However I felt immediately, from the unenthusiastic way in which they spoke of him, that Saint-Loup had not made a good impression on Françoise, or on the butler. Of course the butler’s son and Françoise’s nephew had made as much effort to get themselves safe jobs as Saint-Loup had done, successfully, with the opposite intention of being sent to the most dangerous posting. But that was something which, considering the matter with reference to themselves, Françoise and the butler were unable to believe. They were convinced that the rich were always given safe positions. And in fact, even if they had known the truth about Robert’s heroic bravery, it would not have meant anything to them. He did not say ‘Boches’, he had praised the bravery of the Germans in their presence, and he did not attribute to treachery the fact that we had not been victorious on the first day. And that was what they would have liked to hear, that is what, for them, would have seemed a sign of courage. So, although they continued to look for the croix de guerre, I found them cool on the subject of Robert. Myself, having a pretty good idea where the cross had been left (although if Saint-Loup had indeed entertained himself during the evening in that way, it was only to fill in time while he was waiting, because, seized with the desire to see Morel again, he had used all his military connections to discover which regiment Morel was in, so that he could go and see him, but had thus far only received hundreds of contradictory replies), I advised Françoise and the butler to go to bed. He, however, was always loth to leave Françoise now that, thanks to the war, he had found an even more effective means of tormenting her than the ‘expulsion of the nuns’77 or the Dreyfus Affair. On this evening, and every time I was near them during my remaining few days in Paris, before I left for a new sanatorium, I would hear the butler say to a horrified Françoise: ‘They’re in no hurry, of course, they’re waiting till the pear’s ripe for plucking, but when the time comes they’ll take Paris, and then they won’t show any mercy! – Oh my Lord! Holy Mary! exclaimed Françoise, aren’t they satisfied that they’ve conquered poor Belgium? They suffered enough, they did, when they were invasioned. – Belgium, Françoise? What they did in Belgium won’t be anything compared with this!’ And then, the war having given conversational currency among the working class to a quantity of terms which they had come across only visually, from reading newspapers, and consequently did not know how to pronounce, the butler added: ‘I don’t know how everyone can be so stupid… Look at this, Françoise, they’re preparing a new attack using more battle-lions than ever before.’ Unable to contain myself, if not in the name of pity for Françoise and strategic good sense, at least in the name of grammar, I told him that the proper pronunciation was ‘battálions’, but achieved nothing except to make him repeat the terrible phrase to Françoise every time I entered the kitchen, for the butler, almost as much as he enjoyed frightening his companion, enjoyed showing his master that, although he had once been a gardener at Combray and was still only a butler, he was none the less a good Frenchman according to the rule of Saint-André-des-Champs, and that the Declaration of the Rights of Man gave him a perfect independent right to pronounce it ‘battle-lion’ if he wanted to, and not to let himself be ordered about on a matter that had nothing to do with his service, and on which consequently, since the Revolution, nobody had a right to say anything to him, as he was my equal.
So I had the irritation of hearing him talk to Françoise about an operation using many ‘battle-lions’ with an emphasis which was meant to show me that this pronunciation was the effect not of ignorance but of a mature and considered choice. He lumped the government and the newspapers together in a single, distrustful ‘they’, saying: ‘They talk about the losses of the Boches, but they don’t say anything about ours, which are apparently ten times larger. They tell us they’re at their last gasp, that they’ve got nothing to eat, but I think they’ve got a hundred times more to eat than we have. They shouldn’t be trying to brainwash us. If they didn’t have anything to eat they wouldn’t fight the way they did the other day, when they killed a hundred thousand of our young men, all under twenty.’ He constantly exaggerated the triumphs of the Germans like that, just as he had once done with those of the Radicals; at the same time he recounted their atrocities, so that the triumphs would be even more painful for Françoise, who would constantly repeat: ‘Oh! Holy Mother of the Angels! Oh, Holy Mother of God!’, or sometimes, to be unpleasant to her in a different way, he would say: ‘Anyway, we’re no better than they are, what we’re doing in Greece is no better than what they did in Belgium. We’re going to set everybody against us, you’ll see, and we’ll end up fighting against all the other nations,’ when the true situation was quite the opposite of that. On days when the news was good, he would get his revenge by assuring Françoise that the war would last for thirty-five years and, if there was any talk of peace, he would assure her that it would not last more than a few months and would be followed by battles that would make these ones look like child’s play, after which there would be nothing left of France.
The victory of the Allies seemed, if not close, at least more or less certain, and it must be admitted, sadly, that the butler was very upset by it. For, having reduced the ‘world’ war, like everything else, to his own private war against Françoise (whom actually he liked, despite that, in the same way that one likes somebody whom one enjoys enraging every day by beating them at dominoes), whenever he imagined victory it took the form of the first conversation in which he would have to put up with hearing Françoise say: ‘Well, that’s over at last, and they’re going to have to give us a lot more than we gave them in ’70.’ For all this, though, he was always convinced that the fatal day was about to dawn, for an unconscious patriotism made him think, like all Frenchmen, victims of the same mirage as me since the onset of my illness, that victory – like my recovery – was just round the corner. He tried to take the initiative by announcing to Françoise that victory might be coming, but that the thought of it made his heart bleed, as it would immediately be followed by revolution, and then by invasion. ‘Oh, this ruddy war, the Boches will be the only ones to get over it quickly, Françoise, they’ve already made hundreds of billions out of it. But the idea that they’d cough up even a penny for us, that’s just a joke! They may say that in the newspapers,’ he added cautiously, so as to be ready for any eventuality, ‘to keep people quiet, just as they’ve said for the last three years that the war will be over tomorrow.’ Françoise was all the more disturbed by these words in fact because, having believed the optimists rather than the butler, she could now see that the war, which she thought was bound to be over in a fortnight despite ‘the invasioning of poor little Belgium’, was still going on, that no advances were being made, a consequence of the fixed fronts, something she could not really understand, and, finally, one of the countless ‘godsons’ to whom she gave everything she earned with us told her that they had concealed the truth about first one thing and then another. ‘It’s the working man who will have to bear the brunt, concluded the butler. They’ll take your field away, Françoise. – Oh, Lord save us!’ But he preferred more immediate misfortunes to distant ones of that sort, and pored over the newspapers in the hope of finding a defeat to announce to Françoise. He waited for bad news like a child waiting for an Easter-egg, hoping that things would go badly enough to frighten Françoise, but not so badly as to cause him actual suffering. Hence the attraction of a Zeppelin raid, which allowed him to watch Françoise hiding in the cellars, but did not shake his conviction that in a city as big as Paris the bombs would never chance to fall quite on to our house.
Meanwhile Françoise was beginning to have occasional recurrences of her Combray pacifism. She almost started to have doubts about the ‘German atrocities’. ‘When the war started they told us that the Germans were murderers, brigands, complete bandits, B-b-boches…’ (If she gave several bs to Boches, it was because the accusation that the Germans were murderers seemed quite plausible to her, whereas the idea that they might be Boches seemed so terrible
as to be completely improbable. Only it was rather difficult to know what mysteriously terrifying sense Françoise gave to the word ‘Boche’, since she was talking about the beginning of the war, and also because of the dubious expression with which she uttered the word. A doubt about whether the Germans were criminals might have no factual foundation, but from the logical point of view it did not contain a contradiction. But how could she doubt that they were Boches, since the word, in popular speech, means, quite simply, German? Perhaps all she was doing was repeating, indirectly, the violent remarks she had heard at the time, in which the word Boche was given a particularly powerful emphasis.) ‘I used to believe all that, she said, but now I wonder if we are not as rotten as they are.’ This blasphemous thought had been slyly introduced into Françoise’s mind by the butler, who, observing that his friend had a soft spot for King Constantine of Greece, had constantly pictured him to her as being starved of food until such time as he gave in to us. That ruler’s abdication had therefore moved Françoise deeply, who went so far as to declare: ‘We’re no better than they are. If we were in Germany we’d be doing the same as they are.’ Anyway, I saw very little of her during these few days, as she was often at the house of those cousins of whom Mama had said to me one day: ‘They are much richer than you are, you know.’ People throughout the country during this period were often privileged to see some very fine behaviour, which, if there were a historian to perpetuate its memory, would bear witness to the greatness of France, her greatness of soul, her greatness according to the code of Saint-André-des-Champs, conduct displayed as much by the many civilians living in safety behind the lines as by the soldiers who fell at the Marne. Françoise had lost a nephew at Berry-au-Bac who was also a nephew of these millionaire cousins of hers, the former owners of a large café who had long since made a fortune and retired. The young man who had been killed, himself the poor owner of a very small café, had joined up aged twenty-five, leaving his wife to run the little bar which he thought he would be returning to in a few months. He had been killed. And then do you know what happened? Françoise’s millionaire cousins, who were not related to the young woman, who was just their nephew’s widow, left their home in the country, to which they had retired ten years earlier, and set about running a café again, without taking a sou for themselves; every morning at six o’clock, the millionaire’s wife, a real lady, and her young lady daughter were dressed and ready to help their niece and cousin by marriage. And for nearly three years now, they had rinsed glasses and served drinks from first thing in the morning until half past nine at night, without a single day’s rest. In this book, in which there is not one fact that is not fictitious, not one real character concealed under a false name, in which everything has been made up by me in accordance with the needs of my exposition, I have to say, to the honour of my country, that Françoise’s millionaire relatives alone, who came out of their retirement to help their niece when she was left without support, that they and they alone are real, living people. And convinced as I am that their modesty will not be offended by it, for the simple reason that they will never read this book, and being unable to mention the names of the many others who must have acted in a similar way, as a result of whom France survived, I take a childlike and deeply felt pleasure, in transcribing their real name here: appropriately enough, they are called by the very French name of Larivière. Although there were a few worthless shirkers like the imperious young man in a dinner-jacket I had seen at Jupien’s, whose only concern was to discover whether he could have Léon at half past ten the next day ‘because he was lunching in town’, these were redeemed by the countless masses of the Frenchmen of Saint-André-des-Champs, by all the sublime soldiers, and by those whom I regard as their equals, the Larivières.
To increase Françoise’s anxieties even more, the butler showed her some old copies of Lectures pour tous78 he had found, the covers of which (these numbers dating from before the war) depicted the imperial royal family of Germany. ‘That’s our new ruler to be,’ the butler said to Françoise, showing her ‘William’: she stared open-eyed, then pointed to the female figure standing at his side and said: ‘And that must be the Williamess!’ Françoise’s hatred of the Germans was extreme; it was tempered only by that which our own ministers inspired in her. I don’t know which she wished for more passionately, the death of Hindenburg or the death of Clemenceau.
My departure from Paris was delayed by a piece of news which caused me such grief that for a while I was quite unable to set off. This was the news of the death of Robert de Saint-Loup, killed two days after his return to the front, while covering the retreat of his men. No man had ever felt less hatred for a nation than he did (and as for the Emperor, for reasons of his own, which may have been mistaken, he thought that William II had wanted to prevent the war rather than bring it about). Nor did he have the slightest hatred of Germanism: the last words I had heard him utter, six days earlier, were the opening words of a Schubert song which he had been singing in German on my staircase, so enthusiastically that I had to tell him to stop because of the neighbours. Accustomed by a faultless education and upbringing to expunging every trace of praise, invective or flowery language from his manner, he had avoided, in the face of the enemy, as he had at the moment of joining up, the one thing that might have safeguarded his life through that self-effacement that characterized the whole of his behaviour, right down to the way he would follow me out on the street bare-headed to close the door of my cab every time I left his house. For several days I remained shut up in my room, thinking about him. I remembered his arrival for the first time at Balbec, when, in an almost-white wool suit, his eyes greenish and changeable like the sea, he had crossed the hall beside the great dining-room whose windows gave on to the sea. I remembered the special being he had seemed to me then, the being whose friend I so much wanted to be. That wish had been realized to a greater extent than I could ever have imagined possible, although I derived little pleasure from it then, coming only later to understand the many great qualities, and other things too, which that elegant exterior concealed. All that, the good and the bad, he had given unstintingly every day, last of all by going forward to attack a trench, out of generosity and the devotion of everything he possessed to the service of others, just as one evening he had run along the backs of the banquettes in the restaurant so that I didn’t have to move. And the fact that I had really seen him so seldom, in such diverse settings, in such different circumstances and at such long intervals, in that hall in Balbec, in the café at Rivebelle, in the cavalry barracks and at the military dinners at Doncières, at the theatre when he slapped the journalist, in the house of the Princesse de Guermantes, all this meant only that I had a sharper, more vivid picture of his life, and a clearer sense of grief at his death, than often one has for people more dearly loved but so regularly seen that the image we retain of them is no more than a sort of vague composite of an infinite number of subtly different images, where also, our affections being fully gratified, we do not have, as we may with those we have seen only for brief moments, in the course of meetings inconclusive despite the wishes of both parties, the illusion of the possibility of a greater affection thwarted only by circumstance. Only a few days after I had seen him in pursuit of his monocle in the hall at Balbec, when I had thought him so haughty, there was another living form which I had seen for the first time on the beach at Balbec, and which also no longer existed outside the state of memory: this was Albertine, trudging across the sand that first evening, indifferent to everything around her, as much at home there as a seagull. So quickly had I fallen in love with her that, in order to be able to go out with her every day, I had never gone over from Balbec to see Saint-Loup. And yet the history of my relations with him bore witness also to the fact that I did once stop loving Albertine for a while, since the reason for my going to live for a time near Robert, at Doncières, was my sadness at seeing that the feeling I had for Mme de Guermantes was not reciprocated. His life and Albertine’s, di
scovered so late, at Balbec, and so swiftly over, had scarcely touched; it was he, I reminded myself as I saw how the nimble shuttles of the years weave slender connections between those of our memories which seem at first most independent of each other, it was he whom I had sent to Mme Bontemps’s house when Albertine left me. And then it had turned out that their two lives each had a parallel, and unsuspected, secret. Saint-Loup’s secret perhaps caused me more sadness now than that of Albertine, whose life had become so alien to me. But I could not get over the fact that her life, like Saint-Loup’s, had been so short. Often, when they were looking after me, she and he would tell me: ‘You’re not well.’ And now it was they who were dead, and they whose first and final images I could compare, separated as they were by such a short span of time, the final image of each, in front of the trench, floating in the river, set against the first image which, in the case of Albertine, was precious to me now only by its association with that of the sun sinking into the sea.
His death was received more sympathetically by Françoise than Albertine’s had been. Straight away she adopted her role of hired mourner and expatiated on the memory of the dead man with sorrowful threnodies and lamentations. She flaunted her grief and turned her face away dry-eyed only when in spite of myself I let her glimpse mine, which she wanted to appear not to have noticed. For like many highly strung people she was exasperated by other people’s emotional volatility, probably because it was too much like her own. These days, she was always keen to mention the slightest touch of stiffness in her neck, or a feeling of dizziness, or a knock she had given herself. But if I were to say anything about one of my ailments, she would resume her stoic and solemn air and pretend not to have heard.
In Search of Lost Time Page 20