The final volume takes us back to Paris, and thence to Rome. Christophe is now the genius of his age, but his personal life is still meagre and sad; no wife, no child, no friend, no love, concentrates its elixir in one golden drop. And one day in the Alps he meets--as a middle-aged woman, a widow still charming in her tired grace and kind serenity,--that Countess Berény whom he had known as a girl in Paris, long ago. And Grazia Berény incarnates indulgent lazy Italy; as Anna Braun, Switzerland; as Henriette Jeannin, France; as the dear, feckless, gentle Sabina, South Germany; in the long gallery of Christophe’s lady-loves. Of them all, it is Grazia that he desires to marry. But Grazia, indifferent and gentle, loves Christophe less than her quiet days, her children’s interests, her pleasant, nonchalant, and sociable life of a handsome widow ‘well left,’ who cares above all things for her _quieto vivere_. She is not very interesting, this Grazia, so much in love with peace and measure; she and Christophe would have been as well mated as a sleek and sober Angora with a mastiff ever on the growl (though his bark is worse than his bite), and we are not very sorry when she dies. We have wept so many tears for poor old Louisa (Christophe’s mother), for Sabine, for Antoinette, for Olivier, that we have none to spare for the passive and elegant great lady. Neither in the painting of Grazia nor in his image of Rome is our author to be seen at his best. And yet what citizen of Cosmopolis knows Rome as well as Romain Rolland? By the end of this tenth volume, Jean-Christophe is no longer young, and all has happened to him that reasonably could be expected to happen. He has mixed in the politics of several nations, he has known fight and flight and exile; he has been poor, he has been famous; he is now the greatest musician of his times. The most exacting reader could not wish to stretch him out much longer on the rack of this tough world. There are ten sizable volumes of him at Mr Ollendorff’s--or, if you prefer, seventeen of those wonderful little ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ (beloved of garrulous and expansive genius) in which M. Charles Péguy has produced not only M. Romain Rolland, but himself. Now we know all there is to know, and find that (as in real life) the climax is middling compared to the hopes of youth. Jean-Christophe dies a genius; but we, after all, have never heard his operas. He dies, like any other mortal whom a living faith sustains in the last hour of all. The death of Jean-Christophe has probably preoccupied more readers than the end of any other hero in fiction since the great days of Dickens and Thackeray. We ourselves know one eminent hand in letters who wrote to the author suggesting that his hero should disappear in the wreck of the _Titanic_, conducting the band, in place of the unforgettable bandmaster. Another wished him to wander away alone and die in the desert, after the fashion of Tolstoi.