Jean-Christophe in Paris: The Market-Place, Antoinette, the House Part 40

A fortuitous circ.u.mstance gave Christophe a yet greater interest in the girl, and showed him the full extent of the suppression of the emotions of the French, their fear of life, of letting themselves go, and claiming their birthright.

Elsberger, the engineer, had a brother ten years younger than himself, likewise an engineer. He was a very good fellow, like thousands of others, of the middle-cla.s.s, and he had artistic aspirations: he was one of those people who would like to practise an art, but are afraid of compromising their reputation and position. As a matter of fact, it is not a very difficult problem, and most of the artists of to-day have solved it without any great danger to themselves. But it needs a certain amount of will-power: and not everybody is capable of even that much expenditure of energy: such people are not sure enough of wanting what they really want: and as their position in life grows more a.s.sured, they submit and drift along, without any show of revolt or protest. They cannot be blamed if they become good citizens instead of bad artists. But their disappointment too often leaves behind it a secret discontent, a _qualis artifex pereo_, which as best it can a.s.sumes a crust of what is usually called philosophy, and spoils their lives, until the wear and tear of daily life and new anxieties have erased all trace of the old bitterness. Such was the case of Andre Elsberger. He would have liked to be a writer: but his brother, who was very self-willed, had made him follow in his footsteps and enter upon a scientific career. Andre was clever, and quite well equipped for scientific work--or for literature, for that matter: he was not sure enough of being an artist, and he was too sure that he was middle-cla.s.s: and so, provisionally at first,--(one knows what that means)--he had bowed to his brother's wishes: he entered the _Centrale_, high up in the list, and pa.s.sed out equally high, and since then he had practised his profession as an engineer conscientiously, but without being interested in it. Of course, he had lost the little artistic quality that he had possessed, and he never spoke of it except ironically.

"And then," he used to say--(Christophe recognized Olivier's pessimistic tendency in his arguments)--"life is not good enough to make one worry about a spoiled career. What does a bad poet more or less matter!..."

The brothers were fond of one another: they were of the same stamp morally: but they did not get on well together. They had both been Dreyfus-mad. But Andre was attracted by syndicalism, and was an anti-militarist: and Elie was a patriot.

From time to time Andre would visit Christophe without going to see his brother: and that astonished Christophe: for there was no great sympathy between himself and Andre, who used hardly ever to open his mouth except to gird at something or somebody,--which was very tiresome: and when Christophe said anything, Andre would not listen. Christophe made no effort to conceal the fact that he found his visits a nuisance: but Andre did not mind, and seemed not to notice it. At last Christophe found the key to the riddle one day when he found his visitor leaning out of the window, and paying much more attention to what was happening in the garden below than to what he was saying. He remarked upon it, and Andre was not reluctant to admit that he knew Mademoiselle Chabran, and that she had something to do with his visits to Christophe. And, his tongue being, loosed, he confessed that he had long been attached to the girl, and perhaps something more than that: the Elsbergers had long ago been in close touch with the Chabrans: but, though they had been very intimate, politics and recent events had separated them: and thereafter they saw very little of each other.

Christophe did not disguise his opinion that it was an idiotic state of things. Was it impossible for people to think differently, and yet to retain their mutual esteem? Andre said he thought it was, and protested that he was very broad-minded: but he would not admit the possibility of tolerance in certain questions, concerning which, he said, he could not admit any opinion different from his own: and he instanced the famous Affair. On that, as usual, he became wild. Christophe knew the sort of thing that happened in that connection, and made no attempt to argue: but he; asked whether the Affair was never going to come to an end, or whether its curse was to go on and on to the end of time, descending even unto the third and fourth generation. Andre began to laugh: and without answering Christophe, he fell to tender praise of Celine Chabran, and protested against her father's selfishness, who thought it quite natural that she should be sacrificed to him.

"Why don't you marry her," asked Christophe, "if you love her and she loves you?"

Andre said mournfully that Celine was clerical. Christophe asked what he meant by that. Andre replied that he meant that she was religious, and had vowed a sort of feudal service to G.o.d and His bonzes.

"But how does that affect you?"

"I don't want to share my wife with any one."

"What! You are jealous even of your wife's ideas? Why, you're more selfish even than the Commandant!"

"It's all very well for you to talk: would you take a woman who did not love music?"

"I have done so."

"How can a man and a woman live together if they don't think the same?"

"Don't you worry about what you think! Ah! my dear fellow, ideas count for so little when one loves. What does it matter to me whether the woman I love cares for music as much as I do? She herself is music to me! When a man has the luck, as you have, to find a dear girl whom he loves, and she loves him, she must believe what she likes, and he must believe what he likes! When all is said and done, what do your ideas amount to? There is only one truth in the world, there is only one G.o.d: love."

"You speak like a poet. You don't see life as it is. I know only too many marriages which have suffered from such a want of union in thought."

"Those husbands and wives did not love each other enough. You have to know what you want."

"Wanting does not do everything in life. Even if I wanted to marry Mademoiselle Chabran, I couldn't."

"I'd like to know why."

Andre spoke of his scruples: his position was not a.s.sured: he had no fortune and no great health. He was wondering whether he had the right to marry in such circ.u.mstances. It was a great responsibility. Was there not a great risk of bringing unhappiness on the woman he loved, and himself,--not to mention any children there might be?... It was better to wait--or give up the idea.

Christophe shrugged his shoulders.

"That's a fine sort of love! If she loves you, she will be happy in her devotion to you. And as for the children, you French people are absurd. You would like only to bring them into the world when you are sure of turning them out with comfortable private means, so that they will have nothing to suffer and nothing to fear.... Good Lord! That's nothing to do with you: your business is only to give them life, love of life, and courage to defend it. The rest ... whether they live or die ... is the common lot. Is it better to give up living than to take the risks of life?"

The st.u.r.dy confidence which emanated from Christophe affected Andre, but did not change his mind. He said:

"Yes, perhaps, that is true...."

But he stopped at that. Like all the rest, his will and power of action seemed to be paralyzed.

Christophe had set himself to fight the inertia which he found In most of his French friends, oddly coupled with laborious and often feverish activity. Almost all the people he met in the various middle-cla.s.s houses which he visited were discontented. They had almost all the same disgust with the demagogues and their corrupt ideas. In almost all there was the same sorrowful and proud consciousness of the betrayal of the genius of their race. And it was by no means the result of any personal rancor nor the bitterness of men and cla.s.ses beaten and thrust out of power and active life, or discharged officials, or unemployed energy, nor that of an old aristocracy which has returned to its estates, there to die in hiding like a wounded lion. It was a feeling of moral revolt, mute, profound, general: it was to be found everywhere, in a greater or less degree, in the army, in the magistracy, in the University, in the officers, and in every vital branch of the machinery of government. But they took no active measures.

They were discouraged in advance: they kept on saying:

"There is nothing to be done:"

or

"Let us try not to think of it."

Fearfully they dodged anything sad in their thoughts and conversation: and they took refuge in their home life.

If they had been content to refrain only from political action! But even in their daily lives these good people had no interest in doing anything definite. They put up with the degrading, haphazard contact with horrible people whom they despised, because they could not take the trouble to fight against them, thinking that any such revolt must of necessity be useless.

Why, for instance, should artists, and, in particular, the musicians with whom Christophe was most in touch, unprotestingly put up with the effrontery of the scaramouches of the Press, who laid down the law for them? There were absolute idiots among them, whose ignorance _in omni re scibili_ was proverbial, though they were none the less invested with a sovereign authority _in omni re scibili_. They did not even take the trouble to write their articles and books: they had secretaries, poor starving creatures, who would have sold their souls, if they had had such things, for bread or women. There was no secret about it in Paris. And yet they went on riding their high horse and patronizing the artists.

Christophe used to roar with anger sometimes when he read their articles.

"They have no heart!" he would say. "Oh! the cowards!"

"Who are you screaming at?" Olivier would ask. "The idiots of the market-place?"

"No. The honest men. These rascals are plying their trade: they lie, they steal, they rob and murder. But it is the others--those who despise them and yet let them go on--that I despise a thousand times more. If their colleagues on the Press, if honest, cultured critics, and the artists on whose backs these harlequins strut and poise themselves, did not put up with it, in silence, from shyness or fear of compromising themselves, or from some shameful antic.i.p.ation of mutual service, a sort of secret pact made with the enemy so that they may be immune from their attacks,--if they did not let them preen themselves in their patronage and friends.h.i.+p, their upstart power would soon be killed by ridicule. There's the same weakness in everything, everywhere. I've met twenty honest men who have said to me of so-and-so: 'He is a scoundrel.' But there is not one of them who would not refer to him as his 'dear colleague,' and, if he met him, shake hands with him.--'There are too many of them!' they say.--Too many cowards. Too many flabby honest men."

"Eh! What do you want them to do?"

"Be every man his own policeman! What are you waiting for? For Heaven to take your affairs in hand? Look you, at this very moment. It is three days now since the snow fell. Your streets are thick with it, and your Paris is like a sewer of mud. What do you do? You protest against your Munic.i.p.al Council for leaving you in such a state of filth. But do you yourselves do anything to clear it away? Not a bit of it! You sit with your arms folded.

Not one of you has energy enough even to clean the pavement in front of his house. n.o.body does his duty, neither the State nor the members of the State: each man thinks he has done as much as is expected of him by laying the blame on some one else. You have become so used, through centuries of monarchical training, to doing nothing for yourselves that you all seem to spend your time in star-gazing and waiting for a miracle to happen. The only miracle that could happen would be if you all suddenly made up your minds to do something. My dear Olivier, you French people have plenty of brains and plenty of good qualities: but you lack blood. You most of all.

There's nothing the matter with your mind or your heart. It's your life that's all wrong. You're sputtering out."

"What can we do? We can only wait for life to return to us."

"You must want life to return to you. You must want to be cured. You must _want_, use your will! And if you are to do that you must first let in some pure air into your houses. If you won't go out of doors, then at least you must keep your houses healthy. You have let the air be poisoned by the unwholesome vapors of the market-place. Your art and your ideas are two-thirds adulterated. And you are so dispirited that it hardly occasions you any surprise, and rouses you to no sort of indignation. Some of these good people--(it is pitiful to see)--are so cowed that they actually persuade themselves that they are wrong and the charlatans are right.

Why--even on your _esope_ review, in which you profess not to be taken in by anything,--I have found unhappy young men persuading themselves that they love an art and ideas for which they have not a vestige of love. They get drunk on it, without any sort of pleasure, simply because they are told to do so: and they are dying of boredom--boredom with the monstrous lie of the whole thing!"

Christophe pa.s.sed through these wavering and dispirited creatures like a wind shaking the slumbering trees. He made no attempt to force them to his way of thinking: he breathed into them energy enough to make them think for themselves. He used to say:

"You are too humble. The grand enemy is neurasthenia, doubt. A man can and must be tolerant and human. But no man may doubt what he believes to be good and true. A man must believe in what he thinks. And he should maintain what he believes. Whatever our powers may be, we have no right to forswear them. The smallest creature in the world, like the greatest, has his duty.

And--(though he is not sufficiently conscious of it)--he has also a power.

Why should you think that your revolt will carry so little weight? A st.u.r.dy upright conscience which dares a.s.sert itself is a mighty thing. More than once during the last few years you have seen the State and public opinion forced to reckon with the views of an honest man, who had no other weapons but his own moral force, which, with constant courage and tenacity, he had dared publicly to a.s.sert....

"And if you must go on asking what's the good of taking so much trouble, what's the good of fighting, _what's the good of it all?_... Then, I will tell you:--Because France is dying, because Europe is peris.h.i.+ng--because, if we did not fight, our civilization, the edifice so splendidly constructed, at the cost of centuries of labor, by our humanity, would crumble away. These are not idle words. The country is in danger, our European mother-country,--and more than any, yours, your own native country, France. Your apathy is killing her. Your silence is killing her.

Each of your energies as it dies, each of your ideas as it accepts and surrenders, each of your good intentions as it ends in sterility, every drop of your blood as it dries up, unused, in your veins, means death to her.... Up! up! You must live! Or, if you must die, then you must die fighting like men!"

But the chief difficulty lay not in getting them to do something, but in getting them to act together. There they were quite unmanageable. The best of them were the most obstinate, as Christophe found in dealing with the tenants in his own house: M. Felix Weil, Elsberger, the engineer, and Commandant Chabran, lived on terms of polite and silent hostility. And yet, though Christophe knew very little of them, he could see that, underneath their party and racial labels, they all wanted the same thing.

There were many reasons particularly why M. Weil and the Commandant should have understood each other. By one of those contrasts common to thoughtful men, M. Weil, who never left his books and lived only in the life of the mind, had a pa.s.sion for all things military. "_We are all cranks_," said the half-Jew Montaigne, applying to mankind in general what is perfectly true of certain types of minds, like the type of which M. Weil was an example. The old intellectual had the craze for Napoleon. He collected books and relics which brought to life in him the terrible dream of the Imperial epic. Like many Frenchmen of that crepuscular epoch, he was dazzled by the distant rays of that glorious sun. He used to go through the campaigns, fight the battles all over again, and discuss operations: he was one of those chamber-strategists who swarm in the Academies and the Universities, who explain Austerlitz and declare how Waterloo should have been fought. He was the first to make fun of the "Napoleonite" in himself: it tickled his irony: but none the less he went on reading the splendid stories with the wild enthusiasm of a child playing a game: he would weep over certain episodes: and when he realized that he had been weak enough to shed tears, he would roar with laughter, and call himself an old fool. As a matter of fact, he was a Napoleonite not so much from patriotism as from a romantic interest and a platonic love of action. However, he was a good patriot, and much more attached to France than many an actual Frenchman.