M. de Charlus must have regretted his words, for some time later I received another copy – morocco-bound and with a panel of incised leather on its front cover showing a sprig of forget-me-not in half-relief – of the book which he had lent me and which, it being Aimé’s day off, I had asked the ‘lift’ to take back to him.
M. de Charlus having departed, Robert and I were at last able to go to dinner at Bloch’s. I realized that evening that the anecdotes at which Bloch was inclined to laugh too heartily were stories he had heard from M. Bloch senior, and that the ‘somebody really interesting’ who figured in them was always one of the latter’s friends whom he described in those words. We can all recall certain people we admired as children, a father who was wittier than the rest of the family, a teacher whose mind we saw as better than it was because he revealed philosophy to us, a fellow-pupil more advanced than ourselves (as Bloch had been in relation to me), who despises the Musset of ‘L’Espoir en Dieu’ at a time when we still admire him, but who, by the time we have moved on to old Leconte de Lisle or Claudel, will still be full of enthusiasm for the Musset of:
À Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca,
Vous étiez, vous étiez bien aise …
without forgetting:
Padoue est un fort bel endroit
Où de très grands docteurs en droit …
Mais j’aime mieux la polenta …
… Passe dans son domino noir
La Toppatelle
and who rejects all of the ‘Nuits’ except:
Au Havre, devant l’Atlantique,
À Venise, à l’affreux Lido,
Où vient sur l’ herbe d’un tombeau
Mourir la pâle Adriatique.67
When we are impressed by someone, we remember and quote with admiration things which are markedly inferior to other things which we would not even consider saying, if left to the resources of our own invention, just as in a novel a writer will include real characters and their sayings because they are true, notwithstanding the fact that they represent a mediocre element, a dead weight in the living whole. The portraits of Saint-Simon are admirable, though presumably he did not admire himself as he wrote them; and the words he quotes as charming, spoken by wits of the time, have remained mediocre or become incomprehensible. He would have scorned to invent what he quotes as so acute or so vivid from Mme Cornuel68 or Louis XIV, a feature which can be remarked in many others and which lends itself to various interpretations, the only one of which is relevant here is the following: that in the state of mind in which one ‘observes’, one is well below the level at which one creates.
So, set within my old school-friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughed at them in the son’s voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times so that his audience would properly savour the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son’s faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter’s table-talk. The younger Bloch was capable of saying things that were strikingly clever, which he would follow immediately by showing what he owed to his family, telling for the thirtieth time some jokes of his father’s which the latter trotted out, along with his frock-coat, only on those ceremonial occasions when Bloch the younger brought home somebody whom it was worth going to some trouble to impress: one of his former teachers, a ‘chum’ who was a great prize-winner or, as on this occasion, Saint-Loup and myself. So we were treated to this: ‘A military commentator of genius, who had proved without the shadow of a doubt why, in the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese would be beaten and the Russians could not fail to win …’; and then to this: ‘He’s an eminent man who’s seen as a great financier in political circles and a great politician in financial circles.’ These statements were interchangeable with others concerning the Baron de Rothschild and Sir Rufus Israel, two characters who were introduced ambiguously, in a way which could make a listener infer that M. Bloch senior had known them personally.
I was caught out by this habit of M. Bloch’s: his way of referring to Bergotte gave me to understand that he too was one of his old friends. But the fact was that the only famous people whom M. Bloch knew were those he knew of, people whom, ‘without being acquainted with them’, he had seen in the distance at the theatre or about town. He was pretty sure his own person, his name, his identity as a personality were not unknown to these people, who, when they caught sight of him, probably had to resist a frequent furtive urge to greet him. Though people in high society may well be acquainted at first hand with people of talent, may have them to dinner, this does not mean they understand them any better. But when one has a certain familiarity with society, the vacuity of those who compose it makes one over-willing to frequent obscure people, who know the famous ‘without being acquainted with them’, and over-ready to expect them to be intelligent. I was to discover this when speaking of Bergotte. M. Bloch senior was not the only one to be a success in his own house: my old school-friend was even more celebrated among his sisters, at whom he kept grumbling, with his face almost in his plate. At this, they laughed till they cried. They had also adopted their brother’s lingo: they spoke it fluently, as though it was compulsory, as though it was the only language that intelligent people could use. On our arrival, the eldest daughter said to one of the younger ones, ‘Go and tell our wise father and our venerable mother. – Minxes and hussies, said Bloch, I bring you my lord Saint-Loup of the swift javelins, who is come for some days from Doncières of the smooth-stoned dwellings, Doncières the dam of horses.’ Bloch being as vulgar as he was cultured, his speech usually ended with a less Homeric pleasantry: ‘Look here, close up your peplos of the beautiful clasps a bit! What sort of goings-on are these? I mean, he’s not my father,69 is he?’ Whereupon Mesdemoiselles Bloch collapsed in a maelstrom of merriment. I told their brother how much pleasure he had given me by recommending me to read Bergotte, whose books I loved.
M. Bloch senior, who had no acquaintance with Bergotte, but had heard something of his life by lending an ear to gossip in theatres, had an equally indirect way of being familiar with his books, relying on judgments of apparent literary relevance. His world was that of approximations, where greetings are half-exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance. The opposite is more usual: self-esteem works its beneficent miracle and, since few of us can enjoy intimacy with the great or a familiarity with higher learning, those who are excluded from these can still see their own position as the most enviable; the point of view we have from the social tier we occupy makes each of us believe it is the best, for we can see not only many who are worse off than ourselves and to be pitied, but also the great, whom we can name and condemn without knowing them, misjudge and disdain without understanding them. Those who believe they deserve a share of happiness greater than that accorded to others, who find deficient the degree of it afforded them even by self-esteem’s magnification of their meagre personal advantages, can call upon envy to make up the deficit. Envy may well express itself, of course, in the accents of disdain; and ‘I have no wish to know him’ must be translated as ‘I have no possibility of knowing him’. The latter is the literal translation; but the passionate meaning remains: ‘I have no wish to know him.’ We know it is untrue; yet it is not simple dishonesty that makes us say it: we say it because that is how we feel, and that is enough to abolish the difference between truth and untruth, enough for our happiness.
Self-centredness thus making each man a king, enabling him to see the ordered ranks of the universe beneath him, M. Bloch enjoyed the luxury of absolute monarchy every morning as he leafed through the paper, over his bowl of chocolate, whenever he caught sight of the name of Bergotte at the foot of an article: he granted him a haughty and cursory audience, handed down his judgment and, between sips at his scalding beverage, savoured the joy of s
neering: ‘Really, that Bergotte chap has become unreadable. What an old bore! Makes you feel like stopping your subscription. What a piece of convoluted nonsense! What a rigmarole!’ And he helped himself to some more bread and butter.
M. Bloch senior’s illusion of importance reached a little beyond the confines of his own range of vision. For one thing, his children saw him as an outstanding man. All children tend either to underrate or to overrate their parents; but a good son always sees his father as the best of all possible fathers, without reference to any objective grounds for admiration. Such grounds, in the case of M. Bloch senior, were not completely absent: he was educated, percipient, affectionate towards his relations. Those relations who were closest to him were particularly attached to him, especially since in middle-class life, with its multiplicity of smaller worlds (unlike in ‘society’, where people are judged by a single standard which is fixed, however absurd and false it may be, and which is, for purposes of comparison, an aggregate derived from the sum total of all elegant people), there will always be supper parties and family celebrations which have as their life and soul somebody who is deemed to be amusing and agreeable, yet who in society proper would be given short shrift. Also, in those smaller worlds, where the aristocracy’s factitious scale of grandeurs does not exist, it is replaced by distinctions which are even sillier. So it was that, within the family, even well beyond the closest circles, because of a supposed likeness in the cut of his moustache and the bridge of the nose, M. Bloch was known as ‘the Duc d’Aumale’s double’.70 (Among club-men who hunt and shoot, the one who wears his cap at a jaunty angle and buttons his tunic very tight, so as to give himself what he thinks is the look of an officer from a foreign army, will always be seen as something of a character by the others.)
This resemblance was remote; yet it seemed to be viewed as a sort of title. People said, ‘Which Bloch do you mean – the Duc d’Aumale?’ as they might say, ‘Which Princesse Murat do you mean – the Queen of Naples?’ One or two other minute features were enough to make all the kith and kin exclaim at how distinguished he looked. Though his style of life did not run to a carriage, on certain days M. Bloch would hire an open victoria and pair, and have himself driven through the Bois de Boulogne, nonchalantly sprawling, with two fingers at his temple and two under his chin; and though passers-by who did not know him may have thought he was ‘just a joker’, the whole family knew that, when it came to ‘the high life’, Uncle Salomon could show a thing or two to Gramont-Caderousse71 himself. He was one of those men who, when they die, are described in the social column of Le Radical, because they used to eat in a restaurant on the boulevards at the same table as the editor of that little newspaper, as ‘a personality well known to Parisians’. M. Bloch said to Saint-Loup and me that Bergotte was well aware why he, M. Bloch, never greeted him, that Bergotte averted his eyes as soon as he caught sight of him at the theatre or at the club. Saint-Loup started to blush, at the thought that such a club could not possibly be the Jockey Club, of which his father had been the chairman. Yet it had to be quite an exclusive one, as M. Bloch had just said that, nowadays, Bergotte would not be elected to it. So, with some apprehension, in case he was ‘underestimating the opponent’, Saint-Loup asked whether the club in question was not the Cercle de la rue Royale, which was a club deemed to be ‘beyond the pale’ by his family, to which he knew certain Jews had been elected. ‘No, replied M. Bloch with an air of negligence, pride and shame, it’s a small club, but much more enjoyable than that one: the Old Duffers’ Club. We’re very select, you know. – Isn’t Sir Rufus Israel the Chairman?’ the younger Bloch asked, to give his father the opportunity to tell a lie which would put him in a good light, and quite without realizing that the financier’s name did not have the same prestige for Saint-Loup as it had for him. In point of fact, the Old Duffers’ Club counted among its members, not Sir Rufus Israel, but one of his employees. This man, being on good terms with his employer, carried about a supply of cards bearing the financier’s name, one of which he would give to M. Bloch whenever the latter was about to travel with a railway company of which Sir Rufus was a director. M. Bloch would say, ‘I must look in at the club and get a recommendation from Sir Rufus.’ Once on the train, the card enabled him to impress the guard. Mesdemoiselles Bloch being more interested in Bergotte than in pursuing the subject of the Old Duffers, the youngest of them asked her brother in a voice that was completely serious (for she was under the impression that the only way to speak of talented men was to use her brother’s repertoire of expressions), ‘Is this Bergotte customer really an outstanding sort of a cove? I mean, is he one of your Villiers or your Catulles,72 really big customers like that? – I’ve met him at a few first nights, said M. Nissim Bernard. He’s awkward, a sort of Peter Schlemihl.’73 M. Bloch had nothing against this reference to the Count von Chamisso; but the mention of a word like ‘Schlemihl’, though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of keeping when spoken in front of strangers. He shot a dark look at his uncle. ‘He does have some talent, Bloch said. – Oh, I see, the sister replied, in a very sober voice, as though meaning that in that case I was to be excused. – All writers have some talent, M. Bloch senior said scornfully. – It’s even being said,’ said the son, brandishing his fork and screwing his eyes into a diabolically ironic expression, ‘that he’s going to present himself for election to the Académie française! – Oh, for goodness sake! The man’s a light-weight!’ replied M. Bloch senior, who seemed not to hold the Académie in such low esteem as his son and daughters. ‘He doesn’t have the necessary calibre. – In any case, the Académie is a salon and Bergotte enjoys too little credit,’ pronounced Mme Bloch’s uncle, a harmless and gentle individual with money to leave, whose surname, Bernard, might have been enough to stimulate my grandfather’s diagnostic gift, though it might also have seemed insufficiently in harmony with a face which could have been brought back from the palace of Darius and recomposed by Mme Dieulafoy,74 had it not been preceded by the name of Nissim, chosen by some expert wishing to crown this visage from Susa in an aptly Oriental way, by spreading above it the wingspan of some androcephalous bull from Khorsabad. M. Bloch senior would often insult this uncle, either because he was stimulated to pick on him by the man’s simple but vulnerable good nature, or because, the villa being rented in the name of M. Nissim Bernard, he wanted to show that, though his beneficiary, he was not beholden to him in any way, and especially that he was not trying to ingratiate himself with the aim of inheriting all that money when the time came. M. Nissim Bernard was upset mainly at being treated rudely in the presence of the butler. He murmured something unintelligible, in which all one could make out was, ‘When the Meschores are here.’ In the Bible, ‘Meschores’ means the ‘servant of God’. Among themselves, the Blochs used the word with the meaning of ‘the servants’ and they had great fun in using it: their belief that neither Gentiles nor indeed their servants understood the allusion quickened for both M. Nissim Bernard and M. Bloch senior the gratification they derived from their double status of ‘masters’ and ‘Jews’. However, the latter satisfaction turned into dissatisfaction when guests were present. When M. Bloch heard his uncle say ‘Meschores’, he felt he was drawing too much attention to his Easternness, as a courtesan entertaining some of her likes along with more respectable people will be annoyed if the loose women raise the subject of their profession or use objectionable language. So, rather than mollifying M. Bloch, his uncle’s murmur of complaint irritated him beyond measure; and he lost no opportunity of berating the poor man. ‘Naturally, when there’s some pompous stupidity to utter, one may be sure you will do it. You would be the first to lick Bergotte’s boots if he was here!’ M. Bloch exclaimed, while M. Nissim Bernard lowered the dense locks of the beard of King Sargon towards his plate. Young Bloch too now wore a beard, which was also frizzed and blue-black, bringing out in him a close resemblance to his great-uncle.
‘What, do you mean you are the son of the Marquis de Marsantes?’ M. Nissim Bernard said to Saint-Loup. ‘I knew him well.’ I thought he must mean ‘knew’ in the way M. Bloch senior said he ‘knew’ Bergotte, by sight. But M. Nissim Bernard then added, ‘Your father was a good friend of mine.’ Young Bloch had turned extremely red, his father looked profoundly upset, Mesdemoiselles Bloch were stifling laughter. In M. Nissim Bernard, the art of showing off, which was curbed in M. Bloch senior and his offspring, had led to a habit of perpetual mendacity. If staying at a hotel when travelling, M. Nissim Bernard, as M. Bloch senior might have done, always had his manservant bring all the newspapers to him in the dining-room, in the middle of lunch, so that the other guests could see he was a man who travelled with a manservant. But if he struck up an acquaintance with any of these guests, M. Nissim Bernard would be sure to say he was a Senator, which his nephew would never have done. Although he knew perfectly well that it would come out one day that he had no right to this title, at the moment of speaking of it, he could not resist the temptation to acquire it. These lies told by his uncle, and the difficulties they could create, were a trial to M. Bloch. ‘Pay no attention,’ he murmured to Saint-Loup. ‘It’s just his way of making a little joke.’ Saint-Loup, who had a strong interest in the psychology of liars, was very interested in all of this. ‘A bigger liar than Odysseus of Ithaca,’ said Bloch, ‘despite the fact that Athene said of the latter that he was the greatest liar among men. – Well, I must say, exclaimed M. Nissim Bernard, I did not expect to find myself dining with the son of my friend! I have in Paris a photograph of your father and any number of letters from him. He always called me “Uncle”, for some reason. A charming man, of sparkling wit. I remember a dinner I once gave in Nice, for Sardou, Labiche, Augier …75 – Molière, Racine, Corneille, M. Bloch senior continued ironically, his list being completed by his son: Plautus, Menander, Kalidasa.’76 M. Nissim Bernard, with hurt feelings, abandoned his story, ascetically forgoing a great pleasure, and said not another word throughout the rest of dinner.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 44