The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (424 page)

But this did not mean that she had lost her old faults. Whenever I had a visit from a girl, however much her old servant’s legs might be hurting her, if I happened to leave my room for a moment there she was at the top of a step-ladder in the dressing-room, searching, so she said, for some overcoat of mine to see if the moths had got into it, but really in order to eavesdrop. And she still, in spite of all my complaints, had her insidious manner of asking questions in an indirect way, the phrase she now used for this purpose being “because of course.” Not daring to say to me: “Has this lady her own house?” she would say, her eyes timidly raised like the eyes of a good dog: “Because of course this lady has her own house …,” avoiding a blatant interrogative not so much in order to be polite as in order not to seem too curious. Then again, as the servants whom we love most—and this is particularly true when they have almost ceased to give us either the service or the respect proper to their employment—remain, unfortunately, servants and only make more clear the limitations of their caste, which we ourselves would like to do away with, when they imagine that they are penetrating most successfully into ours, Françoise often addressed me (“to get under my skin,” as the butler would have said) with odd remarks which someone of my own class could not have made: for instance, with a joy carefully dissembled but as profound as if she had detected a serious illness, she would say to me if I was hot and there were beads of sweat which I had not noticed on my forehead: “But you’re absolutely dripping,” looking astonished as
though this were some strange phenomenon and at the same time with that little smile of contempt with which we greet an impropriety (“Are you going out? You know you’ve forgotten to put your tie on”) and also with the anxious voice which we assume when we want to alarm someone about the state of his health. One would have thought that no one in the world had ever been “dripping” before. Finally, she no longer spoke good French as she had in the past. For in her humility, in her affectionate admiration for people infinitely inferior to herself, she had come to adopt their ugly habits of speech. Her daughter having complained to me about her and having used the words (I do not know where she had heard them): “She’s always finding fault with me because I don’t shut the doors properly and
patatipatali
and
patatatipatala
.” Françoise clearly thought that only her imperfect education had deprived her until now of this beautiful idiom. And from those lips which I had once seen bloom with the purest French I heard several times a day: “And
patatipatali
and
patatatipatala.
” It is indeed curious how little not only the expressions but also the ideas of an individual vary. The butler, having got into the habit of declaring that M. Poincaré was a wicked man, not because he was after money but because he had been absolutely determined to have a war, repeated this seven or eight times a day to an audience which was always the same and always just as interested. Not a word was altered, not a gesture or an intonation. The performance only lasted two minutes, but it was unvarying, like that of an actor. And his faulty French was quite as much to blame as that of her daughter for corrupting the language of Françoise. He thought that what M. de Rambuteau
had been so annoyed one day to hear the Duc de Guermantes call “Rambuteau shelters” were called “rinals.” No doubt in his childhood he had failed to hear the “u” and had never realised his mistake, so every time he used the word—and he used it frequently—he mispronounced it. Françoise, embarrassed at first, ended by using it too, and liked to complain that the same sort of thing did not exist for women as well as for men. But as a result of her humility and her admiration for the butler she never said “urinals” but—with a slight concession to customary usage—“arinals.”

She no longer slept, no longer ate. Every day she insisted on the bulletins, of which she understood nothing, being read to her by the butler who understood hardly more of them than she did, and in whom the desire to torment Françoise was frequently dominated by a patriotic cheerfulness: he would say, with a sympathetic laugh, referring to the Germans: “Things are hotting up for them, it won’t be long before old Joffre puts salt on the tail of the comet.” Françoise had no idea what comet he was alluding to, but this strengthened her conviction that the phrase was one of those amiable and original extravagances to which a well-bred person is required by the laws of courtesy to respond good-humouredly, so gaily shrugging her shoulders as if to say: “He’s always the same,” she tempered her tears with a smile. At least she was happy that her new butcher’s boy, who in spite of his trade was anything but courageous (his first job nevertheless had been in the slaughterhouses), was not old enough to be called up. Otherwise she would have been quite capable of going to see the Minister of War to get him exempted.

The butler had not enough imagination to realise that the bulletins were not excellent and that we were not advancing towards Berlin, since he kept reading: “We have repulsed with heavy enemy losses, etc.,” actions which he celebrated as a succession of victories. I, however, was alarmed at the speed with which the scene of these victories was approaching Paris, and was astonished that even the butler, having seen in one bulletin that an engagement had taken place near Lens, was not disturbed to read in the newspaper next day that it had been followed by satisfactory operations in the neighbourhood of Jouy-le-Vicomte, of which the approaches were firmly in our hands. Now the butler knew Jouy-le-Vicomte well by name, for it was not so very far from Combray. But we read the newspapers as we love, blindfold. We do not try to understand the facts. We listen to the soothing words of the editor as we listen to the words of our mistress. We are “beaten and happy” because we believe that we are not beaten but victorious.

I had, in any case, not remained long in Paris but had returned very soon to my sanatorium. Although in principle the doctor’s treatment consisted in isolation, I had been allowed to receive, at different times, a letter from Gilberte and a letter from Robert. Gilberte wrote (this was in about September 1914) that, however much she would have liked to stay in Paris in order to get news of Robert more easily, the constant Taube raids on the city had caused her such alarm, particularly for her little girl, that she had fled by the last train to leave for Combray, that the train had not even got as far as Combray, and that it was only thanks to a peasant’s cart, on which she had had an appalling journey of ten hours, that she had
succeeded in reaching Tansonville! “And there, imagine what awaited your old friend,” she concluded her letter. “I had left Paris to escape from the German aeroplanes, supposing that at Tansonville I should be perfectly safe. Before I had been there two days you will never imagine what turned up: the Germans, who having defeated our troops near La Fère, were overrunning the district. A German headquarters staff, with a regiment just behind it, presented itself at the gates of Tansonville and I was obliged to take them in, and not a hope of getting away, no more trains, nothing.” Whether the German staff had really behaved well, or whether it was right to detect in Gilberte’s letter the influence, by contagion, of the spirit of those Guermantes who were of Bavarian stock and related to the highest aristocracy of Germany, she was lavish in her praise of the perfect breeding of the staff-officers, and even of the soldiers who had only asked her for “permission to pick a few of the forget-me-nots growing near the pond,” a good breeding which she contrasted with the disorderly violence of the fleeing French troops, who had pillaged everything as they crossed the property before the arrival of the German generals. In any case, if Gilberte’s letter was in some ways impregnated with the spirit of the Guermantes—others would say the spirit of Jewish internationalism, which would probably have been unfair to her, as we shall see—the letter which I received several months later from Robert was, on the other hand, much more Saint-Loup than Guermantes and reflected in addition all the liberal culture which he had acquired. Altogether, it was a delightful letter. Unfortunately, he did not talk about strategy as he had in our conversations at Doncières, nor did he tell me to what extent
he considered that the war confirmed or invalidated the principles which he had then expounded to me.

All he said was that since 1914 there had in reality been a series of wars, the lessons of each one influencing the conduct of the one that followed. For example, the theory of the “break-through” had been supplemented by a new idea: that it was necessary, before breaking through, for the ground held by the enemy to be completely devastated by the artillery. But then it had been found that on the contrary this devastation made it impossible for the infantry and the artillery to advance over ground in which thousands of shell-holes created as many obstacles. “War,” he wrote, “does not escape the laws of our old friend Hegel. It is in a state of perpetual becoming.”

This was meagre in comparison with what I should have liked to know. But what was still more annoying was that he was forbidden to mention the names of generals. And anyhow, according to the little that the newspapers told me, the generals as to whom at Donciéres I had been so eager to know which among them would prove most effective and courageous in a war, were not the ones who were now in command. Geslin de Bourgogne, Galliffet, Négrier were dead. Pau had retired from active service almost at the beginning of the war. Of Joffre, of Foch, of Castelnau, of Pétain, Robert and I had never spoken. “My dear boy,” he wrote, “I recognise that expressions like
passeront pas
and
on les aura
are not agreeable; they have always set my teeth on edge as much as
poilu
and the rest, and of course it is tiresome to be composing an epic with words and phrases which are—worse than an error of grammar or of taste—an appalling contradiction in terms, a vulgar affectation and pretension of the kind
that you and I abominate, as bad as when people think it clever to say ‘coco’ instead of ‘cocaine.’ But if you could see everybody here, particularly the men of the humbler classes, working men and small shopkeepers, who did not suspect what heroism they concealed within them and might have died in their beds without suspecting it—if you could see them running under fire to help a comrade or carry off a wounded officer and then, when they have been hit themselves, smiling a few moments before they die because the medical officer has told them that the trench has been recaptured from the Germans, I assure you, my dear boy, it gives you a magnificent idea of the French people, makes you begin to understand those great periods in history which seemed to us a little extraordinary when we learned about them as students. The epic is so magnificent that you would find, as I do, that words no longer matter. Cannot Rodin or Maillol create a masterpiece from some hideous raw material which he transforms out of all recognition? At the touch of such greatness, the word
poilu
has for me become something of which I no more feel that it may originally have contained an allusion or a joke than one does, for instance, when one reads about the
chouans.
But I do know that
poilu
is already waiting for great poets, like other words, ‘deluge,’ or ‘Christ,’ or ‘barbarians,’ which were already instinct with greatness before Hugo, Vigny and the rest made use of them. As I say, the people, the working men, are the best of all, but everybody is splendid. Poor young Vaugoubert, the Ambassador’s son, was wounded seven times before he was killed, and each time he came back from a raid without having ‘copped it’ he seemed to want to apologise and to say that it was not his fault. He was a
charming creature. We had become close friends. His parents were given permission to come to the funeral, on condition that they did not wear mourning and only stayed five minutes because of the shelling. The mother, a great horse of a woman whom I dare say you know, was no doubt deeply moved but showed no sign of it. But the poor father was in such a state that I assure you that I, who am now totally unfeeling because I have got used to seeing the head of the comrade who is talking to me suddenly ripped open by a landmine or even severed from its trunk, I could not contain myself when I saw the collapse of poor Vaugoubert, who was an utter wreck. The general tried to tell him that it was for France, that his son had behaved like a hero, but it was no use, this only redoubled the sobs of the poor man, who could not tear himself away from his son’s body. The fact is, and that is why we must learn to put up with
passeront pas
, it is men like these, like my poor valet, like Vaugoubert, who have prevented the Germans from ‘passing.’ You may think we are not advancing much, but logic is beside the point, there is a secret inner feeling which tells an army that it is victorious—or a dying man that he is finished. We know that victory will be ours and we are determined that it shall be, so that we can dictate a just peace, I don’t mean ‘just’ simply for ourselves, but truly just, just to the French and just to the Germans.”

I do not wish to imply that the “calamity” had raised Saint-Loup’s intelligence to a new level. But just as soldier heroes with commonplace and trivial minds, if they happened to write poems during their convalescence, placed themselves, in order to describe the war, at the level not of events, which in themselves are nothing, but
of the commonplace aesthetic whose rules they had obeyed in the past, and talked, as they would have ten years earlier, of the “blood-stained dawn,” “Victory’s tremulous wings,” and so on, so Saint-Loup, by nature much more intelligent and much more of an artist, remained intelligent and an artist, and it was with the greatest good taste that he now recorded for my benefit the observations of landscape which he made if he had to halt at the edge of a marshy forest, very much as he would have done if he had been out duck-shooting. To help me to understand certain contrasts of light and shade which had been “the enchantment of his morning,” he alluded in his letter to certain paintings which we both loved and was not afraid to cite a passage of Romain Rolland, or even of Nietzsche, with the independent spirit of the man at the front, who had not the civilian’s terror of pronouncing a German name, and also—in thus quoting an enemy—with a touch of coquetry, like Colonel du Paty de Clam who, waiting among the witnesses at Zola’s trial and chancing to pass Pierre Quillard, the violently Dreyfusard poet, whom he did not even know, recited some lines from his symbolist play,
La Fille aux Mains Coupées.
In the same way if Saint-Loup had occasion in a letter to mention a song by Schumann, he never gave any but the German title, nor did he use any periphrasis to tell me that, when at dawn on the edge of the forest he had heard the first twittering of a bird, his rapture had been as great as though he had been addressed by the bird in that “sublime
Siegfried
” which he so looked forward to hearing after the war.