In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [73]
More than a nephew, possibly. The first Princesse de Borodino was reputed to have bestowed her favours on Napoleon I, whom she followed to the Isle of Elba, and the second hers on Napoleon III. And if, in the Captain’s placid countenance, one caught a trace of Napoleon I—if not his actual features, at least the studied majesty of the expression—the officer had, particularly in his melancholy and kindly gaze, in his drooping moustache, something that reminded one also of Napoleon III; and this in so striking a fashion that, when he asked leave, after Sedan, to join the Emperor in captivity, and was shown the door by Bismarck, before whom he had been brought, the latter, happening to look up at the young man who was preparing to leave the room, was instantly struck by the likeness and, reconsidering his decision, recalled him and gave him the authorisation which, in common with everyone else, he had just been refused.
If the Prince de Borodino was not prepared to make overtures either to Saint-Loup or to the other representatives of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in the regiment (whereas he frequently invited two subalterns of plebeian origin who were pleasant companions) it was because, looking down on them all from the height of his Imperial grandeur, he drew between these two classes of inferiors the distinction that one set consisted of inferiors who knew themselves to be such and with whom he was delighted to consort, being beneath his outward majesty of a simple, jovial nature, and the other of inferiors who thought themselves his superiors, a claim which he could not allow. And so, while all the other officers of the regiment made much of Saint-Loup, the Prince de Borodino, to whom the young man had been recommended by Marshal X——, confined himself to being kindly towards him in the matter of military duty, where Saint-Loup was in fact exemplary, but never had him to his house, except on one special occasion when he found himself practically compelled to invite him, and, since this occurred during my stay at Doncières, asked him to bring me too. I had no difficulty that evening, as I watched Saint-Loup sitting at his Captain’s table, in distinguishing, in their respective manners and refinements, the difference that existed between the two aristocracies: the old nobility and that of the Empire. The product of a caste whose faults, even if he repudiated them with all the force of his intellect, had been absorbed into his blood, a caste which, having ceased to exert any real authority for at least a century, no longer saw in the patronising affability which was part and parcel of its education anything more than an exercise, like horsemanship or fencing, cultivated without any serious purpose, as a diversion, Saint-Loup, on meeting representatives of that middle class which the old nobility so far despised as to believe that they were flattered by its intimacy and would be honoured by its informality, would cordially shake hands with any bourgeois to whom he was introduced, and whose name he had probably failed to catch, and as he talked to him (constantly crossing and uncrossing his legs, flinging himself back in his chair in an attitude of abandon, one foot in the palm of his hand) would call him “my dear fellow.” Belonging, on the other hand, to a nobility whose titles still preserved their meaning, possessed as they still were of the rich emoluments given in reward for glorious services and bringing to mind the record of high offices in which one is in command of numberless men and must know how to deal with men, the Prince de Borodino—not perhaps very distinctly or in the personal awareness of his conscious mind, but at any rate in his body, which revealed it by its attitudes and manners—regarded his rank as a prerogative that was still effective; those same commoners whom Saint-Loup would have slapped on the shoulder and taken by the arm he addressed with