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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dear old German optimist!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You are still thinking of him."

"Who?"

"You know. That man."

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

"What do you want?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tell me how you can see me."

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

"No. It is impossible now."

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is 1889."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are you?" he said.

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

"My dear Old Fellow,

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

"CHRISTOPHE.

"My respects to Madame Jeannin."

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

"Well. Follow his advice. Save yourself."

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

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

"Let me be!" she cried angrily.

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

"Egoists!"

Christophe had contrived to make enemies of his patrons of the Grand Journal, as was only likely. Christophe had been endowed by Heaven with the virtue extolled by Goethe: non-gratitude.

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

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

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

"I am greater than you!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you know these?"

"Of course," said Hecht.

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

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

"Mine, too, I suppose?"

"No," said Hecht quietly.

Christophe started.

"My own work does not belong to me?"

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

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

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

"Even the right to destroy it?"

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

"Bring me M. Kraff's account."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have had your money," said Hecht.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lorchen?" said Christophe.

They began to talk.

"You are her son?" said the man.

"She had three," said Christophe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Herr Krafft!"

He stopped.

She said laughingly:

"Minna...."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Minna, you are with me,—with me, not with the other,—Minna, you will never grow old!..."

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

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

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

Hostis habet muros....

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

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

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

"Stay, stay with us!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is a fact."

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

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

"Do what thou wilt."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He has killed me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only he had come in at that moment!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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