In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [231]
what was positively a want of frankness. Was his triumphant air the sort that we assume to cloak a certain embarrassment in admitting a thing which we know that we ought not to have done? Was it simply the expression of frivolity, stupidity, making a virtue out of a defect which I had not associated with him? Or a passing fit of ill-humour towards me, prompting him to make an end of our friendship, or the registering of a passing fit of ill humour against Bloch to whom he had wanted to say something disagreeable even though it would compromise me? Whatever it was, his face was seared, while he uttered these vulgar words, by a frightful sinuosity which I saw on it once or twice only in all the time I knew him, and which, beginning by running more or less down the middle of his face, when it came to his lips twisted them, gave them a hideous expression of baseness, almost of bestiality, quite transitory and no doubt inherited. There must have been at such moments, which recurred probably not more than once every other year, a partial eclipse of his true self by the passage across it of the personality of some ancestor reflecting itself upon him. Fully as much as his self-satisfied air, the words “I like clear-cut situations” encouraged the same doubt and should have incurred a similar condemnation. I felt inclined to say to him that if one likes clear-cut situations one ought to confine these outbursts of frankness to one’s own affairs and not to acquire a too easy merit at the expense of others. But by this time the carriage had stopped outside the restaurant, the huge front of which, glazed and streaming with light, alone succeeded in piercing the darkness. The fog itself, lit up by the comfortable brightness of the interior, seemed to be waiting outside on the pavement to show one the way in with the joy of servants whose faces reflect the hospitable instincts of their master; shot with the most delicate shades of light, it pointed the way like the pillar of fire which guided the Hebrews. Many of these, as it happened, were to be found inside. For this was the place to which Bloch and his friends, intoxicated by their fast on coffee and political curiosity, a fast as famishing as the ritual fast which occurs only once a year, had long been in the habit of repairing in the evenings. Every mental excitement creating a value that overrides everything else, a quality superior to the habits bound up in it, there is no taste at all keenly developed that does not thus gather round it a society which it unites and in which the esteem of his fellows is what each of its members seeks before anything else from life. Here, in their café, be it in a little provincial town, you will find impassioned music-lovers; the greater part of their time and all their spare cash are spent in chamber-concerts, in meetings for musical discussion, in cafés where they find themselves among music-lovers and rub shoulders with musicians. Others, keen on flying, seek to stand well with the old waiter in the glazed bar perched on top of the aerodrome; sheltered from the wind as in the glass cage of a lighthouse, they can follow in the company of an airman who is not going up that day the gyrations of a pilot looping the loop, while another, invisible a moment ago, comes suddenly swooping down to land with the great winged roar of an Arabian roc. The little group which met to try to grasp and to perpetuate the fugitive emotions aroused by the Zola trial attached a similar importance to this particular café. But they were not viewed with favour by the young nobles who composed the other part of the clientele and had taken over a second room, separated from the other only by a flimsy parapet topped with a row of plants. These looked upon Dreyfus and his supporters as traitors, although twenty-five years later, ideas having had time to settle down and Dreyfusism to acquire a certain glamour in the light of history, the Bolshevistic and dance-mad sons of these same young nobles would declare to the “intellectuals” who questioned them that undoubtedly, had they