In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (46 page)

From the first Saint-Loup made a conquest of my grandmother, not only by the incessant kindness which he went out of his way to show to us both, but by the naturalness which he put into it as into everything else. For naturalness—doubtless because through the artifice of man it allows a feeling of nature to permeate—was the quality which my grandmother preferred to all others, whether in gardens, where she did not like there to be, as in our Combray garden, too formal flower-beds, or in cooking, where she detested those dressed-up dishes in which you can hardly detect the foodstuffs that have gone to make them, or in piano-playing, which she did not like to be too finicking, too polished, having indeed had a special weakness for the discords, the wrong notes of Rubinstein. This naturalness she found and appreciated even in the clothes that Saint-Loup wore, of a loose elegance, with nothing “swagger” or “dressed-up” about them, no stiffness or starch. She appreciated this rich young man still more highly for the free and careless way that he had of living in luxury without “smelling of money,” without giving himself airs; she even discovered the charm of this naturalness in the incapacity which Saint-Loup had kept—though as a rule it is outgrown with childhood, at the same time as certain physiological peculiarities of that age—for preventing his face from at once reflecting every emotion. Something, for instance, that he wanted to have but had not expected, if only a compliment, induced in him a pleasure so quick, so glowing, so volatile, so expansive that it was impossible for him to contain and to conceal it; a grin of delight seized irresistible hold of his face, the too delicate skin of his cheeks allowed a bright red glow to shine through them, his eyes sparkled with confusion and joy; and my grandmother was infinitely touched by this charming show of innocence and frankness, which indeed in Saint-Loup—at any rate at the time of our first friendship—was not misleading. But I have known another person, and there are many such, in whom the physiological sincerity of that fleeting blush in no way excluded moral duplicity; as often as not it proves nothing more than the intensity with which pleasure may be felt—to the extent of disarming them and forcing them publicly to confess it—by natures capable of the vilest treachery. But where my grandmother especially adored Saint-Loup’s naturalness was in his way of confessing without the slightest reservation his affection for me, to give expression to which he found words than which she herself, she told me, could not have thought of any more appropriate, more truly loving, words to which “Sévigné and Beausergent” might have set their signatures. He was not afraid to make fun of my weaknesses—which he had discerned with a shrewdness that made her smile—but as she herself would have done, affectionately, at the same time extolling my good qualities with a warmth, an impulsive freedom that showed no sign of the reserve, the coldness by means of which young men of his age are apt to suppose that they give themselves importance. And he evinced, in anticipating my every discomfort, however slight, in covering my legs if the day had turned cold without my noticing it, in arranging (without telling me) to stay later with me in the evening if he thought I was sad or gloomy, a vigilance which, from the point of view of my health, for which a more hardening discipline would perhaps have been better, my grandmother found almost excessive, though as a proof of his affection for me she was deeply touched by it.

It was promptly settled between us that he and I were to be great friends for ever, and he would say “our friendship” as though he were speaking of some important and delightful thing which had an existence independent of ourselves, and which he soon called—apart from his love for his mistress—the great joy of his life. These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him—and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else—none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself. Alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other of those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of well-being. But as soon as I was with someone else, as soon as I was talking to a friend, my mind as it were faced about, it was towards this interlocutor and not towards myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure. Once I had left Saint-Loup, I managed, with the help of words, to put some sort of order into the confused minutes that I had spent with him; I told myself that I had a good friend, that a good friend was a rare thing, and I savoured, when I felt myself surrounded by assets that were difficult to acquire, what was precisely the opposite of the pleasure that was natural to me, the opposite of the pleasure of having extracted from myself and brought to light something that was hidden in my inner darkness. If I had spent two or three hours in conversation with Saint-Loup and he had expressed his admiration of what I had said to him, I felt a sort of remorse, or regret, or weariness at not having remained alone and settled down to work at last. But I told myself that one is not intelligent for oneself alone, that the greatest of men have wanted to be appreciated, that hours in which I had built up a lofty idea of myself in my friend’s mind could not be considered wasted. I had no difficulty in persuading myself that I ought to be happy in consequence, and I hoped all the more keenly that this happiness might never be taken from me because I had not actually felt it. We fear more than the loss of anything else the disappearance of possessions that have remained outside ourselves, because our hearts have not taken possession of them. I felt that I was capable of exemplifying the virtues of friendship better than most people (because I should always place the good of my friends before those personal interests to which other people are devoted but which did not count for me), but not of finding happiness in a feeling which, instead of increasing the differences that there were between my nature and those of other people—as there are between all of us—would eliminate them. On the other hand there were moments when my mind distinguished in Saint-Loup a personality more generalised than his own, that of the “nobleman,” which like an indwelling spirit moved his limbs, ordered his gestures and his actions; then, at such moments, although in his company, I was alone, as I should have been in front of a landscape the harmony of which I could understand. He was no more then than an object the properties of which, in my musings, I sought to explore. The discovery in him of this pre-existent, this immemorial being, this aristocrat who was precisely what Robert aspired not to be, gave me intense joy, but a joy of the mind rather than the feelings. In the moral and physical agility which gave so much grace to his kindnesses, in the ease with which he offered my grandmother his carriage and helped her into it, in the alacrity with which he sprang from the box when he was afraid that I might be cold, to spread his own cloak over my shoulders, I sensed not only the inherited litheness of the mighty hunters who had been for generations the ancestors of this young man who had no pretensions except to intellectuality; their scorn of wealth which, subsisting in him side by side with his enjoyment of it simply because it enabled him to entertain his friends more lavishly, made him so carelessly shower his riches at their feet; I sensed in it above all the certainty or the illusion in the minds of those great lords of being “better than other people,” thanks to which they had not been able to hand down to Saint-Loup that anxiety to show that one is “just as good as the next man,” that dread of seeming too assiduous of which he was indeed wholly innocent and which mars with so much stiffness and awkwardness the most sincere plebeian civility. Sometimes I reproached myself for thus taking pleasure in considering my friend
as a work of art, that is to say in regarding the play of all the parts of his being as harmoniously ordered by a general idea from which they depended but of which he was unaware and which consequently added nothing to his own qualities, to that personal value, intellectual and moral, which he prized so highly.

And yet that idea was to a certain extent their determining cause. It was because he was a gentleman that that mental activity, those socialist aspirations, which made him seek the company of arrogant and ill-dressed young students, connoted in him something really pure and disinterested which was not to be found in them. Looking upon himself as the heir of an ignorant and selfish caste, he was sincerely anxious that they should forgive in him that aristocratic origin which they, on the contrary, found irresistibly attractive and on account of which they sought his acquaintance while simulating coldness and indeed insolence towards him. He was thus led to make advances to people from whom my parents, faithful to the sociological theories of Combray, would have been stupefied at his not turning away in disgust. One day when we were sitting on the sands, Saint-Loup and I, we heard issuing from a canvas tent against which we were leaning a torrent of imprecation against the swarm of Jews that infested Balbec. “You can’t go a yard without meeting them,” said the voice. “I am not in principle irremediably hostile to the Jewish race, but here there is a plethora of them. You hear nothing but, ‘I thay, Apraham, I’ve chust theen Chacop.’ You would think you were in the Rue d’Aboukir.” The man who thus inveighed against Israel emerged at last from the tent, and we raised our eyes to behold this anti-Semite. It was my old friend Bloch. Saint-Loup at once asked me to remind him that they had met each other at the
concours général
, when Bloch had carried off the prize of honour, and since then at a people’s university course.
¹¹

At the most I may have smiled now and then, to discover in Robert the marks of his Jesuit schooling in the embarrassment which the fear of hurting people’s feelings at once provoked in him whenever one of his intellectual friends made a social error or did something silly to which Saint-Loup himself attached no importance but felt that the other would have blushed if anybody had noticed it. And it was Robert who used to blush as though he were the guilty party, for instance on the day when Bloch, after promising to come and see him at the hotel, went on: “As I cannot endure to be kept waiting among all the false splendour of these great caravanserais, and the Hungarian band would make me ill, you must tell the ‘lighftboy’ to make them shut up, and to let you know at once.”

Personally, I was not particularly anxious that Bloch should come to the hotel. He was at Balbec, not by himself, unfortunately, but with his sisters, and they in turn had innumerable relatives and friends staying there. Now this Jewish colony was more picturesque than pleasing. Balbec was in this respect like such countries as Russia or Romania, where the geography books teach us that the Jewish population does not enjoy the same esteem and has not reached the same stage of assimilation as, for instance, in Paris. Always together, with no admixture of any other element, when the cousins and uncles of Bloch or their co-religionists male or female repaired to the Casino, the ladies to dance, the gentlemen branching off towards the baccarat-tables, they formed a solid troop, homogeneous within itself, and utterly dissimilar to the people who watched them go by and found them there again every year without ever exchanging a word or a greeting, whether these were the Cambremer set, or the senior judge’s little group, professional or “business” people, or even simple corn-chandlers from Paris, whose daughters, handsome, proud, mocking and French as the statues at Rheims, would not care to mix with that horde of ill-bred sluts who carried their zeal for “seaside fashions” so far as to be always apparently on their way home from shrimping or out to dance the tango. As for the men, despite the brilliance of their dinner-jackets and patent-leather shoes, the exaggeration of their type made one think of the so-called “bright ideas” of those painters who, having to illustrate the Gospels or the Arabian Nights, consider the country in which the scenes are laid, and give to St Peter or to Ali Baba the identical features of the heaviest “punter” at the Balbec tables. Bloch introduced his sisters, who, though he silenced their chatter with the utmost rudeness, screamed with laughter at the mildest sallies of this brother who was their blindly worshipped idol. Although it is probable that this set of people contained, like every other, perhaps more than any other, plenty of attractions, qualities and virtues, in order to experience these one would first have had to penetrate it. But it was not popular, it sensed this, and saw there the mark of an anti-Semitism to which it presented a bold front in a compact and closed phalanx into which, as it happened, no one dreamed of trying to force his way.

As regards the word “lighft,” I had all the less reason to be surprised at Bloch’s pronunciation in that, a few days before, when he had asked me why I had come to Balbec (although it seemed to him perfectly natural that he himself should be there) and whether it had been “in the hope of making grand friends,” and I had explained to him that this visit was a fulfilment of one of my earliest longings, though one not so deep as my longing to see Venice, he had replied: “Yes, of course, to sip iced drinks with the pretty ladies, while pretending to read the
Stones of Venighce
by Lord John Ruskin, a dreary bore, in fact one of the most tedious old prosers you could find.” Thus Bloch evidently thought that in England not only were all the inhabitants of the male sex called “Lord,” but the letter “i” was invariably pronounced “igh.” As for Saint-Loup, this mistake in pronunciation seemed to him all the more venial inasmuch as he saw in it pre-eminently a want of those almost “society” notions which my new friend despised as fully as he was versed in them. But the fear lest Bloch, discovering one day that one says “Venice” and that Ruskin was not a lord, should retrospectively imagine that Robert had thought him ridiculous, made the latter feel as guilty as if he had been found wanting in the indulgence with which, as we have seen, he overflowed, so that the blush which would doubtless one day dye the cheek of Bloch on the discovery of his error, Robert already, by anticipation and reversibility, could feel mounting to his own. For he assumed that Bloch attached more importance than he to this mistake—an assumption which Bloch confirmed some days later, when he heard me pronounce the word “lift,” by breaking in with: “Oh, one says ‘lift,’ does one?” And then, in a dry and lofty tone: “Not that it’s of the slightest importance.” A phrase that is like a reflex action, the same in all proud and susceptible men, in the gravest circumstances as well as in the most trivial, betraying there as clearly as on this occasion how important the thing in question seems to him who declares that it is of no importance; a tragic phrase at times, the first to escape (and then how heart-breakingly) the lips of any man who is at all proud from whom we have just removed the last hope to which he still clung by refusing to do him a service: “Oh, well, it’s not of the slightest importance; I shall make some other arrangement”: the other arrangement which it is not of the slightest importance that he should be driven to adopt being sometimes suicide.