In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [51]
On days when, although there was no parade, Saint-Loup had to stay in barracks, I used often to go and visit him there. It was a long way; I had to leave the town and cross the viaduct, from either side of which I had an immense view. A strong breeze blew almost always over this high ground, and swept round the buildings erected on three sides of the barrack-square, which howled incessantly like a cave of the winds. While I waited for Robert—he being engaged on some duty or other—outside the door of his room or in the mess, talking to some of his friends to whom he had introduced me (and whom later I came to see from time to time, even when he was not going to be there), looking down from the window at the countryside three hundred feet below me, bare now except where recently sown fields, often still soaked with rain and glittering in the sun, showed a few strips of green, of the brilliance and translucent limpidity of enamel, I often heard him discussed by the others, and I soon learned what a popular favourite he was. Among many of the volunteers, belonging to other squadrons, sons of rich business or professional men who looked at aristocratic high society only from outside and without penetrating its enclosure, the attraction which they naturally felt towards what they knew of Saint-Loup’s character was reinforced by the glamour that attached in their eyes to the young man whom, on Saturday evenings, when they went on pass to Paris, they had seen supping in the Café de la Paix with the Duc d’Uzès and the Prince d’Orléans. And on that account they associated his handsome face, his casual way of walking and saluting, the perpetual dance of his monocle, the jaunty eccentricity of his service dress—the caps always too high, the breeches of too fine a cloth and too pink a shade—with a notion of elegance and “tone” which, they averred, was lacking in the best turned-out officers in the regiment, even the majestic Captain to whom I had been indebted for the privilege of sleeping in barracks, who seemed, in comparison, too pompous and almost common.
One of them mentioned that the Captain had bought a new horse. “He can buy as many horses as he likes. I passed Saint-Loup on Sunday morning in the Allée des Acacias. He’s got altogether more style on a horse!” replied his companion with the knowledge of experience, for these young men belonged to a class which, if it does not frequent the same houses and know the same people, yet, thanks to money and leisure, does not differ from the nobility in its experience of all those refinements of life which money can procure. At most their elegance, in the matter of clothes, for instance, had something more studied, more impeccable about it than that relaxed and careless elegance which had so delighted my grandmother in Saint-Loup. It gave quite a thrill to these sons of big stockbrokers or bankers, as they sat eating oysters after the theatre, to see Sergeant Saint-Loup at an adjoining table. And what a tale there was to tell in barracks on Monday night, after a week-end leave, by one of them who was in Robert’s squadron, and to whom he had said how d’ye do “most civilly,” while another, who was not in the same squadron, was quite positive that in spite of this Saint-Loup had recognised him, for two or three times he had put up his monocle and stared in the speaker’s direction.
“Yes, my brother saw him at the Paix,” said another, who had been spending the day with his mistress. “Apparently his dress coat was cut too loose and didn’t fit him.”
“What was the waistcoat like?