In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [142]
“It is a question that concerns only the French themselves, don’t you think?” replied M. d’Argencourt with that peculiar form of insolence which consists in ascribing to the other person an opinion which one plainly knows that he does not share since he has just expressed one directly its opposite.
Bloch coloured; M. d’Argencourt smiled, looking round the room, and if this smile, so long as it was directed at the rest of the company, was charged with malice at Bloch’s expense, he tempered it with cordiality when finally it came to rest on the face of my friend, so as to deprive him of any excuse for annoyance at the words he had just heard, though those words remained just as cruel. Mme de Guermantes muttered something in M. d’Argencourt’s ear which I could not catch but which must have referred to Bloch’s religion, for there flitted at that moment over the face of the Duchess that expression to which one’s fear of being noticed by the person one is speaking of gives a certain hesitancy and falseness mixed with the inquisitive, malicious amusement inspired by a human group to which one feels oneself to be fundamentally alien. To retrieve himself, Bloch turned to the Duc de Châtellerault. “You, Monsieur, as a Frenchman, you must be aware that people abroad are all Dreyfusards, although everyone pretends that in France we never know what is going on abroad. Anyhow, I know I can talk freely to you; Saint-Loup told me so.” But the young Duke, who felt that everyone was turning against Bloch, and was a coward as people often are in society, employing a mordant and precious form of wit which he seemed, by a sort of collateral atavism, to have inherited from M. de Charlus, replied: “Forgive me, Monsieur, if I don’t discuss the Dreyfus case with you; it is a subject which, on principle, I never mention except among Japhetics.” Everyone smiled, except Bloch, not that he was not himself in the habit of making sarcastic references to his Jewish origin, to that side of his ancestry which came from somewhere near Sinai. But instead of one of these remarks (doubtless because he did not have one ready) the trigger of his inner mechanism brought to Bloch’s lips something quite different. And all one heard was: “But how on earth did you know? Who told you?” as though he had been the son of a convict. Whereas, given his name, which had not exactly a Christian sound, and his face, his surprise argued a certain naïvety.
What M. de Norpois had said to him not having completely satisfied him, he went up to the archivist and asked him whether M. du Paty de Clam or M. Joseph Reinach were not sometimes to be seen at Mme de Villeparisis’s. The archivist made no reply; he was a Nationalist, and never ceased preaching to the Marquise that the social revolution might break out at any moment, and that she ought to show more caution in the choice of her acquaintances. He wondered whether Bloch might not be a secret emissary of the Syndicate, come to collect information, and went off at once to repeat to Mme de Villeparisis the questions that Bloch had put to him. She decided that he was ill-bred at best and that he might perhaps be in a position to compromise M. de Norpois. She also wished to give satisfaction to the archivist, who was the only person she was a little afraid of, and by whom she was being indoctrinated, though without much success (every morning he read her M. Judet’s article in the Petit Journal). She decided, therefore, to make it plain to Bloch that he need not come to the house again, and had no difficulty in choosing from her social repertory the scene by which a great lady shows someone her door, a scene which does not in the least involve the raised finger and blazing eyes that people imagine. As Bloch came up to her to say good-bye, buried in her deep armchair she seemed only half-awakened from a vague somnolence. Her filmy eyes held only the faint and charming gleam of a pair of pearls.