With that he sat down at his desk and wrote down everything that was in his head, without another thought for what he had been saying.
At that time Christophe was in a condition in which all the elements of his life were perfectly balanced. He did not bother his head with esthetic discussions as to the value of this or that musical form, nor with reasoned attempts to create a new form: he did not even have to cast about for subjects for translation into music. One thing was as good as another. The flood of music welled forth without Christophe knowing exactly what feeling he was expressing. He was happy: that was all: happy in expanding, happy in having expanded, happy in feeling within himself the pulse of universal life.
His fullness of joy was communicated to those about him.
The house with its closed garden was too small for him. He had the view out over the garden of the neighboring convent with the solitude of its great avenues and century-old trees: but it was too good to last. In front of Christophe’s windows they were building a six-story house, which shut out the view and completely hemmed him in. In addition, he had the pleasure of hearing the creaking of pulleys, the chipping of stones, the hammering of nails, all day long from morning to night. Among the workmen he found his old friend the slater, whose acquaintance he had made on the roof. They made signs to each other, and once, when he met him in the street, he took the man to a wineshop, and they drank together, much to the surprise of Olivier, who was a little scandalized. He found the man’s drollery and unfailing good-humor very entertaining, but did not curse him any the less, with his troop of workmen and stupid idiots who were raising a barricade in front of the house and robbing him of air and light. Olivier did not complain much: he could quite easily adapt himself to a limited horizon: he was like the stove of Descartes, from which the suppressed ideas darted upward to the free sky. But Christophe needed more air. Shut up in that confined space, he avenged himself by expanding into the lives of those about him. He drank in their inmost life, and turned it into music. Olivier used to tell him that he looked like a lover.
“If I were in love,” Christophe would reply, “I should see nothing, love nothing, be interested in nothing outside my love.”
“What is the matter with you, then?”
“I’m very well. I’m hungry.”
“Lucky Christophe!” Olivier would sigh. “I wish you could hand a little of your appetite over to us.”
Health, like sickness, is contagious. The first to feel the benefit of Christophe’s vitality was naturally Olivier. Vitality was what he most lacked. He retired from the world because its vulgarity revolted him. Brilliantly clever though he was, and in spite of his exceptional artistic gifts, he was too delicate to be a great artist. Great artists do not feel disgust: the first law for every healthy being is to live: and that law is even more imperative for a man of genius: for such a man lives more. Olivier fled from life: he drifted along in a world of poetic fictions that had no body, no flesh and blood, no relation to reality. He was one of those literary men who, in quest of beauty, have to go outside time, into the days that are no more, or the days that have never been. As though the wine of life were not as intoxicating, and its vintages as rich nowadays as ever they were! But men who are weary in soul recoil from direct contact with life: they can only bear to see it through the veil of visions spun by the backward movement of time, and hear it in the echo which sends back and distorts the dead words of those who were once alive.—Christophe’s friendship gradually dragged Olivier out of this Limbo of art. The sun’s rays pierced through to the innermost recesses of his soul in which he was languishing.
Elsberger, the engineer, also succumbed to Christophe’s contagious optimism. It was not shown in any change in his habits: they were too inveterate: and it was too much to expect him to become enterprising enough to leave France and go and seek his fortune elsewhere. But he was shaken out of his apathy: he recovered his taste for research, and reading, and the scientific work which he had long neglected. He would have been much astonished had he been told that Christophe had something to do with his new interest in his work: and certainly no one would have been more surprised than Christophe.
But of all the inhabitants of the house, Christophe was the soonest intimate with the little couple on the second floor. More than once as he passed their door he had stopped to listen to the sound of the piano which Madame Arnaud used to play quite well when she was alone. Then he gave them tickets for his concert, for which they thanked him effusively. And after that he used to go and sit with them occasionally in the evening. He had never heard Madame Arnaud playing again: she was too shy to play in company: and even when she was alone, now that she knew she could be heard on the stairs, she kept the soft pedal down. But Christophe used to play to them, and they would talk about it for hours together. The Arnauds used to speak
