Jean-Christophe in Paris: The Market-Place, Antoinette, the House Part 39

"Not at all!" they protested. "It is only the critics who take upon themselves to speak for us. They always follow the fas.h.i.+on, 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 cla.s.ses. 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-cla.s.ses: he belongs to our cla.s.s. A certain French artist, whose name I won't mention, is not of our cla.s.s: though he was of the middle-cla.s.s 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d. Holy Writ was to him only its richest example, just as the Church was the highest company of men united in the brotherhood of G.o.d: 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 G.o.d. 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d."--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 G.o.d to his place in Christophe's heart. Not that he believed in G.o.d. He denied G.o.d. But he was filled with the spirit of G.o.d. The Abbe Corneille used to tell him with a smile, that like his namesake, the sainted giant, he bore G.o.d 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 G.o.d every day, and never know that it is He. G.o.d 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 G.o.d," 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 embarra.s.sed at finding himself in the company of a man in a ca.s.sock, 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 cla.s.sify them in any social category: for he always had to cla.s.sify 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 nave 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sers-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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 cra.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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-cla.s.s: 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."

"You're very polite!" she would answer with a laugh.

Her healthy nature recoiled as much as Christophe's from philandering friends.h.i.+p, that form of sentimentality dear to equivocal men and women, who are always juggling with their emotions. They were just comrades one to another.

He asked her one day what she was doing in the afternoons, when he saw her sitting in the garden with her work on her knees, never touching it, and not stirring for hours together. She blushed, and protested that it was not a matter of hours, but only a matter of a few minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour, during which she "went on with her story."

"What story?"

"The story I am always telling myself."

"You tell yourself stories? Oh, tell them to me!"

She told him that he was too curious. She would only go so far as to intimate that they were stories of which she was not the heroine.

He was surprised at that:

"If you are going to tell yourself stories, it seems to me that it would be more natural if you told your own story with embellishments, and lived in a happier dream-life."

"I couldn't," she said. "If I did that, I should become desperate."

She blushed again at having revealed even so much of her inmost thoughts: and she went on:

"Besides, when I am in the garden and a gust of wind reaches me, I am happy. Then the garden becomes alive for me. And when the wind bl.u.s.ters and comes from a great distance, he tells me so many things!"

In spite of her reserve, Christophe could see the hidden depths of melancholy that lay behind her good-humor, and the restless activity which, as she knew perfectly well, led nowhere. Why did she not try to break away from her condition and emanc.i.p.ate herself? She would have been so well fitted for a useful and active life!--But she alleged her affection for her father, who would not hear of her leaving him. In vain did Christophe tell her that the old soldier was perfectly vigorous and energetic, and had no need of her, and that a man of his stamp could quite well be left alone, and had no right to make a sacrifice of her. She would begin to defend her father: by a pious fiction she would pretend that it was not her father who was forcing her to stay, but she herself who could not bear to leave him.--And, up to a point, what she said was true. It seemed to have been accepted from time immemorial by herself, and her fatter, and all their friends that their life had to be thus and thus, and not otherwise. She had a married brother, who thought it quite natural that she should devote her life to their father in his stead. He was entirely wrapped up in his children. He loved them jealously, and left them no will of their own. His love for his children was to him, and especially to his wife, a voluntary bondage which weighed heavily on their life, and cramped all their movements: his idea seemed to be that as soon as a man has children, his own life comes to an end, and he has to stop short in his own development: he was still young, active, and intelligent, and there he was reckoning up the years he would have still to work before he could retire.--Christophe saw how these good people were weighed down by the atmosphere of family affection, which is so deep-rooted in France--deep-rooted, but stifling and destructive of vitality. And it has become all the more oppressive since families in France have been reduced to the minimum: father, mother, one or two children, and here and there, perhaps, an uncle or an aunt. It is a cowardly, fearful love, turned in upon itself, like a miser clinging tightly to his h.o.a.rd of gold.