The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (161 page)

“That I do not believe. Oriane isn’t exactly a genius, but all the same she’s by no means stupid.”

“You know that as a rule I’m not at all keen on your advertising the good opinion you’re kind enough to hold of me; I’m not conceited. That’s why I’m sorry you should have said flattering things about me to your friends here (whom we’ll join in two seconds). But Mme de Guermantes is different. If you could let her know—even with a bit of exaggeration—what you think of me, you would give me great pleasure.”

“Why, of course I will. If that’s all you want me to do, it’s not very difficult. But what difference can it possibly make to you what she thinks of you? I suppose you think her no end of a joke, really. Anyhow, if that’s all you want we can discuss it in front of the others or when we’re by ourselves; I’m afraid of your tiring yourself if you stand talking, especially in such awkward conditions, when we have heaps of opportunities of being alone together.”

It was precisely these awkward conditions that had given me courage to approach Robert; the presence of the others was for me a pretext that justified my giving my remarks a brief and disjointed form, under cover of which I could more easily dissemble the falsehood of my saying to my friend that I had forgotten his connexion with the Duchess, and also for not giving him time to frame—with regard to my reasons for wishing Mme de Guermantes to know that I was his friend, was clever, and so forth—questions which would have been all the more disturbing in that I should not have been able to answer them.

“Robert, I’m surprised that a man of your intelligence should fail to understand that one doesn’t discuss the things that will give one’s friends pleasure; one does them. Now I, if you were to ask me no matter what—and indeed I only wish you would ask me to do something for you—I can assure you I shouldn’t demand any explanations. I’ve gone further than I really meant; I have no desire to know Mme de Guermantes, but just to test you I ought to have said that I was anxious to dine with Mme de Guermantes and I’m sure you would never have done it.”

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

“When?”

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

“We shall see. I dare say she won’t want to see me, though. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

“Not at all, it’s nothing.”

“Don’t say that; it’s tremendous, because now I can see what a friend you are. Whether what I ask you to do is important or not, disagreeable or not, whether I mean it truly or only to test you, it makes no difference: you say you will do it, and there you show the fineness of your mind and heart. A stupid friend would have argued.”

This was exactly what he had just been doing; but perhaps I wanted to flatter his self-esteem; perhaps also I was sincere, the sole touchstone of merit seeming to me to be the extent to which a friend could be useful in respect of the one thing that seemed to me to have any importance, my love. Then I added, perhaps out of duplicity, perhaps in a genuine access of affection inspired by gratitude, by self-interest, and by all the similarities with Mme de Guermantes’s very features which nature had reproduced in her nephew Robert:

“But now we must really join the others, and I’ve mentioned only one of the two things I wanted to ask you, the less important; the other is more important to me, but I’m afraid you’ll never consent. Would it annoy you if we were to call each other
tu
?”

“Annoy me? My dear fellow!
Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-of happiness!
”
⁵

“How can I thank you? … After you! It’s such a pleasure to me that you needn’t do anything about Mme de Guermantes if you’d rather not, saying
tu
and
toi
is enough.”

“I can do both.”

“I say, Robert! Listen to me a minute,” I said to him later during dinner. “Oh, it’s really too absurd, this conversation in fits and starts, I can’t think why—you remember the lady I was speaking to you about just now.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

I had meant to ask him only for the loan of it. But as I was about to speak I was overcome with shyness, feeling that the request was indiscreet, and in order to hide my confusion I formulated it more bluntly and amplified it, as if it had been quite natural.

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

He blushed as he spoke. I could see that he had a reservation in his mind, that he attributed one to me as well, that he would further my love only partially, subject to certain moral principles, and for this I hated him.

At the same time I was touched to see how differently Saint-Loup behaved towards me now that I was no longer alone with him, and that his friends formed an audience. His increased affability would have left me cold had I thought that it was deliberately assumed; but I could feel that it was spontaneous and simply consisted of all that he was wont to say about me in my absence and refrained as a rule from saying when I was alone with him. True, in our private conversations I could detect the pleasure that he found in talking to me, but that pleasure almost always remained unexpressed. Now, at the same remarks of mine which ordinarily he enjoyed without showing it, he watched from the corner of his eye to see whether they produced on his friends the effect on which he had counted and which evidently corresponded to what he had promised them beforehand. The mother of a debutante could be no more anxiously attentive to her daughter’s repartee and to the attitude of the audience. If I had made some remark at which, alone in my company, he would merely have smiled, he was afraid that the others might not have seen the point, and kept saying “What? What?” to make me repeat what I had said, to attract their attention, and turning at once to his friends with a hearty laugh, making himself willy-nilly the fugleman of their laughter, presented me for the first time with the opinion that he had of me and must often have expressed to them. So that I caught sight of myself suddenly from the outside, like someone who reads his name in a newspaper or sees himself in a mirror.

It occurred to me on one of these evenings to tell a mildly amusing story about Mme Blandais, but I stopped at once, remembering that Saint-Loup knew it already, and that when I had started to tell it to him the day after my arrival he had interrupted me with: “You told me that before, at Balbec.” I was surprised, therefore, to find him begging me to go on and assuring me that he did not know the story and that it would amuse him immensely. “You’ve forgotten it for the moment,” I said to him, “but you’ll soon remember.” “No, really, I swear to you, you’re mistaken. You’ve never told it to me. Do go on.” And throughout the story he kept his feverish and enraptured gaze fixed alternately on myself and on his friends. I realised only after I had finished, amid general laughter, that it had struck him that this story would give his comrades a good idea of my wit, and that it was for this reason that he had pretended not to know it. Such is the stuff of friendship.

On the third evening, one of his friends, to whom I had not had an opportunity of speaking before, conversed with me at great length; and at one point I overheard him telling Saint-Loup how much he was enjoying himself. And indeed we sat talking together almost the entire evening, leaving our glasses of Sauterne untouched on the table before us, separated, sheltered from the others by the imposing veils of one of those instinctive likings between men which, when they are not based on physical attraction, are the only kind that is altogether mysterious. Of such an enigmatic nature had seemed to me to be, at Balbec, the feeling which Saint-Loup had for me, a feeling not to be confused with the interest of our conversations, free from any material association, invisible, intangible, and yet of whose presence in himself like a sort of combustible gas he had been sufficiently conscious to refer to with a smile. And perhaps there was something more surprising still in this fellow-feeling born here in a single evening, like a flower that had blossomed in a few minutes in the warmth of this little room.

I could not help asking Robert when he spoke to me about Balbec whether it was really settled that he was to marry Mlle d’Ambresac. He assured me that not only was it not settled, but that there had never been any question of such a match, that he had never seen her, that he did not know who she was. If at that moment I had happened to see any of the social gossips who had told me of this coming event, they would promptly have announced the engagement of Mlle d’Ambresac to someone who was not Saint-Loup and that of Saint-Loup to someone who was not Mlle d’Ambresac. I should have surprised them greatly had I reminded them of their incompatible and still so recent predictions. In order that this little game should continue, and should multiply false reports by attaching the greatest possible number to every name in turn, nature has furnished those who play it with a memory as short as their credulity is long.

Saint-Loup had spoken to me of another of his comrades who was present also, one with whom he was on particularly good terms since in this environment they were the only two to champion the reopening of the Dreyfus case.

“That fellow? Oh, he’s not like Saint-Loup, he’s a tub-thumper,” my new friend told me. “He’s not even sincere. At first he used to say: ‘Just wait a little, there’s a man I know well, a very shrewd and kind-hearted fellow, General de Boisdeffre; you need have no hesitation in accepting his opinion.’ But as soon as he heard that Boisdeffre had pronounced Dreyfus guilty, Boisdeffre ceased to count: clericalism, the prejudices of the General Staff, prevented him from forming a candid opinion, although there is, or rather was, before this Dreyfus business, no one as clerical as our friend. Next he told us that in any event we were to get the truth, because the case had been put in the hands of Saussier, and he, a Republican soldier (our friend coming of an ultra-monarchist family, if you please), was a man of steel, with a stern unyielding conscience. But when Saussier pronounced Esterhazy innocent, he found fresh reasons to account for the verdict, reasons damaging not to Dreyfus but to General Saussier. Saussier was blinded by the militarist spirit (and our friend, by the way, is as militarist as he is clerical, or at least was; I don’t know what to make of him any more). His family are broken-hearted at seeing him possessed by such ideas.”

“Don’t you think,” I suggested, half turning towards Saint-Loup so as not to appear to be cutting myself off from him, and in order to bring him into the conversation, “that the influence we ascribe to environment is particularly true of an intellectual environment. Each of us is conditioned by an idea. There are far fewer ideas than men, therefore all men with similar ideas are alike. As there is nothing material in an idea, the people who are only materially connected to the man with an idea in no way modify it.”

At this point I was interrupted by Saint-Loup, because another of the young soldiers had leaned across to him with a smile and, pointing to me, exclaimed: “Duroc! Duroc all over!” I had no idea what this might mean, but I felt the expression on the shy young face to be more than friendly.

Saint-Loup was not satisfied with this comparison. In an ecstasy of joy, no doubt intensified by the joy he felt in making me shine before his friends, with extreme volubility, he reiterated, stroking and patting me as though I were a horse that had just come first past the post: “You’re the cleverest man I know, do you hear?” He corrected himself, and added: “Together with Elstir.—You don’t mind my bracketing him with you, I hope? Scrupulous accuracy, don’t you know. As one might have said to Balzac, for example: ‘You’re the greatest novelist of the century—together with Stendhal.’ Scrupulous to a fault, you see, but nevertheless, immense admiration. No? You don’t agree about Stendhal?” he went on, with a naïve confidence in my judgment which found expression in a charming, smiling, almost childish glance of interrogation from his green eyes. “Oh, good! I see you’re on my side. Bloch can’t stand Stendhal. I think it’s idiotic of him. The
Chartreuse
is after all a stunning work, don’t you think? I’m so glad you agree with me. What is it you like best in the
Chartreuse
? Answer me,” he urged with boyish impetuosity. And the menace of his physical strength made the question almost terrifying. “Mosca? Fabrice?” I answered timidly that Mosca reminded me a little of M. de Norpois. Whereupon there were peals of laughter from the young Siegfried Saint-Loup. And no sooner had I added: “But Mosca is far more intelligent, not so pedantic,” than I heard Robert exclaim “Bravo,” actually clapping his hands, and, helpless with laughter, gasp: “Oh, perfect! Admirable! You really are astounding.”

While I was speaking, even the approbation of the others seemed supererogatory to Saint-Loup; he insisted on silence. And just as a conductor stops his orchestra with a rap from his baton because someone has made a noise, so he rebuked the author of this disturbance: “Gibergue, you must be silent when people are speaking. You can tell us about it afterwards.” And to me: “Please go on.”

I gave a sigh of relief, for I had been afraid that he was going to make me begin all over again.

“And as an idea,” I went on, “is a thing that cannot partake of human interests and would be incapable of deriving any benefit from them, the men who are governed by an idea are not swayed by self-interest.”

When I had finished speaking, “That stops your gob, doesn’t it, my boys,” exclaimed Saint-Loup, who had been following me with his eyes with the same anxious solicitude as if I had been walking a tight-rope. “What were you going to say, Gibergue?”

“I was just saying that your friend reminded me of Major Duroc. I could almost hear him speaking.”

“Why, I’ve often thought so myself,” replied Saint-Loup. “They have several points in common, but you’ll find that this one has all kinds of qualities Duroc hasn’t.”

Just as a brother of this friend of Saint-Loup, who had been trained at the Schola Cantorum, thought about every new musical work not at all what his father, his mother, his cousins, his club-mates thought, but exactly what the other students at the Schola thought, so this non-commissioned nobleman (of whom Bloch formed an extraordinary opinion when I told him about him, because, touched to hear that he was on the same side as himself, he nevertheless imagined him, on account of his aristocratic birth and religious and military upbringing, to be as different as possible, endowed with the romantic attraction of a native of a distant country) had a “mentality,” as people were now beginning to say, analogous to that of the whole body of Dreyfusards in general and of Bloch in particular, on which the traditions of his family and the interests of his career could retain no hold whatever. (Similarly, one of Saint-Loup’s cousins had married a young Eastern princess who was said to write poetry quite as fine as Victor Hugo’s or Alfred de Vigny’s, and in spite of this was presumed to have a different type of mind from what could normally be imagined, the mind of an Eastern princess immured in an
Arabian Nights
palace. It was left to the writers who had the privilege of meeting her to savour the disappointment, or rather the joy, of listening to conversation which gave the impression not of Scheherazade but of a person of genius of the type of Alfred de Vigny or Victor Hugo.)
⁶

I took a particular pleasure in talking to my new friend, as for that matter to all Robert’s comrades and to Robert himself, about the barracks, the officers of the garrison, and the Army in general. Thanks to the immensely exaggerated scale on which we see the things, however petty they may be, in the midst of which we eat, and talk, and lead our real life; thanks to that formidable enlargement which they undergo, and the effect of which is that the rest of the world, not being present, cannot compete with them, and assumes in comparison the insubstantiality of a dream, I had begun to take an interest in the various personalities of the barracks, in the officers whom I saw in the square when I went to visit Saint-Loup, or, if I was awake then, when the regiment passed beneath my windows. I should have liked to know more about the major whom Saint-Loup so greatly admired, and about the course in military history which would have appealed to me “even aesthetically.” I knew that all too often Robert indulged in a rather hollow verbalism, but at other times gave evidence of the assimilation of profound ideas which he was fully capable of grasping. Unfortunately, in respect of Army matters Robert was chiefly preoccupied at this time with the Dreyfus case. He spoke little about it, since he alone of the party at table was a Dreyfusard; the others were violently opposed to the idea of a fresh trial, except my other neighbour, my new friend, whose opinions appeared to be somewhat wavering. A firm admirer of the colonel, who was regarded as an exceptionally able officer and had denounced the current agitation against the Army in several of his regimental orders which had earned him the reputation of being an anti-Dreyfusard, my neighbour had heard that his commanding officer had let fall certain remarks leading to suppose that he had his doubts as to the guilt of Dreyfus and retained his admiration for Picquart. On this last point at any rate, the rumour of the colonel’s relative Dreyfusism was ill-founded, as are all the rumours, springing from no one knows where, which float around any great scandal. For, shortly afterwards, this colonel having been detailed to interrogate the former Chief of the Intelligence Branch, had treated him with a brutality and contempt the like of which had never been known before. However this might be (and although he had not taken the liberty of making a direct inquiry of the colonel), my neighbour had been kind enough to tell Saint-Loup—in the tone in which a Catholic lady might tell a Jewish lady that her parish priest denounced the pogroms in Russia and admired the generosity of certain Jews—that their colonel was not, with regard to Dreyfusism—to a certain kind of Dreyfusism, at least—the fanatical, narrow opponent that he had been made out to be.