The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (13 page)

On the other hand, the eminent and sullen world of finance inspires respect but also
aversion. The financier remains careworn even at the wildest ball. One of his numberless
clerks keeps coming to report the latest news from the stock exchange even at four
in the morning; the financier conceals his most successful coups and his most horrible
disasters from his wife. You never know whether he is a mogul or a swindler: he switches
to and fro without warning; and despite his immense fortune, he ruthlessly evicts
a poor tenant for being in arrears with his rent and refuses to grant him an extension
unless he wants to use the tenant as a spy or sleep with his daughter. Moreover, the
financier is always in his carriage, dresses without taste, and habitually wears a
pince-nez.

Nor did Bouvard and Pécuchet feel any keener love for Protestant society: it is cold,
starchy, gives solely to its own poor,
and is made up exclusively of pastors. Their temples look too much like their homes,
and a home is as dreary as a temple. There is always a pastor for lunch; the servants
admonish their employers with biblical verses; Protestants fear merriment too deeply
not to have something to hide; and when conversing with Catholics, they reveal their
undying grudge about the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Massacre of Saint
Bartholomew.

The art world, equally homogeneous, is quite different; every artist is a humbug,
estranged from his family, never wears a top hat, and speaks a special language. He
spends his life outsmarting bailiffs who try to dispossess him and finding grotesque
disguises for masked balls. Nevertheless artists constantly produce masterpieces,
and for most of them their overindulgence in wine and women is the sine qua non of
their inspiration if not their genius; they sleep all day, go out all night, work
God knows when, and, with their heads always flung back, their limp scarves fluttering
in the wind, they perpetually roll cigarettes.

The theater world is barely distinct from the art world: there is no family life on
any level; theater people are eccentric and inexhaustibly generous. Actors, while
vain and jealous, help their fellow players endlessly, applaud their successes, adopt
the children of consumptive or down-on-their-luck actresses, and are precious in society,
although, being uneducated, they are often sanctimonious and always superstitious.
Actors at subsidized theaters are in a class of their own; entirely worthy of our
admiration, they would deserve a more honorable place at the table than a general
or a prince; they nurture feelings expressed in the masterpieces they perform on our
great stages. Their memory is prodigious and their bearing perfect.

As for the Jews, Bouvard and Pécuchet, though unwilling to banish them (for one must
be liberal), admitted that they hated being with them; in their younger days Jews
had all sold opera glasses in Germany; in Paris (with a piety that, incidentally,
both men, as impartial observers, felt was all to their credit) the Jews zealously
maintained special practices, an unintelligible vocabulary, and butchers of their
own race. All Jews had hooked noses, exceptional intelligence, and vile souls
devoted purely to self-interest; their women, on the contrary, were beautiful, a bit
flabby, but capable of the loftiest sentiments. How many Catholics ought to emulate
them! But why were their fortunes always incalculable and concealed? Furthermore they
formed a kind of vast secret society, like the Jesuits and the Freemasons. They had—no
one knew where—inexhaustible treasures in the service of some enemies or other, with
a dreadful and mysterious goal.

Musical Tastes

Already disgusted with bicycles and paintings, Bouvard and Pécuchet now seriously
took up music. But, although the everlasting champion of tradition and order, Pécuchet
let himself be hailed as the utmost enthusiast of off-color songs and
Le Domino noir;
on the other hand, Bouvard, a revolutionary if ever there was one, turned out to
be—it must be admitted—a resolute Wagnerian. Truth to tell, he had never laid eyes
on a single score by the “Berlin brawler” (as he was cruelly nicknamed by Pécuchet,
always patriotic and uninformed); after all, one cannot hear Wagner’s scores in France,
where the Conservatory is dying of its own routine, between Colonne, who babbles,
and Lamoureux, who spells out everything; nor were those scores played in Munich,
which did not maintain tradition, or in Bayreuth, which had been unendurably contaminated
by snobs. It was nonsense trying to play a Wagnerian score on the piano: the theatrical
illusion was necessary, as were the lowering of the orchestra and the darkness of
the auditorium. Nevertheless, the prelude to
Parsifal
, ready to dumbfound visitors, was perpetually open on the music stand of Bouvard’s
piano, between the photographs of César Franck’s penholder and Botticelli’s
Primavera
.

The “Song of Spring” had been carefully torn out from the
Valkyrie
. On the first page of the roster of Wagner’s operas,
Lohengrin
and
Tannhäuser
had been indignantly crossed out by a
red pencil. Of the early operas
Rienzi
alone prevailed. Disavowing
Rienzi
had become banal; it was time—Bouvard keenly sensed—to establish the opposite view.
Gounod made him laugh and Verdi shout. Less, assuredly, than Erik Satie—who could
disagree? Beethoven, however, struck Bouvard as momentous, like a Messiah. Bouvard
himself, without stooping, could salute Bach as a forerunner. Saint-Saëns lacks substance
and Massenet form, he endlessly repeated to Pécuchet, in whose eyes, quite the contrary,
Saint-Saëns had nothing but substance and Massenet nothing but form.

“That is why one of them instructs us and the other charms us, but without elevating
us,” Pécuchet insisted.

For Bouvard both composers were equally despicable. Massenet had a few ideas, but
they were coarse, and besides, ideas had had their day. Saint-Saëns revealed some
craftsmanship, but it was old-fashioned. Uninstructed about Gaston Lemaire, but playing
with contrasts in their lessons, they eloquently pitted Chausson and Cécile Chaminade
against one another. Moreover, Pécuchet and, though it was repugnant to his aesthetics,
Bouvard himself gallantly yielded to Madame Chaminade the first place among composers
of the day, for every Frenchman is chivalrous and always lets women go first.

It was the democrat in Bouvard even more than the musician who proscribed the music
of Charles Levadé; was it not an obstruction of progress to linger over Madame de
Girardin’s poems in the age of steam, universal suffrage, and the bicycle? Furthermore,
as an advocate for the theory of art for art’s sake, for playing without nuances and
singing without modulation, Bouvard declared that he could not stand hearing Levadé
sing: he was too much the musketeer, the jokester, with the facile elegance of an
antiquated sentimentalism.

However, the topic of their liveliest debates was Reynaldo Hahn. While his close friendship
with Massenet, endlessly eliciting Bouvard’s cruel sarcasm, pitilessly marked Hahn
as the victim of Pécuchet’s passionate predilections, Hahn had the knack of exasperating
Pécuchet by his reverence for Verlaine, an admiration shared, incidentally, by Bouvard.
“Set Jacques Normand
to music, Sully Prudhomme, the Viscount of Borrelli. There is, thank goodness, no
shortage of poets in the land of the troubadours,” he added patriotically. And, divided
between the Teutonic sonority of Hahn’s last name and the southern ending of Reynaldo,
his first name, and preferring to execute him out of hatred for Wagner rather than
absolving him on behalf of Verdi, Pécuchet, turning to Bouvard, rigorously concluded:

“Despite the efforts of all your fine gentlemen, our beautiful land of France is a
land of clarity, and French music will be clear or it will not be,” Pécuchet stated,
pounding on the table for emphasis.

“A plague on your eccentricities from across the Channel and on your mists from across
the Rhine—do not always look beyond the Vosges,” he added, his glare bristling with
hints, “unless you are defending our fatherland. I doubt whether the
Valkyrie
can be liked even in Germany. . . . But for French ears it will always be the most
hellish of tortures—and the most cacophonous!—plus the most humiliating for our national
pride. Moreover, doesn’t this opera combine the most atrocious dissonance with the
most revolting incest? Your music, sir, is full of monsters, and all one can do is
keep inventing. In nature herself—the mother of simplicity, after all—you like only
the horrible. Doesn’t Monsieur Delafosse write melodies on bats, so that the composer’s
aberration will compromise his old reputation as a pianist? Why didn’t he choose some
nice bird? Melodies on sparrows would at least be quite Parisian; the swallow has
lightness and grace, and the lark is so eminently French that Caesar, they say, placed
roasted larks on the helmets of his soldiers. But bats!!! The Frenchman, ever thirsty
for openness and clarity, will always detest this sinister animal. Let it pass in
Monsieur Montesquiou’s verses—as the fantasy of a blasé aristocrat, which we can allow
him in a pinch. But in music! What’s next—a
Requiem for Kangaroos
? . . .” This good joke brightened Bouvard up. “Admit that I’ve made you laugh,” said
Pécuchet (with no reprehensible smugness, for an awareness of its merit is permissible
in a good mind). “Let’s shake, you’re disarmed!”

*
Needless to say, the opinions ascribed here to Flaubert’s two famous characters are
by no means those of the author.

That evening, Françoise de Breyves wavered for a long time between Princess Élisabeth
d’A.’s party, the Opera, and the Livrays’ play.

At the home where she had just dined with friends, they had left the table over an
hour ago. She had to make up her mind.

Her friend Geneviève, who was to drive back with her, was in favor of the princess’s
soirée, whereas, without quite knowing why, Madame de Breyves would have preferred
either of the two other choices, or even a third: to go home to bed. Her carriage
was announced. She was still undecided.

“Honestly,” said Geneviève, “this isn’t nice of you. I understand that Rezké will
be singing, and I’d like to hear him. You act as if you’d suffer serious consequences
by going to Élisabeth’s soirée. First of all, I have to tell you that you haven’t
been
to a single one of her grand soirées this year, and considering you’re friends, that’s
not very nice of you.”

Since her husband had died four years ago, leaving her a widow at twenty, Françoise
had done almost nothing without Geneviève and she liked pleasing her. She did not
resist her entreaties much longer, and, after bidding good night to the host and hostess
and to the other guests, who were all devastated at having enjoyed so little of one
of the most sought-after women in Paris, Françoise told her lackey:

“To Princess d’A.”