In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (49 page)

There was, however, this rather painful consideration: that if M. de
Marsantes, with his extremely open mind, would have appreciated a son
so different from himself, Robert de Saint–Loup, because he was one of
those who believe that merit is attached only to certain forms of art
and life, had an affectionate but slightly contemptuous memory of a
father who had spent all his time hunting and racing, who yawned at
Wagner and raved over Offenbach. Saint–Loup had not the intelligence
to see that intellectual worth has nothing to do with adhesion to any
one aesthetic formula, and had for the intellectuality of M. de
Marsantes much the same sort of scorn as might have been felt for
Boieldieu or Labiche by a son of Boieldieu or Labiche who had become
adepts in the most symbolic literature and the most complex music. "I
scarcely knew my father," he used to say. "He seems to have been a
charming person. His tragedy was the deplorable age in which he lived.
To have been born in the Faubourg Saint–Germain and to have to live in
the days of La Belle Hélène would be enough to wreck any existence.
Perhaps if he'd been some little shopkeeper mad about the Ring he'd
have turned out quite different. Indeed they tell me that he was fond
of literature. But that can never be proved, because literature to him
meant such utterly god–forsaken books." And in my own case, if I found
Saint–Loup a trifle earnest, he could not understand why I was not
more earnest still. Never judging anything except by the weight of the
intelligence that it contained, never perceiving the magic appeal to
the imagination that I found in things which he condemned as
frivolous, he was astonished that I—I, to whom he imagined himself to
be so utterly inferior—could take any interest in them.

From the first Saint–Loup made a conquest of my grandmother, not only
by the incessant acts of kindness which he went out of his way to shew
to us both, but by the naturalness which he put into them as into
everything. 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 there had been in our Combray garden, too
formal borders, or at table, where she detested those dressed–up
dishes in which you could hardly detect the foodstuffs that had gone
to make them, or in piano–playing, which she did not like to be too
finicking, too laboured, having indeed had a special weakness for the
discords, the wrong notes of Rubinstein. This naturalness she found
and enjoyed even in the clothes that Saint–Loup wore, of a pliant
elegance, with nothing swagger, nothing formal 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
period, for preventing his face from at once reflecting every emotion.
Something, for instance, that he wanted to have but had not expected,
were it no more than a compliment, reacted in him in a burst of
pleasure so quick, so burning, 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 vivid 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, incidentally, in
Saint–Loup—at any rate at the period 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 vivacity with which pleasure is felt—so that it disarms them and
they are forced publicly to confess it—by natures capable of the
vilest treachery. But where my grandmother did really adore
Saint–Loup's naturalness was in his way of admitting, without any
evasion, 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 an acuteness
that made her smile—but as she herself would have done, lovingly, at
the same time extolling my good qualities with a warmth, an impulsive
freedom that shewed 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 shewed in forestalling 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 that I was depressed or felt unwell, 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 myself
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—not counting his
love for his mistress—the great joy of his life. These words made me
rather uncomfortable and I was at a loss for an answer, for I did not
feel when I was with him and talked to him—and no doubt it would have
been the same with everyone else—any of that happiness which it was,
on the other hand, possible for me to experience when I was by myself.
For 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 comfort.
But as soon as I was with some one else, when I began to talk to a
friend, my mind at once 'turned about,' it was towards the listener
and not 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 more or less in
order 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
tasted, when I felt myself surrounded by 'goods' 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
been left alone and ready, at last, to begin my work. But I told
myself that one is not given intelligence for one's own benefit only,
that the greatest of men have longed for appreciation, that I could
not regard as wasted hours in which I had built up an exalted idea of
myself in the mind of my friend; I had no difficulty in persuading
myself that I ought to be happy in consequence, and I hoped all the
more anxiously that this happiness might never be taken from me simply
because I had not yet been conscious of it. We fear more than the loss
of everything else the disappearance of the 'goods' that have remained
beyond our reach, because our heart has 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 were
devoted but which did not count for me), but not of finding happiness
in a feeling which, instead of multiplying the differences that there
were between my nature and those of other people—as there are among
all of us—would cancel them. At the same time my mind was
distinguishing in Saint–Loup a personality more collective than his
own, that of the 'noble'; which like an indwelling spirit moved his
limbs, ordered his gestures and his actions; then, at such moments,
although in his company, I was as much alone as I should have been
gazing at a landscape the harmony of which I could understand. He was
no more then than an object the properties of which, in my musing
contemplations, I sought to explore. The perpetual discovery in him of
this pre–existent, this aeonial creature, this aristocrat who was just
what Robert aspired not to be, gave me a keen delight, but one that
was intellectual and not social. 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 made her get 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 felt not
only the inherited litheness of the mighty hunters who had been for
generations the ancestors of this young man who made no pretence save
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 felt in him especially 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 shew that one is "just as good", that dread
of seeming inferior, of which he was indeed wholly unconscious, but
which mars with so much ugliness, so much awkwardness, the most
sincere overtures of a plebeian. Sometimes I found fault with myself
for thus taking pleasure in my friend as in 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
which he did not know, so that it added nothing to his own good
qualities, to that personal value, intellectual and moral, to which he
attached so high a price.

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 young
students, arrogant and ill–dressed, 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 to know him, though with a show of coldness and
indeed of 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 Israelites 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 nation, 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;
we raised our eyes to behold this anti–Semite. It was my old friend
Bloch. Saint–Loup at once begged me to remind him that they had met
before the Board of Examiners, when Bloch had carried off the prize of
honour, and since then at a popular university course.

At the most I may have smiled now and then, to discover in Robert the
marks of his Jesuit schooling, in the awkwardness which the fear of
hurting people's feelings at once created in him whenever one of his
intellectual friends made a social error, 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 it had been he that was to blame, 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 'lighft–boy' 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
pleasant. Balbec was in this respect like such countries as Russia or
Rumania, where the geography books teach us that the Israelite
population does not enjoy anything approaching the same esteem and has
not reached the same stage of assimilation as, for instance, in Paris.
Always together, with no blend of any other element, when the cousins
and uncles of Bloch or their coreligionists 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 past
and found them there again every year without ever exchanging a word
or a sign with them, whether these were on the Cambremers' list, or
the presiding magistrate's little group, professional or 'business'
people, or even simple corn–chandlers from Paris, whose daughters,
handsome, proud, derisive and French as the statues at Rheims, would
not care to mix with that horde of ill–bred tomboys, 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 what people
call the 'intelligent research' of painters who, having to illustrate
the Gospels or the Arabian Nights, consider the country in which the
scenes are laid, and give to Saint 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, their blindly worshipped idol. So that it is probable that
this set of people contained, like every other, perhaps more than any
other, plenty of attractions, merits and virtues. But in order to
experience these, one had first to penetrate its enclosure. Now it was
not popular; it could feel this; it saw in its unpopularity 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 ever dreamed of
trying to make his way.