In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [293]
Friendships more precious than Bloch’s would not, for that matter, be saying very much. He had all the faults that I most disliked, and it happened by chance that my affection for Albertine made them altogether intolerable. Thus in that brief moment in which I was talking to him while keeping my eye on Robert, Bloch told me that he had been to lunch at Mme Bontemps’s and that everybody had spoken about me in the most glowing terms until the “decline of Helios.” “Good,” thought I, “since Mme Bontemps regards Bloch as a genius, the enthusiastic approval that he will have expressed for me will do more than anything that the others can have said, it will get back to Albertine. Any day now she is bound to learn—I’m surprised that her aunt has not repeated it to her already—that I’m a ‘superior person.’ ” “Yes,” Bloch went on, “everybody sang your praises. I alone preserved a silence as profound as though, in place of the repast (poor, as it happened) that was set before us, I had absorbed poppies, dear to the blessed brother of Thanatos and Lethe, the divine Hypnos, who enwraps in pleasant bonds the body and the tongue. It is not that I admire you less than the band of ravening dogs with whom I had been bidden to feed. But I admire you because I understand you, and they admire you without understanding you. To tell the truth, I admire you too much to speak of you thus in public. It would have seemed to me a profanation to praise aloud what I carry in the profoundest depths of my heart. In vain did they question me about you, a sacred Pudor, daughter of Kronion, kept me mute.”
I did not have the bad taste to appear annoyed, but this Pudor seemed to me akin—far more than to Kronion—to the reticence that prevents a critic who admires you from speaking of you because the secret temple in which you sit enthroned would be invaded by the mob of ignorant readers and journalists; to the reticence of the statesman who does not recommend you for a decoration because you would be lost in a crowd of people who are not your equals; to the reticence of the Academician who refrains from voting for you in order to spare you the shame of being the colleague of X—— who is devoid of talent; to the reticence, finally, more respectable and at the same time more criminal, of the sons who implore us not to write about their dead father who abounded in merit, in order to ensure silence and repose, to prevent us from maintaining the stir of life and the sound of glory round the deceased, who himself would prefer the echo of his name upon the lips of men to all the wreaths upon his tomb, however piously borne.
If Bloch, while grieving me by his inability to understand the reason that prevented me from going to greet his father, had exasperated me by confessing that he had depreciated me at Mme Bontemps’s (I now understood why Albertine had never made any allusion to this lunch-party and remained silent when I spoke to her of Bloch’s affection for myself), my young Jewish friend had produced upon M. de Charlus an impression that was quite the opposite of annoyance.
Of course, Bloch now believed not only that I was incapable of depriving myself for a second of the company of smart people, but that, jealous of the advances that they might make to him (M. de Charlus, for instance), I was trying to put a spoke in his wheel and to prevent him from making friends with them; but for his part the Baron regretted that he had not seen more of my friend. As was his habit, he took care not to betray this feeling. He began by asking me various questions about Bloch, but in so casual a tone, with an interest that seemed so feigned,