The epic is so marvellous that you would discover, as I have, that words no longer matter. Rodin or Maillol32 could make a masterpiece from some hideous raw material, transforming it out of all recognition. At the touch of this sort of greatness, a word like ‘poilu’ for me has become one where I no longer have any more sense of its originally having contained an allusion or a joke than we have when we read words like ‘chouans’. I feel ‘poilu’ is ripe for great poets, like the words Flood, or Christ, or Barbarians, which were already steeped in grandeur before they were used by Hugo, de Vigny or the others.
Ordinary people, workers, as I say, are the best of all, but everyone is good. Poor young Vaugoubert, the ambassador’s son, was wounded seven times before he was killed, and every time he came back from a sortie without having copped it, he seemed to be apologizing and saying it was not his fault. He was a delightful soul. We were very close; his poor parents were given permission to attend the burial on condition they did not wear mourning, and did not stay longer than five minutes because of the shelling. His mother, a bovine woman whom you have probably met, may have been deeply upset, but she showed no sign of it. But his poor father was in such a state that I tell you I, who have now become totally impervious to feeling, having got used to seeing the head of a comrade suddenly smashed by a shell, or even torn from its body, while he was in the middle of talking to me, I could not contain myself when I saw the collapse of poor Vaugoubert, who was nothing but a poor shadow of himself. The general tried to tell him how his son’s heroic conduct had all been in the service of France, but that merely intensified the sobs of the poor man, who was unable to drag himself away from his son’s body. But in the end, and this is why one has to get used to ‘shall not pass’, all of these men, like my poor valet and like Vaugoubert, have prevented the Germans from passing. Maybe you think we have not advanced very far, but it is no good just being rational about it, there is some deep inner feeling that gives an army the sense of winning, just as a dying man knows when he has had it. We know that we shall win, and we want victory so that we can impose a just peace, and I don’t only mean just to our side, but truly just, just to the French and just to the Germans.
Of course, the ‘scourge’ had not raised Saint-Loup’s intelligence to a higher level. Just as heroes with ordinary, commonplace minds, writing poems during their convalescence, placed themselves, in order to describe the war, at the level not of events, which in themselves are nothing, but of the commonplace aesthetic whose rules they had followed thitherto, talking as they might have done ten years earlier about the ‘blood-red dawn’ and the ‘trembling wing of victory’ etc., so Saint-Loup, whose nature was much more intelligent and much more artistic, remained intelligent and artistic, and, while halted at the edge of some marshy forest, with characteristic good taste would note down descriptions of the landscape for me, in the same way as he would have done if he had been out duck-shooting. To help me understand how certain contrasts of light and shade had created ‘the magic of the morning’, he would make reference to paintings we both liked, and was not afraid to make allusion to a passage by Romain Rolland,33 or even Nietzsche, with the independent-mindedness typical of men at the front, who did not suffer the same fear of uttering a German name as did the civilian population, and even with that touch of vanity in quoting one of the enemy which led Colonel du Paty de Clam in the courtroom during the Dreyfus Affair to recite in front of Pierre Quillard, a Dreyfusard poet of extremely powerful convictions whom he had never previously met, some lines from his Symbolist drama, La Fille aux mains coupées.34 If Saint-Loup happened to mention a melody by Schumann, he would only give its title in German, nor did he have recourse to circumlocution to tell me that, when he had heard the first twitterings of the dawn chorus at the edge of the forest, he had been as intoxicated as if he had just been spoken to by the bird in that ‘sublime Siegfried’, which he very much hoped to hear performed after the war.
And now, returning to Paris for the second time, I had received, the day after my arrival, another letter from Gilberte, who must have forgotten the one, or at least the gist of the one I cited, because her departure from Paris at the end of 1914 is described retrospectively in it in a rather different manner. You may not know perhaps, my dear friend, she told me, that I have been at Tansonville for two years now. I arrived at the same time as the Germans; everyone had tried to stop me leaving. They thought I was mad. ‘Why on earth, they would say, are you leaving the safety of Paris for the occupied regions, at the very moment when everyone else is trying to escape from there?’ I did recognize how much good sense there was in all this. But what could I do, I only possess one good quality, I’m not a coward, or if you prefer I’m loyal, and when I learned that my beloved Tansonville was under threat, I couldn’t leave our old steward to defend it by himself. It seemed to me that my place was by his side. And it was because of that decision that I was able to do something at least to save the house, when all the other chateaux in the neighbourhood, abandoned by their panic-stricken owners, have almost all been destroyed from top to bottom, and not only to save the house but to save those precious collections my dear father set so much store by. In short, Gilberte was now persuaded that she had not gone to Tansonville, as she had told me in her letter in 1914, to escape from the Germans to a place of safety, but on the contrary to find them and defend her house against them. They had not, in fact, stayed at Tansonville, but from then on her house had seen a constant coming and going of soldiers which exceeded by far that which drew tears from Françoise in the street at Combray, and she had not ceased, as she put it quite truthfully this time, to live life on the front line. So the newspapers spoke in the most laudatory terms of her admirable conduct, and there was talk of giving her a decoration. The conclusion of the letter was entirely accurate. You have no idea what this war is like, my dear friend, and the importance that a road, a bridge or a hill can assume. How often I have thought of you, and the walks, which you made so delightful, that we took together through this now devastated countryside, where vast battles were fought just to win possession of one of the paths or slopes you used to love, where we so often walked together! You probably did not imagine, any more than I did, that humble Roussainville and boring Méséglise, where they used to bring our letters from, and where they went to find the doctor when you were ill, would ever be famous places. Well, my dear friend, they now share the same immortal fame as Austerlitz or Valmy. The battle of Méséglise lasted for more than eight months, in the course of which the Germans lost over six hundred thousand men and destroyed Méséglise, but they did not take it. The little path you used to like so much, the one we called the hawthorn climb, where you claimed you fell in love with me when you were a child, though I can assure you quite truthfully that it was I who was in love with you, I can’t tell you how important it has become. The huge cornfield it led into is the famous Hill 307, whose name you must have seen crop up time and again in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which you told me did not remind you of your childhood as much as you would have wished, the Germans put up some new ones, and for the last year and a half they have held one half of Combray and the French have held the other.
The day after I received this letter, that is two days before that evening when I was walking along in the darkness, listening to the echoing sound of my footsteps, chewing over all these memories, Saint-Loup, back from the front and about to return there, had paid me just a few moments’ visit, the mere announcement of which had powerfully affected me. Françoise had wanted to pounce on him at once, in the hope that he might be able to get an exemption for the timid butcher’s boy, whose class was to be called up in a year’s time. But she was stopped by her own realization that there was no point in such a step, as the timid animal slaughterer had long since moved to another butcher’s shop. And whether our butcher’s wife was afraid of losing our custom, or whether she was telling the truth, she told Françoise that she did not know where
the boy, who anyway would never make a good butcher, was now employed. Françoise had searched high and low for him. But Paris is large, butchers’ shops are numerous, and despite visiting a great number of them, she had never been able to find the timid, blood-stained young man again.
When Saint-Loup entered my room, I had gone up to him with that feeling of shyness, that sense of eeriness which in fact all soldiers on leave made one feel, and which one experiences when one comes into the presence of someone suffering from a fatal illness, who none the less still gets up, gets dressed and goes for walks. It seemed (it had seemed most strongly to begin with, because for anyone who had not, as I had, lived away from Paris, habit had taken hold, which takes away from things we have seen a number of times the radically profound impression and thought which gives them their real meaning), it seemed almost as if there was something cruel in the leave granted to combatants. When the first of them came, people said to themselves: ‘They won’t want to go back, they’ll desert.’ And indeed it was not that they came simply from places that seemed unreal to us because we had only heard of them through the newspapers, and therefore could not imagine how these men could have taken part in those titanic battles and returned with nothing more than a bruised shoulder; it was from the shores of death, whither they were about to return, that they came to spend a moment among us, incomprehensible to us, filling us with tenderness, dread and a sense of mystery, like the dead whom we evoke, and who appear to us for a second, whom we dare not question and who could anyway only reply: ‘You could not even imagine.’ For it is extraordinary how, both in those who have survived combat, which is what soldiers on leave are, and in the living or the dead hypnotized or invoked by a medium, the sole effect of contact with mystery is to increase, if that be possible, our sense of the insignificance of what is said. It was with this in mind that I approached Robert, who still had a scar on his forehead, more noble and more mysterious to me than the imprint left in earth by the foot of a giant. And I had not dared ask him a single question and he had addressed only a few simple words to me. Even these differed hardly at all from those he might have spoken before the war, as if people, in spite of it, continued to be what they were; the tone of the discussion was the same, only the subject matter was different, if that!
My sense was that he had found resources in the army which had allowed him gradually to forget that Morel had behaved as badly to him as to his uncle. Yet he still had a great fondness for him and would suddenly be overcome with a desire to see him again, which he always put off doing. I thought it kinder to Gilberte not to point out to Robert that if he wanted to find Morel he had only to go to Mme Verdurin’s.
I told Robert apologetically how little the war impinged on us in Paris. He said that even in Paris it was sometimes ‘pretty unbelievable’. He was alluding to a Zeppelin raid that had taken place the previous evening and he asked me whether I had had a good view of it, but in the same terms as he might once have talked about some spectacle of great aesthetic beauty. At the front, as one knows, there is a sort of affectation in saying: ‘It’s wonderful, look at that pink! and that pale green!’ when at any moment they might be killed, but in Paris Saint-Loup showed no trace of that, as he talked about a raid which was insignificant, but which from our balcony, in the silence of a night which suddenly contained a real display with rockets that were both useful and protective, bugle calls that were not just sounding for parade, etc. I talked about the beauty of the aeroplanes as they climbed into the night. ‘And perhaps they are even more so as they are coming down, he said. I agree that the moment after they take off is very beautiful, when they join together in star-like formation, and in doing so obey laws as precise as the ones that govern the constellations, for the thing that strikes you as a marvellous sight is the rallying of squadrons, the orders they are given, their setting off in pursuit, etc. But don’t you prefer the moment when having finally come to seem like stars, they peel off individually in pursuit of something or return home after the all-clear, the moment of apocalypse, when even the stars no longer keep their places? And those sirens, weren’t they Wagnerian? Though I suppose that is quite an appropriate way to salute the arrival of the Germans, it was just like the national anthem, with the Crown Prince and the Princesses in the imperial box, the Wacht am Rhein; one wondered whether they really were airmen and not Valkyries who were climbing into the night.’ He seemed rather pleased with this comparison between airmen and Valkyries, and went on to explain it in purely musical terms: ‘Yes, by Jove, the music of the sirens was a Ride of the Valkyries! Obviously the Germans have to come before we can hear Wagner in Paris.’
And in some ways the comparison was not a false one. From our balcony the city, which had seemed merely a place of formless, shifting blackness, suddenly passed from the depths of night into the glowing sky, where at the shattering sound of the sirens the airmen soared up one by one, while with a slower but more insidious and alarming movement, as their questing gaze suggested the still invisible object, perhaps already close at hand, which they were seeking, the searchlights moved ceaselessly across the sky, sniffing out the enemy, surrounding him with their beams until the moment when the aeroplanes were ready to shoot off in pursuit to strike him down. And, squadron after squadron, each airman was thus soaring up above the city, transported now into the sky, like a Valkyrie. But here and there on the ground, at the level of the houses, lights went on, and I told Saint-Loup that if he had been at home the previous evening he might, while contemplating the apocalypse in the sky, have been able to see on the ground (as in El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz, where these different levels are parallel) a genuine farce played out by characters in their nightshirts, all of them celebrities whose names would have been worth sending to a successor of Ferrari,35 whose Society Notes had so often entertained Saint-Loup and myself that we used to amuse ourselves by making up imaginary ones. And that is what we did again that day, as if there were no war on, even though the subject, the fear of Zeppelins, was very ‘wartime’: ‘I spotted the Duchesse de Guermantes looking superb in a nightgown, the Duc de Guermantes simply priceless in pink pyjamas and bathrobe, etc., etc.’
– ‘I am sure, he said to me, that in all the big hotels you would have seen American Jewish ladies in their night-dresses, clutching to their withered bosoms the pearl necklaces that would enable them to marry a penniless duke. On nights like that the Ritz Hotel must look like the Hôtel du libre échange of Feydeau’s farce.’36
It must be said, however, that although the war had not increased Saint-Loup’s intelligence, this intelligence, developing according to laws in which heredity played a major part, had taken on a polish that I had never before seen in him. What a difference there was between the fair-haired young man who was once courted by women of fashion, or women who aspired to be fashionable, and the talker, the theorist, who played with words all the time! In another generation, in another branch of the family, like an actor taking on one of the roles that Bressant or Delaunay37 used to play, he was like a successor – pink, fair-haired and golden, where the other had been half very black and half pure white – to M. de Charlus. He would hardly have agreed with his uncle about the war, having aligned himself with that section of the aristocracy which put France above everything else, while M. de Charlus was a defeatist at heart, but he could still show anyone who had not seen the ‘creator of the role’ how it was possible to excel in dexterous argumentation. ‘Hindenburg seems to be a revelation, I said to him. – An old revelation, he parried, or a future revolution. Instead of being soft on the enemy, we ought to have let Mangin get on with it, smashed Austria and Germany and Europeanized Turkey, instead of Balkanizing France. – But we’ll have the help of the United States, I said. – In the meantime, all I can see here is the spectacle of disunited states. Why does the fear of dechristianizing France prevent us making broader concessions to Italy? – If your uncle Charlus could hear you now! I said. You really wouldn’t mind going for the Pope a bit more, whil
e he is in despair at the thought of the harm that may come to the throne of Franz-Josef. And he claims that when he says that, he’s just following in the footsteps of Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna. – The age of the Congress of Vienna is over, he replied; secret diplomacy must be replaced by concrete diplomacy. My uncle is basically an unrepentant monarchist who will swallow a silly carp like Mme Molé or an unprincipled carper like Arthur Meyer, so long as they are both cooked à la Chambord.38 He hates the tricolore so much that I think he would rather line up behind a rag like the Bonnet rouge,39 which he’d take in good faith for the white flag.’ Of course, this was all just word-play, and Saint-Loup was far from having the sometimes profound originality of his uncle. But he was by nature as affable and charming as the other was suspicious and jealous. And he had remained charming and pink, as he had been at Balbec, beneath all his golden hair. The only aspect in which his uncle could not have surpassed him was that state of mind characteristic of the Faubourg Saint-Germain which leaves its mark on those men who think they are most detached from it and which gives them a respect for intelligent men of no pedigree (something which really flourishes only in the nobility, and which makes revolutions so unjust) mingled with an inane self-satisfaction. As a result of this mixture of pride and humility, of acquired intellectual curiosity and innate authority, M. de Charlus and Saint-Loup, by different paths, and with opposite opinions, had become, a generation apart, intellectuals interested in every new idea and talkers whom no interruption could silence. The result of which was that people with more commonplace minds tended to find them both, depending on the situation, either dazzling or a complete bore.
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