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
