In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [72]
All Robert’s friends assured me that, as long as I stayed at Doncières, or if I should come there again at any time, even though Robert was away, their horses, their quarters, their free time would be at my disposal, and I felt that it was with the greatest cordiality that these young men put their comfort and youth and strength at the service of my weakness.
“Why at any rate,” they went on after insisting that I should stay, “don’t you come down here every year? You see how our humble life appeals to you! Besides, you’re so keen about everything that goes on in the regiment: quite the old soldier.”
For I continued to ask them eagerly to classify the different officers whose names I knew according to the degree of admiration which they felt them to deserve, just as, in the old days, I used to make my schoolfriends classify the actors of the Théâtre-Français. If, in the place of one of the generals whom I had always heard mentioned at the head of the list, such as Galliffet or Négrier, one of Saint-Loup’s friends remarked, “But Négrier is one of the feeblest of our general officers,” and put in the new, untarnished, appetising name of Pau or Geslin de Bourgogne, I felt the same happy surprise as long ago when the outworn names of Thiron or Febvre were ousted by the sudden blossoming of the unfamiliar name of Amaury. “Better even than Négrier? But in what respect? Give me an example.” I should have liked there to exist profound differences even among the junior officers of the regiment, and I hoped, in the reason for these differences, to grasp the essence of what constituted military superiority. One of those whom I should have been most interested to hear discussed, because he was the one whom I had most often seen, was the Prince de Borodino. But neither Saint-Loup nor his friends, while giving him credit for being a fine officer who kept his squadron up to an incomparable pitch of efficiency, liked the man. Without speaking of him, naturally, in the same tone as of certain other officers, rankers and freemasons, who did not fraternise much with the rest and had, in comparison, an uncouth, barrack-room manner, they seemed not to include M. de Borodino among the other officers of noble birth, from whom indeed he differed considerably in his attitude even towards Saint-Loup. These, taking advantage of the fact that Robert was only an NCO, and that therefore his influential relatives might be grateful were he invited to the houses of superior officers on whom otherwise they would have looked down, lost no opportunity of having him to dine when any bigwig was expected who might be of use to a young cavalry sergeant. Captain de Borodino alone confined himself to his official relations (which for that matter were always excellent) with Robert. The fact was that the Prince, whose grandfather had been made a Marshal and a Prince-Duke by the Emperor, into whose family he had subsequently married, and whose father had then married a cousin of Napoleon III and had twice been a minister after the coup d’état, felt that in spite of all this he did not count for much with Saint-Loup and the Guermantes set, who in turn, since he did not look at things from the same point of view as they, counted for very little with him. He suspected that, for Saint-Loup, he—a kinsman of the Hohenzollerns—was not a true noble but the grandson of a farmer, but at the same time he regarded Saint-Loup as the son of a man whose countship had been confirmed by the Emperor—one of what were known in the Faubourg Saint-Germain as “touched-up” counts—and who had besought him first for a Prefecture, then for some other post a long way down