‘Well, my poor friend, all that is terrible, and we have more than boring articles to lament. People talk of vandalism and of statues being destroyed. But isn’t the destruction of so many marvellous young men, once incomparable polychrome statues themselves, also vandalism? Isn’t a town which will no longer have any beautiful men in it like a town with all its statues smashed? What kind of pleasure will I be able to get from dining in a restaurant if I am to be waited on by moss-covered old buffoons who look like Père Didon, if not by women in mob-caps who make me think I’ve wandered into a Duval Restaurant?56 That’s how things are, my dear chap, and I think I have a right to speak like this because beauty is no less beauty when it is living matter. What a pleasure it is to be served by rachitic creatures wearing glasses, with the grounds of their exemption writ large on their faces! Contrary to what always used to happen in the past, if you want to rest your eyes on someone nice-looking in a restaurant, you have to look at the customers eating and drinking, not at the waiters who are serving. And then one could always see a waiter again, even though they often changed, but how is one to find out who this English lieutenant is, and when he will come back, when it is perhaps the first time he has been there and when he may be killed tomorrow? When, as we are told by the charming Morand, the enchanting author of Clarisse,57 Augustus of Poland exchanged one of his regiments for a collection of Chinese vases, he made, in my opinion, a bad bargain. Just think, all those great footmen, six feet tall, who used to adorn the monumental staircases of our loveliest female friends, have all been killed, and most of them only joined up because they kept on being told that the war would last for two months. Ah! they didn’t know, as I did, the strength of Germany, and the courage of the Prussian race,’ he said, forgetting himself.
And then, noticing that he had revealed too much of his point of view: ‘It is not so much Germany that I fear for France, as the war itself. Here behind the lines people imagine that the war is merely a gigantic boxing match, which they can watch from a distance, thanks to the newspapers. But it is not like that at all. It is an illness which, whenever it seems to have been warded off at one point, reappears somewhere else. Today Noyon will be recaptured, tomorrow there will be no more bread or chocolate, the next day the man who thought he was content, and who was ready, if necessary, to accept the idea of a bullet because he could not imagine it, will panic when he reads in the newspaper that his age-group is being called up. As for monuments, the disappearance of a masterpiece like Rheims, unique in its quality, does not appal me so much as the sight of the annihilation of so many of the groups of buildings which once made the smallest village in France both charming and edifying.’
I thought at once of Combray, but in the past I had thought I would lower myself in the eyes of Mme de Guermantes if I confessed the modest position which my family occupied in the village. I wondered whether it had ever been disclosed to the Guermantes and M. de Charlus, either by Legrandin, or by Swann, or Saint-Loup, or Morel. But even preterition of that sort was less painful to me than the prospect of retrospective explanation. I only hoped that M. de Charlus would not say anything about Combray.
‘I do not wish to speak ill of the Americans, Monsieur, he continued, it seems that they are inexhaustibly generous and, as there has not been a conductor in this war, and each performer has joined in long after the last, and the Americans have come in when we are almost finished, they may have an enthusiasm which four years of war have somewhat dulled in us. Even before the war they exhibited a love for our country and our art, and paid high prices for our masterpieces. Many of them are now in their country. But this deracinated art, as M. Barrès would call it,58 is precisely the opposite of what used to make up the exquisite charm of France. The chateau explained the church, which itself, because it had been a site of pilgrimage, explained the chanson de geste. I do not want to make too much of the illustriousness of my family origins and my connections, which in any case is not to the point here. But recently, in order to settle a financial matter, and despite there being a certain coolness between that couple and myself, I had to pay a visit to my niece Saint-Loup, who lives at Combray. Combray was just a small town, like so many others. But our ancestors were depicted as benefactors in some of the church windows, while others bore our coat of arms. We had our chapel there, and our tombs. The church was destroyed by the French and the English because it was being used as an observation-post by the Germans. The whole of that mixture of living history and art that was France is being destroyed, and the process is not over yet. Of course I am not so absurd as to compare, for reasons of family, the destruction of the church at Combray with that of Rheims cathedral, in which by some miracle the gothic cathedral seemed to have rediscovered, quite naturally, the purity of classical statuary, or with that of the cathedral at Amiens. I don’t know whether the uplifted arm of St Firmin is now broken. But if it is, the highest affirmation of faith and energy has vanished from this world. – The symbol of it, Monsieur, I responded. I adore certain symbols as much as you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality which it symbolizes. Cathedrals should be adored until such time as their preservation becomes dependent on our denying the truths that they teach. The arm of St Firmin, uplifted in an almost military gesture of command, said: Let us be broken, if honour demands it. Do not sacrifice men for the sake of stones, the beauty of which derives precisely from their having for a moment embodied human truths. – I understand what you mean, replied M. de Charlus, and M. Barrès, who has sent us, alas, on too many pilgrimages to the statue of Strasbourg and to the tomb of M. Déroulède,59 was moving and generous when he wrote that Rheims cathedral itself was less dear to us than the lives of our infantrymen. An assertion which renders rather absurd the anger of our newspapers against the German general in command there, who said that Rheims cathedral was less precious than the life of one German soldier. In the end, what is so exasperating and distressing is that each country says the same thing. The grounds on which the associated industrialists of Germany declare the possession of Belfort indispensable for protecting their nation against our ideas of revenge are the same as those of Barrès when he demands Mainz in order to protect us against the recurrent wish of the Boche to invade us. Why should the return of Alsace-Lorraine have seemed to France an insufficient motive for waging a war, yet a sufficient motive to continue one, and to declare it anew each year? You seem to think that victory is now guaranteed to France, and with all my heart I hope that it is, don’t doubt that. But now that, rightly or wrongly, the Allies believe themselves certain to win (for my part I should naturally be delighted by that outcome, but what I see mostly are numerous paper victories, Pyrrhic victories, at a cost that is never vouchsafed to us) and that the Boches no longer believe themselves certain to win, we see Germany trying to hasten peace and France trying to prolong the war, France which prides itself on justice, and is right to pronounce words of justice, but which is also gentle France, and ought to pronounce words of mercy, even if only for her own children, and so that the flowers when they bloom again may light up other things than tombs. Be honest, my friend, you yourself have propounded to me a theory about things existing only by virtue of a creation which is perpetually renewed. The creation of the world did not happen once and for all, you told me, it has to take place, necessarily, every day. Well, if you are sincere, you cannot make war an exception to this theory. Never mind that the excellent Norpois has written (wheeling out one of those rhetorical flourishes that he is so fond of, like “the dawn of victory” and “General Winter”): “Now that Germany has determined upon war, the die has been cast”, the truth is that every morning war is declared anew. Thus those who wish to continue it are as guilty as those who started it, perhaps more so, for the latter may not perhaps have foreseen the full horror of it.
‘There is, besides, nothing to say that such a prolonged war, even if it must have a victorious outcome, is not without its own dangers. It is difficult to talk about things that ha
ve no precedent, and about the repercussions on an organism of an operation being attempted for the first time. It is true, generally speaking, that innovations, alarming though people may find them, go off very well. The most sensible Republicans thought that it was mad to separate Church and State. It went through as easily as posting a letter. Dreyfus was rehabilitated, Picquart became Minister of War, both without a murmur from anyone.60 Yet what may we not fear from the stress and fatigue of a war that has continued uninterrupted for several years? What will the men do when they come back from it? Will they have been broken or driven mad by exhaustion? The whole thing may turn out very badly, if not for France, then at least for the government, even perhaps for our form of government. You once made me read Maurras’s admirable essay on the memoirs of Aimée de Coigny. I would be very surprised if some modern Aimée de Coigny was not expecting, as a consequence of the Republic’s war, what the 1812 Aimée de Coigny expected from the war waged by the Empire.61 If the modern Aimée exists, will her hopes be realized? That is not something I want to see.
‘But to return to the war itself, was it really the Emperor William who first started it? I am very dubious about that. And if it was, what has he done that Napoleon, for example, did not do, something that I myself find abominable, but which I am astonished to see also inspiring such horror in worshippers of Napoleon, and in those people who on the day war was declared exclaimed like General Pau: “I have been waiting for this day for forty years. It is the best day of my life.” God knows, nobody protested more forcefully than I did when society afforded such a disproportionate place to nationalists and military men, and when every friend of the arts was accused of being involved in things that would be fatal to the country, all civilization that was not bellicose being regarded as pernicious! A genuine member of the best society barely counted compared with a general. Some madwoman even once almost presented me to M. Syveton.62 You will tell me that the rules I was endeavouring to maintain were only those of society. But despite their apparent frivolity they might perhaps have prevented many excesses. I have always respected those who defend grammar or logic. We realize, fifty years later, that they averted serious dangers. Now our nationalists are the most anti-German, the most die-hard, of men. But over the last fifteen years their philosophy has completely altered. It is true that they are pressing hard for a continuation of the war. But this is only in order to exterminate a war-mongering race, and out of a love of peace. Because a warlike civilization, which they thought so fine fifteen years ago, now fills them with horror. Not only do they criticize Prussia for allowing the military element to become predominant in their state, they think that in every age military civilizations have been destructive of everything they now hold precious, not only of the arts but even of courtesy towards women. If any one of their critics is converted to nationalism, that is sufficient for him to become by the same token a friend of peace. He becomes convinced that in all warlike civilizations women have been humiliated and have occupied an inferior position. One does not dare respond that the “ladies” of knights in the Middle Ages, and Dante’s Beatrice, were perhaps placed on a throne as elevated as the heroines of M. Becque.63 One of these days I fully expect to find myself seated at table below a Russian revolutionary, or simply below one of those generals of ours who wage war out of a horror of war and in order to punish a people for cultivating an ideal which they themselves, fifteen years ago, judged the only one capable of reinvigorating us. The unfortunate Tsar was still honoured only a few months ago because he had called the peace conference at The Hague. But now that people are hailing the free Russia, they forget that he ever had that claim to glory. So turns the wheel of the world.
‘And yet Germany uses such similar expressions to France that one might think she was quoting her, she never tires of saying that she “is fighting for her existence”. When I read: “We shall fight against an implacable and cruel enemy until we have obtained a peace which will guarantee us a future free from all aggression, so that the blood of our brave soldiers shall not have flowed in vain,” or: “He who is not for us is against us,” I do not know whether the sentence comes from the Emperor William or from M. Poincaré, because they have both, give or take a few variations, pronounced each one twenty times, although to be honest I must confess that the Emperor, in this instance, is echoing the President of the Republic. France might perhaps not have been so enthusiastic about prolonging the war if she had remained weak, but above all Germany would probably not have been in such a hurry to end it if she had not ceased to be strong. To be as strong as she was, for strong you will see she still is.’
He had developed the habit of almost shouting some of the things he said, out of excitability, out of his attempt to find outlets for impressions of which he needed – never having cultivated any of the arts – to unburden himself, as an aviator looses his bombs, if necessary in open country, in places where his words affected nobody, especially in society, where they fell equally randomly and where he was listened to out of snobbery or dependence, and, so much did he tyrannize his audience, one may say under obligation and even out of fear. On the boulevards this harangue was also a mark of his contempt for passers-by, for whom he no more lowered his voice than he would have moved out of their way. But it was out of place there, caused surprise, and above all rendered audible to the people who turned round remarks which might have had us taken for defeatists. I commented on this to M. de Charlus but succeeded only in arousing his mirth. ‘That would be very funny, you must admit, he said. After all, he added, one never knows, we all run the risk every evening of being an item in the next day’s news. Is there really any reason why I should not end up shot in the moat at Vincennes? After all, that is what happened to my great-uncle, the Duc d’Enghien.64 The thirst for noble blood maddens a certain kind of rabble, and in that they are more discriminating than lions are. You know that for those animals it would take no more than a scratch on her nose for them to leap on to Mme Verdurin. A scratch on what in my youth we would have called her conk!’ And he began to roar with laughter as if we had been alone in a drawing-room.
From time to time, seeing some rather shifty-looking individuals emerge from the shadows as M. de Charlus went by and cluster together a short distance away from him, I wondered whether he would prefer me to leave him alone or to remain with him. In the same way, somebody who meets an old man subject to frequent epileptic fits, and who sees from his inconsistent movements that an attack is probably imminent, wonders whether his company is more desired as a support or dreaded as a witness from whom he would wish to conceal the fit, and whose mere presence, when absolute calm might perhaps succeed in averting it, would be enough to hasten its onset. But the possibility of the event from which one does not know whether or not one should remove oneself is revealed, in the case of the sick man, by his meandering progress, like that of a drunk. Whereas with M. de Charlus these variously divaricating positions, the indication of a possible incident in relation to which I was not sure whether he desired or feared that my presence should prevent its occurrence, were occupied, as if by ingenious stage-management, not by the Baron himself, who was walking straight ahead, but by a whole circle of extras. All the same, I believe he wanted to avoid the encounter, because he dragged me into a side-street, darker than the boulevard, yet into which it was constantly disgorging, except for those who were flocking towards it, soldiers from every branch of the service and from every nation, a youthful influx which compensated and consoled M. de Charlus for the ebbing of all the men towards the frontier which had, as if pneumatically, created a vacuum in Paris during the early days of mobilization. M. de Charlus made constant admiring comments about the brilliant uniforms which passed about us, turning Paris into a town as cosmopolitan as a port and as unreal as the scenery in a painter’s studio, where a few bits of architecture have been assembled simply as a pretext for him to gather together the most varied and glittering costumes.
He still retained all his respect and all
his affection for some great ladies who were accused of defeatism, as he had once for those who had been accused of Dreyfusism. He regretted only that by stooping to the level of politics they might have laid themselves open ‘to being talked about by journalists’. As far as he was concerned, nothing about them had changed. For his frivolity was so much second nature to him, that birth, combined with beauty and other forms of prestige, was the thing that endured – and the war, like the Dreyfus Affair, was merely a vulgar and passing fashion. If the Duchesse de Guermantes had been shot for trying to reach a separate peace with Austria, he would still have considered her as noble as ever, and no more demeaned by it than Marie-Antoinette seems to us today for having been condemned to decapitation. As he spoke then, M. de Charlus, with the noble guise of a Saint-Vallier or a Saint-Megrin, was upright, stiff and solemn, his voice was serious, and for a brief moment he displayed none of the mannerisms by which men of his sort reveal themselves. And yet, why is it that none of them can ever have a voice that sounds absolutely right? Even at this moment, when it was approaching its most serious, his still sounded slightly wrong, as if it needed tuning.
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