of the highest distinction, he bade Albertine good day. “Been playing golf, Octave?” she asked. “How did it go? Were you in form?” “Oh, it’s too sickening; I’m a wash-out,” he replied. “Was Andrée playing?” “Yes, she went round in seventy-seven.” “Why, that’s a record!” “I went round in eighty-two yesterday.” He was the son of an immensely rich manufacturer who was to take an important part in the organisation of the coming World’s Fair. I was struck by the extreme degree to which, in this young man and the other very rare male friends of the band of girls, the knowledge of everything that pertained to clothes and how to wear them, cigars, English drinks, horses—a knowledge which he displayed down to its minutest details with a haughty infallibility that approached the reticent modesty of the true expert—had been developed in complete isolation, unaccompanied by the least trace of any intellectual culture. He had no hesitation as to the right time and place for dinner-jacket or pyjamas, but had no notion of the circumstances in which one might or might not employ this or that word, or even of the simplest rules of grammar. This disparity between the two forms of culture must have existed also in his father, the President of the Householders’ Association of Balbec, for, in an open letter to the electors which he had recently had posted on all the walls, he announced: “I desired to see the Mayor, to chat to him about it, but he would not listen to my just grievances.” Octave, at the Casino, took prizes in all the dancing competitions, for the boston, the tango, and what-not, an accomplishment that would enable him, if he chose, to make a fine marriage in that seaside society where it is not figuratively but literally that the girls are “wedded” to their “dancing partners.” He lit a cigar with a “D’you mind?” to Albertine, as one who asks permission to finish an urgent piece of work while going on talking. For he was one of those people who can never be “doing nothing,” although there was nothing, in fact, that he could ever be said to do. And since complete inactivity in the end has the same effect as prolonged overwork, in the mental sphere as much as in the life of the body and the muscles, the steadfast intellectual nullity that reigned behind Octave’s meditative brow had ended by giving him, despite his air of unruffled calm, an ineffectual itch to think which kept him awake at night, for all the world like an overwrought philosopher.
Thinking that if I knew their male friends I should have more opportunities of seeing the girls, I had been on the point of asking for an introduction to Octave. I told Albertine this, as soon as he had left us, still muttering “I’m a wash-out,” thinking to put into her head the idea of doing it next time.
“Come, come,” she exclaimed, “I can’t introduce you to a gigolo! This place simply swarms with them. But what on earth would they have to say to you? This one plays golf quite well, and that’s all there is to him. I know what I’m talking about; you’d find he wasn’t at all your sort.”
“Your friends will be cross with you if you desert them like this,” I repeated, hoping that she would then suggest my joining the party.
“Oh, no, they don’t need me.”
We passed Bloch, who directed at me a subtle, insinuating smile, and, embarrassed by the presence of Albertine, whom he did not know, or, rather, knew “without knowing” her, lowered his head towards his neck in a stiff, ungainly motion. “Who’s that weird customer?” Albertine asked. “I can’t think why he should bow to me since he doesn’t know me. So I didn’t respond.”
I had no time to explain to her, for, bearing straight down upon us, “Excuse me,” he began, “for interrupting you, but I must tell you that I’m going to Doncières tomorrow. I cannot put it off any longer without discourtesy; indeed, I wonder what de Saint-Loup-en-Bray must think of me. I just came to let you know that I shall take the two o’clock train. At your service.”
But I thought now only of seeing Albertine again, and of trying to get to know her friends, and Doncières,