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

in his

moral resolutions. These were only pretexts. The uneasiness had not come

from without. It was within himself. He felt stirring in his heart

monstrous and unknown things, and he dared not rely on his thoughts to face

the evil. The evil? Was it evil? A languor, an intoxication, a voluptuous

agony filled all his being. He was no longer master of himself. In vain he

sought to fortify himself with his former stoicism. His whole being crashed

down. He had a sudden consciousness of the vast world, burning, wild, a

world immeasurable…. How it swallows up God!

 

Only for a moment. But the whole balance of his old life was in that moment

destroyed.

 

*

 

There was only one person in the family to whom Christophe paid no

attention: this was little Rosa. She was not beautiful: and Christophe, who

was far from beautiful himself, was very exacting of beauty in others. He

had that calm, cruelty of youth, for which a woman does not exist if she be

ugly,—unless she has passed the age for inspiring tenderness, and there is

then no need to feel for her anything but grave, peaceful, and

quasi-religious sentiments. Rosa also was not distinguished by any especial

gift, although she was not without intelligence: and she was cursed with a

chattering tongue which drove Christophe from her. And he had never taken

the trouble to know her, thinking that there was in her nothing to know;

and the most he ever did was to glance at her.

 

But she was of better stuff than most girls: she was certainly better than

Minna, whom he had so loved. She was a good girl, no coquette, not at all

vain, and until Christophe came it had never occurred to her that she was

plain, or if it had, it had not worried her: for none of her family

bothered about it. Whenever her grandfather or her mother told her so out

of a desire to grumble, she only laughed: she did not believe it, or she

attached no importance to it; nor did they. So many others, just as plain,

and more, had found some one to love them! The Germans are very mildly

indulgent to physical imperfections: they cannot see them: they are even

able to embellish them, by virtue of an easy imagination which finds

unexpected qualities in the face of their desire to make them like the most

illustrious examples of human beauty. Old Euler would not have needed much

urging to make him declare that his granddaughter had the nose of the Juno

Ludovisi. Happily he was too grumpy to pay compliments: and Rosa,

unconcerned about the shape of her nose, had no vanity except in the

accomplishment, with all the ritual, of the famous household duties. She

had accepted as Gospel all that she had been taught. She hardly ever went

out, and she had very little standard of comparison; she admired her family

naïvely, and believed what they said. She was of an expansive and confiding

nature, easily satisfied, and tried to fall in with the mournfulness of her

home, and docilely used to repeat the pessimistic ideas which she heard.

She was a creature of devotion—always thinking of others, trying to

please, sharing anxieties, guessing at what others wanted; she had a great

need of loving without demanding anything in return. Naturally her family

took advantage of her, although they were kind and loved her: but there is

always a temptation to take advantage of the love of those who are

absolutely delivered into your hands. Her family were so sure of her

attentions that they were not at all grateful for them: whatever she did,

they expected more. And then, she was clumsy; she was awkward and hasty;

her movements were jerky and boyish; she had outbursts of tenderness which

used to end in disaster: a broken glass, a jug upset, a door slammed to:

things which let loose upon her the wrath of everybody in the house. She

was always being snubbed and would go and weep in a corner. Her tears did

not last long. She would soon smile again, and begin to chatter without a

suspicion of rancor against anybody.

 

Christophe’s advent was an important event in her life. She had often heard

of him. Christophe had some place in the gossip of the town: he was a sort

of little local celebrity: his name used often to recur in the family

conversation, especially when old Jean Michel was alive, who, proud of his

grandson, used to sing his praises to all of his acquaintance. Rosa had

seen the young musician once or twice at concerts. When she heard that he

was coming to live with them, she clapped her hands. She was sternly

rebuked for her breach of manners and became confused. She saw no harm in

it. In a life so monotonous as hers, a new lodger was a great distraction.

She spent the last few days before his arrival in a fever of expectancy.

She was fearful lest he should not like the house, and she tried hard to

make every room as attractive as possible. On the morning of his arrival,

she even put a little bunch of flowers on the mantelpiece to bid him

welcome. As to herself, she took no care at all to look her best; and one

glance was enough to make Christophe decide that she was plain, and

slovenly dressed. She did not think the same of him, though she had good

reason to do so: for Christophe, busy, exhausted, ill-kempt, was even more

ugly than usual. But Rosa, who was incapable of thinking the least ill of

anybody, Rosa, who thought her grandfather, her father, and her mother, all

perfectly beautiful, saw Christophe exactly as she had expected to see him,

and admired him with all her heart. She was frightened at sitting next to

him at table; and unfortunately her shyness took the shape of a flood of

words, which at once alienated Christophe’s sympathies. She did not see

this, and that first evening remained a shining memory in her life. When

she was alone in her room, after, they had all gone upstairs, she heard the

tread of the new lodgers as they walked over her head; and the sound of it

ran joyously through her; the house seemed to her to taken new life.

 

The next morning for the first time in her life she looked at herself in

the mirror carefully and: uneasily, and without exactly knowing the extent

of her misfortune she began to be conscious of it. She tried to decide

about her features, one by one; but she could not. She was filled with

sadness and apprehension. She sighed deeply, and thought of introducing

certain changes in her toilet, but she only made herself look still more

plain. She conceived the unlucky idea of overwhelming Christophe with her

kindness. In her naïve desire to be always seeing her new friends, and

doing them service, she was forever going up and down the stairs, bringing

them some utterly useless thing, insisting on helping them, and always

laughing and talking and shouting. Her zeal and her stream of talk could

only be interrupted by her mother’s impatient voice calling her. Christophe

looked grim; but for his good resolutions he must have lost his temper

quite twenty times. He restrained himself for two days; on the third, he

locked his door. Rosa knocked, called, understood, went downstairs in

dismay, and did not try again. When he saw her he explained that he was

very busy and could not be disturbed. She humbly begged his pardon. She

could not deceive herself as to the failure of her innocent advances: they

had accomplished the opposite of her intention: they had alienated

Christophe. He no longer took the trouble to conceal his ill-humor; he did

not listen when she talked, and did not disguise his impatience. She felt

that her chatter irritated him, and by force of will she succeeded in

keeping silent for a part of the evening: but the thing was stronger than

herself: suddenly she would break out again and her words would tumble over

each other more tumultuously than ever. Christophe would leave her in the

middle of a sentence. She was not angry with him. She was angry with

herself. She thought herself stupid, tiresome, ridiculous: all her faults

assumed enormous proportions and she tried to wrestle with them: but she

was discouraged by the check upon her first attempts, and said to herself

that she could not do it, that she was not strong enough. But she would try

again.

 

But there were other faults against which she was powerless: what could she

do against her plainness? There was no doubt about it. The certainty of her

misfortune had suddenly been revealed to her one day when she was looking

at herself in the mirror; it came like a thunderclap. Of course she

exaggerated the evil, and saw her nose as ten times larger than it was; it

seemed to her to fill all her face; she dared not show herself; she wished

to die. But there is in youth such a power of hope that these fits of

discouragement never lasted long: she would end by pretending that she had

been mistaken; she would try to believe it, and for a moment or two would

actually succeed in thinking her nose quite ordinary and almost shapely.

Her instinct made her attempt, though very clumsily, certain childish

tricks, a way of doing her hair so as not so much to show her forehead and

so accentuate the disproportion of her face. And yet, there was no coquetry

in her; no thought of love had crossed her mind, or she was unconscious of

it. She asked little: nothing but a little friendship: but Christophe did

not show any inclination to give her that little. It seemed to Rosa that

she would have been perfectly happy had he only condescended to say

good-day when they met. A friendly good-evening with a little kindness. But

Christophe usually looked so hard and so cold! It chilled her. He never

said anything disagreeable to her, but she would rather have had cruel

reproaches than such cruel silence.

 

One evening Christophe was playing his piano. He had taken up his quarters

in a little attic at the top of the house so as not to be so much disturbed

by the noise. Downstairs Rosa was listening to him, deeply moved. She loved

music though her taste was bad and unformed. While her mother was there,

she stayed in a corner of the room and bent over her sewing, apparently

absorbed in her work; but her heart was with the sounds coming from

upstairs, and she wished to miss nothing. As soon as Amalia went out for a

walk in the neighborhood, Rosa leaped to her feet, threw down her sewing,

and went upstairs with her heart beating until she came to the attic door.

She held her breath and laid her ear against the door. She stayed like that

until Amalia returned. She went on tiptoe, taking care to make no noise,

but as she was not very sure-footed, and was always in a hurry, she was

always tripping upon the stairs; and once while she was listening, leaning

forward with her cheek glued to the keyhole, she lost her balance, and

banged her forehead against the door. She was so alarmed that she lost her

breath. The piano stopped dead: she could not escape. She was getting up

when the door opened. Christophe saw her, glared at her furiously, and then

without a word, brushed her aside, walked angrily downstairs, and went out.

He did not return until dinner time, paid no heed to the despairing looks