And as, from the moment he returned to thinking about things in terms of the Peerage, which for him fundamentally dominated everything, M. de Charlus became extraordinarily childish, he told me, in the same tone of voice with which he might have spoken of the Marne or Verdun, that there were significant and very curious matters which ought not to be passed over by anyone who came to write the history of this war. ‘For example, he said, everybody is so ignorant that no one has pointed out this remarkable fact: the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, who is a pure Boche, continues none the less to live in Rome, where, as Grand Master of our order, he enjoys the privilege of extraterritoriality. Rather interesting,’ he added, as if to say: ‘You see that you have not had a wasted evening, meeting me.’ I thanked him, and he assumed the modest expression of someone requiring no payment. ‘But what was I saying to you just now? Oh, yes, that people nowadays hate Franz-Josef because their newspaper tells them to. As for King Constantine of Greece and the Tsar of Bulgaria, the public has repeatedly oscillated between loathing and sympathy, depending on whether they were said to be about to take the side of the Entente or the side that Brichot calls the Central Empires. It is like Brichot telling us all the time that “Venizelos’s hour is about to come”. I do not doubt that M. Venizelos is a very capable statesman, but how do we know that the Greeks want him as much as all that? We are told that he wanted Greece to honour her commitments to Serbia. Yet we still ought to know what these commitments were and whether they were more extensive than those that Italy and Romania believed that they could violate. We exhibit a concern for the way in which Greece implements its treaties and respects its constitution which we would certainly not feel if it were not in our own interest. If the war had not happened, do you think that the “guarantor” powers would even have noticed the dissolution of the Chambers? All I can see is that one by one all the supports of the King of Greece are being removed so that he can be thrown out or locked up as soon as he no longer has an army to defend him. I was saying that the public’s judgment of the King of Greece or the King of the Bulgars is informed solely by what they read in the newspapers. But how could they think about them in any other way but through the newspapers, since they do not know them personally? Whereas I myself have seen a great deal of them, I knew Constantine of Greece very well when he was the Diadoch,52 and he is quite wonderful. I always thought the Emperor Nicholas had a very great fondness for him. It was all entirely honourable, naturally. Princess Christian used to talk openly about it, but she is a poisonous woman. As for the Tsar of the Bulgars, he is a complete nancy, a raving queer, but very intelligent, a remarkable man. He likes me very much.’ M. de Charlus, who could be so agreeable, became obnoxious when he started on topics like these. He brought to them a self-satisfaction as annoying as that which we feel in the presence of an invalid who is always pointing out how good his health is. I have often thought that in the Balbec train we used to call the Slow-coach, the faithful, who so longed for the admissions he always evaded, might perhaps not have been able to accept such an overt display of his compulsion and, ill at ease, breathing awkwardly as in a sickroom or when faced with a dope fiend who takes out his syringe in front of you, it might have been they who put a stop to the confidences they thought they wanted to hear. And one was indeed annoyed to hear everyone accused, often probably without any sort of evidence, by somebody who excepted himself from the special category to which one none the less knew that he belonged and to which he was so ready to consign others. For all his intelligence, he had in this area fashioned a narrow little philosophy for himself (at the bottom of which there was perhaps a touch of that sense of curiosity which ‘life’ aroused in Swann), explaining everything in terms of these special causes, and in which, as when anybody lapses into their characteristic weakness, he was not only unworthy of himself but also exceptionally self-satisfied. Thus it was that he, who was capable of such gravity and nobility, adopted the most inane grin as he completed this pronouncement: ‘As there are strong presumptions of the same kind as for Ferdinand of Coburg53 in the case of Emperor William, that might be the reason why Tsar Ferdinand has aligned himself with the “predatory empires”. Well, really, it is quite understandable, one is indulgent towards a sister, one cannot refuse her anything. I think that would be very neat as an explanation of Bulgaria’s alliance with Germany.’ And at this stupid explanation M. de Charlus laughed at length, as thought he really thought that it was very ingenious, and which, even if it had rested on true facts, was as puerile as the reflections M. de Charlus offered on the war when he judged it from the standpoint of a feudal lord or a Knight of St John of Jerusalem. He ended with a more sensible remark: ‘The astonishing thing, he said, is that the public that thus judges the men and the events of the war solely on the basis of newspaper reports is convinced that it is forming its own judgments.’
In that M. de Charlus was right. I have been told that one really had to see the moments of silence and hesitation that Mme de Forcheville used to have, just like those that are necessary not simply to the expression but to the very formation of a personal opinion, before saying, in the tone of voice appropriate to a deeply private feeling: ‘No, I don’t think they will take Warsaw’; ‘I don’t feel they can last a second winter’; ‘what I don’t want is a botched-up peace’; ‘the thing that scares me, if you want to know, is the Chamber’; ‘yes, I still believe we’ll be able to break through.’ And to say these things, Odette adopted a simpering expression which she exaggerated even further when she said: ‘I’m not saying the German armies don’t fight well, but they lack what we call pluck.’ As she pronounced the word ‘pluck’ (and even when she merely said ‘fighting spirit’), she made a moulding gesture with her hand and half-closed her eyes as if she were a student artist using a technical studio term. Her own way of speaking, though, even more than before, indicated her admiration for the English, whom she was no longer obliged to content herself with calling, as previously she did, ‘our neighbours across the Channel’ or at most ‘our friends the English’, but now could call ‘our loyal allies’. Needless to say, she never missed a single opportunity to cite the expression fair play in order to show how the English thought that the Germans were unfair players, and ‘the main thing is to win the war, as our brave allies say’. She used even rather clumsily to link the name of her son-in-law to anything involving English soldiers and the pleasure he derived from living in close contact with Australians and Scots, New Zealanders and Canadians. ‘My son-in-law Saint-Loup now knows the slang of all the brave tommies, he can make himself understood by the ones from the furthest dominions and fraternizes with the humblest private as easily as with the general commanding the base.’
Let this parenthesis on Mme de Forcheville, while I walk down the boulevards side by side with M. de Charlus, serve as my excuse for another, even longer but useful for describing this period, on the relations between Mme Verdurin and Brichot. The fact is that, although poor Brichot was judged with severity by M. de Charlus (because the latter was both very intelligent and more or less unconsciously pro-German), he was treated still more badly by the Verdurins. They were chauvinistic, of course, which ought to have made them like Brichot’s articles, especially since they were no worse than plenty of the writings which Mme Verdurin thoroughly enjoyed. But, first, it will perhaps be remembered that even at La Raspelière Brichot had become, instead of the great man he had seemed to them in the past, if not a whipping boy like Saniette, at least the object of their scarcely disguised mockery. But at least he still remained, at that point, one of the most faithful of the faithful, which ensured him a share of the benefits tacitly envisaged by the statutes for all the founding or associate members of the little group. But as, thanks to the war perhaps, or to the sudden crystallization of a long-delayed elegance, all the necessary elements of which, albeit invisibly, had long saturated it, the Verdurin salon had been opening itself to a new social world, and the faithful, at first the lures to attract this new world,
had ended by being invited less and less, so a parallel phenomenon had been occurring in Brichot’s life. Despite the Sorbonne, despite the Institut, his renown had not, before the war, extended beyond the limits of the Verdurin salon. But when he started writing almost daily articles adorned with the shallow brilliance which one has so often seen him dispense so munificently to the faithful, yet also rich with a quite genuine erudition which, as a true member of the Sorbonne, he never tried to conceal however exaggerated the form in which he couched it, ‘high society’ was literally dazzled. For once, it bestowed its favour on somebody who was far from being a nonentity, somebody who could retain its attention by the fertility of his intelligence and the resources of his memory. And while three duchesses would go to spend the evening with Mme Verdurin, three more would compete for the honour of having the great man to dine with them, one of which invitations he would accept, feeling the freer to do so since Mme Verdurin, exasperated by the success that his articles were achieving in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, now took care never to have Brichot to her house when he was likely to meet there some glittering woman whom he did not yet know and who would hasten to entice him away. Thus it was that journalism (in which Brichot was really doing nothing more in the end than belatedly providing, to general praise and in return for magnificent fees, what all his life he had squandered gratis and incognito in the Verdurin drawing-room, since his articles, so eloquent and knowledgeable was he, cost him no more effort than his conversation) might have led Brichot, even at one point seemed to be leading him, to undisputed fame… if it had not been for Mme Verdurin. Brichot’s articles, of course, were far from being as remarkable as people in society thought them. The vulgarity of the man was constantly visible beneath the pedantry of the literary scholar. And alongside images which meant nothing at all (‘the Germans will no longer be able to look Beethoven’s statue in the face’; ‘Schiller must have been turning in his grave’; ‘the ink which had initialled Belgium’s neutrality was hardly dry’; ‘Lenin speaks, but his words are all gone with the wind of the steppes’), there were trivialities such as: ‘Twenty thousand prisoners, that is quite a number; our command will know to keep an extra eye open; we want to win, and that’s that.’ But mixed in with all this, how much knowledge, how much intelligence, what telling arguments! Mme Verdurin, however, never started an article by Brichot without the prior satisfaction of thinking that she was going to find ridiculous things in it, and she would read it with the closest attention in order to be certain of not letting them escape her. And unfortunately there were bound to be some. They did not even wait until they had found them. The most felicitous quotation from an author who was genuinely little known, at least for the work Brichot was referring to, was taken as proof of the most unbearable pedantry, and Mme Verdurin would wait impatiently for dinner-time when she would be able to unleash peals of laughter from her guests. ‘Well, what do you think of Brichot this evening? I thought of you when I read the quotation from Cuvier. Upon my word, I think he’s going mad. – I haven’t read it yet, Cottard would say. – What, you haven’t read it yet? But you don’t know what a treat you’re missing. Honestly, you’ll die laughing.’ And secretly pleased that someone had not yet read the latest Brichot as it meant that she herself had an opportunity to point out its absurdities, Mme Verdurin would tell the butler to bring Le Temps and herself would read it aloud, giving to the simplest sentences a ring of grandiloquence. After dinner, for the rest of the evening, the anti-Brichot campaign would continue, but with a pretence of reserve. ‘I shan’t say it too loud because I’m afraid that over there’, she would say, indicating the Comtesse Molé, ‘they rather admire this stuff. Society people are more gullible than we think.’ Mme Molé, whom they tried, by speaking fairly loudly, to ensure was aware that they were talking about her, at the same time as they did their best to show her, by now and then lowering their voices, that they did not want her to hear what they were saying, was cowardly enough to disown Brichot, whom in reality she thought the equal of Michelet. She agreed with Mme Verdurin and then, in order nevertheless to conclude on a note that seemed to her to be unquestionable, said: ‘The one thing nobody can take away from him is that it is well written. – You really call that well written? said Mme Verdurin, personally I think it reads as if it was written by a pig,’ a piece of daring which made her fashionable guests laugh all the more as Mme Verdurin, as if horrified by the word ‘pig’, had uttered it in a whisper, her hand clapped to her lips. Her rage against Brichot was increased even more by the way he naïvely paraded his pleasure at his success, in spite of the fits of bad temper aroused in him by the censors every time that they, as he put it with his habit of using new words to show that he was not too academic, ‘blue-pencilled’ a part of his article. In his presence, Mme Verdurin did not let it be too clearly seen, save by a peevishness that might have put a more perspicacious man on his guard, how little store she set by what Chochotte wrote. All she did was to tell him once that he was wrong to use ‘I’ as often as he did. And indeed he got into the habit of using it continually, first of all because out of pedagogic habit he constantly employed phrases such as ‘I grant that’ and even, when he meant ‘I am happy to admit that’, ‘I am happy that’, as in: ‘I am happy that the enormous expansion of the fronts necessitates, etc.’, but principally because, as a former militant anti-Dreyfusard who had scented the German preparations long before the war, he had very often had occasion to write: ‘Since 1897, I have denounced’; ‘I pointed out in 1901’; ‘I warned in my little pamphlet, now extremely hard to come by (habent sua fata libelli54)’, and thereafter the habit had stayed with him. He blushed deeply at Mme Verdurin’s comment, a comment which had been delivered with a note of asperity. ‘You are right, madam. A man who was as little fond of the Jesuits as M. Combes, albeit he never had a preface from our gentle master of exquisite scepticism, Anatole France, who was, if I mistake not, my adversary… before the deluge, said that the self is always hateful.’55 From then on, Brichot replaced I with one, but one did not prevent the reader from seeing that the author was speaking about himself, and indeed allowed the author never to stop speaking about himself, or commenting on the most insignificant of his sentences, or fabricating an article on the basis of a single negative statement, always shielding himself behind one. For example, if Brichot said, perhaps in another article, that the German armies had lost some of their power, he would begin like this: ‘One will not here conceal the true state of things. One has said that the German armies have lost some of their power. One has not said that they do not still possess great power. Still less will one write that they have no power. Nor will one say that the ground won, if it is not, etc.’ In short, simply by pronouncing all he would not say, by recalling everything that he had said some years before, and that Clausewitz, Jomini, Ovid, Apollonius of Tyre, etc., had said at various times over the centuries, Brichot could easily have gathered the material for a substantial volume. It is to be regretted that he did not publish one, as those well-directed articles of his are difficult to find now. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, admonished by Mme Verdurin, began by laughing at Brichot when they were under her roof, but continued, once they had come away from the little set, to admire him. Then, after a while, making fun of him became as much the fashion as admiring him had been, and even those whom he continued to dazzle in secret, for as long as they were reading his articles, checked their adulation and laughed as soon as they were no longer alone, in order not to seem less intelligent than the others. Brichot had never been so much talked about by the little set as he was at this period, but only with derision. It became the criterion of any newcomer’s intelligence to ask what he thought of Brichot’s articles; if he gave the wrong answer the first time, people were quick to instruct him in how it was that people’s intelligence was recognized.
In Search of Lost Time Page 13