Chapter IV A Frustrate Message
JEAN CHRISTOPHE was the deliberate divergence from a generation. Colas Breugnon is another divergence, unconsciously effected; a divergence from the traditional France, heedlessly cheerful. This “bourguinon salé” wished to show his fellow countrymen of a later day how life can be salted with mockery and yet be full of enjoyment. Rolland here displayed all the riches of his beloved homeland, displaying above all the most beautiful of these goods, the joy of life.
A heedless world, our world of to-day, was to be awakened by the poet singing of an earlier world which had been likewise impoverished, had likewise wasted its energies in futile hostility. A call to joy from a Frenchman, echoing down the ages, was to answer the voice of the German, Jean Christophe. Their two voices were to mingle harmoniously as the voices mingle in the Ode to Joy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. During the tranquil summer the pages were stacked like golden sheaves. The book was in the press, to appear during the next summer, that of 1914.
But the summer of 1914 reaped a bloody harvest. The roar of the cannon, drowning Jean Christophe’s warning cry, deafened the ears of those who might otherwise have hearkened also to the call to joy. For five years, the five most terrible years in the world’s history, the luminous figure stood unheeded in the darkness. There was no conjuncture between Colas Breugnon and “la douce France”; for this book, with its description of the cheerful France of old, was not to appear until that Old France had vanished for ever.