In this M. de Charlus was right. I have been told that it was fascinating to see the moments of silence and hesitation, so exactly like those that are necessary not merely to the pronouncement but to the formation of a personal opinion, which Mme de Forcheville used to have before declaring, as though it were a heartfelt sentiment: “No, I do not think they will take Warsaw;” “I have the impression that it cannot last another winter;” “the worst thing that could happen is a patched-up peace;” “what alarms me, if you want to know, is the Chamber;” “yes, I believe all the same that we shall succeed in breaking through.” And to make these statements Odette assumed a simpering air which became even more exaggerated when she said: “I don’t say the German armies do not fight well, but they lack what is called pluck.” In pronouncing the word “pluck” (and it was the same when she merely said “fighting spirit”) she executed with her hand the sculptural gesture, and with her eyes the wink, of an art student employing a technical term of the studios. Her language now, however, even more than in the past bore witness to her admiration for the English, whom she was no longer obliged to call, as formerly, merely “our neighbours across the Channel,” or at most “our friends the English”: they were “our loyal allies.” Needless to say she never failed, relevant or not, to quote the expression fair play (and to point out that in the eyes of the English the Germans were unfair players) and also: “the important thing is to win the war, as our brave allies say.” She even had an unfortunate habit of associating the name of her son-in-law with the subject of English soldiers and of referring to the pleasure which he derived from living cheek by jowl with Australians and Scotsmen, New Zealanders and Canadians. “My son-in-law Saint-Loup has learned the slang of all the brave tommies, he can make himself understood by the ones from the most distant dominions—and I don’t mean just the general in command of the base, he fraternises with the humblest private.”
May this parenthesis on Mme de Forcheville serve as my excuse, while I am strolling along the boulevards side by side with M. de Charlus, for embarking upon another, of greater length but useful as an illustration of this era, on the relations of Mme Verdurin with Brichot. The truth is that if, as we have seen, poor Brichot was judged without indulgence by M. de Charlus (because the latter was both extremely intelligent and more or less unconsciously pro-German), he was treated still worse by the Verdurins. They no doubt were chauvinistic, and this ought to have made them appreciate Brichot’s articles, which were in any case quite as good as many pieces of writing which delighted Mme Verdurin. But first, the reader may remember that already at La Raspelière Brichot had become for the Verdurins, instead of the great man that he had once been in their eyes, if not actually a scapegoat like Saniette at any rate a target for their scarcely disguised ridicule. Still, at that period he remained a faithful of the faithful and thus was entitled to a share in the advantages tacitly conferred by the statutes upon all the founding or associate members of the little group. But while, under cover of the war perhaps, or through the rapid crystallisation of a long-delayed social prestige, of which in fact all the necessary elements had for a long time existed in it, invisible and in a state of saturation, the drawing-room of the Verdurins had been opening itself to a new world and the faithful, at first the baits to attract this new world, had ended by being invited less and less themselves, at the same time a parallel phenomenon had been taking place in the life of Brichot. In spite of the Sorbonne, in spite of the Institut, before the war he had been a celebrity only inside the Verdurin drawing-room. But when he began to write, almost every day, articles adorned with that second-rate brilliance which we have so often seen him scatter open-handed in the presence of the faithful, yet enriched too with a perfectly genuine learning which, like a true man of the Sorbonne, he made no attempt to conceal however he might clothe it in agreeable forms, the “great world” was literally dazzled. And for once it had bestowed its favour upon someone who was far from being a nonentity, upon a man who could hold the attention of an audience by the fertility of his intelligence and the resources of his memory. So that now, while three duchesses spent the evening with Mme Verdurin, three other duchesses contested the honour of having the great man at their dinner table, and one of these invitations the great man usually accepted, feeling all the freer to do this since Mme Verdurin, exasperated by the success of his articles with the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was careful never to ask him to her house when some smart woman was to be there whom he did not yet know and who would lose no time in luring him away. Thus journalism (into which he was really doing no more than pour belatedly, with applause and in return for a magnificent financial reward, what all his life he had squandered incognito and for nothing in the Verdurin drawing-room—for his articles, since he had so much knowledge and wrote with such ease, cost him no more trouble than his conversation) might have led, indeed at one moment seemed to be leading Brichot to an indefeasible glory, had it not been for Mme Verdurin. Admittedly, these articles were far from being as remarkable as fashionable people supposed. The vulgarity of the man was apparent in every line beneath the pedantry of the scholar. And side by side with images which had absolutely no meaning (“the Germans will no longer be able to look Beethoven’s statue in the face; Schiller must have shuddered in his tomb; the ink which had guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium was scarcely dry; Lenin speaks, but his words are scattered on the winds of the steppe”) there were trivialities such as: “twenty thousand prisoners, that is indeed a figure; our command will know how to keep a weather eye open; we mean to win, that sums it up in a nutshell.” Yet mixed with all this, how much knowledge, how much intelligence, what just reasoning! Mme Verdurin, however, never began an article by Brichot without first dwelling upon the enjoyable thought that she was going to find ridiculous things in it, and she read it with the most sustained attention in order to be certain of not letting them escape her. And unfortunately it could not be denied that ridiculous things there were. But the faithful did not even wait until they had found them. The most felicitous quotation from an author who was really very little known, at least in the work to which Brichot referred, was seized upon as proof of the most insufferable pedantry, and Mme Verdurin could hardly wait for the hour of dinner when she would unloose the torrential laughter of her guests. “Well, what do you say to tonight’s Brichot? I thought of you when I read the quotation from Cuvier. I honestly think the man is going mad.” “I haven’t read it yet,” Cottard would say. “What, you haven’t read it yet? But you don’t know what delights you are missing. I promise you you will die of laughter.” And pleased at heart that someone had not yet read the latest Brichot, since this meant that she herself could call attention to the ludicrous things in it, Mme Verdurin would tell the butler to bring Le Temps and would herself read the article aloud, lingering with emphasis on the most simple phrases. After dinner, for the whole of the evening, the anti-Brichot campaign would continue, but with hypocritical reservations. “I won’t say it too loud because I am afraid that over there,” she would say, indicating Comtesse Molé, “there is a good deal of admiration for this stuff. Fashionable people are more foolish than is generally supposed.” In saying this she did her best, by speaking just loud enough, to let Mme Molé hear that she was being talked about, and at the same time to convey to her, by occasionally lowering her voice, that she did not want her to hear what she was saying. Mme Molé was cowardly enough to disown Brichot, whom in fact she thought the equal of Michelet. She said that of course Mme Verdurin was right, and so as to end by nevertheless saying something which seemed to her incontestably true, added: “What one must allow him, is that it is well written.” “You call that well written?” said Mme Verdurin. “Personally, I consider that it might have been written by a pig”—an audacity which always made her fashionable guests laugh, particularly as Mme Verdurin, as though she herself were frightened by the word “pig,” uttered it in a whisper, holding her hand to her lips. Her rage against Brichot was still further increased
by the naïve fashion in which he displayed his pleasure at his success, in spite of the fits of ill-humour provoked in him by the censorship every time that it—as he expressed it, for he liked to employ new words in order to show that he was not too donnish—“blue-pencilled” part of his article. In his presence, however, Mme Verdurin did not reveal too clearly, save by a certain grumpiness which might have been a warning to a more perspicacious man, the poor opinion which she had of the writings of “Cho-chotte.” Only once did she criticise him, for using the word “I” too often. And it was true that he was in the habit of using it continually, firstly because, with his professorial habits, he was constantly employing phrases like “I grant that” and even (in the sense of “I am willing to admit that”) “I am willing that,” as for instance: “I am willing that the vast development of the fronts should necessitate, etc.,” but principally because, as a militant antiDreyfusard of the old days who had had suspicions of German preparations long before the war, he had frequently had occasion to write: “Since 1897 I have been denouncing;” “I pointed out in 1901;” “In my little pamphlet, of the greatest rarity today (habent sua fata libelli) I drew attention,” and the habit, once formed, had remained with him. He turned crimson at Mme Verdurin’s remark, which had been made with acerbity. “You are right, Madame. A man who had no more love for the Jesuits than M. Combes—although he never had the honour of a preface from our sweet master of delicious scepticism, Anatole France, who was, if I am not mistaken, my adversary … before the Flood—observed that the first person singular is always odious.”6 From that moment Brichot replaced “I” by “one,” but one did not prevent the reader from seeing that the author was speaking of himself, indeed it permitted him to speak of himself more frequently than ever, to comment on the most insignificant of his own phrases, to build a whole article round a single negative statement, always behind the protective screen of one. If for example Brichot had said, in another article perhaps, that the German armies had lost some of their strength, he would begin thus: “One does not camouflage the truth here. One has said that the German armies have lost some of their strength. One has not said that they do not still possess great strength. Still less will one write that the ground gained, if it is not, etc.” In short, simply by enunciating all that he would not say and by recalling all that he had said some years ago and all that Clausewitz, Jomini, Ovid, Apollonius of Tyana and others had said in the more recent or more remote past, Brichot could easily have put together the material for a solid volume. It is to be regretted that he did not publish one, for these erudite articles are now difficult to come by. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, admonished by Mme Verdurin, began by laughing at Brichot in her drawing-room, but continued, after departing from the little clan, to admire him. Then after a while it became the fashion to scoff at him as it had previously been to admire him, and even those ladies who continued to find him dazzling in secret while they were actually reading his articles, checked themselves and mocked as soon as they were no longer alone, so as not to appear less clever than their friends. Never was Brichot so much discussed in the little clan as at this period, but in a spirit of derision. The criterion for judging the intelligence of a newcomer was simply his opinion of Brichot’s articles, and if the first time he gave the wrong reply no pains were spared to instruct him how it was that you were recognised to be foolish or clever.
“Well, my poor friend,” M. de Charlus went on, “all this is very dreadful, and tedious articles are not the only things we have to deplore. We hear talk of vandalism, of the destruction of statues. But the destruction of so many marvellous young men, who while they lived were incomparable polychrome statues, is that not also vandalism? Will not a town which has lost all its beautiful men be like a town of which all the sculpture has been smashed to pieces? What pleasure can I get from dining in a restaurant where I am served by moth-eaten old buffoons who look like Father Didon, if not by hags in mob-caps who make me think I have strayed into one of Duval’s soup-kitchens? Yes, it’s as bad as that, my boy, and I think I have the right to say these things, because beauty is still beauty when it exists in a living material. How delightful to be served by rachitic creatures with spectacles on their noses and the reason for their exemption from military service written all over their faces! In these changed times, if you wish to rest your eyes on someone nice-looking in a restaurant, you must look not among the waiters who are serving you but among the customers who are eating and drinking. And then in the old days one could always see a waiter a second time, although they frequently changed, but with some English lieutenant who has perhaps never been to the restaurant before and may well be killed tomorrow, what hope is there of finding out who he is and when he will return? When Augustus of Poland, as we are told by the charming Morand, the delightful author of Clarisse, exchanged one of his regiments for a collection of Chinese porcelain, it is my opinion that he made a bad bargain. To think that all those huge footmen six foot tall and more, who used to adorn the monumental staircases of the lovely hostesses whose houses we visited, have one and all been killed, and that most of them joined up because it was dinned into them that the war would last two months! Ah! they did not know as I do the strength of Germany, the courage of the Prussian race,” he said, forgetting himself. And then, realising that he had revealed too much of his point of view, he went on: “It is not so much Germany that I fear for France as the war itself. People away from the front imagine that the war is no more than a gigantic boxing match, of which, thanks to the newspapers, they are spectators at a comfortable distance. But it is nothing of the sort. It is an illness which, when it seems to have been defeated at one point, returns at another. Today Noyon will be recovered from the enemy, tomorrow there will be no bread or chocolate, the next day the man who thought he was safe and was prepared, if necessary, to face death on the battlefield because he had not imagined it, will be panic-stricken to read in the newspapers that his class has been called up. As for monuments, it is not so much the quality as the quantity of the destruction that appals me, I am less horrified at the disappearance of a unique monument like Rheims than at that of all the living entities which once made the smallest village in France instructive and charming.”
My mind turned immediately to Combray, but in the past I had thought that I would lower myself in the eyes of Mme de Guermantes by confessing to the humble position which my family occupied there. I wondered now whether the facts had not been revealed to the Guermantes and to M. de Charlus, either by Legrandin or by Swann or Saint-Loup or Morel, and I said nothing, even this silence being less painful to me than a retrospective explanation. I only hoped that M. de Charlus would not mention Combray.
“I do not wish to speak ill of the Americans, Monsieur,” he went on, “it seems that they are inexhaustibly generous, and as there has been nobody to conduct the orchestra in this war, as each performer has joined in a long time after the one before and the Americans only began when we had almost finished, they may possibly have an ardour which in us four years of war have succeeded in damping. Even before the war they were fond of our country and our art, they paid high prices for our masterpieces. They have taken many home with them. But this uprooted art, as M. Barres would call it, is precisely the opposite of what once formed the delicious charm of France. The château explained the church, which itself, because it had been a place of pilgrimage, explained the chanson de geste. I need not dwell upon the illustriousness of my family and my connexions, which in any case is not the subject that concerns us. But recently I had occasion, to settle a matter of business, and in spite of a certain coolness that exists between the young couple and myself, to visit my niece Saint-Loup who lives at Combray. Combray was simply a small town like hundreds of others. But the ancestors of my family were portrayed as donors in some of the windows in the church, and in others our armorial bearings were depicted. We had our chapel there, and our tombs. And now this church has been destroyed by the French and the English because it served as
an observation-post to the Germans. All that mixture of art and still-living history that was France is being destroyed, and we have not seen the end of the process yet. Of course I am not so absurd as to compare, for family reasons, the destruction of the church of Combray with that of the cathedral of Rheims, that miracle of a Gothic cathedral which seemed, somehow naturally, to have rediscovered the purity of antique sculpture, or of the cathedral of Amiens. I do not know whether the raised arm of St Firmin is still intact today or whether it has been broken. If so, the loftiest affirmation of faith and energy ever made has disappeared from this world.”
“You mean its symbol, Monsieur,” I interrupted. “And I adore certain symbols no less than you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality that it symbolises. Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach. The raised arm of St Firmin said, with an almost military gesture of command: ‘Let us be broken, if honour requires.’ Do not sacrifice men to stones whose beauty comes precisely from their having for a moment given fixed form to human truths.”
Time Regained & a Guide to Proust Page 14
