In Search of Lost Time Page 12

  There was one last trait in M. de Charlus’s pro-Germanism, which he owed, by a bizarre reaction, to his ‘Charlusism’. The Germans, to his eyes, were very ugly, perhaps because they were too close to his own blood; he was mad about Moroccans, but most of all about Anglo-Saxons, whom he viewed as living statues by Phidias. But pleasure for him was never without a certain tendency to cruelty, though at that point I was still unaware of the full extent of it; any man he loved became a delicious torturer. He may have believed that taking sides against the Germans would be acting as he acted only during his periods of sexual pleasure, that is, in opposition to his compassionate nature, burning with desire for seductive evil, and crushing virtuous ugliness. It was like that, too, when Rasputin was murdered, a murder which surprised people by its decidedly Russian stamp, at a Dostoyevskian dinner (an impression which might have been a great deal stronger if the public had not been unaware of what M. de Charlus knew perfectly well), because life disappoints us so often that we end up by believing that literature has no connection with it, and so we are amazed to see the precious ideas which we have found in books on display, without fear of getting spoiled, gratuitously, naturally, in the midst of everyday life, amazed, for instance, to find that a dinner and a murder occurring in Russia should have anything Russian about them.

  The war seemed to be continuing indefinitely, and those who had already announced several years earlier, from a reliable source, that peace negotiations had started, and even specified the clauses of the treaty, no longer bothered when they talked to you to apologize for their false reports. They had forgotten them completely, and were ready to spread new stories with equal sincerity, which they would forget with the same rapidity. This was the time when there were constant Gotha raids, the air crackled all the time with the sonorous and vigilant vibration of French aeroplanes. But sometimes the siren rang out like a heart-rending Valkyrie call – the only German music anyone had heard since the outbreak of war – until the moment the fire engines announced that the alert was over, while beside them the all-clear, like an invisible street-urchin, commented at regular intervals on the good news and let loose its cry of joy on the air.

  M. de Charlus was astonished to see that even people like Brichot, who had been militarists before the war, and had criticized France in particular for not being sufficiently so, were not content to blame Germany for the excesses of her militarism, but even criticized her admiration of the army. In all likelihood, they changed their attitude as soon as there was any question of slowing down the war against Germany, and continued, quite rightly, to denounce the pacifists. Yet Brichot, for instance, having agreed, despite his failing eyesight, to give an account in his lectures of some books which had recently been published in neutral countries, praised a novel by a Swiss writer in which two children who evince symbolic admiration at the sight of a dragoon are ridiculed as embryonic militarists.47 This ridicule may also have annoyed M. de Charlus for other reasons, as he considered a dragoon capable of being an object of great beauty. But principally he failed to understand Brichot’s admiration, if not for the novel, which the Baron had not read, then at least for its attitude, which was so far removed from that which Brichot had professed before the war. Then, everything to do with soldiers was good, even the irregularities of General de Boisdeffre, the disguises and schemings of Colonel du Paty de Clam, or Colonel Henry’s forgery.48 What extraordinary volte-face (which in reality was simply another side of the same noble passion, the patriotic passion, obliged to turn from the militarism he displayed when he was fighting against Dreyfusism, the tendency of which was anti-militarist, to a position almost of anti-militarism, as he was now fighting against super-militaristic Germany) led Brichot to declare: ‘Oh, fabulous spectacle, and most worthy to entice the youth of an age of brutality, which knows only the worship of force: a dragoon! We may readily judge what will be the vile soldiery of a generation raised in the worship of these manifestations of brute force. Therefore Spitteler, wanting to set him against the hideous concept of the all-mighty sword, has symbolically exiled to the depths of the forest, ridiculed, slandered and alone, the visionary character he calls the Student Fool, in whom the author has so delightfully incarnated all the sweetness, so sadly unfashionable and likely soon to be forgotten if the dread reign of their ancient god is not broken, all the adorable sweetness of times of peace.’ ‘Tell me now, M. de Charlus said to me, you know Cottard and Cambremer. Every time I see them they tell me about Germany’s extraordinary lack of psychology. Between you and me, do you think they concerned themselves about psychology before, or even that they are capable of showing any competence in it now? I am not exaggerating, believe me. Even if he is talking about one of the greatest Germans, about Nietzsche or Goethe, you will hear Cottard say: “with the habitual lack of psychology that characterizes the Teutonic race”. There are things about the war that give me greater pain, obviously, but you must admit it is irritating. Norpois is more intelligent, I know, although he has been wrong about everything since the beginning of the war. But what is one to say about those articles that arouse such universal enthusiasm? My dear sir, you know Brichot’s worth as well as I do, I like him a great deal, even after the schism which has separated me from his little church, which means that I see a great deal less of him. I do have a certain regard for this schoolmaster, he is a good talker and he is highly educated, and I grant you it is very touching that at his age, and enfeebled as he is, for he has been quite noticeably so for some years, he should have come back, as he puts it, to “serve”. But in the end good intentions are one thing and talent is another, and Brichot has never had any talent. I admit that I share his admiration for certain examples of greatness in the current war. Yet it is strange, to say the least, that a blind partisan of antiquity like Brichot, who could never be sarcastic enough about Zola’s finding more poetry in a working-class household, or down a mine, than in historic palaces, or about Goncourt’s setting Diderot above Homer and Watteau above Raphael, should tell us endlessly that Thermopylae, even Austerlitz, are nothing compared with Vauquois.49 Besides, this time, the public which rejected the modernists of literature and art accepts the modernists of war, because it has become fashionable to think in that way, and small minds, too, are overwhelmed not by beauty but by the enormity of action. Kolossal may be spelled only with a k nowadays, but it is still in essence the colossal that people kowtow to. Speaking of Brichot, have you seen Morel? I am told he wants to see me again. He has only to make the first move, I am the older, it is not up to me to initiate it.’

  Unfortunately, the very next day, to anticipate for a moment, M. de Charlus found himself face to face with Morel in the street; in order to arouse his jealousy, the latter took him by the arm and told him some more-or-less true stories, but when M. de Charlus, driven to distraction, felt a need for Morel to stay with him that evening and not to go anywhere else, Morel caught sight of a friend across the street and bade M. de Charlus farewell, at which he, hoping that this threat, which of course he would never have put into practice, would make Morel stay where he was, said: ‘Watch out, I shall have my revenge,’ but Morel, laughing, left him, patting his astonished friend on the neck, and putting his arm around his waist.

  No doubt the things that M. de Charlus had said to me about Morel were testimony to the extent that love – and the Baron’s must indeed have been very persistent – makes us (as well as more imaginative and more touchy) more credulous and less proud. But when M. de Charlus added: ‘The boy is mad about women, and never thinks about anything else,’ he spoke more truly than he knew. He said it out of pride, and out of love, in order that other people should think that Morel’s fondness for him had not been followed by other attachments of the same sort. I, of course, did not believe this at all, having with my own eyes seen Morel agree to spend a night with the Prince de Guermantes for fifty francs, something of which M. de Charlus was still unaware. And if, seeing M. de Charlus pass by, Morel (except on those days when, feeling th
e need to confess, he would bump into him in order to have the opportunity to say ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I know I’ve been horrible to you’), sitting at a pavement café with some friends, joined in their jeers, pointed his finger at the Baron, and made the clucking noises with which people make fun of old inverts, I was convinced he did it to conceal his hand, and that if they were taken aside by the Baron, each of his public denouncers would do everything he asked of them. I was wrong. While a remarkable impulse had led people like Saint-Loup, who were at the furthest remove from it, to inversion – something that happens in every class – a contrary impulse had weaned away from those practices those in whom they had been most habitual. In some, the change was brought about by belated religious scruples, or by the agitation they felt when certain scandals broke, or by a fear of non-existent diseases in which they had been made to believe, in all sincerity, by relatives who were often concierges or valets, or quite without sincerity by jealous lovers who thought thereby to keep for themselves a young man on whom in fact their words had a quite contrary effect, alienating him from them as effectively as from others. Thus it was that the former lift-boy at Balbec would no longer have accepted, for love or money, propositions which now seemed to him as dangerous as approaches from the enemy. For Morel, his refusal of everybody, without exception, about which M. de Charlus had unwittingly uttered a truth which simultaneously justified his illusions and destroyed his hopes, stemmed from the fact that two years after leaving M. de Charlus he had fallen in love with a woman with whom he was still living and who, being more strong-willed than he was, had been able to demand absolute fidelity from him. With the result that Morel who, at the time when M. de Charlus was giving him so much money, had spent a night with the Prince de Guermantes for fifty francs, would not have agreed to do so with him or anybody else, even if they offered him fifty thousand francs. In the absence of honour and disinterestedness, his ‘wife’ had inculcated in him a certain fear of what other people might say, so that he was not averse to maintaining, with ostentatious bravado, that all the money in the world meant nothing to him when it was offered with certain strings attached. Thus the interplay of different psychological laws contrives to compensate, in the flowering of the human species, for everything which, in one way or another, would lead by superabundance or scarcity to its annihilation. As Darwin has shown, a comparable wisdom is to be found among the flowers, governing the methods of fertilization by opposing them successively one to another.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ added M. de Charlus in the shrill little voice he sometimes adopted. ‘I hear people who look quite happy all the time, and drink the best cocktails, declaring that they won’t last until the end of the war, that their hearts are not strong enough, that they can think of nothing else, that one day they will just drop dead. And the most extraordinary thing is that this does actually happen. It is very odd! Is it a question of nutrition, because none of the food they eat is properly prepared any more, or is it because they have to demonstrate their zeal by buckling down to some futile job which only destroys the habits of life that kept them going? What ever it is, I’ve noticed an astonishing number of these strange, premature deaths, premature at least from the standpoint of the deceased. I can’t remember what I was saying to you about Norpois’s admiration for the war. But what a peculiar way he has of writing about it! To begin with, have you noticed the proliferation of new expressions which, when they have finally become threadbare from being used day in and day out – for Norpois is truly indefatigable, I think the death of my aunt Villeparisis must have given him a new lease of life – are immediately replaced by further commonplaces? I remember in the old days you used to amuse yourself by noting down the fashionable phrases as they appeared, stayed in circulation and then disappeared: “who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind”; “the dogs bark, the caravan moves on”; “show me sound politics and I’ll show you sound finances, as Baron Louis used to say”; “these are symptoms which it would be excessive to regard as tragic but wise to take seriously”; “to labour and to seek for no reward” (that one has been resuscitated, as it was bound to be). Alas, how many phrases since have come and gone into the dark! We have had “the scrap of paper”, “the predatory empires”, “the infamous Kultur that consists in murdering defenceless women and children”, “victory belongs, as the Japanese say, to the side that can hold out a quarter of an hour longer than the other”, “the Germano-Touranians”, “scientific barbarism”, “if we want to win the war, in Lloyd George’s potent phrase”, though that is out of date now, and “the fighting-spirit of the troops” and “the pluck of the troops”. The war has even wrought as profound a change in the excellent Norpois’s syntax as in the baking of bread or the rapidity of transport. Have you noticed how the good fellow, although he insists on proclaiming his wishes as truths on the point of realization, does not quite dare use the future tense, pure and simple, which would run the risk of being contradicted by events, but indicates it instead by his adoption of the verb “to be able to”?’ I confessed to M. de Charlus that I did not entirely understand what he meant.

  I should mention here that the Duc de Guermantes shared none of his brother’s pessimism. Also, he was as anglophile as M. de Charlus was anglophobe. And he regarded M. Caillaux50 as a traitor who infinitely deserved to be shot. When his brother demanded proof of his treachery, M. de Guermantes replied that if people were only to be convicted if they had signed a document saying ‘I am a traitor,’ then the crime of treason would never be punished. But in case I do not have an opportunity to return to this matter, I should also say that two years later the Duc de Guermantes, his anti-Caillautism undiluted, met an English military attaché and his wife, a remarkably cultivated couple with whom he made friends, as he had with the three charming ladies at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, and was astounded at their first meeting, when he talked about Caillaux, whose crime he regarded as undeniable and whose conviction he thought a foregone conclusion, to hear the cultivated and charming couple say: ‘But he will probably be acquitted, there is absolutely no evidence against him.’ M. de Guermantes tried to argue that M. de Norpois, when he had given evidence, had looked straight at the appalled Caillaux and said: ‘You are the Giolitti51 of France, yes, M. Caillaux, you are the Giolitti of France.’ But the cultivated and charming couple had smiled, made fun of M. de Norpois, cited examples of his senility, and concluded by saying that although the Figaro had claimed that he had spoken those words in front of ‘the appalled M. Caillaux’, it was more likely to have been a cynically amused M. Caillaux. The Duc de Guermantes was not slow to change his opinions. Attributing this change to the influence of an Englishwoman is not so extraordinary as it would have seemed if it had been predicted even as late as 1919, when the English still referred to the Germans only as the Huns and called for savage penalties against the guilty parties. Now English public opinion had also changed, and they approved every decision which might discomfit France and be of benefit to Germany.

  To go back to M. de Charlus: ‘Ah, yes,’ he responded to my confession that I did not entirely understand, ‘ah, yes: “to be able to”, in Norpois’s articles, indicates the future, that is, it indicates what Norpois wishes for, and what we all wish for, come to that,’ he added, perhaps not completely sincerely. ‘You realize of course that if “to be able” had not become simply an indication of the future tense, one might just about understand that the subject of the verb might be a country. For instance, every time Norpois says: “America would not be able to remain indifferent to these repeated violations of ‘law’ ”; “the Dual Monarchy would not be able to fail to see the evil of its ways”, it is clear that such phrases express his wishes (which are also mine, and yours), but in those cases, in spite of everything, the verb can still retain something of its original meaning, because a country can “be able”, America can “be able”, the Dual Monarchy itself can “be able” (despite its eternal “lack of psychology”). But that ambiguity is no longer possible when No
rpois writes: “These systematic devastations would not be able to persuade the neutrals”, “the region of the Lakes would not be able to fail to fall very quickly into the hands of the Allies”, “the results of these neutralist elections would not be able to reflect the opinion of the great majority of countries”. It is undeniable that these devastations, these regions and the results of these votes are inanimate things which cannot “be able”. By using this formulation Norpois is simply addressing to the neutrals the injunction (which I regret to say they seem not to have obeyed) to abandon neutrality, or to the lake regions no longer to belong to the “Boches” ’ (it cost M. de Charlus the same kind of effort to pronounce the word ‘Boche’ as it had long ago in the tram at Balbec to speak about men whose taste was not for women). ‘Also, have you noticed the crafty way Norpois, since 1914, has begun all his articles addressed to the neutrals? He starts by declaring that of course France has no desire to meddle in the politics of Italy (or Romania or Bulgaria, etc.). It is the business of those powers alone to decide, completely independently, taking into account nothing but the national interest, whether or not they should abandon neutrality. But while these preliminary statements of the article (what might once have been called the exordium) are so notably disinterested, what follows is generally much less so. “Nevertheless”, Norpois in substance continues, “it is quite clear that the only nations to derive any material benefit from the struggle will be those who have ranged themselves on the side of law and justice. It cannot be expected that the Allies will reward, by allocating them the territories from which for centuries has risen the cry of their oppressed brothers, those peoples who, adopting the line of least resistance, have not taken up arms in the Allied cause.” Having once taken this first step towards advising intervention, nothing can stop Norpois, and he goes on to offer less and less guarded advice not only about the principle of intervention, but about its timing. “Of course, he says, ‘playing the saint’ as he would put it, it is for Italy and Romania alone to decide on the time and manner at which it is most appropriate for them to intervene. Yet they must be aware that by equivocating too long they risk letting the moment slip past. Already the hoofs of the Russian cavalry are sending shivers through a Germany that faces an unspeakable horror. It is very clear that those peoples who have done no more than rush to help in a victory whose resplendent dawn is already in sight will have no entitlement at all to the reward that they may yet if they hasten, etc.’ It is like those notices you see at the theatre: “Only a few seats left. Book now to avoid disappointment!” A line of argument which is all the more stupid as Norpois has to revise it every six months, periodically telling Romania: “The moment has come for Romania to decide whether or not she wants to realize her national aspirations. If she delays any longer, it may be too late.” He has been saying that for three years now, and not only has the “too late” not yet come, but Romania continues to be offered greater and greater incitements. Similarly, he invites France, etc., to intervene in Greece as protective power, on the grounds that the treaty allying Greece with Serbia has not been observed. But do you honestly think that if France were not at war and did not want the support or the benevolent neutrality of Greece it would occur to her to intervene in the role of protective power, or that the moral feelings which impel her to express outrage at Greece’s failure to honour her commitments to Serbia do not fall silent the moment it is a question of an equally flagrant violation on the part of Romania and Italy, who, quite rightly I believe, and this applies to Greece too, have not fulfilled their duties, albeit less imperative and extensive than people say, as allies of Germany? The truth is that people see everything through the eyes of their newspapers, and how could they do otherwise given that they are not personally acquainted with the people or the events concerned? During the Dreyfus Affair, which you were so curiously worked up about, at a time conventionally regarded as separated from us by centuries now that the war-philosophers have added their weight to the idea that all links with the past have been broken, I was shocked to see members of my family express the highest esteem for anticlerical former Communards whom their newspaper represented as anti-Dreyfusards, and revile a Catholic general of good family who was in favour of a retrial. I am no less shocked now to see all Frenchmen execrate the Emperor Franz-Josef whom they used to venerate, quite rightly I may say, I having known him well, and whom he is kind enough to treat as a cousin. Ah! I have not written to him since the war,’ he added as if bravely confessing to a fault for which he knew he could not be blamed. ‘No, I did, just once, in the first year. What else can one do? None of this alters my respect for him, but I have plenty of young relatives here fighting in our lines who would, I know, think it very wrong of me to maintain a regular correspondence with the leader of a nation that is at war with us. What can I do? Censure me if you like,’ he added as if bravely inviting my criticism, ‘but I have had no wish, at this time, for a letter signed Charlus to arrive in Vienna. The only serious criticism I would level at the old sovereign is that a nobleman of his rank, head of one of the oldest and most illustrious houses in Europe, should allow himself to be led by a petty country squire, very intelligent I grant you, but basically just a parvenu, like William of Hohenzollern. It is not the least of the many shocking anomalies of this war.’