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By Root 1636 0

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 shown me, I thought that perhaps they were only mock aristocrats and that there must be a secret article in the laws that govern the nobility which allowed women, perhaps, and certain diplomats to discard, in their relations with commoners, for a reason which was beyond me, the haughtiness 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 ridiculous age I was going through—awkward indeed but by no means infertile—is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. 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 adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

This insolence which I surmised in M. de Saint-Loup, and all that it implied of innate hardness, received confirmation from his attitude whenever he passed us, his body as inflexibly erect as ever, his head held as high, his gaze as impassive, not to 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, in accordance with which I did not behave in quite the same way towards an old lady as towards a gas lamp. These frigid manners were as far removed from the charming letters which, only a few days before, I had still imagined him writing to me to express his regard as, from the enthusiasm of the Chamber and of the populace which he has pictured himself rousing by an imperishable speech, is the humble, dull, obscure position of the dreamer who, after rehearsing 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 unfriendly nature, spoke to us again of the inexhaustible kindness of her great-nephew (he was the son of one of her nieces, and a little older than myself), I marvelled how the gentry, with an utter disregard of truth, ascribe 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 set. 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 she could not do otherwise than introduce me to him. He seemed not to hear that a person’s name was being announced to him; not a muscle of his face moved; his eyes, in which there shone not the faintest gleam of human sympathy, showed 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 examine me before returning my salute, with an abrupt gesture 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 when we met only of literature, and declared after a long talk that he would like immensely