In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [87]
“I dare say!” retorted my father. “That simply proves that he’s a false and malevolent fellow. My poor boy, you never had much common sense, but I’m sorry to see that you’ve fallen among people who will send you off the rails altogether.”
Already the mere fact of my associating with the Swanns had far from delighted my parents. This introduction to Bergotte seemed to them a fatal but natural consequence of an original mistake, namely their own weakness, which my grandfather would have called a “want of circumspection.” I felt that in order to put the finishing touch to their ill humour, it only remained for me to tell them that this perverse fellow who did not appreciate M. de Norpois had found me extremely intelligent. For I had observed that whenever my father decided that anyone, one of my school friends for instance, was going astray—as I was at that moment—if that person had the approval of somebody whom my father did not respect, he would see in this testimony the confirmation of his own stern judgment. The evil merely seemed to him the greater. Already I could hear him exclaiming, “Of course, it all hangs together,” an expression that terrified me by the vagueness and vastness of the reforms the introduction of which into my quiet life it seemed to threaten. But since, even if I did not tell them what Bergotte had said of me, nothing could anyhow efface the impression my parents had already formed, that it should be made slightly worse mattered little. Besides, they seemed to me so unfair, so completely mistaken, that not only had I no hope, I had scarcely any desire to bring them to a more equitable point of view. However, sensing, as the words were passing my lips, how alarmed my parents would be at the thought that I had found favour in the sight of a person who dismissed clever men as fools, who had earned the contempt of all decent people, and praise from whom, since it seemed to me a thing to be desired, would only encourage me in wrongdoing, it was in faltering tones and with a slightly shamefaced air that I reached the coda: “He told the Swanns that he had found me extremely intelligent.” Just as a poisoned dog in a field flings itself without knowing why at the grass which is precisely the antidote to the toxin that it has swallowed, so I, without in the least suspecting it, had said the one thing in the world that was capable of overcoming in my parents this prejudice with respect to Bergotte, a prejudice which all the best arguments that I could have put forward, all the tributes that I could have paid him, must have proved powerless to defeat. Instantly the situation changed.
“Oh! he said that he found you intelligent,” repeated my mother. “I’m glad to hear that, because he’s a man of talent.”
“What! he said that, did he?” my father joined in . . . “I don’t for a moment deny his literary distinction, before which the whole world bows; only it’s a pity that he should lead that disreputable existence to which old Norpois made a guarded allusion,” he went on, not seeing that against the sovereign virtue of the magic words which I had just pronounced, the depravity of Bergotte’s morals was scarcely more capable of holding out any longer than the falsity of his judgment.
“But, my dear,” Mamma interrupted, “we’ve no proof that it’s true. People say all sorts of things. Besides, M. de Norpois may have the most perfect manners in the world, but he’s not always very good-natured, especially about people who are not exactly his sort.”
“That’s quite true; I’ve noticed it myself,” my father admitted.
“And then, too, a great deal ought to be forgiven Bergotte since he thinks well of my little son,” Mamma went on, stroking my hair and fastening upon me a long and pensive gaze.
My mother had not in fact awaited this verdict from Bergotte before telling me that I might ask Gilberte to tea whenever I had friends coming. But I dared not do so for two reasons.