Jean-Christophe

deep azure vault of heaven, a gulf of blue light. He wandered in the vast Campagna, near the ruddy Tiber, thick with mud, like moving earth⁠—and along the ruined aqueducts, like the gigantic vertebrae of antediluvian monsters. Thick masses of black clouds rolled across the blue sky. Peasants on horseback goaded across the desert great herds of pearly-gray cattle with long horns; and along the ancient road, straight, dusty, and bare, goat-footed shepherds, clad in thick skins, walked in silence. On the far horizon, the Sabine Chain, with its Olympian lines, unfolded its hills; and on the other edge of the cup of the sky the old walls of the city, the front of Saint John’s Church, surmounted with statues which danced in black silhouette.⁠ ⁠… Silence.⁠ ⁠… A fiery sun.⁠ ⁠… The wind passed over the plain.⁠ ⁠… On a headless, armless statue, almost inundated by the waving grass, a lizard, with its heart beating tranquilly, lay motionless, absorbed, drinking in its fill of light. And Christophe, with his head buzzing with the sunshine (sometimes also with the Castelli wine), sitting on the black earth near the broken statue, smiling, sleepy, lost in forgetfulness, breathed in the calm, tremendous force of Rome.⁠—Until nightfall.⁠—Then, with his heart full of a sudden anguish, he fled from the gloomy solitude in which the tragic light was sinking.⁠ ⁠… O earth, burning earth, earth passionate and dumb! Beneath thy fevered peace I still can hear the trumpeting of the legions. What a fury of life is shining in thy bosom! What a mighty desire for an awakening!

Christophe found men in whose souls there burned brands of the age-old fire. Beneath the ruse of the dead they had been preserved. It might be thought that the fire had died down with the closing of Mazzini’s eyes. It was springing to life again. It was the same. Very few wished to see it. It troubled the quiet of those who were asleep. It gave a clear and brutal light. Those who bore it aloft⁠—young men (the eldest was not thirty-five), a little band of the elect come from every point of the horizon, men of free intellect who were all different in temperament, education, opinions, and faith⁠—were all united in worship of this flame of the new life. The etiquette of parties, systems of thought, mattered not to them: the great thing was to “think with courage.” To be frank, to be brave, in mind and deed. Rudely they disturbed the sleep of their race. After the political resurrection of Italy, awakened from death by the summons of her heroes, after her recent economic resurrection, they had set themselves to pluck Italian thought from the grave. They suffered, as from an insult, from the indolent and timid indifference of the elect, their cowardice of mind and verbolatry. Their Voices rang hollow in the midst of rhetoric and the moral slavery which for centuries had been gathering into a crust upon the soul of their country. They breathed into it their merciless realism and their uncompromising loyalty. Though upon occasion they were capable of sacrificing their own personal intellectual preferences to the duty of discipline which national life imposes on the individual, yet they reserved their highest altar and their purest ardor for the truth. They loved truth with fiery, pious hearts. Insulted by his adversaries, defamed, threatened, one of the leaders of these young men replied, with grand, calm dignity:

“Respect the truth. I speak to you now, from my heart, with no shade of bitterness. I forget the ill I have received at your hands and the evil that I may have done you. Be true. There is no conscience, there is no noble life, there is no capacity for sacrifice where there is not a religious, a rigid, and a rigorous respect for truth. Strive, then, to fulfil this difficult duty. Untruth corrupts whoever makes use of it before it overcomes him against whom it is used. What does it matter that you gain an immediate success? The roots of your soul will remain withered in the air above the soil that is crumbled away with untruth. We are on a plane superior to our disagreements, even though on your lips your passion brings the name of our country. There is one thing greater than a man’s country, and that is the human conscience. There are laws which you must not violate on pain of being bad Italians. You see before you now only a man who is a seeker after truth: you must hear his cry. You have before you now only a man who ardently desires to see you great and pure, and to work with you. For, whether you will or no, we all work in common with all those who in this world work truthfully. That which comes out of our labors (and we cannot foresee what it will be) will bear our common mark, the mark of us all, if we have labored with truth. The essence of man lies in this, in his marvelous faculty for seeking truth, seeing it, loving it, and sacrificing himself to it.⁠—Truth, that over all who possess it spends the magic breath of its puissant health!⁠ ⁠…”10

The first time Christophe heard these words they seemed to him like an echo of his own voice: and he felt that these men and he were brothers. The chances of the conflict of the nations and ideas might one day fling them into the position of adversaries in the melee; but, friends or enemies, they were, and would always be, members of the same human family. They knew it, even as he. They knew it, before he did. They knew him before he knew them, for they had been friends of Olivier’s. Christophe discovered that his friend’s writings⁠—(a few volumes of verse and critical essays)⁠—which had only been read by a very few in Paris, had been translated by these Italians, and were as familiar to them