In every respect, the German's thought process is intentionally presented in a typical form. In his little native town he had never known a Frenchman. His feelings towards the French, of whom he had no concrete experience whatever, took the form of a genial, but somewhat contemptuous, sympathy. "The French are good fellows, but rather a slack lot," would seem to sum up his German prejudice. They are a nation of spineless artists, bad soldiers, corrupt politicians, women of easy virtue; but they are clever, amusing, and liberal-minded. Amid the order and sobriety of German life, he feels a certain yearning towards the democratic freedom of France. His first encounter with a French actress, Corinne, akin to Goethe's Philine, seems to confirm this facile judgment; but soon, when he meets Antoinette, he comes to realize the existence of another France. "You are so serious," he says with astonishment to the demure, tongue-tied girl, who in this foreign land is hard at work as a teacher in a pretentious, parvenu household. Her characteristics are not in keeping with his traditional prejudices. A Frenchwoman ought to be trivial, saucy, and wanton. For the first time France presents to him "the riddle of its twofold nature." This initial appeal from the distance exercises a mysterious lure. He begins to realize the infinite multiplicity of these foreign worlds. Like Gluck, Wagner, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach, he takes refuge from the narrowness of German provincial life, and flees to Paris, the fabled home of universal art. His feeling on arrival is one of disorder, and this impression never leaves him. The first and last impression, the strongest impression, to which the German in him continually returns, is that powerful energies are being squandered through lack of discipline. His first guide in the fair is one of those spurious "real Parisians," one of the immigrants who are more Parisian in their manners than those who are Parisian by birth, a Jew of German extraction named Sylvain Kohn, who here passes by the name of Hamilton, and in whose hands all the threads of the trade in art are centered. He shows Jean Christophe the painters, the musicians, the politicians, the journalists; and Jean Christophe turns away disheartened. It seems to him that all their works exhale an unpleasant "odor femininus," an oppressive atmosphere laden with scent. He sees praises showered upon second-rate persons, hears a clamor of appreciation, without discovering a single genuine work of art. There is indeed art of a kind amid the medley, but it is over-refined and decadent; the work of taste and not of power; lacking integration through excess of irony; an Alexandrian-Greek literature and music; the breath of a moribund nation; the hothouse blossom of a perishing civilization. He sees an end, but no beginning. The German in him already hears "the rumbling of the cannon" which will destroy this enfeebled Greece.