He needed only to become the great man of a coterie. He needed only not to write anything, or as little as possible, and not to have anything performed, and to supply Goujart and his like with ideas, Goujart and the whole set of men whose motto is the famous quip--adapted a little: _"My glass is small: but I drink ... the wine of others."_ A strong personality sheds its rays especially on young people who are more concerned with feeling than with action. There were plenty of young people about Christophe. They were for the most part idle, will-less, aimless, purposeless. Young men, living in dread of work, fearful of being left alone with themselves, who sought an armchair immortality, wandering from café to theater, from theater to café, finding all sorts of excuses for not going home, to avoid coming face to face with themselves. They came and stayed for hours, dawdling, talking, making aimless conversation, and going away empty, aching, disgusted, satiated, and yet famishing, forced to go on with it in spite of loathing. They surrounded Christophe, like Goethe's water-spaniel, the "lurking specters," that lie in wait and seize upon a soul and fasten upon its vitality. A vain fool would have found pleasure in such a circle of parasites. But Christophe had no taste for pedestals. He was revolted by the idiotic subtlety of his admirers, who read into anything he did all sorts of absurd meanings, Renanian, Nietzschean, hermaphroditic. He kicked them out. He was not made for passivity. Everything in him cried aloud for action. He observed so as to understand: he wished to understand so as to act. He was free of the constraint of any school, and of any prejudice, and he inquired into everything, read everything, and studied all the forms of thought and the resources of the expression of other countries and other ages in his art. He seized on all those which seemed to him effective and true. Unlike the French artists whom he studied, who were ingenious inventors of new forms, and wore themselves out in the unceasing effort of invention, and gave up the struggle half-way, he endeavored not so much to invent a new musical language as to speak the authentic language of music with more energy: his aim was not to be particular, but to be strong. His, passion for strength was the very opposite of the French genius of subtlety and moderation. He scorned style for the sake of style and art for art's sake. The best French artists seemed to him to be no more than pleasure-mongers. One of the most perfect poets in Paris had amused himself with drawing up a "list of the workers in contemporary French poetry, with their talents, their productions, and their earnings": and he enumerated "the crystals, the Oriental fabrics, the gold and bronze medals, the lace for dowagers, the polychromatic sculpture, the painted porcelain," which had been produced in the workshops of his various colleagues. He pictured himself "in the corner