Christophe was not content to apply these principles in music: he urged Olivier to set himself at the head of a similar movement in literature:
“The writers of today,” he said, “waste their energy in describing human rarities, or cases that are common enough in the abnormal groups of men and women living on the fringe of the great society of active, healthy human beings. Since they themselves have shut themselves off from life, leave them and go where there are men. Show the life of every day to the men and women of every day: that life is deeper and more vast than the sea. The smallest among you bears the infinite in his soul. The infinite is in every man who is simple enough to be a man, in the lover, in the friend, in the woman who pays with her pangs for the radiant glory of the day of childbirth, in every man and every woman who lives in obscure self-sacrifice which will never be known to another soul: it is the very river of life, flowing from one to another, from one to another, and back again and round. … Write the simple life of one of these simple men, write the peaceful epic of the days and nights following, following one like to another, and yet all different, all sons of the same mother, from the dawning of the first day in the life of the world. Write it simply, as simple as its own unfolding. Waste no thought upon the word, and the letter, and the subtle vain researches in which the force of the artists of today is turned to nought. You are addressing all men: use the language of all men. There are no words noble or vulgar; there is no style chaste or impure: there are only words and styles which say or do not say exactly what they have to say. Be sound and thorough in all you do: think just what you think—and feel just what you feel. Let the rhythm of your heart prevail in your writings! The style is the soul.”
Olivier agreed with Christophe, but he replied rather ironically:
“Such a book would be fine: but it would never reach the people who would care to read it. The critics would strangle it on the way.”
“There speaks my little French bourgeois!” replied Christophe. “Worrying his mind about what the critics will or will not think of his work! … The critics, my boy, are only there to register victory or defeat. The great thing is to be victor. … I have managed to get along without them! You must learn how to disregard them, too. …”
But Olivier had learned how to disregard something entirely different! He had turned aside from art, and Christophe, and everybody. At that time he was thinking of nothing but Jacqueline, and Jacqueline was thinking of nothing but him.
The selfishness of their love had cut them off from everything and everybody: they were recklessly destroying all their future resources.
They were in the blind wonder of the first days, when man and woman, joined together, have no thought save that of losing themselves in each other. … With every part of themselves, body and soul, they touch and taste and seek to probe into the very inmost depths. They are alone together in a lawless universe, a very chaos of love, when the confused elements know not as yet what distinguishes one from the other, and strive greedily to devour each other. Each in other finds nothing save delight: each in other finds another self. What is the world to them? Like the antique Androgyne slumbering in his dream of voluptuous and harmonious delights, their eyes are closed to the world. All the world is in themselves. …
O days, O nights, weaving one web of dreams, hours fleeting like the floating white clouds in the heavens, leaving nought but a shimmering wake in dazzled eyes, the warm wind breathing the languor of spring, the golden warmth of the body, the sunlit arbor of love, shameless chastity, embraces, and madness, and sighs, and happy laughter, happy tears, what is there left of the lovers, thrice happy dust? Hardly, it seems, that their hearts could ever remember to beat: for when they were one then time had ceased to exist.
And all their days are one like unto another. … Sweet, sweet dawn. … Together, embracing, they issue from the abyss of sleep: they smile and their breath is mingled, their eyes open and meet, and they kiss. … There is freshness and youth in the morning hours, a virgin air cooling their fever. … There is a sweet languor in the endless day still throbbing with the sweetness of the night. … Summer afternoons, dreams in the fields, on the velvety sward, beneath the rustling of the tall white poplars. … Dreams in the lovely evenings, when, under the gleaming sky, they return, clasping each other, to the house of their love. The wind whispers in the bushes. In the clear lake of the sky hovers the fleecy light of the silver moon. A star falls and dies—hearts give a little throb—a world is silently snuffed out. Swift silent shadows pass at rare intervals on the road nearby. The bells of the town ring in the morrow’s holiday. They stop for a moment, she nestles close to him, they stand so without a word. … Ah! if only life could be so forever, as still and silent as that moment! … She sighs and says:
“Why do I love you so much? …”
After a few weeks’ traveling in Italy they had settled in a town in the west of France, where Olivier had gained an appointment. They saw hardly anybody. They took no interest in anything. When
