In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  ‘O bronze-helmeted Saint-Loup, said Bloch, do have some more of this duck with thighs thick with fat, whereon the illustrious sacrificer of poultry has poured copious libations of the red wine.’

  Usually, once M. Bloch senior, so as to impress one of his son’s important friends, had brought out his choicest stories about Sir Rufus Israel, he would withdraw, feeling that he had already touched a chord of deepest gratitude in his son, and not wanting to ‘go too far’ in front of ‘the lad’. But if there was some quite exceptional reason, such as the time when ‘the lad’ passed the agrégation,77 then M. Bloch would augment the normal series of anecdotes by bringing out an ironic remark which he generally preferred to keep for his select group of friends, and which, now that it was offered to friends of the younger Bloch, filled the latter with an excess of pride: ‘The government’s behaviour is an outrage! They have not sought the view of M. Coquelin! M. Coquelin has let it be known he is extremely upset.’ (M. Bloch took pride in being reactionary and scornful towards theatre people.)

  Mesdemoiselles Bloch and their brother blushed to the roots of their hair, a sign of how impressed they were, when their parent, to show that he knew how to behave like a king when occasion demanded it, gave the order to serve champagne, then let drop the news that, as a ‘treat’ for his son’s ‘faithful friends’, he had booked three seats for the performance to be given at the Casino that very night by a touring comic-opera company. He was sorry he could not get a box, but they were all taken: however, he had often tried every one of them, and you were far better off in the front stalls. Whereas the son’s failing, that is, a way of behaving he thought was invisible to others, was bad manners, the father’s fault was avarice. So he had the ‘champagne’, really a mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe, and he treated us to ‘front stalls’ which turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others, under the miraculous persuasion of his failing that no one would notice the difference, whether at dinner or in the theatre (where all the boxes were in fact unoccupied). M. Bloch having let us wet our lips in shallow champagne glasses, which his son described as ‘craters with deep-swept flanks’, he invited us to admire a painting which he liked so much that it had accompanied him to Balbec. It was a Rubens, he told us. Saint-Loup was naïve enough to ask whether it was signed. M. Bloch replied with a blush that he had had the signature cut off because of the frame, but this was of no importance as he had no intention of selling it. Then he bundled us out, so as to catch up on his reading of the Journal officiel,78 piles of which were to be seen about the house, and which he said he could not avoid reading, because of his ‘parliamentary situation’, on which he did not enlighten us further. ‘I’ll just get a scarf, said Bloch, as Zephyrus and Boreas are abroad on the fish-teeming seas, and if we delay even a little after the performance, our homecoming will be lit by the first glimmerings of rosy-fingered Eos. By the way,’ he said to Saint-Loup, once we had left the house (and I had my heart in my mouth, having immediately realized that Bloch’s irony was now being exercised at the expense of M. de Charlus), ‘who’s the priceless clown in the dark suit that you were parading about the beach the other day? – That was my uncle, Saint-Loup answered curtly. Such a blunder was not the sort of thing to give Bloch pause. He spluttered with laughter: ‘Congratulations! I ought to have realized – he’s very neatly turned out, and he’s got a physog that stamps him as a codger of the first water. – You are utterly and completely mistaken, Saint-Loup snapped. He is a man of high intelligence. – Well, that’s a pity, Bloch said, because it makes him less than perfect. I wouldn’t mind getting to know him, though, as I’m sure I could write something pretty good on customers like him. When you see him walk past, it’s just huge! Mind you, I would have to underplay the face with its burlesque aspect, caricature being beneath any artist who’s really interested in the plastic beauty of his sentences – though mind you it did give me a good laugh! – and I’d bring out your uncle’s aristocratic side, which really makes a splendiferous effect, and once you get over the first fit of the giggles it really does strike you with its grand manner. Tell me, Bloch said to me, just to change the subject for a moment, there’s one thing I keep meaning to ask you, then every time we meet, some divinity, some blessed denizen of Olympus, makes me completely forget to find out from you something which could come in handy some day – which might already have come in handy! Who is that beautiful creature I saw you with once at the Zoo? She was with a gent that I know by sight and a damsel with long hair.’ I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann, who had called him by some other name and said he was attached to a ministry, a statement which I had never thought to ask him to verify. I could not understand how Bloch, who, according to what she had said, had sought an introduction to her, could remain in ignorance of her name. This so surprised me that I was speechless for a moment. ‘Well, anyway, he said, you deserve to be congratulated – she must have given you a nice time. I had just met her a few days before, you see, riding on the suburban line. She had no objection to yours truly, and so a nice ride was had by one and all, and we were just on the point of arranging to do it again on a future occasion when someone she knew had the bad form to get on, just one stop before the terminus.’ I said nothing, which did not appear much to his liking. ‘So, he said, I was rather hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favourite of the gods. But look, if you’re reluctant to let me into the secrets of a professional who, between central Paris and the Point-du-Jour, had no reluctance to letting me into her, three times in a row and with refinements, then so be it, I won’t insist. I’m bound to come across her again, one of these evenings.’

  I went to see Bloch shortly after this dinner, and when he came to the hotel to return my visit, I was out. As he was asking for me, he was noticed by Françoise, who as it happened, though he had once come to Combray, had never set eyes on him before. All she knew was that ‘one of my gents’ had called to see me, but she ‘didn’t know for why’; all she could say was that it was a man dressed in no particular style and who had made no great impression on her. Though I knew that some of Françoise’s notions about social things would remain for ever impenetrable to me, that they derived from misheard words, names once mistaken and never thereafter put right, and though I had long since taken the view that any investigation into this was pointless, I could not help wondering, to no avail, of course, what there could possibly be in the name ‘Bloch’ which she found so stupendous. For I had no sooner told her that the young man she had seen was M. Bloch, than she stepped back, dumbfounded and disappointed. ‘What! You mean that’s M. Bloch?’ she gasped, quite staggered, as though such a prestigious personage should have had an appearance which would make manifest to all and sundry that they were in the presence of a prodigy of nature; and like someone finding out that a historical figure does not live up to his reputation, she repeated in an awe-struck voice which suggested that in future she would be a sadder but wiser, if more sceptical, woman, ‘So, that was M. Bloch! Well, all I can say is, you wouldn’t think so to see him!’ She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance. She did, however, have the considerateness to add, ‘Well, if that’s your M. Bloch, sir, then all I can say is you’re every bit as good as he is!’

  Françoise soon had to endure, with regard to Saint-Loup, whom she adored, a disillusionment of a different order, but more short-lived: she learned that he was a Republican. Despite the fact that, when she spoke, say, of the Queen of Portugal, she could say, with that homely disrespect which is the expression of supreme respect among the lower classes, ‘Amélie, that sister of Philippe’s’, Françoise was a royalist. But that someone who was not only a marquis, but a marquis who had dazzled her, could be a supporter of the Republic, seemed beyond the bounds of the possible. She was as peeved towards me as though I had given h
er a box which she had believed to be of solid gold, for which she had thanked me from the bottom of her heart, only to be told by a jeweller that it was just gold-plated. She instantly lost her admiration for Saint-Loup, which she soon gave back to him, however, it having occurred to her that, since he was the Marquis de Saint-Loup, he could not possibly be a Republican and was therefore only pretending, out of self-interest, since with ‘a government like that, he stood to make a bit out of it’. From then on, her coolness towards him and her spite towards me disappeared; and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, ‘He’s just a hypocrite,’ her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought as well of him as before and that she had forgiven him.

  Saint-Loup’s sincerity and disinterest were, pace Françoise, absolute. In fact, it was this complete integrity of his which, in its inability to find entire fulfilment in a self-regarding emotion such as love, and being, unlike myself, free of the impossibility of finding spiritual sustenance anywhere but within the self, made him as capable as I was incapable of friendship.

  Françoise was equally mistaken when she said of Saint-Loup that he ‘just looked as though he didn’t look down on people beneath him’, but that this was really untrue: you only had to see the way he got angry with his coachman. Robert, it was true, had more than once had occasion to speak rather severely to the man; but that, rather than a proof of any consciousness of class-distinction, was a proof of his belief in equality between the classes. ‘But look here,’ he said, when I reproached him for having treated his coachman harshly, ‘why should I affect to speak politely to the fellow? Are we not equals? Is he not as close to me as my uncles and my cousins? You seem to suggest that I should handle him with care, like an inferior!’ And he added disdainfully, ‘You’re speaking like an aristocrat.’

  If anything, Saint-Loup’s class-consciousness, expressed as a bias or a prejudice, went against the aristocracy, to the extent that he was as ready to disbelieve in the moral superiority of a man of fashion as he was ready to believe in that of a man of the people. When I mentioned the Princess of Luxembourg and her encounter with me and my grandmother, he said:

  ‘She’s just a silly old bore, like all her kind. A sort of cousin of mine, actually.’

  Robert rarely went into society, with his prejudice against the people who made it up; and when he did, the attitude of disgust and coldness which he took with him increased all his close relatives’ distress about his liaison with a woman ‘of the theatre’, which they believed was doing him great harm, in particular because it had fostered his tendency towards wilful and systematic disparagement, because it had ‘led him astray’ and ‘addled his mind’, and could be expected to lead him to complete abandonment of his social position. This explained why many of the most frivolous men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain said the most cutting things about Robert’s mistress: ‘Harlots have their job to do, they’re a necessary evil, but she is quite unforgivable! She has done too much harm to someone we are very fond of.’ Not that Robert was the first man ever to fall victim to a loose woman; but the others saw their women as a mere pastime for men of the world, and went on thinking as men of the world in all things, politics included. Robert’s family thought he was ‘embittered’. They did not understand that for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake. Even among the lowest classes, who can often vie in uncouthness with the highest, it is the woman, with her greater sensitivity and delicacy, and her idle mind, who inquires further into certain refinements, aspires to modes of beauty or art which, even though she may not fully grasp them, she still sees as more important than the things, like money or position, which to the eyes of the man would have seemed more desirable. The lover, whether a young club-man like Saint-Loup or a young working-man (nowadays electricians, for example, have a rightful place in the ranks of the true nobility), has so much admiration and respect for his mistress that he will naturally extend these sentiments to what she respects and admires, and this leads to a complete reversal of his scale of values. By virtue of her sex, she is weak and prone to inexplicable nervous troubles which, if he encountered them in a man, or in some other woman, an aunt or a cousin of his for instance, the sturdy youngster would dismiss with a smile. But the woman he loves he cannot bear to see in pain. When a young aristocrat like Saint-Loup takes his mistress to dinner at an exclusive little restaurant, he soon acquires habits, such as making sure he has in his pocket the valerianate which she may need during the evening, or telling the waiter, forcefully and without irony, not to let the doors bang, and not to include damp moss among the table decoration, so as to prevent her from feeling ill, a reaction he himself has never had to it, but which is part of an occult world which she has taught him to see as real, which despite his lack of personal experience now arouses his sympathy and will continue to arouse it in the future at the sight of somebody else suffering in the same way. Because she was fond of animals (her dog, her canaries and her parrots went everywhere with her), Saint-Loup’s mistress had taught him – as the earliest monks in the Middle Ages had taught Christendom – not to inflict suffering on dumb creatures; and he now took great care of all her pets and spoke of people who were cruel to animals as brutes. In addition, an actress, whether real or, like the one who lived with Saint-Loup, so-called, whether she was intelligent or unintelligent (and her intelligence was something I knew nothing about), by making him see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable, had saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity. Although his mistress had helped reduce the importance of society and its relations in his life, she had had the converse effect of making him invest with real nobility and refinement his relations with friends, which, if he had been merely a frequenter of fashionable salons, would have been governed by vanity or self-interest and dominated by grossness. With her woman’s instinct, better able to appreciate in men certain qualities of sensitivity which her lover might otherwise have overlooked or mocked, she had the gift of immediately identifying among his friends the ones whose affection for him was genuine, and also the habit of preferring them to the others. She knew how to make him feel real gratitude to these friends, to make him show it, and pay attention to the things they enjoyed and the things they disliked. Before long, he came to have no need of her reminders and attended to all this himself; and so in her absence, at Balbec, though she had never set eyes on me, though he had perhaps never even mentioned me in the letters he wrote to her, he took care to close the windows of carriages for me, took away flowers which might make me have an attack and, when he was taking his leave of several people at once, made sure to say his farewells in such an order as to be able to have a few final minutes alone with me, marking a difference between them and me, treating me in a way which contrasted with the way he treated other people. The mistress had opened his mind to things invisible; she had brought serious considerations into his life; she had changed his heart for the better. But none of this was apparent to the family, who went on lamenting, ‘That whore will be the death of him! She has already led him into a life of dishonour!’ By this time, to be sure, Robert had derived from her all the benefit she had to give; and now she could do nothing but hurt him, as her feelings for him had turned to disgust and she tortured him. It had started one day when she had thought for the first time that he was stupid and ridiculous, some friends of hers, writers and actors, having assured her this was the case; and she had taken to repeating what they had said of him, with all the passion and absence of moderation that one puts into the expression of opinions and the display of attitudes of which one has just discover
ed the existence. She maintained, like her theatrical friends, that there was now an unbridgeable gulf between her and Saint-Loup, because their worlds were too dissimilar, she being an intellectual and he, whatever he might say, being a born enemy of the intellectual life. This way of seeing herself and Saint-Loup struck her as acute, and she enjoyed looking for proof of it in his most insignificant statements and his slightest actions. Then, once these same friends had convinced her that she was squandering on someone unworthy of her the great promise she had already shown, that her lover was bound to have a bad effect on her, that by living with him she was throwing away her chance to become a great actress, the scorn she had for him was combined with a hatred which could not have been more virulent if he had been trying to infect her with a fatal disease. She saw him as infrequently as possible, while still putting off the moment of a definitive break with him, an eventuality which seemed remote to me. The sacrifices Saint-Loup made for her were so great that, unless she was strikingly lovely (he had always declined to show me a photograph of her, saying, ‘For one thing, she’s no great beauty; and for another, she doesn’t photograph well. They’re just snaps I took myself with my Kodak and they’d give you a misleading impression of her’), I thought she would have trouble finding another man who would be prepared to do so much for her. It did not occur to me that, even for an obscure little tart, the passing fancy of being famous, though one may have no talent to speak of, or just the good opinion of a few people who matter to her, may be (though, of course, that might not be the case for Saint-Loup’s mistress) much more powerful motives than the satisfaction of making money. Although Saint-Loup, without clearly understanding what was in her mind, did not believe she was entirely sincere, either in her unfair criticisms of him or in her promises of undying love, he did now and then suspect she would break with him when it suited her; and so, no doubt acting on his love’s instinct for self-preservation, which may have been more perceptive than he was, and exercising a practical side of his nature which could function in tandem with the most passionate and spontaneous urgings of his heart, he had refused to advance her any sizable capital, while borrowing a huge sum so that she should lack for nothing, but making sure it was paid to her in the form of a daily allowance. If she really did intend to leave him, no doubt she would wait quietly until she had ‘made her pile’, which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as though it might take a very short time, although any time, however short, would afford my new friend a little extra happiness – or unhappiness.