Jean-Christophe In Paris — THE MARKET-PLACE, III, part 2

* * * * * 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.

She was a little girl with a golden-brown complexion, with cheeks delicately tinged with red: healthy-looking: she had a little aquiline nose, a large well-shaped mouth, always half-open, a round chin, very white, calm clear eyes, softly smiling, a round forehead framed in masses of long, silky hair, which fell in long, waving locks loosely down to her shoulders.

She was like a little Virgin of Andrea del Sarto, with her wide face and serenely gazing eyes.

She was Italian.

Her parents lived almost all the year round in the country on an estate in the North of Italy: plains, fields, little canals.

From the loggia on the housetop they looked down on golden vines, from which here and there the black spikes of the cypress-trees emerged.

Beyond them were fields, and again fields.

Silence.

The lowing of the oxen returning from the fields, and the shrill cries of the peasants at the plow were to be heard: _"Ihi!...

Fat innanz'!..."

_ Grasshoppers chirruped in the trees, frogs croaked by the waterside.

And at night there was infinite silence under the silver beams of the moon.

In the distance, from time to time, the watchers by the crops, sleeping in huts of branches, fired their guns by way of warning thieves that they were awake.

To those who heard them drowsily, these noises meant no more than the chiming of a dull clock in the distance, marking the hours of the night.

And silence closed again, like a soft cloak, about the soul.

Round little Grazia life seemed asleep.

Her people did not give her much attention.

In the calmness and beauty that was all about her she grew up peacefully without haste, without fever.

She was lazy, and loved to dawdle and to sleep.

For hours together she would lie in the garden.

She would let herself be borne onward by the silence like a fly on a summer stream.

And sometimes, suddenly, for no reason, she would begin to run.

She would run like a little animal, head and shoulders a little leaning to the right, moving easily and supply.

She was like a kid climbing and slithering among the stones for the sheer joy of leaping about.

She would talk to the dogs, the frogs, the grass, the trees, the peasants, and the beasts in the farmyard.

She adored all the creatures about her, great and small: but she was less at her ease with the great.

She saw very few people.

The estate was isolated and far from any town.

Very rarely there came along the dusty road some trudging, solemn peasant, or lovely country woman, with bright eyes and sunburnt face, walking with a slow rhythm, head high and chest well out.

For days together Grazia lived alone in the silence of the garden: she saw no one: she was never bored: she was afraid of nothing.

One day a tramp came, stealing fowls.

He stopped dead when he saw the little girl lying on the grass, eating a piece of bread and butter and humming to herself.

She looked up at him calmly, and asked him what he waited.

He said: "Give me something, or I'll hurt you."

She held out her piece of bread and butter and smiled, and said: "You must not do harm."

Then he went away.

Her mother died.

Her father, a kind, weak man, was an old Italian of a good family, robust, jovial, affectionate, but rather childish, and he was quite incapable of bringing up his child.

Old Buontempi's sister, Madame Stevens, came to the funeral, and was struck by the loneliness of the child, and decided to take her back to Paris for a while, to distract her from her grief.

Grazia and her father wept: but when Madame Stevens had made up her mind to anything, there was nothing for it but to give in: nobody could stand out against her.

She had the brains of the family: and, in her house in Paris, she directed everything, dominated everybody: her husband, her daughter, her lovers:--for she had not denied herself in the matter of love: she went straight at her duties, and her pleasures: she was a practical woman and a passionate--very worldly and very restless.

Transplanted to Paris, Grazia adored her pretty cousin Colette, whom she amused.

The pretty little savage was taken out into society and to the theater.

They treated her as a child, and she regarded herself as a child, although she was a child no longer.

She had feelings which she hid away, for she was fearful of them: accesses of tenderness for some person or thing.

She was secretly in love with Colette, and would steal a ribbon or a handkerchief that belonged to her: often in her presence, she could not speak a word: and when she expected her, when she knew that she was going to see her, she would tremble with impatience and happiness.

At the theater when she saw her pretty cousin, in evening dress, come into the box and attract general attention, she would smile humbly, affectionately, lovingly: and her heart would leap when Colette spoke to her.

Dressed in white, with her beautiful black hair loose and hanging over her shoulders, biting the fingers of her long white cotton gloves, and idly poking her fingers through the holes,--every other minute during the play she would turn towards Colette in the hope of meeting a friendly look, to share the pleasure she was feeling, and to say with her clear brown eyes: "I love you."

When they were out together in the Bois, outside Paris, she would walk in Colette's shadow, sit at her feet; run in front of her, break off branches that might be in her way, place stones in the mud for her to walk on.

And one evening in the garden, when Colette shivered and asked for her shawl, she gave a little cry of delight--she was at once ashamed of it--to think that her beloved would be wrapped in something of hers, and would give it back to her presently filled with the scent of her body.

There were books, certain passages in the poets, which she read in secret--(for she was still given children's books)--which gave her delicious thrills.

And there were more even in certain passages in music, although she was told that she could not understand them: and she persuaded herself that she did not understand them:--but she would turn pale and cold with emotion.

No one knew what was happening within her at such moments.

Outside that she was just a docile little girl, dreamy, lazy, greedy, blushing on the slightest provocation, now silent for hours together, now talking volubly, easily touched to tears and laughter, breaking suddenly into fits of sobbing or childish laughter.

She loved to laugh, and silly little things would amuse her.

She never tried to be grown up.

She remained a child.

She was, above all, kind and could not bear to hurt anybody, and she was hurt by the least angry word addressed to herself.

She was very modest and retiring, ready to love and admire anything that seemed good and beautiful to her, and so she attributed to others qualities which they did not possess.

She was being educated, for she was very backward.

And that was how she came to be taught music by Christophe.

She saw him for the first time at a crowded party in her aunt's house.

Christophe, who was incapable of adapting himself to his audience, played an interminable _adagio_ which made everybody yawn: when it seemed to be over he began again: and everybody wondered if it was ever going to end.

Madame Stevens was boiling with impatience: Colette was highly amused: she was enjoying the absurdity of it, and rather pleased with Christophe for being so insensible of it: she felt that he was a force, and she liked that: but it was comic too: and she would have been the last person to defend him.

Grazia alone was moved to tears by the music.

She hid herself away in a corner of the room.

When it was over she went away, so that no one should see her emotion, and also because she could not bear to see people making fun of Christophe.

A few days later, at dinner, Madame Stevens in her presence spoke of her having music-lessons from Christophe.

Grazia was so upset that she let her spoon drop into her soup-plate, and splashed herself and her neighbor.

Colette said she ought first to have lessons in table-manners.

Madame Stevens added that Christophe was not the person to go to for that.

Grazia was glad to be scolded in Christophe's company.

Christophe began to teach her.

She was stiff and frozen, and held her arms close to her sides, and could not stir: and when Christophe placed his hand on hers, to correct the position of her fingers, and stretched them over the keys, she nearly fainted.

She was fearful of playing badly for him; but in vain did she practise until she nearly made herself ill, and evoked impatient protests from her cousin: she always played vilely when Christophe was present: she was breathless, and her fingers were as stiff as pieces of wood, or as flabby as cotton: she struck the wrong notes and gave the emphasis all wrong: Christophe would lose his temper, scold her, and go away: then she would long to die.

He paid no attention to her, and thought only of Colette.

Grazia was envious of her cousin's intimacy with Christophe: but, although it hurt her, in her heart she was glad both for Colette and for Christophe.

She thought Colette so superior to herself that it seemed natural to her that she should monopolize attention.

--It was only when she had to choose between her cousin and Christophe that she felt her heart turn against Colette.

With her girlish intuition she saw that Christophe was made to suffer by Colette's coquetry, and the persistent courtship of her by Lucien Lévy-Coeur.

Instinctively she disliked Lévy-Coeur, and she detested him as soon as she knew that Christophe detested him.

She could not understand how Colette could admit him as a rival to Christophe.

She began secretly to judge him harshly.

She discovered certain of his small hypocrisies, and suddenly changed her manner towards him.

Colette saw it, but did not guess the cause: she pretended to ascribe it to a little girl's caprice.

But it was very certain that she had lost her power over Grazia: as was shown by a trifling incident.

One evening, when they were walking together in the garden, a gentle rain came on, and Colette, tenderly, though coquettishly, offered Grazia the shelter of her cloak: Grazia, for whom, a few weeks before, it would have been happiness ineffable to be held close to her beloved cousin, moved away coldly, and walked on in silence at a distance of some yards.

And when Colette said that she thought a piece of music that Grazia was playing was ugly, Grazia was not kept from playing and loving it.

She was only concerned with Christophe.

She had the insight of her tenderness, and saw that he was suffering, without his saying a word.

She exaggerated it in her childish, uneasy regard for him.

She thought that Christophe was in love with Colette, when he had really no more than an exacting friendship.

She thought he was unhappy, and she was unhappy for him, and she had little reward for her anxiety.

She paid for it when Colette had infuriated Christophe: then he was surly and avenged himself on his pupil, waxing wrathful with her mistakes.

One morning when Colette had exasperated him more than usual, he sat down by the piano so savagely that Grazia lost the little nerve she had: she floundered: he angrily scolded her for her mistakes: then she lost her head altogether: he fumed, wrung his hands, declared that she would never do anything properly, and that she had better occupy herself with cooking, sewing, anything she liked, only, in Heaven's name, she must not go on with her music!

It was not worth the trouble of torturing people with her mistakes.

With that he left her in the middle of her lesson.

He was furious.

And poor Grazia wept, not so much for the humiliation of anything he had said to her, as for despair at not being able to please Christophe, when she longed to do so, and could only succeed in adding to his sufferings.

The greatest grief was when Christophe ceased to go to the Stevens' house.

Then she longed to go home.

The poor child, so healthy, even in her dreams, in whom there was much of the sweet peace of the country, felt ill at ease in the town, among the neurasthenic, restless women of Paris.

She never dared say anything, but she had come to a fairly accurate estimation of the people about her.

But she was shy, and, like her father, weak, from kindness, modesty, distrust of herself.

She submitted to the authority of her domineering aunt and her cousin, who was used to tyrannizing over everybody.

She dared not write to her father, to whom she wrote regularly long, affectionate letters: "Please, please, take me home!"

And her father dared not take her home, in spite of his own longing: for Madame Stevens had answered his timid advances by saying that Grazia was very well off where she was, much better off than she would be with him, and that she must stay for the sake of her education.

But there came a time when her exile was too hard for the little southern creature, a time when she had to fly back towards the light.

--That was after Christophe's concert.

She went to it with the Stevens: and she was tortured by the hideous sight of the rabble amusing themselves with insulting an artist....

An artist?

The man who, in Grazia's eyes, was the very type of art, the personification of all that was divine in life!

She was on the point of tears; she longed to get away.

She had to listen to all the caterwauling, the hisses, the howls, and, when they reached home, to the laughter of Colette as she exchanged pitying remarks with Lucien Lévy-Coeur.

She escaped to her room, and through part of the night she sobbed: she spoke to Christophe, and consoled him: she would gladly have given her life for him, and she despaired of ever being able to do anything to make him happy.

It was impossible for her to stay in Paris any longer.

She begged her father to take her away, saying: "I cannot live here any longer; I cannot: I shall die if you leave me here any longer."

Her father came at once, and though it was very painful to them both to stand up to her terrible aunt, they screwed up their courage for it by a desperate effort of will.

Grazia returned to the sleepy old estate.

She was glad to get back to Nature and the creatures that she loved.

Every day she gathered comfort for her sorrow, but in her heart there remained a little of the melancholy of the North, like a veil of mist, that very slowly melted away before the sun.

Sometimes she thought of Christophe's wretchedness.

Lying on the grass, listening to the familiar frogs and grasshoppers, or sitting at her piano, which now she played more often than before, she would dream of the friend her heart had chosen: she would talk to him, in whispers, for hours together, and it seemed not impossible to her that one day he would open the door and come in to her.

She wrote to him, and, after long hesitation, she sent the letter, unsigned, which, one day, with beating heart, she went secretly and dropped into the box in the village two miles away, beyond the long plowed fields,--a kind, good, touching letter, in which she told him that he was not alone, that he must not be discouraged, that there was one who thought of him, and loved him, and prayed to God for him,--a poor little letter, which was lost in the post, so that he never received it.

Then the serene, monotonous days succeeded each other in the life of his distant friend.

And the Italian peace, the genius of tranquillity, calm happiness, silent contemplation, once more took possession of that chaste and silent heart, in whose depths there still burned, like a little constant flame, the memory of Christophe.

* * * * * But Christophe never knew of the simple love that watched over him from afar, and was later to fill so great a room in his life.

Nor did he know that at that same concert, where he had been insulted, there sat the woman who was to be the beloved, the dear companion, destined to walk by his side, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand.

He was alone.

He thought himself alone.

But he did not suffer overmuch.

He did not feel that bitter anguish that had given him such great agony in Germany.

He was stronger, riper: he knew that it must be so.

His illusions about Paris were destroyed: men were everywhere the same: he must be a law unto himself, and not waste strength in a childish struggle with the world: he must be himself, calmly, tranquilly.

As Beethoven had said, "If we surrender the forces of our lives to life, what, then, will be left for the noblest and highest?"

He had firmly grasped a knowledge of his nature and the temper of his race, which formerly he had so harshly judged.

The more he was oppressed by the atmosphere of Paris, the more keenly did he feel the need of taking refuge in his own country, in the arms of the poets and musicians, in whom the best of Germany is garnered and preserved.

As soon as he opened their books his room was filled with the sound of the sunlit Rhine and lit by the loving smiles of old friends new found.

How ungrateful he had been to them!

How was it he had failed to feel the treasure of their goodness and honesty?

He remembered with shame all the unjust, outrageous things he had said of them when he was in Germany.

Then he saw only their defects, their awkward ceremonious manners, their tearful idealism, their little mental hypocrisies, their cowardice.

Ah!

How small were all these things compared with their great virtues!

How could he have been so hard upon their weaknesses, which now made them even more moving in his eyes: for they were more human for them!

In his reaction he was the more attracted to those of them to whom he had been most unjust.

What things he had said about Schubert and Bach!

And now he felt so near to them.

Now it was as though these noble souls, whose foibles he had so scorned, leaned over him, now that he was in exile and far from his own people, and smiled kindly and said: "Brother, we are here!

Courage!

We too have had more than our share of misery ...

Bah!

one wins through it...."

He heard the soul of Johann Sebastian Bach roaring like the sea: hurricanes, winds howling, the clouds of life scudding,--men and women drunk with joy, sorrow, fury, and the Christ, all meekness, the Prince of Peace, hovering above them,--towns awakened by the cries of the watchmen, running with glad shouts, to meet the divine Bridegroom, whose footsteps shake the earth,--the vast store of thoughts, passions, musical forms, heroic life, Shakespearean hallucinations, Savonarolaesque prophecies, pastoral, epic, apocalyptic visions, all contained in the stunted body of the little Thuringian _cantor_, with his double chin, and little shining eyes under the wrinkled lids and the raised eyebrows ...

--he could see him so clearly!

somber, jovial, a little absurd, with his head stuffed full of allegories and symbols, Gothic and rococo, choleric, obstinate, serene, with a passion for life, and a great longing for death ...

--he saw him in his school, a genial pedant, surrounded by his pupils, dirty, coarse, vagabond, ragged, with hoarse voices, the ragamuffins with whom he squabbled, and sometimes fought like a navvy, one of whom once gave him a mighty thrashing ...

--he saw him with his family, surrounded by his twenty-one children, of whom thirteen died before him, and one was an idiot, and the rest were good musicians who gave little concerts....

Sickness, burial, bitter disputes, want, his genius misunderstood:--and through and above it all, his music, his faith, deliverance and light, joy half seen, felt, desired, grasped,--God, the breath of God kindling his bones, thrilling through his flesh, thundering from his lips....

O Force!

Force!

Thrice joyful thunder of Force!...

Christophe took great draughts of that force.

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!

"Poor little things!"

--thought Christophe, forgetting that he himself had once been just as absurd--"they find fault with Wagner and Beethoven!

They must have faultless men of genius!...

As though, when the tempest rages, it would take care not to upset the existing order of things!..."

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: otherwise he would never have the courage to go on to the end: for it would no longer be his idea, but the miserable idea of others that would live in him.

Now that there was nothing to disturb his dreams, they bubbled forth like springs from all the corners of his soul, and from every stone of the roads by which he walked.

He was living in a visionary state.

Everything he saw and heard called forth in him creatures and things different from those he saw and heard.

He had only to live to find everywhere about him the life of his heroes.

Their sensations came to him of their own accord.

The eyes of the passers-by, the sound of a voice borne by the wind, the light on a lawn, the birds singing in the trees of the Luxembourg, a convent-bell ringing so far away, the pale sky, the little patch of sky seen from his room, the sounds and shades of sound of the different hours of the day, all these were not in himself, but in the creatures of his dreams.

--Christophe was happy.

But his material position was worse than ever.

He had lost his few pupils, his only resource.

It was September, and rich people were out of town, and it was difficult to find new pupils.

The only one he had was an engineer, a crazy, clever fellow, who had taken it into his head, at forty, to become a great violinist.

Christophe did not play the violin very well: but he knew more about it than his pupil: and for some time he gave him three hours a week at two francs an hour.

But at the end of six weeks the engineer got tired of it, and suddenly discovered that painting was his vocation.

--When he imparted his discovery to Christophe, Christophe laughed heartily: but, when he had done laughing, he reckoned up his finances, and found that he had in hand the twelve francs which his pupil had just paid him for his last lessons.

That did not worry him: he only said to himself that he must certainly set about finding some other means of living, and start once more going from publisher to publisher.

That was not very pleasant....

Pff!...

It was useless to torment himself in advance.

It was a jolly day.

He went to Meudon.

He had a sudden longing for a walk.

As he walked there rose in him scraps of music.

He was as full of it as a hive of honey: and he laughed aloud at the golden buzzing of his bees.

For the most part it was changing music.

And lively leaping rhythms, insistent, haunting....

Much good it is to create and fashion music buried within four walls!

There you can only make combinations of subtle, hard, unyielding harmonies, like the Parisians!

When he was weary he lay down in the woods.

The trees were half in leaf, the sky was periwinkle blue.

Christophe dozed off dreamily, and in his dreams there was the color of the sweet light falling from October clouds.

His blood throbbed.

He listened to the rushing flood of his ideas.

They came from all corners of the earth: worlds, young and old, at war, rags and tatters of dead souls, guests and parasites that once had dwelled within him, as in a city.

The words that Gottfried had spoken by the grave of Melchior returned to him: he was a living tomb, filled with the dead, striving in him,--all his unknown forefathers.

He listened to those countless lives, it delighted him to set the organ roaring, the roaring of that age-old forest, full of monsters, like the forest of Dante.

He was no longer fearful of them as he had been in his youth.

For the master was there: his will.

It was a great joy to him to crack his whip and make the beasts howl, and feel the wealth of living creatures in himself.

He was not alone.

There was no danger of his ever being alone.

He was a host in himself.

Ages of Kraffts, healthy and rejoicing in their health.

Against hostile Paris, against a hostile people, he could set a whole people: the fight was equal.