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By Root 1914 0

touching my chin. “But your choice of men friends is more important. Eight out of ten young men are little bounders, little wretches capable of doing you an injury which you will never be able to repair. My nephew Saint-Loup, now, he might be a suitable companion for you at a pinch. As far as your future is concerned, he can be of no possible use to you, but for that I will suffice. And really, when all’s said and done, as a person to go about with, at times when you have had enough of me, he does not seem to present any serious drawback that I know of. At least he’s a man, not one of those effeminate creatures one sees so many of nowadays, who look like little rent boys and at any moment may bring their innocent victims to the gallows.” (I did not know the meaning of this slang expression, “rent boy”; anyone who had known it would have been as greatly surprised by his use of it as myself. Society people always like talking slang, and people who may be suspected of certain things like to show that they are not afraid to mention them. A proof of innocence in their eyes. But they have lost their sense of proportion, they are no longer capable of realising the point beyond which a certain pleasantry will become too technical, too flagrant, will be a proof rather of corruption than of ingenuousness.) “He’s not like the rest of them: he’s very nice, very serious.”

I could not help smiling at this epithet “serious,” to which the intonation that M. de Charlus gave it seemed to impart the sense of “virtuous,” of “steady,” as one says of a little shop-girl that she is “serious.” At that moment a cab passed, zigzagging along the street. A young cabman, who had deserted his box, was driving it from inside, where he lay sprawling on the cushions, apparently half-tipsy. M. de Charlus instantly stopped him. The driver began to parley:

“Which way are you going?”

“Yours.” (This surprised me, for M. de Charlus had already refused several cabs with similarly coloured lamps.)

“Well, I don’t want to get up on the box. D’you mind if I stay inside?”

“No, but lower the hood. Well, think over my proposal,” said M. de Charlus, preparing to leave me, “I give you a few days to consider it. Write to me. I repeat, I shall need to see you every day, and to receive from you guarantees of loyalty and discretion which, I must admit, you do seem to offer. But in the course of my life I have been so often deceived by appearances that I never wish to trust them again. Damn it, it’s the least I can expect that before giving up a treasure I should know into what hands it is going to pass. Anyway, bear in mind what I’m offering you. You are like Hercules (though, unfortunately for yourself, you do not appear to me to have quite his muscular development) at the parting of the ways. Remember that you may regret for the rest of your life not having chosen the way that leads to virtue. Hallo,” he turned to the cabman, “haven’t you put the hood down? I’ll do it myself. I think, too, I’d better drive, seeing the state you appear to be in.”

He jumped in beside the cabman, and the cab set off at a brisk trot.

As for myself, no sooner had I turned in at our gate than I came across the pendant to the conversation which I had heard that afternoon between Bloch and M. de Norpois, but in another form, brief, inverted and cruel. This was a dispute between our butler, who was a Dreyfusard, and the Guermantes’, who was an anti-Dreyfusard. The truths and counter-truths which contended on high among the intellectuals of the rival Leagues, the Patrie Française and the Droits de l’Homme, were fast spreading downwards into the subsoil of popular opinion. M. Reinach manipulated through their feelings people whom he had never seen, whereas for him the Dreyfus case simply presented itself to his reason as an irrefutable theorem which he “demonstrated” in the sequel by the most astonishing victory for rational politics (a victory against France, according to some) that the world has ever seen. In two years he replaced a Billot ministry by a Clemenceau ministry, revolutionised