Jean-Christophe quotes

His large head, that seems to have swollen up, is wrinkled with the grotesque and lamentable grimaces that he makes; the skin of his face and hands is brown and purple, and spotted with yellow. …

“Dear God!” said the old man with conviction: “How ugly he is!”

He put the lamp down on the table.

Louisa took the child feverishly and pressed it to her bosom. She looked at it with a bashful and delighted smile.

“Oh, my poor child!” she said shamefacedly. “How ugly you are⁠—how ugly! and how I love you!”

Jean Michel went back to the fireside. He began to poke the fire in protest, but a smile gave the lie to the moroseness and solemnity of his expression.

The child was comforted by contact with his mother’s warm body. He could be heard sucking her milk and gurgling and snorting. Jean Michel turned in his chair, and said once more, with some emphasis:

“There’s nothing finer than an honest man.”

He was silent for a moment, pondering whether it would not be proper to elaborate this thought; but he found nothing more to say, and after a silence he said irritably:

“Father, please—please!” said Louisa. “You will make him cry.”

The child hesitated for a second or two whether to cry or to go on with his meal; but not being able to do both at once, he went on with the meal.

Jean Michel continued in a lower tone, though with outbursts of anger:

He went and sat down again, thought for a little, and then said, with the solemnity in which he invested all his aphorisms:

“The first thing in life is to do one’s duty.”

He waited for contradiction, and spat on the fire. Then, as neither mother nor child raised any objection, he was for going on, but relapsed into silence.

always he escapes it. He swims in the infinite. How happy he is! He is made to be happy! There is nothing in him that does not believe in happiness, and does not cling to it with all his little strength and passion! …

Life will soon see to it that he is brought to reason.

After having known plenty, want came, and every day increased. Melchior refused to take notice of it; he did not spend one penny the less on his toilet or his pleasures.

He was not a bad man, but a half-good man, which is perhaps worse⁠—weak, without spring, without moral strength, but for the rest, in his own opinion, a good father, a good son, a good husband, a good man

—and perhaps he was good, if to be so it is enough to possess an easy kindness, which is quickly touched, and that animal affection by which a man loves his kin as a part of himself.

It cannot even be said that he was very egoistic; he had not personality enough for that.

He was nothing. They are a terrible thing in life, these people who are nothing.

Like a dead weight thrown into the air, they fall, and must fall; and in their fall they drag with them everything that they have.

He was sick with shame; he heard the two children dancing with delight round him; he suffered horribly. He felt that they despised and hated him. Why? Why? He would gladly have died!

There is no more cruel suffering than that of a child who discovers for the first time the wickedness of others; he believes then that he is persecuted by the whole world, and there is nothing to support him

; there is nothing then—nothing! … Jean-Christophe tried to get up; the little boy pushed him down again; the little girl kicked him. He tried again, and they both jumped on him, and sat on his back and pressed his face down into the ground.

But when he opened his eyes it was day, and it no longer shone so lightly or so carelessly as its predecessor. There was a great change in the world.

Jean-Christophe now knew the meaning of injustice.

There were now times of extremely straitened circumstances at home. They became more and more frequent. They lived meagerly then. No one was more sensible of it than Jean-Christophe. His father saw nothing. He was served first, and there was always enough for him.

Although his ever keen observation, which never forgot anything it had seen, told him that there were in his father’s behavior several things which did not accord with his childish and imperious sense of justice, yet he continued to admire him.

A child has so much need of an object of admiration!

Doubtless it is one of the eternal forms of self-love.

He vowed that he would not give way to it, to watch the whole night through, fearing his nightmares. But in the end weariness always overcame him, and it was always when he was least on his guard that the monsters returned.

Fearful night! So sweet to most children, so terrible to some!

… He was afraid to sleep. He was afraid of not sleeping. Waking or sleeping, he was surrounded by monstrous shapes, the phantoms of his own brain, the larvae floating in the half-day and twilight of childhood, as in the dark chiaroscuro of sickness.

To tell the truth, he had been doing so for long enough without knowing it, and he had not waited to be conscious of composing before he composed.

Everything is music for the born musician.

Everything that throbs, or moves, or stirs, or palpitates—sunlit summer days, nights when the wind howls, flickering light, the twinkling of the stars, storms, the song of birds, the buzzing of insects, the murmuring of trees, voices, loved or loathed, familiar fireside sounds, a creaking …

He never showed it when the day came, because he thought that the others would laugh at him. Besides, he was too little to see in kindness all the rare value that it has.

In the language of children, kind and stupid are almost synonymous, and Uncle Gottfried seemed to be the living proof of it.

One evening when Melchior was dining out, Gottfried was left alone in the living-room, while Louisa put the children to bed. He went out, and sat by the river a few yards away from the house.

Gottfried laughed again, and said:

“You want to make beautiful songs, so as to be a great man; and you want to be a great man, so as to make beautiful songs. You are like a dog chasing its own tail.”

Jean-Christophe was dashed. At any other time he would not have borne his uncle laughing at him, he at whom he was used to laughing. And, at the same time, he would never have thought Gottfried clever enough to stump him with an argument.

The shrill tremolo of the grasshoppers seemed to answer the twinkling of the stars. The wind rustled softly in the branches of the alders. From the hills above the river there came down the sweet light song of a nightingale.

“What need is there to sing?” sighed Gottfried, after a long silence.

(It was not clear whether he were talking to himself or to Jean-Christophe.) “Don’t they sing sweeter than anything that you could make?”

You wrote because you wanted to be a great musician, and to be admired. You have been proud; you have been a liar; you have been punished. … You see! A man is always punished when he is proud and a liar in music.

Music must be modest and sincere⁠—or else, what is it?

Impious, a blasphemy of the Lord, who has given us song to tell the honest truth.”

A lady threw a bunch of violets up at him as he went. It brushed his face. He was panic-stricken and ran as fast as he could, turning over a chair that was in his way.

The faster he ran the more they laughed, and the more they laughed the faster he ran.

At last he reached the exit, which was filled with people looking at him. He forced his way through, butting, and ran and hid himself at the back of the anteroom. His grandfather was in high feather, and covered him with blessings.

But he had never before seen it, and he who sees it for the first time learns that he knew nothing, neither of death nor of life. One moment brings everything tottering. Reason is of no avail.

You thought you were alive, you thought you had some experience of life; you see then that you knew nothing, that you have been living in a veil of illusions spun by your own mind to hide from your eyes the awful countenance of reality.

There is no connection between the idea of suffering and the creature who bleeds and suffers. There is no connection between the idea of death and the convulsions of body and soul in combat and in death.

Jean-Christophe no longer knew what he was doing. He hurled himself like a mad thing on his father. Melchior, lolling in his chair, had no time to protect himself. The boy seized him by the throat and cried:

It was only for a moment.

Melchior shook himself, and sent Jean-Christophe rolling down on to the tile floor, though in his fury he was clinging to him like grim death. The boy’s head crashed against the tiles. Jean-Christophe got upon his knees.

The boy was left to support his father, his brothers, and the whole household.

So at fourteen Jean-Christophe became the head of the family.

He stoutly faced his formidable task. His pride would not allow him to resort to the charity of others. He vowed that he would pull through alone.

As he could be free only for an hour or two a day, his strength flowed into that space of time like a river between walls of rock.

It is a good discipline for art for a man to confine his efforts between unshakable bounds.

In that sense it may be said that misery is a master, not only of thought, but of style; it teaches sobriety to the mind as to the body.

As he could be free only for an hour or two a day, his strength flowed into that space of time like a river between walls of rock. It is a good discipline for art for a man to confine his efforts between unshakable bounds.

In that sense it may be said that misery is a master, not only of thought, but of style; it teaches sobriety to the mind as to the body.

When time is doled out and thoughts measured, a man says no word too much, and grows accustomed to thinking only what is essential; so he lives at double pressure, having less time for living.

But they began to weary of each other.

It is false to pretend that little quarrels feed friendship.

Jean-Christophe was sore against Otto for the injustice that Otto made him be guilty of. He tried to argue with himself; he laid the blame upon his own despotic temper.

“Well, well, old fellow! What is it?”

Oh, the sweetness of that voice, that peace, that silence, that soft air in which were no shouts, no roughness, no violence, that oasis in the harsh desert of life

, and—heroic light gilding with its rays people and things—the light of the enchanted world conjured up by the reading of the divine poets! Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, springs of strength, of sorrow, and of love! …

She would pretend to choke, so as to make herself interesting; she would have a fit of coughing, or she would have something very important to say to the maid.

Jean-Christophe knew that she was playacting; and Minna knew that Jean-Christophe knew that she was playacting; and it amused her, for Jean-Christophe could not tell her what he was thinking.

One day, when she was indulging in this amusement and was coughing languidly, hiding her mouth in her handkerchief, as if she were on the point of choking, but in reality watching Jean-Christophe’s exasperation out of the corner of her eye, she conceived the ingenious …

They were uneasy. But they did not for that desist from their little hostilities and sulkinesses; only there were no more familiarities between them; they were silent. Each was busy constructing their love in silence.

Love has curious retroactive effects. As soon as Jean-Christophe discovered that he loved Minna, he discovered at the same time that he had always loved her.

For three months they had been seeing each other almost every day without ever suspecting the existence of their love. But from the day when he did actually love her, he was absolutely convinced that he had loved her from all eternity.

He had loved for so long without knowing whom! It was a sort of relief to him, like a sick man, who, suffering from a general illness, vague and enervating, sees it become definite in sharp pain in some portion of his body.

Nothing is more wearing than love without a definite object; it eats away and saps the strength like a fever.

A known passion leads the mind to excess; that is exhausting, but at least one knows why. It is an excess; it is not a wasting away. Anything rather than emptiness.

It is possible to reply to an unjust accusation. But what is to be done against the negativeness of such polite indifference? He raged against it. He thought that he would never see Minna again, and he could not bear it.

He felt how little all the pride in the world weighs against a little love.

He forgot his dignity; he became cowardly; he wrote more letters, in which he implored forgiveness. They were no less stupid than the letter in which he had railed against her. They evoked no response. And everything was said.

A too violent expression, an awkward gesture, a harmless twitching of an eye or a nose, a trick of eating, walking, or laughing, a physical constraint which is beyond analysis. …

You say that these things are nothing, and yet they are all the world.

Often they are enough to keep a mother and a son, a brother and a brother, a friend and a friend, who live in proximity to each other, forever strangers to each other.

And in spite of all her care she did irritate him by her every gesture and by her very presence, for she was not very adroit, and he was not very indulgent. And yet he loved her; they loved each other.

But so little is needed to part two creatures who are dear to each other, and love each other with all their hearts!

A too violent expression, an awkward gesture, a harmless twitching of an eye or a nose, a trick of eating, walking, or laughing, a physical constraint which is beyond analysis. … You say that these things are nothing, and yet they are all the world.

His childish passion was gone from him like a fit of fever; the icy breath of the grave had taken it all away. Minna, his pride, his love, and himself. …

Alas! What misery! How small everything showed by the side of this reality, the only reality⁠—death!

Was it worth while to suffer so much, to desire so much, to be so much put about to come in the end to that! …

“But whither, Lord, shall I go? Whatsoever I do, whithersoever I go, is not the end always the same? Is not the end of all things in that?”

“Go on to Death, you who must die! Go and suffer, you who must suffer! You do not live to be happy. You live to fulfil my Law. Suffer; die. But be what you must be⁠—a Man.”

she would turn and turn it in her hands and begin to dream; it would drop from her hands; she would stay for hours together with her arms hanging down, lying back exhausted in a chair, given up to a stupor of sorrow.

Poor Louisa was now spending most of her life in the past⁠—that sad past, which had been very niggardly of joy for her; but she was so used to suffering that she was still grateful for the least tenderness shown to her

, and the pale lights which had shone here and there in the drab days of her life, were still enough to make them bright. All the evil that Melchior had done her was forgotten; she remembered only the good.

Perhaps Jean Michel used only to listen in the same way.

Most friendships are little more than arrangements for mutual satisfaction, so that each party may talk about himself to the other.

But at least Jean Michel, however naively he used to give himself up to the delight of talking, had sympathy which he was always ready to lavish on all sides. He was interested in everything;

He had the quality, perhaps the most precious in life, a curiosity always fresh, never changing with the years, born anew every morning. He had not the talent to turn this gift to account; but how many men of talent might envy him!

Most men die at twenty or thirty; thereafter they are only reflections of themselves: for the rest of their lives they are aping themselves, repeating from day to day more and more mechanically and affectedly what they said and did and thought and loved when they were alive.

It was so long since old Euler had been alive, and he had been such a small thing then, that what was left of him now was very poor and rather ridiculous.

If he was sympathetic towards Christophe it was because he thought that the misanthropic boy found life as evil as he did himself, and that he was not a genius.

Nothing so unites the small of soul in their suffering and discontent as the statement of their common impotence.

Nothing so much restores the desire for health or life to those who are healthy and made for the joy of life as contact with the stupid pessimism of the mediocre and the sick, who, because they are not happy, deny the happiness of others.

She was ostentatious about it. It was as though it was a point of honor with her. And after all, is it not in much the same spirit that many women conceive and defend their honor?

It is a sort of piece of furniture which they have to keep polished, a well waxed floor, cold, hard⁠—and slippery.

The accomplishment of her task did not make Frau Vogel more amicable. She sacrificed herself to the trivialities of the household, as to a duty imposed by God.

he would shout, stamp with his foot, and roar insults at her through the wall.

In the general uproars no one ever noticed it; they thought he was composing.

He would consign Frau Vogel to the depths of hell. He had no respect for her, nor esteem to check him.

When he was unhappy he thought of Him, but did not believe; it seemed to him impossible that a God could authorize unhappiness and injustice. But these difficulties did not greatly exercise him. He was too fundamentally religious to think much about God.

He lived in God; he had no need to believe in Him.

That is well enough for the weak and worn, for those whose lives are anaemic. They aspire to God, as a plant does to the sun. The dying cling to life.

… 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 he would never sleep.

…

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.

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. …

And yet, resigned though she was, she could not help expecting with beating heart a word of sympathy from him when he came near her. A word only, a look … her imagination did the rest.

In the beginning love needs so little food!

It is enough to see, to touch as you pass; such a power of dreams flows from the soul in such moments, that almost of itself it can create its love:

there was nothing. He would fall, his head would drag him down, face forwards: he could hardly hold himself up; he was on the point of collapse. He thought he was going to die, suddenly, struck down. He thought he was dead. …

Christophe was growing a new skin. Christophe was growing a new soul.

And seeing the worn out and rotten soul of his childhood falling away he never dreamed that he was taking on a new one, young and stronger. As through life we change our bodies, so also do we change our souls:

As through life we change our bodies, so also do we change our souls: and the metamorphosis does not always take place slowly over many days; there are times of crisis when the whole is suddenly renewed.

The adult changes his soul. The old soul that is cast off dies.

In those hours of anguish we think that all is at an end. And the whole thing begins again. A life dies. Another life has already come into being.

there are times of crisis when the whole is suddenly renewed. The adult changes his soul. The old soul that is cast off dies. In those hours of anguish we think that all is at an end. And the whole thing begins again.

A life dies. Another life has already come into being.

One night he was alone in his room, with his elbow on his desk under the light of a candle. His back was turned to the window. He was not working. He had not been able to work for weeks.

He tried to relight it. In vain. The more he pursued it, the more it eluded him. From that time on, all his energy was directed towards recalling the vision of a moment. The endeavor was futile.

Ecstasy does not answer the bidding of the will.

But that mystic exaltation was not the only experience that he had of it: it recurred several times, but never with the intensity of the first.

He seemed to have issued from the grave. He swam voluptuously in life flowing free and full: and borne on by its current he thought that he was free.

He did not know that he was less free than ever, that no creature is ever free, that even the law that governs the universe is not free, that only death⁠—perhaps⁠—can bring deliverance.

But the chrysalis issuing from its stifling sheath, joyously, stretched its limbs in its new shape, and had no time as yet to mark the bounds of its new prison.

He had no remorse about it. The stoic principles of life, to which he had hitherto delighted to bend his will, morality, duty, now seemed to him to have no truth, nor reason. Their jealous despotism was smashed against Nature.

Human nature, healthy, strong, free, that alone was virtue: to hell with all the rest!

It provoked pitying laughter to see the little peddling rules of prudence and policy which the world adorns with the name of morality, while it pretends to enclose all life within them. A preposterous molehill, an ant-like people!

Next day they did not even try to talk: they resumed their sweet silence. At long intervals a word or two let them know that they were thinking of the same things.

“How much better it is,” she said, “not to try to talk! One thinks one must, and it is so tiresome!”

“Ah!” said Christophe with conviction, “if only everybody thought the same.”

“Even when you are doing nothing?”

“Especially when I am doing nothing. It is much worse doing something: that bores me.”

They looked at each other and laughed.

“You have made God in your own image,” said Christophe.

“I should be so bored if I were in His place,” replied she with conviction.

“You would not bother much about the world if you were in His place.”

Amalia would avenge herself with angry words. But the innocent Rosa’s heart was rent and torn by this refinement of cruelty: she felt that he detested them and wished to avenge himself: and she wept bitterly.

So, Christophe, who had suffered so much from injustice, learned unjustly to inflict suffering.

Some time after that Sabine’s brother, a miller at Landegg, a little town a few miles away, was to celebrate the christening of a child. Sabine was to be godmother. She invited Christophe. He had no liking for these functions:

She was used to it, and thought it natural.

She did nothing to win love: it seemed to her right that she should be loved: and if she were not, did not care: that is why everybody loved her.

Christophe made another discovery not so pleasing. For a christening a godfather is necessary as well as a godmother, and the godfather has certain rights over the godmother, rights which he does not often renounce, especially when she is young and pretty.

Sabine sat in the stern facing Christophe, and talked to her brother and looked at Christophe. Talking so, they were able to look at each other undisturbedly. They could never have done so had the words ceased to flow.

The deceitful words seemed to say: “It is not you that I see.” But their eyes said to each other: “Who are you? Who are you? You that I love!⁠ ⁠… You that I love, whoever you be!⁠ ⁠…”

The sky was clouded, mists rose from the fields, the river steamed, the sun went down behind the clouds. Sabine shivered and wrapped her little black shawl round her head and shoulders. She seemed to be tired.

“We shall always be friends,” he said softly. She bowed her head and left him, too sad to speak.

They thought that the world is ill made. The lover is unloved. The beloved does not love. The lover who is loved is sooner or later torn from his love.

… There is suffering. There is the bringing of suffering. And the most wretched is not always the one who suffers.

They thought that the world is ill made. The lover is unloved. The beloved does not love. The lover who is loved is sooner or later torn from his love. …

There is suffering. There is the bringing of suffering. And the most wretched is not always the one who suffers.

Once more Christophe took to avoiding the house. He could not bear it. He could not bear to see the curtainless windows, the empty rooms.

And Christophe knew that, in himself, in the secret hidden depths of his soul, he had an inaccessible and inviolable sanctuary where lay the shadow of Sabine. That the flood of life could not bear away. …

Each of us bears in his soul as it were a little graveyard of those whom he has loved.

They sleep there, through the years, untroubled. But a day cometh—this we know—when the graves shall reopen.

But on the contrary she was thinking that it was rather a pity.

But speech was not given to woman for her to say what she is thinking.⁠ ⁠… Thank God! for there would be an end of morality on earth.⁠ ⁠…

The voices came near. Her friends were near the road. She leaped the ditch, climbed the hedge, and hid behind the trees. He watched her in amazement. She signed to him imperiously to come to her. He followed her.

The flickering light of the garden is dead. All is dead. … Night. … The abyss. … Neither light nor consciousness. … Being. The obscure, devouring forces of Being. Joy all-powerful. Joy rending.

Joy which sucks down the human creature as the void a stone.

The sprout of desire sucking up thought. The absurd delicious law of the blind intoxicated worlds which roll at night. …

but what was there in it that could be called vile? Suppose—(he forced the idea on himself)—that Ada were not a woman of any great moral worth, how was the love that he had for her the less pure for that?

Love is in the lover, not in the beloved.

Everything is worthy of the lover, everything is worthy of love. To the pure all is pure. All is pure in the strong and the healthy of mind.

Love is in the lover, not in the beloved. Everything is worthy of the lover, everything is worthy of love. To the pure all is pure. All is pure in the strong and the healthy of mind.

Love, which adorns certain birds with their loveliest colors, calls forth from the souls that are true all that is most noble in them.

The desire to show to the beloved only what is worthy makes the lover take pleasure only in those thoughts and actions which are in harmony with the beautiful image fashioned by love.

There was no reason, because they were stupid enough or ungracious enough to be sad, to want everybody else to be so too and to impose on everybody their decrepit way of living. …

The first of all virtues is joy.

Virtue must be happy, free, and unconstrained. He who does good must give pleasure to himself.

Christophe was not wrong in thinking duty exceptional. But love is so no less. Everything is exceptional. Everything that is of worth has no worse enemy—not the evil (the vices are of worth)—but the habitual.

The mortal enemy of the soul is the daily wear and tear.

Ada was beginning to weary of it. She was not clever enough to find new food for her love in an abundant nature like that of Christophe. Her senses and her vanity had extracted from it all the pleasure they could find in it.

But ten minutes away from her were enough to make him forget everything that had annoyed him. He would return to Ada with a fresh store of hopes and new illusions. He loved her.

Love is a perpetual act of faith.

Whether God exist or no is a small matter: we believe, because we believe. We love because we love; there is no need of reasons! …

He would return to Ada with a fresh store of hopes and new illusions. He loved her. Love is a perpetual act of faith. Whether God exist or no is a small matter: we believe, because we believe.

We love because we love; there is no need of reasons!

…

“Not for the last time, my boy. We do not do what we will to do. We will and we live: two things. You must be comforted.

The great thing is, you see, never to give up willing and living. The rest does not depend on us.

”

“

There is always a tomorrow,

” said Gottfried.

“It is more than anybody does. You are a vain fellow. You want to be a hero. That is why you do such silly things. … A hero! … I don’t quite know what that is: but, you see,

I imagine that a hero is a man who does what he can. The others do not do it.

”

He made this resolve because he knew quite well that the storm was coming.

Thunder falls when it will, and where it will.

But there are peaks which attract it. Certain places—certain souls—breed storms: they create them, or draw them from all points of the horizon:

Joy, furious joy, the sun that lights up all that is and will be, the godlike joy of creation!

There is no joy but in creation. There are no living beings but those who create.

All the rest are shadows, hovering over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are the joys of creation: love, genius, action—quickened by flames issuing from one and the same fire. Even those who cannot find a place by the great fireside:

To create in the region of the body, or in the region of the mind, is to issue from the prison of the body: it is to ride upon the storm of life: it is to be He who Is.

To create is to triumph over death.

Wretched is the sterile creature, that man or that woman who remains alone and lost upon the earth, scanning their withered bodies, and the sight of themselves from which no flame of life will ever leap!

Wretched is the sterile creature, that man or that woman who remains alone and lost upon the earth, scanning their withered bodies, and the sight of themselves from which no flame of life will ever leap!

Wretched is the soul that does not feel its own fruitfulness, and know itself to be big with life and love, as a tree with blossom in the spring! The world may heap honors and benefits upon such a soul: it does but crown a corpse.

When Christophe was struck by the flash of lightning, an electric fluid coursed through his body: he trembled under the shock. It was as though on the high seas, in the dark night, he had suddenly sighted land.

These lies are adapted to the mind of each race: they vary from one to the other: it is they that make it so difficult for nations to understand each other, and so easy for them to despise each other.

Truth is the same for all of us: but every nation has its own lie, which it calls its idealism

: every creature therein breathes it from birth to death: it has become a condition of life:

… example made Christophe understand that the worst falsity in German art came into it not when the artists tried to express something which they had not felt, but rather when they tried to express the feelings which they did in fact feel—feelings which were false.

Music is an implacable mirror of the soul.

The more a German musician is naive and in good faith, the more he displays the weaknesses of the German soul, its uncertain depths, its soft tenderness, its want of frankness, its rather sly idealism, its incapacity for seeing itself, for daring to come face …

And yet Christophe went on composing: and his compositions were not examples of the faults which he found in others. In him creation was an irresistible necessity which would not submit to the rules which his intelligence laid down for it.

No man creates from reason, but from necessity.

—It is not enough to have recognized the untruth and affectation inherent in the majority of the feelings to avoid falling into them: long and painful endeavor is necessary:

Christophe was conscious of it: and he showed his joy simply, impudently. He saw no harm in it, he only asked to share it with others.

He did not see how such joy hurts the majority of men, who never can possess it and are always envious of it.

For the rest he never bothered about pleasing or displeasing: he was sure of himself, and nothing seemed to him simpler than to communicate his conviction to others—to conquer. Instinctively he compared his riches with the general poverty of the makers of music:

It was when he tried to pretend that he liked the real great men that he was lying to himself—in perfect innocence. There are “Brahmins” who think to find in their God the breath of old men of genius: they love Beethoven in Brahms.

Kuh went one better: he loved Brahms in Beethoven.

But the most enraged of all with Christophe’s paradoxes was Spitz, the bassoon. It was not so much his musical instinct that was wounded as his natural servility. One of the Roman Emperors wished to die standing.

she never did anything with her prize. Once her curiosity and her vanity were satisfied she lost her interest and passed on to another specimen. All her power was sterile. There was something of death in her living soul.

She had the genius of curiosity and boredom.

And so she looked at Christophe and he looked at her. She hardly spoke. An imperceptible smile was enough, a little movement of the corners of her mouth: Christophe was hypnotized by her.

You shall for once know yourselves. … Be what you like: but, for any sake, be true! Be true even though art and artists—and I myself—have to suffer for it! If art and truth cannot live together, then let art disappear.

Truth is life. Lies are death.

”

… To enjoy the Ocean you need to put it in a bowl with goldfish.

You only understand life when you have killed it.

”

… But you have seen nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, understood nothing, nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing! The sufferings of an artist are a show to you. You think the tears of agony of a Beethoven are finely painted.

You would cry ‘Encore’ to the Crucifixion.

A great soul struggles all its life long in sorrow to divert your idleness for an hour! …”

and he did them an injustice. The Klings and the Laubers also had had their hour of illumination: they had been advanced twenty years ago: and then like most people they had stopped short at that.

Man has so little force that he is out of breath after the first ascent: very few are long-winded enough to go on.

Christophe’s attitude quickly alienated him from his new friends. Their sympathy was a bargain: he had to side with them if they were to side with him: and it was quite evident that Christophe would not yield an inch: he would not join them.

… I tell you that I will never set foot inside it again! I loathe all these Wagner-Vereine, all these Vereine, all these flocks of sheep who have to huddle together to be able to baa in unison.

Go and tell those sheep from me that I am a wolf, that I have teeth, and am not made far the pasture!

”

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.

“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.

It was hailed as a masterpiece by everybody about him. He was cowardly and was overpersuaded. In truth, he was bursting with music and thinking much more of his music than of the text.

The text was a new bed into which to let loose the flood of his passions.

He was as far as possible from the state of abnegation and intelligent impersonality proper to musical translation of a poetic work. He was thinking only of himself and not at all of the work. He never thought of adapting himself to it.

The general public whom Christophe had tried to shake out of their apathy were quite pleased to see the insolent young man, who had presumed to reform opinion and disturb the rest of people of property, taken down a peg.

Christophe was in the water. Everybody did their best to duck him.

They did not come down upon him all at once. One tried first, to spy out the land. Christophe made no response, and he struck more lustily. Others followed, and then the whole gang of them.

They tried to recall him; the applause went on for a few minutes longer. But he did not return. The orchestra went away. The audience decided to go too. The concert was over.

It had been a good day.

Christophe had gone already. Hardly had he seen the wretched conductor leave his desk when he had rushed from the box; he plunged down the stairs from the first floor to meet him and slap his face.

He threw himself on the ground; he buried his face in the grass; he laughed nervously, happily. All the beauty, the grace, the charm of life wrapped him round, imbued his soul, and he sucked them up like a sponge. He thought:

“Why are you so beautiful, and they⁠—men⁠—so ugly?”

No matter! He loved it, he loved it, he felt that he would always love it, and that nothing could ever take it from him. He held the earth to his breast. He held life to his breast:

“I love you! You are mine. They cannot take you from me. Let them do what they will! Let them make me suffer! …

Suffering also is life!

”

he felt stupid with them; what could he have found to say to them? They were full of their profession and saw nothing beyond it.

They were not men. If only they had been books! But they were only notes to books, philological commentaries.

Christophe avoided meeting them. But sometimes he was forced to do so. The director was at home once a month in the afternoon; and he insisted on all his people being there.

The Reinharts’ little house was gemütlich like themselves.

It was a rather chattering Gemüt, a Gemüt with inscriptions.

The furniture, the utensils, the china all talked, and went on repeating their joy in seeing their “charming guest,” asked after his health, and gave him pleasant and virtuous advice. On the sofa—which was very hard—was a little cushion which murmured amiably:

“

Ah! the worst misery of all is that there is not a single man who can understand you!

”

“It is old,” he said humbly. “It is like myself.” Christophe turned round and looked at the old man, who seemed to be asking pardon for his age, took both his hands, and laughed. He looked into his honest eyes:

“Oh!” he said, “you are younger than I.”

Schulz laughed aloud and spoke of his old body and his infirmities.

“That’s a good creature!” said Christophe, getting up from the piano. “She is right.

There is nothing so intolerable as an audience arriving in the middle of a concert.

”

Not only was Schulz in touch with every manifestation of the art of the day that Christophe knew, but he knew an immense amount about musicians of the past and of other countries of whom Christophe had never heard.

His memory was a great reservoir in which all the beautiful waters of the heavens were collected.

Christophe never wearied of dipping into it, and Schulz was glad of Christophe’s interest.

… girl, to Christophe, and doubtless to many others who would be forever unknown, it was because, instead of bringing the customary words of the revolt of man against nature, he brought something of the indifferent peace of Nature, and reconciled the submissive soul with her.

He did good like the fields, the woods, all Nature with which he was impregnated.

Christophe remembered the evenings he had spent with Gottfried in the country, his walks as a child, the stories and songs in the night.

They parted. He went down the hill. When he reached the bottom he turned. She was standing at the summit in the same place. She waved her handkerchief and made signs to him as though she saw him.

There was something heroic and absurd in her obstinacy in denying her misfortune, something which touched Christophe and hurt him.

He felt how worthy Modesta was of pity and even of admiration—and he could not have lived two days with her.

And Christophe would have thought it a crime to snatch from such poor wretches the illusion which upheld them. But for himself he never could have recourse to such subterfuges.

He would rather die than live by illusion.

Was not Art also an illusion? No. It must not be. Truth! Truth! Eyes wide open, let him draw in through every pore the all-puissant breath of life, see things as they are, squarely face his misfortunes—and laugh.

He wrote to them once and their relation ended there. He tried also to write to Modesta, but she answered with a commonplace letter in which she spoke only of trivialities. He gave up the correspondence. He wrote to nobody and nobody wrote to him.

Silence. Silence. From day to day the heavy cloak of silence descended upon Christophe. It was like a rain of ashes falling on him.

It seemed already to be evening, and Christophe was losing his hold on life. He would not resign himself to that. The hour of sleep was not yet come. He must live.

The worst of all to bear was living from morning to night as they did, together, always together, isolated from the rest of the world.

When two people suffer and cannot help each other’s suffering, exasperation is fatal; each in the end holds the other responsible for the suffering; and each in the end believes it.

It were better to be alone; alone in suffering.

“Oh! I know that,” said the girl mockingly. “It was for Lorchen.”

It was not only Lorchen that Christophe kissed as he kissed the little milkmaid’s chubby cheeks; it was all Germany.

The girl slipped away and ran towards the train which was just going. She hung out of the window and waved her handkerchief to him until she was out of sight.

He wrote insipid society paragraphs and articles in a delicately involved manner. He was the champion of French style, French smartness, French gallantry, French wit—Regency, red heels, Lauzun. People laughed at him: but that did not prevent his success.

Those who say that in Paris ridicule kills do not know Paris: so far from dying of it, there are people who live on it: in Paris ridicule leads to everything, even to fame and fortune.

Sylvain Kohn was far beyond any need to reckon the goodwill that every day accumulated to him through his Frankfurtian affectations.

Kohn began to laugh, and said fatuously:

“France is a woman, my dear fellow. If you want to succeed, make up to the women.”

Christophe did not listen to the explanation, and went on with his own story. To put a stop to it, Kohn asked:

… To whom did he pray? To whom could he pray? He did not believe in God; he believed that there was no God. … But he had to pray—he had to pray within his soul.

Only the mean of spirit never need to pray. They never know the need that comes to the strong in spirit of taking refuge within the inner sanctuary of themselves.

As he left behind him the humiliations of the day, in the vivid silence of his heart Christophe felt the presence of his eternal Being, of his God. The waters of his wretched life stirred and shifted above Him and never touched Him:

The others, who would have been hard put to it to give any explanation and were disconcerted by Christophe, referred him to the musician of the company, Théophile Goujart, the great musical critic, who began at once to talk of sevenths and ninths.

Goujart knew music much as Sganarelle knew Latin.

…

When he was summoned to join in the fight between the army of Succession and the army of Superposition, he replied, with his usual formula, which was very different from that of Sosia:

“Gentlemen, I am everybody’s enemy.”

And when they insisted, saying:

“Which matters most in music, harmony or counterpoint?”

“Music. Show me what you have done.”

They were all agreed about their own music. These intrepid warriors who, when they were not pummeling each other, were whacking away at some dead Master whose fame had endured too long, were reconciled by the one passion which was common to them all:

The music-theater was to them a literary form, and therefore impure. (Being all literary men, they set a ban on literature.) Any music that was expressive, descriptive, suggestive—in short, any music with any meaning—was condemned as impure.

In every Frenchman there is a Robespierre. He must be forever chopping the head off something or somebody to purify it.

The great French critics only recognized pure music: the rest they left to the rabble.

Massenet and Gounod were more frequently performed than anybody else, and the musical trinity—Mignon, Les Huguenots, and Faust—had safely crossed the bar of the thousandth performance. But these were only trivial accidents: there was no need to go and see them.

When some untoward fact upsets a theory, nothing is more simple than to ignore it.

The French critics shut their eyes to these blatant works and to the public which applauded them: and only a very little more was needed to make them ignore the whole music-theater in France. The music-theater was to them a literary form, and therefore impure.

But to how many men in France does that ever occur? To these chemists music seems to be no more than the art of resolving sounds.

They mistake the alphabet for a book.

Christophe shrugged his shoulders when he heard them say complacently that to understand art it must be abstracted from the man. They were extraordinarily pleased with this paradox: for by it they fancied they were proving their own musical quality.

It never seemed to occur to them that every real musician lives in a world of sound, as other men live in a visible world, and that his days are lived in and borne onward by a flood of music.

Music is the air he breathes, the sky above him.

Nature wakes answering music in his soul. His soul itself is music: music is in all that it loves, hates, suffers, fears, hopes. And when the soul of a musician loves a beautiful body, it sees music in that, too.

they are music: their tenderness is like caressing notes, like a delicious chord. That inward music is a thousand times more rich than the music that finds expression, and the instrument is inferior to the player.

Genius is measured by the power of life, by the power of evoking life through the imperfect instrument of art.

But to how many men in France does that ever occur? To these chemists music seems to be no more than the art of resolving sounds. They mistake the alphabet for a book.

“There’s a time for everything,” said Sylvain Kohn chaffingly. “You wanted virtue. You see, there’s still virtue in France.”

“But that’s not virtue!” cried Christophe. “That’s rhetoric!”

“In France,” said Sylvain Kohn. “Virtue in the theater is always rhetorical.”

Why, it is a pleasure, it is the most intoxicating of all. But it is a pleasure which is only won at the cost of a strenuous fight: it is the laurel-wreath that crowns the victory of the strong.

Art is life tamed. Art is the Emperor of life.

To be Caesar a man must have the soul of Caesar. But you are only limelight Kings: you are playing a part, and do not even deceive yourselves.

You deaden their minds with the fumes of opium. Behind it all is death: you know it: but you will not admit it. Well, I tell you:

Where death is, there art is not. Art is the spring of life.

But even the most honest of your writers are so cowardly that even when the bandage is removed from their eyes they pretend not to see: they have the effrontery to say:

Art for art’s sake! … That’s a fine faith! But it is the faith of the strong.

Art! To grasp life, as the eagle claws its prey, to bear it up into the air, to rise with it into the serenity of space!

… For that you need talons, great wings, and a strong heart. But you are nothing but sparrows who, when they find a piece of carrion, rend it here and there, squabbling for it, and twittering … Art for art’s sake! … Oh! wretched men!

“What more do you want?” asked Sylvain Kohn.

“We are France,” said Sylvain Kohn, gurgling with laughter.

Christophe stared hard at him for a moment, then shook his head, and said once more:

“But you ought to be interested in art if not in love.”

“One doesn’t talk about these things: one does them.”

“But when one cannot do them?” said Colette, pouting.

“I’m not saying anything hard about good women,” replied Christophe gaily.

“A good woman is Paradise on earth. Only, Paradise on earth.⁠ ⁠…”

“I know. No one has ever seen it.”

But that did not work with a friend like Christophe. He was perfectly willing to allow her to prefer people whom he did not admire, even people whom he despised: but he would not suffer her to put him on the same level with them.

Everybody to his own taste: but at least let everybody have his own taste.

He was the less inclined to be patient with Colette, as she seemed to take a delight in gathering round herself all the young men who were most likely to exasperate Christophe:

But it was impossible for him to find out the meaning of their fanaticism. For or against religion? For or against Reason? For or against the country?—They were for and against everything.

They were fanatics for the pleasure of it.

He spoke about it one evening to a Socialist deputy whom he met sometimes at the Stevens’. Although he had spoken to him before, he had no idea what sort of man he was: till then they had only talked about music.

Christophe was not particularly grateful to her for it: he was not much in sympathy with her: she hardly existed for him. Perhaps it was that unconsciously he could not forgive her acquiescence in her husband’s infidelities, of which she was by no means ignorant.

Passive acceptance was of all the vices that which he could least excuse.

He was more intimate with Achille Roussin. Roussin loved music, as he loved the other arts, crudely but sincerely. When he liked a symphony, it became a thing that he could take into his arms.

… a morbid humanitarianism which broke down the distinction between Good and Evil, and developed a sentimental pity for the “sacred and irresponsible human” in the criminal, the doting sentimentality of an old man:—it was a capitulation to crime, the surrender of society to its mercies.

“France is drunk with liberty. When she has raved and screamed, she will fall down dead-drunk. And when she wakes up she will find herself in prison.”

What hurt Christophe most in this demagogy was to see the most violent political measures coldly carried through by these men whose fundamental instability he knew perfectly well.

and while he admitted in it a certain professional dignity, he had a contempt for the poor quality of life which most often it disguised. He could not understand writing for the sake of writing, or talking for the sake of talking.

He never said words; he said⁠—or wanted to say⁠—the things themselves.

“Ei dice cose, e voi dite parole. …”

Through the voluptuous night of Paris a great flame darted in his heart.

He thought himself free of Faith, and he was a living torch of Faith.

Nothing was more calculated to outrage the French spirit of irony. Faith is one of the feelings which a too civilized society can least forgive: for it has lost it and hates others to possess it.

He was in no hurry, for, like Christophe, he counted on time, not, as Christophe did, to build, but to destroy. He had no difficulty in detaching Sylvain Kohn and Goujart from Christophe, just as he had gradually forced him out of the Stevens’ circle.

He was isolating Christophe.

Christophe himself helped him. He pleased nobody, for he would not join any party, but was rather against all parties. He did not like the Jews: but he liked the anti-Semites even less.

Once more Christophe found himself alone, more solitary than ever, in that great, hostile, stranger city. He did not worry about it. He began to think that he was fated to be so, and would be so all his life.

He did not know that a great soul is never alone, that, however Fortune may cheat him of friendship, in the end a great soul creates friends by the radiance of the love with which it is filled, and that even in that hour, when he thought himself forever isolated, he was more rich in love than the happiest men and women in the world.

Living with the Stevens was a little girl of thirteen or fourteen, to whom Christophe had given lessons at the same time as Colette. She was a distant cousin of Colette’s, and her name was Grazia Buontempi.

He felt the blessing of that power of music which issues from the depths of the German soul. Often mediocre, and even coarse, what does it matter? The great thing is that it is so, and that it flows plenteously.

In France music is gathered carefully, drop by drop, and passed through Pasteur filters into bottles, and then corked.

And the drinkers of stale water are disgusted by the rivers of German music! They examine minutely the defects of the German men of genius!

He strode about Paris rejoicing in his strength. If he were misunderstood, so much the better! He would be all the freer. To create, as genius must, a whole world, organically constituted according to his own inward laws, the artist must live in it altogether.

An artist can never be too much alone.

What is terrible is to see his ideas reflected in a mirror which deforms and stunts them. He must say nothing to others of what he is doing until he has done it:

His eyes, seared by the raw light, used to the frantic motley of that drunken savage, could hardly adapt themselves to the half-tints, the dainty and mellifluous harmonies of French art.

But no man with impunity can live in a foreign land. Unknown to him it sets its seal upon him.

In vain does he withdraw into himself: upon a day he must wake up to find that something has changed.

She never even thought of looking for a more profitable place outside France. (She had once been offered a situation in America.) The idea of leaving the country never entered her head. She said:

“Stones are hard everywhere.”

There was in her a profound, skeptical, and mocking fatalism.

Christophe would fancy her occupying the place of a lady of his acquaintance: she was not a fool, and she was no plainer than many another woman: he declared that in the lady’s place she would have been the better woman of the two.

There are so many splendid lives hidden in the world, unknown and unsuspected!

And, on the other hand, the hosts of the living dead, who encumber the earth, and take up the room and the happiness of others in the light of the sun! …

Illness is often a blessing. By ravaging the body it frees the soul and purifies it: during the nights and days of forced inaction thoughts arise which are fearful of the raw light of day, and are scorched by the sun of health.

No man who has never been ill can have a thorough knowledge of himself.

His illness had, in a queer way, soothed Christophe. It had purged him of the coarser elements of his nature.

No doubt that would not have mattered much: it was quite easy to get another copy: but Christophe did not know whether the book was rare or not: and besides, he wanted that particular book and no other.

Those who love books easily become fetish worshipers.

The pages from which the well of dreams springs forth are sacred to them, even when they are dirty and spotted.

The France of today could not be worse than that of Charles VII, the debauched and prostituted nation from which the Maid sprang. The temple was empty, fouled, half in ruins. No matter! God had spoken in it.

Christophe was seeking a Frenchman whom he could love for the love of France.

It was about the end of March.

He felt the stranger’s thin fingers tremble in his great paw and press it with an involuntary tenderness: and the young man felt Christophe’s paw affectionately crush his hand. They ceased to hear the chatter of the people round them.

They were alone together and they knew that they were friends.

It was only for a second, for then Madame Roussin touched Christophe on the arm with her fan and said:

like his mother and sister, he was superstitiously inclined to believe that perhaps misfortune, the approach of which he did not wish to see, would not come.

Those poor wretches who feel the imminence of danger do readily play the ostrich: they hide their heads behind a stone, and pretend that Misfortune will not see them.

Disturbing rumors began to fly. It was said that the bank’s credit was impaired. In vain did the banker assure his clients that it was perfectly all right, on one pretext or another the more suspicious of them demanded their money. M.

It was even worse with their relations: not only did they receive no single word of sympathy, but they were visited with bitter reproaches. The banker’s suicide, far from removing ill-feeling, seemed to be hardly less criminal than his failure.

Respectable people cannot forgive those who kill themselves.

It seems to them monstrous that a man should prefer death to life with dishonor: and they would fain call down all the rigor of the law on him who seems to say:

Music was their Paradise in their hard life. It filled an enormous place in their existence. They steeped themselves in music so as to forget the rest of the world. There was danger in it too.

Music is one of the great modern dissolvents.

Its languorous warmth, like the heat of a stove, or the enervating air of autumn, excites the senses and destroys the will. But it was a relaxation for a creature forced into excessive, joyless activity as was Antoinette.

and when she expressed her surprise at his coming back so soon and made him promise to go out again, he said, as once before he had said when he came back from the Châtelet concert:

“No, no. It is too beautiful: it hurts me to see it without you.”

That feeling was not new to them: they knew that they had to be together to enjoy anything wholly. But they always loved to hear it said. His tender words did Antoinette more good than any medicine.

how empty were Shakespeare and Beethoven without Olivier! … —Yes: no doubt they were beautiful. … But Olivier was not there. What is the good of beautiful things if the eyes of the beloved are not there to see them?

What is the use of beauty, what is the use even of joy, if they cannot be won through the heart of the beloved?

If she had been stronger she would have tried to build up her life anew, and give it another object. But she was at the end of her tether.

Now that she was no longer there to love and counsel and console him, inexperienced and childish as he was, he was flung into the waters of life, to sink or swim! …

He who has once had the happiness of perfect intimacy and boundless friendship with another human being has known the divinest of all joys⁠—a joy that will make him miserable for the remainder of his life.

…

Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria. …

For a weak and tender soul it is the greatest of misfortunes ever to have known the greatest happiness.

But though it is sad indeed to lose the beloved at the beginning of life, it is even more terrible later on when the springs of life are running dry. Olivier was young:

I have a friend!⁠ ⁠… Oh! The delight of having found a kindred soul to which to cling in the midst of torment, a tender and sure refuge in which to breathe again while the fluttering heart beats slower!

No longer to be alone, no longer never to unarm, no longer to stay on guard with straining, burning eyes, until from sheer fatigue he should fall into the hands of his enemies!

“Good gracious, yes! Leave it undiscovered. There are worse ways of doing good than knowing nothing about it.

Good isn’t a matter of knowledge: it’s a matter of action.

It’s only your neurasthenics who go haggling about morality: and the first of all moral laws is not to be neurasthenic. Rotten pedants! They are like cripples teaching people how to walk.”

Good isn’t a matter of knowledge: it’s a matter of action. It’s only your neurasthenics who go haggling about morality: and the first of all moral laws is not to be neurasthenic. Rotten pedants!

They are like cripples teaching people how to walk.

”

At first his fingers trembled so that he could hardly make them press down the keys: but he regained courage little by little: and, while he thought he was but repeating Mozart’s utterance, he unwittingly revealed his inmost heart.

Music is an indiscreet confidant: it betrays the most secret thoughts of its lovers to those who love it.

Through the godlike scheme of the Adagio of Mozart Christophe could perceive the invisible lines of the character, not of Mozart, but of his new friend sitting there by the piano:

Christophe was standing behind him, and he stooped and reached over him and finished the broken melody: then he said:

“Now I know the music of your soul.”

He held his hands, and stayed for a long time gazing into his face. At last he said:

They were very different, but they were both pure metal.

They loved each other because they were so different though so much the same.

Olivier was weak, delicate, incapable of fighting against difficulties. When he came up against an obstacle he drew back, not from fear, but something from timidity, and more from disgust with the brutal and coarse means he would have to employ to overcome it.

The vulgar saying has it that riches go to the rich.

Strength goes to the strong.

Christophe fed on Olivier’s ideas: he impregnated himself with his intellectual calmness and mental detachment, his lofty outlook, his silent understanding and mastery of things.

Christophe admired the initiative of their music born of yesterday and already marching in the van of art. What valiance there was in the elegant tiny little creature! He found indulgence for the follies that he had lately seen in her.

Only those who attempt nothing never make mistakes. But error struggling on towards the living truth is more fruitful and more blessed than dead truth.

Whatever the results, the effort was amazing. Olivier showed Christophe the work done in the last thirty-five years, and the amount of energy expended in raising French music from the void in which it had slumbered before 1870:

But their mask of irony and haughty ignorance, naturally enough, had small attraction for the public: rather it repelled. The people are only with a writer when he brings them words of simple, clear, vigorous, and assured life.

They prefer a sturdy lie to an anemic truth.

Skepticism is only to their liking when it is the covering of lusty naturalism or Christian idolatry. The scornful Pyrrhonism in which the Ésope clothed itself could only be acceptable to a few minds—“aeme sdegnose,”—who knew the solid worth beneath it.

I think it is fine of you to prefer truth to your happiness. But when it comes to the happiness of other people. … Then I say, ‘Stop!’ You are taking too much upon yourselves.

Thou shalt love truth more than thyself, but thy neighbor more than truth.

”

the terrible “What’s the use?” which destroys the goodwill of so many of the French of today. They are too intelligent—(their intelligence has no wide sweep of the wings)—they are too intent upon reasons for and against. They lack force. They lack vitality.

When a man’s life beats strongly he never wonders why he goes on living: he lives for the sake of living⁠—because it is a splendid thing to be alive!

In fine, the best of them were a mixture of sympathetic and average qualities: a modicum of philosophy, moderate desires, fond attachment to the family, the earth, moral custom; discretion, dread of intruding, of being a nuisance to other people: modesty of feeling, unbending reserve.

Stout hearts are those which feed on it. Without the antidote of the Old Testament the Gospel is tasteless and unwholesome fare. The Bible is the bone and sinew of nations with the will to live. A man must fight, and he must hate.”

“I hate hatred,” said Olivier.

“I only wish you did!” retorted Christophe.

Mooch smiled, with sad irony, and replied calmly:

“It is an even greater misfortune to be a man.”

To Christophe the remark was nothing but the whim of a moment. But its pessimism cut deeper than he imagined: and Olivier, with his subtle perception, felt it intuitively.

“My friend has betrayed me! …”: and he stayed like that half through the night. Then he felt how dearly he loved Olivier: for he was not angry with him for having betrayed him: he only suffered.

Those whom we love have absolute rights over us, even the right to cease loving us.

We cannot bear them any ill-will; we can only be angry with ourselves for being so unworthy of love that it must desert us. There is mortal anguish in such a state of mind—anguish which destroys the will to live.

“Lucky Christophe!” Olivier would sigh. “I wish you could hand a little of your appetite over to us.”

Health, like sickness, is contagious.

The first to feel the benefit of Christophe’s vitality was naturally Olivier. Vitality was what he most lacked. He retired from the world because its vulgarity revolted him.

Olivier was right.

It is not through words that a man can influence other men: but through his life.

There are people who irradiate an atmosphere of peace from their eyes, and in their gestures, and through the silent contact with the serenity of their souls. Christophe irradiated life.

And that night, for the first time for many months, the image of her little girl came to her in her dreams.—

For the surest road to bring us near the beloved dead, the best means of seeing them again, is not to go with them into death, but to live.

They live in our lives, and die with us.

The woman had an expression of contentment and secret joy which they had never known in her before. She paid no attention to them. However, just as they were going, she noticed Christophe, and held out her hand, and said:

“It was you who saved me.”

“What’s the matter with the woman?” asked Christophe in amazement, as they were going upstairs after her departure.

Beneath it were written these words:

“With thanks from my dear, dead child.”

Thus it was that the breath of life passed into all these people. In the attic on the fifth floor was a great and mighty flame of humanity, the warmth and light of which were slowly filtered through the house.

Olivier gave up the argument. It was not that he was without an answer. But it did not interest him. All through the discussion he had only been thinking of Christophe. He said, with a sigh:

“You love me less than I love you.”

Christophe took his hand and pressed it tenderly:

It was annoying that their music was not better. But that was a detail. And besides, his eulogy of these men, and even his praise of Christophe, was of not nearly so much account as his criticism of the rest.

In Paris, when you read an article eulogizing a man’s work, it is always as well to ask yourself:

Olivier went hot with shame as he read the paper, and said to himself:

Some of them—(his colleagues)—laid the blame on Olivier.—They were only too glad to pay him out for his intolerance and his way of holding aloof from them—rather, if the truth were known, from a desire for solitude than from scorn of any of them.

But men are least apt to pardon those who show that they can do without them.

—Some of them almost went so far as to hint that he had made money by the articles in the Grand Journal. There were others who took upon themselves to defend Christophe against him:

Now that everybody, men and women, were properly convinced that they had a genius in their midst, as usual, they set to work to stifle him.

Such people, when they see a flower, have only one idea: to put it in a pot⁠—a bird: to put it in a cage⁠—a free man: to turn him into a smooth lackey.

Christophe was shaken for a moment, pulled himself together, and sent them all packing.

And for the rest it was the old, old, delicious, stupid need of being in love. As Jacqueline was naturally intelligent, she knew that quite well, and it kept her from making a fool of herself.

A fool who knows his folly is worth two who don’t.

She went out a good deal. There were many young men who felt her charm, and more than one of them was in love with her. She did not care what harm she did. A pretty girl makes a cruel game of love.

He lost all interest in music which was a monologue, a soliloquy, and even more so in music which was a scientific structure built entirely for the interest of the profession. He wished his music to be an act of communion with other men.

There is no vital art save that which is linked with the rest of humanity.

Johann Sebastian Bach, even in his darkest hours of isolation, was linked with the rest of humanity by his religious faith, which he expressed in his art. Handel and Mozart, by dint of circumstances, wrote for an audience, and not for themselves.

Waste no thought upon the word, and the letter, and the subtle vain researches in which the force of the artists of today is turned to nought. You are addressing all men: use the language of all men.

There are no words noble or vulgar; there is no style chaste or impure: there are only words and styles which say or do not say exactly what they have to say.

Be sound and thorough in all you do: think just what you think—and feel just what you feel. Let the rhythm of your heart prevail in your writings! The style is the soul.”

And Jacqueline also set to work to destroy their every source of life, to kill the tree of life, without the support of which the ivy of love must die. Thus in their happiness they destroyed each other.

Alas! we so soon grow used to happiness! When selfish happiness is the sole aim of life, life is soon left without an aim.

It becomes a habit, a sort of intoxication which we cannot do without. And how vitally important it is that we should do without it. … Happiness is an instant in the universal rhythm, one of the poles between which the pendulum of life swings:

When selfish happiness is the sole aim of life, life is soon left without an aim. It becomes a habit, a sort of intoxication which we cannot do without. And how vitally important it is that we should do without it. …

Happiness is an instant in the universal rhythm, one of the poles between which the pendulum of life swings: to stop the pendulum it must be broken.

…

And yet it is perfectly natural for a human being who is full of life without the curb of the will not to be tomorrow what it is today.

A woman is like running water. The man who loves her must follow the stream or divert it into the channel of his own life.

In both cases there must be change. But it is a dangerous experience, and no man really knows love until he has gone through it.

she had other more positive mental difficulties: and she would think of the mystical revolt of her childhood with pitying irony.—And yet her new positivism was no more real than her old idealism. She forced it.

She was neither angel nor brute. She was just a poor bored woman.

She was bored, bored, bored: and her boredom was all the greater in that she could not excuse herself on the score of not being loved, or by saying that she could not endure Olivier.

Christophe bore him no ill-will. He thought that there was much truth in the saying that a man’s wife is his better half.

For a man married is but the half of a man.

He tried to reconstruct his life without Olivier. But it was all in vain, and it was idle for him to pretend that the separation would only be for a short time: in spite of his optimism, he had many hours of sadness.

“How sad life is!” said Madame Arnaud, after a moment.

“No; life is not sad,” he said. “But there are sad moments in it.”

Madame Arnaud went on with veiled bitterness:

“We love, and then we love no longer. What is the good of it all?”

“It is good to have loved.”

“You have sacrificed yourself for him. If only our self-sacrifice could be of any use to those we love! But it makes them none the happier!”

There never was anything so idiotic as this talk of sacrifice! Clergymen, in the poverty of their hearts, mix it up with a cramped and morose idea of Protestant gloom. Apparently, if an act of sacrifice is to be good, it must be besotted. …

Good Lord! if a sacrifice means sorrow to you, and not joy, then don’t do it; you are unworthy of it.

A man doesn’t sacrifice himself for the King of Prussia, but for himself. If you don’t feel the happiness that lies in the gift of yourself, then get out! You don’t deserve to live.”

“It was too strong for me. If you saw a man drowning, wouldn’t you hold out your hand to him?”

“I? Certainly not,” she said. “I would push him under water, so as to get it over quickly.”

She spoke with a mixture of bitterness and humor: and, when he looked at her in amazement, she laughed.

“Yes, but you have become a man. I shall never be grown-up as long as I live. I am an incomplete creature.”

“No one is complete. Happiness lies in knowing one’s limitations and loving them.”

“I can’t do that. I’ve lost it. Life has cheated me, tricked me, crippled me. And yet I fancy that I could never have been a normal and healthy and beautiful woman without being like the rest of the gang.”

Christophe was delighted, but not greatly surprised. He had been inclined to think that Jacqueline’s unjust disposition towards him would not last. He was fond of quoting a jest of his old grandfather’s:

“Sooner or later women have their good moments: one only needs the patience to wait for them.”

He went to see Olivier, and was welcomed with delight. Jacqueline was most attentive to him:

Christophe entirely unconscious, Jacqueline not knowing what she really wanted, and leaving it to chance to tell her, and Olivier alone seeing and feeling what was in the wind, but in the delicacy of vanity and love, refusing to think of it.

When the will is silent, instinct speaks: in the absence of the soul, the body goes its own way.

One evening, after dinner, the night seemed to them so lovely—a moonless, starry night—that they proposed to go for a walk in the garden. Olivier and Christophe left the house. Jacqueline went up to her room to fetch a shawl. She did not come down.

Christophe had contrived to make enemies of his patrons of the Grand Journal, as was only likely.

Christophe had been endowed by Heaven with the virtue extolled by Goethe: non-gratitude.

“The horror of showing gratitude,” wrote Goethe ironically, “is rare, and only appears in remarkable men who have risen from the poorest class, and at every turn have been forced to accept assistance, which is almost invariably poisoned by the churlishness of the benefactor. …”

When he read the pronunciamentos directed against him in the pages of an important newspaper by one of those presumptuous critics who usurp the sovereignty of art with all the insolence of ignorance and impunity, he would shrug his shoulders and say:

“Judge me. I judge you. Let us meet in a hundred years!”

But meanwhile the outcry against him took its course: and the public, as usual, gulped down the most fatuous and shameful accusations.

He stopped in horror and held his head in his hands.

“I have sold my soul,” he said over and over again.

“You may be sure,” said Hecht sarcastically, “that I shall not abuse it.”

“I have sold my soul,” he said over and over again.

“You may be sure,” said Hecht sarcastically, “that I shall not abuse it.”

“And to think,” said Christophe, “that your Republic authorizes such practices! You say that man is free. And you put ideas up to public auction.”

And the dear little girl who had sipped with him the dream of first love was conjured up. Together they lived through their childish tenderness again, with its sweet tears and infinite hopes. And he thought with a simple smile:

“Life has taught me nothing. All my knowledge is vain.⁠ ⁠… All my knowledge is vain.⁠ ⁠… I have still the same old illusions.”

How good it is to love and to believe unfailingly! Everything that is touched by love is saved from death.

“Life has taught me nothing. All my knowledge is vain. … All my knowledge is vain. … I have still the same old illusions.”

How good it is to love and to believe unfailingly! Everything that is touched by love is saved from death.

“Minna, you are with me—with me, not with the other—Minna, you will never grow old! …”

And she no longer loved “the other.” Poor child! Dear child! She was exasperated with the little creature who was there to bind her to the dead past: and she bent over him and kissed and kissed him. …

It is the great misfortune of the women of today that they are too free without being free enough.

If they were more free, they would seek to form ties, and would find charm and security in them. If they were less free, they would resign themselves to ties which they would not know how to break: and they would suffer less.

If they were more free, they would seek to form ties, and would find charm and security in them. If they were less free, they would resign themselves to ties which they would not know how to break: and they would suffer less.

But the worst state of all is to have ties which do not bind, and duties from which it is possible to break free.

If Jacqueline had believed that her little house was to be her lot for the whole of her life, she would not have found it so inconvenient and cramped, and she would have devised ways of making it comfortable:

But Jacqueline was more frank, and played to win or lose. The first thing was to be sincere. Again, to be sincere. Again and always, to be sincere. Sincerity was also one of the virtues extolled by the ideas of that time.

But herein it is proved once again that everything is sound for the sound in heart, while everything is corrupt for the corrupt.

How hideous it is sometimes to be sincere! It is a sin for mediocre people to try to look into the depths of themselves. They see their mediocrity: and their vanity always finds something to feed on.

“A pretty state of things!” some will say. … —(They are poor creatures who only suffer from the betrayal of love when it is consummated! …

When the heart remains faithful, the sordid offenses of the body are of small account. When the heart turns traitor, all the rest is nothing.

) …

She brought into her folly an absolute lack of selfish motive, and an utter disinterestedness. She had the dangerous merit of always being frank with herself and of never shirking the consequences of her own actions.

She was a better creature than the people she lived with: and for that reason she did worse.

When she loved, when she conceived the idea of adultery, she flung herself into it headlong with desperate frankness.

There was abundance and fullness of life in it. There were memories, and treasures, the existence of which lay unsuspected. … Had they ever had any reality?—No doubt they were real, since they were real to her. …

Oh! the wonder of such lowly lives transfigured by the magic wand of dreams!

Madame Arnaud would go back through the years to her childhood: each of the little frail flowers of her vanished hopes sprang silently into life again. … Her first childish love for a girl, whose charm had fascinated her at first sight:

She adored this friend of hers, in whom, though she seemed so fragile, she felt a moral energy and faith superior to her own. She did not confide in her. But Madame Arnaud could guess volumes on a hint.

The world seemed to her to be a sad misunderstanding. It is impossible to dissolve it. One can only love, have pity, and dream.

And when the swarm of her dreams buzzed too loudly, when her thoughts stopped, she would go to her piano and let her hands fall lightly on the keys, at random, and play softly to wreathe the mirage of life about with the subdued light …

That was all. It meant worlds to her.

There are so many tragedies unknown, even the most intimate, in the depths of the most tranquil and seemingly most ordinary lives!

And the greatest tragedy of all perhaps is:—that nothing happens in such lives of hope crying for what is their right, their just due promised, and refused, by Nature—wasting away in passionate anguish—showing nothing of it all to the outside world!

if only he could sleep until he became a new man! But that gift can never be his: and he would not wish to have it.

The worst suffering of all were to be deprived of suffering.

Olivier was like a man in a fever, feeding on his fever: a real fever which came in regular waves, being at its height in the evening when the light began to fade.

To reason: true. One can only help by loving the sufferer, by loving him unreasoningly, without trying to convince him, without trying to cure him, but just by loving and pitying him.

Love is the only balm for the wounds of love.

But love is not inexhaustible even with those who love the best: they have only a limited store of it.

“Poor devil! I had a better opinion of him.”

Amid such universal selfishness what a marvelous amount of good can be done by a simple word of tenderness, a delicate attention, a look of pity and love!

Then the sick man feels the worth of kindness. And how poor is all the rest compared with that! … Kindness brought Olivier nearer to Madame Arnaud than anybody else, even his friend Christophe.

rather he is apt to love those who can do him harm. Opposites meet: his nature seeks its own destruction, and goes to the burning and intense life rather than to the cautious life which is sparing of itself.

And a man like Christophe is quite right, for his law is not to live as long as possible, but as mightily as possible.

However, Christophe, having less penetration than Françoise, said to himself that love is a blind, inhuman force, throwing those together who cannot bear with each other. Love joins those together who are like each other.

They talked of the past. Christophe hardly knew what they said.

A man hears the woman he loves just as little as he sees her.

He loves her. And when a man really loves he never even thinks whether he is loved or no. Christophe never doubted it. She was there: that was enough. All the rest had ceased to exist. …

For some time Grazia had loved Christophe without Christophe knowing or caring. Now Christophe loved Grazia: and Grazia had nothing for him but calm friendship: she loved another man.

As so often happens, one of the two clocks of their lives was a little faster than the other, and it was enough to have changed the course of both their lives.⁠ ⁠…

Grazia withdrew her hand, and Christophe did not stay her. And they sat there for a moment, mum, without a word.

Oh, blessed power of dreams, the creative imagination of life! Life. … What is life? It is not as cold reason and our eyes tell us that it is.

Life is what we dream, and the measure of life is love.

Christophe gazed at Cécile, whose peasant face with its wide-set eyes shone with the splendor of the maternal instinct—she was more a mother than the real mother. And he looked at the tender weary face of Madame Arnaud.

And he thought that children or the lack of children has as much to do with the happiness or unhappiness of those who marry and those who do not marry as faith and the lack of faith.

Happiness is the perfume of the soul, the harmony that dwells, singing, in the depths of the heart. And the most beautiful of all the music of the soul is kindness.

Olivier came in. He was quite calm and reposeful in his movements: a new serenity shone in him. He smiled at the child, shook hands with Cécile and Madame Arnaud, and began to talk quietly. He watched them with a sort of surprised affection.

“Brahms?” said Olivier. “Do you play your old enemy’s music nowadays?”

“It is All Saints’ Day,” said Christophe. “The day when all are forgiven.”

Softly, so as not to wake the child, he sang a few bars of the old Swabian folksong:

A man is very generous when he can renounce what is not yet his. Besides, it is so good to love and to hate, and to believe that one is transforming the earth with dreams and shouting!

Young people are like watchdogs: they are forever howling and barking at the wind.

An act of injustice committed at the other end of the world will send them off their heads.

What did their mediocrity matter?

Ideas have never conquered the world as ideas, but only by the force they represent.

They do not grip men by their intellectual contents, but by the radiant vitality which is given off from them at certain periods in history. They give off as it were a rich scent which overpowers even the dullest sense of smell.

Their theoretical violence was the throwback from their weakness, their bitterness, and the suppression of their vitality. But above all it was an indication of the storms brewing all around them.

Theorists are like meteorologists: they state in scientific terms not what the weather will be, but what the weather is.

They are weathercocks pointing to the quarter whence the wind blows. When they turn they are never far from believing that they are turning the wind.

That would mean setting up a wall between themselves and others. On the one hand, freedom in the wilderness, on the other, mankind. They do not hesitate: they choose mankind, the herd.

The herd is evil smelling, but it gives warmth.

Then those who have chosen pretend to think what they do not in fact think. It is not very difficult for them: they know so little what they think! … “Know thyself!” … How could they, these men who have hardly a Me to know?

She had had her share of unhappiness. Three months ago she had lost a boy of fifteen whom she dearly loved: it had been a great grief to her: but now she was once more busy and laughing. She used to say:

“If one were to think of these things one could not live.”

So she ceased to think of it. It was not selfishness. She could not do otherwise: her vitality was too strong: she was absorbed by the present: it was impossible for her to linger over the past.

You will be glad enough to find it still intact after the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up the fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the ship. To understand everything is to hate nothing.

The artist is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north.

”

Not to speak of the disorder inherent in all crowds, the anarchy of the people. They tried hard to create corporate strikes which should assume a revolutionary character: but they were not willing to be treated as revolutionaries. They had no liking for bayonets.

They fancied that it was possible to make an omelette without eggs. In any case, they preferred the eggs to be broken by other people.

Olivier watched, observed, and was not surprised. From the very outset he had recognized the great inferiority of these men to the work which they were supposed to be accomplishing: but he had also recognized the inevitable force that swept them on:

In the midst of the torrent of interests and muddy passions, Olivier’s gaze and heart were attracted by the little islands of independent spirits, the little groups of true believers who emerged here and there like flowers on the face of the waters.

In vain do the elect seek to mingle with the mob: the elect always come together⁠—the elect of all classes and all parties⁠—the bearers of the fire of the world.

And it is their sacred duty to see to it that the fire in their hands shall never die down.

Olivier went up to him, spoke to him gently and politely and soothed him. …

Who can tell all that gentleness can bring to a heart deprived of all consideration? It is like a drop of water falling upon parched earth, greedily to be sucked up.

It needed only a few words, a smile, for the boy Emmanuel in his heart of hearts to surrender to Olivier, and to determine to have Olivier for his friend.

little by little he was able to read his hopes and his absurdly touching faith in the new birth of the world. He had no desire to laugh, though he knew that the dream was impossible, and would never change human nature.

The Christians also have dreamed of impossible things, and they have not changed human nature.

From the time of Pericles to the time of M. Fallières when has there been any moral progress? … But all faith is beautiful: and when the light of an old faith dies down it is meet to salute the kindling of the new:

The Christians also have dreamed of impossible things, and they have not changed human nature. From the time of Pericles to the time of M. Fallières when has there been any moral progress? …

But all faith is beautiful: and when the light of an old faith dies down it is meet to salute the kindling of the new: there will never be too many.

With a curious tenderness Olivier saw the uncertain light gleaming in the boy’s mind. What a strange mind it was!

but in the intervals of rhythmic movement ideas crop up and mental images come floating to the surface: the regular movements of the body send them flying upwards like sparks under the smith’s bellows.

The thought of the people! It is just smoke and fire, a shower of glittering sparks fading away, glowing, then fading away once more!

But sometimes a spark will be carried away by the wind to set fire to the dried forests and the fat ricks of the upper-classes. …

The boy listened, nodded his head, and said:

“Yes, but I’ve got to face the fact that I shall always have to live in this body of mine!”

“Not at all. You will quit it.”

His artistic impotence had for a long time been one of Olivier’s greatest griefs. It was so hard to feel so much life in himself and to be able to save none of it! … —Now he was resigned.

Flowers do not need to be seen to blossom. They are only the more beautiful in the fields where no hand can pluck them.

Happy, happy fields with flowers dreaming in the sun!—Here in the little valley there was hardly any sun; but Olivier’s dreams flowered all the better for it. What stories he wove for his own delight in those days, stories sad and tender and fantastic!

The crowd was stemmed up against several ranks of police and soldiers. In front of the obstacles a serried mass was formed, howling, whistling, singing, laughing, and eddying this way and that. …

The laughter of the people is the only means they have of expressing a thousand obscure and yet deep feelings which cannot find an outlet in words!

…

and in the depths of his soul there was a frightful tumult of sorrow—“the bitter cry of one living in the wilderness. …”

The world’s misery lies in this, that a man hardly ever has a companion.

Women perhaps, and chance friendships. We are reckless in our use of the lovely word, friend. In reality we hardly have a single friend all through our lives. Rare, very rare, are those men who have real friends.

Rare, very rare, are those men who have real friends. But the happiness of it is so great that it is impossible to live when they are gone. The friend filled the life of his friend, unbeknown to him, unmarked.

The friend goes: and life is empty. Not only the beloved is lost, but every reason for loving, every reason for having loved.

Why had he lived? Why had either lived?

But at night, hard though he tried, he could never succeed in seeing him in his dreams.

We rarely dream of those we have lost, while their loss is still a pain. They come back to us later on when we are beginning to forget.

However, the outside world began gradually to penetrate to the sepulcher of Christophe’s soul. At first he became dimly conscious of the different noises in the house and to take an unwitting interest in them.

Get up, dress, to what end? … He tried desperately to work: it made him sick. What was the good of creation, when everything ends in nothing? Music had become impossible for him. Art—(and everything else)—can only be rightly judged in unhappiness.

Unhappiness is the touchstone.

Only then do we know those who can stride across the ages, those who are stronger than death. Very few bear the test.

It is the saddest hypocrisy, such rejection of self-knowledge, in shame or piety, it is the invincible imperative need of living hiding away from itself!

Knowing that no consolation is possible, a man invents consolations. Being convinced that life has no reason, he forges reasons for living.

He persuades himself that he must live, even when no one outside himself is concerned. If need be he will go so far as to pretend that the dead man encourages him to live.

his step seemed to have regained its old assurance: the gates of his heart were closed upon his sorrow: he never spoke of it to others: he avoided being left alone with it himself: outwardly he seemed calm.

“Real sorrows,” says Balzac, “are apparently at peace in the deep bed that they have made for themselves, where they seem to sleep, though all the while they never cease to fret and eat away the soul.”

Anyone knowing Christophe and watching him closely, seeing him coming and going, talking, composing, even laughing—(he could laugh now!)—would have felt that for all his vigor and the radiance of life in his eyes, something had been destroyed in him, in the inmost depths of …

How should they hesitate? Had they not truth, right, virtue, on their side? Did they not receive revelation direct from their hallowed reason?

Reason is a hard sun: it gives light, but it blinds.

In that withering light, without shade or mist, human beings grow pallid, the blood is sucked up from their hearts.

A man who gives himself without counting the cost, to everything that he does, everything that he suffers, everything that he loves, everything that he hates, is a prodigy, the greatest that is granted to us here on earth.

Passion is like genius: a miracle, which is as much as to say that it does not exist.

So thought Christophe: and life was on the verge of giving him the lie in a terrible fashion. The miracle is everywhere, like fire in stone: friction brings it forth. We have little notion of the demons who lie slumbering within ourselves. …

So thought Christophe: and life was on the verge of giving him the lie in a terrible fashion.

The miracle is everywhere, like fire in stone: friction brings it forth.

We have little notion of the demons who lie slumbering within ourselves. …

Anna sat staring into the darkness, and let him talk, and then shook her head, and said coldly:

“A woman is not kind when she loves.”

Christophe did not renew the experiment of hearing Anna sing. He was afraid … of disillusion, or what? He could not tell. Anna was just as fearful. She would never stay in the room when he began to play.

“What is there in you that makes you sing like that?”

“Only what you put there to make me sing.”

“Yes? Well, it is not out of place. I’m wondering whether I created it or you. How do you come to think of such things?”

sage, practical wisdom, cowardly common sense, are the keepers of the keys of the room. They let us see only a few cupboards tidily and properly arranged.

But music holds the magic wand which drives back every lock. The doors are opened. The demons of the heart appear.

And, for the first time, the soul sees itself naked.—While the siren sings, while the bewitching voice trembles on the air, the tamer holds all the wild beasts in check with the power of the eye.

… They hurl themselves at each other. Hatred or love? A frenzy of mutual destruction?—

Passion is the soul of prey.

The sea has burst its bounds. Who shall turn it back into its bed? Then must a man appeal to a mightier than himself. To Neptune, the God of the tides.

It was in vain that she condemned the tyranny and meanness of public opinion: she respected it: she subscribed to its decrees even when they were directed against herself: if they had come into conflict with her conscience, she would have sacrificed her conscience.

She despised the town: but she could not have borne the town to despise herself.

Now the time was coming when the public scandal would be afforded an opportunity of discharging itself. The carnival was coming on.

“

Too much ends in too little. There are no worse invalids than the men who have always had too much health.

”

It is no use either coming to the conclusion that we must renounce life and sniveling like children. No. We must kill to live, if, at the time, there is no other means of living.

But the man who kills for the sake of killing is a miscreant.

An unconscious miscreant, I know. But, all the same, a miscreant. The continual endeavor of man should be to lessen the sum of suffering and cruelty: that is the first duty of humanity.

Black ants would grind exceeding small the rotting wood. Millions of invisible insects were gnawing, boring, reducing to dust what had once been life. … And the silence of the struggle! …

Oh! the peace of Nature, the tragic mask that covers the sorrowful and cruel face of Life!

Christophe was going down and down. But he was not the kind of man to let himself drown without a struggle, with his arms held close to his sides. In vain did he wish to die: he did everything in his power to remain alive.

Night passed. Day came. The tree was not broken. All through the new day and the following night the tree went on bending and cracking: but it did not break.

Christophe had no reason for living left: and he went on living.

He had no motive for struggling; and he struggled, body to body, foot to foot, with the invisible enemy who was bending his back. He was like Jacob with the angel. He expected nothing from the fight, he expected nothing now but the end, rest;

“

It is not peace that I seek, but life.

”

“I am not all that is. I am Life fighting Nothingness. I am not Nothingness, I am the Fire which burns in the Night.

I am not the Night. I am the eternal Light; I am not an eternal destiny soaring above the fight. I am free Will which struggles eternally. Struggle and burn with Me.

”

You young men, you men of today, march over us, trample us under your feet, and press onward. Be ye greater and happier than we. For myself, I bid the soul that was mine farewell. I cast it from me like an empty shell.

Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections.

We must die, Christophe, to be born again.

Life passes. Body and soul flow onward like a stream.

The years are written in the flesh of the ageing tree. The whole visible world of form is forever wearing out and springing to new life. Thou only dost not pass, immortal music. Thou art the inward sea.

Life passes. Body and soul flow onward like a stream. The years are written in the flesh of the ageing tree. The whole visible world of form is forever wearing out and springing to new life.

Thou only dost not pass, immortal music. Thou art the inward sea.

Thou art the profound depths of the soul. In thy clear eyes the scowling face of life is not mirrored.

Among them were charming natures, handsome, fine-featured patrician, Italian faces, with soft, intelligent eyes, men with gentle, quiet manners, who, with exquisite taste and affectionate hearts, loved Nature, the old masters, flowers, women, books, good food, their country, music. …

They loved everything. They preferred nothing. Sometimes one felt that they loved nothing.

Love played so large a part in their lives, but only on condition that it never disturbed them. Their love was indolent and lazy, like themselves; even in their passion it was apt to take on a domestic character.

… They loved everything. They preferred nothing. Sometimes one felt that they loved nothing.

Love played so large a part in their lives, but only on condition that it never disturbed them.

Their love was indolent and lazy, like themselves; even in their passion it was apt to take on a domestic character.

Passionately sincere, giving themselves unreservedly, without stint or thought of economy, they were consumed by their excessive intellectuality, their precocious and blindly obstinate endeavors.

It is not well for young ideas, hardly out of the pod, to be exposed to the raw sunlight.

The soul is scorched by it. Nothing is made fruitful save with time and silence. Time and silence these men had not allowed themselves. It is the misfortune of only too many Italian talents. Violent, hasty action is an intoxicant.

It is not well for young ideas, hardly out of the pod, to be exposed to the raw sunlight. The soul is scorched by it.

Nothing is made fruitful save with time and silence.

Time and silence these men had not allowed themselves. It is the misfortune of only too many Italian talents. Violent, hasty action is an intoxicant. The mind that has once tasted it is hard put to it to break the habit;

All her friends were more or less tainted by this malaria of the soul. Stronger men than they had in old days fallen victim to it: it had rusted away the brass of the Roman she-wolf.

Rome breathes forth death: it is too full of graves.

It is healthier to stay there for a little time than to live there. Too easily does one slip out of one’s own time, a dangerous taste for the still young forces that have a vast duty to accomplish.

But it was in vain that he kept his thoughts to himself: Emmanuel knew what he was thinking. More than that, he was obscurely conscious that Christophe saw farther than he. And he was only irritated by it.

Young people never forgive their elders for forcing them to see what they will see in twenty years’ time.

Christophe read his heart, and said to himself:

“No. I’m interested in everything.”

“Everything is so interesting that there is no time.⁠ ⁠…”

“No time? What the devil do you do?”

“On your word of honor?”

“There is no such thing as a good tyrant: there are tyrants whom one loves and tyrants whom one detests.”

“No. You are one of the first.”

she was a coquette, except with Christophe—even with Christophe. When he was very tender with her, she would be deliberately cold and reserved. When he was cold and reserved she would become tender and tease him affectionately. She was the most honest of women.

But even in the most honest and the best of women there is always a girl.

She insisted on standing well with the world, and conformed to the conventions. She had fine musical gifts, and understood Christophe’s work;

At once she regretted it; at night she would be filled with remorse that she could not make Christophe happier; she loved him more than she would let him see; she felt that her friendship with him was the best part of her life.

As usually happens with two very different people, they were more united when they were not together.

In truth, if they had been thrust apart by a misunderstanding, the fault was not altogether Christophe’s, as he honestly believed. Even when in the old days Grazia most dearly loved Christophe, would she have married him? She would perhaps have given him her life;

Grazia also bore the weight of that uneasy heritage, which, of all the patrimony of ancient families, is the least in danger of being dissipated in transit. She, at least, was aware of it.

It is a great source of strength to know our weakness, to make ourselves, if not the masters, the pilots of the soul of the race to which we are bound, which bears us like a vessel upon its waters⁠—to make fate our instrument, to use it as a sail which we furl or clew up according to the wind.

When Grazia closed her eyes, she could hear within herself more than one disturbing voice, of a tone familiar to her. But in her healthy soul even the dissonances were blended to form a profound, soft music, under the guiding hand of her harmonious reason.

When Grazia closed her eyes, she could hear within herself more than one disturbing voice, of a tone familiar to her. But in her healthy soul even the dissonances were blended to form a profound, soft music, under the guiding hand of her harmonious reason.

Unhappily it is not within our power to transmit the best of our blood to the creatures of our blood.

Of Grazia’s two children, the little girl, Aurora, who was eleven years old, was like her mother; she was not so pretty, being a little coarser in fiber; she had a slight limp;

With one glance he could take in the whole blossoming of a woman’s soul; and it was at once fair and sad to see: he could see whence it came and whither it was going.

There is nothing more natural than for an ardent, chaste heart to love two sisters at one and the same time, or mother and daughter.

Christophe would have loved the woman of his love through all her descendants, just as in her he loved the stock of which she came.