de Montespan was the attitude of criticism in its cult of history and
truth--(everybody just then, of course, made a cult of truth). These young
men were subscribers to the cult: no detail was too small for them in their
search for truth. They applied it to the art of the present as well as to
that of the past: and they analyzed the private life of certain of the more
notorious of their contemporaries with the same passion for exactness.
It was a queer thing that they were possessed of the smallest details of
scenes which are usually enacted without witnesses. It was really as though
the persons concerned had been the first to give exact information to the
public out of their great devotion to the truth.

Christophe was more and more embarrassed and tried to talk to his neighbors
of something else; but nobody listened to him. At first they asked him
a few vague questions about Germany--questions which, to his amazement,
displayed the almost complete ignorance of these distinguished and
apparently cultured young men concerning the most elementary things of
their work--literature and art--outside Paris; at most they had heard of a
few great names: Hauptmann, Sudermann, Liebermann, Strauss (David, Johann,
Richard), and they picked their way gingerly among them for fear of getting
mixed. If they had questioned Christophe it was from politeness rather than
from curiosity: they had no curiosity: they hardly seemed to notice his
replies: and they hurried back at once to the Parisian topics which were
regaling the rest of the company.

Christophe timidly tried to talk of music. Not one of these men of letters
was a musician. At heart they considered music an inferior art. But the
growing success of music during the last few years had made them secretly
uneasy: and since it was the fashion they pretended to be interested in it.
They frothed especially about a new opera and declared that music dated
from its performance, or at least the new era in music. This idea made