Jean-Christophe In Paris — THE MARKET-PLACE, II, part 1

II

The more clearly Christophe saw into the vat of ideas in which Parisian art was fermenting, the more strongly he was impressed by the supremacy of women in that cosmopolitan community.

They had an absurdly disproportionate importance.

It was not enough for woman to be the helpmeet of man.

It was not even enough for her to be his equal.

Her pleasure must be law both for herself and for man.

And man truckled to it.

When a nation is growing old, it renounces its will, its faith, the whole essence of its being, in favor of the giver of pleasure.

Men make works of art: but women make men,--(except when they tamper with the work of the men, as happened in France at that time):--and it would be more just to say that they unmake what they make.

No doubt the Eternal Feminine has been an uplifting influence on the best of men: but for the ordinary men, in ages of weariness and fatigue, there is, as some one has said, another Feminine, just as eternal, who drags them down.

This other Feminine was the mistress of Parisian thought, the Queen of the Republic.

* * * * * Christophe closely observed the Parisian women at the houses at which Sylvain Kohn's introduction or his own skill at the piano had made him welcome.

Like most foreigners, he generalized freely and unsparingly about French women from the two or three types he had met: young women, not very tall, and not at all fresh, with neat figures, dyed hair, large hats on their pretty heads that were a little too large for their bodies: they had trim features, but their faces were just a little too fleshy: good noses, vulgar sometimes, characterless always: quick eyes without any great depth, which they tried to make as brilliant and large as possible: well-cut lips that were perfectly under control: plump little chins; and the lower part of their faces revealed their utter materialism; they were elegant little creatures who, amid all their preoccupations with love and intrigue, never lost sight of public opinion and their domestic affairs.

They were pretty, but they belonged to no race.

In all these polite ladies there was the savor of the respectable woman perverted, or wanting to be so, together with all the traditions of her class; prudence, economy, coldness, practical common sense, egoism.

A poor sort of life.

A desire for pleasure emanating rather from a cerebral curiosity than from a need of the senses.

Their will was mediocre in quality, but firm.

They were very well dressed, and had little automatic gestures.

They were always patting their hair or their gowns with the backs or the palms of their hands, with little delicate movements.

And they always managed to sit so that they could admire themselves--and watch other women--in a mirror, near or far, not to mention, at tea or dinner, the spoons, knives, silver coffee-pots, polished and shining, in which they always peeped at the reflections of their faces, which were more interesting to them than anything or anybody else.

At meals they dieted sternly: drinking water and depriving themselves altogether of any food that might stand in the way of their ideal of a complexion of a floury whiteness.

There was a fairly large proportion of Jewesses among Christophe's acquaintance: and he was always attracted by them, although, since his encounter with Judith Mannheim, he had hardly any illusions about them.

Sylvain Kohn had introduced him to several Jewish houses where he was received with the usual intelligence of the race, which loves intelligence.

Christophe met financiers there, engineers, newspaper proprietors, international brokers, slave-dealers of a sort from Algiers--the men of affairs of the Republic.

They were clear-headed and energetic, indifferent to other people, smiling, affable, and secretive.

Christophe felt sometimes that behind their hard faces was the knowledge of crime in the past, and the future, of these men gathered round the sumptuous table laden with food, flowers, and wine.

They were almost all ugly.

But the women, taken as a whole, were quite brilliant, though it did not do to look at them too closely: in most of them there was a want of subtlety in their coloring.

But brilliance there was, and a fair show of material life, beautiful shoulders generously exposed to view, and a genius for making their beauty and even their ugliness a lure for the men.

An artist would have recognized in some of them the old Roman type, the women of the time of Nero, down to the time of Hadrian.

And there were Palmaesque faces, with a sensual expression, heavy chins solidly modeled with the neck, and not without a certain bestial beauty.

Some of them had thick curly hair, and bold, fiery eyes: they seemed to be subtle, incisive, ready for everything, more virile than other women.

And also more feminine.

Here and there a more spiritual profile would stand out.

Those pure features came from beyond Rome, from the East, the country of Laban: there was expressed in them the poetry of silence, of the Desert.

But when Christophe went nearer, and listened to the conversations between Rebecca and Faustina the Roman, or Saint Barbe the Venetian, he found her to be just a Parisian Jewess, just like the others, even more Parisian than the Parisian women, more artificial and sophisticated, talking quietly, and maliciously stripping the assembled company, body and soul, with her Madonna's eyes.

Christophe wandered from group to group, but could identify himself with none of them.

The men talked savagely of hunting, brutally of love, and only of money with any sort of real appreciation.

And that was cold and cunning.

They talked business in the smoking-room.

Christophe heard some one say of a certain fop who was sauntering from one lady to another, with a buttonhole in his coat, oozing heavy compliments: "So!

He is free again?"

In a corner of the room two ladies were talking of the love-affairs of a young actress and a society woman.

There was occasional music.

Christophe was asked to play.

Large women, breathless and heavily perspiring, declaimed in an apocalyptic tone verses of Sully-Prudhomme or Auguste Dorchain.

A famous actor solemnly recited a _Mystic Ballad_ to the accompaniment of an American organ.

Words and music were so stupid that they turned Christophe sick.

But the Roman women were delighted, and laughed heartily to show their magnificent teeth.

Scenes from Ibsen were performed.

It was a fine epilogue to the struggle of a great man against the Pillars of Society that it should be used for their diversion!

And then they all began, of course, to prattle about art.

That was horrible.

The women especially began to talk of Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoy, flirtatiously, politely, boredly, or idiotically.

Once the conversation had started, there was no stopping it.

The disease was contagious.

Christophe had to listen to the ideas of bankers, brokers, and slave-dealers on art.

In vain did he refuse to speak or try to turn the conversation: they insisted on talking about music and poetry.

As Berlioz said: "Such people use the words quite coolly: just as though they were talking of wine, women, or some such trash."

An alienist physician recognized one of his patients in an Ibsen heroine, though to his way of thinking she was infinitely more silly.

An engineer quite sincerely declared that the husband was the sympathetic character in the _Doll's House_.

The famous actor--a well-known Comedian--brayed his profound ideas on Nietzsche and Carlyle: he assured Christophe that he could not see a picture of Velasquez--(the idol of the hour)--"without the tears coursing down his cheeks."

And he confided--still to Christophe's private ear--that, though he esteemed art very highly, yet he esteemed still more highly the art of living, acting, and that if he were asked to choose what part he would play, it would be that of Bismarck....

Sometimes there would be of the company a professed wit, but the level of the conversation was not appreciably higher for that.

Generally they said nothing; they confined themselves to a jerky remark or an enigmatic smile: they lived on their reputations, and were saved further trouble.

But there were a few professional talkers, generally from the South.

They talked about anything and everything.

They had no sense of proportion: everything came alike to them.

One was a Shakespeare.

Another a Molière.

Another a Pascal, if not a Jesus Christ.

They compared Ibsen with Dumas _fils_, Tolstoy with George Sand: and the gist of it all was that everything came from France.

Generally they were ignorant of foreign languages.

But that did not disturb them.

It mattered so little to their audience whether they told the truth or not!

What did matter was that they should say amusing things, things as flattering as possible to national vanity.

Foreigners had to put up with a good deal--with the exception of the idol of the hour: for there was always a fashionable idol: Grieg, or Wagner, or Nietzsche, or Gorki, or D'Annunzio.

It never lasted long, and the idol was certain one fine morning to be thrown on to the rubbish-heap.

For the moment the idol was Beethoven.

Beethoven--save the mark!

--was in the fashion: at least, among literary and polite persons: for musicians had dropped him at once, in accordance with the see-saw system which is one of the laws of artistic taste in France.

A Frenchman needs to know what his neighbor thinks before he knows what he thinks himself, so that he can think the same thing or the opposite.

Thus, when they saw Beethoven in popular favor, the most distinguished musicians began to discover that he was not distinguished enough for them: they claimed to lead opinion, not to follow it: and rather than be in agreement with it they turned their backs on it.

They began to regard Beethoven as a man afflicted with deafness, crying in a voice of bitterness: and some of them declared that he might be an excellent moralist, but that he was certainly overpraised as a musician.

That sort of joke was not at all to Christophe's taste.

Still less did he like the enthusiasm of polite society.

If Beethoven had come to Paris just then, he would have been the lion of the hour: it was such a pity that he had been dead for more than a century.

His vogue grew not so much out of his music as out of the more or less romantic circumstances of his life which had been popularized by sentimental and virtuous biographies.

His rugged face and lion's mane had become a romantic figure.

Ladies wept for him: they hinted that if they had known him he should not have been so unhappy: and in their greatness of heart they were the more ready to sacrifice all for him, in that there was no danger of Beethoven taking them at their word: the old fellow was beyond all need of anything.

That was why the virtuosi, the conductors, and the _impresarii_ bowed down in pious worship before him: and, as the representatives of Beethoven, they gathered the homage destined for him.

There were sumptuous festivals at exorbitant prices, which afforded society people an opportunity of showing their generosity--and incidentally also of discovering Beethoven's symphonies.

There were committees of actors, men of the world, Bohemians, and politicians, appointed by the Republic to preside over the destinies of art, and they informed the world of their intention to erect a monument to Beethoven: and on these committees, together with a few honest men whose names guaranteed the rest, were all the riffraff who would have stoned Beethoven if he had been alive, if Beethoven had not crushed the life out of them.

Christophe watched and listened.

He ground his teeth to keep himself from saying anything outrageous.

He was on tenterhooks the whole evening.

He could not talk, nor could he keep silent.

It seemed to him humiliating and shameful to talk neither for pleasure nor from necessity, but out of politeness, because he had to talk.

He was not allowed to say what he thought, and it was impossible for him to make conversation.

And he did not even know how to be polite without talking.

If he looked at anybody, he glared too fixedly and intently: in spite of himself he studied that person, and that person was offended.

If he spoke at all, he believed too much in what he was saying; and that was disturbing for everybody, and even for himself.

He quite admitted that he was out of his element: and, as he was clever enough to sound the general note of the company, in which his presence was a discord, he was as upset by his manners as his hosts.

He was angry with himself and with them.

When, at last he stood in the street once more, very late at night, he was so worn out with the boredom of it all that he could hardly drag himself home: he wanted to lie down just where he was, in the street, as he had done many times when he was returning as a boy from his performances at the Palace of the Grand Duke.

Although he had only five or six francs to take him to the end of the week, he spent two of them on a cab.

He flung himself into it the more quickly to escape: and as he drove along he groaned aloud from sheer exhaustion.

When he reached home and got to bed, he groaned in his sleep....

And then, suddenly, he roared with laughter as he remembered some ridiculous saying.

He woke up repeating it, and imitating the features of the speaker.

Next day, and for several days after, as he walked about, he would suddenly bellow like a bull....

Why did he visit these people?

Why did he go on visiting them?

Why force himself to gesticulate and make faces, like the rest, and pretend to be interested in things that did not appeal to him in the very least?

Was it true that he was not in the least interested?

A year ago he would not have been able to put up with them for a moment.

Now, at heart, he was amused by it all, while at the same time it exasperated him.

Was a little of the indifference of the Parisians creeping over him?

He would sometimes wonder fearfully whether he had lost strength.

But, in truth, he had gained in strength.

He was more free in mind in strange surroundings.

In spite of himself, his eyes were opened to the great Comedy of the world.

Besides, whether he liked it or not, he had to go on with it if he wanted his art to be recognized by Parisian society, which is only interested in art in so far as it knows the artist.

And he had to make himself known if he were to find among these Philistines the pupils necessary to keep him alive.

And, then, Christophe had a heart: his heart must have affection: wherever he might be, there he would find food for his affections: without it he could not live.

* * * * * Among the few girls of that class of society--few enough--whom Christophe taught, was the daughter of a rich motor-car manufacturer, Colette Stevens.

Her father was a Belgian, a naturalized Frenchman, the son of an Anglo-American settled at Antwerp, and a Dutchwoman.

Her mother was an Italian.

A regular Parisian family.

To Christophe--and to many others--Colette Stevens was the type of French girl.

She was eighteen, and had velvety, soft black eyes, which she used skilfully upon young men--regular Spanish eyes, with enormous pupils; a rather long and fantastic nose, which wrinkled up and moved at the tip as she talked, with little fractious pouts and shrugs; rebellious hair; a pretty little face, rather sallow complexion, dabbed with powder; heavy, rather thick features: altogether she was like a plump kitten.

She was slight, very well dressed, attractive, provoking: she had sly, affected, rather silly manners: her pose was that of a little girl, and she would sit rocking her chair for hours at a time, and giving little exclamations like: "No?

Impossible...."

At meals she would clap her hands when there was a dish she loved: in the drawing-room she would smoke cigarette after cigarette, and, when there were men present, display an exuberant affection for her girl-friends, flinging her arms round their necks, kissing their hands, whispering in their ears, making ingenuous and naughty remarks, doing it most brilliantly, in a soft, twittering voice; and in the lightest possible way she would say improper things, without seeming to do more than hint at them, and was even more skilful in provoking them from others; she had the ingenuous air of a little girl, who knows perfectly well what she is about, with her large brilliant eyes, slyly and voluptuously looking sidelong, maliciously taking in all the gossip, and catching at all the dubious remarks of the conversation, and all the time angling for hearts.

All these tricks and shows, and her sophisticated ingenuity, were not at all to Christophe's liking.

He had better things to do than to lend himself to the practices of an artful little girl, and did not even care to look on at them for his amusement.

He had to earn his living, to keep his life and ideas from death.

He had no interest in these drawing-room parakeets beyond the gaining of a livelihood.

In return for their money, he gave them lessons, conscientiously concentrating all his energies on the task, to keep the boredom of it from mastering him, and his attention from being distracted by the tricks of his pupils when they were coquettes, like Colette Stevens.

He paid no more attention to her than to Colette's little cousin, a child of twelve, shy and silent, whom the Stevens had adopted, to whom also Christophe gave lessons on the piano.

But Colette was too clever not to feel that all her charms were lost on Christophe, and too adroit not to adapt herself at once to his character.

She did not even need to do so deliberately.

It was a natural instinct with her.

She was a woman.

She was like water, formless.

The soul of every man she met was a vessel, whose form she took immediately out of curiosity.

It was a law of her existence that she should always be some one else.

Her whole personality was for ever shifting.

She was for ever changing her vessel.

Christophe attracted her for many reasons, the chief of which was that he was not attracted by her.

He attracted her also because he was different from all the young men of her acquaintance: she had never tried to pour herself into a vessel of such a rugged form.

And, finally, he attracted her, because, being naturally and by inheritance expert in the valuation at the first glance of men and vessels, she knew perfectly well that what he lacked in polish Christophe made up in a solidity of character which none of her smart young Parisians could offer her.

She played as well and as badly as most idle young women.

She played a great deal and very little--that is to say, that she was always working at it, but knew nothing at all about it.

She strummed on her piano all day long, for want of anything else to do, or from affectation, or because it gave her pleasure.

Sometimes she rattled along mechanically.

Sometimes she would play well, very well, with taste and soul--(it was almost as though she had a soul: but, as a matter of fact, she only borrowed one).

Before she knew Christophe, she was capable of liking Massenet, Grieg, Thomé.

But after she met Christophe she ceased to like them.

Then she played Bach and Beethoven very correctly--(which is not very high praise): but the great thing was that she loved them.

At bottom it was not Beethoven, nor Thomé, nor Bach, nor Grieg that she loved, but the notes, the sounds, the fingers running over the keys, the thrills she got from the chords which tickled her nerves and made her wriggle with pleasure.

In the drawing-room of the great house, decorated with faded tapestry, and on an easel in the middle room, a portrait of the stout Madame Stevens by a fashionable painter who had represented her in a languishing attitude, like a flower dying for want of water, with a die-away expression in her eyes, and her body draped in impossible curves, by way of expressing the rare quality of her millionaire soul--in the great drawing-room, with its bow-windows looking on to a clump of old trees powdered with snow, Christophe would find Colette sitting at her piano, repeating the same passage over and over again, delighting her ear with mellifluous dissonance.

"Ah!"

Christophe would say as he entered, "the cat is still purring!"

"How wicked of you!"

she would laugh....

(And she would hold out her soft little hand.

) "...

Listen.

Isn't it pretty?"

"Very pretty," he would say indifferently.

"You aren't listening!...

Will you please listen?"

"I am listening....

It's the same thing over and over again."

"Ah!

you are no musician," she would say pettishly.

"As if that were music or anything like it!"

"What!

Not music!...

What is it, then, if you please?"

"You know quite well: I won't tell you, because it would not be polite."

"All the more reason why you should say it."

"You want me to?...

So much the worse for you!...

Well, do you know what you are doing with your piano?...

You are flirting with it."

"Indeed!"

"Certainly.

You say to it: 'Dear piano, dear piano, say pretty things to me; kiss me; give me just one little kiss!'

" "You need not say any more," said Colette, half vexed, half laughing.

"You haven't the least idea of respect."

"Not the least."

"You are impertinent....

And then, even if it were so, isn't that the right way to love music?"

"Oh, come, don't mix music up with that."

"But that is music!

A beautiful chord is a kiss."

"I never told you that."

"But isn't it true?...

Why do you shrug your shoulders and make faces?"

"Because it annoys me."

"So much the better."

"It annoys me to hear music spoken of as though it were a sort of indulgence....

Oh, it isn't your fault.

It's the fault of the world you live in.

The stale society in which you live regards music as a sort of legitimate vice....

Come, sit down!

Play me your sonata."

"No. Let us talk a little longer."

"I'm not here to talk.

I'm here to teach you the piano....

Come, play away!"

"You're so rude!"

said Colette, rather vexed--but at heart delighted to be handled so roughly.

She played her piece carefully: and, as she was clever, she succeeded fairly well, and sometimes even very well.

Christophe, who was not deceived, laughed inwardly at the skill "of the little beast, who played as though she felt what she was playing, while really she felt nothing at all."

And yet he had a sort of amused sympathy for her.

Colette, on her part, seized every excuse for going on with the conversation, which interested her much more than her lesson.

It was no good Christophe drawing back on the excuse that he could not say what he thought without hurting her feelings: she always wheedled it out of him: and the more insulting it was, the less she was hurt by it: it was an amusement for her.

But, as she was quick enough to see that Christophe liked nothing so much as sincerity, she would contradict him flatly, and argue tenaciously They would part very good friends.

However, Christophe would never have had the least illusion about their friendship, and there would never have been the smallest intimacy between them, had not Colette one day taken it into her head, out of sheer instinctive coquetry, to confide in him.

The evening before her parents had given an At Home.

She had laughed, chattered, flirted outrageously: but next morning, when Christophe came for her lesson, she was worn out, drawn-looking, gray-faced, and haggard.

She hardly spoke: she seemed utterly depressed.

She sat at the piano, played softly, made mistakes, tried to correct them, made them again, stopped short, and said: "I can't....

Please forgive me....

Please wait a little...."

He asked if she were unwell.

She said: "No....

She was out of sorts....

She had bouts of it....

It was absurd, but he must not mind."

He proposed to go away and come again another day: but she insisted on his staying: "Just a moment....

I shall be all right presently....

It's silly of me, isn't it?"

He felt that she was not her usual self: but he did not question her: and, to turn the conversation, he said: "That's what comes of having been so brilliant last night.

You took too much out of yourself."

She smiled a little ironically.

"One can't say the same of you," she replied.

He laughed.

"I don't believe you said a word," she went on.

"Not a word."

"But there were interesting people there."

"Oh yes.

All sorts of lights and famous people, all talking at once.

But I'm lost among all your boneless Frenchmen who understand everything, and explain everything, and excuse everything--and feel nothing at all.

People who talk for hours together about art and love!

Isn't it revolting?"

"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.

Christophe replied with a laugh: "Well, leave it to others.

Everybody is not fit for art."

"Nor for love?"

"Nor for love."

"How awful!

What is left for us?"

"Housekeeping."

"Thanks," said Colette, rather annoyed.

She turned to the piano and began again, made mistakes, thumped the keyboard, and moaned: "I can't!...

I'm no good at all.

I believe you are right.

Women aren't any good."

"It's something to be able to say so," said Christophe genially.

She looked at him rather sheepishly, like a little girl who has been scolded, and said: "Don't be so hard."

"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."

"I'm not so pessimistic.

I say only that I have never seen it: but that's no reason why it should not exist.

I'm determined to find it, if it does exist.

But it is not easy.

A good woman and a man of genius are equally rare."

"And all the other men and women don't count?"

"On the contrary, it is only they who count--for the world."

"But for you?"

"For me, they don't exist."

"You _are_ hard," repeated Colette.

"A little.

Somebody has to be hard, if only in the interest of the others!...

If there weren't a few pebbles here and there in the world, the whole thing would go to pulp."

"Yes.

You are right.

It is a good thing for you that you are strong," said Colette sadly.

"But you must not be too hard on men,--and especially on women who aren't strong....

You don't know how terrible our weakness is to us.

Because you see us flirting, and laughing, and doing silly things, you think we never dream of anything else, and you despise us.

Ah!

if you could see all that goes on in the minds of the girls of from fifteen to eighteen as they go out into society, and have the sort of success that comes to their youth and freshness--when they have danced, and talked smart nonsense, and said bitter things at which people laugh because they laugh, when they have given themselves to imbeciles, and sought in vain in their eyes the light that is nowhere to be found,--if you could see them in their rooms at night, in silence, alone, kneeling in agony to pray!..."

"Is it possible?"

said Christophe, altogether amazed.

"What!

you, too, have suffered?"

Colette did not reply: but tears came to her eyes.

She tried to smile and held out her hand to Christophe: he grasped it warmly.