“Whenever we like.”
She blushed, and said:
“Oh! it was not an indiscreet question!”
He was sorry for his gruffness, and took her hands:
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I am always afraid of his being blamed. Poor boy! He is suffering as much as I. … No, we don’t see each other now.”
“And he doesn’t write to you?”
“No,” said Christophe, rather shamefacedly. …
“How sad life is!” said Madame Arnaud, after a moment.
“No; life is not sad,” he said. “But there are sad moments in it.”
Madame Arnaud went on with veiled bitterness:
“We love, and then we love no longer. What is the good of it all?”
Christophe replied:
“It is good to have loved.”
She went on:
“You have sacrificed yourself for him. If only our self-sacrifice could be of any use to those we love! But it makes them none the happier!”
“I have not sacrificed myself,” said Christophe angrily. “And if I have, it is because it pleased me to do so. There’s no room for arguing about it. One does what one has to do. If one did not do it, one would be unhappy, and suffer for it! There never was anything so idiotic as this talk of sacrifice! Clergymen, in the poverty of their hearts, mix it up with a cramped and morose idea of Protestant gloom. Apparently, if an act of sacrifice is to be good, it must be besotted. … Good Lord! if a sacrifice means sorrow to you, and not joy, then don’t do it; you are unworthy of it. A man doesn’t sacrifice himself for the King of Prussia, but for himself. If you don’t feel the happiness that lies in the gift of yourself, then get out! You don’t deserve to live.”
Madame Arnaud listened to Christophe without daring to look at him. Suddenly she got up and said:
“Goodbye.”
Then he saw that she had come to confide in him, and said:
“Oh! forgive me. I’m a selfish oaf, and can only talk about myself. Please stay. Won’t you?”
She said:
“No: I cannot. … Thank you. …”
And she left him.
It was some time before they met again. She gave no sign of life; and he did not go to see either her or Philomela. He was fond of both of them: but he was afraid of having to talk to them about things that made him sad. And, besides, for the time being, their calm, dull existence, with its too rarefied air, was not suited to his needs. He wanted to see new faces; it was imperative that he should find a new interest, a new love, to occupy his mind.
By way of being taken out of himself he began to frequent the theaters which he had neglected for a long time. The theater seemed to him to be an interesting school for a musician who wishes to observe and take note of the accents of the passions.
It was not that he had any greater sympathy with French plays than when he first came to live in Paris. Outside his small liking for their eternal stale and brutal subjects connected with the psychophysiology of love, it seemed to him that the language of the French theater, especially in poetic drama, was ultra-false. Neither their prose nor their verse had anything in common with the living language and the genius of the people. Their prose was an artificial language, the language of a polite chronicle with the best, that of a vulgar feuilletonist with the worst. Their poetry justified Goethe’s gibe:
“Poetry is all very well for those who have nothing to say.”
It was a wordy and inverted prose: the profusion of metaphors clumsily tacked on to it in imitation of the lyricism of other nations produced an effect of utter falsity upon any sincere person. Christophe set no more store by these poetic dramas than he did by the Italian operas with their shrill mellifluous airs and their ornamental vocal exercises. He was much more interested in the actors than the plays. And the authors had tried hard to imitate them. “It was hopeless to think that a play could be performed with any success unless the author had looked to it that his characters were modeled on the vices of the actors.” The situation was hardly at all changed since the time when Diderot wrote those lines. The actors had become the models of the art of the theater. As soon as any one of them reached success, he had his theater, his compliant tailor-authors, and his plays made to measure.
Among these great mannikins of literary fashions Françoise Oudon attracted Christophe. Paris had been infatuated with her for a couple of years or so. She, too, of course, had her theater and her purveyors of parts: however, she did not only act in plays written for her: her mixed repertory ranged from Ibsen to Sardou, from Gabriele d’Annunzio to Dumas fils, from Bernard Shaw to the latest Parisian playwrights. Upon occasion she would even venture into the Versailles’ avenues of the classic hexameter, or on to the deluge of images of Shakespeare. But she was ill at ease in that galley, and her audience was even more so. Whatever she played, she played herself, nothing but herself, always. It was both her weakness and her strength. Until the public had been awakened to an interest in her personality, her acting had had no success. As soon as that interest was roused, everything she did appeared marvelous. And, indeed, it was well worth while in watching her to forget the usually pitiful plays which she betrayed by endowing and adorning them with her vitality. The mystery of the woman’s body, swayed by a stranger soul, was to Christophe far more moving than the plays in which she acted.
She had a fine, clear-cut, rather tragic profile. She had not the marked heavy lines of the Roman style: on the contrary, her lines were delicate and Parisian, à la Jean Goujon—as much like a boy’s as a woman’s. A short, finely-modeled nose. A beautiful mouth, with
