Jean-Christophe: Journeys End | Page 6

even if he were not a genius, such good intentions and such tremendous industry deserved a better fate, and he was being intoxicated with incense of an inferior brand. It was a great pity. Why could they not leave him in his obscurity to go on working patiently for years?
Olivier might have had the answer pat:
"A man must eat to work. Who will give him his bread?"
But that would not have abashed them. They would have replied with their magnificent serenity:
"That is a detail. An artist must suffer. And what does a little suffering matter?"
Of course, they were men of the world, quite well off, who professed these Stoic theories. As the millionaire once said to the simple person who came and asked him to help a poverty-stricken artist:
"But, sir, Mozart died of poverty."
They would have thought it very bad taste on Olivier's part if he had told them that Mozart would have asked nothing better than to go on living, and that Christophe was determined to do so.
* * * * *
Christophe was getting heartily sick of the vulgar tittle-tattle. He began to wonder if it were going on forever.--But it was all over in a fortnight. The newspapers gave up talking about him. However, he had become known. When his name was mentioned, people said, not:
"The author of David or Gargantua," but:
"Oh yes! The Grand Journal man!..."
He was famous.
Olivier knew it by the number of letters that came for Christophe, and even for himself, in his reflected glory: offers from librettists, proposals from concert-agents, declarations of friendship from men who had formerly been his enemies, invitations from women. His opinion was asked, for newspaper inquiries, about anything and everything: the depopulation of France, idealist art, women's corsets, the nude on the stage,--and did he believe that Germany was decadent, or that music had reached its end, etc., etc. They used to laugh at them all. But, though he laughed, lo and behold! Christophe, that Huron, steadily accepted the invitations to dinner! Olivier could not believe his eyes.
"You?" he said.
"I! Certainly," replied Christophe jeeringly. "You thought you were the only man who could go and see the beautiful ladies? Not at all, my boy! It's my turn now. I want to amuse myself!"
"You? Amuse yourself? My dear old man!"
The truth was that Christophe had for so long lived shut up in his own room that he felt a sudden longing to get away from it. Besides, he took a na?ve delight in tasting his new fame. He was terribly bored at parties, and thought the people idiotic. But when he came home he used to take a malicious pleasure in telling Olivier how much he had enjoyed himself. He would go to people's houses once, but never again: he would invent the wildest excuses, with a frightful want of tact, to get out of their renewed invitations. Olivier would be scandalized, and Christophe would shout with laughter. He did not go to their houses to spread his fame, but to replenish his store of life, his collection of expressions and tones of voice--all the material of form, and sound, and color, with which an artist has periodically to enrich his palette. A musician does not feed only on music. An inflection of the human voice, the rhythm of a gesture, the harmony of a smile, contain more suggestion of music for him that another man's symphony. But it must be said that the music of faces and human souls is as stale and lacking in variety in polite society as the music of polite musicians. Each has a manner and becomes set in it. The smile of a pretty woman is as stereotyped in its studied grace as a Parisian melody. The men are even more insipid than the women. Under the debilitating influence of society, their energy is blunted, their original characters rot away and finally disappear with a frightful rapidity. Christophe was struck by the number of dead and dying men he met among the artists: there was one young musician, full of life and genius, whom success had dulled, stupefied, and wiped out of existence: he thought of nothing but swallowing down the flattery in which he was smothered, enjoying himself, and sleeping. What he would be like twenty years later was shown in another corner of the room, in the person of an old pomaded maestro, who was rich, famous, a member of all the Academies, at the very height of his career, and, though apparently he had nothing to fear and no more wires to pull, groveled before everything and everybody, and was fearful of opinion, power, and the Press, dared not say what he thought, and thought nothing at all--a man who had ceased to exist, showing himself off, an ass saddled with