In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [208]
But the misses Bloch and their brother blushed to the tips of their ears, so impressed were they when Bloch senior, to show that he could be regal to the last in his entertainment of his son’s two “chums,” gave the order for champagne to be served, and announced casually that, as a “treat” for us, he had taken three stalls for the performance which a company from the Opéra-Comique was giving that evening at the Casino. He was sorry that he had not been able to get a box. They had all been taken. In any case, he had often been in the boxes, and really one saw and heard better in the stalls. However, if the failing of his son, that is to say the failing which his son believed to be invisible to other people, was coarseness, the father’s was avarice. And so it was in a decanter that we were served, under the name of champagne, with a light sparkling wine, while under that of orchestra stalls he had taken three in the pit, which cost half as much, miraculously persuaded by the divine intervention of his failing that neither at table nor in the theatre (where the boxes were all empty) would the difference be noticed. When M. Bloch had invited us to moisten our lips in the flat glasses which his son dignified with the style and title of “craters with deeply hollowed flanks,” he showed us a picture to which he was so much attached that he always brought it with him to Balbec. He told us that it was a Rubens. Saint-Loup asked innocently if it was signed. M. Bloch replied, blushing, that he had had the signature cut off to make it fit the frame, but that it made no difference, as he had no intention of selling the picture. Then he hurriedly bade us good night, in order to bury himself in the Journal Officiel, back numbers of which littered the house and which, he informed us, he was obliged to read carefully on account of his “parliamentary position,” as to the precise nature of which he gave us no enlightenment.
“I shall take a muffler,” said Bloch, “for Zephyrus and Boreas are vying with each other over the fish-teeming sea, and should we but tarry a little after the show is over, we shall not be home before the first flush of Eos, the rosy-fingered.* By the way,” he asked Saint-Loup when we were outside (and I trembled, for I realised at once that it was of M. de Charlus that Bloch spoke in tones of sarcasm), “who was that splendid old card dressed in black that I saw you walking with the day before yesterday on the beach?”
“That was my uncle,” replied Saint-Loup, somewhat ruffled.
Unfortunately, a “gaffe” was far from seeming to Bloch a thing to be avoided. He shook with laughter. “Heartiest congratulations. I ought to have guessed: he has a lot of style, and the most priceless dial of an old dotard of the highest lineage.”
“You are absolutely mistaken: he’s an extremely clever man,” retorted Saint-Loup, now furious.
“I’m sorry about that; it makes him less complete. All the same, I should very much like to know him, for I flatter myself I could write some highly adequate pieces about old buffers like that. He’s killing when you see him go by. But I should disregard the caricaturable aspect of his mug, which really is hardly worthy of an artist enamoured of the plastic beauty of phrases, although (you’ll forgive me) it had me doubled up for quite a while with joyous laughter, and I should bring out the aristocratic side of your uncle, who on the whole makes a tip-top impression, and when one has finished laughing, does strike one with his considerable sense of style. But,” he went on, addressing me this time, “there is something in a completely different connexion about which I have been meaning to question you, and every time we are together, some god, some blessed denizen of Olympus, makes me completely forget to ask for a piece of information which might before now have been and is sure