In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (55 page)

"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 cheek,
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 title 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 caricaturable 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, 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.