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

being

interrupted every moment by Amalia or the old man, Christophe proposed that

they should go for a walk one evening after dinner. Leonard was too polite

to refuse, although he would gladly have got out of it, for his indolent

nature disliked walking, talking, and anything that cost him an effort.

 

Christophe had some difficulty in opening up the conversation. After two or

three awkward sentences about trivialities he plunged with a brusqueness

that was almost brutal. He asked Leonard if he were really going to be a

priest, and if he liked the idea. Leonard was nonplussed, and looked at him

uneasily, but when he saw that Christophe was not hostilely disposed he was

reassured.

 

“Yes,” he replied. “How could it be otherwise?”

 

“Ah!” said Christophe. “You are very happy.” Leonard was conscious of a

shade of envy in Christophe’s voice and was agreeably flattered by it. He

altered his manner, became expansive, his face brightened.

 

“Yes,” he said, “I am happy.” He beamed.

 

“What do you do to be so?” asked Christophe.

 

Before replying Leonard proposed that they should sit down, on a quiet seat

in the cloisters of St. Martin’s. From there they could see a corner of the

little square, planted with acacias, and beyond it the town, the country,

bathed in the evening mists. The Rhine flowed at the foot of the hill. An

old deserted cemetery, with graves lost under the rich grass, lay in

slumber beside them behind the closed gates.

 

Leonard began to talk. He said, with his eyes shining with contentment, how

happy he was to escape from life, to have found a refuge, where a man is,

and forever will be, in shelter. Christophe, still sore from his wounds,

felt passionately the desire for rest and forgetfulness; but it was mingled

with regret. He asked with a sigh:

 

“And yet, does it cost you nothing to renounce life altogether?”

 

“Oh!” said Leonard quietly. “What is there to regret? Isn’t life sad and

ugly?”

 

“There are lovely things too,” said Christophe, looking at the beautiful

evening.

 

“There are some beautiful things, but very few.”

 

“The few that there are are yet many to me.”

 

“Oh, well! it is simply a matter of common sense. On the one hand a little

good and much evil; on the other neither good nor evil on earth, and after,

infinite happiness—how can one hesitate?”

 

Christophe was not very pleased with this sort of arithmetic. So economic a

life seemed to him very poor. But he tried to persuade himself that it was

wisdom.

 

“So,” he asked a little ironically, “there is no risk of your being seduced

by an hour’s pleasure?”

 

“How foolish! When you know that it is only an hour, and that after it

there is all eternity!”

 

“You are quite certain of eternity?”

 

“Of course.”

 

Christophe questioned him. He was thrilled with hope and desire. Perhaps

Leonard would at last give him impregnable reasons for believing. With what

a passion he would himself renounce all the world to follow him to God.

 

At first Leonard, proud of his rôle of apostle, and convinced that

Christophe’s doubts were only a matter of form, and that they would of

course give way before his first arguments, relied upon the Holy Books, the

authority of the Gospel, the miracles, and traditions. But he began to grow

gloomy when, after Christophe had listened for a few minutes, he stopped

him and said that he was answering questions with questions, and that he

had not asked him to tell exactly what it was that he was doubting, but to

give some means of resolving his doubts. Leonard then had to realize that

Christophe was much more ill than he seemed, and that he would only allow

himself to be convinced by the light of reason. But he still thought that

Christophe was playing the free thinker—(it never occurred to him that

he might be so sincerely).—He was not discouraged, and, strong in his

recently acquired knowledge, he turned back to his school learning:

he unfolded higgledy, piggledy, with more authority than order, his

metaphysical proofs of the existence of God and the immortality of the

soul. Christophe, with his mind at stretch, and his brow knit in the

effort, labored in silence, and made him say it all over again; tried

hard to gather the meaning, and to take it to himself, and to follow the

reasoning. Then suddenly he burst out, vowed that Leonard was laughing at

him, that it was all tricks, jests of the fine talkers who forged words

and then amused themselves with pretending that these words were things.

Leonard was nettled, and guaranteed the good faith of his authors.

Christophe shrugged his shoulders, and said with an oath that they were

only humbugs, infernal writers; and he demanded fresh proof.

 

Leonard perceived to his horror that Christophe was incurably attainted,

and took no more interest in him. He remembered that he had been told not

to waste his time in arguing with skeptics,—at least when they stubbornly

refuse to believe. There was the risk of being shaken himself, without

profiting the other. It was better to leave the unfortunate fellow to the

will of God, who, if He so designs, would see to it that the skeptic was

enlightened: or if not, who would dare to go against the will of God?

Leonard did not insist then on carrying on the discussion. He only said

gently that for the time being there was nothing to be done, that no

reasoning could show the way to a man who was determined not to see it, and

that Jean-Christophe must pray and appeal to Grace: nothing is possible

without that: he must desire grace and the will to believe.

 

“The will,” thought Christophe bitterly. “So then, God will exist because

I will Him to exist? So then, death will not exist, because it pleases me

to deny it!… Alas! How easy life is to those who have no need to see the

truth, to those who can see what they wish to see, and are forever forging

pleasant dreams in which softly to sleep!” In such a bed, Christophe knew

well that be would never sleep….

 

Leonard went on talking. He had fallen back on his favorite subject, the

sweets of the contemplative life, and once on this neutral ground, he was

inexhaustible. In his monotonous voice, that shook with the pleasure in

him, he told of the joys of the life in God, outside, above the world,

far from noise, of which he spoke in a sudden tone of hatred (he detested

it almost as much as Christophe), far from violence, far from frivolity,

far from the little miseries that one has to suffer every day, in the

warm, secure nest of faith, from which you can contemplate in peace the

wretchedness of a strange and distant world. And as Christophe listened,

he perceived the egoism of that faith. Leonard saw that. He hurriedly

explained: the contemplative life was not a lazy life. On the contrary,

a man is more active in prayer than in action. What would the world be

without prayer? You expiate the sins of others, you bear the burden of

their misdeeds, you offer up your talents, you intercede between the world

and God.

 

Christophe listened in silence with increasing hostility. He was conscious

of the hypocrisy of such renunciation in Leonard. He was not unjust enough

to assume hypocrisy in all those who believe. He knew well that with a

few, such abdication of life comes from the impossibility of living, from

a bitter despair, an appeal to death,—that with still fewer, it is an

ecstasy of passion…. (How long does it last?)…. But with the majority

of men is it not too often the cold reasoning of souls more busied with

their own ease and peace than with the happiness of others, or with truth?

And if sincere men are conscious of it, how much they must suffer by such

profanation of their ideal!…

 

Leonard was quite happy, and now set forth the beauty and harmony of the

world, seen from the loftiness of the divine roost: below all was dark,

unjust, sorrowful; seen from on high, it all became clear, luminous,

ordered: the world was like the works of a clock, perfectly ordered….

 

Now Christophe only listened absently. He was asking himself: “Does he

believe, or does he believe that he believes?” And yet his own faith, his

own passionate desire for faith was not shaken. Not the mediocrity of soul,

and the poverty of argument of a fool like Leonard could touch that….

 

Night came down over the town. The seat on which they were sitting was in

darkness: the stars shone out, a white mist came up from the river, the

crickets chirped under the trees in the cemetery. The bells began to ring:

first the highest of them, alone, like a plaintive bird, challenging the

sky: then the second, a third lower, joined in its plaint: at last came

the, deepest, on the fifth, and seemed to answer them. The three voices

were merged in each other. At the bottom of the towers there was a buzzing,

as of a gigantic hive of bees. The air and the boy’s heart quivered.

Christophe held his breath, and thought how poor was the music of musicians

compared with such an ocean of music, with all the sounds of thousands of

creatures: the former, the free world of sounds, compared with the world

tamed, catalogued, coldly labeled by human intelligence. He sank and sank

into that sonorous and immense world without continents or bounds….

 

And when the great murmuring had died away, when the air had ceased at last

to quiver, Christophe woke up. He looked about him startled…. He knew

nothing. Around him and in him everything was changed. There was no God….

 

As with faith, so the loss of faith is often equally a flood of grace, a

sudden light. Reason counts for nothing: the smallest thing is enough—a

word, silence, the sound of bells. A man walks, dreams, expects nothing.

Suddenly the world crumbles away. All about him is in ruins. He is alone.

He no longer believes.

 

Christophe was terrified, and could not understand how it had come about.

It was like the flooding of a river in the spring….

 

Leonard’s voice was still sounding, more monotonous than the voice of a

cricket. Christophe did not hear it: he heard nothing. Night was fully

come. Leonard stopped. Surprised to find Christophe motionless, uneasy

because of the lateness of the hour, he suggested that they should go home.

Christophe did not reply. Leonard took his arm. Christophe trembled, and

looked at Leonard with wild eyes.

 

“Christophe, we must go home,” said Leonard.

 

“Go to hell!” cried Christophe furiously.

 

“Oh! Christophe! What have I done?” asked Leonard tremulously. He was

dumfounded.

 

Christophe came to himself.

 

“Yes. You are right,” he said more gently. “I do not know what I’m saying.

Go to God! Go to God!”

 

He was alone. He was in bitter distress.

 

“Ah! my God! my God!” he cried, wringing his hands, passionately raising

his face to the dark sky. “Why do I no longer believe? Why can I believe no

more? What has happened to me?…”

 

The disproportion between the wreck of his faith and the conversation that

he had just had with Leonard was too great: it was obvious that the

conversation had no more brought it about than that the boisterousness of

Amalia’s gabble and the pettiness of the people with whom he lived were not

the cause of the upheaval which for some days had been taking place