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

and quick eyes, who said the conventional things with a thick

accent. Corinne naturally made eyes, and then she would go on talking to

Christophe in the same affected, provoking voice, and that irritated him.

And he found no pleasure in the calm lack of modesty with which she went on

dressing in his presence, and the paint and grease with which she larded

her arms, throat, and face filled him with profound disgust. He was on the

point of going away without seeing her again after the performance; but

when he said good-bye and begged to be excused from going to the supper

that was to be given to her after the play, she was so hurt by it and

so affectionate, too, that he could not hold out against her. She had a

time-table brought, so as to prove that he could and must stay an hour

with her. He only needed to be convinced, and he was at the supper. He was

even able to control his annoyance with the follies that were indulged in

and his irritation at Corinne’s coquetries with all and sundry. It was

impossible to be angry with her. She was an honest girl, without any moral

principles, lazy, sensual, pleasure-loving, childishly coquettish; but at

the same time so loyal, so kind, and all her faults were so spontaneous and

so healthy that it was only possible to smile at them and even to love

them. Christophe, who was sitting opposite her, watched her animation, her

radiant eyes, her sticky lips, with their Italian smile—that smile in

which there is kindness, subtlety, and a sort of heavy greediness. He saw

her more clearly than he had yet done. Some of her features reminded him

of Ada: certain gestures, certain looks, certain sensual and rather coarse

tricks—the eternal feminine. But what he loved in her was her southern

nature, that generous nature which is not niggardly with its gifts, which

never troubles to fashion drawing-room beauties and literary cleverness,

but harmonious creatures who are made body and mind to grow in the air and

the sun. When he left she got up from the table to say good-bye to him away

from the others. They kissed and renewed their promises to write and meet

again.

 

He took the last train home. At a station the train coming from the

opposite direction was waiting. In the carriage opposite his—a third-class

compartment—Christophe saw the young Frenchwoman who had been with him to

the performance of Hamlet. She saw Christophe and recognized him. They

were both astonished. They bowed and did not move, and dared not look

again. And yet he had seen at once that she was wearing a little traveling

toque and had an old valise by her side. It did not occur to him that she

was leaving the country. He thought she must be going away for a few days.

He did not know whether he ought to speak to her. He stopped, turned over

in his mind what to say, and was just about to lower the window of the

carriage to address a few words to her, when the signal was given. He gave

up the idea. A few seconds passed before the train moved. They looked

straight at each other. Each was alone, and their faces were pressed

against the windows and they looked into each other’s eyes through the

night. They were separated by two windows. If they had reached out their

hands they could have touched each other. So near. So far. The carriages

shook heavily. She was still looking at him, shy no longer, now that they

were parting. They were so absorbed in looking at each other that they

never even thought of bowing for the last time. She was slowly borne away.

He saw her disappear, and the train which bore her plunged into the night.

Like two circling worlds, they had passed close to each other in infinite

space, and now they sped apart perhaps for eternity.

 

When she had disappeared he felt the emptiness that her strange eyes had

left in him, and he did not understand why; but the emptiness was there.

Sleepy, with eyes half-closed, lying in a corner of the carriage, he felt

her eyes looking into his, and all other thoughts ceased, to let him feel

them more keenly. The image of Corinne fluttered outside his heart like an

insect breaking its wings against a window; but he did not let it in.

 

He found it again when he got out of the train on his arrival, when the

keen night air and his walk through the streets of the sleeping town had

shaken off his drowsiness. He scowled at the thought of the pretty actress,

with a mixture of pleasure and irritation, according as he recalled her

affectionate ways or her vulgar coquetries.

 

“Oh! these French people,” he growled, laughing softly, while he was

undressing quietly, so as not to waken his mother, who was asleep in the

next room.

 

A remark that he had heard the other evening in the box occurred to him:

 

“There are others also.”

 

At his first encounter with France she laid before him the enigma of her

double nature. But, like all Germans, he did not trouble to solve it, and

as he thought of the girl in the train he said quietly:

 

“She does not look like a Frenchwoman.”

 

As if a German could say what is French and what is not.

 

*

 

French or not, she filled his thoughts; for he woke in the middle of the

night with a pang: he had just remembered the valise on the seat by the

girl’s side; and suddenly the idea that she had gone forever crossed his

mind. The idea must have come to him at the time, but he had not thought of

it. It filled him with a strange sadness. He shrugged his shoulders.

 

“What does it matter to me?” he said. “It is not my affair.”

 

He went to sleep.

 

But next day the first person he met when he went out was Mannheim, who

called him “Blücher,” and asked him if he had made up his mind to conquer

all France. From the garrulous newsmonger he learned that the story of the

box had had a success exceeding all Mannheim’s expectations.

 

“Thanks to you! Thanks to you!” cried Mannheim. “You are a great man. I am

nothing compared with you.”

 

“What have I done?” said Christophe.

 

“You are wonderful!” Mannheim replied. “I am jealous of you. To shut the

box in the Grünebaums’ faces, and then to ask the French governess instead

of them—no, that takes the cake! I should never have thought of that!”

 

“She was the Grünebaums’ governess?” said Christophe in amazement.

 

“Yes. Pretend you don’t know, pretend to be innocent. You’d better!… My

father is beside himself. The Grünebaums are in a rage!… It was not for

long: they have sacked the girl.”

 

“What!” cried Christophe. “They have dismissed her? Dismissed her because

of me?”

 

“Didn’t you know?” said Mannheim. “Didn’t she tell you?”

 

Christophe was in despair.

 

“You mustn’t be angry, old man,” said Mannheim. “It does not matter.

Besides, one had only to expect that the Grünebaums would find out…”

 

“What?” cried Christophe. “Find out what?”

 

“That she was your mistress, of course!”

 

“But I do not even know her. I don’t know who she is.”

 

Mannheim smiled, as if to say:

 

“You take me for a fool.”

 

Christophe lost his temper and bade Mannheim do him the honor of believing

what he said. Mannheim said:

 

“Then it is even more humorous.”

 

Christophe worried about it, and talked of going to the Grünebaums and

telling them the facts and justifying the girl. Mannheim dissuaded him.

 

“My dear fellow,” he said, “anything you may say will only convince them of

the contrary. Besides, it is too late. The girl has gone away.”

 

Christophe was utterly sick at heart and tried to trace the young

Frenchwoman. He wanted to write to her to beg her pardon. But nothing was

known of her. He applied to the Grünebaums, but they snubbed him. They did

not know themselves where she had gone, and they did not care. The idea

of the harm he had done in trying to do good tortured Christophe: he was

remorseful. But added to his remorse was a mysterious attraction, which

shone upon him from the eyes of the woman who was gone. Attraction and

remorse both seemed to be blotted out, engulfed in the flood of the day’s

new thoughts. But they endured in the depths of his heart. Christophe did

not forget the woman whom he called his victim. He had sworn to meet her

again. He knew how small were the chances of his ever seeing her again: and

he was sure that he would see her again.

 

As for Corinne, she never answered his letters. But three months later,

when he had given up expecting to hear from her, he received a telegram

of forty words of utter nonsense, in which she addressed him in little

familiar terms, and asked “if they were still fond of each other.” Then,

after nearly a year’s silence, there came a scrappy letter scrawled in her

enormous childish zigzag writing, in which she tried to play the lady,—a

few affectionate, droll words. And there she left it. She did not forget

him, but she had no time to think of him.

 

*

 

Still under the spell of Corinne and full of the ideas they had exchanged

about art, Christophe dreamed of writing the music for a play in which

Corinne should act and sing a few airs—a sort of poetic melodrama. That

form of art once so much in favor in Germany, passionately admired by

Mozart, and practised by Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and

all the great classics, had fallen into discredit since the triumph of

Wagnerism, which claimed to have realized the definite formula of the

theater and music. The Wagnerian pedants, not content with proscribing

every new melodrama, busied themselves with dressing up the old melodramas

and operas. They carefully effaced every trace of spoken dialogue and wrote

for Mozart, Beethoven, or Weber, recitations in their own manner; they were

convinced that they were doing a service to the fame of the masters and

filling out their thoughts by the pious deposit of their dung upon

masterpieces.

 

Christophe, who had been made more sensible of the heaviness, and often

the ugliness, of Wagnerian declamation by Corinne, had for some time been

debating whether it was not nonsense and an offense against nature to

harness and yoke together the spoken word and the word sung in the theater:

it was like harnessing a horse and a bird to a cart. Speech and singing

each had its rhythm. It was comprehensible that an artist should sacrifice

one of the two arts to the triumph of that which he preferred. But to try

to find a compromise between them was to sacrifice both: it was to want

speech no longer to be speech, and singing no longer to be singing; to want

singing to let its vast flood be confined between the banks of monotonous

canals, to want speech to cloak its lovely naked limbs with rich, heavy

stuffs which must paralyze its gestures and movements. Why not leave both

with their spontaneity and freedom of movement? Like a beautiful girl

walking tranquilly, lithely along a stream, dreaming as she goes: the gay

murmur of the water lulls her dreams, and unconsciously she brings her

steps and her thoughts in tune with the