I had to stop talking and gaze right out of the window. My grandmother left the room for a moment. Then the following evening I launched into philosophy, speaking in a detached voice but making sure that she was paying attention to my words: it was remarkable, I said, that the latest advances in science seemed to have made materialism untenable, and that the most likely outcome was still the eternal life of the soul and reunion beyond the grave.
Mme de Villeparisis informed us that she would soon not be able to see so much of us: a young nephew of hers who was preparing for entry to the cavalry school at Saumur, and who was garrisoned nearby at Doncières,37 was coming to spend a few weeks’ holiday with her, and she would have to devote much of her time to him. On some of our drives together, she had spoken very warmly of his high intelligence and especially his kind heart, and I had been imagining how he would take a liking to me, how I would become his favourite friend; then, when his aunt hinted to my grandmother, before his arrival, that he had had the misfortune to fall madly in love with some impossible woman who now had him in her clutches and would not let him go, as I was convinced that love affairs of that sort could only lead to mental derangement, crime and suicide, the thought of how little time was left for our friendship, which was already so strong in my heart although I had not set eyes on him, moved me to tears for the misfortunes which must attend it, as though it was some beloved companion who one learns is seriously ill and not expected to live long.
One very hot afternoon, from inside the dining-room, which was in half-darkness, sheltering from the sun behind drawn curtains, which were a yellow glow edged by the blue dazzle of the sea, I saw, traversing the hotel’s central bay, which extended from the beach to the road, a tall, slim, young man with piercing eyes, a proud head held high on a fine uncovered neck, and with hair so golden and skin so fair that they seemed to have soaked up the bright sunshine of the day. In a loose off-white garment, the like of which I would never have believed a man would dare to wear, and which in its lightness was as suggestive of the heat and brilliance of outdoors as was the cool dimness of the dining-room, he was advancing at a quick march. His eyes, from which a monocle kept dropping, were the colour of the sea. We all sat there, intrigued, watching him as he passed, knowing that we beheld the young Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, famous in the fashionable world. The newspapers had recently been full of descriptions of the suit he had worn when attending at a duel, as a second for the young Duc d’Uzès. It seemed as though the very special quality of his hair and eyes, his skin and bearing, which would have distinguished him in a crowd, as a pale precious vein of luminous opal stands out among crude earth, must be the mark of a life quite unlike those lived by ordinary men. In the days before the beginning of the liaison lamented by Mme de Villeparisis, when the prettiest women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain had vied for his attentions, his presence at a seaside resort, for example, with whichever celebrated beauty he was courting at the time, not only thrust the lady into the limelight, but also turned all heads towards him. Because of his general ‘stylishness’ as a young ‘lion’, his cavalier manner and above all his own remarkable beauty, some thought there was something effeminate about him, though no one ever said such a thing against him, as his virility and passionate liking for women were well known. This was the nephew of whom Mme de Villeparisis had spoken. I was warmed by the thought that, for these few weeks, I would have the opportunity of knowing him, and by the certainty that he would give me his affection. He strode right through the hotel, seeming to be in pursuit of his monocle, which fluttered in front of him like a butterfly. He had come up from the beach; and the sea, which filled the lower half of the plate-glass in the vestibule, was a background against which his whole figure stood out, as in those portraits in which the painter, without departing from the strictest observation of present-day life, chooses to put his model in an apt setting – a polo ground, a golf-course, a race-track, the deck of a yacht – making a modern equivalent of the old masters’ canvasses in which a human figure stands in the foreground of a landscape. A carriage and pair awaited him at the door; and with his monocle now flitting about against the background of the sunny roadway, the nephew of Mme de Villeparisis, with all the grace and command that a virtuoso pianist is somehow able to show even in the simplest passage, where it would have seemed barely possible for him to display any superiority over a lesser performer, climbed up beside his coachman, accepted the reins from the latter and, opening the while an envelope that the manager of the hotel handed to him, set the horses off.
What a disappointment it was for me, on each of the days following, whenever our paths crossed outside or inside the hotel, he with his high collar, and keeping his limbs in perpetual equilibrium about the dancing flight of his monocle, which seemed to be their centre of gravity, to realize that it was not his intention to make our acquaintance, that he never once greeted us, although he could not be unaware we were friends with his aunt! When I remembered how polite Mme de Villeparisis, and before her M. de Norpois, had been towards me, I wondered whether they might not be mere mock nobility, whether there might not be some secret provision in the code of laws governing the aristocracy which perhaps, for some reason unknown to me, permitted women or the odd diplomat who might have dealings with commoners not to treat them with the sweeping disdain which a merciless young marquis must show. Reason could have contradicted this. But the salient feature of the absurd age I was at – an age which, for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich – is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity which urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.
The insolence I sensed in M. de Saint-Loup, and the ingrained callousness to be inferred from it, was to be confirmed by his demeanour each time he passed through our vicinity, lean and straight as a ramrod, his head always held high, his eye quite blank, or rather quite implacable, devoid even of that hint of latent considerateness towards other persons (even though they may not know your aunt) which meant that my own attitude, for instance, towards an old lady was not the same as it was towards a lamp-post. The distance between his stand-offish ways and the fulsome letters into which, only the other day, I had imagined him pouring his liking for me, was as great as the gulf between the obscurity of the day-dreamer and the orator he fancies himself to be, swaying his fellow citizens with an unforgettable speech, filling his solitude with the sound of his own voice, carried away by the ‘hear-hears’ of the House and the acclaim of the country, but then, once the fictitious hubbub has died down, finding he is still the same mute inglorious nobody as before. When Mme de Villeparisis, no doubt hoping to correct the bad impression left on us by such appearances, with their suggestion of a haughty and bilious nature, rehearsed the inexhaustible goodness of her grand-nephew (he was the son of one of her nieces and not much older than I was), I marvelled at the ways of the fashionable, whose total disregard for truth enables them to praise the kind hearts of people whose hearts are hard, however cordial they may be with the brilliant members of their own set. Mme de Villeparisis, albeit indirectly, soon afforded me a confirmation of what I now knew were the essential features of her grand-nephew’s nature, when I encountered them one day in a lane which was so narrow as to leave her no choice but to introduce me to him. He gave no sign that someone’s name had just been uttered in his presence; not a muscle moved in his face; and had it not been for the fact that his eyes, in which there glowed not the slightest spark of humane feeling, showed a mere exaggeration of their insensitivity and emptiness of all expression, nothing would have distinguished them from lifeless mirrors. Then, star
ing at me with his hard eyes, as though he wished to be informed about me before acknowledging my greeting, suddenly set in motion as though by a muscular reflex rather than by an act of will, and putting between himself and me the greatest distance possible, he thrust out his arm as far as it would go and, from a great distance, gave me his hand. When he sent up his card the following day, I thought it must be at least a challenge to a duel. But his talk was of literature; and after a long conversation with me, he announced that he was very much looking forward to spending several hours in my company every day. Throughout that first visit of his, not only did he show a keen preference for intellectual things, but he showed a liking for me that was quite out of keeping with the handshake of the previous day. It was not until I had seen him repeat it with several other people that I realized it was nothing more than a habit, part of the manners common to some of his family, passed down to him by his mother, who had trained his body to show the excellence of his breeding; and he always shook hands like that, giving it no more thought than he gave to his fine clothes or his handsome hair; it was something which had none of the inner meaning which I had seen in it, something which he had merely acquired, just as he had come to have another habit, that of making sure of being introduced immediately to the relatives of his friends, which had become so irresistible to him that, when he saw me with my grandmother on the day after our first meeting, he walked straight up to me and, without even saying ‘Good morning’, asked me to introduce him to her, with such feverish haste that his request might have been prompted by some impulse of self-defence, such as ducking to avoid a punch or closing the eyes against a spray of boiling water, as though he were faced by a danger demanding immediate evasive action.
These first rites of exorcism having been enacted, as a malevolent fairy divests itself of its first appearance and takes on the most captivating grace and beauty, I saw the man of disdain turn into the most likeable and considerate fellow I had ever met. ‘Well, I thought, I’ve already misread the man once, I’ve been fooled by a mirage; but now that I’ve seen through it, here I am being taken in by another one, because he’s clearly just one of the high and mighty, full of his own nobility, while pretending he’s not.’ In fact, before very long, all the charming manners and agreeableness of Saint-Loup were indeed to reveal another person in him, but a very different one from the person I now suspected him of being.
The only things valued by this young man, who looked like an aristocrat and a supercilious sportsman, the only things which aroused his interest, were intellectual things, and especially those most modernistic examples of literature and art which his aunt thought so ludicrous. In addition, he was imbued with what she called the ‘haverings of the socialists’, spoke of his own class with heartfelt contempt and spent hours deep in Nietzsche and Proudhon.38 He was one of those ‘intellectuals’39 whose ready admiration keeps them immersed in books, satisfying a hunger for ideas. Actually, the manifestation of this very abstract tendency in Saint-Loup, which was at such a remove from my own usual mental activity, though it struck me as touching, also annoyed me somewhat. For instance, after I realized who his father was, if I happened to have been reading somebody’s memoirs full of anecdotes figuring the doings of the famous Comte de Marsantes, whom I saw as the epitome of the special elegance of a period already long past, in the mood of vague yearning aroused in me by the book I found it galling that my appetite for information on the life that M. de Marsantes had led must remain unsatisfied, because Robert de Saint-Loup, rather than being content to be a chip off the old block, rather than being able to lead me through the chapters of the outmoded romance of his father’s life, had aspired to familiarity with Nietzsche and Proudhon. Not that his father would have shared my regret. For he too had been an intelligent man, whose embrace of the world reached well beyond the fashionable Faubourg. He had had little time in which to become acquainted with his son, but had hoped he would turn out a better man than he was himself. I suspect that, unlike the rest of the family, he would have admired this son, would have rejoiced to see his own trivial pastimes exchanged for serious pursuits, and that, without a word to anyone, like the witty but modest nobleman he was, he would have dipped privately into his son’s favourite authors, so as to ascertain by how far Robert had outdistanced him.
It was of course rather sad that, whereas the Comte de Marsantes was open-minded enough to appreciate a son so different from himself, Robert de Saint-Loup had kept a memory of his father which, though affectionate, was rather scornful, because he was one of those for whom merit is inseparable from certain forms of art and ways of life, and all he could remember was a man who had devoted his whole life to hunting and racing, who had yawned through Wagner and delighted in Offenbach. Saint-Loup was not intelligent enough to realize that intellectual worth is unrelated to belief in any particular aesthetic doctrine; and the disdain in which he held the intellectual life of M. de Marsantes was akin to what one might have expected in a son of Boieldieu or Labiche,40 if either of them had had a son who was a lover of the most advanced symbolist writing or the most abstruse music. ‘I hardly knew my father, Robert said. By all accounts, he was a delightful man. His trouble was just the awful period in which he lived. I mean, being born into the Faubourg Saint-Germain and being alive in the period of La Belle-Hélèn41 is enough to ruin anyone’s existence. If he had been, say, a petty bourgeois with a passion for Wagner’s Ring, it’s conceivable that he might just have made some sort of a mark. They actually say he had a liking for literature, but it’s not really possible to say, because what he thought was literature was made up of works that are all dead and forgotten.’ Though I thought Saint-Loup was rather serious, he found it strange that I was not serious enough. Judging all things by their intellectual content, and being unaware of the delights that my imagination took in what he dismissed as frivolous, he was amazed that I, whom he thought of as far superior to himself, could take any interest in such things.
From the very first days of our acquaintance, Saint-Loup completely won over my grandmother, partly by the unfailing kindness with which he contrived to treat us, partly by the naturalness of the way he went about it, which was his way of going about everything. Naturalness, no doubt because it gives a glimpse, through human artistry, into nature itself, was the one quality which my grandmother preferred to all others, whether in gardens, which she disliked if, like the garden at Combray, their plots and flowerbeds were too regular, in cookery, in which she abhorred fancy contraptions like wedding-cakes, with their barely recognizable ingredients, or in piano playing, which displeased her if it was too polished, too immaculate, a style to which she even preferred Rubinstein’s slight mistakes of fingering or wrong notes. She also found naturalness to enjoy in Saint-Loup’s clothes, which showed a soft elegance, as far from the ‘flashy’ as from the ‘prim and proper’, without stiffness or starch. Even more to her taste were the casual, easy ways of this rich young man, who managed to live among luxury without ‘smacking of money’, without giving himself airs; and the charm of his naturalness she saw too in something that Saint-Loup had never outgrown, though it generally disappears with the loss of childhood, along with some of childhood’s physiological characteristics: his inability to master his face, which revealed his every emotion. Taken by surprise, for example, by something he had wished for but not expected to receive, even just a compliment, he would be overcome by such a sudden gust of pleasure, so burning, so volatile, so expansive, that it was impossible for him to contain and conceal it; his features would set in an irresistible grimace of gratification; through the skin of his cheeks, of excessive fineness, there glowed a bright flush, and his eyes reflected embarrassment and joy; and my grandmother was greatly touched by this gracious show of candour and guilelessness, in which, at least in the days when I first came to know Saint-Loup, there was nothing misleading. I must say, though, that I have known another person, indeed there are many, in whom the physiological sincerity of the passing blush was entirel
y compatible with moral duplicity; in many such people, all it proves is that, for those who are capable of the direst treachery, there can be an intensity of enjoyment so disarming as to require immediate disclosure. But in nothing was the naturalness of Saint-Loup so endearing to my grandmother as in the open way he expressed his liking for me, in words which she herself, as she said, could never have bettered for their aptness and true devotion, words worthy of Mmes de Sévigné and de Beausergent; he made no bones about bantering me for my defects – the perspicacity with which he had surmised them had delighted her – but he did it in a way which was her own, with affection, and with a compensatory admiration for my qualities which was full of the warm spontaneity that eschews reserve and avoids disdain, the ways in which the self-importance of young men of his age usually likes to express itself. In anticipating my slightest indisposition, tucking my blankets round my legs at moments when I had not noticed the weather was turning cool, secretly arranging things so as to be able to stay late with me on evenings when he thought I was feeling doleful or not quite well, the care he took of my health, which might have required sterner measures, seemed all but excessive to my grandmother, though she was very touched by it as a token of his attachment to me.
It was very soon agreed between us that we had become firm friends for ever, and each time he said ‘our friendship’ it was as though he spoke of some important and delightful entity existing outside ourselves – before long he even came to say that, apart from his love for his mistress, it was the greatest joy in his life. Such talk saddened me in a way, and I never knew how to respond to it: for in spending my time chatting with him, I felt none of the happiness I was capable of deriving from being without company; and in this, I suspect it would have been the same for me with any other person. It was only when I was alone that I would be swept on occasion by one of those impressions which brought with them such deeply satisfying feelings. But I only had to be in the presence of someone else, talking with a friend for instance, for my mind to face the wrong way, occupying itself with thoughts directed towards the other person rather than towards myself; and thoughts going in that other direction never afforded me any enjoyment. No sooner had I left the company of Saint-Loup than I sought words with which to tidy up the disordered minutes I had just spent with him: I assured myself that I had a close friend and that a close friend is a rarity; yet in knowing I was the recipient of things difficult to come by, what I felt was the exact opposite of the mode of enjoyment natural to me, the opposite of the pleasure that could come from finding something lying deep within myself, from bringing it out of its inner darkness and into the light of day. Whenever I spent two or three hours talking with Robert de Saint-Loup, and if he was impressed by what I had been saying, I was overcome by something like remorse, regret or weariness, vexed at not having spent the time alone, at not having got down once and for all to the work that awaited me. Then I would assure myself that there is no law against others’ appreciation of one’s cleverest ideas, that even the greatest minds may be excused for being admired, that it was not right to see a waste of time in hours which had led my friend to form a high opinion of me; I had no difficulty in convincing myself that I should really be happy about all this, and my hope that such happiness would never leave me was as strong as my knowledge that I had never in fact felt it. The joys we most dread losing are those which have remained outside us, beyond the reach of our heart. Although I felt I was better able than most to practise the virtues of friendship (in that I would always see the interests of my friends as counting for more than the sort of selfish advantage that motivates others, but which I ignored), I was aware of my own inability to find joy in a feeling which, rather than enhancing the differences between my mind and the minds of others – differences which exist among all minds – would abolish them. However, there were also moments when my mind could detect in Saint-Loup a creature of wider generality than himself, the ‘nobleman’, a being which, like some inner daemon, moved his limbs, directed his gestures and his actions; and at such times, though sitting beside him, I was as alone as I would have been gazing at a landscape and appreciating its harmonies. He had become an object for my thoughts to toy with in an idle moment. To glimpse through him the earlier, immemorial, aristocratic self that Robert sought to avoid being was to experience a keen joy, but it was a joy generated by the mind, not by friendship. In the moral and physical agility which gave him such grace in friendliness, in his easy manner as he offered my grandmother a lift in his carriage and handed her in, then in the nimble way he jumped down from the box when he feared I might be feeling the cold, so as to drape his own overcoat about my shoulders, I sensed not only the hereditary deftness of generations of great hunters, the ancestors of this young man who prized nothing so much as things of the mind, not only their disdain for wealth, which, though he also enjoyed being wealthy for the sole reason that he could afford to make much of his friends, had come down to him in a casual habit of lavishing luxury on them, but also especially the knowledge (or possibly the illusion) these grand personages had entertained of being ‘above other people’, which had prevented them from handing on to Saint-Loup any wish to show he was ‘no better than other people’, any reluctance to appear overfriendly, of which he was genuinely devoid but which can spoil even the sincerest likings of the less-than-noble with much stiff and awkward posturing. Occasionally I would feel a little guilty at delighting in this view of my friend as a work of art, at seeing the smooth interplay of his component parts as being regulated by a general idea which underlay their structure and function, but which, because he was unaware of it, added nothing to his inherent qualities as an individual, or to those personal values of mind and morality which he saw as paramount.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 39