André said mournfully that Céline was clerical. Christophe asked what he meant by that. André replied that he meant that she was religious, and had vowed a sort of feudal service to God and His bonzes.
“But how does that affect you?”
“I don’t want to share my wife with anyone.”
“What! You are jealous even of your wife’s ideas? Why, you’re more selfish even than the Commandant!”
“It’s all very well for you to talk: would you take a woman who did not love music?”
“I have done so.”
“How can a man and a woman live together if they don’t think the same?”
“Don’t you worry about what you think! Ah! my dear fellow, ideas count for so little when one loves. What does it matter to me whether the woman I love cares for music as much as I do? She herself is music to me! When a man has the luck, as you have, to find a dear girl whom he loves, and she loves him, she must believe what she likes, and he must believe what he likes! When all is said and done, what do your ideas amount to? There is only one truth in the world, there is only one God: love.”
“You speak like a poet. You don’t see life as it is. I know only too many marriages which have suffered from such a want of union in thought.”
“Those husbands and wives did not love each other enough. You have to know what you want.”
“Wanting does not do everything in life. Even if I wanted to marry Mademoiselle Chabran, I couldn’t.”
“I’d like to know why.”
André spoke of his scruples: his position was not assured: he had no fortune and no great health. He was wondering whether he had the right to marry in such circumstances. It was a great responsibility. Was there not a great risk of bringing unhappiness on the woman he loved, and himself—not to mention any children there might be? … It was better to wait—or give up the idea.
Christophe shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s a fine sort of love! If she loves you, she will be happy in her devotion to you. And as for the children, you French people are absurd. You would like only to bring them into the world when you are sure of turning them out with comfortable private means, so that they will have nothing to suffer and nothing to fear. … Good Lord! That’s nothing to do with you: your business is only to give them life, love of life, and courage to defend it. The rest … whether they live or die … is the common lot. Is it better to give up living than to take the risks of life?”
The sturdy confidence which emanated from Christophe affected André, but did not change his mind. He said:
“Yes, perhaps, that is true. …”
But he stopped at that. Like all the rest, his will and power of action seemed to be paralyzed.
Christophe had set himself to fight the inertia which he found in most of his French friends, oddly coupled with laborious and often feverish activity. Almost all the people he met in the various middle-class houses which he visited were discontented. They had almost all the same disgust with the demagogues and their corrupt ideas. In almost all there was the same sorrowful and proud consciousness of the betrayal of the genius of their race. And it was by no means the result of any personal rancor nor the bitterness of men and classes beaten and thrust out of power and active life, or discharged officials, or unemployed energy, nor that of an old aristocracy which has returned to its estates, there to die in hiding like a wounded lion. It was a feeling of moral revolt, mute, profound, general: it was to be found everywhere, in a greater or less degree, in the army, in the magistracy, in the University, in the officers, and in every vital branch of the machinery of government. But they took no active measures. They were discouraged in advance: they kept on saying:
“There is nothing to be done:” or “Let us try not to think of it.”
Fearfully they dodged anything sad in their thoughts and conversation: and they took refuge in their home life.
If they had been content to refrain only from political action! But even in their daily lives these good people had no interest in doing anything definite. They put up with the degrading, haphazard contact with horrible people whom they despised, because they could not take the trouble to fight against them, thinking that any such revolt must of necessity be useless. Why, for instance, should artists, and, in particular, the musicians with whom Christophe was most in touch, unprotestingly put up with the effrontery of the scaramouches of the Press, who laid down the law for them? There were absolute idiots among them, whose ignorance in omni re scibili was proverbial, though they were none the less invested with a sovereign authority in omni re scibili. They did not even take the trouble to write their articles and books: they had secretaries, poor starving creatures, who would have sold their souls, if they had had such things, for bread or women. There was no secret about it in Paris. And yet they went on riding their high horse and patronizing the artists. Christophe used to roar with anger sometimes when he read their articles.
“They have no heart!” he would say. “Oh! the cowards!”
“Who are you screaming at?” Olivier would ask. “The idiots of the marketplace?”
“No. The honest men. These rascals are plying their trade: they lie, they steal, they rob and murder. But it is the others—those who despise them and yet let them go on—that I despise a thousand times more. If their colleagues on the Press, if honest, cultured critics, and the artists on whose backs these harlequins strut and poise themselves, did not put up with it, in silence,
