In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [167]
“All this Dreyfus business,” went on the Baron, still clasping me by the arm, “has only one drawback. It destroys society (I don’t mean polite society; society has long ceased to deserve that laudatory epithet) by the influx of Mr and Mrs Cow and Cowshed and Cow-pat, whom I find even in the houses of my own cousins, because they belong to the Patriotic League, the Anti-Jewish League, or some such league, as if a political opinion entitled one to a social qualification.”
This frivolity in M. de Charlus brought out his family likeness to the Duchesse de Guermantes. I remarked on the resemblance. As he appeared to think that I did not know her, I reminded him of the evening at the Opéra when he had seemed to be trying to avoid me. He assured me so forcefully that he had never seen me there that I should have ended by believing him if presently a trifling incident had not led me to think that M. de Charlus, in his excessive pride perhaps, did not care to be seen with me.
“Let us return to yourself,” he said, “and my plans for you. There exists among certain men a freemasonry of which I cannot now say more than that it numbers in its ranks four of the reigning sovereigns of Europe. Now, the entourage of one of these, who is the Emperor of Germany, is trying to cure him of his fancy. That is a very serious matter, and may lead us to war. Yes, my dear sir, that is a fact. You remember the story of the man who believed that he had the Princess of China shut up in a bottle. It was a form of insanity. He was cured of it. But as soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies which we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious. A cousin of mine had a stomach ailment: he could digest nothing. The most learned stomach specialists treated him, to no avail. I took him to a certain doctor (another highly interesting man, by the way, of whom I could tell you a great deal). He guessed at once that the malady was nervous, persuaded his patient of this, advised him to eat whatever he liked unhesitatingly, and assured him that his digestion would stand it. But my cousin also had nephritis. What the stomach digested perfectly well the kidneys ceased after a time to be able to eliminate, and my cousin, instead of living to a fine old age with an imaginary disease of the stomach which obliged him to keep to a diet, died at forty with his stomach cured but his kidneys ruined. Given a very considerable lead over your contemporaries, who knows whether you may not perhaps become what some eminent man of the past might have been if a beneficent spirit had revealed to him, among a generation that knew nothing of them, the secrets of steam and electricity. Do not be foolish, do not refuse for reasons of tact and discretion. Try to understand that, if I do you a great service, I do not expect my reward from you to be any less great. It is many years now since people in society ceased to interest me. I have but one passion left, to seek to redeem the mistakes of my life by conferring the benefit of my knowledge on a soul that is still virgin and capable of being fired by virtue. I have had great sorrows, of which I may tell you perhaps some day; I have lost my wife, who was the loveliest, the noblest, the most perfect creature that one could dream of. I have young relatives who are not—I do not say worthy, but capable of accepting the intellectual heritage of which I have been speaking. Who knows but that you may be the person into whose hands it is to pass, the person whose life I shall be able to guide and to raise to so lofty a plane. My own