FRIENDS OF HIS YOUTH
143
opinions issued from his mouth, what issued from his room, as soon
as he had locked himself in, was, more and more often, the sound
of Wagner's music, that
is
to say, a kind of music that in earlier
years he had taught Clarisse to despise as the perfect example of a
philistine, florid, degenerate era, and to which he himself had now
become addicted as to a thickly brewed, hot, intoxicating potion.
Clarisse put up a fight against it. She hated Wagner, if for
nothing else, for his velvet jacket and his beret. She was the daughter
of a painter whose stage decors were famous throughout the world.
She had spent her childhood in a realm of back-stage air and the
smell of paint, where three different jargons were spoken, that of
the theater, that of opera, and that of the painter's studio, sur–
rounded by velvet, carpets, genius, leopard skins, knick-knacks, pea–
cock feathers, oak chests and lutes. She therefore loathed all sensu–
ality in art from the bottom of her soul and felt herself drawn to
everything lean and austere, whether it was the metageometry of the
new atonal music or the clearly apparent will of classic forms,
stripped of its skin like a specimen of dissected muscle. It was Walter
who had brought the first word of it into her maidenly captivity.
"Prince of light," she had called him, and while she was still a
child Walter and she had sworn not to marry until he had become
a king. The history of his transformations and undertakings was at
the same time a story of immeasurable sufferings and raptures, of
which she had been the trophy. Clarisse was not as talented as
Walter; she had always felt that. But she believed genius to be all
a matter of will. She had with wild energy tried to make the art of
music her own; it w,as not impossible that she was simply not musical
at
all,
but she had the ten sinewy fingers of a pianist and she had
resolution. She practiced for days on end, driving her fingers like
ten
lean oxen that were to wrench some overwhelming weight out
of the ground. She went in for painting in the same way. She had
considered Walter a genius since she was fifteen, because she had
always had the intention of marrying no one but a genius. She
would not permit him not to be one. And when she became aware
of
his
failure, she fought frantically against this suffocating, slow
change in the atmosphere of her life. It was precisely there and then
that Walter was in need of human warmth, and when his help–
lessness tormented him he clutched at her like a baby wanting milk
