In Search of Lost Time Page 7

  ‘Have you heard anything, he asked as he was leaving, about my aunt Oriane getting a divorce? I know absolutely nothing about it myself. People talk about it from time to time, and I’ve heard it predicted so often that I’ll wait till it happens before I believe it. Mind you, it would be quite understandable; my uncle is a charming man, not just socially but to his friends and his family. He’s even, in a way, got more heart than my aunt, who is a saint but who does make him very much aware of the fact. Only he is a terrible husband, who has constantly deceived his wife, and insulted her, ill-treated her, and kept her short of money. It would be so natural for her to leave him that it would provide a reason for its being true, but it might equally well not be, because it’s one of those ideas which people talk about as soon as it occurs to them. And given that she’s put up with him for so long! But of course I know perfectly well that there are plenty of things that are mistakenly announced, then denied, but which go on to become true later.’ That reminded me to ask him if there had ever been any talk of his marrying Mlle de Guermantes. He started and assured me that there had not, that it had merely been one of those society rumours that appear from time to time for no good reason, and vanish in the same way, without their falsity making the people who believed them any more cautious, the next time a new rumour of an engagement or a divorce, or a political rumour appears, about giving it their credence and passing it on.

  Forty-eight hours had not gone by before certain facts which I learned showed that I had been completely mistaken in my interpretation of Robert’s words: ‘If anyone isn’t at the front, it’s because they’re afraid.’ Saint-Loup had said that only in order to sparkle in conversation, to be psychologically original, so long as he was not certain that his enlistment had been accepted. But all the time he was working as hard as he could to ensure that it would be, being in this less original, in the sense in which he believed the word ought to be taken, but more profoundly a Frenchman of Saint-André-des-Champs,28 more in conformity with all that at this moment was best in the Frenchmen of Saint-André-des-Champs, lords, burghers and serfs whether respectful of their lords or in revolt against them, two equally French divisions of the same family, the Françoise sub-branch and the Morel sub-branch, from which two arrows pointed, to join forces once again, in a single direction, towards the frontier. Bloch had been delighted to hear the admission of cowardice of a ‘nationalist’ (who in point of fact was hardly nationalist at all) and when Saint-Loup had asked him whether he was having to go, he adopted a high-priestly expression and replied: ‘Short-sighted.’

  But Bloch had completely changed his mind about the war a few days later when he came to see me, panic-stricken. Although ‘short-sighted’ he had been passed fit for service. I was taking him back home when we met Saint-Loup, who had an appointment at the Ministry of War to be introduced to a colonel, with a former officer, ‘M. de Cambremer,’ he told me. ‘Oh, but of course, I’m talking about an old acquaintance of yours. You know Cancan as well as I do.’ I replied that I did indeed know him, and his wife, and that I did not think terribly highly of them. However I had grown so used, since I had met them for the first time, to thinking of the wife, none the less, as a remarkable person, with a deep understanding of Schopenhauer and, generally speaking, as having access to intellectual circles that were closed to her uncouth husband, that I was at first astonished to hear Saint-Loup reply: ‘His wife is an idiot, I give up on her. But he himself is an excellent man, who had great gifts and is still very good company.’ By the wife’s ‘idiocy’ Saint-Loup must have meant her desperate desire to move in high society, something about which high society is most severely judgmental. By the husband’s qualities, he probably meant something of those that his mother recognized in him when she said that he was the best of the family. He at least had no interest in duchesses, but this, to be honest, indicates a kind of ‘intelligence’ which differs as much from that which characterizes thinkers as does the ‘intelligence’ attributed by the public to some rich man for ‘having been clever enough to make his fortune’. Saint-Loup’s words did not, however, displease me, in so far as they reminded me that pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect. I had not, it was true, had an opportunity to savour that of M. de Cambremer. But it is precisely this sort of thing that means that a person is a number of different people, depending on who is judging him, quite apart from differences of judgment themselves. All I had ever known of M. de Cambremer was the outer shell. And his flavour, to which others attested, was unknown to me.

  Bloch left us outside his front door, brimming with resentment against Saint-Loup, telling him that the ‘favoured sons’ in their braided uniforms, strutting around at headquarters, were running no risks, and that he, a private second-class, had no wish to ‘get himself perforated because of William’. ‘I gather that the Emperor William is gravely ill,’ replied Saint-Loup. Bloch, who, like everyone who keeps a close eye on the Stock Exchange, was particularly prone to accept sensational news, said: ‘A lot of people are even saying he’s dead.’ On the Stock Exchange any ill sovereign, whether Edward VII or William II, is already dead, every town on the point of being besieged already captured. ‘They’re only concealing it, Bloch added, so as not to lower Boche morale. But he died the night before last. My father has it from an impeccable source.’ Impeccable sources were the only ones which M. Bloch senior took any notice of when, by the good fortune he had, thanks to his ‘important connections’, to be in contact with them, he came by the still secret news that Foreign Bonds were about to rise or that de Beers29 were about to fall. Moreover, if at that precise moment there was a rise in de Beers or there was an ‘offer’ of Foreign Bonds, if the market for the first was ‘firm’ and ‘active’, that for the second ‘cautious’, ‘weak’, one in which nobody was ‘committing themselves’, the impeccable source did not thereby become any the less impeccable. Thus Bloch informed us of the Kaiser’s death with an air of mystery and self-importance, but also angrily. He was particularly exasperated at the way Robert said: ‘the Emperor William’. But I believe that even under the blade of the guillotine Saint-Loup and M. de Guermantes would have been incapable of saying anything else. Two men who moved in society, finding themselves the sole survivors on a desert island, where there was no need to demonstrate their good manners to anyone, would recognize each other by these marks of their upbringing, just as two Latinists would quote Virgil correctly. Saint-Loup could never, even under German torture, have said anything except ‘the Emperor William’. And these social graces, whatever else they signify, are an indication of significant mental shackles. Anyone unable to cast them off will always remain merely a society man. Yet even this elegant mediocrity was exquisite – especially with all the hidden generosity and unexpressed heroism that accompanied it – beside the vulgarity, simultaneously cowardly and arrogant, displayed by Bloch, who shouted at Saint-Loup: ‘Couldn’t you just call him William and be done with it? The truth is you’re scared, even here you’re crawling belly-down at his feet! Oh, what fine soldiers we’re going to have at the frontier, they’ll be licking the Boches’s boots. All you know how to do, in all your fancy braid, is to strut about the parade-ground, and that’s that.’

  ‘Poor old Bloch quite wants me to do nothing but strut about on parade,’ said Saint-Loup to me with a smile when we had left our friend. And I sensed that parading about was not at all what Robert wanted to do, even though I was not so fully aware of his intentions then as I later became when, the cavalry continuing inactive, he obtained permission to serve as an officer with the infantry, and then with the light infantry, or when finally occurred the sequel which the reader will discover later. But of Robert’s patriotism Bloch remained completely unaware, simply because Robert gave absolutely no expression to it. Although Bloch had given us some extreme anti-militarist declarations of faith once he had been passed ‘fit’, he had earlier, when he thought he would be rejected because of his sh
ortsight, made the most chauvinistic declarations. Saint-Loup would have been incapable of making any statement of that sort, principally because of a kind of moral delicacy that prevents the expression of sentiments which are so deeply rooted that they seem a part of one’s nature. There was a time when my mother would not only not have hesitated for a moment to die for my grandmother but would have suffered terribly if anybody had prevented her from doing so. Nevertheless it is impossible for me retrospectively to imagine her uttering a sentence like: ‘I would lay down my life for my mother.’ Equally unspoken was Robert’s love of France; at this moment he seemed to me much more a Saint-Loup (to the extent that I could imagine his father) than a Guermantes. He may also have been protected from expressing sentiments of that sort by, as it were, the moral quality of his intelligence. Among really serious and intelligent workers, there is a certain aversion towards those who advertise what they do by turning it into fine words. We had not been at the Lycée or at the Sorbonne together, but we did separately follow courses given by some of the same lecturers (and I remember Saint-Loup’s smile) who, when they gave a particularly noteworthy course, as some of them did, tried to make themselves look like men of genius by giving an ambitious name to their theories. Whenever we talked about this Robert would laugh out loud. Naturally, our instinctive predilection was not for the Cottards or the Brichots, but we did have a certain respect for the men who had a thorough knowledge of Greek or medicine but did not believe themselves thereby entitled to behave like charlatans. I have said that while all Mama’s actions rested at one time on the feeling that she would have given her life for her mother, she had never formulated this sentiment for herself and would anyway have found it not only pointless and ridiculous, but shocking and shameful to express it to others; similarly, it was impossible for me to imagine Saint-Loup uttering, in the course of talking about his equipment, the things he had to get, our chances of victory, the shortage of bravery in the Russian Army, what England would do – it was impossible for me to imagine him uttering even the most eloquent phrase spoken by even the most popular minister to an audience of Deputies standing and cheering with enthusiasm. Yet I cannot say that in this negative side, which prevented him from expressing the fine sentiments he felt, there was not an element of the ‘Guermantes wit’, of which we have seen so many instances in Swann. For although I took him to be more of a Saint-Loup than anything else, he was still a Guermantes too, which meant that, among the numerous motives which inspired his courage, there were some which were different from those of his Doncières friends, those young men so smitten with their profession with whom I had dined every evening and so many of whom went to their deaths at the battle of the Marne or elsewhere, leading their men into action.

  Any young socialists who may have been at Doncières when I was there, but whose acquaintance I did not make because they were not part of Saint-Loup’s set, were able now to see that the officers in that set were not in the least ‘toffs’, with the connotations of haughty pride and low hedonism that the ‘plebs’, the officers promoted from the ranks, or the freemasons gave to the term. And by the same token, moreover, the aristocratic officers discovered fully the same degree of patriotism among the socialists whom I had heard them accuse, while I was at Doncières at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, of being ‘men without a country’. The patriotism of the career soldiers, profound and deep-seated as it was, had taken a distinct form which they believed to be inviolable and which they were outraged to see made an object of opprobrium, whereas the relatively unthinking, independent patriots, with no distinct set of patriotic beliefs, that the radical-socialists were, had been incapable of understanding the profound reality that existed behind what they took to be empty and hate-inspired phrases.

  No doubt Saint-Loup, like them, had grown used to developing in his mind, as the truest part of himself, the search for and the elaboration of the best manoeuvres by which to achieve the greatest tactical and strategic successes, so that for him as for them the life of the body was something relatively unimportant which could be easily sacrificed to this inward part, this truly vital core within them, around which individual existence was valuable only as a protective skin. But in Saint-Loup’s courage there were also more individual elements, in which it would have been easy to recognize the generosity which had constituted the initial charm of our friendship, as well as the hereditary vice which had surfaced in him later, and which, together with a certain intellectual level which he had not transcended, caused him not only to admire courage, but to carry his horror of effeminacy so far as to find any contact with virility intoxicating. He discovered, no doubt chastely, from living in the open with Senegalese troops who were sacrificing their lives at every moment, an intense cerebral pleasure into which was infused a great deal of scorn for the ‘little musk-scented gentlemen’, and which, contradictory though it might seem, was not so different from the pleasure derived from the cocaine he had taken too much of at Tansonville and of which heroism – as one remedy replaces another – was curing him. But the principal aspect of his courage was that twofold habit of courtesy which, on the one hand, led him to praise others but for himself made him content to do the right thing and say nothing about it, unlike a Bloch, who had said to him in the course of our meeting: ‘Obviously you’d turn tail and run,’ but who was doing nothing himself; and, on the other, drove him to disregard everything he possessed, his fortune, his rank, even his life, and be ready to give them away. In a word, the true nobility of his nature. But so many different sources come together in heroism that the changed preference that had manifested itself in him, and also the intellectual mediocrity he had never been able to overcome, had their part to play in it. By adopting the habits of M. de Charlus, Robert found that he had also taken on, albeit in a very different form, his ideal of masculinity.

  ‘Do you think we’re in for a long haul?’ I said to Saint-Loup. ‘No, I think it will be a very short war,’ he replied. But here, as always, his arguments were bookish. ‘Bearing in mind Moltke’s prophecies, reread’, he said to me, as if I had already read them, ‘the decree of the 28th of October 1913 on the command of large units, and you will see that the replacement of the peacetime reserves has not been organized, or even foreseen, something they would not have failed to do if the war was going to be a long one.’ It seemed to me that the decree in question could be interpreted not as proof that the war would be short, but rather as a lack of foresight about its length, and about its nature, on the part of those who had drafted it, and who had not the slightest idea of the appalling waste of every sort of raw material that would occur in a war of consolidation, nor of the interdependence of the different theatres of operations.

  Outside the homosexual world, among the people most constitutionally opposed to homosexuality, there exists a certain conventional ideal of masculinity, which, unless the homosexual is quite exceptional, is at his disposal, but not without his distorting it. This ideal – represented by certain soldiers, certain diplomats – is particularly exasperating. In its lowest form it is simply the unsophistication of the man with a heart of gold who does not want to betray any emotion, and who, at the moment of parting from a friend who is perhaps going to his death, feels a deep desire to cry which nobody suspects because he overlays it with a rising anger, ending in an outburst at the actual moment of leaving: ‘Come on, damn it! Embrace me, you bloody idiot, and you’d better take this purse, I’ve got no use for it, don’t be such a damn fool.’ The diplomat, the officer, the man who feels that the only thing that matters is the great task of national importance, but who none the less felt a fondness for the ‘kid’ in the legation or the battalion who died from fever or a bullet, presents the same taste for masculinity in a form that is more adept and more skilful, but fundamentally just as obnoxious. He does not want to weep for the ‘kid’, he knows that soon nobody will be thinking about him, any more than the kind-hearted surgeon does, who yet, despite everything, on the evening when some little gi
rl has died in an epidemic, feels a sadness he does not express. Even should the diplomat be a writer and describe the death, he will not say that he felt any grief: no; first out of ‘manly decency’, and second by virtue of the artistic skill which arouses emotion by concealing it. He and one of his colleagues will watch by the dying man’s bedside. Not for a moment will they say that they feel grief. They will talk about legation or battalion business, perhaps even in greater detail than usual:

  ‘B—— said to me: “Don’t forget that we’ve got the general’s inspection tomorrow, so make sure your men are properly turned out.” He is normally so softly spoken, but his tone was sharper than usual, and I noticed that he avoided meeting my eyes. Mind you, I felt rather on edge as well.’

  And the reader understands that this sharpness is just grief as it appears in men who do not want to appear to feel grief, a fact which would be simply ridiculous if it were not also ugly and terribly sad, because it is the way that people who think that grief does not matter, who think that there are more important things in life than partings, etc., experience grief, so that when somebody dies they give the same impression of dishonesty, of pointlessness, as the gentleman on New Year’s Day who brings you some marrons glacés and says: ‘With my very best wishes for your health and happiness,’ giggling, but saying it all the same. But to finish the account of the officer or the diplomat watching beside the deathbed, his head covered because the wounded or dying man has been taken out of doors, a moment suddenly comes when it is all over.