In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [59]
At this point I was interrupted by Saint-Loup, because another of the young soldiers had leaned across to him with a smile and, pointing to me, exclaimed: “Duroc! Duroc all over!” I had no idea what this might mean, but I felt the expression on the shy young face to be more than friendly.
Saint-Loup was not satisfied with this comparison. In an ecstasy of joy, no doubt intensified by the joy he felt in making me shine before his friends, with extreme volubility, he reiterated, stroking and patting me as though I were a horse that had just come first past the post: “You’re the cleverest man I know, do you hear?” He corrected himself, and added: “Together with Elstir.—You don’t mind my bracketing him with you, I hope? Scrupulous accuracy, don’t you know. As one might have said to Balzac, for example: ‘You’re the greatest novelist of the century—together with Stendhal.’ Scrupulous to a fault, you see, but nevertheless, immense admiration. No? You don’t agree about Stendhal?” he went on, with a naïve confidence in my judgment which found expression in a charming, smiling, almost childish glance of interrogation from his green eyes. “Oh, good! I see you’re on my side. Bloch can’t stand Stendhal. I think it’s idiotic of him. The Chartreuse is after all a stunning work, don’t you think? I’m so glad you agree with me. What is it you like best in the Chartreuse? Answer me,” he urged with boyish impetuosity. And the menace of his physical strength made the question almost terrifying. “Mosca? Fabrice?” I answered timidly that Mosca reminded me a little of M. de Norpois. Whereupon there were peals of laughter from the young Siegfried Saint-Loup. And no sooner had I added: “But Mosca is far more intelligent, not so pedantic,” than I heard Robert exclaim “Bravo,” actually clapping his hands, and, helpless with laughter, gasp: “Oh, perfect! Admirable! You really are astounding.”
While I was speaking, even the approbation of the others seemed supererogatory to Saint-Loup; he insisted on silence. And just as a conductor stops his orchestra with a rap from his baton because someone has made a noise, so he rebuked the author of this disturbance: “Gibergue, you must be silent when people are speaking. You can tell us about it afterwards.” And to me: “Please go on.”
I gave a sigh of relief, for I had been afraid that he was going to make me begin all over again.
“And as an idea,” I went on, “is a thing that cannot partake of human interests and would be incapable of deriving any benefit from them, the men who are governed by an idea are not swayed by self-interest.”
When I had finished speaking, “That stops your gob, doesn’t it, my boys,” exclaimed Saint-Loup, who had been following me with his eyes with the same anxious solicitude as if I had been walking a tight-rope. “What were you going to say, Gibergue?”
“I was just saying that your friend reminded me of Major Duroc. I could almost hear him speaking.”
“Why, I’ve often thought so myself,” replied Saint-Loup. “They have several points in common, but you’ll find that this one has all kinds of qualities Duroc hasn’t.”
Just as a brother of this friend of Saint-Loup, who had been trained at the Schola Cantorum, thought about every new musical work not at all what his father, his mother, his cousins, his club-mates thought, but exactly what the other students at the Schola thought, so this non-commissioned nobleman (of whom Bloch formed an extraordinary opinion when I told him about him, because, touched to hear that he was on the same side as himself, he nevertheless imagined him, on account of his aristocratic birth and religious and military upbringing, to be as different as possible, endowed with the romantic attraction of a native of a distant country) had a “mentality,” as people were now beginning to say, analogous to that of the whole body of Dreyfusards in general and of Bloch in particular,