In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [239]
He spoke to me of friendship, affection, regret, although like all travellers of his sort he was going off the next morning for some months which he was to spend in the country and would only be staying a couple of nights in Paris on his way back to Morocco (or elsewhere); but the words which he thus let fall into the warm furnace of my heart this evening kindled a pleasant glow there. Our infrequent meetings, and this one in particular, have since assumed epoch-making proportions in my memory. For him, as for me, this was the evening of friendship. And yet the friendship that I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I feared (and felt therefore some remorse at the thought), what he would have liked to inspire. Suffused still with the pleasure that I had had in seeing him canter towards me and come gracefully to a halt on arriving at his goal, I felt that this pleasure lay in my recognising that each of the movements which he had executed on the bench, along the wall, had its meaning, its cause, in Saint-Loup’s own personal nature perhaps, but even more in that which by birth and upbringing he had inherited from his race.
A certainty of taste in the domain not of aesthetics but of behaviour, which when he was faced by a novel combination of circumstances enabled the man of breeding to grasp at once—like a musician who has been asked to play a piece he has never seen—the attitude and the action required and to apply the appropriate mechanism and technique, and then allowed this taste to be exercised without the constraint of any other consideration by which so many young men of the middle class would have been paralysed from fear both of making themselves ridiculous in the eyes of strangers by a breach of propriety and of appearing over-zealous in those of their friends, and which in Robert’s case was replaced by a lofty disdain that certainly he had never felt in his heart but had received by inheritance in his body, and that had fashioned the attitudes of his ancestors into a familiarity which, they imagined, could only flatter and enchant those to whom it was addressed; together with a noble liberality which, far from taking undue heed of his boundless material advantages (lavish expenditure in this restaurant had succeeded in making him, here as elsewhere, the most fashionable customer and the general favourite, a position underlined by the deference shown him not only by the waiters but by all its most exclusive young patrons), led him to trample them underfoot, just as he had actually and symbolically trodden upon those crimson benches, suggestive of some ceremonial way which pleased my friend only because it enabled him more gracefully and swiftly to arrive at my side: such were the quintessentially aristocratic qualities that shone through the husk of this body—not opaque and dim as mine would have been, but limpid and revealing—as, through a work of art, the industrious, energetic force which has created it, and rendered the movements of that light-footed course which Robert had pursued along the wall as intelligible and charming as those of horsemen on a marble frieze. “Alas!” Robert might have thought, “was it worth while to have grown up despising birth, honouring only justice and intellect, choosing, outside the ranks of the friends provided for me, companions who were awkward and ill-dressed but had the gift of eloquence, only to find that the sole personality apparent in me which remains a treasured memory is not the one that my will, with the most praiseworthy effort, has fashioned in my likeness, but one that is not of my making, that is not myself, that I have always despised and striven to overcome; was it worth while to love my chosen friend as I have done, only to find that the greatest pleasure he derives from my company is that of discovering in it something far more general than myself,