Since he bore a respected name, Armenian leaders, whenever they were in Paris, would come to call on him. He had even been offered the leadership of the Dashnakzagan party. Though he retreated in terror from this suggestion, he at least had taken part in that famous congress which, in 1907, united the Young Turks with Armenian nationalists. An empire was to be grounded in which the two races should live at peace side by side and not dishonor each other. Such an object excited even an alienated enthusiasm. In those days Turks had paid Armenians the most charming compliments, declaring their love. Gabriel, as his habit was, took these compliments more seriously than other people. That was why, when the Balkan war broke out, he had volunteered. He had been hastily trained in the school for reservist officers in Istanbul and had just had time to fight, as the officer of a howitzer battery, at the battle of Bulair. This one long separation from his family had lasted over six months. He had missed them greatly. He may have feared that Juliette would slip away from him. Something seemed imperilled in their relationship though he could not have given a reason for any such feeling. He was a thinker, an abstract man, an individual. What did the Turks matter, what the Armenians? He had thoughts of taking French citizenship. That, above all, would have made Juliette happy. But always, in the end, the same vague uneasiness had prevented it. He had volunteered for the war. Even if he did not live in his country, he could at least always re-evoke it. His fathers' country.

 

 

These fathers had suffered in it monstrously and still not given it up. Gabriel had never suffered. Massacre and torture he only knew through books and stories. It is not, he thought, a matter of indifference which country even an abstract man belongs to. So he remained an Ottoman subject. Two happy years in a charming flat in the Avenue Kléber. It really looked as though all problems had been solved and his life taken on its final definite shape. Gabriel was thirty-five; Juliette, thirty-four; Stephan, thirteen. Their lives were untroubled, their work intellectual, they had some very pleasant friends. Juliette was the decisive factor in choosing them. This was chiefly evident in the fact that Gabriel's former Armenian acquaintances -- his parents had been dead some time -- came less and less frequently to the flat. Juliette, so to speak, insisted relentlessly on her blood-stream. But she could not manage to change her son's eyes.