Jean Christophe: In Paris by Romain Rolland

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"Eternal ... I am ... I am...."

Well did he know that voice: as long as he could remember he had heard
it. Sometimes he forgot it: often for months together he would lose
consciousness of its mighty monotonous rhythm: but he knew that it was
there, that it never ceased, like the ocean roaring in the night. In the
music of it he found once more the same energy that he gained from it
whenever he bathed in its waters. He rose to his feet. He was fortified.
No: the hard life that he led contained nothing of which he need be
ashamed: he could eat the bread he earned, and never blush for it: it was
for those who made him earn it at such a price to blush and be ashamed.
Patience! Patience! The time would come....

But next day he began to lose patience again: and, in spite of all his
efforts, he did at last explode angrily, one day during a lesson, at the
silly little ninny, who had been maddeningly impertinent and laughed at his
accent, and had taken a malicious delight in doing exactly the opposite
of what he told her. The girl screamed in response to Christophe's angry
shouts. She was frightened and enraged at a man whom she paid daring to
show her no respect. She declared that he had struck her--(Christophe had
shaken her arm rather roughly). Her mother bounced in on them like a Fury,
and covered her daughter with kisses and Christophe with abuse. The butcher
also appeared, and declared that he would not suffer any infernal Prussian
to take upon himself to touch his daughter. Furious, pale with rage,
itching to choke the life out of the butcher and his wife and daughter,
Christophe rushed away. His host and hostess, seeing him come in in an
abject condition, had no difficulty in worming the story out of him: and it
fed the malevolence with which they regarded their neighbors. But by the
evening the whole neighborhood was saying that the German was a brute and a
child-beater.

* * * * *

Christophe made fresh advances to the music-vendors: but in vain. He found
the French lacking in cordiality: and the whirl and confusion of their
perpetual agitation crushed him. They seemed to him to live in a state of
anarchy, directed by a cunning and despotic bureaucracy.

One evening, he was wandering along the boulevards, discouraged by the
futility of his efforts, when he saw Sylvain Kohn coming from the opposite
direction. He was convinced that they had quarreled irrevocably and looked
away and tried to pass unnoticed. But Kohn called to him:

"What became of you after that great day?" he asked with a laugh. "I've
been wanting to look you up, but I lost your address.... Good Lord, my dear
fellow, I didn't know you! You were epic: that's what you were, epic!"

Christophe stared at him. He was surprised and a little ashamed.

"You're not angry with me?"

"Angry? What an idea!"

So far from being angry, he had been delighted with the way in which
Christophe had trounced Hecht: it had been a treat to him. It really
mattered nothing to him whether Christophe or Hecht was right: he only
regarded people as source of entertainment: and he saw in Christophe a
spring of high comedy, which he intended to exploit to the full.

"You should have come to see me," he went on. "I was expecting you. What
are you doing this evening? Come to dinner. I won't let you off. Quite
informal: just a few artists: we meet once a fortnight. You should know
these people. Come. I'll introduce you."

In vain did Christophe beg to be excused on the score of his clothes.
Sylvain Kohn carried him off.

They entered a restaurant on one of the boulevards, and went up to the
second floor. Christophe found himself among about thirty young men, whose
ages ranged from twenty to thirty-five, and they were all engaged in
animated discussion. Kohn introduced him as a man who had just escaped
from a German prison. They paid no attention to him and did not stop their
passionate discussion, and Kohn plunged into it at once.

Christophe was shy in this select company, and said nothing: but he was
all ears. He could not grasp--he had great difficulty in following the
volubility of the French--what great artistic interests were in dispute.
He listened attentively, but he could only make out words like "trust,"
"monopoly," "fall in prices," "receipts," mixed up with phrases like "the
dignity of art," and the "rights of the author." And at last he saw that
they were talking business. A certain number of authors, it appeared,
belonged to a syndicate and were angry about certain attempts which had
been made to float a rival concern, which, according to them, would dispute
their monopoly of exploitation. The defection of certain of their members
who had found it to their advantage to go over bag and baggage to the rival
house had roused them, to the wildest fury. They talked of decapitation.
"... Burked.... Treachery.... Shame.... Sold...."

Others did not worry about the living: they were incensed against the dead,
whose sales without royalties choked up the market. It appeared that the
works of De Musset had just become public property, and were selling far
too well. And so they demanded that the State should give them rigorous
protection, and heavily tax the masterpieces of the past so as to check
their circulation at reduced prices, which, they declared, was unfair
competition with the work of living artists.

They stopped each other to hear the takings of such and such a theater on
the preceding evening. They all went into ecstasies over the fortune of
a veteran dramatist, famous in two continents--a man whom they despised,
though they envied him even more. From the incomes of authors they passed
to those of the critics. They talked of the sum--(pure calumny, no
doubt)--received by one of their colleagues for every first performance
at one of the theaters on the boulevards, the consideration being that he
should speak well of it. He was an honest man: having made his bargain he
stuck to it: but his great secret lay--(so they said)--in so eulogizing the
piece that it would be taken off as quickly as possible so that there might
be many new plays. The tale--(or the account)--caused laughter, but nobody
was surprised.

And mingled with all that talk they threw out fine phrases: they talked of
"poetry" and "art for art's sake." But through it all there rang "art for
money's sake"; and this jobbing spirit, newly come into French literature,
scandalized Christophe. As he understood nothing at all about their talk of
money he had given it up. But then they began to talk of letters, or rather
of men of letters.--Christophe pricked up his ears as he heard the name of
Victor Hugo.

They were debating whether he had been cuckolded: they argued at length
about the love of Sainte-Beuve and Madame Hugo. And then they turned to
the lovers of George Sand and their respective merits. That was the chief
occupation of criticism just then: when they had ransacked the houses of
great men, rummaged through the closets, turned out the drawers, ransacked
the cupboards, they burrowed down to their inmost lives. The attitude
of Monsieur de Lauzun lying flat under the bed of the King and Madame
de Montespan was the attitude of criticism in its cult of history and
truth--(everybody just then, of course, made a cult of truth). These young
men were subscribers to the cult: no detail was too small for them in their
search for truth. They applied it to the art of the present as well as to
that of the past: and they analyzed the private life of certain of the more
notorious of their contemporaries with the same passion for exactness.
It was a queer thing that they were possessed of the smallest details of
scenes which are usually enacted without witnesses. It was really as though
the persons concerned had been the first to give exact information to the
public out of their great devotion to the truth.

Christophe was more and more embarrassed and tried to talk to his neighbors
of something else; but nobody listened to him. At first they asked him
a few vague questions about Germany--questions which, to his amazement,
displayed the almost complete ignorance of these distinguished and
apparently cultured young men concerning the most elementary things of
their work--literature and art--outside Paris; at most they had heard of a
few great names: Hauptmann, Sudermann, Liebermann, Strauss (David, Johann,
Richard), and they picked their way gingerly among them for fear of getting
mixed. If they had questioned Christophe it was from politeness rather than
from curiosity: they had no curiosity: they hardly seemed to notice his
replies: and they hurried back at once to the Parisian topics which were
regaling the rest of the company.

Christophe timidly tried to talk of music. Not one of these men of letters
was a musician. At heart they considered music an inferior art. But the
growing success of music during the last few years had made them secretly
uneasy: and since it was the fashion they pretended to be interested in it.
They frothed especially about a new opera and declared that music dated
from its performance, or at least the new era in music. This idea made
things easy for their ignorance and snobbishness, for it relieved them
of the necessity of knowing anything else. The author of the opera, a
Parisian, whose name Christophe heard for the first time, had, said some,
made a clean sweep of all that had gone before him, cleaned up, renovated,
and recreated music. Christophe started at that. He asked nothing better
than to believe in genius. But such a genius as that, a genius who had at
one swoop wiped out the past.... Good heavens! He must be a lusty lad: how
the devil had he done it? He asked for particulars. The others, who would
have been hard put to it to give any explanation and were disconcerted by
Christophe, referred him to the musician of the company, Theophile Goujart,
the great musical critic, who began at once to talk of sevenths and ninths.
Goujart knew music much as Sganarelle knew Latin....

"_... You don't know Latin?_"

"_No._"

_(With enthusiasm) "Cabricias, arci thuram, catalamus, singulariter ...
bonus, bona, bonum."_

Finding himself with a man who "understood Latin" he prudently took refuge
in the chatter of esthetics. From that impregnable fortress he began to
bombard Beethoven, Wagner, and classical art, which was not before the
house (but in France it is impossible to praise an artist without making
as an offering a holocaust of all those who are unlike him). He announced
the advent of a new art which trampled under foot the conventions of the
past. He spoke of a new musical language which had been discovered by the
Christopher Columbus of Parisian music, and he said it made an end of the
language of the classics: that was a dead language.

Christophe reserved his opinion of this reforming genius to wait until
he had seen his work before he said anything: but in spite of himself he
felt an instinctive distrust of this musical Baal to whom all music was
sacrificed. He was scandalized to hear the Masters so spoken of: and he
forgot that he had said much the same sort of thing in Germany. He who at
home had thought himself a revolutionary in art, he who had scandalized
others by the boldness of his judgments and the frankness of his
expressions, felt, as soon as he heard these words spoken in France, that
he was at heart a conservative. He tried to argue, and was tactless enough
to speak, not like a man of culture, who advances arguments without
exposition, but as a professional, bringing out disconcerting facts. He did
not hesitate to plunge into technical explanations: and his voice, as he
talked, struck a note which was well calculated to offend the ears of a
company of superior persons to whom his arguments and the vigor with which
he supported them were alike ridiculous. The critic tried to demolish
him with an attempt at wit, and to end the discussion which had shown
Christophe to his stupefaction that he had to deal with a man who did
not in the least know what he was talking about. And so they came to
the opinion that the German was pedantic and superannuated: and without
knowing anything about it they decided that his music was detestable. But
Christophe's bizarre personality had made an impression on the company of
young men, and with their quickness in seizing on the ridiculous they had
marked the awkward, violent gestures of his thin arms with their enormous
hands, and the furious glances that darted from his eyes as his voice rose
to a falsetto. Sylvain Kohn saw to it that his friends were kept amused.

Conversation had deserted literature in favor of women. As a matter of
fact they were only two aspects of the same subject: for their literature
was concerned with nothing but women, and their women were concerned with
nothing but literature, they were so much taken up with the affairs and men
of letters.

They spoke of one good lady, well known in Parisian society, who had, it
was said, just married her lover to her daughter, the better to keep him.
Christophe squirmed in his chair, and tactlessly made a face of disgust.
Kohn saw it, and nudged his neighbor and pointed out that the subject
seemed to excite the German--that no doubt he was longing to know the lady.
Christophe blushed, muttered angrily, and finally said hotly that such
women ought to be whipped. His proposition was received with a shout of
Homeric laughter: and Sylvain Kohn cooingly protested that no man should
touch a woman, even with a flower, etc., etc. (In Paris he was the very
Knight of Love.) Christophe replied that a woman of that sort was neither
more nor less than a bitch, and that there was only one remedy for vicious
dogs: the whip. They roared at him. Christophe said that their gallantry
was hypocritical, and that those who talked most of their respect for women
were those who possessed the least of it: and he protested against these
scandalous tales. They replied that there was no scandal in it, and that it
was only natural: and they were all agreed that the heroine of the story
was not only a charming woman, but _the_ Woman, _par excellence_. The
German waxed indignant. Sylvain Kohn asked him slyly what he thought Woman
was like. Christophe felt that they were pulling his leg and laying a trap
for him: but he fell straight into it in the violent expression of his
convictions. He began to explain his ideas on love to these bantering
Parisians. He could not find his words, floundered about after them, and
finally fished up from the phrases he remembered such impossible words,
such enormities, that he had all his hearers rocking with laughter, while
all the time he was perfectly and admirably serious, never bothered about
them, and was touchingly impervious to their ridicule: for he could not
help seeing that they were making fun of him. At last he tied himself up
in a sentence, could not extricate himself, brought his fist down on the
table, and was silent.

They tried to bring him back into the discussion: he scowled and did not
flinch, but sat with his elbows on the table, ashamed and irritated. He
did not open his lips again, except to eat and drink, until the dinner was
over. He drank enormously, unlike the Frenchmen, who only sipped their
wine. His neighbor wickedly encouraged him, and went on filling his glass,
which he emptied absently. But, although he was not used to these excesses,
especially after the weeks of privation through which he had passed, he
took his liquor well, and did not cut so ridiculous a figure as the others
hoped. He sat there lost in thought: they paid no attention to him: they
thought he was made drowsy by the wine. He was exhausted by the effort of
following the conversation in French, and tired of hearing about nothing
but literature--actors, authors, publishers, the chatter of the _coulisses_
and literary life: everything seemed to be reduced to that. Amid all these
new faces and the buzz of words he could not fix a single face, nor a
single thought. His short-sighted eyes, dim and dreamy, wandered slowly
round the table, and they rested on one man after another without seeming
to see them. And yet he saw them better than any one, though he himself was
not conscious of it. He did not, like these Jews and Frenchmen, peck at
the things he saw and dissect them, tear them to rags, and leave them in
tiny, tiny pieces. Slowly, like a sponge, he sucked up the essence of men
and women, and bore away their image in his soul. He seemed to have seen
nothing and to remember nothing. It was only long afterwards--hours, often
days--when he was alone, gazing in upon himself, that he saw that he had
borne away a whole impression.

But for the moment he seemed to be just a German boor, stuffing himself
with food, concerned only with not missing a mouthful. And he heard nothing
clearly, except when he heard the others calling each other by name, and
then, with a silly drunken insistency, he wondered why so many Frenchmen
have foreign names: Flemish, German, Jewish, Levantine, Anglo- or
Spanish-American.

He did not notice when they got up from the table. He went on sitting
alone: and he dreamed of the Rhenish hills, the great woods, the tilled
fields, the meadows by the waterside, his old mother. Most of the others
had gone. At last he thought of going, and got up, too, without looking
at anybody, and went and took down his hat and cloak, which were hanging
by the door. When he had put them on he was turning away without saying
good-night, when through a half-open door he saw an object which fascinated
him: a piano. He had not touched a musical instrument for weeks. He went in
and lovingly touched the keys, sat down just as he was, with his hat on his
head and his cloak on his shoulders, and began to play. He had altogether
forgotten where he was. He did not notice that two men crept into the room
to listen to him. One was Sylvain Kohn, a passionate lover of music--God
knows why! for he knew nothing at all about it, and he liked bad music
just as well as good. The other was the musical critic, Theophile Goujart.
He--it simplifies matters so much--neither understood nor loved music: but
that did not keep him from talking about it. On the contrary: nobody is so
free in mind as the man who knows nothing of what he is talking about: for
to such a man it does not matter whether he says one thing more than
another.

Theophile Goujart was tall, strong, and muscular: he had a black beard,
thick curls on his forehead, which was lined with deep inexpressive
wrinkles, short arms, short legs, a big chest: a type of woodman or porter
of the Auvergne. He had common manners and an arrogant way of speaking. He
had gone into music through politics, at that time the only road to success
in France. He had attached himself to the fortunes of a Minister to whom he
had discovered that he was distantly related--a son "of the bastard of his
apothecary." Ministers are not eternal, and when it seemed that the day of
his Minister was over Theophile Goujart deserted the ship, taking with him
all that he could lay his hands on, notably several orders: for he loved
glory. Tired of politics, in which for some time past he had received
various snubs, both on his own account and on that of his patron, he
looked out for a shelter from the storm, a restful position in which he
could annoy others without being himself annoyed. Everything pointed to
criticism. Just at that moment there fell vacant the post of musical critic
to one of the great Parisian papers. The previous holder of the post, a
young and talented composer, had been dismissed because he insisted on
saying what he thought of the authors and their work. Goujart had never
taken any interest in music, and knew nothing at all about it: he was
chosen without a moment's hesitation. They had had enough of competent
critics: with Goujart there was at least nothing to fear: he did not attach
an absurd importance to his opinions: he was always at the editor's orders,
and ready to comply with a slashing article or enthusiastic approbation.
That he was no musician was a secondary consideration. Everybody in
France knows a little about music. Goujart quickly acquired the requisite
knowledge. His method was quite simple: it consisted in sitting at every
concert next to some good musician, a composer if possible, and getting him
to say what he thought of the works performed. At the end of a few months
of this apprenticeship, he knew his job: the fledgling could fly. He did
not, it is true, soar like an eagle: and God knows what howlers Goujart
committed with the greatest show of authority in his paper! He listened and
read haphazard, stirred the mixture up well in his sluggish brains, and
arrogantly laid down the law for others; he wrote in a pretentious style,
interlarded with puns, and plastered over with an aggressive pedantry: he
had the mind of a schoolmaster. Sometimes, every now and then, he drew down
on himself cruel replies: then he shammed dead, and took good care not to
answer them. He was a mixture of cunning and thick-headedness, insolent or
groveling as circumstances demanded. He cringed to the masters who had an
official position or an established fame (he had no other means of judging
merit in music). He scorned everybody else, and exploited writers who were
starving. He was no fool.

In spite of his reputation and the authority he had acquired, he knew in
his heart of hearts that he knew nothing about music: and he recognized
that Christophe knew a great deal about it. Nothing would have induced him
to say so: but it was borne in upon him. And now he heard Christophe play:
and he made great efforts to understand him, looking absorbed, profound,
without a thought in his head: he could not see a yard ahead of him through
the fog of sound, and he wagged his head solemnly as one who knew and
adjusted the outward and visible signs of his approval to the fluttering of
the eyelids of Sylvain Kohn, who found it hard to stand still.

At last Christophe, emerging to consciousness from the fumes of wine and
music, became dimly aware of the pantomime going on behind his back: he
turned and saw the two amateurs of music. They rushed at him and violently
shook hands with him--Sylvain Kohn gurgling that he had played like a god,
Goujart declaring solemnly that he had the left hand of Rubinstein and the
right hand of Paderewski (or it might be the other way round). Both agreed
that such talent ought not to be hid under a bushel, and they pledged
themselves to reveal it. And, incidentally, they were both resolved to
extract from it as much honor and profit as possible.

From that day on Sylvain Kohn took to inviting Christophe to his rooms,
and put at his disposal his excellent piano, which he never used himself.
Christophe, who was bursting with suppressed music, did not need to be
urged, and accepted: and for a time he made good use of the invitation.

At first all went well. Christophe was only too happy to play: and
Sylvain Kohn was tactful enough to leave him to play in peace. He enjoyed
it thoroughly himself. By one of those queer phenomena which must be
in everybody's observation, the man, who was no musician, no artist,
cold-hearted and devoid of all poetic feeling and real kindness, was
enslaved sensually by Christophe's music, which he did not understand,
though he found in it a strongly voluptuous pleasure. Unfortunately, he
could not hold his tongue. He had to talk, loudly, while Christophe was
playing. He had to underline the music with affected exclamations, like a
concert snob, or else he passed ridiculous comment on it. Then Christophe
would thump the piano, and declare that he could not go on like that. Kohn
would try hard to be silent: but he could not do it: at once he would
begin again to sniffle, sigh, whistle, beat time, hum, imitate the various
instruments. And when the piece was ended he would have burst if he had not
given Christophe the benefit of his inept comment.

He was a queer mixture of German sentimentality, Parisian humbug, and
intolerable fatuousness. Sometimes he expressed second-hand precious
opinions; sometimes he made extravagant comparisons; and then he would
make dirty, obscene remarks, or propound some insane nonsense. By way of
praising Beethoven, he would point out some trickery, or read a lascivious
sensuality into his music. The _Quartet in C Minor_ seemed to him jolly
spicy. The sublime _Adagio of the Ninth Symphony_ made him think of
Cherubino. After the three crashing chords at the opening of the _Symphony
in C Minor_, he called out: "Don't come in! I've some one here." He admired
the Battle of _Heldenleben_ because he pretended that it was like the noise
of a motor-car. And always he had some image to explain each piece, a
puerile incongruous image. Really, it seemed impossible that he could have
any love for music. However, there was no doubt about it: he really did
love it: at certain passages to which he attached the most ridiculous
meanings the tears would come into his eyes. But after having been moved by
a scene from Wagner, he would strum out a gallop of Offenbach, or sing some
music-hall ditty after the _Ode to Joy_. Then Christophe would bob about
and roar with rage. But the worst of all to bear was not when Sylvain Kohn
was absurd so much as when he was trying to be profound and subtle, when he
was trying to impress Christophe, when it was Hamilton speaking, and not
Sylvain Kohn. Then Christophe would scowl blackly at him, and squash him
with cold contempt, which hurt Hamilton's vanity: very often these musical
evenings would end in a quarrel. But Kohn would forget it next day, and
Christophe, sorry for his rudeness, would make a point of going back.

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