In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [60]
But Françoise would hasten back to my aunt, and I would return to my book, and the servants would take their places again outside the gate to watch the dust settle on the pavement and the excitement caused by the passage of the soldiers subside. Long after calm had been restored, an abnormal tide of humanity would continue to darken the streets of Combray. And in front of every house, even those where it was not the custom, the servants, and sometimes even the masters, would sit and watch, festooning the doorsteps with a dark, irregular fringe, like the border of shells and sea-weed which a stronger tide than usual leaves on the beach, as though trimming it with embroidered crape, when the sea itself has retreated.
Except on such days as these, however, I would as a rule be left to read in peace. But the interruption and the commentary which a visit from Swann once occasioned in the course of my reading, which had brought me to the work of an author quite new to me, Bergotte, resulted in the consequence that for a long time afterwards it was not against a wall gay with spikes of purple blossom, but against a wholly different background, the porch of a Gothic cathedral, that I saw the figure of one of the women of whom I dreamed.
I had heard Bergotte spoken of for the first time by a friend older than myself whom I greatly admired, Bloch. Hearing me confess my admiration for the Nuit d’Octobre, he had burst out in a loud bray of laughter like a bugle-call, and said to me: “You really must conquer your vile taste for A. de Musset, Esquire. He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a pretty detestable specimen. I am bound to admit, natheless, that he, and even the man Racine, did, each of them, once in his life, compose a line which is not only fairly rhythmical but has also what is in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing. One is ‘La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camyre,’ and the other ‘La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë’ They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of these two runagates, in an article by my revered master, old Leconte, beloved of the immortal gods. By which token, here is a book which I haven’t the time to read just now, recommended, it appears, by that colossal fellow. He regards, or so they tell me, its author, one Bergotte, as a most subtle scribe; and, albeit he exhibits on occasion a critical mansuetude that is not easily explicable, still his word has weight with me as it were the Delphic Oracle. Read you then this lyrical prose, and, if the titanic rhymester who composed Bhagavat and the Lévrier de Magnus speaks not falsely, then, by Apollo, you may taste, cher maître, the ambrosial joys of Olympus.” It was in an ostensible vein of sarcasm that he had asked me to call him, and that he himself called me, “cher maître.” But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain satisfaction from the mannerism, being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.
Unfortunately I was unable to set at rest by further talks with Bloch, in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts he had engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself) were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For, as it happened, Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first he had been well received there. It is true that my grandfather made out that, whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he would not have objected on principle—indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish extraction—had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as friends were not usually of the best type. And so whenever I brought a new friend home my grandfather seldom failed to start humming the “O, God of our fathers” from La Juive, or else “Israel, break thy chains,” singing the tune alone, of course, to an “um-ti-tum-ti-tum, tra-la”; but I used