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Jean-Christophe Journey's End by Romain Rolland
page 288 of 655 (43%)
strong and the independent. But though they had withdrawn, one to the
bows, the other to the stern, they were still traveling in the vessel
which was carrying the army of the working-classes and the whole of
society. Free and self-confident, Christophe watched with tingling
interest the coalition of the proletarians: he needed every now and then
to plunge into the vat of the people: it relaxed him: he always issued
from it fresher and jollier. He kept up his relation with Coquard, and
he went on taking his meals from time to time at Amelie's. When he was
there he lost all self-control, and would whole-heartedly indulge his
fantastic humor: he was not afraid of paradox: and he took a malicious
delight in pushing his companions to the extreme consequences of their
absurd and wild principles. They never knew whether he was speaking in
jest or in earnest: for he always grew warm as he talked, and always in
the end lost sight of the paradoxical point of view with which he had
begun. The artist in him was carried away by the intoxication of the rest.
In one such moment of esthetic emotion in Amelie's back-shop, he
improvised a revolutionary song, which was at once tried, repeated, and
on the very next day spread to every group of the working-classes. He
compromised himself. He was marked by the police. Manousse, who was in
touch with the innermost chambers of authority, was warned by one of his
friends, Xavier Bernard, a young official in the police department, who
dabbled in literature and expressed a violent admiration for
Christophe's music:--(for dilettantism and the spirit of anarchy had
spread even to the watchdogs of the Third Republic).

"That Krafft of yours is making himself a nuisance," said Bernard to
Manousse. "He's playing the braggart. We know what it means: but I tell
you that those in high places would be not at all sorry to catch a
foreigner--what's more, a German--in a revolutionary plot: it is the
regular method of discrediting the party and casting suspicion upon its
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