Jean Christophe: In Paris by Romain Rolland

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"Yes. You are in the same state of mind as that of the knights of the
Middle Ages, when, for the first time, they found themselves faced with
gunpowder. What do you want? There is evolution in war too."

"So be it. But then, let us be frank, and say that war is war."

"Suppose a common enemy were to threaten Europe, wouldn't you throw in your
lot with the Germans?"

"We did so, in China."

"Very well, then: look about you. Don't you see that the heroic idealism
of your country and every other country in Europe is actually threatened?
Don't you see that they are all, more or less, a prey to the adventurers of
every class of society? To fight that common enemy, don't you think you
should join with those of your adversaries who are of some worth and moral
vigor? How can a man like you set so little store by the realities of life?
Here are people who uphold an ideal which is different from your own! An
ideal is a force, you cannot deny it: in the struggle in which you were
recently engaged, it was your adversaries' ideal which defeated you.
Instead of wasting your strength in fighting against it, why not make use
of it, side by side with your own, against the enemies of all ideals, the
men who are exploiting your country and your wealth of ideas, the men who
are bringing European civilization to rottenness?"

"For whose sake? One must know where one is. To make our adversaries
triumph?"

"When you were in Africa, you never stopped to think whether you were
fighting for the King or the Republic. I fancy that not many of you ever
gave a thought to the Republic."

"They didn't care a rap."

"Good! And that was well for France. You conquered for her, as well as for
yourselves, and for the honor and the joy of it. Why not do the same here?
Why not widen the scope of the fight? Don't go haggling over differences in
politics and religion. These things are utterly futile. What does it matter
whether your nation is the eldest daughter of the Church or the eldest
daughter of Reason? The only thing that does matter is that it should
live! Everything that exalts life is good. There is only one enemy,
pleasure-seeking egoism, which fouls the sources of life and dries them up.
Exalt force, exalt the light, exalt fruitful love, the joy of sacrifice,
action, and give up expecting other people to act for you. Do, act,
combine! Come!..."

And he laughed and began to bang out the first bars of the march in _B
minor_ from the _Choral Symphony_.

"Do you know," he said, breaking off, "that if I were one of your
musicians, say Charpentier or Bruneau (devil take the two of them!),
I would combine in a choral symphony _Aux armes, citoyens!_,
_l'Internationale_, _Vive Henri IV_, and _Dieu Protege la France!_,--(You
see, something like this.)--I would make you a soup so hot that it would
burn your mouth! It would be unpleasant,--(no worse in any case than what
you are doing now):--but I vow it would warm your vitals, and that you
would have to set out on the march!"

And he roared with laughter.

The Commandant laughed too:

"You're a fine fellow, Monsieur Krafft. What a pity you're not one of us!"

"But I am one of you! The fight is the same everywhere. Let us close up the
ranks!"

The Commandant quite agreed: but there he stayed. Then Christophe pressed
his point and brought the conversation back to M. Weil and the Elsbergers.
And the old soldier no less obstinately went back to his eternal arguments
against Jews and Dreyfusards, and nothing that Christophe had said seemed
to have had the slightest effect on him.

Christophe grew despondent. Olivier said to him:

"Don't you worry about it. One man cannot all of a sudden change the whole
state of mind of a nation. That's too much to expect! But you have done a
good deal without knowing it."

"What have I done?" said Christophe.

"You are Christophe."

"What good is that to other people?"

"A great deal. Just go on being what you are, my dear Christophe. Don't you
worry about us."

But Christophe could not surrender. He went on arguing with Commandant
Chabran, sometimes with great vehemence. It amused Celine. She was
generally present at their discussions, sitting and working in silence. She
took no part in the argument: but it seemed to make her more lively: and
quite a different expression would come into her eyes: it was as though it
gave her more breathing-space. She began to read, and went out a little
more, and found more things to interest her. And one day, when Christophe
was battling with her father about the Elsbergers, the Commandant saw her
smile: he asked her what she was thinking, and she replied calmly:

"I think M. Krafft is right."

The Commandant was taken aback, and said:

"You ... you surprise me!... However, right or wrong, we are what we are.
And there's no reason why we should know these people. Isn't it so, my
dear?"

"No, father," she replied. "I would like to know them."

The Commandant said nothing, and pretended that he had not heard. He
himself was much less insensible of Christophe's influence than he cared to
appear. His vehemence and narrow-mindedness did not prevent his having a
proper sense of justice and very generous feelings. He loved Christophe, he
loved his frankness and his moral soundness, and he used often bitterly to
regret that Christophe was a German. Although he always lost his temper in
these discussions, he was always eager for more, and Christophe's arguments
did produce an effect on him though he would never have been willing to
admit it. But one day Christophe found him absorbed in reading a book which
he would not let him see. And when Celine took Christophe to the door and
found herself alone with him, she said:

"Do you know what he was reading? One of M. Weil's books."

Christophe was delighted.

"What does he say about it?"

"He says: 'Beast!'... But he can't put it down."

Christophe made no allusion to the fact with the Commandant. It was he who
asked:

"Why have you stopped hurling that blessed Jew at my head?"

"Because I don't think there's any need to," said Christophe. "Why?" asked
the Commandant aggressively.

Christophe made no reply, and went away laughing.

* * * * *

Olivier was right. It is not through words that a man can influence other
men: but through his life. There are people who irradiate an atmosphere
of peace from their eyes, and in their gestures, and through the silent
contact with the serenity of their souls. Christophe irradiated life.
Softly, softly, like the moist air of spring, it penetrated the walls and
the closed windows of the somnolent old house: it gave new life to the
hearts of men and women, whom sorrow, weakness, and isolation had for years
been consuming, so that they were withered and like dead creatures. What
a power there is in one soul over another! Those who wield that power and
those who feel it are alike ignorant of its working. And yet the life of
the world is in the ebb and flow controlled by that mysterious power of
attraction.

On the second floor, below Christophe and Olivier's room, there lived,
as we have seen, a young woman of thirty-five, a Madame Germain, a widow
of two years' standing, who, the year before, had lost her little girl,
a child of seven. She lived with her mother-in-law, and they never saw
anybody. Of all the tenants of the house, they had the least to do with
Christophe. They had hardly met, and they had never spoken to each other.

She was a tall woman, thin, but with a good figure; she had fine brown
eyes, dull and rather inexpressive, though every now and then there glowed
in them a hard, mournful light. Her face was sallow and her complexion
waxy: her cheeks were hollow and her lips were tightly compressed. The
elder Madame Germain was a devout lady, and spent all her time at church.
The younger woman lived in jealous isolation in her grief. She took no
interest in anything or anybody. She surrounded herself with portraits and
pictures of her little girl, and by dint of staring at them she had ceased
to see her as she was: the photographs and dead presentments had killed the
living image of the child. She had ceased to see her as she was, but she
clung to it: she was determined to think of nothing but the child: and so,
in the end, she reached a point at which she could not even think of her:
she had completed the work of death. There she stopped, frozen, with her
heart turned to stone, with no tears to shed, with her life withered.
Religion was no aid to her. She went through the formalities, but her heart
was not in them, and therefore she had no living faith: she gave money for
Masses, but she took no active part in any of the work of the Church: her
whole religion was centered in the one thought of seeing her child again.
What did the rest matter? God? What had she to do with God? To see her
child again, only to see her again.... And she was by no means sure that
she would do so. She wished to believe it, willed it hardly, desperately:
but she was in doubt.... She could not bear to see other children, and used
to think:

"Why are they not dead too?"

In the neighborhood there was a little girl who in figure and manner was
like her own. When she saw her from behind, with her little pigtails down
her back, she used to tremble. She would follow her, and, when the child
turned round and she saw that it was not _she_, she would long to strangle
her. She used to complain that the Elsberger children made a noise
below her, though they were very quiet, and even very subdued by their
up-bringing: and when the unhappy children began to play about their
room, she would send her maid to ask her neighbors to make them be quiet.
Christophe met her once as he was coming in with the little girls, and was
hurt and horrified by the hard way in which she looked at them.

One summer evening when the poor woman was sitting in the dark in the
self-hypnotized condition of the utter emptiness of her living death, she
heard Christophe playing. It was his habit to sit at the piano in the
half-light, musing and improvising. His music irritated her, for it
disturbed the empty torpor into which she had sunk. She shut the window
angrily. The music penetrated through to her room. Madame Germain was
filled with a sort of hatred for it. She would have been glad to stop
Christophe, but she had no right to do so. Thereafter, every day at the
same time she sat waiting impatiently and irritably for the music to begin:
and when it was later than usual her irritation was only the more acute. In
spite of herself, she had to follow the music through to the end, and when
it was over she found it hard to sink back into her usual apathy.--And one
evening, when she was curled up in a corner of her dark room, and, through
the walls and the closed window, the distant music reached her, that
light-giving music ... she felt a thrill run through her, and once more
tears came to her eyes. She went and opened the window, and stood there
listening and weeping. The music was like rain drop by drop falling upon
her poor withered heart, and giving it new life. Once more she could see
the sky, the stars, the summer night: within herself she felt the dawning
of a new interest in life, as yet only a poor, pale light, vague and
sorrowful sympathy for others. And that night, for the first time for many
months, the image of her little girl came to her in her dreams.--For the
surest road to bring us near the beloved dead, the best means of seeing
them again, is not to go with them into death, but to live. They live in
our lives, and die with us.

She made no attempt to meet Christophe. Bather she avoided him. But she
used to hear him go by on the stairs with the children: and she would stand
in hiding behind her door to listen to their babyish prattle, which so
moved her heart.

One day, as she was going out, she heard their little padding footsteps
coming down the stairs, rather more noisily than usual, and the voice of
one of the children saying to her sister:

"Don't make so much noise, Lucette. Christophe says you mustn't because of
the sorrowful lady."

And the other child began to walk more quietly and to talk in a whisper.
Then Madame Germain could not restrain herself: she opened the door, and
took the children in her arms, and hugged them fiercely. They were afraid:
one of the children began to cry. She let them go, and went back into her
own room.

After that, whenever she met them, she used to try to smile at them, a poor
withered smile,--(for she had grown unused to smiling);--she would speak to
them awkwardly and affectionately, and the children would reply shyly in
timid, bashful whispers. They were still afraid of the sorrowful lady, more
afraid than ever: and now, whenever they passed the door, they used to run
lest she should come out and catch them. She used to hide to catch sight
of them as they passed. She would have been ashamed to be seen talking to
the children. She was ashamed in her own eyes. It seemed to her that she
was robbing her own dead child of some of the love to which she only was
entitled. She would kneel down and pray for her forgiveness. But now that
the instinct for life and love was newly awakened in her, she could not
resist it: it was stronger than herself.

One evening, as Christophe came in, he saw that there was an unusual
commotion in the house. He met a tradesman, who told him that the tenant
of the third floor, M. Watelet, had just died suddenly of angina pectoris.
Christophe was filled with pity, not so much for his unhappy neighbor as
for the child who was left alone in the world. M. Watelet was not known to
have any relations, and there was every reason to believe that he had left
the girl almost entirely unprovided for. Christophe raced upstairs, and
went into the flat on the third floor, the door of which was open. He
found the Abbe Corneille with the body, and the child in tears, crying
to her father: the housekeeper was making clumsy efforts to console her.
Christophe took the child in his arms and spoke to her tenderly. She clung
to him desperately: he could not think of leaving her: he wanted to take
her away, but she would not let him. He stayed with her. He sat near the
window in the dying light of day, and went on rocking her in his arms and
speaking to her softly. The child gradually grew calmer, and went to sleep,
still sobbing. Christophe laid her on her bed, and tried awkwardly to
undress her and undo the laces of her little shoes. It was nightfall. The
door of the flat had been left open. A shadow entered with a rustling of
skirts. In the fading light Christophe recognized the fevered eyes of the
sorrowful lady. He was amazed. She stood by the door, and said thickly:

"I came.... Will you ... will you let me take her?"

Christophe took her hand and pressed it. Madame Germain was in tears. Then
she sat by the bedside. And, a moment later, she said:

"Let me stay with her...."

Christophe went up to his own room with the Abbe Corneille. The priest was
a little embarrassed, and begged Ms pardon for coming up. He hoped, he
said, humbly, that the dead man would have nothing to reproach him with: he
had gone, not as a priest, but as a friend. Christophe was too much moved
to speak, and left him with an affectionate shake of the hand.

Next morning, when Christophe went down, he found the child with her arms
round Madame Germain's neck, with the naive confidence which makes children
surrender absolutely to those who have won their affection. She was glad to
go with her new friend.... Alas! she had soon forgotten her adopted father.
She showed just the same affection for her new mother. That was not very
comforting. Did Madame Germain, in the egoism of her love, see it?...
Perhaps. But what did it matter? The thing is to love. That way lies
happiness....

A few weeks after the funeral Madame Germain took the child into the
country, far away from Paris. Christophe and Olivier saw them off. The
woman had an expression of contentment and secret joy which they had never
known in her before. She paid no attention to them. However, just as they
were going, she noticed Christophe, and held out her hand, and said:

"It was you who saved me."

"What's the matter with the woman?" asked Christophe in amazement, as they
were going upstairs after her departure.

A few days later the post brought him a photograph of a little girl whom he
did not know, sitting on a stool, with her little hands sagely folded in
her lap, while she looked up at him with clear, sad eyes. Beneath it were
written these words:

"With thanks from my dear, dead child."

* * * * *

Thus it was that the breath of life passed into all these people. In the
attic on the fifth floor was a great and mighty flame of humanity, the
warmth and light of which were slowly filtered through the house.

But Christophe saw it not. To him the process was very slow.

"Ah!" he would sigh, "if one could only bring these good people together,
all these people of all classes and every kind of belief, who refuse to
know each other! Can't it be done?"

"What do you want?" said Olivier. "You would need to have mutual tolerance
and a power of sympathy which can only come from inward joy,--the joy of a
healthy, normal, harmonious existence,--the joy of having a useful outlet
for one's activity, of feeling that one's efforts are not wasted, and that
one is serving some great purpose. You would need to have a prosperous
country, a nation at the height of greatness, or--(better still)--on the
road to greatness. And you must also have--(the two things go together)--a
power which could employ all the nation's energies, an intelligent and
strong power, which would be above party. Now, there is no power above
party save that which finds its strength in itself--not in the multitude,
that power which seeks not the support of anarchical majorities,--as it
does nowadays when it is no more than a well-trained dog in the hands
of second-rate men, and bends all to its will by service rendered: the
victorious general, the dictatorship of Public Safety, the supremacy of the
intelligence... what you will. It does not depend on us. You must have the
opportunity and the men capable of seizing it: you must have happiness and
genius. Let us wait and hope! The forces are there: the forces of faith,
knowledge, work, old France and new France, and the greater France.... What
an upheaval it would be, if the word were spoken, the magic word which
should let loose these forces all together! Of course, neither you nor I
can say the word. Who will say it? Victory? Glory?... Patience! The chief
thing is for the strength of the nation to be gathered together, and not
to rust away, and not to lose heart before the time comes. Happiness and
genius only come to those peoples who have earned them by ages of stoic
patience, and labor, and faith."

"Who knows?" said Christophe. "They often come sooner than we think--just
when we expect them least. You are counting too much on the work of ages.
Make ready. Gird your loins. Always be prepared with your shoes on your
feet and your staff in your hand.... For you do not know that the Lord will
not pass your doors this very night."

* * * * *

The Lord came very near that night. His shadow fell upon the threshold of
the house.

* * * * *

Following on a sequence of apparently insignificant events, relations
between France and Germany suddenly became strained: and, in a few days,
the usual neighborly attitude of banal courtesy passed into the provocative
mood which precedes war. There was nothing surprising in this, except to
those who were living under the illusion that the world is governed by
reason. But there were many such in France: and numbers of people were
amazed from day to day to see the vehement Gallophobia of the German
Press becoming rampant with the usual quasi-unanimity. Certain of those
newspapers which, in the two countries, arrogate to themselves a monopoly
of patriotism, and speak in the nation's name, and dictate to the State,
sometimes with the secret complicity of the State, the policy it should
follow, launched forth insulting ultimatums to France. There was a dispute
between Germany and England; and Germany did not admit the right of France
not to interfere: the insolent newspapers called upon her to declare for
Germany, or else threatened to make her pay the chief expenses of the war:
they presumed that they could wrest alliance from her fears, and already
regarded her as a conquered and contented vassal,--to be frank, like
Austria. It only showed the insane vanity of German Imperialism, drunk with
victory, and the absolute incapacity of German statesmen to understand
other races, so that they were always applying the simple common measure
which was law for themselves: Force, the supreme reason. Naturally, such a
brutal demand, made of an ancient nation, rich in its past ages of a glory
and a supremacy in Europe, such as Germany had never known, had had exactly
the opposite effect to that which Germany expected. It had provoked their
slumbering pride; France was shaken from top to base; and even the most
diffident of the French roared with anger.

The great mass of the German people had nothing at all to do with the
provocation: they were shocked by it: the honest men of every country
ask only to be allowed to live in peace: and the people of Germany are
particularly peaceful, affectionate, anxious to be on good terms with
everybody, and much more inclined to admire and emulate other nations than
to go to war with them. But the honest men of a nation are not asked for
their opinion: and they are not bold enough to give it. Those who are not
virile enough to take public action are inevitably condemned to be its
pawns. They are the magnificent and unthinking echo which casts back the
snarling cries of the Press and the defiance of their leaders, and swells
them into the _Marseillaise_, or the _Wacht am Rhein_.

It was a terrible blow to Christophe and Olivier. They were so used to
living in mutual love that they could not understand why their countries
did not do the same. Neither of them could grasp the reasons for the
persistent hostility, which was now so suddenly brought to the surface,
especially Christophe, who, being a German, had no sort of ground for
ill-feeling against the people whom his own people had conquered.
Although he himself was shocked by the intolerable vanity of some of his
fellow-countrymen, and, up to a certain point, was entirely with the French
against such a high-handed Brunswicker demand, he could not understand
why France should, after all, be unwilling to enter into an alliance with
Germany. The two countries seemed to him to have so many deep-seated
reasons for being united, so many ideas in common, and such great tasks to
accomplish together, that it annoyed him to see them persisting in their
wasteful, sterile ill-feeling. Like all Germans, he regarded France as the
most to blame for the misunderstanding: for, though he was quite ready to
admit that it was painful for her to sit still under the memory of her
defeat, yet that was, after all, only a matter of vanity, which should be
set aside in the higher interests of civilization and of France herself.
He had never taken the trouble to think out the problem of Alsace and
Lorraine. At school he had been taught to regard the annexation of those
countries as an act of justice, by which, after centuries of foreign
subjection, a German province had been restored to the German flag. And so,
he was brought down with a run, and he discovered that his friend regarded
the annexation as a crime. He had never even spoken to him about these
things, so convinced was he that they were of the same opinion: and now he
found Olivier, of whose good faith and broad-mindedness he was certain,
telling him, dispassionately, without anger and with profound sadness, that
it was possible for a great people to renounce the thought of vengeance for
such a crime, but quite impossible for them to subscribe to it without
dishonor.

They had great difficulty in understanding each other. Olivier's historical
argument, alleging the right of France to claim Alsace as a Latin country,
made no impression on Christophe: there were just as good arguments to the
contrary: history can provide politics with every sort of argument in every
sort of cause. Christophe was much more accessible to the human, and not
only French, aspect of the problem. Whether the Alsatians were or were not
Germans was not the question. They did not wish to be Germans: and that
was all that mattered. What nation has the right to say: "These people are
mine: for they are my brothers"? If the brothers in question renounce that
nation, though they be a thousand times in the wrong, the consequences of
the breach must always be borne by the party who has failed to win the
love of the other, and therefore has lost the right to presume to bind the
other's fortunes up with his own. After forty years of strained relations,
vexations, patent or disguised, and even of real advantage gained from the
exact and intelligent administration of Germany, the Alsatians persist in
their refusal to become Germans: and, though they might give in from sheer
exhaustion, nothing could ever wipe out the memory of the sufferings of the
generations, forced to live in exile from their native land, or, what is
even more pitiful, unable to leave it, and compelled to bend under a yoke
which was hateful to them, and to submit to the seizure of their country
and the slavery of their people.

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