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 someone 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 Arsène 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 businessman, 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 café 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 Arsène 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 tomorrow.”

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 Arsène 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 Opéra.⁠—(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 Opéra, 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 Père 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 today. 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 tomorrow 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 brokenhearted at Olivier’s callousness in dragging a sensitive artist, a dreamer, ill-equipped for the battle of life⁠—Christophe⁠—into the turmoil of the marketplace, 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—Frühlingserwachen. 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, clearheaded 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 tiptoe, 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 chromolithographic 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 hothouse 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 someone 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 someone 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 today 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 upbringing, 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!

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 hothouse 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. Anyone 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 freethinker 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 goodbye, 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. Arsène 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 Molière, 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 everyone 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 Cécile Fleury. She was short and rather thickset. 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 fingertips. 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 clearheaded, 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 Cécile. 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 anyone 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!”

Cécile 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 Cécile’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. Cécile 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 Cécile 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 Cécile sighed, and said to Christophe:

“Yes.⁠ ⁠… He is my brother.”

Christophe understood:

“Ah!” he said.⁠ ⁠… “I know.⁠ ⁠… I have a brother, too.⁠ ⁠…”

Cécile took his hand with an air of affectionate commiseration:

“You too?”

“Yes,” he said.⁠ ⁠… “These are the joys of a family.”

Cécile 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 daydream in which she indulged was that some day⁠—Heaven knows when!⁠—she would not have to give lessons anymore, and would be able to live in the country. 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 wastelands which were called “fields,” and Cécile 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 tomorrow morning.”

He was fitted up with an improvised bed in the little sitting-room. Only a thin partition was between it and Cécile’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 Trasteverine Madonnas. Who is there now to give us in music a Madonna à 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 Hindu 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 today. 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, formulae 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 today,” 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 today 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 nearby. 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 sleepwalker 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 semidarkness 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 hardworking 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 mediocritas 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 tomorrow what it is today. 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 someone 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 someone 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 someone would take away their money, their health, all the marvelous gifts of which they are so unworthy! If only someone 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 lifeblood. 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:

“Goodbye.”

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 psychophysiology 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 Françoise 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, à 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:

“Today 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 today. 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 today?”

“Today 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. Françoise 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. Françoise 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 underfoot 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 Hôtel et Café du Théâtre, 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 armchair by the dead fire, and went on talking quietly while all the house was still.

“You will be tired tomorrow.”

“I am used to it. But what about you?⁠ ⁠… What are you doing tomorrow?”

“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. Françoise 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 goodbye.

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. Françoise 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 Françoise. 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.

Françoise’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. Françoise’s experience helped him to grasp the mysterious collaboration which is set up between the audience and the actor. Though Françoise 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. Françoise 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. Françoise, 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 today! 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 Françoise 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 today 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 Françoise 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 Françoise’s respect. And Françoise, 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:

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. Françoise 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 someone 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 anyone 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 motorcar: 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 dillydallying 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.

“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 percent, 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 “logrolling” 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 formulae, 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 Hecht’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 lifeblood; 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. Krafft’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, cafés-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 café-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 goodbye 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 Échos 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 Berény, 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 Berény 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 attaché 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.8

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 ever 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-Bergère, the Opéra, 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 anyone 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 today 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 noninterference, 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 anyone 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 Cécile Fleury had often been to the Jeannins’. Olivier had met her at Christophe’s: then Jacqueline had invited her to the house; and Cécile 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 Cécile 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 Cécile 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 someone to confide in, with an absolute surrender. Cécile 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 Cécile 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 Cécile. 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 Cécile⁠—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 Cécile.⁠ ⁠… 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. Céline Chabran had married André Elsberger. Élie 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 Cécile 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 daydreams 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 passersby 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 passersby can perceive the secrets of their lives of yesterday and tomorrow, 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 madcap, 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 Cécile. 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 Cécile 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 off 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, Cécile 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 Cécile 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 doorbell 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 goodbye 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 schoolmistress 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 cafés 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 headmistress 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 childbed, 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 today, 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 Cécile. 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 Cécile 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 Cécile 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 someone, 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 wholehearted man must, until he has learned enough of life to have pity on its weaknesses.

He would go and see Cécile and the child who had been entrusted to her. That refreshed his soul. Cécile 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 Cécile with very different eyes. He remembered an ironic saying of Françoise 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 Françoise 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 Françoise, 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 Lévy-Coeurs to ignore him any longer. His works were played at concerts: and he had had an opera accepted by the Opéra 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: someone 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 Françoise: 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.9

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 Berény.” 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 attaché 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 Berény’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 Cécile, 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 eyeglass, 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:

“Goodbye.”

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.

“Goodbye.”

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.