And she left him.

It was some time before they met again. She gave no sign of life; and he
did not go to see either her or Philomela. He was fond of both of them:
but he was afraid of having to talk to them about things that made him
sad. And, besides, for the time being, their calm, dull existence, with
its too rarefied air, was not suited to his needs. He wanted to see new
faces; it was imperative that he should find a new interest, a new love,
to occupy his mind.

By way of being taken out of himself he began to frequent the theaters
which he had neglected for a long time. The theater seemed to him to be
an interesting school for a musician who wishes to observe and take note
of the accents of the passions.

It was not that he had any greater sympathy with French plays than when
he first came to live in Paris. Outside his small liking for their
eternal stale and brutal subjects connected with the psycho-physiology
of love, it seemed to him that the language of the French theater,
especially in poetic drama, was ultra-false. Neither their prose nor
their verse had anything in common with the living language and the
genius of the people. Their prose was an artificial language, the
language of a polite chronicle with the best, that of a vulgar
feuilletonist with the worst. Their poetry justified Goethe's gibe:

"_Poetry is all very well for those who have nothing to say_."

It was a wordy and inverted prose: the profusion of metaphors clumsily
tacked on to it in imitation of the lyricism of other nations produced
an effect of utter falsity upon any sincere person. Christophe set no