In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [203]
No doubt he felt remorse for this speech, for some time later I received—in a morocco binding on the front of which was inlaid a panel of tooled leather representing in demi-relief a spray of forget-me-nots—the book which he had lent me, and which I had sent back to him, not by Aimé who was apparently off duty, but by the lift-boy.
M. de Charlus having gone, Robert and I were free at last to dine with Bloch. And I realised during this little party that the stories too readily admitted by our friend as funny were favourite stories of M. Bloch senior, and that the son’s “really remarkable person” was always one of his father’s friends whom he had so classified. There are a certain number of people whom we admire in our childhood, a father who is wittier than the rest of the family, a teacher who acquires credit in our eyes from the philosophy he reveals to us, a schoolfellow more advanced than we are (which was what Bloch had been to me) who despises the Musset of the Espoir en Dieu when we still admire it, and when we have reached Leconte or Claudel will be raving only about
At Saint-Blaise, at the Zuecca
You were well, you were well pleased . . .
to which he will add:
Padua is a place to adore
Where very great doctors of law . . .
But I prefer the polenta . . .
Goes past in her cloak of velour
La Toppatelle,
and of all the Nuits will remember only:
At Le Havre, facing the Atlantic,
At Venice, in the Lido’s gloom,
Where on the grass above a tomb
Comes to die the pale Adriatic.
So, whenever we confidently admire anyone, we collect from him and quote with admiration sayings vastly inferior to the sort which, left to our own judgment, we would sternly reject, just as the writer of a novel puts into it, on the pretext that they are true, “witticisms” and characters which in the living context are like a dead weight, mere padding. Saint-Simon’s portraits, composed by himself evidently without any self-admiration, are admirable, whereas the strokes of wit of the clever people he knew which he cites as being delightful are frankly mediocre when they have not become meaningless. He would have scorned to invent what he reports as so acute or so colourful when said by Mme Cornuel or Louis XIV, a point which is to be remarked also in many other writers, and is capable of various interpretations, of which it is enough to note but one for the present: namely, that in the state of mind in which we “observe” we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.
There was, then, embedded in my friend Bloch, a father Bloch who lagged forty years behind his son and told preposterous stories at which he laughed as loudly, inside my friend’s being, as did the real, visible, authentic Bloch senior, since to the laugh which the latter emitted, not without several times repeating the last word so that his audience might taste the full flavour of the story, was added the braying laugh with which the son never failed, at table, to greet his father’s anecdotes. Thus it came about that after saying the most intelligent things Bloch junior, manifesting the portion that he had inherited from his family, would tell us for the thirtieth time some of the gems which Bloch senior brought out only (together with his swallow-tail coat) on the solemn occasions on which Bloch junior brought someone to the house on whom it was worth while making an impression: one of his masters, a “chum” who had taken all the prizes, or, this evening, Saint-Loup and myself. For instance: “A military critic of great insight, who had brilliantly worked out, supporting them with infallible