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By Root 1862 0

me. I derived from my grandmother such a want of self-importance as could easily make me seem lacking in dignity. Doubtless I was little aware of this, and by dint of having seen and heard, from my schooldays onwards, my most highly regarded companions refuse to tolerate an affront, refuse to overlook disloyal behaviour, I had come in time to exhibit in my speech and actions a second nature which was tolerably proud. It was indeed considered to be extremely proud, because, being not in the least timorous, I was easily provoked into duels, the moral prestige of which, however, I diminished by making little of them, which easily persuaded other people that they were absurd. But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it all those of our own reflexions which we have despised, joys and sorrows which we have repressed, a whole world of feelings we have scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them afresh suddenly teaches us. I had come to learn from my experience of life that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made fun of me, instead of getting angry. But this absence of self-importance and resentment, if I had so far ceased to express it as to have become almost entirely unaware that it existed in me, was nevertheless the primordial vital element in which I was steeped. Anger and spite came to me only in a wholly different manner, in fits of rage. What was more, the notion of justice, to the extent of a complete absence of moral sense, was unknown to me. I was in my heart of hearts entirely on the side of the weaker party, and of anyone who was in trouble. I had no opinion as to the proportion in which good and evil might be blended in the relations between Morel and M. de Charlus, but the thought of the sufferings that were in store for M. de Charlus was intolerable to me. I would have liked to warn him, but did not know how to do so.

“The spectacle of that industrious little world is very pleasing to an old stick like myself. I do not know them,” he went on, raising his hand with a depreciatory air, in order not to appear to be boasting, to testify to his own purity and not to allow any suspicion to hover over that of the students—“but they are most polite, they often go so far as to keep a place for me, since I’m a very old gentleman. Yes indeed, my dear boy, do not protest, I’m past forty,” said the Baron, who was past sixty. “It’s a trifle stuffy in the hall in which Brichot lectures, but it’s always an interesting experience.”

Although the Baron preferred to mingle with the scholarly young and indeed to be jostled by them, sometimes, to save him a long wait in the lecture-room, Brichot took him in by his own door. For all that Brichot was at home in the Sorbonne, at the moment when the beadle, loaded with his chains of office, stepped out before him, and the master so admired by his young students followed, he could not overcome a certain shyness, and much as he desired to profit by that moment in which he felt himself so important to display his affability towards Charlus, he was nevertheless slightly embarrassed; so that the beadle should allow him in, he said to him in an artificial tone and with a busy air: “Follow me, Baron, they’ll find a place for you,” then, without paying any further attention to him, to make his own entry he advanced briskly and alone down the aisle. On either side, a double hedge of young lecturers bowed to him; Brichot, anxious not to appear to be posing in front of these young men, in whose eyes he knew that he was a great pundit, bestowed on them countless winks, countless little nods of complicity, to which his desire to remain martial and thoroughly French gave the effect of a sort of cordial encouragement, the sursum corda of an old soldier saying: “We’ll fight them, God damn it!” Then the applause of the students broke out. Brichot sometimes extracted from this attendance by M. de Charlus at his lectures an