In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (48 page)

"I could manage to be sensible if you went away for a few days, but I
should count the hours."

"But if I were to go away for months…" (at the bare suggestion of
such a thing my heart was wrung) "…for years…for…"

We both remained silent. We dared not look one another in the face.
And yet I was suffering more keenly from her anguish than from my own.
And so I walked across to the window, and said to her, with a studied
clearness of tone but with averted eyes:

"You know what a creature of habit I am. For the first few days after
I have been parted from the people I love best, I am wretched. But
though I go on loving them just as much, I grow used to their absence;
life becomes calm, bearable, pleasant; I could stand being parted from
them for months, for years…"

I was obliged to stop, and looked straight out of the window. My
grandmother went out of the room for something. But next day I began
to talk to her about philosophy, and, speaking in a tone of complete
indifference, but at the same time taking care that my grandmother
should pay attention to what I was saying, I remarked what a curious
thing it was that, according to the latest scientific discoveries, the
materialist position appeared to be crumbling, and the most likely
thing to be, once again, the survival of the soul and reunion in a
life everlasting.

Mme. de Villeparisis gave us warning that presently she would not be
able to see so much of us. A young nephew who was preparing for
Saumur, and was meanwhile stationed in the neighbourhood, at
Doncières, was coming to spend a few weeks' furlough with her, and she
would be devoting most of her time to him. In the course of our drives
together she had boasted to us of his extreme cleverness, and above
all of his goodness of heart; already I was imagining that he would
have an instinctive feeling for me, that I was to be his best friend;
and when, before his arrival, his aunt gave my grandmother to
understand that he had unfortunately fallen into the clutches of an
appalling woman with whom he was quite infatuated and who would never
let him go, since I believed that that sort of love was doomed to end
in mental aberration, crime and suicide, thinking how short the time
was that was set apart for our friendship, already so great in my
heart, although I had not yet set eyes on him, I wept for that
friendship and for the misfortunes that were in store for it, as we
weep for a person whom we love when some one has just told us that he
is seriously ill and that his days are numbered.

One afternoon of scorching heat I was in the dining–room of the hotel,
which they had plunged in semi–darkness, to shield it from the glare,
by drawing the curtains which the sun gilded, while through the gaps
between them I caught flashing blue glimpses of the sea, when along
the central gangway leading inland from the beach to the high road I
saw, tall, slender, his head held proudly erect upon a springing neck,
a young man go past with searching eyes, whose skin was as fair and
whose hair as golden as if they had absorbed all the rays of the sun.
Dressed in a clinging, almost white material such as I could never
have believed that any man would have the audacity to wear, the
thinness of which suggested no less vividly than the coolness of the
dining–room the heat and brightness of the glorious day outside, he
was walking fast. His eyes, from one of which a monocle kept dropping,
were of the colour of the sea. Everyone looked at him with interest as
he passed, knowing that this young Marquis de Saint–Loup–en–Bray was
famed for the smartness of his clothes. All the newspapers had
described the suit in which he had recently acted as second to the
young Duc d'Uzès in a duel. One felt that this so special quality of
his hair, his eyes, his skin, his figure, which would have marked him
out in a crowd like a precious vein of opal, azure–shot and luminous,
embedded in a mass of coarser substance, must correspond to a life
different from that led by other men. So that when, before the
attachment which Mme. de Villeparisis had been deploring, the
prettiest women in society had disputed the possession of him, his
presence, at a watering–place for instance, in the company of the
beauty of the season to whom he was paying court, not only made her
conspicuous, but attracted every eye fully as much to himself.
Because of his 'tone,' of his impertinence befitting a young 'lion,'
and especially of his astonishing good looks, some people even thought
him effeminate, though without attaching any stigma, for everyone knew
how manly he was and that he was a passionate 'womaniser.' This was
Mme. de Villeparisis's nephew of whom she had spoken to us. I was
overcome with joy at the thought that I was going to know him and to
see him for several weeks on end, and confident that he would bestow
on me all his affection. He strode rapidly across the hotel, seeming
to be in pursuit of his monocle, which kept darting away in front of
him like a butterfly. He was coming from the beach, and the sea which
filled the lower half of the glass front of the hall gave him a
background against which he was drawn at full length, as in certain
portraits whose painters attempt, without in anyway falsifying the
most accurate observation of contemporary life, but by choosing for
their sitter appropriate surroundings, a polo ground, golf links, a
racecourse, the bridge of a yacht, to furnish a modern equivalent of
those canvases on which the old masters used to present the human
figure in the foreground of a landscape. A carriage and pair was
waiting for him at the door; and, while his monocle resumed its
gambollings in the air of the sunlit street, with the elegance and
mastery which a great pianist contrives to display in the simplest
piece of execution, where it has not appeared possible that he could
shew himself superior to a performer of the second class, Mme. de
Villeparisis's nephew, taking the reins that were handed him by the
groom, jumped on to the box seat by his side and, while he opened a
letter which the manager of the hotel sent out after him, made his
horses start.

What a disappointment was mine on the days that followed, when, each
time that I met him outside or in the hotel—his head erect,
perpetually balancing the movements of his limbs round the fugitive
and dancing monocle which seemed to be their centre of gravity—I was
forced to admit that he had evidently no desire to make our
acquaintance, and saw that he did not bow to us although he must have
known that we were friends of his aunt. And calling to mind the
friendliness that Mme. de Villeparisis, and before her M. de Norpois,
had shewn me, I thought that perhaps they were only of a bogus
nobility, and that there might be a secret section in the laws that
govern the aristocracy which allowed women, perhaps, and certain
diplomats to discard, in their relations with plebeians, for a reason
which was beyond me, the stiffness which must, on the other hand, be
pitilessly maintained by a young Marquis. My intelligence might have
told me the opposite. But the characteristic feature of the silly
phase through which I was passing—a phase by no means irresponsive,
indeed highly fertile—is that we do not consult our intelligence and
that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us then to
form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged
with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of tranquillity.
There is hardly one of the actions which we performed in that phase
which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to erase
from our memory. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer
possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we
look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the
rest of society, but youth was the only time in which we learned
anything.

This insolence which I surmised in M. de Saint–Loup, and all that it
implied of ingrained severity, received confirmation from his attitude
whenever he passed us, his body as inflexibly erect, his head always
held as high, his gaze as impassive, or rather, I should say, as
implacable, devoid of that vague respect which one has for the rights
of other people, even if they do not know one's aunt, one example of
which was that I did not look in quite the same way at an old lady as
at a gas lamp. These frigid manners were as far removed from the
charming letters which, but a few days since, I had still been
imagining him as writing to tell me of his regard for myself, as is
removed from the enthusiasm of the Chamber and of the populace which
he has been picturing himself as rousing by an imperishable speech,
the humble, dull, obscure position of the dreamer who, after pondering
it thus by himself, for himself, aloud, finds himself, once the
imaginary applause has died away, just the same Tom, Dick or Harry as
before. When Mme. de Villeparisis, doubtless in an attempt to
counteract the bad impression that had been made on us by an exterior
indicative of an arrogant and evil nature, spoke to us again of the
inexhaustible goodness of her great–nephew (he was the son of one of
her nieces, and a little older than myself), I marvelled how the
world, with an utter disregard of truth, ascribes tenderness of heart
to people whose hearts are in reality so hard and dry, provided only
that they behave with common courtesy to the brilliant members of
their own sets. Mme. de Villeparisis herself confirmed, though
indirectly, my diagnosis, which was already a conviction, of the
essential points of her nephew's character one day when I met them
both coming along a path so narrow that there was nothing for it but
to introduce me to him. He seemed not to hear that a person's name was
being repeated to him, not a muscle of his face moved; his eyes, in
which there shone not the faintest gleam of human sympathy, shewed
merely in the insensibility, in the inanity of their gaze an
exaggeration failing which there would have been nothing to
distinguish them from lifeless mirrors. Then fastening on me those
hard eyes, as though he wished to make sure of me before returning my
salute, by an abrupt release which seemed to be due rather to a reflex
action of his muscles than to an exercise of will, keeping between
himself and me the greatest possible interval, he stretched his arm
out to its full extension and, at the end of it, offered me his hand.
I supposed that it must mean, at the very least, a duel when, next
day, he sent me his card. But he spoke to me only of literature,
declared after a long talk that he would like immensely to spend
several hours with me every day. He had not only, in this encounter,
given proof of an ardent zest for the things of the spirit, he had
shewn a regard for myself which was little in keeping with his
greeting of me the day before. After I had seen him repeat the same
process whenever anyone was introduced to him, I realised that it was
simply a social usage peculiar to his branch of the family, to which
his mother, who had seen to it that he should be perfectly brought up,
had moulded his limbs; he went through those motions without thinking,
any more than he thought about his beautiful clothes or hair; they
were a thing devoid of the moral significance which I had at first
ascribed to them, a thing purely acquired like that other habit that
he had of at once demanding an introduction to the family of anyone
whom he knew, which had become so instinctive in him that, seeing me
again the day after our talk, he fell upon me and without asking how I
did begged me to make him known to my grandmother, who was with me,
with the same feverish haste as if the request had been due to some
instinct of self–preservation, like the act of warding off a blow, or
of shutting one's eyes to avoid a stream of boiling water, without
which precautions it would have been dangerous to stay where one was a
moment longer.

The first rites of exorcism once performed, as a wicked fairy discards
her outer form and endures all the most enchanting graces, I saw this
disdainful creature become the most friendly, the most considerate
young man that I had ever met. "Good," I said to myself, "I've been
mistaken about him once already; I was taken in by a mirage; but I
have corrected the first only to fall into a second, for he must be a
great gentleman who has grown sick of his nobility and is trying to
hide it." As a matter of fact it was not long before all the exquisite
breeding, all the friendliness of Saint–Loup were indeed to let me see
another creature but one very different from what I had suspected.

This young man who had the air of a scornful, sporting aristocrat had
in fact no respect, no interest save for and in the things of the
spirit, and especially those modern manifestations of literature and
art which seemed so ridiculous to his aunt; he was imbued, moreover,
with what she called 'Socialistic spoutings,' was filled with the most
profound contempt for his caste and spent long hours in the study of
Nietzsche and Proudhon. He was one of those intellectuals, quick to
admire what is good, who shut themselves up in a book, and are
interested only in pure thought. Indeed in Saint–Loup the expression
of this highly abstract tendency, which removed him so far from my
customary preoccupations, while it seemed to me touching, also annoyed
me not a little. I may say that when I realised properly who had been
his father, on days when I had been reading memoirs rich in anecdotes
of that famous Comte de Marsantes, in whom were embodied the special
graces of a generation already remote, the mind full of
speculation—anxious to obtain fuller details of the life that M. de
Marsantes had led, it used to infuriate me that Robert de Saint–Loup,
instead of being content to be the son of his father, instead of being
able to guide me through the old–fashioned romance of what had been
that father's existence, had trained himself to enjoy Nietzsche and
Proudhon. His father would not have shared my regret. He had been
himself a man of brains, who had transcended the narrow confines of
his life as a man of the world. He had hardly had time to know his
son, but had hoped that his son would prove a better man than himself.
And I really believe that, unlike the rest of the family, he would
have admired his son, would have rejoiced at his abandoning what had
been his own small diversions for austere meditations, and without
saying a word, in his modesty as a great gentleman endowed with
brains, he would have read in secret his son's favourite authors in
order to appreciate how far Robert was superior to himself.