Jean Christophe: In Paris by Romain Rolland

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"I know that," said Christophe. "It is my friend Shakespeare."

"No," said Arnaud gently. "It is a Frenchman who lived before him, Ronsard.
That will show you that, if it is the fashion in France to care for music,
it is no new thing."

But what astonished Christophe was not so much that people in France should
care for music, as that almost without exception they cared for the same
music as the people in Germany. In the world of Parisian snobs and artists,
in which he had moved at first, it had been the mode to treat the German
masters as distinguished foreigners, by all means to be admired, but to be
kept at a distance: they were always ready to poke fun at the dullness of a
Gluck, and the barbarity of a Wagner: against them they set up the subtlety
of the French composers. And in the end Christophe had begun to wonder
whether a Frenchman could have the least understanding of German music, to
judge by the way it was rendered in France. Only a short time before he had
come away perfectly scandalized from a performance of an opera of Gluck's:
the ingenious Parisians had taken it into their heads to deck the old
fellow up, and cover him with ribbons, and pad out his rhythms, and bedizen
his music with, impressionistic settings, and charming little dancing
girls, forward and wanton.... Poor Gluck! There was nothing left of his
eloquent and sublime feeling, his moral purity, his naked sorrow. Was it
that the French could not understand these things?--And now Christophe
could see how deeply and tenderly his new friends loved the very inmost
quality of the Germanic spirit, and the old German _lieder_, and the German
classics. And he asked them if it was not the fact that the great Germans
were as foreigners to them, and that a Frenchman could only really love the
artists of his own nationality.

"Not at all!" they protested. "It is only the critics who take upon
themselves to speak for us. They always follow the fashion, and they want
us to follow it too. But we don't worry about them any more than they worry
about us. They're funny little people, trying to teach us what is and is
not French--us, who are French of the old stock of France!... They come and
tell us that our France is in Rameau,--or Racine,--and nowhere else. As
though we did not know,--(and thousands like us in the provinces, and in
Paris). How often Beethoven, Mozart, and Gluck, have sat with us by the
fireside, and watched with us by the bedside of those we love, and shared
our troubles, and revived our hopes, and been one of ourselves! If we
dared say exactly what we thought, it is much more likely that the French
artists, who are set up on a pedestal by our Parisian critics, are
strangers among us."

"The truth is," said Olivier, "that if there are frontiers in art, they are
not so much barriers between races as barriers between classes. I'm not so
sure that there is a French art or a German art: but there is certainly
one art for the rich and another for the poor. Gluck was a great man of
the middle-classes: he belongs to our class. A certain French artist,
whose name I won't mention, is not of our class: though he was of the
middle-class by birth, he is ashamed of us, and denies us: and we deny
him."

What Olivier said was true. The better Christophe got to know the French,
the more he was struck by the resemblance between the honest men of France
and the honest men of Germany. The Arnauds reminded him of dear old Schulz
with his pure, disinterested love of art, his forgetfulness of self, his
devotion to beauty. And he loved them in memory of Schulz.

* * * * *

At the same time as he realized the absurdity of moral frontiers between
the honest men of different nationalities, Christophe began to see the
absurdity of the frontiers that lay between the different ideas of honest
men of the same nationality. Thanks to him, though without any deliberate
effort on his part, the Abbe Corneille and M. Watelet, two men who seemed
very far indeed from understanding each other, made friends.

Christophe used to borrow books from both of them and, with a want of
ceremony which shocked Olivier, he used to lend their books in turn to the
other. The Abbe Corneille was not at all scandalized: he had an intuitive
perception of the quality of a man: and, without seeming to do so, he had
marked the generous and even unconsciously religious nature of his young
neighbor. A book by Kropotkin, which had been borrowed from M. Watelet, and
for different reasons had given great pleasure to all three of them, began
the process of bringing them together. It chanced one evening that they met
in Christophe's room. At first Christophe was afraid that they might be
rude to each other: but, on the contrary, they were perfectly polite, They
discussed various sage subjects: their travels, and their experience of
men. And they discovered in each other a fund of gentleness and the spirit
of the Gospels, and chimerical hopes, in spite of the many reasons that
each had for despair, They discovered a mutual sympathy, mingled with a
little irony. Their sympathy was of a very discreet nature. They never
revealed their fundamental beliefs. They rarely met and did not try to
meet: but when they did so they were glad to see each other.

Of the two men the Abbe Corneille was not the least independent of mind,
though Christophe would never have thought it. He gradually came to
perceive the greatness of the religious and yet free ideas, the immense,
serene, and unfevered mysticism which permeated the priest's whole mind,
the every action of his daily life, and his whole outlook on the
world,--leading him to live in Christ, as he believed that Christ had lived
in God.

He denied nothing, no single element of life. To him the whole of
Scripture, ancient and modern, lay and religious, from Moses to Berthelot,
was certain, divine, the very expression of God. Holy Writ was to him only
its richest example, just as the Church was the highest company of men
united in the brotherhood of God: but in neither of them was the spirit
confined in any fixed, unchanging truth. Christianity was the living
Christ. The history of the world was only the history of the perpetual
advance of the idea of God. The fall of the Jewish Temple, the ruin of the
pagan world, the repulse of the Crusades, the humiliation of Boniface VIII,
Galileo flinging the world back into giddy space, the infinitely little
becoming more mighty than the great, the downfall of kingdoms, and the end
of the Concordats, all these for a time threw the minds of men out of their
reckoning. Some clung desperately to the passing order: some caught at a
plank and drifted. The Abbe Corneille only asked: "Where do we stand as
men? Where is that which makes us live?" For he believed: "Where life is,
there is God."--And that was why he was in sympathy with Christophe.

For his part, Christophe was glad once more to hear the splendid music of a
great religious soul. It awoke in him echoes distant and profound. Through
the feeling of perpetual reaction, which is in vigorous natures a vital
instinct, the instinct of self-preservation, the stroke which preserves
the quivering balance of the boat, and gives it a new drive onward,--his
surfeit of doubts and his disgust with Parisian sensuality had for the last
two years been slowly restoring God to his place in Christophe's heart. Not
that he believed in God. He denied God. But he was filled with the spirit
of God. The Abbe Corneille used to tell him with a smile, that like his
namesake, the sainted giant, he bore God on his shoulders without knowing
it.

"How is it that I don't see it then?" Christophe would ask.

"You are like thousands of others: you see God every day, and never know
that it is He. God reveals Himself to all, in every shape,--to some He
appears in their daily life, as He did to Saint Peter in Galilee,--to
others (like your friend M. Watelet), as He did to Saint Thomas, in wounds
and suffering that call for healing,--to you in the dignity of your ideal:
_Noli me tangere_.... Some day you will know it."

"I will never surrender," said Christophe. "I am free. Free I shall
remain."

"Only the more will you live in God," replied the priest calmly.

But Christophe would not submit to being made out a Christian against his
will. He defended himself ardently and simply, as though it mattered in the
least whether one label more than another was plastered on to his ideas.
The Abbe Corneille would listen with a faint ecclesiastical irony, that was
hardly perceptible, while it was altogether kindly. He had an inexhaustible
fund of patience, based on his habit of faith. It had been tempered by the
trials to which the existing Church had exposed him: while it had made him
profoundly melancholy, and had even dragged him through terrible moral
crises, he had not really been touched by it all. It was cruel to suffer
the oppression of his superiors, to have his every action spied upon by
the Bishops, and watched by the free-thinkers, who were endeavoring to
exploit his ideas, to use him as a weapon against his own faith, and to
be misunderstood and attacked both by his co-religionists and the enemies
of his religion. It was impossible for him to offer any resistance: for
submission was enforced upon him. It was impossible for him to submit in
his heart: for he knew that the authorities were wrong. It was agony for
him to hold his peace. It was agony for him to speak and to be wrongly
interpreted. Not to mention the soul for which he was responsible, he had
to think of those, who looked to him for counsel and help, while he had to
stand by and see them suffer.... The Abbe Corneille suffered both for them
and for himself, but he was resigned. He knew how small a thing were the
days of trial in the long history of the Church.--Only, by dint of being
turned in upon himself in his silent resignation, slowly he lost heart, and
became timid and afraid to speak, so that it became more and more difficult
for him to do anything, and little by little the torpor of silence crept
over him. Meeting Christophe had given him new courage. His neighbor's
youthful ardor and the affectionate and simple interest which he took in
his doings, his sometimes indiscreet questions, did him a great deal of
good. Christophe forced him to mix once more with living men and women.

Aubert, the journeyman electrician, once met him in Christophe's room. He
started back when he saw the priest, and found it hard to conceal his
feeling of dislike. Even when he had overcome his first inclination, he was
uncomfortable and oddly embarrassed at finding himself in the company of a
man in a cassock, a creature to whom he could attach no exact definition.
However, his sociable instincts and the pleasure he always found in talking
to educated men were stronger than his anti-clericalism. He was surprised
by the pleasant relations existing between M. Watelet and the Abbe
Corneille: he was no less surprised to find a priest who was a democrat,
and a revolutionary who was an aristocrat: it upset all his preconceived
ideas. He tried vainly to classify them in any social category: for he
always had to classify people before he could begin to understand them. It
was not easy to find a pigeon-hole for the peaceful freedom of mind of a
priest who had read Anatole France and Renan, and was prepared to discuss
them calmly, justly, and with some knowledge. In matters of science the
Abbe Corneille's way was to accept the guidance of those who knew, rather
than of those who laid down the law. He respected authority, but in his
eyes it stood lower than knowledge. The flesh, the spirit, and charity:
the three orders, the three rungs of the divine ladder, the ladder of
Jacob.--Of course, honest Aubert was far, indeed, from understanding, or
even from dreaming, of the possibility of such a state of mind. The Abbe
Corneille used to tell Christophe that Aubert reminded him of certain
French peasants whom he had seen one day. A young Englishwoman had asked
them the way, in English. They listened solemnly, but did not understand.
Then they spoke in French. She did not understand. Then they looked at each
other pityingly, and wagged their heads, and went on with their work, and
said:

"What a pity! What a pity! Such a pretty girl, too!..."

As though they had thought her deaf, or dumb, or soft in the head....

At first Aubert was abashed by the knowledge and distinguished manners of
the priest and M. Watelet, and sat mum, listening intently to what they
said. Then, little by little, he joined in the conversation, giving way to
the naive pleasure that he found in hearing himself speak. He paraded his
generous store of rather vague ideas. The other two would listen politely,
and smile inwardly. Aubert was delighted, and could not hold himself in:
he took advantage of, and presently abused, the inexhaustible patience of
the Abbe Corneille. He read his literary productions to him. The priest
listened resignedly; and it did not bore him overmuch, for he listened not
so much to the words as to the man. And then he would reply to Christophe's
commiseration:

"Bah! I hear so many of them!"

Aubert was grateful to M. Watelet and the Abbe Corneille: and, without
taking much trouble to understand each other's ideas, or even to find out
what they were, the three of them became very good friends without exactly
knowing why. They were very surprised to find themselves so intimate. They
would never have thought it.--Christophe was the bond between them.

He had other innocent allies in the three children, the two little
Elsbergers and M. Watelet's adopted daughter. He was great friends with
them: they adored him. He told each of them about the other, and gave them
an irresistible longing to know each other. They used to make signs to each
other from the windows, and spoke to each other furtively on the stairs.
Aided and abetted by Christophe, they even managed to get permission
sometimes to meet in the Luxembourg Gardens. Christophe was delighted with
the success of his guile, and went to see them there the first time they
were together: they were shy and embarrassed, and hardly knew what to make
of their new happiness. He broke down their reserve in a moment, and
invented games for them, and races, and played hide-and-seek: he joined in
as keenly as though he were a child of ten: the passers-by cast amused and
quizzical glances at the great big fellow, running and shouting and dodging
round trees, with three little girls after him. And as their parents were
still suspicious of each other, and showed no great readiness to let these
excursions to the Luxembourg Gardens occur very often--(because it kept
them too far out of sight)--Christophe managed to get Commandant Chabran,
who lived on the ground floor, to invite the children to play in the garden
belonging to the house.

Chance had thrown Christophe and the old soldier together:--(chance always
singles out those who can turn it to account).--Christophe's writing-table
was near his window. One day the wind blew a few sheets of music down into
the garden. Christophe rushed down, bareheaded and disheveled, just as he
was, without even taking the trouble to brush his hair. He thought he would
only have to see a servant. However, the daughter opened the door to him.
He was rather taken aback, but told her what he had come for. She smiled
and let him in: they went into the garden. When he had picked up his papers
he was for hurrying away, and she was taking him to the door, when they met
the old soldier. The Commandant gazed at his odd visitor in some surprise.
His daughter laughed, and introduced him.

"Ah! So you are the musician?" said the old soldier. "We are comrades."

They shook hands. They talked in a friendly, bantering tone of the concerts
they gave together, Christophe with his piano, the Commandant with his
flute. Christophe tried to go, but the old man would not let him: and he
plunged blindly into a disquisition on music. Suddenly he stopped short,
and said:

"Come and see my canons."

Christophe followed him, wondering how anybody could be interested in
anything he might think about French artillery. The old man showed him in
triumph a number of musical canons, amazing productions, compositions that
might just as well be read upside down, or played as duets, one person
playing the right-hand page, and the other the left. The Commandant was an
old pupil of the Polytechnic, and had always had a taste for music: but
what he loved most of all in it was the mathematical problem: it seemed
to him--(as up to a point it is)--a magnificent mental gymnastic: and
he racked his brains in the invention and solution of puzzles in the
construction of music, each more useless and extravagant than the last. Of
course, his military career had not left him much time for the development
of his mania: but since his retirement he had thrown himself into it with
enthusiasm: he expended on it all the energy and ingenuity which he had
previously employed in pursuing the hordes of negro kings through the
deserts of Africa, or avoiding their traps. Christophe found his puzzles
quite amusing, and set him a more complicated one to solve. The old soldier
was delighted: they vied with one another: they produced a perfect shower
of musical riddles. After they had been playing the game for some time,
Christophe went upstairs to his own room. But the very next morning his
neighbor sent him a new problem, a regular teaser, at which the Commandant
had been working half the night: he replied with another: and the duel went
on until Christophe, who was getting tired of it, declared himself beaten:
at which the old soldier was perfectly delighted. He regarded his success
as a retaliation on Germany. He invited Christophe to lunch. Christophe's
frankness in telling the old soldier that he detested his musical
compositions, and shouting in protest when Chabran began to murder an
_andante_ of Haydn on his harmonium, completed the conquest. From that time
on they often met to talk. But not about music. Christophe could not summon
up any great interest in his neighbor's crotchety notions about it, and
much preferred getting him to talk about military subjects. The Commandant
asked nothing better: music was only a forced amusement for the unhappy
man: in reality, he was fretting his life out.

He was easily led on to yarn about his African campaigns. Gigantic
adventures worthy of the tales of a Pizarro and a Cortez! Christophe was
delighted with the vivid narrative of that marvelous and barbaric epic, of
which he knew nothing, and almost every Frenchman is ignorant: the tale of
the twenty years during which the heroism, and courage, and inventiveness,
and superhuman energy of a conquering handful of Frenchmen were spent far
away in the depths of the Black Continent, where they were surrounded
by armies of negroes, where they were deprived of the most rudimentary
arms of war, and yet, in the face of public opinion and a panic-stricken
Government, in spite of France, conquered for France an empire greater than
France itself. There was the flavor of a mighty joy, a flavor of blood in
the tale, from which, in Christophe's mind's eye, there sprang the figures
of modern _condottieri_, heroic adventurers, unlooked for in the France of
to-day, whom the France of to-day is ashamed to own, so that she modestly
draws a veil over them. The Commandant's voice would ring out bravely
as he recalled it all: and he would jovially recount, with learned
descriptions--(oddly interpolated in his epic narrative)--of the geological
structure of the country, in cold, precise terms, the story of the
tremendous marches, and the charges at full gallop, and the man-hunts, in
which he had been hunter and quarry, turn and turn about, in a struggle to
the death.--Christophe would listen and watch his face, and feel a great
pity for such a splendid human animal, condemned to inaction, and forced to
spend his time in playing ridiculous games. He wondered how he could ever
have become resigned to such a lot. He asked the old man how he had done
it. The Commandant was at first not at all inclined to let a stranger
into his confidence as to his grievances. But the French are naturally
loquacious, especially when they have a chance of pitching into each other:

"What on earth should I do," he said, "in the army as it is to-day? The
marines write books. The infantry study sociology. They do everything but
make war. They don't even prepare for it: they prepare never to go to war
again: they study the philosophy of war.... The philosophy of war! That's
a game for beasts of burden wondering how much thrashing they are going to
get!... Discussing, philosophizing, no, that's not my work. Much better
stay at home and go on with my canons!"

He was too much ashamed to air the most serious of his grievances: the
suspicion created among the officers by the appeal to informers, the
humiliation of having to submit to the insolent orders of certain crass and
mischievous politicians, the army's disgust at being put to base police
duty, taking inventories of the churches, putting down industrial strikes,
at the bidding of capital and the spite of the party in power--the petty
burgess radicals and anti-clericals--against the rest of the country. Not
to speak of the old African's disgust with the new Colonial Army, which was
for the most part recruited from the lowest elements of the nation, by way
of pandering to the egoism and cowardice of the rest, who refuse to share
in the honor and the risks of securing the defense of "greater
France"--France beyond the seas.

Christophe was not concerned with these French quarrels: they were no
affair of his: but he sympathized with the old soldier. Whatever he might
think of war, it seemed to him that an army was meant to produce soldiers,
as an apple-tree to produce apples, and that it was a strange perversion to
graft on to it politicians, esthetes, and sociologists. And yet he could
not understand how a man of such vigor could give way to his adversaries.
It is to be his own worst enemy for a man not to fight his enemies. In
all French people of any worth at all there was a spirit of surrender, a
strange temper of renunciation.--To Christophe it was even more profound,
and even more touching as it existed in the old soldier's daughter.

Her name was Celine. She had beautiful hair, plaited and braided so as
to set off her high, round forehead and her rather pointed ears, her
thin cheeks, and her pretty chin: she was like a country girl, with fine
intelligent dark eyes, very trustful, very soft, rather short-sighted: her
nose was a little too large, and she had a tiny mole on her upper lip by
the corner of her mouth, and she had a quiet smile which made her pout
prettily and thrust out her lower lip, which was a little protruding. She
was kind, active, clever, but she had no curiosity of mind. She read very
little, and never any of the newest books, never went to the theater, never
traveled,--(for traveling bored her father, who had had too much of it
in the old days),--never had anything to do with any polite charitable
work,--(her father used to condemn all such things),--made no attempt to
study,--(he used to make fun of blue stockings),--hardly ever left her
little patch of garden inclosed by its four high walls, so that it was like
being at the bottom of a deep well. And yet she was not really bored. She
occupied her time as best she could, and was good-tempered and resigned.
About her and about the setting which every woman unconsciously creates
for herself wherever she may be, there was a Chardinesque atmosphere: the
same soft silence, the same tranquil expression, the same attitude of
absorption--(a little drowsy and languid)--in the common task: the poetry
of the daily round, of the accustomed way of life, with its fixed thoughts
and actions, falling into exactly the same place at exactly the same
time--thoughts and actions which are cherished none the less with an
all-pervading tranquil gentleness: the serene mediocrity of the fine-souled
women of the middle-class: honest, conscientious, truthful, calm--calm in
their pleasures, unruffled in their labors, and yet poetic in all their
qualities. They are healthy and neat and tidy, clean in body and mind: all
their lives are sweetened with the scent of good bread, and lavender, and
integrity, and kindness. There is peace in all that they are and do, the
peace of old houses and smiling souls....

Christophe, whose affectionate trustfulness invited trust, had become very
friendly with her: they used to talk quite frankly: and he even went so far
as to ask her certain questions, which she was surprised to find herself
answering: she would tell him things which she had not told anybody, even
her most intimate friends.

"You see," Christophe would say, "you're not afraid of me. There's no
danger of our falling in love with each other: we're too good friends for
that."

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