At seven o’clock I dressed myself and went out again to dine with

Saint-Loup at the hotel where he took his meals. I liked to go there on

foot. It was by now pitch dark, and after the third day of my visit

there began to blow, as soon as night had fallen, an icy wind which

seemed a harbinger of snow. As I walked, I ought not, strictly speaking,

to have ceased for a moment to think of Mme. de Guermantes; it was only

in the attempt to draw nearer to her that I had come to visit Robert’s

garrison. But a memory, a grief, are fleeting things. There are days

when they remove so far that we are barely conscious of them, we think

that they have gone for ever. Then we pay attention to other things. And

the streets of this town had not yet become for me what streets are in

the place where one is accustomed to live, simply means of communication

between one part and another. The life led by the inhabitants of this

unknown world must, it seemed to me, be a marvellous thing; and often

the lighted windows of some dwelling-house kept me standing for a long

while motionless in the darkness by laying before my eyes the actual and

mysterious scenes of an existence into which I might not penetrate. Here

the fire-spirit displayed to me in purple colouring the booth of a

chestnut seller in which a couple of serjeants, their belts slung over

the backs of chairs, were playing cards, never dreaming that a

magician’s wand was making them emerge from the night, like a

transparency on the stage, and presenting them in their true lineaments

at that very moment to the eyes of an arrested passer-by whom they could

not see. In a little curiosity shop a candle, burned almost to its

socket, projecting its warm glow over an engraving reprinted it in

sanguine, while, battling against the darkness, the light of the big

lamp tanned a scrap of leather, inlaid a dagger with fiery spangles, on

pictures which were only bad copies spread a priceless film of gold like

the patina of time or the varnish used by a master, made in fact of the

whole hovel, in which there was nothing but pinchbeck rubbish, a

marvellous composition by Rembrandt. Sometimes I lifted my gaze to some

huge old dwelling-house on which the shutters had not been closed and in

which amphibious men and women floated slowly to and fro in the rich

liquid that after nightfall rose incessantly from the wells of the lamps

to fill the rooms to the very brink of the outer walls of stone and

glass, the movement of their bodies sending through it long unctuous

golden ripples. I proceeded on my way, and often, in the dark alley that

ran past the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Méséglise, the force

of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be on the

point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I felt suddenly

brush past me a skirt, the violence of the pleasure which I then felt

made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was accidental and

I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger. This gothic alley

meant for me something so real that if I had been successful in raising

and enjoying a woman there, it would have been impossible for me not to

believe that it was the ancient charm of the place that was bringing us

together, and even though she were no more than a common street-walker,

stationed there every evening, still the wintry night, the strange

place, the darkness, the mediaeval atmosphere would have lent her their

mysterious glamour. I thought of what might be in store for me; to try

to forget Mme. de Guermantes seemed to me a dreadful thing, but

reasonable, and for the first time possible, easy perhaps even. In the

absolute quiet of this neighbourhood I could hear ahead of me shouted

words and laughter which must come from tipsy revellers staggering home.

I waited to see them, I stood peering in the direction from which I had

heard the sound. But I was obliged to wait for some time, for the

surrounding silence was so intense that it allowed to travel with the

utmost clearness and strength sounds that were still a long way off.

Finally the revellers did appear; not, as I had supposed, in front of

me, but ever so far behind. Whether the intersection of side-streets,

the interposition of buildings had, by reverberation, brought about this

acoustic error, or because it is very difficult to locate a sound when

the place from which it comes is not known, I had been as far wrong over

direction as over distance.

The wind grew stronger. It was thick and bristling with coming snow. I

returned to the main street and jumped on board the little tramway-car

on which, from its platform, an officer, without apparently seeing them,

was acknowledging the salutes of the loutish soldiers who trudged past

along the pavement, their faces daubed crimson by the cold, reminding

me, in this little town which the sudden leap from autumn into early

winter seemed to have transported farther north, of the rubicund faces

which Breughel gives to his merry, junketing, frostbound peasants.

And sure enough at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his

friends and to which the fair now beginning had attracted a number of

people from near and far, I found, as I hurried across the courtyard

with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on

spits, pigs were roasting, lobsters being flung, alive, into what the

landlord called the “everlasting fire”, an influx (worthy of some

_Numbering of the People before Bethlehem_ such as the old Flemish

masters used to paint) of new arrivals who assembled there in groups,

asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if he did not like the

look of them, would recommend lodgings elsewhere in the town) whether

they could have dinner and beds, while a scullion hurried past holding a

struggling fowl by the neck. And similarly, in the big dining-room which

I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my

friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed

with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that

one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock,

pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless

waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down

on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for

most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they

accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those

who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the

diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the

letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local

custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to

the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and

the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the

far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone

appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our

table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that

had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from

growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre

of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge

mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of

crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a

sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk

of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I

felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all

these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the

blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already

half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not

yet begun to suspect. I should add that, in view probably of the coming

fair, this presentation was strengthened by a celestial contingent,

recruited in mass, of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician,

whose fair hair enclosed a fourteen-year-old face, was not, it was true,

playing on any instrument, but stood musing before a gong or a pile of

plates, while other less infantile angels flew swiftly across the

boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless

fluttering of the napkins which fell along the lines of their bodies

like the wings in “primitive” paintings, with pointed ends. Fleeing

those ill-defined regions, screened by a hedge of palms through which

the angelic servitors looked, from a distance, as though they had

floated down out of the empyrean, I explored my way to the smaller room

in which Saint-Loup’s table was laid. I found there several of his

friends who dined with him regularly, nobles except for one or two

commoners in whom the young nobles had, in their school days, detected

likely friends, and with whom they readily associated, proving thereby

that they were not on principle hostile to the middle class, even though

it were Republican, provided it had clean hands and went to mass. On the

first of these evenings, before we sat down to dinner, I drew Saint-Loup

into a corner and, in front of all the rest but so that they should not

hear me, said to him:

“Robert, this is hardly the time or the place for what I am going to

say, but I shan’t be a second. I keep on forgetting to ask you when I’m

in the barracks; isn’t that Mme. de Guermantes’s photograph that you

have on your table?”

“Why, yes; my good aunt.”

“Of course she is; what a fool I am; you told me before that she was;

I’d forgotten all about her being your aunt. I say, your friends will be

getting impatient, we must be quick, they’re looking at us; another time

will do; it isn’t at all important.”

“That’s all right; go on as long as you like. They can wait.”

“No, no; I do want to be polite to them; they’re so nice; besides, it

doesn’t really matter in the least, I assure you.”

“Do you know that worthy Oriane, then?”

This “worthy Oriane,” as he might have said, “that good Oriane,” did not

imply that Saint-Loup regarded Mme. de Guermantes as especially good. In

this instance the words “good”, “excellent”, “worthy” are mere

reinforcements of the demonstrative “that”, indicating a person who is

known to both parties and of whom the speaker does not quite know what

to say to someone outside the intimate circle. The word “good” does duty

as a stop-gap and keeps the conversation going for a moment until the

speaker has hit upon “Do you see much of her?” or “I haven’t set eyes on

her for months,” or “I shall be seeing her on Tuesday,” or “She must be

getting on, now, you know.”

“I can’t tell you how funny it is that it should be her photograph,

because we’re living in her house now, in Paris, and I’ve been hearing

the most astounding things” (I should have been hard put to it to say

what) “about her, which have made me immensely interested in her, only

from a literary point of view, don’t you know, from a—how shall I put

it—from a Balzacian point of view; but you’re so clever you can see what

I mean; I don’t need to explain things to you; but we must hurry up;

what on earth will your friends think of my manners?”

“They will think absolutely nothing; I have told them that you are

sublime, and they are a great deal more alarmed than you are.”

“You are too kind. But listen, what I want to say is this: I suppose

Mme. de Guermantes hasn’t any idea that I know you, has she?”

“I can’t say; I haven’t seen her since the summer, because I haven’t had

any leave since she’s been in town.”

“What I was going to say is this: I’ve been told that she looks on me as

an absolute idiot.”

“That I do not believe; Oriane is not exactly an eagle, but all the same

she’s by no means stupid.”

“You know that, as a rule, I don’t care about your advertising the good

opinion you’re kind enough to hold of me; I’m not conceited. That’s why

I’m sorry you should have said flattering things about me to your

friends here (we will go back to them in two seconds). But Mme. de

Guermantes is different; if you could let her know—if you would even

exaggerate a trifle—what you think of me, you would give me great

pleasure.”

“Why, of course I will, if that’s all you want me to do; it’s not very

difficult; but what difference can it possibly make to you what she

thinks of you? I suppose you think her no end of a joke, really; anyhow,

if that’s all you want we can discuss it in front of the others or when

we are by ourselves; I’m afraid of your tiring yourself if you stand

talking, and it’s so inconvenient too, when we have heaps of

opportunities of being alone together.”

It was precisely this inconvenience that had given me courage to

approach Robert; the presence of the others was for me a pretext that

justified my giving my remarks a curt and incoherent form, under cover

of which I could more easily dissemble the falsehood of my saying to my

friend that I had forgotten his connexion with the Duchess, and also did

not give him time to frame—with regard to my reasons for wishing that

Mme. de Guermantes should know that I was his friend, was clever, and so

forth—questions which would have been all the more disturbing in that I

should not have been able to answer them.

“Robert, I’m surprised that a man of your intelligence should fail to

understand that one doesn’t discuss the things that will give one’s

friends pleasure; one does them. Now I, if you were to ask me no matter

what, and indeed I only wish you would ask me to do something for you, I

can assure you I shouldn’t want any explanations. I may ask you for more

than I really want; I have no desire to know Mme. de Guermantes, but

just to test you I ought to have said that I was anxious to dine with

Mme. de Guermantes; I am sure you would never have done it.”

“Not only should I have done it, I will do it.”

“When?”

“Next time I’m in Paris, three weeks from now, I expect.”

“We shall see; I dare say she won’t want to see me, though. I can’t tell

you how grateful I am.”

“Not at all; it’s nothing.”

“Don’t say that; it’s everything in the world, because now I can see

what sort of friend you are; whether what I ask you to do is important

or not, disagreeable or not, whether I am really keen about it or ask

you only as a test, it makes no difference; you say you will do it, and

there you shew the fineness of your mind and heart. A stupid friend

would have started a discussion.”

Which was exactly what he had just been doing; but perhaps I wanted to

flatter his self-esteem; perhaps also I was sincere, the sole touchstone

of merit seeming to me to be the extent to which a friend could be

useful in respect of the one thing that seemed to me to have any

importance, namely my love. Then I went on, perhaps from cunning,

possibly from a genuine increase of affection inspired by gratitude,

expectancy, and the copy of Mme. de Guermantes’s very features which

nature had made in producing her nephew Robert: “But, I say, we mustn’t

keep them waiting any longer, and I’ve mentioned only one of the two

things I wanted to ask you, the less important; the other is more

important to me, but I’m afraid you will never consent. Would it bore

you if we were to call each other _tu_?”

“Bore me? My dear fellow! Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-of happiness!”

“Thank you—_tu_ I mean; you begin first—ever so much. It is such a

pleasure to me that you needn’t do anything about Mme. de Guermantes if

you’ld rather not, this is quite enough for me.”

“I can do both.”

“I say, Robert! Listen to me a minute,” I said to him later while we

were at dinner. “Oh, it’s really too absurd the way our conversation is

always being interrupted, I can’t think why—you remember the lady I was

speaking to you about just now.”

“Yes.”

“You’re quite sure you know who’ I mean?”

“Why, what do you take me for, a village idiot?”

“You wouldn’t care to give me her photograph, I suppose?”

I had meant to ask him only for the loan of it. But when the time came

to speak I felt shy, I decided that the request was indiscreet, and in

order to hide my confusion I put the question more bluntly, and

increased my demand, as if it had been quite natural.

“No; I should have to ask her permission first,” was his answer.

He blushed as he spoke. I could see that he had a reservation in his

mind, that he credited me also with one, that he would give only a

partial service to my love, under the restraint of certain moral

principles, and for this I hated him.

At the same time I was touched to see how differently Saint-Loup behaved

towards me now that I was no longer alone with him, and that his friends

formed an audience. His increased affability would have left me cold had

I thought that it was deliberately assumed; but I could feel that it was

spontaneous and consisted only of all that he had to say about me in my

absence and refrained as a rule from saying when we were together by

ourselves. In our private conversations I might certainly suspect the

pleasure that he found in talking to me, but that pleasure he almost

always left unexpressed. Now, at the same remarks from me which, as a

rule, he enjoyed without shewing it, he watched from the corner of his

eye to see whether they produced on his friends the effect on which he

had counted, an effect corresponding to what he had promised them

beforehand. The mother of a girl in her first season could be no more

unrelaxing in her attention to her daughter’s responses and to the

attitude of the public. If I had made some remark at which, alone in my

company, he would merely have smiled, he was afraid that the others

might not have seen the point, and put in a “What’s that?” to make me

repeat what I had said, to attract attention, and turning at once to his

friends and making himself automatically, by facing them with a hearty

laugh, the fugleman of their laughter, presented me for the first time

with the opinion that he actually held of me and must often have

expressed to them. So that I caught sight of myself suddenly from

without, like a person who reads his name in a newspaper or sees himself

in a mirror.

It occurred to me, one of these evenings, to tell a mildly amusing story

about Mme. Blandais, but I stopped at once, remembering that Saint-Loup

knew it already, and that when I had tried to tell him it on the day

following my arrival he had interrupted me with: “You told me that

before, at Balbec.” I was surprised, therefore, to find him begging me

to go on and assuring me that he did not know the story, and that it

would amuse him immensely. “You’ve forgotten it for the moment,” I said

to him, “but you’ll remember as I go on.” “No, really; I swear you’re

mistaken. You’ve never told me. Do go on.” And throughout the story he

fixed a feverish and enraptured gaze alternately on myself and on his

friends. I realised only after I had finished, amid general laughter,

that it had struck him that this story would give his friends a good

idea of my wit, and that it was for this reason that he had pretended

not to know it. Such is the stuff of friendship.

On the third evening, one of his friends, to whom I had not had an

opportunity before of speaking, conversed with me at great length; and I

overheard him telling Saint-Loup how much he had been enjoying himself.

And indeed we sat talking together almost all evening, leaving our

glasses of sauterne untouched on the table before us, isolated,

sheltered from the others by the sumptuous curtains of one of those

intuitive sympathies between man and man which, when they are not based

upon any physical attraction, are the only kind that is altogether

mysterious. Of such an enigmatic nature had seemed to me, at Balbec,

that feeling which Saint-Loup had for me, which was not to be confused

with the interest of our conversations, a feeling free from any material

association, invisible, intangible, and yet a thing of the presence of

which in himself, like a sort of inflammatory gas, he had been so far

conscious as to refer to it with a smile. And yet there was perhaps

something more surprising still in this sympathy born here in a single

evening, like a flower that had budded and opened in a few minutes in

the warmth of this little room. I could not help asking Robert when he

spoke to me about Balbec whether it were really settled that he was to

marry Mlle. d’Ambresac. He assured me that not only was it not settled,

but there had never been any thought of such a match, he had never seen

her, he did not know who she was. If at that moment I had happened to

see any of the social gossipers who had told me of this coming event,

they would promptly have announced the betrothal of Mlle. d’Ambresac to

some one who was not Saint-Loup and that of Saint-Loup to some one who

was not Mlle. d’Ambresac. I should have surprised them greatly had I

reminded them of their incompatible and still so recent predictions. In

order that this little game may continue, and multiply false reports by

attaching the greatest possible number to every name in turn, nature has

furnished those who play it with a memory as short as their credulity is

long.

Saint-Loup had spoken to me of another of his friends who was present

also, one with whom he was on particularly good terms just then, since

they were the only two advocates in their mess of the retrial of

Dreyfus.

Just as a brother of this friend of Saint-Loup, who had been trained at

the Schola Cantorum, thought about every new musical work not at all

what his father, his mother, his cousins, his club friends thought, but

exactly what the other students thought at the Schola, so this

non-commissioned nobleman (of whom Bloch formed an extraordinary opinion

when I told him about him, because, touched to hear that he belonged to

the same party as himself, he nevertheless imagined him on account of

his aristocratic birth and religious and military upbringing to be as

different as possible, endowed with the same romantic attraction as a

native of a distant country) had a “mentality”, as people were now

beginning to say, analogous to that of the whole body of Dreyfusards in

general and of Bloch in particular, on which the traditions of his

family and the interests of his career could retain no hold whatever.

Similarly one of Saint-Loup’s cousins had married a young Eastern

princess who was said to write poetry quite as fine as Victor Hugo’s or

Alfred de Vigny’s, and in spite of this was supposed to have a different

type of mind from what one would naturally expect, the mind of an

Eastern princess immured in an Arabian Nights palace. For the writers

who had the privilege of meeting her was reserved the disappointment or

rather the joy of listening to conversation which gave the impression

not of Scheherazade but of a person of genius of the type of Alfred de

Vigny or Victor Hugo.

“That fellow? Oh, he’s not like Saint-Loup, he’s a regular devil,” my

new friend informed me; “he’s not even straight about it. At first, he

used to say: ‘Just wait a little, there’s a man I know well, a clever,

kind-hearted fellow, General de Boisdeffre; you need have no hesitation

in accepting his decision.’ But as soon as he heard that Boisdeffre had

pronounced Dreyfus guilty, Boisdeffre ceased to count: clericalism,

staff prejudices prevented his forming a candid opinion, although there

is no one in the world (or was, rather, before this Dreyfus business)

half so clerical as our friend. Next he told us that now we were sure to

get the truth, the case had been put in the hands of Saussier, and he, a

soldier of the Republic (our friend coming of an ultra-monarchist

family, if you please), was a man of bronze, a stern unyielding

conscience. But when Saussier pronounced Esterhazy innocent, he found

fresh reasons to account for the decision, reasons damaging not to

Dreyfus but to General Saussier. It was the militarist spirit that

blinded Saussier (and I must explain to you that our friend is just as

much militarist as clerical, or at least he was; I don’t know what to

think of him now). His family are all broken-hearted at seeing him

possessed by such ideas.”

“Don’t you think,” I suggested, turning half towards Saint-Loup so as

not to appear to be cutting myself off from him, as well as towards his

friend, and so that we might all three join in the conversation, “that

the influence we ascribe to environment is particularly true of

intellectual environment. One is the man of one’s idea. There are far

fewer ideas than men, therefore all men with similar ideas are alike. As

there is nothing material in an idea, so the people who are only

materially neighbours of the man with an idea can do nothing to alter

it.”

At this point I was interrupted by Saint-Loup, because another of the

young men had leaned across to him with a smile and, pointing to me,

exclaimed: “Duroc! Duroc all over!” I had no idea what this might mean,

but I felt the expression on the shy young face to be more than

friendly. While I was speaking, the approbation of the party seemed to

Saint-Loup superfluous; he insisted on silence. And just as a conductor

stops his orchestra with a rap from his baton because some one in the

audience has made a noise, so he rebuked the author of this disturbance:

“Gibergue, you must keep your mouth shut when people are speaking. You

can tell us about it afterwards.” And to me: “Please go on.”

I gave a sigh of relief, for I had been afraid that he was going to make

me begin all over again.

“And as an idea,” I went on, “is a thing that cannot participate in

human interests and would be incapable of deriving any benefit from

them, the men who are governed by an idea are not influenced by material

considerations.”

When I had finished, “That’s one in the eye for you, my boys,” exclaimed

Saint-Loup, who had been following me with his gaze with the same

anxious solicitude as if I had been walking upon a tight-rope. “What

were you going to say, Gibergue?”

“I was just saying that your friend reminded me of Major Duroc. I seemed

to hear him speaking.”

“Why, I’ve often thought so myself,” replied Saint-Loup; “they have

several points in common, but you’ll find there are a thousand things in

this fellow that Duroc hasn’t got.”

Saint-Loup was not satisfied with this comparison. In an ecstasy of joy,

into which there no doubt entered the joy that he felt in making me

shine before his friends, with extreme volubility, stroking me as though

he were rubbing down a horse that had just come first past the post, he

reiterated: “You’re the cleverest man I know, do you hear?” He corrected

himself, and added: “You and Elstir.—You don’t mind my bracketing him

with you, I hope. You understand—punctiliousness. It’s like this: I say

it to you as one might have said to Balzac: ‘You are the greatest

novelist of the century—you and Stendhal.’ Excessive punctiliousness,

don’t you know, and at heart an immense admiration. No? You don’t admit

Stendhal?” he went on, with an ingenuous confidence in my judgment which

found expression in a charming, smiling, almost childish glance of

interrogation from his green eyes. “Oh, good! I see you’re on my side;

Bloch can’t stand Stendhal. I think it’s idiotic of him. The

_Chartreuse_ is after all an immense work, don’t you think? I am so glad

you agree with me. What is it you like best in the _Chartreuse_, answer

me?” he appealed to me with a boyish impetuosity. And the menace of his

physical strength made the question almost terrifying. “Mosca? Fabrice?”

I answered timidly that Mosca reminded me a little of M. de Norpois.

Whereupon peals of laughter from the young Siegfried Saint-Loup. And

while I was going on to explain: “But Mosca is far more intelligent, not

so pedantic,” I heard Robert cry: “Bravo!” actually clapping his hands,

and, helpless with laughter, gasp: “Oh, perfect! Admirable! You really

are astounding.”

I took a particular pleasure in talking to this young man, as for that

matter to all Robert’s friends and to Robert himself, about their

barracks, the officers of the garrison, and the army in general. Thanks

to the immensely enlarged scale on which we see the things, however

petty they may be, in the midst of which we eat, and talk, and lead our

real life; thanks to that formidable enlargement which they undergo, and

the effect of which is that the rest of the world, not being present,

cannot compete with them, and assumes in comparison the unsubstantiality

of a dream, I had begun to take an interest in the various personalities

of the barracks, in the officers whom I saw in the square when I went to

visit Saint-Loup, or, if I was awake then, when the regiment passed

beneath my windows. I should have liked to know more about the major

whom Saint-Loup so greatly admired, and about the course of military

history which would have appealed to me “even from an aesthetic point of

view”. I knew that with Robert the spoken word was, only too often, a

trifle hollow, but at other times implied the assimilation of valuable

ideas which he was fully capable of grasping. Unfortunately, from the

military point of view Robert was exclusively preoccupied at this time

with the case of Dreyfus. He spoke little about it, since he alone of

the party at table was a Dreyfusard; the others were violently opposed

to the idea of a fresh trial, except my other neighbour, my new friend,

and his opinions appeared to be somewhat vague. A firm admirer of the

colonel, who was regarded as an exceptionally competent officer and had

denounced the current agitation against the Army in several of his

regimental orders, which won him the reputation of being an

anti-Dreyfusard, my neighbour had heard that his commanding officer had

let fall certain remarks which had led to the supposition that he had

his doubts as to the guilt of Dreyfus and retained his admiration for

Picquart. In the latter respect, at any rate, the rumour of Dreyfusism

as applied to the colonel was as ill-founded as are all the rumours,

springing from none knows where, which float around any great scandal.

For, shortly afterwards, this colonel having been detailed to

interrogate the former Chief of the Intelligence Branch, had treated him

with a brutality and contempt the like of which had never been known

before. However this might be (and naturally he had not taken the

liberty of going direct to the colonel for his information), my

neighbour had paid Saint-Loup the compliment of telling him—in the tone

in which a Catholic lady might tell a Jewish lady that her parish priest

denounced the pogroms in Russia and might openly admire the generosity

of certain Israelites—that their colonel was not, with regard to

Dreyfusism—to a certain kind of Dreyfusism, at least—the fanatical,

narrow opponent that he had been made out to be.

“I am not surprised,” was Saint-Loup’s comment; “for he’s a sensible

man. But in spite of that he is blinded by the prejudices of his caste,

and above all by his clericalism. Now,” he turned to me, “Major Duroc,

the lecturer on military history I was telling you about; there’s a man

who is whole-heartedly in support of our views, or so I’m told. And I

should have been surprised to hear that he wasn’t, for he’s not only a

brilliantly clever man, but a Radical-Socialist and a freemason.”

Partly out of courtesy to his friends, whom these expressions of

Saint-Loup’s faith in Dreyfus made uncomfortable, and also because the

subject was of more interest to myself, I asked my neighbour if it were

true that this major gave a demonstration of military history which had

a genuine aesthetic beauty. “It is absolutely true.”

“But what do you mean by that?”

“Well, all that you read, let us say, in the narrative of a military

historian, the smallest facts, the most trivial happenings, are only the

outward signs of an idea which has to be analysed, and which often

brings to light other ideas, like a palimpsest. So that you have a field

for study as intellectual as any science you care to name, or any art,

and one that is satisfying to the mind.”

“Give me an example or two, if you don’t mind.”

“It is not very easy to explain,” Saint-Loup broke in. “You read, let us

say, that this or that Corps has tried ... but before we go any farther,

the serial number of the Corps, its order of battle are not without

their significance. If it is not the first time that the operation has

been attempted, and if for the same operation we find a different Corps

being brought up, it is perhaps a sign that the previous Corps have been

wiped out or have suffered heavy casualties in the said operation; that

they are no longer in a fit state to carry it through successfully.

Next, we must ask ourselves what was this Corps which is now out of

action; if it was composed of shock troops, held in reserve for big

attacks, a fresh Corps of inferior quality will have little chance of

succeeding where the first has failed. Furthermore, if we are not at the

start of a campaign, this fresh Corps may itself be a composite

formation of odds and ends withdrawn from other Corps, which throws a

light on the strength of the forces the belligerent still has at his

disposal and the proximity of the moment when his forces shall be

definitely inferior to the enemy’s, which gives to the operation on

which this Corps is about to engage a different meaning, because, if it

is no longer in a condition to make good its losses, its successes even

will only help mathematically to bring it nearer to its ultimate

destruction. And then, the serial number of the Corps that it has facing

it is of no less significance. If, for instance, it is a much weaker

unit, which has already accounted for several important units of the

attacking force, the whole nature of the operation is changed, since,

even if it should end in the loss of the position which the defending

force has been holding, simply to have held it for any length of time

may be a great success if a very small defending force has been

sufficient to disable highly important forces on the other side. You can

understand that if, in the analysis of the Corps engaged on both sides,

there are all these points of importance, the study of the position

itself, of the roads, of the railways which it commands, of the lines of

communication which it protects, is of the very highest. One must study

what I may call the whole geographical context,” he added with a laugh.

And indeed he was so delighted with this expression that, every time he

employed it, even months afterwards, it was always accompanied by the

same laugh. “While the operation is being prepared by one of the

belligerents, if you read that one of his patrols has been wiped out in

the neighbourhood of the position by the other belligerent, one of the

conclusions which you are entitled to draw is that one side was

attempting to reconnoitre the defensive works with which the other

intended to resist his attack. An exceptional burst of activity at a

given point may indicate the desire to capture that point, but equally

well the desire to hold the enemy in check there, not to retaliate at

the point at which he has attacked you; or it may indeed be only a

feint, intended to cover by an increased activity the relief of troops

in that sector. (Which was a classic feint in Napoleon’s wars.) On the

other hand, to appreciate the significance of any movement, its probable

object, and, as a corollary, the other movements by which it will be

accompanied or followed, it is not immaterial to consult, not so much

the announcements issued by the Higher Command, which may be intended to

deceive the enemy, to mask a possible check, as the manual of field

operations in use in the country in question. We are always entitled to

assume that the manoeuvre which an army has attempted to carry out is

that prescribed by the rules that are applicable to the circumstances.

If, for instance, the rule lays down that a frontal attack should be

accompanied by a flank attack; if, after the flank attack has failed,

the Higher Command makes out that it had no connexion with the main

attack and was merely a diversion, there is a strong likelihood that the

truth will be found by consulting the rules and not the reports issued

from Headquarters. And there are not only the regulations governing each

army to be considered, but their traditions, their habits, their

doctrines; the study of diplomatic activities, with their perpetual

action or reaction upon military activities, must not be neglected

either. Incidents apparently insignificant, which at the time are not

understood, will explain to you how the enemy, counting upon a support

which these incidents shew to have been withheld, was able to carry out

only a part of his strategic plan. So that, if you can read between the

lines of military history, what is a confused jumble for the ordinary

reader becomes a chain of reasoning as straightforward as a picture is

for the picture-lover who can see what the person portrayed is wearing

and has in his hands, while the visitor hurrying through the gallery is

bewildered by a blur of colour which gives him a headache. But just as

with certain pictures, in which it is not enough to observe that the

figure is holding a chalice, but one must know why the painter chose to

place a chalice in his hands, what it is intended to symbolise, so these

military operations, apart from their immediate object, are quite

regularly traced, in the mind of the general responsible for the

campaign, from the plans of earlier battles, which we may call the past

experience, the literature, the learning, the etymology, the aristocracy

(whichever you like) of the battles of to-day. Observe that I am not

speaking for the moment of the local, the (what shall I call it?)

spatial identity of battles. That exists also. A battle-field has never

been, and never will be throughout the centuries, simply the ground upon

which a particular battle has been fought. If it has been a

battle-field, that was because it combined certain conditions of

geographical position, of geological formation, drawbacks even, of a

kind that would obstruct the enemy (a river, for instance, cutting his

force in two), which made it a good field of battle. And so what it has

been it will continue to be. A painter doesn’t make a studio out of any

old room; so you don’t make a battle-field out of any old piece of

ground. There are places set apart for the purpose. But, once again,

this is not what I was telling you about; it was the type of battle

which one follows, in a sort of strategic tracing, a tactical imitation,

if you like. Battles like Ulm, Lodi, Leipzig, Cannae. I can’t say

whether there is ever going to be another war, or what nations are going

to fight in it, but, if a war does come, you may be sure that it will

include (and deliberately, on the commander’s part) a Cannae, an

Austerlitz, a Rosbach, a Waterloo. Some of our people say quite openly

that Marshal von Schieffer and General Falkenhausen have prepared a

Battle of Cannae against France, in the Hannibal style, pinning their

enemy down along his whole front, and advancing on both flanks,

especially through Belgium, while Bernhardi prefers the oblique order of

Frederick the Great, Lenthen rather than Cannae. Others expound their

views less crudely, but I can tell you one thing, my boy, that

Beauconseil, the squadron commander I introduced you to the other day,

who is an officer with a very great future before him, has swotted up a

little Pratzen attack of his own; he knows it inside out, he is keeping

it up his sleeve, and if he ever has an opportunity to put it into

practice he will make a clean job of it and let us have it on a big

scale. The break through in the centre at Rivoli, too; that’s a thing

that will crop up if there’s ever another war. It’s no more obsolete

than the _Iliad_. I must add that we are practically condemned to make

frontal attacks, because we can’t afford to repeat the mistake we made

in Seventy; we must assume the offensive, and nothing else. The only

thing that troubles me is that if I see only the slower, more antiquated

minds among us opposing this splendid doctrine, still, one of the

youngest of my masters, who is a genius, I mean Mangin, would like us to

leave room, provisionally of course, for the defensive. It is not very

easy to answer him when he cites the example of Austerlitz, where the

defence was merely a prelude to attack and victory.”

The enunciation of these theories by Saint-Loup made me happy. They gave

me to hope that perhaps I was not being led astray, in my life at

Doncières, with regard to these officers whom I used to hear being

discussed while I sat sipping a sauterne which bathed them in its

charming golden glint, by the same magnifying power which had swollen to

such enormous proportions in my eyes while I was at Balbec the King and

Queen of the South Sea Island, the little group of the four epicures,

the young gambler, Legrandin’s brother-in-law, now shrunken so in my

view as to appear non-existent. What gave me pleasure to-day would not,

perhaps, leave me indifferent to-morrow, as had always happened

hitherto; the creature that I still was at this moment was not, perhaps,

doomed to immediate destruction, since to the ardent and fugitive

passion which I had felt on these few evenings for everything connected

with military life, Saint-Loup, by what he had just been saying to me,

touching the art of war, added an intellectual foundation, of a

permanent character, capable of attaching me to itself so strongly that

I might, without any attempt to deceive myself, feel assured that after

I had left Doncières I should continue to take an interest in the work

of my friends there, and should not be long in coming to pay them

another visit. At the same time, so as to make quite sure that this art

of war was indeed an art in the true sense of the word:

“You interest me—I beg your pardon, _tu_ interest me enormously,” I said

to Saint-Loup, “but tell me, there is one point that puzzles me. I feel

that I could be keenly thrilled by the art of strategy, but if so I must

first be sure that it is not so very different from the other arts, that

knowing the rules is not everything. You tell me that plans of battles

are copied. I do find something aesthetic, just as you said, in seeing

beneath a modern battle the plan of an older one, I can’t tell you how

attractive it sounds. But then, does the genius of the commander count

for nothing? Does he really do no more than apply the rules? Or, in

point of science, are there great generals as there are great surgeons,

who, when the symptoms exhibited by two states of ill-health are

identical to the outward eye, nevertheless feel, for some infinitesimal

reason, founded perhaps on their experience, but interpreted afresh,

that in one case they ought to do one thing, in another case another;

that in one case it is better to operate, in another to wait?”

“I should just say so! You will find Napoleon not attacking when all the

rules ordered him to attack, but some obscure divination warned him not

to. For instance, look at Austerlitz, or in 1806 take his instructions

to Lannes. But you will find certain generals slavishly imitating one of

Napoleon’s movements and arriving at a diametrically opposite result.

There are a dozen examples of that in 1870. But even for the

interpretation of what the enemy _may_ do, what he actually does is only

a symptom which may mean any number of different things. Each of them

has an equal chance of being the right thing, if one looks only to

reasoning and science, just as in certain difficult cases all the

medical science in the world will be powerless to decide whether the

invisible tumour is malignant or not, whether or not the operation ought

to be performed. It is his instinct, his divination—like Mme. de Thèbes

(you follow me?)—which decides, in the great general as in the great

doctor. Thus I’ve been telling you, to take one instance, what might be

meant by a reconnaissance on the eve of a battle. But it may mean a

dozen other things also, such as to make the enemy think you are going

to attack him at one point whereas you intend to attack him at another,

to put out a screen which will prevent him from seeing the preparations

for your real operation, to force him to bring up fresh troops, to hold

them, to immobilise them in a different place from where they are

needed, to form an estimate of the forces at his disposal, to feel him,

to force him to shew his hand. Sometimes, indeed, the fact that you

employ an immense number of troops in an operation is by no means a

proof that that is your true objective; for you may be justified in

carrying it out, even if it is only a feint, so that your feint may have

a better chance of deceiving the enemy. If I had time now to go through

the Napoleonic wars from this point of view, I assure you that these

simple classic movements which we study here, and which you will come

and see us practising in the field, just for the pleasure of a walk, you

young rascal—no, I know you’re not well, I apologise!—well, in a war,

when you feel behind you the vigilance, the judgment, the profound study

of the Higher Command, you are as much moved by them as by the simple

lamps of a lighthouse, only a material combustion, but an emanation of

the spirit, sweeping through space to warn ships of danger. I may have

been wrong, perhaps, in speaking to you only of the literature of war.

In reality, as the formation of the soil, the direction of wind and

light tell us which way a tree will grow, so the conditions in which a

campaign is fought, the features of the country through which you march,

prescribe, to a certain extent, and limit the number of the plans among

which the general has to choose. Which means that along a mountain

range, through a system of valleys, over certain plains, it is almost

with the inevitability and the tremendous beauty of an avalanche that

you can forecast the line of an army on the march.”

“Now you deny me that freedom of choice in the commander, that power of

divination in the enemy who is trying to discover his plan, which you

allowed me a moment ago.”

“Not at all. You remember that book of philosophy we read together at

Balbec, the richness of the world of possibilities compared with the

real world. Very well. It is the same again with the art of strategy. In

a given situation there will be four plans that offer themselves, one of

which the general has to choose, as a disease may pass through various

phases for which the doctor has to watch. And here again the weakness

and greatness of the human elements are fresh causes of uncertainty. For

of these four plans let us assume that contingent reasons (such as the

attainment of minor objects, or time, which may be pressing, or the

smallness of his effective strength and shortage of rations) lead the

general to prefer the first, which is less perfect, but less costly also

to carry out, is more rapid, and has for its terrain a richer country

for feeding his troops. He may, after having begun with this plan, which

the enemy, uncertain at first, will soon detect, find that success lies

beyond his grasp, the difficulties being too great (that is what I call

the element of human weakness), abandon it and try the second or third

or fourth. But it may equally be that he has tried the first plan (and

this is what I call human greatness) merely as a feint to pin down the

enemy, so as to surprise him later at a point where he has not been

expecting an attack. Thus at Ulm, Mack, who expected the enemy to

advance from the west, was surrounded from the north where he thought he

was perfectly safe. My example is not a very good one, as a matter of

fact. And Ulm is a better type of enveloping battle, which the future

will see reproduced, because it is not only a classic example from which

generals will seek inspiration, but a form that is to some extent

necessary (one of several necessities, which leaves room for choice, for

variety) like a type of crystallisation. But it doesn’t much matter,

really, because these conditions are after all artificial. To go back to

our philosophy book; it is like the rules of logic or scientific laws,

reality does conform to it more or less, but bear in mind that the great

mathematician Poincaré is by no means certain that mathematics are

strictly accurate. As to the rules themselves, which I mentioned to you,

they are of secondary importance really, and besides they are altered

from time to time. We cavalrymen, for instance, have to go by the _Field

Service_ of 1895, which, you may say, is out of date since it is based

on the old and obsolete doctrine which maintains that cavalry warfare

has little more than a moral effect, in the panic that the charge

creates in the enemy. Whereas the more intelligent of our teachers, all

the best brains in the cavalry, and particularly the major I was telling

you about, anticipate on the contrary that the decisive victory will be

obtained by a real hand to hand encounter in which our weapons will be

sabre and lance and the side that can hold out longer will win, not

simply morally and by creating panic, but materially.”

“Saint-Loup is quite right, and it is probable that the next _Field

Service_ will shew signs of this evolution,” put in my other neighbour.

“I am not ungrateful for your support, for your opinions seem to make

more impression upon my friend than mine,” said Saint-Loup with a smile,

whether because the growing attraction between his comrade and myself

annoyed him slightly or because he thought it graceful to solemnise it

with this official confirmation. “Perhaps I may have underestimated the

importance of the rules; I don’t know. They do change, that must be

admitted. But in the mean time they control the military situation, the

plans of campaign and concentration. If they reflect a false conception

of strategy they may be the principal cause of defeat. All this is a

little too technical for you,” he remarked to me. “After all, you may

say that what does most to accelerate the evolution of the art of war is

wars themselves. In the course of a campaign, if it is at all long, you

will see one belligerent profiting by the lessons furnished him by the

successes and mistakes, perfecting the methods of the other, who will

improve on him in turn. But all that is a thing of the past. With the

terrible advance of artillery, the wars of the future, if there are to

be any more wars, will be so short that, before we have had time to

think of putting our lessons into practice, peace will have been

signed.”

“Don’t be so touchy,” I told Saint-Loup, reverting to the first words of

this speech. “I was listening to you quite eagerly.”

“If you will kindly not fly into a passion, and will allow me to speak,”

his friend went on, “I shall add to what you have just been saying that

if battles copy and coincide with one another it is not merely due to

the mind of the commander. It may happen that a mistake on his part (for

instance, his failure to appreciate the strength of the enemy) will lead

him to call upon his men for extravagant sacrifices, sacrifices which

certain units will make with an abnegation so sublime that their part in

the battle will be analogous to that played by some other unit in some

other battle, and these will be quoted in history as interchangeable

examples: to stick to 1870, we have the Prussian Guard at Saint-Privat,

and the Turcos at Frœschviller and Wissembourg.”

“Ah! Interchangeable; very neat! Excellent! The lad has brains,” was

Saint-Loup’s comment.

I was not unmoved by these last examples, as always when, beneath the

particular instance, I was afforded a glimpse of the general law. Still,

the genius of the commander, that was what interested me, I was anxious

to discover in what it consisted, what steps, in given circumstances,

when the commander who lacked genius could not withstand the enemy, the

inspired leader would take to re-establish his jeopardised position,

which, according to Saint-Loup, was quite possible and had been done by

Napoleon more than once. And to understand what military worth meant I

asked for comparisons between the various generals whom I knew by name,

which of them had most markedly the character of a leader, the gifts of

a tactician; at the risk of boring my new friends, who however shewed no

signs of boredom, but continued to answer me with an inexhaustible

good-nature.

I felt myself isolated, not only from the great, freezing night which

extended far around us and in which we heard from time to time the

whistle of a train which only rendered more keen the pleasure of being

where we were, or the chime of an hour which, happily, was still a long

way short of that at which these young men would have to buckle on their

sabres and go, but also from all my external obsessions, almost from the

memory of Mme. de Guermantes, by the hospitality of Saint-Loup, to which

that of his friends, reinforcing it, gave, so to speak, a greater

solidity; by the warmth also of this little dining-room, by the savour

of the well-chosen dishes that were set before us. They gave as much

pleasure to my imagination as to my appetite; sometimes the little piece

of still life from which they had been taken, the rugged holy water

stoup of the oyster in which lingered a few drops of brackish water, or

the knotted stem, the yellow leaves of a bunch of grapes still enveloped

them, inedible, poetic and remote as a landscape, and producing, at

different points in the course of the meal, the impressions of rest in

the shade of a vine and of an excursion out to sea; on other evenings it

was the cook alone who threw into relief these original properties of

our food, which he presented in its natural setting, like a work of art;

and a fish cooked in wine was brought in on a long earthenware dish, on

which, as it stood out in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, unbreakable

now but still contorted from having been dropped alive into boiling

water, surrounded by a circle of satellite creatures in their shells,

crabs, shrimps and mussels, it had the appearance of being part of a

ceramic design by Bernard Palissy.

“I am jealous, furious,” Saint-Loup attacked me, half smiling, half in

earnest, alluding to the interminable conversations aside which I had

been having with his friend. “Is it because you find him more

intelligent than me; do you like him better than me? Well, I suppose

he’s everything now, and no one else is to have a look in!” Men who are

enormously in love with a woman, who live in the society of

woman-lovers, allow themselves pleasantries on which others, who would

see less innocence in them, would never venture.

When the conversation became general, they avoided any reference to

Dreyfus for fear of offending Saint-Loup. The following week, however,

two of his friends were remarking what a curious thing it was that,

living in so military an atmosphere, he was so keen a Dreyfusard, almost

an anti-militarist: “The reason is,” I suggested, not wishing to enter

into details, “that the influence of environment is not so important as

people think....” I intended of course to stop at this point, and not to

reiterate the observations which I had made to Saint-Loup a few days

earlier. Since, however, I had repeated these words almost textually, I

proceeded to excuse myself by adding: “As, in fact, I was saying the

other day....” But I had reckoned without the reverse side of Robert’s

polite admiration of myself and certain other persons. That admiration

reached its fulfilment in so entire an assimilation of their ideas that,

in the course of a day or two, he would have completely forgotten that

those ideas were not his own. And so, in the matter of my modest theory,

Saint-Loup, for all the world as though it had always dwelt in his own

brain, and as though I were merely poaching on his preserves, felt it

incumbent upon him to greet my discovery with warm approval.

“Why, yes; environment is of no importance.”

And with as much vehemence as if he were afraid of my interrupting, or

failing to understand him:

“The real influence is that of one’s intellectual environment! One is

the man of one’s idea!”

He stopped for a moment, with the satisfied smile of one who has

digested his dinner, dropped his eyeglass and, fixing me with a

gimlet-like stare:

“All men with similar ideas are alike,” he informed me, with a

challenging air. Probably he had completely forgotten that I myself had

said to him, only a few days earlier, what on the other hand he

remembered so well.

I did not arrive at Saint-Loup’s restaurant every evening in the same

state of mind. If a memory, a sorrow that weigh on us are able to leave

us so effectively that we are no longer aware of them, they can also

return and sometimes remain with us for a long time. There were evenings

when, as I passed through the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt

so keen a longing for Mme. de Guermantes that I could scarcely breathe;

you might have said that part of my breast had been cut open by a

skilled anatomist, taken out, and replaced by an equal part of

immaterial suffering, by an equivalent load of longing and love. And

however neatly the wound may have been stitched together, there is not

much comfort in life when regret for the loss of another person is

substituted for one’s entrails, it seems to be occupying more room than

they, one feels it perpetually, and besides, what a contradiction in

terms to be obliged to _think_ a part of one’s body. Only it seems that

we are worth more, somehow. At the whisper of a breeze we sigh, from

oppression, but from weariness also. I would look up at the sky. If it

were clear, I would say to myself: “Perhaps she is in the country; she

is looking at the same stars; and, for all I know, when I arrive at the

restaurant Robert may say to me: ‘Good news! I have just heard from my

aunt; she wants to meet you; she is coming down here.’” It was not in

the firmament alone that I enshrined the thought of Mme. de Guermantes.

A passing breath of air, more fragrant than the rest, seemed to bring me

a message from her, as, long ago, from Gilberte in the cornfields of

Méséglise. We do not change; we introduce into the feeling with which we

regard a person many slumbering elements which that feeling revives but

which are foreign to it. Besides, with these feelings for particular

people, there is always something in us that is trying to bring them

nearer to the truth, that is to say, to absorb them in a more general

feeling, common to the whole of humanity, with which people and the

suffering that they cause us are merely a means to enable us to

communicate. What brought a certain pleasure into my grief was that I

knew it to be a tiny fragment of the universal love. Simply because I

thought that I recognised sorrows which I had felt on Gilberte’s

account, or else when in the evenings at Combray Mamma would not stay in

any room, and also the memory of certain pages of Bergotte, in the agony

I now felt, to which Mme. de Guermantes, her coldness, her absence, were

not clearly linked, as cause is to effect in the mind of a philosopher,

I did not conclude that Mme. de Guermantes was not the cause of that

agony. Is there not such a thing as a diffused bodily pain, extending,

radiating out into other parts, which, however, it leaves, to vanish

altogether, if the practitioner lays his finger on the precise spot from

which it springs? And yet, until that moment, its extension gave it for

us so vague, so fatal a semblance that, powerless to explain or even to

locate it, we imagined that there was no possibility of its being

healed. As I made my way to the restaurant I said to myself: “A

fortnight already since I last saw Mme. de Guermantes.” A fortnight

which did not appear so enormous an interval save to me, who, when Mme.

de Guermantes was concerned, reckoned time by minutes. For me it was no

longer the stars and the breeze merely, but the arithmetical divisions

of time that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect. Each day now was like

the loose crest of a crumbling mountain, down one side of which I felt

that I could descend into oblivion, but down the other was borne by the

necessity of seeing the Duchess again. And I was continually inclining

one way or the other, having no stable equilibrium. One day I said to

myself: “Perhaps there will be a letter to-night;” and on entering the

dining-room I found courage to ask Saint-Loup:

“You don’t happen to have had any news from Paris?”

“Yes,” he replied gloomily; “bad news.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when I realised that it was only he who was

unhappy, and that the news came from his mistress. But I soon saw that

one of its consequences would be to prevent Robert, for ever so long,

from taking me to see his aunt.

I learned that a quarrel had broken out between him and his mistress,

through the post presumably, unless she had come down to pay him a

flying visit between trains. And the quarrels, even when relatively

slight, which they had previously had, had always seemed as though they

must prove insoluble. For she was a girl of violent temper, who would

stamp her foot and burst into tears for reasons as incomprehensible as

those that make children shut themselves into dark cupboards, not come

out for dinner, refuse to give any explanation, and only redouble their

sobs when, our patience exhausted, we visit them with a whipping. To say

that Saint-Loup suffered terribly from this estrangement would be an

understatement of the truth, which would give the reader a false

impression of his grief. When he found himself alone, the only picture

in his mind being that of his mistress parting from him with the respect

which she had felt for him at the sight of his energy, the anxieties

which he had had at first gave way before the irreparable, and the

cessation of an anxiety is so pleasant a thing that the rupture, once it

was certain, assumed for him something of the same kind of charm as a

reconciliation. What he began to suffer from, a little later, was a

secondary and accidental grief, the tide of which flowed incessantly

from his own heart, at the idea that perhaps she would be glad to make

it up, that it was not inconceivable that she was waiting for a word

from him, that in the mean time, to be avenged on him, she would perhaps

on a certain evening, in a certain place, do a certain thing, and that

he had only to telegraph to her that he was coming for it not to happen,

that others perhaps were taking advantage of the time which he was

letting slip, and that in a few days it would be too late to recapture

her, for she would be already bespoke. Among all these possibilities he

was certain of nothing; his mistress preserved a silence which wrought

him up to such a frenzy of grief that he began to ask himself whether

she might not be in hiding at Doncières, or have sailed for the Indies.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely

different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are

loved. It increases the anxiety of the lover who has to wait. Nothing so

tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and

what barrier is there so insurmountable as silence? It has been said

also that silence is a torture, capable of goading to madness him who is

condemned to it in a prison cell. But what a torture—keener than that of

having to keep silence—to have to endure the silence of the person one

loves! Robert asked himself: “What can she be doing, never to send me a

single word, like this? She hates me, perhaps, and will always go on

hating me.” And he reproached himself. Thus her silence did indeed drive

him mad with jealousy and remorse. Besides, more cruel than the silence

of prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison. An immaterial

enclosure, I admit, but impenetrable, this interposed slice of empty

atmosphere through which, despite its emptiness, the visual rays of the

abandoned lover cannot pass. Is there a more terrible illumination than

that of silence which shews us not one absent love but a thousand, and

shews us each of them in the act of indulging in some fresh betrayal?

Sometimes, in an abrupt relaxation of his strain, Robert would imagine

that this period of silence was just coming to an end, that the long

expected letter was on its way. He saw it, it arrived, he started at

every sound, his thirst was already quenched, he murmured: “The letter!

The letter!” After this glimpse of a phantom oasis of affection, he

found himself once more toiling across the real desert of a silence

without end.

He suffered in anticipation, without a single omission, all the griefs

and pains of a rupture which at other moments he fancied he might

somehow contrive to avoid, like people who put all their affairs in

order with a view to a migration abroad which they never make, whose

minds, no longer certain where they will find themselves living next

day, flutter helplessly for the time being, detached from them, like a

heart that is taken out of a dying man and continues to beat, though

disjoined from the rest of his body. Anyhow, this hope that his mistress

would return gave him courage to persevere in the rupture, as the belief

that one will return alive from the battle helps one to face death. And

inasmuch as habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that

has least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to

appear upon what is apparently the most barren rock, perhaps had he

begun by effecting their rupture as a feint he would in the end have

grown genuinely accustomed to it. But his uncertainty kept him in a

state of emotion which, linked with the memory of the woman herself, was

akin to love. He forced himself, nevertheless, not to write to her,

thinking perhaps that it was a less cruel torment to live without his

mistress than with her in certain conditions, or else that, after the

way in which they had parted, it was necessary to wait for excuses from

her, if she was to keep what he believed her to feel for him in the way,

if not of love, at any rate of esteem and regard. He contented himself

with going to the telephone, which had recently been installed at

Doncières, and asking for news from, or giving instructions to a lady’s

maid whom he had procured and placed with his friend. These

communications were, as it turned out, complicated and took up much of

his time, since, influenced by what her literary friends preached to her

about the ugliness of the capital, but principally for the sake of her

animals, her dogs, her monkey, her canaries and her parrokeet, whose

incessant din her Paris landlord had declined to tolerate for another

moment, Robert’s mistress had now taken a little house in the

neighbourhood of Versailles. Meanwhile he, down at Doncières, no longer

slept a wink all night. Once, in my room, overcome by exhaustion, he

dozed off for a little. But suddenly he began to talk, tried to get up

and run, to stop something from happening, said: “I hear her; you shan’t

... you shan’t....” He awoke. He had been dreaming, he explained to me,

that he was in the country with the serjeant-major. His host had tried

to keep him away from a certain part of the house. Saint-Loup had

discovered that the serjeant-major had staying with him a subaltern,

extremely rich and extremely vicious, whom he knew to have a violent

passion for his mistress. And suddenly in his dream he had distinctly

heard the spasmodic, regular cries which his mistress was in the habit

of uttering at the moment of gratification. He had tried to force the

serjeant-major to take him to the room in which she was. And the other

had held him back, to keep him from going there, with an air of

annoyance at such a want of discretion in a guest which, Robert said, he

would never be able to forget.

“It was an idiotic dream,” he concluded, still quite breathless.

All the same I could see that, during the hour that followed, he was

more than once on the point of telephoning to his mistress to beg for a

reconciliation. My father had now had the telephone for some time at

home, but I doubt whether that would have been of much use to

Saint-Loup. Besides, it hardly seemed to me quite proper to make my

parents, or even a mechanical instrument installed in their house, play

pander between Saint-Loup and his mistress, ladylike and high-minded as

the latter might be. His bad dream began to fade from his memory. With a

fixed and absent stare, he came to see me on each of those cruel days

which traced in my mind as they followed one after the other the

splendid sweep of a staircase forged in hard metal on which Robert stood

asking himself what decision his friend was going to take.

At length she wrote to ask whether he would consent to forgive her. As

soon as he realised that a definite rupture had been avoided he saw all

the disadvantages of a reconciliation. Besides, he had already begun to

suffer less acutely, and had almost accepted a grief the sharp tooth of

which he would have, in a few months perhaps, to feel again if their

intimacy were to be resumed. He did not hesitate for long. And perhaps

he hesitated only because he was now certain of being able to recapture

his mistress, of being able to do it and therefore of doing it. Only she

asked him, so that she might have time to recover her equanimity, not to

come to Paris at the New Year. Now he had not the heart to go to Paris

without seeing her. On the other hand, she had declared her willingness

to go abroad with him, but for that he would need to make a formal

application for leave, which Captain de Borodino was unwilling to grant.

“I’m sorry about it, because of your meeting with my aunt, which will

have to be put off. I dare say I shall be in Paris at Easter.”

“We shan’t be able to call on Mme. de Guermantes then, because I shall

have gone to Balbec. But, really, it doesn’t matter in the least, I

assure you.”

“To Balbec? But you didn’t go there till August.”

“I know; but next year they’re making me go there earlier, for my

health.”

All that he feared was that I might form a bad impression of his

mistress, after what he had told me. “She is violent simply because she

is too frank, too thorough in her feelings. But she is a sublime

creature. You can’t imagine what exquisite poetry there is in her. She

goes every year to spend All Souls’ Day at Bruges. ‘Nice’ of her, don’t

you think? If you ever do meet her you’ll see what I mean; she has a

greatness....” And, as he was infected with certain of the mannerisms

used in the literary circles in which the lady moved: “There is

something sidereal about her, in fact something bardic; you know what I

mean, the poet merging into the priest.”

I was searching all through dinner for a pretext which would enable

Saint-Loup to ask his aunt to see me without my having to wait until he

came to Paris. Now such a pretext was furnished by the desire that I had

to see some more pictures by Elstir, the famous painter whom Saint-Loup

and I had met at Balbec. A pretext behind which there was, moreover, an

element of truth, for if, on my visits to Elstir, what I had asked of

his painting had been that it should lead me to the comprehension and

love of things better than itself, a real thaw, an authentic square in a

country town, live women on a beach (all the more would I have

commissioned from it the portraits of the realities which I had not been

able to fathom, such as a lane of hawthorn-blossoms, not so much that it

might perpetuate their beauty for me as that it might reveal that beauty

to me), now, on the other hand, it was the originality, the seductive

attraction of those paintings that aroused my desire, and what I wanted

above anything else was to look at other pictures by Elstir.

It seemed to me, also, that the least of his pictures were something

quite different from the masterpieces even of greater painters than

himself. His work was like a realm apart, whose frontiers were not to be

passed, matchless in substance. Eagerly collecting the infrequent

periodicals in which articles on him and his work had appeared, I had

learned that it was only recently that he had begun to paint landscapes

and still life, and that he had started with mythological subjects (I

had seen photographs of two of these in his studio), and had then been

for long under the influence of Japanese art.

Several of the works most characteristic of his various manners were

scattered about the provinces. A certain house at Les Andelys, in which

there was one of his finest landscapes, seemed to me as precious, gave

me as keen a desire to go there and see it as did a village in the

Chartres district, among whose millstone walls was enshrined a glorious

painted window; and towards the possessor of this treasure, towards the

man who, inside his ugly house, on the main street, closeted like an

astrologer, sat questioning one of those mirrors of the world which

Elstir’s pictures were, and who had perhaps bought it for many thousands

of francs, I felt myself borne by that instinctive sympathy which joins

the very hearts, the inmost natures of those who think alike upon a

vital subject. Now three important works by my favourite painter were

described in one of these articles as belonging to Mme. de Guermantes.

So that it was, after all, quite sincerely that, on the evening on which

Saint-Loup told me of his lady’s projected visit to Bruges, I was able,

during dinner, in front of his friends, to let fall, as though on the

spur of the moment:

“Listen, if you don’t mind. Just one last word on the subject of the

lady we were speaking about. You remember Elstir, the painter I met at

Balbec?”

“Why, of course I do.”

“You remember how much I admired his work?”

“I do, quite well; and the letter we sent him.”

“Very well, one of the reasons—not one of the chief reasons, a

subordinate reason—why I should like to meet the said lady—you do know

who’ I mean, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. How involved you’re getting.”

“Is that she has in her house one very fine picture, at least, by

Elstir.”

“I say, I never knew that.”

“Elstir will probably be at Balbec at Easter; you know he stays down

there now all the year round, practically. I should very much like to

have seen this picture before I leave Paris. I don’t know whether you’re

on sufficiently intimate terms with your aunt: but couldn’t you manage,

somehow, to give her so good an impression of me that she won’t refuse,

and then ask her if she’ll let me come and see the picture without you,

since you won’t be there?”

“That’s all right. I’ll answer for her; I’ll make a special point of

it.”

“Oh, Robert, you are an angel; I do love you.”

“It’s very nice of you to love me, but it would be equally nice if you

were to call me _tu_, as you promised, and as you began to do.”

“I hope it’s not your departure that you two are plotting together,” one

of Robert’s friends said to me. “You know, if Saint-Loup does go on

leave, it needn’t make any difference, we shall still be here. It will

be less amusing for you, perhaps, but we’ll do all we can to make you

forget his absence.” As a matter of fact, just as we had decided that

Robert’s mistress would have to go to Bruges by herself, the news came

that Captain de Borodino, obdurate hitherto in his refusal, had given

authority for Serjeant Saint-Loup to proceed on long leave to Bruges.

What had happened was this. The Prince, extremely proud of his luxuriant

head of hair, was an assiduous customer of the principal hairdresser in

the town, who had started life as a boy under Napoleon III’s barber.

Captain de Borodino was on the best of terms with the hairdresser,

being, in spite of his air of majesty, quite simple in his dealings with

his inferiors. But the hairdresser, through whose books the Prince’s

account had been running without payment for at least five years,

swollen no less by bottles of Portugal and Eau des Souverains, irons,

razors, and strops, than by the ordinary charges for shampooing,

haircutting and the like, had a greater respect for Saint-Loup, who

always paid on the nail and kept several carriages and saddle-horses.

Having learned of Saint-Loup’s vexation at not being able to go with his

mistress, he had spoken strongly about it to the Prince at a moment when

he was trussed up in a white surplice with his head held firmly over the

back of the chair and his throat menaced by a razor. This narrative of a

young man’s gallant adventures won from the princely captain a smile of

Bonapartish indulgence. It is hardly probable that he thought of his

unpaid bill, but the barber’s recommendation tended to put him in as

good a humour as one from a duke would have put him in a bad. While his

chin was still smothered in soap, the leave was promised, and the

warrant was signed that evening. As for the hairdresser, who was in the

habit of boasting all day long of his own exploits, and in order to do

so claimed for himself, shewing an astonishing faculty for lying,

distinctions that were pure fabrications, having for once rendered this

signal service to Saint-Loup, not only did he refrain from publishing it

broadcast, but, as if vanity were obliged to lie, and when there was no

scope for lying gave place to modesty, he never mentioned the matter to

Robert again.

All his friends assured me that, as long as I stayed at Doncières, or if

I should come there again at any time, even although Robert were away,

their horses, their quarters, their time would be at my disposal, and I

felt that it was with the greatest cordiality that these young men put

their comfort and youth and strength at the service of my weakness.

“Why on earth,” they went on, after insisting that I should stay, “don’t

you come down here every year; you see how our quiet life appeals to

you! Besides you’re so keen about everything that goes on in the

Regiment; quite the old soldier.”

For I continued my eager demands that they would classify the different

officers whose names I knew according to the degree of admiration which

they seemed to deserve, just as, in my schooldays, I used to make the

other boys classify the actors of the Théâtre-Français. If, in the place

of one of the generals whom I had always heard mentioned at the head of

the list, such as Galliffet or Négrier, one of Saint-Loup’s friends,

with a contemptuous: “But Négrier is one of the feeblest of our general

officers,” put the new, intact, appetising name of Pau or Geslin de

Bourgogne, I felt the same joyful surprise as long ago when the outworn

name of Thiron or Febvre was sent flying by the sudden explosion of the

unfamiliar name of Amaury. “Better even than Négrier? But in what

respect; give me an example?” I should have liked there to exist

profound differences even among the junior officers of the regiment, and

I hoped in the reason for these differences to seize the essential

quality of what constituted military superiority. The one whom I should

have been most interested to hear discussed, because he was the one whom

I had most often seen, was the Prince de Borodino. But neither

Saint-Loup nor his friends, if they did justice to the fine officer who

kept his squadron up to the supreme pitch of efficiency, liked the man.

Without speaking of him, naturally, in the same tone as of certain other

officers, rankers and freemasons, who did not associate much with the

rest and had, in comparison, an uncouth, barrack-room manner, they

seemed not to include M. de Borodino among the officers of noble birth,

from whom, it must be admitted, he differed considerably in his attitude

even towards Saint-Loup. The others, taking advantage of the fact that

Robert was only an N.C.O., and that therefore his influential relatives

might be grateful were he invited to the houses of superior officers on

whom ordinarily they would have looked down, lost no opportunity of

having him to dine when any bigwig was expected who might be of use to a

young cavalry serjeant. Captain de Borodino alone confined himself to

his official relations (which, for that matter, were always excellent)

with Robert. The fact was that the Prince, whose grandfather had been

made a Marshal and a Prince-Duke by the Emperor, with whose family he

had subsequently allied himself by marriage, while his father had

married a cousin of Napoleon III and had twice been a Minister after the

Coup d’Etat, felt that in spite of all this he did not count for much

with Saint-Loup and the Guermantes connexion, who in turn, since he did

not look at things from the same point of view as they, counted for very

little with him. He suspected that, for Saint-Loup, he himself was—he, a

kinsman of the Hohenzollern—not a true noble but the grandson of a

farmer, but at the same time he regarded Saint-Loup as the son of a man

whose Countship had been confirmed by the Emperor—one of what were known

in the Faubourg Saint-Germain as “touched-up” Counts—and who had

besought him first for a Prefecture, then for some other post a long way

down the list of subordinates to His Highness the Prince de Borodino,

Minister of State, who was styled on his letters “Monseigneur” and was a

nephew of the Sovereign.

Something more than a nephew, possibly. The first Princesse de Borodino

was reputed to have bestowed her favours on Napoleon I, whom she

followed to the Isle of Elba, and the second hers on Napoleon III. And

if, in the Captain’s placid countenance, one caught a trace of Napoleon

I—if not in his natural features, at least in the studied majesty of the

mask—the officer had, particularly in his melancholy and kindly gaze, in

his drooping moustache, something that reminded one also of Napoleon

III; and this in so striking a fashion that, having asked leave, after

Sedan, to join the Emperor in captivity, and having been sent away by

Bismarck, before whom he had been brought, the latter, happening to look

up at the young man who was preparing to leave the room, was at once

impressed by the likeness and, reconsidering his decision, recalled him

and gave him the authorisation which he, in common with every one else,

had just been refused.

If the Prince de Borodino was not prepared to make overtures to

Saint-Loup nor to the other representatives of Faubourg Saint-Germain

society that there were in the regiment (while he frequently invited two

subalterns of plebeian origin who were pleasant companions) it was

because, looking down upon them all from the height of his Imperial

grandeur, he drew between these two classes of inferiors the distinction

that one set consisted of inferiors who knew themselves to be such and

with whom he was delighted to spend his time, being beneath his outward

majesty of a simple, jovial humour, and the other of inferiors who

thought themselves his superiors, a claim which he could not allow. And

so, while all the other officers of the regiment made much of

Saint-Loup, the Prince de Borodino, to whose care the young man had been

recommended by Marshal X——, confined himself to being obliging with

regard to the military duties which Saint-Loup always performed in the

most exemplary fashion, but never had him to his house except on one

special occasion when he found himself practically compelled to invite

him, and when, as this occurred during my stay at Doncières, he asked

him to bring me to dinner also. I had no difficulty that evening, as I

watched Saint-Loup sitting at his Captain’s table, in distinguishing, in

their respective manners and refinements, the difference that existed

between the two aristocracies: the old nobility and that of the Empire.

The offspring of a caste the faults of which, even if he repudiated them

with all the force of his intellect, had been absorbed into his blood, a

caste which, having ceased to exert any real authority for at least a

century, saw nothing more now in the protective affability which formed

part of its regular course of education, than an exercise, like

horsemanship or fencing, cultivated without any serious purpose, as a

sport; on meeting representatives of that middle class on which the old

nobility so far looked down as to believe that they were flattered by

its intimacy and would be honoured by the informality of its tone,

Saint-Loup would take the hand of no matter who might be introduced to

him, though he had failed perhaps to catch the stranger’s name, in a

friendly grip, and as he talked to him (crossing and uncrossing his legs

all the time, flinging himself back in his chair in an attitude of

absolute unconstraint, one foot in the palm of his hand) call him “my

dear fellow.” Belonging on the other hand to a nobility whose titles

still preserved their original meaning, provided that their holders

still possessed the splendid emoluments given in reward for glorious

services and bringing to mind the record of high offices in which one is

in command of numberless men and must know how to deal with men, the

Prince de Borodino—not perhaps very distinctly or with any clear

personal sense of superiority, but at any rate in his body, which

revealed it by its attitudes and behaviour generally—regarded his own

rank as a prerogative that was still effective; those same commoners

whom Saint-Loup would have slapped on the shoulder and taken by the arm

he addressed with a majestic affability, in which a reserve instinct

with grandeur tempered the smiling good-fellowship that came naturally

to him, in a tone marked at once by a genuine kindliness and a stiffness

deliberately assumed. This was due, no doubt, to his being not so far

removed from the great Embassies, and the Court itself, at which his

father had held the highest posts, whereas the manners of Saint-Loup,

the elbow on the table, the foot in the hand, would not have been well

received there; but principally it was due to the fact that he looked

down less upon the middle classes because they were the inexhaustible

source from which the first Emperor had chosen his Marshals and his

nobles and in which the second had found a Rouher and a Fould.

Son, doubtless, or grandson of an Emperor, who had nothing more

important to do than to command a squadron, the preoccupations of his

putative father and grandfather could not, for want of an object on

which to fasten themselves, survive in any real sense in the mind of M.

de Borodino. But as the spirit of an artist continues to model, for many

years after he is dead, the statue which he carved, so they had taken

shape in him, were materialised, incarnate in him, it was they that his

face reflected. It was with, in his voice, the vivacity of the first

Emperor that he worded a reprimand to a corporal, with the dreamy

melancholy of the second that he puffed out the smoke of a cigarette.

When he passed in plain clothes through the streets of Doncières, a

certain sparkle in his eyes escaping from under the brim of the bowler

hat sent radiating round this captain of cavalry a regal incognito;

people trembled when he strode into the serjeant-major’s office,

followed by the adjutant and the quartermaster, as though by Berthier

and Masséna. When he chose the cloth for his squadron’s breeches, he

fastened on the master-tailor a gaze capable of baffling Talleyrand and

deceiving Alexander; and at times, in the middle of an inspection, he

would stop, let his handsome blue eyes cloud with dreams, twist his

moustache, with the air of one building up a new Prussia and a new

Italy. But a moment later, reverting from Napoleon III to Napoleon I, he

would point out that the equipment was not properly polished, and would

insist on tasting the men’s rations. And at home, in his private life,

it was for the wives of middle class officers (provided that their

husbands were not freemasons) that he would bring out not only a dinner

service of royal blue Sèvres, fit for an Ambassador (which had been

given to his father by Napoleon, and appeared even more priceless in the

commonplace house on a provincial street in which he was living, like

those rare porcelains which tourists admire with a special delight in

the rustic china-cupboard of some old manor that has been converted into

a comfortable and prosperous farm house), but other gifts of the Emperor

also: those noble and charming manners, which too would have won

admiration in some diplomatic post abroad, if, for some men, it did not

mean a lifelong condemnation to the most unjust form of ostracism,

merely to be well born; his easy gestures, his kindness, his grace, and,

embedding beneath an enamel that was of royal blue, also glorious

images, the mysterious, illuminated, living reliquary of his gaze. And,

in treating of the social relations with the middle classes which the

Prince had at Doncières, it may be as well to add these few words. The

lieutenant-colonel played the piano beautifully; the senior medical

officer’s wife sang like a Conservatoire medallist. This latter couple,

as well as the lieutenant-colonel and his wife, used to dine every week

with M. de Borodino. They were flattered, unquestionably, knowing that

when the Prince went to Paris on leave he dined with Mme. de Pourtalès,

and the Murats, and people like that. “But,” they said to themselves,

“he’s just a captain, after all; he’s only too glad to get us to come.

Still, he’s a real friend, you know.” But when M. de Borodino, who had

long been pulling every possible wire to secure an appointment for

himself nearer Paris, was posted to Beauvais, he packed up and went, and

forgot as completely the two musical couples as he forgot the Doncières

theatre and the little restaurant to which he used often to send out for

his luncheon, and, to their great indignation, neither the

lieutenant-colonel nor the senior medical officer, who had so often sat

at his table, ever had so much as a single word from him for the rest of

their lives.

One morning, Saint-Loup confessed to me that he had written to my

grandmother to give her news of me, with the suggestion that, since

there was telephonic connexion between Paris and Doncières, she might

make use of it to speak to me. In short, that very day she was to give

me a call, and he advised me to be at the post office at about a quarter

to four. The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in use as it

is to-day. And yet habit requires so short a time to divest of their

mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that, not having

had my call at once, the only thought in my mind was that it was very

slow, and badly managed, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint. Like

all of us nowadays I found not rapid enough for my liking in its abrupt

changes the admirable sorcery for which a few moments are enough to

bring before us, invisible but present, the person to whom we have been

wishing to speak, and who, while still sitting at his table, in the town

in which he lives (in my grandmother’s case, Paris), under another sky

than ours, in weather that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of

circumstances and worries of which we know nothing, but of which he is

going to inform us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles

(he and all the surroundings in which he remains immured) within reach

of our ear, at the precise moment which our fancy has ordained. And we

are like the person in the fairy-tale to whom a sorceress, on his

uttering the wish, makes appear with supernatural clearness his

grandmother or his betrothed in the act of turning over a book, of

shedding tears, of gathering flowers, quite close to the spectator and

yet ever so remote, in the place in which she actually is at the moment.

We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to

the magic orifice and invoke—occasionally for rather longer than seems

to us necessary, I admit—the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen

every day without ever coming to know their faces, and who are our

Guardian Angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so

jealously keep; the All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise

up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the

Danaids of the Unseen who without ceasing empty, fill, transmit the urns

of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a confidence

to a friend, in the hope that no one was listening, cry brutally: “I

hear you!”; the ever infuriated servants of the Mystery, the umbrageous

priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the Telephone.

And, the moment our call has sounded, in the night filled with phantoms

to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny sound, an abstract

sound—the sound of distance overcome—and the voice of the dear one

speaks to us.

It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how

remote it is! How often have I been unable to listen without anguish, as

though, confronted by the impossibility of seeing, except after long

hours of journeying, her whose voice has been so close to my ear, I felt

more clearly the sham and illusion of meetings apparently most pleasant,

and at what a distance we may be from the people we love at the moment

when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hand to seize and

hold them. A real presence indeed that voice so near—in actual

separation. But a premonition also of an eternal separation! Over and

again, as I listened in this way, without seeing her who spoke to me

from so far away, it has seemed to me that the voice was crying to me

from depths out of which one does not rise again, and I have known the

anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice should thus

return (alone, and attached no longer to a body which I was never more

to see), to murmur, in my ear, words I would fain have kissed as they

issued from lips for ever turned to dust.

This afternoon, alas, at Doncières, the miracle did not occur. When I

reached the post office, my grandmother’s call had already been

received; I stepped into the box; the line was engaged; some one was

talking who probably did not realise that there was nobody to answer

him, for when I raised the receiver to my ear, the lifeless block began

squeaking like Punchinello; I silenced it, as one silences a puppet, by

putting it back on its hook, but, like Punchinello, as soon as I took it

again in my hand, it resumed its gabbling. At length, giving it up as

hopeless, by hanging up the receiver once and for all, I stifled the

convulsions of this vociferous stump which kept up its chatter until the

last moment, and went in search of the operator, who told me to wait a

little; then I spoke, and, after a few seconds of silence, suddenly I

heard that voice which I supposed myself, mistakenly, to know so well;

for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me,

I had been accustomed to follow what she was saying on the open score of

her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but her voice itself I

was hearing this afternoon for the first time. And because that voice

appeared to me to have altered in its proportions from the moment that

it was a whole, and reached me in this way alone and without the

accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered for the first time

how sweet that voice was; perhaps, too, it had never been so sweet, for

my grandmother, knowing me to be alone and unhappy, felt that she might

let herself go in the outpouring of an affection which, on her principle

of education, she usually restrained and kept hidden. It was sweet, but

also how sad it was, first of all on account of its very sweetness, a

sweetness drained almost—more than any but a few human voices can ever

have been—of every element of resistance to others, of all selfishness;

fragile by reason of its delicacy it seemed at every moment ready to

break, to expire in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone

beside me, seen, without the mask of her face, I noticed for the first

time the sorrows that had scarred it in the course of a lifetime.

Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me

this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; it was rather that

this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, a presentation, a direct

consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, separated, for

the first time in my life, from myself. The orders or prohibitions which

she addressed to me at every moment in the ordinary course of my life,

the tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion which neutralised the

affection that I felt for her were at this moment eliminated, and indeed

might be eliminated for ever (since my grandmother no longer insisted on

having me with her under her control, was in the act of expressing her

hope that I would stay at Doncières altogether, or would at any rate

extend my visit for as long as possible, seeing that both my health and

my work seemed likely to benefit by the change); also, what I held

compressed in this little bell that was ringing in my ear was, freed

from the conflicting pressures which had, every day hitherto, given it a

counterpoise, and from this moment irresistible, carrying me altogether

away, our mutual affection. My grandmother, by telling me to stay,

filled me with an anxious, an insensate longing to return. This freedom

of action which for the future she allowed me and to which I had never

dreamed that she would consent, appeared to me suddenly as sad as might

be my freedom of action after her death (when I should still love her

and she would for ever have abandoned me). “Granny!” I cried to her,

“Granny!” and would fain have kissed her, but I had beside me only that

voice, a phantom, as impalpable as that which would come perhaps to

revisit me when my grandmother was dead. “Speak to me!” but then it

happened that, left more solitary still, I ceased to catch the sound of

her voice. My grandmother could no longer hear me; she was no longer in

communication with me; we had ceased to stand face to face, to be

audible to one another; I continued to call her, sounding the empty

night, in which I felt that her appeals also must be straying. I was

shaken by the same anguish which, in the distant past, I had felt once

before, one day when, a little child, in a crowd, I had lost her, an

anguish due less to my not finding her than to the thought that she must

be searching for me, must be saying to herself that I was searching for

her; an anguish comparable to that which I was to feel on the day when

we speak to those who can no longer reply and whom we would so love to

have hear all the things that we have not told them, and our assurance

that we are not unhappy. It seemed as though it were already a beloved

ghost that I had allowed to lose herself in the ghostly world, and,

standing alone before the instrument, I went on vainly repeating:

“Granny! Granny!” as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of his dead

wife. I decided to leave the post office, to go and find Robert at his

restaurant, in order to tell him that, as I was half expecting a

telegram which would oblige me to return to Paris, I wished at all costs

to find out at what times the trains left. And yet, before reaching this

decision, I felt I must make one attempt more to invoke the Daughters of

the Night, the Messengers of the Word, the Deities without form or

feature; but the capricious Guardians had not deigned once again to

unclose the miraculous portals, or more probably, had not been able; in

vain might they untiringly appeal, as was their custom, to the venerable

inventor of printing and the young prince, collector of impressionist

paintings and driver of motor-cars (who was Captain de Borodino’s

nephew); Gutenberg and Wagram left their supplications unanswered, and I

came away, feeling that the Invisible would continue to turn a deaf ear.

When I came among Robert and his friends, I withheld the confession that

my heart was no longer with them, that my departure was now irrevocably

fixed. Saint-Loup appeared to believe me, but I learned afterwards that

he had from the first moment realised that my uncertainty was feigned

and that he would not see me again next day. And while, letting their

plates grow cold, his friends joined him in searching through the

time-table for a train which would take me to Paris, and while we heard

in the cold, starry night the whistling of the engines on the line, I

certainly felt no longer the same peace of mind which on all these last

evenings I had derived from the friendship of the former and the

latter’s distant passage. And yet they did not fail me this evening,

performing the same office in a different way. My departure overpowered

me less when I was no longer obliged to think of it by myself, when I

felt that there was concentrated on what was to be done the more normal,

more wholesome activity of my strenuous friends, Robert’s brothers in

arms, and of those other strong creatures, the trains, whose going and

coming, night and morning, between Doncières and Paris, broke up in

retrospect what had been too compact and insupportable in my long

isolation from my grandmother into daily possibilities of return.

“I don’t doubt the truth of what you’re saying, or that you aren’t

thinking of leaving us just yet,” said Saint-Loup, smiling; “but pretend

you are going, and come and say good-bye to me to-morrow morning; early,

otherwise there’s a risk of my not seeing you; I’m going out to

luncheon, I’ve got leave from the Captain; I shall have to be back in

barracks by two, as we are to be on the march all afternoon. I suppose

the man to whose house I’m going, a couple of miles out, will manage to

get me back in time.”

Scarcely had he uttered these words when a messenger came for me from my

hotel; the telephone operator had sent to find me. I ran to the post

office, for it was nearly closing time. The word “trunks” recurred

incessantly in the answers given me by the officials. I was in a fever

of anxiety, for it was my grandmother who had asked for me. The office

was closing for the night. Finally I got my connexion. “Is that you,

Granny?” A woman’s voice, with a strong English accent, answered: “Yes,

but I don’t know your voice.” Neither did I recognise the voice that was

speaking to me; besides, my grandmother called me _tu_, and not _vous_.

And then all was explained. The young man for whom his grandmother had

called on the telephone had a name almost identical with my own, and was

staying in an annex of my hotel. This call coming on the very day on

which I had been telephoning to my grandmother, I had never for a moment

doubted that it was she who was asking for me. Whereas it was by pure

coincidence that the post office and the hotel had combined to make a

twofold error.

The following morning I rose late, and failed to catch Saint-Loup, who

had already started for the country house where he was invited to

luncheon. About half past one, I had decided to go in any case to the

barracks, so as to be there before he arrived, when, as I was crossing

one of the avenues on the way there, I noticed, coming behind me in the

same direction as myself, a tilbury which, as it overtook me, obliged me

to jump out of its way; an N.C.O. was driving it, wearing an eyeglass;

it was Saint-Loup. By his side was the friend whose guest he had been at

luncheon, and whom I had met once before at the hotel where we dined. I

did not dare shout to Robert since he was not alone, but, in the hope

that he would stop and pick me up, I attracted his attention by a

sweeping wave of my hat, which might be regarded as due to the presence

of a stranger. I knew that Robert was short-sighted; still, I should

have supposed that, provided he saw me at all, he could not fail to

recognise me; he did indeed see my salute, and returned it, but without

stopping; driving on at full speed, without a smile, without moving a

muscle of his face, he confined himself to keeping his hand raised for a

minute to the peak of his cap, as though he were acknowledging the

salute of a trooper whom he did not know personally. I ran to the

barracks, but it was a long way; when I arrived, the regiment was

parading on the square, on which I was not allowed to stand, and I was

heart-broken at not having been able to say good-bye to Saint-Loup; I

went up to his room, but he had gone; I was reduced to questioning a

group of sick details, recruits who had been excused route-marches, the

young graduate, one of the “old soldiers”, who were watching the

regiment parade.

“You haven’t seen Serjeant Saint-Loup, have you, by any chance?” I

asked.

“He’s gone on parade, sir,” said the old soldier.

“I never saw him,” said the graduate.

“You never saw him,” exclaimed the old soldier, losing all interest in

me, “you never saw our famous Saint-Loup, the figure he’s cutting with

his new breeches! When the Capstan sees that, officer’s cloth, my word!”

“Oh, you’re a wonder, you are; officer’s cloth,” replied the young

graduate, who, reported “sick in quarters”, was excused marching and

tried, not without some misgivings, to be on easy terms with the

veterans. “This officer’s cloth you speak of is cloth like that, is it?”

“Sir?” asked the old soldier angrily.

He was indignant that the young graduate should throw doubt on the

breeches’ being made of officer’s cloth, but, being a Breton, coming

from a village that went by the name of Penguern-Stereden, having

learned French with as much difficulty as if it had been English or

German, whenever he felt himself overcome by emotion he would go on

saying “Sir?” to give himself time to find words, then, after this

preparation, let loose his eloquence, confining himself to the

repetition of certain words which he knew better than others, but

without haste, taking every precaution to glose over his unfamiliarity

with the pronunciation.

“Ah! It is cloth like that,” he broke out, with a fury the intensity of

which increased as the speed of his utterance diminished. “Ah! It is

cloth like that; when I tell.. you that it is, officer’s cloth,

when-I-tell-you-a-thing, if-I-tell-you-a-thing, it’s because I know, I

should think.”

“Very well, then;” replied the young graduate, overcome by the force of

this argument. “Keep your hair on, old boy.”

“There, look, there’s the Capstan coming along. No, but just look at

Saint-Loup; the way he throws his leg out; and his head. Would you call

that a non-com? And his eyeglass; oh, he’s hot stuff, he is.”

I asked these troopers, who did not seem at all embarrassed by my

presence, whether I too might look out of the window. They neither

objected to my doing so nor moved to make room for me. I saw Captain de

Borodino go majestically by, putting his horse into a trot, and

apparently under the illusion that he was taking part in the Battle of

Austerlitz. A few loiterers had stopped by the gate to see the regiment

file out. Erect on his charger, his face inclined to plumpness, his

cheeks of an Imperial fulness, his eye lucid, the Prince must have been

the victim of some hallucination, as I was myself whenever, after the

tramway-car had passed, the silence that followed its rumble seemed to

me to throb and echo with a vaguely musical palpitation. I was wretched

at not having said good-bye to Saint-Loup, but I went nevertheless, for

my one anxiety was to return to my grandmother; always until then, in

this little country town, when I thought of what my grandmother must be

doing by herself, I had pictured her as she was when with me,

suppressing my own personality but without taking into account the

effects of such a suppression; now, I had to free myself, at the first

possible moment, in her arms, from the phantom, hitherto unsuspected and

suddenly called into being by her voice, of a grandmother really

separated from me, resigned, having, what I had never yet thought of her

as having, a definite age, who had just received a letter from me in an

empty house, as I had once before imagined Mamma in a house by herself,

when I had left her to go to Balbec.