In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [149]
“The Order was a mistake,” thought the Prince; “the negotiations have not advanced one step. That’s not what he wanted. I have not yet laid my hand on the right key.”
This was a kind of reasoning of which M. de Norpois, formed in the same school as the Prince, would also have been capable. One may mock at the pedantic silliness which makes diplomats of the Norpois type go into ecstasies over some piece of official wording which is to all intents and purposes meaningless. But their childishness has this compensation: diplomats know that, in the scales which ensure that balance of power, European or otherwise, which we call peace, good feeling, fine speeches, earnest entreaties weigh very little; and that the heavy weight, the true determinant consists in something else, in the possibility which the adversary enjoys, if he is strong enough, or does not enjoy, of satisfying a desire in exchange for something in return. With this order of truths, which an entirely disinterested person, such as my grandmother for instance, would not have understood, M. de Norpois and Prince von Faffenheim had frequently to deal. As an envoy in countries with which we had been within an ace of going to war, M. de Norpois, in his anxiety as to the turn which events were about to take, knew very well that it was not by the word “Peace,” nor by the word “War,” that it would be revealed to him, but by some other, apparently commonplace word, a word of terror or blessing, which the diplomat, by the aid of his cipher, would immediately know how to interpret and to which, to safeguard the dignity of France, he would respond in another word, quite as commonplace, but one beneath which the minister of the enemy nation would at once decipher: “War.” Moreover, in accordance with a time-honoured custom, analogous to that which used to give to the first meeting between two young people promised to one another in marriage the form of a chance encounter at a performance in the Théâtre du Gymnase, the dialogue in the course of which destiny was to dictate the word “War” or the word “Peace” took place, as a rule, not in the ministerial sanctum but on a bench in a Kurgarten where the minister and M. de Norpois went independently to a thermal spring to drink at its source their little tumblers of some curative water. By a sort of tacit convention they met at the hour appointed for their cure, and began by taking together a short stroll which, beneath its benign appearance, the two interlocutors knew to be as tragic as an order for mobilisation. And so, in a private matter like this nomination for election to the Institute, the Prince had employed the same system of induction which had served him in the diplomatic service, the same method of reading beneath superimposed symbols.
And certainly it would be wrong to pretend that my grandmother and the few who resembled her would have been alone in their failure to understand this kind of calculation. For one thing, the average run of humanity, practising professions the lines of which have been laid down in advance, approximate in their lack of intuition to the ignorance which my grandmother owed to her lofty disinterestedness. Often one has to come down to “kept” persons, male or female, before one finds the hidden spring of actions or words, apparently of the most innocent nature, in self-interest, in the necessity to keep alive. What man