‘I was thinking I must go back and get my things ready for cleaning; when, I don’t know why, just as the doctor let go of the pulse, it happened that B—— and I, quite independently of each other, the sun was beating down on us, maybe we were hot, standing there beside the bed, both took off our képis.’
And the reader knows perfectly well that it is not because of the heat of the sun but out of emotion in the presence of the majesty of death that these two masculine men, who never allow the words affection or grief to pass their lips, removed their caps.
The ideal of masculinity found in homosexuals like Saint-Loup is not the same, but it is equally conventional and equally dishonest. For them, the dishonesty lies in the fact of their unwillingness to admit to themselves that physical desire is at the root of feelings to which they attribute some other origin. M. de Charlus detested effeminacy. Saint-Loup admires the courage of young men, the intoxication of a cavalry charge, the moral and intellectual nobility of those friendships between men, entirely pure, in which one sacrifices his life for another. War, which renders capital cities, where only women remain, the despair of homosexuals, is at the same time a story of intense romance for homosexuals, so long as they are intelligent enough to invent chimeras to pursue, but not intelligent enough to be able to see through them, recognize their origin and pass judgment on themselves. So that at a time when some young men were joining up simply out of a sporting spirit of imitation, just as one year everybody seems to be playing ‘diabolo’, for Saint-Loup war was rather the very ideal he imagined himself pursuing in his much more concrete desires, clouded in ideology though they were, an ideal he served alongside the kind of people he liked best, in a purely masculine order of chivalry, far removed from women, where he could risk his life to save his batman, and die inspiring a fanatical love in his men. And thus, while there might be a number of other elements in his courage, the fact that he was a nobleman was part of it, as was, in an unrecognizable and idealized form, M. de Charlus’s idea that it was of the essence of manhood to display no trace of effeminacy. Moreover, in the same way as in philosophy or in art two analogous ideas only acquire value from the ways in which they are developed, and may be quite different depending whether they are expounded by Xenophon or by Plato, so, while fully acknowledging how much they share in this regard, I admire Saint-Loup’s asking to be sent to the positions where there was greatest danger infinitely more than M. de Charlus’s avoiding wearing brightly coloured cravats.
I spoke to Saint-Loup about my friend the manager of the Grand Hotel in Balbec, who, it appeared, had claimed that at the beginning of the war, in some French regiments, there had been defections, which he called ‘defectations’, and had accused what he called the ‘Prussian militarist’ of having provoked them; he had even believed, at one point, that there had been simultaneous landing of Japanese, Germans and Cossacks at Rivebelle, threatening Balbec, and had said that there was nothing left to do but ‘evaculate’. He thought that the departure of the authorities for Bordeaux was somewhat precipitate, and declared that they were wrong to ‘evaculate’ so quickly. This hater of Germans would laughingly say, of his brother: ‘He’s in the trenches, just twenty-five metres from the Boche!’ until, having discovered that he was one himself, they put him in a concentration camp.
‘Talking of Balbec, do you remember that lift-boy they used to have in the hotel?’ asked Saint-Loup as he was about to go, in a tone of voice that suggested that he did not quite know who it was and was relying on me to clarify matters. ‘He’s joining up and has written to ask me to get him into the flying corps.’ The lift-boy was doubtless tired of going up in the captive cage of the lift, and the heights of the staircase in the Grand Hotel were no longer enough for him. He was going to ‘win his stripes’ in some other way than as a porter, for our destiny is not always what we thought it would be. ‘Obviously, I’ll support his application, Saint-Loup said. I was saying to Gilberte only this morning that we’ll never have enough aeroplanes. With them we’ll be able to see what the enemy is preparing. They’ll take away the greatest advantage of an attack, which is surprise, and the best army will perhaps be the one that has the best eyes.’
I had met the lift-boy airman a few days earlier. He had talked to me about Balbec and, curious to know what he would have to say about Saint-Loup, I led the conversation round to the subject by asking him if it was true, as I had been told, that where young men were concerned M. de Charlus had etc. The lift-boy seemed astonished, he knew absolutely nothing about it. But he did make an accusation against the rich young man who lived with his mistress and three male friends. As he seemed to be tarring them all with the same brush, and as I knew from M. de Charlus, who had told me, it will be remembered, in front of Brichot, that it was not at all like that, I told the lift-boy that he must be mistaken. He responded to my doubts with the most confident assertions. It was the girl-friend of the rich young man who was responsible for picking up young men, and they all took their pleasure together. So M. de Charlus, the most competent of men in these matters, was completely mistaken, the truth being so partial, secret and unpredictable. For fear of seeming to think in a bourgeois way, or of seeing Charlusism where there was none, he had completely missed the fact that the woman was making the pick-ups. ‘She came to look for me quite often, the lift-boy told me. But she realized straightaway who she was dealing with, I refused categorically, I don’t get involved in that kind of stuff; I told her I really hated it. It just takes one person to be indiscreet, word gets around, and then you can never find another job anywhere.’ These last reasons rather weakened the virtuous declarations with which he had begun, since they seemed to imply that the lift-boy would have acceded if he had been assured of discretion. That had doubtless been the case for Saint-Loup. It is quite probable that even the rich man, his mistress and his friends had not been less favourably treated, because the lift-boy cited numerous conversations he had had with them at various times, which rarely happens after such a categorical refusal. For instance, the rich man’s mistress had come to him to make the acquaintance of a bellboy he was very friendly with. ‘I don’t think you know him, you weren’t here then. Victor, they called him. Naturally,’ added the lift-boy as if with reference to some vaguely secret and inviolable law, ‘one can’t say no to a pal who’s short of money.’ I remembered the invitation which the rich man’s noble friend had extended to me a few days before my departure from Balbec. But in all probability that had nothing to do with it, and was prompted simply by friendliness.
‘Well, now, what about poor Françoise, has she managed to get her nephew exempted?’ But Françoise, who had for some time been doing everything she could to get her nephew exempted and who, when someone had suggested a recommendation, through the Guermantes, to General Saint-Joseph, had replied in a voice of despair: ‘Oh no, that wouldn’t help at all, there’s nothing to be had from that old bloke, he’s worse than the rest of them, he’s patriotic’; Françoise, as soon as there had been any question of war, however much it pained her to think it, decided that we could not abandon the ‘poor Russians’ as we were ‘allianced’ to them. The butler, who was anyway convinced that the war would only last ten days and would end in a stunning victory for France, would not have dared, for fear of being contradicted by events, and also did not even have enough imagination, to predict a long and indecisive war. But he tried at least to extract in advance from this total and immediate victory anything likely to cause suffering to Françoise. ‘It could easily get very nasty, because it seems that lots of them don’t want to go, lads of sixteen in tears.’ And his telling her unpleasant things in order to ‘vex’ her, was what he called ‘giving her the pip, telling her a thing or two, having a laugh’. ‘Sixteen, Mother of God!’ Françoise would say, then suspicious for a minute: ‘But they said they were only taking people over twenty, they’re still children. – Naturally the newspapers are under orders not to say anything about it. Anyway, all the young men will be up at the front
, and not many of them will be coming back. In one way that will be a good thing, after all, a good blood-letting is useful from time to time, it’s good for trade. Oh yes, if there are any soft-hearted kids who hang back, they’ll be shot straight away, a dozen bullets in them, bang! It’s the only way, really. After all, the officers, what does it matter to them? They get their screw, that’s all they ask.’ Françoise would turn so pale during each of these conversations that one was afraid the butler would give her a fatal heart attack.
For all that, she didn’t lose her old faults. Whenever a young lady came to see me, however badly the old servant’s legs were troubling her, if I happened to leave my room for a moment, I would see her up a ladder in the dressing-room, in the process, she would say, of looking out some jacket of mine to check that the moths had not got at it, though she was actually there to listen to us. Despite my criticisms, she retained her insidious way of asking questions indirectly, to do which she had for some time now had a way of using ‘because probably’. Not daring to say to me: ‘Does this lady own a town house?’ she would say, her eyes timidly raised like those of a faithful dog: ‘Because probably the lady has a town house…’, avoiding blatant interrogation less out of politeness than in order not to appear curious.
In the end, just as the servants whom we love best – especially if they have almost abandoned giving us the service or the respect that go with their job – remain, alas, servants and show most clearly the limits of their class (which we would wish to remove) when they think they have most penetrated into our own, Françoise when she was with me often (‘to needle me’, the butler might have said) made strange comments, which someone of my own class would not have done: with a joy disguised, but as deeply felt as if a grave illness were involved, if I were hot and sweat – if I had not noticed – beaded my forehead: ‘Oh, but you’re dripping,’ she’d say, as if in wonder at some strange phenomenon, smiling a little with the sort of scorn provoked by some impropriety (‘you seem to be going out but you’ve forgotten to put a tie on’), but adopting that preoccupied tone of voice which is designed to make someone worried about their state of health. It was as if I were the only person in the universe who had ever sweated. Finally she quite lost the pleasant manner of speaking she used to have. For in her humility, in her kind-hearted admiration for people who were infinitely inferior to her, she adopted their ugly turns of phrase. Her daughter having complained to me about her and saying (I don’t know who she got it from): ‘She’s always going on at me, saying I shut doors the wrong way, and so on and so forth ad infinitum,’ Françoise must have thought that only her incomplete education had thitherto deprived her of that elegant usage. And from the lips where I had once seen blossom the purest French, I now heard several times a day: ‘And so on and so forth ad infinitum.’ It is a curious thing how little not only a person’s expressions but also their thoughts vary. The butler having got into the habit of declaring that M. Poincaré’s intentions were bad, not for monetary gain but because he had been absolutely in favour of war, he would repeat this seven or eight times a day in front of the same familiar and always equally attentive audience. He never altered a word, a gesture or an intonation. Although it only lasted two minutes, the performance was unvarying. His errors of French corrupted Françoise’s language quite as much as those of her daughter. He thought that what M. de Rambuteau had been so hurt one day to hear the Duc de Guermantes refer to as ‘Rambuteau conveniences’ were called urals. In his childhood he must have failed to hear the in, and it had stuck. He therefore pronounced the word wrongly, although he used it all the time. Françoise, initially embarrassed, ended up using it too, so that she could complain that women, unlike men, had no such things. But her humility and her admiration for the butler meant that she never said urinals, but – with a slight concession to custom – urials.
She no longer slept, no longer ate, and had the communiqués, of which she understood nothing, read to her by the butler, who, scarcely understanding them any better and in whom the desire to torment Françoise was often overridden by patriotic enthusiasm, would say with a sympathetic laugh, speaking of the Germans: ‘They’re going to get a rocket under them soon, good old Joffre’s preparing a big new plan.’ Françoise had no idea what rocket he was talking about, but sensing only that the phrase was one of those pleasant and original eccentricities to which politeness requires a well-brought-up person to respond with good humour, with a gay shrug of her shoulders, as if to say: ‘Isn’t he always the same?’ she would temper her tears with a smile. At least she was glad that her new butcher’s boy, who despite his job was rather timorous (even though he had started in the abattoirs), was not old enough to be sent to fight. If he had been, she would have been quite capable of going to see the Minister of War to have him exempted.
The butler was unable to imagine that the communiqués were not wonderful, and that the army was not close to Berlin, whenever he read: ‘We have repulsed, with heavy enemy losses, etc.’, engagements which he celebrated as further victories. I, however, was alarmed at the speed with which the theatre of these victories was approaching Paris, and I was equally astonished that the butler, having seen in one communiqué that a battle had taken place near Lens, had shown no anxiety when he read in the next day’s paper that the subsequent fighting had turned in our favour at Jouy-la-Vicomte, and that we were firmly in command of its approaches. Yet the butler was familiar with the name of Jouy-le-Vicomte, which was not all that far away from Combray. But we read the newspapers in the same way as we love, blindfold. We do not attempt to understand the facts. We listen to the editor’s soothing words as we listen to the words of our mistress. We are beaten and happy because we think we are victorious, not beaten.
At all events I did not stay long in Paris and fairly quickly returned to my sanatorium. Although in theory the doctor’s treatment involved complete isolation, I was handed letters on two separate occasions, one from Gilberte and one from Robert. Gilberte wrote (it was some time around September 1914) that, despite her desire to stay in Paris in order more easily to get news of Robert, the perpetual air-raids of the taubes30 over Paris had caused her such terror, especially for her little daughter, that she had fled from Paris by the last train to leave for Combray, that the train had not even got as far as Combray, and that it was only thanks to a farm-worker’s cart, on which she had had a ghastly ten-hour journey, that she had been able to reach Tansonville! ‘And what do you think your old friend found when she got there, Gilberte wrote in conclusion. I had left Paris to get away from the German aeroplanes, supposing that at Tansonville I would be safe from all that. I had only been there two days when you can’t imagine what happened: the Germans were invading the whole district after beating our troops near La Fère, and the German commanding officers, followed by a regiment, appeared at the door of Tansonville, and I had to put them up, and there was no way of escaping, no train, nothing.’ The German commanding officers did, in fact, behave well, or else one had to imagine from Gilberte’s letter some contagious effect of the spirit of the Guermantes, who came from Bavarian stock, and were related to the highest levels of the German aristocracy, but Gilberte went on at length about the perfect manners of the commanding officers, and even of the soldiers who had merely asked for ‘permission to pick some forget-me-nots that were growing beside the pond’, good manners which she contrasted with the disorderly violence of the French deserters, who had devastated everything as they passed through the property, before the German generals arrived. At all events, if Gilberte’s letter was in some respects impregnated with the spirit of the Guermantes – some would say, of Jewish internationalism, which would probably not be fair, as we shall see – the letter I received a few months later from Robert was, by contrast, much more Saint-Loup than Guermantes, and displayed in addition all the liberal culture he had acquired: in short, it was entirely delightful. Sadly, he no longer talked about strategy, as he had done in our conversations at Doncières, and did not say how far he
thought the war confirmed or invalidated the principles he had expounded to me then.
The furthest he went was to say that since 1914 there had in reality been a succession of wars, the lessons of each influencing the conduct of the next. So that, for example, the theory of the ‘breakthrough’ had been supplemented by the proposition that, before breaking through, it was necessary for the artillery completely to disrupt the ground occupied by the enemy. But then the opposite had been argued, that such disruption made it impossible for the infantry and artillery to advance across ground where thousands of shell-holes created as many obstacles. ‘War, he said, is no exception to good old Hegel’s laws. It is in a state of perpetual becoming.’
This was scant answer to all the things I would have liked to know. But what annoyed me even more was that he was no longer allowed to mention the names of the generals. All the more so as, from the little I was able to glean from the newspapers, it was not those whose likely valour in the event of a war I had been so preoccupied with discovering at Doncières who were now in command of this one. Geslin de Bourgogne, Gallifet, Négrier, were dead. Pau had retired from active service shortly after the outbreak of war. Of Joffre, of Foch, of Castelnau and Pétain we had never spoken. My dear boy, wrote Robert, I do realize that phrases such as ‘shall not pass’ or ‘we’ll get them’ are not very pleasant; they have stuck in my throat as much as poilu’31 and the rest, and of course it is tedious to be making an epic out of terms that are worse than faults of grammar or failures of taste, that are in fact that dreadful, contradictory thing, vernacular affectation or pretentiousness of the sort we detest so much, like for example the people who think it is clever to say ‘coke’ instead of ‘cocaine’. But if you saw everyone, especially the ordinary people, the workers, the small shop-keepers, who never dreamed of possessing the kind of heroism they have been displaying and would have died peacefully in their beds without ever having imagined it, running through the bullets to rescue a comrade, or to fetch a wounded officer and, when they are hit themselves, smiling just before they die because the medical officer has told them that the trench has been recaptured from the Germans, then I assure you, my dear boy, that it gives you a marvellous idea of the French and makes you begin to understand those periods of history which used to seem a bit implausible when we studied them at school.
In Search of Lost Time Page 8