In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [288]
“It’s not bad,” she said to Albertine, “but if I were you and had the the same subject set me, which is quite likely, as they set it very often, I shouldn’t do it in that way. This is how I would tackle it. In the first place, if I had been Gisèle, I shouldn’t have got carried away and I’d have begun by making a rough sketch of what I was going to write on a separate piece of paper. First and foremost, the formulation of the question and the exposition of the subject; then the general ideas to be worked into the development; finally, appreciation, style, conclusion. In that way, with a summary to refer to, you know where you are. But at the very start, with the exposition of the subject, or, if you like, Titine, since it’s a letter, with the preamble, Gisèle has made a bloomer. Writing to a person of the seventeenth century, Sophocles ought never to have said ‘My dear friend.’ ”
“Why, of course, she ought to have said ‘My dear Racine,’ ” came impetuously from Albertine. “That would have been much better.”
“No,” replied Andrée, with a trace of mockery in her tone, “She ought to have put ‘Sir.’ In the same way, to end up, she ought to have thought of something like, ‘Allow me, Sir,’ (at the very most, ‘Dear Sir’) ‘to inform you of the high esteem with which I have the honour to be your servant.’ Then again, Gisèle says that the chorus in Athalie is a novelty. She is forgetting Esther, and two tragedies that are not much read now but happen to have been analysed this year by the teacher himself, so that you need only mention them, since they’re his hobby-horse, and you’re bound to pass. I mean Les Juives by Robert Garnier, and Montchrestien’s Aman.”
Andrée quoted these titles without managing quite to conceal a secret sense of benevolent superiority, which found expression in a rather charming smile. Albertine could contain herself no longer.
“Andrée, you really are staggering,” she cried. “You must write down those names for me. Just fancy, what luck it would be if I got on to that, even in the oral, I should quote them at once and make a colossal impression.”
But in the days that followed, every time that Albertine asked Andrée to tell her again the names of those two plays so that she might write them down, her erudite friend seemed to have forgotten them, and never recalled them for her.
“And another thing,” Andrée went on with the faintest note of scorn for companions more childish than herself, though relishing their admiration and attaching to the manner in which she herself would have composed the essay a greater importance than she wished to reveal, “Sophocles in the Shades must be well-informed about all that goes on. He must therefore know that it was not before the general public but before the Sun King and a few privileged courtiers that Athalie was first played. What Gisèle says in this connexion of the esteem of the connoisseurs is not at all bad, but she might have gone a little further. Sophocles, now that he is mortal, may quite well have the gift of prophecy and announce that, according to Voltaire, Athalie will be the supreme achievement not only of Racine but of the human mind.”
Albertine was drinking in every word. Her eyes blazed. And it was with the utmost indignation that she rejected Rosemonde’s suggestion that they should have a game.
“Finally,” Andrée concluded in the same detached, airy tone, a trifle mocking and at the same time fairly warmly convinced, “if Gisèle had first calmly noted down the general ideas that she was going to develop, it might perhaps have occurred to her to do what I myself should have done, point out what a difference there is between the religious inspiration of Racine’s choruses and those of Sophocles. I should have made Sophocles remark that if Racine’s choruses are impregnated with religious feeling like those of the Greek tragedians, the gods are not the same. The god of