The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (205 page)

As ill luck would have it, Saint-Loup remaining outside for a few minutes to explain to the driver that he was to call for us again after dinner, I had to go in alone. Now, to begin with, once I had ventured into the turning door, a contrivance to which I was unaccustomed, I began to fear that I should never succeed in getting out again. (Let me note here for the benefit of lovers of verbal accuracy that the contrivance in question, despite its peaceful appearance, is known as a “revolver,” from the English “revolving door.”) That evening the proprietor, unwilling either to brave the elements outside or to desert his customers, nevertheless remained standing near the entrance so as to have the pleasure of listening to the joyful complaints of the new arrivals, all aglow with the satisfaction of people who had had trouble getting there and been afraid of getting lost. The smiling cordiality of his welcome was, however, dissipated by the sight of a stranger incapable of disengaging himself from the rotating sheets of glass. This flagrant sign of ignorance made him frown like an examiner who has a good mind not to utter the formula:
Dignus est intrare
. As a crowning error I went and sat down in the room set apart for the nobility, from which he came at once to root me out, with a rudeness to which all the waiters immediately conformed, and showed me to a place in the other room. This was all the less to my liking because the seat was in the middle of a crowded bench and I had opposite me the door reserved for the Hebrews which, since it did not revolve, opened and closed every other minute and kept me in a horrible draught. But the proprietor declined to move me, saying: “No, sir, I cannot disturb everybody just for you.” Presently, however, he forgot this belated and troublesome guest, captivated as he was by the arrival of each newcomer who, before calling for his beer, his wing of cold chicken, or his hot grog (it was by now long past dinner-time), must first, as in the old romances, sing for his supper by relating his adventure as soon as he entered this asylum of warmth and security where the contrast with the perils just escaped engendered the sort of gaiety and sense of comradeship that create a cheerful harmony round the camp fire.

One reported that his carriage, thinking it had got to the Pont de la Concorde, had circled the Invalides three times, another that his, in trying to make its way down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, had driven into a clump of trees at the Rond-Point, from which it had taken three-quarters of an hour to extricate itself. Then followed lamentations about the fog, the cold, the deathly silence of the streets, uttered and received with the same exceptionally jovial air that was attributable to the pleasant atmosphere of the room which, except where I sat, was warm, the dazzling light which set blinking eyes already accustomed to not seeing, and the buzz of talk which restored their activity to deafened ears.

The new arrivals had the greatest difficulty in keeping silence. The singularity of the mishaps which each of them thought unique set their tongues on fire, and their eyes roved in search of someone to engage in conversation. The proprietor himself lost all sense of social distinctions: “M. le Prince de Foix lost his way three times coming from the Porte Saint-Martin,” he was not afraid to say with a laugh, actually pointing out, as though introducing one to the other, the illustrious nobleman to a Jewish barrister who on any evening but this would have been separated from him by a barrier far harder to surmount than the ledge of greenery. “Three times—fancy that!” said the barrister, touching his hat. This note of friendly interest was not at all to the Prince’s liking. He belonged to an aristocratic group for whom the practice of rudeness, even at the expense of their fellow-nobles when these were not of the very highest rank, seemed to be the sole occupation. Not to acknowledge a greeting; if the polite stranger repeated the offence, to laugh with sneering contempt or fling back one’s head with a look of fury; to pretend not to recognise some elderly man who had done them a service; to reserve their handshakes for dukes and the really intimate friends of dukes whom the latter introduced to them: such was the attitude of these young men, and especially of the Prince de Foix. Such an attitude was encouraged by the thoughtlessness of youth (a period in which, even in the middle class, one appears ungrateful and behaves boorishly because, having forgotten for months to write to a benefactor who has just lost his wife, one then ceases to greet him in the street so as to simplify matters), but it was inspired above all by an acute caste snobbery. It is true that, after the fashion of certain nervous disorders the symptoms of which grow less pronounced in later life, this snobbishness would generally cease to express itself in so offensive a form in these men who had been so intolerable when young. Once youth is outgrown, it is rare for a man to remain confined in insolence. He had supposed it to be the only thing in the world; suddenly he discovers, prince though he is, that there are also such things as music, literature, even standing for parliament. The scale of human values is correspondingly altered and he engages in conversation with people whom at one time he would have dismissed with a withering glance. Good luck to those of the latter who have had the patience to wait, and who are of such a good disposition—if “good” is the right word—that they accept with pleasure in their forties the civility and welcome that had been coldly withheld from them at twenty.

Since we are on the subject of the Prince de Foix, it may be mentioned here that he belonged to a set of a dozen or fifteen young men and to an inner group of four. The dozen or fifteen shared the characteristic (from which the Prince, I fancy, was exempt) that each of them presented a dual aspect to the world. Up to their eyes in debt, they were regarded as bounders by their tradesmen, notwithstanding the pleasure these took in addressing them as “Monsieur le Comte,” “Monsieur le Marquis,” “Monsieur le Duc.” They hoped to retrieve their fortunes by means of the famous rich marriage (“moneybags” as the expression still was) and, as the fat dowries which they coveted numbered at the most four or five, several of them were secretly setting their sights on the same damsel. And the secret would be so well kept that when one of them, on arriving at the café, announced: “My dear fellows, I’m too fond of you all not to tell you of my engagement to Mlle d’Ambresac,” there would be a general outburst, more than one of the others imagining that the marriage was as good as settled already between Mlle d’Ambresac and himself, and not having the self-control to stifle a spontaneous cry of stupefaction and rage. “So you like the idea of marriage, do you, Bibi?” the Prince de Châtellerault could not help exclaiming, dropping his fork in surprise and despair, for he had been fully expecting the engagement of this identical Mlle d’Ambresac to be announced, but with himself, Châtellerault, as her bridegroom. And heaven only knew all that his father had cunningly hinted to the Ambresacs about Bibi’s mother. “So you think it’ll be fun, being married, do you?” he could not help repeating for the second time to Bibi, who, better prepared because he had had plenty of time to decide on the right attitude to adopt since the engagement had reached the semi-official stage, would reply with a smile: “I’m pleased, not to be getting married, which I didn’t particularly want to do, but to be marrying Daisy d’Ambresac whom I find charming.” In the time taken up by this response M. de Châtellerault would have recovered his composure, but then he would think that he must at the earliest possible moment execute an about-face in the direction of Mlle de la Canourgue or Miss Foster, numbers two and three on the list of heiresses, pacify somehow the creditors who were expecting the Ambresac marriage, and, finally, explain to the people to whom he too had declared that Mlle de Ambresac was charming that this marriage was all very well for Bibi, but that he himself would have had all his family down on him like a ton of bricks if he had married her. Mme Soléon (he would say) had actually gone so far as to announce that she would not have them in her house.

But if in the eyes of tradesmen, restaurant proprietors and the like they seemed of little account, conversely, being creatures of dual personality, the moment they appeared in society they ceased to be judged by the dilapidated state of their fortunes and the sordid occupations by which they sought to repair them. They became once more M. le Prince this, M. le Duc that, and were judged only by their quarterings. A duke who was practically a multimillionaire and seemed to combine in his person every possible distinction would give precedence to them because, being the heads of their various houses, they were by descent sovereign princes of small territories in which they were entitled to mint money and so forth. Often, in this café, one of them would lower his eyes when another came in so as not to oblige the newcomer to greet him. This was because in his imaginative pursuit of riches he had invited a banker to dine. Every time a man about town enters into relations with a banker in such circumstances, the latter leaves him the poorer by a hundred thousand francs, which does not prevent the man about town from at once repeating the process with another. We continue to burn candles in churches and to consult doctors.

But the Prince de Foix, who was himself rich, belonged not only to this fashionable set of fifteen or so young men, but to a more exclusive and inseparable group of four, which included Saint-Loup. These were never asked anywhere separately, they were known as the four gigolos, they were always to be seen riding together, and in country houses their hostesses gave them communicating bedrooms, with the result that, especially as they were all four extremely good-looking, rumours were current as to the extent of their intimacy. I was in a position to give these the lie direct so far as Saint-Loup was concerned. But the curious thing is that if, later on, it was discovered that these rumours were true of all four, each of the quartet had been entirely in the dark as to the other three. And yet each of them had done his utmost to find out about the others, to gratify a desire or (more probably) a grudge, to prevent a marriage or to secure a hold over the friend whose secret he uncovered. A fifth (for in groups of four there are always more than four) had joined this platonic party who was more so than any of the others. But religious scruples restrained him until long after the group had broken up and he himself was a married man, the father of a family, fervently praying at Lourdes that the next baby might be a boy or a girl, and in the meantime flinging himself upon soldiers.

Despite the Prince’s arrogant ways, the fact that the barrister’s comment, though uttered in his hearing, had not been directly addressed to him made him less angry than he would otherwise have been. Besides, this evening was somehow exceptional. And in any case the barrister had no more chance of getting to know the Prince de Foix than the cabman who had driven that noble lord to the restaurant. The Prince accordingly felt that he might allow himself to reply—in an arrogant tone, however, and as though to the company at large—to this stranger who, thanks to the fog, was in the position of a travelling companion whom one meets at some seaside place at the ends of the earth, scoured by all the winds of heaven or shrouded in mist: “Losing your way isn’t so bad; the trouble is finding it again.” The wisdom of this aphorism impressed the proprietor, for he had already heard it several times in the course of the evening.

He was, indeed, in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration quicken if he could detect no difference. This state of mind is by no means to be ignored, for, applied to political conversations, to the reading of newspapers, it forms public opinion and thereby makes possible the greatest events in history. A large number of German café owners, simply by being impressed by a customer or a newspaper when they said that France, England and Russia were “provoking” Germany, made war possible at the time of Agadir, even if no war occurred. Historians, if they have not been wrong to abandon the practice of attributing the actions of peoples to the will of kings, ought to substitute for the latter the psychology of the individual, the inferior individual at that.

In politics the proprietor of this particular café had for some time now applied his recitation-teacher’s mentality to a certain number of set-pieces on the Dreyfus case. If he did not find the terms that were familiar to him in the remarks of a customer or the columns of a newspaper he would pronounce the article boring or the speaker insincere. The Prince de Foix, however, impressed him so forcibly that he barely gave him time to finish his sentence. “Well said, Prince, well said” (which meant, more or less, “faultlessly recited”), “that’s it, that’s exactly it,” he exclaimed, “swelling up,” as they say in the
Arabian Nights
, “to the extreme limit of satisfaction.” But the Prince had already vanished into the smaller room. Then, as life resumes its normal course after even the most sensational happenings, those who had emerged from the sea of fog began to order whatever they wanted to eat or drink; among them a party of young men from the Jockey Club who, in view of the abnormality of the occasion, had no hesitation in taking their places at a couple of tables in the big room, and were thus quite close to me. So the cataclysm had established even between the smaller room and the bigger, among all these people stimulated by the comfort of the restaurant after their long wanderings across the ocean of fog, a familiarity from which I alone was excluded and which was not unlike the spirit that must have prevailed in Noah’s ark.

Suddenly I saw the landlord bent double, bowing and scraping, and the waiters hurrying to support him in full force, a scene which drew every eye towards the door. “Quick, send Cyprien here, a table for M. le Marquis de Saint-Loup,” cried the proprietor, for whom Robert was not merely a great nobleman who enjoyed genuine prestige even in the eyes of the Prince de Foix, but a customer who burned the candle at both ends and spent a great deal of money in this restaurant. The customers in the big room looked on with curiosity, those in the small room vied with one another in hailing their friend as he finished wiping his shoes. But just as he was about to make his way into the small room he caught sight of me in the big one. “Good God,” he exclaimed, “what on earth are you doing there? And with the door wide open too?” he added with a furious glance at the proprietor, who ran to shut it, throwing the blame on his staff: “I’m always telling them to keep it shut.”