
could or would be bothered with. Besides, he was weak: and the mere fact
that he had angrily said "No!" to Jacqueline, now inclined him to say
"Yes." After all, what does one know of life? Perhaps the child was
right. The great thing was that they should love each other. M. Langeais
knew quite well that Olivier was a serious young man, and perhaps had
talent.... He gave his consent.

       *       *       *       *       *

The day before the marriage the two friends sat up together into the
small hours. They did not wish to lose the last hours of their dear life
together.--But already it was in the past. It was like those sad
farewells on the station platform when there is a long wait before the
train moves: one insists on staying, and looking and talking. But one's
heart is not in it: one's friend has already gone.... Christophe tried
to talk. He stopped in the middle of a sentence, seeing the absent look
in Olivier's eyes, and he said, with a smile:

"You are so far away!"

Olivier was confused and begged his pardon. It made him sad to realize
that his thoughts were wandering during the last intimate moments with
his friend. But Christophe pressed his hand, and said:

"Come, don't constrain yourself. I am happy. Go on dreaming, my boy."

They stayed by the window, leaning out side by side, and looking through
the darkness down into the garden. After some time Christophe said to
Olivier:

"You are running away from me. You think you can escape me? You are
thinking of your Jacqueline. But I shall catch you up. I, too, am
thinking of her."

"Poor old fellow," said Olivier, "and I was thinking of you! And
even...."

He stopped.

Christophe laughed and finished the sentence for him.

"... And even taking a lot of trouble over it!..."

       *       *       *       *       *

Christophe turned out very fine, almost smart, for the wedding. There
was no religious ceremony: neither the indifferent Olivier nor the
rebellious Jacqueline had wished it. Christophe had written a symphonic
fragment for the ceremony at the _mairie_, but at the last moment
he gave up the idea when he realized what a civil marriage is: he
thought such ceremonies absurd. People need to have lost both faith and
liberty before they can have any belief in them. When a true Catholic
takes the trouble to become a free-thinker he is not likely to endow a
functionary of the civil State with a religious character. Between God
and his own conscience there is no room for a State religion. The State
registers, it does not bind man and wife together.

The marriage of Olivier and Jacqueline was not likely to make Christophe
regret his decision. Olivier listened with a faintly ironical air of
aloofness to the Mayor ponderously fawning upon the young couple, and
the wealthy relations, and the witnesses who wore decorations.
Jacqueline did not listen: and she furtively put out her tongue at
Simone Adam, who was watching her: she had made a bet with her that
being "married" would not affect her in the least, and it looked as
though she would win it: it hardly seemed to occur to her that it was
she who was being married: the idea of it tickled her. The rest were
posing for the onlookers: and the onlookers were taking them all in. M.
Langeais was showing off: in spite of his sincere affection for his
daughter, he was chiefly occupied in taking stock of the guests to find
out whether he had left any gaps in his list of invitations. Only
Christophe was moved: not one of the rest, relations, bride, and
bridegroom, or the Mayor officiating, showed any emotion: he stood
gazing hungrily at Olivier, who did not look at him.

In the evening the young couple left for Italy. Christophe and M.
Langeais went with them to the station. They seemed happy, not at all
sorry to be going, and did not conceal their impatience for the train to
move. Olivier looked like a boy, and Jacqueline like a little girl....
What a tender, melancholy charm is in such partings! The father is a
little sad to see his child taken away by a stranger, and for what!...
and to see her go away from him forever. But they feel nothing but a new
intoxicating sense of liberty. There are no more hindrances to life:
nothing can stop them ever again: they seem to have reached the very
summit: now might they die readily, for they have everything, and
nothing to fear.... But soon they see that it was no more than a stage
in the journey. The road still lies before them, and winds round the
mountain: and there are very few who reach the second stage....

The train bore them away into the night. Christophe and M. Langeais went
home together. Christophe said with naive archness:

"Now we are both widowed!"

M. Langeais began to laugh. He liked Christophe now that he knew him
better. They said good-by, and went their ways. They were both unhappy,
with an odd mixture of sadness and sweetness. Sitting alone in his room
Christophe thought:

"The best of my soul is happy."

Nothing had been altered in Olivier's room. They had arranged that until
Olivier returned and settled in a new house his furniture and belongings
should stay with Christophe. It was as though he himself was still
present. Christophe looked at the portrait of Antoinette, placed it on
his desk, and said to it:

"My dear, are you glad?"

He wrote often--rather too often--to Olivier. He had a few vaguely
written letters, which were increasingly distant in tone. He was
disappointed, but not much affected by it. He persuaded himself that it
must be so, and he had no anxiety as to the future of their friendship.

His solitude did not trouble him. Far from it: he did not have enough of
it to suit his taste. He was beginning to suffer from the patronage of
the _Grand Journal_. Arsene Gamache had a tendency to believe that
he had proprietary rights in the famous men whom he had taken the
trouble to discover: he took it as a matter of course that their fame
should be associated with his own, much as Louis XIV. grouped Moliere,
Le Brun, and Lulli about his throne. Christophe discovered that the
author of the _Hymn to Aegis_ was not more imperial or more of a
nuisance to art than his patron of the _Grand Journal_. For the
journalist, who knew no more about art than the Emperor, had opinions no
less decided about it: he could not tolerate the existence of anything
he did not like: he decreed that it was bad and pernicious: and he would
ruin it in the public interest. It is both comic and terrible to see
such coarse-grained uncultivated men of affairs presuming to control not
only politics and money, but also the mind, and offering it a kennel
with a collar and a dish of food, or, if it refuses, having the power to
let loose against it thousands of idiots whom they have trained into a
docile pack of hounds!--Christophe was not the sort of man to let
himself be schooled and disciplined. It seemed to him a very bad thing
that an ignoramus should take upon himself to tell him what he ought and
ought not to do in music: and he gave him to understand that art needed
a much more severe training than politics. Also, without any sort of
polite circumlocution, he declined a proposal that he should set to
music a libretto, which the author, a leading member of the staff of the
paper, was trying to place, while it was highly recommended by his
chief. It had the effect of cooling his relations with Gamache.

Christophe did not mind that in the least. Though he had so lately risen
from his obscurity, he was longing to return to it. He found himself
"exposed to that great light in which a man is lost among the many."
There were too many people bothering their heads about him. He pondered
these words of Goethe:

_"When a writer has attracted attention by a good piece of work, the
public tries to prevent his producing another.... The brooding talent is
dragged out into the hurly-burly of the world, in spite of itself,
because every one thinks he will be able to appropriate a part of
it."_

He shut his door upon the outside world, and began to seek the company
of some of his old friends in his own house. He revisited the Arnauds,
whom he had somewhat neglected. Madame Arnaud, who was left alone for
part of the day, had time to think of the sorrows of others. She thought
how empty Christophe's life must be now that Olivier was gone: and she
overcame her shyness so far as to invite him to dinner. If she had
dared, she would even have offered to go in from time to time and tidy
his rooms: but she was not bold enough: and no doubt it was better so:
for Christophe did not like to have people worrying about him. But he
accepted the invitation to dinner, and made a habit of going in to the
Arnauds' every evening.

He found them just as united, living in the same atmosphere of rather
sad, sorrowful tenderness, though it was even grayer than before, Arnaud
was passing through a period of depression, brought on by the wear and
tear of his life as a teacher,--a life of exhausting labor, in which one
day is like unto another, and each day's work is like that of the next,
like a wheel turning in one place, without ever stopping, or ever
advancing. Though he was very patient, the good man was passing through
a crisis of discouragement. He let certain acts of injustice prey upon
him, and was inclined to think that all his zeal was futile. Madame
Arnaud would comfort him with kind words: she seemed to be just as calm
and peaceful as in the old days: but her face was thinner. In her
presence Christophe would congratulate Arnaud on having such a sensible
wife.

"Yes," Arnaud would say, "she is a good little creature; nothing ever puts
her out. She is lucky: so am I. If she had suffered in this cursed
life, I don't see how I could have got through."

Madame Arnaud would blush and say nothing. Then in her even tones she
would talk of something else.--Christophe's visits had their usual good
effect: they brought light in their train: and he, for his part, found
it very pleasant to feel the warmth of their kind, honest hearts.

Another friend, a girl, came into his life. Or rather he sought her out:
for though she longed to know him, she could not have made the effort to
go and see him. She was a young woman of a little more than twenty-five,
a musician, and she had taken the first prize at the Conservatoire: her
name was Cecile Fleury. She was short and rather thick-set. She had
heavy eyebrows, fine, large eyes, with a soft expression, a short,
broad, turned-up nose, inclined to redness, like a duck's beak, thick
lips, kind and tender, an energetic chin, heavy and solid, and her
forehead was broad, but not high. Her hair was done up in a large bun at
the back of her neck. She had strong arms and a pianist's hands, very
long, with a splayed thumb and square finger-tips. The general
impression she gave was one of a rather sluggish vitality and of rude
rustic health. She lived with her mother, who was very dear to her: a
good, kind woman, who took not the smallest interest in music though she
used to talk about it, because she was always hearing about it, and knew
everything that happened in Musicopolis. She had a dull, even life, gave
lessons all day long, and sometimes concerts, of which nobody took any
notice. She used to go home late at night, on foot or in an omnibus,
worn out, but quite good-tempered: and she used to practise her scales
bravely and trim her own hats, talking a great deal, laughing readily,
and often singing for nothing.

She had not been spoiled by life. She knew the value of a little comfort
when she had earned it by her own efforts,--the joy of a little
pleasure, or a little scarcely perceptible advance in her position or
her work. Indeed, if one month she could only earn five francs more than
in the last, or if she could at length manage to play a certain passage
of Chopin which she had been struggling with for weeks,--she would be
quite happy. Her work, which was not excessive, exactly fitted her
aptitude for it, and gave her a healthy satisfaction. Playing, singing,
giving lessons gave her a pleasant feeling of satisfied activity, normal
and regular, and at the same time a modest competence and a comfortable
placid success. She had a healthy appetite, ate much, slept well, and
was never ill.

She was clear-headed, sensible, modest, perfectly balanced, and never
worried about anything: for she always lived in and for the present,
without bothering her head about what had happened or what was going to
happen in the future. And as she was always well, and as her life was
comparatively secure from the sudden turns of fate, she was almost
always satisfied. She took the same pleasure in practising her piano as
in keeping house, or talking about things domestic, or doing nothing.
She had the art of living, not from day to day--(she was economical and
provident)--but from minute to minute. She was not possessed of any sort
of idealism: the only ideal she had, if it could be called so, was
bourgeois, and was unostentatiously expressed in her every action, and
evenly distributed through every moment of the day: it consisted in
peacefully loving everything she was doing, whatever it might be. She
went to church on Sundays: but the feeling of religion had practically
no place in her life. She admired enthusiasts, like Christophe, who had
faith or genius: but she did not envy them: what could she have done
with their uneasiness and their genius?

How came it, then, that she could feel their music? She would have found
it hard to say. But it was very certain that she did feel it. She was
superior to other virtuosi by reason of her sturdy quality of balance,
physical and moral: in her abounding vitality, in the absence of
personal passion, the passions of others found a rich soil in which to
come to flower. She was not touched by them. She could translate in all
their energy the terrible passions which had consumed the artist without
being tainted by their poison: she only felt their force and the great
weariness that came after its expression. When it was over, she would be
all in a sweat, utterly exhausted: she would smile calmly and feel very
happy.

Christophe heard her one evening, and was struck by her playing. He went
and shook hands with her after the concert. She was grateful to him for
it: there were very few people at the concert, and she was not so used
to compliments as to take no delight in them. As she had never been
clever enough to throw in her lot with any musical coterie, or cunning
enough to surround herself with a group of worshipers, and as she never
attempted to make herself particular, either by technical mannerisms or
by a fantastic interpretation of the hallowed compositions, or by
assuming an exclusive right to play some particular master, such as
Johann Sebastian Bach, or Beethoven, and as she had no theories about
what she played, but contented herself with playing simply what she
felt--nobody paid any attention to her, and the critics ignored her: for
nobody told them that she played well, and they were not likely to find
it out for themselves.

Christophe saw a good deal of Cecile. Her strength and tranquillity
attracted him as a mystery. She was vigorous and apathetic. In his
indignation at her not being better known he proposed that he should get
his friends of the _Grand Journal_ to write about her. But although
she would have liked to be praised, she begged him not to do anything to
procure it. She did not want to have the struggle or the bother or the
jealousies it would entail: she wanted to be left in peace. She was not
talked about: so much the better! She was not envious, and she was the
first to be enthusiastic about the technique of other virtuosi. She had
no ambition, and no desire for anything. She was much too lazy in mind!
When she had not any immediate and definite work to do, she did nothing,
nothing; she did not even dream, not even at night, in bed: she either
slept or thought of nothing. She had not the morbid preoccupation with
marriage, which poisons the lives of girls who shiver at the thought of
dying old maids. When she was asked if she would not like to have a
husband, she would say:

"Why not throw in fifty thousand a year? One has to take what comes. If
any one offers, so much the better! If not, one goes without. Because
one can't have cake, I don't see why one shouldn't be glad of honest
bread. Especially when one has had to eat stale bread for so long!"

"Besides," her mother would say, "there are plenty of people who never
get any bread to eat at all!"

Cecile had good reason to fight shy of men. Her father, who had been
dead some years, was a weak, lazy creature: he had wronged his wife and
his family. She had also a brother who had turned out badly and did not
know what had become of him: every now and then he would turn up and ask
for money: she and her mother were afraid of him and ashamed of him, and
fearful of what they might hear about him any day: and yet they loved
him. Christophe met him once. He was at Cecile's house: there was a ring
at the door: and her mother answered it. He heard a conversation being
carried on in the next room, and the voices were raised every now and
then. Cecile seemed ill at ease, and went out also, leaving Christophe
alone. The discussion went on, and the stranger's voice assumed a
threatening tone: Christophe thought it time to intervene, and opened
the door. He hardly had time to do more than catch a glimpse of a young
and slightly deformed man, whose back was turned towards him, for Cecile
rushed towards him and implored him to go back. She went with him, and
they sat in silence. In the next room the visitor went on shouting for a
few minutes longer, and then took his leave and slammed the door. Then
Cecile sighed, and said to Christophe:

"Yes.... He is my brother."

Christophe understood:

"Ah!" he said.... "I know.... I have a brother, too...."

Cecile took his hand with an air of affectionate commiseration:

"You too?"

"Yes," he said.... "These are the joys of a family."

Cecile laughed, and they changed the conversation. No, the joys of a
family had no enchantment for her, nor had the idea of marriage any
fascination: men were rather a worthless lot on the whole. Her
independent life had many advantages: her mother had often sighed after
her liberty: she had no desire to lose it. The only day-dream in which
she indulged was that some day--Heaven knows when!--she would not have
to give lessons any more, and would be able to live in the county. But
she did not even take the trouble to imagine such a life in detail: she
found it too fatiguing to think of anything so uncertain: it was better
to sleep,--or do her work....

In the meanwhile, in default of her castle in Spain, she used to hire a
little house in the outskirts of Paris for the summer, and lived there
with her mother. It was twenty minutes' journey by train. The house was
some distance away from the station, standing alone in the midst of a
stretch of waste lands which were called "fields," and Cecile used often
to return late at night. But she was not afraid, and did not believe
there was any danger. She had a revolver, but she always used to leave
it at home. Besides, it was doubtful if she would have known how to use
it.

Sometimes, when he went to see her, Christophe would make her play. It
amused him to see her keen perception of the music, especially when he
had dropped a hint which put her on the track of a feeling that called
for expression. He had discovered that she had an excellent voice, but
she had no idea of it. He made her practise it, and would give her old
German _lieder_ or his own music to sing: it gave her pleasure, and
she made such progress as to surprise herself as much as him. She was
marvelously gifted. The fire of music had miraculously descended upon
this daughter of Parisian middle-class parents who were utterly devoid
of any artistic feeling. Philomela--(for so he used to call her)--used
sometimes to discuss music with Christophe, but always in a practical,
never in a sentimental, way: she seemed only to be interested in the
technique of singing and the piano. Generally, when they were together
and were not playing music, they talked of the most commonplace things,
and Christophe, who could not for a moment have tolerated such
conversations with an ordinary woman, would discuss these subjects as a
matter of course with Philomela.

They used to spend whole evenings alone together, and were genuinely
fond of each other, though their affection was perfectly calm and even
almost cold. One evening, when he had dined with her, and had stayed
talking longer than usual, a violent storm came on: she said:

"You can't go now! Stay until to-morrow morning."

He was fitted up with an improvised bed in the little sitting-room. Only
a thin partition was between it and Cecile's bedroom, and the doors were
not locked. As he lay there he could hear her bed creaking and her soft,
regular breathing. In five minutes she was asleep: and very soon he
followed her example without either of them having had the faintest
shadow of an uneasy thought.

At the same time there came into his life a number of other unknown
friends, drawn to him by reading his works. Most of them lived far away
from Paris or shut up in their homes, and never met him. Even a vulgar
success does a certain amount of good: it makes the artist known to
thousands of good people in remote corners whom he could never have
reached without the stupid articles in the papers. Christophe entered
into correspondence with some of them. There were lonely young men,
living a life of hardship, their whole being aspiring to an ideal of which
they were not sure, and they came greedily to slake their thirst
at the well of Christophe's brotherly spirit. There were humble people
in the provinces who read his _lieder_ and wrote to him, like old
Schulz, and felt themselves one with him. There were poor artists,--a
composer among others,--who had not, and could not attain, not only
success, but self-expression, and it made them glad to have their ideas
realized by Christophe. And dearest of all, perhaps,--there were those
who wrote to him without giving their names, and, being thus more free
to speak, naively laid bare their touching confidence in the elder
brother who had come to their assistance. Christophe's heart would grow
big at the thought that he would never know these charming people whom
it would have given him such joy to love: he would kiss some of these
anonymous letters as the writers of them kissed his _lieder_; and
each to himself would think:

"Dear written sheets, what a deal of good you have done me!"

So, according with the unvaried rhythm of the universe, there was formed
about him the little family of genius, grouped about him, giving him
food and taking it from him, which grows little by little, and in the
end becomes one great collective soul, of which he is the central fire,
like a gleaming world, a moral planet moving through space, mingling its
chorus of brotherhood with the harmony of the spheres.

And as these mysterious links were forged between Christophe and his
unseen friends, a revolution took place in his artistic faculty: it
became larger and more human. He lost all interest in music which was a
monologue, a soliloquy, and even more so in music which was a scientific
structure built entirely for the interest of the profession. He wished
his music to be an act of communion with other men. There is no vital
art save that which is linked with the rest of humanity. Johann Sebastian
Bach, even in his darkest hours of isolation, was linked with the rest
of humanity by his religious faith, which he expressed in his art.
Handel and Mozart, by dint of circumstances, wrote for an audience, and
not for themselves. Even Beethoven had to reckon with the multitude. It
is salutary. It is good for humanity to remind genius every now and then:

"What is there for us in your art? If there is nothing, out you go!"

In such constraint genius is the first to gain. There are, indeed, great
artists who express only themselves. But the greatest of all are those
whose hearts beat for all men. If any man would see the living God face
to face, he must seek Him, not in the empty firmament of his own brain,
but in the love of men.

The artists of that time were far removed from that love. They wrote
only for a more or less anarchical and vain group, uprooted from the
life of the country, who preened themselves on not sharing the
prejudices and passions of the rest of humanity, or else made a mock of
them. It is a fine sort of fame that is won by self-amputation from
life, so as to be unlike other men! Let all such artists perish! We will
go with the living, be suckled at the breasts of the earth, and drink in
all that is most profound and sacred in our people, and all its love
from the family and the soil. In the greatest age of liberty, among the
people with the most ardent worship of beauty, the young Prince of the
Italian Renaissance, Raphael, glorified maternity in his transteverine
Madonnas. Who is there now to give us in music a _Madonna a la
Chaise?_ Who is there to give us music meet for every hour of life?
You have nothing, you have nothing in France. When you want to give your
people songs, you are reduced to bringing up to date the German masters
of the past. In your art, from top to bottom, everything remains to be
done, or to be done again....

Christophe corresponded with Olivier, who was now settled in a provincial
town. He tried to maintain in correspondence that collaboration which had
been so fruitful during the time when they had lived together. He wanted
him to write him fine poetic words closely allied with the thoughts and
deeds of everyday life, like the poems which are the substance of the old
German _lieder_. Short fragments from the Scriptures and the Hindoo poems,
and the old Greek philosophers, short religious and moral poems, little
pictures of Nature, the emotions of love or family life, the whole poetry
of morning, evening, and night, that is in simple, healthy people. Four
lines or six are enough for a _lied_: only the simplest expressions, and
no elaborate development or subtlety of harmony. What have I to do with
your esthetic tricks? Love my life, help me to love it and to live it.
Write me the _Hours of France_, my _Great_ and _Small Hours_. And let us
together find the clearest melody. Let us avoid like the plague any
artistic language that belongs to a caste like that of so many writers,
and especially of so many French musicians of to-day. We must have the
courage to speak like men, and not like "artists." We must draw upon the
common fund of all men, and unashamedly make use of old formulae, upon
which the ages have set their seal, formulas which the ages have filled
with their spirit. Look at what our forefathers have done. It was by
returning to the musical language of all men that the art of the German
classics of the eighteenth century came into being. The melodies of Gluck
and the creators of the symphony are sometimes trivial and commonplace
compared with the subtle and erudite phrases of Johann Sebastian Bach and
Rameau. It is their raciness of the soil that gives such zest to, and has
procured such immense popularity for the German classics. They began with
the simplest musical forms, the _lied_ and the _Singspiel_, the little
flowers of everyday life which impregnated the childhood of men like
Mozart and Weber.--Do you do the same. Write songs for all and sundry.
Upon that basis you will soon build quartettes and symphonies. What is
the good of rushing ahead? The pyramids were not begun at the top. Your
symphonies at present are trunkless heads, ideas without any stuffing.
Oh, you fair spirits, become incarnate! There must be generations of
musicians patiently and joyously and piously living in brotherhood with
these people. No musical art was ever built in a day.

Christophe was not content to apply these principles in music: he urged
Olivier to set himself at the head of a similar movement in literature:

"The writers of to-day," he said, "waste their energy in describing
human rarities, or cases that are common enough in the abnormal groups
of men and women living on the fringe of the great society of active,
healthy human beings. Since they themselves have shut themselves off
from life, leave them and go where there are men. Show the life of every
day to the men and women of every day: that life is deeper and more vast
than the sea. The smallest among you bears the infinite in his soul. The
infinite is in every man who is simple enough to be a man, in the lover,
in the friend, in the woman who pays with her pangs for the radiant
glory of the day of childbirth, in every man and every woman who lives
in obscure self-sacrifice which will never be known to another soul: it
is the very river of life, flowing from one to another, from one to
another, and back again and round.... Write the simple life of one of
these simple men, write the peaceful epic of the days and nights
following, following one like to another, and yet all different, all
sons of the same mother, from the dawning of the first day in the life
of the world. Write it simply, as simple as its own unfolding. Waste no
thought upon the word, and the letter, and the subtle vain researches in
which the force of the artists of to-day is turned to nought. You are
addressing all men: use the language of all men. There are no words
noble or vulgar; there is no style chaste or impure: there are only
words and styles which say or do not say exactly what they have to say.
Be sound and thorough in all you do: think just what you think,--and
feel just what you feel. Let the rhythm of your heart prevail in your
writings! The style is the soul."

Olivier agreed with Christophe, but he replied rather ironically:

"Such a book would be fine: but it would never reach the people who
would care to read it. The critics would strangle it on the way."

"There speaks my little French bourgeois!" replied Christophe. "Worrying
his mind about what the critics will or will not think of his work!...
The critics, my boy, are only there to register victory or defeat. The
great thing is to be victor.... I have managed to get along without
them! You must learn how to disregard them, too...."

       *       *       *       *       *

But Olivier had learned how to disregard something entirely different!
He had turned aside from art, and Christophe, and everybody. At that
time he was thinking of nothing but Jacqueline, and Jacqueline was
thinking of nothing but him.

The selfishness of their love had cut them off from everything and
everybody: they were recklessly destroying all their future resources.

They were in the blind wonder of the first days, when man and woman,
joined together, have no thought save that of losing themselves in each
other.... With every part of themselves, body and soul, they touch and
taste and seek to probe into the very inmost depths. They are alone
together in a lawless universe, a very chaos of love, when the confused
elements know not as yet what distinguishes one from the other, and
strive greedily to devour each other. Each in other finds nothing save
delight: each in other finds another self. What is the world to them?
Like the antique Androgyne slumbering in his dream of voluptuous and
harmonious delights, their eyes are closed to the world, All the world
is in themselves....

O days, O nights, weaving one web of dreams, hours fleeting like the
floating white clouds in the heavens, leaving nought but a shimmering
wake in dazzled eyes, the warm wind breathing the languor of spring, the
golden warmth of the body, the sunlit arbor of love, shameless chastity,
embraces, and madness, and sighs, and happy laughter, happy tears, what
is there left of the lovers, thrice happy dust? Hardly, it seems, that
their hearts could ever remember to beat: for when they were one then
time had ceased to exist.

And all their days are one like unto another.... Sweet, sweet dawn....
Together, embracing, they issue from the abyss of sleep: they smile
and their breath is mingled, their eyes open and meet, and they kiss....
There is freshness and youth in the morning hours, a virgin air
cooling their fever.... There is a sweet languor in the endless day
still throbbing with the sweetness of the night.... Summer
afternoons, dreams in the fields, on the velvety sward, beneath the
rustling of the tall white poplars.... Dreams in the lovely evenings,
when, under the gleaming sky, they return, clasping each other, to the
house of their love. The wind whispers in the bushes. In the clear lake
of the sky hovers the fleecy light of the silver moon. A star falls and
dies,--hearts give a little throb--a world is silently snuffed out.
Swift silent shadows pass at rare intervals on the road near by. The
bells of the town ring in the morrow's holiday. They stop for a moment,
she nestles close to him, they stand so without a word.... Ah! if only
life could be so forever, as still and silent as that moment!... She
sighs and says:

"Why do I love you so much?..."

After a few weeks' traveling in Italy they had settled in a town in the
west of France, where Olivier had gained an appointment. They saw hardly
anybody. They took no interest in anything. When they were forced to pay
calls, their scandalous indifference was so open that it hurt some,
while it made others smile. Anything that was said to them simply made
no impression. They had the impertinently solemn manner common to young
married people, who seem to say:

"You people don't know anything at all...."

Jacqueline's pretty pouting face, with its absorbed expression,
Olivier's happy eyes that looked so far away, said only:

"If you knew how boring we find you!... When shall we be left alone?"

Even the presence of others could not embarrass them. It was hard not to
see their exchange of glances as they talked. They did not need to look
to see each other: and they would smile: for they knew that they were
thinking of the same things at the same time. When they were alone once
more, after having suffered the constraint of the presence of others,
they would shout for joy--indulge in a thousand childish pranks. They
would talk baby-language, and find grotesque nicknames for each other.
She used to call him Olive, Olivet, Olifant, Fanny, Mami, Mime, Minaud,
Quinaud, Kaunitz, Cosima, Cobourg, Panot, Nacot, Ponette, Naquet, and
Canot. She would behave like a little girl; but she wanted to be all
things at once to him, to give him every kind of love: mother, sister,
wife, sweetheart, mistress.

It was not enough for her to share his pleasures: as she had promised
herself, she shared his work: and that, too, was a game. At first she
brought to bear on it the amused ardor of a woman to whom work is
something new: she seemed really to take a pleasure in the most
ungrateful tasks, copying in the libraries, and translating dull books:
it was part of her plan of life, that it should be pure and serious, and
wholly consecrated to noble thoughts and work in common. And all went
well as long as the light of love was in them: for she thought only of
him, and not of what she was doing. The odd thing was that everything
she did in that way was well done. Her mind found no difficulty in
taking in abstract ideas, which at any other time of her life she would
have found it hard to follow: her whole being was, as it were, uplifted
from the earth by love; she did not know it; like a sleep-walker moving
easily over roofs, gravely and gaily, without seeing anything at all,
she lived on in her dream....

And then she began to see the roofs: but that did not give her any
qualms: only she asked what she was doing so high up, and became herself
again. Work bored her. She persuaded herself that it stood in the way of
her love: no doubt because her love had already become less ardent. But
there was no evidence of that. They could not bear to be out of each
other's sight. They shut themselves off from the world, and closed their
doors and refused all invitations. They were jealous of the affections
of other people, even of their occupations, of everything which
distracted them from their love. Olivier's correspondence with
Christophe dwindled. Jacqueline did not like it: he was a rival to her,
representing a part of Olivier's past life in which she had had no
share; and the more room he filled in Olivier's life, the more she
sought, instinctively, to rob him of it. Without any deliberate
intention, she gradually and steadily alienated Olivier from his friend:
she made sarcastic comments on Christophe's manners, his face, his way
of writing, his artistic projects: there was no malice in what she said,
nor slyness: she was too good-natured for that. Olivier was amused by
her remarks, and saw no harm in them: he thought he still loved
Christophe as much as ever, but he loved only his personality: and that
counts for very little in friendship: he did not see that little by
little he was losing his understanding of him, and his interest in his
ideas, and the heroic idealism in which they had been so united.... Love
is too sweet a joy for the heart of youth: compared with it, what other
faith can hold its ground? The body of the beloved and the soul that
breathes in it are all science and all faith. With what a pitying smile
does a lover regard the object of another's adoration and the things
which he himself once adored! Of all the might of life and its bitter
struggles the lover sees nothing but the passing flower, which he
believes must live forever.... Love absorbed Olivier. In the beginning
his happiness was not so great but it left him with the energy to
express it in graceful verse. Then even that seemed vain to him: it was
a theft of time from love. And Jacqueline also set to work to destroy
their every source of life, to kill the tree of life, without the
support of which the ivy of love must die. Thus in their happiness they
destroyed each other.

Alas! we so soon grow used to happiness! When selfish happiness is the
sole aim of life, life is soon left without an aim. It becomes a habit,
a sort of intoxication which we cannot do without. And how vitally
important it is that we should do without it.... Happiness is an instant
in the universal rhythm, one of the poles between which the pendulum of
life swings: to stop the pendulum it must be broken....

They knew the "boredom of well-being which sets the nerves on edge."
Their hours of sweetness dragged, drooped, and withered like flowers
without water. The sky was still blue for them, but there was no longer
the light morning breeze. All was still: Nature was silent. They were
alone, as they had desired.--And their hearts sank.

An indefinable feeling of emptiness, a vague weariness not without a
certain charm, came over them. They knew not what it was, and they were
darkly uneasy. They became morbidly sensitive. Their nerves, strained in
the close watching of the silence, trembled like leaves at the least
unexpected clash of life. Jacqueline was often in tears without any
cause for weeping, and although she tried hard to convince herself of
it, it was not only love that made them flow. After the ardent and
tormented years that had preceded her marriage the sudden stoppage of
her efforts as she attained--attained and passed--her end,--the sudden
futility of any new course of action--and perhaps of all that she had
done in the past,--flung her into a state of confusion, which she could
not understand, so that it appalled and crushed her. She would not allow
that it was so: she attributed it to her nerves, and pretended to laugh
it off: but her laughter was no less uneasy than her tears. She tried
bravely to take up her work again: but as soon as she began she could
not understand how she could ever have taken any interest in such stupid
things, and she flung them aside in disgust. She made an effort to pick
up the threads of her social life once more: but with no better success:
she had committed herself, and she had lost the trick of dealing with
the commonplace people and their commonplace remarks that are inevitable
in life: she thought them grotesque; and she flung back into her
isolation with her husband, and tried hard to persuade herself, as a
result of these unhappy experiences, that there was nothing good in the
world save love. And for a time she seemed really to be more in love
than ever. Olivier, being less passionate and having a greater store of
tenderness, was less susceptible to these apprehensions: only every now
and then he would feel a qualm of uneasiness. Besides, his love was
preserved in some measure by the constraint of his daily occupation, his
work, which was distasteful to him. But as he was highly strung and
sensitive, and everything that happened in the heart of the woman he
loved affected him also, Jacqueline's secret uneasiness infected him.

One fine afternoon they went for a walk together in the country. They
had looked forward to the walk eagerly and happily. All the world was
bright and gay about them. But as soon as they set out gloom and heavy
sadness descended upon them: they felt chilled to the heart. They could
find nothing to say to each other. However, they forced themselves to
speak, but every word they said rang hollowly, and made them feel the
emptiness of their lives at that moment. They finished their walk
mechanically, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. They returned home sick
at heart. It was twilight: their rooms were cold, black, and empty. They
did not light up at once, to avoid seeing each other. Jacqueline went
into her room, and, instead of taking off her hat and cloak, she sat in
silence by the window. Olivier sat, too, in the next room with his arms
resting on the table. The door was open between the two rooms; they were
so near that they could have heard each other's breathing. And in the
semi-darkness they both wept, in silence, bitterly. They held their
hands over their mouths, so that they should make no sound. At last, in
agony, Olivier said:

"Jacqueline...."

Jacqueline gulped down her sobs, and said:

"What is it?"

"Aren't you coming?"

"Yes, I'm coming."

She took off her hat and cloak, and went and bathed her eyes. He lit the
lamp. In a few minutes she came into the room. They did not look at each
other. Each knew that the other had been weeping. And they could not
console each other, for they knew not why it was.

Then came a time when they could no longer conceal their unhappiness.
And as they would not admit the true cause of it, they cast about for
another, and had no difficulty in finding it. They set it down to the
dullness of provincial life and their surroundings. They found comfort
in that. M. Langeais was informed of their plight by his daughter, and
was not greatly surprised to hear that she was beginning to weary of
heroism. He made use of his political friends, and obtained a post in
Paris for his son-in-law.

When the good news reached them, Jacqueline jumped for joy and regained
all her old happiness. Now that they were going to leave it, they found
that they were quite fond of the dull country: they had sown so many
memories of love in it! They occupied their last days in going over the
traces of their love. There was a tender melancholy in their pilgrimage.
Those calm stretches of country had seen them happy. An inward voice
murmured:

"You know what you are leaving behind you. Do you know what lies before
you?"

Jacqueline wept the day before they left. Olivier asked her why. She
would not say. They took a sheet of paper, and as they always did when
they were fearful of the sound of words, wrote:

"My dear, dear Olivier...."

"My dear, dear Jacqueline...."

"I am sorry to be going away."

"Going away from what?"

"From the place where we have been lovers."

"Going where?"

"To a place where we shall be older."

"To a place where we shall be together."

"But never so loving."

"Always more loving."

"Who can tell?"

"I know."

"I will be."

Then they drew two circles at the bottom of the paper for kisses. And
then she dried her tears, laughed, and dressed him up as a favorite of
Henri III by putting her toque on his head and her white cape with its
collar turned up like a ruff round his shoulders.

In Paris they resumed all their old friendships, but they did not find
their friends just as they had left them. When he heard of Olivier's
arrival, Christophe rushed to him delightedly. Olivier was equally
rejoiced to see him. But as soon as they met they felt an unaccountable
constraint between them. They both tried to break through it, but in
vain. Olivier was very affectionate, but there was a change in him, and
Christophe felt it. A friend who marries may do what he will: he cannot
be the friend of the old days. The woman's soul is, and must be, merged
in the man's. Christophe could detect the woman in everything that
Olivier said and did, in the imperceptible light of his expression, in
the unfamiliar turn of his lips, in the new inflections of his voice and
the trend of his ideas. Olivier was oblivious of it: but he was amazed
to find Christophe so different from the man he had left. He did not go
so far as to think that it was Christophe who had changed: he recognized
that the change was in himself, and ascribed it to normal evolution, the
inevitable result of the passing years; and he was surprised not to find
the same progress in Christophe: he thought reproachfully that he had
remained stationary in his ideas, which had once been so dear to him,
though now they seemed naive and out of date. The truth was that they
did not sort well with the stranger soul which, unknown to himself, had
taken up its abode in him. He was most clearly conscious of it when
Jacqueline was present when they were talking: and then between
Olivier's eyes and Christophe there was a veil of irony. However, they
tried to conceal what they felt. Christophe went often to see them, and
Jacqueline innocently let fly at him her barbed and poisoned shafts. He
suffered her. But when he returned home he would feel sad and sorry.

Their first months in Paris were fairly happy for Jacqueline, and
consequently for Olivier. At first she was busy with their new house:
they had found a nice little flat looking on to a garden in an old
street at Passy. Choosing furniture and wallpapers kept her time full
for a few weeks. Jacqueline flung herself into it energetically, and
almost passionately and exaggeratedly: it was as though her eternal
happiness depended on the color of her hangings or the shape of an old
chest. Then she resumed intercourse with her father and mother and her
friends. As she had entirely forgotten them during her year of love, it
was as though she had made their acquaintance for the first time: just
as part of her soul was merged in Olivier's, so part of Olivier's soul was
merged in hers, and she saw her old friends with new eyes. They
seemed to her to have gained much. Olivier did not lose by it at first.
They were a set-off to each other. The moral reserve and the poetic
light and shade of her husband made Jacqueline find more pleasure in
those worldly people who only think of enjoying themselves, and of being
brilliant and charming: and the seductive but dangerous failings of
their world, which she knew so much better because she belonged to it,
made her appreciate the security of her lover's affection. She amused
herself with these comparisons, and loved to linger over them, the
better to justify her choice.--She lingered over them to such an extent
that sometimes she could not tell why she had made that choice. Happily,
such moments never lasted long. She would be sorry for them, and was
never so tender with Olivier as when they were past. Thereupon she would
begin again. By the time it had become a habit with her it had ceased to
amuse her: and the comparison became more aggressive: instead of
complementing each other, the two opposing worlds declared war on each
other. She began to wonder why Olivier lacked the qualities, if not some
of the failings, which she now admired in her Parisian friends. She did
not tell him so: but Olivier often felt his wife looking at him without
any indulgence in her eyes, and it hurt him and made him uneasy.

However, he had not lost the ascendancy over Jacqueline which love had
given him: and they would have gone on quite happily living their life
of tender and hard-working intimacy for long enough had it not been for
circumstances which altered their material condition and destroyed its
delicate balance.

_Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran nemico...._

A sister of Madame Langeais died. She was the widow of a rich
manufacturer, and had no children. Her whole estate passed to the
Langeais. Jacqueline's fortune was more than doubled by it. When she
came in for her legacy, Olivier remembered what Christophe had said
about money, and remarked:

"We were quite well off without it: perhaps it will be a bad thing for
us."

Jacqueline laughed at him:

"Silly!" she said. "As though money could ever do any harm! We won't
make any change in our way of living just yet."

Their life remained the same to all appearances: so much the same that
after a certain time Jacqueline began to complain that they were not
well enough off: proof positive that there was a change somewhere. And,
in fact, although their income had been doubled or tripled, they spent
the whole of it without knowing how they did it. They began to wonder
how they had managed to live before. The money flew, and was swallowed
up by a thousand new expenses, which seemed at once to be habitual and
indispensable. Jacqueline had begun to patronize the great dressmakers:
she had dismissed the family sempstress who came by the day, a woman she
had known since she was a child. The days of the little fourpenny hats
made out of nothing, though they were quite pretty all the same, were
gone,--gone the days of the frocks which were not impeccably smart,
though they had much of her own grace, and were, indeed, a part of
herself! The sweet intimate charm which shone upon all about her grew
fainter every day. The poetry of her nature was lost. She was becoming
commonplace.

They changed their flat. The rooms which they had furnished with so much
trouble and pleasure seemed narrow and ugly. Instead of the cozy little
rooms, all radiant with her spirit, with a friendly tree waving its
delicate foliage against the windows, they took an enormous,
comfortable, well-arranged flat which they did not, could not, love,
where they were bored to death. Instead of their old friendly
belongings, they obtained furniture and hangings which were strangers to
them. There was no place left for memories. The first years of their
married life were swept away from their thoughts.... It is a great
misfortune for two people living together to have the ties which bind
them to their past love broken! The image of their love is a safeguard
against the disappointment and hostility which inevitably succeed the
first years of tenderness.... The power to spend largely had brought
Jacqueline, both in Paris and abroad--(for now that they were rich they
often traveled)--into touch with a class of rich and useless people,
whose society gave her a sort of contempt for the rest of mankind, all
those who had work to do. With her marvelous power of adaptation, she
very quickly caught the color of these sterile and rotten men and women.
She could not fight against it. At once she became refractory and
irritable, regarding the idea that it was possible--and right--to be
happy in her domestic duties and the _aurea mediocritus_ as mere
"vulgar manners." She had lost even the capacity to understand the
bygone days when she had so generously given herself in love.

Olivier was not strong enough to fight against it. He, too, had changed.
He had given up his work, and had no fixed and compulsory occupation. He
wrote, and the balance of his life was adjusted by it. Till then he had
suffered because he could not give his whole life to art. Now that he
could do so he felt utterly lost in the cloudy world. Art which is not also
a profession, and supported by a healthy practical life, art which
knows not the necessity of earning the daily bread, loses the best part
of its force and its reality. It is only the flower of luxury. It is
not--(what in the greatest, the only great, artists it is)--the sacred
fruit of human suffering.--Olivier felt a disinclination to work, a
desire to ask: "What is the good of it?" There was nothing to make him
write: he would let his pen run on, he dawdled about, he had lost his
bearings. He had lost touch with his own class of men and women
patiently plowing the hard furrow of their lives. He had fallen into a
different world, where he was ill at ease, though on the whole he did
not find it unpleasant. Weak, amiable, and curious, he fell complacently
to observing that world which was entirely lacking in consistency,
though it was not without charm; and he did not see that little by
little he was becoming contaminated by it: it was undermining his faith.

No doubt the transformation was not so rapid in him as it was in
Jacqueline.--Women have the terrible privilege of being able suddenly to
undergo a complete change. The way in which they suddenly die and then
as suddenly come to life again is appalling to those who love them. And
yet it is perfectly natural for a human being who is full of life
without the curb of the will not to be to-morrow what it is to-day. A
woman is like running water. The man who loves her must follow the
stream or divert it into the channel of his own life. In both cases
there must be change. But it is a dangerous experience, and no man
really knows love until he has gone through it. And its harmony is so
delicate during the first years of married life that often the very
smallest change in either husband or wife is enough to destroy their
whole relationship. How much more perilous, then, is a sudden change of
fortune or of circumstance! They must needs be very strong--or very
indifferent to each other--to withstand it.

Jacqueline and Olivier were neither indifferent nor strong. They began
to see each other in a new light: and the face of the beloved became
strange to them. When first they made the sad discovery, they hid it
from each other in loving pity: for they still loved each other. Olivier
took refuge in his work, and by applying himself to it regularly, though
with even less conviction than before, won through to tranquillity.
Jacqueline had nothing. She did nothing. She would stay in bed for
hours, or dawdle over her toilette, sitting idly, half dressed,
motionless, lost in thought: and gradually a dumb misery crept over her
like an icy mist. She could not break away from the fixed idea of
love.... Love! Of things human the most Divine when it is the gift of
self, a passionate and blind sacrifice. But when it is no more than the
pursuit of happiness, it is the most senseless and the most elusive....
It was impossible for her to conceive any other aim in life. In moments
of benevolence she had tried to take an interest in the sorrows of other
people: but she could not do it. The sufferings of others filled her
with an ungovernable feeling of repulsion: her nerves were not strong
enough to bear them. To appease her conscience she had occasionally done
something which looked like philanthropy: but the result had been tame
and disappointing.

"You see," she would say to Christophe, "when one tries to do good one
does harm. It is much better not to try. I'm not cut out for it."

Christophe would look at her: and he would think of a girl he had met, a
selfish, immoral little grisette, absolutely incapable of real
affection, though, as soon as she saw anybody suffering, she was filled
with motherly pity for him, even though she had not cared a rap for him
before, even though he were a stranger to her. She was not abashed by
the most horrible tasks, and she would even take a strange pleasure in
doing those which demanded the greatest self-denial. She never stopped
to think about it: she seemed to find in it a use for her obscure,
hereditary, and eternally unexpressed idealism: her soul was atrophied
as far as the rest of her life was concerned, but at such rare moments
it breathed again: it gave her a sense of well-being and inward joy to
be able to allay suffering: and her joy was then almost misplaced.--The
goodness of that woman, who was selfish, the selfishness of Jacqueline,
who was good in spite of it, were neither vice nor virtue, but in both
cases only a matter of health. But the first was in the better case.
Jacqueline was crushed by the mere idea of suffering. She would have
preferred death to physical illness. She would have preferred death to
the loss of either of her sources of joy: her beauty or her youth. That
she should not have all the happiness to which she thought herself
entitled,--(for she believed in happiness, it was a matter of faith with
her, wholeheartedly and absurdly, a religious belief),--and that others
should have more happiness than herself, would have seemed to her the
most horrible injustice. Happiness was not only a religion to her; it
was a virtue. To be unhappy seemed to her to be an infirmity. Her whole
life gradually came to revolve round that principle. Her real character
had broken through the veils of idealism in which in girlish bashful
modesty she had enshrouded herself. In her reaction against the idealism
of the past she began to see things in a hard, crude light. Things were
only true for her in proportion as they coincided with the opinion of
the world and the smoothness of life. She had reached her mother's state
of mind: she went to church, and practised religion punctiliously and
indifferently. She never stopped to ask herself whether there was any
real truth in it: she had other more positive mental difficulties: and
she would think of the mystical revolt of her childhood with pitying
irony.--And yet her new positivism was no more real than her old
idealism. She forced it. She was neither angel nor brute. She was just a
poor bored woman.

She was bored, bored, bored: and her boredom was all the greater in that
she could not excuse herself on the score of not being loved, or by
saying that she could not endure Olivier. Her life seemed to be stunted,
walled up, with no future prospect: she longed for a new happiness that
should be perpetually renewed; her longing was utterly childish, for it
never took into account her indifferent capacity for happiness. She was
like so many women living idle lives with idle husbands, who have every
reason to be happy, and yet never cease torturing themselves. There are
many such couples, who are rich and blessed with health and lovely
children, and clever and capable of feeling fine things, and possessed
of the power to keep themselves employed and to do good, and to enrich
their own lives and the lives of others. And they spend their time in
moaning and groaning that they do not love each other, that they love
some one else, or that they do not love somebody else--perpetually taken
up with themselves, and their sentimental or sensual relations, and
their pretended right to happiness, their conflicting egoism, and
arguing, arguing, arguing, playing with their sham grand passion, their
sham great suffering, and in the end believing in it, and--suffering....
If only some one would say to them:

"You are not in the least interesting. It is indecent to be so sorry for
yourselves when you have so many good reasons for being happy!"

If only some one would take away their money, their health, all the
marvelous gifts of which they are so unworthy! If only some one would
once more lay the yoke of poverty and real suffering on these slaves who
are incapable of being free and are driven mad by their liberty! If they
had to earn their bread in the sweat of their brows, they would be glad
enough to eat it. And if they were to come face to face with grim
suffering, they would never dare to play with the sham....

But, when all is said and done, they do suffer. They are ill. How, then,
are they not to be pitied?--Poor Jacqueline was quite innocent, as
innocent in drifting apart from Olivier as Olivier was in not holding
her. She was what Nature had made her. She did not know that marriage is
a challenge to Nature, and that, when one has thrown down the gauntlet
to Nature, it is only to be expected that she will arise and begin
valiantly to wage the combat which one has provoked. She saw that she
had been mistaken, and she was exasperated with herself; and her
disillusion turned to hostility towards the thing she had loved,
Olivier's faith, which had also been her own. An intelligent woman has,
much more than a man, moments of an intuitive perception of things
eternal: but it is more difficult for her to maintain her grip on them.
Once a man has come by the idea of the eternal, he feeds it with his
life-blood. A woman uses it to feed her own life: she absorbs it, and
does not create it. She must always be throwing fresh fuel into her
heart and mind: she cannot be self-sufficing. And if she cannot believe
and love, she must destroy--except she possess the supreme virtue of
serenity.

Jacqueline had believed passionately in a union based on a common faith,
in the happiness of struggling and suffering together in accomplishment.
But she had only believed in that endeavor, that faith, while they were
gilded by the sun of love: and as the sun died down she saw them as
barren, gloomy mountains standing out against the empty sky: and her
strength failed her, so that she could go no farther on the road: what
was the good of reaching the summit? What was there on the other side?
It was a gigantic phantom and a snare!... Jacqueline could not
understand how Olivier could go on being taken in by such fantastic
notions which consumed life: and she began to tell herself that he was
not very clever, nor very much alive. She was stifling in his
atmosphere, in which she could not breathe, and the instinct of
self-preservation drove her on to the attack, in self-defense. She
strove to scatter and bring to dust the injurious beliefs of the man she
still loved: she used every weapon of irony and seductive pleasure in
her armory: she trammeled him with the tendrils of her desires and her
petty cares: she longed to make him a reflection of herself, ...
herself who knew neither what she wanted nor what she was! She was
humiliated by Olivier's want of success: and she did not care whether it
were just or unjust; for she had come to believe that the only thing
which saves a man of talent from failure is success. Olivier was
oppressed by his consciousness of her doubts, and his strength was
sapped by it. However, he struggled on as best he could, as so many men
have struggled, and will struggle, for the most part vainly, in the
unequal conflict in which the selfish instinct of the woman upholds
itself against the man's intellectual egoism by playing upon his
weakness, his dishonesty, and his common sense, which is the name with
which he disguises the wear and tear of life and his own cowardice.--At
least, Jacqueline and Olivier were better than the majority of such
combatants. For he would never have betrayed his ideal, as thousands of
men do who drift with the demands of their laziness, their vanity, and
their loves, into renunciation of their immortal souls. And, if he had
done so, Jacqueline would have despised him. But, in her blindness, she
strove to destroy that force in Olivier, which was hers also, their common
safeguard: and by an instinctive strategical movement she undermined the
friendship by which that force was upheld.

Since the legacy Christophe had become a stranger in their household.
The affectation of snobbishness and a dull practical outlook on life
which Jacqueline used wickedly to exaggerate in her conversations with
him were more than he could bear. He would lash out sometimes, and say
hard things, which were taken in bad part. They could never have brought
about a rupture between the two friends: they were too fond of each
other. Nothing in the world would have induced Olivier to give up
Christophe. But he could not make Jacqueline feel the same about him;
and, his love making him weak, he was incapable of hurting her.
Christophe, who saw what was happening to him, and how he was suffering,
made the choice easy by a voluntary withdrawal. He saw that he could not
help Olivier in any way by staying, but rather made things worse. He was
the first to give his friend reasons for turning from him: and Olivier,
in his weakness, accepted those inadequate reasons, while he guessed
what the sacrifice must have cost Christophe, and was bitterly sorry for
it.

Christophe bore him no ill-will. He thought that there was much truth in
the saying that a man's wife is his better half. For a man married is
but the half of a man.

He tried to reconstruct his life without Olivier. But it was all in
vain, and it was idle for him to pretend that the separation would only
be for a short time: in spite of his optimism, he had many hours of
sadness. He had lost the habit of loneliness. He had been alone, it is
true, during Olivier's sojourn in the provinces: but then he had been
able to pretend and tell himself that his friend was away for a time,
and would return. Now that his friend had come back he was farther away
than ever. His affection for him, which had filled his life for a number
of years, was suddenly taken from him: it was as though he had lost his
chief reason for working. Since his friendship for Olivier he had grown
used to thinking with him and bringing him into everything he did. His
work was not enough to supply the gap: for Christophe had grown used to
weaving the image of his friend into his work. And now that his friend
no longer took any interest in him, Christophe was thrown off his
balance: he set out to find another affection to restore it.

Madame Arnaud and Philomela did not fail him. But just then such
tranquil friendship as theirs was not enough. However, the two women
seemed to divine Christophe's sorrow, and they secretly sympathized with
him. Christophe was much surprised one evening to see Madame Arnaud come
into his room. Till then she had never ventured to call on him. She
seemed to be somewhat agitated. Christophe paid no heed to it, and set
her uneasiness down to her shyness. She sat down, and for some time said
nothing. To put her at her ease, Christophe did the honors of his room.
They talked of Olivier, with memories of whom the room was filled.
Christophe spoke of him gaily and naturally, without giving so much as
a hint of what had happened. But Madame Arnaud, knowing it, could not help
looking at him pityingly and saying:

"You don't see each other now?"

He thought she had come to console him, and felt a gust of impatience,
for he did not like any meddling with his affairs. He replied:

"Whenever we like."

She blushed, and said:

"Oh! it was not an indiscreet question!"

He was sorry for his gruffness, and took her hands:

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I am always afraid of his being blamed.
Poor boy! He is suffering as much as I.... No, we don't see each other
now."

"And he doesn't write to you?"

"No," said Christophe, rather shamefacedly....

"How sad life is!" said Madame Arnaud, after a moment.

"No; life is not sad," he said. "But there are sad moments in it."

Madame Arnaud went on with veiled bitterness:

"We love, and then we love no longer. What is the good of it all?"

Christophe replied:

"It is good to have loved."

She went on:

"You have sacrificed yourself for him. If only our self-sacrifice could
be of any use to those we love! But it makes them none the happier!"

"I have not sacrificed myself," said Christophe angrily. "And if I have,
it is because it pleased me to do so. There's no room for arguing about
it. One does what one has to do. If one did not do it, one would be
unhappy, and suffer for it! There never was anything so idiotic as this
talk of sacrifice! Clergymen, in the poverty of their hearts, mix it up
with a cramped and morose idea of Protestant gloom. Apparently, if an
act of sacrifice is to be good, it must be besotted.... Good Lord! if a
sacrifice means sorrow to you, and not joy, then don't do it; you are
unworthy of it. A man doesn't sacrifice himself for the King of Prussia,
but for himself. If you don't feel the happiness that lies in the gift
of yourself, then get out! You don't deserve to live."

Madame Arnaud listened to Christophe without daring to look at him.
Suddenly she got up and said:

"Good-by."

Then he saw that she had come to confide in him, and said:

"Oh! forgive me. I'm a selfish oaf, and can only talk about myself.
Please stay. Won't you?"

She said:

"No: I cannot.... Thank you...."

And she left him.

It was some time before they met again. She gave no sign of life; and he
did not go to see either her or Philomela. He was fond of both of them:
but he was afraid of having to talk to them about things that made him
sad. And, besides, for the time being, their calm, dull existence, with
its too rarefied air, was not suited to his needs. He wanted to see new
faces; it was imperative that he should find a new interest, a new love,
to occupy his mind.

By way of being taken out of himself he began to frequent the theaters
which he had neglected for a long time. The theater seemed to him to be
an interesting school for a musician who wishes to observe and take note
of the accents of the passions.

It was not that he had any greater sympathy with French plays than when
he first came to live in Paris. Outside his small liking for their
eternal stale and brutal subjects connected with the psycho-physiology
of love, it seemed to him that the language of the French theater,
especially in poetic drama, was ultra-false. Neither their prose nor
their verse had anything in common with the living language and the
genius of the people. Their prose was an artificial language, the
language of a polite chronicle with the best, that of a vulgar
feuilletonist with the worst. Their poetry justified Goethe's gibe:

"_Poetry is all very well for those who have nothing to say_."

It was a wordy and inverted prose: the profusion of metaphors clumsily
tacked on to it in imitation of the lyricism of other nations produced
an effect of utter falsity upon any sincere person. Christophe set no
more store by these poetic dramas than he did by the Italian operas with
their shrill mellifluous airs and their ornamental vocal exercises. He
was much more interested in the actors than the plays. And the authors
had tried hard to imitate them. "_It was hopeless to think that a play
could be performed with any success unless the author had looked to it
that his characters were modeled on the vices of the actors_." The
situation was hardly at all changed since the time when Diderot wrote
those lines. The actors had become the models of the art of the theater.
As soon as any one of them reached success, he had his theater, his
compliant tailor-authors, and his plays made to measure.

Among these great mannikins of literary fashions Francoise Oudon
attracted Christophe. Paris had been infatuated with her for a couple of
years or so. She, too, of course, had her theater and her purveyors of
parts: however, she did not only act in plays written for her: her mixed
repertory ranged from Ibsen to Sardou, from Gabriele d'Annunzio to Dumas
_fils_, from Bernard Shaw to the latest Parisian playwrights. Upon
occasion she would even venture into the Versailles' avenues of the
classic hexameter, or on to the deluge of images of Shakespeare. But she
was ill at ease in that galley, and her audience was even more so.
Whatever she played, she played herself, nothing but herself, always. It
was both her weakness and her strength. Until the public had been
awakened to an interest in her personality, her acting had had no
success. As soon as that interest was roused, everything she did
appeared marvelous. And, indeed, it was well worth while in watching her
to forget the usually pitiful plays which she betrayed by endowing and
adorning them with her vitality. The mystery of the woman's body, swayed
by a stranger soul, was to Christophe far more moving than the plays in
which she acted.

She had a fine, clear-cut, rather tragic profile. She had not the marked
heavy lines of the Roman style: on the contrary, her lines were delicate
and Parisian, _a la _Jean Goujon--as much like a boy's as a
woman's. A short, finely-modeled nose. A beautiful mouth, with thin
lips, curling rather bitterly. Bright cheeks, girlishly thin, in which
there was something touching, the light of inward suffering. A strong
chin. Pale complexion. One of those habitually impassive faces which are
transparent in spite of themselves, and reveal the soul quivering behind
it, as though it were exposed in its nakedness; one of those faces in
which the soul seems to be ever, in every part of it, just beneath the
skin. She had very fine hair and eyebrows, and her changing eyes were
gray and amber-colored, passing quickly from one light to another,
greenish and golden, like the eyes of a cat. And there was something
catlike in all her nature, in her apparent torpor, her semi-somnolence,
with eyes wide open, always on the watch, always suspicious, while
suddenly she would nervously and rather cruelly relax her watchfulness.
She was not so tall as she appeared, nor so slender; she had beautiful
shoulders, lovely arms, and fine, long hands. She was very neat in her
dress, and her coiffure, always trim and tasteful, with none of the
Bohemian carelessness or the exaggerated smartness of many artists--even
in that she was catlike, instinctively aristocratic, although she had
risen from the gutter. At bottom she was incurably shy and wild.

She must have been a little less than thirty. Christophe had heard
people speak of her at Gamache's with coarse admiration, as a woman of
great freedom, intelligence, and boldness, tremendous and inflexible
energy, and burning ambition, but bitter, fantastic, perplexing, and
violent, a woman who had waded through a deal of mud before she had
reached her present pinnacle of fame, and had since avenged herself.

One day, when Christophe was going by train to see Philomela at Meudon,
as he opened the door of a compartment, he saw the actress sitting
there. She seemed to be agitated and perturbed, and Christophe's
appearance annoyed her. She turned her back on him, and looked
obstinately out of the opposite window. But Christophe was so struck by
the changed expression in her face, that he could not stop gazing at her
with a naive and embarrassing compassion. It exasperated her, and she
flung an angry look at him which he did not understand. At the next
station she got out and went into another compartment. Then for the
first time it occurred to him--rather late in the day--that he had
driven her away: and he was greatly distressed. A few days later, at a
station on the same line, he was sitting on the only seat in the
platform, waiting for the train back to Paris. She appeared, and came
and sat by his side. He began to move, but she said:

"Stay."

They were alone. He begged her pardon for having forced her to go to
another compartment the other day, saying that if he had had any idea
that he was incommoding her he would have got out himself. She smiled
ironically, and only replied:

"You were certainly unbearable with your persistent staring."

He said:

"I begged your pardon: I could not help it.... You looked so unhappy."

"Well, what of it?" she said.

"It was too strong for me. If you saw a man drowning, wouldn't you hold
out your hand to him?"

"I? Certainly not," she said. "I would push him under water, so as to
get it over quickly."

She spoke with a mixture of bitterness and humor: and, when he looked at
her in amazement, she laughed.

The train came in. It was full up, except for the last carriage. She got
in. The porter told them to hurry up. Christophe, who had no mind to
repeat the scene of a few days before, was for finding another
compartment, but she said:

"Come in."

He got in, and she said:

"To-day I don't mind."

They began to talk. Christophe tried very seriously to prove to her that
it was not right not to take an interest in others, and that people
could do so much for each other by helping and comforting each other....

"Consolation," she said, "is not much in my line...."

And as Christophe insisted:

"Yes," she said, with her impertinent smile; "the part of comforter is
all very well for the man who plays it."

It was a moment or two before he grasped her meaning. When he
understood, when he fancied that she suspected him of seeking his own
interest, while he was only thinking of her, he got up indignantly and
opened the door, and made as though to climb out, although the train was
moving. She prevented him, though not without difficulty. He sat down
again angrily, and shut the door just as the train shot into a tunnel.

"You see," she said, "you might have been killed."

"I don't care," he said.

He refused to speak to her again.

"People are so stupid," he said. "They make each other suffer, they
suffer, and when a man goes to help another fellow-creature, he is
suspected. It is disgusting. People like that are not human."

She laughed and tried to soothe him. She laid her gloved hand on his:
she spoke to him gently, and called him by his name.

"What?" he said. "You know me?"

"As if everybody didn't know everybody in Paris! We're all in the same
boat. But it was horrid of me to speak to you as I did. You are a good
fellow. I can see that. Come; calm yourself. Shake hands! Let us make
peace!"

They shook hands, and went on talking amicably. She said:

"It is not my fault, you know. I have had so many experiences with men
that I have become suspicious."

"They have deceived me, too, many a time," said Christophe. "But I
always give them credit for something better."

"I see; you were born to be gulled."

He began to laugh:

"Yes; I've been taken in a good many times in my life; I've gulped down
a good many lies. But it does me no harm. I've a good stomach. I can put
up with worse things, hardship, poverty, and, if necessary, I can gulp
down with their lies the poor fools who attack me. It does me good, if
anything."

"You're in luck," she said. "You're something like a man."

"And you. You're something like a woman."

"That's no great thing."

"It's a fine thing," he said, "and it may be a good thing, too!"

She laughed:

"To be a woman!" she said. "But what does the world make of women?"

"You have to defend yourself."

"But goodness never lasts long."

"Then you can't have much of it."

"Possibly. And then, I don't think one ought to suffer too much. There
is a point beyond which suffering withers you up."

He was just about to tell her how he pitied her, but he remembered how
she had received it a short while before....

"You'll only talk about the advantages of the part of comforter...."

"No," she said, "I won't say it again. I feel that you are kind and
sincere. Thank you. Only, don't say anything. You cannot know.... Thank
you."

They had reached Paris. They parted without exchanging addresses or
inviting each other to call.

       *       *       *       *       *

A few months later she came of her own accord and knocked at
Christophe's door.

"I came to see you. I want to talk to you. I have been thinking of you
sometimes since our meeting."

She took a seat.

"Only for a moment. I shan't disturb you for long."

He began to talk to her. She said:

"Wait a moment, please."

They sat in silence. Then she said with a smile:

"I couldn't bear it any longer. I feel better now."

He tried to question her.

"No," she said. "Not that!"

She looked round the room, examined and appraised the things in it, and
saw the photograph of Louisa:

"Your mother?" she said.

"Yes."

She took it and looked at it sympathetically.

"What a good old woman!" she said. "You are lucky!"

"Alas! she is dead."

"That is nothing. You have had the luck to have her for your mother."

"Yes. And you?"

But she turned the subject with a frown. She would not let him question
her about herself.

"No; tell me about yourself. Tell me.... Something about your life...."

"How can it be of any interest to you?"

"Tell me, all the same...."

He would not tell her: but he could not avoid answering her questions,
for she cross-examined him very skilfully: so much so, that he told her
something of what he was suffering, the story of his friendship, and how
Olivier had left him. She listened with a pitying ironical smile....
Suddenly she asked:

"What time is it? Oh! good Heavens! I've been here two whole hours!...
Please forgive me.... Ah! what a rest it has been!..."

She added:

"Will you let me come again?... Not often.... Sometimes.... It would do
me good. But I wouldn't like to bore you or waste your time.... Only a
minute or two every now and then...."

"I'll come and see you," said Christophe.

"No, don't do that. I would much rather come to see you...."

But she did not come again for a long time. One evening he heard by
accident that she was seriously ill, and had not been acting for some
weeks. He went to see her, although she had forbidden it. She was not at
home: but when she heard who it was, she sent and had him brought back
as he was going down the stairs. She was in bed, but much better: she
had had pneumonia, and looked altered: but she still had her ironical
manner and her watchful expression, which there was no disarming.
However, she seemed to be really pleased to see Christophe. She made him
sit by her bedside, and talked about herself in a mocking, detached way,
and said that she had almost died. He was much moved, and showed it.
Then she teased him. He reproached her for not having let him know.

"Let you know? And have you coming to see me? Never!"

"I bet you never even thought of me."

"You've won," she said, with her sad little mocking smile. "I didn't
think of you for a moment while I was ill. To be precise, I never
thought of you until to-day. There's nothing to be glum about, come.
When I am ill I don't think of anybody. I only ask one thing of people;
to be left alone in peace. I turn my face to the wall and wait: I want
to be alone. I want to die alone, like a rat in a hole."

"And yet it is hard to suffer alone."

"I'm used to it. I have been unhappy for years. No one ever came to my
assistance. Now it has become a habit.... Besides, it is better so. No
one can do anything for you. A noise in the room, worrying attentions,
hypocritical jeremiads.... No; I would rather die alone."

"You are very resigned!"

"Resigned? I don't even know what the word means. No: I set my teeth and
I hate the illness which makes me suffer."

He asked her if she had no one to see her, no one to look after her. She
said that her comrades at the theater were kind enough,--idiots,--but
obliging and compassionate (in a superficial sort of way).

"But I tell you, I don't want to see them. I'm a surly sort of
customer."

"I would put up with it," he said.

She looked at him pityingly:

"You, too! You're going to talk like the rest?"

He said:

"Pardon, pardon.... Good Heavens! I'm becoming a Parisian! I am
ashamed.... I swear that I didn't even think what I was saying...."

He buried his face in the bedclothes. She laughed frankly, and gave him
a tap on the head!

"Ah! that's not Parisian! That's something like! I know you again. Come,
show your face. Don't weep all over my bed."

"Do you forgive me?"

"I forgive you. But don't do it again."

She talked to him a little more, asked him what he was doing, and was
then tired, bored, and dismissed him.

He had arranged to go and see her again the following week. But just as
he was setting out he received a telegram from her telling him not to
come: she was having a bad day.--Then, the next day but one, she sent
for him. He went, and found her convalescent, sitting by the window,
with her feet up. It was early spring, with a sunny sky and the young
buds on the trees. She was more gentle and affectionate than he had yet
seen her. She told him that she could not see anybody the other day, and
would have detested him as much as anybody else.

"And to-day?"

"To-day I feel young and fresh, and I feel fond of everything else about
me that feels young and fresh--as you do."

"And yet I am neither very young nor very fresh."

"You will be both until the day of your death."

They talked about what he had been doing since their last meeting, and
about the theater in which she was going to resume her work soon: and on
that she told him what she thought of the theater, which disgusted her,
while it held her in its grip.

She did not want him to come again, and promised to resume her visits to
his flat. He told her the times when she would be least likely to
disturb his work. They arranged a countersign. She was to knock at the
door in a certain way, and he was to open or not as he felt inclined....

She did not go beyond bounds at first. But once, when she was going to a
society At Home, where she was to recite, the idea of it bored her at
the last moment: she stopped on the way and telephoned to say that she
could not come, and she told her man to drive to Christophe's. She only
meant to say good-night to him as she passed. But, as it turned out, she
began to confide in him that night, and told him all her life from her
childhood on.

A sad childhood! An accidental father whom she had never known. A mother
who kept an ill-famed inn in a suburb of a town in the north of France:
the carters used to go and drink there, use the proprietress, and bully
her. One of them married her because she had some small savings: he used
to beat her and get drunk. Francoise had an elder sister who was a
servant in the inn: she was worked to death; the proprietor made her his
mistress in the sight and knowledge of her mother; she was consumptive,
and had died. Francoise had grown up amid scenes of violence and
shameful things. She saw her mother and sister weep, suffer, accept,
degrade themselves, and die. And desperately she made up her mind not to
submit to it, and to escape from her infamous surroundings: she was a
rebel by instinct: certain acts of injustice would set her beside
herself: she used to scratch and bite when she was thrashed. Once she
tried to hang herself. She did not succeed: she had hardly set about it
than she was afraid lest she might succeed only too well; and, even
while she was beginning to choke and desperately clutching at the rope
and trying to loosen it with stiff fumbling fingers, there was writhing
in her a furious desire to live. And since she could not escape by
death,--(Christophe smiled sadly, remembering his own experiences,)--she
swore that she would win, and be free, rich, and trample under foot all
those who oppressed her. She had made it a vow in her lair one evening,
when in the next room she could hear the oaths of the man, and the cries
of her mother as he beat her, and her sister's sobs. How utterly
wretched she felt! And yet her vow had been some solace. She clenched
her teeth and thought:

"I will crush the lot of you."

In that dark childhood there had been one ray of light:

One day, one of the little grubby boys with whom she used to lark in the
gutter, the son of the stage-door keeper of the theater, got her in to
the rehearsal, although it was strictly forbidden. They stole to the
very back of the building in the darkness. She was gripped by the
mystery of the stage, gleaming in the darkness, and by the magnificent
and incomprehensible things that the actors were saying, and by the
queenly bearing of the actress,--who was, in fact, playing a queen in a
romantic melodrama. She was chilled by emotion: and at the same time her
heart thumped.... "That--that is what I must be some day!" ... Oh! if
she could ever be like that!...--When it was over she wanted at all
costs to see the evening performance. She let her companion go out, and
pretended to follow him: and then she turned back and hid herself in the
theater: she cowered away under a seat, and stayed there for three hours
without stirring, choked by the dust: and when the performance was about
to begin and the audience was arriving, just as she was creeping out of
her hiding-place, she had the mortification of being pounced on,
ignominiously expelled amid jeers and laughter, and taken home, where
she was whipped. She would have died that night had she not known now
what she must do later on to master these people and avenge herself on
them.

Her plan was made. She took a situation as a servant in the _Hotel et
Cafe du Theatre_, where the actors put up. She could hardly read or
write: and she had read nothing, for she had nothing to read. She wanted
to learn, and applied herself to it with frantic energy. She used to
steal books from the guests' rooms, and read them at night by moonlight
or at dawn, so as not to use her candle. Thanks to the untidiness of the
actors, her larcenies passed unnoticed or else the owners put up with
cursing and swearing. She used to restore their books when she had read
them,--except one or two which had moved her too much for her to be able
to part with them;--but she did not return them intact. She used to tear
out the pages which had pleased her. When she took the books back, she
used carefully to slip them under the bed or the furniture, so as to
make the owners of them believe that they had never left the room. She
used to glue her ears to the door to listen to the actors going over
their parts. And when she was alone, sweeping the corridor, she would
mimic their intonations in a whisper and gesticulate. When she was
caught doing so she was laughed at and jeered at. She would say nothing,
and boil with rage.--That sort of education might have gone on for a
long time had she not on one occasion been imprudent enough to steal the
script of a part from the room of an actor. The actor stamped and swore.
No one had been to his room except the servant: he accused her. She
denied it boldly: he threatened to have her searched: she threw herself
at his feet and confessed everything, even to her other pilferings and
the pages she had torn out of the books: the whole boiling. He cursed
and swore frightfully: but he was not so angry as he seemed. He asked
why she had done it. When she told him that she wanted to become an
actress he roared with laughter. He questioned her, and she recited
whole pages which she had learned by heart: he was struck by it, and
said:

"Look here, would you like me to give you lessons?"

She was in the highest heaven of delight, and kissed his hands.

"Ah!" she said to Christophe, "how I should have loved him!"

But at once he added:

"Only, my dear, you know you can't have anything for nothing...."

She was chaste, and had always been scared and modest with those who had
pursued her with their overtures. Her absolute chastity, her ardent need
of purity, her disgust with things unclean and ignoble loveless
sensuality, had been with her always from her childhood on, as a result
of the despair and nausea of the sad sights which she saw about her on
all sides at home:--and they were with her still.... Ah! unhappy
creature! She had borne much punishment!... What a mockery of Fate!...

"Then," asked Christophe, "you consented?"

"Ah!" she said, "I would have gone through fire to get out of it. He
threatened to have me arrested as a thief. I had no choice.--That was
how I was initiated into art--and life."

"The blackguard!" said Christophe.

"Yes, I hated him. But I have met so many men since that he does not
seem to me to be one of the worst. He did at least keep his word. He
taught me what he knew--(not much!)--of the actor's trade. He got me
into his company. At first I was everybody's servant, I played little
scraps of parts. Then one night, when the soubrette was ill, they risked
giving me her part. I went on from that. They thought me impossible,
grotesque, uncouth. I was ugly then. I remained ugly until I was
decreed,--if not 'divine' like the other Woman,--the highest, the ideal
type of woman, ... 'Woman.' ... Idiots! As for my acting, it was thought
extravagant and incorrect. The public did not like me. The other players
used to make fun of me. I was kept on because I was useful in spite of
everything, and was not expensive. Not only was I not expensive, but I
paid! Ah! I paid for every step, every advance, rung by rung, with my
suffering, with my body. Fellow-actors, the manager, the impresario, the
impresario's friends...."

She stopped: her face was very pale, her lips were pressed together,
there was a hard stare in her eyes: no tears came, but it was plain to
see that her soul was shedding tears of blood. In a flash she was living
through the shameful past, and the consuming desire to conquer which had
upheld her--a desire that burned the more with every fresh stain and
degradation that she had had to endure. She would sometimes have been
glad to die: but it would have been too abominable to succumb in the
midst of humiliation and to go no farther. Better to take her life
before--if so it must be--or after victory. But not when she had
degraded herself and not enjoyed the price of it....

She said no more. Christophe was pacing up and down the room in anger:
he was in a mood to slay these men who had made this woman suffer and
besmirched her. Then he looked at her with the eyes of pity: and he
stood near her and took her face in his hands and pressed it fondly, and
said:

"Poor little woman!"

She made to thrust him away. He said:

"You must not be afraid of me. I love you."

Then the tears trickled down her pale cheeks. He knelt down by her and
kissed--

  "_La lunga man d'ogni bellezza piena_...."

--the long delicate hands on which two tears had fallen.

He sat down again, and she recovered herself and calmly went on with her
story:

An author had at last launched her. He had discovered in the strange
little creature a daimon, a genius,--and, even better for his purpose,
"a dramatic type, a new woman, representative of an epoch." Of course,
he made her his mistress after so many others had done the same. And she
let him take her, as she had suffered the others, without love, and even
with the opposite of love. But he had made her famous: and she had done
the same for him.

"And now," said Christophe, "the others cannot do anything to you: you
can do what you like with them."

"You think so?" she said bitterly.

Then she told him of Fate's other mockery,--her passion for a knave whom
she despised: a literary man who had exploited her, had plucked out the
most sorrowful secrets of her soul, and turned them into literature, and
then had left her.

"I despise him," she said, "as I despise the dirt on my boots: and I
tremble with rage when I think that I love him, that he has but to hold
up his finger, and I should go running to him, and humble myself before
such a cur. But what can I do? I have a heart that will never love what
my mind desires. And I am compelled alternately to sacrifice and
humiliate one or the other. I have a heart: I have a body. And they cry
out and cry out and demand their share of happiness. And I have nothing
to curb them with, for I believe in nothing. I am free.... Free? I am
the slave of my heart and my body, which often, almost always, in spite
of myself, desire and have their will. They carry me away, and I am
ashamed. But what can I do?..."

She stopped for a moment, and mechanically moved the cinders in the fire
with the tongs.

"I have read in books," she said, "that actors feel nothing. And,
indeed, those whom I meet are nearly all conceited, grown-up children
who are never troubled by anything but petty questions of vanity. I do
not know if it is they who are not true comedians, or myself. I fancy it
must be I. In any case, I pay for the others."

She stopped speaking. It was three in the morning. She got up to go.
Christophe told her to wait until the morning before she went home, and
proposed that she should go and lie down on his bed. She preferred to
stay in the arm-chair by the dead fire, and went on talking quietly
while all the house was still.

"You will be tired to-morrow."

"I am used to it. But what about you?... What are you doing to-morrow?"

"I am free. I have a lesson to give about eleven.... Besides, I am
strong."

"All the more reason why you should sleep soundly."

"Yes; I sleep like a log. Not even pain can stand out against it. I am
sometimes furious with myself for sleeping so well. So many hours
wasted!... I am delighted to be able to take my revenge on sleep for
once in a way, and to cheat it of a night."

They went on talking in low tones, with long intervals of silence. And
Christophe went to sleep. Francoise smiled and supported his head to
keep him from falling.... She sat by the window dreaming and looking
down into the darkness of the garden, which presently was lit up. About
seven o'clock she woke Christophe gently, and said good-by.

In the course of the month she came at times when Christophe was out,
and found the door shut. Christophe sent her a key to the flat, so that
she could go there when she liked. She went more than once when
Christophe was away, and she would leave a little bunch of violets on
the table, or a few words scribbled on a sheet of paper, or a sketch, or
a caricature--just to show that she had been.

And one evening, when she left the theater, she went to the flat to
resume their pleasant talk. She found him at work, and they began to
talk. But at the very outset they both felt that the friendly
comfortable mood of the last occasion was gone. She tried to go: but it
was too late. Not that Christophe did anything to prevent her. It was
her own will that failed her and would not let her go. They stayed there
with the gathering consciousness of the desire that was in them.

Following on that night she disappeared for some weeks. In him there had
been roused a sensual ardor that had lain dormant for months before, and
he could not live without her. She had forbidden him to go to her house:
he went to see her at the theater. He sat far back, and he was aflame
with love and devotion: every nerve in his body thrilled: the tragic
intensity which she brought to her acting consumed him also in its fire.
At last he wrote to her:

"My Dear,--Are you angry with me? Forgive me if I have hurt you."
When she received his humble little note she hastened to him and flung
herself into his arms.

"It would have been better to be just friends, good friends. But since
it is impossible, it is no good holding out against the inevitable. Come
what may!"

They lived together. They kept on in their separate flats, and each of
them was free. Francoise could not have submitted to living openly with
Christophe. Besides, her position would not allow it. She used to go to
Christophe's flat and spend part of the day and night with him; but she
used to return to her own place every day and also sleep there.

During the vacation, when the theater was closed, they took a house
together outside Paris, near Gif. They had many happy days there, though
there were clouds of sadness too. They were days of confidence and work.
They had a beautiful light room, high up, with a wide view over the
fields. At night through the window they could see the strange shadows
of the clouds floating across the clear, dull darkness of the sky. Half
asleep, they could hear the joyous crickets chirping and the showers
falling; the breath of the autumn earth--honeysuckle, clematis, glycine,
and new-mown hay--filled the house and soothed their senses. The silence
of the night. In the distance dogs barked. Cocks crowed. Dawn comes. The
tinkling angelus rings in the distant belfry, through the cold, gray
twilight, and they shiver in the warmth of their nest, and yet more
lovingly hold each other close. The voices of the birds awake in the
trellis on the wall. Christophe opens his eyes, holds his breath, and
his heart melts as he looks down at the dear tired face of his sleeping
beloved, pale with the paleness of love....

Their love was no selfish passion. It was a profound love in
comradeship, in which the body also demanded its share. They did not
hinder each other. They both went on with their work. Christophe's
genius and kindness and moral fiber were dear to Francoise. She felt
older than he in many ways, and she found a maternal pleasure in the
relation. She regretted her inability to understand anything he played:
music was a closed book to her, except at rare moments, when she would
be overcome by a wild emotion, which came less from the music than from
her own inner self, from the passion in which she was steeped at that
time, she and everything about her, the country, people, color, and
sound. But she was none the less conscious of Christophe's genius,
because it was expressed in a mysterious language which she did not
understand. It was like watching a great actor playing in a foreign
language. Her own genius was rekindled by it. Christophe, thanks to
love, could project his ideas and body forth his passions in the mind of
the woman and her beloved person: they seemed to him more beautiful
there than they were in himself--endowed with an antique and seemingly
eternal beauty. Intimacy with such a soul, so feminine, so weak and kind
and cruel, and genial in flashes, was a source of boundless wealth. She
taught him much about life, and men--about women, of whom he knew very
little, while she judged them with swift, unerring perception. But
especially he was indebted to her for a better understanding of the
theater; she helped him to pierce through to the spirit of that
admirable art, the most perfect of all arts, the fullest and most sober.
She revealed to him the beauty of that magic instrument of the human
dream,--and made him see that he must write for it and not for himself,
as he had a tendency to do,--(the tendency of too many artists, who,
like Beethoven, refuse to write "_for a confounded violin when the
Spirit speaks to them_").--A great dramatic poet is not ashamed to
work for a particular theater and to adapt his ideas to the actors at
his disposal: he sees no belittlement in that: but he knows that a vast
auditorium calls for different methods of expression than those
necessary for a smaller space, and that a man does not write
trumpet-blares for the flute. The theater, like the fresco, is art
fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art,
the living art.

Francoise's ideas were in accordance with Christophe's, who, at that
stage in his career, was inclined towards a collective art, in communion
with other men. Francoise's experience helped him to grasp the
mysterious collaboration which is set up between the audience and the
actor. Though Francoise was a realist, and had very few illusions, yet
she had a great perception of the power of reciprocal suggestion, the
waves of sympathy which pass between the actor and the multitude, the
great silence of thousands of men and women from which arises the single
voice of their interpreter. Naturally she could only feel it in
intermittent flashes, very, very rare, which were hardly ever reproduced
at the same passages in the same play. For the rest her work was a
soulless trade, an intelligent and coldly mechanical routine. But the
interest of it lay in the exception--the flash of light which pierced
the darkness of the abyss, the common soul of millions of men and women
whose living force was expressed in her for the space of a second of
eternity.

It was this common soul which it was the business of the great artist to
express. His ideal should be a living objectivism, in which the poet
should throw himself into those for whom he sings, and denude himself of
self, to clothe the collective passions which are blown over the world
like a mighty wind. Francoise was all the more keenly conscious of the
necessity, inasmuch as she was incapable of such disinterestedness, and
always played herself.--For the last century and a half the disordered
efflorescence of individual lyricism has been tinged with morbidity.
Moral greatness consists in feeling much and controlling much, in being
sober in words and chaste in thought, in not making a parade of it, in
making a look speak and speak profoundly, without childish exaggeration
or effeminate effusiveness, to those who can grasp the half-spoken
thought, to men. Modern music, which is so loquaciously introspective,
dragging in indiscreet confidences at every turn, is immodest and
lacking in taste. It is like those invalids who can think of nothing but
their illnesses, and never weary of discussing them with other people
and going into repulsive petty details. This travesty of art has been
growing more and more prevalent for the last century. Francoise, who was
no musician, was disposed to see a sign of decadence in the development
of music at the expense of poetry, like a polypus sucking it dry.
Christophe protested: but, upon reflection, he began to wonder whether
there might not be some truth in it. The first _lieder_ written to
poems of Goethe were sober and apt: soon Schubert came and infused his
romantic sentimentality into them and gave them a twist: Schumann
introduced his girlish languor: and, down to Hugo Wolf, the movement had
gone on towards more stress in declamation, indecent analysis, a
presumptuous endeavor to leave no smallest corner of the soul unlit.
Every veil about the mysteries of the heart was rent. Things said in all
earnestness by a man were now screamed aloud by shameless girls who
showed themselves in their nakedness.

Christophe was rather ashamed of such art, by which he was himself
conscious of being contaminated: and, without seeking to go back to the
past,--(an absurd, unnatural desire),--he steeped himself in the spirit
of those of the masters of the past who had been haughtily discreet in
their thought and had possessed the sense of a great collective art:
like Handel, who, scorning the tearful piety of his time and country,
wrote his colossal _Anthems_ and his oratorios, those heroic epics
which are songs of the nations for the nations. The difficulty was to
find inspiring subjects, which, like the Bible in Handel's time, could
arouse emotions common to all the nations of modern Europe. Modern
Europe had no common book: no poem, no prayer, no act of faith which was
the property of all. Oh! the shame that should overwhelm all the
writers, artists, thinkers, of to-day! Not one of them has written, not
one of them has thought, for all. Only Beethoven has left a few pages of
a new Gospel of consolation and brotherhood: but only musicians can read
it, and the majority of men will never hear it. Wagner, on the hill at
Bayreuth, has tried to build a religious art to bind all men together.
But his great soul had too little simplicity and too many of the
blemishes of the decadent music and thought of his time: not the fishers
of Galilee have come to the holy hill, but the Pharisees.

Christophe felt sure what he had to do: but he had no poet, and he was
forced to be self-sufficing and to confine himself to music. And music,
whatever people say, is not a universal language: the bow of words is
necessary to send the arrow of sound into the hearts of all men.

Christophe planned to write a suite of symphonies inspired by everyday
life. Among others he conceived a Domestic Symphony, in his own manner,
which was very different from that of Richard Strauss. He was not
concerned with materializing family life in a cinematograph picture, by
making use of a conventional alphabet, in which musical themes expressed
arbitrarily the various characters whom, if the auditor's eyes and ears
could stand it, were presently to be seen going through divers
evolutions together. That seemed to him a pedantic and childish game for
a great contrapuntist. He did not try to describe characters or actions,
but only to express emotions familiar to every man and woman, in which
they could find the echo of their own souls, and perhaps comfort and
relief. The first movement expressed the grave and simple happiness of a
loving young couple, with its tender sensuality, its confidence in the
future, its joy and hopes. The second movement was an elegy on the death
of a child. Christophe had avoided with horror any effort to depict
death, and realistic detail in the expression of sorrow: there was only
the utter misery of it,--yours, mine, everybody's, of being face to face
with a misfortune which falls or may fall to the lot of everybody. The
soul, prostrate in its grief, from which Christophe had banned the usual
effects of sniveling melodrama, recovered bit by bit, in a sorrowful
effort, to offer its suffering as a sacrifice to God. Once more it set
bravely out on the road, in the next movement, which was linked with the
second,--a headstrong fugue, the bold design and insistent rhythm of
which captivated, and, through struggles and tears, led on to a mighty
march, full of indomitable faith. The last movement depicted the evening
of life. The themes of the opening movement reappeared in it with their
touching confidence and their tenderness which could not grow old, but
riper, emerging from the shadow of sorrow, crowned with light, and, like
a rich blossoming, raising a religious hymn of love to life and God.

Christophe also rummaged in the books of the past for great, simple,
human subjects speaking to the best in the hearts of all men. He chose
two such stories: _Joseph_ and _Niobe_. But then Christophe
was brought up not only against his need of a poet, but against the
vexed question, which has been argued for centuries and never solved, of
the union of poetry and music. His talks with Francoise had brought him
back to his idea, sketched out long ago with Corinne, of a form of
musical drama, somewhere between recitative opera and the spoken
drama,--the art of the free word united with free music,--an art of
which hardly any artist of to-day has a glimmering, an art also which
the routine critics, imbued with the Wagnerian tradition, deny, as they
deny every really new work: for it is not a matter of following in the
footsteps of Beethoven, Weber, Schumann, Bizet, although they used the
melodramatic form with genius: it is not a matter of yoking any sort of
speaking voice to any sort of music, and producing, at all costs, with
absurd tremolos, coarse effects upon coarse audiences: it is a matter of
creating a new form, in which musical voices will be wedded to
instruments attuned to those voices, discreetly mingling with their
harmonious periods the echo of dreams and the plaintive murmur of music.
It goes without saying that such a form could only be applied to a
narrow range of subjects, to intimate and introspective moments of the
soul, so as to conjure up its poetic perfume. In no art should there be
more discretion and aristocracy of feeling. It is only natural,
therefore, that it should have little chance of coming to flower in an
age which, in spite of the pretensions of its artists, reeks of the
deep-seated vulgarity of upstarts.

Perhaps Christophe was no more suited to such an art than the rest: his
very qualities, his plebeian force, were obstacles in the way. He could
only conceive it, and with the aid of Francoise realize a few rough
sketches.

In this way he set to music passages from the Bible, almost literally
transcribed,--like the immortal scene in which Joseph makes himself
known to his brothers, and, after so many trials, can no longer contain
his emotion and tender feeling, and whispers the words which have wrung
tears from old Tolstoy, and many another:

"_Then Joseph could not refrain himself.... I am Joseph; doth my
father yet live? I am Joseph, your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. I
am Joseph...._"

Their beautiful and free relation could not last. They had moments
splendid and full of life: but they were too different. They were both
strong-willed, and then often clashed. But their differences were never
of a vulgar character: for Christophe had won Francoise's respect. And
Francoise, who could sometimes be so cruel, was kind to those who were
kind to her; no power on earth could have made her do anything to hurt
them. And besides, both of them had a fund of gay humor. She was always
the first to laugh at herself. She was still eating her heart out: for
the old passion still had its grip on her: she still thought of the
blackguard she loved: and she could not bear to be in so humiliating a
position or, above all, to have Christophe suspecting what she was
feeling.

Christophe would sometimes find her for days together silent and
restless and given up to melancholy, and could not understand how she
could be unhappy. She had achieved her end: she was a great artist,
admired, flattered....

"Yes," she would say; "that would be all very well if I were one of
those famous actresses, with, no soul above shopkeeping, who run the
theater just as they would run any other business. They are quite happy
when they have 'realized' a good position, a commonplace, wealthy
marriage, and--the _ne plus ultra_--been decorated. I wanted more
than that. Unless one is a fool, success is even more empty than
failure. You must know that!"

"I know," said Christophe. "Ah! Dear God, that is not what I imagined
fame to be when I was a child. How I longed for it, and what a shining
thing it seemed to be! It was almost a religion to me then.... No
matter! There is one divine virtue in success: the good it gives one the
power to do."

"What good? One has conquered. But what's the good of it? Nothing is
altered. Theaters, concerts, everything is just the same. A new fashion
succeeds the old: that is all. They do not understand one, or only
superficially: and they begin to think of something else at once.... Do
you yourself understand other artists? In any case, they don't
understand you. The people you love best are so far away from you! Look
at your Tolstoy...."

Christophe had written to him: he had been filled with enthusiasm for
him, and had wept over his books: he wanted to set one of the peasant
tales to music, and had asked for his authority, and had sent him his
_lieder_. Tolstoy did not reply, any more than Goethe replied to
Schubert or Berlioz when they sent him their masterpieces. He had had
Christophe's music played to him, and it had irritated him: he could
make nothing of it. He regarded Beethoven as a decadent, and Shakespeare
as a charlatan. On the other hand, he was infatuated with various little
pretty-pretty masters, and the harpsichord music which used to charm the
_Roi-Perruque_: and he regarded _La Confession d'une Femme de
Chambre_ as a Christian book....

"Great men have no need of us," said Christophe. "We must think of the
others."

"Who? The dull public, the shadows who hide life from us? Act, write for
such people? Give your life for them? That would be bitter indeed!"

"Bah!" said Christophe. "I see them as they are just as you do: but I
don't let it make me despondent. They are not as bad as you say."

"Dear old German optimist!"

"They are men, like myself. Why should they not understand me?...--And
suppose they don't understand me, why should I despair? Among all the
thousands of people there will surely be one or two who will be with me:
that is enough for me, and gives me window enough to breathe the outer
air.... Think of all the simple playgoers, the young people, the old
honest souls, who are lifted out of their tedious everyday life by your
appearance, your voice, your revelation of tragic beauty. Think of what
you were yourself when you were a child! Isn't it a fine thing to give
to others--perhaps even only to one other--the happiness that others
gave you, and to do to them the good that others did to you?"

"Do you really believe that there is one such in the world? I have come
to doubt it.... Besides, what sort of love do we get from the best of
those who love us? How do they see us? They see so badly! They admire
you while they degrade you: they get just as much pleasure out of
watching any old stager act: they drag you down to the level of the
idiots you despise. In their eyes all successful people are exactly the
same."

"And yet, when all is told, it is the greatest of all who go down to
posterity with the greatest."

"It is only the backward movement of time. Mountains grow taller the
farther you go away from them. You see their height better: but you are
farther away from them.... And besides, who is to tell us who are the
greatest? What do you know of the men who have disappeared?"

"Nonsense!" said Christophe. "Even if nobody were to feel what I think
and what I am, I think my thoughts and I am what I am just the same. I
have my music, I love it, I believe in it: it is the truest thing in my
life."

"You are free in your art,--you can do what you like. But what can I do?
I am forced to act in the plays they give me, and go on acting until I
am sick of it. We are not yet, in France, such beasts of burden as those
American actors who play _Rip_ or _Robert Macaire_ ten thousand times, and
for twenty-five years of their lives go on grinding out and grinding out
an idiotic part. But we are on the road to it. Our theaters are so
poverty-stricken! The public will only stand genius in infinitesimal
doses, sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature.... A
'fashionable genius'! Doesn't that make you laugh?... What waste of power!
Look at what they have made of a Mounet. What has he had to play the whole
of his life? Two or three parts that are worth the struggle for life: the
_Oedipus_ and _Polyeucte_. The rest has been rot! Isn't that enough to
disgust one? And just think of all the great and glorious things he might
have had to do!... Things are no better outside France? What have they
made of a Duse? What has her life been given up to? Think of the futile
parts she has played?"

"Your real task," said Christophe, "is to force great works of art on
the world."

"We should exhaust ourselves in a vain endeavor. It isn't worth it. As
soon as a great work of art is brought into the theater it loses its
great poetic quality. It becomes a hollow sham. The breath of the public
sullies it. The public consists of people living in stifling towns and
they have lost all knowledge of the open air, and Nature, and healthy
poetry: they must have their poetry theatrical, glittering, painted,
reeking.--Ah! And besides ... besides, even suppose one did succeed ...
no, that would not fill one's life, it would not fill my life...."

"You are still thinking of him."

"Who?"

"You know. That man."

"Yes."

"Even if you could have him and he loved you, confess that you would not
be happy even then: you would still find some means of tormenting
yourself."

"True.... Ah! What is the matter with me?... I think I have had too hard
a fight. I have fretted too much: I can't ever be calm again: there is
always an uneasiness in me, a sort of fever...."

"It must have been in you even before your struggles."

"Possibly. Yes. It was in me when I was a little girl, as far back as I
can remember.... It was devouring me then."

"What do you want?"

"How do I know? More than I can have."

"I know that," said Christophe. "I was like that when I was a boy."

"Yes, but you have become a man. I shall never be grown-up as long as I
live. I am an incomplete creature."

"No one is complete. Happiness lies in knowing one's limitations and
loving them."

"I can't do that. I've lost it. Life has cheated me, tricked me,
crippled me. And yet I fancy that I could never have been a normal and
healthy and beautiful woman without being like the rest of the gang."

"There's no reason why you shouldn't be all these things. I can see you
being like that!"

"Tell me how you can see me."

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

"No. It is impossible now."

"Well," he said, "in that case you must say to yourself, like dear old
Handel when he went blind:

[Illustration: Musical notation with caption: _What ever is, is right."_]

He went to the piano and sang it for her. She kissed him and called him
her dear, crazy optimist. He did her good. But she did him harm: or at
least, she was afraid of him. She had violent fits of despair, and could
not conceal them from him: her love made her weak. At night she would
try to choke down her agony, he would guess, and beg the beloved
creature who was so near and yet so far, to share with him the burden
which lay so heavy on her: then she could not hold out any longer, and
she would turn weeping to his arms; and he would spend hours in
comforting her, kindly, without a spark of anger: but in the long-run
her perpetual restlessness was bound to tell on him. Francoise trembled
lest the fever that was in her should infect him. She loved him too much
to be able to bear the idea that he should suffer because of her. She
was offered an engagement in America, and she accepted it, so as to tear
herself away from him. She left him a little humiliated. She was as
humiliated as he, in the knowledge that they could not make each other
happy!

"My poor dear," she said to him, smiling sadly and tenderly. "Aren't we
stupid? We shall never have such a friendship again, never such a
glorious opportunity. But it can't be helped, it can't be helped. We are
too stupid!"

They looked at each other mournfully and shamefacedly. They laughed to
keep themselves from weeping, kissed, and parted with tears in their
eyes. Never had they loved so well as when they parted.

And after she was gone he returned to art, his old companion.... Oh, the
peace of the starry sky!

It was not long before Christophe received a letter from Jacqueline. It
was only the third time she had written to him, and her tone was very
different from that to which she had accustomed him. She told him how
sorry she was not to have seen him for so long, and very nicely invited
him to come and see her, unless he wished to hurt two friends who loved
him. Christophe was delighted, but not greatly surprised. He had been
inclined to think that Jacqueline's unjust disposition towards him would
not last. He was fond of quoting a jest of his old grandfather's:

"Sooner or later women have their good moments: one only needs the
patience to wait for them."

He went to see Olivier, and was welcomed with delight. Jacqueline was
most attentive to him: she avoided the ironical manner which was natural
to her, took care not to say anything that might hurt Christophe, showed
great interest in what he was doing, and talked intelligently about
serious subjects. Christophe thought her transformed. But she was only
so to please him. Jacqueline had heard of Christophe's affair with the
popular actress, the tale of which had gone the rounds of Parisian
gossip: and Christophe had appeared to her in an altogether new light:
she was filled with curiosity about him. When she met him again she
found him much more sympathetic. Even his faults seemed to her to be not
without attraction. She realized that Christophe had genius, and that it
would be worth while to make him love her.

The position between the young couple was no better, but rather worse.
Jacqueline was bored, bored, bored: she was bored to death.... How
utterly lonely a woman is! Except children, nothing can hold her: and
children are not enough to hold her forever: for when she is really a
woman, and not merely a female, when she has a rich soul and an
abounding vitality, she is made for so many things which she cannot
accomplish alone and with none to help her!... A man is much less
lonely, even when he is most alone: he can people the desert with his
own thoughts: and when he is lonely in married life he can more easily
put up with it, for he notices it less, and can always live in the
soliloquy of his own thoughts. And it never occurs to him that the sound
of his voice going on imperturbably babbling in the desert, makes the
silence more terrible and the desert more frightful for the woman by his
side, for whom all words are dead that are not kindled by love. He does
not see it: he has not, like the woman, staked his whole life on love:
his life has other occupations.... What man is there can fill the life
of a woman and satisfy her immense desire, the millions of ardent and
generous forces that, through the forty thousand years of the life of
humanity, have burned to no purpose, as a holocaust offered up to two
idols: passing love and motherhood, that sublime fraud, which is refused
to thousands of women and never fills more than a few years in the lives
of the rest?

Jacqueline was in despair. She had moments of terror that cut through
her like swords. She thought:

"Why am I alive? Why was I ever born?" And her heart would ache and
throb in agony.

"My God, I am going to die! My God, I am going to die!"

That idea haunted her, obsessed her through the night. She used to dream
that she was saying:

"It is 1889."

"No," the answer would come. "It is 1909." And the thought that she was
twenty years older than she imagined would make her wretched.

"It will all be over, and I have never lived! What have I done with
these twenty years? What have I made of my life?"

She would dream that she was _four_ little girls, all four lying in
the same room in different beds. They were all of the same figure and
the same face: but one was eight, one was fifteen, one was twenty, and
the fourth was thirty. There was an epidemic. Three of them had died.
The fourth looked at herself in the mirror, and she was filled with
terror: she saw herself with the skin drawn tight over her nose, and her
features pinched and withered... she was going to die too--and then it
would be all over....

"... What have I done with my life?..." She would wake up in tears; and
the nightmare would not vanish with the day: the nightmare was real.
What had she done with her life? Who had robbed her of it?... She would
begin to hate Olivier, the innocent accomplice--(innocent! What did it
matter if the harm done was the same!)--of the blind law which was
crushing her. She would be sorry for it at once, for she was kind of
heart: but she was suffering too much: and she could not help wreaking
her vengeance on the man who was bound to her and was stifling her life,
by making him suffer more than he was indeed suffering. Then she would
be more sorry than ever: she would loathe herself and feel that if she
did not find some way of escape she would do things even more evil. She
groped blindly about to find some way of escape: she clutched at
everything like a drowning woman: she tried to take an interest in
something, work, or another human being, that might be in some sort her
own, her work, a creature belonging to herself. She tried to take up
some intellectual work, and learned foreign languages: she began an
article, a story: she began to paint, to compose.... In vain: she grew
tired of everything, and lost heart the very first day. They were too
difficult. And then, "books, works of art! What are they? I don't know
whether I love them, I don't even know whether they
exist...."--Sometimes she would talk excitedly and laugh with Olivier,
and seem to be keenly interested in the things they talked about, or in
what he was doing: she would try to bemuse and benumb herself.... In
vain: suddenly her excitement would collapse, her heart would go icy
cold, she would hide away, with never a tear, hardly a breath, utterly
prostrate.--She had in some measure succeeded in destroying Olivier. He
was growing skeptical and worldly. She did not mind: she found him as
weak as herself. Almost every evening they used to go out: and she would
go in an agony of suffering and boredom from one fine house to another,
and no one would ever guess the feeling that lay behind the irony of her
unchanging smile. She was seeking for some one to love her and keep her
back from the edge of the abyss.... In vain, in vain, in vain. There was
nothing but silence in answer to her cry of despair.

She did not love Christophe: she could not bear his rough manner, his
painful frankness, and, above all, his indifference. She did not love
him: but she had a feeling that he at least was strong,--a rock towering
above death. And she tried to clutch hold of the rock, to cling to the
swimmer whose head rose above the waves, to cling to him or to drown
with him....

Besides, it was not enough for her to have cut her husband off from his
friends: now she was driven on to take them from him. Even the best of
women sometimes have an instinct which impels them to try and see how
far their power goes, and to go beyond it. In that abuse of their power
their weakness proves its strength. And when the woman is selfish and
vain she finds a malign pleasure in robbing her husband of the
friendship of his friends. It is easily done: she has but to use her
eyes a little. There is hardly a single man, honorable or otherwise, who
is not weak enough to nibble at the bait. Though the friend be never so
true and loyal, he may avoid the act, but he will almost always betray
his friend in thought. And if the other man sees it, there is an end of
their friendship: they no longer see each other with the same eyes.--The
woman who plays such a dangerous game generally stops at that and asks
no more: she has them both, disunited, at her mercy.

Christophe observed Jacqueline's new graces and charming treatment of
himself, but he was not surprised. When he had an affection for any one
he had a naive way of taking it as a matter of course that the affection
should be returned without any ulterior thought. He responded gladly to
Jacqueline's advances; he thought her charming, and amused himself
thoroughly with her: and he thought so well of her that he was not far
from thinking Olivier rather a bungler not to be able to be happy with
her and to make her happy.

He went with them for a few days' tour in a motor-car: and he was their
guest at the Langeais' country house in Burgundy--an old family mansion
which was kept because of its associations, though they hardly ever went
there. It was in a lovely situation, in the midst of vineyards and
woods: it was very shabby inside, and the windows were loose in their
frames: there was a moldy smell in it, a smell of ripe fruit, of cold
shadow, and resinous trees warmed by the sun. Living constantly in
Jacqueline's company for days together, a sweet insidious feeling crept
into Christophe's veins, without in the least disturbing his peace of
mind: he took an innocent, though by no means immaterial, delight in
seeing her, hearing her, feeling the contact of her beautiful body, and
sipping the breath of her mouth. Olivier was a little anxious and
uneasy, but said nothing. He suspected nothing: but he was oppressed by
a vague uneasiness which he would have been ashamed to admit to himself:
by way of punishing himself for it he frequently left them alone
together. Jacqueline saw what he was thinking, and was touched by it:
she longed to say to him:

"Come, don't be anxious, my dear. I still love you the best."

But she did not say it: and they all three went on drifting: Christophe
entirely unconscious, Jacqueline not knowing what she really wanted, and
leaving it to chance to tell her, and Olivier alone seeing and feeling
what was in the wind, but in the delicacy of vanity and love, refusing
to think of it. When the will is silent, instinct speaks: in the absence
of the soul, the body goes its own way.

One evening, after dinner, the night seemed to them so lovely--a
moonless, starry night,--that they proposed to go for a walk in the
garden. Olivier and Christophe left the house. Jacqueline went up to her
room to fetch a shawl. She did not come down. Christophe went to look
for her, fuming at the eternal dilatoriness of woman.--(For some time
without knowing it he had slipped into playing the part of the
husband.)--He heard her coming. The shutters of her room were closed and
he could not see.

"Come along, you dilly-dallying madam," cried Christophe gaily. "You'll
wear your mirror out if you look at yourself so much."

She did not reply. She had stopped still. Christophe felt that she was
in the room: but she did not stir.

"Where are you?" he said.

She did not reply. Christophe said nothing either, and began groping in
the dark, and suddenly his heart grew big and began to thump, and he
stood still. Near him he could hear Jacqueline breathing lightly. He
moved again and stopped once more. She was near him: he knew it, but he
could not move. There was silence for a second or two. Suddenly he felt
her hands on his, her lips on his. He held her close. They stood still
and spoke no word.--Their lips parted; they wrenched away from each
other. Jacqueline left the room. Christophe followed her, trembling. His
legs shook beneath him. He stopped for a moment to lean against the wall
until the tumult in his blood died down. At last he joined them again.
Jacqueline was calmly talking to Olivier. They walked on a few yards in
front. Christophe followed them in a state of collapse. Olivier stopped
to wait for him. Christophe stopped too. Olivier, knowing his friend's
temper and the capricious silence in which he would sometimes bar
himself, did not persist, and went on walking with Jacqueline. And
Christophe followed them mechanically, lagging ten yards behind them
like a dog. When they stopped, he stopped. When they walked on, he
walked on. And so they went round the garden and back into the house.
Christophe went up to his room and shut himself in. He did not light the
lamp. He did not go to bed. He could not think. About the middle of the
night he fell asleep, sitting, with his head resting in his arms on the
table. He woke up an hour later. He lit a candle, feverishly flung
together his papers and belongings, packed his bag, and then flung
himself on the bed and slept until dawn. Then he went down with his
luggage and left the house. They waited for him all morning, and spent
the day looking for him. Jacqueline hid her furious anger beneath a mask
of indifference, and sarcastically pretended to go over her plate. It
was not until the following evening that Olivier received a letter from
Christophe:

    "_My dear Old Fellow_,

    "_Don't lie angry with me for having gone away like a madman.
    I am mad, you know. But what can I do? I am what I am. Thanks
    for your dear hospitality. I enjoyed it much. But, you know, I
    am not fit to live with other people. I'm not so sure either
    that I am fit to live. I am only fit to stay in my corner and
    love people--at a distance: it is wiser so. When I see them at
    too close quarters, I become misanthropic. And I don't want to
    be that. I want to love men and women, I want to love you all.
    Oh! How I long to help you all! If I could only help you to
    be--to be happy! How gladly would I give all the happiness I may
    have in exchange!... But that is forbidden. One can only show
    others the way. One cannot go their way in their stead. Each of
    us must save himself. Save yourself! Save yourselves! I love
    you._

    "CHRISTOPHE.

    "_My respects to Madame Jeannin_."

"Madame Jeannin" read the letter with a smile of contempt and her lips
tightly pressed together, and said dryly:

"Well. Follow his advice. Save yourself."

But when Olivier held out his hand for the letter, Jacqueline crumpled
it up and flung it down, and two great tears welled up into her eyes.
Olivier took her hands.

"What's the matter?" he asked, with some emotion.

"Let me be!" she cried angrily.

She went out. As she reached the door she cried:

"Egoists!"

Christophe had contrived to make enemies of his patrons of the _Grand
Journal_, as was only likely. Christophe had been endowed by Heaven
with the virtue extolled by Goethe: _non-gratitude_.

_"The horror of showing gratitude,"_ wrote Goethe ironically, _"is rare,
and only appears in remarkable men who have risen from the poorest class,
and at every turn have been forced to accept assistance, which is almost
invariably poisoned by the churlishness of the benefactor...."_

Christophe was never disposed to think himself obliged to abase himself
in return for service rendered, nor--what amounted to the same thing--to
surrender his liberty. He did not lend his own benefactions at so much
per cent.: he gave them. His benefactors, however, were of a very
different way of thinking. Their lofty moral feeling of the duties of
their debtors was shocked by Christophe's refusal to write the music for
a stupid hymn for an advertising festivity organized by the paper. They
made him feel the impropriety of his conduct. Christophe sent them
packing. And finally he exasperated them by the flat denial which he
gave shortly afterwards to certain statements attributed to him by the
paper.

Then they began a campaign against him. They used every possible weapon.
They dragged out once more the old pettifogging engine of war which has
always served the impotent against creative men, and, though it has
never killed anybody, yet it never fails to have an effect upon the
simple-minded and the fools: they accused him of plagiarism. They went
and picked out artfully selected and distorted passages from his
compositions and from those of various obscure musicians, and they
proved that he had stolen his inspiration from others. He was accused of
having tried to stifle various young artists. It would have been well
enough if he had only had to deal with those whose business it is to
bark, with those critics, those mannikins, who climb on the shoulders of
a great man and cry;

"I am greater than you!"

But no: men of talent must be wrangling among themselves: each man does
his best to make himself intolerable to his colleagues: and yet, as
Christophe said, the world was large enough for all of them to be able
to work in peace: and each of them in his own talent had quite enough to
struggle against.

In Germany he found artists so jealous of him that they were ready to
furnish his enemies with weapons against him, and even, if need be, to
invent them. He found the same thing in France. The nationalists of the
musical press--several of whom were foreigners,--flung his nationality
in his teeth as an insult. Christophe's success had grown widely; and as
he had a certain vogue, they pretended that his exaggeration must
irritate even those who had no definite views--much more those who had.
Among the concert-going public, and among people in society and the
writers on the young reviews, Christophe by this time had enthusiastic
partisans, who went into ecstasies over everything he did, and were wont
to declare that music did not exist before his advent. Some of them
explained his music and found philosophic meanings in it which simply
astounded him. Others would see in it a musical revolution, an assault
on the traditions which Christophe respected more than anybody. It was
useless for him to protest. They would have proved to him that he did
not know what he had written. They admired themselves by admiring him.
And so the campaign against Christophe met with great sympathy among his
colleagues, who were exasperated by the "log-rolling" to which he was no
party. They did not need to rely on such reasons for not liking his
music: most of them felt with regard to it the natural irritation of the
man who has no ideas and no difficulty in expressing them according to
parrot-like formula, with the man who is full of ideas and employs them
clumsily in accordance with the apparent disorder of his creative
faculty. How often he had had to face the reproach of not being able to
write hurled at him by scribes, for whom style consisted in recipes
concocted by groups or schools, kitchen molds into which thought was
cast! Christophe's best friends, those who did not try to understand
him, and were alone in understanding him, because they loved him,
simply, for the pleasure he gave them, were obscure auditors who had no
voice in the matter. The only man who could have replied vigorously in
Christophe's name--Olivier--was at that time out of friends with him,
and had apparently forgotten him. Thus Christophe was delivered into the
hands of his adversaries and admirers, who vied with each other in doing
him harm. He was too disgusted to reply. When he read the
pronunciamentos directed against him in the pages of an important
newspaper by one of those presumptuous critics who usurp the sovereignty
of art with all the insolence of ignorance and impunity, he would shrug
his shoulders and say:

"Judge me. I judge you. Let us meet in a hundred years!"

But meanwhile the outcry against him took its course: and the public, as
usual, gulped down the most fatuous and shameful accusations.

As though his position was not already difficult enough, Christophe
chose that moment to quarrel with his publisher. He had no reason at all
to complain of Hecht, who published each new work as it was written, and
was honest in business. It is true that his honesty did not prevent his
making contracts disadvantageous to Christophe: but he kept his
contracts. He kept them only too well. One day Christophe was amazed to
see a septette of his arranged as a quartette, and a suite of piano
pieces clumsily transcribed as a duet, without his having been
consulted. He rushed to Heeht's office and thrust the offending music
under his nose, and said:

"Do you know these?"

"Of course," said Hecht.

"And you dared ... you dared tamper with my work without asking my
permission!..."

"What permission?" said Hecht calmly. "Your compositions are mine."

"Mine, too, I suppose?"

"No," said Hecht quietly.

Christophe started.

"My own work does not belong to me?"

"They are not yours any longer. You sold them to me."

"You're making fun of me! I sold you the paper. Make money out of that
if you like. But what is written on it is my life-blood; it is mine."

"You sold me everything. In exchange for these particular pieces, I gave
you a sum of three hundred francs in advance of a royalty of thirty
centimes on every copy sold of the original edition. Upon that
consideration, without any restriction or reserve, you have assigned to
me all your rights in your work."

"Even the right to destroy it?"

Hecht shrugged his shoulders, rang the bell, and said to a clerk.

"Bring me M. Kraff's account."

He gravely read Christophe the terms of the contract, which he had
signed without reading--from which it appeared, in accordance with the
ordinary run of contracts signed by music publishers in those very
distant times--"that M. Hecht was the assignee of all the rights,
powers, and property of the author, and had the exclusive right to edit,
publish, engrave, print, translate, hire, sell to his own profit, in any
form he pleased, to have the said work performed at concerts,
cafe-concerts, balls, theaters, etc., and to publish any arrangement of
the said work for any instrument and even with words, and also to change
the title ... etc., etc."

"You see," he said, "I am really very moderate."

"Evidently," said Christophe. "I ought to thank you. You might have
turned my septette into a cafe-concert song."

He stopped in horror and held his head in his hands.

"I have sold my soul," he said over and over again.

"You may be sure," said Hecht sarcastically, "that I shall not abuse
it."

"And to think," said Christophe, "that your Republic authorizes such
practices! You say that man is free. And you put ideas up to public
auction."

"You have had your money," said Hecht.

"Thirty pieces of silver. Yes," said Christophe. "Take them back."

He fumbled in his pockets, meaning to give the three hundred francs back
to Hecht. But he had nothing like that sum. Hecht smiled a little
disdainfully. His smile infuriated Christophe.

"I want my work back," he said. "I will buy them back from you."

"You have no right to do so," said Hecht. "But as I have no desire to
keep a man against his will, I am quite ready to give them back to
you,--if you are in a position to pay the indemnity stated in the
contract."

"I will do it," said Christophe, "even if I have to sell myself."

He accepted without discussion the conditions which Hecht submitted to
him a fortnight later. It was an amazing act of folly, and he bought
back his published compositions at a price five times greater than the
sum they had brought him in, though it was by no means exorbitant: for
it was scrupulously calculated on the basis of the actual profits which
had accrued to Hecht. Christophe could not pay, and Hecht had counted on
it. He had no intention of squeezing Christophe, of whom he thought more
highly, both as a musician and as a man, than of any other young
musician: but he wanted to teach him a lesson: for he could not permit
his clients to revolt against what was after all within his rights. He
had not made the laws: they were those of the time, and they seemed to
him equitable. Besides, he was quite sincerely convinced that they were
to the benefit of the author as much as to the benefit of the publisher,
who knows better than the author how to circulate his work, and is not,
like the author, hindered by scruples of a sentimental, respectable
order, which are contrary to his real interests. He had made up his mind
to help Christophe to succeed, but in his own way, and on condition that
Christophe was delivered into his hands, tied hand and foot. He wanted
to make him feel that he could not so easily dispense with his services.
They made a conditional bargain: if, at the end of six months,
Christophe could not manage to pay, his work should become Hecht's
absolute property. It was perfectly obvious that Christophe would not be
able to collect a quarter of the sum requisite.

However, he stuck to it, said good-by to the rooms which were so full of
memories for him, and took a less expensive flat,--selling a number of
things, none of which, to his great surprise, were of any
value,--getting into debt, and appealing to Mooch's good nature, who,
unfortunately, was at that time very badly off and ill, being confined
to the house with rheumatism,--trying to find another publisher, and
everywhere finding conditions as grasping as Hecht's, and in some cases
a point-blank refusal.

It was just at the time when the attack on him in the musical press was
at its height. One of the leading Parisian papers was especially
implacable: he was like a red rag to a bull to one of the staff who did
not sign his name; not a week passed but there appeared in the column
headed _Echos_ a spiteful paragraph ridiculing him. The musical
critic completed the work of his anonymous colleague: the very smallest
pretext served him as an opportunity of expressing his animosity. But
that was only the preliminary skirmishing: he promised to return to the
subject and deal with it at leisure, and to proceed in due course to
execution. They were in no hurry, knowing that a definite accusation has
nothing like the same effect on the public as a succession of
insinuations repeated persistently. They played with Christophe like a
cat with a mouse. The articles were all sent to Christophe, and he
despised them, though they made him suffer for all that. However, he
said nothing: and, instead of replying--(could he have done so, even if
he had wanted to?)--he persisted in the futile and unequal fight with
his publisher, provoked by his own vanity. He wasted his time, his
strength, his money, and his only weapons, since in the lightness of his
heart he was rash enough to deprive himself of the publicity which his
music gained through Hecht.

Suddenly there was a complete change. The article announced in the paper
never appeared. The insinuations against him were dropped. The campaign
stopped short. More than that: a few weeks later, the critic of the
paper published incidentally a few eulogistic remarks which seemed to
indicate that peace was made. A great publisher at Leipzig wrote to
Christophe offering to publish his work, and the contract was signed on
terms very advantageous to him. A flattering letter, bearing the seal of
the Austrian Embassy, informed Christophe that it was desired to place
certain of his compositions on the programs of the galas given at the
Embassy. Philomela, whom Christophe was pushing forward, was asked to
sing at one of the galas: and, immediately afterwards, she was in great
demand in the best houses of the German and Italian colonies in Paris.
Christophe himself, who could not get out of going to one of the
concerts, was very well received by the Ambassador. However, a very
short conversation showed him that his host, who knew very little about
music, was absolutely ignorant of his work. How, then, did this sudden
interest come about? An invisible hand seemed to be protecting him,
removing obstacles, and making the way smooth for him. Christophe made
inquiries. The Ambassador alluded to friends of Christophe--Count and
Countess Bereny, who were very fond of him. Christophe did not even know
their name: and on the night of his visit to the Embassy he had no
opportunity of being introduced to them. He did not make any effort to
meet them. He was passing through a period of disgust with men, in which
he set as little store by his friends as by his enemies: friends and
enemies were equally uncertain: they changed with the wind: he would
have to learn how to do without them, and say, like the old fellow of
the seventeenth century:

"_God gave me friends: He took them from me. They have left me. I will
leave them and say no more about it_."

Since the day when he left Olivier's house, Olivier had given no sign of
life: all seemed over between them. Christophe had no mind to form new
friendships. He imagined Count and Countess Bereny to be like the rest
of the snobs who called themselves his friends: and he made no attempt
to meet them. He was more inclined to avoid them. He longed to be able
to escape from Paris. He felt an urgent desire to take refuge for a few
weeks in soothing solitude. If only he could have a few days, only a few
days, to refresh himself in his native country! Little by little that
idea became a morbid obsession. He wanted once more to see his dear
river, his own native sky, the land of his dead kinsfolk. He felt that
he must see them. He could not without endangering his freedom: he was
still subject to the warrant of arrest issued against him at the time of
his flight from Germany. But he felt that he was prepared to go to any
lengths if he could return, though it were only for one day.

As good luck would have it, he spoke of his longing to one of his new
patrons. A young attache of the German Embassy, whom he met at an At
Home where he was playing, happened to say to him that his country was
proud of so fine a musician as himself, to which Christophe replied
bitterly:

"Our country is so proud of me that she lets me die on her doorstep
rather than open to me."

The young diplomatist asked him to explain the situation, and, a few
days later, he came to see Christophe, and said:

"People in high places are interested in you. A very great personage who
alone has the power to suspend the consequence of the sentence which is
the cause of your wretchedness has been informed of your position: and
he deigns to be touched by it. I don't know how it is that your music
can have given him any pleasure: for--(between ourselves)--his taste is
not very good: but he is intelligent, and he has a generous heart.
Though he cannot, for the moment, remove the sentence passed upon you,
the police are willing to shut their eyes, if you care to spend
forty-eight hours in your native town to see your family once more. Here
is a passport. You must have it endorsed when you arrive and when you
leave. Be wary, and do not attract attention to yourself."

Once more Christophe saw his native land. He spent the two days which
had been granted him in communion with the earth and those who were
beneath it. He visited his mother's grave. The grass was growing over
it: but flowers had lately been laid on it. His father and grandfather
slept side by side. He sat at their feet. Their grave lay beneath the
wall of the cemetery. It was shaded by a chestnut-tree growing in the
sunken road on the other side of the low wall, over which he could see
the golden crops, softly waving in the warm wind: the sun was shining in
his majesty over the drowsy earth: he could hear the cry of the quails
in the corn, and the soft murmuring of the cypress-trees above the
graves. Christophe was alone with his dreams. His heart was at peace. He
sat there with his hands clasping his knees, and his back against the
wall, gazing up at the sky. He closed his eyes for a moment. How simple
everything was! He felt at home here with his own people. He stayed
there near them, as it were hand in hand. The hours slipped by. Towards
evening he heard footsteps scrunching on the gravel paths. The custodian
passed by and looked at Christophe sitting there. Christophe asked him
who had laid the flowers on the grave. The man answered that the
farmer's wife from Buir came once or twice a year.

"Lorchen?" said Christophe.

They began to talk.

"You are her son?" said the man.

"She had three," said Christophe.

"I mean the one at Hamburg. The other two turned out badly."

Christophe sat still with his head thrown back a little, and said
nothing. The sun was setting.

"I'm going to lock up," said the custodian.

Christophe got up and walked slowly round the cemetery with him. The
custodian did the honors of the place. Christophe stopped every now and
then to read the names carved on the gravestones. How many of those he
knew were of that company! Old Euler,--his son-in-law,--and farther off,
the comrades of his childhood, little girls with whom he had played,
--and there, a name which stirred his heart: Ada.... Peace be with all of
them....

The fiery rays of the setting sun put a girdle round the calm horizon.
Christophe left the cemetery. He went for a long walk through the
fields. The stars were peeping....

Next day he came again, and once more spent the afternoon at his vigil.
But the fair silent calm of the day before was broken and thrilling with
life. His heart sang a careless, happy hymn. He sat on the curb of the
grave, and set down the song he heard in pencil in a notebook resting on
his knees. So the day passed. It seemed to him that he was working in
his old little room, and that his mother was there on the other side of
the partition. When he had finished and was ready to go--he had moved a
little away from the grave,--he changed his mind and returned, and
buried the notebook in the grass under the ivy. A few drops of rain were
beginning to fall. Christophe thought:

"It will soon be blotted out. So much the better!... For you alone. For
nobody else."

And he went to see the river once more, and the familiar streets where
so many things were changed. By the gates of the town along the
promenade of the old fortifications a little wood of acacia-trees which
he had seen planted had overrun the place, and they were stifling the
old trees. As he passed along the wall surrounding the Von Kerichs'
garden, he recognized the post on which he used to climb when he was a
little boy, to look over into the grounds: and he was surprised to see
how small the tree, the wall, and the garden had become.

He stopped for a moment before the front gateway. He was going on when a
carriage passed him. Mechanically he raised his eyes: and they met those
of a young lady, fresh, plump, happy-looking, who stared at him with a
puzzled expression. She gave an exclamation of surprise. She ordered the
carriage to stop, and said:

"Herr Krafft!"

He stopped.

She said laughingly:

"Minna...."

He ran to her almost as nervous as he had been on the day when he first
met her. [Footnote: See "Jean-Christophe: Morning."]

She was with a tall, stout, bald gentleman, with mustachios brushed up
belligerently, whom she introduced as "Herr Reichsgerichtsrat von
Brombach"--her husband. She wanted Christophe to go home with her. He
tried to excuse himself. But Minna exclaimed:

"No, no. You must come; come and dine with us."

She spoke very loud and very quickly, and, without waiting to be asked,
began to tell him her whole life. Christophe was stupefied by her
volubility and the noise she made, and only heard half what she said,
and stood looking at her. So that was his little Minna. She looked
blooming, healthy, well-fed: she had a pretty skin and pink complexion,
but her features were rather coarse, and her nose in particular was
thick and heavy. Her gestures, manners, pretty little ways, were just
the same; but her size was greatly altered.

However, she never stopped talking: she told Christophe all the stories
of her past; her whole private history, and how she had come to love her
husband and her husband her. Christophe was embarrassed. She was an
uncritical optimist, who found everything belonging to herself perfect
and superior to other people's possessions--(at least, when she was with
other people)--her town, her house, her family, her husband, her
cooking, her four children, and herself. She said of her husband in his
presence that he was "the most splendid man she had even seen," and that
there was in him "a superhuman force." "The most splendid man" pinched
Minna's cheeks laughingly, and assured Christophe that she "was a very
remarkable woman."

It seemed that _Herr Reichsgerichtsrat_ was informed of
Christophe's position, and did not exactly know whether he ought to
treat him with or without respect, having regard on the one hand to the
warrant out against him, and on the other to the august protection which
shielded him: he solved the difficulty by affecting a compromise between
the two manners. As for Minna, she went on talking. When she had talked
her fill about herself to Christophe, she began to talk about him: she
battered him with questions as intimate as her answers had been to the
supposititious questions which he had never asked. She was delighted to
see Christophe again: she knew nothing about his music: but she knew
that he was famous: it flattered her to think that she had loved
him,--(and that she had rejected him).--She reminded him of it jokingly
without much delicacy. She asked him for his autograph for her album.
She pestered him with questions about Paris. She showed a mixture of
curiosity and contempt for that city. She pretended that she knew it,
having been to the Folies-Bergere, the Opera, Montmartre, and
Saint-Cloud. According to her, the women of Paris were all _cocottes_, bad
mothers, who had as few children as possible, and did not look after them,
and left them at home while they went to the theater or the haunts of
pleasant vice. She did not suffer contradiction. In the course of the
evening she asked Christophe to play the piano. She thought it charming.
But at bottom she admired her husband's playing just as much, for she
thought him as superior all round as she was herself.

Christophe had the pleasure of meeting Minna's mother once more, Frau
von Kerich. He still had a secret tenderness for her because she had
been kind to him. She had not lost any of her old kindness, and she was
more natural than Minna: but she still treated Christophe with that
ironical affection which used to irritate him in the old days. She had
stayed very much where he had left her: she liked the same things; and
it did not seem possible for her to admit that any one could do better
or differently: she set the Jean-Christophe of the old days against the
new Jean-Christophe, and preferred the former.

Of those about her no one had changed in mind save Christophe. The
rigidity of the little town, and its narrowness of outlook, were painful
to him. His hosts spent part of the evening in talking scandal about
people he did not know. They picked out the ridiculous points of their
neighbors, and they decreed everything ridiculous which was different
from themselves or their own way of doing things. Their malicious
curiosity, which was perpetually occupied with trifles, at last made
Christophe feel quite sick. He tried to talk about his life abroad. But
at once he became conscious of the impossibility of making them
understand French civilization which had made him suffer, and now became
dear to him when he stood for it in his own country--the free Latin
spirit, whose first law is understanding: to understand as much as possible
of life and mind, at the risk of cheapening moral codes. In his
hosts, especially in Minna, he found once more the arrogant spirit with
which he had come into such violent contact in the old days, though he
had almost forgotten it since,--the arrogance of weakness as much as of
virtue,--honesty without charity, pluming itself on its virtue, and
despising the weaknesses which it could not understand, a worship of the
conventional, and a shocked disdain of "irregular" higher things. Minna
was calmly and sententiously confident that she was always right. There
were no degrees in her judgment of others. For the rest, she never made
any attempt to understand them, and was only occupied with herself. Her
egoism was thinly coated with a blurred metaphysical tinge. She was
always talking of her "ego" and the development of her "ego." She may
have been a good woman, one capable of loving. But she loved herself too
much. And, above all, her respect for herself was too great. She seemed
to be perpetually saying a _Paternoster_ and an _Ave_ to her "ego." One
felt that she would have absolutely and forever ceased to love the man she
might have loved the best, if for a single instant he had failed--(even
though he were to regret it a thousand times when it was done)--to show a
due and proper respect for the dignity of her "ego."... Hang your "ego"!
Think a little of the second person singular!...

However, Christophe did not regard her severely. He who was ordinarily
so irritable listened to her chatter with the patience of an archangel.
He would not judge her. He surrounded her, as with a halo, with the
religious memory of his childish love, and he kept on trying to find in
her the image of his little Minna. It was not impossible to find her in
certain of her gestures: the quality of her voice had certain notes
which awoke echoes that moved him. He was absorbed in them, and said
nothing, and did not listen to what she was saying, though he seemed to
listen and always treated her with tender gentle respect. But he found
it hard to concentrate his thoughts: she made too much noise, and
prevented his hearing Minna. At last he got up, and thought a little
wearily:

"Poor little Minna! They would like me to think that you are there, in
that comely, stout woman, shouting at the top of her voice, and boring
me to death. But I know that it is not so. Come away, Minna. What have
we to do with these people?"

He went away, giving them to understand that he would return on the
morrow. If he had said that he was going away that very night, they
would not have let him go until it was time to catch the train. He had
only gone a few yards in the darkness when he recovered the feeling of
well-being which he had had before he met the carriage. The memory of
his tiresome evening was wiped out as though a wet sponge had been over
it: nothing was left of it: it was all drowned in the voice of the
Rhine. He walked along its banks by the house where he was born. He had
no difficulty in recognizing it. The shutters were closed: all were
asleep in it. Christophe stopped in the middle of the road: and it
seemed to him that if he knocked at the door, familiar phantoms would
open to him. He went into the field round the house, near the river, and
came to the place where he used to go and talk to Gottfried in the
evening. He sat down. And the old days came to life again. And the dear
little girl who had sipped with him the dream of first love was conjured
up. Together they lived through their childish tenderness again, with
its sweet tears and infinite hopes. And he thought with a simple smile:

"Life has taught me nothing. All my knowledge is vain.... All my
knowledge is vain.... I have still the same old illusions."

How good it is to love and to believe unfailingly! Everything that is
touched by love is saved from death.

"Minna, you are with me,--with me, not with _the other_,--Minna,
you will never grow old!..."

The veiled moon darted from her clouds, and made the silver scales on
the river's back gleam in her light. Christophe had a vague feeling that
the river never used to pass near the knoll where he was sitting. He
went near it. Yes. Beyond the pear-tree there used to be a tongue of
sand, a little grassy slope, where he had often played. The river had
swept them away: the river was encroaching, lapping at the roots of the
pear-tree. Christophe felt a pang at his heart: he went back towards the
station. In that direction a new colony--mean houses, sheds half-built,
tall factory chimneys--was in course of construction. Christophe thought
of the acacia-wood he had seen in the afternoon, and he thought:

"There, too, the river is encroaching...."

The old town, lying asleep in the darkness, with all that it contained
of the living and the dead, became even more dear to him: for he felt
that a menace hung over it....

_Hostis habet muros...._

Quick, let us save our women and children! Death is lying in wait for
all that we love. Let us hasten to carve the passing face upon eternal
bronze. Let us snatch the treasure of our motherland before the flames
devour the palace of Priam.

Christophe scrambled into the train as it was going, like a man fleeing
before a flood. But, like those men who saved the gods of their city
from the wreck, Christophe bore away within his soul the spark of life
which had flown upwards from his native land, and the sacred spirit of
the past.

Jacqueline and Olivier had come together again for a time. Jacqueline
had lost her father, and his death had moved her deeply. In the presence
of real misfortune she had felt the wretched folly of her other sorrows:
and the tenderness which Olivier showed towards her had revived her
affection for him. She was taken back several years to the sad days
which had followed on the death of her Aunt Marthe--days which had been
followed by the blessed days of love. She told herself that she was
ungrateful to life, and that she ought to be thankful that the little it
had given her was not taken from her. She hugged that little to herself
now that its worth had been revealed to her. A short absence from Paris,
ordered by her doctor to distract her in her grief, travel with Olivier,
a sort of pilgrimage to the places where they had loved each other
during the first year of her marriage, softened her and filled her with
tenderness. In the sadness of seeing once more at the turn of the road
the dear face of the love which they thought was gone forever, of seeing
it pass and knowing that it would vanish once more,--for how long?
perhaps forever?--they clutched at it passionately and desperately....

"Stay, stay with us!"

But they knew that they must lose it....

When Jacqueline returned to Paris she felt a little new life, kindled by
love, thrilling in her veins. But love had gone already. The burden
which lay so heavy upon her did not bring her into sympathy with Olivier
again. She did not feel the joy she expected. She probed herself
uneasily. Often when she had been so tormented before she had thought
that the coming of a child might be her salvation. The child had come,
but it brought no salvation. She felt the human plant rooted in her
flesh growing, and sucking up her blood and her life. She would stay for
days together lost in thought, listening with vacant eyes, all her being
exhausted by the unknown creature that had taken possession of her. She
was conscious of a vague buzzing, sweet, lulling, agonizing. She would
start suddenly from her torpor--dripping with sweat, shivering, with a
spasm of revolt. She fought against the meshes in which Nature had
entrapped her. She wished to live, to live freely, and it seemed to her
that Nature had tricked her. Then she was ashamed of such thoughts, and
seemed monstrous in her own eyes, and asked herself if she were more
wicked than, or made differently from, other women. And little by little
she would grow calm again, browsing like a tree over the sap, and the
dream of the living fruit ripening in her womb. What was it? What was it
going to be?...

When she heard its first cry to the light, when she saw its pitiable
touching little body, her heart melted. In one dazzling moment she knew
the glorious joy of motherhood, the mightiest in all the world: in her
suffering to have created of her own flesh a living being, a man. And
the great wave of love which moves the universe, caught her whole body,
dashed her down, rushed over her, and lifted her up to the heavens.... O
God, the woman who creates is Thy equal: and thou knowest no joy like
unto hers: for thou hast not suffered....

Then the wave rolled back, and her soul dropped back into the depths.
Olivier, trembling with emotion, stooped over the child: and, smiling at
Jacqueline, he tried to understand what bond of mysterious life there
was between themselves and the wretched little creature that was as yet
hardly human. Tenderly, with a little feeling of disgust, he just
touched its little yellow wrinkled face with his lips. Jacqueline
watched him: jealously she pushed him away: she took the child and
hugged it to her breast, and covered it with kisses. The child cried and
she gave it back, and, with her face turned to the wall, she wept.
Olivier came to her and kissed her, and drank her tears: she kissed him
too, and forced herself to smile: then she asked to be left alone to
rest with the child by her side.... Alas! what is to be done when love
is dead? The man who gives more than half of himself up to intelligence
never loses a strong feeling without preserving a trace, an idea, of it
in his brain. He cannot love any more, but he cannot forget that he has
loved. But the woman who has loved wholly and without reason, and
without reason ceases wholly to love, what can she do? Will? Take refuge
in illusions? And what if she be too weak to will, too true to take
refuge in illusions?...

Jacqueline, lying on her side with her head propped up by her hand,
looked down at the child with tender pity. What was he? Whatever he was,
he was not entirely hers. He was also something of "the other." And she
no longer loved "the other." Poor child! Dear child! She was exasperated
with the little creature who was there to bind her to the dead past: and
she bent over him and kissed and kissed him....

It is the great misfortune of the women of to-day that they are too free
without being free enough. If they were more free, they would seek to
form ties, and would find charm and security in them. If they were less
free, they would resign themselves to ties which they would not know how
to break: and they would suffer less. But the worst state of all is to
have ties which do not bind, and duties from which it is possible to
break free.

If Jacqueline had believed that her little house was to be her lot for
the whole of her life, she would not have found it so inconvenient and
cramped, and she would have devised ways of making it comfortable: she
would have ended as she began, by loving it. But she knew that it was
possible to leave, it, and it stifled her. It was possible for her to
revolt, and at last she came to think it her duty to do so.

The present-day moralists are strange creatures. All their qualities
have atrophied to the profit of their faculties of observation. They
have given up trying to see life, hardly attempt to understand it, and
never by any chance WILL it. When they have observed and noted down the
facts of human nature, they seem to think their task is at an end, and
say:

"That is a fact."

They make no attempt to change it. In their eyes, apparently, the mere
fact of existence is a moral virtue. Every sort of weakness seems to
have been inserted with a sort of Divine right. The world is growing
democratic. Formerly only the King was irresponsible. Nowadays all men,
preferably the basest, have that privilege. Admirable counselors! With
infinite pains and scrupulous care they set themselves to prove to the
weak exactly how weak they are, and that it has been decreed that they
should be so and not otherwise from all eternity. What can the weak do
but fold their arms? We may think ourselves lucky if they do not admire
themselves! By dint of hearing it said over and over again that she is a
sick child, a woman soon takes a pride in being so. It is encouraging
cowardice, and making it spread. If a man were to amuse himself by
telling children complacently that there is an age in adolescence when
the soul, not yet having found its balance, is capable of crimes, and
suicide, and the worst sort of physical and moral depravity, and were to
excuse these things--at once these offenses would spring into being. And
even with men it is quite enough to go on telling them that they are not
free to make them cease to be so and descend to the level of the beasts.
Tell a woman that she is a responsible being, and mistress of her body
and her will, and she will be so. But you moralists are cowards, and
take good care not to tell her so: for you have an interest in keeping
such knowledge from her!...

The unhappy surroundings in which Jacqueline found herself led her
astray. Since she had broken with Olivier she had returned to that
section of society which she despised when she was a girl. About her and
her friends, among married women, there gathered a little group of
wealthy young men and women, smart, idle, intelligent, and licentious.
They enjoyed absolute liberty of thought and speech, tempered only by
the seasoning of wit. They might well have taken for their motto the
device of the Rabelaisian abbey:

 _"Do what thou wilt."_

But they bragged a little: for they did not will anything much: they
were like the enervated people of Thelema. They would complacently
profess the freedom of their instincts: but their instincts were faded
and faint; and their profligacy was chiefly cerebral. They delighted in
feeling themselves sink into the great piscina of civilization, that
warm mud-bath in which human energy, the primeval and vital forces,
primitive animalism, and its blossom of faith, will, duties, and
passions, are liquefied. Jacqueline's pretty body was steeped in that
bath of gelatinous thought. Olivier could do nothing to keep her from
it. Besides, he too was touched by the disease of the time: he thought
he had no right to tamper with the liberty of another human being: he
would not ask anything of the woman he loved that he could not gain
through love. And Jacqueline did not in the least resent his
non-interference, because she regarded her liberty as her right.

The worst of it was that she went into that amphibious section of
society with a wholeness of heart which made anything equivocal
repulsive to her: when she believed she gave herself: in the generous
ardor of her soul, even in her egoism, she always burned her boats; and,
as a result of living with Olivier, she had preserved a moral inability
to compromise, which she was apt to apply even in immorality.

Her new friends were too cautious to let others see them as they were.
In theory they paraded absolute liberty with regard to the prejudices of
morality and society, though in practice they so contrived their affairs
as not to fall out with any one whose acquaintance might be useful to
them: they used morality and society, while they betrayed them like
unfaithful servants, robbing their masters. They even robbed each other
for want of anything better to do, and as a matter of habit. There was
more than one of the men who knew that his wife had lovers. The wives
were not ignorant of the fact that their husbands had mistresses. They
both put up with it. Scandal only begins when one makes a noise about
these things. These charming marriages rested on a tacit understanding
between partners--between accomplices. But Jacqueline was more frank,
and played to win or lose. The first thing was to be sincere. Again, to
be sincere. Again and always, to be sincere. Sincerity was also one of
the virtues extolled by the ideas of that time. But herein it is proved
once again that everything is sound for the sound in heart, while
everything is corrupt for the corrupt. How hideous it is sometimes to be
sincere! It is a sin for mediocre people to try to look into the depths
of themselves. They see their mediocrity: and their vanity always finds
something to feed on.

Jacqueline spent her time in looking at herself in her mirror: she saw
things in it which it were better she had never seen: for when she saw
them she could not take her eyes off them: and instead of struggling
against them she watched them grow: they became enormous and in the end
captured her eyes and her mind.

The child was not enough to fill her life. She had not been able to
nurse it: the baby pined with her. She had to procure a wet nurse. It
was a great grief to her at first.... Soon it became a solace. The child
became splendidly healthy: he grew lustily, and became a fine little
fellow, gave no trouble, spent his time in sleeping, and hardly cried at
all at night. The nurse--a strapping Nivernaise who had fostered many
children, and always had a jealous and embarrassing animal affection for
each of them in turn--was like the real mother. Whenever Jacqueline
expressed an opinion, the woman went her own way: and if Jacqueline
tried to argue, in the end she always found that she knew nothing at all
about it. She had never really recovered from the birth of the child: a
slight attack of phlebitis had dragged her down, and as she had to lie
still for several weeks she worried and worried: she was feverish, and
her mind went on and on indefinitely beating out the same monotonous
deluded complaint:

"I have not lived, I have not lived: and now my life is finished...."

For her imagination was fired: she thought herself crippled for life:
and there rose in her a dumb, harsh, and bitter rancor, which she did
not confess to herself, against the innocent cause of her illness, the
child. The feeling is not so rare as is generally believed: but a veil
is drawn over it: and even those who feel it are ashamed to submit to it
in their inmost hearts. Jacqueline condemned herself: there was a sharp
conflict between her egoism and her mother's love. When she saw the
child sleeping so happily, she was filled with tenderness: but a moment
later she would think bitterly:

"He has killed me."

And she could not suppress a feeling of irritation and revolt against
the untroubled sleep of the creature whose happiness she had bought at
the price of her suffering. Even after she had recovered, when the child
was bigger, the feeling of hostility persisted dimly and obscurely. As
she was ashamed of it, she transferred it to Olivier. She went on
fancying herself ill: and her perpetual care of her health, her
anxieties, which were bolstered up by the doctors, who encouraged the
idleness which was the prime cause of it all,--(separation from the
child, forced inactivity, absolute isolation, weeks of emptiness spent
in lying in bed and being stuffed with food, like a beast being fatted
for slaughter),--had ended by concentrating all her thoughts upon,
herself. The modern way of curing neurasthenia is very strange, being
neither more nor less than the substitution of hypertrophy of the ego
for a disease of the ego! Why not bleed their egoism, or restore the
circulation of the blood from head to heart, if they do not have too
much, by some violent, moral reagent!

Jacqueline came out of it physically stronger, plumper, and
rejuvenated,--but morally she was more ill than ever. Her months of
isolation had broken the last ties of thought which bound her to
Olivier. While she lived with him she was still under the ascendancy of
his idealism, for, in spite of all his failings, he remained constant to
his faith: she struggled in vain against the bondage in which she was
held by a mind more steadfast than her own, against the look which
pierced to her very soul, and forced her sometimes to condemn herself,
however loath she might be to do so. But as soon as chance had separated
her from her husband--as soon as she ceased to feel the weight of his
all-seeing love--as soon as she was free--the trusting friendship that
used to exist between them was supplanted by a feeling of anger at
having broken free, a sort of hatred born of the idea that she had for
so long lived beneath the yoke of an affection which she no longer
felt.--Who can tell the hidden, implacable, bitter feelings that seethe
and ferment in the heart of a creature he loves, by whom he believes
that he is loved? Between one day and the next, all is changed. She
loved the day before, she seemed to love, she thought she loved. She
loves no longer. The man she loved is struck out from her thoughts. She
sees suddenly that he is nothing to her: and he does not understand: he
has seen nothing of the long travail through which she has passed: he
has had no suspicion of the secret hostility towards himself that has
been gathering in her: he does not wish to know the reasons for her
vengeful hatred. Reasons often remote, complex, and obscure,--some
hidden deep in the mysteries of their inmost life,--others arising from
injured vanity, secrets of the heart surprised and judged,--others....
What does she know of them herself? It is some hidden offense committed
against her unwittingly, an offense which she will never forgive. It is
impossible to find out, and she herself is not very sure what it is: but
the offense is marked deep in her flesh: her flesh will never forget it.

To fight against such an appalling stream of disaffection called for a
very different type of man from Olivier--one nearer nature, a simpler
man and a more supple one not hampered with sentimental scruples, a man
of strong instincts, capable, if need be, of actions which his reason
would disavow. He lost the fight before ever it began, for he had lost
heart: his perception was too clear, and he had long since recognized in
Jacqueline a form of heredity which was stronger than her will, her
mother's soul reappearing in her: he saw her falling like a stone down
to the depths of the stock from which she sprang: and his weak and
clumsy efforts to stay her only accelerated her downfall. He forced
himself to be calm. She, from an unconsciously selfish motive, tried to
break down his defenses and make him say violent, brutal, boorish things
to her so as to have a reason for despising him. If he gave way to
anger, she despised him. If at once he were ashamed and became
apologetic, she despised him even more. And if he did not, would not,
give way to anger--then she hated him. And worst of all was the silence
which for days together would rise like a wall between them. A
suffocating, crushing, maddening silence which brings even the gentlest
creatures to fury and exasperation, and makes them have moments when
they feel a savage desire to hurt, to cry out, or make the other cry
out. The black silence in which love reaches its final stage of
disintegration, and the man and the woman, like the worlds, each
following its own orbit, pass onward into the night.... They had reached
a point at which everything they did, even an attempt to come together
again, drove them farther and farther apart. Their life became
intolerable. Events were precipitated by an accident.

During the past year Cecile Fleury had often been to the Jeannins'.
Olivier had met her at Christophe's: then Jacqueline had invited her to
the house; and Cecile went on seeing them even after Christophe had
broken with them. Jacqueline had been kind to her: although she was
hardly at all musical and thought Cecile a little common, she felt the
charm of her singing and her soothing influence. Olivier liked playing
with her, and gradually she became a friend of the family. She inspired
confidence: when she came into the Jeannins' drawing-room with her
honest eyes and her air of health and high spirits, and her rather loud
laugh which it was good to hear, it was like a ray of sunlight piercing
the mist. She brought a feeling of inexpressible relief and solace to
Olivier and Jacqueline. When she was leaving they longed to say to her:

"No. Stay, stay a little while longer, for I am cold!"

During Jacqueline's absence Olivier saw Cecile more often: he could not
help letting her see something of his troubles. He did it quite
unthinkingly, with the heedlessness of a weak and tender creature who is
stifling and has need of some one to confide in, with an absolute
surrender. Cecile was touched by it: she soothed him with motherly words
of comfort. She pitied both of them, and urged Olivier not to lose
heart. But whether it was that she was more embarrassed than he by his
confidences, or that there was some other reason, she found excuses for
going less often to the house. No doubt it seemed to her that she was
not acting loyally towards Jacqueline, for she had no right to know her
secrets. At least, that was how Olivier interpreted her estrangement:
and he agreed with her, for he was sorry that he had spoken. But the
estrangement made him feel what Cecile had become to him. He had grown
used to sharing his ideas with her, and she was the only creature who
could deliver him from the pain he was suffering. He was too much
skilled in reading his own feelings to have any doubt as to the name of
what he felt for her. He would never have said anything to Cecile. But
he could not resist the imperative desire to write down what he felt.
For some little time past he had returned to the dangerous habit of
communing with his thoughts on paper. He had cured himself of it during
the years of love: but now that he found himself alone once more, his
inherited mania took possession of him: it was a relief from his
sufferings, and it was the artist's need of self-analysis. So he
described himself, and set his troubles down in writing, as though he
were telling them to Cecile--more freely indeed; since she was never to
read it. And as luck would have it the manuscript came into Jacqueline's
hands. It happened one day when she was feeling nearer Olivier than she
had been for years. As she was clearing out her cupboard she read once
more the old love-letters he had sent her: she had been moved to tears
by them. Sitting in the shadow of the cupboard, unable to go on with her
tidying, she lived through the past once more: and then was filled with
sorrow and remorse to think that she had destroyed it. She thought of
the grief it must be to Olivier; she had never been able to face the
idea of it calmly: she could forget it: but she could not bear to think
that he had suffered through her. Her heart ached. She longed to throw
herself into his arms and say:

"Oh! Olivier, Olivier, what have we done? We are mad, we are mad! Don't
let us ever again hurt each other!"

If only he had come in at that moment!

And it was exactly at that moment that she found his letters to
Cecile.... It was the end.--Did she think that Olivier had really
deceived her? Perhaps. But what does it signify? To her the betrayal was
not so much in the act as in the thought and intention. She would have
found it easier to forgive the man she loved for taking a mistress than
for secretly giving his heart to another woman. And she was right.

"A pretty state of things!" some will say....--(They are poor creatures
who only suffer from the betrayal of love when it is consummated!...
When the heart remains faithful, the sordid offenses of the body are of
small account. When the heart turns traitor, all the rest is
nothing.)...

Jacqueline did not for a moment think of regaining Olivier's love. It
was too late! She no longer cared for him enough. Or perhaps she cared
for him too much. All her trust in him crumbled away, all that was left
in her secret heart of her faith and hope in him. She did not tell
herself that she had scorned him, and had discouraged him, and driven
him to his new love, or that his love was innocent: and that after all
we are not masters of ourselves sufficiently to choose whether we will
love or not. It never occurred to her to compare his sentimental impulse
with her flirtation with Christophe: she did not love Christophe, and so
he did not count! In her passionate exaggeration she thought that
Olivier was lying to her, and that she was nothing to him. Her last stay
had failed her at the moment when she reached out her hand to grasp
it.... It was the end.

Olivier never knew what she had suffered that day. But when he next saw
her he too felt that it was the end.

From that moment on they never spoke to each other except in the
presence of strangers. They watched each other like trapped beasts
fearfully on their guard. Jeremias Gotthelf somewhere describes, with
pitiless simplicity, the grim situation of a husband and a wife who no
longer love each other and watch each other, each carefully marking the
other's health, looking for symptoms of illness, neither actually
thinking of hastening or even wishing the death of the other, but
drifting along in the hope of some sudden accident: and each of them
living in the flattering thought of being the healthier of the two.
There were moments when both Jacqueline and Olivier almost fancied that
such thoughts were in the other's mind. And they were in the mind of
neither: but it was bad enough that they should attribute them to each
other, as Jacqueline did at night when she would lie feverishly awake
and tell herself that her husband was the stronger, and that he was
wearing her down gradually, and would soon triumph over her.... The
monstrous delirium of a crazy heart and brain!--And to think that in
their heart of hearts, with all that was best in them, they loved each
other!...

Olivier bent beneath the weight of it, and made no attempt to fight
against it; he held aloof and dropped the rudder of Jacqueline's soul.
Left to herself with no pilot to steer her, her freedom turned her
dizzy: she needed a master against whom to revolt: if she had no master
she had to make one. Then she was the prey of a fixed idea. Till then,
in spite of her suffering, she had never dreamed of leaving Olivier.
From that time on she thought herself absolved from every tie. She
wished to love, before it was too late:--(for, young as she was, she
thought herself an old woman).--She loved, she indulged in those
imaginary devouring passions, which fasten on the first object they
meet, a face seen in a crowd, a reputation, sometimes merely a name,
and, having laid hold of it cannot let go, telling the heart that it
cannot live without the object of its choice, laying it waste, and
completely emptying it of all the memories of the past that filled it;
other affections, moral ideas, memories, pride of self, and respect for
others. And when the fixed idea dies in its time for want of anything to
feed it, after it has consumed everything, who can tell what the new
nature may be that will spring from the ruins, a nature often without
kindness, without pity, without youth, without illusions, thinking of
nothing but devouring life as grass smothers and devours the ruins of
monuments!

In this case, as usual, the fixed idea fastened on a creature of the
type that most easily tricks the heart. Poor Jacqueline fell in love
with a philanderer, a Parisian writer, who was neither young nor
handsome, a man who was heavy, red-faced, dissipated, with bad teeth,
absolutely and terribly heartless, whose chief merit was that he was a man
of the world and had made a great many women unhappy. She had not
even the excuse that she did not know how selfish he was: for he paraded
it in his art. He knew perfectly what he was doing: egoism enshrined in
art is like a mirror to larks, like a candle to moths. More than one
woman in Jacqueline's circle had been caught: quite recently one of her
friends, a young, newly-married woman, whom he had had no great
difficulty in seducing, had been deserted by him. Their hearts were not
broken by it, though they found it hard to conceal their discomfiture
from the delight of the gossips. Even those who were most cruelly hurt
were much too careful of their interests and their social interests not
to keep their perturbation within the bounds of common sense. They made
no scandal. Whether they deceived their husbands or their lovers, or
whether they were themselves deceived and suffered, it was all done in
silence. They were the heroines of scandalous rumors.

But Jacqueline was mad: she was capable not only of doing what she said,
but also of saying what she did. She brought into her folly an absolute
lack of selfish motive, and an utter disinterestedness. She had the
dangerous merit of always being frank with herself and of never shirking
the consequences of her own actions. She was a better creature than the
people she lived with: and for that reason she did worse. When she
loved, when she conceived the idea of adultery, she flung herself into
it headlong with desperate frankness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Madame Arnaud was alone in her room, knitting with the feverish
tranquillity with which Penelope must have woven her famous web. Like
Penelope, she was waiting for her husband's return. M. Arnaud used to
spend whole days away from home. He had classes in the morning and
evening. As a rule he came back to lunch. Although he was a slow walker
and his school was at the other end of Paris, he forced himself to take
the long walk home, not so much from affection, as from habit, and for
the sake of economy. But sometimes he was detained by lectures, or he
would take advantage of being in the neighborhood of a library to go and
work there. Lucile Arnaud would be left alone in the empty flat. Except
for the charwoman who came from eight to ten to do the cleaning, and the
tradesmen who came to fetch and bring orders, no one ever rang the bell.
She knew nobody in the house now. Christophe had removed, and there were
newcomers in the lilac garden. Celine Chabran had married Andre
Elsberger. Elie Elsberger had gone away with his family to Spain, where
he had been appointed manager of a mine. Old Weil had lost his wife and
hardly ever lived in his flat in Paris. Only Christophe and his friend
Cecile had kept up their relations with Lucile Arnaud: but they lived
far away, and they were busy and hard at work all day long, so that they
often did not come to see her for weeks together. She had nothing
outside herself.

She was not bored. She needed very little to keep her interest in things
alive: the very smallest daily task was enough, or a tiny plant, whose
delicate foliage she would clean with motherly care every morning. She
had her quiet gray cat, who had lost something of his manners, as is apt
to happen with domestic animals who are loved by their masters: he used
to spend the day, like herself, sitting by the fire, or on the table
near the lamp watching her fingers as she sewed, and sometimes gazing at
her with his strange eyes, which watched her for a moment and then
closed again. Even the furniture was company to her. Every piece was
like a familiar face. She took a childlike pleasure in looking after
them, in gently wiping off the dust which settled on their sides, and in
carefully replacing them in their usual corners. She would hold silent
conversations with them. She would smile at the fine Louis XVI.
round-topped bureau, which was the only piece of old furniture she had.
Every day she would feel the same joy in seeing it. She was always
absorbed in going over her linen, and she would spend hours standing on
a chair, with her hands and arms deep in the great country cupboard,
looking and arranging, while the cat, whose curiosity was roused, would
spend hours watching her.

But her real happiness came when, after her work was done and she had
lunched alone, God knows how--(she never had much of an appetite)--and
had gone the necessary errands, and her day was at an end, she would
come in about four and sit by the window or the fire with her work and
her cat. Sometimes she would find some excuse for not going out at all;
she was glad when she could stay indoors, especially in the winter when
it was snowing. She had a horror of the cold, and the wind, and the mud,
and the rain, for she was something of a cat herself, very clean,
fastidious, and soft. She would rather not eat than go and procure her
lunch when the tradespeople forgot to bring it. In that case she would
munch a piece of chocolate or some fruit from the sideboard. She was
very careful not to let Arnaud know. These were her escapades. Then
during the days when the light was dim, and also sometimes on lovely
sunny days,--(outside the blue sky would shine, and the noise of the
street would buzz round the dark silent rooms; like a sort of mirage
enshrouding the soul),--she would sit in her favorite corner, with her
feet on her hassock, her knitting in her hands, and go off into
day-dreams while her fingers plied the needles. She would have one of
her favorite books by her side: as a rule one of those humble,
red-backed volumes, a translation of an English novel. She would read
very little, hardly more than a chapter a day; and the book would lie on
her knees open at the same page for a long time together, or sometimes
she would not even open it: she knew it already, and the story of it
would be in her dreams. So the long novels of Dickens and Thackeray
would be drawn out over weeks, and in her dreams they would become
years. They wrapped her about with their tenderness. The people of the
present day, who read quickly and carelessly, do not know the marvelous
vigor irradiated by those fine books which must be taken in slowly.
Madame Arnaud had no doubt that the lives of the characters in the
novels were not as real as her own. There were some for whom she would
have laid down her life: the tender jealous creature, Lady Castlewood,
the woman who loved in silence with her motherly virginal heart, was a
sister to her: little Dombey was her own dear little boy: she was Dora,
the child-wife, who was dying: she would hold out her arms to all those
childlike souls which pass through the world with the honest eyes of
purity: and around her there would pass a procession of friendly beggars
and harmless eccentrics, all in pursuit of their touchingly preposterous
cranks and whims,--and at their head the fond genius of dear Dickens,
laughing and crying together at his own dreams. At such times, when she
looked out of the window, she would recognize among the passers-by the
beloved or dreaded figure of this or that personage in that imaginary
world. She would fancy similar lives, the same lives, being lived behind
the walls of the houses. Her dislike for going out came from her dread
of that world with its moving mysteries. She saw around her hidden
dramas and comedies being played. It was not always an illusion. In her
isolation she had come by the gift of mystical intuition which in the
eyes of the passers-by can perceive the secrets of their lives of
yesterday and to-morrow, which are often unknown to themselves. She
mixed up what she actually saw with what she remembered of the novels
and distorted it. She felt that she must drown in that immense universe.
And she would have to go home to regain her footing.

But what need had she to read or to look at others? She had but to gaze
in upon herself. Her pale, dim existence--seeming so when seen from
without--was gloriously lit up within. There was abundance and fullness
of life in it. There were memories, and treasures, the existence of
which lay unsuspected.... Had they ever had any reality?--No doubt they
were real, since they were real to her.... Oh! the wonder of such lowly
lives transfigured by the magic wand of dreams!

Madame Arnaud would go back through the years to her childhood: each of
the little frail flowers of her vanished hopes sprang silently into life
again.... Her first childish love for a girl, whose charm had fascinated
her at first sight: she loved her with the love which is only possible
to those who are infinitely pure: she used to think she would die at the
touch of her: she used to long to kiss her feet, to be her little girl,
to marry her: the girl had married, had not been happy, had had a child
which died, and then she too had died.... Another love, when she was
about twelve years old, for a little girl of her own age, who tyrannized
over her: a fair-haired mad-cap, gay and imperious, who used to amuse
herself by making her cry, and then would devour her with kisses: she
laid a thousand romantic plans for their future together: then,
suddenly, the girl became a Carmelite nun, without anybody knowing why:
she was said to be happy.... Then there had been a great passion for a
man much older than herself. No one had ever known anything about it,
not even the object of it. She had given to it a great and ardent
devotion and untold wealth of tenderness.... Then another passion: this
time she was loved. But from a strange timidity, and mistrust of
herself, she had not dared to believe that she was loved, or to let the
man see that she loved him. And happiness passed without her grasping
it.... Then.... But what is the use of telling others what only has a
meaning for oneself? So many trivial facts which had assumed a profound
significance: a little attention at the hands of a friend: a kind word
from Olivier, spoken without his attaching any importance to it:
Christophe's kindly visits, and the enchanted world evoked by his music:
a glance from a stranger: yes, and even in that excellent woman, so
virtuous and pure, certain involuntary infidelities in thought, which
made her uneasy and feel ashamed, while she would feebly thrust them
aside, though all the same--being so innocent--they brought a little
sunshine into her heart.... She loved her husband truly, although he was
not altogether the husband of her dreams. But he was kind, and one day
when he said to her: "My darling wife, you do not know all you are to
me; you are my whole life," her heart melted: and that day she felt that
she was one with him, wholly and forever, without any possibility of
going back on it. Each year brought them closer to each other, and
tightened the bond between them. They had shared lovely dreams: of work,
traveling, children. What had become of them?... Alas!... Madame Arnaud
was still dreaming them. There was a little boy of whom she had so often
and so profoundly dreamed, that she knew him almost as well as though he
really existed. She had slowly begotten him through the years, always
adorning him with all the most beautiful things she saw, and the things
she loved most dearly.... Silence!...

That was all. It meant worlds to her. There are so many tragedies
unknown, even the most intimate, in the depths of the most tranquil and
seemingly most ordinary lives! And the greatest tragedy of all perhaps
is:--_that nothing happens_ in such lives of hope crying for what
is their right, their just due promised, and refused, by Nature--wasting
away in passionate anguish--showing nothing of it all to the outside
world! Madame Arnaud, happily for herself, was not only occupied with
herself. Her own life filled only a part of her dreams. She lived also
in the lives of those she knew, or had known, and put herself in their
place: she thought much of Christophe and his friend Cecile. She was
thinking of them now. The two women had grown fond of one another. The
strange thing was that of the two it was the sturdy Cecile who felt most
need to lean on the frail Madame Arnaud. In reality the healthy,
high-spirited young woman was not so strong as she seemed to be. She was
passing through a crisis. Even the most tranquil hearts are not immune
from being taken by surprise. Unknown to herself, a feeling of
tenderness had crept into her heart: she refused to admit it at first:
but it had grown so that she was forced to see it:--she loved Olivier.
His sweet and affectionate disposition, the rather feminine charm of his
personality, his weakness and inability to defend himself, had attracted
her at once:--(a motherly nature is attracted by the nature which has
need of her).--What she had learned subsequently of his marital troubles
had inspired her with a dangerous pity for Olivier. No doubt these
reasons would not have been enough. Who can say why one human being
falls in love with another? Neither counts for anything in the matter,
but often it merely happens that a heart which is for the moment of its
guard is taken by surprise, and is delivered up to the first affection
it may meet on the road,--As soon as she had no room left for doubt as
to her state of mind, Cecile bravely struggled to pluck out the barb of
a love which she thought wicked and absurd: she suffered for a long time
and did not recover. No one would have suspected what was happening to
her: she strove valiantly to appear happy. Only Madame Arnaud knew what
it must have cost her. Not that Cecile had told her her secret. But she
would sometimes come and lay her head on Madame Arnaud's bosom. She
would weep a little, without a word, kiss her, and then go away
laughing. She adored this friend of hers, in whom, though she seemed so
fragile, she felt a moral energy and faith superior to her own. She did
not confide in her. But Madame Arnaud could guess volumes on a hint. The
world seemed to her to be a sad misunderstanding. It is impossible to
dissolve it. One can only love, have pity, and dream.

And when the swarm of her dreams buzzed too loudly, when her thoughts
stopped, she would go to her piano and let her hands fall lightly on the
keys, at random, and play softly to wreathe the mirage of life about
with the subdued light of music....

But the good little creature would not forget to perform her everyday
duties: and when Arnaud came home he would find the lamp lit, the supper
ready, and his wife's pale, smiling face waiting for him. And he would
have no idea of the universe in which she had been living.

The great difficulty was to keep the two lives going side by side
without their clashing: her everyday life and that other, the great life
of the mind, with its far-flung horizons. It was not always easy.
Fortunately Arnaud also lived to some extent in an imaginary life, in
books, and works of art, the eternal fire of which fed the flickering
flames of his soul. But during the last few years he had become more and
more preoccupied with the petty annoyances of his profession, injustice
and favoritism, and friction with his colleagues or his pupils: he was
embittered: he began to talk politics, and to inveigh against the
Government and the Jews: and he made Dreyfus responsible for his
disappointments at the university. His mood of soreness infected Madame
Arnaud a little. She was at an age when her vital force was upset and
uneasy, groping for balance. There were great gaps in her thoughts. For
a time they both lost touch with life, and their reason for existence: for
they had nothing to which to bind their spider's web, which was left
hanging in the void. Though the support of reality be never so weak, yet
for dreams there must be one. They had no sort of support. They could
not contrive any means of propping each other up. Instead of helping
her, he clung to her. And she knew perfectly well that she was not
strong enough to hold him up, for she could not even support herself.
Only a miracle could save her. She prayed for it to come. It came from
the depths of her soul. In her solitary pious heart Madame Arnaud felt
the irony of the sublime and absurd hunger for creation in spite of
everything, the need of weaving her web in spite of everything, through
space, for the joy of weaving, leaving it to the wind, the breath of
God, to carry her whithersoever it was ordained that she should go. And
the breath of God gave her a new hold on life, and found her an
invisible support. Then the husband and wife both set patiently to work
once more to weave the magnificent and vain web of their dreams, a web
fashioned of their purest suffering and their blood.

Madame Arnaud was alone in her room.... It was near evening.

The door-bell rang. Madame Arnaud, roused from her reverie before the
usual time, started and trembled. She carefully arranged her work and
went to open the door. Christophe came in. He was in a great state of
emotion. She took his hands affectionately.

"What is it, my dear?" she asked.

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

"Come back?"

"He came this morning and said: 'Christophe, help me!' I embraced him.
He wept. He told me: I have nothing but you now. She has gone."

Madame Arnaud gasped, and clasped her hands and said:

"Poor things!"

"She has gone," said Christophe. "Gone with her lover."

"And her child?" asked Madame Arnaud.

"Husband, child--she has left everything."

"Poor thing!" said Madame Arnaud again.

"He loved her," said Christophe. "He loved her, and her alone. He will
never recover from the blow. He keeps on saying: 'Christophe, she has
betrayed me.... My dearest friend has betrayed me.' It is no good my
saying to him, 'Since she has betrayed you, she cannot have been your
friend. She is your enemy. Forget her or kill her!'"

"Oh! Christophe, what are you saying! It is too horrible!"

'Yes, I know. You all think it barbaric and prehistoric to kill! It is
jolly to hear these Parisians protesting against the brutal instincts
which urge the male to kill the female if she deceives him, and
preaching indulgence and reason! They're splendid apostles! It is a fine
thing to see the pack of mongrel dogs waxing wrath against the return to
animalism. After outraging life, after having robbed it of its worth,
they surround it with religious worship.... What! That heartless,
dishonorable, meaningless life, the mere physical act of breathing, the
beating of the blood in a scrap of flesh, these are the things which
they hold worthy of respect! They are never done with their niceness
about the flesh: it is a crime to touch it. You may kill the soul if you
like, but the body is sacred...."

"The murderers of the soul are the worst of all: but one crime is no
excuse for another. You know that."

"I know it. Yes. You are right. I did not think what I was saying....
Who knows? I should do it, perhaps."

"No. You are unfair to yourself. You are so kind."

"If I am roused to passion, I am as cruel as the rest. You see how I had
lost control of myself!... But when you see a friend brought to tears,
how can you not hate the person who has caused them? And how can one be
too hard on a woman who leaves her child to run after her lover?"

"Don't talk like that, Christophe. You don't know."

"What! You defend her?"

"I pity her, too."

"I pity those who suffer. Not those who cause suffering."

"Well! Do you think she hasn't suffered too? Do you think she has left
her child and wrecked her life out of lightness of heart? For her life
is wrecked too. I hardly know her, Christophe. I have only seen her a
few times, and that only in passing: she never said a friendly word to
me, she was not in sympathy with me. And yet I know her better than you.
I am sure she is not a bad woman. Poor child! I can guess what she has
had to go through...."

"You.... You whose life is so worthy and so right and sensible!..."

"Yes, Christophe, I. You do not know. You are kind, but you are a man
and, like all men, you are hard, in spite of your kindness--a man hard
and set against everything which is not in and of yourself. You have no
real knowledge of the women who live with you. You love them, after your
fashion; but you never take the trouble to understand them. You are so
easily satisfied with yourselves! You are quite sure that you know
us.... Alas! If you knew how we suffer sometimes when we see, not that
you do not love us, but how you love us, and that that is all we are to
those we love the best! There are moments, Christophe, when we clench
our fists so that the nails dig into our hands to keep ourselves from
crying to you: 'Oh! Do not love us, do not love us! Anything rather than
love us like that!'... Do you know the saying of a poet: 'Even in her
home, among her children, surrounded with sham honors, a woman endures a
scorn a thousand times harder to bear than the most utter misery'? Think
of that, Christophe. They are terrible words."

"What you say has upset me. I don't rightly understand. But I am
beginning to see.... Then, you yourself...."

"I have been through all these torments."

"Is it possible?... But, even so, you will never make me believe that
you would have done the same as that woman."

"I have no child, Christophe. I do not know what I should have done in
her place."

"No. That is impossible. I believe in you. I respect you too much. I
swear that you could not."

"Swear nothing! I have been very near doing what she has done.... It
hurts me to destroy the good idea you had of me. But you must learn to
know us a little if you do not want to be unjust. Yes, I have been
within an ace of just such an act of folly. And you yourself had
something to do with my not going on with it. It was two years ago. I
was going through a period of terrible depression, that seemed to be
eating my life away. I kept on telling myself that I was no use in the
world, that nobody needed me, that even my husband could do without me,
that I had lived for nothing.... I was on the very point of running
away, to do Heaven knows what! I went up to your room.... Do you
remember?... You did not understand why I came. I came to say good-bye
to you.... And then, I don't know what happened, I can't remember
exactly ... but I know that something you said ... (though you had no
idea of it....) ... was like a flash of light to me.... Perhaps it was
not what you said.... Perhaps it was only a matter of opportunity; at
that moment the least thing was enough to make or mar me.... When I left
you I went back to my own room, locked myself in, and wept the whole day
through.... I was better after that: the crisis had passed."

"And now," asked Christophe, "you are sorry?"

"Now?" she said. "Ah! If I had been so mad as to do it I should have
been at the bottom of the Seine long ago. I could not have borne the
shame of it, and the injury I should have done to my poor husband."

"Then you are happy?"

"Yes. As happy as one can be in this life. It is so rare for two people
to understand each other, and respect each other, and know that they are
sure of each other, not merely with a simple lover's belief, which is
often an illusion, but as the result of years passed together, gray,
dull, commonplace years even--especially with the memory of the dangers
through which they have passed together. And as they grow older their
trust grows greater and finer."

She stopped and blushed suddenly.

"Oh, Heavens! How could I tell you that?... What have I done?... Forget
it, Christophe, I beg of you. No one must know."

"You need not be afraid," said Christophe, pressing her hand warmly. "It
shall be sacred to me."

Madame Arnaud was unhappy at what she had said, and turned away for a
moment.

Then she went on:

"I ought not to have told you.... But, you see, I wanted to show you
that even in the closest and best marriages, even for the women ... whom
you respect, Christophe ... there are times, not only of aberration, as
you say, but of real, intolerable suffering, which may drive them to
madness, and wreck at least one life, if not two. You must not be too
hard. Men and women make each other suffer terribly even when they love
each other dearly."

"Must they, then, live alone and apart?"

"That is even worse for us. The life of a woman who has to live alone,
and fight like men (and often against men), is a terrible thing in a
society which is not ready for the idea of it, and is, in a great
measure, hostile to it...."

She stopped again, leaning forward a little, with her eyes fixed on the
fire in the grate; then she went on softly, in a rather hushed tone,
hesitating every now and then, stopping, and then going on:

"And yet it is not our fault when a woman lives like that, she does not
do so from caprice, but because she is forced to do so; she has to earn
her living and learn how to do without a man, since men will have
nothing to do with her if she is poor. She is condemned to solitude
without having any of its advantages, for in France she cannot, like a
man, enjoy her independence, even in the most innocent way, without
provoking scandal: everything is forbidden her. I have a friend who is a
school-mistress in the provinces. If she were shut up in an airless
prison she could not be more lonely and more stifled. The middle-classes
close their doors to women who struggle to earn their living by their
work; they are suspected and contemned; their smallest actions are spied
upon and turned to evil. The masters at the boys' school shun them,
either because they are afraid of the tittle-tattle of the town, or from
a secret hostility, or from shyness, and because they are in the habit
of frequenting cafes and consorting with low women, or because they are
too tired after the day's work and have a dislike, as a result of their
work, for intellectual women. And the women themselves cannot bear each
other, especially if they are compelled to live together in the school.
The head-mistress is often a woman absolutely incapable of understanding
young creatures with a need of affection, who lose heart during the
first few years of such a barren trade and such inhuman solitude; she
leaves them with their secret agony and makes no attempt to help them;
she is inclined to think that they are only vain and haughty. There is
no one to take an interest in them. Having neither fortune nor
influence, they cannot marry. Their hours of work are so many as to
leave them no time in which to create an intellectual life which might
bind them together and give them some comfort. When such an existence is
not supported by an exceptional religious or moral feeling,--(I might
say abnormal and morbid; for such absolute self-sacrifice is not
natural),--it is a living death....--In default of intellectual work,
what resources does charity offer to women? What great disappointments
it holds out for those women who are too sincere to be satisfied with
official or polite charity, philanthropic twaddle, the odious mixture of
frivolity, beneficence, and bureaucracy, the trick of dabbling in
poverty in the intervals of flirtation! And if one of them in disgust
has the incredible audacity to venture out alone among the poor or the
wretched, whose life she only knows by hearsay, think of what she will
see! Sights almost beyond bearing! It is a very hell. What can she do to
help them? She is lost, drowned in such a sea of misfortune. However,
she struggles on, she tries hard to save a few of the poor wretches, she
wears herself out for them, and drowns with them. She is lucky if she
succeeds in saving one or two of them! But who is there to rescue her?
Who ever dreams of going to her aid? For she, too, suffers, both with
her own and the suffering of others: the more faith she gives, the less
she has for herself; all these poor wretches cling desperately to her,
and she has nothing with which to stay herself. No one holds out a hand
to her. And sometimes she is stoned.... You knew, Christophe, the
splendid woman who gave herself to the humblest and most meritorious
charitable work; she took pity on the street prostitutes who had just
been brought to child-bed, the wretched women with whom the Public Aid
would have nothing to do, or who were afraid of the Public Aid; she
tried to cure them physically and morally, to look after them and their
children, to wake in them the mother-feeling, to give them new homes and
a life of honest work. She taxed her strength to the utmost in her grim
labors, so full of disappointment and bitterness--(so few are saved, so
few wish to be saved! And think of all the babies who die! Poor innocent
little babies, condemned in the very hour of their birth!...)--That
Woman who had taken upon herself the sorrows of others, the blameless
creature who of her own free will expiated the crimes of human
selfishness--how do you think she was judged, Christophe? The
evil-minded public accused her of making money out of her work, and even
of making money out of the poor women she protected. She had to leave
the neighborhood, and go away, utterly downhearted....--You cannot
conceive the cruelty of the struggles which independent women have to
maintain against the society of to-day, a conservative, heartless
society, which is dying and expends what little energy it has left in
preventing others from living."

"My dear creature, it is not only the lot of women. We all know these
struggles. And I know the refuge."

"What is it?"

"Art,"

"All very well for you, but not for us. And even among men, how many are
there who can take advantage of it?"

"Look at your friend Cecile. She is happy."

"How do you know? Ah! You have jumped to conclusions! Because she puts a
brave face on it, because she does not stop to think of things that make
her sad, because she conceals them from others, you say that she is
happy! Yes. She is happy to be well and strong, and to be able to fight.
But you know nothing of her struggles. Do you think she was made for
that deceptive life of art? Art! Just think of the poor women who long
for the glory of being able to write or play or sing as the very summit
of happiness! Their lives must be bare indeed, and they must be so hard
pressed that they can find no affection to which to turn! Art! What have
we to do with art, if we have all the rest with it? There is only one
thing in the world which can make a woman forget everything else,
everything else: and that is the child." "And when she has a child, you
see, even that is not enough."

"Yes. Not always.... Women are not very happy. It is difficult to be a
woman. Much more difficult than to be a man. You men never realize that
enough. You can be absorbed in an intellectual passion or some outside
activity. You mutilate yourselves, but you are the happier for it. A
healthy woman cannot do that without suffering for it. It is inhuman to
stifle a part of yourself. When we women are happy in one way, we regret
that we are not happy in another. We have several souls. You men have
but one, a more vigorous soul, which is often brutal and even monstrous.
I admire you. But do not be too selfish. You are very selfish without
knowing it. You hurt us often, without knowing it."

"What are we to do? It is not our fault."

"No, it is not your fault, my dear Christophe. It is not your fault, nor
is it ours. The truth is, you know, that life is not a simple thing.
They say that there we only need to live naturally. But which of us is
natural?"

"True. Nothing is natural in our way of living. Celibacy is not natural.
Nor is marriage. And free love delivers the weak up to the rapaciousness
of the strong. Even our society is not a natural thing: we have
manufactured it. It is said that man is a sociable animal. What
nonsense! He was forced to be so to live. He has made himself sociable
for the purposes of utility, and self-defence, and pleasure, and the
rise to greatness. His necessity has led him to subscribe to certain
compacts. Nature kicks against the constraint and avenges herself.
Nature was not made for us. We try to quell her. It is a struggle, and
it is not surprising that we are often beaten. How are we to win through
it? By being strong."

"By being kind."

"Heavens! To be kind, to pluck off one's armor of selfishness, to
breathe, to love life, light, one's humble work, the little corner of
the earth in which one's roots are spread. And if one cannot have
breadth to try to make up for it in height and depth, like a tree in a
cramped space growing upward to the sun."

"Yes. And first of all to love one another. If a man would feel more
that he is the brother of a woman, and not only her prey, or that she
must be his! If both would shed their vanity and each think a little
less of themselves, and a little more of the other!... We are weak: help
us. Let us not say to those who have fallen: 'I do not know you.' But:
'Courage, friend. We'll pull through.'"

They sat there in silence by the hearth, with the cat between them, all
three still, lost in thought, gazing at the fire It was nearly out; but
a little flame flickered up, and with its wing lightly touched Madame
Arnaud's delicate face, which was suffused with the rosy light of an
inward exaltation which was strange to her. She was amazed at herself
for having been so open. She had never said so much before, and she
would never say so much again.

She laid her hand on Christophe's and said:

"What will you do with the child?"

She had been thinking of that from the outset. She talked and talked and
became another woman, excited and exalted. But she was thinking of that
and that only. With Christophe's first words she had woven a romance in
her heart. She thought of the child left by its mother, of the happiness
of bringing it up, and weaving about its little soul the web of her
dreams and her love. And she thought:

"No. It is wicked of me: I ought not to rejoice in the misfortunes of
others."

But the idea was too strong for her. She went on talking and talking,
and her silent heart was flooded with hope.

Christophe said:

"Yes, of course we have thought it over. Poor child! Both Olivier and I
are incapable of rearing it. It needs a woman's care. I thought perhaps
one of our friends would like to help us...."

Madame Arnaud could hardly breathe.

Christophe said:

"I wanted to talk to you about it. And then Cecile came in just as we
were talking about it. When she heard of our difficulty, when she saw
the child, she was so moved, she seemed so delighted, she said:
'Christophe....'"

Madame Arnaud's heart stopped; she did not hear what else he said: there
was a mist in front of her eyes. She was fain to cry out:

"No, no. Give him to me...."

Christophe went on speaking. She did not hear what he was saying. But
she controlled herself. She thought of what Cecile had told her, and she
thought:

"Her need is greater than mine. I have my dear Arnaud ... and ... and
everything ... and besides, I am older...."

And she smiled and said:

"It is well."

But the flame in the dying fire had flickered out: so too had the rosy
light in her face. And her dear tired face wore only its usual
expression of kindness and resignation.

       *       *       *       *       *

"My wife has betrayed me."

Olivier was crushed by the weight of that idea. In vain did Christophe
try affectionately to shake him out of his torpor.

"What would you?" he said. "The treachery of a friend is an everyday
evil like illness, or poverty, or fighting the fools. We have to be
armed against it. It is a poor sort of man that cannot bear up against
it."

"That's just what I am. I'm not proud of it ... a poor sort of man: yes:
a man who needs tenderness, and dies if it is taken from him."

"Your life is not finished: there are other people to love."

"I can't believe in any one. There are none who can be friends."

"Olivier!"

"I beg your pardon. I don't doubt you, although there are moments when
I doubt everybody--myself included.... But you are strong: you don't need
anybody: you can do without me."

"So can she--even better."

"You are cruel, Christophe."

"My dear fellow. I'm being brutal to you just to make you lash out. Good
Lord! It is perfectly shameful of you to sacrifice those who love you,
and your life, to a woman who doesn't care for you."

"What do I care for those who love me? I love her."

"Work. Your old interests...."

"... Don't interest me any longer. I'm sick of it all. I seem to have
passed out of life altogether. Everything seems so far away.... I see,
but I don't understand.... And to think that there are men who never
grow tired of winding up their clockwork every day, and doing their dull
work, and their newspaper discussions, and their wretched pursuit of
pleasure, men who can be violently for or against a Government, or a
book, or an actress.... Oh! I feel so old! I feel nothing, neither
hatred, nor rancor against anybody. I'm bored with everything. I feel
that there is nothing in the world.... Write? Why write? Who understands
you? I used to write only for one person: everything that I did was for
her.... There is nothing left: I'm worn out, Christophe, fagged out. I
want to sleep."

"Sleep, then, old fellow. I'll sit by you."

But sleep was the last thing that Olivier could have. Ah! if only a
sufferer could sleep for months until his sorrow is no more and has no
part in his new self; if only he could sleep until he became a new man!
But that gift can never be his: and he would not wish to have it. The
worst suffering of all were to be deprived of suffering. Olivier was
like a man in a fever, feeding on his fever: a real fever which came in
regular waves, being at its height in the evening when the light began
to fade. And the rest of the day it left him shattered, intoxicated by
love, devoured by memory, turning the same thought over and over like an
idiot chewing the same mouthful again and again without being able to
swallow it, with all the forces of his brain paralyzed, grinding slowly
on with the one fixed idea.

He could not, like Christophe, resort to cursing his injuries and
honestly blackguarding the woman who had dealt them. He was more
clear-sighted and just, and he knew that he had his share of the
responsibility, and that he was not the only one to suffer: Jacqueline
also was a victim:--she was his victim. She had trusted herself to him:
how had he dealt with his trust? If he was not strong enough to make her
happy, why had he bound her to himself? She was within her rights in
breaking the ties which chafed her.

"It is not her fault," he thought. "It is mine. I have not loved her
well. And yet I loved her truly. But I did not know how to love since I
did not know how to win her love."

So he blamed himself: and perhaps he was right. But it is not much use
to hold an inquest on the past: if it were all to do again, it would be
just the same, inquiry or no inquiry: and such probing stands in the way
of life. The strong man is he who forgets the injury that has been done
him--and also, alas! that which he has done himself, as soon as he is
sure that he cannot make it good. But no man is strong from reason, but
from passion. Love and passion are like distant relations: they rarely
go together. Olivier loved: he was only strong against himself. In the
passive state into which he had fallen he was an easy prey to every kind
of illness. Influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, pounced on him. He was ill
for part of the summer. With Madame Arnaud's assistance, Christophe
nursed him devotedly: and they succeeded in checking his illness. But
against his moral illness they could do nothing: and little by little
they were overcome by the depression and utter weariness of his
perpetual melancholy, and were forced to run away from it.

Illness plunges a man into a strange solitude. Men have an instinctive
horror of it. It is as though they were afraid lest it should be
contagious: and at the very least it is boring, and they run away from
it. How few people there are who can forgive the sufferings of others!
It is always the old story of the friends of Job. Eliphaz the Temanite
accuses Job of impatience. Bildad the Shuhite declares that Job's
afflictions are the punishment of his sins. Sophar of Naamath charges
him with presumption. _"Then was kindled the wrath of Elihu, the son
of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram: against Job was his wrath
kindled, because he justifieth himself, rather than God."_--Few men
are really sorrowful. Many are called, but few are chosen. Olivier was
one of these. As a misanthrope once observed: "He seemed to like being
maltreated. There is nothing to be gained by playing the part of the
unhappy man. You only make yourself detested."

Olivier could not tell even his most intimate friends what he felt. He
saw that it bored them. Even his friend Christophe lost patience with
such tenacious and importunate grief. He knew that he was clumsy and
awkward in remedying it. If the truth must be told, Christophe, whose
heart was generous, Christophe who had gone through much suffering on
his own account, could not feel the suffering of his friend. Such is the
infirmity of human nature. You may be kind, full of pity, understanding,
and you may have suffered a thousand deaths, but you cannot feel the
pain of your friend if he has but a toothache. If illness goes on for a
long time, there is a temptation to think that the sufferer is
exaggerating his complaint. How much more, then, must this be so when
the illness is invisible and seated in the very depths of the soul! A
man who is outside it all cannot help being irritated by seeing his
friend moaning and groaning about a feeling which does not concern him
in the very least. And in the end he says: by way of appeasing his
conscience:

"What can I do? He won't listen to reason, whatever I say."

To reason: true. One can only help by loving the sufferer, by loving him
unreasoningly, without trying to convince him, without trying to cure
him, but just by loving and pitying him. Love is the only balm for the
wounds of love. But love is not inexhaustible even with those who love
the best: they have only a limited store of it. When the sick man's
friends have once written all the words of affection they can find, when
they have done what they consider their duty, they withdraw prudently,
and avoid him like a criminal. And as they feel a certain secret shame
that they can help him so little, they help him less and less: they try
to let him forget them and to forget themselves. And if the sick man
persists in his misfortune and, indiscreetly, an echo of it penetrates
to their ears, then they judge harshly his want of courage and inability
to bear up against his trials. And if he succumbs, it is very certain
that lurking beneath their really genuine pity lies this disdainful
under-thought:

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

Amid such universal selfishness what a marvelous amount of good can be
done by a simple word of tenderness, a delicate attention, a look of
pity and love! Then the sick man feels the worth of kindness. And how
poor is all the rest compared with that!... Kindness brought Olivier
nearer to Madame Arnaud than anybody else, even his friend Christophe.
However, Christophe most meritoriously forced himself to be patient, and
in his affection for him, concealed what he really thought of him. But
Olivier, with his natural keenness of perception sharpened by suffering,
saw the conflict in his friend, and what a burden he was upon him with
his unending sorrow. It was enough, to make him turn from Christophe,
and fill him with a desire to cry:

"Go away. Go."

So unhappiness often divides loving hearts. As the winnower sorts the
grain, so sorrow sets on one side those who have the will to live, and
on the other those who wish to die. It is the terrible law of life,
which is stronger than love! The mother who sees her son dying, the
friend who sees his friend drowning,--if they cannot save them, they do
not cease their efforts to save themselves: they do not die with them.
And yet, they love them a thousand times better than their lives....

In spite of his great love, there were moments when Christophe had to
leave Olivier. He was too strong, too healthy, to be able to live and
breathe in such airless sorrow. He was mightily ashamed of himself! He
would feel cold and dead at heart to think that he could do nothing for
his friend: and as he needed to avenge himself on some one, he visited
his wrath upon Jacqueline. In spite of Madame Arnaud's words of
understanding and sympathy, he still judged her harshly, as a young,
ardent, and whole-hearted man must, until he has learned enough of life
to have pity on its weaknesses.

He would go and see Cecile and the child who had been entrusted to her.
That refreshed his soul. Cecile was transfigured by her borrowed
motherhood: she seemed to be young again, and happy, more refined and
tender. Jacqueline's departure had not given her any unavowed hope of
happiness. She knew that the memory of Jacqueline must leave her farther
away from Olivier than her presence. Besides, the little puff of wind
that had set her longing had passed: it had been a moment of crisis,
which the sight of poor Jacqueline's frenzied mistake had helped to
dissipate: she had returned to her normal tranquillity, and she could
not rightly understand what it was that had dragged her out of it. All
that was best in her need of love was satisfied by her love for the
child. With the marvelous power of illusion--of intuition--of women, she
found the man she loved in the little child: in that way she could have
him, weak and utterly dependent, utterly her own: he belonged to her:
and she could love him, love him passionately, with a love as pure as
the heart of the innocent child, and his dear blue eyes, like little
drops of light.... True, there was mingled with her tenderness a
regretful melancholy. Ah! It could never be the same thing as a child of
her own blood!... But it was good, all the same.

Christophe now regarded Cecile with very different eyes. He remembered
an ironic saying of Francoise Oudon:

"How is it that you and Philomela, who would do so well as husband and
wife, are not in love with each other?"

But Francoise knew the reason better than Christophe: it is very rarely
that a man like Christophe loves those who can do him good: rather he is
apt to love those who can do him harm. Opposites meet: his nature seeks
its own destruction, and goes to the burning and intense life rather
than to the cautious life which is sparing of itself. And a man like
Christophe is quite right, for his law is not to live as long as
possible, but as mightily as possible.

However, Christophe, having less penetration than Francoise, said to
himself that love is a blind, inhuman force, throwing those together who
cannot bear with each other. Love joins those together who are like each
other. And what love inspires is very small compared with what it
destroys. If it be happy it dissolves the will. If unhappy it breaks
hearts. What good does it ever do?

And as he thus maligned love he saw its ironic, tender smile saying to
him:

"Ingrate!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Christophe had been unable to get out of going to one of the At Homes
given at the Austrian Embassy. Philomela was to sing _lieder_ by
Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Christophe. She was glad of her success and
that of her friend, who was now made much of by a certain set.
Christophe's name was gaining ground from day to day, even with the
great public: it had become impossible for the Levy-Coeurs to ignore him
any longer. His works were played at concerts: and he had had an opera
accepted by the Opera Comique. The sympathies of some person unknown
were enlisted on his behalf. The mysterious friend, who had more than
once helped him, was still forwarding his claims. More than once
Christophe had been conscious of that fondly helping hand in everything
he did: some one was watching over him and jealously concealing his or
her identity. Christophe had tried to discover it: but it seemed as
though his friend were piqued by his not having attempted sooner to find
out who he was, and he remained unapproachable. Besides, Christophe was
absorbed by other preoccupations: he was thinking of Olivier, he was
thinking of Francoise: that very morning he had just read in the paper
that she was lying seriously ill at San Francisco: he imagined her alone
in a strange city, in a hotel bedroom, refusing to see anybody, or to
write to her friends, clenching her teeth, and waiting, alone, for
death.

He was obsessed by these ideas and avoided the company present: and he
withdrew into a little room apart: he stood leaning against the wall in
a recess that was half in darkness, behind a curtain of evergreens and
flowers, listening to Philomela's lovely voice, with its elegiac warmth,
singing _The Lime-tree_ of Schubert: and the pure music called up
sad memories. Facing him on the wall was a large mirror which reflected
the lights and the life of the next room. He did not see it: he was
gazing in upon himself: and the mist of tears swam before his eyes....
Suddenly, like Schubert's rustling tree, he began to tremble for no
reason. He stood so for a few seconds, very pale, unable to move. Then
the veil fell from before his eyes, and he saw in the mirror in front of
him his "friend," gazing at him.... His "friend"? Who was she? He knew
nothing save that she was his friend and that he knew her: and he stood
leaning against the wall, his eyes meeting hers, and he trembled. She
smiled. He could not see the lines of her face or her body, nor the
expression in her eyes, nor whether she was tall or short, nor how she
was dressed. Only one thing he saw: the divine goodness of her smile of
compassion.

And suddenly her smile conjured up in Christophe an old forgotten memory
of his early childhood.... He was six or seven, at school, unhappy: he
had just been humiliated and bullied by some older, stronger boys, and
they were all jeering at him, and the master had punished him unjustly:
he was crouching in a corner, utterly forlorn, while the others were
playing: and he wept softly. There was a sad-faced little girl who was
not playing with the others,--(he could see her now, though he had never
thought of her since then; she was short, and had a big head, fair,
almost white hair and eyebrows, very pale blue eyes, broad white cheeks,
thick lips, a rather puffy face, and small red hands),--and she came
close up to him, then stopped, with her thumb in her mouth and stood
watching him cry: then she laid her little hand on Christophe's head and
said hurriedly and shyly, with just the same smile of compassion:

"Don't cry! Don't cry!"

Then Christophe could not control himself any longer, and he burst into
sobs, and buried his face in the little girl's pinafore, while, in a
quavering, tender voice, she went on saying:

"Don't cry...."

She died soon afterwards, a few weeks perhaps: the hand of death must
have been upon her at the time of that little scene.... Why should he
think of her now? There was no connection between the child who was dead
and forgotten, the humble daughter of the people in a distant German
town, and the aristocratic young lady who was gazing at him now. But
there is only one soul for all: and although millions of human beings
seem to be all different one from another, different as the worlds
moving in the heavens, it is the same flash of thought or love which
lights up the hearts of men and women though centuries divide them.
Christophe had just seen once more the light that he had seen shining
upon the pale lips of the little comforter....

It was all over in a second. A throng of people filled the door and shut
out Christophe's view of the other room. He stepped back quickly into
the shade, out of sight of the mirror: he was afraid lest his emotion
should be noticed. But when he was calm again he wanted to see her once
more. He was afraid she would be gone. He went into the room and he
found her at once in the crowd, although she did not look in the least
like what he had seen in the mirror. Now he saw her in profile sitting
in a group of finely dressed ladies: her elbow was resting on the arm of
her chair, she was leaning forward a little, with her head in her hand,
and listening to what they were saying with an intelligent absent smile:
she had the expression and features of the young St. John, listening and
looking through half-closed eyes, and smiling at his own thoughts, of
_The Dispute_ of Raphael.... Then she raised her eyes, saw him, and
showed no surprise. And he saw that her smile was for himself. He was
much moved, and bowed, and went up to her.

"You don't recognize me?" she said.

He knew her again that very moment.

"Grazia".... he said. [Footnote: See "Jean-Christophe in Paris: The
Market Place."]

At the same moment the ambassador's wife passed by, and smiled with
pleasure to see that the long-sought meeting had at last come about: and
she introduced Christophe to "Countess Bereny." But Christophe was so
moved that he did not even hear her, and he did not notice, the new
name. She was still his little Grazia to him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grazia was twenty-two. She had been married for a year to a young
attache of the Austrian Embassy, a nobleman, a member of a great family,
related to one of the Emperor's chief ministers, a snob, a man of the
world, smart, prematurely worn out; with whom she had been genuinely in
love, while she still loved him, though she judged him. Her old father
was dead. Her husband had been appointed to the Embassy in Paris.
Through Count Bereny's influence, and her own charm and intelligence,
the timid little girl, whom the smallest thing used to set in a flutter,
had become one of the best-known women in Parisian society, though she
did nothing to procure that distinction, which embarrassed her not at
all. It is a great thing to be young and pretty, and to give pleasure,
and to know it. And it is a thing no less great to have a tranquil
heart, sound and serene, which can find happiness in the harmonious
coincidence of its desires and its fate. The lonely flower of her life
had unfolded its petals: but she had lost some of the calm music of her
Latin soul, fed by the light and the mighty peace of Italy. Quite
naturally she had acquired a certain influence in Parisian society: it
did not surprise her, and she was discreet and adroit in using it to
further the artistic or charitable movements which turned to her for aid:
she left the official patronage of these movements to others: for
although she could well maintain her rank, she had preserved a secret
independence from the days of her rather wild childish days in the
lonely villa in the midst of the fields, and society wearied while it
amused her, though she always disguised her boredom by the amiable smile
of a courteous and kind heart.

She had not forgotten her great friend Christophe. No doubt there was
nothing left of the child in whom an innocent love had burned in
silence. This new Grazia was a very sensible woman, not at all given to
romance. She regarded the exaggerations of her childish tenderness with
a gentle irony. And yet she was always moved by the memory of it. The
thought of Christophe was associated with the purest hours of her life.
She could not hear his name spoken without feeling pleasure: and each of
his successes delighted her as though she had shared in it herself: for
she had felt that they must come to him. As soon as she arrived in Paris
she tried to meet him again. She had invited him to her house, and had
appended her maiden name to her letter. Christophe had paid no attention
to it, and had flung the invitation into the waste-paper basket
unanswered. She was not offended. She had gone on following his doings
and, to a certain extent, his life, without his knowing it. It was she
whose helping hand had come to his aid in the recent campaign against
him in the papers. Grazia was in all things correct and had hardly
any connection with the world of the Press: but when it came to doing a
friend a service, she was capable of a malicious cunning in wheedling
the people whom she most disliked. She invited the editor of the paper
which was leading the snarling pack, to her house: and in less than no
time she turned his head: she skilfully flattered his vanity: and she
gained such an ascendancy over him, while she overawed him, that it
needed only a few careless words of contemptuous astonishment at the
attacks on Christophe for the campaign to be stopped short. The editor
suppressed the insulting article which was to appear next day: and when
the writer asked why it was suppressed he rated him soundly. He did
more: he gave orders to one of his factotums to turn out an enthusiastic
article about Christophe within a fortnight: the article was turned out
to order; it was enthusiastic and stupid. It was Grazia, too, who
thought of organizing performances of her friend's music at the Embassy,
and, knowing that he was interested in Cecile, helped her to make her
name. And finally, through her influence among the German diplomatists,
she began gently, quietly, and adroitly to awaken the interest of the
powers that be in Christophe, who was banished from Germany: and little
by little she did create a current of opinion directed towards obtaining
from the Emperor a decree reopening the gates of his country to a great
artist who was an honor to it. And though it was too soon to expect such
an act of grace, she did at least succeed in procuring an undertaking
that the Government would close its eyes to his two days' visit to his
native town.

And Christophe, who was conscious of the presence of his invisible
friend hovering about him without being able to find out who she was, at
last recognized her in the young St. John whose eyes smiled at him in
the mirror.

       *       *       *       *       *

They talked of the past. Christophe hardly knew what they said. A man
hears the woman he loves just as little as he sees her. He loves her.
And when a man really loves he never even thinks whether he is loved or
no. Christophe never doubted it. She was there: that was enough. All the
rest had ceased to exist....

Grazia stopped speaking. A very tall young man, quite handsome,
well-dressed, clean-shaven, partly bald, with a bored, contemptuous
manner, stood appraising Christophe through his eye-glass, and then
bowed with haughty politeness.

"My husband," said she.

The clatter and chatter of the room rushed back to his ears. The inward
light died down. Christophe was frozen, said nothing, bowed, and
withdrew at once.

How ridiculous and consuming are the unreasonable demands of the souls
of artists and the childish laws which govern their passionate lives!
Hardly had he once more found the friend whom he had neglected in the
old days when she loved him, while he had not thought of her for years,
than it seemed to him that she was his, his very own, and that if
another man had taken her he had stolen her from him: and she herself
had no right to give herself to another. Christophe did not know clearly
what was happening to him. But his creative daimon knew it perfectly,
and in those days begat some of his loveliest songs of sorrowful love.

Some time passed before he saw her again. He was obsessed by thoughts of
Olivier's troubles and his health. At last one day he came upon the
address she had given him and he made up his mind to call on her.

As he went up the steps he heard the sound of workmen hammering. The
anteroom was in disorder and littered with boxes and trunks. The footman
replied that the Countess was not at home. But as Christophe was
disappointedly going away after leaving his card, the servant ran after
him and asked him to come in and begged his pardon. Christophe was shown
into a little room in which the carpets had been rolled up and taken
away. Grazia came towards him with her bright smile and her hand held
out impulsively and gladly. All his foolish rancor vanished. He took her
hand with the same happy impulsiveness and kissed it.

"Ah!" she said, "I am glad you came! I was so afraid I should have to go
away without seeing you again!"

"Go away? You are going away!"

Once more darkness descended upon him.

"You see...." she said, pointing to the litter in the room. "We are
leaving Paris at the end of the week."

"For long?"

She shrugged:

"Who knows?"

He tried to speak. But his throat was dry.

"Where are you going?"

"To the United States. My husband has been appointed first secretary to
the Embassy."

"And so, and so...." he said ... (his lips trembled) ... "it is all
over?"

"My dear friend!" she said, touched by his tone.... "No: it is not all
over."

"I have found you again only to lose you?"

There were tears in her eyes.

"My dear friend," she said again.

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

"Do not be so sad," she said, laying her hand on his.

Once more, just then, he thought of the little girl in Germany. They
were silent.

"Why did you come so late?" she asked at last, "I tried to find you. You
never replied."

"I did not know. I did not know," he said.... "Tell me, was it you who
came to my aid so many times without my guessing who it was?... Do I owe
it to you that I was able to go back to Germany? Were you my good angel,
watching over me?"

She said:

"I was glad to be able to do something for you. I owe you so much!"

"What do you owe?" he asked. "I have done nothing for you."

"You do not know," she said, "what you have been to me."

She spoke of the days when she was a little girl and met him at the
house of her uncle, Stevens, and he had given her through his music the
revelation of all that is beautiful in the world. And little by little,
with growing animation she told him with brief allusions, that were both
veiled and transparent, of her childish feeling for him, and the way in
which she had shared Christophe's troubles, and the concert at which he
had been hissed, and she had wept, and the letter she had written and he
had never answered: for he had not received it. And as Christophe
listened to her, in all good faith, he projected his actual emotion and
the tenderness he felt for the tender face so near his own into the
past.

They talked innocently, fondly, and joyously. And, as he talked,
Christophe took Grazia's hand. And suddenly they both stopped: for
Grazia saw that Christophe loved her. And Christophe saw it too....

For some time Grazia had loved Christophe without Christophe knowing or
caring. Now Christophe loved Grazia: and Grazia had nothing for him but
calm friendship: she loved another man. As so often happens, one of the
two clocks of their lives was a little faster than the other, and it was
enough to have changed the course of both their lives....

Grazia withdrew her hand, and Christophe did not stay her. And they sat
there for a moment, mum, without a word.

And Grazia said:

"Good-bye."

Christophe said plaintively once more:

"And it is all over?"

"No doubt it is better that it should be so."

"We shall not meet again before you go."

"No," she said.

"When shall we meet again?"

She made a sad little gesture of doubt.

"Then," said Christophe, "what's the good, what's the good of our having
met again?"

Her eyes reproached him, and he said quickly:

"No. Forgive me. I am unjust."

"I shall always think of you," said she.

"Alas!" he replied, "I cannot even think of you. I know nothing of your
life."

Very quietly she described her ordinary life in a few words and told him
how her days were spent. She spoke of herself and of her husband with
her lovely affectionate smile.

"Ah!" he said jealously. "You love him?"

"Yes," she said.
He got up.

"Good-bye."

She got up too. Then only he saw that she was with child. And in his
heart there was an inexpressible feeling of disgust, and tenderness, and
jealousy, and passionate pity. She walked with him to the door of the
little room. There he turned, bent over her hands, and kissed them
fervently. She stood there with her eyes half closed and did not stir.
At last he drew himself up, turned, and hurried away without looking at
her.


    ... _E chi allora m'avesse domandalo di cosa alcuna, la mia
    risponsione sarebbe stata solamente AMORE, con viso vestito
    d'umilta_....


All Saints' Day. Outside, a gray light and a cold wind. Christophe was
with Cecile, who was sitting near the cradle, and Madame Arnaud was
bending over it. She had dropped in. Christophe was dreaming. He was
feeling that he had missed happiness: but he never thought of
complaining: he knew that happiness existed.... Oh! sun, I have no need
to see thee to love thee! Through the long winter days, when I shiver in
the darkness, my heart is full of thee: my love keeps me warm: I know
that thou art there....

And Cecile was dreaming too. She was pondering the child, and she had
come to believe that it was indeed her own. Oh, blessed power of dreams,
the creative imagination of life! Life.... What is life? It is not as
cold reason and our eyes tell us that it is. Life is what we dream, and
the measure of life is love.

Christophe gazed at Cecile, whose peasant face with its wide-set eyes
shone with the splendor of the maternal instinct,--she was more a mother
than the real mother. And he looked at the tender weary face of Madame
Arnaud. In it, as in books that moved him, he read the hidden sweetness
and suffering of the life of a married woman which, though none ever
suspects it, is sometimes as rich in sorrow and joy as the love of
Juliet or Ysolde: though it touches a greater height of religious
feeling ....

  _Soda rei humana atque divina...._

And he thought that children or the lack of children has as much to do
with the happiness or unhappiness of those who marry and those who do
not marry as faith and the lack of faith. Happiness is the perfume of
the soul, the harmony that dwells, singing, in the depths of the heart.
And the most beautiful of all the music of the soul is kindness.

Olivier came in. He was quite calm and reposeful in his movements: a new
serenity shone in him. He smiled at the child, shook hands with Cecile
and Madame Arnaud, and began to talk quietly. He watched them with a
sort of surprised affection. He was no longer the same. In the isolation
in which he had shut himself up with his grief, like a caterpillar in
the nest of its own spinning, he had succeeded after a hard struggle in
throwing off his sorrow like an empty shell. Some day we shall tell how
he thought he had found a fine cause to which to devote his life, in
which he had no interest save that of sacrifice: and, as it is ordered,
on the very day when in his heart he had come to a definite renunciation
of life, it was kindled once more. His friends looked at him. They did
not know what had happened, and dared not ask him: but they felt that he
was free once more, and that there was in him neither regret nor
bitterness for anything or against anybody in the whole wide world.

Christophe got up and went to the piano, and said to Olivier:

"Would you like me to sing you a melody of Brahms?"

"Brahms?" said Olivier. "Do you play your old enemy's music nowadays?"

"It is All Saints' Day," said Christophe. "The day when all are
forgiven."

Softly, so as not to wake the child, he sang a few bars of the old
Schwabian folk-song:

  _"... Fur die Zeit, wo du g'liebt mi hast,
  Da dank' i dir schon,
  Und i wunsch', dass dir's anders wo
  Besser mag geh'n...."_

  "... For the time when thou did'st love me,
  I do thank thee well;
  And I hope that elsewhere
  Thou may'st better fare...."

"Christophe!" said Olivier.

Christophe hugged him close.

"Come, old fellow," he said. "We have fared well."

The four of them sat near the sleeping child. They did not speak. And if
they had been asked what they were thinking,--_with the countenance of
humility, they would have replied only:_

"Love."




THE BURNING BUSH

I


Came calmness to his heart. No wind stirred. The air was still....

Christophe was at rest: peace was his. He was in a certain measure proud
of having conquered it: but secretly, in his heart of hearts, he was
sorry for it. He was amazed at the silence. His passions were
slumbering: in all good faith he thought that they would never wake
again.

The mighty, somewhat brutal force that was his was browsing listlessly
and aimlessly. In his inmost soul there was a secret void, a hidden
question: "What's the good?": perhaps a certain consciousness of the
happiness which he had failed to grasp. He had not force enough to
struggle either with himself or with others. He had come to the end of a
stage in his progress: he was reaping the fruits of all his former
efforts, cumulatively: too easily he was tapping the vein of music that
he had opened and while the public was naturally behindhand, and was
just discovering and admiring his old work, he was beginning to break
away from them without knowing as yet whether he would be able to make
any advance on them. He had now a uniform and even delight in creation.
At this period of his life art was to him no more than a fine instrument
upon which he played like a virtuoso. He was ashamedly conscious of
becoming a dilettante.

"_If_," said Ibsen, "_a man is to persevere in his art; he must
have something else, something more than his native genius: passions,
sorrows, which shall fill his life and give it a direction. Otherwise he
will not create, he will write books."_

Christophe was writing books. He was not used to it. His books were
beautiful. He would have rather had them less beautiful and more alive.
He was like an athlete resting, not knowing to what use to turn his
muscles, and, yawning in boredom like a caged wild beast, he sat looking
ahead at the years and years of peaceful work that awaited him. And as,
with his old German capacity for optimism, he had no difficulty in
persuading himself that everything was for the best, he thought that
such a future was no doubt the appointed inevitable end: he flattered
himself that he had issued from his time of trial and tribulation and
had become master of himself. That was not saying much.... Oh, well! A
man is sovereign over that which is his, he is what he is capable of
being.... He thought that he had reached his haven.

The two friends were not living together. After Jacqueline's flight,
Christophe had thought that Olivier would come back and take up his old
quarters with him. But Olivier could not. Although he felt keenly the
need of intimacy with Christophe, yet he was conscious of the
impossibility of resuming their old existence together. After the years
lived with Jacqueline, it would have seemed intolerable and even
sacrilegious to admit another human being to his most intimate
life,--even though he loved and were loved by that other a thousand
times more than Jacqueline.--There was no room for argument.

Christophe had found it hard to understand. He returned again and again
to the charge, he was surprised, saddened, hurt, and angry. Then his
instinct, which was finer and quicker than his intelligence, bade him
take heed. Suddenly he ceased, and admitted that Olivier was right.

But they saw each other every day: and they had never been so closely
united even when they were living under the same roof. Perhaps they did
not exchange their most intimate thoughts when they talked. They did not
need to do so. The exchange was made naturally, without need of words,
by grace of the love that was in their hearts.

They talked very little, for each was absorbed: one in his art, the other
in his memories. Olivier's sorrow was growing less: but he did
nothing to mitigate it, rather almost taking a pleasure in it: for a
long time it had been his only reason for living. He loved his child:
but his child--a puling baby--could occupy no great room in his life.
There are men who are more lovers than fathers, and it is useless to cry
out against them. Nature is not uniform, and it would be absurd to try
to impose identical laws upon the hearts of all men. No man has the
right to sacrifice his duty to his heart. At least the heart must be
granted the right to be unhappy where a man does his duty. What Olivier
perhaps most loved in his child was the woman of whose body it was made.

Until quite recently he had paid little attention to the sufferings of
others. He was an intellectual living too much shut up in himself. It
was not egoism so much as a morbid habit of dreaming. Jacqueline had
increased the void about him: her love had traced a magic circle about
Olivier to cut him off from other men, and the circle endured after love
had ceased to be. In addition he was a little aristocratic by temper.
From his childhood on, in spite of his soft heart, he had held aloof
from the mob for reasons rooted in the delicacy of his body and his
soul. The smell of the people and their thoughts were repulsive to him.

But everything had changed as the result of a commonplace tragedy which
he had lately witnessed.

       *       *       *       *       *

He had taken a very modest lodging at the top of the Mont-rouge quarter,
not far from Christophe and Cecile. The district was rather common, and
the house in which he lived was occupied by little gentlepeople, clerks,
and a few working-class families. At any other time he would have suffered
from such surroundings in which he moved as a stranger: but now
it mattered very little to him where he was: he felt that he was a
stranger everywhere. He hardly knew and did not want to know who his
neighbors were. When he returned from his work--(he had gone into a
publishing-house)--he withdrew into his memories, and would only go out
to see his child and Christophe. His lodging was not home to him: it was
the dark room in which the images of the past took shape and dwelling:
the darker it was the more clearly did the inward images emerge. He
scarcely noticed the faces of those he passed on the stairs. And yet
unconsciously he was aware of certain faces that were impressed upon his
mind. There is a certain order of mind which only really sees things
after they have passed. But then, nothing escapes them, the smallest
details are graven on the plate. Olivier's was such a mind: he bore
within himself multitudes of the shadowy shapes of the living. With any
emotional shock they would come mounting up in crowds: and Olivier would
be amazed to recognize those whom he had never known, and sometimes he
would hold out his hands to grasp them.... Too late.

One day as he came out of his rooms he saw a little crowd collected in
front of the house-door round the housekeeper, who was making a
harangue. He was so little interested that he was for going his way
without troubling to find out what was the matter: but the housekeeper,
anxious to gain another listener, stopped him, and asked him if he knew
what had happened to the poor Roussels. Olivier did not even know who
"the poor Roussels" were, and he listened with polite indifference. When
he heard that a working-class family, father, mother, and five children,
had committed suicide to escape from poverty in the house in which he
lived, he stopped, like the rest, and looked up at the walls of the
building, and listened to the woman's story, which she was nothing loth
to begin again from the beginning. As she went on talking, old memories
awoke in him, and he realized that he had seen the wretched family: he
asked a few questions.... Yes, he remembered them: the man--(he used to
hear him breathing noisily on the stairs)--a journeyman baker, with a
pale face, all the blood drawn out of it by the heat of the oven, hollow
cheeks always ill shaven: he had had pneumonia at the beginning of the
winter: he had gone back to work only half cured: he had had a relapse:
for the last three weeks he had had no work and no strength. The woman
had dragged from childbirth to childbirth: crippled with rheumatism, she
had worn herself out in trying to make both ends meet, and had spent her
days running hither and thither trying to obtain from the Public Charity
a meager sum which was not readily forthcoming. Meanwhile the children
came, and went on coming: eleven, seven, three--not to mention two others
who had died in between:--and, to crown all, twins who had chosen
the very dire moment to make their appearance: they had been born only
the month before.

--On the day of their birth, a neighbor said, the eldest of the five, a
little girl of eleven, Justine--poor little mite!--had begun to cry and
asked how ever she could manage to carry both of them.

Olivier at once remembered the little girl,--a large forehead, with
colorless hair pulled back, and sorrowful, gray bulging eyes. He was
always meeting her, carrying provisions or her little sister: or she
would be holding her seven-year-old brother by the hand, a little
pinch-faced, cringing boy he was, with one blind eye. When they met on
the stairs Olivier used to say, with his absent courteous manner:

"Pardon, mademoiselle."

But she never said anything: she used to go stiffly by, hardly moving
aside: but his illusory courtesy used to give her a secret pleasure.
Only the evening before, at six o'clock, as he was going downstairs, he
had met her for the last time: she was carrying up a bucket of charcoal.
He had not noticed it, except that he did remark that the burden seemed
to be very heavy. But that is merely in the order of things for the
children of the people. Olivier had bowed, as usual, without looking at
her. A few steps lower down he had mechanically looked up to see her
leaning over the balustrade of the landing, with her little pinched
face, watching him go down. She turned away at once, and resumed her
climb upstairs. Did she know whither she was climbing?--Olivier had no
doubt that she did, and he was obsessed by the thought of the child
bearing death in the load that was too heavy for her, death the
deliverer--the wretched children for whom to cease to be meant an end of
suffering! He was unable to continue his walk. He went back to his room.
But there he was conscious of the proximity of the dead.... Only a few
thin walls between him and them.... To think that he had lived so near
to such misery!

He went to see Christophe. He was sick at heart: he told himself that it
was monstrous for him to have been so absorbed as he had been in vain
regrets for love while there were so many creatures suffering
misfortunes a thousand times more cruel, and it was possible to help and
save them. His emotion was profound: there was no difficulty In
communicating it. Christophe was easily impressionable, and he in his
turn was moved. When he heard Olivier's story he tore up the page of
music he had just been writing, and called himself a selfish brute to be
amusing himself with childish games. But, directly after, he picked up
the pieces. He was too much under the spell of his music. And his
instinct told him that a work of art the less would not make one happy
man the more. The tragedy of want was no new thing to him: from his
childhood on he had been used to treading on the edge of such abysmal
depths, and contriving not to topple over. But he was apt to judge
suicide harshly, being conscious as he was of such a fullness of force,
and unable to understand how a man, under the pressure of any suffering
whatsoever, could give up the struggle. Suffering, struggling, is there
anything more normal? These things are the backbone of the universe.

Olivier also had passed through much the same sort of experience: but he
had never been able to resign himself to it, either on his own account
or for others. He had a horror of the poverty in which the life of his
beloved Antoinette had been consumed. After his marriage with
Jacqueline, when he had suffered the softening influence of riches and
love, he had made haste to thrust back the memory of the sorrowful years
when he and his sister had worn themselves out each day in the struggle
to gain the right to live through the next, never knowing whether they
would succeed or no. The memories of those days would come to him now
that he no longer had his youthful egoism to preserve. Instead of flying
before the face of suffering he set out to look for it. He did not need
to go far to find it. In the state of mind in which he was he was prone
to find it everywhere. The world was full of it, the world, that
hospital.... Oh, the agony, the sorrow! Pains of the wounded body,
quivering flesh, rotting away in life. The silent torture of hearts
under gnawing grief. Children whom no one loves, poor hopeless girls,
women seduced or betrayed, men deceived in their friends, their loves,
their faith, the pitiable herd of the unfortunates whom life has broken
and forgotten!... Not poverty and sickness were the most frightful
things to see, but the cruelty of men one to another. Hardly had Olivier
raised the cover of the hell of humanity than there rose to his ears the
plaint of all the oppressed, the exploited poor, the persecuted peoples,
massacred Armenians, Finland crushed and stifled, Poland rent in pieces,
Russia martyred, Africa flung to the rapacious pack of Europe, all the
wretched creatures of the human race. It stifled him: he heard it
everywhere, he could no longer close his ears to it, he could no longer
conceive the possibility of there being people with any other thought.
He was for ever talking about it to Christophe. Christophe grew anxious,
and said:

"Be quiet! Let me work."

And as he found it hard to recover his balance he would lose his temper
and swear.

"Damnation! My day is wasted! And you're a deal the better for it,
aren't you?"

Olivier would beg his pardon.

"My dear fellow," said Christophe, "it's no good always looking down
into the pit. It stops your living."

"One must lend a hand to those who are in the pit."

"No doubt. But how? By flinging ourselves down as well? For that is what
you want. You've got a propensity for seeing nothing but the sad side of
life. God bless you! Your pessimism is charitable, I grant you, but it
is very depressing. Do you want to create happiness? Very well, then, be
happy."

"Happy! How can one have the heart to be happy when one sees so much
suffering? There can only be happiness in trying to lessen it and
fighting the evil."

"Very good. But I don't help the unfortunate much by lashing out blindly
in all directions. It means only one bad soldier the more. But I can
bring comfort by my art and spread force and joy. Have you any idea how
many wretched beings have been sustained in their suffering by the
beauty of an idea, by a winged song? Every man to his own trade! You
French people, like the generous scatterbrains that you are, are always
the first to protest against the injustice of, say, Spain or Russia,
without knowing what it is all about. I love you for it. But do you
think you are helping things along? You rush at it and bungle it and the
result is nil,--if not worse.... And, look you, your art has never been
more weak and emaciated than now, when your artists claim to be taking
part in the activities of the world. It is the strangest thing to see so
many little writers and artists, all dilettante and rather dishonest,
daring to set themselves up as apostles! They would do much better if
they were to give the people wine to drink that was not so
adulterated.--My first duty is to do whatever I am doing well, and to
give you healthy music which shall set new blood coursing in your veins
and let the sun shine in upon you."

       *       *       *       *       *

If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first
of all have it within himself. Olivier had none of it. Like the best man
of to-day, he was not strong enough to radiate force by himself. But in
unison with others he might have been able to do so. But with whom could
he unite? He was free in mind and at heart religious, and he was
rejected by every party political and religious. They were all
intolerant and narrow and were continually at rivalry. Whenever they
came into power they abused it. Only the weak and the oppressed
attracted Olivier. In this at least he agreed with Christophe's opinion,
that before setting out to combat injustice in distant lands, it were as
well to fight injustice close at hand, injustice everywhere about,
injustice for which each and every man is more or less responsible.
There are only too many people who are quite satisfied with protesting
against the evil wrought by others, without ever thinking of the evil
that they do themselves.

At first he turned his attention to the relief of the poor. His friend,
Madame Arnaud, helped to administer a charity. Olivier got her to allow
him to help. But at the outset he had more than one setback: the poor
people who were given into his charge were not all worthy of interest,
or they were unresponsive to his sympathy, distrusted him, and shut
their doors against him. Besides, it is hard for a man of intellect to
be satisfied with charity pure and simple: it waters such a very small
corner of the kingdom of wretchedness! Its effects are almost always
piecemeal, fragmentary: it seems to move by chance, and to be engaged
only in dressing wounds as fast as it discovers them: generally it is
too modest and in too great a hurry to probe down to the roots of the
evil. Now it was just this probing that Olivier's mind found
indispensable.

He began to study the problem of social poverty. There was no lack of
guides to point the way. In those days the social question had become a
society question. It was discussed in drawing-rooms, in the theater, in
novels. Everybody claimed some knowledge of it. Some of the young men
were expending the best part of their powers upon it.

Every new generation needs to have some splendid mania or other. Even
the most selfish of young people are endowed with a superfluity of life,
a capital sum of energy which has been advanced to them and cannot be
left idle and unproductive: they are for ever seeking to expend it on a
course of action, or--(more prudently)--on a theory. Aviation or
Revolution, a muscular or intellectual exercise. When a man is young he
needs to be under the illusion that he is sharing in some great movement
of humanity and is renewing the life of the world. It is a lovely thing
when the senses thrill in answer to every puff of the winds of the
universe! Then a man is so free, so light! Not yet is he laden with the
ballast of a family, he has nothing, risks next to nothing. A man is
very generous when he can renounce what is not yet his. Besides, it is
so good to love and to hate, and to believe that one is transforming the
earth with dreams and shouting! Young people are like watch-dogs: they
are for ever howling and barking at the wind. An act of injustice
committed at the other end of the world will send them off their heads.

Dogs barking through the night. From one farm to another in the heart of
the forest they were yelping to one another, never ceasing. The night
was stormy. It was not easy to sleep in those days. The wind bore
through the air the echoes of so many acts of injustice!... The tale of
injustice is unnumbered: in remedying one there is danger of causing
others. What is injustice?--To one man it means a shameful peace, the
fatherland dismembered. To another it signifies war. To another it means
the destruction of the past, the banishment of princes: to another, the
spoliation of the Church: to yet another the stifling of the future to
the peril of liberty. For the people, injustice lies in inequality: for
the upper ten, in equality. There are so many different kinds of
injustice that each age chooses its own,--the injustice that it fights
against, and the injustice that it countenances.

At the present time the mightiest efforts of the world were directed
against social injustice,--and unconsciously were tending to the
production of fresh injustice.

And, in truth, such injustice had waxed great and plain to see since the
working-classes, growing in numbers and power, had become part of the
essential machinery of the State. But in spite of the declamations of
the tribunes and bards of the people, their condition was not worse, but
rather better than it had ever been in the past: and the change had come
about not because they suffered more, but because they had grown
stronger. Stronger by reason of the very power of the hostile ranks of
Capital, by the fatality of economic and industrial development which
had banded the workers together in armies ready for the fight, and, by
the use of machinery, had given weapons into their hands, and had turned
every foreman into a master with power over light, lightning, movement,
all the energy of the world. From this enormous mass of elementary
forces, which only a short time ago the leaders of men were trying to
organize, there was given out a white heat, electric waves gradually
permeating the whole body of human society.

It was not by reason of its justice, or its novelty, or the force of the
ideas bound up in it that the cause of the people was stirring the minds
of the intelligent middle-class, although they were fain to think so.
Its appeal lay in its vitality.

Its justice? Justice was everywhere and every day violated thousands of
times without the world ever giving a thought to it. Its ideas? Scraps
of truth, picked up here and there and adjusted to the interests and
requirements of one class at the expense of the other classes. Its creed
was as absurd as every other creed,--the Divine Right of Kings, the
Infallibility of the Popes, Universal Suffrage, the Equality of
Man,--all equally absurd if one only considers them by their rational
value and not in the light of the force by which they are animated. What
did their mediocrity matter? Ideas have never conquered the world as
ideas, but only by the force they represent. They do not grip men by
their intellectual contents, but by the radiant vitality which is given
off from them at certain periods in history. They give off as it were a
rich scent which overpowers even the dullest sense of smell. The
loftiest and most sublime idea remains ineffective until the day when it
becomes contagious, not by its own merits, but by the merits of the
groups of men in whom it becomes incarnate by the transfusion of their
blood. Then the withered plant, the rose of Jericho, comes suddenly to
flower, grows to its full height, and fills all the air with its
powerful aroma.--Some of the ideas which were now the flaming standard
under which the working-classes were marching on to the assault upon the
capitalistic citadel, emanated from the brains of dreamers of the
comfortable classes. While they had been left in their comfortable
books, they had lain dead: items in a museum, mummies packed away in
glass cases with no one to look at them. But as soon as the people laid
hands on them, they had become part and parcel of the people, they had
been given their feverish reality, which deformed them while it gave
them life, breathing into such abstract reason, their hallucinations,
and their hopes, like a burning wind of Hegira. They were quickly spread
from man to man. Men succumbed to them without knowing from whom they
came or how they had been brought. They were no respecters of persons.
The moral epidemic spread and spread: and it was quite possible for
limited creatures to communicate it to superior men. Every man was
unwittingly an agent in the transmission.

Such phenomena of intellectual contagion are to be observed in all times
and in all countries: they make themselves felt even in aristocratic
States where there is the endeavor to maintain castes hermetically
sealed one against the other. But nowhere are they more electric than in
democracies which preserve no sanitary barrier between the elect and the
mob. The elect are contaminated at once whatever they do to fight
against it. In spite of their pride and intelligence they cannot resist
the contagion; for the elect are much weaker than they think.
Intelligence is a little island fretted by the tides of humanity,
crumbling away and at last engulfed. It only emerges again on the ebb of
the tide.--One wonders at the self-denial of the French privileged
classes when on the night of August 4 they abdicated their rights. Most
wonderful of all, no doubt, is the fact that they could not do
otherwise. I fancy a good many of them when they returned home must have
said to themselves: "What have I done? I must have been drunk...." A
splendid drunkenness! Blessed be wine and the vine that gives it forth!
It was not the privileged classes of old France who planted the vine
whose blood brought them to drunkenness. The wine was extracted, they
had only to drink it. He who drank must lose his wits. Even those who
did not drink turned dizzy only from the smell of the vat that caught
them as they passed. The vintages of the Revolution!... Hidden away in
the family vaults there are left only a few empty bottles of the wine of
'89: but our grandchildren's children will remember that their
great-grandfathers had their heads turned by it.

It was a sourer wine but a wine no less strong that was mounting to the
heads of the comfortable young people of Olivier's generation. They were
offering up their class as a sacrifice to the new God, _Deo
ignoto_:--the people.

       *       *       *       *       *

To tell the truth, they were not all equally sincere. Many of them were
only able to see in the movement an opportunity of rising above their
class by affecting to despise it. For the majority it was an
intellectual pastime, an oratorical enthusiasm which they never took
altogether seriously. There is a certain pleasure in believing that you
believe in a cause, that you are fighting, or will fight, for it,--or
at least could fight. There is a by no means negligible satisfaction in the
thought that you are risking something. Theatrical emotions.

They are quite innocent so long as you surrender to them simply without
any admixture of interested motive.--But there were men of a more
worldly type who only played the game of set purpose: the popular
movement was to them only a road to success. Like the Norse pirates,
they made rise of the rising tide to carry their ships up into the land:
they aimed at reaching the innermost point of the great estuaries so as
to be left snugly ensconced in the conquered cities when the sea fell
back once more. The channel was narrow and the tide was capricious:
great skill was needed. But two or three generations of demagogy have
created a race of corsairs who know every trick and secret of the trade.
They rushed boldly in with never even so much as a glance back at those
who foundered on the way.

This piratical rabble is made up of all parties: thank Heaven, no party
is responsible for it. But the disgust with which such adventurers had
inspired the sincere and all men of conviction had led some of them to
despair of their class. Olivier came in contact with rich young men of
culture who felt very strongly that the comfortable classes were
moribund and that they themselves were useless. He was only too much
inclined to sympathize with them. They had begun by believing in the
reformation of the people by the elect, they had founded Popular
Universities, and taken no account of the time and money spent upon
them, and now they were forced to admit the futility of their efforts:
their hopes had been pitched too high, their discouragement sank too
low. The people had either not responded to their appeal or had run away
from it. When the people did come, they understood everything all wrong,
and only assimilated the vices and absurdities of the culture of the
superior classes. And in the end more than one scurvy knave had stolen
into the ranks of the burgess apostles, and discredited them by
exploiting both people and apostles at the same time. Then it seemed to
honest men that the middle-class was doomed, that it could only infect
the people who, at all costs, must break free and go their way alone. So
they were left cut off from all possibility of action, save to predict
and foresee a movement which would be made without and against
themselves. Some of them found in this the joy of renunciation, the joy
of deep disinterested human sympathy feeding upon itself and the
sacrifice of itself. To love, to give self! Youth is so richly endowed
that it can afford to do without repayment: youth has no fear of being
left despoiled. And it can do without everything save the art of
loving.--Others again found in it a pleasurable rational satisfaction, a
sort of imperious logic: they sacrificed themselves not to men so much
as to ideas. These were the bolder spirits. They took a proud delight in
deducing the fated end of their class from their reasoned arguments. It
would have hurt them more to see their predictions falsified than to be
crushed beneath the weight of circumstance. In their intellectual
intoxication they cried aloud to those outside: "Harder! Strike harder!
Let there be nothing left of us!"--They had become the theorists of
violence.

Of the violence of others. For, as usual, these apostles of brute force
were almost always refined and weakly people. Many of them were
officials of the State which they talked of destroying, industrious,
conscientious, and orderly officials.

Their theoretical violence was the throwback from their weakness, their
bitterness, and the suppression of their vitality. But above all it was
an indication of the storms brewing all around them. Theorists are like
meteorologists: they state in scientific terms not what the weather will
be, but what the weather is. They are weathercocks pointing to the
quarter whence the wind blows. When they turn they are never far from
believing that they are turning the wind.

The wind had turned.

Ideas are quickly used up in a democracy, and the more quickly they are
propagated, the more quickly are they worn out. There are any number of
Republicans in France who in less than fifty years have grown disgusted
with the Republic, with Universal Suffrage, with all the manifestations
of liberty won with such blind intoxication! After the fetish worship of
numbers, after the gaping optimism which had believed in the sanctity of
the majority and had looked to it for the progress of humanity, there
came the wind of brute force: the inability of the majority to govern
themselves, their venality, their corruption, their base and fearful
hatred of all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, raised the spirit
of revolt: the minorities of energy--every kind of minority--appealed
from the majority to force. A queer, yet inevitable alliance was brought
about between the royalists of the _Action Francaise_ and the
syndicalists of the C. G. T. Balzac speaks somewhere of the men of his
time who _"though aristocrats by inclination, yet became Republicans
in spite, of themselves, only to find many inferiors among their
equals."_--A scant sort of pleasure. Those who are inferior must be
made to accept themselves as such: and to bring that about there is
nothing to be done but to create an authority which shall impose the
supremacy of the elect--of either class, working or burgess--upon the
oppressive majority. Our young intellectuals, being proud and of the
better class, became royalists or revolutionaries out of injured vanity
and hatred of democratic equality. And the disinterested theorists, the
philosophers of brute force, like good little weathercocks, reared their
heads above them and were the oriflammes of the storm.

Last of all there was the herd of literary men in search of
inspiration--men who could write and yet knew not what to write: like
the Greeks at Aulis, they were becalmed and could make no progress, and
sat impatiently waiting for a kindly wind from any quarter to come and
belly out their sails.--There were famous men among them, men who had
been wrenched away from their stylistic labors and plunged into public
meetings by the Dreyfus affair. An example which had found only too many
followers for the liking of those who had set it. There was now a mob of
writing men all engrossed in politics, and claiming to control the
affairs of the State. On the slightest excuse they would form societies,
issue manifestoes, save the Capitol. After the intellectuals of the
advance guard came the intellectuals of the rear: they were much of a
muchness. Each of the two parties regarded the other as intellectual and
themselves as intelligent. Those who had the luck to have in their veins
a few drops of the blood of the people bragged about it: they dipped
their pens into it, wrote with it.--They were all malcontents of the
burgess class, and were striving to recapture the authority which that
class had irreparably lost through its selfishness. Only in rare
instances were these apostles known to keep up their apostolic zeal for
any length of time. In the beginning the cause meant a certain amount of
success to them, success which in all probability was in no wise due to
their oratorical gifts. It gave them a delicious flattery for their
vanity. Thereafter they went on with less success and a certain secret
fear of being rather ridiculous. In the long-run the last feeling was
apt to dominate the rest, being increased by the fatigue of playing a
difficult part for men of their distinguished tastes and innate
skepticism. But they waited upon the favor of the wind and of their
escort before they could withdraw. For they were held captive both by
wind and escort. These latter-day Voltaires and Joseph de Maistres,
beneath their boldness in speech and writing, concealed a dread
uncertainty, feeling the ground, being fearful of compromising
themselves with the young men, and striving hard to please them and to
be younger than the young. They were revolutionaries or
counter-revolutionaries merely as a matter of literature, and in the end
they resigned themselves to following the literary fashion which they
themselves had helped to create.

The oddest of all the types with which Olivier came in contact in the
small burgess advance guard of the Revolution was the revolutionary who
was so from timidity.

The specimen presented for his immediate observation was named Pierre
Canet. He was brought up in a rich, middle-class, and conservative
family, hermetically sealed against any new idea: they were magistrates
and officials who had distinguished themselves by crabbing authority or
being dismissed: thick-witted citizens of the Marais who flirted with
the Church and thought little, but thought that little well. He had
married, for want of anything better to do, a woman with an aristocratic
name, who had no great capacity for thought, but did her thinking no
less well than he. The bigoted, narrow, and retrograde society in which
he lived, a society which was perpetually chewing the cud of its own
conceit and bitterness, had finally exasperated him,--the more so as his
wife was ugly and a bore. He was fairly intelligent and open-minded, and
liberal in aspiration, without knowing at all clearly in what liberalism
consisted: there was no likelihood of his discovering the meaning of
liberty in his immediate surroundings. The only thing he knew for
certain was that liberty did not exist there: and he fancied that he had
only to leave to find it. On his first move outwards he was lucky enough
to fall in with certain old college friends, some of whom had been
smitten with syndicalistic ideas. He was even more at sea in their
company than in the society which he had just quitted: but he would not
admit it: he had to live somewhere: and he was unable to find people of
his own cast of thought (that is to say, people of no cast of thought
whatever), though, God knows, the species is by no means rare in France!
But they are ashamed of themselves: they hide themselves, or they take
on the hue of one of the fashionable political colors, if not of
several, all at once. Besides, he was under the influence of his
friends.

As always happens, he had particularly attached himself to the very man
who was most different from himself. This Frenchman, French, burgess and
provincial to his very soul, had become the _fidus Achates_ of a
young Jewish doctor named Manousse Heimann, a Russian refugee, who, like
so many of his fellow-countrymen, had the twofold gift of settling at
once among strangers and making himself at home, and of being so much at
his ease in any sort of revolution as to rouse wonder as to what it was
that most interested him in it: the game or the cause. His experiences
and the experiences of others were a source of entertainment to him. He
was a sincere revolutionary, and his scientific habit of mind made him
regard the revolutionaries and himself as a kind of madmen. His excited
dilettantism and his extreme instability of mind made him seek the
company of men the most opposite. He had acquaintances among those in
authority and even among the police: he was perpetually prying and
spying with that morbid and dangerous curiosity which makes so many
Russian revolutionaries seem to be playing a double game, and sometimes
reduces the appearance to reality. It is not treachery so much as
versatility, and it is thoroughly disinterested. There are so many men
of action to whom action is a theater into which they bring their
talents as comedians, quite honestly prepared at any moment to change
their part! Manousse was as faithful to the revolutionary part as it was
possible for him to be: it was the character which was most in accord
with his natural anarchy, and his delight in demolishing the laws of the
countries through which he passed. But yet, in spite of everything, it
was only a part. It was always impossible to know how much was true and
how much invented in what he said, and even he himself was never very
sure. He was intelligent and skeptical, endowed with the psychological
subtlety of his twofold nationality, could discern quite marvelously the
weaknesses of others, and his own, and was extremely skilful in playing
upon them, so that he had no difficulty in gaining an ascendancy over
Canet. It amused him to drag this Sancho Panza into Quixotic pranks. He
made no scruple about using him, disposing of his will, his time, his
money,--not for his own benefit, (he needed none, though no one knew how
or in what way he lived),--but in the most compromising demonstrations
of the cause. Canet submitted to it all: he tried to persuade himself
that he thought like Manousse. He knew perfectly well that this was not
the case: such ideas scared him: they were shocking to his common sense.
And he had no love for the people. And, in addition, he had no courage.
This big, bulky, corpulent young man, with his clean-shaven pinkish face,
his short breathing, his pleasant, pompous, and rather childish way of
speaking, with a chest like the Farnese Hercules, (he was a fair hand at
boxing and singlestick), was the most timid of men. If he took a certain
pride in being taken for a man of a subversive temper by his own people,
in his heart of hearts he used to tremble at the boldness of his
friends. No doubt the little thrill they gave him was by no means
disagreeable as long as it was only in fun. But their fun was becoming
dangerous. His fervent friends were growing aggressive, their hardy
pretensions were increasing: they alarmed Canet's fundamental egoism,
his deeply rooted sense of propriety, his middle-class pusillanimity. He
dared not ask: "Where are you taking me to?" But, under his breath, he
fretted and fumed at the recklessness of these young men who seemed to
love nothing so much as breaking their necks, and never to give a
thought as to whether they were not at the same time running a risk of
breaking other people's.--What was it impelled him to follow them? Was
he not free to break with them? He had not the courage. He was afraid of
being left alone, like a child who gets left behind and begins to
whimper. He was like so many men: they have no opinions, except in so
far as they disapprove of all enthusiastic opinion: but if a man is to
be independent he must stand alone, and how many men are there who are
capable of that? How many men are there, even amongst the most clear
sighted, who will dare to break free of the bondage of certain
prejudices, certain postulates which cramp and fetter all the men of the
same generation? That would mean setting up a wall between themselves
and others. On the one hand, freedom in the wilderness, on the other,
mankind. They do not hesitate: they choose mankind, the herd. The herd
is evil smelling, but it gives warmth. Then those who have chosen
pretend to think what they do not in fact think. It is not very
difficult for them: they know so little what they think!... _"Know
thyself!"_... How could they, these men who have hardly a _Me_
to know? In every collective belief, religious or social, very rare are
the men who believe, because very rare are the men who are men. Faith is
an heroic force: its fire has kindled but a very few human torches, and
even these have often flickered. The apostles, the prophets, even Jesus
have doubted. The rest are only reflections,--save at certain hours when
their souls are dry and a few sparks falling from a great torch set
light to all the surface of the plain: then the fire dies down, and
nothing gleams but the glowing embers beneath the ashes. Not more than a
few hundred Christians really believe in Christ. The rest believe that
they believe, or else they only try to believe.

Many of these revolutionaries were like that. Our friend Canet tried
hard to believe that he was a revolutionary: he did believe it. And he
was scared at his own boldness.

All these comfortable people invoked divers principles: some followed
the bidding of their hearts, others that of their reason, others again
only their interests: some associated their way of thinking with the
Gospel, others with M. Bergson, others, again, with Karl Marx, with
Proudhon, with Joseph de Maistre. with Nietzsche, or with M. Sorel.
There were men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who
were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred,
others from love: some from a need of active, hot-headed heroism: and
some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds.
But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no
more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke
in the far distance on the white roads in the country, clouds of dust
foretelling the coming of the storm.

Olivier and Christophe watched the wind coming. Both of them had strong
eyes. But they used them in different ways. Olivier, whose clear gaze,
in spite of himself, pierced to the very inmost thoughts of men, was
saddened by their mediocrity: but he saw the hidden force that sustained
them: he was most struck by the tragic aspect of things. Christophe was
more sensible of their comic aspect. Men interested him, ideas not at
all. He affected a contemptuous indifference towards them. He laughed at
Socialistic Utopias. In a spirit of contradiction and out of instinctive
reaction against the morbid humanitarianism which was the order of the
day, he appeared to be more selfish than he was: he was a self-made man,
a sturdy upstart, proud of his strength of body and will, and he was a
little too apt to regard all those who had not his force as shirkers. In
poverty and alone he had been able to win through: let others do the
same! Why all this talk of a social question? What question? Poverty?

"I know all about that," he would say. "My father, my mother, I myself,
we have been through it. It's only a matter of getting out of it."

"Not everybody can," Olivier would reply. "What about the sick and the
unlucky?"

"One must help them, that's all. But that is a very different thing from
setting them on a pinnacle, as people are doing nowadays. Only a short
while ago people were asserting the odious doctrine of the rights of the
strongest man. Upon my word, I'm inclined to think that the rights of
the weakest are even more detestable: they're sapping the thought of
to-day, the weakest man is tyrannizing over the strong, and exploiting
them. It really looks as though it has become a merit to be diseased,
poor, unintelligent, broken,--and a vice to be strong, upstanding, happy
in righting, and an aristocrat in brains and blood. And what is most
absurd of all is this, that the strong are the first to believe it....
It's a fine subject for a comedy, my dear Olivier!"

"I'd rather have people laugh at me than make other people weep."

"Good boy!" said Christophe. "But, good Lord, who ever said anything to
the contrary? When I see a hunchback, my back aches for him.... We're
playing the comedy, we won't write it."

He did not suffer himself to be bitten by the prevalent dreams of social
justice. His vulgar common sense told him and he believed that what had
been would be.

"But if anybody said that to you about art you'd be up in arms against
him."

"May be. Anyhow, I don't know about anything except art. Nor do you.
I've no faith in people who talk about things without knowing anything
about them."

Olivier's faith in such people was no greater. Both of them were
inclined to push their distrust a little too far: they had always held
aloof from politics. Olivier confessed, not without shame, that he could
not remember ever having used his rights as an elector: for the last ten
years he had not even entered his name at the _mairie_.

"Why," he asked, "should I take part in a comedy which I know to be
futile? Vote? For whom should I vote? I don't see any reason for
choosing between two candidates, both of whom are unknown to me, while I
have only too much reason to expect that, directly the election is over,
they will both be false to all their professions of faith. Keep an eye
on them? Remind them of their duty? It would take up the whole of my
life, with no result. I have neither time, nor strength, nor the
rhetorical weapons, nor sufficient lack of scruple, nor is my heart
steeled against all the disgust that action brings. Much better to keep
clear of it all. I am quite ready to submit to the evil. But at least I
won't subscribe to it."

But, in spite of his excessive clear-sightedness, Olivier, to whom the
ordinary routine of politics was repulsive, yet preserved a chimerical
hope in a revolution. He knew that it was chimerical: but he did not
discard it. It was a sort of racial mysticism in him. Not for nothing
does a man belong to the greatest destructive and constructive people of
the Western world, the people who destroy to construct and construct to
destroy,--the people who play with ideas and life, and are for ever
making a clean sweep so as to make a new and better beginning, and shed
their blood in pledge.

Christophe was endowed with no such hereditary Messianism. He was too
German to relish much the idea of a revolution. He thought that there
was no changing the world. Why all these theories, all these words, all
this futile uproar?

"I have no need," he would say, "to make a revolution--or long speeches
about revolution--in order to prove to my own satisfaction that I am
strong. I have no need, like these young men of yours, to overthrow the
State in order to restore a King or a Committee of Public Safety to
defend me. That's a queer way of proving your strength! I can defend
myself. I am not an anarchist: I love all necessary order and I revere
the laws which govern the universe. But I don't want an intermediary
between them and myself. My will knows how to command, and it knows also
how to submit. You've got the classics on the tip of your tongue. Why
don't you remember your Corneille: _'Myself alone, and that is
enough.'_ Your desire for a master is only a cloak for your weakness.
Force is like the light: only the blind can deny it. Be strong, calmly,
without all your theories, without any act of violence, and then, as
plants turn to the sun, so the souls of the weak will turn to you."

But even while he protested that he had no time to waste on political
discussions, he was much less detached from it all than he wished to
appear. He was suffering, as an artist, from the social unrest. In his
momentary dearth of strong passion he would sometimes pause to look
around and wonder for what people he was writing. Then he would see the
melancholy patrons of contemporary art, the weary creatures of the
upper-classes, the dilettante men and women of the burgess-class, and he
would think:

"What profits it to work for such people as these?" In truth there was
no lack of men of refinement and culture, men sensitive to skill and
craft, men even who were not incapable of appreciating the novelty
or--(it is all the same)--the archaism of fine feeling. But they were
bored, too intellectual, not sufficiently alive to believe in the
reality of art: they were only interested in tricks,--tricks of sound,
or juggling with ideas; most of them were distraught by other worldly
interests, accustomed to scattering their attention over their
multifarious occupations, none of which was "necessary." It was almost
impossible for them to pierce the outer covering of art, to feel its
heart deep down: art was not flesh and blood to them; it was literature.
Their critics built up their impotence to issue from dilettantism into a
theory, an intolerant theory. When it happened that a few here and there
were vibrant enough to respond to the voice of art, they were not strong
enough to bear it, and were left disgruntled and nerve-ridden for life.
They were sick men or dead. What could art do in such a hospital?--And
yet in modern society he was unable to do without these cripples: for
they had money, and they ruled the Press: they only could assure an
artist the means of living. So then he must submit to such humiliation:
an intimate and sorrowful art, music in which is told the secret of the
artist's inmost life, offered up as an amusement--or rather as a
palliative of boredom, or as another sort of boredom--in the theaters or
in fashionable drawing-rooms, to an audience of snobs and worn-out
intellectuals.

Christophe was seeking the real public, the public which believes in the
emotions of art as in those of life, and feels them with a virgin soul.
And he was vaguely attracted by the new promised world--the people. The
memories of his childhood, Gottfried and the poor, who had revealed to
him the living depths of art, or had shared with him the sacred bread of
music, made him inclined to believe that his real friends were to be
found among such people. Like many another young man of a generous heart
and simple faith, he cherished great plans for a popular art, concerts,
and a theater for the people, which he would have been hard put to it to
define. He thought that a revolution might make it possible to bring
about a great artistic renascence, and he pretended that he had no other
interest in the social movement. But he was hoodwinking himself: he was
much too alive not to be attracted and drawn onward by the sight of the
most living activity of the time.

In all that he saw he was least of all interested in the middle-class
theorists. The fruit borne by such trees is too often sapless: all the
juices of life are wasted in ideas. Christophe did not distinguish
between one idea and another. He had no preference even for ideas which
were his own when he came upon them congealed in systems. With
good-humored contempt he held aloof from the theorists of force as from
the theorists of weakness. In every comedy the one ungrateful part is
that of the _raisonneur_. The public prefers not only the
sympathetic characters to him, but the unsympathetic characters also.
Christophe was like the public in that. The _raisonneurs_ of the
social question seemed tiresome to him. But he amused himself by
watching the rest, the simple, the men of conviction, those who believed
and those who wanted to believe, those who were tricked and those who
wanted to be tricked, not to mention the buccaneers who plied their
predatory trade, and the sheep who were made to be fleeced. His sympathy
was indulgent towards the pathetically absurd little people like fat
Canet. Their mediocrity was not offensive to him as it was to Olivier.
He watched them all with affectionate and mocking interest: he believed
that he was outside the piece they were playing: and he did not see that
little by little he was being drawn into it. He thought only of being a
spectator watching the wind rush by. But already the wind had caught
him, and was dragging him along into its whirling cloud of dust.

       *       *       *       *       *

The social drama was twofold. The piece played by the intellectuals was
a comedy within a comedy; the people hardly heeded it. The real drama
was that of the people. It was not easy to follow it: the people
themselves did not always know where they were in it. It was all
unexpected, unforeseen.

It was not only that there was much more talk in it than action. Every
Frenchman, be he burgess or of the people, is as great an eater of speeches
as he is of bread. But all men do not eat the same sort of
bread. There is the speech of luxury for delicate palates, and the more
nourishing sort of speech for hungry gullets. If the words are the same,
they are not kneaded into the same shape: taste, smell, meaning, all are
different.

The first time Olivier attended a popular meeting and tasted of the fare
he lost his appetite: his gorge rose at it, and he could not swallow. He
was disgusted by the platitudinous quality of thought, the drab and
uncouth clumsiness of expression, the vague generalizations, the
childish logic, the ill-mixed mayonnaise of abstractions and
disconnected facts. The impropriety and looseness of the language were
not compensated by the raciness and vigor of the vulgar tongue. The
whole thing was compounded of a newspaper vocabulary, stale tags picked
up from the reach-me-downs of middle-class rhetoric. Olivier was
particularly amazed at the lack of simplicity. He forgot that literary
simplicity is not natural, but acquired: it is a thing achieved by the
people of the elect. Dwellers in towns cannot be simple: they are rather
always on the lookout for far-fetched expressions.

Olivier did not understand the effect such turgid phrases might have on
their audience. He had not the key to their meaning. We call foreign the
languages of other races, and it never occurs to us that there are
almost as many languages in our nation as there are social grades. It is
only for a limited few that words retain their traditional and age-old
meaning: for the rest they represent nothing more than their own
experience and that of the group to which they belong. Many of such
words, which are dead for the select few and despised by them, are like
an empty house, wherein, as soon as the few are gone, new energy and
quivering passion take up their abode. If you wish to know the master of
the house, go into it.

That Christophe did.

       *       *       *       *       *

He had been brought into touch with the working-classes by a neighbor of
his who was employed on the State Railways. He was a little man of
forty-five, prematurely old, with a pathetically bald head, deep-sunken
eyes, hollow cheeks, a prominent nose, fleshy and aquiline, a clever
mouth, and malformed ears with twisted lobes: the marks of degeneracy.
His name was Alcide Gautier. He was not of the people, but of the lower
middle-class.

He came of a good family who had spent all they had on the education of
their only son, but, for want of means, had been unable to let him go
through with it. As a very young man he had obtained one of those
Government posts which seem to the lower middle-class a very heaven, and
are in reality death,--living death.--Once he had gone into it, it had
been impossible for him to escape. He had committed the offense--(for it
is an offense in modern society)--of marrying for love a pretty
workgirl, whose innate vulgarity had only increased with time. She gave
him three children and he had to earn a living for them. This man, who
was intelligent and longed with all his might to finish his education,
was cramped and fettered by poverty. He was conscious of latent powers
in himself which were stifled by the difficulties of his existence: he
could not take any decisive step. He was never alone. He was a
bookkeeping clerk and had to spend his days over purely mechanical work
in a room which he had to share with several of his colleagues who were
vulgar chattering creatures: they were for ever talking of idiotic
things and avenged themselves for the absurdity of their existence by
slandering their chiefs and making fun of him and his intellectual point
of view which he had not been prudent enough to conceal from them. When
he returned home it was to find an evil-smelling charmless room, a noisy
common wife who did not understand him and regarded him as a humbug or a
fool. His children did not take after him in anything: they took after
their mother. Was it just that it should be so? Was it just? Nothing but
disappointment and suffering and perpetual poverty, and work that took
up his whole day from morning to night, and never the possibility of
snatching an hour for recreation, an hour's silence, all this had
brought him to a state of exhaustion and nervous
irritability.--Christophe, who had pursued his acquaintance with him,
was struck by the tragedy of his lot: an incomplete nature, lacking
sufficient culture and artistic taste, yet made for great things and
crushed by misfortune. Gautier clung to Christophe as a weak man
drowning grasps at the arm of a strong swimmer. He felt a mixture of
sympathy and envy for Christophe. He took him to popular meetings, and
showed him some of the leaders of the syndicalist party to which he
belonged for no other reason than his bitterness against society. For he
was an aristocrat gone wrong. It hurt him terribly to mix with the
people.

Christophe was much more democratic than he--the more so as nothing
forced him to be so--and enjoyed the meetings. The speeches amused him.
He did not share Olivier's feeling of repulsion: he was hardly at all
sensible of the absurdities of the language. In his eyes a windbag was
as good as any other man. He affected a sort of contempt for eloquence
in general. But though he took no particular pains to understand their
rhetoric, he did feel the music which came through the man who was
speaking and the men who were listening. The power of the speaker was
raised to the hundredth degree by the echo thrown back from hie hearers.
At first Christophe only took stock of the speakers, and he was
interested enough to make the acquaintance of some of them.

The man who had the most influence on the crowd was Casimir Joussier,--a
little, pale, dark man, between thirty and thirty-five, with a Mongolian
cast of countenance, thin, puny, with cold burning eyes, scant hair, and
a pointed beard. His power lay not so much in his gesture, which was
poor, stilted, and rarely in harmony with the, words,--not so much in
his speech, which was raucous and sibilant, with marked pauses for
breathing,--as in his personality and the emphatic assurance and force
of will which emanated from it. He never seemed to admit the possibility
of any one thinking differently from himself: and as what he thought was
what his audience wanted to think they had no difficulty in
understanding one another. He would go on saying thrice, four times, ten
times, the things they expected him to say: he never stopped hammering
the same nail with a tenacious fury: and his audience, following his
example, would hammer, hammer, hammer, until the nail was buried deep in
the flesh.--Added to this personal ascendancy was the confidence
inspired by his past life, the _prestige_ of many terms in prison,
largely deserved by his violent writings. He breathed out an indomitable
energy: but for the seeing eye there was revealed beneath it all an
accumulated fund of weariness, disgust with so much continual effort,
anger against fate. He was one of those men who every day spend more
than their income of vitality. From his childhood on he had been ground
down by work and poverty. He had plied all sorts of trades: journeyman
glass-blower, plumber, printer: his health was ruined: he was a prey to
consumption, which plunged him into fits of bitter discouragement and
dumb despair of the cause and of himself: at other times it would raise
him up to a pitch of excitement. He was a mixture of calculated and
morbid violence, of policy and recklessness. He was educated up to a
certain point: he had a good knowledge of many things, science,
sociology, and his various trades: he had a very poor knowledge of many
others: and he was just as cocksure with both: he had Utopian notions,
just ideas, ignorance in many directions, a practical mind, many
prejudices, experience, and suspicion and hatred of burgess society.
That did not prevent his welcoming Christophe. His pride was tickled by
being sought out by a well-known artist. He was of the race of leaders,
and, whatever he did, he was brusque with ordinary workmen. Although in
all good faith he desired perfect equality, he found it easier to
realize with those above than with those beneath him.

Christophe came across other leaders of the working-class movement.
There was no great sympathy between them. If the common fight--with
difficulty--produced unity of action, it was very far from creating
unity of feeling. It was easy to see the external and purely transitory
reality to which the distinction between the classes corresponded. The
old antagonisms were only postponed and marked: but they continued to
exist. In the movement were to be found men of the north and men of the
south with their fundamental scorn of each other. The trades were
jealous of each other's wages, and watched each other with an
undisguised feeling of superiority to all others in each. But the great
difference lay--and always will lie--in temperament. Foxes and wolves
and horned beasts, beasts with sharp teeth, and beasts with four
stomachs, beasts that are made to eat, and beasts that are made to be
eaten, all sniffed at each other as they passed in the herd that had been
drawn together by the accident of class and common interest: and
they recognized each other: and they bristled.

Christophe sometimes had his meals at a little creamery and restaurant
kept by a former colleague of Gautier's, one Simon, a railway clerk who
had been dismissed for taking part in a strike. The shop was frequented
by syndicalists. There were five or six of them who used to sit in a
room at the back, looking on to an inclosed courtyard, narrow and
ill-lit, from which there arose the never-ceasing desperate song of two
caged canaries straining after the light. Joussier used to come with
his mistress, the fair Berthe, a large coquettish young woman, with a pale
face, and a purple cap, and merry, wandering eyes. She had under her
thumb a good-looking boy, Leopold Graillot, a journeyman mechanic, who
was clever and rather a _poseur_: he was the esthete of the
company. Although he called himself an anarchist, and was one of the
most violent opponents of the burgess-class, his soul was typical of
that class at its very worst. Every morning for years he had drunk in
the erotic and decadent news of the halfpenny literary papers. His
reading had given him a strongly addled brain. His mental subtlety in
imagining the pleasures of the senses was allied in him with an absolute
lack of physical delicacy, indifference to cleanliness, and the
comparative coarseness of his life. He had acquired a taste for an
occasional glass of such adulterated wine--the intellectual alcohol of
luxury, the unwholesome stimulants of unhealthy rich men. Being unable
to take these pleasures in the flesh, he inoculated his brain with them.
That means a bad tongue in the morning and weakness in the knees. But it
puts you on an equality with the rich. And you hate them.

Christophe could not bear him. He was more in sympathy with Sebastien
Coquard, an electrician, who, with Joussier, was the speaker with the
greatest following. He did not overburden himself with theories. He did
not always know where he was going. But he did go straight ahead. He was
very French. He was heavily built, about forty, with a big red face, a
round head, red hair, a flowing beard, a bull neck, and a bellowing
voice. Like Joussier, he was an excellent workman, but he loved drinking
and laughter. The sickly Joussier regarded his superabundant health with
the eyes of envy: and, though they were friends, there was always a
simmering secret hostility between them.

Amelie, the manageress of the creamery, a kind creature of forty-five,
who must have been pretty once, and still was, in spite of the wear of
time, used to sit with them, with some sewing in her hands, listening to
their talk with a jolly smile, moving her lips in time to their words:
every now and then she would drop a remark into the discussion, and she
would emphasize her words with a nod of her head as she worked. She had
a married daughter and two children of seven and ten--a little girl and
a boy--who used to do their home lessons at the corner of a sticky
table, putting out their tongues, and picking up scraps of conversations
which were not meant for their ears.

On more than one occasion Olivier tried to go with Christophe. But he
could not feel at ease with these people. When these working-men were
not tied down by strict factory hours or the insistent scream of a
hooter, they seemed to have an incredible amount of time to waste,
either after work, or between jobs, in loafing or idleness. Christophe,
being in one of those periods when the mind has completed one piece of
work and is waiting until a new piece of work presents itself, was in no
greater hurry than they were: and he liked sitting there with his elbows
on the table, smoking, drinking, and talking. But Olivier's respectable
burgess instincts were shocked, and so were his traditional habits of
mental discipline, and regular work, and scrupulous economy of time: and
he did not relish such a waste of so many precious hours. Besides that,
he was not good at talking or drinking. Above all there was his physical
distaste for it all, the secret antipathy which raises a physical
barrier between the different types of men, the hostility of the senses,
which stands in the way of the communion of their souls, the revolt of
the flesh against the heart. When Olivier was alone with Christophe he
would talk most feelingly about the duty of fraternizing with the
people: but when he found himself face to face with the people, he was
impotent to do anything, in spite of his good will. Christophe, on the
other hand, who laughed at his ideas, could, without the least effort,
meet any workman he chanced to come across in brotherhood. It really
hurt Olivier to find himself so cut off from these men. He tried to be
like them, to think like them, to speak like them. He could not do it.
His voice was dull, husky, had not the ring that was in theirs. When he
tried to catch some of their expressions the words would stick in his
throat or sound queer and strange. He watched himself; he was
embarrassed, and embarrassed them. He knew it. He knew that to them he
was a stranger and suspect, that none of them was in sympathy with him,
and then, when he was gone, everybody would sigh with relief: "Ouf!" As
he passed among them he would notice hard, icy glances, such hostile
glances as the working-classes, embittered by poverty, cast at any
comfortable burgess. Perhaps Christophe came in for some of it too: but
he never noticed it.

Of all the people in that place the only ones who showed any inclination
to be friendly with Olivier were Amelie's children. They were much more
attracted by their superior in station than disposed to hate him. The
little boy was fascinated by the burgess mode of thought: he was clever
enough to love it, though not clever enough to understand it: the little
girl, who was very pretty, had once been taken by Olivier to see Madame
Arnaud, and she was hypnotized by the comfort and ease of it all: she
was silently delighted to sit in the fine armchairs, and to feel the
beautiful clothes, and to be with lovely ladies: like the little
simpleton she was, she longed to escape from the people and soar upwards
to the paradise of riches and solid comfort. Olivier had no desire or
taste for the cultivation of these inclinations in her: and the simple
homage she paid to his class by no means consoled him for the silent
antipathy of her companions. Their ill-disposition towards him pained
him. He had such a burning desire to understand them! And in truth he
did understand them, too well, perhaps: he watched them too closely, and
he irritated them. It was not that he was indiscreet in his curiosity,
but that he brought to bear on it his habit of analyzing the souls of
men and his need of love.

It was not long before he perceived the secret drama of Joussier's life:
the disease which was undermining his constitution, and the cruelty of
his mistress. She loved him, she was proud of him: but she had too much
vitality: he knew that she was slipping away from him, would slip away
from him: and he was aflame with jealousy. She found his jealousy
diverting: she was for ever exciting the men about her, bombarding them
with her eyes, flinging around them her sensual provocative atmosphere:
she loved to play with him like a cat. Perhaps she deceived him with
Graillot. Perhaps it pleased her to let him think so. In any case if she
were not actually doing so, she very probably would. Joussier dared not
forbid her to love whomsoever she pleased: did he not profess the woman's
right to liberty equally with the man's? She reminded him of
that slyly and insolently one day when he was upbraiding her. He was
delivered up to a terrible struggle within himself between his theories
of liberty and his violent instincts. At heart he was still a man like
the men of old, despotic and jealous: by reason he was a man of the
future, a Utopian. She was neither more nor less than the woman of
yesterday, to-morrow, and all time.--And Olivier, looking on at their
secret duel, the savagery of which was known to him by his own
experience, was full of pity for Joussier when he realized his weakness.
But Joussier guessed that Olivier was reading him: and he was very far
from liking him for it.

There was another interested witness, an indulgent spectator of this
game of love and hate. This was the manageress, Amelie. She saw
everything without seeming to do so. She knew life. She was an honest,
healthy, tranquil, easy-going woman, and in her youth had been free
enough. She had been in a florist's shop: she had had a lover of the
class above her own: she had had other lovers. Then she had married a
working-man. She had become a good wife and mother. But she understood
everything, all the foolish ways of the heart, Joussier's jealousy, as
well as the young woman's desire for amusement. She tried to help them
to understand each other with a few affectionate words:

"You must make allowances: it is not worth while creating bad blood
between you for such a trifle...."

She was not at all surprised when her words produced no result....

"That's the way of the world. We must always be torturing ourselves...."

She had that splendid carelessness of the people, from which misfortune
of every sort seems harmlessly to glide. She had had her share of
unhappiness. Three months ago she had lost a boy of fifteen whom she
dearly loved: it had been a great grief to her: but now she was once
more busy and laughing. She used to say:

"If one were to think of these things one could not live."

So she ceased to think of it. It was not selfishness. She could not do
otherwise: her vitality was too strong: she was absorbed by the present:
it was impossible for her to linger over the past. She adapted herself
to things as they were, and would adapt herself to whatever happened. If
the revolution were to come and turn everything topsy-turvy she would
soon manage to be standing firmly on her feet, and do everything that
was there to do; she would be in her place wherever she might be set
down. At heart she had only a modified belief in the revolution. She had
hardly any real faith in anything whatever. It is hardly necessary to
add that she used to consult the cards in her moments of perplexity, and
that she never failed to make the sign of the cross when she met a
funeral. She was very open-minded and very tolerant, and she had the
skepticism of the people of Paris, that healthy skepticism which doubts,
as a man breathes, joyously. Though she was the wife of a revolutionary,
nevertheless she took up a motherly and ironical attitude towards her
husband's ideas and those of his party--and those of the other
parties,--the sort of attitude she had towards the follies of youth--and
of maturity. She was never much moved by anything. But she was
interested in everything. And she was equally prepared for good and bad
luck. In fine, she was an optimist.

"It's no good getting angry.... Everything settles itself so long as
your health is good...."

That was clearly to Christophe's way of thinking. They did not need much
conversation to discover that they belonged to the same family. Every
now and then they would exchange a good-humored smile, while the others
were haranguing and shouting. But, more often, she would laugh to
herself as she looked at Christophe, and saw him being caught up by the
argument to which he would at once bring more passion than all the rest
put together.

       *       *       *       *       *

Christophe did not observe Olivier's isolation and embarrassment. He
made no attempt to probe down to the inner workings of his companions.
But he used to eat and drink with them, and laugh and lose his temper.
They were never distrustful of him, although they used to argue heatedly
enough. He did not mince his words with them. At bottom he would have
found it very hard to say whether he was with or against them. He never
stopped to think about it. No doubt if the choice had been forced upon
him he would have been a syndicalist as against Socialism and all the
doctrines of the State--that monstrous entity, that factory of
officials, human machines. His reason approved of the mighty effort of
the cooperative groups, the two-edged ax of which strikes at the same
time at the dead abstractions of the socialistic State, and at the
sterility of individualism, that corrosion of energy, that dispersion of
collective force in individual frailties,--the great source of modern
wretchedness for which the French Revolution is in part responsible.

But Nature is stronger than reason. When Christophe came in touch with
the syndicates--those formidable coalitions of the weak--his vigorous
individuality drew back. He could not help despising those men who
needed to be linked together before they could march on--to the fight;
and if he admitted that it was right for them to submit to such a law,
he declared that such a law was not for him. Besides, if the weak and
the oppressed are sympathetic, they cease altogether to be so when they
in their turn become oppressors. Christophe, who had only recently been
shouting out to the honest men living in isolation: "Unite! Unite!" had
a most unpleasant sensation when for the first time he found himself in
the midst of such unions of honest men, all mixed up with other men who
were less honest, and yet were endowed with their force, their rights,
and only too ready to abuse them. The best people, those whom Christophe
loved, the friends whom he had met in The House, on every floor, drew no
sort of profit from these fighting combinations. They were too sensitive
at heart and too timid not to be scared: they were fated to be the first
to be crushed out of existence by them. Face to face with the
working-class movement they were in the same position as Olivier and the
most warmly generous of the young men of the middle-class. Their
sympathies were with the workers organizing themselves. But they had
been brought up in the cult of liberty: now liberty was exactly what the
revolutionaries cared for least of all. Besides, who is there nowadays
that cares for liberty? A select few who have no sort of influence over
the world. Liberty is passing through dark days. The Popes of Rome
proscribe the light of reason. The Popes of Paris put out the light of
the heavens. And M. Pataud puts out the lights of the streets.
Everywhere imperialism is triumphant: the theocratic imperialism of the
Church of Rome: the military imperialism of the mercantile and mystic
monarchies: the bureaucratic imperialism of the republics of Freemasonry
and covetousness: the dictatorial imperialism of the revolutionary
committees. Poor liberty, thou art not in this world!... The abuse of
power preached and practised by the revolutionaries revolted Christophe
and Olivier. They had little regard for the blacklegs who refuse to
suffer for the common cause. But it seemed abominable to them that the
others should claim the right to use force against them.--And yet it is
necessary to take sides. Nowadays the choice in fact lies not between
imperialism and liberty, but between one imperialism and another.
Olivier said:

"Neither. I am for the oppressed."

Christophe hated the tyranny of the oppressors no less. But he was
dragged into the wake of force in the track of the army of the
working-classes in revolt.

He was hardly aware that it was so. He would tell his companions in the
restaurant that he was not with them.

"As long as you are only out for material interests," he would say, "you
don't interest me. The day when you march out for a belief then I shall
be with you. Otherwise, what have I to do with the conflict between one
man's belly and another's? I am an artist; it is my duty to defend art;
I have no right to enroll myself in the service of a party. I am
perfectly aware that recently certain ambitious writers, impelled by a
desire for an unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It seems
to me that they have not rendered any great service to the cause which
they defended in that way: but they have certainly betrayed art. It is
our, the artists', business to save the light of the intellect. We have
no right to obscure it with your blind struggles. Who shall hold the
light aloft if we let it fall? You will be glad enough to find it still
intact after the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up
the fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the ship.
To understand everything is to hate nothing. The artist is the compass
which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north."

They regarded him as a maker of phrases, and said that, if he were
talking of compasses, it was very clear that he had lost his: and they
gave themselves the pleasure of indulging in a little friendly contempt
at his expense. In their eyes an artist was a shirker who contrived to
work as little and as agreeably as possible.

He replied that he worked as hard as they did, harder even, and that he
was not nearly so afraid of work. Nothing disgusted him so much as
_sabotage_, the deliberate bungling of work, and skulking raised to
the level of a principle.

"All these wretched people," he would say, "afraid for their own
skins!... Good Lord! I've never stopped working since I was eight. You
people don't love your work; at heart you're just common men.... If only
you were capable of destroying the Old World! But you can't do it. You
don't even want to. No, you don't even want to. It is all very well for
you to go about shrieking menace and pretending you're going to
exterminate the human race. You have only one thought: to get the upper
hand and lie snugly in the warm beds of the middle-classes. Except for a
few hundred poor devils, navvies, who are always ready to break their
bones or other people's bones for no particular reason,--just for
fun--or for the pain, the age-old pain with which they are simply
bursting, the whole lot of you think of nothing but deserting the camp
and going over to the ranks of the middle-classes on the first
opportunity. You become Socialists, journalists, lecturers, men of
letters, deputies, Ministers.... Bah! Bah! Don't you go howling about
so-and-so! You're no better. You say he is a traitor?... Good. Whose
turn next? You'll all come to it. There is not one of you who can resist
the bait. How could you? There is not one of you who believes in the
immortality of the soul. You are just so many bellies, I tell you. Empty
bellies thinking of nothing but being filled."

Thereupon they would all lose their tempers and all talk at once. And in
the heat of the argument it would often happen that Christophe, whirled
away by his passion, would become more revolutionary than the others. In
vain did he fight against it: his intellectual pride, his complacent
conception of a purely esthetic world, made for the joy of the spirit,
would sink deep into the ground at the sight of injustice. Esthetic, a
world in which eight men out of ten live in nakedness and want, in
physical and moral wretchedness? Oh! come! A man must be an impudent
creature of privilege who would dare to claim as much. An artist like
Christophe, in his inmost conscience, could not but be on the side of
the working-classes. What man more than the spiritual worker has to
suffer from the immorality of social conditions, from the scandalously
unequal partition of wealth among men? The artist dies of hunger or
becomes a millionaire for no other reason than the caprice of fashion
and of those who speculate on fashion. A society which suffers its best
men to die or gives them extravagant rewards is a monstrous society: it
must be swept and put in order. Every man, whether he works or no, has a
right to a living minimum.

Every kind of work, good or mediocre, should be rewarded, not according
to its real value--(who can be the infallible judge of that?)--but
according to the normal legitimate needs of the worker. Society can and
should assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor an income
sufficient to guarantee that they have the means and the time yet
further to grace and honor it. Nothing more. The _Gioconda_ is not
worth a million. There is no relation between a sum of money and a work
of art: a work of art is neither above nor below money: it is outside
it. It is not a question of payment: it is a question of allowing the
artist to live. Give him enough to feed him, and allow him to work in
peace. It is absurd and horrible to try to make him a robber of
another's property. This thing must be put bluntly: every man who has
more than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his family, and
for the normal development of his intelligence, is a thief and a robber.
If he has too much, it means that others have too little. How often have
we smiled sadly to hear tell of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and
the number of great fortunes, we workers, and toilers, and
intellectuals, and men and women who from our very birth have been given
up to the wearying task of keeping ourselves from dying of hunger, often
struggling in vain, often seeing the very best of us succumbing to the
pain of it all,--we who are the moral and intellectual treasure of the
nation! You who have more than your share of the wealth of the world are
rich at the cost of our suffering and our poverty. That troubles you not
at all: you have sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred
rights of property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of
that Moloch, the State and Progress, that fabulous monster, that
problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,--the Good of other
men.--But for all that, the fact remains, and all your sophistries will
never manage to deny it: "You have too much to live on. We have not
enough. And we are as good as you. And some of us are better than the
whole lot of you put together."

       *       *       *       *       *

So Christophe was affected by the intoxication of the passions with
which he was surrounded. Then he was astonished at his own bursts of
eloquence. But he did not attach any importance to them. He was amused
by such easily roused excitement, which he attributed to the bottle. His
only regret was that the wine was not better, and he would belaud the
wines of the Rhine. He still thought that he was detached from
revolutionary ideas. But there arose the singular phenomenon that
Christophe brought into the discussion, if not the upholding of them, a
steadily increasing passion, while that of his companions seemed in
comparison to diminish.

As a matter of fact, they had fewer illusions than he. Even the most
violent leaders, the men who were most feared by the middle-classes,
were at heart uncertain and horribly middle-class. Coquard, with his
laugh like a stallion's neigh, shouted at the top of his voice and made
terrifying gestures: but he only half believed what he was saying: it
was all for the pleasure of talking, giving orders, being active: he was
a braggart of violence. He knew the cowardice of the middle-classes
through and through, and he loved terrorizing them by showing that he
was stronger than they: he was quite ready to admit as much to
Christophe, and to laugh over it. Graillot criticized everything, and
everything anybody tried to do: he made every plan come to nothing.
Joussier was for ever affirming, for he was unwilling ever to be in the
wrong. He would be perfectly aware of the inherent weakness of his line
of argument, but that would make him only the more obstinate in sticking
to it: he would have sacrificed the victory of his cause to his pride of
principle. But he would rush from extremes of bullet-headed faith to
extremes of ironical pessimism, when he would bitterly condemn the lie
of all systems of ideas and the futility of all efforts.

The majority of the working-classes were just the same. They would
suddenly relapse from the intoxication of words into the depths of
discouragement. They had immense illusions: but they were based upon
nothing: they had not won them in pain or forged them for themselves:
they had received them ready-made, by that law of the smallest effort
which led them for their amusements to the slaughter-house and the
blatant show. They suffered from an incurable indolence of mind for
which there were only too many excuses: they were like weary beasts
asking only to be suffered to lie down and in peace to ruminate over
their end and their dreams. But once they had slept off their dreams
there was nothing left but an even greater weariness and the doleful
dumps. They were for ever flaring up to a new leader: and very soon they
became suspicious of him and spurned him. The sad part of it all was
that they were never wrong: one after another their leaders were dazzled
by the bait of wealth, success, or vanity: for one Joussier, who was
kept from temptation by the consumption under which he was wasting away,
a brave crumbling to death, how many leaders were there who betrayed the
people or grew weary of the fight! They were victims of the secret sore
which was devouring the politicians of every party in those days:
demoralization through women and money, women and money,--(the two
scourges are one and the same).--In the Government as in the ministry
there were men of first-rate talent, men who had in them the stuff of
which great statesmen are made--(they, might have been great statesmen
in the days of Richelieu, perhaps);--but they lacked faith and
character: the need, the habit, the weariness of pleasure, had sapped
them: when they were engaged upon vast schemes they fumbled into
incoherent action, or they would suddenly fling up the whole thing,
while important business was in progress, desert their country or their
cause for rest and pleasure. They were brave enough to meet death in
battle: but very few of the leaders were capable of dying in harness, at
their posts, never budging, with their hands upon the rudder and their
eyes unswervingly fixed upon the invisible goal.

The revolution was hamstrung by the consciousness of the fundamental
weakness. The leaders of the working-classes spent part of their time in
blaming each other. Their strikes always failed as a result of the
perpetual dissensions between the leaders and the trades-unions, between
the reformers and the revolutionaries--and of the profound timidity
that underlay their blustering threats--and of the inherited
sheepishness that made the rebels creep once more beneath the yoke upon
the first legal sentence,--and of the cowardly egoism and the baseness
of those who profited by the revolt of others to creep a little nearer
the masters, to curry favor and win a rich reward for their
disinterested devotion. Not to speak of the disorder inherent in all
crowds, the anarchy of the people. They tried hard to create corporate
strikes which should assume a revolutionary character: but they were not
willing to be treated as revolutionaries. They had no liking for
bayonets. They fancied that it was possible to make an omelette without
eggs. In any case, they preferred the eggs to be broken by other people.

Olivier watched, observed, and was not surprised. From the very outset
he had recognized the great inferiority of these men to the work which
they were supposed to be accomplishing: but he had also recognized the
inevitable force that swept them on: and he saw that Christophe, unknown
to himself, was being carried on by the stream. But the current would
have nothing to do with himself, who would have asked nothing better
than to let himself be carried away.

It was a strong current: it was sweeping along an enormous mass of
passions, interest, and faith, all jostling, pushing, merging into each
other, boiling and frothing and eddying this way and that. The leaders
were in the van; they were the least free of all, for they were pushed
forward, and perhaps they had the least faith of all: there had been a
time when they believed: they were like the priests against whom they
had so loudly railed, imprisoned by their vows, by the faith they once
had had, and were forced to profess to the bitter end. Behind them the
common herd was brutal, vacillating, and short-sighted. The great
majority had a sort of random faith, because the current had now set in
the direction of Utopia: but a little while, and they would cease to
believe because the current had changed. Many believed from a need of
action, a desire for adventure, from romantic folly. Others believed
from a sort of impertinent logic, which was stripped of all common
sense. Some believed from goodness of heart. The self-seeking only made
use of ideas as weapons for the fight: their eye was for the main
chance: they were fighting for a definite sum as wages for a definite
number of hours' work. The worst of all were nursing a secret hope of
wreaking a brutal revenge for the wretched lives they had led.

But the current which bore them all along was wiser than they: it knew
where it was going. What did it matter that at any moment it might dash
up against the dyke of the Old World! Olivier foresaw that a social
revolution in these days would be squashed. But he knew also that
revolution would achieve its end through defeat as well as through
victory: for the oppressors only accede to the demands of the oppressed
when the oppressed inspire them with fear. And so the violence of the
revolutionaries was of no less service to their cause than the justice
of that cause. Both violence and justice were part and parcel of the
plan of that blind and certain force which moves the herd of human
kind....

_"For consider what you are, you whom the Master has summoned. If the
body be considered there are not many among you who are wise, or strong,
or noble. But He has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound
the wise; and He has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the
strong: and He has chosen the vile things of the world and the despised
things, and the things that are not, to the destruction of those things
that are...."_

And yet, whatever may be the Master who orders all things,--(Reason or
Unreason),--and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism
might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future,
Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself to
scatter the whole of their power of illusion and sacrifice in this
earthy combat which would open no new world. His mystic hopes of the
revolution were dashed to the ground. The people seemed to him no better
and hardly any more sincere than the other classes: there was not enough
difference between them and others. In the midst of the torrent of
interests and muddy passions, Olivier's gaze and heart were attracted by
the little islands of independent spirits, the little groups of true
believers who emerged here and there like flowers on the face of the
waters. In vain do the elect seek to mingle with the mob: the elect
always come together,--the elect of all classes and all parties,--the
bearers of the fire of the world. And it is their sacred duty to see to
it that the fire in their hands shall never die down.

Olivier had already made his choice.

A few houses away from that in which he lived was a cobbler's booth,
standing a little below the level of the street,--a few planks nailed
together, with dirty windows and panes of paper. It was entered by three
steps down, and you had to stoop to stand up in it. There was just room
for a shelf of old shoes, and two stools. All day long, in accordance
with the classic tradition of cobbling, the master of the place could be
heard singing. He used to whistle, drum on the soles of the boots, and
in a husky voice roar out coarse ditties and revolutionary songs, or
chaff the women of the neighborhood as they passed by. A magpie with a
broken wing, which was always hopping about on the pavement, used to
come from a porter's lodge and pay him a visit. It would stand on the
first step at the entrance to the booth and look at the cobbler. He
would stop for a moment to crack a dirty joke with the bird in a piping
voice, or he would insist on whistling the _Internationale_. The
bird would stand with its beak in the air, listening gravely: every now
and then it would bob with its beak down by way of salutation, and it
would awkwardly flap its wings in order to regain its balance: then it
would suddenly turn round, leaving the cobbler in the middle of a
sentence, and fly away with its wing and a bit on to the back of a
bench, from whence it would hurl defiance at the dogs of the quarter.
Then the cobbler would return to his leather, and the flight of his
auditor would by no means restrain him from going through with his
harangue.

He was fifty-six, with a jovial wayward manner, little merry eyes under
enormous eyebrows, with a bald top to his head rising like an egg out of
the nest of his hair, hairy ears, a black gap-toothed mouth that gaped
like a well when he roared with laughter, a very thick dirty beard, at
which he used to pluck in handfuls with his long nails that were always
filthy with wax. He was known in the district as Daddy Feuillet, or
Feuillette, or Daddy la Feuillette--and to tease him they used to call
him La Fayette: for politically the old fellow was one of the reds: as a
young man he had been mixed up in the Commune, sentenced to death, and
finally deported: he was proud of his memories, and was always
rancorously inclined to lump together Badinguet, Galliffet, and
Foutriquet. He was a regular attendant at the revolutionary meetings,
and an ardent admirer of Coquard and the vengeful idea that he was
always prophesying with much beard-wagging and a voice of thunder. He
never missed one of his speeches, drank in his words, laughed at his
jokes with head thrown back and gaping mouth, foamed at his invective,
and rejoiced in the fight and the promised paradise. Next day, in his
booth, he would read over the newspaper report of the speeches: he would
read them aloud to himself and his apprentice: and to taste their full
sweetness he would have them read aloud to him, and used to box his
apprentice's ears if he skipped a line. As a consequence he was not
always very punctual in the delivery of his work when he had promised
it: on the other hand, his work was always sound: it might wear out the
user's feet, but there was no wearing out his leather....

The old fellow had in his shop a grandson of thirteen, a hunchback, a
sickly, rickety boy, who used to run his errands, and was a sort of
apprentice. The boy's mother had left her family when she was seventeen
to elope with a worthless fellow who had sunk into hooliganism, and
before very long had been caught, sentenced, and so disappeared from the
scene. She was left alone with the child, deserted by her family, and
devoted herself to the upbringing of the boy Emmanuel. She had
transferred to him all the love and hatred she had had for her lover.
She was a woman of a violent and jealous character, morbid to a degree.
She loved her child to distraction, brutally ill-treated him, and, when
he was ill, was crazed with despair. When she was in a bad temper she
would send him to bed without any dinner, without so much as a piece of
bread. When she was dragging him along through the streets, if he grew
tired and would not go on and slipped down to the ground, she would kick
him on to his feet again. She was amazingly incoherent in her use of
words, and she used to pass swiftly from tears to a hysterical mood of
gaiety. She died. The cobbler took the boy, who was then six years old.
He loved him dearly: but he had his own way of showing it, which
consisted in bullying the boy, battering him with a large assortment of
insulting names, pulling his ears, and clouting him over the head
from morning to night by way of teaching him his job: and at the same time
he grounded him thoroughly in his own social and anti-clerical catechism.

Emmanuel knew that his grandfather was not a bad man: but he was always
prepared to raise his arm to ward off his blows: the old fellow used to
frighten him, especially on the evenings when he got drunk. For Daddy la
Feuillette had not come by his nickname for nothing: he used to get
tipsy twice or thrice a month: then he used to talk all over the place,
and laugh, and act the swell, and always in the end he used to give the
boy a good thrashing. His bark was worse than his bite. But the boy
was terrified: his ill-health made him more sensitive than other children:
he was precociously intelligent, and he had inherited a fierce and
unbalanced capacity for feeling from his mother. He was overwhelmed by
his grandfather's brutality, and also by his revolutionary
harangues,--(for the two things went together: it was particularly when
the old man was drunk that he was inclined to hold forth).--His whole
being quivered in response to outside impressions, just as the booth
shook with the passing of the heavy omnibuses. In his crazy imagination
there were mingled, like the humming vibrations of a belfry, his
day-to-day sensations, the wretchedness of his childhood, his deplorable
memories of premature experience, stories of the Commune, scraps of
evening lectures and newspaper feuilletons, speeches at meetings, and
the vague, uneasy, and violent sexual instincts which his parents had
transmitted to him. All these things together formed a monstrous grim
dream-world, from the dense night, the chaos and miasma of which there
darted dazzling rays of hope.

The cobbler used sometimes to drag his apprentice with him to Amelie's
restaurant. There it was that Olivier noticed the little hunchback with
the voice of a lark. Sitting and never talking to the workpeople, he had
had plenty of time to study the boy's sickly face, with its jutting brow
and shy, humiliated expression: he had heard the coarse jokes that had
been thrown at the boy, jokes which were met with silence and a faint
shuddering tremor. During certain revolutionary utterances he had seen
the boy's soft brown eyes light up with the chimerical ecstasy of the
future happiness,--a happiness which, even if he were ever to realize
it, would make but small difference in his stunted life. At such moments
his expression would illuminate his ugly face in such a way as to make
its ugliness forgotten. Even the fair Berthe was struck by it; one day
she told him of it, and, without a word of warning, kissed him on the
lips. The boy started back: he went pale and shuddering, and flung away
in disgust. The young woman had no time to notice him: she was already
quarreling with Joussier. Only Olivier observed Emmanuel's uneasiness:
he followed the boy with his eyes, and saw him withdraw into the shadow
with his hands trembling, head down, looking down at the floor, and
darting glances of desire and irritation at the girl. Olivier went up to
him, spoke to him gently and politely and soothed him.... Who can tell
all that gentleness can bring to a heart deprived of all consideration?
It is like a drop of water falling upon parched earth, greedily to be
sucked up. It needed only a few words, a smile, for the boy Emmanuel in
his heart of hearts to surrender to Olivier, and to determine to have
Olivier for his friend. Thereafter, when he met him in the street and
discovered that they were neighbors, it seemed to him to be a mysterious
sign from Fate that he had not been mistaken. He used to watch for
Olivier to pass the booth, and say good-day to him: and if ever Olivier
were thinking of other things and did not glance in his direction, then
Emmanuel would be hurt and sore.

It was a great day for him when Olivier came into Daddy Feuillette's
shop to leave an order. When the work was done Emmanuel took it to
Olivier's rooms; he had watched for him to come home so as to be sure of
finding him in. Olivier was lost in thought, hardly noticed him, paid
the bill, and said nothing: the boy seemed to wait, looked from right to
left, and began reluctantly to move away. Olivier, in his kindness,
guessed what was happening inside the boy: he smiled and tried to talk
to him in spite of the awkwardness he always felt in talking to any of
the people. But now he was able to find words simple and direct. An
intuitive perception of suffering made him see in the boy--(rather too
simply)--a little bird wounded by life, like himself, seeking
consolation with his head under his wing, sadly huddled up on his perch,
dreaming of wild flights into the light. A feeling that was something
akin to instinctive confidence brought the boy closer to him: he felt
the attraction of the silent soul, which made no moan and used no harsh
words, a soul wherein he could take shelter from the brutality of the
streets; and the room, thronged with books, filled with bookcases
wherein there slumbered the dreams of the ages, filled him with an
almost religious awe. He made no attempt to evade Olivier's questions:
he replied readily, with sudden gasps and starts of shyness and pride:
but he had no power of expression. Carefully, patiently, Olivier
unswathed his obscure stammering soul: little by little he was able to
read his hopes and his absurdly touching faith in the new birth of the
world. He had no desire to laugh, though he knew that the dream was
impossible, and would never change human nature. The Christians also
have dreamed of impossible things, and they have not changed human
nature. From the time of Pericles to the time of M. Fallieres when has
there been any moral progress?... But all faith is beautiful: and when
the light of an old faith dies down it is meet to salute the kindling of
the new: there will never be too many. With a curious tenderness Olivier
saw the uncertain light gleaming in the boy's mind. What a strange mind
it was!... Olivier was not altogether able to follow the movement of his
thoughts, which were incapable of any sustained effort of reason,
progressing in hops and jerks, and lagging behind in conversation,
unable to follow, clutching in some strange way at an image called up by
a word spoken some time before, then suddenly catching up, rushing
ahead, weaving a commonplace thought or an ordinary cautious phrase into
an enchanted world, a crazy and heroic creed. The boy's soul, slumbering
and waking by fits and starts, had a puerile and mighty need of
optimism: to every idea in art or science thrown out to it, it would add
some complacently melodramatic tag, which would link it up with and
satisfy its own chimerical dreams.

As an experiment Olivier tried reading aloud to the boy on Sundays. He
thought that he was most likely to be interested by realistic and
familiar stories: he read him Tolstoy's _Memories of Childhood_.
They made no impression on the boy: he said:

"That's quite all right. Things are like that. One knows that."

And he could not understand why anybody should take so much trouble to
write about real things....

"He's just a boy," he would say disdainfully, "just an ordinary little
boy."

He was no more responsive to the interest of history: and science bored
him: it was to him no more than a tiresome introduction to a fairy-tale:
the invisible forces brought into the service of man were like terrible
genii laid low. What was the use of so much explanation? When a man
finds something it is no good his telling how he found it, he need
only tell what it is that he has found. The analysis of thought is a luxury
of the upper-classes. The souls of the people demand synthesis, ideas
ready-made, well or ill, or rather ill-made than well, but all tending
to action, and composed of the gross realities of life, and charged with
electricity. Of all the literature open to Emmanuel that which most
nearly touched him was the epic pathos of certain passages in Hugo and
the fuliginous rhetoric of the revolutionary orators, whom he did not
rightly understand, characters who no more understood themselves than
Hugo did. To him as to them the world was not an incoherent collection
of reasons or facts, but an infinite space, steeped in darkness and
quivering with light, while through the night there passed the beating
of mighty wings all bathed in the sunlight. Olivier tried in vain to
make him grasp his cultivated logic. The boy's rebellious and weary soul
slipped through his fingers: and it sank back with a sigh of comfort and
relief into the indeterminate haze and the chafing of its own sensation
and hallucinations, like a woman in love giving herself with eyes closed
to her lover.

Olivier was at once attracted and disconcerted by the qualities in the
child so much akin to his own:--loneliness, proud weakness, idealistic
ardor,--and so very different,--the unbalanced mind, the blind and
unbridled desires, the savage sensuality which had no idea of good and
evil, as they are defined in ordinary morality. He had only a partial
glimpse of that sensuality which would have terrified him had he known
its full extent. He never dreamed of the existence of the world of
uneasy passions stirring and seething in the heart and mind of his
little friend. Our bourgeois atavism has given us too much wisdom. We
dare not even look within ourselves. If we were to tell a hundredth part
of the dreams that come to an ordinary honest man, or of the desires
which come into being in the body of a chaste woman, there would be a
scandal and an outcry. Silence such monsters! Bolt and bar their cage!
But let us admit that they exist, and that in the souls of the young
they are insecurely fettered.--The boy had all the erotic desires and
dreams which we agree among ourselves to regard as perverse: they would
suddenly rise up unawares and take him by the throat: they would come in
gusts and squalls: and they only gained in intensity and heat through
the irritation set up by the isolation to which his ugliness condemned
him. Olivier knew nothing of all this. Emmanuel was ashamed in his
presence. He felt the contagion of such peace and purity. The example of
such a life was a taming influence upon him. The boy felt a passionate
love for Olivier. And his suppressed passions rushed headlong into
tumultuous dreams of human happiness, social brotherhood, fantastic
aviation, wild barbaric poetry--a whole heroic, erotic, childish,
splendid, vulgar world in which his intelligence and his will were
tossed hither and thither in mental loafing and fever.

He did not have much time for indulging himself in this way, especially
in his grandfather's booth, for the old man was never silent for a
minute on end, but was always whistling, hammering, and talking from
morning to night; but there is always room for dreams. How many voyages
of the mind one can make standing up with wide-open eyes in the space of
a second!--Manual labor is fairly well suited to intermittent thought.
The working-man's mind would be hard put to it without an effort of the
will to follow a closely reasoned chain of argument: if he does manage
to do so he is always certain to miss a link here and there: but in the
intervals of rhythmic movement ideas crop up and mental images come
floating to the surface: the regular movements of the body send them
flying upwards like sparks under the smith's bellows. The thought of the
people! It is just smoke and fire, a shower of glittering sparks fading
away, glowing, then fading away once more! But sometimes a spark will be
carried away by the wind to set fire to the dried forests and the fat
ricks of the upper-classes....

Olivier procured Emmanuel a place in a printing house. It was the boy's
wish, and his grandfather did not oppose it; he was glad to see his
grandson better educated than himself, and he had a great respect for
printer's ink. In his new trade the boy found his work more exhausting
than in the old: but he felt more free to think among the throng of
workers than in the little shop where he used to sit alone with his
grandfather.

The best time of day was the dinner hour. He would escape and get right
away from the horde of artisans crowding round the little tables on the
pavement and into the wineshops of the district, and limp along to the
square hard by: and there he would sit astride a bench under a spreading
chestnut-tree, near a bronze dancing faun with grapes in his hands, and
untie his brown-paper parcel of bread and meat, and munch it slowly,
surrounded by a little crowd of sparrows. Over the green turf little
fountains spread the trickling web of their soft rain. Round-eyed,
slate-blue pigeons cooed in a sunlit tree. And all about him was the
perpetual hum of Paris, the roar of the carriages, the surging sea of
footsteps, the familiar street-cries, the gay distant whistle of a
china-mender, a navvy's hammer ringing out on the cobblestones, the
noble music of a fountain--all the fevered golden trappings of the
Parisian dream.--And the little hunchback, sitting astride his bench,
with his mouth full, never troubling to swallow, would drowse off into a
delicious torpor, in which he lost all consciousness of his twisted
spine and his craven soul, and was all steeped in an indeterminate
intoxicating happiness.

"... Soft warm light, sun of justice that art to shine for us to-morrow,
art thou not shining now? It is all so good, so beautiful! We are rich,
we are strong, we are hale, we love ... I love, I love all men, all men
love me.... Ah! How splendid it all is! How splendid it will be
to-morrow!..."

       *       *       *       *       *

The factory hooters would sound: the boy would come to his senses,
swallow down his mouthful, take a long drink at the Wallace fountain
near by, slip back into his hunchbacked shell, and go limping and
hobbling back to his place in the printing works in front of the cases
of magic letters which would one day write the _Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin_, of the Revolution.

Daddy Feuillet had a crony, Trouillot, the stationer on the other side
of the street. He kept a stationery and haberdashery shop, in the
windows of which were displayed pink and green bonbons in green bottles,
and pasteboard dolls without arms or legs. Prom either side of the
street, one standing on his doorstep, the other in his shop, the two old
men used to exchange winks and nods and a whole elaborate code of
pantomimic gesture. At intervals, when the cobbler was tired of
hammering, and had, as he used to say, the cramp in his buttocks, they
would hail each other, La Feuillette in his shrill treble, Trouillot
with a muffled roar, like a husky calf; and they would go off together
and take a nip at a neighboring bar. They were never in any hurry to
return. They were both infernally loquacious. They had known each other
for half a century. The stationer also had played a little walking-on
part in the great melodrama of 1871. To see the fat placid creature with
his black cap on his head and his white blouse, and his gray,
heavy-dragoon mustache, and his dull light-blue bloodshot eyes with
heavy pouches under the lids, and his flabby shining cheeks, always in a
perspiration, slow-footed, gouty, out of breath, heavy of speech, no one
would ever have thought it. But he had lost none of the illusions of the
old days. He had spent some years as a refugee in Switzerland, where he
had met comrades of all nations, notably many Russians, who had
initiated him in the beauties of anarchic brotherhood. On that point he
disagreed with La Feuillette, who was a proper Frenchman, an adherent of
the strong line and of absolutism in freedom. For the rest, they were
equally firm in their belief in the social revolution and the
working-class _salente_ of the future. Each was devoted to a leader
in whose person he saw incarnate the ideal man that each would have
liked to be. Trouillot was for Joussier, La Feuillette for Coquard. They
used to engage in interminable arguments about the points on which they
were divided, being quite confident that the thoughts upon which they
agreed were definitely decided;--(and they were so sure of their common
ground that they were never very far from believing, in their cups, that
it was a matter of hard fact).--The cobbler was the more argumentative
of the two. He believed as a matter of reason: or at least he flattered
himself that he did, for, Heaven knows, his reason was of a very
peculiar kind, and could have fitted the foot of no other man. However,
though he was less skilled in argument than in cobbling, he was always
insisting that other minds should be shod to his own measure. The
stationer was more indolent and less combative, and never worried about
proving his faith. A man only tries to prove what he doubts himself. He
had no doubt. His unfailing optimism always made him see things as he
wanted to see them, and not see things or forget them immediately when
they were otherwise. Whether he did so wilfully or from apathy he saved
himself from trouble of any sort: experience to the contrary slipped off
his hide without leaving a mark.--The two of them were romantic babies
with no sense of reality, and the revolution, the mere sound of the name
of which was enough to make them drunk, was only a jolly story they told
themselves, and never knew whether it would ever happen, or whether it
had actually happened. And the two of them firmly believed in the God of
Humanity merely by the transposition of the habits they had inherited
from their forbears, who for centuries had bowed before the Son of
Man.--It goes without saying that both men were anti-clerical.

The amusing part of it was that the honest stationer lived with a very
pious niece who did just what she liked with him. She was a very dark
little woman, plump, with sharp eyes and a gift of volubility spiced
with a strong Marseilles accent, and she was the widow of a clerk in the
Department of Commerce. When she was left alone with no money, with a
little girl, and received a home with her uncle, the common little
creature gave herself airs, and was more than a little inclined to think
that she was doing her shop-keeping relation a great favor by serving in
his shop: she reigned there with the airs of a fallen queen, though,
fortunately for her uncle's business and his customers, her arrogance
was tempered by her natural exuberance and her need of talking. As
befitted a person of her distinction, Madame Alexandrine was royalist
and clerical, and she used to parade her feelings with a zeal that was
all the more indiscreet as she took a malicious delight in teasing the
old miscreant in whose house she had taken up her abode. She had set
herself up as mistress of the house, and regarded herself as responsible
for the conscience of the whole household: if she was unable to convert
her uncle--(she had vowed to capture him _in extremis_),--she
busied herself to her heart's content with sprinkling the devil with
holy water. She fixed pictures of Our Lady of Lourdes and Saint Anthony
of Padua on the walls: she decorated the mantelpiece with little painted
images in glass cases: and in the proper season she made a little chapel
of the months of Mary with little blue candles in her daughter's
bedroom. It was impossible to tell which was the predominant factor in
her aggressive piety, real affection for the uncle she desired to
convert or a wicked joy in worrying the old man.

He put up with it apathetically and sleepily: he preferred not to run
the risk of rousing the tempestuous ire of his terrible niece: it was
impossible to fight against such a wagging tongue: he desired peace
above all things. Only once did he lose his temper, and that was when a
little Saint Joseph made a surreptitious attempt to creep into his room
and take up his stand above his bed: on this point he gained the day:
for he came very near to having an apoplectic fit, and his niece was
frightened: she did not try the experiment again. For the rest he gave
in, and pretended not to see: the odor of sanctity made him feel very
uncomfortable: but he tried not to think of it. On the other hand they
were at one in pampering the girl, little Reine, or Rainette.

She was twelve or thirteen, and was always ill. For some months past she
had been on her back with hip disease, with the whole of one side of her
body done up in plaster of Paris like a little Daphne in her shell. She
had eyes like a hurt dog's, and her skin was pallid and pale like a
plant grown out of the sun: her head was too big for her body, and her
fair hair, which was very soft and very tightly drawn back, made it
appear even bigger: but she had an expressive and sweet face, a sharp
little nose, and a childlike expression. The mother's piety had assumed
in the child, in her sickness and lack of interest, a fervid character.
She used to spend hours in telling her beads, a string of corals,
blessed by the Pope: and she would break off in her prayers to kiss it
passionately. She did next to nothing all day long: needlework made her
tired: Madame Alexandrine had not given her a taste for it. She did
little more than read a few insipid tracts, or a stupid miraculous
story, the pretentious and bald style of which seemed to her the very
flower of poetry,--or the criminal reports illustrated in color in the
Sunday papers which her stupid mother used to give her. She would
perhaps do a little crochet-work, moving her lips, and paying less
attention to her needle than to the conversation she would hold with
some favorite saint or even with God Himself. For it is useless to
pretend that it is necessary to be Joan of Are to have such visitations:
every one of us has had them. Only, as a rule, our celestial visitors
leave the talking to us as we sit by the fireside: and they say never a
word. Rainette never dreamed of taking exception to it: silence gives
consent. Besides, she had so much to tell them that she hardly gave them
time to reply: she used to answer for them. She was a silent chatterer:
she had inherited her mother's volubility: but her fluency was drawn off
in inward speeches like a stream disappearing underground.--Of course
she was a party to the conspiracy against her uncle with the object of
procuring his conversion: she rejoiced over every inch of the house
wrested by the spirit of light from the spirit of darkness: and on more
than one occasion she had sewn a holy medallion on to the inside of the
lining of the old man's coat or had slipped into one of his pockets the
bead of a rosary, which her uncle, in order to please her, had pretended
not to notice.--This seizure by the two pious women of the bitter foe of
the priests was a source of indignation and joy to the cobbler. He had
an inexhaustible store of coarse pleasantries on the subject of women
who wear breeches: and he used to jeer at his friend for letting himself
be under their thumb. As a matter of fact he had no right to scoff: for
he had himself been afflicted for twenty years with a shrewish
cross-grained wife, who had always regarded him as an old scamp and had
taken him down a peg or two. But he was always careful not to mention
her. The stationer was a little ashamed, and used to defend himself
feebly, and in a mealy voice profess a Kropotkinesque gospel of
tolerance.

Rainette and Emmanuel were friends. They had seen each other every day
ever since they were children. To be quite accurate, Emmanuel only
rarely ventured to enter the house. Madame Alexandrine used to regard
him with an unfavorable eye as the grandson of an unbeliever and a
horrid little dwarf. But Rainette used to spend the day on a sofa near
the window on the ground floor. Emmanuel used to tap at the window as he
passed, and, flattening his nose against the panes, he would make a face
by way of greeting. In summer, when the window was left open, he would
stop and lean his arms on the windowsill, which was a little high for
him;--(he fancied that this attitude was flattering to himself and that,
his shoulders being shrugged up in such a pose of intimacy, it might
serve to disguise his actual deformity);--and they would talk. Rainette
did not have too many visitors, and she never noticed that Emmanuel was
hunchbacked. Emmanuel, who was afraid and mortified in the presence of
girls, made an exception in favor of Rainette. The little invalid, who
was half petrified, was to him something intangible and far removed,
something almost outside existence. Only on the evening when the fair
Berthe kissed him on the lips, and the next day too, he avoided Rainette
with an instinctive feeling of repulsion: he passed the house without
stopping and hung his head: and he prowled about far away, fearfully and
suspiciously, like a pariah dog. Then he returned. There was so little
woman in her! As he was passing on his way home from the works, trying
to make himself as small as possible among the bookbinders in their long
working-blouses like nightgowns--busy merry young women whose hungry
eyes stripped him as he passed,--how eagerly he would scamper away to
Rainette's window! He was grateful for his little friend's infirmity:
with her he could give himself airs of superiority and even be a little
patronizing. With a little swagger he would tell her about the things
that happened in the street and always put himself in the foreground.
Sometimes in gallant mood he would bring Rainette a little present,
roast chestnuts in winter, a handful of cherries in summer. And she used
to give him some of the multi-colored sweets that filled the two glass
jars in the shop-window: and they would pore over picture postcards
together. Those were happy moments: they could both forget the pitiful
bodies in which their childish souls were held captive.

But sometimes they would begin to talk, like their elders, of politics
and religion. Then they would become as stupid as their elders. It put
an end to their sympathy and understanding. She would talk of miracles
and the nine days' devotion, or of pious images tricked out with paper
lace, and of days of indulgence. He used to tell her that it was all
folly and mummery, as he had heard his grandfather say. But when he in
turn tried to tell her about the public meetings to which the old man
had taken him, and the speeches he had heard, she would stop him
contemptuously and tell him that all such folk were drunken sots.
Bitterness would creep into their talk. They would get talking about
their relations: they would recount the insulting things that her mother
and his grandfather had said of each other respectively. Then they would
talk about themselves. They tried to say disagreeable things to each
other. They managed that without much difficulty. They indulged in
coarse gibes. But she was always the more malicious of the two. Then he
would go away: and when he returned he would tell her that he had been
with other girls, and how pretty they were, and how they had joked and
laughed, and how they were going to meet again next Sunday. She would
say nothing to that: she used to pretend to despise what he said: and
then, suddenly, she would grow angry, and throw her crochet-work at his
head, and shout at him to go, and declare that she loathed him: and she
would hide her face in her hands. He would leave her on that, not at all
proud of his victory. He longed to pull her thin little hands away from
her face and to tell her that it was not true. But his pride would not
suffer him to return.

One day Rainette had her revenge.--He was with some of the other boys at
the works. They did not like him because he used to hold as much aloof
from them as possible and never spoke, or talked too well, in a naively
pretentious way, like a book, or rather like a newspaper article--(he
was stuffed with newspaper articles).--That day they had begun to talk
of the revolution and the days to come. He waxed enthusiastic and made a
fool of himself. One of his comrades brought him up sharp with these
brutal words:

"To begin with, you won't be wanted, you're too ugly. In the society of
the future, there won't be any hunchbacks. They'll be drowned at birth."

That brought him toppling down from his lofty eloquence. He stopped
short, dumfounded. The others roared with laughter. All that afternoon
he went about with clenched teeth. In the evening he was going home,
hurrying back to hide away in a corner alone with his suffering. Olivier
met him: he was struck by his downcast expression: he guessed that he
was suffering.

"You are hurt. Why?"

Emmanuel refused to answer. Olivier pressed him kindly. The boy
persisted in his silence: but his jaw trembled as though he were on the
point of weeping. Olivier took his arm and led him back to his rooms.
Although he too had the cruel and instinctive feeling of repulsion from
ugliness and disease that is in all who are not born with the souls of
sisters of charity, he did not let it appear.

"Some one has hurt you?"

"Yes."

"What did they do?"

The boy laid bare his heart. He said that he was ugly. He said that his
comrades had told him that their revolution was not for him.

"It is not for them, either, my boy, nor for us. It is not a single
day's affair. It is all for those who will come after us."

The boy was taken aback by the thought that it would be so long
deferred.

"Don't you like to think that people are working to give happiness to
thousands of boys like yourself, to millions of human beings?"

Emmanuel sighed and said:

"But it would be good to have a little happiness oneself."

"My dear boy, you mustn't be ungrateful. You live in the most beautiful
city, in an age that is most rich in marvels; you are not a fool, and
you have eyes to see. Think of all the things there are to be seen and
loved all around you."

He pointed out a few things.

The boy listened, nodded his head, and said:

"Yes, but I've got to face the fact that I shall always have to live in
this body of mine!"

"Not at all. You will quit it."

"And that will be the end."

"How do you know that?"

The boy was aghast. Materialism was part and parcel of his grandfather's
creed: he thought that it was only the priest-ridden prigs who believed
in an eternal life. He knew that his friend was not such a one: and he
wondered if Olivier could be speaking seriously. But Olivier held his
hand and expounded at length his idealistic faith, and the unity of
boundless life, that has neither beginning nor end, in which all the
millions of creatures and all the million million moments of time are
but rays of the sun, the sole source of it all. But he did not put it to
him in such an abstract form. Instinctively, when he talked to the boy,
he adapted himself to his mode of thought;--ancient legends, the
material and profound fancies of old cosmogonies were called to mind:
half in fun, half in earnest, he spoke of metempsychosis and the
succession of countless forms through which the soul passes and flows,
like a spring passing from pool to pool. All this was interspersed with
reminiscences of Christianity and images taken from the summer evening,
the light of which was cast upon them both. He was sitting by the open
window, and the boy was standing by his side, and their hands were
clasped. It was a Saturday evening. The bells were ringing. The earliest
swallows, only just returned, were skimming the walls of the houses. The
dim sky was smiling above the city, which was wrapped in shadow. The boy
held his breath and listened to the fairy-tale his man friend was
telling him. And Olivier, warmed by the eagerness of his young hearer,
was caught up by the interest of his own stories.

There are decisive moments in life when, just as the electric lights
suddenly flash out in the darkness of a great city, so the eternal fires
flare up in the darkness of the soul. A spark darting from another soul
is enough to transmit the Promethean fire to the waiting soul. On that
spring evening Olivier's calm words kindled the light that never dies in
the mind hidden in the boy's deformed body, as in a battered lantern. He
understood none of Olivier's arguments: he hardly heard them. But the
legends and images which were only beautiful stories and parables to
Olivier, took living shape and form in his mind, and were most real. The
fairy-tale lived, moved, and breathed all around him. And the view
framed in the window of the room, the people passing in the street, rich
and poor, the swallows skimming the walls, the jaded horses dragging
their loads along, the stones of the houses drinking in the cool shadow
of the twilight, and the pale heavens where the light was dying--all the
outside world was softly imprinted on his mind, softly as a kiss. It was
but the flash of a moment. Then the light died down. He thought of
Rainette, and said;

"But the people who go to Mass, the people who believe in God, are all
cracked, aren't they?"

Olivier smiled.

"They believe," he said, "as we do. We all believe the same thing. Only
their belief is less than ours. They are people who have to shut all the
shutters and light the lamp before they can see the light. They see God
in the shape of a man. We have keener eyes. But the light that we love
is the same."

The boy went home through the dark streets in which the gas-lamps were
not yet lit. Olivier's words were ringing in his head. He thought that
it was as cruel to laugh at people because they had weak eyes as because
they were hunchbacked. And he thought that Rainette had very pretty
eyes: and he thought that he had brought tears into them. He could not
bear that. He turned and went across to the stationer's. The window was
still a little open: and he thrust his head inside and called in a
whisper:

"Rainette."

She did not reply.

"Rainette. I beg your pardon."

From the darkness came Rainette's voice, saying:

"Beast! I hate you."

"I'm sorry," he said.

He stopped. Then, on a sudden impulse, he said in an even softer
whisper, uneasily, rather shamefacedly:

"You know, Rainette, I believe in God just as you do."

"Really?"

"Really."

He said it only out of generosity. But, as soon as he had said it, he
began to believe it.

They stayed still and did not speak. They could not see each other.
Outside the night was so fair, so sweet!... The little cripple murmured:

"How good it will be when one is dead!"

He could hear Rainette's soft breathing.

He said:

"Good-night, little one."

Tenderly came Rainette's voice:

"Good-night."

He went away comforted. He was glad that Rainette had forgiven him. And,
in his inmost soul, the little sufferer was not sorry to think that he
had been the cause of suffering to the girl.

       *       *       *       *       *

Olivier had gone into retirement once more. It was not long before
Christophe rejoined him. It was very certain that their place was not
with the syndicalist movement: Olivier could not throw in his lot with
such people. And Christophe would not. Olivier flung away from them in
the name of the weak and the oppressed; Christophe in the name of the
strong and the independent. But though they had withdrawn, one to the
bows, the other to the stern, they were still traveling in the vessel
which was carrying the army of the working-classes and the whole of
society. Free and self-confident, Christophe watched with tingling
interest the coalition of the proletarians: he needed every now and then
to plunge into the vat of the people: it relaxed him: he always issued
from it fresher and jollier. He kept up his relation with Coquard, and
he went on taking his meals from time to time at Amelie's. When he was
there he lost all self-control, and would whole-heartedly indulge his
fantastic humor: he was not afraid of paradox: and he took a malicious
delight in pushing his companions to the extreme consequences of their
absurd and wild principles. They never knew whether he was speaking in
jest or in earnest: for he always grew warm as he talked, and always in
the end lost sight of the paradoxical point of view with which he had
begun. The artist in him was carried away by the intoxication of the rest.
In one such moment of esthetic emotion in Amelie's back-shop, he
improvised a revolutionary song, which was at once tried, repeated, and
on the very next day spread to every group of the working-classes. He
compromised himself. He was marked by the police. Manousse, who was in
touch with the innermost chambers of authority, was warned by one of his
friends, Xavier Bernard, a young official in the police department, who
dabbled in literature and expressed a violent admiration for
Christophe's music:--(for dilettantism and the spirit of anarchy had
spread even to the watchdogs of the Third Republic).

"That Krafft of yours is making himself a nuisance," said Bernard to
Manousse. "He's playing the braggart. We know what it means: but I tell
you that those in high places would be not at all sorry to catch a
foreigner--what's more, a German--in a revolutionary plot: it is the
regular method of discrediting the party and casting suspicion upon its
doings. If the idiot doesn't look out we shall be obliged to arrest him.
It's a bore. You'd better warn him."

Manousse did warn Christophe: Olivier begged him to be careful.
Christophe did not take their advice seriously.

"Bah!" he said. "Everybody knows there's no harm in me. I've a perfect
right to amuse myself. I like these people. They work as I do, and they
have faith, and so have I. As a matter of fact, it isn't the same faith;
we don't belong to the same camp.... Very well! We'll fight. Not that I
don't like fighting. What would you? I can't do as you do, and stay
curled up in my shell. I must breathe. I'm stifled by the comfortable
classes."

Olivier, whose lungs were not so exacting, was quite at his ease in his
small rooms with the tranquil society of his two women friends, though
one of them, Madame Arnaud, had flung herself into charitable work, and
the other, Cecile, was entirely taken up with looking after the baby, to
such an extent that she could talk of nothing else and to nobody else,
in that twittering, beatific tone which is an attempt to emulate the
note of a little bird, and to mold its formless song into human speech.

His excursion into working-class circles had left him with two
acquaintances. Two men of independent views, like himself. One of them,
Guerin, was an upholsterer. He worked when he felt so disposed,
capriciously, though he was very skilful. He loved his trade. He had a
natural taste for artistic things, and had developed it by observation,
work, and visits to museums. Olivier had commissioned him to repair an
old piece of furniture: it was a difficult job, and the upholsterer had
done it with great skill: he had taken a lot of time and trouble over
it: he sent in a very modest bill to Olivier because he was so delighted
with his success. Olivier became interested in him, questioned him about
his life, and tried to find out what he thought of the working-class
movement. Guerin had no thought about it: he never worried about it. At
bottom he did not belong to the working-class, or to any class. He read
very little. All his intellectual development had come about through his
senses, eyes, hands, and the taste innate in the true Parisian. He was a
happy man. The type is by no means rare among the working people of the
lower middle-class, who are one of the most intelligent classes in the
nation: for they realize a fine balance between manual labor and healthy
mental activity.

Olivier's other acquaintance was a man of a more original kind. He was a
postman, named Hurteloup. He was a tall, handsome creature, with bright
eyes, a little fair beard and mustache, and an open, merry expression.
One day he came with a registered letter, and walked into Olivier's
room. While Olivier was signing the receipt, he wandered round, looking
at the books, with his nose thrust close up to their backs:

"Ha! Ha!" he said. "You have the classics...."

He added:

"I collect books on history. Especially books about Burgundy."

"You are a Burgundian?" asked Olivier.

  _"Bourguignon sale,
  L'epee au cote,
  La barbe au menton,
  Sante Bourguignon,"_

replied the postman with a laugh. "I come from the Avallon country. I
have family papers going back to 1200 and something...."

Olivier was intrigued, and tried to find out more about him. Hurteloup
asked nothing better than to be allowed to talk. He belonged, in fact,
to one of the oldest families in Burgundy. One of his ancestors had been
on crusade with Philippe Auguste: another had been secretary of State
under Henri II. The family had begun to decay in the seventeenth
century. At the time of the Revolution, ruined and despairing, they had
taken the plunge into the ocean of the people. Now they were coming to
the surface again as the result of honest work and the physical and
moral vigor of Hurteloup the postman, and his fidelity to his race. His
greatest hobby had been collecting historical and genealogical documents
relating to his family and their native country. In off hours he used to
go to the Archives and copy out old papers. Whenever he did not
understand them he would go and ask one of the people on his beat, a
Chartist or a student at the Sorbonne, to explain. His illustrious
ancestry did not turn his head: he would speak of it laughingly, with
never a shade of embarrassment or of indignation at the hardness of
fate. His careless sturdy gaiety was a delightful thing to see. And when
Olivier looked at him he thought of the mysterious ebb and flow of the
life of human families, which for centuries flows burningly, for
centuries disappears under the ground, and then comes bubbling forth
again, having gathered fresh energy from the depths of the earth. And
the people seemed to him to be an immense reservoir into which the
rivers of the past plunge, while the rivers of the future spring forth
again, and, though they bear a new name, are sometimes the same as those
of old.

He was in sympathy with both Guerin and Hurteloup: but it is obvious
that they could not be company for him: between him and them there was
no great possibility of conversation. The boy Emmanuel took up more of
his time: he came now almost every evening. Since their magical talk
together a revolution had taken place in the boy. He had plunged into
reading with a fierce desire for knowledge. He would come back from his
books bewildered and stupefied. Sometimes he seemed even less
intelligent than before: he would hardly speak: Olivier could only get
him to answer in monosyllables: the boy would make fatuous replies to
his questions. Olivier would lose heart: he would try not to let it be
seen: but he thought he had made a mistake, and that the boy was
thoroughly stupid. He could not see the frightful fevered travail in
incubation that was going on in the inner depths of the boy's soul.
Besides, he was a bad teacher, and was more fitted to sow the good seed
at random in the fields than to weed the soil and plow the furrows.
Christophe's presence only served to increase the difficulty. Olivier
felt a certain awkwardness in showing his young protege to his friend:
he was ashamed of Emmanuel's stupidity, which was raised to alarming
proportions when Jean-Christophe was in the room. Then the boy would
withdraw into bashful sullenness. He hated Christophe because Olivier
loved him: he could not bear any one else to have a place in his
master's heart. Neither Christophe nor Olivier had any idea of the love
and jealousy tugging at the boy's heart. And yet Christophe had been
through it himself in old days. But he was unable to see himself in the
boy who was fashioned of such different metal from that of which he
himself was made. In the strange obscure combination of inherited
taints, everything, love, hate, and latent genius, gave out an entirely
different sound.

       *       *       *       *       *

The First of May was approaching. A sinister rumor ran through Paris.
The blustering leaders of the C.G.T. were doing their best to spread it.
Their papers were announcing the coming of the great day, mobilizing the
forces of the working-classes, and directing the word of terror upon the
point in which the comfortable classes were mostly sensitive--namely,
upon the stomach.... _Feri ventrem_.... They were threatening them
with a general strike. The scared Parisians were leaving for the country
or laying in provisions as against a siege. Christophe had met Canet, in
his motor, carrying two hams and a sack of potatoes: he was beside
himself: he did not in the least know to which party he belonged: he was
in turn an old Republican, a royalist, and a revolutionary. His cult of
violence was like a compass gone wrong, with the needle darting from
north to south and from south to north. In public he still played the
part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have
taken _in petto_ the first dictator who came along and swept away
the red spectre.

Christophe was tickled to death by such universal cowardice. He was
convinced that nothing would come of it all. Olivier was not so sure.
His birth into the burgess-class had given him something of the
inevitable and everlasting tremulation which the comfortable classes
always feel upon the recollection or the expectation of Revolution.

"That's all right!" said Christophe. "You can sleep in peace. Your
Revolution isn't going to happen to-morrow. You're all afraid. Afraid of
being hurt. That sort of fear is everywhere. In the upper-classes, in
the people, in every nation, in all the nations of the West. There's not
enough blood in the whole lot of them: they're afraid of spilling a
little. For the last forty years all the fighting has been done in words,
in newspaper articles. Just look at your old Dreyfus Affair. You
shouted loud enough: 'Death! Blood! Slaughter!'... Oh! you Gascons!
Spittle and ink! But how many drops of blood?"

"Don't you be so sure," said Olivier. "The fear of blood is a secret
instinctive feeling that on the first shedding of it the beast in man
will see red, and the brute will appear again under the crust of
civilization: and God knows how it will ever be muzzled! Everybody
hesitates to declare war: but when the war does come it will be a
frightful thing."

Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that it was not for nothing
that the heroes of the age were lying heroes, Cyrano the braggart and
the swaggering cock, Chantecler.

Olivier nodded. He knew that in France bragging is the beginning of
action. However, he had no more faith than Christophe in an immediate
movement: it had been too loudly proclaimed, and the Government was on
its guard. There was reason to believe that the syndicalist strategists
would postpone the fight for a more favorable opportunity.

During the latter half of April Olivier had an attack of influenza: he
used to get it every winter about the same time, and it always used to
develop into his old enemy, bronchitis. Christophe stayed with him for a
few days. The attack was only a slight one, and soon passed. But, as
usual, it left Olivier morally and physically worn out, and he was in
this condition for some time after the fever had subsided. He stayed in
bed, lying still for hours without any desire to get up or even to move:
he lay there watching Christophe, who was sitting at his desk, working,
with his back towards him.

Christophe was absorbed in his work. Sometimes, when he was tired of
writing, he would suddenly get up and walk over to the piano: he would
play, not what he had written, but just whatever came into his mind.
Then there came to pass a very strange thing. While the music he had
written was conceived in a style which recalled that of his earlier
work, what he played was like that of another man. It was music of a
world raucous and uncontrolled. There were in it a disorder and a
violence, and incoherence which had no resemblance at all to the
powerful order and logic which were everywhere present in his other
music. These unconsidered improvizations, escaping the scrutiny of his
artistic conscience, sprang, like the cry of an animal, from the flesh
rather than from the mind; and seemed to reveal a disturbance of the
balance of his soul, a storm brewing in the depths of the future.
Christophe was quite unconscious of it: but Olivier would listen, look
at Christophe, and feel vaguely uneasy. In his weak condition he had a
singular power of penetration, a far-seeing eye: he saw things that no
other man could perceive.

Christophe thumped out a final chord and stopped all in a sweat, and
looking rather haggard: he looked at Olivier, and there was still a
troubled expression in his eyes; then he began to laugh, and went back
to his desk. Olivier asked him:

"What was that, Christophe?"

"Nothing," replied Christophe. "I'm stirring the water to attract my
fish."

"Are you going to write that?"

"That? What do you mean?"

"What you've just said."

"What did I say? I don't remember."
"What were you thinking of?"

"I don't know," said Christophe, drawing his hand across his forehead.

He went on writing. Silence once mere filled the room. Olivier went on
looking at Christophe. Christophe felt that he was looking, and turned.
Olivier's eyes were upon him with such a hunger of affection!

"Lazy brute!" he said gaily.

Olivier sighed.

"What's the matter?" asked Christophe.

"Oh! Christophe! To think there are so many things in you, sitting
there, close at hand, treasures that you will give to others, and I
shall never be able to share!..."

"Are you mad? What's come to you?"

"I wonder what your life will be. I wonder what peril and sorrow you
have still to go through.... I would like to follow you. I would like to
be with you.... But I shan't see anything of it all. I shall be left
stuck stupidly by the wayside."

"Stupid? You are that. Do you think that I would leave you behind even
if you wanted to be left?"

"You will forget me," said Olivier.

Christophe got up and went and sat on the bed by Olivier's side: he took
his wrists, which were wet with a clammy sweat of weakness. His
nightshirt was open at the neck, showing his weak chest, his too
transparent skin, which was stretched and thin like a sail blown out by
a puff of wind to rending point. Christophe's strong fingers fumbled as
he buttoned the neckband of Olivier's nightshirt. Olivier suffered him.

"Dear Christophe!" he said tenderly. "Yet I have had one great happiness
in my life!"

"Oh! what on earth are you thinking of?" said Christophe. "You're as
well as I am."

"Yes," said Olivier.

"Then why talk nonsense?"

"I was wrong," said Olivier, ashamed and smiling. "Influenza is so
depressing."

"Pull yourself together, though! Get up."

"Not now. Later on."

He stayed in bed, dreaming. Next day he got up. But he was only able to
sit musing by the fireside. It was a mild and misty April. Through the
soft veil of silvery mist the little green leaves were unfolding their
cocoons, and invisible birds were singing the song of the hidden sun.
Olivier wound the skein of his memories. He saw himself once more as a
child, in the train carrying him away from his native town, through the
mist, with his mother weeping. Antoinette was sitting by herself at the
other end of the carriage.... Delicate shapes, fine landscapes, were
drawn in his mind's eye. Lovely verses came of their own accord, with
every syllable and charming rhythm in due order. He was near his desk:
he had only to reach out his hand to take his pen and write down his
poetic visions. But his will failed him: he was tired: he knew that the
perfume of his dreams would evaporate so soon as he tried to catch and
hold them. It was always so: the best of himself could never find
expression: his mind was like a little valley full of flowers: but
hardly a soul had access to it: and as soon as they were picked the
flowers faded. No more than just a few had been able languidly to
survive, a few delicate little tales, a few pieces of verse, which all
gave out a fragrant, fading scent. His artistic impotence had for a long
time been one of Olivier's greatest griefs. It was so hard to feel so
much life in himself and to be able to save none of it!...--Now he was
resigned. Flowers do not need to be seen to blossom. They are only the
more beautiful in the fields where no hand can pluck them. Happy, happy
fields with flowers dreaming in the sun!--Here in the little valley
there was hardly any sun; but Olivier's dreams flowered all the better
for it. What stories he wove for his own delight in those days, stories
sad and tender and fantastic! They came he knew not whence, sailing like
white clouds in a summer sky, melted into thin air, and others followed
them: he was full of them. Sometimes the sky was clear: in the light of
it Olivier would sit drowsily until once more, with all sail set, there
would come gliding the silent ships of dreams.

In the evening the little hunchback would come in. Olivier was so full
of stories that he told him one, smiling, eager and engrossed in the
tale. Often he would go on talking to himself, with the boy breathing
never a word. In the end he would altogether forget his presence....
Christophe arrived in the middle of the story, and was struck by its
beauty, and asked Olivier to begin all over again. Olivier refused:

"I am in the same position as yourself," he said. "I don't know anything
about it."

"That is not true," said Christophe. "You're a regular Frenchman, and
you always know exactly what you are doing and saying. You never forget
anything."

"Alas!" said Olivier.

"Begin again, then."

"I'm too tired. What's the good?"

Christophe was annoyed.

"That's all wrong," he said. "What's the good of your having ideas? You
throw away what you have. It's an utter waste." "Nothing is ever lost,"
said Olivier.

The little hunchback started from the stillness he had maintained during
Olivier's story--sitting with his face towards the window, with eyes
blankly staring, and a frown on his face and a fierce expression so that
it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. He got up and said:

"It will be fine to-morrow."

"I bet," said Christophe to Olivier, "that he didn't even listen."

"To-morrow, the First of May," Emmanuel went on, while his morose
expression lighted up.

"That is his story," said Olivier. "You shall tell it me tomorrow."
"Nonsense!" said Christophe.

Next day Christophe called for Olivier to take him for a walk in Paris.
Olivier was better: but he still had the same strange feeling of
exhaustion: he did not want to go out, he had a vague fear, he did not
like mixing with the crowd. His heart and mind were brave: but the flesh
was weak. He was afraid of a crush, an affray, brutality of all sorts:
he knew only too well that he was fated to be a victim, that he could
not, even would not, defend himself: for he had as great a horror of
giving pain as of suffering it himself. Men who are sick in body shudder
away from physical suffering more readily than others, because they are
more familiar with it, because they have less power to resist, and
because it is presented more immediately and more poignantly to their
heated imagination. Olivier was ashamed of this physical cowardice of
his which was in entire contradiction to the stoicism of his will: and
he tried hard to fight it down. But this morning the thought of human
contact of any sort was painful to him, and he would gladly have
remained indoors all day long. Christophe scolded him, rallied him,
absolutely insisted on his going out and throwing off his stupor: for
quite ten days he had not had a breath of air. Olivier pretended not to
pay any attention. Christophe said:

"Very well. I'll go without you. I want to see their First of May. If I
don't come back to-night, you will know that I have been locked up."

He went out. Olivier caught him up on the stairs. He would not leave
Christophe to go alone.

There were very few people in the streets. A few little work-girls
wearing sprays of lily-of-the-valley. Working-people in their Sunday
clothes were walking about rather listlessly. At the street corners, and
near the Metro stations were groups of policemen in plain clothes. The
gates of the Luxembourg were closed. The weather was still foggy and
damp. It was a long, long time since the sun had shown himself!... The
friends walked arm in arm. They spoke but little, but they were very
glad of each other. A few words were enough to call up all their tender
memories of the intimate past. They stopped in front of a _mairie_
to look at the barometer, which had an upward tendency.

"To-morrow," said Olivier, "I shall see the sun."

They were quite near the house where Cecile lived. They thought of going
in and giving the baby a hug.

"No. We can do it when we come back."

On the other side of the river they began to fall in with more people.
Just ordinary peaceful people taking a walk, wearing their Sunday
clothes and faces; poor people with their babies: workmen loafing. A few
here and there wore the red eglantine in their buttonholes: they looked
quite inoffensive: they were revolutionaries by dint of self-persuasion:
they were obviously quite benevolent and optimistic at heart, well
satisfied with the smallest opportunities for happiness: whether it were
fine or merely passable for their holiday, they were grateful for it ...
they did not know exactly to whom ... to everything and everybody about
them. They walked along without any hurry, expansively admiring the new
leaves of the trees and the pretty dresses of the little girls who went
by: they said proudly:

"Only in Paris can you see children so well dressed as that."

Christophe made fun of the famous upheaval that had been predicted....
Such nice people!... He was quite fond of them, although a little
contemptuous.

As they got farther along the crowd thickened. Men with pale hangdog
faces and horrible mouths slipped into the stream of people, all on the
alert, waiting for the time to pounce on their prey. The mud was stirred
up. With every inch the river grew more and more turbid. Now it flowed
slowly thick, opaque, and heavy. Like air-bubbles rising from the depths
to the greasy surface, there came up calling voices, shrill whistles,
the cries of the newsboys, piercing the dull roar of the multitude, and
made it possible to take the measure of its strata. At the end of a
street, near Amelie's restaurant, there was a noise like that of a
mill-race. The crowd was stemmed up against several ranks of police and
soldiers. In front of the obstacles a serried mass was formed, howling,
whistling, singing, laughing, and eddying this way and that.... The
laughter of the people is the only means they have of expressing a
thousand obscure and yet deep feelings which cannot find an outlet in
words!...

The multitude was not hostile. The people did not know what they wanted.
Until they did know they were content to amuse themselves--after their
own nervous, brutal fashion, still without malice--to amuse themselves
with pushing and being pushed, insulting the police and each other. But
little by little, they lost their ardor. Those who came up from behind
got tired of being able to see nothing, and were the more provocative
inasmuch as they ran little risk behind the shelter of the human
barricade in front of them. Those in front, being crushed between those
who were pushing and those who were offering resistance, grew more and
more exasperated as their position became more and more intolerable: the
force of the current pushing them on increased their own force an
hundredfold. And all of them, as they were squeezed closer and closer
together, like cattle, felt the warmth of the whole herd creeping
through their breasts and their loins: and it seemed to them then that
they formed a solid block: and each was all, each was a giant with the
arms of Briareus. Every now and then a wave of blood would surge to the
heart of the thousand-headed monster: eyes would dart hatred, murderous
cries would go up. Men cowering away in the third and fourth row began
to throw stones. Whole families were looking down from the windows of
the houses: it was like being at the play: they excited the mob and
waited with a little thrill of agonized impatience for the troops to
charge.

Christophe forced his way through the dense throng with elbows and
knees, like a wedge. Olivier followed him. The living mass parted for a
moment to let them pass and closed again at once behind them. Christophe
was in fine fettle. He had entirely forgotten that only five minutes ago
he had denied the possibility of an upheaval of the people. Hardly had
he set foot inside the stream than he was swept along: though he was a
foreigner in this crowd of Frenchmen and a stranger to their demands,
yet he was suddenly engulfed by them: little he cared what they wanted:
he wanted it too: little he cared whither they were going: he was going
too, drinking in the breath of their madness.

Olivier was dragged along after him, but it was no joy to him; he saw
clearly, he never lost his self-consciousness, and was a thousand times
more a stranger to the passions of these people who were his people than
Christophe, and yet he was carried away by them like a piece of
wreckage. His illness, which had weakened him, had also relaxed
everything that bound him to life. How far removed he felt from these
people!... Being free from the delirium that was in them and having all
his wits at liberty, his mind took in the minutest details. It gave him
pleasure to gaze at the bust of a girl standing in front of him and at
her pretty, white neck. And at the same time he was disgusted by the
sickly, thick smell that was given off from the close-packed heap of
bodies.

"Christophe!" he begged.

Christophe did not hear him.

"Christophe!"

"Eh?"

"Let's go home."

"You're afraid?" said Christophe.

He pushed on. Olivier followed him with a sad smile.

A few rows in front of them, in the danger zone where the people were so
huddled together as to form a solid barricade, he saw his friend the
little hunchback perched on the roof of a newspaper kiosk. He was
clinging with both hands, and crouching in a most uncomfortable
position, and laughing as he looked over the wall of soldiers: and then
he would turn again and look back at the crowd with an air of triumph.
He saw Olivier and beamed at him: then once more he began to peer across
the soldiers, over the square, with his eyes wide staring in hope and
expectation ... of what?--Of the thing which was to come to pass.... He
was not alone. There were many, many others all around him waiting for
the miracle! And Olivier, looking at Christophe, saw that he too was
expecting it.

He called to the boy and shouted to him to come down. Emmanuel pretended
not to hear and looked away. He had seen Christophe. He was glad to be
in a position of peril in the turmoil, partly to show his courage to
Olivier, partly to punish him for being with Christophe.

Meanwhile they had come across some of their friends in the
crowd,--Coquard, with his golden beard, who expected nothing more than a
little jostling and crushing, and with the eye of an expert was watching
for the moment when the vessel would overflow. Farther on they met the
fair Berthe, who was slanging the people about her and getting roughly
mauled. She had succeeded in wriggling through to the front row, and she
was hurling insults at the police. Coquard came up to Christophe. When
Christophe saw him he began to chaff him:

"What did I tell you? Nothing is going to happen."

"That remains to be seen!" said Coquard. "Don't you be too sure. It
won't be long before the fun begins."

"Rot!" said Christophe.

At that very moment the cuirassiers, getting tired of having stones
flung at them, marched forward to clear the entrances to the square: the
central body came forward at a double. Immediately the stampede began.
As the Gospel has it, the first were last. But they took good care not
to be last for long. By way of covering their confusion the runaways
yelled at the soldiers following them and screamed: "Assassins!" long
before a single blow had been struck. Berthe wriggled through the crowd
like an eel, shrieking at the top of her voice. She rejoined her
friends; and taking shelter behind Coquard's broad back, she recovered
her breath, pressed close up against Christophe, gripped his arm, in
fear or for some other reason, ogled Olivier, and shook her fist at the
enemy, and screeched. Coquard took Christophe's arm and said:

"Let's go to Amelie's,"

They had very little way to go. Berthe had preceded them with Graillot
and a few workmen. Christophe was on the point of entering followed by
Olivier. The street had a shelving ridge. The pavement, by the creamery,
was five or six steps higher than the roadway. Olivier stopped to take a
long breath after his escape from the crowd. He disliked the idea of
being in the poisoned air of the restaurant and the clamorous voices of
these fanatics. He said to Christopher:

"I'm going home."

"Very well, then, old fellow," said Christophe. "I'll rejoin you in an
hour from now."

"Don't run any risks, Christophe!"

"Coward!" said Christophe, laughing.

He turned into the creamery.

Olivier walked along to the corner of the shop. A few steps more and he
would be in a little by-street which would take him out of the uproar.
The thought of his little protege crossed his mind. He turned to look
for him. He saw him at the very moment when Emmanuel had slipped down
from his coign of vantage and was rolling on the ground being trampled
underfoot by the rabble: the fugitives were running over his body: the
police were just reaching the spot. Olivier did not stop to think: he
rushed down the steps and ran to his aid. A navvy saw the danger, the
soldiers with drawn sabers. Olivier holding out his hand to the boy to
help him up, the savage rush of the police knocked them both over. He
shouted out, and in his turn rushed in. Some of his comrades followed at
a run. Others rushed down from the threshold of the restaurant, and, on
their cries, came those who had already entered. The two bodies of men
hurled themselves at each other's throats like dogs. And the women,
standing at the top of the steps, screamed and yelled.--So Olivier, the
aristocrat, the essentially middle-class nature, released the spring of
the battle, which no man desired less than he.

Christophe was swept along by the workmen and plunged into the fray
without knowing who had been the cause of it. Nothing was farther from
his thoughts than that Olivier had taken part in it. He thought him far
away in safety. It was impossible to see anything of the fight. Every
man had enough to do in keeping an eye on his opponent. Olivier had
disappeared in the whirlpool like a foundered ship. He had received a
jab from a bayonet, meant for some one else, in his left breast: he
fell: the crowd trampled him underfoot. Christophe had been swept away
by an eddy to the farthest extremity of the field of battle. He did not
fight with any animosity: he jostled and was jostled with a fierce zest
as though he was in the throng at a village fair. So little did he think
of the serious nature of the affair that when he was gripped by a huge,
broad-shouldered policeman and closed with him, he saw the thing in
grotesque and said:

"My waltz, I think."

But when another policeman pounced on to his back, he shook himself like
a wild boar, and hammered away with his fists at the two of them: he had
no intention of being taken prisoner. One of his adversaries, the man
who had seized him from behind, rolled down on the ground. The other
lost his head and drew his sword. Christophe saw the point of the saber
come within a hand's breadth of his chest: he dodged, and twisted the
man's wrist and tried to wrench his weapon from him. He could not
understand it: till then it had seemed to him just a game. They went on
struggling and battering at each other's faces. He had no time to stop
to think. He saw murder in the other man's eyes: and murderous desire
awoke in him. He saw that the man would slit him up like a sheep. With a
sudden movement he turned the man's hand and sword against himself: he
plunged the sword into his breast, felt that he was killing him, and
killed him. And suddenly the whole thing was changed: he was mad,
intoxicated, and he roared aloud.

His yells produced an indescribable effect. The crowd had smelt blood.
In a moment it became a savage pack. On all sides swords were drawn. The
red flag appeared in the windows of the houses. And old memories of
Parisian revolutions prompted them to build a barricade. The stones were
torn up from the street, the gas lamps were wrenched away, trees were
pulled up, an omnibus was overturned. A trench that had been left open
for months in connection with work on the _Metropolitain_ was
turned to account. The cast-iron railings round the trees were broken up
and used as missiles. Weapons were brought out of pockets and from the
houses. In less than an hour the scuffle had grown into an insurrection:
the whole district was in a state of siege. And, on the barricade, was
Christophe, unrecognizable, shouting his revolutionary song, which was
taken up by a score of voices. Olivier had been carried to Amelie's. He
was unconscious. He had been laid on a bed in the dark back-shop. At the
foot of the bed stood the hunchback, numbed and distraught. At first
Berthe had been overcome with emotion: at a distance she had thought it
was Graillot who had been wounded, and, when she recognized Olivier, her
first exclamation had been:

"What a good thing! I thought it was Leopold."

But now she was full of pity.. And she kissed Olivier and held his head
on the pillow. With her usual calmness Amelie had undone his clothes and
dressed his wound. Manousse Heimann was there, fortunately, with his
inseparable Canet. Like Christophe they had come out of curiosity to see
the demonstration: they had been present at the affray and seen Olivier
fall. Canet was blubbering like a child: and at the same time he was
thinking:

"What on earth am I doing here?"

Manousse examined Olivier: at once he saw that it was all over. He had a
great feeling for Olivier: but he was not a man to worry about what
can't