gutter, the son of the stage-door keeper of the theater, got her in to
the rehearsal, although it was strictly forbidden. They stole to the
very back of the building in the darkness. She was gripped by the
mystery of the stage, gleaming in the darkness, and by the magnificent
and incomprehensible things that the actors were saying, and by the
queenly bearing of the actress,--who was, in fact, playing a queen in a
romantic melodrama. She was chilled by emotion: and at the same time her
heart thumped.... "That--that is what I must be some day!" ... Oh! if
she could ever be like that!...--When it was over she wanted at all
costs to see the evening performance. She let her companion go out, and
pretended to follow him: and then she turned back and hid herself in the
theater: she cowered away under a seat, and stayed there for three hours
without stirring, choked by the dust: and when the performance was about
to begin and the audience was arriving, just as she was creeping out of
her hiding-place, she had the mortification of being pounced on,
ignominiously expelled amid jeers and laughter, and taken home, where
she was whipped. She would have died that night had she not known now
what she must do later on to master these people and avenge herself on
them.
Her plan was made. She took a situation as a servant in the _Hôtel et
Café du Théâtre_, where the actors put up. She could hardly read or
write: and she had read nothing, for she had nothing to read. She wanted
to learn, and applied herself to it with frantic energy. She used to
steal books from the guests' rooms, and read them at night by moonlight
or at dawn, so as not to use her candle. Thanks to the untidiness of the
actors, her larcenies passed unnoticed or else the owners put up with
cursing and swearing. She used to restore their books when she had read
them,--except one or two which had moved her too much for her to be able
to part with them;--but she did not return them intact. She used to tear
out the pages which had pleased her. When she took the books back, she
used carefully to slip them under the bed or the furniture, so as to
make the owners of them believe that they had never left the room. She
used to glue her ears to the door to listen to the actors going over
their parts. And when she was alone, sweeping the corridor, she would
mimic their intonations in a whisper and gesticulate. When she was
caught doing so she was laughed at and jeered at. She would say nothing,
and boil with rage.--That sort of education might have gone on for a
long time had she not on one occasion been imprudent enough to steal the
script of a part from the room of an actor. The actor stamped and swore.
No one had been to his room except the servant: he accused her. She
denied it boldly: he threatened to have her searched: she threw herself
at his feet and confessed everything, even to her other pilferings and
the pages she had torn out of the books: the whole boiling. He cursed
and swore frightfully: but he was not so angry as he seemed. He asked
why she had done it. When she told him that she wanted to become an
actress he roared with laughter. He questioned her, and she recited
whole pages which she had learned by heart: he was struck by it, and
said:
"Look here, would you like me to give you lessons?"
She was in the highest heaven of delight, and kissed his hands.
"Ah!" she said to Christophe, "how I should have loved him!"
But at once he added:
"Only, my dear, you know you can't have anything for nothing...."
She was chaste, and had always been scared and modest with those who had
pursued her with their overtures. Her absolute chastity, her ardent need
of purity, her disgust with things unclean and ignoble loveless
sensuality, had been with her always from her childhood on, as a result
of the despair and nausea of the sad sights which she saw about her on
all sides at home:--and they were with her still.... Ah! unhappy
creature! She had borne much punishment!... What a mockery of Fate!...
"Then," asked Christophe, "you consented?"
"Ah!" she said, "I would have gone through fire to get out of it. He
threatened to have me arrested as a thief. I had no choice.--That was
how I was initiated into art--and life."
"The blackguard!" said Christophe.
"Yes, I hated him. But I have met so many men since that he does not
seem to me to be one of the worst. He did at least keep his word. He
taught me what he knew--(not much!)--of the actor's trade. He got me
into his company. At first I was everybody's servant, I played little
scraps of parts. Then one night, when the soubrette was ill, they risked
giving me her part. I went on from that. They thought me impossible,
grotesque, uncouth. I was ugly then. I remained ugly until I was
decreed,--if not 'divine' like the other Woman,--the highest, the ideal
type of woman, ... 'Woman.' ... Idiots! As for my acting, it was thought
extravagant and incorrect. The public did not like me. The other players
used to make fun of me. I was kept on because I was useful in spite of
everything, and was not expensive. Not only was I not expensive, but I
paid! Ah! I paid for every step, every advance, rung by rung, with my
suffering, with my body. Fellow-actors, the manager, the impresario, the
impresario's friends...."
She stopped: her face was very pale, her lips were pressed together,
there was a hard stare in her eyes: no tears came, but it was plain to
see that her soul was shedding tears of blood. In a flash she was living
through the shameful past, and the consuming desire to conquer which had
upheld her--a desire that burned the more with every fresh stain and
degradation that she had had to endure. She would sometimes have been
glad to die: but it would have been too abominable to succumb in the
midst of humiliation and to go no farther. Better to take her life
before--if so it must be--or after victory. But not when she had
degraded herself and not enjoyed the price of it....
She said no more. Christophe was pacing up and down the room in anger:
he was in a mood to slay these men who had made this woman suffer and
besmirched her. Then he looked at her with the eyes of pity: and he
stood near her and took her face in his hands and pressed it fondly, and
said:
"Poor little woman!"
She made to thrust him away. He said:
"You must not be afraid of me. I love you."
Then the tears trickled down her pale cheeks. He knelt down by her and
kissed--
"_La lunga man d'ogni bellezza piena_...."
--the long delicate hands on which two tears had fallen.
He sat down again, and she recovered herself and calmly went on with her
story:
An author had at last launched her. He had discovered in the strange
little creature a daimon, a genius,--and, even better for his purpose,
"a dramatic type, a new woman, representative of an epoch." Of course,
he made her his mistress after so many others had done the same. And she
let him take her, as she had suffered the others, without love, and even
with the opposite of love. But he had made her famous: and she had done
the same for him.
"And now," said Christophe, "the others cannot do anything to you: you
can do what you like with them."
"You think so?" she said bitterly.
Then she told him of Fate's other mockery,--her passion for a knave whom
she despised: a literary man who had exploited her, had plucked out the
most sorrowful secrets of her soul, and turned them into literature, and
then had left her.
"I despise him," she said, "as I despise the dirt on my boots: and I
tremble with rage when I think that I love him, that he has but to hold
up his finger, and I should go running to him, and humble myself before
such a cur. But what can I do? I have a heart that will never love what
my mind desires. And I am compelled alternately to sacrifice and
humiliate one or the other. I have a heart: I have a body. And they cry
out and cry out and demand their share of happiness. And I have nothing
to curb them with, for I believe in nothing. I am free.... Free? I am
the slave of my heart and my body, which often, almost always, in spite
of myself, desire and have their will. They carry me away, and I am
ashamed. But what can I do?..."
She stopped for a moment, and mechanically moved the cinders in the fire
with the tongs.
"I have read in books," she said, "that actors feel nothing. And,
indeed, those whom I meet are nearly all conceited, grown-up children
who are never troubled by anything but petty questions of vanity. I do
not know if it is they who are not true comedians, or myself. I fancy it
must be I. In any case, I pay for the others."
She stopped speaking. It was three in the morning. She got up to go.
Christophe told her to wait until the morning before she went home, and
proposed that she should go and lie down on his bed. She preferred to
stay in the arm-chair by the dead fire, and went on talking quietly
while all the house was still.
"You will be tired to-morrow."
"I am used to it. But what about you?... What are you doing to-morrow?"
"I am free. I have a lesson to give about eleven.... Besides, I am
strong."
"All the more reason why you should sleep soundly."
"Yes; I sleep like a log. Not even pain can stand out against it. I am
sometimes furious with myself for sleeping so well. So many hours
wasted!... I am delighted to be able to take my revenge on sleep for
once in a way, and to cheat it of a night."
They went on talking in low tones, with long intervals of silence. And
Christophe went to sleep. Françoise smiled and supported his head to
keep him from falling.... She sat by the window dreaming and looking
down into the darkness of the garden, which presently was lit up. About
seven o'clock she woke Christophe gently, and said good-by.
In the course of the month she came at times when Christophe was out,
and found the door shut. Christophe sent her a key to the flat, so that
she could go there when she liked. She went more than once when
Christophe was away, and she would leave a little bunch of violets on
the table, or a few words scribbled on a sheet of paper, or a sketch, or
a caricature--just to show that she had been.
And one evening, when she left the theater, she went to the flat to
resume their pleasant talk. She found him at work, and they began to
talk. But at the very outset they both felt that the friendly
comfortable mood of the last occasion was gone. She tried to go: but it
was too late. Not that Christophe did anything to prevent her. It was
her own will that failed her and would not let her go. They stayed there
with the gathering consciousness of the desire that was in them.
Following on that night she disappeared for some weeks. In him there had
been roused a sensual ardor that had lain dormant for months before, and
he could not live without her. She had forbidden him to go to her house:
he went to see her at the theater. He sat far back, and he was aflame
with love and devotion: every nerve in his body thrilled: the tragic
intensity which she brought to her acting consumed him also in its fire.
At last he wrote to her:
"My Dear,--Are you angry with me? Forgive me if I have hurt you."
When she received his humble little note she hastened to him and flung
herself into his arms.
"It would have been better to be just friends, good friends. But since
it is impossible, it is no good holding out against the inevitable. Come
what may!"
They lived together. They kept on in their separate flats, and each of
them was free. Françoise could not have submitted to living openly with
Christophe. Besides, her position would not allow it. She used to go to
Christophe's flat and spend part of the day and night with him; but she
used to return to her own place every day and also sleep there.
During the vacation, when the theater was closed, they took a house
together outside Paris, near Gif. They had many happy days there, though
there were clouds of sadness too. They were days of confidence and work.
They had a beautiful light room, high up, with a wide view over the
fields. At night through the window they could see the strange shadows
of the clouds floating across the clear, dull darkness of the sky. Half
asleep, they could hear the joyous crickets chirping and the showers
falling; the breath of the autumn earth--honeysuckle, clematis, glycine,
and new-mown hay--filled the house and soothed their senses. The silence
of the night. In the distance dogs barked. Cocks crowed. Dawn comes. The
tinkling angelus rings in the distant belfry, through the cold, gray
twilight, and they shiver in the warmth of their nest, and yet more
lovingly hold each other close. The voices of the birds awake in the
trellis on the wall. Christophe opens his eyes, holds his breath, and
his heart melts as he looks down at the dear tired face of his sleeping
beloved, pale with the paleness of love....
Their love was no selfish passion. It was a profound love in
comradeship, in which the body also demanded its share. They did not
hinder each other. They both went on with their work. Christophe's
genius and kindness and moral fiber were dear to Françoise. She felt
older than he in many ways, and she found a maternal pleasure in the
relation. She regretted her inability to understand anything he played:
music was a closed book to her, except at rare moments, when she would
be overcome by a wild emotion, which came less from the music than from
her own inner self, from the passion in which she was steeped at that
time, she and everything about her, the country, people, color, and
sound. But she was none the less conscious of Christophe's genius,
because it was expressed in a mysterious language which she did not
understand. It was like watching a great actor playing in a foreign
language. Her own genius was rekindled by it. Christophe, thanks to
love, could project his ideas and body forth his passions in the mind of
the woman and her beloved person: they seemed to him more beautiful
there than they were in himself--endowed with an antique and seemingly
eternal beauty. Intimacy with such a soul, so feminine, so weak and kind
and cruel, and genial in flashes, was a source of boundless wealth. She
taught him much about life, and men--about women, of whom he knew very
little, while she judged them with swift, unerring perception. But
especially he was indebted to her for a better understanding of the
theater; she helped him to pierce through to the spirit of that
admirable art, the most perfect of all arts, the fullest and most sober.
She revealed to him the beauty of that magic instrument of the human
dream,--and made him see that he must write for it and not for himself,
as he had a tendency to do,--(the tendency of too many artists, who,
like Beethoven, refuse to write "_for a confounded violin when the
Spirit speaks to them_").--A great dramatic poet is not ashamed to
work for a particular theater and to adapt his ideas to the actors at
his disposal: he sees no belittlement in that: but he knows that a vast
auditorium calls for different methods of expression than those
necessary for a smaller space, and that a man does not write
trumpet-blares for the flute. The theater, like the fresco, is art
fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art,
the living art.
Françoise's ideas were in accordance with Christophe's, who, at that
stage in his career, was inclined towards a collective art, in communion
with other men. Françoise's experience helped him to grasp the
mysterious collaboration which is set up between the audience and the
actor. Though Françoise was a realist, and had very few illusions, yet
she had a great perception of the power of reciprocal suggestion, the
waves of sympathy which pass between the actor and the multitude, the
great silence of thousands of men and women from which arises the single
voice of their interpreter. Naturally she could only feel it in
intermittent flashes, very, very rare, which were hardly ever reproduced
at the same passages in the same play. For the rest her work was a
soulless trade, an intelligent and coldly mechanical routine. But the
interest of it lay in the exception--the flash of light which pierced
the darkness of the abyss, the common soul of millions of men and women
whose living force was expressed in her for the space of a second of
eternity.
It was this common soul which it was the business of the great artist to
express. His ideal should be a living objectivism, in which the poet
should throw himself into those for whom he sings, and denude himself of
self, to clothe the collective passions which are blown over the world
like a mighty wind. Françoise was all the more keenly conscious of the
necessity, inasmuch as she was incapable of such disinterestedness, and
always played herself.--For the last century and a half the disordered
efflorescence of individual lyricism has been tinged with morbidity.
Moral greatness consists in feeling much and controlling much, in being
sober in words and chaste in thought, in not making a parade of it, in
making a look speak and speak profoundly, without childish exaggeration
or effeminate effusiveness, to those who can grasp the half-spoken
thought, to men. Modern music, which is so loquaciously introspective,
dragging in indiscreet confidences at every turn, is immodest and
lacking in taste. It is like those invalids who can think of nothing but
their illnesses, and never weary of discussing them with other people
and going into repulsive petty details. This travesty of art has been
growing more and more prevalent for the last century. Françoise, who was
no musician, was disposed to see a sign of decadence in the development
of music at the expense of poetry, like a polypus sucking it dry.
Christophe protested: but, upon reflection, he began to wonder whether
there might not be some truth in it. The first _lieder_ written to
poems of Goethe were sober and apt: soon Schubert came and infused his
romantic sentimentality into them and gave them a twist: Schumann
introduced his girlish languor: and, down to Hugo Wolf, the movement had
gone on towards more stress in declamation, indecent analysis, a
presumptuous endeavor to leave no smallest corner of the soul unlit.
Every veil about the mysteries of the heart was rent. Things said in all
earnestness by a man were now screamed aloud by shameless girls who
showed themselves in their nakedness.
Christophe was rather ashamed of such art, by which he was himself
conscious of being contaminated: and, without seeking to go back to the
past,--(an absurd, unnatural desire),--he steeped himself in the spirit
of those of the masters of the past who had been haughtily discreet in
their thought and had possessed the sense of a great collective art:
like Handel, who, scorning the tearful piety of his time and country,
wrote his colossal _Anthems_ and his oratorios, those heroic epics
which are songs of the nations for the nations. The difficulty was to
find inspiring subjects, which, like the Bible in Handel's time, could
arouse emotions common to all the nations of modern Europe. Modern
Europe had no common book: no poem, no prayer, no act of faith which was
the property of all. Oh! the shame that should overwhelm all the
writers, artists, thinkers, of to-day! Not one of them has written, not
one of them has thought, for all. Only Beethoven has left a few pages of
a new Gospel of consolation and brotherhood: but only musicians can read
it, and the majority of men will never hear it. Wagner, on the hill at
Bayreuth, has tried to build a religious art to bind all men together.
But his great soul had too little simplicity and too many of the
blemishes of the decadent music and thought of his time: not the fishers
of Galilee have come to the holy hill, but the Pharisees.
Christophe felt sure what he had to do: but he had no poet, and he was
forced to be self-sufficing and to confine himself to music. And music,
whatever people say, is not a universal language: the bow of words is
necessary to send the arrow of sound into the hearts of all men.
Christophe planned to write a suite of symphonies inspired by everyday
life. Among others he conceived a Domestic Symphony, in his own manner,
which was very different from that of Richard Strauss. He was not
concerned with materializing family life in a cinematograph picture, by
making use of a conventional alphabet, in which musical themes expressed
arbitrarily the various characters whom, if the auditor's eyes and ears
could stand it, were presently to be seen going through divers
evolutions together. That seemed to him a pedantic and childish game for
a great contrapuntist. He did not try to describe characters or actions,
but only to express emotions familiar to every man and woman, in which
they could find the echo of their own souls, and perhaps comfort and
relief. The first movement expressed the grave and simple happiness of a
loving young couple, with its tender sensuality, its confidence in the
future, its joy and hopes. The second movement was an elegy on the death
of a child. Christophe had avoided with horror any effort to depict
death, and realistic detail in the expression of sorrow: there was only
the utter misery of it,--yours, mine, everybody's, of being face to face
with a misfortune which falls or may fall to the lot of everybody. The
soul, prostrate in its grief, from which Christophe had banned the usual
effects of sniveling melodrama, recovered bit by bit, in a sorrowful
effort, to offer its suffering as a sacrifice to God. Once more it set
bravely out on the road, in the next movement, which was linked with the
second,--a headstrong fugue, the bold design and insistent rhythm of
which captivated, and, through struggles and tears, led on to a mighty
march, full of indomitable faith. The last movement depicted the evening
of life. The themes of the opening movement reappeared in it with their
touching confidence and their tenderness which could not grow old, but
riper, emerging from the shadow of sorrow, crowned with light, and, like
a rich blossoming, raising a religious hymn of love to life and God.
Christophe also rummaged in the books of the past for great, simple,
human subjects speaking to the best in the hearts of all men. He chose
two such stories: _Joseph_ and _Niobe_. But then Christophe
was brought up not only against his need of a poet, but against the
vexed question, which has been argued for centuries and never solved, of
the union of poetry and music. His talks with Françoise had brought him
back to his idea, sketched out long ago with Corinne, of a form of
musical drama, somewhere between recitative opera and the spoken
drama,--the art of the free word united with free music,--an art of
which hardly any artist of to-day has a glimmering, an art also which
the routine critics, imbued with the Wagnerian tradition, deny, as they
deny every really new work: for it is not a matter of following in the
footsteps of Beethoven, Weber, Schumann, Bizet, although they used the
melodramatic form with genius: it is not a matter of yoking any sort of
speaking voice to any sort of music, and producing, at all costs, with
absurd tremolos, coarse effects upon coarse audiences: it is a matter of
creating a new form, in which musical voices will be wedded to
instruments attuned to those voices, discreetly mingling with their
harmonious periods the echo of dreams and the plaintive murmur of music.
It goes without saying that such a form could only be applied to a
narrow range of subjects, to intimate and introspective moments of the
soul, so as to conjure up its poetic perfume. In no art should there be
more discretion and aristocracy of feeling. It is only natural,
therefore, that it should have little chance of coming to flower in an
age which, in spite of the pretensions of its artists, reeks of the
deep-seated vulgarity of upstarts.
Perhaps Christophe was no more suited to such an art than the rest: his
very qualities, his plebeian force, were obstacles in the way. He could
only conceive it, and with the aid of Françoise realize a few rough
sketches.
In this way he set to music passages from the Bible, almost literally
transcribed,--like the immortal scene in which Joseph makes himself
known to his brothers, and, after so many trials, can no longer contain
his emotion and tender feeling, and whispers the words which have wrung
tears from old Tolstoy, and many another:
"_Then Joseph could not refrain himself.... I am Joseph; doth my
father yet live? I am Joseph, your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. I
am Joseph...._"