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

swear that it was all a disgusting calumny, worthy of the foolish rotten

town. But there had been stories; it did not matter what, did it?

 

“No,” said Christophe, bowing his head.

 

“And so she has gone.”

 

“And what did she say—anything to you when she went?”

 

“Ah!” said Lili Reinhart, “I had no chance. I had gone to Cologne for a few

days just then! When I came back—_Zu spät_” (too late).—She stopped to

scold her maid, who had brought her lemon too late for her tea.

 

And she added sententiously with the solemnity which the true German brings

naturally to the performance of the familiar duties of daily life:

 

“Too late, as one so often is in life!”

 

(It was not clear whether she meant the lemon or her interrupted story.)

 

She went on:

 

“When I returned I found a line from her thanking me for all I had done

and telling me that she was going; she was returning to Paris; she gave no

address.”

 

“And she did not write again?”

 

“Not again.”

 

Once more Christophe saw her sad face disappear into the night; once more

he saw her eyes for a moment just as he had seen them for the last time

looking at him through the carriage window.

 

The enigma of France was once more set before him more insistently than

ever. Christophe never tired of asking Frau Reinhart about the country

which she pretended to know so well. And Frau Reinhart who had never been

there was not reluctant to tell him about it. Reinhart, a good patriot,

full of prejudices against France, which he knew better than his wife,

sometimes used to qualify her remarks when her enthusiasm went too far; but

she would repeat her assertions only the more vigorously, and Christophe,

knowing nothing at all about it, backed her up confidently.

 

What was more precious even than Lili Reinhart’s memories were her books.

She had a small library of French books: school books, a few novels, a few

volumes bought at random. Christophe, greedy of knowledge and ignorant of

France, thought them a treasure when Reinhart went and got them for him and

put them at his disposal.

 

He began with volumes of select passages, old school books, which had been

used by Lili Reinhart or her husband in their school days. Reinhart had

assured him that he must begin with them if he wished to find his way about

French literature, which was absolutely unknown to him. Christophe was full

of respect for those who knew more than himself, and obeyed religiously:

and that very evening he began to read. He tried first of all to take stock

of the riches in his possession.

 

He made the acquaintance of certain French writers, namely: Thédore-Henri

Barrau, François Pétis de la Croix, Frédéric Baudry, Émile Delérot,

Charles-Auguste-Désiré Filon, Samuel Descombaz, and Prosper Baur. He read

the poetry of Abbé Joseph Reyre, Pierre Lachambaudie, the Duc de Nivernois,

André van Hasselt, Andrieux, Madame Colet, Constance-Marie Princesse de

Salm-Dyck, Henrietta Hollard, Gabriel-Jean-Baptiste-Ernest-Wilfrid Legouvé,

Hippolyte Violeau, Jean Reboul, Jean Racine, Jean de Béranger, Frédéric

Béchard, Gustave Nadaud, Édouard Plouvier, Eugène Manuel, Hugo, Millevoye,

Chênedollé, James Lacour Delâtre, Félix Chavannes, Francis-Édouard-Joachim,

known as François Coppée, and Louis Belmontet. Christophe was lost,

drowned, submerged under such a deluge of poetry and turned to prose. He

found Gustave de Molinari, Fléchier, Ferdinand-Édouard Buisson, Mérimée,

Malte-Brun, Voltaire, Lamé-Fleury, Dumas père, J.J. Bousseau, Mézières,

Mirabeau, de Mazade, Claretie, Cortambert, Frédéric II, and M. de Vogüé.

The most often quoted of French historians was Maximilien Samson-Frédéric

Schoell. In the French anthology Christophe found the Proclamation of

the new German Empire; and he read a description of the Germans by

Frédéric-Constant de Rougemont, in which he learned that “_the German was

born to live in the region of the soul. He has not the light noisy gaiety

of the Frenchman. His is a great soul; his affections are tender and

profound. He is indefatigable in toil, and persevering in enterprise. There

is no more moral or long-lived people. Germany has an extraordinary number

of writers. She has the genius of art. While the inhabitants of other

countries pride themselves on being French, English, Spanish, the German on

the other hand embraces all humanity in his love. And though its position

is the very center of Europe the German nation seems to be at once the

heart and the higher reason of humanity_.”

 

Christophe closed the book. He was astonished and tired. He thought:

 

“The French are good fellows; but they are not strong.”

 

He took another volume. It was on a higher plane; it was meant for high

schools. Musset occupied three pages, and Victor Duray thirty, Lamartine

seven pages and Thiers almost forty. The whole of the Cid was

included—or almost the whole:–(ten monologues of Don Diègue and Rodrigue

had been suppressed because they were too long.)—Lanfrey exalted Prussia

against Napoleon I and so he had not been cut down; he alone occupied more

space than all the great classics of the eighteenth century. Copious

narrations of the French defeats of 1870 had been extracted from _La

Debâcle_ of Zola. Neither Montaigne, nor La Rochefoucauld, nor La Bruyère,

nor Diderot, nor Stendhal, nor Balzac, nor Flaubert appeared. On the other

hand, Pascal, who did not appear in the other book, found a place in this

as a curiosity; and Christophe learned by the way that the convulsionary

“was one of the fathers of Port-Royal, a girls’ school, near Paris…”

[Footnote: The anthologies of French literature which Jean-Christophe

borrowed from his friends the Reinharts were:

 

I. Selected French passages for the use of secondary schools, by Hubert

H. Wingerath, Ph.D., director of the real-school of Saint John at

Strasburg. Part II: Middle forms.—7th Edition, 1902, Dumont-Schauberg.

 

II. L. Herrig and G.F. Burguy: Literary France, arranged by F. Tendering,

director of the real-gymnasium of the Johanneum, Hamburg.—1904,

Brunswick.]

 

Christophe was on the point of throwing the book away; his head was

swimming; he could not see. He said to himself: “I shall never get through

with it.” He could not formulate any opinion. He turned over the leaves

idly for hours without knowing what he was reading. He did not read French

easily, and when he had labored to make out a passage, it was almost always

something meaningless and highfalutin.

 

And yet from the chaos there darted flashes of light, like rapier thrusts,

words that looked and stabbed, heroic laughter. Gradually an impression

emerged from his first reading, perhaps through the biased scheme of the

selections. Voluntarily or involuntarily the German editors had selected

those pieces of French which could seem to establish by the testimony of

the French themselves the failings of the French and the superiority of the

Germans. But they had no notion that what they most exposed to the eyes of

an independent mind like Christophe’s was the surprising liberty of these

Frenchmen who criticised everything in their own country and praised

their adversaries. Michelet praised Frederick II, Lanfrey the English of

Trafalgar, Charras the Prussia of 1813. No enemy of Napoleon had ever dared

to speak of him so harshly. Nothing was too greatly respected to escape

their disparagement. Even under the great King the previous poets had had

their freedom of speech. Molière spared nothing, La Fontaine laughed at

everything. Even Boileau gibed at the nobles. Voltaire derided war, flogged

religion, scoffed at his country. Moralists, satirists, pamphleteers, comic

writers, they all vied one with another in gay or somber audacity. Want

of respect was universal. The honest German editors were sometimes scared

by it, they had to throw a rope to their consciences by trying to excuse

Pascal, who lumped together cooks, porters, soldiers, and camp followers;

they protested in a note that Pascal would not have written thus if he had

been acquainted with the noble armies of modern times. They did not fail

to remind the reader how happily Lessing had corrected the Fables of La

Fontaine by following, for instance, the advice of the Genevese Rousseau

and changing the piece of cheese of Master Crow to a piece of poisoned meat

of which the vile fox dies.

 

“May you never gain anything but poison. You cursed flatterers!”

 

They blinked at naked truth; but Christophe was pleased with it; he loved

this light. Here and there he was even a little shocked; he was not used to

such unbridled independence which looks like anarchy to the eyes even of

the freest of Germans, who in spite of everything is accustomed to order

and discipline. And he was led astray by the way of the French; he took

certain things too seriously; and other things which were implacable

denials seemed to him to be amusing paradoxes. No matter! Surprised or

shocked he was drawn on little by little. He gave up trying to classify his

impressions; he passed from one feeling to another; he lived. The gaiety

of the French stories—Chamfort, Ségur, Dumas père, Mérimée all lumped

together—delighted him; and every now and then in gusts there would creep

forth from the printed page the wild intoxicating scent of the Revolutions.

 

It was nearly dawn when Louisa, who slept in the next room, woke up and saw

the light through the chinks of Christophe’s door. She knocked on the wall

and asked if he were ill. A chair creaked on the floor: the door opened and

Christophe appeared, pale, in his nightgown, with a candle and a book in

his hand, making strange, solemn, and grotesque gestures. Louisa was in

terror and got up in her bed, thinking that he was mad. He began to laugh,

and, waving his candle, he declaimed a scene from Molière. In the middle of

a sentence he gurgled with laughter; he sat at the foot of his mother’s bed

to take breath; the candle shook in his hand. Louisa was reassured, and

scolded him forcibly:

 

“What is the matter with you? What is it? Go to bed…. My poor boy, are

you going out of your senses?”

 

But he began again:

 

“You must listen to this!”

 

And he sat by her bedside and read the play, going back to the beginning

again. He seemed to see Corinne; he heard her mocking tones, cutting and

sonorous. Louisa protested:

 

“Go away! Go away! You will catch cold. How tiresome you are. Let me go to

sleep!”

 

He went on relentlessly. He raised his voice, waved his arms, choked with

laughter; and he asked his mother if she did not think it wonderful. Louisa

turned her back on him, buried herself in the bedclothes, stopped her ears,

and said:

 

“Do leave me alone!…”

 

But she laughed inwardly at hearing his laugh. At last she gave up

protesting. And when Christophe had finished the act, and asked her,

without eliciting any reply, if she did not think what he had read

interesting, he bent over her and saw that she was asleep. Then he smiled,

gently kissed her hair, and stole back to his own room.

 

*

 

He borrowed more and more books from the Reinharts’ library. There were all

sorts of books in it. Christophe devoured them all. He wanted so much to

love the country of Corinne and the unknown young woman. He had so much

enthusiasm to get rid of that he found a use for it in his reading. Even

in second-rate works there were sentences and pages which had the effect

on him of a gust of fresh air. He exaggerated the effect, especially when

he was talking to Frau Reinhart, who always went a little better than he.

Although she was as ignorant as a fish, she delighted to