In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (51 page)

Besides, he was not altogether a bad youth, this Bloch; he could be,
and was at times quite charming. And now that the race of Combray, the
race from which sprang creatures absolutely unspoiled like my
grandmother and mother, seems almost extinct, as I have hardly any
choice now save between honest brutes—insensible and loyal, in whom
the mere sound of their voices shews at once that they take absolutely
no interest in one's life—and another kind of men who so long as they
are with one understand one, cherish one, grow sentimental even to
tears, take—their revenge a few hours later by making some cruel joke
at one's expense, but return to one, always just as comprehending,
as charming, as closely assimilated, for the moment, to oneself, I
think that it is of this latter sort that I prefer if not the moral
worth at any rate the society.

"You cannot imagine my grief when I think of you," Bloch went on.
"When you come to think of it, it is a rather Jewish side of my
nature," he added ironically, contracting his pupils as though he had
to prepare for the microscope an infinitesimal quantity of 'Jewish
blood,' and as might (but never would) have said a great French noble
who among his ancestors, all Christian, might nevertheless have
included Samuel Bernard, or further still, the Blessed Virgin from
whom, it is said, the Levy family claim descent, "coming out. I rather
like," he continued, "to find room among my feelings for the share
(not that it is more than a very tiny share) which may be ascribed to
my Jewish origin." He made this statement because it seemed to him at
once clever and courageous to speak the truth about his race, a truth
which at the same time he managed to water down to a remarkable
extent, like misers who decide to pay their debts but have not the
courage to pay more than half. This kind of deceit which consists in
having the boldness to proclaim the truth, but only after mixing with
it an ample measure of lies which falsify it, is commoner than people
think, and even among those who do not habitually practise it certain
crises in life, especially those in which love is at stake, give them
an opportunity of taking to it.

All these confidential diatribes by Bloch to Saint–Loup against me and
to me against Saint–Loup ended in an invitation to dinner. I am by no
means sure that he did not first make an attempt to secure Saint–Loup
by himself. It would have been so like Bloch to do so that probably he
did; but if so success did not crown his effort, for it was to myself
and Saint–Loup that Bloch said one day: "Dear master, and you, O
horseman beloved of Ares, de Saint–Loup–en–Bray, tamer of horses,
since I have encountered you by the shore of Amphitrite, resounding
with foam, hard by the tents of the swift–shipped Méniers, will both
of you come to dinner any day this week with my illustrious sire, of
blameless heart?" He proffered this invitation because he desired to
attach himself more closely to Saint–Loup
who would, he hoped, secure him the right of entry into aristocratic
circles. Formed by me for myself, this ambition would have seemed to
Bloch the mark of the most hideous snobbishness, quite in keeping with
the opinion that he already held of a whole side of my nature which he
did not regard—or at least had not hitherto regarded—as its most
important side; but the same ambition in himself seemed to him the
proof of a finely developed curiosity in a mind anxious to carry out
certain social explorations from which he might perhaps glean some
literary benefit. M. Bloch senior, when his son had told him that he
was going to bring one of his friends in to dinner, and had in a
sarcastic but satisfied tone enunciated the name and title of that
friend: "The Marquis de Saint–Loup–en–Bray," had been thrown into
great commotion. "The Marquis de Saint–Loup–en–Bray! I'll be
jiggered!" he had exclaimed, using the oath which was with him the
strongest indication of social deference. And he cast at a son capable
of having formed such an acquaintance an admiring glance which seemed
to say: "Really, it is astounding. Can this prodigy be indeed a child
of mine?" which gave my friend as much pleasure as if his monthly
allowance had been increased by fifty francs. For Bloch was not in his
element at home and felt that his father treated him like a lost sheep
because of his lifelong admiration for Leconte de Lisle, Heredia and
other 'Bohemians.' But to have got to know Saint–Loup–en–Bray, whose
father had been chairman of the Suez Canal board ('I'll be jiggered!')
was an indisputable 'score.' What a pity, indeed, that they had left in
Paris, for fear of its being broken on the journey, the stereoscope.
Alone among men, M. Bloch senior had the art, or at least the right to
exhibit it. He did this, moreover, on rare occasions only, and then to
good purpose, on evenings when there was a full–dress affair, with
hired waiters. So that from these exhibitions of the stereoscope there
emanated, for those who were present, as it were a special
distinction, a privileged position, and for the master of the house
who gave them a reputation such as talent confers on a man—which
could not have been greater had the photographs been taken by M. Bloch
himself and the machine his own invention. "You weren't invited to
Solomon's yesterday?" one of the family would ask another. "No! I was
not one of the elect. What was on?" "Oh, a great how–d'ye–do, the
stereoscope, the whole box of tricks!" "Indeed! If they had the
stereoscope I'm sorry I wasn't there; they say Solomon is quite
amazing when he works it."—"It can't be helped;" said M. Bloch now to
his son, "it's a mistake to let him have everything at once; that
would leave him nothing to look forward to." He had actually thought,
in his paternal affection and in the hope of touching his son's heart,
of sending for the instrument. But there was not time, or rather they
had thought there would not be; for we were obliged to put off the
dinner because Saint–Loup could not leave the hotel, where he was
waiting for an uncle who was coming to spend a few days with Mme. de
Villeparisis. Since—for he was greatly addicted to physical culture,
and especially to long walks—it was largely on foot, spending the
night in wayside farms, that this uncle was to make the journey from
the country house in which he was staying, the precise date of his
arrival at Balbec was by no means certain. And Saint–Loup, afraid to
stir out of doors, even entrusted me with the duty of taking to
Incauville, where the nearest telegraph–office was, the messages that
he sent every day to his mistress. The uncle for whom we were waiting
was called Palamède, a name that had come down to him from his
ancestors, the Princes of Sicily. And later on when I found, as I
read history, belonging to this or that Podestà or Prince of the
Church, the same Christian name, a fine renaissance medal—some said,
a genuine antique—that had always remained in the family, having
passed from generation to generation, from the Vatican cabinet to the
uncle of my friend, I felt the pleasure that is reserved for those
who, unable from lack of means to start a case of medals, or a picture
gallery, look out for old names (names of localities, instructive and
picturesque as an old map, a bird's–eye view, a sign–board or a return
of customs; baptismal names, in which rings out and is plainly heard,
in their fine French endings, the defect of speech, the intonation of
a racial vulgarity, the vicious pronunciation by which our ancestors
made Latin and Saxon words undergo lasting mutilations which in due
course became the august law–givers of our grammar books) and, in
short, by drawing upon their collections of ancient and sonorous
words, give themselves concerts like the people who acquire viols da
gamba and viols d'amour so as to perform the music of days gone by
upon old–fashioned instruments. Saint–Loup told me that even in the
most exclusive aristocratic society his uncle Palamède had the further
distinction of being particularly difficult to approach, contemptuous,
double–dyed in his nobility, forming with his brother's wife and a few
other chosen spirits what was known as the Phoenix Club. There even
his insolence was so much dreaded that it had happened more than once
that people of good position who had been anxious to meet him and had
applied to his own brother for an introduction had met with a refusal:
"Really, you mustn't ask me to introduce you to my brother Palamède.
My wife and I, we would all of us do our best for you, but it would be
no good. Besides, there's always the danger of his being rude to you,
and I shouldn't like that." At the Jockey Club he had, with a few of
his friends, marked a list of two hundred members whom they would
never allow to be introduced to them. And in the Comte de Paris's
circle he was known by the nickname of 'The Prince' because of his
distinction and his pride.

Saint–Loup told me about his uncle's early life, now a long time ago.
Every day he used to take women to a bachelor establishment which he
shared with two of his friends, as good–looking as himself, on account
of which they were known as 'The Three Graces.'

"One day, a man who just now is very much in the eye, as Balzac would
say, of the Faubourg Saint–Germain, but who at a rather awkward period
of his early life displayed odd tastes, asked my uncle to let him come
to this place. But no sooner had he arrived than it was not to the
ladies but to my uncle Palamède that he began to make overtures. My
uncle pretended not to understand, made an excuse to send for his two
friends; they appeared on the scene, seized the offender, stripped
him, thrashed him till he bled, and then with twenty degrees of frost
outside kicked him into the street where he was found more dead than
alive; so much so that the police started an inquiry which the poor
devil had the greatest difficulty in getting them to abandon. My uncle
would never go in for such drastic methods now, in fact you can't
conceive the number of men of humble position that he, who is so
haughty with people in society, has shewn his affection, taken under
his wing, even if he is paid for it with ingratitude. It may be a
servant who has looked after him in a hotel, for whom he will find a
place in Paris, or a farm–labourer whom he will pay to have taught a
trade. That is really the rather nice side of his character, in
contrast to his social side." Saint–Loup indeed belonged to that type
of young men of fashion, situated at an altitude at which it has been
possible to cultivate such expressions as: "What is really rather nice
about him," "His rather nice side," precious seeds which produce very
rapidly a way of looking at things in which one counts oneself as
nothing and the 'people' as everything; the exact opposite, in a word,
of plebeian pride. "It seems, it is quite impossible to imagine how
he set the tone, how he laid down the law for the whole of society
when he was a young man. He acted entirely for himself; in any
circumstances he did what seemed pleasing to himself, what was most
convenient, but at once the snobs would start copying him. If he felt
thirsty at the play, and sent out from his box for a drink, the little
sitting–rooms behind all the boxes would be filled, a week later, with
refreshments. One wet summer, when he had a touch of rheumatism, he
ordered an ulster of a loose but warm vicuna wool, which is used only
for travelling rugs, and kept the blue and orange stripes shewing. The
big tailors at once received orders from all their customers for blue
and orange ulsters of rough wool. If he had some reason for wishing to
keep every trace of ceremony out of a dinner in a country house where
he was spending the day, and to point the distinction had come without
evening clothes and sat down to table in the suit he had been wearing
that afternoon, it became the fashion, when you were dining in the
country, not to dress. If he was eating some special sweet and instead
of taking his spoon used a knife, or a special implement of his own
invention which he had had made for him by a silversmith, or his
fingers, it at once became wrong to eat it in any other way. He wanted
once to hear some Beethoven quartets again (for with all his
preposterous ideas he is no fool, mind, he has great gifts) and
arranged for some musicians to come and play them to him and a few
friends once a week. The ultra–fashionable thing that season was to
give quite small parties, with chamber music. I should say he's not
done at all badly out of life. With his looks, he must have had any
number of women! I can't tell you exactly whom, for he is very
discreet. But I do know that he was thoroughly unfaithful to my poor
aunt. Not that that prevented his being always perfectly charming to
her, and her adoring him; he was in mourning for her for years. When
he is in Paris, he still goes to the cemetery nearly every day."

The morning after Robert had told me all these things about his uncle,
while he waited for him (and waited, as it happened, in vain), as I
was coming by myself past the Casino on my way back to the hotel, I
had the sensation of being watched by somebody who was not far off. I
turned my head and saw a man of about forty, very tall and rather
stout, with a very dark moustache, who, nervously slapping the leg of
his trousers with a switch, kept fastened upon me a pair of eyes
dilated with observation. Every now and then those eyes were shot
through by a look of intense activity such as the sight of a person
whom they do not know excites only in men to whom, for whatever
reason, it suggests thoughts that would not occur to anyone
else—madmen, for instance, or spies. He trained upon me a supreme
stare at once bold, prudent, rapid and profound, like a last shot
which one fires at an enemy at the moment when one turns to flee, and,
after first looking all round him, suddenly adopting an absent and
lofty air, by an abrupt revolution of his whole body turned to examine
a playbill on the wall in the reading of which he became absorbed,
while he hummed a tune and fingered the moss–rose in his buttonhole.
He drew from his pocket a note–book in which he appeared to be taking
down the title of the performance that was announced, looked two or
three times at his watch, pulled down over his eyes a black straw hat
the brim of which he extended with his hand held out over it like a
visor, as though to see whether some one were at last coming, made the
perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean to shew that
they have waited long enough, although they never make it when they
are really waiting, then pushing back his hat and exposing a scalp
cropped close except at the sides where he allowed a pair of waved
'pigeon's–wings' to grow quite long, he emitted the loud panting
breath that people give who are not feeling too hot but would like it
to be thought that they were. He gave me the impression of a 'hotel
crook' who had been watching my grandmother and myself for some days,
and while he was planning to rob us had just discovered that I had
surprised him in the act of spying; to put me off the scent, perhaps
he was seeking only, by his new attitude, to express boredom and
detachment, but it was with an exaggeration so aggressive that his
object appeared to be—at least as much as the dissipating of the
suspicions that I must have had of him—to avenge a humiliation which
quite unconsciously I must have inflicted on him, to give me the idea
not so much that he had not seen me as that I was an object of too
little importance to attract his attention. He threw back his
shoulders with an air of bravado, bit his lips, pushed up his
moustache, and in the lens of his eyes made an adjustment of something
that was indifferent, harsh, almost insulting. So effectively that
the singularity of his expression made me take him at one moment for a
thief and at another for a lunatic. And yet his scrupulously ordered
attire was far more sober and far more simple than that of any of the
summer visitors I saw at Balbec, and gave a reassurance to my own
suit, so often humiliated by the dazzling and commonplace whiteness of
their holiday garb. But my grandmother was coming towards me, we took
a turn together, and I was waiting for her, an hour later, outside the
hotel into which she had gone for a moment, when I saw emerge from it
Mme. de Villeparisis with Robert de Saint–Loup and the stranger who
had stared at me so intently outside the Casino. Swift as a
lightning–flash his look shot through me, just as at the moment when I
first noticed him, and returned, as though he had not seen me, to
hover, slightly lowered, before his eyes, dulled, like the neutral
look which feigns to see nothing without and is incapable of reporting
anything to the mind within, the look which expresses merely the
satisfaction of feeling round it the eyelids which it cleaves apart
with its sanctimonious roundness, the devout, the steeped look that we
see on the faces of certain hypocrites, the smug look on those of
certain fools. I saw that he had changed his clothes. The suit he was
wearing was darker even than the other; and no doubt this was because
the true distinction in dress lies nearer to simplicity than the
false; but there was something more; when one came near him one felt
that if colour was almost entirely absent from these garments it was
not because he who had banished it from them was indifferent to it but
rather because for some reason he forbade himself the enjoyment of it.
And the sobriety which they displayed seemed to be of the kind that
comes from obedience to a rule of diet rather than from want of
appetite. A dark green thread harmonised, in the stuff of his
trousers, with the clock on his socks, with a refinement which
betrayed the vivacity of a taste that was everywhere else conquered,
to which this single concession had been made out of tolerance for
such a weakness, while a spot of red on his necktie was imperceptible,
like a liberty which one dares not take.