What astonished me more in Bloch than his bad manners was to find how

the quality of his conversation varied. This youth, so hard to please

that of authors who were at the height of their fame he would say: "He's

a gloomy idiot; he's a sheer imbecile," would every now and then tell,

with immense gusto, stories that were simply not funny or would instance

as a "really remarkable person" some man who was completely

insignificant. This double scale of measuring the wit, the worth, the

interest of people continued to puzzle me until I was introduced to M.

Bloch, senior.

I had not supposed that we should ever be allowed to know him, for Bloch

junior had spoken ill of me to Saint-Loup and of Saint-Loup to me. In

particular, he had said to Robert that I was (always) a frightful snob.

"Yes, really, he is overjoyed at knowing M. LLLLegrandin." This trick of

isolating a word, was, in Bloch, a sign at once of irony and of

learning. Saint-Loup, who had never heard the name of Legrandin, was

bewildered. "But who is he?" "Oh, he's a bit of all right, he is!" Bloch

laughed, thrusting his hands into his pockets as though for warmth,

convinced that he was at that moment engaged in contemplation of the

picturesque aspect of an extraordinary country gentleman compared to

whom those of Barbey d'Aurevilly were as nothing. He consoled himself

for his inability to portray M. Legrandin by giving him a string of

capital 'L's, smacking his lips over the name as over a wine from the

farthest bin. But these subjective enjoyments remained hidden from other

people. If he spoke ill of me to Saint-Loup he made up for it by

speaking no less ill of Saint-Loup to me. We had each of us learned

these slanders in detail, the next day, not that we repeated them to

each other, a thing which would have seemed to us very wrong, but to

Bloch appeared so natural and almost inevitable that in his natural

anxiety, in the certainty moreover that he would be telling us only what

each of us was bound sooner or later to know, he preferred to anticipate

the disclosure and, taking Saint-Loup aside, admitted that he had spoken

ill of him, on purpose, so that it might be repeated to him, swore to

him "by Zeus Kronion, binder of oaths" that he loved him dearly, that he

would lay down his life for him; and wiped away a tear. The same day, he

contrived to see me alone, made his confession, declared that he had

acted in my interest, because he felt that a certain kind of social

intercourse was fatal to me and that I was "worthy of better things."

Then, clasping me by the hand, with the sentimentality of a drunkard,

albeit his drunkenness was purely nervous: "Believe me," he said, "and

may the black Ker seize me this instant and bear me across the portals

of Hades, hateful to men, if yesterday, when I thought of you, of

Combray, of my boundless affection for you, of afternoon hours in class

which you do not even remember, I did not lie awake weeping all night

long. Yes, all night long, I swear it, and alas, I know--for I know the

human soul--you will not believe me." I did indeed "not believe" him,

and to his words which, I felt, he was making up on the spur of the

moment, and expanding as he went on, his swearing "by Ker" added no

great weight, the Hellenic cult being in Bloch purely literary. Besides,

whenever he began to grow sentimental and wished his hearer to grow

sentimental over a falsehood, he would say: "I swear it", more for the

hysterical satisfaction of lying than to make people think that he was

speaking the truth. I did not believe what he was saying, but I bore him

no ill-will for that, for I had inherited from my mother and grandmother

their incapacity for resentment even of far worse offenders, and their

habit of never condemning anyone.

Besides, he was not altogether a bad youth, this Bloch; he could be, and

was at times quite charming. And now that the race of Combray, the race

from which sprang creatures absolutely unspoiled like my grandmother and

mother, seems almost extinct, as I have hardly any choice now save

between honest brutes, insensible and loyal, in whom the mere sound of

their voices shews at once that they take absolutely no interest in

one's life--and another kind of men who so long as they are with one

understand one, cherish one, grow sentimental even to tears, take their

revenge a few hours later by making some cruel joke at one's expense,

but return to one, always just as comprehending, as charming, as closely

assimilated, for the moment, to oneself, I think that it is of this

latter sort that I prefer if not the moral worth at any rate the

society.

"You cannot imagine my grief when I think of you," Bloch went on. "When

you come to think of it, it is a rather Jewish side of my nature," he

added ironically, contracting his pupils as though he had to prepare for

the microscope an infinitesimal quantity of "Jewish blood", and as might

(but never would) have said a great French noble who among his

ancestors, all Christian, might nevertheless have included Samuel

Bernard, or further still, the Blessed Virgin from whom, it is said, the

Lévy family claim descent, "coming out. I rather like," he continued

"to find room among my feelings for the share (not that it is more than

a very tiny share) which may be ascribed to my Jewish origin." He made

this statement because it seemed to him at once clever and courageous to

speak the truth about his race, a truth which at the same time he

managed to water down to a remarkable extent, like misers who decide to

pay their debts but have not the courage to pay more than half. This

kind of deceit which consists in having the boldness to proclaim the

truth, but only after mixing with it an ample measure of lies which

falsify it, is commoner than people think, and even among those who do

not habitually practise it certain crises in life, especially those in

which love is at stake, give them an opportunity of taking to it.

All these confidential diatribes by Bloch to Saint-Loup against me and

to me against Saint-Loup ended in an invitation to dinner. I am by no

means sure that he did not first make an attempt to secure Saint-Loup by

himself. It would have been so like Bloch to do so that probably he did;

but if so success did not crown his effort, for it was to myself and

Saint-Loup that Bloch said one day: "Dear master, and you, O horseman

beloved of Ares, de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, tamer of horses, since I have

encountered you by the shore of Amphitrite, resounding with foam, hard

by the tents of the swift-shipped Méniers, will both of you come to

dinner any day this week with my illustrious sire, of blameless heart?"

He proffered this invitation because he desired to attach himself more

closely to Saint-Loup who would, he hoped, secure him the right of entry

into aristocratic circles. Formed by me for myself, this ambition would

have seemed to Bloch the mark of the most hideous snobbishness, quite in

keeping with the opinion that he already held of a whole side of my

nature which he did not regard--or at least had not hitherto

regarded--as its most important side; but the same ambition in himself

seemed to him the proof of a finely developed curiosity in a mind

anxious to carry out certain social explorations from which he might

perhaps glean some literary benefit. M. Bloch senior, when his son had

told him that he was going to bring one of his friends in to dinner, and

had in a sarcastic but satisfied tone enunciated the name and title of

that friend: "The Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray", had been thrown into

great commotion. "The Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray! I'll be jiggered!"

he had exclaimed, using the oath which was with him the strongest

indication of social deference. And he cast at a son capable of having

formed such an acquaintance an admiring glance which seemed to say:

"Really, it is astounding. Can this prodigy be indeed a child of mine?"

which gave my friend as much pleasure as if his monthly allowance had

been increased by fifty francs. For Bloch was not in his element at home

and felt that his father treated him like a lost sheep because of his

lifelong admiration for Leconte de Lisle, Heredia and other "Bohemians".

But to have got to know Saint-Loup-en-Bray, whose father had been

chairman of the Suez Canal board ("I'll be jiggered!") was an

indisputable "score". What a pity, indeed, that they had left in Paris,

for fear of its being broken on the journey, the stereoscope. Alone

among men, M. Bloch senior had the art, or at least the right to exhibit

it. He did this, moreover, on rare occasions only, and then to good

purpose, on evenings when there was a full-dress affair, with hired

waiters. So that from these exhibitions of the stereoscope there

emanated, for those who were present, as it were a special distinction,

a privileged position, and for the master of the house who gave them a

reputation such as talent confers on a man--which could not have been

greater had the photographs been taken by M. Bloch himself and the

machine his own invention. "You weren't invited to Solomon's yesterday?"

one of the family would ask another. "No! I was not one of the elect.

What was on?" "Oh, a great how-d'ye-do, the stereoscope, the whole box

of tricks!" "Indeed! If they had the stereoscope I'm sorry I wasn't

there; they say Solomon is quite amazing when he works it."--"It can't

be helped;" said M. Bloch now to his son, "it's a mistake to let him

have everything at once; that would leave him nothing to look forward

to." He had actually thought, in his paternal affection and in the hope

of touching his son's heart, of sending for the instrument. But there

was not time, or rather they had thought there would not be; for we were

obliged to put off the dinner because Saint-Loup could not leave the

hotel, where he was waiting for an uncle who was coming to spend a few

days with Mme. de Villeparisis. Since--for he was greatly addicted to

physical culture, and especially to long walks--it was largely on foot,

spending the night in wayside farms, that this uncle was to make the

journey from the country house in which he was staying, the precise date

of his arrival at Balbec was by no means certain. And Saint-Loup, afraid

to stir out of doors, even entrusted me with the duty of taking to

Incauville, where the nearest telegraph-office was, the messages that he

sent every day to his mistress. The uncle for whom we were waiting was

called Palamède, a name that had come down to him from his ancestors

the Princes of Sicily. And later on when I found, as I read history,

belonging to this or that Podestà or Prince of the Church, the same

Christian name, a fine renaissance medal--some said, a genuine

antique--that had always remained in the family, having passed from

generation to generation, from the Vatican cabinet to the uncle of my

friend, I felt the pleasure that is reserved for those who, unable from

lack of means to start a case of medals, or a picture gallery, look out

for old names (names of localities, instructive and picturesque as an

old map, a bird's eye view, a sign-board or a return of customs;

baptismal names, in which rings out and is plainly heard, in their fine

French endings, the defect of speech, the intonation of a racial

vulgarity, the vicious pronunciation by which our ancestors made Latin

and Saxon words undergo lasting mutilations which in due course became

the august law-givers of our grammar books) and, in short, by drawing

upon their collections of ancient and sonorous words, give themselves

concerts like the people who acquire viols da gamba and viols d'amour so

as to perform the music of days gone by upon old-fashioned instruments.

Saint-Loup told me that even in the most exclusive aristocratic society

his uncle Palamède had the further distinction of being particularly

difficult to approach, contemptuous, double-dyed in his nobility,

forming with his brother's wife and a few other chosen spirits what was

known as the Phoenix Club. There even his insolence was so much dreaded

that it had happened more than once that people of good position who had

been anxious to meet him and had applied to his own brother for an

introduction had met with a refusal: "Really, you mustn't ask me to

introduce you to my brother Palamède. My wife and I, we would all of us

do our best for you, but it would be no good. Besides, there's always

the danger of his being rude to you, and I shouldn't like that." At the

Jockey Club he had, with a few of his friends, marked a list of two

hundred members whom they would never allow to be introduced to them.

And in the Comte de Paris's circle he was known by the nickname of "The

Prince" because of his distinction and his pride.

Saint-Loup told me about his uncle's early life, now a long time ago.

Every day he used to take women to a bachelor establishment which he

shared with two of his friends, as good-looking as himself, on account

of which they were known as "The Three Graces".

"One day, a man who just now is very much in the eye, as Balzac would

say, of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but who at a rather awkward period

of his early life displayed odd tastes, asked my uncle to let him come

to this place. But no sooner had he arrived than it was not to the

ladies but to my uncle Palamède that he began to make overtures. My

uncle pretended not to understand, made an excuse to send for his two

friends; they appeared on the scene, seized the offender, stripped him,

thrashed him till he bled, and then with twenty degrees of frost outside

kicked him into the street where he was found more dead than alive; so

much so that the police started an inquiry which the poor devil had the

greatest difficulty in getting them to abandon. My uncle would never go

in for such drastic methods now, in fact you can't conceive the number

of men of humble position that he, who is so haughty with people in

society, has shewn his affection, taken under his wing, even if he is

paid for it with ingratitude. It may be a servant who has looked after

him in a hotel, for whom he will find a place in Paris, or a

farm-labourer whom he will pay to have taught a trade. That is really

the rather nice side of his character, in contrast to his social side."

Saint-Loup indeed belonged to that type of young men of fashion,

situated at an altitude at which it has been possible to cultivate such

expressions as: "What is really rather nice about him", "His rather nice

side", precious seeds which produce very rapidly a way of looking at

things in which one counts oneself as nothing and the "people" as

everything; the exact opposite, in a word, of plebeian pride. "It seems,

it is quite impossible to imagine how he set the tone, how he laid down

the law for the whole of society when he was a young man. He acted

entirely for himself; in any circumstances he did what seemed pleasing

to himself, what was most convenient, but at once the snobs would start

copying him. If he felt thirsty at the play, and sent out from his box

for a drink, the little sitting-rooms behind all the boxes would be

filled, a week later, with refreshments. One wet summer, when he had a

touch of rheumatism, he ordered an ulster of a loose but warm vicuna

wool, which is used only for travelling rugs, and kept the blue and

orange stripes shewing. The big tailors at once received orders from all

their customers for blue and orange ulsters of rough wool. If he had

some reason for wishing to keep every trace of ceremony out of a dinner

in a country house where he was spending the day, and to point the

distinction had come without evening clothes and sat down to table in

the suit he had been wearing that afternoon, it became the fashion, when

you were dining in the country, not to dress. If he was eating some

special sweet and instead of taking his spoon used a knife, or a special

implement of his own invention which he had had made for him by a

silversmith, or his fingers, it at once became wrong to eat it in any

other way. He wanted once to hear some Beethoven quartets again (for

with all his preposterous ideas he is no fool, mind, he has great gifts)

and arranged for some musicians to come and play them to him and a few

friends once a week. The ultra-fashionable thing that season was to give

quite small parties, with chamber music. I should say he's not done at

all badly out of life. With his looks, he must have had any number of

women! I can't tell you exactly whom, for he is very discreet. But I do

know that he was thoroughly unfaithful to my poor aunt. Not that that

prevented his being always perfectly charming to her, and her adoring

him; he was in mourning for her for years. When he is in Paris, he still

goes to the cemetery nearly every day."

The morning after Robert had told me all these things about his uncle,

while he waited for him (and waited, as it happened, in vain), as I was

coming by myself past the Casino on my way back to the hotel, I had the

sensation of being watched by somebody who was not far off. I turned my

head and saw a man of about forty, very tall and rather stout, with a

very dark moustache, who, nervously slapping the leg of his trousers

with a switch, kept fastened upon me a pair of eyes dilated with

observation. Every now and then those eyes were shot through by a look

of intense activity such as the sight of a person whom they do not know

excites only in men to whom, for whatever reason, it suggests thoughts

that would not occur to anyone else--madmen, for instance, or spies. He

trained upon me a supreme stare at once bold, prudent, rapid and

profound, like a last shot which one fires at an enemy at the moment

when one turns to flee, and, after first looking all round him, suddenly

adopting an absent and lofty air, by an abrupt revolution of his whole

body turned to examine a playbill on the wall in the reading of which he

became absorbed, while he hummed a tune and fingered the moss-rose in

his buttonhole. He drew from his pocket a note-book in which he appeared

to be taking down the title of the performance that was announced,

looked two or three times at his watch, pulled down over his eyes a

black straw hat the brim of which he extended with his hand held out

over it like a visor, as though to see whether some one were at last

coming, made the perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean

to shew that they have waited long enough, although they never make it

when they are really waiting, then pushing back his hat and exposing a

scalp cropped close except at the sides where he allowed a pair of waved

"pigeon's-wings" to grow quite long, he emitted the loud panting breath

that people give who are not feeling too hot but would like it to be

thought that they were. He gave me the impression of a "hotel crook" who

had been watching my grandmother and myself for some days, and while he

was planning to rob us had just discovered that I had surprised him in

the act of spying; to put me off the scent, perhaps he was seeking only,

by his new attitude, to express boredom and detachment, but it was with

an exaggeration so aggressive that his object appeared to be--at least

as much as the dissipating of the suspicions that I must have had of

him--to avenge a humiliation which quite unconsciously I must have

inflicted on him, to give me the idea not so much that he had not seen

me as that I was an object of too little importance to attract his

attention. He threw back his shoulders with an air of bravado, bit his

lips, pushed up his moustache, and in the lens of his eyes made an

adjustment of something that was indifferent, harsh, almost insulting.

So effectively that the singularity of his expression made me take him

at one moment for a thief and at another for a lunatic. And yet his

scrupulously ordered attire was far more sober and far more simple than

that of any of the summer visitors I saw at Balbec, and gave a

reassurance to my own suit, so often humiliated by the dazzling and

common-place whiteness of their holiday garb. But my grandmother was

coming towards me, we took a turn together, and I was waiting for her,

an hour later, outside the hotel into which she had gone for a moment,

when I saw emerge from it Mme. de Villeparisis with Robert de Saint-Loup

and the stranger who had stared at me so intently outside the Casino.

Swift as a lightning-flash his look shot through me, just as at the

moment when I first noticed him, and returned, as though he had not seen

me, to hover, slightly lowered, before his eyes, dulled, like the

neutral look which feigns to see nothing without and is incapable of

reporting anything to the mind within, the look which expresses merely

the satisfaction of feeling round it the eyelids which it cleaves apart

with its sanctimonious roundness, the devout, the steeped look that we

see on the faces of certain hypocrites, the smug look on those of

certain fools. I saw that he had changed his clothes. The suit he was

wearing was darker even than the other; and no doubt this was because

the true distinction in dress lies nearer to simplicity than the false;

but there was something more; when one came near him one felt that if

colour was almost entirely absent from these garments it was not because

he who had banished it from them was indifferent to it but rather

because for some reason he forbade himself the enjoyment of it. And the

sobriety which they displayed seemed to be of the kind that comes from

obedience to a rule of diet rather than from want of appetite. A dark

green thread harmonised, in the stuff of his trousers, with the clock on

his socks, with a refinement which betrayed the vivacity of a taste that

was everywhere else conquered, to which this single concession had been

made out of tolerance for such a weakness, while a spot of red on his

necktie was imperceptible, like a liberty which one dares not take.

"How are you? Let me introduce my nephew, the Baron de Guermantes," Mme.

de Villeparisis greeted me, while the stranger without looking at me,

muttering a vague "Charmed!" which he followed with a "H'm, h'm, h'm" to

give his affability an air of having been forced, and doubling back his

little finger, forefinger and thumb, held out to me his middle and ring

fingers, the latter bare of any ring, which I clasped through his suede

glove; then, without lifting his eyes to my face, he turned towards Mme.

de Villeparisis.

"Good gracious; I shall be forgetting my own name next!" she exclaimed.

"Here am I calling you Baron de Guermantes. Let me introduce the Baron

de Charlus. After all, it's not a very serious mistake," she went on,

"for you're a thorough Guermantes whatever else you are."

By this time my grandmother had reappeared, and we all set out together.

Saint-Loup's uncle declined to honour me not only with a word, with so

much as a look, even, in my direction. If he stared strangers out of

countenance (and during this short excursion he two or three times

hurled his terrible and searching scrutiny like a sounding lead at

insignificant people of obviously humble extraction who happened to

pass), to make up for that he never for a moment, if I was to judge by

myself, looked at the people whom he did know, just as a detective on

special duty might except his personal friends from his professional

vigilance. Leaving them, my grandmother, Mme. de Villeparisis and him to

talk to one another, I fell behind with Saint-Loup.

"Tell me, am I right in thinking I heard Mme. de Villeparisis say just

now to your uncle that he was a Guermantes?"

"Of course he is; Palamède de Guermantes."

"Not the same Guermantes who have a place near Combray, and claim

descent from Geneviève de Brabant?"

"Most certainly: my uncle, who is the very last word in heraldry and all

that sort of thing, would tell you that our 'cry', our war-cry, that is

to say, which was changed afterwards to 'Passavant' was originally

'Combraysis'," he said, smiling so as not to appear to be priding

himself on this prerogative of a "cry", which only the semi-royal

houses, the great chiefs of feudal bands enjoyed. "It's his brother who

has the place now."

And so she was indeed related, and quite closely, to the Guermantes,

this Mme. de Villeparisis who had so long been for me the lady who had

given me a duck filled with chocolates, when I was little, more remote

then from the Guermantes way than if she had been shut up somewhere on

the Méséglise, less brilliant, less highly placed by me than was the

Combray optician, and who now suddenly went through one of those

fantastic rises in value, parallel to the depreciations, no less

unforeseen, of other objects in our possession, which--rise and fall

alike--introduce in our youth and in those periods of our life in which

a trace of youth persists changes as numerous as the Metamorphoses of

Ovid.

"Haven't they got, down there, the busts of all the old lords of

Guermantes?"

"Yes; and a lovely sight they are!" Saint-Loup was ironical. "Between

you and me, I look on all that sort of thing as rather a joke. But they

have got at Guermantes, what is a little more interesting, and that is

quite a touching portrait of my aunt by Carrière. It's as fine as

Whistler or Velasquez," went on Saint-Loup, who in his neophyte zeal was

not always very exact about degrees of greatness. "There are also some

moving pictures by Gustave Moreau. My aunt is the niece of your friend

Mme. de Villeparisis; she was brought up by her, and married her cousin,

who was a nephew, too, of my aunt Villeparisis, the present Duc de

Guermantes."

"Then who is this uncle?"

"He bears the title of Baron de Charlus. Properly speaking, when my

great-uncle died, my uncle Palamède ought to have taken the title of

Prince des Laumes, which his brother used before he became Duc de

Guermantes, for in that family they change their names as you'ld change

your shirt. But my uncle has peculiar ideas about all that sort of

thing. And as he feels that people are rather apt to overdo the Italian

Prince and Grandee of Spain business nowadays, though he had

half-a-dozen titles of 'Prince' to choose from, he has remained Baron de

Charlus, as a protest, and with an apparent simplicity which really

covers a good deal of pride. 'In these days', he says, 'everybody is

Prince something-or-other; one really must have a title that will

distinguish one; I shall call myself Prince when I wish to travel

incognito.' According to him there is no older title than the Charlus

barony; to prove to you that it is earlier than the Montmorency title,

though they used to claim, quite wrongly, to be the premier barons of

France when they were only premier in the Ile-de-France, where their

fief was, my uncle will explain to you for hours on end and enjoy doing

it, because, although he's a most intelligent man, really gifted, he

regards that sort of thing as quite a live topic of conversation,"

Saint-Loup smiled again. "But as I am not like him, you mustn't ask me

to talk pedigrees; I know nothing more deadly, more perishing; really,

life is not long enough."

I now recognised in the hard look which had made me turn round that

morning outside the Casino the same that I had seen fixed on me at

Tansonville, at the moment when Mme. Swann called Gilberte away.

"But, I say, all those mistresses that, you told me, your uncle M. de

Charlus had had, wasn't Mme. Swann one of them?"

"Good lord, no! That is to say, my uncle's a great friend of Swann, and

has always stood up for him. But no one has ever suggested that he was

his wife's lover. You would make a great sensation in Paris society if

people thought you believed that."

I dared not reply that it would have caused an even greater sensation in

Combray society if people had thought that I did not believe it.

My grandmother was delighted with M. de Charlus. No doubt he attached an

extreme importance to all questions of birth and social position, and my

grandmother had remarked this, but without any trace of that severity

which as a rule embodies a secret envy and the annoyance of seeing some

one else enjoy an advantage which one would like but cannot oneself

possess. As on the other hand my grandmother, content with her lot and

never for a moment regretting that she did not move in a more brilliant

sphere, employed only her intellect in observing the eccentricities of

M. de Charlus, she spoke of Saint-Loup's uncle with that detached,

smiling, almost affectionate kindness with which we reward the object of

our disinterested study for the pleasure that it has given us, all the

more that this time the object was a person with regard to whom she

found that his if not legitimate, at any rate picturesque pretensions

shewed him in vivid contrast to the people whom she generally had

occasion to see. But it was especially in consideration of his

intelligence and sensibility, qualities which it was easy to see that M.

de Charlus, unlike so many of the people in society whom Saint-Loup

derided, possessed in a marked degree, that my grandmother had so

readily forgiven him his aristocratic prejudice. And yet this had not

been sacrificed by the uncle, as it was by the nephew, to higher

qualities. Rather, M. de Charlus had reconciled it with them.

Possessing, by virtue of his descent from the Ducs de Nemours and

Princes de Lamballe, documents, furniture, tapestries, portraits painted

for his ancestors by Raphael, Velasquez, Boucher, justified in saying

that he was visiting a museum and a matchless library when he was merely

turning over his family relics at home, he placed in the rank from which

his nephew had degraded it the whole heritage of the aristocracy.

Perhaps also, being less metaphysical than Saint-Loup, less satisfied

with words, more of a realist in his study of men, he did not care to

neglect a factor that was essential to his prestige in their eyes and,

if it gave certain disinterested pleasures to his imagination, could

often be a powerfully effective aid to his utilitarian activities. No

agreement can ever be reached between men of his sort and those who obey

the ideal within them which urges them to strip themselves bare of such

advantages so that they may seek only to realise that ideal, similar in

that respect to the painters, the writers who renounce their virtuosity,

the artistic peoples who modernise themselves, warrior peoples who take

the initiative in a move for universal disarmament, absolute governments

which turn democratic and repeal their harsh laws, though as often as

not the sequel fails to reward their noble effort; for the men lose

their talent, the nations their secular predominance; "pacificism" often

multiplies wars and indulgence criminality. If Saint-Loup's efforts

towards sincerity and emancipation were only to be commended as most

noble, to judge by their visible result, one could still be thankful

that they had failed to bear fruit in M. de Charlus, who had transferred

to his own home much of the admirable panelling from the Guermantes

house, instead of substituting, like his nephew, a "modern style" of

decoration, employing Lebourg or Guillaumin. It was none the less true

that M. de Charlus's ideal was highly artificial, and, if the epithet

can be applied to the word ideal, as much social as artistic. In certain

women of great beauty and rare culture whose ancestresses, two centuries

earlier, had shared in all the glory and grace of the old order, he

found a distinction which made him take pleasure only in their society,

and no doubt the admiration for them which he had protested was sincere,

but countless reminiscences, historical and artistic, called forth by

their names, entered into and formed a great part of it, just as

suggestions of classical antiquity are one of the reasons for the

pleasure which a booklover finds in reading an Ode of Horace that is

perhaps inferior to poems of our own day which would leave the same

booklover cold. Any of these women by the side of a pretty commoner was

for him what are, hanging beside a contemporary canvas representing a

procession or a wedding, those old pictures the history of which we

know, from the Pope or King who ordered them, through the hands of

people whose acquisition of them, by gift, purchase, conquest or

inheritance, recalls to us some event or at least some alliance of

historic interest, and consequently some knowledge that we ourselves

have acquired, gives it a fresh utility, increases our sense of the

richness of the possessions of our memory or of our erudition. M. de

Charlus might be thankful that a prejudice similar to his own, by

preventing these several great ladies from mixing with women whose blood

was less pure, presented them for his veneration unspoiled, in their

unaltered nobility, like an eighteenth-century house-front supported on

its flat column of pink marbles, in which the passage of time has

wrought no change.

M. de Charlus praised the true "nobility" of mind and heart which

characterised these women, playing upon the word in a double sense by

which he himself was taken in, and in which lay the falsehood of this

bastard conception, of this medley of aristocracy, generosity and art,

but also its seductiveness, dangerous to people like my grandmother, to

whom the less refined but more innocent prejudice of a nobleman who

cared only about quarterings and took no thought for anything besides

would have appeared too silly for words, whereas she was defenceless as

soon as a thing presented itself under the externals of a mental

superiority, so much so, indeed, that she regarded Princes as enviable

above all other men because they were able to have a Labruyère, a

Fénelon as their tutors. Outside the Grand Hotel the three Guermantes

left us; they were going to luncheon with the Princesse de Luxembourg.

While my grandmother was saying good-bye to Mme. de Villeparisis and

Saint-Loup to my grandmother, M. de Charlus who, so far, had not uttered

a word to me, drew back a little way from the group and, when he reached

my side, said: "I shall be taking tea this evening after dinner in my

aunt Villeparisis's room; I hope that you will give me the pleasure of

seeing you there, and your grandmother." With which he rejoined the

Marquise.

Although it was Sunday there were no more carriages waiting outside the

hotel now than at the beginning of the season. The solicitor's wife, in

particular, had decided that it was not worth the expense of hiring one

every time simply because she was not going to the Cambremers', and

contented herself with staying in her room.

"Is Mme. Blandais not well?" her husband was asked. "We haven't seen her

all day."

"She has a slight headache; it's the heat, there's thunder coming. The

least thing upsets her; but I expect you will see her this evening; I've

told her she ought to come down. It can't do her any harm."

I had supposed that in thus inviting us to take tea with his aunt, whom

I never doubted that he would have warned that we were coming, M. de

Charlus wished to make amends for the impoliteness which he had shewn me

during our walk that morning. But when, on our entering Mme. de

Villeparisis's room, I attempted to greet her nephew, even although I

walked right round him, while in shrill accents he was telling a

somewhat spiteful story about one of his relatives, I did not succeed in

catching his eye; I decided to say "Good evening" to him, and fairly

loud, to warn him of my presence; but I realised that he had observed

it, for before ever a word had passed my lips, just as I began to bow to

him, I saw his two fingers stretched out for me to shake without his

having turned to look at me or paused in his story. He had evidently

seen me, without letting it appear that he had, and I noticed then that

his eyes, which were never fixed on the person to whom he was speaking,

strayed perpetually in all directions, like those of certain animals

when they are frightened, or those of street hawkers who, while they are

bawling their patter and displaying their illicit merchandise, keep a

sharp lookout, though without turning their heads, on the different

points of the horizon, from any of which may appear, suddenly, the

police. At the same time I was a little surprised to find that Mme. de

Villeparisis, while glad to see us, did not seem to have been expecting

us, and I was still more surprised to hear M. de Charlus say to my

grandmother: "Ah! that was a capital idea of yours to come and pay us a

visit; charming of them, is it not, my dear aunt?" No doubt he had

noticed his aunt's surprise at our entry and thought, as a man

accustomed to set the tone, to strike the right note, that it would be

enough to transform that surprise into joy were he to shew that he

himself felt it, that it was indeed the feeling which our arrival there

ought to have prompted. In which he calculated wisely; for Mme. de

Villeparisis, who had a high opinion of her nephew and knew how

difficult it was to please him, appeared suddenly to have found new

attractions in my grandmother and continued to make much of her. But I

failed to understand how M. de Charlus could, in the space of a few

hours, have forgotten the invitation--so curt but apparently so

intentional, so premeditated--which he had addressed to me that same

morning, or why he called a "capital idea" on my grandmother's part an

idea that had been entirely his own. With a scruple of accuracy which I

retained until I had reached the age at which I realised that it is not

by asking him questions that one learns the truth of what another man

has had in his mind, and that the risk of a misunderstanding which will

probably pass unobserved is less than that which may come from a

purblind insistence: "But, sir," I reminded him, "you remember, surely,

that it was you who asked me if we would come in this evening?" Not a

sound, not a movement betrayed that M. de Charlus had so much as heard

my question. Seeing which I repeated it, like a diplomat, or like young

men after a misunderstanding who endeavour, with untiring and unrewarded

zeal, to obtain an explanation which their adversary is determined not

to give them. Still M. de Charlus answered me not a word. I seemed to

see hovering upon his lips the smile of those who from a great height

pass judgment on the characters and breeding of their inferiors.

Since he refused to give any explanation, I tried to provide one for

myself, but succeeded only in hesitating between several, none of which

could be the right one. Perhaps he did not remember, or perhaps it was I

who had failed to understand what he had said to me that morning. . . .

More probably, in his pride, he did not wish to appear to have sought to

attract people whom he despised, and preferred to cast upon them the

responsibility for their intrusion. But then, if he despised us, why had

he been so anxious that we should come, or rather that my grandmother

should come, for of the two of us it was to her alone that he spoke that

evening, and never once to me. Talking with the utmost animation to her,

as also to Mme. de Villeparisis, hiding, so to speak, behind them, as

though he were seated at the back of a theatre-box, he contented

himself, turning from them every now and then the exploring gaze of his

penetrating eyes, with fastening it on my face, with the same gravity,

the same air of preoccupation as if my face had been a manuscript

difficult to decipher.

No doubt, if he had not had those eyes, the face of M. de Charlus would

have been similar to the faces of many good-looking men. And when

Saint-Loup, speaking to me of various other Guermantes, on a later

occasion, said: "Gad, they've not got that thoroughbred air, of being

gentlemen to their finger-tips, that uncle Palamède has!" confirming my

suspicion that a thoroughbred air and aristocratic distinction were not

anything mysterious and new but consisted in elements which I had

recognised without difficulty and without receiving any particular

impression from them, I was to feel that another of my illusions had

been shattered. But that face, to which a faint layer of powder gave

almost the appearance of a face on the stage, in vain might M. de

Charlus hermetically seal its expression; his eyes were like two

crevices, two loopholes which alone he had failed to stop, and through

which, according to where one stood or sat in relation to him, one felt

suddenly flash across one the glow of some internal engine which seemed

to offer no reassurance even to him who without being altogether master

of it must carry it inside him, at an unstable equilibrium and always on

the point of explosion; and the circumspect and unceasingly restless

expression of those eyes, with all the signs of exhaustion which,

extending from them to a pair of dark rings quite low down upon his

cheeks, were stamped on his face, however carefully he might compose and

regulate it, made one think of some incognito, some disguise assumed by

a powerful man in danger, or merely by a dangerous--but tragic--person.

I should have liked to divine what was this secret which other men did

not carry in their breasts and which had already made M. de Charlus's

gaze so enigmatic to me when I had seen him that morning outside the

Casino. But with what I now knew of his family I could no longer believe

that they were the eyes of a thief, nor, after what I had heard of his

conversation, could I say that they were those of a madman. If he was

cold with me, while making himself agreeable to my grandmother, that

arose perhaps not from a personal antipathy for, generally speaking,

just as he was kindly disposed towards women, of whose faults he used to

speak without, as a rule, any narrowing of the broadest tolerance, so he

shewed with regard to men, and especially young men, a hatred so violent

as to suggest that of certain extreme misogynists for women. Two or

three "carpet-knights", relatives or intimate friends of Saint-Loup who

happened to mention their names, M. de Charlus, with an almost ferocious

expression, in sharp contrast to his usual coldness, called: "Little

cads!" I gathered that the particular fault which he found in the young

men of the period was their extreme effeminacy. "They're absolute

women," he said with scorn. But what life would not have appeared

effeminate beside that which he expected a man to lead, and never found

energetic or virile enough? (He himself, when he walked across country,

after long hours on the road would plunge his heated body into frozen

streams.) He would not even allow a man to wear a single ring. But this

profession of virility did not prevent his having also the most delicate

sensibilities. When Mme. de Villeparisis asked him to describe to my

grandmother some country house in which Mme. de Sévigné had stayed,

adding that she could not help feeling that there was something rather

"literary" about that lady's distress at being parted from "that

tiresome Mme. de Grignan":

"On the contrary," he retorted, "I can think of nothing more true.

Besides, it was a time in which feelings of that sort were thoroughly

understood. The inhabitant of Lafontaine's Monomotapa, running to see

his friend who had appeared to him in a dream, and had looked sad, the

pigeon finding that the greatest of evils is the absence of the other

pigeon, seem to you perhaps, my dear aunt, as exaggerated as Mme. de

Sévigné's impatience for the moment when she will be alone with her

daughter. It is so fine what she says when she leaves her: 'This parting

gives a pain to my soul which I feel like an ache in my body. In absence

one is liberal with the hours. One anticipates a time for which one is

longing.'" My grandmother was in ecstasies at hearing the Letters thus

spoken of, exactly as she would have spoken of them herself. She was

astonished that a man could understand them so thoroughly. She found in

M. de Charlus a delicacy, a sensibility that were quite feminine. We

said to each other afterwards, when we were by ourselves and began to

discuss him together, that he must have come under the strong influence

of a woman, his mother, or in later life his daughter if he had any

children. "A mistress, perhaps," I thought to myself, remembering the

influence that Saint-Loup's seemed to have had over him, which enabled

me to realise the point to which men can be refined by the women with

whom they live.

"Once she was with her daughter, she had probably nothing to say to

her," put in Mme. de Villeparisis.

"Most certainly she had: if it was only what she calls 'things so slight

that nobody else would notice them but you and me.' And anyhow she was

with her. And Labruyère tells us that that is everything. 'To be with

the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all

the same.' He is right; that is the only form of happiness," added M. de

Charlus in a mournful voice, "and that happiness--alas, life is so ill

arranged that one very rarely tastes it; Mme. de Sévigné was after all

less to be pitied than most of us. She spent a great part of her life

with the person whom she loved."

"You forget that it was not 'love' in her case; the person was her

daughter."

"But what matters in life is not whom or what one loves," he went on, in

a judicial, peremptory, almost a cutting tone; "it is the fact of

loving. What Mme. de Sévigné felt for her daughter has a far better

claim to rank with the passion that Racine described in _Andromaque_ or

_Phèdre_ than the common-place relations young Sévigné had with his

mistresses. It's the same with a mystic's love for his God. The hard and

fast lines with which we circumscribe love arise solely from our

complete ignorance of life."

"You think all that of _Andromaque_ and _Phèdre_, do you?" Saint-Loup

asked his uncle in a faintly contemptuous tone. "There is more truth in

a single tragedy of Racine than in all the dramatic works of Monsieur

Victor Hugo," replied M. de Charlus. "People really are overwhelming,"

Saint-Loup murmured in my ear. "Preferring Racine to Victor, you may say

what you like, it's epoch-making!" He was genuinely distressed by his

uncle's words, but the satisfaction of saying "you may say what you

like" and, better still, "epoch-making" consoled him.

In these reflexions upon the sadness of having to live apart from the

person whom one loves (which were to lead my grandmother to say to me

that Mme. de Villeparisis's nephew understood certain things quite as

well as his aunt, but in a different way, and moreover had something

about him that set him far above the average club man) M. de Charlus not

only allowed a refinement of feeling to appear such as men rarely shew;

his voice itself, like certain contralto voices which have not been

properly trained to the right pitch, so that when they sing it sounds

like a duet between a young man and a woman, singing alternately,

mounted, when he expressed these delicate sentiments, to its higher

notes, took on an unexpected sweetness and seemed to be embodying choirs

of betrothed maidens, of sisters, who poured out the treasures of their

love. But the bevy of young girls, whom M. de Charlus in his horror of

every kind of effeminacy would have been so distressed to learn that he

gave the impression of sheltering thus within his voice, did not confine

themselves to the interpretation, the modulation of scraps of sentiment.

Often while M. de Charlus was talking one could hear their laughter,

shrill, fresh laughter of school-girls or coquettes quizzing their

partners with all the archness of clever tongues and pretty wits.

He told us how a house that had belonged to his family, in which Marie

Antoinette had slept, with a park laid out by Lenôtre, was now in the

hands of the Israels, the wealthy financiers, who had bought it.

"Israel--at least that is the name these people go by, which seems to me

a generic, a racial term rather than a proper name. One cannot tell;

possibly people of that sort do not have names, and are designated only

by the collective title of the tribe to which they belong. It is of no

importance! But fancy, after being a home of the Guermantes, to belong

to Israels!!!" His voice rose. "It reminds me of a room in the Chateau

of Blois where the caretaker who was shewing me over said: 'This is

where Mary Stuart used to say her prayers; I use it to keep my brooms

in.' Naturally I wish to know nothing more of this house that has let

itself be dishonoured, any more than of my cousin Clara de Chimay after

she left her husband. But I keep a photograph of the house, when it was

still unspoiled, just as I keep one of the Princess before her large

eyes had learned to gaze on anyone but my cousin. A photograph acquires

something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be

a reproduction of reality and shews us things that no longer exist. I

could give you a copy, since you are interested in that style of

architecture," he said to my grandmother. At that moment, noticing that

the embroidered handkerchief which he had in his pocket was shewing some

coloured threads, he thrust it sharply down out of sight with the

scandalised air of a prudish but far from innocent lady concealing

attractions which, by an excess of scrupulosity, she regards as

indecent. "Would you believe," he went on, "that the first thing the

creatures did was to destroy Lenôtre's park, which is as bad as

slashing a picture by Poussin? For that alone, these Israels ought to be

in prison. It is true," he added with a smile, after a moment's silence,

"that there are probably plenty of other reasons why they should be

there! In any case, you can imagine the effect, with that architecture

behind it, of an English garden."

"But the house is in the same style as the Petit Trianon," said Mme. de

Villeparisis, "and Marie Antoinette had an English garden laid out

there."

"Which, all the same, ruins Gabriel's front;" replied M. de Charlus.

"Obviously, it would be an act of vandalism now to destroy the Hameau.

But whatever may be the spirit of the age, I doubt, all the same,

whether, in that respect, a whim of Mme. Israel has the same importance

as the memory of the Queen."

Meanwhile my grandmother had been making signs to me to go up to bed, in

spite of the urgent appeals of Saint-Loup who, to my utter confusion,

had alluded in front of M. de Charlus to the depression that used often

to come upon me at night before I went to sleep, which his uncle must

regard as betokening a sad want of virility. I lingered a few moments

still, then went upstairs, and was greatly surprised when, a little

later, having heard a knock at my bedroom door and asked who was there,

I heard the voice of M. de Charlus saying dryly:

"It is Charlus. May I come in, sir? Sir," he began again in the same

tone as soon as he had shut the door, "my nephew was saying just now

that you were apt to be worried at night before going to sleep, and also

that you were an admirer of Bergotte's books. As I had one here in my

luggage which you probably do not know, I have brought it to help you to

while away these moments in which you are not comfortable."

I thanked M. de Charlus with some warmth and told him that, on the

contrary, I had been afraid that what Saint-Loup had said to him about

my discomfort when night came would have made me appear in his eyes more

stupid even than I was.

"No; why?" he answered, in a gentler voice. "You have not, perhaps, any

personal merit; so few of us have! But for a time at least you have

youth, and that is always a charm. Besides, sir, the greatest folly of

all is to laugh at or to condemn in others what one does not happen

oneself to feel. I love the night, and you tell me that you are afraid

of it. I love the scent of roses, and I have a friend whom it throws

into a fever. Do you suppose that I think, for that reason, that he is

inferior to me? I try to understand everything and I take care to

condemn nothing. After all, you must not be too sorry for yourself; I do

not say that these moods of depression are not painful, I know that one

can be made to suffer by things which the world would not understand.

But at least you have placed your affection wisely, in your grandmother.

You see a great deal of her. And besides, that is a legitimate

affection, I mean one that is repaid. There are so many of which one

cannot say that."

He began walking up and down the room, looking at one thing, taking up

another. I had the impression that he had something to tell me, and

could not find the right words to express it.

"I have another volume of Bergotte here; I will fetch it for you," he

went on, and rang the bell. Presently a page came. "Go and find me your

head waiter. He is the only person here who is capable of obeying an

order intelligently," said M. de Charlus stiffly. "Monsieur Aimé, sir?"

asked the page. "I cannot tell you his name; yes, I remember now, I did

hear him called Aimé. Run along, I am in a hurry." "He won't be a

minute, sir, I saw him downstairs just now," said the page, anxious to

appear efficient. There was an interval of silence. The page returned.

"Sir, M. Aimé has gone to bed. But I can take your message." "No, you

have only to get him out of bed." "But I can't do that, sir; he doesn't

sleep here." "Then you can leave us alone." "But, sir," I said when the

page had gone, "you are too kind; one volume of Bergotte will be quite

enough." "That is just what I was thinking." M. de Charlus walked up and

down the room. Several minutes passed in this way, then after a

prolonged hesitation, and several false starts, he swung sharply round

and, his voice once more stinging, flung at me: "Good night, sir!" and

left the room. After all the lofty sentiments which I had heard him

express that evening, next day, which was the day of his departure, on

the beach, before noon, when I was on my way down to bathe, and M. de

Charlus had come across to tell me that my grandmother was waiting for

me to join her as soon as I left the water, I was greatly surprised to

hear him say, pinching my neck as he spoke, with a familiarity and a

laugh that were frankly vulgar:

"But he doesn't give a damn for his old grandmother, does he, eh? Little

rascal!"

"What, sir! I adore her!"

"Sir," he said, stepping back a pace, and with a glacial air, "you are

still young; you should profit by your youth to learn two things; first,

to refrain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be

taken for granted; and secondly not to dash into speech to reply to

things that are said to you before you have penetrated their meaning. If

you had taken this precaution a moment ago you would have saved yourself

the appearance of speaking at cross-purposes like a deaf man, thereby

adding a second absurdity to that of having anchors embroidered on your

bathing-dress. I have lent you a book by Bergotte which I require. See

that it is brought to me within the next hour by that head waiter with

the silly and inappropriate name, who, I suppose, is not in bed at this

time of day. You make me see that I was premature in speaking to you

last night of the charms of youth; I should have done you a better

service had I pointed out to you its thoughtlessness, its inconsequence,

and its want of comprehension. I hope, sir, that this little douche will

be no less salutary to you than your bathe. But don't let me keep you

standing: you may catch cold. Good day, sir."

No doubt he was sorry afterwards for this speech, for some time later I

received--in a morocco binding on the front of which was inlaid a panel

of tooled leather representing in demi-relief a spray of

forget-me-not--the book which he had lent me, and I had sent back to

him, not by Aimé who was apparently "off duty", but by the lift-boy.

M. de Charlus having gone, Robert and I were free at last to dine with

Bloch. And I realised during this little party that the stories too

readily admitted by our friend as funny were favourite stories of M.

Bloch senior, and that the son's "really remarkable person" was always

one of his father's friends whom he had so classified. There are a

certain number of people whom we admire in our boyhood, a father with

better brains than the rest of the family, a teacher who acquires credit

in our eyes from the philosophy he reveals to us, a schoolfellow more

advanced than we are (which was what Bloch had been to me), who despises

the Musset of the _Espoir en Dieu_ when we still admire it, and when we

have reached Leconte or Claudel will be in ecstasies only over:

A Saint-Biaise, à la Zuecca

Vous étiez, vous étiez bien aise:

with which he will include:

Padoue est un fort bel endroit

Où de très grands docteurs en droit. . . .

Mais j'aime mieux la polenta. . . .

Passe dans mon domino noir

La Toppatelle

and of all the _Nuits_ will remember only:

Au Havre, devant l'Atlantique

A Venise, à l'affreux Lido.

Où vient sur l'herbe d'un tombeau

Mourir la pâle Adriatique.

So, whenever we confidently admire anyone, we collect from him, we quote

with admiration sayings vastly inferior to the sort which, left to our

own judgment, we would sternly reject, just as the writer of a novel

puts into it, on the pretext that they are true, things which people

have actually said, which in the living context are like a dead weight,

form the dull part of the work. Saint-Simon's portraits composed by

himself (and very likely without his admiring them himself) are

admirable, whereas what he cites as the charming wit of his clever

friends is frankly dull where it has not become meaningless. He would

have scorned to invent what he reports as so pointed or so coloured when

said by Mme. Cornuel or Louis XIV, a point which is to be remarked also

in many other writers, and is capable of various interpretations, of

which it is enough to note but one for the present: namely, that in the

state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to

which we rise when we create.

There was, then, embedded in my friend Bloch a father Bloch who lagged

forty years behind his son, told impossible stories and laughed as

loudly at them from the heart of my friend as did the separate, visible

and authentic father Bloch, since to the laugh which the latter emitted,

not without several times repeating the last word so that his public

might taste the full flavour of the story, was added the braying laugh

with which the son never failed, at table, to greet his father's

anecdotes. Thus it came about that after saying the most intelligent

things young Bloch, to indicate the portion that he had inherited from

his family, would tell us for the thirtieth time some of the gems which

father Bloch brought out only (with his swallow-tail coat) on the solemn

occasions on which young Bloch brought someone to the house on whom it

was worth while making an impression; one of his masters, a "chum" who

had taken all the prizes, or, this evening, Saint-Loup and myself. For

instance: "A military critic of great insight, who had brilliantly

worked out, supporting them with proofs, the reasons for which, in the

Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese must inevitably be beaten and the

Russians victorious," or else: "He is an eminent gentleman who passes

for a great financier in political circles and for a great politician

among financiers." These stories were interchangeable with one about

Baron de Rothschild and one about Sir Rufus Israels, who were brought

into the conversation in an equivocal manner which might let it be

supposed that M. Bloch knew them personally.

I was myself taken in, and from the way in which M. Bloch spoke of

Bergotte I assumed that he too was an old friend. But with him as with

all famous people, M. Bloch knew them only "without actually knowing

them", from having seen them at a distance in the theatre or in the

street. He imagined, moreover, that his appearance, his name, his

personality were not unknown to them, and that when they caught sight of

him they had often to repress a stealthy inclination to bow. People in

society, because they know men of talent, original characters, and have

them to dine in their houses, do not on that account understand them any

better. But when one has lived to some extent in society, the silliness

of its inhabitants makes one too anxious to live, suppose too high a

standard of intelligence in the obscure circles in which people know

only "without actually knowing". I was to discover this when I

introduced the topic of Bergotte. M. Bloch was not the only one who was

a social success at home. My friend was even more so with his sisters,

whom he continually questioned in a hectoring tone, burying his face in

his plate, all of which made them laugh until they cried. They had

adopted their brother's language, and spoke it fluently, as if it had

been obligatory and the only form of speech that people of intelligence

might use. When we arrived, the eldest sister said to one of the younger

ones: "Go, tell our sage father and our venerable mother!" "Puppies,"

said Bloch, "I present to you the cavalier Saint-Loup, hurler of

javelins, who is come for a few days from Doncières to the dwellings of

polished stone, fruitful in horses." And, since he was as vulgar as he

was literary, his speech ended as a rule in some pleasantry of a less

Homeric kind: "See, draw closer your pepla with fair clasps, what is all

that that I see? Does your mother know you're out?" And the misses Bloch

subsided in a tempest of laughter. I told their brother how much

pleasure he had given me by recommending me to read Bergotte, whose

books I had loved.

M. Bloch senior, who knew Bergotte only by sight, and Bergotte's life

only from what was common gossip, had a manner quite as indirect of

making the acquaintance of his books, by the help of criticisms that

were apparently literary. He lived in the world of "very nearlies",

where people salute the empty air and arrive at wrong judgments.

Inexactitude, incompetence do not modify their assurance; quite the

contrary. It is the propitious miracle of self-esteem that, since few of

us are in a position to enjoy the society of distinguished people, or to

form intellectual friendships, those to whom they are denied still

believe themselves to be the best endowed of men, because the optics of

our social perspective make every grade of society seem the best to him

who occupies it, and beholds as less favoured than himself, less

fortunate and therefore to be pitied, the greater men whom he names and

calumniates without knowing, judges and despises without understanding

them. Even in cases where the multiplication of his modest personal

advantages by his self-esteem would not suffice to assure a man the dose

of happiness, superior to that accorded to others, which is essential to

him, envy is always there to make up the balance. It is true that if

envy finds expression in scornful phrases, we must translate "I have no

wish to know him" by "I have no means of knowing him." That is the

intellectual sense. But the emotional sense is indeed, "I have no wish

to know him." The speaker knows that it is not true, but he does not,

all the same, say it simply to deceive; he says it because it is what he

feels, and that is sufficient to bridge the gulf between them, that is

to say to make him happy.

Self-centredness thus enabling every human being to see the universe

spread out in a descending scale beneath himself who is its lord, M.

Bloch afforded himself the luxury of being pitiless when in the morning,

as he drank his chocolate, seeing Bergotte's signature at the foot of an

article in the newspaper which he had scarcely opened, he disdainfully

granted the writer an audience soon cut short, pronounced sentence upon

him, and gave himself the comforting pleasure of repeating after every

mouthful of the scalding brew: "That fellow Bergotte has become

unreadable. My word, what a bore the creature can be. I really must stop

my subscription. How involved it all is, bread and butter nonsense!" And

he helped himself to another slice.

This illusory importance of M. Bloch senior did, moreover, extend some

little way beyond the radius of his own perceptions. In the first place

his children regarded him as a superior person. Children have always a

tendency either to depreciate or to exalt their parents, and to a good

son his father is always the best of fathers, quite apart from any

objective reason there may be for admiring him. Now, such reasons were

not altogether lacking in the case of M. Bloch, who was an educated man,

shrewd, affectionate towards his family. In his most intimate circle

they were all the more proud of him because, if, in "society", people

are judged by a standard (which is incidentally absurd) and according to

false but fixed rules, by comparison with the aggregate of all the other

fashionable people, in the subdivisions of middle class life, on the

other hand, the dinners, the family parties all turn upon certain people

who are pronounced good company, amusing, and who in "society" would not

survive a second evening. Moreover in such an environment where the

artificial values of the aristocracy do not exist, their place is taken

by distinctions even more stupid. Thus it was that in his family circle,

and even among the remotest branches of the tree, an alleged similarity

in his way of wearing his moustache and in the bridge of his nose led to

M. Bloch's being called "the Duc d'Aumale's double". (In the world of

club pages, the one who wears his cap on one side and his jacket tightly

buttoned, so as to give himself the appearance, he imagines, of a

foreign officer, is he not also a personage of a sort to his comrades?)

The resemblance was the faintest, but you would have said that it

conferred a title. When he was mentioned, it would always be: "Bloch?

Which one? The Duc d'Aumale?" as people say "Princesse Murat? Which one?

The Queen (of Naples)?" And there were certain other minute marks which

combined to give him, in the eyes of the cousinhood, an acknowledged

claim to distinction. Not going the length of having a carriage of his

own, M. Bloch used on special occasions to hire an open victoria with a

pair of horses from the Company, and would drive through the Bois de

Boulogne, his body sprawling limply from side to side, two fingers

pressed to his brow, other two supporting his chin, and if people who

did not know him concluded that he was an "old nuisance", they were all

convinced, in the family, that for smartness Uncle Solomon could have

taught Gramont-Caderousse a thing or two. He was one of those people who

when they die, because for years they have shared a table in a

restaurant on the boulevard with its news-editor, are described as "well

known Paris figures" in the social column of the _Radical._ M. Bloch

told Saint-Loup and me that Bergotte knew so well why he, M. Bloch,

always cut him that as soon as he caught sight of him, at the theatre or

in the club, he avoided his eye. Saint-Loup blushed, for it had occurred

to him that this club could not be the Jockey, of which his father had

been chairman. On the other hand it must be a fairly exclusive club, for

M. Bloch had said that Bergotte would never have got into it if he had

come up now. So it was not without the fear that he might be

"underrating his adversary" that Saint-Loup asked whether the club in

question were the Rue Royale, which was considered "lowering" by his own

family, and to which he knew that certain Israelites had been admitted.

"No," replied M. Bloch in a tone at once careless, proud and ashamed,

"it is a small club, but far more pleasant than a big one, the Ganaches.

We're very strict there, don't you know." "Isn't Sir Rufus Israels the

chairman?" Bloch junior asked his father, so as to give him the

opportunity for a glorious lie, never suspecting that the financier had

not the same eminence in Saint-Loup's eyes as in his. The fact of the

matter was that the Ganaches club boasted not Sir Rufus Israels but one

of his staff. But as this man was on the best of terms with his

employer, he had at his disposal a stock of the financier's cards, and

would give one to M. Bloch whenever he wished to travel on a line of

which Sir Rufus was a director, the result of which was that old Bloch

would say: "I'm just going round to the Club to ask Sir Rufus for a line

to the Company." And the card enabled him to dazzle the guards on the

trains. The misses Bloch were more interested in Bergotte and, reverting

to him rather than pursue the subject of the Ganaches, the youngest

asked her brother, in the most serious tone imaginable, for she believed

that there existed in the world, for the designation of men of talent,

no other terms than those which he was in the habit of using: "Is he

really an amazing good egg, this Bergotte? Is he in the category of the

great lads, good eggs like Villiers and Catullus?" "I've met him several

times at dress rehearsals," said M. Nissim Bernard. "He is an uncouth

creature, a sort of Schlemihl." There was nothing very serious in this

allusion to Chamisso's story but the epithet "Schlemihl" formed part of

that dialect, half-German, half-Jewish, the use of which delighted M.

Bloch in the family circle, but struck him as vulgar and out of place

before strangers. And so he cast a reproving glance at his uncle. "He

has talent," said Bloch. "Ah!" His sister sighed gravely, as though to

imply that in that case there was some excuse for me. "All writers have

talent," said M. Bloch scornfully. "In fact it appears," went on his

son, raising his fork, and screwing up his eyes with an air of impish

irony, "that he is going to put up for the Academy." "Go on. He hasn't

enough to shew them," replied his father, who seemed not to have for the

Academy the same contempt as his son and daughters. "He's not big

enough." "Besides, the Academy is a salon, and Bergotte has no polish,"

declared the uncle (whose heiress Mme. Bloch was), a mild and

inoffensive person whose surname, Bernard, might perhaps by itself have

quickened my grandfather's powers of diagnosis, but would have appeared

too little in harmony with a face which looked as if it had been brought

back from Darius's palace and restored by Mme. Dieulafoy, had not

(chosen by some collector desirous of giving a crowning touch of

orientalism to this figure from Susa) his first name, Nissim, stretched

out above it the pinions of an androcephalous bull from Khorsabad. But

M. Bloch never stopped insulting his uncle, whether it was that he was

excited by the unresisting good-humour of his butt, or that the rent of

the villa being paid by M. Nissim Bernard, the beneficiary wished to

shew that he kept his independence, and, more important still, that he

was not seeking by flattery to make sure of the rich inheritance to

come. What most hurt the old man was being treated so rudely in front of

the manservant. He murmured an unintelligible sentence of which all that

could be made out was: "when the meschores are in the room".

"Meschores", in the Bible, means "the servant of God". In the family

circle the Blochs used the word when they referred to their own

servants, and were always exhilarated by it, because their certainty of

not being understood either by Christians or by the servants themselves

enhanced in M. Nissim Bernard and M. Bloch their twofold distinction of

being "masters" and at the same time "Jews". But this latter source of

satisfaction became a source of displeasure when there was "company". At

such times M. Bloch, hearing his uncle say "meschores", felt that he was

making his oriental side too prominent, just as a light-of-love who has

invited some of her sisters to meet her respectable friends is annoyed

if they allude to their profession or use words that do not sound quite

nice. Therefore, so far from his uncle's request's producing any effect

on M. Bloch, he, beside himself with rage, could contain himself no

longer. He let no opportunity pass of scarifying his wretched uncle. "Of

course, when there is a chance of saying anything stupid, one can be

quite certain that you won't miss it. You would be the first to lick his

boots if he were in the room!" shouted M. Bloch, while M. Nissim Bernard

in sorrow lowered over his plate the ringleted beard of King Sargon. My

friend, when he began to grow his beard, which also was blue-black and

crimped, became very like his great-uncle.

"What! Are you the son of the Marquis de Marsantes? Why, I knew him very

well," said M. Nissim Bernard to Saint-Loup. I supposed that he meant

the word "knew" in the sense in which Bloch's father had said that he

knew Bergotte, namely by sight. But he went on: "Your father was one of

my best friends." Meanwhile Bloch had turned very red, his father was

looking intensely cross, the misses Bloch were choking with suppressed

laughter. The fact was that in M. Nissim Bernard the love of ostentation

which in M. Bloch and his children was held in check, had engendered the

habit of perpetual lying. For instance, if he was staying in an hotel,

M. Nissim Bernard, as M. Bloch equally might have done, would have his

newspapers brought to him always by his valet in the dining-room, in the

middle of luncheon, when everybody was there, so that they should see

that he travelled with a valet. But to the people with whom he made

friends in the hotel the uncle used to say what the nephew would never

have said, that he was a Senator. He might know quite well that they

would sooner or later discover that the title was usurped; he could not,

at the critical moment, resist the temptation to assume it. M. Bloch

suffered acutely from his uncle's lies and from all the embarrassments

that they led to. "Don't pay any attention to him, he talks a great deal

of nonsense," he whispered to Saint-Loup, whose interest was all the

more whetted, for he was curious to explore the psychology of liars. "A

greater liar even than the Ithacan Odysseus, albeit Athene called him

the greatest liar among mortals," his son completed the indictment.

"Well, upon my word!" cried M. Nissim Bernard, "If I'd only known that I

was going to sit down to dinner with my old friend's son! Why, I have a

photograph still of your father at home, in Paris, and any number of

letters from him. He used always to call me 'uncle', nobody ever knew

why. He was a charming man, sparkling. I remember so well a dinner I

gave at Nice; there were Sardou, Labiche, Augier," "Molière, Racine,

Corneille," M. Bloch added with sarcasm, while his son completed the

tale of guests with "Plautus, Menander, Kalidasa." M. Nissim Bernard,

cut to the quick, stopped short in his reminiscence, and, ascetically

depriving himself of a great pleasure, remained silent until the end of

dinner.

"Saint-Loup with helm of bronze," said Bloch, "have a piece more of this

duck with thighs heavy with fat, over which the illustrious sacrificer

of birds has spilled numerous libations of red wine."

As a rule, after bringing out from his store for the entertainment of a

distinguished guest his anecdotes of Sir Rufus Israels and others, M.

Bloch, feeling that he had succeeded in touching and melting his son's

heart, would withdraw, so as not to spoil his effect in the eyes of the

"big pot". If, however, there was an absolutely compelling reason, as

for instance on the night when his son won his fellowship, M. Bloch

would add to the usual string of anecdotes the following ironical

reflexion which he ordinarily reserved for his own personal friends, so

that young Bloch was extremely proud to see it produced for his: "The

Government have acted unpardonably. They have forgotten to consult M.

Coquelin! M. Coquelin has let it be known that he is displeased." (M.

Bloch prided himself on being a reactionary, with a contempt for

theatrical people.)

But the misses Bloch and their brother reddened to the tips of their

ears, so much impressed were they when Bloch senior, to shew that he

could be regal to the last in his entertainment of his son's two

'chums', gave the order for champagne to be served, and announced

casually that, as a treat for us, he had taken three stalls for the

performance which a company from the Opéra-Comique was giving that

evening at the Casino. He was sorry that he had not been able to get a

box. They had all been taken. However, he had often been in the boxes,

and really one saw and heard better down by the orchestra. All very

well, only, if the defect of his son, that is to say the defect which

his son believed to be invisible to other people, was coarseness, the

father's was avarice. And so it was in a decanter that we were served

with, under the name of champagne, a light sparkling wine, while under

that of orchestra stalls he had taken three in the pit, which cost half

as much, miraculously persuaded by the divine intervention of his defect

that neither at table nor in the theatre (where the boxes were all

empty) would the defect be noticed. When M. Bloch had let us moisten our

lips in the flat glasses which his son dignified with the style and tide

of "craters with deeply hollowed flanks", he made us admire a picture to

which he was so much attached that he had brought it with him to Balbec.

He told us that it was a Rubens. Saint-Loup asked innocently if it was

signed. M. Bloch replied, blushing, that he had had the signature cut

off to make it fit the frame, but that it made no difference, as he had

no intention of selling the picture. Then he hurriedly bade us good

night, in order to bury himself in the _Journal Officiel_, back numbers

of which littered the house, and which, he informed us, he was obliged

to read carefully on account of his "parliamentary position" as to the

precise nature of which, however, he gave us no enlightenment. "I shall

take a muffler," said Bloch, "for Zephyrus and Boreas are disputing to

which of them shall belong the fish-teeming sea, and should we but tarry

a little after the show is over, we shall not be home before the first

flush of Eos, the rosy-fingered. By the way," he asked Saint-Loup when

we were outside, and I trembled, for I realised at once that it was of

M. de Charlus that Bloch was speaking in that tone of irony, "who was

that excellent old card dressed in black that I saw you walking with,

the day before yesterday, on the beach?" "That was my uncle." Saint-Loup

was ruffled. Unfortunately, a "floater" was far from seeming to Bloch a

thing to be avoided. He shook with laughter. "Heartiest congratulations;

I ought to have guessed; he has an excellent style, the most priceless

dial of an old 'gaga' of the highest lineage." "You are absolutely

mistaken; he is an extremely clever man," retorted Saint-Loup, now

furious. "I am sorry about that; it makes him less complete. All the

same, I should like very much to know him, for I flatter myself I could

write some highly adequate pieces about old buffers like that. Just to

see him go by, he's killing. But I should leave out of account the

caricaturale side, which really is hardly worthy of an artist enamoured

of the plastic beauty of phrases, of his mug, which (you'll forgive me)

doubled me up for a moment with joyous laughter, and I should bring into

prominence the aristocratic side of your uncle, who after all has a

distinct bovine effect, and when one has finished laughing does impress

one by his great air of style. But," he went on, addressing myself this

time, "there is also a matter of a very different order about which I

have been meaning to question you, and every time we are together, some

god, blessed denizen of Olympus, makes me completely forget to ask for a

piece of information which might before now have been and is sure some

day to be of the greatest use to me. Tell me, who was the lovely lady I

saw you with in the Jardin d'Acclimatation accompanied by a gentleman

whom I seem to know by sight and a little girl with long hair?" It had

been quite plain to me at the time that Mme. Swann did not remember

Bloch's name, since she had spoken of him by another, and had described

my friend as being on the staff of some Ministry, as to which I had

never since then thought of finding out whether he had joined it. But

how came it that Bloch, who, according to what she then told me, had got

himself introduced to her, was ignorant of her name? I was so much

surprised that I stopped for a moment before answering. "Whoever she

is," he went on, "hearty congratulations; you can't have been bored with

her. I picked her up a few days before that on the Zone railway, where,

speaking of zones, she was so kind, as to undo hers for the benefit of

your humble servant; I have never had such a time in my life, and we

were just going to make arrangements to meet again when somebody she

knew had the bad taste to get in at the last station but one." My

continued silence did not appear to please Bloch. "I was hoping," he

said, "thanks to you, to learn her address, so as to go there several

times a week to taste in her arms the delights of Eros, dear to the

gods; but I do not insist since you seem pledged to discretion with

respect to a professional who gave herself to me three times running,

and in the most refined manner, between Paris and the Point-du-Jour. I

am bound to see her again, some night."

I called upon Bloch after this dinner; he returned my call, but I was

out and he was seen asking for me by Françoise, who, as it happened,

albeit he had visited us at Combray, had never set eyes on him until

then. So that she knew only that one of "the gentlemen" who were friends

of mine had looked in to see me, she did not know "with what object",

dressed in a nondescript way, which had not made any particular

impression upon her. Now though I knew quite well that certain of

Françoise's social ideas must for ever remain impenetrable by me, ideas

based, perhaps, partly upon confusions between words, between names

which she had once and for all time mistaken for one another, I could

not restrain myself, who had long since abandoned the quest for

enlightenment in such cases, from seeking--and seeking, moreover, in

vain--to discover what could be the immense significance that the name

of Bloch had for Françoise. For no sooner had I mentioned to her that

the young man whom she had seen was M. Bloch than she recoiled several

paces, so great were her stupor and disappointment. "What! Is that M.

Bloch?" she cried, thunderstruck, as if so portentous a personage ought

to have been endowed with an appearance which "made you know" as soon as

you saw him that you were in the presence of one of the great ones of

the earth; and, like some one who has discovered that an historical

character is not "up to" the level of his reputation, she repeated in an

impressed tone, in which I could detect latent, for future growth, the

seeds of a universal scepticism: "What! Is that M. Bloch? Well, really,

you would never think it, to look at him." She seemed also to bear me a

grudge, as if I had always "overdone" the praise of Bloch to her. At the

same time she was kind enough to add: "Well, he may be M. Bloch, and all

that. I'm sure Master can say he's every bit as good."

She had presently, with respect to Saint-Loup, whom she worshipped, a

disillusionment of a different kind and of less severity: she discovered

that he was a Republican. Now for all that, when speaking, for instance,

of the Queen of Portugal, she would say with that disrespect which is,

among the people, the supreme form of respect: "Amélie, Philippe's

sister," Françoise was a Royalist. But when it came to a Marquis; a

Marquis who had dazzled her at first sight, and who was for the

Republic, seemed no longer real. And she shewed the same ill-humour as

if I had given her a box which she had believed to be made of gold, and

had thanked me for it effusively, and then a jeweller had revealed to

her that it was only plated. She at once withdrew her esteem from

Saint-Loup, but soon afterwards restored it to him, having reflected

that he could not, being the Marquis de Saint-Loup, be a Republican,

that he was just pretending, in his own interest, for with such a

Government as we had it might be a great advantage to him. From that

moment her coldness towards him, her resentment towards myself ceased.

And when she spoke of Saint-Loup she said: "He is a hypocrite," with a

broad and friendly smile which made it clear that she "considered" him

again just as much as when she first knew him, and that she had forgiven

him.

As a matter of fact, Saint-Loup was absolutely sincere and

disinterested, and it was this intense moral purity which, not being

able to find entire satisfaction in a selfish sentiment such as love,

nor on the other hand meeting in him the impossibility (which existed in

me, for instance) of finding its spiritual nourishment elsewhere than in

himself, rendered him truly capable (just as I was incapable) of

friendship.

Françoise was no less mistaken about Saint-Loup when she complained

that he had "that sort of" air, as if he did not look down upon the

people, but that it was all just a pretence, and you had only to see him

when he was in a temper with his groom. It had indeed sometimes happened

that Robert would scold his groom with a certain amount of brutality,

which proved that he had the sense not so much of the difference as of

the equality between classes and masses. "But," he said in answer to my

rebuke of his having treated the man rather harshly, "why should I go

out of my way to speak politely to him? Isn't he my equal? Isn't he just

as near to me as any of my uncles and cousins? You seem to think that I

ought to treat him with respect, as an inferior. You talk like an

aristocrat!" he added scornfully.

And indeed if there was a class to which he shewed himself prejudiced

and hostile, it was the aristocracy, so much so that he found it as hard

to believe in the superior qualities of a man in society as he found it

easy to believe in those of a man of the people. When I mentioned the

Princesse de Luxembourg, whom I had met with his aunt:

"An old trout," was his comment. "Like all that lot. She's a sort of

cousin of mine, by the way."

Having a strong prejudice against the people who frequented it, he went

rarely into "Society", and the contemptuous or hostile attitude which he

adopted towards it served to increase, among all his near relatives, the

painful impression made by his intimacy with a woman on the stage, a

connexion which, they declared, would be his ruin, blaming it specially

for having bred in him that spirit of denigration, that bad spirit, and

for having led him astray, after which it was only a matter of time

before he would have dropped out altogether. And so, many easy-going men

of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were without compunction when they spoke

of Robert's mistress. "Those girls do their job," they would say, "they

are as good as anybody else. But that one; no, thank you! We cannot

forgive her. She has done too much harm to a fellow we were fond of." Of

course, he was not the first to be caught in that snare. But the others

amused themselves like men of the world, continued to think like men of

the world about politics, about everything. As for him, his family found

him "soured". They did not bear in mind that, for many young men of

fashion who would otherwise remain uncultivated mentally, rough in their

friendships, without gentleness or taste--it is very often their

mistress who is their real master, and connexions of this sort the only

school of morals in which they are initiated into a superior culture,

and learn the value of disinterested relations. Even among the lower

orders (who, when it comes to coarseness, so often remind us of the

world of fashion) the woman, more sensitive, finer, more leisured, is

driven by curiosity to adopt certain refinements, respects certain

beauties of sentiment and of art which, though she may fail to

understand them, she nevertheless places above what has seemed most

desirable to the man, above money or position. Now whether the mistress

be a young blood's (such as Saint-Loup) or a young workman's

(electricians, for instance, must now be included in our truest order of

Chivalry) her lover has too much admiration and respect for her not to

extend them also to what she herself respects and admires; and for him

the scale of values is thereby reversed. Her sex alone makes her weak;

she suffers from nervous troubles, inexplicable things which in a man,

or even in another woman--a woman whose nephew or cousin he was--would

bring a smile to the lips of this stalwart young man. But he cannot bear

to see her suffer whom he loves. The young nobleman who, like

Saint-Loup, has a mistress acquires the habit, when he takes her out to

dine, of carrying in his pocket the valerian "drops" which she may need,

of ordering the waiter, firmly and with no hint of sarcasm, to see that

he shuts the doors quietly and not to put any damp moss on the table, so

as to spare his companion those discomforts which himself he has never

felt, which compose for him an occult world in whose reality she has

taught him to believe, discomforts for which he now feels pity without

in the least needing to understand them, for which he will still feel

pity when other women than she shall be the sufferers. Saint-Loup's

mistress--as the first monks of the middle ages taught Christendom--had

taught him to be kind to animals, for which she had a passion, never

moving without her dog, her canaries, her love-birds; Saint-Loup looked

after them with motherly devotion and treated as brutes the people who

were not good to dumb creatures. On the other hand, an actress, or

so-called actress, like this one who was living with him,--whether she

were intelligent or not, and as to that I had no knowledge--by making

him find the society of fashionable women boring, and look upon having

to go out to a party as a painful duty, had saved him from snobbishness

and cured him of frivolity. If, thanks to her, his social engagements

filled a smaller place in the life of her young lover, at the same time,

whereas if he had been simply a drawing-room man, vanity or

self-interest would have dictated his choice of friends as rudeness

would have characterised his treatment of them, his mistress had taught

him to bring nobility and refinement into his friendship. With her

feminine instinct, with a keener appreciation in men of certain

qualities of sensibility which her lover might perhaps, without her

guidance, have misunderstood and laughed at them, she had always been

swift to distinguish from among the rest of Saint-Loup's friends, the

one who had a real affection for him, and to make that one her

favourite. She knew how to make him feel grateful to such a friend, shew

his gratitude, notice what things gave his friend pleasure and what

pain. And presently Saint-Loup, without any more need of her to prompt

him, began to think of all these things by himself, and at Balbec, where

she was not with him, for me whom she had never seen, whom he had

perhaps not yet so much as mentioned in his letters to her, of his own

accord would pull up the window of a carriage in which I was sitting,

take out of the room the flowers that made me feel unwell, and when he

had to say good-bye to several people at once manage to do so before it

was actually time for him to go, so as to be left alone and last with

me, to make that distinction between them and me, to treat me

differently from the rest. His mistress had opened his mind to the

invisible, had brought a serious element into his life, delicacy into

his heart, but all this escaped his sorrowing family who repeated: "That

creature will be the death of him; meanwhile she's doing what she can to

disgrace him." It is true that he had succeeded in getting out of her

all the good that she was capable of doing him; and that she now caused

him only incessant suffering, for she had taken an intense dislike to

him and tormented him in every possible way. She had begun, one fine

day, to look upon him as stupid and absurd because the friends that she

had among the younger writers and actors had assured her that he was,

and she duly repeated what they had said with that passion, that want of

reserve which we shew whenever we receive from without and adopt as our

own opinions or customs of which we previously knew nothing. She readily

professed, like her actor friends, that between Saint-Loup and herself

there was a great gulf fixed, and not to be crossed, because they were

of different races, because she was an intellectual and he, whatever he

might pretend, the born enemy of the intellect. This view of him seemed

to her profound, and she sought confirmation of it in the most

insignificant words, the most trivial actions of her lover. But when the

same friends had further convinced her that she was destroying, in

company so ill-suited to her, the great hopes which she had, they said,

aroused in them, that her lover would leave a mark on her, that by

living with him she was spoiling her future as an artist; to her

contempt for Saint-Loup was added the same hatred that she would have

felt for him if he had insisted upon inoculating her with a deadly germ.

She saw him as seldom as possible, at the same time postponing the hour

of a definite rupture, which seemed to me a highly improbable event.

Saint-Loup made such sacrifices for her that unless she was ravishingly

beautiful (but he had always refused to shew me her photograph, saying:

"For one thing, she's not a beauty, and besides she always takes badly.

These are only some snapshots that I took myself with my kodak; they

would give you a wrong idea of her.") it would surely be difficult for

her to find another man who would consent to anything of the sort. I

never reflected that a certain obsession to make a name for oneself,

even when one has no talent, that the admiration, no more than the

privately expressed admiration of people who are imposing on one, can

(although it may not perhaps have been the case with Saint-Loup's

mistress) be, even for a little prostitute, motives more determining

than the pleasure of making money. Saint-Loup who, without quite

understanding what was going on in the mind of his mistress, did not

believe her to be completely sincere either in her unfair reproaches or

in her promises of undying love, had all the same at certain moments the

feeling that she would break with him whenever she could, and

accordingly, impelled no doubt by the instinct of self-preservation

which was part of his love, a love more clear-sighted, possibly, than

Saint-Loup himself, making use, too, of a practical capacity for

business which was compatible in him with the loftiest and blindest

flights of the heart, had refused to settle upon her any capital, had

borrowed an enormous sum so that she should want nothing, but made it

over to her only from day to day. And no doubt, assuming that she really

thought of leaving him, she was calmly waiting until she had feathered

her nest, a process which, with the money given her by Saint-Loup, would

not perhaps take very long, but would all the same require a time which

must be conceded to prolong the happiness of my new friend--or his

misery.

This dramatic period of their connexion, which had now reached its most

acute stage, the most cruel for Saint-Loup, for she had forbidden him to

remain in Paris, where his presence exasperated her, and had forced him

to spend his leave at Balbec, within easy reach of his regiment--had

begun one evening at the house of one of Saint-Loup's aunts, on whom he

had prevailed to allow his friend to come there, before a large party,

to recite some of the speeches from a symbolical play in which she had

once appeared in an "advanced" theatre, and for which she had made him

share the admiration that she herself professed.

But when she appeared in the room, with a large lily in her hand, and

wearing a costume copied from the _Ancilia Domini_, which she had

persuaded Saint-Loup was an absolute "vision of beauty", her entrance

had been greeted, in that assemblage of club men and duchesses, with

smiles which the monotonous tone of her chantings, the oddity of certain

words and their frequent recurrence had changed into fits of laughter,

stifled at first but presently so uncontrollable that the wretched

reciter had been unable to go on. Next day Saint-Loup's aunt had been

universally censured for having allowed so grotesque an actress to

appear in her drawing-room. A well-known duke made no bones about telling

her that she had only herself to blame if she found herself criticised.

"Damn it all, people really don't come to see 'turns' like that! If the

woman had talent, even; but she has none and never will have any. 'Pon my

soul, Paris is not such a fool as people make out. Society does not

consist exclusively of imbeciles. This little lady evidently believed

that she was going to take Paris by surprise. But Paris is not so easily

surprised as all that, and there are still some things that they can't

make us swallow."

As for the actress, she left the house with Saint-Loup, exclaiming:

"What do you mean by letting me in for those geese, those uneducated

bitches, those dirty corner-boys? I don't mind telling you, there wasn't

a man in the room who didn't make eyes at me or squeeze my foot, and it

was because I wouldn't look at them that they were out for revenge."

Words which had changed Robert's antipathy for people in society into a

horror that was at once deep and distressing, and was provoked in him

most of all by those who least deserved it, devoted kinsmen who, on

behalf of the family, had sought to persuade Saint-Loup's lady to break

with him, a move which she represented to him as inspired by their

passion for her. Robert, although he had at once ceased to see them,

used to imagine when he was parted from his mistress as he was now, that

they or others like them were profiting by his absence to return to the

charge and had possibly prevailed over her. And when he spoke of the

sensualists who were disloyal to their friends, who sought to seduce

their friends' wives, tried to make them come to houses of assignation,

his whole face would glow with suffering and hatred.

"I would kill them with less compunction than I would kill a dog, which

is at least a well-behaved beast, and loyal and faithful. There are men

who deserve the guillotine if you like, far more than poor wretches who

have been led into crime by poverty and by the cruelty of the rich."

He spent the greater part of his time in sending letters and telegrams

to his mistress. Every time that, while still preventing him from

returning to Paris, she found an excuse to quarrel with him by post, I

read the news at once in his evident discomposure. Inasmuch as his

mistress never told him what fault she found with him, suspecting that

possibly if she did not tell him it was because she did not know

herself, and simply had had enough of him, he would still have liked an

explanation and used to write to her: "Tell me what I have done wrong; I

am quite ready to acknowledge my faults," the grief that overpowered him

having the effect of persuading him that he had behaved badly.

But she kept him waiting indefinitely for her answers which, when they

did come, were meaningless. And so it was almost always with a furrowed

brow, and often with empty hands that I would see Saint-Loup returning

from the post office, where, alone in all the hotel, he and Françoise

went to fetch or to hand in letters, he from a lover's impatience, she

with a servant's mistrust of others. (His telegrams obliged him to take

a much longer journey.)