In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [262]
“I know that Balzac is all the rage this year, as pessimism was last,” Brichot interrupted. “But, at the risk of giving pain to hearts that are smitten with the Balzacian fever, without laying any claim, God forbid, to the role of policeman of letters, and drawing up a list of offences against the laws of grammar, I must confess that the copious improviser whose alarming lucubrations you appear to me singularly to overrate has always struck me as being an insufficiently meticulous scribe. I have read these Illusions perdues of which you speak, Baron, flagellating myself to attain to the fervour of an initiate, and I confess in all simplicity of heart that those serial instalments of sentimental balderdash, composed in double or triple Dutch—Esther heureuse, Où mènent les mauvais chemins, À, combien l’amour revient aux vieillards—have always had the effect on me of the mysteries of Rocambole, exalted by an inexplicable preference to the precarious position of a masterpiece.”
“You say that because you know nothing of life,” said the Baron, doubly irritated, for he felt that Brichot would not understand either his aesthetic reasons or the other kind.
“I quite realise,” replied Brichot, “that, to speak like Master François Rabelais, you mean that I am moult sorbonagre, sorbonicole et sorboniforme. And yet, just as much as any of our friends here, I like a book to give an impression of sincerity and real life, I am not one of those clerks . . .”
“The quart d’heure de Rabelais,” 19 Dr Cottard broke in, with an air no longer of uncertainty but of confidence in his own wit.
“. . . who take a vow of literature following the rule of the Abbaye-aux-Bois under the obedience of M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Grand Master of humbug, according to the strict rule of the humanists. M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand . . .”
“Chateaubriand aux potatoes?” put in Dr Cottard.
“He is the patron saint of the brotherhood,” continued Brichot, ignoring the Doctor’s joke, while the latter, alarmed by the scholar’s phrase, glanced anxiously at M. de Charlus. Brichot had seemed wanting in tact to Cottard, whose pun meanwhile had brought a subtle smile to the lips of Princess Sherbatoff: “With the Professor, the mordant irony of the complete sceptic never forfeits its rights,” she said kindly, to show that Cottard’s “quip” had not passed unperceived by herself.
“The sage is of necessity sceptical,” replied the Doctor. “What do I know? Gn thi seauton, said Socrates. He was quite right, excess in anything is a mistake. But I am dumbfounded when I think that those words have sufficed to keep Socrates’s name alive all this time. What does his philosophy amount to? Very little when all is said. When one thinks that Charcot and others have done work that is a thousand times more remarkable and is at least based on something, on the suppression of the pupillary reflex as a syndrome of general paralysis, and that they are almost forgotten. After all, Socrates was nothing out of the common. Those people had nothing better to do than spend all their time strolling about and splitting hairs. Like Jesus Christ: ‘Love one another!” it’s all very pretty.”
“My dear,” Mme Cottard implored.
“Naturally my wife protests, women are all neurotic.”
“But, my dear Doctor, I’m not neurotic,” murmured Mme Cottard.
“What, she’s not neurotic! When her son is ill, she develops all the symptoms of insomnia. Still, I quite admit that Socrates, and all the rest of them, are necessary for a superior culture, to acquire the talent of exposition. I always quote his gn thi seauton to my students at the beginning of the course. Old Bouchard, when he heard of it, congratulated me.”
“I am not an upholder of form for form’s sake, any more than I am inclined to treasure millionaire rhymes in poetry,” Brichot went on. “But all the same, the not