In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [66]
Swann now found equally intelligent anybody who was of his opinion, his old friend the Prince de Guermantes as well as my schoolfellow Bloch, whom previously he had avoided and whom he now invited to lunch. Swann interested Bloch greatly by telling him that the Prince de Guermantes was a Dreyfusard. “We must ask him to sign our appeal on behalf of Picquart; a name like his would have a tremendous effect.” But Swann, blending with his ardent conviction as a Jew the diplomatic moderation of a man of the world, whose habits he had too thoroughly acquired to be able to shed them at this late hour, refused to allow Bloch to send the Prince a petition to sign, even on his own initiative. “He cannot do such a thing, we mustn’t expect the impossible,” Swann repeated. “There you have a charming man who has travelled thousands of miles to come over to our side. He can be very useful to us. If he were to sign your petition, he would simply be compromising himself with his own people, would be made to suffer on our account, might even repent of his confidences and do nothing more.” Furthermore, Swann withheld his own name. He considered it too Hebraic not to create a bad effect. Besides, even if he approved of everything that concerned reconsideration, he did not wish to be mixed up in any way in the anti-militarist campaign. He wore, a thing he had never done previously, the decoration he had won as a young militiaman in ’70, and added a codicil to his will asking that, contrary to its previous provisions, he might be buried with the military honours due to his rank as Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. A request which assembled round the church of Combray a whole squadron of those troopers over whose fate Françoise used to weep in days gone by, when she envisaged the prospect of war. In short, Swann refused to sign Bloch’s petition, with the result that, if he passed in the eyes of many people as a fanatical Dreyfusard, my friend found him lukewarm, infected with nationalism, and jingoistic.
Swann left me without shaking hands so as not to be forced into a general leave-taking in this room where he had too many friends, but said to me: “You ought to come and see your friend Gilberte. She has really grown up now and altered, you wouldn’t know her. She would be so pleased!” I no longer loved Gilberte. She was for me like a dead person for whom one has long mourned, and then forgetfulness has come, and if she were to be resuscitated would no longer fit into a life which has ceased to be fashioned for her. I no longer had any desire to see her, not even that desire to show her that I did not wish to see her which, every day, when I was in love with her, I vowed to myself that I would flaunt before her when I loved her no longer.
Hence, seeking now only to give myself in Gilberte’s eyes the air of having longed with all my heart to meet her again and of having been prevented by circumstances of the kind called “beyond our control,” which indeed only occur, with any consistency at least, when we do nothing to thwart them, so far from accepting Swann’s invitation with reserve, I did not leave him until he had promised to explain in detail to his daughter the mischances that had prevented and would continue to prevent me from going to see her. “In any case I shall write to her as soon as I get home,” I added. “But be sure to tell her it will be a threatening letter, for in a month or two I shall be quite free, and then let her tremble, for I shall be coming to your house as regularly as in the old days.”
Before parting from Swann, I had a word with him about his health. “No, it’s not as bad