- JEAN-CHRISTOPHE
- JEAN-CHRISTOPHE IN PARIS
- JEAN-CHRISTOPHE: JOURNEY'S END
- COLAS BREUGNON, BURGUNDIAN
- CLERAMBAULT
- THE MUSICIANS OF TODAY
- SOME MUSICIANS OF FORMER DAYS
- BEETHOVEN
- HANDEL
- MUSICAL TOUR THROUGH THE LAND OF THE PAST
- THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY
- THE PEOPLE'S THEATER
- PIERRE AND LUCE
PIERRE AND LUCE
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Translated by
Charles De Kay
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1922
Copyright, 1922,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Printed in U.S.A.
THE ISLE OF CALMS
"Just as the Gulf Stream embraces the Sargasso Sea into which graduallydrift the odds and ends that are carried away by the marine currentsinto the regions of calm, so does our aerial current surround a regionwhere the air is still. It is called The Isle of Calms."
Duration of the Story
From Wednesday evening, January 30, to
Good Friday, May 29, 1918.
PIERRE AND LUCE
Pierre plunged into the subway. A feverish, a brutal crowd. On his feetnear the door, closely pressed in a bank of human bodies and sharing theheavy atmosphere passing in and out of their mouths, he stared withoutseeing them at the black and rumbling vaults over which flickered theshining eyes of the train. The same heavy shadows lay in his mind, thesame gleams, hard and tremulous. Suffocating in the raised collar of hisovercoat, his arms jammed against his sides and his lips compressed, hisforehead damp with perspiration momentarily cooled by a current fromoutside when the door opened, he tried hard not to see, he tried not tobreathe, he tried not to live. The heart of this young fellow ofeighteen, still almost a child, was full of a dull despair. Above hishead, above the shadows of these long vaulted ways, of this rat-runthrough which the monster of metal whirled, all swarming with humanmasks—was Paris, the snow, the cold January darkness, the nightmare oflife and of death—the war.
The war! Four years ago it was, the war had come to stay. It had weighedheavily on his adolescent years. It had caught him by surprise in thatmorally critical period when the growing boy, disquieted by theawakening of his feelings, discovers with a shock the existence ofblind, bestial, crushing forces in life whose prey he is and thatwithout having asked to live at all. And if he happens to be delicate incharacter, tender of heart and frail as to body in the way Pierre was,he experiences a disgust and horror which he does not dare confide toothers for all these brutalities, these nastinesses, all this nonsenseof fruitful and devouring nature—this breeding sow that gobbles up herlitter of pigs.
In every growing youth between sixteen and eighteen there is a bit ofthe soul of Hamlet. Don't ask him to understand the war! (All right foryou men, who have had your fill!) He has all he can do to understandlife and forgive its existence. As a rule he digs himself in with hisdream and with the arts, until the time comes when he has got used tohis incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing passage fromlarva to winged insect. What a need he has for peace and meditation