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Jean Christophe: In Paris

R >> Romain Rolland >> Jean Christophe: In Paris




Christophe looked down. As far as he could see, along the road, around the
swamps, on the slopes of rocky hills, over the battlefields and ruins of
action, over the mountains and plains of France, all was cultivated and
richly bearing: it was the great garden of European civilization. Its
incomparable charm lay no less in the good fruitful soil than in the blind
labors of an indefatigable people, who for centuries have never ceased to
till and sow and make the land ever more beautiful.

A strange people! They are always called inconstant: but nothing in them
changes. Olivier, looking backward, saw in Gothic statuary all the types of
the provinces of to-day: and so in the drawings of a Clouet and a
Dumoustier, the weary ironical faces of worldly men and intellectuals: or
in the work of a Lenain the clear eyes of the laborers and peasants of
Île-de-France or Picardy. And the thoughts of the men of old days lived in
the minds of the present day. The mind of Pascal was alive, not only in the
elect of reason and religion, but in the brains of obscure citizens or
revolutionary Syndicalists. The art of Corneille and Racine was living for
the people even more than for the elect, for they were less attainted by
foreign influences: a humble clerk in Paris would feel more sympathy with a
tragedy of the time of Louis XIV than with a novel of Tolstoi or a drama of
Ibsen. The chants of the Middle Ages, the old French _Tristan_, would be
more akin to the modern French than the _Tristan_ of Wagner. The flowers of
thought, which since the twelfth century have never ceased to blossom in
French soil, however different they may be, were yet kin one to another,
though utterly different from all the flowers about them.

Christophe knew too little of France to be able to grasp how these
characteristics had endured. What struck him most of all in all the wide
expanse of country was the extremely small divisions of the earth. As
Olivier said, every man had his garden: and each garden, each plot of land,
was separated from the rest by walls, and quickset hedges, and inclosures
of all sorts. At most there were only a few woods and fields in common, and
sometimes the dwellers on one side of a river were forced to live nearer to
each other than to the dwellers on the other. Every man shut himself up in
his own house: and it seemed that this jealous individualism, instead of
growing weaker after centuries of neighborhood, was stronger than ever.
Christophe thought:

"How lonely they all are!"

* * * * *

In that sense nothing could have been more characteristic than the house in
which Christophe and Olivier lodged. It was a world in miniature, a little
France, honest and industrious, without any bond which could unite its
divers elements. A five-storied house, a shaky house, leaning over to one
side, with creaking floors and crumbling ceilings. The rain came through
into the rooms under the roof in which Christophe and Olivier lived: they
had had to have the workmen in to botch up the roof as best they could:
Christophe could hear them working and talking overhead. There was one man
in particular who amused and exasperated him: he never stopped talking to
himself, and laughing, and singing, and babbling nonsense, and whistling
inane tunes, and holding long conversations with himself all the time he
was working: he was incapable of doing anything without proclaiming exactly
what it was:

"I'm going to put in another nail. Where's my hammer? I'm putting in a
nail, two nails. One more blow with the hammer! There, old lady, that's
it...."

When Christophe was playing he would stop for a moment and listen, and then
go on whistling louder than ever: during a stirring passage he would beat
time with his hammer on the roof. At last Christophe was so exasperated
that he climbed on a chair, and poked his head through the skylight of the
attic to rate the man. But when he saw him sitting astride the roof, with
his jolly face and his cheek stuffed out with nails, he burst out laughing,
and the man joined in. And not until they had done laughing did he remember
why he had come to the window:

"By the way," he said, "I wanted to ask you: my playing doesn't interfere
with your work?"

The man said it did not: but he asked Christophe to play something faster,
because, as he worked in time to the music, slow tunes kept him back. They
parted very good friends. In a quarter of an hour they had exchanged more
words than in six months Christophe had spoken to the other inhabitants of
the house.

There were two flats on each floor, one of three rooms, the other of only
two. There were no servants' rooms: each household did its own housework,
except for the tenants of the ground floor and the first floor, who
occupied the two flats thrown into one.

On the fifth floor Christophe and Olivier's next-door neighbor was the Abbé
Corneille, a priest of some forty years old, a learned man, an independent
thinker, broad-minded, formerly a professor of exegesis in a great
seminary, who had recently been censured by Rome for his modernist
tendency. He had accepted the censure without submitting to it, in silence:
he made no attempt to dispute it and refused every opportunity offered to
him of publishing his doctrine: he shrank from a noisy publicity and would
rather put up with the ruin of his ideas than figure in a scandal.
Christophe could not understand that sort of revolt in resignation. He had
tried to talk to the priest, who, however, was coldly polite and would not
speak of the things which most interested him, and seemed to prefer as a
matter of dignity to remain buried alive.

* * * * *

On the floor below in the flat corresponding to that of the two friends
there lived a family of the name of Elie Elsberger: an engineer, his wife,
and their two little girls, seven and ten years old: superior and
sympathetic people who kept themselves very much to themselves, chiefly
from a sort of false shame of their straitened means. The young woman who
kept her house most pluckily was humiliated by it: she would have put up
with twice the amount of worry and exhaustion if she could have prevented
anybody knowing their condition: and that too was a feeling which
Christophe could not understand. They belonged to a Protestant family and
came from the East of France. Both man and wife, a few years before, had
been bowled over by the storm of the Dreyfus affair: both of them had taken
the affair passionately to heart, and, like thousands of French people,
they had suffered from the frenzy brought on by the turbulent wind of that
exalted fit of hysteria which lasted for seven years. They had sacrificed
everything to it, rest, position, relations: they had broken off many dear
friendships through it: they had almost ruined their health. For months at
a time they did not sleep nor act, but went on bringing forward the same
arguments over and over again with the monotonous insistence of the insane:
they screwed each other up to a pitch of excitement: in spite of their
timidity and their dread of ridicule, they had taken part in demonstrations
and spoken at meetings, from which they returned with minds bewildered and
aching hearts, and they would weep together through the night. In the
struggle they had expended so much enthusiasm and passion that when at last
victory was theirs they had not enough of either to rejoice: it left them
dry of energy and broken for life. Their hopes had been so high, their
eagerness for sacrifice had been so pure, that triumph when it came had
seemed a mockery compared with what they had dreamed. To such single-minded
creatures for whom there could exist but one truth, the bargaining of
politics, the compromises of their heroes had been a bitter disappointment.
They had seen their comrades in arms, men whom they had thought inspired
with the same single passion for justice,--once the enemy was overcome,
swarming about the loot, catching at power, carrying off honors and
positions, and, in their turn, trampling justice underfoot. Only a mere
handful of men held steadfast to their faith, and, in poverty and
isolation, rejected by every party, rejecting every party, they remained in
obscurity, cut off one from the other, a prey to sorrow and neurasthenia,
left hopeless and disgusted with men and utterly weary of life. The
engineer and his wife were among these wretched victims.

They made no noise in the house: they were morbidly afraid of disturbing
their neighbors, the more so as they suffered from their neighbors' noises,
and they were too proud to complain. Christophe was sorry for the two
little girls, whose outbursts of merriment, and natural need of shouting,
jumping about and laughing, were continually being suppressed. He adored
children, and he made friendly advances to his little neighbors when he met
them on the stairs. The little girls were shy at first, but were soon on
good terms with Christophe, who always had some funny story to tell them or
sweetmeats in his pockets: they told their parents about him: and, though
at first they had been inclined to look askance at his advances, they were
won over by the frank open manners of their noisy neighbor, whose
piano-playing and terrific disturbance overhead had often made them
curse:--(for Christophe used to feel stifled in his room and take to pacing
up and down like a caged bear).--They did not find it easy to talk to him.
Christophe's rather boorish and abrupt manners sometimes made Elie
Elsberger shudder. But it was all in vain for the engineer to try to keep
up the wall of reserve, behind which he had taken shelter, between himself
and the German: it was impossible to resist the impetuous good humor of the
man whose eyes were so honest and affectionate and so free from any
ulterior motive. Every now and then Christophe managed to squeeze a little
confidence out of his neighbor. Elsberger was a queer man, full of courage,
yet apathetic, sorrowful, and yet resigned. He had energy enough to bear a
life of difficulty with dignity, but not enough to change it. It was as
though he took a delight in justifying his own pessimism. Just at that time
he had been offered a post in Brazil as manager of an undertaking: but he
had refused as he was afraid of the climate and fearful of the health of
his wife and children.

"Well, leave them," said Christophe. "Go alone and make their fortune."

"Leave them!" cried the engineer. "It's easy to see that you have no
children."

"I assure you that, if I had, I should be of the same opinion."

"Never! Never!... Leave the country!... No. I would rather suffer here."

To Christophe it seemed an odd way of loving one's country and one's wife
and children to sit down and vegetate with them. Olivier understood.

"Just think," he said, "of the risk of dying out there, in a strange
unknown country, far away from those you love! Anything is better than the
horror of that. Besides, it isn't worth while taking so much trouble for
the few remaining years of life!..."

"As though one had always to be thinking of death!" said Christophe with a
shrug. "And even if that does happen, isn't it better to die fighting for
the happiness of those one loves than to flicker out in apathy?"

* * * * *

On the same landing in the smaller flat on the fourth floor lived a
journeyman electrician named Aubert.--If he lived entirely apart from the
other inhabitants of the house it was not altogether his fault. He had
risen from the lower class and had a passionate desire not to sink back
into it. He was small and weakly-looking; he had a harsh face, and his
forehead bulged over his eyes, which were keen and sharp and bored into you
like a gimlet: he had a fair mustache, a satirical mouth, a sibilant way of
speaking, a husky voice, a scarf round his neck, and he had always
something the matter with his throat, in which irritation was set up by his
perpetual habit of smoking: he was always feverishly active and had the
consumptive temperament. He was a mixture of conceit, irony, and
bitterness, cloaking a mind that was enthusiastic, bombastic, and naïve,
while it was always being taken in by life. He was the bastard of some
burgess whom he had never known, and was brought up by a mother whom it was
impossible to respect, so that in his childhood he had seen much that was
sad and degrading. He had plied all sorts of trades and had traveled much
in France. He had an admirable desire for education, and had taught himself
with frightful toil and labor: he read everything: history, philosophy,
decadent poets: he was up-to-date in everything: theaters, exhibitions,
concerts: he had a touching veneration for art, literature, and
middle-class ideas: they fascinated him. He had imbibed the vague and
ardent ideology which intoxicated the middle-classes in the first days of
the Revolution. He had a definite belief in the infallibility of reason, in
boundless progress,--_quo non ascendam?_--in the near advent of happiness
on earth, in the omnipotence of science, in Divine Humanity, and in France,
the eldest daughter of Humanity. He had an enthusiastic and credulous sort
of anti-clericalism which made him lump together religion--especially
Catholicism--and obscurantism, and see in priests the natural foe of light.
Socialism, individualism, Chauvinism jostled each other in his brain. He
was a humanitarian in mind, despotic in temperament, and an anarchist in
fact. He was proud and knew the gaps in his education, and, in
conversation, he was very cautious: he turned to account everything that
was said in his presence, but he would never ask advice: that humiliated
him; now, though he had intelligence and cleverness, these things could not
altogether supply the defects of his education. He had taken it into his
head to write. Like so many men in France who have not been taught, he had
the gift of style, and a clear vision: but he was a confused thinker. He
had shown a few pages of his productions to a successful journalist in whom
he believed, and the man made fun of him. He was profoundly humiliated, and
from that time on never told a soul what he was doing. But he went on
writing: it fed his need of expansion and gave him pride and delight. In
his heart he was immensely pleased with his eloquent passages and
philosophic ideas, which were not worth a brass farthing. And he set no
store by his observation of real life, which was excellent. It was his
crank to fancy himself as a philosopher, and he wished to write
sociological plays and novels of ideas. He had no difficulty in solving all
sorts of insoluble questions, and at every turn he discovered America. When
in due course he found that America was already discovered, he was
disappointed, humiliated, and rather bitter: he was never far from scenting
injustice and intrigue. He was consumed by a thirst for fame and a burning
capacity for devotion which suffered from finding no means or direction of
employment: he would have loved to be a great man of letters, a member of
that literary élite, who in his eyes were adorned with a supernatural
prestige. In spite of his longing to deceive himself he had too much good
sense and was too ironical not to know that there was no chance of its
coming to pass. But he would at least have hiked to live in that atmosphere
of art and middle-class ideas which at a distance seemed to him so
brilliant and pure and chastened of mediocrity. This innocent longing had
the unfortunate result of making the society of the people with whom his
condition in life forced him to live intolerable to him. And as the
middle-class society which he wished to enter closed its doors to him, the
result was that he never saw anybody. And so Christophe had no difficulty
in making his acquaintance. On the contrary he had very soon to bolt and
bar against him: otherwise Aubert would more often have been in
Christophe's rooms, than Christophe in his. He was only too happy to find
an artist to whom he could talk about music, plays, etc. But, as one would
imagine, Christophe did not find them so interesting: he would rather have
discussed the people with a man who was of the people. But that was just
what Aubert would not and could not discuss.

In proportion as he went lower in the house relations between Christophe
and the other tenants became naturally more distant. Besides, some secret
magic, some _Open Sesame_, would have been necessary for him to reach the
inhabitants of the third floor.--In the one flat there lived two ladies who
were under the self-hypnotism of grief for a loss that was already some
years old: Madame Germain, a woman of thirty-five who had lost her husband
and daughter, and lived in seclusion with her aged and devout
mother-in-law.--On the other side of the landing there dwelt a mysterious
character of uncertain age, anything between fifty and sixty, with a little
girl of ten. He was bald, with a handsome, well-trimmed beard, a soft way
of speaking, distinguished manners, and aristocratic hands. He was called
M. Watelet. He was said to be an anarchist, a revolutionary, a foreigner,
from what country was not known, Russia or Belgium. As a matter of fact he
was a Northern Frenchman and was hardly at all revolutionary: but he was
living on his past reputation. He had been mixed up with the Commune of '71
and condemned to death: he had escaped, how he did not know: and for ten
years he had lived for a short time in every country in Europe. He had seen
so many ill-deeds during the upheaval in Paris, and afterwards, and also in
exile, and also since his return, ill-deeds done by his former comrades now
that they were in power, and also by men in every rank of the revolutionary
parties, that he had broken with them, peacefully keeping his convictions
to himself useless and untarnished. He read much, wrote a few mildly
incendiary books, pulled--(so it was said)--the wires of anarchist
movements in distant places, in India or the Far East, busied himself with
the universal revolution, and, at the same time, with researches no less
universal but of a more genial aspect, namely with a universal language, a
new method of popular instruction in music. He never came in contact with
anybody in the house: when he met any of its inmates he did no more than
bow to them with exaggerated politeness. However, he condescended to tell
Christophe a little about his musical method. Christophe was not the least
interested in it: the symbols of his ideas mattered very little to him: in
any language he would have managed somehow to express them. But Watelet was
not to be put off, and went on explaining his system gently but firmly:
Christophe could not find out anything about the rest of his life. And so
he gave up stopping when he met him on the stairs and only looked at the
little girl who was always with him: she was fair, pale, anemic: she had
blue eyes, rather a sharp profile, a thin little figure--she was always
very neatly dressed--and she looked sickly and her face was not very
expressive. Like everybody else he thought she was Watelet's daughter. She
was an orphan, the daughter of poor parents, whom Watelet had adopted when
she was four or five, after the death of her father and mother in an
epidemic. He had an almost boundless love for the poor, especially for poor
children. It was a sort of mystic tenderness with him as with Vincent de
Paul. He distrusted official charity, and knew exactly what philanthropic
institutions were worth, and therefore he set about doing charity alone: he
did it by stealth, and took a secret joy in it. He had learned medicine so
as to be of some use in the world. One day when he went to the house of a
working-man in the district and found sickness there, he turned to and
nursed the invalids: he had some medical knowledge and turned it to
account. He could not bear to see a child suffer: it broke his heart. But,
on the other hand, what a joy it was when he had succeeded in tearing one
of these poor little creatures from the clutches of sickness, and the first
pale smile appeared on the little pinched face! Then Watelet's heart would
melt. Those were his moments of Paradise. They made him forget the trouble
he often had with his protégés: for they very rarely showed him much
gratitude. And the housekeeper was furious at seeing so many people with
dirty boots going up her stairs, and she would complain bitterly. And the
proprietor would watch uneasily these meetings of anarchists, and make
remarks. Watelet would contemplate leaving his flat: but that hurt him: he
had his little whimsies: he was gentle and obstinate, and he put up with
the proprietor's observations.

Christophe won his confidence up to a certain point by the love he showed
for children. That was their common bond. Christophe never met the little
girl without a catch at his heart: for, though he did not know why, by one
of those mysterious similarities in outline, which the instinct perceives
immediately and subconsciously, the child reminded him of Sabine's little
girl. Sabine, his first love, now so far away, the silent grace of whose
fleeting shadow had never faded from his heart. And so he took an interest
in the pale-faced little girl whom he never saw romping, or running, whose
voice he hardly ever heard, who had no little friend of her own age, who
was always alone, mum, quietly amusing herself with lifeless toys, a doll
or a block of wood, while her lips moved as she whispered some story to
herself. She was affectionate and a little offhanded in manner: there was a
foreign and uneasy quality in her, but her adopted father never saw it: he
loved her too much. Alas! Does not that foreign and uneasy quality exist
even in the children of our own flesh and blood?... Christophe tried to
make the solitary little girl friends with the engineer's children. But
with both Elsberger and Watelet he met with a polite but categorical
refusal. These people seemed to make it a point of honor to bury themselves
alive, each in his own mausoleum. If it came to a point each would have
been ready to help the other: but each was afraid of it being thought that
he himself was in need of help: and as they were both equally proud and
vain,--and the means of both were equally precarious,--there was no hope of
either of them being the first to hold out his hand to the other.

The larger flat on the second floor was almost always empty. The proprietor
of the house reserved it for his own use: and he was never there. He was a
retired merchant who had closed down his business as soon as he had made a
certain fortune, the figure of which he had fixed for himself. He spent the
greater part of the year in some hotel on the Riviera, and the summer at
some watering-place in Normandy, living as a gentleman with private means
who enjoys the illusion of luxury cheaply by watching the luxury of others,
and, like them, leading a useless existence.

* * * * *

The smaller flat was let to a childless couple: M. and Madame Arnaud. The
husband, a man of between forty and forty-five, was a master at a school.
He was so overworked with lectures, and correcting exercises, and giving
classes, that he had never been able to find time to write his thesis: and
at last he had given it up altogether. The wife was ten years younger,
pretty, and very shy. They were both intelligent, well read, in love with
each other: they knew nobody, and never went out. The husband had no time
for it. The wife had too much time: but she was a brave little creature,
who fought down her fits of depression when they came over her, and hid
them, by occupying herself as best she could, trying to learn, taking notes
for her husband, copying out her husband's notes, mending her husband's
clothes, making frocks and hats for herself. She would have liked to go to
the theater from time to time: but Arnaud did not care about it: he was too
tired in the evening. And she resigned herself to it.

Their great Joy was music. They both adored it. He could not play, and she
dared not although she could: when she played before anybody, even before
her husband, it was like a child strumming. However, that was good enough
for them: and Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, whom they stammered out, were as
friends to them: they knew their lives in detail, and their sufferings
filled them with love and pity. Books, too, beautiful, fine books, which
they read together, gave them happiness. But there are few such books in
the literature of to-day: authors do not worry about those people who can
bring them neither reputation, nor pleasure, nor money, such humble readers
who are never seen in society, and do not write in any journal, and can
only love and say nothing. The silent light of art, which in their upright
and religious hearts assumed almost a supernatural character, and their
mutual affection, were enough to make them live in peace, happy enough,
though a little sad--(there is no gainsaying that),--very lonely, a little
bruised in spirit. They were both much superior to their position in life.
M. Arnaud was full of ideas: but he had neither the time nor enough courage
left to write them down. It meant such a lot of trouble to get articles and
books published: it was not worth it: futile vanity! Anything he could do
was so small in comparison with the thinkers he loved! He had too true a
love for the great works of art to want to produce art himself: it would
have seemed to him pretentious, impertinent, and ridiculous. It seemed to
be his lot to spread their influence. He gave his pupils the benefit of his
ideas: they would turn them into books later on,--without mentioning his
name of course.--Nobody spent more money than he in subscribing to various
publications. The poor are always the most generous: they do buy their
books: the rich would take it as a slur upon themselves if they did not
somehow manage to get them for nothing. Arnaud ruined himself in buying
books: it was his weakness--his vice. He was ashamed of it, and concealed
it from his wife. But she did not blame him for it: she would have spent
just as much.--And with it all they were always making fine plans for
saving, with a view to going to Italy some day--though, as they knew quite
well, they never would go: and they were the first to laugh at their
incapacity for keeping money. Arnaud would console himself. His dear wife
was enough for him, and his life of work and inward joys. Was it not also
enough for her?--She said it was. She dared not say how dear it would have
been to her if her husband could have some reputation, which would in some
sort be reflected upon herself, and brighten her life, and give her ease
and comfort: inward joys are beautiful: but a little ray of light from
without shining in from time to time is sweet, and does so much good!...
But she never said anything, because she was timid: and besides, she knew
that even if he wished to make a reputation it was by no means certain that
he would succeed: it was too late!... Their greatest sorrow was that they
had no children. Each hid that sorrow from the other: and they were only
the more tender with each other: it was as though the poor creatures were
striving to win one another's forgiveness. Madame Arnaud was kind and
affectionate: she would gladly have been friends with Madame Elsberger. But
she dared not: she was never approached. As for Christophe, husband and
wife would have asked nothing better than to know him: they were fascinated
by the music that they could hear faintly when he was playing. But nothing
in the world could have induced them to make the first move: they would
have thought it indiscreet.

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