M. LLLLegrandin.” This trick of Bloch’s of isolating a word was a sign at once of irony and literature. Saint-Loup, who had never heard the name Legrandin, was bewildered: “But who is he?” “Oh, he’s a very distinguished person,” Bloch replied with a laugh, thrusting his hands into his pockets as though for warmth, convinced that he was at that moment engaged in contemplation of the picturesque aspect of an extraordinary country gentleman compared to whom those of Barbey d’Aurevilly were as nothing. He consoled himself for his inability to portray M. Legrandin by giving him a string of capital L’s and smacking his lips over the name as over a wine of the finest vintage. But these subjective enjoyments remained hidden from other people. If he spoke ill of me to Saint-Loup he made up for it by speaking no less ill of Saint-Loup to me. We had each of us learned these slanders in detail the very next day, not that we had repeated them to each other, a thing which would have seemed to us very wrong but to Bloch appeared so natural and almost inevitable that in his natural anxiety, in the certainty moreover that he would be telling us only what each of us was bound sooner or later to learn, he preferred to anticipate the disclosure and, taking Saint-Loup aside, admitted that he had spoken ill of him, on purpose, so that it might be repeated to him, swore to him “by Zeus Kronion, binder of oaths” that he loved him dearly, that he would lay down his life for him, and wiped away a tear. The same day, he contrived to see me alone, made his confession, declared that he had acted in my interest, because he felt that a certain kind of social intercourse was fatal to me and that I was “worthy of better things.” Then, clasping me by the hand with the sentimentality of a drunkard, although his drunkenness was purely nervous: “Believe me,” he said, “and may the black Ker seize me this instant and bear me across the portals of Hades, hateful to men, if yesterday, when I thought of you, of Combray, of my boundless affection for you, of afternoon hours in class which you do not even remember, I did not lie awake sobbing all night long. Yes, all night long, I swear it, and alas, I know—for I know the human soul—you will not believe me.” I did indeed “not believe” him, and to these words which I felt he was making up on the spur of the moment and developing as he went on, his swearing “by Ker” added no great weight, the Hellenic cult being in Bloch purely literary. Besides, whenever he began to get emotional over a falsehood and wanted one to share his emotion, he would say “I swear it,” more for the hysterical pleasure of lying than to make one think that he was speaking the truth. I did not believe what he was saying, but I bore him no ill-will on that account, for I had inherited from my mother and grandmother their incapacity for rancour even against far worse offenders, and their habit of never condemning anyone.
Besides, Bloch was not altogether a bad fellow: he was capable of being extremely nice. And now that the race of Combray, the race from which sprang creatures as absolutely unspoiled as my grandmother and my mother, seems almost extinct, since I no longer have much choice except between decent brutes, frank and insensitive, the mere sound of whose voices shows at once that they take absolutely no interest in your life—and another kind of men who so long as they are with you understand you, cherish you, grow sentimental to the point of tears, then make up for it a few hours later with some cruel joke at your expense, but come back to you, always just as understanding, as charming, as in tune with you for the moment, I think that it is of this latter sort that I prefer, if not the moral worth, at any rate the society.
“You cannot imagine my grief when I think of you,” Bloch went on. “Actually, I suppose it’s a rather Jewish side of my nature coming out,” he added ironically, contracting his pupils as though measuring out under the microscope an infinitesimal quantity of “Jewish blood,” as a French nobleman might (but never would)