Jean-Christophe, vol 1, Romain Rolland [book club recommendations .txt] 📗

everything,

all the suffering, all the misery in the world, rather than come to

that!…” How near he had been to it! Had he not all but yielded to the

temptation to snap off his life himself, cowardly to escape his sorrow? As

if all the sorrows, all betrayals, were not childish griefs beside the

torture and the crime of self-betrayal, denial of faith, of self-contempt

in death!

 

He saw that life was a battle without armistice, without mercy, in which he

who wishes to be a man worthy of the name of a man must forever fight

against whole armies of invisible enemies; against the murderous forces of

Nature, uneasy desires, dark thoughts, treacherously leading him to

degradation and destruction. He saw that he had been on the point of

falling into the trap. He saw that happiness and love were only the friends

of a moment to lead the heart to disarm and abdicate. And the little

puritan of fifteen heard the voice of his God:

 

“Go, go, and never rest.”

 

“But whither, Lord, shall I go? Whatsoever I do, whithersoever I go, is not

the end always the same? Is not the end of all things in that?”

 

“Go on to Death, you who must die! Go and suffer, you who must suffer! You

do not live to be happy. You live to fulfil my Law. Suffer; die. But be

what you must be—a Man.”

YOUTH

Christofori faciem die quaeunque tueris, Illa nempe die non morte mala

morieris.

I THE HOUSE OF EULER

The house was plunged in silence. Since Melchior’s death everything seemed

dead. Now that his loud voice was stilled, from morning to night nothing

was heard but the wearisome murmuring of the river.

 

Christophe hurled himself into his work. He took a fiercely angry pleasure

in self-castigation for having wished to be happy. To expressions of

sympathy and kind words he made no reply, but was proud and stiff. Without

a word he went about his daily task, and gave his lessons with icy

politeness. His pupils who knew of his misfortune were shocked by his

insensibility. But, those who were older and had some experience of sorrow

knew that this apparent coldness might, in a child, be used only to conceal

suffering: and they pitied him. He was not grateful for their sympathy.

Even music could bring him no comfort. He played without pleasure, and as a

duty. It was as though he found a cruel joy in no longer taking pleasure in

anything, or in persuading himself that he did not: in depriving himself of

every reason for living, and yet going on.

 

His two brothers, terrified by the silence of the house of death, ran away

from it as quickly as possible. Rodolphe went into the office of his uncle

Theodore, and lived with him, and Ernest, after trying two or three trades,

found work on one of the Rhine steamers plying between Mainz and Cologne,

and he used to come back only when he wanted money. Christophe was left

alone with his mother in the house, which was too large for them; and the

meagerness of their resources, and the payment of certain debts which had

been discovered after his father’s death, forced them, whatever pain it

might cost, to seek another more lowly and less expensive dwelling.

 

They found a little flat,—two or three rooms on the second floor of a

house in the Market Street. It was a noisy district in the middle of the

town, far from the river, far from the trees, far from the country and all

the familiar places. But they had to consult reason, not sentiment, and

Christophe found in it a fine opportunity for gratifying his bitter creed

of self-mortification. Besides, the owner of the house, old registrar

Euler, was a friend of his grandfather, and knew the family: that was

enough for Louisa, who was lost in her empty house, and was irresistibly

drawn towards those who had known the creatures whom she had loved.

 

They got ready to leave. They took long draughts of the bitter melancholy

of the last days passed by the sad, beloved fireside that was to be left

forever. They dared hardly tell their sorrow: they were ashamed of it, or

afraid. Each thought that they ought not to show their weakness to the

other. At table, sitting alone in a dark room with half-closed shutters,

they dared not raise their voices: they ate hurriedly and did not look at

each other for fear of not being able to conceal their trouble. They parted

as soon as they had finished. Christophe went back to his work; but as soon

as he was free for a moment, he would come back, go stealthily home, and

creep on tiptoe to his room or to the attic. Then he would shut the door,

sit down in a corner on an old trunk or on the window-ledge, or stay there

without thinking, letting the indefinable buzzing and humming of the old

house, which trembled with the lightest tread, thrill through him. His

heart would tremble with it. He would listen anxiously for the faintest

breath in or out of doors, for the creaking of floors, for all the

imperceptible familiar noises: he knew them all. He would lose

consciousness, his thoughts would be filled with the images of the past,

and he would issue from his stupor only at the sound of St. Martin’s clock,

reminding him that it was time to go.

 

In the room below him he could hear Louisa’s footsteps passing softly to

and fro, then for hours she could not be heard; she made no noise.

Christophe would listen intently. He would go down, a little uneasy, as one

is for a long time after a great misfortune. He would push the door ajar;

Louisa would turn her back on him; she would be sitting in front of a

cupboard in the midst of a heap of things—rags, old belongings, odd

garments, treasures, which she had brought out intending to sort them. But

she had no strength for it; everything reminded her of something; she would

turn and turn it in her hands and begin to dream; it would drop from her

hands; she would stay for hours together with her arms hanging down, lying

back exhausted in a chair, given up to a stupor of sorrow.

 

Poor Louisa was now spending most of her life in the past—that sad past,

which had been very niggardly of joy for her; but she was so used to

suffering that she was still grateful for the least tenderness shown to

her, and the pale lights which had shone here and there in the drab days of

her life, were still enough to make them bright. All the evil that Melchior

had done her was forgotten; she remembered only the good. Her marriage had

been the great romance of her life. If Melchior had been drawn into it by a

caprice, of which he had quickly repented, she had given herself with her

whole heart; she thought that she was loved as much as she had loved; and

to Melchior she was ever most tenderly grateful. She did not try to

understand what he had become in the sequel. Incapable of seeing reality as

it is, she only knew how to bear it as it is, humbly and honestly, as a

woman who has no need of understanding life in order to be able to live.

What she could not explain, she left to God for explanation. In her

singular piety, she put upon God the responsibility for all the injustice

that she had suffered at the hands of Melchior and the others, and only

visited them with the good that they had given her. And so her life of

misery had left her with no bitter memory. She only felt worn out—weak as

she was—by those years of privation and fatigue. And now that Melchior was

no longer there, now that two of her sons were gone from their home, and

the third seemed to be able to do without her, she had lost all heart for

action; she was tired, sleepy; her will was stupefied. She was going

through one of those crises of neurasthenia which often come upon active

and industrious people in the decline of life, when some unforeseen event

deprives them of every reason for living. She had not the heart even to

finish the stocking she was knitting, to tidy the drawer in which she was

looking, to get up to shut the window; she would sit there, without a

thought, without strength—save for recollection. She was conscious of her

collapse, and was ashamed of it or blushed for it; she tried to hide it

from her son; and Christophe, wrapped up in the egoism of his own grief,

never noticed it. No doubt he was often secretly impatient with his

mother’s slowness in speaking, and acting, and doing the smallest thing;

but different though her ways were from her usual activity, he never gave a

thought to the matter until then.

 

Suddenly on that day it came home to him for the first time when he

surprised her in the midst of her rags, turned out on the floor, heaped up

at her feet, in her arms, and in her lap. Her neck was drawn out, her head

was bowed, her face was stiff and rigid. When she heard him come in she

started; her white cheeks were suffused with red; with an instinctive

movement she tried to hide the things she was holding, and muttered with an

awkward smile:

 

“You see, I was sorting….”

 

The sight of the poor soul stranded among the relics of the past cut to his

heart, and he was filled with pity. But he spoke with a bitter asperity and

seemed to scold, to drag her from her apathy:

 

“Come, come, mother; you must not stay there, in the middle of all that

dust, with the room all shut up! It is not good for you. You must pull

yourself together, and have done with all this.”

 

“Yes,” said she meekly.

 

She tried to get up to put the things back in the drawer. But she sat down

again at once and listlessly let them fall from her hands.

 

“Oh! I can’t … I can’t,” she moaned. “I shall never finish!”

 

He was frightened. He leaned over her. He caressed her forehead with his

hands.

 

“Come, mother, what is it?” he said. “Shall I help you? Are you ill?”

 

She did not answer. She gave a sort of stifled sob. He took her hands, and

knelt down by her side, the better to see her in the dusky room.

 

“Mother!” he said anxiously.

 

Louisa laid her head on his shoulder and burst into tears.

 

“My boy, my boy,” she cried, holding close to him. “My boy!… You will not

leave me? Promise me that you will not leave me?”

 

His heart was torn with pity.

 

“No, mother, no. I will not leave you. What made you think of such a

thing?”

 

“I am so unhappy! They have all left me, all….”

 

She pointed to the things all about her, and he did not know whether she

was speaking of them or of her sons and the dead.

 

“You will stay with me? You will not leave me?… What should I do, if you

went too?”

 

“I will not go, I tell you; we will stay together. Don’t cry. I promise.”

 

She went on weeping. She could not stop herself. He dried her eyes with his

handkerchief.

 

“What is it, mother dear? Are you in pain?”

 

“I don’t know; I don’t know what