Jean-Christophe Journey's End

by Romain Rolland

He grew excited as he talked: his eyes burned, his pale face glowed pink in patches, and his voice rose to a scream. Christophe could not help noticing the contrast between the devouring fire and the wretched body that was its pyre. He was only half-conscious of the irony of this stroke of fate. The singer of energy, the poet who hymned the generation of intrepid sport, of action, war, could hardly walk without losing his breath, was extremely temperate, lived on a strict diet, drank water, could not smoke, lived without women, bore every passion in his body, and was reduced by his health to asceticism.

Christophe watched Emmanuel, and he felt a mixture of admiration and brotherly pity. He tried not to show it: but no doubt his eyes betrayed his feeling. Emmanuel's pride, which ever kept an open wound in his side, made him think he read commiseration in Christophe's eyes, and that was more odious to him than hatred. The fire in him suddenly died down. He stopped talking. Christophe tried in vain to win back his confidence. His soul had closed up. Christophe saw that he was wounded.

The hostile silence dragged on. Christophe got up. Emmanuel took him to the door without a word. His step declared his infirmity: he knew it: it was a point of pride with him to appear indifferent: but he thought Christophe was watching him, and his rancor grew.

Just as he was coldly shaking hands with his guest, and saying good-by, an elegant young lady rang at the door. She was escorted by a pretentious nincompoop whom Christophe recognized as a man he had seen at theatrical first-nights, smiling, chattering, waving his hand, kissing the hands of the ladies, and from his stall shedding smiles all over the theater: not knowing his name, he had called him "the buck."—The buck and his companion, on seeing Emmanuel, flung themselves on the "cher maître" with obsequious and familiar effusiveness. As Christophe walked away he heard Emmanuel in his dry voice saying that he was too busy to see any one. He admired the man's gift of being disagreeable. He did not know Emmanuel's reasons for scowling at the rich snobs who came to gratify him with their indiscreet visits; they were prodigal of fine phrases and eulogy; but they no more thought of helping him in his poverty than the famous friends of César Franck ever dreamed of releasing him from the piano-lessons which he had to give up to the last to make a living.

Christophe went several times again to see Emmanuel. He never succeeded in restoring the intimacy of his first visit. Emmanuel showed no pleasure in seeing him, and maintained a suspicious reserve. Every now and then he would be carried away by the generous need of expansion of his genius: a remark of Christophe's would shake him to the very roots of his being: then he would abandon himself to a fit of enthusiastic confidence: and over his secret soul his idealism would cast the glowing light of a flashing poetry. Then, suddenly, he would fall back: he would shrivel up into sulky silence: and Christophe would find him hostile once more.

They were divided by too many things. Not the least was the difference in their ages. Christophe was on the way to full consciousness and mastery of himself. Emmanuel was still in process of formation and more chaotic than Christophe had ever been. The originality of his face came from the contradictory elements that were at grips in him; a mighty stoicism, struggling to tame a nature consumed by atavistic desires,—(he was the son of a drunkard and a prostitute);—a frantic imagination which tugged against the bit of a will of steel; an immense egoism, and an immense love for others, and of the two it were impossible to tell which would be the conqueror; an heroic idealism and a morbid thirst for glory which made him impatient of other superiorities. If Olivier's ideas, and his independence, and his disinterestedness were in him, if Emmanuel was superior to his master by his plebeian vitality which knew not disgust in the face of action, by his poetic genius and his thicker skin, which protected him from disgust of all kinds, yet he was very far from reaching the serenity of Antoinette's brother: his character was vain and uneasy: and the restlessness of other people only augmented his own.

He lived in a stormy alliance with a young woman who was his neighbor, the woman who had received Christophe on his first visit. She loved Emmanuel, and was jealously busy over him, looked after his house, copied out his work, and wrote to his dictation. She was not beautiful, and she bore the burden of a passionate soul. She came of the people, and for a long time worked in a bookbinding workshop, then in the post-office. Her childhood had been spent in the stifling atmosphere common to all the poor workpeople of Paris: souls and bodies all huddled together, harassing work, perpetual promiscuity, no air, no silence, never any solitude, no opportunity for recuperation or of defending the inner sanctuary of the heart. She was proud in spirit, with her mind ever seething with a religious fervor for a confused ideal of truth. Her eyes were worn out with copying out at night, sometimes without a lamp, by moonlight, Les Misérables of Hugo. She had met Emmanuel at a time when he was more unhappy than she, ill and without resources; and she had devoted herself to him. This passion was the first, the only living love of her life. So she attached herself to him with a hungry tenacity. Her affection was a terrible trial to Emmanuel, who rather submitted to than shared it. He was touched by her devotion: he knew that she was his best friend, the only creature to whom he was everything, who could not do without him. But this very feeling overwhelmed him. He needed liberty and isolation; her eyes always greedily beseeching a look obsessed him: he used to speak harshly to her, and longed to say: "Go!" He was irritated by her ugliness and her clumsy manners. Though he had seen but little of fashionable society, and though he heartily despised it,—(for he suffered at appearing even uglier and more ridiculous there),—he was sensitive to elegance, and alive to the attraction of women who felt towards him (he had no doubt of it) exactly as he felt towards his friend. He tried to show her an affection which he did not possess or, at least, which was continually obscured by gusts of involuntary hatred. He could not do it: he had a great generous heart in his bosom, hungering to do good, and also a demon of violence, capable of much evil. This inward struggle and his consciousness of his inability to end it to his advantage plunged him into a state of acute irritation, which he vented on Christophe.

Emmanuel could not help feeling a double antipathy towards Christophe; firstly because of his old jealousy (one of those childish passions which still subsist, though we may forget the cause of them): secondly, because of his fierce nationalism. In France he had embodied all the dreams of justice, pity, and human brotherhood conceived by the best men of the preceding age. He did not set France against the rest of Europe as an enemy whose fortune is swelled by the ruin of the other nations, but placed her at their head, as the legitimate sovereign who reigns for the good of all—the sword of the ideal, the guide of the human race. Rather than see her commit an injustice he would have preferred to see her dead. But he had no doubt of her. He was exclusively French in culture and in heart, nourished wholly by the French tradition, the profound reasons of which he found in his own instinct. Quite sincerely he ignored foreign thought, for which he had a sort of disdainful condescension,—and was exasperated if a foreigner did not accept his lowly position.

Christophe saw all that, but, being older and better versed in life, he did not worry about it. If such pride of race could not but be injurious, Christophe was not touched by it: he could appreciate the illusions of filial love, and never dreamed of criticising the exaggerations of a sacred feeling. Besides, humanity is profited by the vain belief of the nations in their mission. Of all the reasons at hand for feeling himself estranged from Emmanuel only one hurt him: Emmanuel's voice, which at times rose to a shrill, piercing scream. Christophe's ears suffered cruelly. He could not help making a face when it happened. He tried to prevent Emmanuel's seeing it. He endeavored to hear the music and not the instrument. There was such a beauty of heroism shining forth from the crippled poet when he evoked the victories of the mind, the forerunners of other victories, the conquest of the air, the "flying God" who should upraise the peoples, and, like the star of Bethlehem, lead them in his train, in ecstasies, towards far distant spaces or near revenge. The splendor of these visions of energy did not prevent Christophe's seeing their danger, and foreknowing whither this change and the growing clamor of the new Marseillaise would lead. He thought, with a little irony, (with no regret for past or fear of the future), that the song would find an echo that the singer could not foresee, and that a day would come when men would sigh for the vanished days of the Market-Place.—How free they were then! The golden age of liberty! Never would its like be known again. The world was moving on to the age of strength, of health, of virile action, and perhaps of glory, but also of harsh authority and narrow order. We shall have called it enough with our prayers, the age of iron, the classic age! The great classic ages—Louis XIV. or Napoleon—seem now at a distance the peaks of humanity. And perhaps the nation therein most victoriously realized its ideal State. But go and ask the heroes of those times what they thought of them! Your Nicolas Poussin went to live and die in Rome; he was stifled in your midst. Your Pascal, your Racine, said farewell to the world. And among the greatest, how many others lived apart in disgrace, and oppressed! Even the soul of a man like Molière hid much bitterness.—For your Napoleon, whom you so greatly regret, your fathers do not seem to have had any doubt as to their happiness, and the master himself was under no illusion; he knew that when he disappeared the world would say: "Ouf!"… What a wilderness of thought surrounds the Imperator! Over the immensity of the sands, the African sun….

Christophe did not say all that was in his mind. A few hints were enough to set Emmanuel in a fury, and he did not try the experiment again. But it was in vain that he kept his thoughts to himself: Emmanuel knew what he was thinking. More than that, he was obscurely conscious that Christophe saw farther than he. And he was only irritated by it. Young people never forgive their elders for forcing them to see what they will see in twenty years' time.