Their beautiful and free relation could not last. They had moments splendid and full of life: but they were too different. They were both strong-willed, and then often clashed. But their differences were never of a vulgar character: for Christophe had won Françoise’s respect. And Françoise, who could sometimes be so cruel, was kind to those who were kind to her; no power on earth could have made her do anything to hurt them. And besides, both of them had a fund of gay humor. She was always the first to laugh at herself. She was still eating her heart out: for the old passion still had its grip on her: she still thought of the blackguard she loved: and she could not bear to be in so humiliating a position or, above all, to have Christophe suspecting what she was feeling.
Christophe would sometimes find her for days together silent and restless and given up to melancholy, and could not understand how she could be unhappy. She had achieved her end: she was a great artist, admired, flattered. …
“Yes,” she would say; “that would be all very well if I were one of those famous actresses, with no soul above shopkeeping, who run the theater just as they would run any other business. They are quite happy when they have ‘realized’ a good position, a commonplace, wealthy marriage, and—the ne plus ultra—been decorated. I wanted more than that. Unless one is a fool, success is even more empty than failure. You must know that!”
“I know,” said Christophe. “Ah! Dear God, that is not what I imagined fame to be when I was a child. How I longed for it, and what a shining thing it seemed to be! It was almost a religion to me then. … No matter! There is one divine virtue in success: the good it gives one the power to do.”
“What good? One has conquered. But what’s the good of it? Nothing is altered. Theaters, concerts, everything is just the same. A new fashion succeeds the old: that is all. They do not understand one, or only superficially: and they begin to think of something else at once. … Do you yourself understand other artists? In any case, they don’t understand you. The people you love best are so far away from you! Look at your Tolstoy. …”
Christophe had written to him: he had been filled with enthusiasm for him, and had wept over his books: he wanted to set one of the peasant tales to music, and had asked for his authority, and had sent him his lieder. Tolstoy did not reply, any more than Goethe replied to Schubert or Berlioz when they sent him their masterpieces. He had had Christophe’s music played to him, and it had irritated him: he could make nothing of it. He regarded Beethoven as a decadent, and Shakespeare as a charlatan. On the other hand, he was infatuated with various little pretty-pretty masters, and the harpsichord music which used to charm the Roi-Perruque: and he regarded La Confession d’une Femme de Chambre as a Christian book. …
“Great men have no need of us,” said Christophe. “We must think of the others.”
“Who? The dull public, the shadows who hide life from us? Act, write for such people? Give your life for them? That would be bitter indeed!”
“Bah!” said Christophe. “I see them as they are just as you do: but I don’t let it make me despondent. They are not as bad as you say.”
“Dear old German optimist!”
“They are men, like myself. Why should they not understand me? … —And suppose they don’t understand me, why should I despair? Among all the thousands of people there will surely be one or two who will be with me: that is enough for me, and gives me window enough to breathe the outer air. … Think of all the simple playgoers, the young people, the old honest souls, who are lifted out of their tedious everyday life by your appearance, your voice, your revelation of tragic beauty. Think of what you were yourself when you were a child! Isn’t it a fine thing to give to others—perhaps even only to one other—the happiness that others gave you, and to do to them the good that others did to you?”
“Do you really believe that there is one such in the world? I have come to doubt it. … Besides, what sort of love do we get from the best of those who love us? How do they see us? They see so badly! They admire you while they degrade you: they get just as much pleasure out of watching any old stager act: they drag you down to the level of the idiots you despise. In their eyes all successful people are exactly the same.”
“And yet, when all is told, it is the greatest of all who go down to posterity with the greatest.”
“It is only the backward movement of time. Mountains grow taller the farther you go away from them. You see their height better: but you are farther away from them. … And besides, who is to tell us who are the greatest? What do you know of the men who have disappeared?”
“Nonsense!” said Christophe. “Even if nobody were to feel what I think and what I am, I think my thoughts and I am what I am just the same. I have my music, I love it, I believe in it: it is the truest thing in my life.”
“You are free in your art—you can do what you like. But what can I do? I am forced to act in the plays they give me, and go on acting until I am sick of it. We are not yet, in France, such beasts of burden as those American actors who play Rip or Robert Macaire ten thousand
