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Self-centredness thus enabling every human being to see the universe spread out in descending tiers beneath himself who is its lord, M. Bloch afforded himself the luxury of being a pitiless one when in the morning, as he drank his chocolate, seeing Bergotte’s signature at the foot of an article in the newspaper which he had scarcely opened, he disdainfully granted him a hearing which was soon cut short, pronounced sentence upon him, and gave himself the comforting pleasure of repeating after every mouthful of the scalding brew: “That fellow Bergotte has become unreadable. My word, what a bore the brute can be. I really must stop my subscription. It’s such a rigmarole—stodgy stuff!” And he helped himself to another slice of bread.

This illusory importance of M. Bloch senior did, however, extend some little way beyond the radius of his own perceptions. In the first place his children regarded him as a superior person. Children have always a tendency either to depreciate or to exalt their parents, and to a good son his father is always the best of fathers, quite apart from any objective reasons there may be for admiring him. Now, such reasons were not altogether lacking in the case of M. Bloch, who was an educated man, shrewd, affectionate towards his family. In his most intimate circle they were all the more proud of him because if, in “society,” people are judged, in accordance with a standard scale which is incidentally absurd and a series of false but fixed rules, by comparison with the aggregate of all the other fashionable people, in the subdivisions of middle-class life on the other hand, dinner parties and family reunions turn upon certain people who are pronounced agreeable and amusing but who in “society” would not survive a second evening. Moreover in this social environment where the artificial values of the aristocracy do not exist, their place is taken by even more stupid distinctions. Thus it was that in his family circle, and even to a fairly remote degree of consanguinity, an alleged similarity in his way of wearing his moustache and in the bridge of his nose led to M. Bloch’s being called “the Duc d’Aumale’s double.” (In the world of club bell-hops, is not the one who wears his cap on one side and his tunic tightly buttoned so as to give himself the appearance, he imagines, of a foreign officer, also a personage of a sort to his colleagues?)

The resemblance was of the faintest, but it seemed almost to confer a title. Whenever he was mentioned, it was always: “Bloch? Which one? The Duc d’Aumale?” as people say “Princesse Murat? Which one? The Queen (of Naples)?” And together with certain other minor indications it combined to give him, in the eyes of the cousinhood, an acknowledged claim to distinction. Not going to the lengths of having a carriage of his own, M. Bloch used on special occasions to hire an open victoria with a pair of horses from the Company, and would drive through the Bois de Boulogne, reclining indolently, two fingers on his temple, two others under his chin, and if people who did not know him concluded that he was an “old humbug,” they were convinced in the family that in point of elegance Uncle Solomon could have taught Gramont-Caderousse a thing or two. He was one of those people who when they die, because for years they have shared a table in a restaurant on the boulevard with its editor, are described in the social column of the Radical as “well known Paris figures.” M. Bloch told Saint-Loup and me that Bergotte knew so well why he, M. Bloch, always cut him, that as soon as he caught sight of him, at the theatre or in the club, he avoided his eye. Saint-Loup blushed, for it occurred to him that this club could not be the Jockey, of which his father had been president. On the other hand it must be a fairly exclusive club, for M. Bloch had said that Bergotte would never have got into it if he had come up now. So it was not without the fear that he might be “underrating