Often, when M. de Cambremer hailed me from the station, I had just been taking advantage of the darkness with Albertine, not without some difficulty as she had struggled a little, fearing that it was not dark enough. “You know, I’m sure Cottard saw us; anyhow, if he didn’t, he must have noticed your breathless voice, just when they were talking about your other kind of breathlessness,” Albertine said to me when we arrived at Douville station where we took the little train home. But if this return journey, like the outward one, by giving me a certain impression of poetry, awakened in me the desire to travel, to lead a new life, and so made me want to abandon any intention of marrying Albertine, and even to break off our relations for good, it also, by the very fact of their contradictory nature, made this breach easier. For, on the homeward journey just as much as on the other, at every station we were joined in the train or greeted from the platform by people whom we knew; the furtive pleasures of the imagination were overshadowed by those other, continual pleasures of sociability which are so soothing, so soporific. Already, before the stations themselves, their names (which had so fired my imagination ever since the day I had first heard them, that first evening when I had travelled down to Balbec with my grandmother) had become humanised, had lost their strangeness since the evening when Brichot, at Albertine’s request, had given us a more complete account of their etymology. I had been charmed by the “flower” that ended certain names, such as Fiquefleur, Honfleur, Flers, Barfleur, Harfleur, etc., and amused by the “beef” that comes at the end of Bricqueboeuf. But the flower vanished, and also the beef, when Brichot (and this he had told me on the first day in the train) informed us that fleur means a harbour (like fiord), and that boeuf, in Norman budh, means a hut. As he cited a number of examples, what had appeared to me a particular instance became general: Bricqueboeuf took its place by the side of Elbeuf, and even in a name that was at first sight as individual as the place itself, like the name Pennedepie, in which peculiarities too impenetrable for reason to elucidate seemed to me to have been blended from time immemorial in a word as coarse, flavoursome and hard as a certain Norman cheese, I was disappointed to find the Gallic pen which means mountain and is as recognisable in Penmarch as in the Apennines. Since, at each halt of the train, I felt that we should have friendly hands to shake if not visitors to receive in our carriage, I said to Albertine: “Hurry up and ask Brichot about the names you want to know. You mentioned to me Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse.”
“Yes, I love that orgueil, it’s a proud village,” said Albertine.
“You would find it prouder still,” Brichot replied, “if instead of its French or even its low Latin form, as we find it in the cartulary of the Bishop of Bayeux, Marcovilla superba, you were to take the older form, more akin to the Norman, Marculphivilla superba, the village, the domain of Merculph. In almost all these names which end in ville, you might see still marshalled upon this coast the ghosts of the rude Norman invaders. At Hermenonville, you had, standing at the carriage door, only our excellent Doctor, who, obviously, has nothing of the Norse chieftain about him. But, by shutting your eyes, you might have seen the illustrious Herimund (Herimundivilla). Although, I can never understand why, people choose these roads, between Loigny and Balbec-Plage, rather than the very picturesque roads that lead from Loigny to old Balbec, Mme Verdurin has perhaps taken you out that way in her carriage. If so, you have seen Incarville, or the village of Wiscar; and Tourville, before you come to Mme Verdurin’s, is the village of Turold. Moreover, there were not only the Normans. It seems that the Germans (Alemanni) came as far as here: Aumenancourt, Alemanicurtis—don’t let us speak of it to that young officer I see there; he would be capable of refusing to visit his cousins there any more. There were also Saxons, as is proved by the springs of Sissonne (the goal of one of Mme Verdurin’s favourite excursions, and rightly so), just as in England you have Middlesex, Wessex. And what is inexplicable, it seems that the Goths, gueux as they were called, came as far as this, and even the Moors, for Mortagne comes from Mauretania. Their traces still remain at Gourville—Gothorumvilla. Some vestige of the Latins subsists also, for instance Lagny (Latiniacum).”
“I should like to know the explanation of Thorpehomme,” said M. de Charlus. “I understand homme,” he added, at which the sculptor and Cottard exchanged meaning glances. “But Thorpe?”
“Homme does not in the least mean what you are naturally led to suppose, Baron,” replied Brichot, glancing mischievously at Cottard and the sculptor. “Homme has nothing to do, in this instance, with the sex to which I am not indebted for my mother. Homme is holm, which means a small island, etc. As for Thorpe, or village, we find that in any number of words with which I have already bored our young friend. Thus in Thorpehomme there is not the name of a Norman chief, but words of the Norman language. You see how the whole of this country has been Germanised.”
“I think that is an exaggeration,” said M. de Charlus. “Yesterday I was at Orgeville.”
“This time I give you back the man I took from you in Thorpehomme, Baron. Without wishing to be pedantic, a charter of Robert I gives us, for Orgeville, Otgerivilla, the domain of Otger. All these names are those of ancient lords. Octeville-la-Venelle is a corruption of l’Avenel. The Avenels were a family of repute in the Middle Ages. Bourguenolles, where Mme Verdurin took us the other day, used to be written Bourg de Môles, for that village belonged in the eleventh century to Baudoin de Môles, as also did La Chaise-Baudoin; but here we are at Doncières.”
“Heavens, look at all these subalterns trying to get in,” said M. de Charlus with feigned alarm. “I’m thinking of you, for it doesn’t affect me, I’m getting out here.”
“You hear, Doctor?” said Brichot. “The Baron is afraid of officers passing over his body. And yet it’s quite appropriate for them to be here in strength, for Doncières is precisely the same as Saint-Cyr, Dominus Cyriacus. There are plenty of names of towns in which Sanctus and Sancta are replaced by Dominus and Domina. Besides, this peaceful military town sometimes has a spurious look of Saint-Cyr, of Versailles, and even of Fontainebleau.”
During these homeward journeys (as on the outward ones) I used to tell Albertine to put on her things, for I knew very well that at Aumenancourt, Doncières, Epreville, Saint-Vast we should be receiving brief visits from friends. Nor did I find these disagreeable, whether it might be, at Hermenonville (the domain of Herimund) a visit from M. de Chevregny, seizing the opportunity, when he had come down to meet other guests, of asking me to come over to lunch next day at Beausoleil, or (at Doncières) the sudden irruption of one of Saint-Loup’s charming friends, sent by him (if he himself was not free) to convey to me an invitation from Captain de Borodino, from the officers’ mess at the Coq-Hardi, or from the sergeants’ at the Faisan Doré. Saint-Loup often came in person, and during the whole of the time he was with us I contrived, without letting anyone notice, to keep Albertine a prisoner under my unnecessarily vigilant eye. On one occasion however my watch was interrupted. During a protracted stop, Bloch, after greeting us, was making off at once to join his father—who, having just succeeded to his uncle’s fortune, and having leased a country house by the name of La Commanderie, thought it befitting a country gentleman always to go about in a post-chaise, with postilions in livery—and asked me to accompany him to the carriage. “But make haste, for these quadrupeds are impatient. Come, O beloved of the gods, thou wilt give pleasure to my father.” But I could not bear to leave Albertine in the train with Saint-Loup; they might, while my back was turned, get into conversation, go into another compartment, smile at one another, touch one another; my eyes, glued to Albertine, could not detach themselves from her so long as Saint-Loup was there. Now I could see quite well that Bloch, who had asked me as a favour to go and pay my respects to his father, in the first place thought it very ungracious of me to refuse when there was nothing to prevent me from doing so, the porters having told us that the train would remain for at least a quarter of an hour in the station, and almost
all the passengers, without whom it would not leave, having alighted; and, what was more, had not the least doubt that it was because quite clearly—my conduct on this occasion furnished him with a decisive proof of it—I was a snob. For he was not unaware of the names of the people in whose company I was. In fact M. de Charlus had said to me some time before this, without remembering or caring that the introduction had been made long ago: “But you must introduce your friend to me; your behaviour shows a lack of respect for myself,” and had talked to Bloch, who had seemed to please him immensely, so much so that he had gratified him with an: “I hope to meet you again.” “Then it’s final—you won’t walk a hundred yards to say how-d’ye-do to my father, who would be so pleased?” Bloch said to me. I was sorry to appear to be lacking in comradeship, and even more so for the reason for which Bloch supposed that I was lacking in it, and to feel that he imagined that I was not the same towards my middle-class friends when I was with people of “birth.” From that day he ceased to show the same friendliness towards me, and, what pained me more, had no longer the same regard for my character. But, in order to disabuse him as to the motive which made me remain in the carriage, I should have had to tell him something—to wit, that I was jealous of Albertine—which would have distressed me even more than letting him suppose that I was stupidly worldly. So it is that in theory we find that we ought always to explain ourselves frankly, to avoid misunderstandings. But very often life arranges these in such a way that, in order to dispel them, in the rare circumstances in which it might be possible to do so, we must reveal either—which was not the case here—something that would annoy our friend even more than the imaginary wrong that he imputes to us, or a secret the disclosure of which—and this was my predicament—appears to us even worse than the misunderstanding. And moreover, even without my explaining to Bloch, since I could not, my reason for not accompanying him, if I had begged him not to be offended, I should only have increased his umbrage by showing him that I had observed it. There was nothing to be done but to bow before the decree of fate which had willed that Albertine’s presence should prevent me from accompanying him, and that he should suppose that it was on the contrary the presence of important people—the only effect of which, had they been a hundred times more important, would have been to make me devote my attention exclusively to Bloch and reserve all my civility for him. In this way, accidentally and absurdly, a minor incident (in this case the juxtaposition of Albertine and Saint-Loup) has only to be interposed between two destinies whose lines have been converging towards one another, for them to deviate, stretch further and further apart, and never converge again. And there are friendships more precious than Bloch’s for myself which have been destroyed without the involuntary author of the offence having any opportunity to explain to the offended party what would no doubt have healed the injury to his self-esteem and called back his fugitive affection.
Friendships more precious than Bloch’s would not, for that matter, be saying very much. He had all the faults that I most disliked, and it happened by chance that my affection for Albertine made them altogether intolerable. Thus in that brief moment in which I was talking to him while keeping my eye on Robert, Bloch told me that he had been to lunch at Mme Bontemps’s and that everybody had spoken about me in the most glowing terms until the “decline of Helios.” “Good,” thought I, “since Mme Bontemps regards Bloch as a genius, the enthusiastic approval that he will have expressed for me will do more than anything that the others can have said, it will get back to Albertine. Any day now she is bound to learn—I’m surprised that her aunt has not repeated it to her already—that I’m a ‘superior person.’ ” “Yes,” Bloch went on, “everybody sang your praises. I alone preserved a silence as profound as though, in place of the repast (poor, as it happened) that was set before us, I had absorbed poppies, dear to the blessed brother of Thanatos and Lethe, the divine Hypnos, who enwraps in pleasant bonds the body and the tongue. It is not that I admire you less than the band of ravening dogs with whom I had been bidden to feed. But I admire you because I understand you, and they admire you without understanding you. To tell the truth, I admire you too much to speak of you thus in public. It would have seemed to me a profanation to praise aloud what I carry in the profoundest depths of my heart. In vain did they question me about you, a sacred Pudor, daughter of Kronion, kept me mute.”
I did not have the bad taste to appear annoyed, but this Pudor seemed to me akin—far more than to Kronion—to the reticence that prevents a critic who admires you from speaking of you because the secret temple in which you sit enthroned would be invaded by the mob of ignorant readers and journalists; to the reticence of the statesman who does not recommend you for a decoration because you would be lost in a crowd of people who are not your equals; to the reticence of the Academician who refrains from voting for you in order to spare you the shame of being the colleague of X—— who is devoid of talent; to the reticence, finally, more respectable and at the same time more criminal, of the sons who implore us not to write about their dead father who abounded in merit, in order to ensure silence and repose, to prevent us from maintaining the stir of life and the sound of glory round the deceased, who himself would prefer the echo of his name upon the lips of men to all the wreaths upon his tomb, however piously borne.
If Bloch, while grieving me by his inability to understand the reason that prevented me from going to greet his father, had exasperated me by confessing that he had depreciated me at Mme Bontemps’s (I now understood why Albertine had never made any allusion to this lunch-party and remained silent when I spoke to her of Bloch’s affection for myself), my young Jewish friend had produced upon M. de Charlus an impression that was quite the opposite of annoyance.
Of course, Bloch now believed not only that I was incapable of depriving myself for a second of the company of smart people, but that, jealous of the advances that they might make to him (M. de Charlus, for instance), I was trying to put a spoke in his wheel and to prevent him from making friends with them; but for his part the Baron regretted that he had not seen more of my friend. As was his habit, he took care not to betray this feeling. He began by asking me various questions about Bloch, but in so casual a tone, with an interest that seemed so feigned, that it was as though he was not listening to the answers. With an air of detachment, in a chanting voice that expressed inattention more than indifference, and as though simply out of politeness to myself, M. de Charlus asked: “He looks intelligent, he said he wrote, has he any talent?” I told him that it had been very kind of him to say that he hoped to see Bloch again. The Baron gave not the slightest sign of having heard my remark, and as I repeated it four times without eliciting a reply, I began to wonder whether I had been the victim of an acoustic mirage when I thought I heard M. de Charlus utter those words. “He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus. “No, they’ve taken a place near here, La Commanderie.” Having learned what he wished to know, M. de Charlus pretended to despise Bloch. “How appalling,” he exclaimed, his voice resuming all its clarion vigour. “All the places or properties called La Commanderie were built or owned by the Knights of the Order of Malta (of whom I am one), as the places called Temple or Cavalerie were by the Templars. That I should live at La Commanderie would be the most natural thing in the world. But a Jew! However, I am not surprised; it comes from a curious instinct for sacrilege, peculiar to that race. As soon as a Jew has enough money to buy a place in the country he always chooses one that is called Priory, Abbey, Minster, Chantry. I had some business once with a Jewish official, and guess where he lived: at Pont-l’Evêque. When he fell into disfavour, he had himself transferred to Brittany, to Pont-l’Abbé. When they perform in Holy Week those indecent spectacles that are called ‘the Passion,’ half the audie
nce are Jews, exulting in the thought that they are about to hang Christ a second time on the Cross, at least in effigy. At one of the Lamoureux concerts, I had a wealthy Jewish banker sitting next to me. They played the Childhood of Christ by Berlioz, and he was thoroughly dismayed. But he soon recovered his habitually blissful expression when he heard the Good Friday music. So your friend lives at the Commanderie, the wretch! What sadism! You must show me the way to it,” he added, resuming his air of indifference, “so that I may go there one day and see how our former domains endure such a profanation. It is unfortunate, for he has good manners, and he seems cultivated. The next thing I shall hear will be that his address in Paris is Rue du Temple!”
M. de Charlus gave the impression, by these words, that he was seeking merely to find a fresh example in support of his theory; but in reality he was asking me a question with a dual purpose, the principal one being to find out Bloch’s address.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV Page 62
