In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

To

K. S. S.

THAT _men in armour may be born
With serpents' teeth the field is sown;
Rains mould, winds bend, suns gild the corn
Too quickly ripe, too early mown.

I scan the quivering heads, behold
The features, catch the whispered breath
Of friends long garnered in the cold
Unopening granaries of death,

Whose names in solemn cadence ring
Across my slow oblivious page.
Their friendship was a finer thing
Than fame, or wealth, or honoured age,

And—while you live and I—shall last
Its tale of seasons with us yet
Who cherish, in the undying past,
The men we never can forget_.

C. K. S. M.
Bad Kissingen,
July 31, 1923.

MY mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to
dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor
Cottard was away from home, and that she herself had quite ceased to
see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to
entertain the old Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a
guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out
of place at a dinner–table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his
habit of crying aloud from the housetops the name of everyone that he
knew, however slightly, was an impossible vulgarian whom the Marquis
de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as—to use his own epithet—a
'pestilent' fellow. Now, this attitude on my father's part may be felt
to require a few words of explanation, inasmuch as some of us, no
doubt, remember a Cottard of distinct mediocrity and a Swann by whom
modesty and discretion, in all his social relations, were carried to
the utmost refinement of delicacy. But in his case, what had happened
was that, to the original 'young Swann' and also to the Swann of the
Jockey Club, our old friend had added a fresh personality (which was
not to be his last), that of Odette's husband. Adapting to the humble
ambitions of that lady the instinct, the desire, the industry which he
had always had, he had laboriously constructed for himself, a long way
beneath the old, a new position more appropriate to the companion who
was to share it with him. In this he shewed himself another man. Since
(while he continued to go, by himself, to the houses of his own
friends, on whom he did not care to inflict Odette unless they had
expressly asked that she should be introduced to them) it was a new
life that he had begun to lead, in common with his wife, among a new
set of people, it was quite intelligible that, in order to estimate
the importance of these new friends and thereby the pleasure, the
self–esteem that were to be derived from entertaining them, he should
have made use, as a standard of comparison, not of the brilliant
society in which he himself had moved before his marriage but of the
earlier environment of Odette. And yet, even when one knew that it was
with unfashionable officials and their faded wives, the wallflowers of
ministerial ball–rooms, that he was now anxious to associate, it was
still astonishing to hear him, who in the old days, and even still,
would so gracefully refrain from mentioning an invitation to
Twickenham or to Marlborough House, proclaim with quite unnecessary
emphasis that the wife of some Assistant Under–Secretary for Something
had returned Mme. Swann's call. It will perhaps be objected here that
what this really implied was that the simplicity of the fashionable
Swann had been nothing more than a supreme refinement of vanity, and
that, like certain other Israelites, my parents' old friend had
contrived to illustrate in turn all the stages through which his race
had passed, from the crudest and coarsest form of snobbishness up to
the highest pitch of good manners. But the chief reason—and one which
is applicable to humanity as a whole—was that our virtues themselves
are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent
control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in
our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our
duty to practise them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform
some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without
our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those
very same virtues into play. Swann, in his intense consciousness of
his new social surroundings, and in the pride with which he referred
to them, was like those great artists—modest or generous by
nature—who, if at the end of their career they take to cooking or to
gardening, display a childlike gratification at the compliments that
are paid to their dishes or their borders, and will not listen to any
of the criticism which they heard unmoved when it was applied to their
real achievements; or who, after giving away a canvas, cannot conceal
their annoyance if they lose a couple of francs at dominoes.

As for Professor Cottard, we shall meet him again and can study him at
our leisure, much later in the course of our story, with the
'Mistress,' Mme. Verdurin, in her country house La Raspelière. For the
present, the following observations must suffice; first of all, in the
case of Swann the alteration might indeed be surprising, since it had
been accomplished and yet was not suspected by me when I used to see
Gilberte's father in the Champs–Elysées, where, moreover, as he never
spoke to me, he could not very well have made any display of his
political relations. It is true that, if he had done so, I might not
at once have discerned his vanity, for the idea that one has long held
of a person is apt to stop one's eyes and ears; my mother, for three
whole years, had no more noticed the salve with which one of her
nieces used to paint her lips than if it had been wholly and invisibly
dissolved in some clear liquid; until one day a streak too much, or
possibly something else, brought about the phenomenon known as
super–saturation; all the paint that had hitherto passed unperceived
was now crystallised, and my mother, in the face of this sudden riot
of colour, declared, in the best Combray manner, that it was a perfect
scandal, and almost severed relations with her niece. With Cottard, on
the contrary, the epoch in which we have seen him assisting at the
first introduction of Swann to the Verdurins was now buried in the
past; whereas honours, offices and titles come with the passage of
years; moreover, a man may be illiterate, and make stupid puns, and
yet have a special gift, which no amount of general culture can
replace—such as the gift of a great strategist or physician. And so
it was not merely as an obscure practitioner, who had attained in
course of time to European celebrity, that the rest of his profession
regarded Cottard. The most intelligent of the younger doctors used to
assert—for a year or two, that is to say, for fashions, being
themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change
also—that if they themselves ever fell ill Cottard was the only one
of the leading men to whom they would entrust their lives. No doubt
they preferred, socially, to meet certain others who were better read,
more artistic, with whom they could discuss Nietzsche and Wagner. When
there was a musical party at Mme. Cottard's, on the evenings when she
entertained—in the hope that it might one day make him Dean of the
Faculty—the colleagues and pupils of her husband, he, instead of
listening, preferred to play cards in another room. Yet everybody
praised the quickness, the penetration, the unerring confidence with
which, at a glance, he could diagnose disease. Thirdly, in
considering the general impression which Professor Cottard must have
made on a man like my father, we must bear in mind that the character
which a man exhibits in the latter half of his life is not always,
even if it is often his original character developed or withered,
attenuated or enlarged; it is sometimes the exact opposite, like a
garment that has been turned. Except from the Verdurins, who were
infatuated with him, Cottard's hesitating manner, his excessive
timidity and affability had, in his young days, called down upon him
endless taunts and sneers. What charitable friend counselled that
glacial air? The importance of his professional standing made it all
the more easy to adopt. Wherever he went, save at the Verdurins',
where he instinctively became himself again, he would assume a
repellent coldness, remain silent as long as possible, be peremptory
when he was obliged to speak, and not forget to say the most cutting
things. He had every opportunity of rehearsing this new attitude
before his patients, who, seeing him for the first time, were not in a
position to make comparisons, and would have been greatly surprised to
learn that he was not at all a rude man by nature. Complete
impassivity was what he strove to attain, and even while visiting his
hospital wards, when he allowed himself to utter one of those puns
which left everyone, from the house physician to the junior student,
helpless with laughter, he would always make it without moving a
muscle of his face, while even that was no longer recognisable now
that he had shaved off his beard and moustache.

But who, the reader has been asking, was the Marquis de Norpois?
Well, he had been Minister Plenipotentiary before the War, and was
actually an Ambassador on the Sixteenth of May; in spite of which, and
to the general astonishment, he had since been several times chosen to
represent France on Extraordinary Missions,—even as Controller of the
Public Debt in Egypt, where, thanks to his great capability as a
financier, he had rendered important services—by Radical Cabinets
under which a reactionary of the middle classes would have declined to
serve, and in whose eyes M. de Norpois, in view of his past, his
connexions and his opinions, ought presumably to have been suspect.
But these advanced Ministers seemed to consider that, in making such
an appointment, they were shewing how broad their own minds were, when
the supreme interests of France were at stake, were raising themselves
above the general run of politicians, were meriting, from the
Journal
des Débats
itself, the title of 'Statesmen,' and were reaping direct
advantage from the weight that attaches to an aristocratic name and
the dramatic interest always aroused by an unexpected appointment. And
they knew also that they could reap these advantages by making an
appeal to M. de Norpois, without having to fear any want of political
loyalty on his part, a fault against which his noble birth not only
need not put them on their guard but offered a positive guarantee. And
in this calculation the Government of the Republic were not mistaken.
In the first place, because an aristocrat of a certain type, brought
up from his cradle to regard his name as an integral part of himself
of which no accident can deprive him (an asset of whose value his
peers, or persons of even higher rank, can form a fairly exact
estimate), knows that he can dispense with the efforts (since they can
in no way enhance his position) in which, without any appreciable
result, so many public men of the middle class spend themselves,—to
profess only the 'right' opinions, to frequent only the 'sound' people.
Anxious, on the other hand, to increase his own importance in the eyes
of the princely or ducal families which take immediate precedence of
his own, he knows that he can do so by giving his name that complement
which hitherto it has lacked, which will give it priority over other
names heraldically its equals: such as political power, a literary or
an artistic reputation, or a large fortune. And so what he saves by
avoiding the society of the ineffective country squires, after whom
all the professional families run helter–skelter, but of his intimacy
with whom, were he to profess it, a prince would think nothing, he
will lavish on the politicians who (free–masons, or worse, though they
be) can advance him in Diplomacy or 'back' him in an election, and on
the artists or scientists whose patronage can help him to 'arrive' in
those departments in which they excel, on everyone, in fact, who is in
a position to confer a fresh distinction or to 'bring off' a rich
marriage.

But in the character of M. de Norpois there was this predominant
feature, that, in the course of a long career of diplomacy, he had
become imbued with that negative, methodical, conservative spirit,
called 'governmental,' which is common to all Governments and, under
every Government, particularly inspires its Foreign Office. He had
imbibed, during that career, an aversion, a dread, a contempt for the
methods of procedure, more or less revolutionary and in any event
quite incorrect, which are those of an Opposition. Save in the case of
a few illiterates—high or low, it makes no matter—by whom no
difference in quality is perceptible, what attracts men one to another
is not a common point of view but a consanguinity of spirit. An
Academician of the kind of Legouvé, and therefore an upholder of the
classics, would applaud Maxime Ducamp's or Mezière's eulogy of Victor
Hugo with more fervour than that of Boileau by Claudel. A common
Nationalism suffices to endear Barrés to his electors, who scarcely
distinguish between him and M. Georges Berry, but does not endear him
to those of his brother Academicians who, with a similar outlook on
politics but a different type of mind, will prefer to him even such
open adversaries as M. Ribot and M. Deschanel, with whom, in turn,
the most loyal Monarchists feel themselves more closely allied than
with Maurras or Léon Daudet, although these also are living in the
hope of a glorious Restoration. Miserly in the use of words, not only
from a professional scruple of prudence and reserve, but because words
themselves have more value, present more subtleties of definition to
men whose efforts, protracted over a decade, to bring two countries to
an understanding, are condensed, translated—in a speech or in a
protocol—into a single adjective, colourless in all appearance, but
to them pregnant with a world of meaning, M. de Norpois was considered
very stiff, at the Commission, where he sat next to my father, whom
everyone else congratulated on the astonishing way in which the old
Ambassador unbent to him. My father was himself more astonished than
anyone. For not being, as a rule, very affable, his company was little
sought outside his own intimate circle, a limitation which he used
modestly and frankly to avow. He realised that these overtures were an
outcome, in the diplomat, of that point of view which everyone adopts
for himself in making his choice of friends, from which all a man's
intellectual qualities, his refinement, his affection are a far less
potent recommendation of him, when at the same time he bores or
irritates one, than are the mere straightforwardness and good–humour
of another man whom most people would regard as frivolous or even
fatuous. "De Norpois has asked me to dinner again; it's quite
extraordinary; everyone on the Commission is amazed, as he never has
any personal relations with any of us. I am sure he's going to tell me
something thrilling, again, about the 'Seventy war." My father knew
that M. de Norpois had warned, had perhaps been alone in warning the
Emperor of the growing strength and bellicose designs of Prussia, and
that Bismarck rated his intelligence most highly. Only the other day,
at the Opera, during the gala performance given for King Theodosius,
the newspapers had all drawn attention to the long conversation which
that Monarch had held with M. de Norpois. "I must ask him whether the
King's visit had any real significance," my father went on, for he was
keenly interested in foreign politics. "I know old Norpois keeps very
close as a rule, but when he's with me he opens out quite charmingly."