Jean-Christophe In Paris — THE MARKET-PLACE, I, part 3

* * * * * Christophe went home.

Anger had given place to despair.

He felt that he was lost.

The frail prop on which he had counted had failed him.

He had no doubt but that he had made a deadly enemy, not only of Hecht, but of Kohn, who had introduced him.

He was in absolute solitude in a hostile city.

Outside Diener and Kohn he knew no one.

His friend Corinne, the beautiful actress whom he had met in Germany, was not in Paris: she was still touring abroad, in America, this time on her own account: the papers published clamatory descriptions of her travels.

As for the little French governess whom he had unwittingly robbed of her situation,--the thought of her had long filled him with remorse--how often had he vowed that he would find her when he reached Paris.

[Footnote: See _Jean-Christophe_--I: "Revolt."

] But now that he was in Paris he found that he had forgotten one important thing: her name.

He could not remember it.

He could only recollect her Christian name: Antoinette.

And then, even if he remembered, how was he to find a poor little governess in that ant-heap of human beings?

He had to set to work as soon as possible to find a livelihood.

He had five francs left.

In spite of his dislike of him, he forced himself to ask the innkeeper if he did not know of anybody in the neighborhood to whom he could give music-lessons.

The innkeeper, who had no great opinion of a lodger who only ate once a day and spoke German, lost what respect he had for him when he heard that he was only a musician.

He was a Frenchman of the old school, and music was to him an idler's job.

He scoffed: "The piano!...

I don't know.

You strum the piano!

Congratulations!...

But 'tis a queer thing to take to that trade as a matter of taste!

When I hear music, it's just for all the world like listening to the rain....

But perhaps you might teach me.

What do you say, you fellows?"

he cried, turning to some fellows who were drinking.

They laughed loudly.

"It's a fine trade," said one of them.

"Not dirty work.

And the ladies like it."

Christophe did not rightly understand the French or the jest: he floundered for his words: he did not know whether to be angry or not.

The innkeeper's wife took pity on him: "Come, come, Philippe, you're not serious," she said to her husband.

"All the same," she went on, turning to Christophe, "there is some one who might do for you."

"Who?"

asked her husband.

"The Grasset girl.

You know, they've bought a piano."

"Ah!

Those stuck-up folk!

So they have."

They told Christophe that the girl in question was the daughter of a butcher: her parents were trying to make a lady of her; they would perhaps like her to have lessons, if only for the sake of making people talk.

The innkeeper's wife promised to see to it.

Next day she told Christophe that the butcher's wife would like to see him.

He went to her house, and found her in the shop, surrounded with great pieces of meat.

She was a pretty, rather florid woman, and she smiled sweetly, but stood on her dignity when she heard why he had come.

Quite abruptly she came to the question of payment, and said quickly that she did not wish to give much, because the piano is quite an agreeable thing, but not necessary: she offered him fifty centimes an hour.

In any case, she would not pay more than four francs a week.

After that she asked Christophe a little doubtfully if he knew much about music.

She was reassured, and became more amiable when he told her that not only did he know about music, but wrote it into the bargain: that flattered her vanity: it would be a good thing to spread about the neighborhood that her daughter was taking lessons with a composer.

Next day, when Christophe found himself sitting by the piano--a horrible instrument, bought second-hand, which sounded like a guitar--with the butcher's little daughter, whose short, stubby fingers fumbled with the keys; who was unable to tell one note from another; who was bored to tears;

who began at once to yawn in his face; and he had to submit to the mother's superintendence, and to her conversation, and to her ideas on music and the teaching of music--then he felt so miserable, so wretchedly humiliated, that he had not even the strength to be angry about it.

He relapsed into a state of despair: there were evenings when he could not eat.

If in a few weeks he had fallen so low, where would he end?

What good was it to have rebelled against Hecht's offer?

The thing to which he had submitted was even more degrading.

One evening, as he sat in his room, he could not restrain his tears: he flung himself on his knees by his bed and prayed....

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: what was there in common between that and Him?

All the sorrows of the world rushing on to destruction dashed against that rock.

Christophe heard the blood beating in his veins, beating like an inward voice, crying: "Eternal ...

I am ...

I am...."

Well did he know that voice: as long as he could remember he had heard it.

Sometimes he forgot it: often for months together he would lose consciousness of its mighty monotonous rhythm: but he knew that it was there, that it never ceased, like the ocean roaring in the night.

In the music of it he found once more the same energy that he gained from it whenever he bathed in its waters.

He rose to his feet.

He was fortified.

No: the hard life that he led contained nothing of which he need be ashamed: he could eat the bread he earned, and never blush for it: it was for those who made him earn it at such a price to blush and be ashamed.

Patience!

Patience!

The time would come....

But next day he began to lose patience again: and, in spite of all his efforts, he did at last explode angrily, one day during a lesson, at the silly little ninny, who had been maddeningly impertinent and laughed at his accent, and had taken a malicious delight in doing exactly the opposite of what he told her.

The girl screamed in response to Christophe's angry shouts.

She was frightened and enraged at a man whom she paid daring to show her no respect.

She declared that he had struck her--(Christophe had shaken her arm rather roughly).

Her mother bounced in on them like a Fury, and covered her daughter with kisses and Christophe with abuse.

The butcher also appeared, and declared that he would not suffer any infernal Prussian to take upon himself to touch his daughter.

Furious, pale with rage, itching to choke the life out of the butcher and his wife and daughter, Christophe rushed away.

His host and hostess, seeing him come in in an abject condition, had no difficulty in worming the story out of him: and it fed the malevolence with which they regarded their neighbors.

But by the evening the whole neighborhood was saying that the German was a brute and a child-beater.

* * * * * Christophe made fresh advances to the music-vendors: but in vain.

He found the French lacking in cordiality: and the whirl and confusion of their perpetual agitation crushed him.

They seemed to him to live in a state of anarchy, directed by a cunning and despotic bureaucracy.

One evening, he was wandering along the boulevards, discouraged by the futility of his efforts, when he saw Sylvain Kohn coming from the opposite direction.

He was convinced that they had quarreled irrevocably and looked away and tried to pass unnoticed.

But Kohn called to him: "What became of you after that great day?"

he asked with a laugh.

"I've been wanting to look you up, but I lost your address....

Good Lord, my dear fellow, I didn't know you!

You were epic: that's what you were, epic!"

Christophe stared at him.

He was surprised and a little ashamed.

"You're not angry with me?"

"Angry?

What an idea!"

So far from being angry, he had been delighted with the way in which Christophe had trounced Hecht: it had been a treat to him.

It really mattered nothing to him whether Christophe or Hecht was right: he only regarded people as source of entertainment: and he saw in Christophe a spring of high comedy, which he intended to exploit to the full.

"You should have come to see me," he went on.

"I was expecting you.

What are you doing this evening?

Come to dinner.

I won't let you off.

Quite informal: just a few artists: we meet once a fortnight.

You should know these people.

Come.

I'll introduce you."

In vain did Christophe beg to be excused on the score of his clothes.

Sylvain Kohn carried him off.

They entered a restaurant on one of the boulevards, and went up to the second floor.

Christophe found himself among about thirty young men, whose ages ranged from twenty to thirty-five, and they were all engaged in animated discussion.

Kohn introduced him as a man who had just escaped from a German prison.

They paid no attention to him and did not stop their passionate discussion, and Kohn plunged into it at once.

Christophe was shy in this select company, and said nothing: but he was all ears.

He could not grasp--he had great difficulty in following the volubility of the French--what great artistic interests were in dispute.

He listened attentively, but he could only make out words like "trust," "monopoly," "fall in prices," "receipts," mixed up with phrases like "the dignity of art," and the "rights of the author."

And at last he saw that they were talking business.

A certain number of authors, it appeared, belonged to a syndicate and were angry about certain attempts which had been made to float a rival concern, which, according to them, would dispute their monopoly of exploitation.

The defection of certain of their members who had found it to their advantage to go over bag and baggage to the rival house had roused them, to the wildest fury.

They talked of decapitation.

"...

Burked....

Treachery....

Shame....

Sold...."

Others did not worry about the living: they were incensed against the dead, whose sales without royalties choked up the market.

It appeared that the works of De Musset had just become public property, and were selling far too well.

And so they demanded that the State should give them rigorous protection, and heavily tax the masterpieces of the past so as to check their circulation at reduced prices, which, they declared, was unfair competition with the work of living artists.

They stopped each other to hear the takings of such and such a theater on the preceding evening.

They all went into ecstasies over the fortune of a veteran dramatist, famous in two continents--a man whom they despised, though they envied him even more.

From the incomes of authors they passed to those of the critics.

They talked of the sum--(pure calumny, no doubt)--received by one of their colleagues for every first performance at one of the theaters on the boulevards, the consideration being that he should speak well of it.

He was an honest man: having made his bargain he stuck to it: but his great secret lay--(so they said)--in so eulogizing the piece that it would be taken off as quickly as possible so that there might be many new plays.

The tale--(or the account)--caused laughter, but nobody was surprised.

And mingled with all that talk they threw out fine phrases: they talked of "poetry" and "art for art's sake."

But through it all there rang "art for money's sake"; and this jobbing spirit, newly come into French literature, scandalized Christophe.

As he understood nothing at all about their talk of money he had given it up.

But then they began to talk of letters, or rather of men of letters.

--Christophe pricked up his ears as he heard the name of Victor Hugo.

They were debating whether he had been cuckolded: they argued at length about the love of Sainte-Beuve and Madame Hugo.

And then they turned to the lovers of George Sand and their respective merits.

That was the chief occupation of criticism just then: when they had ransacked the houses of great men, rummaged through the closets, turned out the drawers, ransacked the cupboards, they burrowed down to their inmost lives.

The attitude of Monsieur de Lauzun lying flat under the bed of the King and Madame de Montespan was the attitude of criticism in its cult of history and truth--(everybody just then, of course, made a cult of truth).

These young men were subscribers to the cult: no detail was too small for them in their search for truth.

They applied it to the art of the present as well as to that of the past: and they analyzed the private life of certain of the more notorious of their contemporaries with the same passion for exactness.

It was a queer thing that they were possessed of the smallest details of scenes which are usually enacted without witnesses.

It was really as though the persons concerned had been the first to give exact information to the public out of their great devotion to the truth.

Christophe was more and more embarrassed and tried to talk to his neighbors of something else; but nobody listened to him.

At first they asked him a few vague questions about Germany--questions which, to his amazement, displayed the almost complete ignorance of these distinguished and apparently cultured young men concerning the most elementary things of their work--literature and art--outside Paris; at most they had heard of a few great names: Hauptmann, Sudermann, Liebermann, Strauss (David, Johann, Richard), and they picked their way gingerly among them for fear of getting mixed.

If they had questioned Christophe it was from politeness rather than from curiosity: they had no curiosity: they hardly seemed to notice his replies: and they hurried back at once to the Parisian topics which were regaling the rest of the company.

Christophe timidly tried to talk of music.

Not one of these men of letters was a musician.

At heart they considered music an inferior art.

But the growing success of music during the last few years had made them secretly uneasy: and since it was the fashion they pretended to be interested in it.

They frothed especially about a new opera and declared that music dated from its performance, or at least the new era in music.

This idea made things easy for their ignorance and snobbishness, for it relieved them of the necessity of knowing anything else.

The author of the opera, a Parisian, whose name Christophe heard for the first time, had, said some, made a clean sweep of all that had gone before him, cleaned up, renovated, and recreated music.

Christophe started at that.

He asked nothing better than to believe in genius.

But such a genius as that, a genius who had at one swoop wiped out the past....

Good heavens!

He must be a lusty lad: how the devil had he done it?

He asked for particulars.

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....

"_...

You don't know Latin?

_" "_No.

_" _(With enthusiasm) "Cabricias, arci thuram, catalamus, singulariter ...

bonus, bona, bonum."

_ Finding himself with a man who "understood Latin" he prudently took refuge in the chatter of esthetics.

From that impregnable fortress he began to bombard Beethoven, Wagner, and classical art, which was not before the house (but in France it is impossible to praise an artist without making as an offering a holocaust of all those who are unlike him).

He announced the advent of a new art which trampled under foot the conventions of the past.

He spoke of a new musical language which had been discovered by the Christopher Columbus of Parisian music, and he said it made an end of the language of the classics: that was a dead language.

Christophe reserved his opinion of this reforming genius to wait until he had seen his work before he said anything: but in spite of himself he felt an instinctive distrust of this musical Baal to whom all music was sacrificed.

He was scandalized to hear the Masters so spoken of: and he forgot that he had said much the same sort of thing in Germany.

He who at home had thought himself a revolutionary in art, he who had scandalized others by the boldness of his judgments and the frankness of his expressions, felt, as soon as he heard these words spoken in France, that he was at heart a conservative.

He tried to argue, and was tactless enough to speak, not like a man of culture, who advances arguments without exposition, but as a professional, bringing out disconcerting facts.

He did not hesitate to plunge into technical explanations: and his voice, as he talked, struck a note which was well calculated to offend the ears of a company of superior persons to whom his arguments and the vigor with which he supported them were alike ridiculous.

The critic tried to demolish him with an attempt at wit, and to end the discussion which had shown Christophe to his stupefaction that he had to deal with a man who did not in the least know what he was talking about.

And so they came to the opinion that the German was pedantic and superannuated: and without knowing anything about it they decided that his music was detestable.

But Christophe's bizarre personality had made an impression on the company of young men, and with their quickness in seizing on the ridiculous they had marked the awkward, violent gestures of his thin arms with their enormous hands, and the furious glances that darted from his eyes as his voice rose to a falsetto.

Sylvain Kohn saw to it that his friends were kept amused.

Conversation had deserted literature in favor of women.

As a matter of fact they were only two aspects of the same subject: for their literature was concerned with nothing but women, and their women were concerned with nothing but literature, they were so much taken up with the affairs and men of letters.

They spoke of one good lady, well known in Parisian society, who had, it was said, just married her lover to her daughter, the better to keep him.

Christophe squirmed in his chair, and tactlessly made a face of disgust.

Kohn saw it, and nudged his neighbor and pointed out that the subject seemed to excite the German--that no doubt he was longing to know the lady.

Christophe blushed, muttered angrily, and finally said hotly that such women ought to be whipped.

His proposition was received with a shout of Homeric laughter: and Sylvain Kohn cooingly protested that no man should touch a woman, even with a flower, etc. , etc. (In Paris he was the very Knight of Love.

) Christophe replied that a woman of that sort was neither more nor less than a bitch, and that there was only one remedy for vicious dogs: the whip.

They roared at him.

Christophe said that their gallantry was hypocritical, and that those who talked most of their respect for women were those who possessed the least of it: and he protested against these scandalous tales.

They replied that there was no scandal in it, and that it was only natural: and they were all agreed that the heroine of the story was not only a charming woman, but _the_ Woman, _par excellence_.

The German waxed indignant.

Sylvain Kohn asked him slyly what he thought Woman was like.

Christophe felt that they were pulling his leg and laying a trap for him: but he fell straight into it in the violent expression of his convictions.

He began to explain his ideas on love to these bantering Parisians.

He could not find his words, floundered about after them, and finally fished up from the phrases he remembered such impossible words, such enormities, that he had all his hearers rocking with laughter, while all the time he was perfectly and admirably serious, never bothered about them, and was touchingly impervious to their ridicule: for he could not help seeing that they were making fun of him.

At last he tied himself up in a sentence, could not extricate himself, brought his fist down on the table, and was silent.

They tried to bring him back into the discussion: he scowled and did not flinch, but sat with his elbows on the table, ashamed and irritated.

He did not open his lips again, except to eat and drink, until the dinner was over.

He drank enormously, unlike the Frenchmen, who only sipped their wine.

His neighbor wickedly encouraged him, and went on filling his glass, which he emptied absently.

But, although he was not used to these excesses, especially after the weeks of privation through which he had passed, he took his liquor well, and did not cut so ridiculous a figure as the others hoped.

He sat there lost in thought: they paid no attention to him: they thought he was made drowsy by the wine.

He was exhausted by the effort of following the conversation in French, and tired of hearing about nothing but literature--actors, authors, publishers, the chatter of the _coulisses_ and literary life: everything seemed to be reduced to that.

Amid all these new faces and the buzz of words he could not fix a single face, nor a single thought.

His short-sighted eyes, dim and dreamy, wandered slowly round the table, and they rested on one man after another without seeming to see them.

And yet he saw them better than any one, though he himself was not conscious of it.

He did not, like these Jews and Frenchmen, peck at the things he saw and dissect them, tear them to rags, and leave them in tiny, tiny pieces.

Slowly, like a sponge, he sucked up the essence of men and women, and bore away their image in his soul.

He seemed to have seen nothing and to remember nothing.

It was only long afterwards--hours, often days--when he was alone, gazing in upon himself, that he saw that he had borne away a whole impression.

But for the moment he seemed to be just a German boor, stuffing himself with food, concerned only with not missing a mouthful.

And he heard nothing clearly, except when he heard the others calling each other by name, and then, with a silly drunken insistency, he wondered why so many Frenchmen have foreign names: Flemish, German, Jewish, Levantine, Anglo- or Spanish-American.

He did not notice when they got up from the table.

He went on sitting alone: and he dreamed of the Rhenish hills, the great woods, the tilled fields, the meadows by the waterside, his old mother.

Most of the others had gone.

At last he thought of going, and got up, too, without looking at anybody, and went and took down his hat and cloak, which were hanging by the door.

When he had put them on he was turning away without saying good-night, when through a half-open door he saw an object which fascinated him: a piano.

He had not touched a musical instrument for weeks.

He went in and lovingly touched the keys, sat down just as he was, with his hat on his head and his cloak on his shoulders, and began to play.

He had altogether forgotten where he was.

He did not notice that two men crept into the room to listen to him.

One was Sylvain Kohn, a passionate lover of music--God knows why!

for he knew nothing at all about it, and he liked bad music just as well as good.

The other was the musical critic, Théophile Goujart.

He--it simplifies matters so much--neither understood nor loved music: but that did not keep him from talking about it.

On the contrary: nobody is so free in mind as the man who knows nothing of what he is talking about: for to such a man it does not matter whether he says one thing more than another.

Théophile Goujart was tall, strong, and muscular: he had a black beard, thick curls on his forehead, which was lined with deep inexpressive wrinkles, short arms, short legs, a big chest: a type of woodman or porter of the Auvergne.

He had common manners and an arrogant way of speaking.

He had gone into music through politics, at that time the only road to success in France.

He had attached himself to the fortunes of a Minister to whom he had discovered that he was distantly related--a son "of the bastard of his apothecary."

Ministers are not eternal, and when it seemed that the day of his Minister was over Théophile Goujart deserted the ship, taking with him all that he could lay his hands on, notably several orders: for he loved glory.

Tired of politics, in which for some time past he had received various snubs, both on his own account and on that of his patron, he looked out for a shelter from the storm, a restful position in which he could annoy others without being himself annoyed.

Everything pointed to criticism.

Just at that moment there fell vacant the post of musical critic to one of the great Parisian papers.

The previous holder of the post, a young and talented composer, had been dismissed because he insisted on saying what he thought of the authors and their work.

Goujart had never taken any interest in music, and knew nothing at all about it: he was chosen without a moment's hesitation.

They had had enough of competent critics: with Goujart there was at least nothing to fear: he did not attach an absurd importance to his opinions: he was always at the editor's orders, and ready to comply with a slashing article or enthusiastic approbation.

That he was no musician was a secondary consideration.

Everybody in France knows a little about music.

Goujart quickly acquired the requisite knowledge.

His method was quite simple: it consisted in sitting at every concert next to some good musician, a composer if possible, and getting him to say what he thought of the works performed.

At the end of a few months of this apprenticeship, he knew his job: the fledgling could fly.

He did not, it is true, soar like an eagle: and God knows what howlers Goujart committed with the greatest show of authority in his paper!

He listened and read haphazard, stirred the mixture up well in his sluggish brains, and arrogantly laid down the law for others; he wrote in a pretentious style, interlarded with puns, and plastered over with an aggressive pedantry: he had the mind of a schoolmaster.

Sometimes, every now and then, he drew down on himself cruel replies: then he shammed dead, and took good care not to answer them.

He was a mixture of cunning and thick-headedness, insolent or groveling as circumstances demanded.

He cringed to the masters who had an official position or an established fame (he had no other means of judging merit in music).

He scorned everybody else, and exploited writers who were starving.

He was no fool.

In spite of his reputation and the authority he had acquired, he knew in his heart of hearts that he knew nothing about music: and he recognized that Christophe knew a great deal about it.

Nothing would have induced him to say so: but it was borne in upon him.

And now he heard Christophe play: and he made great efforts to understand him, looking absorbed, profound, without a thought in his head: he could not see a yard ahead of him through the fog of sound, and he wagged his head solemnly as one who knew and adjusted the outward and visible signs of his approval to the fluttering of the eyelids of Sylvain Kohn, who found it hard to stand still.

At last Christophe, emerging to consciousness from the fumes of wine and music, became dimly aware of the pantomime going on behind his back: he turned and saw the two amateurs of music.

They rushed at him and violently shook hands with him--Sylvain Kohn gurgling that he had played like a god, Goujart declaring solemnly that he had the left hand of Rubinstein and the right hand of Paderewski (or it might be the other way round).

Both agreed that such talent ought not to be hid under a bushel, and they pledged themselves to reveal it.

And, incidentally, they were both resolved to extract from it as much honor and profit as possible.

From that day on Sylvain Kohn took to inviting Christophe to his rooms, and put at his disposal his excellent piano, which he never used himself.

Christophe, who was bursting with suppressed music, did not need to be urged, and accepted: and for a time he made good use of the invitation.

At first all went well.

Christophe was only too happy to play: and Sylvain Kohn was tactful enough to leave him to play in peace.

He enjoyed it thoroughly himself.

By one of those queer phenomena which must be in everybody's observation, the man, who was no musician, no artist, cold-hearted and devoid of all poetic feeling and real kindness, was enslaved sensually by Christophe's music, which he did not understand, though he found in it a strongly voluptuous pleasure.

Unfortunately, he could not hold his tongue.

He had to talk, loudly, while Christophe was playing.

He had to underline the music with affected exclamations, like a concert snob, or else he passed ridiculous comment on it.

Then Christophe would thump the piano, and declare that he could not go on like that.

Kohn would try hard to be silent: but he could not do it: at once he would begin again to sniffle, sigh, whistle, beat time, hum, imitate the various instruments.

And when the piece was ended he would have burst if he had not given Christophe the benefit of his inept comment.

He was a queer mixture of German sentimentality, Parisian humbug, and intolerable fatuousness.

Sometimes he expressed second-hand precious opinions; sometimes he made extravagant comparisons; and then he would make dirty, obscene remarks, or propound some insane nonsense.

By way of praising Beethoven, he would point out some trickery, or read a lascivious sensuality into his music.

The _Quartet in C Minor_ seemed to him jolly spicy.

The sublime _Adagio of the Ninth Symphony_ made him think of Cherubino.

After the three crashing chords at the opening of the _Symphony in C Minor_, he called out: "Don't come in!

I've some one here."

He admired the Battle of _Heldenleben_ because he pretended that it was like the noise of a motor-car.

And always he had some image to explain each piece, a puerile incongruous image.

Really, it seemed impossible that he could have any love for music.

However, there was no doubt about it: he really did love it: at certain passages to which he attached the most ridiculous meanings the tears would come into his eyes.

But after having been moved by a scene from Wagner, he would strum out a gallop of Offenbach, or sing some music-hall ditty after the _Ode to Joy_.

Then Christophe would bob about and roar with rage.

But the worst of all to bear was not when Sylvain Kohn was absurd so much as when he was trying to be profound and subtle, when he was trying to impress Christophe, when it was Hamilton speaking, and not Sylvain Kohn.

Then Christophe would scowl blackly at him, and squash him with cold contempt, which hurt Hamilton's vanity: very often these musical evenings would end in a quarrel.

But Kohn would forget it next day, and Christophe, sorry for his rudeness, would make a point of going back.

That would not have mattered much if Kohn had been able to refrain from inviting his friends to hear Christophe.

But he could not help wanting to show off his musician.

The first time Christophe found in Kohn's rooms three or four little Jews and Kohn's mistress--a large florid woman, all paint and powder, who repeated idiotic jokes and talked about her food, and thought herself a musician because she showed her legs every evening in the Revue of the Variétés--Christophe looked black.

Next time he told Sylvain Kohn curtly that he would never again play in his rooms.

Sylvain Kohn swore by all his gods that he would not invite anybody again.