In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [58]
On the third evening, one of his friends, to whom I had not had an opportunity of speaking before, conversed with me at great length; and at one point I overheard him telling Saint-Loup how much he was enjoying himself. And indeed we sat talking together almost the entire evening, leaving our glasses of Sauterne untouched on the table before us, separated, sheltered from the others by the imposing veils of one of those instinctive likings between men which, when they are not based on physical attraction, are the only kind that is altogether mysterious. Of such an enigmatic nature had seemed to me to be, at Balbec, the feeling which Saint-Loup had for me, a feeling not to be confused with the interest of our conversations, free from any material association, invisible, intangible, and yet of whose presence in himself like a sort of combustible gas he had been sufficiently conscious to refer to with a smile. And perhaps there was something more surprising still in this fellow-feeling born here in a single evening, like a flower that had blossomed in a few minutes in the warmth of this little room.
I could not help asking Robert when he spoke to me about Balbec whether it was really settled that he was to marry Mlle d’Ambresac. He assured me that not only was it not settled, but that there had never been any question of such a match, that he had never seen her, that he did not know who she was. If at that moment I had happened to see any of the social gossips who had told me of this coming event, they would promptly have announced the engagement of Mlle d’Ambresac to someone who was not Saint-Loup and that of Saint-Loup to someone who was not Mlle d’Ambresac. I should have surprised them greatly had I reminded them of their incompatible and still so recent predictions. In order that this little game should continue, and should multiply false reports by attaching the greatest possible number to every name in turn, nature has furnished those who play it with a memory as short as their credulity is long.
Saint-Loup had spoken to me of another of his comrades who was present also, one with whom he was on particularly good terms since in this environment they were the only two to champion the reopening of the Dreyfus case.
“That fellow? Oh, he’s not like Saint-Loup, he’s a tub-thumper,” my new friend told me. “He’s not even sincere. At first he used to say: ‘Just wait a little, there’s a man I know well, a very shrewd and kind-hearted fellow, General de Boisdeffre; you need have no hesitation in accepting his opinion.’ But as soon as he heard that Boisdeffre had pronounced Dreyfus guilty, Boisdeffre ceased to count: clericalism, the prejudices of the General Staff, prevented him from forming a candid opinion, although there is, or rather was, before this Dreyfus business, no one as clerical as our friend. Next he told us that in any event we were to get the truth, because the case had been put in the hands of Saussier, and he, a Republican soldier (our friend coming of an ultra-monarchist family, if you please), was a man of steel, with a stern unyielding conscience. But when Saussier pronounced Esterhazy innocent, he found fresh reasons to account for the verdict, reasons damaging not to Dreyfus but to General Saussier. Saussier was blinded by the militarist spirit (and our friend, by the way, is as militarist as he is clerical, or at least was; I don’t know what to make of him any more). His family are broken-hearted at seeing him possessed by such ideas.”
“Don’t you think,” I suggested, half turning towards Saint-Loup so as not to appear to be cutting myself off from him, and in order to bring him into the conversation, “that the influence we ascribe to environment is particularly true of an intellectual environment. Each of us is conditioned by an idea. There are far fewer ideas