To my annoyance, therefore, I had to listen to him talking to Françoise about an operation of wide “scoop” with an emphasis which was intended to prove to me that this pronunciation was the result not of ignorance but of an act of will following upon ripe reflexion. He confounded the government and the newspapers in a single “they” full of mistrust, saying: “They tell us about the losses of the Boches, they don’t tell us about our own, it seems that they are ten times as big. They tell us that the enemy are at the end of their tether, that they have nothing to eat, personally I believe they are a hundred times better off than we are for food. It’s no use stuffing us with lies. If the enemy had nothing to eat, they wouldn’t fight as they did the other day when they killed a hundred thousand of our young men not twenty years old.” Thus at every moment he exaggerated the triumphs of the Germans, as in the past he had those of the Radicals; and at the same time he recounted their atrocities in order that these triumphs might be yet more painful to Françoise, who never stopped saying: “Ah! Holy Mother of the Angels! Ah! Mary, Mother of God!,” and sometimes, in order to be disagreeable to her in a different way, he said: “Anyhow, we are no better than they are, what we’re doing in Greece is no prettier than what they have done in Belgium. You will see that we shall turn everybody against us, we shall find ourselves fighting every nation in the world,” whereas the truth was exactly the opposite. On days when the news was good he destroyed its effect by assuring Françoise that the war would last thirty-five years, and if there was talk of the possibility of an armistice, he declared that peace would not last more than a few months and would be followed by battles which would make the present ones look like child’s play, such battles that after them there would be nothing left of France.
The victory of the Allies seemed, if not near at hand, at least more or less certain, and it must unfortunately be admitted that the butler was greatly distressed at the prospect. For he had reduced the “world” war, like everything else, to the war which he was secretly waging against Françoise (of whom, nevertheless, he was fond, just as one may be fond of the person whom one enjoys infuriating every day by beating him at dominoes) and victory in his eyes took the shape of the first conversation in which he would have the pain of hearing Françoise say: “Well, it’s over at last, and they’ll have to give us more than we gave them in ’70.” He believed, nevertheless, that this fatal day of reckoning was perpetually about to arrive, for an unconscious patriotism made him suppose, like all Frenchmen, victims of the same mirage as myself since my illness, that victory—like my recovery—was just round the corner. This event he anticipated by announcing to Françoise that victory might perhaps come, but that his heart bled at the thought, for revolution would follow hard on its heels and then invasion. “Ah! this blooming war, the Boches will be the only ones to recover from it quickly, Françoise. They have already made hundreds of thousands of millions out of it. But as for their coughing up a sou to us, what nonsense! They will print that in the newspapers perhaps,” he added out of prudence and so as to be ready for any eventuality, “in order to appease the people, just as for three years now they have been saying that the war will be over tomorrow.” Françoise was only too easily disturbed by these words, because, having at first believed the optimists rather than the butler, she saw now that the war, which she had thought would end in a fortnight in spite of “the innovation of poor Belgium,” was indeed still going on, that we were not advancing (the phenomenon of fixed front warfare was beyond her comprehension) and that, according to one of the innumerable “godsons” to whom she gave everything that she earned with us, “they” were concealing various awkward facts. “It’s the working man who will have to pay,” concluded the butler. “They will take your field away from you, Françoise.” “Ah! God in Heaven!” But to these distant misfortunes he preferred nearer ones and devoured the newspapers in the hope of being able to announce a defeat to Françoise. He waited for pieces of bad news as eagerly as if they had been Easter eggs, hoping that things would go badly enough to terrify Françoise but not badly enough to cause him any material suffering. Thus the prospect of a Zeppelin raid enchanted him: he would have the spectacle of Françoise hiding in the cellars, and at the same time he was persuaded that in a town as large as Paris the bombs would never happen to fall just on our house.
Françoise meanwhile was beginning at moments to return to her Combray pacifism. She almost had doubts about the “German atrocities.” “When the war started we were told that the Germans were murderers, brigands, real bandits, Bbboches …” (If she gave several b’s to Boche, it was because the accusation that the Germans were murderers seemed to her quite plausible, but the idea that they were Boches, because of the enormity of the accusation, improbable in the extreme. Only it was not at all easy to understand what mysteriously terrifying sense Françoise gave to the word Boche, since the period she was talking about was the very beginning of the war, and also on account of the air of doubt with which she pronounced the word. For a doubt whether the Germans were criminals might be ill-founded in fact but did not contain in itself, from the point of view of logic, any contradiction. But how was it possible to doubt that they were Boches, since the word, in the popular language, means nothing more nor less than German? Perhaps she was simply repeating in an indirect fashion the violent remarks she had heard at the time, in which the word Boche was emphasised with particular energy.) “I believed all that,” she went on, “but I am wondering now whether we are not every bit as scoundrelly as they are.” This blasphemous thought had been slyly prepared in Françoise’s mind by the butler, who, seeing that she had a certain fondness for King Constantine of Greece, had not ceased to represent him to her as literally starved by us until the day when he would yield. So the abdication of this monarch had aroused strong feelings in Françoise, who went so far as to declare: “We are no better than they are. If we were in Germany, we would do just the same.”
I saw little of her, in any case, during these few days, for she spent much time at the house of those cousins of whom Mamma had said to me one day: “But you know that they are richer than you are.” These cousins had given an example of that beautiful conduct which was very frequent at this period throughout the country and which would bear witness, if there were a historian to perpetuate its memory, to the greatness of France, her greatness of soul, her greatness after the fashion of Saint-André-des-Champs, a kind of conduct displayed as much by thousands of civilians living in safety far from the front as by the soldiers who fell at the Marne. There had been killed at Berry-au-Bac a nephew of Françoise who was also a nephew of the millionaire cousins, former proprietors of a large café who had retired long since after making their fortune. The young man who was killed had been the owner of a very small café and quite poor; he had gone off, twenty-five years old, when the army was mobilised, leaving his young wife alone to look after the little bar to which he hoped to return in a few months. He had been killed. And then this is what happened. The millionaire cousins of Françoise, who were not related by blood to the young woman who was their nephew’s widow, had left the home in the country to which they had retired ten years earlier and had set to work again as café proprietors, without putting a sou into their own pockets; every morning at six the millionairess, a real lady, was up and dressed together with Mademoiselle her daughter, ready to help their niece and cousin by marriage. And for nearly three years now they had been washing glasses and serving drinks from early morning until half past nine at night, without a day’s rest. In this book in which there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise, in which everything has been invented by me in accordance with the requirements of my theme, I owe it to the credit of my country to say that only the millionaire cousins of Françoise who came out of retirement to help their niece when she was left without support, only they are real people who exist. And persuaded as I am that I shall not offend their modesty, for the reason that
they will never read this book, it is both with childish pleasure and with a profound emotion that, being unable to record the names of so many others who undoubtedly acted in the same way, to all of whom France owes her survival, I transcribe here the real name of this family: they are called—and what name could be more French?—Larivière. If there were a few vile shirkers like the arrogant young man in a dinner-jacket whom I had seen in Jupien’s establishment, whose only concern was to know whether he could have Léon at half past ten “as he had a luncheon engagement,” they are redeemed by the innumerable throng of all the Frenchmen of Saint-André-des-Champs, by all the sublime soldiers and by those whom I rank as their equals, the Larivières.
The butler, to sharpen the fears of Françoise, showed her an old copy of Lectures pour tous which he had found, with a picture on its cover (it dated from before the war) of the “imperial family of Germany.” “There’s our lord and master to be,” said the butler to Françoise, showing her “William.” She goggled, then pointed to the feminine personage who stood by his side and said: “And there’s the Williamess!”
My departure from Paris was delayed by a piece of news which caused me such grief that I was for some time rendered incapable of travelling. This was the death of Robert de Saint-Loup, killed two days after his return to the front while covering the retreat of his men. Never had any man felt less hatred for a nation than he (and as for the Emperor, for particular reasons, very possibly incorrect, he thought that William II had tried rather to prevent the war than to bring it about). Nor had he hated Germanism; the last words which I had heard on his lips, six days before he died, were the opening words of a Schumann song which he had started to hum in German on my staircase, until I had made him desist because of the neighbours. Accustomed by supreme good breeding to eliminate from his conduct all trace of apology or invective, all rhetoric, he had avoided in face of the enemy, as he had at the time of mobilisation, the actions which would have ensured his survival, through that tendency to efface himself before others of which all his behaviour was symbolic, down to his manner of coming out into the street bare-headed to close the door of my cab, every time I visited him. For several days I remained shut up in my room, thinking of him. I recalled his arrival the first time at Balbec, when, in an almost white suit, with his eyes greenish and mobile like the waves, he had crossed the hall adjoining the great dining-room whose windows gave on to the sea. I recalled the very special being that he had then seemed to me to be, the being for whose friendship I had so greatly wished. That wish had been realised beyond the limits of what I should ever have thought possible, without, however, at the time giving me more than a very slight pleasure; and then later I had come to understand the many great virtues and something else as well which lay concealed behind his elegant appearance. All this, the good as well as the bad, he had given without counting the cost, every day, as much on the last day when he advanced to attack a trench, out of generosity and because it was his habit to place at the service of others all that he possessed, as on that evening when he had run along the backs of the seats in the restaurant in order not to disturb me. And the fact that I had seen him really so little but against such varied backgrounds, in circumstances so diverse and separated by so many intervals—in that hall at Balbec, in the café at Rivebelle, in the cavalry barracks and at the military dinners in Doncières, at the theatre where he had slapped the face of the journalist, in the house of the Princesse de Guermantes—only had the effect of giving me, of his life, pictures more striking and more sharply defined and for his death a grief more lucid than we are likely to have in the case of people whom we have loved more, but with whom our association has been so nearly continuous that the image we retain of them is no more than a sort of vague average between an infinity of imperceptibly different images and our affection, satiated, has not, as with those whom we have seen only for brief moments, during meetings prematurely ended against their wish and ours, the illusion that there was possible between us a still greater affection of which circumstances alone have defrauded us. A few days after the day on which I had seen him pursuing his monocle and supposed him to be so haughty, in that hall at Balbec, there was another living form which I had seen for the first time on the beach at Balbec and which now, like his, no longer existed except in the state of memory: Albertine, making her progress along the sand that first evening, indifferent to everybody around her, a marine creature, like a seagull. For her my love had come so swiftly that, in order to be free to go out with her every day, I had never during my stay at Balbec gone over to Doncières to see Saint-Loup. And yet the history of my relations with him bore witness also to the fact that at one period I had ceased to love Albertine, since if later I had installed myself for a while near Robert at Doncières, the reason lay in my unhappiness at seeing that the feeling which I had for Mme de Guermantes was not returned. His life and Albertine’s, so late made known to me, both at Balbec, and so swiftly concluded, had scarcely crossed, though it was he, I told myself, perceiving that the nimble shuttles of the years weave links between those of our memories which seem at first most independent of each other, it was he whom I had sent to see Mme Bontemps after Albertine had left me. And then it had turned out that their two lives had each of them a parallel secret, which I had not suspected. Saint-Loup’s secret caused me now more sadness perhaps than that of Albertine, whose life had become so alien to me. But I felt an inconsolable regret that her life as well as his had been so short. They had often said to me, both of them: “You who are ill …,” they had looked after me. And yet it was they who were dead, while I, both of the one and of the other, could set side by side, separated by an interval which after all was really not very long, the final image—before the trench, in the river-bed—and the first image, which even in the case of Albertine I valued now only because it was associated in my mind with that of the sun setting over the sea.
Saint-Loup’s death was received by Françoise with more compassion than that of Albertine. Immediately she assumed her role of hired mourner and descanted upon the memory of the dead man with frenzied threnodies and lamentations. She paraded her grief and only put on an unfeeling expression, at the same time averting her head, when in spite of myself I betrayed mine, which she wished to appear not to have seen. For like many emotional people, she was exasperated by the emotions of others, which bore no doubt too great a resemblance to her own. She loved now to draw attention to her slightest rheumatic twinge, to a fit of giddiness, to a bump. But if I referred to one of my symptoms, in an instant she was stoical and grave again and pretended not to have heard. “Poor Marquis,” she said, although she continued to believe that he would have done anything in the world in order not to go to the front and, once there, in order to run away from danger. “Poor lady,” she said, thinking of Mme de Marsantes, “how she must have cried when she heard about her boy’s death! If at least she had been able to see him again! But perhaps it’s better that she didn’t, because his nose was cut in two, he was completely disfaced.” And the eyes of Françoise filled with tears, behind which, however, there was perceptible the cruel curiosity of the peasant woman. No doubt Françoise pitied the sorrow of Mme de Marsantes with all her heart, but she regretted not knowing the form which this sorrow had taken and not being able to enjoy the afflicting spectacle of it. And as she would dearly have loved to cry and to be seen by me to cry, she said, in order to work herself up: “This has really done something to me!” In me too she sought to detect the traces of grief, with an avidity which caused me to feign a certain indifference when I spoke of Robert. And, largely no doubt out of a spirit of imitation and because she had heard the phrase used—for there are clichés in the servants’ hall as well as in social coteries—she kept repeating, not however without a poor man’s smugness in her voice: “All his riches did not save him from dying like anybody else, and what use are they to him now?” The butler took advantage of the occasion to say to Françoise that of course it was sad, but that it hardly
counted beside the millions of men who fell every day in spite of all the efforts which the government made to conceal the fact. But this time the butler did not succeed in augmenting the sorrow of Françoise as he had hoped. For she replied: “It is true that they also die for France, but they are nobodies; it is always more interesting when it is somebody whom one knows.” And Françoise, who enjoyed crying, went on to add: “You must be sure to let me know if they talk about the death of the Marquis in the newspaper.”
Robert had often said to me sadly, long before the war: “Oh! my life, don’t let’s talk about it, I am a condemned man from the start.” Was he alluding to the vice which he had succeeded hitherto in concealing from the world, but of which he was himself aware and whose seriousness he perhaps exaggerated, just as children who make love for the first time, or merely before that age seek solitary pleasure, imagine themselves to be like a plant which cannot scatter its pollen without dying immediately afterwards? Perhaps this exaggeration, for Saint-Loup as for the children, came partly from the still unfamiliar idea of sin, partly from the fact that an entirely novel sensation has an almost terrible force which later will gradually diminish; or had he really, justifying it if need be by the death of his father at an early age, a presentiment of his own premature end? Such a presentiment would seem, no doubt, to be impossible. Yet death appears to be obedient to certain laws. Often for instance, one gets the impression that children of parents who have died very old or very young are almost compelled to disappear at the same age, the former protracting until their hundredth year their incurable miseries and ailments, the latter, in spite of a happy and healthy existence, swept away at the premature but inevitable date by an illness so opportune and so accidental (whatever deep roots it may have in the victim’s temperament) that it appears to be merely the formality necessary for the realisation of death. And may it not be possible that accidental death too—like that of Saint-Loup, which was perhaps in any case linked to his character in more ways than I have thought it necessary to describe—is somehow recorded in advance, known only to the gods, invisible to men, but revealed by a peculiar sadness, half unconscious, half conscious (and even, insofar as it is conscious, proclaimed to others with that complete sincerity with which we foretell misfortunes which in our heart of hearts we believe we shall escape but which will nevertheless take place) to the man who bears and forever sees within himself, as though it were some heraldic device, a fatal date?
Time Regained & a Guide to Proust Page 21