Jean Christophe: In Paris by Romain Rolland

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"Gladly," said Christophe. "But what can I do?"

"Listen to me, advise me, give me courage. I am often so depressed! And
then I don't know what to do. I say to myself: 'What is the good of
fighting? What's the good of tormenting myself? One way or the other, what
does it matter? Nothing and nobody matters!' That is a dreadful condition
to be in. I don't want to get like that. Help me. Help me."

She looked utterly downcast; she looked older by ten years: she looked at
Christophe with abject, imploring eyes. He promised what she asked. Then
she revived, smiled, and was gay once more.

And in the evening she was laughing and flirting as usual.

* * * * *

Thereafter they had many intimate conversations. They were alone together:
she confided in him: he tried hard to understand and advise her: she
listened to his advice, or, if necessary, to his remonstrances, gravely,
attentively, like a good little girl: it was a distraction, an interest,
even a support for her: she thanked him coquettishly with a depth of
feeling in her eyes.--But her life was changed in nothing: it was only a
distraction the more.

Her day was passed in a succession of metamorphoses. She got up very late,
about midday, after a sleepless night: for she rarely went to sleep before
dawn. All day long she did nothing. She would vaguely call to mind a poem,
an idea, a scrap of an idea, or a face that had pleased her. She was never
quite awake until about four or five in the afternoon. Till then her
eyelids were heavy, her face was puffy, and she was sulky and sleepy. She
would revive on the arrival of a few girl-friends as talkative as herself,
and all sharing the same interest in the gossip of Paris. They chattered
endlessly about love. The psychology of love: that was the unfailing topic,
mixed up with dress, the indiscretions of others, and scandal. She had also
a circle of idle young men to whom it was necessary to spend three hours a
day among skirts: they ought to have worn them really, for they had the
souls and the conversation of girls. Christophe had his hour as her
confessor. At once Colette would become serious and intense. She was like
the young Frenchwoman, of whom Bodley speaks, who, at the confessional,
"developed a calmly prepared essay, a model of clarity and order, in
which everything that was to be said was properly arranged in distinct
categories."--And after that she flung herself once more into the business
of amusement. As the day went on she grew younger. In the evening she went
to the theater: and there was the eternal pleasure of recognizing the same
eternal faces in the audience:--her pleasure lay not in the play that was
performed, but in the actors whom she knew, whose familiar mannerisms she
remarked once more. And she exchanged spiteful remarks with the people who
came to see her in her box about the people in the other boxes and about
the actresses. The _ingenue_ was said to have a thin voice "like sour
mayonnaise," or the great comedienne was dressed "like a lampshade."--Or
else she went out to a party: and there the pleasure, for a pretty girl
like Colette, lay in being seen:--(but there were bad days: nothing is
more capricious than good looks in Paris):--and she renewed her store of
criticisms of people, and their dresses, and their physical defects. There
was no conversation.--She would go home late, and take her time about going
to bed (that was the time when she was most awake). She would dawdle about
her dressing-table: skim through a book: laugh to herself at the memory of
something said or done. She was bored and very unhappy. She could not go to
sleep, and in the night there would come frightful moments of despair.

Christophe, who only saw Colette for a few hours at intervals, and could
only be present at a few of these transformations, found it difficult to
understand her at all. He wondered when she was sincere,--or if she were
always sincere--or if she were never sincere. Colette herself could not
have told him. Like most girls who are idle and circumscribed in their
desires, she was in darkness. She did not know what she was, because she
did not know what she wanted, because she could not know what she wanted
without having tried it. She would try it, after her fashion, with the
maximum of liberty and the minimum of risk, trying to copy the people about
her and to take their moral measure. She was in no hurry to choose. She
would have liked to try everything, and turn everything to account.

But that did not work with a friend like Christophe. He was perfectly
willing to allow her to prefer people whom he did not admire, even people
whom he despised: but he would not suffer her to put him on the same level
with them. Everybody to his own taste: but at least let everybody have his
own taste.

He was the less inclined to be patient with Colette, as she seemed to take
a delight in gathering round herself all the young men who were most likely
to exasperate Christophe: disgusting little snobs, most of them wealthy,
all of them idle, or jobbed into a sinecure in some government
office--which amounts to the same thing. They all wrote--or pretended to
write. That was an itch of the Third Republic. It was a sort of indolent
vanity,--intellectual work being the hardest of all to control, and most
easily lending itself to the game of bluff. They never gave more than a
discreet, though respectful hint, of their great labors. They seemed to be
convinced of the importance of their work, staggering under the weight of
it. At first Christophe was a little embarrassed by the fact that he had
never heard of them or their works. He tried bashfully to ask about them:
he was especially anxious to know what one of them had written, a young
man who was declared by the others to be a master of the theater. He was
surprised to hear that this great dramatist had written a one-act play
taken from a novel, which had been pieced together from a number of short
stories, or, rather, sketches, which he had published in one of the
Reviews during the past ten years. The baggage of the others was not more
considerable: a few one-act plays, a few short stories, a few verses. Some
of them had won fame with an article, others with a book "which they were
going to write." They professed scorn for long-winded books. They seemed
to attach extreme importance to the handling of words. And yet the word
"thought" frequently occurred in their conversation: but it did not seem
to have the same meaning as is usually given to it: they applied it to the
details of style. However, there were among them great thinkers, and great
ironists, who, when they wrote, printed their subtle and profound remarks
in _italics_, so that there might be no mistake.

They all had the cult of the letter _I_: it was the only cult they had.
They tried to proselytize. But, unfortunately, other people were
subscribers to the cult. They were always conscious of their audience in
their way of speaking, walking, smoking, reading a paper, carrying their
heads, looking, bowing to each other.--Such players' tricks are natural to
young people, and the more insignificant--that is to say, unoccupied--they
are, the stronger hold do they have on them. They are more especially
paraded before women: for they covet women, and long--even more--to be
coveted by them. But even on a chance meeting they will trot out their bag
of tricks: even for a passer-by from whom they can expect only a glance of
amazement. Christophe often came across these young strutting peacocks:
budding painters, and musicians, art-students who modeled their appearance
on some famous portrait: Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Beethoven; or
fitted it to the parts they wish to play: painter, musician, workman, the
profound thinker, the jolly fellow, the Danubian peasant, the natural
man.... They were always on the lookout to see if they were attracting
attention. When Christophe met them in the street he took a malicious
pleasure in looking the other way and ignoring them. But their discomfiture
never lasted long: a yard or so farther on they would start strutting for
the next comer.--But the young men of Colette's little circle were rather
more subtle: their coxcombry was mental: they had two or three models, who
were not themselves original. Or else they would mimic an idea: Force, Joy,
Pity, Solidarity, Socialism, Anarchism, Faith, Liberty: all these were
parts for their playing. They were horribly clever in making the dearest
and rarest thoughts mere literary stuff, and in degrading the most heroic
impulses of the human soul to the level of drawing-room commodities,
fashionable neckties.

But in love they were altogether in their element: that was their special
province. The casuistry of pleasure had no secrets for them: they were
so clever that they could invent new problems so as to have the honor
of solving them. That has always been the occupation of people who have
nothing else to do: in default of love, they "make love": above all, they
explain it. Their notes took up far more room than their text, which, as
a matter of fact, was very short. Sociology gave a relish to the most
scabrous thoughts: everything was sheltered beneath the flag of sociology:
though they might have had pleasure in indulging their vices, there would
have been something lacking if they had not persuaded themselves that they
were laboring in the cause of the new world. That was an eminently Parisian
sort of socialism: erotic socialism.

Among the problems that were then exercising the little Court of Love was
the equality of men and women in marriage, and their respective rights
in love. There had been young men, honest, protestant, and rather
ridiculous,--Scandinavians and Swiss--who had based equality on virtue:
saying that men should come to marriage as chaste as women. The Parisian
casuists looked for another sort of equality, an equality based on loss
of virtue, saying that women should come to marriage as besmirched as
men,--the right to take lovers. The Parisians had carried adultery, in
imagination and practice, to such a pitch that they were beginning to find
it rather insipid: and in the world of letters attempts were being made to
support it by a new invention: the prostitution of young girls,--I mean
regularized, universal, virtuous, decent, domestic, and, above all, social
prostitution.--There had just appeared a book on the question, full of
talent, which apparently said all there was to be said: through four
hundred pages of playful pedantry, "strictly in accordance with the rules
of the Baconian method," it dealt with the "best method of controlling
the relations of the sexes." It was a lecture on free love, full of talk
about manners, propriety, good taste, nobility, beauty, truth, modesty,
morality,--a regular Berquin for young girls who wanted to go wrong.--It
was, for the moment, the Gospel in which Colette's little court rejoiced,
while they paraphrased it. It goes without saying, that, like all
disciples, they discarded all the justice, observation, and even humanity
that lay behind the paradox, and only retained the evil in it. They
plucked all the most poisonous flowers from the little bed of sweetened
blossoms,--aphorisms of this sort: "The taste for pleasure can only sharpen
the taste for work":--"It is monstrous that a girl should become a mother
before she has tasted the sweets of life."--"To have had the love of a
worthy and pure-souled man as a girl is the natural preparation of a woman
for a wise and considered motherhood":--"Mothers," said this author,
"should organize the lives of their daughters with the same delicacy and
decency with which they control the liberty of their sons."--"The time
would come when girls would return as naturally from their lovers as now
they return from a walk or from taking tea with a friend."

Colette laughingly declared that such teaching was very reasonable.

Christophe had a horror of it. He exaggerated its importance and the evil
that it might do. The French are too clever to bring their literature into
practice. These Diderots in miniature are, in ordinary life, like the
genial Panurge of the encyclopedia, honest citizens, not really a whit less
timorous than the rest. It is precisely because they are so timid in action
that they amuse themselves with carrying action (in thought) to the limit
of possibility. It is a game without any risk.

But Christophe was not a French dilettante.

* * * * *

Among the young men of Colette's circle, there was one whom she seemed to
prefer, and, of course, he was the most objectionable of all to Christophe.

He was one of those young parvenus of the second generation who form an
aristocracy of letters, and are the patricians of the Third Republic. His
name was Lucien Levy-Coeur. He had quick eyes, set wide apart, an aquiline
nose, a fair Van Dyck beard clipped to a point: he was prematurely bald,
which did not become him: and he had a silky voice, elegant manners, and
fine soft hands, which he was always rubbing together. He always affected
an excessive politeness, an exaggerated courtesy, even with people he did
not like, and even when he was bent on snubbing them.

Christophe had met him before at the literary dinner, to which he was taken
by Sylvain Kohn: and though they had not spoken to each other, the sound of
Levy-Coeur's voice had been enough to rouse a dislike which he could not
explain, and he was not to discover the reason for it until much later.
There are sudden outbursts of love; and so there are of hate,--or--(to
avoid hurting those tender souls who are afraid of the word as of every
passion)--let us call it the instinct of health scenting the enemy, and
mounting guard against him.

Levy-Coeur was exactly the opposite of Christophe, and represented the
spirit of irony and decay which fastened gently, politely, inexorably,
on all the great things that were left of the dying society: the family,
marriage, religion, patriotism: in art, on everything that was manly, pure,
healthy, of the people: faith in ideas, feelings, great men, in Man. Behind
that mode of thought there was only the mechanical pleasure of analysis,
analysis pushed to extremes, a sort of animal desire to nibble at thought,
the instinct of a worm. And side by side with that ideal of intellectual
nibbling was a girlish sensuality, the sensuality of a blue-stocking: for
to Levy-Coeur everything became literature. Everything was literary copy
to him: his own adventures, his vices and the vices of his friends. He had
written novels and plays in which, with much talent, he described the
private life of his relations, and their most intimate adventures, and
those of his friends, his own, his _liaisons_, among others one with the
wife of his best friend: the portraits were well-drawn: everybody praised
them, the public, the wife, and his friend. It was impossible for him to
gain the confidence or the favors of a woman without putting them into a
book.--One would have thought that his indiscretions would have produced
strained relations with his "friends." But there Was nothing of the kind;
they were hardly more than a little embarrassed: they protested as a matter
of form: but at heart they were delighted at being held up to the public
gaze, _en deshabille_: so long as their faces were masked, their modesty
was undisturbed. But there was never any spirit of vengeance, or even of
scandal, in his tale-telling. He was no worse a man or lover than the
majority. In the very chapters in which he exposed his father and mother
and his mistress, he would write of them with a poetic tenderness and
charm. He was really extremely affectionate: but he was one of those men
who have no need to respect when they love: quite the contrary: they rather
love those whom they can despise a little: that makes the object of their
affection seem nearer to them and more human. Such men are of all the
least capable of understanding heroism and purity. They are not far from
considering them lies or weakness of mind. It goes without saying that such
men are convinced that they understand better than anybody else the heroes
of art whom they judge with a patronizing familiarity.

He got on excellently well with the young women of the rich, idle
middle-class. He was a companion for them, a sort of depraved servant, only
more free and confidential, who gave them instruction and roused their
envy. They had hardly any constraint with him: and, with the lamp of Psyche
in their hands, they made a careful study of the hermaphrodite, and he
suffered them.

Christophe could not understand how a girl like Colette, who seemed to have
so refined a nature and a touching eagerness to escape from the degrading
round of her life, could find pleasure in such company. Christophe was
no psychologist. Lucien Levy-Coeur could easily beat him on that score.
Christophe was Colette's confidant: but Colette was the confidante of
Lucien Levy-Coeur. That gave him a great advantage. It is very pleasant to
a woman to feel that she has to deal with a man weaker than herself. She
finds food in it at once for her lower and higher instincts: her maternal
instinct is touched by it. Lucien Levy-Coeur knew that perfectly: one of
the surest means of touching a woman's heart is to sound that mysterious
chord. But in addition, Colette felt that she was weak, and cowardly, and
possessed of instincts of which she was not proud, though she was not
inclined to deny them. It pleased her to allow herself to be persuaded by
the audacious and nicely calculated confessions of her friend that others
were just the same, and that human nature must be taken for what it is. And
so she gave herself the satisfaction of not resisting inclinations that
she found very agreeable, and the luxury of saying that it must be so,
and that it was wise not to rebel and to be indulgent with what one could
not--"alas!"--prevent. There was a wisdom in that, the practice of which
contained no element of pain.

For any one who can envisage life with serenity, there is a peculiar relish
in remarking the perpetual contrast which exists in the very bosom of
society between the extreme refinement of apparent civilization and its
fundamental animalism. In every gathering that does not consist only of
fossils and petrified souls, there are, as it were, two conversational
strata, one above the other: one--which everybody can hear--between mind
and mind: the other--of which very few are conscious, though it is the
greater of the two--between instinct and instinct, the beast in man and
woman. Often these two strata of conversation are contradictory. While mind
and mind are passing the small change of convention, body and body say:
Desire, Aversion, or, more often: Curiosity, Boredom, Disgust. The beast in
man and woman, though tamed by centuries of civilization, and as cowed as
the wretched lions in the tamer's cage, is always thinking of its food.

But Christophe had not yet reached that disinterestedness which comes only
with age and the death of the passions. He had taken himself very seriously
as adviser to Colette. She had asked for his help: and he saw her in the
lightness of her heart exposed to danger. So he made no effort to conceal
his dislike of Lucien Levy-Coeur, At first that gentleman maintained
towards Christophe an irreproachable and ironical politeness. He, too,
scented the enemy: but he thought he had nothing to fear from him: he made
fun of him without seeming to do so. If only he could have had Christophe's
admiration he would have been on quite good terms with him, but that he
never could obtain: he saw that clearly, for Christophe had not the art of
disguising his feelings. And so Lucien Levy-Coeur passed insensibly from
an abstract intellectual antagonism to a little, carefully veiled, war, of
which Colette was to be the prize.

She held the balance evenly between her two friends. She appreciated
Christophe's talent and moral superiority: but she also appreciated Lucien
Levy-Coeur's amusing immorality and wit: and, at bottom, she found more
pleasure in it. Christophe did not mince his protestations: she listened
to him with a touching humility which disarmed him. She was quite a good
creature, but she lacked frankness, partly from weakness, partly from
her very kindness. She was half play-acting: she pretended to think with
Christophe. As a matter of fact, she knew the worth of such a friend; but
she was not ready to make any sacrifice for a friendship: she was not
ready to sacrifice anything for anybody: she just wanted everything to go
smoothly and pleasantly, And so she concealed from Christophe the fact that
she went on receiving Lucien Levy-Coeur: she lied with the easy charm of
the young women of her class who, from their childhood, are expert in the
practice which is so necessary for those who wish to keep their friends
and please everybody. She excused herself by pretending that she wished to
avoid hurting Christophe: but in reality it was because she knew that he
was right and wanted to go on doing as she liked without quarreling with
him. Sometimes Christophe suspected her tricks: then he would scold her,
and wax indignant. She would go on playing the contrite little girl, and be
affectionate and sorry: and she would look tenderly at him--_feminae ultima
ratio_.--And really it did distress her to think of losing Christophe's
friendship: she would be charmingly serious and in that way succeed in
disarming Christophe for a little while longer. But sooner or later there
had to be an explosion. Christophe's irritation was fed unconsciously by a
little jealousy. And into Colette's coaxing tricks there crept a little, a
very little, love, all of which made the rupture only the more violent.

One day when Christophe had caught Colette out in a flagrant lie he gave
her a definite alternative: she must choose between Lucien Levy-Coeur and
himself. She tried to dodge the question: and, finally, she vindicated her
right to have whatever friends she liked. She was perfectly right: and
Christophe admitted that he had been absurd: but he knew also that he had
not been exacting from egoism: he had a sincere affection for Colette: he
wanted to save her even against her will. He insisted awkwardly. She
refused to answer. He said:

"Colette, do you want us not to be friends any more?"

She replied:

"No, no. I should be sorry if you ceased to be my friend."

"But you will not sacrifice the smallest thing for our friendship."

"Sacrifice! What a silly word!" she said. "Why should one always be
sacrificing one thing for another? It's just a stupid Christian idea.
You're nothing but an old parson at heart."

"Maybe," he said. "I want one thing or another. I allow nothing between
good and evil, not so much as the breadth of a hair."

"Yes, I know," she said. "That is why I love you. For I do love you:
but...."

"But you love the other fellow too?"

She laughed, and said, with a soft look in her eyes and a tender note in
her voice:

"Stay!"

He was just about to give in once more when Lucien Levy-Coeur came in: and
he was welcomed with the same soft look in her eyes and the same tender
note in her voice. Christophe sat for some time in silence watching Colette
at her tricks: then he went away, having made up his mind to break with
her. He was sick and sorry at heart. It was so stupid to grow so fond,
always to be falling into the trap!

When he reached home he toyed with his books, and idly opened his Bible and
read:

"... _The Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk
with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go,
and making a tinkling with their feet,

"Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the
daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts_ ..."

He burst out laughing as he thought of Colette's little tricks: and he went
to bed well pleased with himself. Then he thought that he too must have
become tainted with the corruption of Paris for the Bible to have become a
humorous work to him. But he did not stop saying over and over again the
judgment of the great judiciary humorist: and he tried to imagine its
effect on the head of his young friend. He went to sleep laughing like a
child. He had lost all thought of his new sorrow. One more or less.... He
was getting used to it.

* * * * *

He did not give up Colette's music-lessons: but he refused to take the
opportunities she gave him of continuing their intimate conversations. It
was no use her being sorry about it or offended, and trying all sorts of
tricks: he stuck to his guns: they were rude to each other: of her own
accord she took to finding excuses for missing the lessons: and he also
made excuses for declining the Stevens' invitations.

He had had enough of Parisian society: he could not bear the emptiness
of it, the idleness, the moral impotence, the neurasthenia, its aimless,
pointless, self-devouring hypercriticism. He wondered how people could
live in such a stagnant atmosphere of art for art's sake and pleasure for
pleasure's sake. And yet the French did live in it: they had beep, a great
nation, and they still cut something of a figure in the world: at least,
they seemed to do so to the outside spectator. But where were the springs
of their life? They believed in nothing, nothing but pleasure....

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