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By Root 1585 0

own. For it is always of those defects that one speaks, as though it were a way of speaking of oneself indirectly, and adding to the pleasure of absolving oneself the pleasure of confession. Moreover it seems that our attention, always attracted by what is characteristic of ourselves, notices it more than anything else in other people. One short-sighted man says of another: “But he can scarcely open his eyes!”; a consumptive has his doubts as to the pulmonary integrity of the most robust; an unwashed man speaks only of the baths that other people do not take; an evil-smelling man insists that other people smell; a cuckold sees cuckolds everywhere, a light woman light women, a snob snobs. Then, too, every vice, like every profession, requires and develops a special knowledge which we are never loath to display. The invert sniffs out inverts; the tailor asked out to dine has hardly begun to talk to you before he has already appraised the cloth of your coat, which his fingers are itching to feel; and if after a few words of conversation you were to ask a dentist what he really thought of you, he would tell you how many of your teeth wanted falling. To him nothing appears more important, or to you, who have noticed his, more absurd. And it is not only when we speak of ourselves that we imagine other people to be blind; we behave as though they were. Each one of us has a special god in attendance who hides from him or promises him the concealment of his defect from other people, just as he closes the eyes and nostrils of people who do not wash to the streaks of dirt which they carry in their ears and the smell of sweat that emanates from their armpits, and assures them that they can with impunity carry both of these about a world that will notice nothing. And those who wear artificial pearls, or give them as presents, imagine that people will take them to be genuine.

Bloch was ill-bred, neurotic and snobbish, and since he belonged to a family of little repute, had to support, as on the floor of the ocean, the incalculable pressures imposed on him not only by the Christians at the surface but by all the intervening layers of Jewish castes superior to his own, each of them crushing with its contempt the one that was immediately beneath it. To pierce his way through to the open air by raising himself from Jewish family to Jewish family would have taken Bloch many thousands of years. It was better to seek an outlet in another direction.

When Bloch spoke to me of the attack of snobbery from which I must be suffering, and bade me confess that I was a snob, I might well have replied: “If I were, I shouldn’t be going about with you.” I said merely that he was not being very polite. Then he wanted to apologise, but in the way that is typical of the ill-bred man who is only too happy, in retracting his words, to find an opportunity to aggravate his offence. “Forgive me,” he would now say to me whenever we met, “I’ve distressed you, tormented you, I’ve been wantonly mischievous. And yet—man in general and your friend in particular is so singular an animal—you cannot imagine the affection that I, I who tease you so cruelly, have for you. It brings me often, when I think of you, to the verge of tears.” And he gave an audible sob.

What astonished me more in Bloch than his bad manners was to find how the quality of his conversation varied. This youth, so hard to please that of authors who were at the height of their fame he would say: “He’s a dismal fool; he’s a sheer imbecile,” would every now and then recount with immense gusto anecdotes that were simply not funny or would instance as a “really remarkable person” someone who was completely insignificant. This double scale of measuring the wit, the worth, the interest of people continued to puzzle me until I was introduced to M. Bloch, senior.

I had not supposed that we should ever be allowed to meet him, for Bloch junior had spoken ill of me to Saint-Loup and of Saint-Loup to me. In particular, he had said to Robert that I was (still) a frightful snob. “Yes, really, he’s thrilled to know