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By Root 1438 0

when he no longer had any talent, whenever he wrote anything with which he was not satisfied, in order not to have to suppress it, as he ought to have done, in order to be able to publish it, he would repeat, but to himself this time: “After all, it’s more or less accurate, it must be of some value to my country.” So that the phrase murmured long ago among his admirers by the crafty voice of modesty came in the end to be whispered in the secrecy of his heart by the uneasy tongue of pride. And the same words which had served Bergotte as a superfluous excuse for the excellence of his early works became as it were an ineffective consolation to him for the mediocrity of the last.

A kind of austerity of taste which he had, a kind of determination to write nothing of which he could not say that it was “mellow,” which had made people for so many years regard him as a sterile and precious artist, a chiseller of trifles, was on the contrary the secret of his strength, for habit forms the style of the writer just as much as the character of the man, and the author who has more than once been content to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a certain kind of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the boundaries of his talent, just as, in succumbing too often to pleasure, to laziness, to the fear of being put to trouble, one traces for oneself, on a character which it will finally be impossible to retouch, the lineaments of one’s vices and the limits of one’s virtue.

If, however, despite all the similarities which I was to perceive later on between the writer and the man, I had not at first sight, in Mme Swann’s drawing-room, believed that this could be Bergotte, the author of so many divine books, who stood before me, perhaps I was not altogether wrong, for he himself did not, in the strict sense of the word, “believe” it either. He did not believe it since he showed some alacrity in ingratiating himself with fashionable people (though he was not a snob), and with literary men and journalists who were vastly inferior to himself. Of course he had long since learned, from the suffrage of his readers, that he had genius, compared to which social position and official rank were as nothing. He had learned that he had genius, but he did not believe it since he continued to simulate deference towards mediocre writers in order to succeed, shortly, in becoming an Academician, when the Academy and the Faubourg Saint-Germain have no more to do with that part of the Eternal Mind which is the author of the works of Bergotte than with the law of causality or the idea of God. That also he knew, but as a kleptomaniac knows, without profiting by the knowledge, that it is wrong to steal. And the man with the goatee beard and snail-shell nose knew and used all the tricks of the gentleman who pockets your spoons, in his efforts to reach the coveted academic chair, or some duchess or other who could command several votes at the election, but to do so in a way that ensured that no one who would consider the pursuit of such a goal a vice in him would see what he was doing. He was only half-successful; one could hear, alternating with the speech of the true Bergotte, that of the other, selfish and ambitious Bergotte who talked only of his powerful, rich or noble friends in order to enhance himself, he who in his books, when he was really himself, had so well portrayed the charm, pure as a mountain spring, of the poor.

As for those other vices to which M. de Norpois had alluded, that almost incestuous love affair, which was made still worse, people said, by a want of delicacy in the matter of money, if they contradicted in a shocking manner the trend of his latest novels, filled with such a painfully scrupulous concern for what was right and good that the most innocent pleasures of their heroes were poisoned by it, and that even for the reader himself it exhaled a sense of anguish in the light of which even the quietest of lives seemed scarcely bearable, those vices did not necessarily prove, supposing that they were fairly imputed to