In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (50 page)

At his use of the word 'lighft' I had all the less reason to be
surprised in that, a few days before, Bloch having asked me why I had
come to Balbec (although it seemed to him perfectly natural that he
himself should be there) and whether it had been "in the hope of
making grand friends," when I had explained to him that this visit was
a fulfilment of one of my earliest longings, though one not so deep as
my longing to see Venice, he had replied: "Yes, of course, to sip iced
drinks with the pretty ladies, while you pretend to be reading the
Stones of Venighce
, by Lord John Ruskin, a dreary shaver, in fact
one of the most garrulous old barbers that you could find." So that
Bloch evidently thought that in England not only were all the
inhabitants of the male sex called 'Lord,' but the letter 'i' was
invariably pronounced 'igh.' As for Saint–Loup, this mistake in
pronunciation seemed to him all the less serious inasmuch as he saw in
it pre–eminently a want of those almost 'society' notions which my new
friend despised as fully as he was versed in them. But the fear lest
Bloch, discovering one day that one says 'Venice' and that Ruskin was
not a lord, should retrospectively imagine that Robert had been
laughing at him, made the latter feel as guilty as if he had been
found wanting in the indulgence with which, as we have seen, he
overflowed, so that the blush which would no doubt one day dye the
cheek of Bloch on the discovery of his error, Robert already, by
anticipation and reflex action, could feel mounting to his own. For
he fully believed that Bloch attached more importance than he to this
mistake. Which Bloch proved to be true some time later, when he heard
me pronounce the word 'lift,' by breaking in with:

"Oh, you say 'lift,' do you?" And then, in a dry and lofty tone: "Not
that it is of the slightest importance." A phrase that is like a
reflex action of the body, the same in all men whose self–esteem is
great, in the gravest circumstances as well as in the most trivial,
betraying there as clearly as on this occasion how important the thing
in question seems to him who declares that it is of no importance; a
tragic phrase at times, the first to escape (and then how
heart–breaking) the lips of every man at all proud from whom we have
just taken the last hope to which he still clung by refusing to do him
a service. "Oh, well, it's not of the slightest importance; I shall
make some other arrangement:" the other arrangement which it is not of
the slightest importance that he should be driven to adopt being often
suicide.

Apart from this, Bloch made me the prettiest speeches. He was
certainly anxious to be on the best of terms with me. And yet he asked
me: "Is it because you've taken a fancy to raise yourself to the
peerage that you run after de Saint–Loup–en–Bray? You must be going
through a fine crisis of snobbery. Tell me, are you a snob? I think
so, what?" Not that his desire to be friendly had suddenly changed.
But what is called, in not too correct language, 'ill breeding' was
his defect, and therefore the defect which he was bound to overlook,
all the more that by which he did not believe that other people could
be shocked. In the human race the frequency of the virtues that are
identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the
defects that are peculiar to each one of us. Undoubtedly, it is not
common sense that is "the commonest thing in the world"; but human
kindness. In the most distant, the most desolate ends of the earth, we
marvel to see it blossom of its own accord, as in a remote valley a
poppy like the poppies in the world beyond, poppies which it has never
seen as it has never known aught but the wind that, now and again,
stirring the folds of its scarlet cloak, disturbs its solitude. Even
if this human kindness, paralysed by self–interest, is not exercised,
it exists none the less, and whenever any inconstant egoist does not
restrain its action, when, for example, he is reading a novel or a
newspaper, it will bud, blossom, grow, even in the heart of him who,
cold–blooded in real life, has retained a tender heart, as a lover of
fiction, for the weak, the righteous and the persecuted. But the
variety of our defects is no less remarkable than the similarity of
our virtues. Each of us has his own, so much so that to continue
loving him we are obliged not to take them into account but to ignore
them and look only to the rest of his character. The most perfect
person in the world has a certain defect which shocks us or makes us
angry. One man is of rare intelligence, sees everything from an
exalted angle, never speaks evil of anyone, but will pocket and forget
letters of supreme importance which it was he himself who asked you to
let him post for you, and will then miss a vital engagement without
offering you any excuse, with a smile, because he prides himself upon
never knowing the time. Another is so refined, so gentle, so delicate
in his conduct that he never says anything about you before your face
except what you are glad to hear; but you feel that he refrains from
uttering, that he keeps buried in his heart, where they grow bitter,
very different opinions, and the pleasure that he derives from seeing
you is so dear to him that he will let you faint with exhaustion
sooner than leave you to yourself. A third has more sincerity, but
carries it so far that he feels bound to let you know, when you have
pleaded the state of your health as an excuse for not having been to
see him, that you were seen going to the theatre and were reported to
be looking well, or else that he has not been able to profit entirely
by the action which you have taken on his behalf, which, by the way,
three other of his friends had already offered to take, so that he is
only moderately indebted to you. In similar circumstances the previous
friend would have pretended not to know that you had gone to the
theatre, or that other people could have done him the same service.
But this last friend feels himself obliged to repeat or to reveal to
somebody the very thing that is most likely to give offence; is
delighted with his own frankness and tells you, emphatically: "I am
like that." While others infuriate you by their exaggerated curiosity,
or by a want of curiosity so absolute that you can speak to them of
the most sensational happenings without their grasping what it is all
about; and others again take months to answer you if your letter has
been about something that concerns yourself and not them, or else, if
they write that they are coming to ask you for something and you dare
not leave the house for fear of missing them, do not appear, but leave
you in suspense for weeks because, not having received from you the
answer which their letter did not in the least 'expect,' they have
concluded that you must be cross with them. And others, considering
their own wishes and not yours, talk to you without letting you get a
word in if they are in good spirits and want to see you, however
urgent the work you may have in hand, but if they feel exhausted by
the weather or out of humour, you cannot get a word out of them, they
meet your efforts with an inert languor and no more take the trouble
to reply, even in monosyllables, to what you say to them than if they
had not heard you. Each of our friends has his defects so markedly
that to continue to love him we are obliged to seek consolation for
those defects—in the thought of his talent, his goodness, his
affection for ourself—or rather to leave them out of account, and for
that we need to display all our good will. Unfortunately our obliging
obstinacy in refusing to see the defect in our friend is surpassed by
the obstinacy with which he persists in that defect, from his own
blindness to it or the blindness that he attributes to other people.
For he does not notice it himself, or imagines that it is not noticed.
Since the risk of giving offence arises principally from the
difficulty of appreciating what does and what does not pass
unperceived, we ought, at least, from prudence, never to speak of
ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that
other people's views are never in accordance with our own. If we find
as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which
inside is full of hidden treasures, torture–chambers, skeletons, when
we discover the true lives of other people, the real beneath the
apparent universe, we are no less surprised if, in place of the image
that we have made of ourself with the help of all the things that
people have said to us, we learn from the terms in which they speak of
us in our absence what an entirely different image they have been
carrying in their own minds of us and of our life. So that whenever we
have spoken about ourselves, we may be sure that our inoffensive and
prudent words, listened to with apparent politeness and hypocritical
approbation, have given rise afterwards to the most exasperated or the
most mirthful, but in either case the least favourable, criticism. The
least risk that we run is that of irritating people by the
disproportion that there is between our idea of ourselves and the
words that we use, a disproportion which as a rule makes people's talk
about themselves as ludicrous as the performances of those self–styled
music–lovers who when they feel the need to hum a favourite melody
compensate for the inadequacy of their inarticulate murmurings by a
strenuous mimicry and a look of admiration which is hardly justified
by all that they let us hear. And to the bad habit of speaking about
oneself and one's defects there must be added, as part of the same
thing, that habit of denouncing in other people defects precisely
analogous to one's own. For it is always of those defects that people
speak, as though it were a way of speaking about oneself, indirectly,
which added to the pleasure of absolution that of confession. Besides
it seems that our attention, always attracted by what is
characteristic of ourselves, notices that more than anything else in
other people. One short–sighted man says of another: "But he can
scarcely open his eyes!"; a consumptive has his doubts as to the
pulmonary integrity of the most robust; an unwashed man speaks only of
the baths that other people do not take; an evil–smelling man insists
that other people smell; a cuckold sees cuckolds everywhere, a light
woman light women, a snob snobs. Then, too, every vice, like every
profession, requires and trains a special knowledge which we are never
loath to display. The invert detects and denounces inverts; the tailor
asked out to dine, before he has begun to talk to you, has passed
judgment on the cloth of your coat, which his fingers are itching to
feel, and if after a few words of conversation you were to ask a
dentist what he really thought of you, he would tell you how many of
your teeth wanted filling. To him nothing appears more important, nor
more absurd to you who have noticed his own. And it is not only when
we speak of ourselves that we imagine other people to be blind; we
behave as though they were. On every one of us there is a special god
in attendance who hides from him or promises him the concealment from
other people of his defect, just as he stops the eyes and nostrils of
people who do not wash to the streaks of dirt which they carry in
their ears and the smell of sweat which emanates from their armpits,
and assures them that they can with impunity carry both of these about
a world that will notice nothing. And those who wear artificial
pearls, or give them as presents, imagine that people will take them
to be genuine. Bloch was ill–bred, neurotic, a snob, and, since he
belonged to a family of little repute, had to support, as on the floor
of ocean, the incalculable pressure that was imposed on him not only
by the Christians upon the surface but by all the intervening layers
of Jewish castes superior to his own, each of them crushing with its
contempt the one that was immediately beneath it. To carve his way
through to the open air by raising himself from Jewish family to
Jewish family would have taken Bloch many thousands of years. It was
better worth his while to seek an outlet in another direction.

When Bloch spoke to me of the crisis of snobbery through which I must
be passing, and bade me confess that I was a snob, I might well have
replied: "If I were, I should not be going about with you." I said
merely that he was not being very polite. Then he tried to apologise,
but in the way that is typical of the ill–bred man who is only too
glad to hark back to whatever it was if he can find an opportunity to
aggravate his offence. "Forgive me," he used now to plead, whenever
we met, "I have vexed you, tormented you; I have been wantonly
mischievous. And yet—man in general and your friend in particular is
so singular an animal—you cannot imagine the affection that I, I who
tease you so cruelly, have for you. It carries me often, when I think
of you, to tears." And he gave an audible sob.

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.