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

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At the appointed hour, he turned up. Corinne was sitting in the little

drawing-room of the hotel, with a book in her hand, which she was reading

aloud. She greeted him with smiling eyes but did not stop reading until she

had finished her sentence. Then she signed to him to sit down on the sofa

by her side:

 

“Sit there,” she said, “and don’t talk. I am going over my part. I shall

have finished in a quarter of an hour.”

 

She followed the script with her finger nail and read quickly and

carelessly like a little girl in a hurry. He offered to hear her her words.

She passed him the book and got up to repeat what she had learned. She

floundered and would repeat the end of one sentence four times before going

on to the next. She shook her head as she recited her part; her hairpins

fell down and all over the room. When she could not recollect sometimes

some word she was as impatient as a naughty child; sometimes she

swore comically or she would use big words;—one word with which she

apostrophized herself was very big and very short. Christophe was

astonished by the mixture of talent and childishness in her. She would

produce moving tones of voice quite aptly, but in the middle of a speech

into which she seemed to be throwing her whole heart she would say a whole

string of words that had absolutely no meaning. She recited her lesson

like a parrot, without troubling about its meaning, and then she produced

burlesque nonsense. She did not worry about it. When she saw it she would

shout with laughter. At last she said: “Zut!”, snatched the book from him,

flung it into a corner of the room, and said:

 

“Holidays! The hour has struck!… Now let us go out.”

 

He was a little anxious about her part and asked:

 

“You think you will know it?”

 

She replied confidently:

 

“Certainly. What is the prompter for?” She went into her room to put on her

hat. Christophe sat at the piano while he was waiting for her and struck a

few chords. From the next room she called:

 

“Oh! What is that? Play some more! How pretty it is!”

 

She ran in, pinning on her hat. He went on. When he had finished she

wanted him to play more. She went into ecstasies with all the little arch

exclamations habitual to Frenchwomen which they make about Tristan and a

cup of chocolate equally. It made Christophe laugh; it was a change from

the tremendous affected, clumsy exclamations of the Germans; they were

both exaggerated in different directions; one made a mountain out of a

mole-hill, the other made a mole-hill out of a mountain; the French was not

less ridiculous than the German, but for the moment it seemed more pleasant

because he loved the lips from which it came. Corinne wanted to know what

he was playing, and when she learned that he had composed it she gave a

shout. He had told her during their conversation in the morning that he was

a composer, but she had hardly listened to him. She sat by him and insisted

on his playing everything that he had composed. Their walk was forgotten.

It was not mere politeness on her part; she adored music and had an

admirable instinct for it which supplied the deficiencies of her education.

At first he did not take her seriously and played his easiest melodies. But

when he had played a passage by which he set more store and saw that she

preferred it too, although he had not said anything about it, he was

joyfully surprised. With the naïve astonishment of the Germans when they

meet a Frenchman who is a good musician he said:

 

“Odd. How good your taste is! I should never have thought it….”

 

Corinne laughed in his face.

 

He amused himself then by selecting compositions more and more difficult

to understand, to see how far she would go with him. But she did not seem

to be put out by his boldness, and after a particularly new melody which

Christophe himself had almost come to doubt because he had never succeeded

in having it accepted in Germany, he was greatly astonished when Corinne

begged him to play it again, and she got up and began to sing the notes

from memory almost without a mistake! He turned towards her and took her

hands warmly:

 

“But you are a musician!” he cried.

 

She began to laugh and explained that she had made her début as a singer in

provincial opera houses, but that an impresario of touring companies had

recognized her disposition towards the poetic theater and had enrolled her

in its services. He exclaimed:

 

“What a pity!”

 

“Why?” said she. “Poetry also is a sort of music.”

 

She made him explain to her the meaning of his Lieder; he told her the

German words, and she repeated them with easy mimicry, copying even the

movements of his lips and eyes as he pronounced the words. When she had

these to sing from memory, then she made grotesque mistakes, and when she

forgot, she invented words, guttural and barbarously sonorous, which made

them both laugh. She did not tire of making him play, nor he of playing

for her and hearing her pretty voice; she did not know the tricks of the

trade and sang a little from the throat like little girls, and there was a

curious fragile quality in her voice that was very touching. She told him

frankly what she thought. Although she could not explain why she liked

or disliked anything there was always some grain of sense hidden in her

judgment. The odd thing was that she found least pleasure in the most

classical passages which were most appreciated in Germany; she paid him a

few compliments out of politeness; but they obviously meant nothing. As she

had no musical culture she had not the pleasure which amateurs and even

artists find in what is already heard, a pleasure which often makes them

unconsciously reproduce, or, in a new composition, like forms or formulæ

which they have already used in old compositions. Nor did she have the

German taste for melodious sentimentality (or, at least, her sentimentality

was different; Christophe did not yet know its failings)—she did not go

into ecstasies over the soft insipid music preferred in Germany; she did

not single out the most melodious of his Lieder,—a melody which he

would have liked to destroy because his friends, only too glad to be able

to compliment him on something, were always talking about it. Corinne’s

dramatic instinct made her prefer the melodies which frankly reproduced

a certain passion; he also set most store by them. And yet she did not

hesitate to show her lack of sympathy with certain rude harmonies which

seemed quite natural to Christophe; they gave her a sort of shock when she

came upon them; she would stop then and ask “if it was really so.” When he

said “Yes,” then she would rush at the difficulty; but she would make a

little grimace which did not escape Christophe. Sometimes even she would

prefer to skip the bar. Then he would play it again on the piano.

 

“You don’t like that?” he would ask.

 

She would screw up her nose.

 

“It is wrong,” she would say.

 

“Not at all,” he would reply with a laugh. “It is quite right. Think of its

meaning. It is rhythmic, isn’t it?”

 

(He pointed to her heart.)

 

But she would shake her head:

 

“May be; but it is wrong here.” (She pulled her ear.)

 

And she would be a little shocked by the sudden outbursts of German

declamation.

 

“Why should he talk so loud?” she would ask. “He is all alone. Aren’t you

afraid of his neighbors overhearing him? It is as though—(Forgive me! You

won’t be angry?)—he were hailing a boat.”

 

He was not angry; he laughed heartily, he recognized that there was some

truth in what she said. Her remarks amused him; nobody had ever said such

things before. They agreed that declamation in singing generally deforms

the natural word like a magnifying glass. Corinne asked Christophe to write

music for a piece in which she would speak to the accompaniment of the

orchestra, singing a few sentences every now and then. He was fired by the

idea in spite of the difficulties of the stage setting which, he thought,

Corinne’s musical voice would easily overcome, and they made plans for the

future. It was not far short of five o’clock when they thought of going

out. Night fell early. They could not think of going for a walk. Corinne

had a rehearsal at the theater in the evening; nobody was allowed to be

present. She made him promise to come and fetch her during the next

afternoon to take the walk they had planned.

 

*

 

Next day they did almost the same again. He found Corinne in front of her

mirror, perched on a high stool, swinging her legs; she was trying on a

wig. Her dresser was there and a hair dresser of the town to whom she was

giving instructions about a curl which she wished to have higher up. As she

looked in the glass she saw Christophe smiling behind her back; she put out

her tongue at him. The hair dresser went away with the wig and she turned

gaily to Christophe:

 

“Good-day, my friend!” she said.

 

She held up her cheek to be kissed. He had not expected such intimacy, but

he took advantage of it all the same. She did not attach so much importance

to the favor; it was to her a greeting like any other.

 

“Oh! I am happy!” said she. “It will do very well to-night.” (She was

talking of her wig.) “I was so wretched! If you had come this morning you

would have found me absolutely miserable.”

 

He asked why.

 

It was because the Parisian hair dresser had made a mistake in packing and

had sent a wig which was not suitable to the part.

 

“Quite flat,” she said, “and falling straight down. When I saw it I wept

like a Magdalen. Didn’t I, Désirée?”

 

“When I came in,” said Désirée, “I was afraid for Madame. Madame was quite

white. Madame looked like death.”

 

Christophe laughed. Corinne saw him in her mirror:

 

“Heartless wretch; it makes you laugh,” she said indignantly.

 

She began to laugh too.

 

He asked her how the rehearsal had gone. Everything had gone off well. She

would have liked the other parts to be cut more and her own less. They

talked so much that they wasted part of the afternoon. She dressed slowly;

she amused herself by asking Christophe’s opinion about her dresses.

Christophe praised her elegance and told her naïvely in his Franco-German

jargon, that he had never seen anybody so “luxurious.” She looked at him

for a moment and then burst out laughing.

 

“What have I said?” he asked. “Have I said anything wrong?”

 

“Yes, yes,” she cried, rocking with laughter. “You have indeed.”

 

At last they went out. Her striking costume and her exuberant chatter

attracted attention. She looked at everything with her mocking eyes and

made no effort to conceal her impressions. She chuckled at the dressmakers’

shops, and at the picture post-card shops in which sentimental scenes,

comic and obscene drawings, the town prostitutes, the imperial family, the

Emperor as a sea-dog holding the wheel of the Germania and defying the

heavens, were all thrown